> Wow, Stalingrad brought "believe the Allies are
> winning the war" from 35% to over 80%!
>
That sounds like an informed opinion. If Stalingrad had been lost, Hitler would have won access to the Caucasian oilfields; he could have shifted Army Group South up to take Moscow; that being done, moved further north with Army Group Center and ended the siege of Leningrad, and with the rump of the USSR being pushed over the Urals, he might have been able to move on England. That's what the public knew.
There's something to the idea that General Chuikov (who held the line at the Volga) and Marshall Zhukov (who led the pincer attack that trapped Gen, later Field Marshall, Paulus' Sixth Army), and Khrushchev (the political rep of the Party and the Stavka, the military command, on the site) saved the world.
(If so Khrushchev may have saved the world twice -- he definitely did in Oct 63 by acting like the grownup in Cuban Missile Crises and "blinking first" -- probably at the cost of his position as GenSec -- while JFK was apparently willing to blow up the world to show he had balls (couldn't he just have gotten a written testimonial from Marylin Monroe or something?).)
Moreover, the public might have been right about the big shift in the likelihood of winning the war. The Allies' ace in the hole was the Manhattan Project. Stalingrad was the winter of 41-42; the US A-bomb wasn't ready till July of '45. If Hitler had been able to grab the atomic info the Russians had developed or gotten from their spies by, say, the end of '43, it's not inconceivable that with Heisenberg heading the program (he _says_ he was footdragging, but who knows?), they might have had the bomb as well as the ballistic missiles they did have (the V-2) and the cruise missiles (the V-1) . . . .
> --- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > The Reps have been saying that if you polled the
> US
> > public during WW2
> > you might have discovered a popular desire to give
> > up on the war.
> > Turns out they're wrong:
> > <http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/wwii-
> > polls/>.
> >
> > Doug
> > ___________________________________
> >
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
>
> Nu, zayats, pogodi!
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam
> protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com