You know guys...DonS hadn't been around for awhile, and now he's come back with a vengeance[chainsawkill].

Just glad you're back.

Thanks, it is nice to know someone likes me!

It is interesting to note that Hitler committed Me-262s to the Battle of the Bulge. One of my dad's friends was in the Bulge. He saw one of the 262s for the first time there. IMO, the plane was poorly suited to such work, but it did do a good job of scaring my dad's friend.

My dad's friend brought back a bunch of neat stuff, including a P-38 pistol, CZ-38 pistol (which I now own), some old revolvers, a Volstrum armband (which I own), a German gas mask & case (which I own), and some other stuff.

I need to go over and ask this guy some questions, and talk about what he saw and did. One of my dad's other friends was a Marine who landed on Guadacanal, Guam, and Okinawa, and who was in China getting ready for the invasion of Japan. I talked to this guy on a number of occasions, but now it is too late to ask any more questions . . .

Cont
If, Germany and Russia had remained allies, lets examine what the Germans used there:
1941-1944 average manpower on the eastern front-3 million which averages out to 170 divisons.  That left 117 divsions covering everything else(1944): France, Holland, Belgium, Norway, Finland, Balkans, Italy, and Demark.  The U.S. had 94-95 divisions fighting including the ones in the pacific theater.

To disregard the importance of the Russian war effort you fail to take into account all the materials and manpower that would have been facing the allies of which we disagree that allied air power could have overcome.

I will give you the Sherman point as I did read that they were used a lot by the Russians in the southern countries.  Couldnt get your links to work though.

Germany and the Soviet Union were never really "allies"; their non-aggression pact was just an attempt by both sides to buy time before the inevitable conflict.

Here's another "what if": What if Japan had attacked the USSR from the east in 1941 instead of taking on the United States?  Would the combination of a two-front war and a delay in American involvement have been enough to defeat Stalin?

Well I was using my "allies" term loosely meaning they never fought each other.
The "what if"  reminds me of the Saturday night live skits of "What if?"  Napolean had a B-52 at Waterloo or Superman was raised in Nazi Germany.
I think had Stalin been forced with a two front war they would have probably lost though I don't know how well the Japanese Army would have performed in a more conventional type war.  Your "what if?' also raises the issue of what would have happened if there was no attack on Pearl Harbor?
How much longer could we have afforded to remain neutral?

The 'what if's' are cool
if japs invaded Russia in early
41,Germans would have most likly
would have beat Russia.HOWEVER,
Germany would have to have ALREADY
invaded and occupy Britian.WE
would STILL have won though.
we woulda nuked them until
Germany stopped fighting,possibly
resulting in a peace treaty w/ germany.

(probably woulda resulted in another
"cold war")

DAMN! did I mess y'all up?

Atencio, the Russians and the Japanese did in fact, fight a conventional war in a few battles in 1939 at the Russian/Manchurian border.  The Russians beat the Japanese rather well. John

what size/type forces involved?
In 41 Dec 8 ,Germans were within SIGHT of moscow,a jap attack on Russia could have had
a drastic impact on the war

At the start of the war, Germany had a large pool of very well trained pilots. Their training program was not really designed for an extended war, and they were never able to keep up with demand after their losses in the Battle of Britian. Part of this was the fact that they were being used on two fronts. They pulled much of their air power out of North Africa because of operation Barbarosa. They were simply not up to an air fight on two fronts, but they were no where near to being up to an air fight on one front against the US.  

The high scoring German pilots are really part of the problem: they should have been pulled off the line for training others instead of staying in combat and racking up impressive kills. The top German aces were the very best in the world, but in terms of average skill level we were much better. When you consider quality + quanity, we dominate.

The fact is, during Normandy the Germans couldn't move a damn thing during daylight. They were impressed by our air, which was able to destroy whole panzer divisions. They had never seen anything like it on the Eastern Front, where Stukas were still blasting Soviet tanks.

We can debate the value of the 262 and other such things (such as the Heinkle jet that could have been operational even earlier), but the fact is the 262 came in too little too late. If the Soviets were out of the picture, Hitler would have still made the same mistakes with the 262, from my knowledge of the issue.

One point on the 262: the Russians considered copying it. But it was too advanced for their post WW2 pilots! They initially went with a less advanced design.

In 1945 the Soviets and Japanese went to war. The Soviets defeated the Japanese with ease. Some 2 million Japanese surrendered to the Soviets, never to be seen again.

The Japanese knew what the Soviets would do if they entered Japan. That, along with the bomb, convinced the Japanese to surrender.

Keep in mind that the Japanese tanks were poor by 1939 standards, and they had no clue how to use them in tank warfare.

Hitler was a dumbass at a LOT of crucial
times in his reign.He had the ability
to defeat everyone but USA .Hitler made
too many wrong decisions at the worst
time possible too many times.Seemed to
lack the ability to hear other ideas
or admit he even made a mistake.

DUMBASS Hitler

One of the links was for a book on Amazon.com:

Commanding the Red Army's Sherman Tanks : The World War II Memoirs of Hero of the Soviet Union Dmitriy Loza
by James F. Gebhardt (Editor), Dmitriy Loza

The other was from a web page called The Russian Battlefield.

Not sure why they didn't work. Maybe you can copy and past. Clicking didn't work for me, either.

The Germans streached themselves to the limit during the war. We didn't. If we faced them by ourselves, we still would have won.

Taking Moscow doesn't mean you have beat the Russians. Just ask Napolian. Maybe if the generals followed Hitler's wishes and went for the oil fields, they could have won. Moscow only had symbolic value.

Alright now, enough BS
this whole thing is just another
"what if the South 'would'a won?"
topics anyway.Right? I'm having fun though!

And you are right moscow would have been
a demoralizer for sure And the oil fields
were critical in Germany's quest for domination

I'm not sure that Hitler always made the wrong decision. I think that he was right about the oilfields vs Moscow. It has been a while since I read up on that part of the Great Patriotic War (mostly been reading on the last part of the war in the East), but Moscow was a dubious objective.

Hitler was probably right about the assault rifle. It was real bad time to add another round to the inventory.

Hitler's mistakes on the 262 project were very much due to Goring. Hitler trusted Goring's advice, and Goring told Hitler what he thought Hitler wanted to hear. It was a little more complicated then Hitler making bad decisions.

Hitler was even right on some of his "stand and fight" orders. Problem is, he became convinced that that was always the right order to give.

Leaders shouldn't micromanage, and that was Hitler's primary fault as a war leader.  

yeah we sure dragged this post away from MrCleans original question about the Battle of the bulge.  Was a lot of fun though.

I have changed my mind after re-reading some of the WWII intelligence books. Remember the US & Britain could decode all German military radio traffic.
For the Germans to plan a big attack like the Bulge, the Allies would have had the information. They might still have mis-interpeted it, but Eisenhower had to know something was up.

Not sure about that. There were 2 different Enigma machine types. One the nave used with 6 "wheels" (IIRC, sorry) and one used by the staff level officers that used 7 "wheels". The navy version was captured other wasn't. The staff level messages were alsoi toughter to decode becuase the codes were used less often, fewer messages, giving the code breakers less material to work with to create a "cypher".

Also just because you can decode messages doesn't mean it is easy, quick, or complete. They would not only have to decipher the code but translte the message.

Imagine working several hours to decode, translate a message to find out you now know what food a division is ordering..........

Critical messages would also probably be hand carried to some extent. Also senior officers may have orders telling them where to meet to strategize but reveal nothing about the why's or what's of the meetings.

All you guys are OK.  I am into reading the book, "Roosevelt's Secret war," by Joseph Persico, and I am certain I can find some "new fodder" for the 'History Channel' here.  The author does kind of mention a lot about the traffic between Berlin and Tokyo. The Japanese were warned about codes broken by a German spy in the embassy in Washington, but they could not believe their top secret codes were broken, so they changed their lower level codes.  The author also states that Churchill denied the pre war US from certain Enigma decodes in order to deceive the Germans. The result was that a few US merchant ships were sunk by U-Boats.  If we had the info on the sub's intention, we could have perhaps saved the ships. In other word, Churchill was above sacrificing a few American lives to preserve Enigma.  John

Well it's war......... If you gave U-boat locales to convoys the Germans would catch on quick to what was going on. The Germans might switch coding systems, then you get no info.

Of course giving that info to the US was in Britains interest how??

I'm also not sure that the codes were really cracked that early. I don't think they were reliable getting decodes until after an enigma machine was captured.

Later in the war, I believe that some of the U-boat info was given to warships and military aircraft. So that they could hunt the subs........

The Brits were reading Enigma by 1941, when this incident ocurred. According to the source, four US cryptographers, led by William Friedman, went to England with a copy of the machine to decode the Japanese Purple code. The British did not reciprocate with much in return.  For one thing, the British did not trust the American's security procedures. They were not going to imperil Ultra. John

RUSSIAN TOPIC:

Joseph Stalin was a madman which on some occasions made him worse or at least as bad as Hitler himself.  Stalin would order impossible missions under impossible deadlines to his Generals and the Generals would have to go along.  Sending men wholesale into the German War Machine, they could loose 80,000 men in a battle.  One such mission was the mission of the Soviet Second Shock Army to lift the seige of Leningrad. The Generals were given 21 days to marshall forces and prepare a counterattack. The men ended up going into combat without much equiptment , much food (which they had little of in any case), and were pushed to advance even even when they were already whipped.  The Germans merely destroyed them wholesale.  Cut them off, surrounded them, captured them , killed them.  The only thing that saved the soviets was the number of conscripts and those people blood.  The soviets were hard at the end, but in the beginning they didn't even acknowledge that Hitler had attacked, they were green, without training, without leadership (Stalin purged their greatest generals before the war started) and in some cases FORCED at GUNPOINT TO FIGHT.


The Americans were not slouches at war. The got off Omaha Beach didn't they??  They had good leaders, good training, and were halfway well kept, they had pretty good morale throughout the war.  They were somewhat more intelligent about fighting wars, and sometimes this kept them from fighting the wrong fight when the right fight would do more for the war effort.  Our leaders Care about our soldiers (as evidenced by Omar Bradley and the Sgts) For any lack of percieved savagery or brutality of our war (if there is any such thing) doesn't translate into lack of War Prowess against any enemy.  With the exception of pre Patton Africa. I would say that our troops were pretty good.  

Benjamin