General Discussions
This is the place to discuss general issues related to the U-boat war or the war at sea in WWII.
RE: U-boats...Stalin etc
Posted by:
John Griffiths
()
Date: April 25, 2001 07:35PM
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Yuri,
There are no attempts within this thread to denigrate Russia. If anything, there is a frank and open discussion which attempts to redress our individual presentation of this, rather staggered, historical equipoise. This is something we are clearly showing as being different representations of events as presented by our individual political systems.
That having been said, let us continue with this part of the debate. I know of Microsoft and Apollo - but know little else! They, I am afraid, do not interest me!
>>At the end of 1941 steel wedges of German tanks aspired to cover Moscow from the miscellaneous parties. There has occurred winter. Temperature was dipped up to -30 hails centigrade. This is not most low temperature for Russia. The German tanks were stopped. It\'s was impossible to get their engines. The tank columns of the nazis turned into mountains to nobody necessary metall.
During war with Finland in 1939-1940 all Soviet engineering were perfect acted at -40 hails centigrade and at more low temperature.<<
Yuri! No one doubts the courage of the Red Army during the occupation of Russia! No-one here would challenge the fact that the tanks built by Russia were vital to her ability to defeat the Germans – whose own machines were far superior in terms of technology and engineering. However, to cite one example – the T-34. It used Christie suspension (previously used in the Soviet BT-7 fast tank.) Christie was an American! Though the T-34 is epitomised as a Soviet machine, its technology was only part Soviet.
The T-34 was a rude, basic machine compared to, say the PzKpfw V1 Tiger E (with its 88mm main gun). However, whereas the German machine was superbly engineered – it was a Porsche design after all! - it had a significant drawback - it had overlapping suspension that was easily clogged by mud and stones. As these froze in the Russian winter, it more or less immobilised the tank – and as the Russians attacked during the dawn the results were disastrous. The Red Army knew this. They were fighting on home land, in conditions they knew, on terrain they understood. I would quote Sun Tzu here as it fits neatly:
Tire them by flight. Cause division among them. Attack when they are unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it.
(This has been a doctrine taught over 2000 years ago. Immortalised in ‘The Art of War’, it holds as true now as it did then.)
The T-34 was mass-produced, in great numbers. One of the main tactical reasons the Soviets won their tank battles was due to the ‘oceans’ of metal which faced the petrol starved, often immobilised, German armour. In terms of superiority, the Germans had the technical edge – Russia had mass production. In terms of military balance, the Red Army overwhelmed an invading army weakened by constant warfare, by lack of supplies – and by using the weather to its advantage.
However, I would also add that if the Germans had had more of the PzKpfw V Panthers, the results might well have been different – this tank is regarded as the finest of its kind and more than a match for anything produced by Russia and the allies.
>>Germany had no enough resources and skilled experts for creations of nuclear weapon. The works in this area there did not begin.<<
Forgive me here but I feel what you are saying is that Russia invented the H and A bombs? Not so! The USSR did not have an atom bomb until 1949 – 4 years after Hiroshima. It did not have a Hydrogen bomb until 1953 – nine months after the US had theirs.
If Russia earned any knowledge about nuclear warfare it was via Klaus Fuchs – who was spying on behalf of Russia! Yes, there was an attempt made to study the possibility by Russia but the invasion by Germany halted this until at least 1942 – and what followed in terms of technical knowledge was only possible via the information supplied by Fuchs.
The Germans lost their chances due to the purges by Hitler of the Jewish community. Hitler killed and ostracised many of his finest physicists, scientists and engineers because they were Jewish. Yet the Germans had Bothe, Weissacker and Heisenberg – capable of producing something of this sort. Their efforts were thwarted by the UK-Norwegian raid on Rjukan in 1942 which more or less stopped German work on nuclear weaponry and from which Germany did not recover in terms of research.
In the UK, work by Profs. Peierls and Frisch – in 1940 – produced a Memorandum in which they set out the problems of designing a bomb. They very nearly got that finished too but due to a little bit of Anglo-American angst, this work was later carried out in the US ( Chicago in 1942 ) where the first atomic pile (reactor) was built. The first nuclear superpower of the period was, undeniably, America.
I would trust that we could continue this debate on many issues to do with the history and weaponry of the Second World War. It is not, as I have said previously, an attack on Russia. The Soviet Union had to rely on convoys of weapons and equipment from the west – without which it is marginal whether they could have repulsed the Germans as well as they did - but they stood against the Nazis and won, though 20 million of her people died in the process.
However, our interpretations of history rely on our political stance. You have your view and I have mine. That is tempered by our education and the social system under which we live.
I would respectfully ask you to read a book by Eric Hobsbawm, titled The Age of Extremes – the short twentieth century 1914 – 1991. Published by Michael Joseph, London. ISBN 0 7181 3307 2. This is an excellent short and incisive history of the century, Hibsbawm having written a four book series which is regarded as an authorative series. This, I would hazard, is the view from the west.
Aye,
John
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Yuri,
There are no attempts within this thread to denigrate Russia. If anything, there is a frank and open discussion which attempts to redress our individual presentation of this, rather staggered, historical equipoise. This is something we are clearly showing as being different representations of events as presented by our individual political systems.
That having been said, let us continue with this part of the debate. I know of Microsoft and Apollo - but know little else! They, I am afraid, do not interest me!
>>At the end of 1941 steel wedges of German tanks aspired to cover Moscow from the miscellaneous parties. There has occurred winter. Temperature was dipped up to -30 hails centigrade. This is not most low temperature for Russia. The German tanks were stopped. It\'s was impossible to get their engines. The tank columns of the nazis turned into mountains to nobody necessary metall.
During war with Finland in 1939-1940 all Soviet engineering were perfect acted at -40 hails centigrade and at more low temperature.<<
Yuri! No one doubts the courage of the Red Army during the occupation of Russia! No-one here would challenge the fact that the tanks built by Russia were vital to her ability to defeat the Germans – whose own machines were far superior in terms of technology and engineering. However, to cite one example – the T-34. It used Christie suspension (previously used in the Soviet BT-7 fast tank.) Christie was an American! Though the T-34 is epitomised as a Soviet machine, its technology was only part Soviet.
The T-34 was a rude, basic machine compared to, say the PzKpfw V1 Tiger E (with its 88mm main gun). However, whereas the German machine was superbly engineered – it was a Porsche design after all! - it had a significant drawback - it had overlapping suspension that was easily clogged by mud and stones. As these froze in the Russian winter, it more or less immobilised the tank – and as the Russians attacked during the dawn the results were disastrous. The Red Army knew this. They were fighting on home land, in conditions they knew, on terrain they understood. I would quote Sun Tzu here as it fits neatly:
Tire them by flight. Cause division among them. Attack when they are unprepared, make your move when they do not expect it.
(This has been a doctrine taught over 2000 years ago. Immortalised in ‘The Art of War’, it holds as true now as it did then.)
The T-34 was mass-produced, in great numbers. One of the main tactical reasons the Soviets won their tank battles was due to the ‘oceans’ of metal which faced the petrol starved, often immobilised, German armour. In terms of superiority, the Germans had the technical edge – Russia had mass production. In terms of military balance, the Red Army overwhelmed an invading army weakened by constant warfare, by lack of supplies – and by using the weather to its advantage.
However, I would also add that if the Germans had had more of the PzKpfw V Panthers, the results might well have been different – this tank is regarded as the finest of its kind and more than a match for anything produced by Russia and the allies.
>>Germany had no enough resources and skilled experts for creations of nuclear weapon. The works in this area there did not begin.<<
Forgive me here but I feel what you are saying is that Russia invented the H and A bombs? Not so! The USSR did not have an atom bomb until 1949 – 4 years after Hiroshima. It did not have a Hydrogen bomb until 1953 – nine months after the US had theirs.
If Russia earned any knowledge about nuclear warfare it was via Klaus Fuchs – who was spying on behalf of Russia! Yes, there was an attempt made to study the possibility by Russia but the invasion by Germany halted this until at least 1942 – and what followed in terms of technical knowledge was only possible via the information supplied by Fuchs.
The Germans lost their chances due to the purges by Hitler of the Jewish community. Hitler killed and ostracised many of his finest physicists, scientists and engineers because they were Jewish. Yet the Germans had Bothe, Weissacker and Heisenberg – capable of producing something of this sort. Their efforts were thwarted by the UK-Norwegian raid on Rjukan in 1942 which more or less stopped German work on nuclear weaponry and from which Germany did not recover in terms of research.
In the UK, work by Profs. Peierls and Frisch – in 1940 – produced a Memorandum in which they set out the problems of designing a bomb. They very nearly got that finished too but due to a little bit of Anglo-American angst, this work was later carried out in the US ( Chicago in 1942 ) where the first atomic pile (reactor) was built. The first nuclear superpower of the period was, undeniably, America.
I would trust that we could continue this debate on many issues to do with the history and weaponry of the Second World War. It is not, as I have said previously, an attack on Russia. The Soviet Union had to rely on convoys of weapons and equipment from the west – without which it is marginal whether they could have repulsed the Germans as well as they did - but they stood against the Nazis and won, though 20 million of her people died in the process.
However, our interpretations of history rely on our political stance. You have your view and I have mine. That is tempered by our education and the social system under which we live.
I would respectfully ask you to read a book by Eric Hobsbawm, titled The Age of Extremes – the short twentieth century 1914 – 1991. Published by Michael Joseph, London. ISBN 0 7181 3307 2. This is an excellent short and incisive history of the century, Hibsbawm having written a four book series which is regarded as an authorative series. This, I would hazard, is the view from the west.
Aye,
John
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