In article <1175196812.631480.22760@l77g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>,
"8MilesHigh" <avianatrix@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The Czechs still harbour a lot of resentment that their preparations
> to resist Hilter weren't backed up by France and Britain.
>
The Czechs also built an elaborate defense system in the Sudetenland
that was partly based on Maginot line and used the same engineers for
construction purposes. Once the Czechs gave the Germans the
Sudetenland, it made it more vulnerable for a German takeover of the
entire country. If the Czechs fought the Germans before the Munich
Agreement, they would had cause many problems to the Germans..
http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=87
> > Chamberlain was a politician, he was bamboozled by certain factions
> > and took a unrealistic view of certain things. WWI was not just another
> > war, but was the most destructive conflict in Human History up to that
> > time.
>
> And WWI was barely 20 years in the past. No one could replicate the
> miraculous recovery of the German economy and military after WWI and
> the Depression. How Germany and Austria managed it is still a hot
> debate topic and a sore point for children of Holocaust survivors who
> feel their families assets were blundered to make German bullets (much
> like how Henry VIII blundered the English Catholic churches and
> monasteries to create his British Rennaissance.)
The Germans pretty much became a slave state to keep its war industry
going, whether getting forced labour from Western European Countries,
like France and the Netherlands, Russian Prisoner of War, Ukranian Women
to do domestic chores, Polish labourers as farmhands etc. etc. For the
Concentration Camps and Extermination Camps, Jewish slave labour, and
using every bit of from killing jews, from gold filings after they were
gassed,to their belongings they took during their "re-settlement",
artifical limbs to be recycled for maimed German soldiers to their hair
to be used as filing for pillows and stuffing for furniture.
The German economy got out of the recession after the Weimar Republic
years by massive deficit spending, and put much of that budget in
re-arming.
>
> Quite simply, no one, not even the US, had the power to give Hitler
> pause. If any country should be criticised for lack of early
> involvement, it would be the USSR in my opinion - because they had the
> population to make up the necessary armies. With their hostile
> weather and thier enormous border, Russia was the only country that
> could have stalled Hitler at all.
If wasn't for American help, in supplying the Soviet Union with high
octane aviation fuel, Dodge and Studebaker trucks, "Spam", foodstuff,
there is a good chance that the Russians couldn't continue. What the
Americans really helped the Soviets were in their offensives from
1943-1945. The Soviets had the industrial base, but like in later years
and the bane of every Soviet or Russian Government is distribution and
transportation in such a huge space.
>
> Of course, Stalin wasn't into protecting the interests of Europe. And
> he probably knew that Hitler could amass enough force to get through
> to the oil fields if that was his sole intention.
>
> And the Nazi death march into Russia could have occurred much earlier
> if Stalin hadn't signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
If Hitler went to war with the Soviet Union in 1939 or 1940, it would
had been difficult for him as long as Britain/France and other weren't
subdued.
Even though Hitler's gamble in Operation Barbarossa in 1941, was much
more riskier than he or the German Generals perceived it to be, their
industrial base wasn't on the war footing that it was by 1944, they way
underestimated the Soviet Reserves and Industrial production, they also
couldn't fathom, and no one else really could the immense suffering that
Russian and other nationalities in the Soviet Union could take.
>
>
> Chamberlain also knew as well as the British Military
> > Establishment that the UK wasn't ready for another major war against
> > Germany. Their industrial base wasn't prepare at the time, nor many
> > inventions that helped Britain win the war, like the Cavity Magnetron
> > and the computer (ie the Colossus) were created until the war years.
> >
> > I don't think what Chamberlain did at Munich at 1938 came from
> > cowardice, there was a heap of gullibility, naivite and a bit of
> > stupidity. Churchill was much more correct in his assessment of Hitler
> > at that time. Chamberlain changed course in March 1939, which put
> > Britain on the path of war. Look up Chamberlain and his speech he made
> > on March, 17th 1939.
> >
> >
> >
> > > Even if their arms were depleted, that doesn't mean that they couldn't
> > > do anything. In such a situation, since they couldn't fight (yet), the
> > > proper thing to do is to start the factories cranking out the war
> > > materiel that would eventually allow them to fight. They can go onto a
> > > war footing without explicitly going to war. One must always wait until
> > > conditions are favorable to launch any kind of attack, even a counter-
> > > attack.
> >
> > The British during the inter war years did invest alot in aircraft
> > production and design, which gave rise to the Rolls Royce Merlin Engine
> > and the Spitfire fighter plane. They also invested alot in new
> > technology like radar, which bear fruit during the Battle of Britain in
> > 1940. It wasn't the lack of arms that made Britain and France weak as
> > so much as poor tactics that was a bane of Britain in its defeats from
> > 1939-1942. Battles like France, Crete, the Atlantic, fall of Tobruk in
> > 1942 were more to blame for bad military tactics and the superior German
> > military tactics of schwerpunkt and use of anti-tank traps, besides air
> > superiority.
> >
> >
> >
> > > Chamberlain just sat there and took it up the ass, and he should have
> > > known perfectly well that he would be immediately betrayed. People who
> > > like conquering countries don't stop after just one. Dominoes fall, and
> > > Adolf overran a lot of territory before we finally started pushing him
> > > back into his shell. Besides us and the Brits, The Russkies were the
> > > only ones with the backbone to hold the line, no matter how brutal it
> > > got. Everything else fell like a house of cards.
> >
> > Alot had to do with geography. Britain had the English Channel, (La
> > Manche) with diverted Napoleon as much as Hitler from invasion. Much
> > like "General Winter", as the Russian call the Russian Winter as an ally
> > in fighting wars, was a factor in helping push back the German from
> > Moscow in Dec. 1941, and with the Soviets' Operation Uranus that
> > destroyed the German 6th Army at Stalingrad.
> >
> > Not all countries fell like a house of cards, the Greeks fought
> > against both the Germans and Italians on their own, and they fought
> > pretty hard. Many countries had resistance groups that fought until
> > liberation, whether in Holland, or how the Poles bitterly fought the
> > Germans during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.
>
>
> I'm extremely impressed that you have all this info at your fingertips
> (so to speak.) and present it with such clarity.
>
> Sometimes, the Usenet coughs up the most surprising things.
I was a history major, I read alot of books about modern history from
1870 onwards, and know the different histographies for the rise of
Nazism and WW2. Much like how the Area Bombing was a complete waste of
British and American Resources. Ian Kershaw's biographies on Hitler
give a very good perspective on what was going in Germany and inside the
Reich Chancellory. I just wish I spoke and read German, because it make
reading some primary source documents much more interesting, like the
Hossback Memorandum (1937), or the minutes from the Wannsee Conference.
(1942)
