Now apologise for America, Britain told

[Michael Haney]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 2:28 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7 April 2011 18:31, Michael Haney <thezorch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> History is one of my best subjects.  It was a mostly US based force
>> that pushed the Nazis out of France and North Africa.
>
>
> The US role was huge, absolutely. But Hitler arguably lost the day he
> double-crossed Stalin, who could and *did* just keep throwing
> cannon-fodder at the effort until Hitler was done. Would Hitler have
> lost without Stalin beating him down? That's worth an entire shelf of
> Harry Turtledove.
>

Hitler lost the Russian Campaign due to two reasons.

1.  As you stated Stalin wasn't about to back down and he threw
everything Russia had at the Nazi forces.  Stalin took Hitler's
double-cross personally, and that is why only the Red Army stormed
Berlin at the end of the war.  There were two reasons for this, first
Stalin knew the allies wouldn't hand over regions they controlled to
Soviet control when the war was over, and he wanted to capture
valuable military assets from Germany such as their nuclear weapons
and rocket research programs.  In the months following the war,
negotiations resulted in Germany being split between east and west.
Wast Germany was under allied occupation well into the 1950's.  The
occupation forces became a part of the forces of NATO in 1955, or so.
The Berlin Wall was dismantled in 1989 and Soviet occupation of West
Germany didn't end until late 1990.

2.  Hitler and his general severely under-estimated how brutal
Russia's winters could be.  The Germans were not ready for it.  The
Russians knew what was coming and they were prepared.  The German
forces struggled against frostbite, heavy snow that hindered the
movement of armor vehicles like tanks and truck transports, and
blizzards that reduced visibility down to zero in some instances.  The
Russians bunkered down for the winter and hammered the German forces
with artillery fire and tanks adapted for cold weather operation.  The
whole Russian Campaign was very poorly thought out.  Hitler
under-estimated how ferociously the Soviets would fight back against
his forces, and he under-estimated how bad the weather could get in
Russia during the winter.  It was a massive military blunder, which
ultimately I think cost Germany the war.  Had Hitler not tried to
invade Russian things in European Campaign might have happened
differently.  The allies likely could have lost the fight in Europe if
Russia hadn't entered the war because Hitler was too ambitious for his
own good.

-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking
of morality by religion." ~ Arthur C. Clarke
"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and
politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there is no place
for it in the endeavor of science. " ~ Carl Sagan

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