but think of the money you could save laying tracks with a 1.25 metre gap in the rails every 3 metres.

Very telling point that the media always ignores.

Thus my point that if Hilter had made an alliance with stalin, i can see it now .. to meglos at dinner together comparing mass-murders, laughing and drinking into the night while the world burns ...

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Hitler would never have kept his "no conflict" pact with Stalin, Hitler was a deranged fool who thought that the Russians and Polish were "sub human". It wasn't only Jews that he ordered sent to the concentration camps.

Hitler and Stalin did form an alliance of course, the so-called Nazi Soviet Pact in 1939, which is one of the great ironies when you consider that German expansion into the soviet sphere was a stated National Socialist objective; as was the total elimination of European Marxism.

I agree that generally speaking the most significant land engagements fought after 1940 occurred in the East. However, it would be a serious misreading of history to go on and argue that the Soviets are mainly responsible for the defeat of the Axis powers. In essence, without western aid the Soviet armies could not have pushed German forces out of Eastern Europe. Specifically the western allies (and mainly the US) supplied the soviets with over 240,000 trucks and lesser but highly significant quantities of aircraft and tanks as well as vast quantities of other war materials. The supply of western food stocks (SPAM) was crucial to the maintenance of viable soviet land forces up to and following the Battle of Stalingrad. And one shouldn't underestimate the contribution made by British and US land forces prior to the D Day landings in 1944. The campaigns in Italy, Tunisia and the Middle East took an enormous amount of pressure off the Soviets - as did the strategic air campaign over Germany, which the US joined in 1944. The German decision to break off the Kursk offensive, (which the Soviets claimed as a great victory) was largely due to the pressing need to transfer vital armoured units to Tunisia, where an allied success would threaten vital German oil supplies. Frankly, for anyone to even suggest that the Soviets might have defeated the Germans on their own is simply nonsense.

For me the greatest irony of the whole War concerns Poland. Ostensibly the war was fought to secure Polish independence and yet, in the end, after all the blood letting and sacrifice by countless millions, the Poles were sold down the bloody river and handed over to the Soviets. If the whole ugly business wasn't so tragic and shocking one might almost laugh.

with poland being the country in ww2 where hitler killed the most jews (almost 3.000.000), most people dont realize the germans killed even more polish Catholics in poland then jews. the jewish lobby is just much better at reminding the world of how many of their own tribe got killed, compared to our willfully poor collective west european memory. the genocidal war initiated by the fascists in ww2 was on a massive industrialized scale, and had a disproportionately high death rate amongst civilians. once hitler's henchmen moved into russia the civilian casualty number became apocalyptic, with over 15 million civilians killed (compared to 12 million military russian casualties in the whole of ww2). less then 10% of those civilian casualties in russia were jews. much of that death toll was due to the indiscriminate bombardment and destruction of civilian area's by the germans, but also the executions squads that followed behind the advancing german troops to round up civilians, then mass deportation to concentration camps, and the forced relocation of civilians under starvation conditions etc. for the jewish populations of those central and east european countries however (for ex Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc), proportionately jews were more targeted as a subgroup then any other group, and in many of those eastern countries over 90% of them were killed during the german occupation (compared to 50% of jews in belgium, 70% in holland, 25% in france, 10% in denmark etc..)

with those high numbers of russian military deaths (and in the early part of the war 100.000's of russians surrendering, many of whom would later die in captivity), it indicates stalins total disregard to his own population and how he used massive numbers of poorly trained men from other parts of russia to try to halt the german advance, fight them to a standstill, and then push them back (2 years later) . iirc the death ratio on the eastern front was at least around 5 russian soldiers for every german killed. at the time the russians halted the german advances (with germans affected by over stretched supply lines), there was very little allied millitary aid to russia. it was basically the indiscriminate sacrifice of a very high number of russians (both military and civilian) by stalin that stopped the german advances, giving the russians just enough time to start rearming themselves with basic war supplies from factories located further east (combined with the russian winter, during which german equipment and soldiers were under-performing, while the russians performed better).

comparing ww1 and ww2 casualty lists, there is an obvious difference in civilian vs military numbers
WWI 95% of casualties were Military Dead, and 5% Civilian Dead
WWII 33% of casualties were Military Dead and 67% Civilian Dead (with over 80% of all those civilian deaths being in poland and russia)

most of those civilian deaths were caused by the germans as a deliberate act of targeting the "sub human races of the east" (not the jews), which was exacerbated by stalin's total disregard of his own civilians. hitlers main purpose of moving east was to create "lebens raum" (living space) for his german race, and he/they saw the eastern lands as populated by subhumans that could just be exterminated with their land free for the taking. with the russians being fairly poor opponents during the 800 years of the austro-hungarian empire, hitler seriously miscalculated how different an industrialized mechanized war would be against an adversary that significantly outnumbered him, compared to the old days of horse and cart when russia was feudal empire populated by uneducated peasants.

it is no surprise the current russian government is trying to put in place some elements that help remember the terrible death toll and destruction that took place in the east during ww2 (including the possible funding of our il2 flightsim series), so that this theater of war does not get forgotten (or overshadowed by western selective memory of how the war affected them). with western countries dominating the world media and press, their selective remembrance of events that affected these western countries risks creating globally a distorted perspective of the horrors of ww2

You are right that millions and millions of Polish Catholics died, and millions of other non Jews in Europe as well, although sources I looked at quoted the number of non Jewish Poles as slightly less than the 3 million Jewish Poles. See this article about the terrible toll on the Polish people, especially the Catholic Clergy in Poland, during the Holocaust.

http://www.catholicculture.org/cultu...TOKEN=46917956

But there is still a reason that there is a special association of the Holocaust and its Jewish victims.
This quote from the article linked above, sums it up well:

Quote:

If we must rank the Nazis' victims, it is only right to place the Jews first. They were the primary target of the Nazis. For as long as the Third Reich endured, they bore the full brunt of Nazi hatred. And when the Third Reich collapsed, six million Jews were dead, over one million of them children. The slaughter inflicted on the Slavs, the Gypsies and the other designated victims of the Third Reich was haphazard compared to the systematic annihilation of the Jews. Even the Nazis, those twentieth-century paragons of ruthless efficiency, could not fight a global war, administer occupied territory that covered almost the entire continent of Europe, operate a campaign of genocide against the Jews and cleanse Europe of the tens of millions of other "undesirables."

Laughable and you forgot the bit about the P51 winning the war too!

You'd never believe it would you?

Thread history: BoM>Spitfires rule>Why the war was lost/won.

Is there any way to get back on track? Or is this thread a lost cause?

By the way...wouldn't it be a good idea if we paid for multiplayer sessions? This way the revenue would be secured for the future development of the series, and those who are most dedicated to the series would be the ones who contribute most to those future developments.


:-);-):-)




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Lonewulf is actually right. Soviet truck production was whoefully inadequate even before the war and once the war had started the increased need for tanks lowered it even more (in relative numbers). Without the allied truck deliveries the Red Army's composition and/or performance (after 1943) would have been very different: either they wouldn't have had the enormous amount of tanks due to a modified production schedule or they would not have had the strategic mobility of 1944/45. The real contribution of Lend&Lease was the provision of the logistic part of an army (trucks, food, radios and other technical systems etc) so that the Soviet industry could concentrate fully on producing the sharp tip (aircraft, tanks, artillery). Without either the sweeping offensives of late 1943 and 1944 would not have been possible with the results we know.

Nah .....

The war was won right here.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...chley-park.jpg