I don't know about 1943, but when Operation Barbarossa started, most of the world including military experts expected the USSR to lose in a month.
Happy D-Day
Tyler Thompson
Connor Wilson
I saw 5th novembre 1943, that's well after barbarossa and after Stalingrad. The Soviets basically won after that, the Germans couldn't get the oil.
Ian Thompson
Fun Fact.
Today the Royal Family put out a tweet that Germany was an ally of Britain & the Soviet Union was not part of the war effort. The parasites deleted the tweet with Germany being named an 'allied nation' of WW2, and replaced it with Merkel cut out.
Ryder Walker
Churchill described Hitler as "an admirable champion" & admired his "patriotic achievements".
Zachary Cooper
Was the tweet archived?
Wyatt Powell
Fascism is the apotheosis of Western bourgeois thought. It may have lost the battle, yet it certainly came out victorious in the end.
Brody Carter
Anyone have a proper answer to the "but muh lend lease! / muh british naval blockade!" meme going through normie channels right now? I recall that both Stalin and Zhukov attributed Lend Lease to tipping the scale in their favor, but that could be true at 5% contribution as much as 50%. How much of a difference did it make?
Kayden Roberts
I'm currently reading Jochen Hellbeck's Stalingrad and, while it does obviously focus on that specific battle, it goes pretty in-depth into the Soviet mentality before and during the war generally. Much of the book is devoted to simply presenting interviews made of Stalingrad fighters by Soviet historians shortly after the battle was decided, so you get the story directly from people that were actually on the front lines.
Of particular interest are his explanations of the Soviet command system, specifically the split between commissars and commanders, and the role of communist agitation in not only maintaining morale, but motivating people to take heroic actions that make war stories from the Western front look childish.
Hellbeck doesn't seem to be a Leninist, and so he will occasionally throw in some bullshit about Stalin, but it is very mild compared to other non-Russian histories, and you can tell that he respects the views of the people on the ground immensely, even in regards to Stalin and the Soviet government.
It's honestly very inspiring. Reading it makes you want to fight, to step up and be active. After you hear about electrical workers maintaining the city's electrical grid under heavy German fire until they are forced to leave by the Red Army, or workers from the tractor factory manning the tanks they have just put together, and then driving them two blocks away to the front lines, it's hard to not have that spirit rub off on you.
Blake Lopez
Well, here's what Zhukov said about it in his memoirs:
"The Soviet people give their due to the people of the United States and Britain, to their soldiers, sailors, officers and military leaders who did everything in their power to bring closer the victory over Nazi Germany. We sincerely honour the memory of the killed British and American seamen who despite the dangerous situation at sea, despite the fact that they faced death every mile of the way, delivered to us the cargoes under the Lend-Lease agreement. We highly appreciate the valiance of the participants in the Resistance movement in many European countries." (…) "We also touched upon the deliveries under the Lend-Lease programme. Everything seemed clear in that respect then. Nevertheless, for years after the war bourgeois historiography has asserted that it was the Allied deliveries of armaments, materials and foodstuffs that had played a decisive role for our victory over the enemy. True, the Soviet Union did receive supplies the economy needed so badly: machinery, equipment, materials, fuel and foodstuffs. For example, over 400,000 vehicles, a great number of locomotives and communication facilities were brought from the United States and Britain. But could all that have had a decisive influence on the course of the war? I have already mentioned that the Soviet industry developed on such a scale during the war that it provided the front and rear with everything needed. I see no sense in going into all that once more. As for the armaments, what I would like to say is that we received under Lend-Lease from the United States and Britain about 18,000 aircraft and over 11,000 tanks. That comprised a mere 4 per cent of the total amount of armaments that the Soviet people produced to equip its army during the war. Consequently, there is no ground for talk about the decisive role of the deliveries under Lend-Lease. As for the tanks and aircraft supplied to us by the British and US governments, they, to be frank, did not display high fighting qualities; especially tanks which, running on petrol, would burn like torches"
Ryan Green
While I respect and am grateful to the soldiers who fought there, I hold only contempt for the orchestrators of D-Day. Their incompetence led to thousands of pointless deaths through drowning, hypothermia and hitting mines that ought to have been cleared way ahead as well as bunkered positions that were left essentially untouched by naval artillery or the Air Force. That's ignoring the parachuters who got airdropped into fucking reservoirs and drowned because the British parachute release took 3 separate parts and the parachute would wrap around the soldier before he could unclasp it.
D-Day was also done so late in the war that it was essentially done for 1 reason… to establish Western control on mainland Europe before the USSR took it over and was greeted universally as saviours.
Does anyone have the archive of the Tweet that is historically important!
Lend Lease was a drop of water in a bucket
nationstates.net