Who will win the Stanley Cup this year?

Italy was openly hostile to Austria-Hungary. No way she was going to fight for Austria-Hungary in an offensive war.

That said, even if she did. Ask yourself, if the weak and ineffective Hapsburg army could curb stomp the Italians for 3 years, what makes you think the French would have any sort of difficulty?  Not to mention the barely functioning Italian economy would have collapsed within a few weeks due to British naval blockade. Italy would have been not but another corpse for Germany to be shackled too.

30th August: Rapunzel.
In 1862 in Northern Virginia, however, Major General John Pope was about to get his long awaited comeuppance. Lee was ready to take the offensive against the man he had come to despise, for his over confident bombast and disregard and disrespect of Virginia and the men he had come east to command.
Not heeding his subordinates’ requests for caution, Pope tried once again to break Jackson’s battered Corps(one Brigade did break, but others plugged the gap). On the union far left were only two brigades of Infantry and they were to be assailed by ten times their number. Three Southern Divisions, Hood’s, Kemper’s and Jones’ crashed onto the field, making short work of the outnumbered Northern troops.
Pope did well to recognise the danger when it appeared and sent four Brigades from three different Divisions to hold at Henry House Hill on his left. Remember this was ground fought over 13 months ago, by much the same men and officers, although most were now promoted.
This time around there would be no rout. Understandably, there was much jubilation on the side of the Southerners and a great loss of morale on the Northern side. This sense of martial superiority, begun last Summer  at 1st Manassas, was to continue and come to a head on the field of Gettysburg another Summer from now.

Brad Stephens at Butler looks like a class act. Hope they can keep him for a while. By the way, Butler has most of their team back next year.

great glad to be of some assistance(bacon is kool for us)

I think that the sudden change was due to Liberal ads that backfired.  They had some attack ads that ended up touching otherwise-Liberal supporters that just chased them into the Conservative camp. 
Also i think that people just wanted to punish the Libs. 
Not sure how long this will last tho’.  The Conservatives have a minority gov’t with very few options for “teammates” with the exceptions of otherwise conservative Liberals.  We shall see . . .

the germans split their forces too thin in Russia i believe. I mean northern army goes to leningrad (and starves it instead of sieging) one army to moscow one army stuck in stalingrad and one in the caucasus.

This and the bad weather and circumstances prevented the blitzkrieg to continue. They should have focussed on Moscow and then rush to the caucasus.

Forget the V2 and just build planes. Don’t bomb London with little fighter cover losing too much planes. They should have copied the RAF defense when defending against the air raids which costed them so much industrial damage.

Production was one of the downfalls of germany too. Too little fuel and resources on any given time.

Mr. Ghoul, I think the Japanese started in China as far back as 1933. You are right as to why the US cut off her fuel supplies. You’re right that didn’t give the Japanese the right to attack in the minds of the US and according to their law. And that is probably the right position legally. However, how would the US react if her oil supply was threatened. Ahhhhh yes, if radical Islam swept across all the oil in the middle east and the world decided to shut of the oil to the US. How would the US react.

The only difference is the degree to which their arguments are valid. Both Japan in 1940 and the US in the last 5 years of done some bad stuff, broken internation law etc. Of course the rape of Nanking is orders of magnitude worse then anything the US has done since perhaps the Indian wars, even then it was spread out over centuries not weeks.

I believe the US had and has laws on her books not to sell weapons to countries at war that don’t involve the US. The US was not at war during WWII until Dec 8, 1941. Therefore it was illegal for the US to supply ANY weapons or war materials to any country at war during the period preceding Dec, 8 1941. The US doesn’t like syria selling weapons to Iraq now, why should they expect war time Germany to like the US selling weapons to England.

In fact, Germany had a legal right to stop and sink any ships entering the british home waters found to be carring war materials. But I digress on this law and history lesson.

BB