Memorial Service for Graf Spee's Captain

One of the major improvements to the Soviet armed forces that came out of the Winter War was the replacement of Kliment Voroshilov by Semyon Timoshenko as People’s Commissar for Defence. Voroshilov had helped Stalin carry out the Great Purge by denouncing some of his military colleagues, and (as I recall) he reversed some of the army reforms that his predecessors had carried out.  He also bungled the opening phases of the Winter War, and was eventually turfed out in favour of the more competent Timoshenko.  After the Soviets won in Finland, Timoshenko set about modernizing the Red Army.

@Imperious:

Great maps!!!

Thanks for sharing

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102332/Adolf-Hitlers-fake-British-bank-notes-expected-fetch-2k-auction.html

all the best NATO military testing facilities

Canada should get an award for that. Most important thing ever!

@legion3:

Naturally though, I voted for the USSR,  :wink: the opportunity to knock them out of the war or at least to take and hold Moscow, a major road, rail and communication hub with no equal in the Soviet Union, was available in the early fall of 41 had the Germans not been diverted and thus delayed in the turn south into the Ukraine. Another Hitler directive.

I take a few issues with this, It is VERY common to overestimate the value of moscow. Because moscow was such a hub, it would be very easy to link the railroads behind moscow, they are not that far apart. The russians built ALOT of railroad in WW2, and this would have been a very small challenge for them. They could probably have made Gorky their new capitol. losing moscow would not have been the end of russia by far.

As long as the russian army is alive and well supplied, russians would win this showdown. What the hitler directive did was to divert the panzers south, to help with the capture of kiev, What this move did was to encircle 700 000 russian soliders and to hasten the capture of Kryvbas and Krivoy Rog, which where the main prodcution of russian steel, dealing another devestating blow to the russian economy. This move severy reduced the resuplyment of the red army and encircled alot of the russian prewar division. This means that the 700k soliders they encircled was among the best equipped and best trained russian divisions. I could very easily argue that if the germans had gone for moscow instead, then these divisions and the increased russian production could have made the summeroffensive of 42 impossible, and the russian winter counterattacks in the winter of 41/42 that much more devestating. It was already devestating because of the of the 18 siberian divisions (guessing about 500K soliders). If you double the number of trained soliders, then the germans would probably have been lucky to even hold moscow, and if they tried, a stalingrad situation might have developed.

@Raunchy:

At least 749 U.S. sailors and soldiers would be dead by dawn.
Code-named Exercise Tiger, the ill-fated D-Day dry run was at the time America’s costliest incident of the war (only Pearl Harbor was worse).

:roll:sigh, people just dont know anything about history

But very interesting article, I dont blame you for the  author being an imbecile

@balungaloaf:

i have to strongly disagree with zhukov here.

its not insane to attack the russians.

americans were the only ones with the bomb.  japan wouldnt want to get bombed again, and russia could give japan NO support.

american could begin daily bombing runs again on all modes of russian factory output.

plus add nuclear devastation to many key soviet cities and to whole armored divisions.

Nations committing such acts will get retribution in kind, sooner or later.  Russia as a state might surrender, but the atomic bomb alone wouldn’t destroy communism completely, and eventually communists (all over the globe) would find a way to respond.

Truthfully I consider it insane to use the atomic bomb at all.  Unless it is against aliens.