War and histroy

Yes, for the Americans it was the Communists and not the Nazi or Japanese racists who were now the enemies. Later it would be the Jihadists. There is no end to it. It is really a game of who is the Top Dog. Same specie fights are usually about the pecking order. They kill each other over the harem, turf or food. When the apex predators are eliminated then the beta predators try to take over and they become the alpha as they succeed and grow bigger in body size. The mesopredators are chimpanzees, baboons, coyotes, etc. when man has succeeded in destroying the lions, tigers, wolves, bears, eagles, etc.

So the former ally Soviets become the dreaded Communists.


I sometimes think that men have always loved war. There are some women (more than men would credit) who would be perfectly happy to have that y chromosome finally disappear and the species evolve so that we don't need men to procreate. I am not one of them, but some culling of the herd to remove the "rabid dogs" and stop them from spreading their mayhem and violence (and their genes) certainly seems like a good idea to me theoretically.

However, all wars and all sides in all wars are not morally equivalent, and to think so is to misread history,in my opinion.

In the case of American history, some more detailed reading would reveal to you that there has always been a pronounced isolationist strand in American political life. Whatever Roosevelt's personal feelings on the matter, the most he could do for Britain was send supplies. (Let's not get involved in conspiracy theories, please.) I personally think that was unfortunate, and that America should have gone to Britain's aide earlier. It was, in my opinion, a moral imperative to defeat Nazi Germany. However, America didn't get into the war until Pearl Harbor was bombed, because the American public did not want to get involved, neither in the Pacific nor in Europe. The Japanese made a severe miscalculation.

As for the Soviet Union, there was an unfortunate tendency among "leftist" intellectuals in Europe and the U.S. to romanticize Communism, and to refuse to see it as it really was. I'm not saying I don't understand why that was so...I come from an area that was highly Anarchist and Communist and I understand the reasons for their choices, especially when the other choice seemed to be fascism/Nazism. That doesn't change the fact that they were both, in my opinion, evil ideologies. The "fellow travelers" in the U.S. were willfully blind. My "pet hate" in that regard is Lillian Hellman, of whom Mary McCarthy once famously said, "Every word she writes is a lie, and that includes "a" and "the"...a brilliant woman, Mary McCarthy, and one of my heroines.

If you think that all American military and civilian leaders during War War II had similarly starry eyed views of the Communists you are mistaken. War makes for strange bedfellows. You have to pick your battles for the appropriate times. The disastrous decisions made at Yalta have more to do, I think, with Roosevelt's failing health than with any lack of clear sightedness about the designs of Joe Stalin, but that could be debated.

As for ISIS, we are dealing with the modern equivalent of Nazism. I cannot believe that anyone could see it as anything other than unadulterated evil. The west, will, in my opinion, rue the day that they allowed them to get this much power and territory.
 
I think you take it too personally. I am saying there is 'pecking order' mechanism at work. Look at all herbivores and even predators like lions. Rams and deer will fight to the death during rut season thus in the wild big horns are natural. Lions and elephants vie for supremacy at the "grassy bedroom" for not one but all the females in the herd. Men are no different. They all animals but with bigger brains so they are more cunning. Chimpanzees our ancestors also engage in this kind of behavior. May be this is how species are formed. The situation I am projecting in politics is that the top dog likes the monopoly of power whether in a family, a tribe, nation, empire or league of nations. No matter what the country it will try to dominate till it weakens and another ascend in its place. Nothing lasts forever.

 
Yes, I have this bad habit of taking rape, sexual slavery, beheadings, crucifixions, the mass slaughter of unarmed men and women, and the killing of babies both seriously and personally.

If I really believed that men are hard wired this way, I would regretfully support either massive genetic engineering, or figuring out a way to procreate without you guys....
 
Yes, I have this bad habit of taking rape, sexual slavery, beheadings, crucifixions, the mass slaughter of unarmed men and women, and the killing of babies both seriously and personally.

If I really believed that men are hard wired this way, I would regretfully support either massive genetic engineering, or figuring out a way to procreate without you guys....

Your comments raised a lot of issues and I sort of have some sort of answer which may not satisfy you.


· Man’s life is no cakewalk either. He has to join the the war and in peace time hunt for game, work the fields or look after herd or mind the sheep.

· Hunting skills certainly helped in learning to kill.

· Protecting herd also helped in learning to kill with arrow or spear.

· We seem to think that pastoralism, horses (chariots or mounted archers, sword and archer weaponry may have advanced empire creation. These activities may have led to patriarchal system as women often died at child birth so women were scarce in the steppes.

· Empire building in Central and South America was runner-based.

· The interpretation of celestial events as doings of the gods brought a lot of fear to the Aztecs and Incas. A good harvest was attributed to a god who was sacrificed to with human blood. At first it was the royals who probably sacrificed their babies then changed to members of the tribe to prisoners and then to other tribes. They went on raids to capture sacrificial victims. The Spaniards brought this to an end.

· Human sacrifice was a common feature in early human civilization. It was practised in the Middle East. The statue of the god Moloch had a huge mouth and victims were shoved into the mouth. The interior of the mouth has a huge fire burning. Human sacrifice was practised by the Sadhus in India not too long ago.

· Horse or equine mastery in Arabia 9,000 years ago or Kazakhstan 5,000 years ago may be the origin of horse culture. The first historical empires were in the Middle East with Sargon. The story is that he usurped the existing royal line.

· Shepherding in marginal grasslands led to desertification in Middle East and Central Asia.

· Junkyard dogs are the meanest.

· Nomads and shepherds if they couldn’t trade their meat or hides often resorted to violence with robbery and violent raids against settlements.

· Hunter gatherers were reportedly matriarchal which is possible. Among the herbivores horses are matriarchal. It is the ones with horns like goats, deer, buffalo that battle each other for their harem. Male horses are same as the female horses unless you look below.

Rape, sexual slavery, , crucifixions, and the killing of babies - Ancient crimes.

Beheadings - French Revolutions Monarchy and Aristocrats enjoying life while people could not get bread just like the Russian Revolution

Mass slaughter of unarmed men and women – Alexander the Great mass slaughter of the citizens of Thebes to show Greek cities not to resist, Julius Caesar mass slaughter of Druids as they were the instigators of war being the learned ones both priest and warriors, Genghis Khan mass slaughter of Khwarezm cities in vengeance for the Khwarezm Governor showing disrespect and murder of Genghis Khan’s ambassadors and to instil fear.


Hermaphrodite worms with both sex organs battle each other to impregnate the other. It seems to enjoy impregnating but not being impregnated. It is inefficient and doesn't seem to benefit the species so it has been limited in its role in the animal world. Creatures with defined sex roles gained the upper hand as less time and effort were wasted reproducing. Sexually specialized i.e. (male/female) animals dominate the world.

Human foetuses have the rudiments of both sex organs. The Y chromosome, I think, suppresses the development of ovaries and vagina while the presence of XX chromosomes suppress the development of the testes and penis. I can see the formative structure of the testes could have been developed into the ovaries with the XX chromosomes. The clitoris is actually a mini penis. I have seen pictures of hermaphrodites with breasts and penises perhaps they have XXY chromosomes or somehow their DNA is screwed up. But that is to be expected as evolution starts with accidental or environmental adaptive change in the DNA.


Reptiles seem to be unusual. Crocodile's sex seem to determined by water temperature as it grows. I don't know too much about them.

Men are hard wired this way - Violence origin is unknown. In the insect world it is the females which are the aggressors. The drones die off after they mate with the queen. The dinosaurs' fiercest and largest members were females e. g. Sue in the Chicago Museum is a 40-foot female Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is the female lions that do all the hunting.

Genetics is at its infancy and anyone who had done programming knows how a little mistakes produce innumerable errors down the line.


Look at the numbers. ACGT instead of 0 and 1.

Byte = 0000, 0001, 0011, 0111
1111, 1000, 1100, 1110

1001, 1101, 1011, 0110

1010, 0110, 0011, 0101


Byte of two bits of 0 and 1= 2^4 = 16 permutations.

Four bases ACGT form our DNA byte.
Gene = tens of thousands of ACGT bytes with various combinations.

The numbers are overwhelming. Even supercomputers cannot handle them.
 
Last edited:
General Heinz Guderian was the architect of the Blitzkrieg. Before tanks were lined up with infantry line cannons in support of infantry charges. It was Guderian who decided to actually have tanks do the charging. His strategy was to find a weakness in the defense line and attack it. Bombing the weak spot was even better. Once the tanks broke through the tanks outflanked the defenses and they were on their way to victory. The tanks with their armor were almost invulnerable to gunfire from rifles.

 
Blitzkrieg tactics:

 
Battle for Leningrad


When I was a teenager I read a lot spy books and novels as I used to read Agatha Christie a lot. There was a book on WWII spy work. There was Red Letter plot in which Hitler knew Stalin was paranoid so he forged letters to implicate General Zhukov as a conspirator. As he wanted to expand German territories in his "Lebensraum" strategy and he worked to weaken the Soviets. To get rid of the Soviet most brilliant general worked as Stalin had Zhukov sent to Siberia. So Hitler then decided to invade Russia.

1938

The Case of the Trotskyist Anti-Soviet Military Organization

While Stalin was indeed the Boss, he was ever mindful to consolidate his power and squash any potential rivals. In 1938, he moved against the army. Stalin’s foe in the power struggle following Lenin’s death, Leon Trotsky, had controlled the army in earlier times. When Stalin had replaced Trotsky with Kliment Voroshilov in the 1920s, he also dismissed former commanders. He continued the process in the early 1930s, with 47,000 more dismissed. But there had been some commanders who had been too difficult to touch. They had been heroes of the Civil War against the Whites, praised vociferously in the Soviet history books. They also despised Stalin. They knew what a poor leader the Boss had been in the Polish campaign. They talked about him behind his back. Would they unite against Stalin? Out of a hunger for power? Or out of fear for their own survival? Stalin’s paranoia over took him. He devised a conspiracy where the high command, Trotsky and the German fascists had joined together against the Soviet Union. It was not too difficult to connect the Red Army leadership with Germany, since the former had previously had close connections with the Reichswehr.

wlddat.jpg


The first to fall was Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a tsarist officer, well-groomed and self-possessed. He shared a mutual contempt with Voroshilov. During World War I, Tukhachevsky was for some time in a German POW camp. In the period of military cooperation between the USSR and Germany after the war and before Hitler came to power, he had sung the Reichswehr’s praises. It would not be difficult to find compromising material in the impending investigation.

At the same time, Hitler’s intelligence service had set out to weaken the Soviet army by forging a letter in which Tukhachevsky announced his intention of carrying out a Napoleonic coup. Whether this occurred to German intelligence spontaneously or was inspired by Stalin’s agents is a matter for conjecture. It is widely believed that the forged documents were probably superfluous, as many of them were not even used by the prosecutors against the generals.

ae645c.jpg

Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky was charged at his trial with taking part in a “right-wing-Trotskyist” conspiracy in which he collaborated with the Germans against the Soviet Union. Tukhachevsky shared a mutual contempt with Kliment Voroshilov, the People's Commissar for Defense.


Tukhachevsky was arrested first and soon confessed. More arrests followed – Iona Yakir, Ieronim Uborevich, August Kork, Vitaly Primakov and many more. The head of the Soviet Air Force, Yakov Alksnis, once so valued for his insight on air doctrines, went from sitting on the tribunals to standing before them. More than a hundred military chiefs had been called in from the provinces because the ranks of the Military Council itself was thinned out catastrophically. A quarter of its members had been arrested as conspirators. It went on like this for the rest of the year. In September, Voroshilov would report that a total of 37,761 officers and commissars were dismissed from the army, 10,868 were arrested and 7,211 were condemned for crimes against the Soviet Union.

2dwhhmo.jpg


The Soviet intelligence agencies were also targeted. Yan Berzin, the head of military intelligence, was tried and convicted. So it went with Genrikh Yagoda, the man responsible for the NKVD, the Soviet internal police agency. Lavrentiy Beria took over from Yagoda while Nikolai Yezhov replaced Berzin.

Commanders had to be replaced as quickly as possible. This meant rapid promotions for those who lacked experience and who were not yet ready for the responsibilities that went with their ranks. For a country with plans for war and neighbors with hostile intentions, this was a terrible setback. Thankfully, promising up-and-comers – such as Zhukov, Ivan Konev and Vasily Chuikov – had been spared. But would it be enough?

dzza5i.jpg


The Battle of Lake Khasan

In July 1938, the tension between Japan and the Soviet Union exploded. The Japanese insisted that Soviet troops be removed from the border between Russia and the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, in the Lake Khasan area not far from Vladivostok. Moscow rejected the demands. The Japanese government had wanted to keep the incident diplomatic, but the Japanese army had little patience with diplomacy. It sent an infantry division under General Kamezo Suetaka to the scene with an order to await the outcome of the negotiations. The order, however, could apparently be construed to apply only to the initial situation, in which the Soviet occupation had been limited. By the end of the month, Soviet troops were now positioned in large numbers. Suetaka attacked and seized the entire ridge possessed by the Soviets.

wro1ec.jpg


At that time, Marshal Vasily Blyukher was the Soviet military commander in the Far East. When he learned of Suetaka’s success, he ordered reinforcements to the Lake Khasan area, but they were slow to arrive due to poor roads south of Vladivostok. After the counterattack failed, Blyukher received an order from the Politburo to take command of the operations in person, only to be replaced by his second-in-command not long afterward. Soviet success was hindered due to an order that prohibited any incursion into Japanese territory, meaning that Soviet units had to move over terrain that heavily favored defense over offense. Though not immediately in danger but at a disadvantage in numbers, the Japanese relented and a ceasefire went into effect in early August.

4htcuq.jpg

Soviet troops positioned atop one of the hills to the west of Lake Khasan, situated along the border between Russia and Japanese-occupied territory. Since entering Japanese territory was forbidden, Soviet units had to fight along the ridges, rendering armor useless.


Although the Soviets had been victorious, the fact that the Japanese had not been ably resisted or pushed back drew harsh criticisms from Moscow. Blyukher was made the scapegoat. His command was taken away and he was sent to the Black Sea resort at Sochi for some rest and relaxation. He was arrested soon after and charged with having been a spy for the Japanese since 1921.

16ga0is.jpg

Marshal Vasily Blyukher, a namesake of the famous Prussian marshal, had been an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek before assuming command in the Soviet Far East. He had been a member of the tribunal that had convicted Marshal Tukhachevsky; he himself was dismissed and arrested due to the unimpressive performance of Soviet units at Lake Khasan.


Treason… The Good Kind

Before 1938 came to a close, something unexpected happened. Colonel Juho Peltonen, an officer in the Finnish army, defected to the Soviet Union. This caused a scandal within Finland, where public opinion was sharply against the Soviets. The actual cause for the defection was disputed, with the Soviets saying Peltonen was escaping the “repression of Finnish socialism” and the Finns claiming Peltonen was an opportunist seeking advancement in the Soviet military.

59t3jo.jpg


Peltonen had been a protégé of Vilho Petter Nenonen, the man responsible for devising artillery tactics for the army of General Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim. After several interviews, he revealed knowledge of using artillery against airborne targets – much of which was antiquated in other major countries, but as of yet unknown in the USSR. Not seeing much value to it, Stalin opted not to pursue using artillery in such a way, instead using Peltonen purely for public relations purposes.

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?383900-Red-Flag-Rising-Soviet-Union-AAR/page2
 
Last edited:
Battle for Kursk

Greatest tank battle in history

 
I read a lot of history in Europe and what`s happened in Poland (Oswicim) that`s everybody should see!!!
 
Your comments are very welcome. To be honest I do not know too much about Europe having never set foot on it. All my knowledge is book knowledge learnt at school, movies, documentaries, self-reading out of curiosity and hearsay from British and European friends
 
Rommel


[h=4]Invasion of France and Belgium[/h] On 10 May 1940 the Germans invaded Belgium, with von Bock's Army Group B moving into northern Belgium while von Runstedt's Army Group A with seven panzer divisions drove the hammer blow by coming through the rugged Ardennes forest. General Hermann Hoth's XV Army Corps, comprising the 5th and 7th Panzer Divisions, formed the northern portion of the advance and was intended to protect the flank.[30] Thus Rommel's role was to be supportive, but as was often the case with his commands, by taking sharp advantage of the opportunities that presented he made them more effective than his mission required.[30]By May 14 the 7th Panzer Division had reached the River Meuse near the Walloon municipality of Dinant. There the attack into France stalled due to destroyed bridges and determined artillery and rifle fire from the Belgian defenders. Rommel, present with the forward units, took direct command of the forces at the river, bringing up tanks and flak units to provide suppressive counter-fire. With no smoke units available, Rommel improvised by having nearby houses set on fire to conceal his forces with their smoke. He sent infantry across in rubber boats, appropriated the bridging tackle of 5th Panzer Division, and went into the water himself, encouraging the sappers and helping lash together the pontoons of their light bridge.[31] Once the bridge was functional, he was in the second tank across.[32] With the Meuse crossed the division moved out of the Ardennes and into France, with Rommel moving back and forth among his forces, directing and pressing forward their advance.
Rommel's experiences in the First World War of successes gained by rapid forward movement, flanking opponents and attacking their rear areas, and catching the defenders by surprise were amplified with the mobility afforded to armoured formations. To augment his force at the point of attack he made use of the Luftwaffe as a forward mobile artillery. For a man who had been in command of armoured units for only a few months, he proved adept at applying the techniques of the "blitzkrieg" style warfare.[33] A major aspect of his success was his grasp of the psychological shock such attacks had upon the morale and fighting spirit of the enemy forces.

Battle of Arras


On 20 May Rommel reached Arras. Here 7th Panzer Division attempted to cut off the British Expeditionary Force from the coast. Hans von Luck, commanding the reconnaissance battalion of the Division, was tasked with forcing a crossing over the La Bassée canals near the city. Supported by Stuka dive bombers, the unit managed to cross. The following day the British launched a counterattack using two columns of infantry supported by the heavily armoured Matilda Mk I and Matilda II tanks in the Battle of Arras. The standard German 37 mm anti-tank gun proved ineffective against the armour of the Matildas. A battery of 105 mm howitzers stopped the first column. The second approached within 1,000 metres of where Rommel was rallying his division, who made use of a battery of 88 mm anti-aircraft guns against the attackers. Rommel and his aide went from gun to gun, with Rommel giving each gun its target. As the losses in the tank force mounted, the attack was broken off. This was the first time the 88 mm Flak gun was used in an anti-tank role.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Rommel
 
The Battle of France

 
The Battle for Russia

 
WWII Hitler's super tanks

 
India and Pakistan

 
WWII Atlantic Wall

 
Battle for Italy

 
Battle for the Mediterranean Sea

 

This thread has been viewed 108922 times.

Back
Top