How can World War 2 vehicles destroy a Challenger 2?

Interesting read so far, although I have not gotten through the whole thing yet (the site is huge!). Thanks for sharing.

The Allies didn’t have “a” plan to wage the Battle of the Atlantic, and neither did the Germans.  The Battle of the Atlantic was a complex battle of attrition on a gigantic scale which lasted all the way from September 1939 to May 1945, and it was characterized by constant changes of plans and tactics and weaponry on both sides as it progressed, with each side trying to overcome every new enemy development with a suitable counter-development.  The campaign see-sawed several times, with one side or the other gaining the advantage at various points; some methods of waging the campaign became ineffectual as time progressed, but were highly effective in earlier stages and therefore were entirely correct to use at those points.

@CWO:

Italy didn’t hold on to British Somalia for very long.  Britain recaptured it in early 1941, and likewise liberated Ethiopia and conquered Italian Somaliland.  Germany didn’t save Italy’s rear end in that part of Africa, nor did it even intervene as far as I know;

I believe the Suez Canal was closed  :wink:

@wittmann:

Worsham: I noticed it was today in 1920 that Polish troops under General Rydz-Smigly held a victory parade up the main road in Kiev, celebrating their 7th May capture of the city.
Their tenure of Kiev only lasted a few weeks.

After studying this conflict, you can get a better understanding of the Soviet willingness to divide Poland with Germany.

We would have cut off all ties with them. The next one would have been a declaration of war.

@KurtGodel7:

@Gargantua:

With that said Kurt Godel…

That makes Jodl innocent.  But also… dead, by execution.

Thus, the United States government is guilty of Murder?  Or is it the internationally community that is to blame?

The Allies conducted Soviet-style show trials after the war, against both the Germans and Japanese.

Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. “(Chief U.S. prosecutor) Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,” he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[61]

Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”[62][63]

Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled,” he wrote. “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”[64]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#Criticism

The above-described trials resulted in a very different outcome than might have been expected, had the trials been conducted by a trustworthy neutral government. (In contrast, the Allied governments which conducted the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible. The worse the Nazis looked, the better the Allied governments would look for having beaten them.) Also, there is this quote from The Guardian, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers:

Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. . . . Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. . . .

The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”. . . .

Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out. . . .

One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in all those two years had undergone such treatmdescribed tactics would have been used to extort confessions for use at the Nuremberg Trials.

@KurtGodel7:

@Gargantua:

With that said Kurt GNuremberg," he wrote. “I don’t mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”[61]

Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves “have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest.”[62][63]

Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of “substituting power for principle” at Nuremberg. “I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled,” he wrote. “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time.”[64]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials#Criticism

The above-described trials resulted in a very different outcome than might have been expected, had the trials been conducted by a trustworthy neutral government. (In contrast, the Allied governments which conducted the trials had a strong vested interest in making the Nazis look as bad as possible. The worse the Nazis looked, the better the Allied governments would look for having beaten them.) Also, there is this quote from The Guardian, one of Britain’s most prestigious newspapers:

Official documents discovered last month at the National Archives at Kew, south-west London, show that the London Cage was a secret torture centre where German prisoners who had been concealed from the Red Cross were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with execution or with unnecessary surgery.

As horrific as conditions were at the London Cage, Bad Nenndorf was far worse. . . . Initially, most of the detainees were Nazi party members or former members of the SS, rounded up in an attempt to thwart any Nazi insurgency. . . .

The Foreign Office briefed Clement Attlee, the prime minister, that “the guards had apparently been instructed to carry out physical assaults on certain prisoners with the object of reducing them to a state of physical collapse and of making them more amenable to interrogation”. . . .

Threats to execute prisoners, or to arrest, torture and murder their wives and children were considered “perfectly proper”, on the grounds that such threats were never carried out. . . .

One victim of the cold cell punishment was Buttlar, who swallowed the spoon handle to escape. An anti-Nazi, he had spent two years as a prisoner of the Gestapo. "I never in alldescribed tactics would have been used to extort confessions for use at the Nuremberg Trials.
I don’t see a problem here
the nazis got what they deserved

Possibly you are correct zhukov, however the city was invaded several times and as far as I am aware, the invasions were conducted by line troops rather than full fledged bandits and outlaws. (like Quantril in Missouri and Kansas, he was much worse than a bandit). In early fights the targets were limited pretty much to strategic targets. I think it was Early who gave the orders to wreck Thaddeous Stevens Ironworks and that probably was more revenge and anger than anything.

@balungaloaf:

without US aid assistance via lend lease, without the allied strategic bombing campaign tying up much of the luftwaffe and anti air defenses, and without the threat of invasion keeping millions of german soldiers in europe, the soviets would have been smashed before they could ever set up a counter attack.  if moscow was taken, the people would give up on their communist overlords and capitulate.

You alluded to the pressure the U.S. and Britain put on Germany; and I fully agree that pressure was immense. Even in 1940–before the U.S. was technically at war–its industrial production created profound implications for the balance of power in Europe. With massive numbers of American aircraft being produced and sent to Britain, Germany had to either a) find a way to keep pace, industrially, with the U.S. and Britain combined, or b) watch its cities and people be destroyed by waves of British and American bombers. The invasion of the Soviet Union was largely precipitated by the desire to allow Germany to attain the raw materials and industrial capacity to achieve outcome A.

However, keeping pace with the production capacity of the U.S. and Britain also required Germany to invest heavily in its own production facilities. That investment diverted effort from what would have been immediately useful production against the Soviet Union. During 1942, the Soviets out-produced the Germans 3:1 or even 4:1 in all major land categories of production, and even out-produced the Germans 2:1 in planes.

Prior to launching Operation Barbarossa, the German military staff had incorrectly believed that the Soviet Army consisted of 200 divisions. Divisions which had fought very poorly in the Soviets’ 1940 invasion of Finland. In the spring of 1941, the German Army consisted of 150 divisions; 100 of which were used for the invasion of the Soviet Union. But in the months after the invasion, the Soviets were quickly able to expand the size of their army to about 600 divisions. Given the imbalance of sheer numbers, it is very unlikely Germany could have prevailed in a war against the Soviet Union even despite its military’s advantage on a man-for-man basis.