Operation Barbarossa and Icebreaker

Discussions on WW2 in Eastern Europe.
Post Reply
User avatar
Kunikov
Member
Posts: 4455
Joined: 20 Jan 2004, 20:23
Contact:

#751

Post by Kunikov » 10 Nov 2005, 20:16

StaHit wrote:
Kunikov wrote:I've read parts of that book, and I've read some of his other books
Kunikov wrote:And I have the book in Russian on my PC, haven't read it yet, but I have it.
Am I the only one who sees some contradiction here?
There is a difference between reading an entire book and reading selected texts out of it.

StaHit
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 04 May 2005, 17:58
Location: Lithuania

#752

Post by StaHit » 10 Nov 2005, 20:19

Kunikov wrote:
StaHit wrote:
Kunikov wrote:I've read parts of that book, and I've read some of his other books
Kunikov wrote:And I have the book in Russian on my PC, haven't read it yet, but I have it.
Am I the only one who sees some contradiction here?
There is a difference between reading an entire book and reading selected texts out of it.
I have to agree - it is really huge difference and that's why it is better to read entire book before criticizing it.
Last edited by StaHit on 10 Nov 2005, 20:23, edited 1 time in total.


User avatar
Kunikov
Member
Posts: 4455
Joined: 20 Jan 2004, 20:23
Contact:

#753

Post by Kunikov » 10 Nov 2005, 20:22

StaHit wrote:
Kunikov wrote:
StaHit wrote:
Kunikov wrote:I've read parts of that book, and I've read some of his other books
Kunikov wrote:And I have the book in Russian on my PC, haven't read it yet, but I have it.
Am I the only one who sees some contradiction here?
There is a difference between reading an entire book and reading selected texts out of it.
I have to agree - it is really huge difference.
Keep playing your games, you again are not showing any proof of anything thus far.

StaHit
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 04 May 2005, 17:58
Location: Lithuania

#754

Post by StaHit » 10 Nov 2005, 21:07

paulmacg wrote:The Red Army was in a defensive posture when it was attacked in 1941. Worse, it lacked even the hint of the formation it would need to adopt to conduct an attack. There is no argument that can change these facts.
R.C.Raack in Stalin's role in the Coming of WWII wrote:Now we also find a major military-historical aspect of Suvorov's argument confirmed by evidence not available to him when he wrote. And this evidence, some from conclusions drawn from Soviet military archives and another vital bit from other previously restricted East Bloc archives, also merits very close attention. First of all, we report the results of an important recent article by another Soviet military-historical writer, V. I. Semidetko. He came to a conclusion about Soviet military behavior in early summer 1941 that he appears hardly to have expected when he began his research on "Results of the Battle in White Russia."

Semidetko was in all likelihood wholly unaware of Suvorov's work when he wrote. Yet he concluded, writing in the Soviet magazine Military-Historical Journal (Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal), in 1989, after research on the early months of the Soviet-German war in newly opened Soviet military archives, that the reason the German army had so easily sliced eastward through the Red army on the central, White Russian front in June 1941 (where both armies, attack and defense, were of approximately equal strength) was that the latter was in an attack position.(14) This is, of course, the very discovery central to the argument Suvorov made several years earlier to explain that same military debacle. The Red army, Suvorov then said, was positioning itself to attack west, hence wholly out of its defensive positions. Because of the Kremlin's longstanding doctrinal emphasis on assault, those positions had, in any event, long been neglected. The Red army was, therefore, totally vulnerable before the onrushing Germans who, anticipating Stalin's attack, attacked first.

Source:14. V. I. Semidetko, "Istoki porazheniia v Belorussii," in number 4/1989, 30-1
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/raack.htm See, Paul, I gave you this link before, but you ignored it...


Emphasis is mine:
R.C.Raack in Preventive Wars? wrote:Stoecker contends, masses of evidence to the contrary, that the Red Army was too
poorly prepared to be able to conduct an attack (though she concedes that it was in attack formation when Hitler struck). Hence, she implies, Stalin would not have ordered one. But she rests that contention about Stalin’s decision-making on another assumption, that Stalin was a “realist,” the very point that Bonwetsch and other contributors to the volume implicitly demolish en passant. That is, they show a Stalin utterly incapable of taking realistic measures in the face of the onrushing German preparations. Moreover, it should be added, if Stalin thought an attack instead of a defense was required,insufficiently prepared though his armies might have been, no one was going to stand in his way. One keen observation German diplomat Erich Kordt relates is of a 1939 visit to Stalin’s office.
There he watched a fearful Boris M. Shaposhnikov, chief of the Red Army General Staff, posture at Kadavergehorsamkeit as the genius Stalin upbraided him like an office boy for failing to bring maps the boss had ordered.
In fact, Russian forces were concentrated mainly in the south
Yes, because the main offensive blow was destined to be made in the southern sector.
Last edited by StaHit on 10 Nov 2005, 22:26, edited 2 times in total.

StaHit
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 04 May 2005, 17:58
Location: Lithuania

#755

Post by StaHit » 10 Nov 2005, 21:58

Kunikov wrote:I've also spoken to authors who have disproved his works, one of them even had the 'honor' to have Suvorov call him and 'accuse' him of being a 'student of Goebbles.'
I don't have any ideas about whom are you talking, and I think you won't reveal that, but IMO it's the best description of the "historians" like Anfilov, Bezymenski or Garejev :D

User avatar
Kunikov
Member
Posts: 4455
Joined: 20 Jan 2004, 20:23
Contact:

#756

Post by Kunikov » 11 Nov 2005, 00:12

StaHit wrote:
Kunikov wrote:I've also spoken to authors who have disproved his works, one of them even had the 'honor' to have Suvorov call him and 'accuse' him of being a 'student of Goebbles.'
I don't have any ideas about whom are you talking, and I think you won't reveal that, but IMO it's the best description of the "historians" like Anfilov, Bezymenski or Garejev :D
Yury Finkelstein, latest book was "Svedyetyele Obvenyeniya: Vlasov, Tukhachevsky, y drugiye."

User avatar
Qvist
Member
Posts: 7836
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 17:59
Location: Europe

#757

Post by Qvist » 11 Nov 2005, 09:55

That's exactly what Glantz did when he ignored political and diplomatical background of the issue, e.g. Timoshenko this, Timoshenko that. Timoshenko was nothing compared to Stalin in SU, if Stalin thought he needed to attack and was sure himself that Red Army is capable to attack , all the timoshenkos in the world could do nothing about it, despite the real situation (reorganisation, unreadiness etc.) of Red Army.
Glantz' book is not about either diplomacy or politics, that is not the significance of it relative to this issue. In my opinion, Paul here makes good points.

I stand by what you quoted from me earlier in your post, and you apparently accept Glantz' description of reality. However - I do not think you are making a reasonable adjustment to that description. It is true that the state of the Red army does not in itself conclusively disprove the possibility of what Suvorov argues. But it is also true that this state is a very heavy piece of circumstantial evidence (to use such an expression) against it. It's almost like this piece of information can't be accomodated to your paradigm, to use a slight exaggeration. :wink:

cheers

StaHit
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 04 May 2005, 17:58
Location: Lithuania

#758

Post by StaHit » 11 Nov 2005, 17:05

Qvist wrote:Glantz' book is not about either diplomacy or politics, that is not the significance of it relative to this issue
Yes, I know this and I don't want to criticize SC for what it is not, but my main point is that political and diplomatical arguments is twice (I know I'm biased :) ) as important as military ones. My task is to provide evidence that Stalin thought that a)Red Army was capable to attack and b) he needed to attack for political reasons. I haven't done it so far, but I will try. Also I have some purely military arguments both from Suvorov and Isaev, but I need to do translations from Russian.


From MRP denial thread http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... &start=180:

my emphasis:
Kunikov wrote:In regards to when Germany would be ready for war:
"Although some generals raised objections, considering the army in the summer of 1939 not yet ready for war, these concerns were ignored, but they prove that the effectiveness of the new methods of combat (namely defeating an enemy much stronger in numbers by modern military means and methods) was not undisputed. Moreover, the fact that the objections raised by senior military officers were ignored again illustrates the changed status of the armed forces in Germany. From then on, assessing the 'military realities' was exclusively the business of the 'statesman', i.e. Hitler. He proceeded on the assumption that a Wehrmacht which was fully prepared for war was not an aim that could be achieved; indeed, he did not even consider it a desirable objective: 'If a statesman' wanted to wait until his armed forces were completely ready for war, he would 'never get to act'."

"From Peace to War" Wegner pgs. 128-129
I think it's not very accurate comparison but still it can serve as an evidence for my assumption that WWII was politicians' war. It would be very fun if someone writes the book Stumbling Wehrmacht and argues that Hitler couldn't attack because his senior military officers thought German army was not capable to do the task. :)

User avatar
Kunikov
Member
Posts: 4455
Joined: 20 Jan 2004, 20:23
Contact:

#759

Post by Kunikov » 11 Nov 2005, 17:13

StaHit wrote: I think it's not very accurate comparison but still it can serve as an evidence for my assumption that WWII was politicians' war. It would be very fun if someone writes the book Stumbling Wehrmacht and argues that Hitler couldn't attack because his senior military officers thought German army was not capable to do the task. :)
Can't be compared to the Soviet Union, while Hitler's ideas for a war with the USSR were around for close to a year before the invasion began, no one can say the same for the Soviet Union.

StaHit
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 04 May 2005, 17:58
Location: Lithuania

#760

Post by StaHit » 11 Nov 2005, 17:22

Kunikov wrote:
StaHit wrote: I think it's not very accurate comparison but still it can serve as an evidence for my assumption that WWII was politicians' war. It would be very fun if someone writes the book Stumbling Wehrmacht and argues that Hitler couldn't attack because his senior military officers thought German army was not capable to do the task. :)
Can't be compared to the Soviet Union, while Hitler's ideas for a war with the USSR were around for close to a year before the invasion began, no one can say the same for the Soviet Union.

But this is not Hitler's thoughts about war with SU, it's about Poland, if I understood correctly.What concerns Soviet preparations, I haven't read Meltiukhov yet, but it seems to me that he provided some arguments that SU began to plan the attack in the middle or the end of 1940 at the latest. It is a subject of future discussion.
Last edited by StaHit on 11 Nov 2005, 18:04, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Kunikov
Member
Posts: 4455
Joined: 20 Jan 2004, 20:23
Contact:

#761

Post by Kunikov » 11 Nov 2005, 17:26

StaHit wrote:
Kunikov wrote:
StaHit wrote: I think it's not very accurate comparison but still it can serve as an evidence for my assumption that WWII was politicians' war. It would be very fun if someone writes the book Stumbling Wehrmacht and argues that Hitler couldn't attack because his senior military officers thought German army was not capable to do the task. :)
Can't be compared to the Soviet Union, while Hitler's ideas for a war with the USSR were around for close to a year before the invasion began, no one can say the same for the Soviet Union.

But this is not Hitler's thoughts about war with SU, it's about Poland, if I understood correctly.What concerns Soviet preparations, I haven't read Meltiukhov yet, but it seems to me that he provided some arguments that SU began to plan attack in the middle or the end of 1940 at the latest. It is a subject of future discussion.
Make your claims when you have evidence to back them up.

StaHit
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 04 May 2005, 17:58
Location: Lithuania

#762

Post by StaHit » 11 Nov 2005, 17:34

Make your claims when you have evidence to back them up.
Let's pretend it was just my speculation, but from your answer looks like I touched the right spot.

User avatar
Kunikov
Member
Posts: 4455
Joined: 20 Jan 2004, 20:23
Contact:

#763

Post by Kunikov » 11 Nov 2005, 17:36

StaHit wrote:
Make your claims when you have evidence to back them up.
Let's pretend it was just my speculation, but from your answer looks like I touched the right spot.
Think what you like. How about from now on you actual present evidence instead of just pure 'speculation'? If you don't have any evidence, don't post.

StaHit
Member
Posts: 146
Joined: 04 May 2005, 17:58
Location: Lithuania

#764

Post by StaHit » 11 Nov 2005, 17:54

My speculation is based on these nice pictures from Meltiukhov's book:

http://web.archive.org/web/200405310652 ... ov/s05.gif

and

http://web.archive.org/web/200405310652 ... ov/s06.gif
Last edited by StaHit on 11 Nov 2005, 17:57, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
Kunikov
Member
Posts: 4455
Joined: 20 Jan 2004, 20:23
Contact:

#765

Post by Kunikov » 11 Nov 2005, 17:56

StaHit wrote:My speculation is based on these nice pictures from Meltiukhov's book:

http://web.archive.org/web/200406030631 ... index.html

and

http://web.archive.org/web/200406030631 ... index.html
These are not pictures but index's of the book, try again.

Post Reply

Return to “WW2 in Eastern Europe”