Nazi Germany VS The Soviet Union

We all know that actually trying to complete Plan Z would have been national suicide for Germany on many levels, militarily, economically, and psychologically.

But what about the battleships called “Stalin’s republics”?

There were plans to build 15 of them, each almost as large as as a Yamato or Montana class battleship, although with less firepower. Only four were laid down (and only one was more than 20% complete) when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. After the war, all were scrapped. A similar fate met the Kronshtadt battlecruisers before the war.

Another naval project were the Stalingrad class battlecruisers. Originally designed before the war, the project was revived as aircraft carrier escorts after it. The project only advanced with Stalin’s backing, and his death led to all the ships being cancelled.

Given that the Soviets only barely completed their Kirov class light cruisers and the struggle on the industry to build even a small part of Stalin’s republics, would it have been harder for the Soviets to build this fleet or for Germany to build Plan Z? And if the Soviets succeeded, what would the impact on the war have been?

This probably assumes Germany doesn’t invade the Soviet Union until later.

@midnight_reaper

Well, it’s just for imagination fun, it’s not meant to be taken really seriously. Sorry if there was a misunderstanding.

Zooey wrote:

Maybe we should have enlisted him to fight in the Korean war lol.

If we’d done that, the Chinese would have taken him prisoner during one of their “human wave” attacks. He would have been conscripted to fight in the Chinese Army. The Chinese would have used him in their invasion of India of 1962. Once he’d been taken prisoner/added to the Indian Army, he would have been used to help fight the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965. Upon being captured and conscripted by the Pakistanis, he would have been sent to fight in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. After being captured by Bangladesh, he would have been forced to serve in the Bangladeshi Army, especially in the Chittagong Hills Tracts Conflict (which began in 1975). He would have been captured by the Shanti Bahini (Bangladesh’s opponent in that conflict). But once that conflict ended, he would have been allowed to retire; quietly living out the rest of his days in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of southeastern Bangladesh.

Imagine it’s the 1980s. An old man in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is cooking food by an outdoor fire. A child comes up to him and begins a conversation. “I served in the war,” the old man says. “Which war?” the child asks. “Now that is a complicated question!” answers the old man.

@aequitas:

Something??
And you say that you don’t deny the Holocaust??

To underline your arguments you should have evidence of it.
You don’t! So just leave it!!
First you blame the Western Allies for the imaginary Food Blockade, now you are saying it was the beasty Pluto-rusky-soviets??

It is just sad… :-(

And you say that you don’t deny the Holocaust??

Correct. I do not deny the Holocaust.

To underline your arguments you should have evidence of it.

If there are specific factual claims I’ve made for which you’d like to see more evidence, just ask. My typical response to such requests is to provide evidence of my assertions. In supporting such claims, I have never cited pro-Nazi or other far right sources. My rationale is that a far right source could be expected to present the Nazis’ case in the most favorable light, and might even be willing to exaggerate things in the Nazis’ favor. If on the other hand a mainstream (anti-Nazi) source is willing to admit the truth of something which casts a less than 100% favorable light on the Allies’ actions, then that admission is most likely true.

First you blame the Western Allies for the imaginary Food Blockade

After his political career ended, former U.S. president Herbert Hoover wrote a series of books. One of those books was Freedom Betrayed. On page 589 of Freedom Betrayed, Hoover wrote the following:

[In 1939] the Polish Government escaped to London under Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski. He requested me to organize relief for his country. My old colleagues and I did so, but after about one year, during which about $6,000,000 was raised and supplies had been shipped, our work was stopped by the British blockade.

Neville Chamberlain had of course blockaded metals, oil, weapons, ammunition, and other items you’d normally expect to be blockaded. Churchill added food to the list of contraband items. That is why Hoover was able to send food to the starving Poles during the first year of the war, and was unable to send food to them thereafter.

The Wikipedia article expands on the subject of this blockade.

As 1940 drew to a close, the situation for many of Europe’s 525 million people was dire. With the food supply reduced by 15% by the blockade and another 15% by poor harvests, starvation and diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera were a threat. Germany was forced to send 40 freight cars of emergency supplies into occupied Belgium and France, and American charities such as the Red Cross, the Aldrich Committee, and the American Friends Service Committee began gathering funds to send aid. Former president Herbert Hoover, who had done much to alleviate the hunger of European children during World War I, wrote:[63]

The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same stage in the [First] World War. … If this war is long continued, there is but one implacable end… the greatest famine in history.

Adam Tooze’s book Wages of Destruction has been praised by The Times (London), The Sunday Times (London), The Wall Street Journal, and History Today. The Financial Times called it “masterful.”  On pages 418 - 419 Tooze writes the following:

After 1939 the supply of food in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal. . . . Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. . . . By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . By 1941 there were already signs of mounting discontent due to the inadequate food supply. In Belgium and France, the official ration allocated to ‘normal consumers’ of as little as 1,300 calories per day, was an open invitation to resort to the black market.

now you are saying it was the beasty Pluto-rusky-soviets

The food blockade was of course imposed by the Western Allies. Those nations are typically known as democracies, even though a study showed that, in practice, decisions are made on a plutocratic basis. Princeton University found there is zero correlation between what the bottom economic 90% wants and what the federal government actually does. (The data go back a number of decades, but do not go all the way back to WWII. The study therefore represents very strong evidence, but not proof, that the U.S. had been a plutocracy during WWII.)

I regard most politicians as shills for America’s plutocrat class. The brutality of the Allied food blockade was not reflective of a murderous American population. It was reflective of a murderous, evil plutocrat class.

If Russia had attacked an entrenched Nazi Europe, the social optics alone would change the outcome in my opinion.

Suddenly the reds are the big fear, and the Nazi’s would probably garner more support.  As for the Russia people, they would blame their leadership, and revolution would be in the air, as opposed to the desire to kill the “invader”

LOL I like it Vance.

There needs to be POW rules…

If you’re looking at physically discernible traits in posterity (i.e., the baby boom generation), I’d say they would require considerable epigenetic or even genetic alterations in the parents (i.e., the people living there at the time). That’s not a very likely effect from such levels of pollution. If anyone was affected in any way, it seems more probable that their overall health would suffer to some degree, but it would probably be difficult to attribute that to any specific factor. An extensive epidemiological study may be able to demonstrate some effects, but I don’t know whether anybody has done one.

Also, it’s uncertain how much of the oil even reached the beaches or the fishing grounds. It seems obvious that the marine ecosystem could handle less oil, over a much longer period of time, and at various locations, much better than the massive BP spill. So a lot of that WWII tanker oil may have evaporated, or sunk to the bottom, or gone down with the ship and slowly dissipated.

I don’t think that the war itself would have played a major role in deciding to either clean up or ignore any oil that may have landed on the beaches. If the oil would have arrived in a town like, say, Biloxi, then people would have probably cleaned it up because it posed a direct threat to the livelihood of the local fishermen. On the other hand, if it would have landed in a remote location, it would likely have been ignored, simply because environmental awareness was not exactly a major concern in the 1940’s, war or no war.

In each case, I’m only speculating - we’d need to look for contemporary reports to know the truth.

And of course, the petroleum flavor does little for the shrimps, so I don’t think too many were eaten.  :-)

In some of my other posts on this forum, I’ve described how even in 1940 (when the U.S. was still technically at peace with Germany), it had devoted a significant amount of industrial potential toward winning the air war against Germany; with plans to considerably expand the effort over the next several years. America’s strongest single asset was her industrial potential, as Hitler clearly understood. But that potential was going to be increasingly turned against Germany, whether the U.S. was technically at war or not.

Hitler’s plan to counter this was to expand Germany’s industrial output over the short-term, so that he could at least keep pace with the air war over Germany in the long haul. His method of expanding Germany’s output included industrialization and conquest. The industrialization aspect of his plan meant that instead of putting everything he had into weapons output for 1941 or 1942–in a massive effort to crush the Soviet Union–he had to divide his nation’s economic activity between short-term military production and long-term output increases. The result of all that industrial investment was that Germany increased its aircraft output from 16,000 planes per year in 1941 to over 40,000 planes per year by 1944. It also increased its military production in other categories, such as tanks and V2 rockets.

In late 1941, Hitler knew that his window of opportunity to win the war was relatively slim; and that 1942 would be critical. Germany had to win a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in that year, both to take pressure off its eastern front, and to provide it with the raw materials and manpower it needed to hold its own in the air war over the long haul. Hitler believed that the overwhelming majority of America’s naval strength would be needed in the Pacific to counter the Japanese; at least until the end of 1943. That gave him what he believed was a two year window with which he could sink the American Lend-Lease Aid pouring into Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Sinking those ships would increase Germany’s chances of obtaining the victory over the Soviet Union it desperately needed.

However, the Japanese Navy proved less adept than Hitler had hoped. The Battle of Midway occurred six months after Pearl Harbor. That battle took the naval pressure off the U.S. in the Pacific, and allowed it to focus more of its efforts on convoy protection in the Atlantic. More generally, the failure of the Japanese military meant that Japan would be far less successful in taking military pressure off of Germany than Hitler had hoped.

In 1942, the Soviet Union outproduced Germany 3:1 - 4:1 in tanks, artillery, and other land combat categories, and even 2:1 in military aircraft. It also fielded a much larger army than Germany. Thus evaporated Hitler’s hope of a decisive victory on his eastern front.

Had Hitler not declared war against the U.S., large amounts of American Lend-Lease aid would still have flowed to his enemies in Europe. Over the long-term, he still would have needed to devote a significant portion of his military production to defending German skies and German cities against American-made bombers. He would have lost out on the Second Happy Time (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time ), which would have resulted in a stronger Soviet war effort for 1942. On the other hand, he wouldn’t have had to deal with the U.S. invasion of Algeria in 1942, its invasion of Sicily and Italy in 1943, or the Normandy invasion of '44. It’s easy to say in hindsight that the harm of the American invasions exceeded the benefit of sinking that Lend-Lease shipping in '42. But that distinction was less obvious at the time.