For all who like war…......

@rjpeters70:

Germany got a bastion of anti-communism in Spain who gave 40,000 “volunteers” in Barbarossa.  What more you want?

Taking Gibraltar from the British.

@Axistiger13:

Britain and France planned to send a expeditionary force to finland, which would bring them to war with both germany and the USSR. If they did send a expeditionary force, how would the Winter War end? and also, how would the outside world (mainly japan and the US) react?

Britain’s expeditionary forces to Norway in 1940 and Greece in 1941 were humiliating failures that ended with Dunkirk-style evacuations (Dunkirk itself being the evacuation of another British expeditionary force), so I doubt that sending a Franco-British expeditionary force to Finland in 1939 would have been of much military help to the Finns against the Russians.  What makes this scenario interesting, however, is that it might have scrambled the landscape of political alliances in various ways, with unpredictable consequences for the rest of the war.  This was a time when alliances were still in flux – one example being Japan’s angry reaction to the signature in August 1939 of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by Germany, which had co-signed with Japan the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936.  Japan had been defeated by Zhukov at Khalkhin Gol a few days before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed, so it was furious to see Germany sign a non-aggression treaty with Russia.  (Ironically, Japan did precisely the same thing in April 1941, seven months after the signing of the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.)

@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

I think this was a very key consideration for the UK, Germany, Russia and Japan:

@KurtGodel7:

However, one reason for Hitler’s impatience in invading the Soviet Union was the British food blockade of Germany; and the resulting starvation in German-held lands. Delaying the invasion of the Soviet Union by two years would have meant two extra years of famine conditions; especially in occupied territories and population groups assigned low or mid-level priorities for scarce, precious food calories.

Only the US and some parts of the British empire had abundant food.  The UK, Germany, (and later Japan) were squeezed by naval (or submarine) blockades.  Russia was squeezed by the vast territories taken by the Germans.  Of course I’ll grant that in the early part of the war, Germany did quite well by taking the food and supplies found in France, Belgium, Ukraine, etc.

Grizzly, you make a good point.  The Germans were never going to be able to invade the UK; but they did try to starve them.  An excess of wheat in Australia and Canada does no good for the UK if it cannot be delivered.  I guess we disagree on whether or not British hunger, lack of heating oil, etc. would have been sufficient to make them either sue for peace with Germany…If the British were hungry enough (and I think without the US merchant marine), I could see them saying screw the French, lets have a ceasefire and let the USSR and Germany fight it out.

Regarding the USSR, I once read an estimate that 7/8 of the entire Germany war effort was fought on the eastern front.  This estimate includes the forces in Norway, the battles in Africa and the Balkans, Crete, the U-boat effort, the battles in Italy, the defense of France after D-day, the V-1 and V2 and other technological weapons, etc.  The defense of France required minimal forces in the early part of the war, especially early in the war when it was obvious the UK was in no position to invade.  I don’t think this small difference would have been enough to turn the tide in the East despite the small margin of victory by the USSR during 1941 and 1942.  I even doubt Hitler would have reduced the forces occupying France at this time had the UK capitulated.

Well considering Italian troop quility of the time, Italy may have decended into revolution even before the Russins in this case. :-o

Is the version of All Quiet on the Western Front from 1979 film with Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine the version that you guys are talking about?

@Fishmoto37:

My favorite–They Were Expendable with Robert Montgomery and John Wayne. Has been since I was a kid and when I was a kid the Dead Sea was only sick.

Great Movie!

:-D