rosinfiorini wrote: > The weird thing i learned recently is that the American president had a Jap= > anese code decoded some days before Pearl Harbour and knew about the attack= > but needed pretext to enter (highly unpopular at home) war so...he ordered= > the radars at Pearl Harbour to be shut (radars or submarines--someone has = > the artickle?) to facilitate the Japanese. They have the (unclassified now)= > documents somewhere at www.infowars.com
Not only weird, but incorrect in its essence and in the particulars. For example, the radar was working at Pearl Harbor, and picked up the incoming Japanese planes. But American planes were expected to be coming in at the time, so no alarm was raised. Stuart LeBlanc wrote: > my understanding is that the Germans would have had the > western front under control if not for the entry of American forces, thus > requiring German reinforcements which otherwise may have > made the difference in the eastern front. Please correct me if I'm mistaken. Whether you're mistaken or not depends on who's telling the story. By the time the Americans got into the war at all in 1942, the Germans were already being pushed back. The Soviet view of it is that the Western Allies, despite repeated Soviet urging to open a second front in western Europe, refused to do so until the war in the East was pretty much decided--by D-Day in June 1944, the Eastern front had been pushed back to Poland and Romania, and there wasn't much question where it would end up. The Soviet view rather discounts the invasion of Italy. Could Hitler have succeeded if American never entered the war? Who knows? The idea that Germany could conquer the USSR seems silly in retrospect, like a doberman attacking a grizzly bear. Hitler thought the Soviet Union was a rotting house that would fall down if the door were kicked in, and though the Soviets did their best to prove him right in the first six months of the invasion, he wound up very impressed (perhaps aghast is by the Soviet ability to manufacture weapons and tanks. There's a tape of him telling the president of Finland that he would never have invaded if he'd known the Russians could produce so many tanks. There are historians who think that if Japan had succeeded in invading Siberia in 1939 (see below), it might not have pushed its conquests in the Pacific, and thus not brought America into the war at all. The American view of World War II has always minimized the war in Russia, which was waged on a scale that can hardly be fathomed. Even after losing an entire army of half a million men at Stalingrad, the Germans attacked Kursk in mid-1943 with 900,000 men 2,700 tanks 2,000 aircraft, and were defeated by an even bigger Soviet force of 1,300,000 men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery pieces and 2,400 aircraft. Nor do most Americans know about the battle in September 1939 variously known as Halhin Gol, or Khalkin Gol, or Nomonhan, in which the Soviet Army crushed an invading Japanese army near the border of Siberia and Mongolia. The enormous Soviet death toll in the four years after May 1941, commonly put at around 26,000,000, obviously had little to do with battle tactics, since there were nowhere near that many Soviet soldiers. Numbers like that can only be achieved in the civilian population, which can't shoot back, and can be starved by an occupying army, which is largely what happened. A Red Army soldiers had vastly better chances of survival than Ukrainian civilians, who died by the millions. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
