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History, Reference, Research, and GrogTalk => Military (and other) History => Topic started by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 07:54:47 AM

Title: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 07:54:47 AM
For the prior thread of my Icebreaker Thesis Chronology project, click here (http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=24397.msg666680#msg666680).

For the Table of Contents and Introduction thread, click here (http://www.grogheads.com/forums/index.php?topic=24392.0).


It's 1939: Do You Know Where Your War Is?
-------------------------------------------------

Despite my narrative teases, I assume everyone reading this on a military geek site knows at least some basic facts about the history of World War II in general and the East Front more specifically. So I know you know what time it is, this year.

But do you know when WW2 officially starts this year? -- by which I mean, being recognized to start by an official government?

I didn't.  ^-^

But we'll get to that eventually. First, let's start the year with the usual notice!

1939: Soviet fighter and bomber airfleet training manuals continue to focus teaching one massive ground strike instead of dogfighting.

Brigade Commander Alexander N. Lapchinksy, the chief Soviet airpower theoretician, in his "Air Army" manual, writes on how to defend Soviet territory: "Like a magnet, a decisive ground offensive attracts hostile forces overhead and serves as a country's best shield from enemy air attack... You do not provide air cover for a country by flying from behind your borders, but rather by flying far beyond them. [...] Given the existence of a massive invasion army, the main task of the air force is to support the advancement of this army, for which all forces must be concentrated."

He illustrates his manual with detailed maps of typical bombing targets, like, let's see, hmm... the Leipzig railway junction and Berlin's Friedrichstrasse and train station!  :o
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 08:18:53 AM
January 1, 1939, Stalin's Red Army has about 21,100 battle ready tanks.

His factories will produce around another 3200 tanks this year.


January 1939: Leningrad Military District Commander Meretskov, and Central Committee representative Zhdanov (soon to be a Politburo member), start riding the same car up and down the entire Finnish border. They continue throughout the spring, summer, and fall, on a regular basis. At the very end of autumn they will finish, just in time for "Finnish militarists" to "provoke war".

What are they doing? Are they out having a secret love affair?! Of course not. They are visually inspecting the ground on the other side of the Finnish border. All year long, on a regular basis.

Seeing teams of scouts show up on the other side of your border is not the most pleasant surprise (as Suvorov dryly puts it).

When a tank division commander stares at you through binoculars for hours on end, that's worse.

Now imagine a local Politburo candidate member hanging around your border posts with the local Military District commander, not for hours but for weeks, all year long! Such was the prelude for every Soviet "liberation crusade".
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 08:23:25 AM
January 11, 1939, the People's Commissariat of Defense Industry, in charge of arms production in the USSR for many years, is dismantled today. Ah, perhaps the dawn of peaceful coexistence at last is rising in the--!

...what? Oh, never mind. Four new People's Commissariats (or "Narkomats" for short) are created instead: one for ammunition, one for aviation, one for weapons, and one for shipbuilding.

While the Shipbuilding Commissariat theoretically produces both civilian and military ships, in practice (per JMH #7, 1982, p.55) "by 1935 [four years ago] all major shipyards were redesigned for production of military ships." More on this Narkomat later.

The Ammunition Narkomat deserves some special notice, so get ready for some details on that next!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 08:30:36 AM
Suvorov claims that the Soviet Ammunition Narkomat is an original organization, unique in the world at this time. Even later throughout the course of the war, the most aggressive nations will not have a separate ministry in charge of ammunition; the Nazi government for example has one minister in charge of both weapons and ammunition production. In peacetime, the Soviet Union has divided its "defense industry" in such a way that there is a dedicated ministry for the production of ammunition! (I'm unsure Suvorov is correct about the Ammo Narkomat being a unique ministry. Back during World War I, Churchill for example was (somewhat demoted to) minister for armaments in its second half after the disaster of Galipoli and the Dardenelles. Perhaps this involved weapons as well as ammo? -- or perhaps Britain folded it back into both weapons and ammo later? Suvorov clearly implies at least one non-aggressive nation during WW2 will have an equivalent Ammunition Ministry.)

Stalin's Ammunition Narkomat starts working fully and immediately, and so immediately must solve a serious problem: where should they locate all the factories that would be producing shells, gunpowder, cartridges, etc.?

Should they be built behind the Volga River for example, where enemy tanks and aircraft cannot reach so far inland? If Hitler's armies are truly dangerous and formidable and Stalin has any concerns about the Red Army's ability to deal with them, then no, absolutely not behind the Volga, that would be insane! -- no, these factories should be built in the Ural Mountains, even farther to the east, behind any wildly imaginable retreat and defeat! This is, in fact, where they eventually end up, where the raw materials need no distant transport logistic travel, where there is a sufficient industrial and energy base, and where even the capture of huge territories in a catastrophic defensive war would leave them totally secure, ready, and able, to turn the tide and win the war in a truly epic and heroic Russian fashion!

But the Ammunition Narkomat is not instructed, in 1939, to put the new factories there. Nor behind the Volga. This is not even briefly considered. Why?

Let us suppose that the Red Army needs to be supplied with only a small quantity of ammunition, for example only one hundred thousand tons, or perhaps only two hundred thousand tons. A standard military train can pull a net mass of nine hundred tons. How many trains would be needed; how many railroad cars; how many locomotives; how many workdays spent by all the railroad personnel; how much coal would be burned; how many train guards would be needed for how many days?

In a defensive war, you will just have to deal with such problems, to provide an invulnerable production base. But if you are sure the enemy will not be attacking you, you can and should plant all your factories up front close to the border, near your troop deployment.

True, Soviet trains can still only pull nine hundred tons, but now they can go back and bring another nine hundred tons more quickly to your troops, with less fuel spent on the round trip; also if for some reason you wanted such preparations to be secret, such as for preparing a surprise attack, this will help with security. And if you are planning for a great invasion then certainly you want the ammunition plants up front, where they can more quickly transfer ammunition to the tips of the guns going forward! Ideally, you want those factories as close to the border as possible.

Other logistic resources can be freed up for other internal needs, like strategic troop transfers, since troops cannot be constructed in local areas in the numbers require but (like grain for example) must be moved around from all over Russia.

Anyway, the Ammunition Narkomat, without even hesitation, is directed to build the new ammunition factories as close to the western border as the metal-forging bases will permit; in Zaporozhie, Dnyepropetrovsk, Dnyeprodzerzhinsk, Kharkov, Krivoy Rog, and Leningrad.

Not behind the Volga; not in the Urals; not in any strategically defensive position. Not yet.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 08:39:52 AM
The Ammunition Narkomat must, necessarily, consume the nation's metal resources, and not only iron and steel, but copper, nickel, chromium, lead, tin, and mercury. The Russian metal pie is large indeed, but it is being sliced into smaller servings for everyone. The question will arise, how long should this be expected to last? Two and a half years perhaps?  ^-^

Now consider, what do you do with all this new ammunition? The Red Army (and its air force, and the Navy) consumes a certain amount of ammunition for military training, of course; and then there have been "liberation crusades" in the recent past; and it looks as though the Soviet Union may have to provide "international aid" to Mongolia soon with Japan looming in Manchuria. As long as you are making ammunition equal to the amounts you spend, there is no problem, comrade! -- but if you make extra ammunition, you have to store it somewhere. Soviet Russia already has plenty of storage space for ammunition, but it happens that if you add a substantial number of new ammunition factories, the surplus will eventually outpace the usage and your storage will be full.

So build new storage facilities, yes? But that is not so simple as typing out the words!

Suppose you have now been given the order from Comrade Stalin's government: build storage facilities to hold one million tons of ammunition. This is a good start. (You may think to yourself, a good start to what exactly...? -- but you should keep that thought behind your lips, unless you want to be counting trees in Siberia or have your mouth washed out with some of that new ammunition someone else will be in charge of storing after all!)

But you cannot put them all in one facility; one accident will explode the entire facility. Nor should you put them near any cities for the same reason. Nor near any factories, least of all near any other ammunition factories! You must scatter them out, but not too far from the western border either (for some reason -- don't ask why or think about it).

Hm, and smaller depots are better in another way, for then it is easier to keep the air from getting slightly too warm or slightly too dry, and your explosives from thus exploding slightly too early! On the other hand, neither do you want the humidity levels slightly too wet, for then the metals will corrode, and the gunpowder will be wet, and then Comrade Stalin's loyal disciple Comrade Beria will provide new residential locations for you and your family and your family's families!

Additional storage facilities, to put it shortly, can only be a temporary solution in several ways, and especially as long as the Ammo Narkomat keeps shoveling new ammunition at you, for you to safely keep somewhere.

Oh, and by the way, two hundred and thirty five other factories completely aside from those under the Ammo Narkomat's jursidiction, will also be producing various types of ammunition during our time of blissful peace. (Per the Soviet "History of the Second World War, 1939-1945", Vol.2, p.190.)

The ammunition must eventually be lost, along with your life, one way or another; or the ammunition must be used before it is lost. Good luck, comrade! Enjoy your life in the workers' paradise on earth, while you can!

Nobody poses a threat to the Soviet Union on the day the Commissariat for Defense Industry is split into its four more efficient constituent ministries. Japan is the largest force on the Soviet border, but while they do have a powerful air force and navy, its land army is relatively small (by Soviet standards of manpower) and currently tied down in a rather unpromising war in China. They also have limited raw material reserves, which is a big reason why the Japanese Army is tied down in mainland China! Even if they set up an invasion powerful enough to seize Soviet territory, they would be stuck with gaining the Far East, which has not yet become anything like an industrial base. Japan needs resources already mined and purified, and so also needs areas where mining and purification of materials has already been set up.

On the other hand, Nazi Germany is currently operating on a peacetime production regimen! -- partly so as not to alert its neighbors and enemies about Hitler's plans. They have no strategic reserve, and even if they did want to attack someone suddenly, they could not attack the Soviet Union that way: the Nazis would have to suddenly attack and plow through someone else first!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 08:50:06 AM
February 2, 1939: at the start of the year, the Council of People's Commissars ("SNK" in the Russian acronym, with English letters) dissolves the Chief Directorate of Border and Internal Forces of the NKVD of the USSR. Its leader, Yezhov, vanishes. Thank God (and Stalin), those evil murderers have been thrown down at last in the age of peace which--!


Also February 2, 1939: six new independent Chief Directorates of NKVD are established!

the CD of NKVD Frontier Troops;
the CD of NKVD Security Troops;
the CD of NKVD Convoy Troops;
the CD of NKVD Railway Troops;
the CD of NKVD Military Supply Troops;
and the CD of NKVD Military Construction Troops.

Having worked for several years without needing such things as armored cars anymore, their arsenal now includes the latest armored cars (BA-10), armored trains, howitzers, tanks, and aircraft.

Yes, the internal death squads have tanks, warplanes, and howitzers now. ...huzzah...?!

A special NKVD Lieutenant-General post is created to oversee and coordinate each individual NKVD Chief Directorate: the Deputy People's Commissar for Armed Forces (first held by Maslennikov).

On Soviet soil, death squads are no longer needed; so six massively upgraded death squad directorates are created. Stalin expects the secret police to use howitzers, tanks, and aircraft, on someone; and his expectation significantly precedes February 2, 1939 (because creating these new NKVD CDs must be planned ahead).


1939 (date unclear but sometime in the first half): from Lenin's time, the Soviet Union has had six military border districts. Early this year, the government effectively disbands those districts, to create eighteen military border districts instead, each district dwarfing its predecessors in combat power. Five however shall eventually be given Special Military District status: Baltic, Leningrad, Western, Kiev, and Odessa. We shall see why later.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:13:30 PM
March 10, 1939: at start of the Eighteenth Party Congress, Stalin in his Report openly labels Great Britain and France as warmongers, accusing them of wanting to plunge Europe into war while staying on the sidelines. "In the politics of non-intervention, there is a desire not to hinder the aggressors while they do their dirty deeds, not to interfere, for example, with Japan involving itself in a war against China... The goal is to let all the participants of the conflict become engulfed by the quicksand of war, and let them weaken and exhaust each other. Then, when they are sufficiently weakened, one can enter the scene with fresh forces, act, of course, 'in the interests of peace', and dictate to the weakened war participants all the terms of peace."

Ribbentrop, the Nazi chief diplomat, will tell them the speech has been "received sympathetically" in Berlin. In political strategy, Stalin has signaled that if Hitler reaches out for alliance or cooperation, Stalin will accept. Secret negotiations begin. In this same speech, Stalin for the first time declares that the Soviet people need to get ready for "surprises" of some sort -- not at home but abroad.

Perhaps coincidentally, this will be the final such congress for more than ten years.


Stalin adds (during this or a later speech), "The aviation arms race in the capitalist countries [has continued] for a number of years and unquestionably presents one of the most characteristic and definitive signs of the inevitable general military conflict."

Of course, he's including the National Socialist Workers' Party among those "capitalists"; and of course the Soviet Union was helping the German "capitalists" prepare for an aviation arms race before the Nazis even arrived in power.

Stalin specifically has in mind Nazi Germany which now has reached four thousand combat airplanes of all types. It is clear as day that such a number of combat oriented planes signals the inevitability of a war.

If producing four thousand warplanes of all types, plus two or three thousand aircraft by some other nations, is a "wild arms race of aviation weapons", and testimony of "inevitable military conflict" -- what would plans be to produce no less than one hundred thousand aircraft of a single type? Stalin is already most of a year into a plan to do just that, with his (quite literally) signature "Ivanov" light bombers! -- and he already has a couple dozen thousand battle-ready warplanes by 1939!


March 18, 1939: during the Eighteenth Party Congress, Colonel A. I. Rodimtsev (cavalry commander; later in early 1941 the commander of the 5th Airborne Brigade, 3rd Airborne Corps) states "We will be waging the battles to come on enemy territory. That is what our regulations dictate." (Suvorov in his own career will later have an opportunity to hear Rodimtsev himself, now as a Colonel-General: "a very sharp general, not given to spouting drivel, nothing like a windbag.")

Rodimtsev will be the one who, with his 42nd Guards Division, will hold the very few last houses in Stalingrad still remaining on the banks of the Volga -- but that will be after he and his Airborne troops are converted into a Guards division. Up until June 22, 1941, they'll be training for parachute assault and airmobile operations.


March 21, 1939: on the final day of the Eighteenth Party Congress (typo'd in "Icebreaker" to be the 8th Party Congress, and typo'd in "Chief Culprit" to be the Seventeenth Party Congress, which may indicate some confusion about when this person gave this speech), 2nd Rank Flag officer N.G. Kuznetsov, commander of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, agrees that the domestic terror campaign should wind down now, so that (uncited by Suvorov) "what has been created in the USSR [with the terror campaign] can be created as well in other countries!"  :o :wow: :timeout:

He also declares, "The fleet must transform itself, and it will, just like the entire Worker-Peasant Red Army, into the most powerful attack fleet!" This very speech, rated by Suvorov as perhaps the most aggressive of the so-called "victors" congress, lofts him to his Central Committee membership (skipping candidate level), and for such words Stalin rewards him by promoting him to be the People's Commissar of the Navy of the USSR.

Kuznetsov will keep his word, doing his best to prepare the Soviet fleet to launch surprise attacks. But for defense the Soviet Union needs submarine hunters, picket boats, minesweepers, and net-layers. Kuznetsov's fleet will have great difficulties when the Nazis invade. As M.M. Kirian's editors put it, in their "Military-Technological Progress and the USSR Armed Forces", 1982, p.189, "During the course of the war, the fleet had to solve problems that were completely unforeseen during its construction. Instead of coordinating their actions with the deep offensive operations of the ground forces, acting near the shores, as the military doctrine dictated, the fleet was forced to secure the naval bases under enemy attack from land and sea and to evacuate troops, population, and property, from shoreline cities."

Another problem is that while Soviet ships are given powerful cannons, mines, and torpedo equipment, they do not have powerful anti-aircraft armament. In Soviet doctrine, enemy air power is expected to be crushed on the ground by an overpowering surprise attack, so Soviet admirals and designers simply do not think they need to spend much material, space, and factory construction, on naval anti-aircraft guns. If any enemy blitzes the Soviet Union first, the Soviet fleet will have very weak anti-aircraft defenses for protecting themselves!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:25:27 PM
March 28, 1939, Madrid falls, the last bastion of the Spanish Republic. Soviet military advisors are evacuated. Despite the loss, they will generally be well-rewarded by Stalin, promoted to high ranks and authority afterward. 4th Directorate Red Army (pre-"GRU") chief Berzin, on the other hand, was recalled already last year and savagely tortured and executed (triggering a purge of his underlings down to Richard Sorge, still currently operating in the Nazi embassy in Japan), typical for Stalin's intelligence chiefs (up until Barbarossa anyway). Antonov-Ovseenko, assigned in 1936 as general consul to Spain, has been similarly executed.

Why doesn't Stalin also destroy his failed elite military commanders? Suvorov argues that Stalin knew they had no chance of winning, and didn't expect them to win, so he didn't punish them for not winning.

First, as previously noted, even Communist propaganda acknowledges that over 80% of the Spanish soldiers and officers chose to fight against the Republic, which aside from being a serious military drawback also suggests serious problems with the Republic.

Second, all the Republic ports were blockaded and the closest ones were far from Russia across ocean guarded by Italian and German air and surface fleets; they wouldn't necessarily shoot at a Soviet ship, but they often caught and turned them back or confiscated goods. Even what could arrive at Republic ports, could only operate on Republic not Soviet logistics in a limited amount of the large Spanish areas. So Stalin could not send even one rifle division, much less supply it; everything he sent had to go, and arrive, and be used, piecemeal.

Third, the Spanish Communist Party was very weak and depended for its operation on collaboration with other parties, often dangerously unstable ones like the anarchists, whom Dolores Ibárruri, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Spain, once described as "something like a reign of thieves" (from "National-revolutionary War of the Spanish People", in "Voprosy Istorii" [Questions of History], #11, 1953, p.11. Eventual Marshal of the Soviet Union Meretskov, who fought in Spain (and who will be highly important for Soviet plans through Barbarossa), called the anarchists "jolly butchers". With allies like this, winning would be even more impossible than with no allies at all!

If Stalin knew the loss wasn't the fault of the military, why did he have Berzin killed? Partly this was just his normal way of purging the intelligence services on a regular basis; by the same token, Ovseenko was part of the old guard dating back to the original overthrow of the Tsar, who might have constituted a rallying point against the tyrannies of the new Red Tsar Stalin (and so who was executed as part of the Tukhachevsky group). But Suvorov argues that Berzin also failed in something Stalin did not expect from the standard military officers: fomenting a second world war among Stalin's enemies using Spain as the initial stage!

Soviet propaganda during the war screamed repeatedly that France and Great Britain were standing aside while four totalitarian regimes were killing children; accusing France and Great Britain of heartless indifference to the children. Of course, Stalin had enacted a law back on April 7, 1935, that made the death penalty applicable to children age 12 and older (in order to tighten up military-level discipline in his factories); and he had been murdering millions of his own nation's children with their families in starvation and concentration camps, so that wasn't the real issue. The real goal was to goad Britain and France into supporting the Republic against Italy, Portugal, Germany, and General Franco. Once all the principal powers of Europe are fighting in Spain, you would already have a second world war in effect, and soon afterward in practice -- but a war nicely distant from Soviet territory. This was also the point of agitating honest young men from fifty-four nations around the world to come fight for the Republic (whereupon Stalin's agents stole their identities for creating thousands of espionage identities.) Stalin paid for their travels, paid for their living costs, and paid for their arming. Ah, will their nations not be ashamed, to leave their young volunteer men to die in Spain?!

But the espionage and politics failed -- not Stalin's military, who did their jobs as far as Stalin reasonably expected them to. But Stalin does blame his spies and diplomats for not expanding the Spanish Civil War to the rest of Europe.

(It must be added that this element of the theory is more of an extended inference by Suvorov, and less of a direct inference from evidence. It fits into the larger theory by comparison with other evidence for the larger theory, but it is not a supporting argument for the theory in itself.)
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:29:01 PM
May 5, 1939, a gorgeous Soviet cruiser with graceful lines and an unusual blue color arrives in Odessa: the "Tashkent", locally nicknamed "the blue beauty". Strictly speaking it is not a cruiser, but rather a destroyer leader.

The Soviet Military Encyclopedia will be oddly silent about which shipping yard the Blue Beauty came from, only the year it starts serving as the pride of the Black Sea Fleet, 1940.

Where did it come from? It departed from its shipyard dock on April 18, 1939, unnamed and camouflaged as a merchant vessel. Why? -- because its crew is Italian and its shipyard is Livorno, Italy, where its construction had started on January 11, 1937. In other words, this ship has been built at a time when Soviet and Italian "volunteers" were busy killing each other in Spain! This comes from A.B. Shirokorad's "Ships and Cutters of the USSR Navy, 1939-1945 (catalog)", 2002, p.241.

At least Stalin purchased it without Italian weapons! Not that Mussolini didn't offer to sell ship weaponry for it, but Stalin didn't want the pitiful Italian weapons. He wants the amazing Soviet 130mm ship cannons installed! -- and for good reason, because at this time nothing in the world comes close to them. Therefore the Tashkhent has them installed in the shipyards of Nikolaev.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:32:35 PM
Early May, 1939, armed conflict starts between Soviet and Japanese troops, near and along the river Khalkhin-Gol, on the border between the People's Republic of Mongolia (an ally but not a direct member of the USSR), and Japanese-occupied China. Neither side declares war, but the clashes turn into battles fought with hundreds of aviators, tankers, and artilleryists. Someone will have to do something about this!

In the western distance, Zhukov's epic theme music starts up...  :D  \m/


May 14, 1939: Stalin from a Pravda article, "the capitalists gnaw at each other's throats like dogs."  From his collected works (dates not provided by Suvorov, but quoted nearby this quote for context), Vol. 10, p.288, "A great deal depends on whether we succeed in staving off war with the capitalist world, inevitable as it is... until the capitalists are fighting it out amongst themselves." From his works Vol 6, p.158, "You may judge the time ripe for the decisive battle, once all class forces hostile to us have been drained enough by a struggle beyond their ability to cope."

In both cases, the plan is to conquer Europe and then "liberate" the world by this method. (Suvorov doesn't quote this specifically. He adds reference to Vol 7, p.14 as supporting evidence but doesn't quote it.)


June 1, 1939, the government of the Soviet Union officially declares (in the Pravda issue for today), "We will defend the borders of the Mongolian's People's Republic as we defend our own." On this same day, the deputy commander of the Byelorussia Military District, G. K. Zhukov, is summoned from Minsk to appear in Moscow. Tomorrow (June 2nd), he will fly from Moscow to Mongolia, where he will take command of the Soviet and Mongolian troops to defend Mongolia. Stalin orders Soviet troops in Mongolia to be armed with the most modern weapons; and directly orders a group of the best Soviet pilots to be sent, each with no less than ten air victories. They will establish air superiority.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:37:44 PM
June 21, 1939: Trotsky, in his "Bulletin of the Opposition", #79-80, p.13, during negotiations between Great Britain, France, and the USSR, regarding alliance against Germany, "Hitler... will have his main force strike the West, and Moscow will want to exploit its positional advantage. [...] Stalin will not shrink [in this situation] from using violence on an unprecedented scale. [...] The USSR will move its entire colossus bodily toward Germany's borders [i.e. to crush neutral minors in between Russia and Germany] at precisely the time the Third Reich will be drawn into a fight for a New World Order [or 'for a new divisions of the world']."

How could Trotsky have guessed so clearly what would happen, and why did he think Stalin would continue on into conquering Europe after arranging such a fight? Because Trotsky had been a key instigator and leader in the original October Revolution in 1917, and had been deep in the party ideology -- which he still largely believes in! (He just resents not being the one to be gaining all power over all resources and means of production. For the people of course.) He has long taught, with Lenin, that the Soviet goal is to instigate and take advantage of a second world war in order to trigger a final revolutionary world war bringing all nations of the world into one worldwide socialist government as the natural, scientific, Marxian preliminary to the final utopia of communism. He had been instrumental in the first Soviet attempts to do this; and he knows Stalin agreed with this idea back during Trotsky's own power; and he can simply point to ongoing political statements and propaganda issued by Stalin's government declaring what Stalin intends to get done someday!

The difference is that up until recently, Trotsky thought Stalin was mouthing these things as a pretext for making Russia into his own tsardom. That changed once Stalin directed the German Communists to suicidally aid the rise of Hitler's National Socialists to power.  Stalin had publicly stated that German Social Democracy had to be eliminated because they weren't devoted to trying to cast Europe into a new world war; and so he had directed the German Communist Party to aid Hitler's Nazis into power, even though the German Communists would naturally be destroyed by Hitler, too.

Trotsky also understands one of Stalin's very simple methods, having been a victim of it himself (and soon to be a more permanently disposed victim from an icepick to the brain): Stalin had allied with Zinovyev and Kamenev to remove Trotsky from power. Then Stalin had allied with Bukharin to remove Zinovyev and Kamenev. Then Stalin had allied with Dzerzhinsky to remove Bukharin. Dzerzhinsky had created a very strong secret police, but Stalin removed generations of such henchmen along with Dzerzhinsky through the hand of Genrikh Yagoda. (At least Dzerzhinsky will get a KGB headquarters named after him eventually!) Then Stalin had allied with Nikolai Ezhov to remove Yagoda and his generation. Then Stalin had allied with Laventri Beria to remove Ezhov... and so on.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:40:27 PM
June 1939, the current chief of the pre-GRU, Ivan Proskurov, reports to Stalin this month that the Nazi government still has no strategic reserves.

So, as a purely hypothetical random example  ^-^ if Hitler invades Poland, his air force will be out of bomb supplies in only ten days.

Proskurov turns out to be wrong -- Hitler's Luftwaffe will run out of bombs in more like fourteen days! -- but that is not why Stalin will have him shot eventually.

Aircraft bombs aren't everything of course; for example, airplane fuel will practically run out, not in ten days, but in twelve days! (Only a few air-wings will throw the final bombs over the final two days.)
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:45:03 PM
June 1939, Stalin starts the formation of the new Finnish government.

Wait, what? When did Finland lose its government??

Ah, not yet, not yet, but who knows when the people may rise up against their oppressors and spontaneously take control of their own lives, comrade?  :coolsmiley:  ^-^ ;)

When that day comes, they will need someone to hand their property and lives over to! -- so Stalin is just planning in advance for that. Let's see, hmmm, the future "minister of the interior" of Finland should be NKVD agent T. Lekhen; and Finland's "minister of foreign affairs" should be Soviet military intelligence officer Otto Kuusinen, a deputy chief of the pre-GRU. Now, of course, the head of the Finnish government should really be also minister of foreign affairs, so Kuusinen will also be the "President of the Finnish Democratic Republic"!

This only seems fair: Stalin had his wife Aino imprisoned last year for working with Richard Sorge, so the guy needs something good to look forward to. Besides, Kuusinen had created the Communist party of Finland back in 1918 using money supplied by Lenin's government, and had tried to stage a coup, which, sure that had failed, but he hadn't had the kind of military support back then that Stalin can give him now!

Stalin clearly likes him a lot, because Otto has survived Stalin's brutal purging of the Comintern in 1937, and after all Stalin did only imprison his wife in 1938 instead of liquidating her.  <:-)
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 12:59:28 PM
July 1939: there have been no European army-level organizations in the Red Army since the Soviet Civil War, on the grounds that such organizations are too logistically taxing to be kept up during peacetime.

So, since "armies" are too costly to keep up during peacetime, this month, Stalin starts secretly creating armies on the European frontier!

3rd and 4th armies in Byelorussia (4th Army starts official operation in August);
5th and 6th in the Ukraine (5th starts operations in July, 6th in August);
7th, 8th, and 9th on the Finnish border.
Soon afterward the 10th and 11th will join in Byelorussia, and 12th in the Ukraine -- these will be formed in the final week of August 1939, just after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

Soviet propaganda will later try to explain the appearance of these armies as having been created after Hitler starts WW2. But in fact they start being organized more than a month (and necessarily planned for even longer, of course) before Hitler invades Poland, during a time when Stalin has initiated public and private cooperation outreach efforts toward Hitler.

July 1939: since 1917, Comrades Trotsky, Tukhachevsky, Yakir, Yegorov, ("and many others" adds Suvorov) never imagined war without "blocking squads", making widespread constant use of them during the Civil War and afterward during military engagements.

What is a blocking squad? These are secret police regiments which stay behind advancing Soviet troops and spray machine-gun fire into their ranks to keep soldiers more afraid of retreating than of fighting the enemy. They arrest and summarily execute soldiers falling back without authorization. Between military adventures, these blocking squads form the backbone of the internal death squads, guards, and security escorts (used for shepherding large numbers of prisoners into concentration work camps or to execution areas).

In July 1939, as Stalin begins forming secret armies in Western Russia, each army is provided a standalone NKVD motorized rifle regiment composed not of battalions, but of blocking squads; as well as separate unintegrated NKVD blocking regiments which can be deployed from reserve.

While they can be used to help stiffen a defensive hold against invasion, they have been customarily used for stiffening attacks against tough defenses; and Soviet military doctrine still teaches their expectation for that purpose.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 01:06:44 PM
August 11, 1939: Hitler has been demanding a review of the Versailles Treaty, by which Eastern Prussia had been separated from the main homeland of Germany by a Polish corridor to the Baltic sea, running to the Polish city of Gdansk (and peninsular areas north of it), and to the more-or-less twin German city of Danzig (south of Gdansk in East Prussian coastal territory) which had been declared a Free City state by the Treaty. Hitler was demanding that Dansk be ceded back to Germany's control, as well as a corridor allowed for a highway and rail-line to East Prussia across the Polish corridor. Poland is refusing to allow this; and treaties of mutual aid have been signed between Great Britain, France, and Poland.

Today, delegations arrive in Moscow to attempt to negotiate Soviet cooperation against Hitler. Stalin instructs his diplomats to demand access corridors be granted by Poland across the entire nation to Germany's borders!  :o :wow: :timeout:

Naturally Poland remembers the prior Soviet invasions dating back to soon after the end of World War One, and with them the mass shootings and terror against all layers of society by the Soviet "liberators". So you can easily guess their opinion about this demand.  ::)

Klement E. Voroshilov, a Politburo member and the People's Commissar for Defense, previously a Marshal of the Soviet Union, declares at the talks, "Since the Soviet Union has no common border with Germany... there are no roads for engaging the aggressor. (Reported in "Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn" [National Affairs], #3, 1959, p.157.) But in terms of defense this makes no sense; it only makes sense in terms of the Red Army's ongoing concept of aggressive invasion of their enemies to occupy and control them: first such corridors would allow the Red Army to occupy and conquer Poland, and then to build up forces on the German border preparing for attack.

Stalin also offers another diplomatic proposal: let France and Britain start a war against Germany, even in case of "indirect aggression" however they wish to regard this (per "JMH", #12, 1963, p.25). By such a Treaty, Stalin could also demand they abide by their terms and start a war in case of how Stalin might regard Hitler's "indirect aggression"! Once Britain and France had created a strong combat front against Hitler, the Soviet Union would then act against Hitler, too -- by invading Poland to reach Hitler's borders! Naturally Stalin would have to secure Poland first for its own protection, before attacking Hitler.

Just as naturally, Britain and France refused to agree to attack Hitler upon Stalin's idea of "indirect aggression", much less so that Stalin would then have a pretext to conquer Poland on the way to conquering Germany! They did however want Stalin to know they were serious about negotiations, so they strongly emphasized that they would definitely go to war with Hitler if Hitler invaded Poland.

As early as August 11, however, the day the delegates arrive (with start of negotiations on August 12th), Stalin decides to start secret negotiations with Germany for the Partition of Poland. According to Ingeborg Fleishhauer's "The Pact: Hitler, Stalin, and the German Diplomatic Initiative, 1938-1939", 1990, pp.237-38; and G.L. Rozanov's "Stalin-Hitler: the Documented Story of the Soviet-German Diplomatic Relationship in 1939-41", 1991, pp.84-86, this decision is presented in the form of a telegram, sent through Molotov to the Soviet chargé d'affaires in Germany, Gheorghy Astrakhov. He receives the message on Saturday, August 12th, and has it conveyed to Hitler on the same day.

Hitler is negotiating with the Italian foreign minister Count Ciano, and after some deliberation Hitler tells the Count, "The Russians have agreed with the decision to send a German representative to Moscow to conduct political negotiations." Ciano himself notes (in a diary or official report, Suvorov is unclear, but presumably cited from one or both of the prior sources), "Russian-German contacts are developing very favorably and, specifically, several days ago came the Russian invitation to send a German plenipotentiary representative to Moscow to negotiate a Friendship Pact."

This suggests, if perhaps optimistically, that Hitler had talked about Stalin offering more than a mere non-aggression agreement, i.e. a mutual invasion and division of Poland. This is happening while public negotiations are starting and continuing with France and Britain about a mutual defense Treaty against Hitler (publicly not stated as such, but everyone would know what they were visiting Moscow to talk about under current conditions.)
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 01:08:26 PM
August 1939: Red Army border guards are the pool for NKVD Special Operation Forces (SOFs), the most aggressive strike formations in the Soviet military since the Civil War, notorious for their brutality even by NKVD standards.

After the Civil War, their military formation was reduced to just one division, the 1st NKVD SOF Division, under NKVD Brigade Commander Pavel Artyomyev, stationed near Moscow. In "Guarding Soviet Borders", p. 106, the author reports that a standalone battalion of NKVD SOF is put under command of Zhukov, as he prepares to blitz the Japanese in Mongolia. Their prime mission: "sweep out the immediate vicinity of the front". During the surprise blitz, Zhukov is pleased with their performance.

In their wake will soon come freshly spawned SOFs in droves, the hand-picked best the border guards have to offer. Per operational doctrine, they will be deployed precisely where the next "liberations" would soon be ready to roll, where "radical socio-political transformations" are about to begin.

Specifically, they will be deployed on the borders of Poland and the other Eastern European nations to be invaded by the Soviets throughout 1939 and 1940.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 02:45:33 PM
The Day the (second!) Second World War Begins
------------------------------------------------------

The day has come -- the day a national government officially declares that the second World War has started, and officially acts in accordance with that acknowledgement!

That nation isn't anyone in the Western Hemisphere, nor the Southern Hemisphere. It isn't Germany, Poland, France, Britain, or Italy.

And the day is not September 1st, 1939.


The day is August 19th, 1939.

Zhukov telegrams Stalin, "Main Mission Accomplished." His main mission? To achieve total strategic surprise in preparing to invade Japanese-occupied territory, over the Japanese 6th Army. Stalin sends back a one word code: "Good."

Japan's war on China and nearby south-east Asian areas, has been going now since at least 1932; and of course this will segue into the Second World War. But no nation has declared that fighting to be World War II yet, because China isn't one nation, much less one of the Great Powers, but a group of warlord dictators. On August 20th, one of the Great Powers, the Soviet Union, will go to war with Japan -- very briefly.

So briefly that one would think this doesn't count as the start of a second world war...


On this same day (before or after receiving this telegram is unclear), Stalin orders his diplomats to cease diplomacy with the French and British delegates.

Vyacheslav Molotov, the formal head of the Soviet govenment, and so also the People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs, is ordered by party secretary Comrade Stalin to summon the Nazi ambassador, Friedrich von der Schulenberg. to Molotov's office. When Molotov receives Schulenberg, Stalin is listening in by microphone from his own office in the Kremlin, where he has called together Shaposhnikov, Beria, and Malenkov. Molotov's attitude to the German ambassador is (paraphrased by Suvorov), "All right, let Ribbentrop come, perhaps we will agree on something, perhaps we will find a solution to the question of Danzig and Poland."

After the meeting Stalin holds a fast discussion with his team, now including Molotov; with the result that Schulenberg has barely had time to reach the embassy to write a report, when he receives another call from the Kremlin: Molotov awaits you for a new meeting! This time Molotov hands him a draft from Stalin, to send as a preliminary proposal for cooperative action together, including in Poland. Stalin, via Molotov, tells Schulenberg, that Ribbentrop can be received in Moscow on August the 26th or 27th; but Hitler will soon tearfully(!??) beg to move Ribbentrop's visit up to August 23. (No idea where Suvorov gets the idea that Hitler begged with tears about this, although he is certainly happy to take the deal.)

Already here on the 19th, however, Stalin has given Schulenberg a draft of the impending mutual agreement with the directions that "the agreement will be in force only given the simultaneous signing of the special protocol on points of interest to the Agreeing Parties, regarding foreign policy." This vaguery is meant to spoof any interception of the cable to Hitler: Stalin means that the forthcoming public non-aggression Pact, and the equally public joint Nazi/Soviet Trade and Economic Agreement (which has already been ready for a long time, and which Stalin directs the Soviet Trade Mission in Berlin to immediately sign), will only count if Hitler through Ribbentrop agrees to the secret protocols about invading Poland and how to divide up the country and spheres of influence afterward.

Stalin is already selling enough Soviet oil, grain, cotton, iron ore, magnesium, chrome, vinadium, zinc, nicklet, and tin to Hitler, that cutting off these supplies would ruin Hitler's ability to make war -- not even counting a more direct threat to throw all Soviet support behind Poland, swamping Germany's attack with five or even ten million troops as well as any number of tanks, warplanes, and artillery. Stalin is agreeing, provisional to the Secret Protocols, to expand this trade agreement substantially, knowing full well that Hitler will use the materials to wage war not only on Poland, but on France and Britain -- who have given Stalin assurances they will not stand idly by anymore if Hitler goes for Poland!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 02:51:23 PM
Didn't I say some nation declares on this day that the Second World War has already started?!

Yep.

Stalin calls the Politburo together on this day, August 19, 1939, to start the process of summoning a fourth emergency session of the Deputies of the Supreme Soviet together in Moscow (which will take 7 to 12 days for some Deputies to arrive, due to the vast Russian distances, even by air where available). Their purpose: to enact universal conscription -- the conscription which Soviet doctrine expects to precede mobilization for the final revolutionary war against all property owners on Earth.

As long as Stalin taught his people, even the children, that Hitler must be feared as a tyrant and a monster, the USSR did not need universal conscription. As soon as a non-aggression pact with Hitler is being seriously offered, and not even signed yet, a universal mandatory draft all of a sudden becomes necessary!

Then why do this now? Stalin justifies the conscription, now to the Politburo, later to the Supreme Soviet, on this basis:

that a second world war has already started.

Remember, in Soviet military and ideological doctrine, Stalin has been preaching a necessary and expected second world war among property owners, in Lenin's Marxist theories, to weaken the imperialists and capitalists enough for a final worldwide revolutionary war to succeed -- with the Red Army invading nations to "liberate" the uprising workers.

Stalin, having contacted Hitler earlier today (through Hitler's ambassador to Moscow) to offer a deal for conquering Poland together, gives a speech to the Politburo explaining his justification for regarding the second world war as starting today, thus requiring universal conscription leading to mobilization.

Someone in the Soviet Union leaks this Politburo resolution to the French news agency Havas, later this year (see November 30th). Suvorov thinks this was leaked as a tacit protest to stop Stalin's plan, similar to plans for Lenin's October 1917 coup being leaked by Central Committee members Zinoviev and Kamenev to the capitalist press. The speech given by Stalin on this day will remain secret until found by historian Tatyana Semenovna Bushueva, in the Special Archives of the USSR, fund 7, index 1, document 1223, and published in the December 1994 issue of "Novyi Mir" [New World]. Suvorov acknowledges that (at the time of publishing "Chief Culprit" anyway) Russian historians dispute and deny the validity of this document, claiming it is unclear how and when the document was made. Suvorov regards it as authentic.

Some key excerpts quoted by Suvorov: "If we make a pact of mutual aid with Great Britain and France, Germany will give up Poland and... the War will be averted. [...] If we accept Germany's proposal about the conclusion of a pact regarding invasion, she will of course attack Poland, and France and England's involvement in this war will be inevitable. Western Europe will be subjected to serious disorders and disturbances. Under these conditions, we will have many chances to stay on the sidelines of the conflict, and we will be able to count on our advantageous entrance into the war... It is in the interest of the USSR -- the motherland of workers -- that the war unfolds between the Reich and the capitalist Anglo-French block. It is necessary to do everything within our powers to make this war last as long as possible, in order to exhaust the two sides. It is precisely for this reason that we must agree to signing the pact, proposed by Germany, and work on making this war, once declared, last a maximum amount of time. [...] All the people who fall under the 'protection' of victorious Germany will also become our allies. We will have a broad field of action for development of the world revolution."


Also on August 19th, 1939, according to Suvorov, the Politburo starts the plan of mustering forces in military districts in the interior, and then dispatching them to districts along the (not yet existent!) western border; a plan the Supreme Soviet, now being summoned, will approve around 15 days from now (once enough of them arrive). Suvorov is unclear whether the Politburo specifically resolved this plan today, or implicitly resolved it as part of universal conscription.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 02:55:12 PM
August 20, 1939, the brief Mongolian War: at Khalkhyn-Gol, Zhukov prepares and successfully launches a blitzkrieg invasion, demonstrating that surprise blitzkrieg forces should be closer to the border than 30 to 40 miles if possible. 320 attack units, each 30 to 75 men, as well as isolated detachments numbering 100-150 men, are formed from border guard troops, in accordance with the continually refined Triandafillov invasion plans. "Drills are run on the basis of surprise attack plans worked out and refined in advance... Most important to achieving success was supposed to be the element of surprise." (JMH, 1965, #8, p.12)

Zhukov has forbidden almost all use of radio communications in setting up his blitz, and even land wire instructions are sent with short sentences with contexts only understood by the two people speaking. Each officer receives directions only within the frames of his duties and has no concept of the overall plan, the scope, or the dates of the offensive. Many people do not even know there is to be an offensive today at all! To fool Japanese spies, Zhukov before all has fooled his own soldiers and officers, many of whom until the last moment thought they were starting the preparations for a long period of defense.

Marshal Zhukov has ordered temporary bunkers built right up next to the border, off to the side of the intended axes of invasion, where they can support the first few minutes of the invasion without getting in the way, and without wasting resources on building real defenses on the border. Zhukov does see the political value of pretending to build defenses on the border, however, as he recalls in his "Recollections" later, p.161: "With these measures we strove to lead the enemy to believe there was a total absence on our side of preparations for offense, making a show of engaging in wide-ranging work on setting up defenses, and nothing but defenses."

The Japanese 6th Army has fallen for the maskirovka (the masquerade), and are caught off guard by Zhukov's surprise attack.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 02:58:58 PM
At 5:45am, 153 Soviet bombers, under the cover of a corresponding number of fighters, carry out a surprise raid over Japanese air bases and command posts. Artillery joins in immediately, for 2 hours and 45 minutes -- a short time, relatively, for Soviet bombardment doctrine, but highly concentrated. During this time, Soviet air power turns around, lands, rearms (no need to refuel), and strikes with a second air raid! Zhukov ordered their air bases to be moved as close to the front lines as possible, not only allowing faster strike times and turnaround, but also allowing more ordnance instead of fuel. The bombers have not even reached cruising height before unloading their bombs, and returning. The main strike force features the excellent twin-engine SB bombers, totaling 181 aircraft; plus 23 of the TB-3 heavy bombers attacking from 1500 to 2000 meters. During the first hour and a half, not one Japanese artillery gun shoots back in response, and not even one Japanese aircraft gets off the ground.

At 9am, Zhukov's relatively weak center attacks to fix the enemy's direction, while his tanks speed around the flanks for envelopment, avoiding direct engagements to strike deep in the army's rear. Air bases are close enough to the front line, that the tanks can be easily given timely and accurate close air support.

Zhukov has also moved hospitals and supply bases to the front lines, quickly and efficiently providing ammunition, fuel, and everything necessary for battle, while also supporting the wounded promptly. Zhukov moved his and all other command posts to the front lines, so that he was personally able to see the battlefield panorama -- at least in the initial movements, and as the enemy's resistance collapsed he could move forward with his front line with no effort.

It should be noted that setting up these forward command posts was no easy feat. In the barren waste of Mongolia, the troops had to be supplied with everything, including wood to burn in the field kitchens. The main supply for the Baikal Military District headquarters was 1500 kilometers from the staging line; but not everything could be found there. Supplies brought from factories and central storages to the MD HQ, for passing on to the staging line, had to travel 7000 to 8000 kilometers! The final stretch of railroad had a very limited load-bearing capacity, and ended in a deserted steppe. After that, trucks had to carry supplies and tow heavy weapons (or tanks and other combat vehicles had to roll on their own) another 650 to 700 kilometers. Some supply trucks stayed at the staging line to ferry supplies from Zhukov's forward HQ to subordinate HQs, and thence down to company units; but most had to make continual round trips back to the end of the rail line. The most common Soviet truck of the period could cover that 1300 to 1400 km round trip in roughly five days -- if weather conditions were good! The round trip trucks and other automobiles naturally had to be refueled several times, out and back. At first this meant, with embarrassment, that the trucks had to carry away any fuel they had just brought! (Fuel dumps no doubt had to be built, or rough pipelines and pumps rigged, though Suvorov doesn't say so.)

Nevertheless, for Zhukov's successful waging of a war unknown to the world, his logistics staff managed to gather at the staging line 25,000 tons of ammunition; 15,000 tons of fuel and lubricants; 4,000 tons of food; 7,000 tons of fuel (Suvorov might mean aircraft fuel of a different grade than other vehicles, but perhaps due to a type doesn't specify, only repeats "fuel"), and a lot of other cargo.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 03:04:55 PM
By August 23, the fourth day of the attack, the strategic circle drawn around Japanese troops tightens, and their rout begins (for example see the "Soviet Military Encyclopedia", Vol.8, p.353).

During the 30s, Stalin had ordered military maneuvers repeatedly staged on a massive scale. Each one (per Suvorov) drilled one theme: "operations in depth", which meant sudden crushing air strikes against enemy air bases, followed by airborne troops capturing the bases on the ground and airmobile troops landing behind them, flying ahead of an equally sudden assault by tanks in vast numbers deep into enemy territory.

Nazi high command does not even have the experience of practice in such large-scale maneuvers yet; they are currently planning the first of such training exercises to be sometime in the fall of 1939! (per Muller-Hillebrand's "Germany's Ground Forces 1933-1945", 2002, Vol.1, p.157.) When Hitler invades Poland upon Stalin's invitation for a combined assault (preliminaries for which are being offered today), the training exercises will never be conducted.

Zhukov's blitzkrieg into China was not invented on a spur of the moment: Soviet forces had been training such assaults for a decade already. Mongolia provided a much-needed live fire application of the theories, against enemies seriously shooting back -- and prepared to counter-attack. Zhukov's force isn't overwhelmingly strong enough to deal with other Japanese armies rushing to rescue the crumbling 6th Army, so he withdraws, keeping some gained territory which the Japanese don't care enough about regaining themselves. Zhukov's attack is operationally pointless -- except to practice blitzkrieg tactics in actual combat. It does however achieve one strategic objective, perhaps incidentally: the Japanese general headquarters decides going forward to concentrate their aggression elsewhere for a while -- against British and American colonies and bases, on the Asian mainland and at sea.

During the Mongolian operation, BT ('speed tank') units run into many problems with their suspensions on the rough terrain and poor roads. Worse, the tracks keep coming off by accident, too! That's because these tanks have been designed with overpowered engines, and with tracks expected (in training and doctrinal manuals) to be shed quickly, like a parachute once the tank has reached its operational area. The remaining wheels are often useless on the poor roads, much less the rough terrain; they are designed for superhighway quality roads (by the standard of this time period). Still, adjustments start to be made, even out in the field this far! -- with test results to be discussed soon.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 08, 2020, 03:31:08 PM
August 20, 1939: five Soviet I-16 fighters become the world's first to use rockets (air-to-air RS-82 rocket missiles with remote detonators) as weapons, as the Su-2 and its family have been designed to do. They are, of course, nearly useless except in ground attack; but they can be of some use against level bombers. (Suvorov is unclear how they are being used other than in the Mongolian war. His source, Maslov's "Fighter I-16", pp.19-20, may have more details.)

The greatest Soviet air achievement before and during the war, however, is not a fighter, but the epic IL-2! In development at this time, this ground-attack flying tank would carry 8 such rockets along with its normal combat load, and would be the world's only plane during the war with an armor-plated airframe. To be more specific, its crew cabin, engine, and fuel tanks are all covered with armor, and indeed the main fuselage itself is one complex armor casing, up to 12mm thick, assembled from over twenty double-curved pieces. Only the wings, the tail part of the fusilage, and the tail unit itself are left unshielded. Even the canopy was 63mm armored glass! -- bullets fired from even close range only left insignificant scratches! Aside from its rockets, and/or a bomb load 400 to 600 kilograms, it also mounted two 23mm automatic cannons shooting at 500 rounds per minute, and two of the world-record fire-rate machine guns which Soviet designers could include for any aircraft (even dating back several years).

The designer Illyushin planned to include a rear-set .50 caliber gunner, as in the famous Stuka. Stalin personally called him (Suvorov unsourced) and told him to remove the rear-gunner from the design. Why? -- because it would not be needed: Stalin fully expected the IL-2 would never be attacked by German fighters. Stalin directed the weight savings to be redeemed in enlarging the fuel tank and the bomb load.

The IL-2, however, is not the Su-2 and its family: changes of this sort cannot be simply made to its design. The entire technology for producing the armored fuselage will have to be replaced, delaying the start of mass production. By June 21, 1941, only 249 will be produced.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 09, 2020, 08:03:39 AM
August 22, 1939: from 1932 to 1937, Germany created world-class defensive fortified sectors between the Oder and Warta rivers, similar in quality to the Stalin Line, but naturally much less extensive (for covering smaller areas and having fewer resources to use on the project). Once the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed and the Nazis start heading east, work will stop on the Oder Line, and the magnificent fortifications are stripped progressively of their personnel and material, never again to be manned by troops. Some are used to house vegetables, others are used for factory purposes (such as the amazing Hochwald area fortifications, two four-story combat structures linked by a 19-mile tunnel, which became an aircraft factory.)

Today, the day before the Pact is made, German General Guderian is ordered to command the "Pomerania Fortifications Headquarters". His goal is to reassure the Poles with purely defensive preparations; specifically by building rather light fortifications created off to the side of his expected line of invasion into Poland. Germany will invade in about a week. (Or actually sooner! -- Hitler will take a jump on the planned Molotov timetable and try to invade the day after the Pact is signed, so that he might not need to share Poland with Stalin after all.)

From Zinoviev's collected works (date unreported, citation not specific), "If Russia makes peace, this peace will only be temporary. The Socialist Revolution in Russia will only win when it is surrounded by a ring of sister Socialist republics. A peace made with imperialist Germany would only be an episodic phenomenon. It will provide a short break, after which war will boil once again."
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 09, 2020, 12:34:29 PM
August 23, 1939: today, Stalin directs Molotov to sign the Ribbentrop Pact with Germany.

Also present on the Soviet side at the signing are Stalin himself (even though he has no political authority, technically speaking, to be there -- he has accepted only the equivalent of being the person who keeps the records for the American Democrat or Republican parties), and Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov: the Soviet military instructor whose mobilization theories are still accepted on this day in 1939, and will continue to be accepted down to at least the mid-80s.

Keep in mind that the Politburo (under Stalin's guidance) already voted to call together the Supreme Soviet, who are in the process of gathering, in order to enact the Soviet Union's first universal conscription, on the basis that the second world war has already started (on August 19th)! Conscription is the first step of mobilization; and per Shaposhnikov, once a nation the size of Russia starts mobilizing, a war is inevitable.

As Army General A. Mayorov will write later (reported in "JMH" #5, 1989, p.35), "In planning the invasion of Poland, Germany feared most of all the Soviet Union, not England and not France. That is precisely why fascist leaders hurried to conclude a pact about invasion, with the USSR."

From the head of the GRU, Army General P.I. Ivashutin (reported in "JMH", #6, 1991, p.11), "With this Pact, Hitler untied his hands for aggression."

Mayorov is not entirely correct (nor Suvorov in endorsing his opinion) that Hitler feared the Soviet Union more than England and France; Suvorov does not know in "Chief Culprit" or earlier (or perhaps knows but doesn't reveal), that Hitler upon completion of the pact decides to invade Poland one week early and sends out his divisions to go this evening! -- but he stops when the British Ambassador to Germany delivers a clear ultimatum that Britain will definitely go to war if Hitler invades. Thus Hitler (barely) manages to halt his divisions, and waits a week to invade upon the time agreed with Stalin. (This account can be found in Richard Hargreaves Blitzkrieg Unleashed: the German Invasion of Poland 1939.)

Still, this doesn't affect Suvorov's estimate: if Stalin had not signed a pact with Hitler, there would have been no invasion of Poland, and there would have been no World War II.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 09, 2020, 12:38:54 PM
Upon the signing of this document, Stalin halts all construction and production for the "Stalin Line" (supposedly reported in V. A. Anfilof's "Immortal Feat", p.35, though Suvorov doesn't provide a quote.) Garrisons in the Fortified Sectors will be thinned out and then totally disbanded. Any offensive-capable weapons will be stripped out. The remaining arms, ammunition, as well as observation devices, and equipment for communication and fire control will be mothballed (per JMH, 1961, #9, p.120.) Note the distinction there, by the way! -- anything not capable of offensive use is put into storage, not put into defensive use elsewhere! Most structures will be buried; some will be given to kolkhozes (the murderously ruthless projects of seizing and resettlement of farmland during the Five-Year Plans) for vegetable storage.

Instead of building forward from the Stalin Line to create a second such Line (perhaps even more formidable) with its own similar security corridors at the new borders with German territory, and/or creating a third such line stretching back to the eastern banks of the Dnepr, Stalin orders the progressive destruction of the Stalin Line, replacing it with practically nothing.

Assembly lines for tactical anti-tank cannons are stopped; and production for regimental and divisional 76-mm cannons (such as found on the Line previously), which could also be used for direct anti-tank fire, are also stopped (per JMH 1961 No. 7, p.101, and No. 2, p.12). Anti-tank rifle production not only stops, but the guns are taken away from the Red Army's arsenal (per JMH 1961 ibid.) Suvorov apparently references Lieutenant-General Rosly's 1983 memoir, "Last Rest Stop -- Berlin", p.27, as testimony that anti-tank cannons already issued to the troops were directed to be used for other purposes, such as suppression of defensive fire during Soviet assaults. This not only applies during the final push into Berlin but, Suvorov implies, as a doctrine that had been decided back in 1939.

The thorough destruction of the Stalin Line will continue into the spring of 1941. Professor Colonel I.G. Starinov of the pre-GRU (one of Suvorov's favorite authors) was instrumental in helping create the defensive network of the Stalin Line originally. In his 1964 memoir, "Mines Awaiting Their Moment" (aka "Mines Await Their Hour"), often cited by Suvorov, p.176 in this case, he candidly writes, "A stupid situation arose. When we faced weak armies of small countries, our borders were truly locked. But when Nazi Germany became our neighbor, the defense structures along the former border were abandoned and even partly dismantled!"
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 09, 2020, 12:42:29 PM
Hitler will start blitzing Poland two days later. The whole world will witness the assault, not only from Nazi propaganda footage and reports, but from foreign journalists in Warsaw, as well as foreign embassies from practically all nations.

Few people, by comparison, know about Zhukov's prior blitz of the Japanese 6th Army this month, where there were no international observers and journalists, and where neither side -- for obvious but differing reasons -- rushed out to tell the world about how quickly the Soviets defeated the Japanese; not even Soviet propaganda!

Major-General D. Ortenberg (one of the German Red Army trainees), eventually the editor-in-chief of the central military newspaper "Red Star" (Krasnaya Zvezda) during the Great Patriotic War, is the editor-in-chief of the 1st Army Group newspaper during Khalkhin-Gol. He will reminisce in "Red Star" itself later, August 18, 1993, that "In central newspapers all materials about Khalkhin-Gol effectively went to the trash bin: there was a strict order from Stalin to not print anything about the Khalkhin-Gol events." Suvorov reports that leafing through any Soviet national paper, including Pravda and Izvestia from those days, shows not a word about the brilliant blitz of an entire Japanese army.

Even bus tickets cannot be printed in Stalin's empire without a censor's permission! The strategy is simple: hide all defects, catastrophes, and mistakes (or blame them on someone else if they cannot be hidden), and praise all accomplishments. During these days, the reported news is that farms are producing slightly more milk and have dug slightly more potatoes; also a new factory has been built. The unprecedented defeat of a modern Japanese Army? -- the worst defeat of any Japanese Army in history?! -- the revenge of an entire embarrassing war lost to the Japanese under the hated Imperial Russia in 1904-5, opening along the way an entirely new art of war by a previously unseen method!? No, no, must not be printed, keep quiet, or Stalin will have your head plastered on a wall!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 09, 2020, 12:49:45 PM
August 31 1939: having created the world's first national air assault arm in 1930, and having inducted civilians into parachute infantry combat training for the past nine years (expending massive cash and resource outlays on the support infrastructure to do so), Stalin's officially inducted air assault forces now number over one million.

Hitler's air assault arm numbers around 4000.

Suvorov (or perhaps his English translator) somewhat inaccurately calls these "paratroopers" near the beginning of "Icebreaker" chapter 12. He will later clarify that while they have paratroop training, and other elite training and equipment, they are far from all airborne assault troops: there are twelve brigades of assault jumpers (roughly 36,000 troops), but the vast majority are meant to be deployed by airlift onto captured enemy airfields, after the assault troopers have jumped and captured the fields.

Using paratroopers as regular infantry has no special defensive value aside from their quality, and in some ways they are more brittle: they do not have the heavy and powerful infantry of regular infantry. They are great at capturing and holding airfields, and at springboarding from those into further offensive action in the enemy's former backfield. They are not so great on defense: like a factory with reinforcing bars made of gold instead of steel, except paratroopers cost more than literally their weight in gold!

Enormous numbers of Soviet children have starved to death to field more than one million Soviet airborne and airmobile troops! -- troops meant, by design, to wage battles on enemy territory, in accordance with Stalin's Soviet political doctrine and past practice. They will not, or barely, be used in coming Soviet invasions, including against Finland where they might have wildly succeeded against the Mannerheim Line. They will be saved for some other invasion against a foe much harder to crack than the Finns, requiring more secrecy so as not to spoil the strategic surprise -- even at the cost of risking the failure of the Finland invasion.

While the cost outlay hasn't been as monstrous, the national glider mania has also borne fruit: after all, someone needs to fly the gliders and military transport planes to land the airmobile troops and deploy the jump assaulters! At the start of World War Two, the Soviet Union holds 13 out of 18 world gliding records (per the "Encylcopedia of Aviation", 1994, p.421). The best Soviet combat aircraft builders are sometimes tasked with creating gliders, even the future father of Sputnik, Serguey Korolyov.

In 1939 alone, thirty thousand people are learning to fly a glider in the USSR. This is many times greater than the combined total of all other nations in the world. Ten or twelve Soviet R&D labs are locked in fierce competition to design and produce the best troop-carrying glider. Oleg Antonov designs the A-7 multi-seat troop glider; Gribovsky designs the G-11 carrier-glider (rated superb by Suvorov). Kolesnikov develops the KTs-20, and Korbula was working on a mammoth glider.

Oleg Antonov, who will later create the largest cargo warplane in the world, suggests adding wings and a tail assembly to a regular tank. The amazingly simple design allowed the crew to guide the glider by turning the turret and adjusting the barrel elevation (thus changing the center of gravity). Before landing the Krylatyi ("winged") Tank, the engine was turned on and the tracks revved to maximum speed, to use their friction as a brake upon touchdown. This ran into problems, to say the least! (As Suvorov quips, "In Soviet Russia, human life was cheaper than tank-mounted wings!") Eventually the preferred debarkation method will be to land in the water, since the BT models could be easily made amphibious (to climb out from under the water by sinking), and the floatable amphibious tanks are lighter to use as gliders anyway. This is a totally pointless tank to produce in 1942 while fighting a screaming defensive war, but they will go ahead and tried to finish it anyway.

Keep in mind the point of the attempt, however: this was an up-to-medium-weight airmobile tank which could only be feasibly deployed in good terrain so far behind enemy lines as to not need worrying about anti-air fire (or much resistance on the ground while the crew extricated themselves from the wings and maybe also from a lake), and delivered in a blue-sky clear of enemy interceptors. Stalin kept it in development just in case he needed to launch a surprise deep-strike airborne invasion somewhere. Until such an operation, a winged tank would be as useless as one million silk parachutes folded up neatly. (Which, unlike the winged tank, will see some combat action eventually! -- sort of...)


Speaking of the BT tanks: on August 31st, 1939:,Stalin has more BT type light tanks than all other tanks combined from all other nations in the world. Its family characteristics are designed to be maximally applied in a surprise deep-penetration attack into urban and near-urban areas with the best roads in the world; not fighting against strong points but bypassing them to interdict lines of supply, hit command headquarters, and to strike support bases (like airports and, to a lesser extent, naval ports). Soviet textbooks (uncited by Suvorov) emphasize that the wheels are more important than the tracks, which are seen as a crutch to be used just once and then ditched, like a parachute, once the light tanks have reached the areas where their wheels will work the best. Russia does not have superhighways where these tanks would work best. No nation with a contiguous border with Russia has a superhighway.

By the end of next month, Stalin will have engineered a common territorial border with the closest nation which has superhighways.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 03:20:23 PM
September 1, 1939: Hitler invades Poland. (Again. He actually invaded one week ago, just after the Pact was signed, but only one special-ops team crossed the border by the time Hitler put the brakes on the invasion.)

He has 2,977 tanks, roughly the same number Stalin has been producing per year in peacetime; Stalin has considerably more by now than the 21,100ish tanks he had at the start of the year. Not a single one of Hitler's operational tanks has the firepower to match the Soviet BA-3, BA-6, or BA-10 -- which are armored scout cars! -- and which will still outclass the vast majority of German tanks in firepower, speed, and even maneuverability in some ways, by June of 1941.  Hitler invades Poland and (publicly) starts World War II with six panzer divisions.

Six.

Only six.

Suvorov mocks this: "What sort of blitzkrieg could one dream about, having only six tank divisions?!"

(Note that Suvorov is somewhat inconsistent or unclear about Soviet tank numbers here. In "Chief Culprit" he clearly enumerates production figures for a combined total of 21,100ish Soviet tanks as of Jan 1st; but he also says in the same book that the Red Army has 6456 BT tanks on September 1st, with references cited either way. He appears to mean that Stalin has 6456 of the latest BT-28 tanks, among the tally of all tank models. I don't have his citation for this number, Meltiukhov's "Stalin's Missed Opportunity", p.525, so I don't know the context.)


British pilot Alfred Price (4000+ hours, 40+ aircraft types experience), in "World War II Fighter Conflict", pp 18-21, later judges the most powerfully armed fighter plane in production in the world, on the day Hitler invades Poland, to be...

...the Soviet I-16! -- designed by Polikarpov, surpassing the Me-109E in firepower by 2:1 and the Spitfire-1 by 3:1. It is also the only fighter in production, on this day, with armor plating around the pilot. "Those who think the Russians were backwards peasants, prior to World War II, who then made progress only by drawing on German insights, have to recall the facts."


Hitler has fifty-seven submarines on the day he invades Poland, a very respectable fleet by world standards on this day, including already what will be the most successful submarine type in World War II, the Type V-III. (Suvorov's source on that claim isn't clear about whether this success rate applies to Germany alone or across all nations.) While subs can be used defensively sometimes, such as the American defense of Midway Island against the Japanese carrier strike force, typically they are meant as offensive commerce raiders and certainly this is Hitler's intention.

On this same day, Stalin has 165 submarines, not only comparable in quality to the Nazi Type V-III but effectively identical. How?! -- simple: the Soviet Union had invited Weimar Germany to get around the Versailles Treaty by building submarines in Russia, and so according to American historian Anthony Sutton (in his "National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union", 1973, pp.152-53), the German delegation transferred to the Soviet Union the design of the Type V-III back in 1926. In Sutton's estimation, the Soviet Schuka-class submarine is based directly on this design, while the Soviet S-class is based on the German Type VII design. Soviet scientist S.A. Gorlov (in his "Top Secret: The Moscow-Berlin Alliance, 1923-1933", 2001, p.264), "It is, of course, difficult to imagine that Soviet shipbuilding, from which in German professional opinion 'nothing could be learned', all of a sudden could develop several promising types of submarines. Even though such ship designers as B.M. Malinin, A.N. Krylov, V.P. Kostenko and others were naturally gifted talents, it is doubtful that they would have ignored such outstanding completed designs and other specific German assistance." Especially when they basically recreated the same models for Soviet use!


Suvorov regards Major-General B. Muller-Gillebrand as producing the best studies (up through publication of "Chief Culprit") for the development of the German army during the reign of the Third Reich, specifically his "German Ground Force, 1933-1945". On his calculations, the Nazis are invading Poland on this day with enough pistol ammunition for 36 days; enough mountain artillery ammunition (for getting through the southern passes) for 18 days; enough light mortar shells for 13 days; enough heavy mortar shells for 11 days. They are bringing enough heavy field howitzer ammo for 60 days! But they have only brought enough 20mm ammo for their Panzer II cannons, their main tank of this operation, for six days of combat. (Ibid, Vol.1, p.161.) This is because Hitler's regime is still working on a peacetime war production plan. He has no choice: he lacks the materials for a wartime production plan, and this would be easy to spot and alert his neighbors about.


Stalin could stop Hitler's invasion at any moment. But he has chosen to cooperate with Hitler instead; and not out of fear of Hitler's power. Compared to Stalin's military, Hitler has only enough power to be an annoyance, perhaps not even an aggravation. Yet.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 03:26:59 PM
September 1, 1939: enough of the Supreme Soviet has arrived to start the 4th Special Session of the Supreme Soviet, summoned back on August 19th. In accordance with the Politburo resolution on the 19th, the Supreme Soviet enacts universal conscription for the first time in the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Eventual Chief of the General Staff and Marshal of the Soviet Union Meretskov will later insist (in his 1968 memoir "In the Service of the Nation: Pages Remembered") that the USSR's first military draft of its population was adopted "under circumstances where the Second World War had already begun."

But the Soviets had agreed to cooperate with Hitler in conquering Poland, and had signed a non-aggression pact with him! Consequently, they had enabled Hitler, and technically cooperated with him, in doing something that they themselves were already sure would start World War 2! They are so sure of this, that on the first morning of Poland's invasion, when even Hitler doesn't know he is starting WW2, the deputies of the Supreme Soviet are urgently meeting in a Special Session to adopt legislation on the basis that they already know WW2 is starting. They were so sure of it, that the justification for the Politburo calling together the Supreme Soviet a few weeks ago, was that the second world war had already started back then! -- less than a day before Zhukov blitz-assaulted the 6th Japanese Army.

Air Force Colonel-General Yakovlev, at the time Stalin's personal aide, will recall later the general strategic understanding in Moscow: "Hitler was sure England and France would not fight for Poland." ("My Mission in Life", p.212.) Stalin might or might not know yet, that Hitler tried to launch his invasion one week earlier than today's planned date, then had called off the Nazi divisions at the last moment. But even if Stalin does know this, he must not know yet (per Yakovlev's testimony) that Hitler aborted invading before and without his planned Soviet ally support-invading from the east, partly upon receiving a diplomatic warning from the English ambassador to Berlin, that England would declare war if Hitler invaded Poland. Thus Hitler decided to wait for the planned joint invasion today on Sept 1; the idea being that if Stalin invades at the same time, then England and France will hesitate to declare war on Germany at the risk of aggravating Russia.

Stalin will not invade today, however: explaining apologetically that he just isn't prepared yet, while Soviet troops stand on Polish borders! Stalin promises he will be ready in two or three days.

Thus Hitler alone, in the view of most of the world, starts World War II: a war the Soviets considered to have already started on August 19th, 1939.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 03:31:15 PM
The conscription has a very odd detail in context. Traditionally in the Soviet Union up to now, limited conscription aimed only at men aged 21, which is a relatively old age for trying to train military reservists to fill out divisions and their constituent groups; and the armed forces were relatively selective about who they called in. But if you are going to do limited conscription anyway, why not start at age 18, when boys are more easily trained than adult men who are more set in their ways and who may have a family already (and wondering if they will be called up for the conscription)?

Now with universal conscription being enacted, the age is lowered to 19, and in some categories 18, and raised to any practical limit. (See for example Pravda's September 3rd, 1939 issue. The draft age of 18 years was established for those who had graduated from the Soviet equivalent of high school. Mostly they were drafted into military schools -- roughly equivalent to officer training schools -- willingly or not. Suvorov's own father was part of this age 18 group.)

The system for processing this training has already been in place, in a way that doesn't look aggressively threatening (only relatively few of men aged 21, no younger, no older); it only needs expanding. In one stroke Stalin has increased his official troops-in-action from one million to five and a half million.

True, many of these troops only 'officially' exist on paper; but a few million of even those merely-officially-existing troops, at any age, have already been pre-trained in various unofficial but still highly effective military fashions -- such as through the glider-pilot program and the airborne assault infantry program.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 03:43:48 PM
There is another subtly important detail: this universal conscription level is planned for only two years.

While Suvorov may lean a little too heavily on this, the fundamental point is that Stalin and his high command have started a ticking clock (one of several to come) ending two years from now.

Why? -- can't the conscription be extended? Sure, under various circumstances: to give the most obvious possible example, conscription won't end on September 1st 1941 with a Nazi invasion grinding more than two months already through western Russia! But Stalin and his high command don't know yet that he'll be dealing with a Nazi invasion at that time.

Isn't a two year conscription just standard flexible protocol? Yes and no: this is the first universal conscription in the history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (the closest parallel being the prior Civil War while World War I was still finishing out, before the USSR per se even existed), so there's nothing "standard" about this at all!

What does regularly happen around this time, which would have a bearing on practical conscription limits, is Russia's harvest. Stalin has been murderously starving his people since the mid-20s, in order to gear up his military-industrial base; and his radical socialist plans haven't turned out to be most efficient (to say the least) in growing the crops which he has been selling off to (partly) fund this expansion -- and storing to feed his ever-expanding military. Stalin does have something like a strategic food reserve, but it's slated for military use.

Thus, as long as Stalin just cycles his conscripted reservists in and out on relatively short-term cycles of training, or never calls them in at all (even for training, much less for actual mobilization), then Soviet harvest plans (such as they are), and industrial plans, can continue with only proportionate added strain: the strain of absent workers off on training, and the strain of clothing, feeding, equipping, and housing at least one million new soldiers, not only in production but also in the logistics of getting the soldiers and their supplies together for training.

But, if Stalin ever starts truly mobilizing his universal conscription -- and plans are being laid here to do just this, within the two year limit! -- then he will smack headfirst into Shaposhnikov's long-running mobilization theory (keeping in mind that Shaposhnikov is very much involved in the political setup here, including a week ago with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact): a modern nation the size of Russia must go to war once mobilization starts. If so many men are in arms when a harvest time comes, under the dangerously thin circumstances of Soviet harvest practices in past years, a mass starvation will happen, among soldier and civilian alike, unlike anything yet seen, even by the Soviet Union through the millions of deaths of the Five-Year Plans!

Stalin and Shaposhnikov worked out back in 1929, that you can mask your mobilization by cycling your universal conscription in and out; but if Stalin ever starts seriously mobilizing his universal conscription, the Soviet Union must go to war -- and go to war somewhere else, where there's food to raid -- or else the Soviet Union will perish, at least as a government and also somewhat literally in its population.

The only way the Soviet Union might survive without invading someone else (someone with enough food to even thinly feed the Soviet Union another year), would be if someone else invaded the Soviet Union so strongly as to kill off or imprison (and so take over feeding) enough of those mouths for even a lack of Soviet harvest and strategic reserves to survive. Which would be a much different kind of disaster.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 03:54:30 PM
Ideologically, however, this first Soviet universal conscription resolution is no mere casual training flexibility for potential usage someday (like the parachuting infantry training program among Soviet civilian men over the past decade, to give a very successful prior ongoing example). Soviet theories about the final revolutionary world war, require such a universal conscription as necessary to prepare for this final, ultimate war.

The Politburo and Supreme Soviet are well aware of these ideological implications, because this collection of the extended congress was summoned for an emergency session precisely on the ground that the second world war has (somehow) already started! -- the second world war which Lenin, and after him Stalin, have been expecting since the end of World War One, and which Stalin has been ideologically training Soviet citizens about. In Soviet social-military ideology, this Second Imperialist War (as they like to call it) is necessary to break down the power of the property owners so that a worldwide revolutionary militant uprising of the workers and peasants can (and 'scientifically' will) succeed.

So conceptually, this universal conscription has an ideological goal of converting exactly into a level of mobilization which will be fatal to the Soviet Union if they don't go seize national and international levels of property and resources from somewhere else! -- an invasion on the grandest possible scale which happens to be the ideological plan anyway!

Would five million troops be enough for the grandest possible scale? No of course not; that would be silly. Prior Soviet theories about their role in the final revolutionary world war estimated ten million troops being necessary at a minimum.

But don't worry! -- the universal conscription law just happens to allow for, and thus foresees a need for, EIGHTEEN million troops!

They don't all have to be ready in time for the two year limit, but that's the goal the conscription is aiming at: a goal totally in line with Soviet ideology about conquering the nations of the world. For the people, of course.  ::)

And this conscription isn't only an ideological lip service (of potentially suicidal intensity): resolutions here include plans to conscript, create, train, and then mobilize westward (eventually) several dozens of divisions in Russian interior military districts, within the next two years.

As an example, a little later this month the Urals Military District will create the 85th and 159th Rifle Divisions. On the day before Barbarossa, where will these Ural divisions be? All the way westward across the entire eventual theater of the Great Patriotic War! The 85th will be bumped up to the border near Augustov, watching elements of an NKVD mobile response division cutting down Soviet barbed wire. (The Nazis will have started cutting their wire for invading Russia a few weeks prior, as the Soviets on the border will be well aware!) The 159th will be sitting on the Romanian border, in Rava-Russkaya, as part of the 6th Army (about which more later). The 85th and 159th Divisions being over there, at a border which (largely) doesn't exist yet in September 1939, is no historical accident: their appearance and redeployment fit precisely into the ideological plan of universal conscription being implemented now. (So does the creation of much of that future border, by the Soviet Union joining and exploiting the Nazi invasion of Poland this month.)

Later in 1939, the Urals MD will create the 110th, 125th, and 128th Rifle Divisions, all to be eventually parked on a German frontier which doesn't yet exist. According to Soviet sources (unsourced by Suvorov), 125th will be "right on the border" of Eastern Prussia, i.e. in Baltic nations which Stalin will order captured next year in 1940.

While these particular divisions will be part of the First Strategic Echelon, the Supreme Soviet formalizes plans here for the eventual creation of the Second Strategic Echelon, too. Not counting the divisions already moved, another seventy-seven will be grouped into armies on June 13th, 1941, and start moving westward -- based ultimately on this resolution (and the Politburo resolution of August 19th, 1939).

The Soviet government isn't starting World War II here: in their (political and ideological) estimation, that started already back before Zhukov was invading Manchuria! Instead, they're planning to start a war AFTER the (ideologically expected) Second World War. Specifically, they're planning to start the final revolutionary world war for bringing all property and resources and means of production, including all people as the ultimate key means of production, under the control of the Communist International and its leader(s).

And they're planning to start this final, ultimate world war, sometime before September 1st, 1941.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 03:59:02 PM
Meanwhile, getting back to the current world war... ;)

September 3, 1939: Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany due to his invasion of Poland, pledging to guarantee the sovereignty of Poland and to rescue the nation from Nazi invasion. After all, the USSR hasn't teamed up with Hitler, so there is not much reason to be frightened of Nazi Germany yet by itself -- even Italy has not yet joined Hitler's war!

Stalin will however order the Communists of the Western democracies to oppose the war -- specifically, to oppose the western democracies going to war against Hitler!

Stalin will portray this as a plot by capitalist imperialists to use Hitler's invasion of Poland as an excuse to go in and take over Germany. The Comintern also orders its members to organize worker strikes at western armament and airplane factories. Hitler, on the other hand, is promoted in Communist propaganda as a fighter for the working classes, launching revolutionary action. (The Comintern doesn't bother ordering its members to organize worker strikes at Nazi armament and airplane factories; partly because Hitler destroyed the German Communist Party already.)


September 3, 1939, Hitler notices that Stalin has still not invaded, and sends a reminder of their treaty obligations. After all, the whole reason Hitler had felt safe declaring war to seize Poland, was because Stalin had told him Britain and France weren't prepared to fight him for Poland (except Stalin had instead received numerous strong assurances they would); and the whole reason Hitler had called off his initial invasion of Poland more than a week ago, intending to beat Stalin to the punch in seizing Polish territory, was that Britain had given him a final ultimatum not to invade.

Consequently, Hitler had waited to stage a joint invasion with Stalin, so that Britain and France might be leery of teaming up against both of them together; and now Stalin isn't invading! -- leading both western nations to feel safe declaring war on Hitler!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 04:06:07 PM
September 4, 1939, in his opposition bulletin for this month (page uncited by Suvorov), Trotsky reminds the world that "the Kremlin had fed oil to the Italian campaign into Abyssinia... Is it unclear why Hitler began the advance on Poland immediately after the embraces between Ribbentrop and Molotov? Stalin knew very well what he was doing. For an attack against Poland and a war against England and France, Hitler needed favorable 'neutrality' from the USSR -- plus Soviet raw materials! The political and economic agreement provides Hitler with one and the other."

Suvorov claims that this is the point at which Stalin starts sending out assassins; Trotsky has shed too much light on the situation.

Without Soviet petroleum, chrome, tin, nickel, platinum, iron ore (Hitler doesn't have a gun to Sweden's head yet), cotton, grain, manganese, copper, vanadium, molybdenum (both together important as an alloy for making submarine and aircraft equipment, not only screwdrivers!), and tungsten, Hitler would not have been able to unleash war in Europe. Cut him off, and Hitler must fail his war soon.

But Stalin has no plans to cut Hitler off anytime soon.


September 5, 1939: the (official) head of the Soviet government Vyacheslav Molotov, also acting as its chief foreign minister, replies to the Nazi reminder of joint invasion (after another two days have passed  >:D ), "We agree with you that concrete action has to be taken at an appropriate time. However, we consider that such time has not come yet. It is possible that we are mistaken, but it appears to us that excessive haste could cause us harm and facilitate unification among our enemies." (cited in Yury Felshtinsky, ed., "It Must Be Published: USSR-Germany 1939-1941, Documents and Materials", 1991, p.90.)

This is a masterful level of diplomatic trolling! Stalin has left Hitler holding the bag for the public start of World War II, and Hitler is reduced to begging them to keep their promise and invade Poland with him! However, there is a real rock of truth in Stalin's reply through Molotov; and a very serious concern, to be addressed by Stalin's government a few days from now...
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 04:13:18 PM
September 7, 1939: Georgi Dimitrov, the general secretary of the Comintern, records in his diary today how Stalin (in the presence of Molotov and Zhdanov) explained to the leaders of the Comintern his new line of foreign policy! -- i.e. why is Stalin now promoting Hitler as a socialist hero striking a blow for workers' justice against capitalist oppression?! And why has Stalin directed Molotov to sign a non-agression treaty with secret protocols for dividing up Poland (which hasn't started yet and won't for more than another week)?

"The war," explains Stalin, "is between two groups of capitalist nations," -- flipping over again to regard Hitler's National Socialist Workers' Party as capitalist, by the way. "But we are not against it, if they fight a bit and weaken each other. It would be good if Germany could destabilize the positions of the wealthiest capitalist nations, of England especially. Hitler, without knowing it, is weakneing the foundations of the capitalist system... We, in the meantime, are able to maneuver, to nudge one country on against the other, so that the fight will be more intense." (per Lev Bezymenskiy's "Hitler and Stalin before the Fight", 2000, p.290; also found  in A.O. Chubarian, ed., "War and Politics, 1939-1941", 1999, pp.38,97.)

This echoes the gist of the secret August 19th Politburo meeting where Stalin declared universal conscription must start, on the basis that the second world war had already begun -- where on that day, Stalin had ceased diplomacy with Britain and France, to offer to split up Poland with the Nazis!

However, Stalin has also quietly suffered some unease about his plan. After all, he has been supplying Hitler with the means to make this war for some time already; and he has directed the Soviet trade delegation in Berlin to strongly extend that trade agreement; and he did this just after ceasing negotiations with Britain and France, and inviting Ribbentrop to Moscow; all of which the other nations can easily see or discover (even though the specifics of the non-aggression pact and its secret protocols remain secret for now). Plus now Stalin has changed his propaganda about Hitler to defending him as a hero for the working class against property owners! And now the other nations can easily see that he is not demanding Hitler to cease invading Poland -- nor is Stalin cutting off Hitler's warmaking supplies! On the contrary, Stalin has directed his foreign diplomatic service to agitate other nations along the line that Britain and France instigated this war in order to gang up and conquer Germany, and so Stalin's Communists have been calling for peace on that ground: a peace for leaving Hitler alone to do what he wants with Poland (thus brokering Hitler's offer of peace to the initial allies against him).

How, after all, will Britain and France and their own allies read this? They must realize by now that Stalin is supporting Hitler's war more-or-less directly, even though he has not invaded Poland himself from the other side. Will they try to woo Stalin over to their side with diplomatic carrots? Or will they take a hard line and extend their war declaration to the Soviet Union?!

And these questions must only be amplified by Stalin's plans to indeed invade Poland sometime soon: to keep his pact with Hitler, to forestall Hitler taking all of Poland on Russia's current border, and of course to enact a "liberation crusade" of the typical Soviet sort onto as much of Poland as he can get -- which he knows full well will not be the heroic rescue of Poland that his propaganda will paint it as, and which he knows the western allies will also know (even if they won't quite know for decades to come, the extent of how many murders he will hide).
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:12:30 PM
Just to be safe, on this same evening of September 7, 1939, Stalin executes a BUS order.

Under the People's Commissar Decree No.2/1/50698 of May 20, 1939, the acronym BUS (in Russian with English letters) was set up as a coded signal for covert mobilization; in English the acronym would be something like BTC, "Big Training Call-up". BUS with an "A" designation means deployment of individual units with the operational readiness date of up to ten days for their support elements to reach war-level strength.

This BUS order is to be executed with maximum secrecy, or as much as possible when Stalin is quickly calling up for "training" the headquarters of:

twenty-two rifle corps;
five cavalry corps;
three tank corps;
ninety-eight rifle divisions;
twenty-eight tank brigades;
three mechanized infantry brigades;
fourteen cavalry brigades (because if you're going this far already then why not?!);
and one airborne brigade.

These are to be deployed in the seven military districts along Russia's western frontier.

Naturally, the headquarters just start the process as containers for the arrival of troops. But in total, 2,610,136 men are drafted.

This is on top of another draft Stalin's government already instigated a couple of days ago! Under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR Decree #1348-268cc, a new military draft was supposed to start from September 5th to reinforce the troops in the Far East region, plus one thousand men for each newly formed division -- looking forward to the divisions being authorized today, a few days later!

Under the new universal conscription duty, the call-up period for 190,000 soldiers already drafted in 1939 was extended by one year.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:18:39 PM
September 16, 1939: Hitler has been repeatedly reminding the USSR government about their obligation to invade Poland together, but Stalin keeps refusing, requiring more delays of two or three or four days! This has lasted two and a half weeks.

NKVD SOF battalions have been assembled on the Polish eastern border, and are awaiting orders, according to a report filed by the political section of the Kiev Military District border guards. These will be the first to cross the borders during the Soviet invasions, not only of Poland, but over the next ten months also in Bessarabia, Bukovina, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland (not in that order, however -- Finland first, Bessarabia and Bukovina last).

As expected from SpecOp invasions, their job is to secure invasion routes by knocking out enemy border posts, cutting communications, eliminating minor enemy concentrations, and terrorizing area inhabitants to prevent them lending aid to defenders. Once the Red Army catches up with them, their job is to cleanse the territory, catching and executing undesirables, handing others over to security convoys to send back behind Soviet lines for imprisonment. Notably most will be kept imprisoned by the NKVD security convoys under the authority of the SOF, and never handed over alive even to the Gulags!

September 17, 1939: the Red Army invades Poland. Secret police units launch operations under orders from NKVD Brigade Commander Bogdanov, "At dawn on September 17, 1939, Byelorussian front armies will go on the offensive to support the insurgent workers and peasants of Byelorussia."

The idea is that thanks to Hitler's invasion over the past two and a half weeks, the worker revolution is now underway in Poland, and so the Red Army is going in to lend a hand to the peasants in their efforts. As part of this "support" program, thousands of Polish soldiers, priests, doctors, and intellectuals, will soon be massacred by the Soviet invaders in the Katyn Forest, to be blamed on the Nazis, and only acknowledged by Moscow as a Soviet atrocity in April of 1990.


September 18, 1939: Pravda prints a Soviet TASS radio announcement from Molotov explaining the invasion, "Poland has become a convenient staging-area for all kinds of accidents and surprises that might threaten the USSR... The Soviet Government can no longer remain neutral in the face of these facts... In view of this situation the Soviet Government has notified Red Army General Headquarters to order troops to cross the border and place the lives and property of the population under their protection... to free the Polish people from the disastrous war, into which they were plunged by foolish governments, and to give the people the chance to settle down to a peaceful life."

Who made Poland such a convenient staging-area for the Red Army to invade under the pretext of reducing all kinds of accidents and surprises that might threaten the USSR? Which "foolish leaders plunged" the Polish people (as Molotov puts it in this propaganda) into "a disastrous war", so that the Red Army must come "pull the Polish people out" and "to give them the chance to settle down to a peaceful life"?

Hitler, of course; but also Stalin, when he directed Molotov himself to sign a Pact inviting Hitler to invade and divide up Poland with Stalin.

This is another example of Stalin's propaganda preparing the Soviet people to expect military "surprises" of some kind coming from this direction.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:20:03 PM
September 19, 1939: Soviet SOF units send around 600 prisoners in a convoy back through one small NKVD border post, to be executed later by the SOF or under their authority, including "officers, landowners, clerics, gendarmes, police". Suvorov notes that the official border guard history cuts off the sentence here, indicating some kind of censorship to a report which didn't mind clerics and landowners being sent back through the prior Soviet border to their deaths! (He doesn't speculate on what was censored instead.)


September 20, 1939 (typo'd by Suvorov apparently to read 1940?), the Red Army's strength, not counting border guards, interior counter-insurgency troops, or the navy, has reached 5,289,400.  :o

They are by far NOT in position to fight! They lack all support; logistics would take many months to get them to the front line. But just in case Britain and France and their friends regard Stalin's invasion and abuse of Poland as a final straw and lump him into the war declared on Hitler, the paperwork has at least started to get them on the way.


September 23, 1939: under the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and People's Commissar of Defense Decree #177, the 2,610,136 men called up in the draft back on September 7th are declared mobilized until a "special instruction".
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:21:31 PM
September 24, 1939: (from a wiki article) warships of the Soviet Navy appear off Estonian ports, and Soviet bombers start patrolling the skies.

No shots are fired yet, but Moscow demands that Estonia must allow the USSR to establish Soviet military bases on Estonian soil as protection against Hitler, or else face invasion and conquest before Hitler gets to them.

Estonia is unaware that Hitler has already ceded interest in the region to Stalin during the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but realizes that if Great Britain and France can't (or won't) come help Poland they won't be able to help the Baltic Coast states either.


September 28, 1939: (from wiki) Estonia agrees to the Soviet ultimatum. 25,000 Soviet troops start basing in the nation.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:23:45 PM
End of September: Poland has been destroyed, mostly by Nazi Germany. Indeed, the Nazis will be required by their secret treaty to give the Soviet Union a number of important cities the Nazis actually conquered!

Britan and France do not declare war on the USSR. After all, Stalin is only reacting to put some more room between himself and the aggressive Hitler, while he still has time! -- right?  ^-^

Also, the western allies want to prevent Germany from using Soviet strategic resources, so they must turn a blind eye to Soviet atrocities to keep Stalin on their side (sort of). Stalin will send Hitler strategic resources necessary to continue the war anyway.

Poland will remain under socialist slavery for decades to come: the specific purpose for which Britain and France entered the war, to rescue Poland, will not be achieved during the Second World War -- and not in the lifetimes of the officials of Britain and France.
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:29:14 PM
Analyzing Lightning(s)
-------------------------

Comparing the Poland blitz to the Mongolian blitz, in numbers of people the Nazi operation surpassed the Soviet operation by 28 times (1.6 million troops vs only 57,000). But the Nazi blitz only had 4 times more airplanes and 6 times more tanks -- a proportion of concentration much favoring the Soviet blitz in equipment to manpower!

The Soviets also spread their tanks around more liberally in the Mongolian blitz: each Soviet Rifle Division had its own tank battalion, which isn't much but also isn't nothing (and this standard will be continued, since Stalin likes to have more tanks than God!) -- but there is not a single tank in any of the thirteen German motorized divisions in the Nazi invasion. Sure, the Soviet infantry had a battalion of T-26 tanks, but the Germany infantry don't have tanks at all! -- except in the sense that the Nazi 'panzer' (or 'armored') divisions are mostly foot infantry.

The Soviets used long-range bombers; not even 50 of them, true, but the Nazis had no such planes. He-111 medium two-engine bombers had to fill this role. The Soviet SB close-support bombers are closer to the excellent Ju-88 medium bombers in capability, but are much simpler to produce and operate.

Hitler goes to war with field artillery developed at the end of World War I, the justly famous -18 models (in two calibers, mostly the smaller). They are drawn by horses mainly. The Soviets blitzed with the best cannons, howitzers, and mortars available in the world at this time, developed only in the past few years!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:43:48 PM
The most prevalent Nazi tank was the Panzer I, meant to be a training tank originally! -- it did not even have small 20mm cannons, only a pair of machine guns, and only its latest packages came with a 100 horsepower motor! Many still had the original 57hp. Hitler fought with 1445 of these.

His second most numerous tank was the Panzer II, with an actual but pitiful 20mm cannon. Some have 130hp engines, others the later 140hp. His heaviest tanks are 211 PzIVs, and 98 late in production PzIIIs. (They had been delayed over disputes about what kind of anti-armor gun to use, currently the "door-knocker" 37mm as found on the Nazis' own despised towed anti-tank weapon.) Some of the later models have 300hp engines, but some still have the original 250hp. The PzIV has no anti-armor gun yet, being intended as an infantry support weapon. For every thousand Nazi soldiers there were fewer than two tanks.

(Suvorov leaves out 244 Pz-35(t) and around 100 Pz-38(t) models, which I think is rather unfair, as they are reasonably good tanks even though Hitler didn't use a lot for Case White in Poland. Leaving out the "Skoda" models also skews Suvorov's stats sometimes. The (t) in parenthesis is short for the German word for Czech, thus designating a Czech model.)

The Soviet blitz used BT-5 and BT-7 tanks in the most numbers, out of 498 tanks total. Motors, 400hp and 500hp respectively. Practically all were armed with the most powerful tank cannon in the world at this time, the 45mm with the L-46 barrel (46 times the caliber in length). Even Soviet armored cars are armed with this cannon! -- and 385 such armored cars were brought to the blitz. No army in the world has anything comparable at this time. (The PzIV's 75mm short-barrel gun is not meant to fight tanks, and cannot do so effectively yet.) For every thousand Soviet soldiers, there were almost nine tanks much more powerful than Nazi ones! This gets close to the experimental ideal of 86 troops per tank determined by Soviet statistical science during WW2 later.

The BT tanks did have some unexpected problems, due to being designed with motors too strong for their transmissions on rough ground, and their tracks being designed for shedding like a parachute after only a short travel -- which led to them throwing off tracks by accident a lot. Lessons were learned about attacking a dug-in enemy, too, such as more artillery being needed than aviation for that.

Consequently, from September 1939 Stalin authorizes the unfolding of new artillery formations and the construction of new ammunition factories. Soviet strategists also take to heart the corollary, that a blitz works best on an enemy who is out of defensive alignment in their own blitz preparations!
Title: Re: IceBreakChron IV: IGNITING THE WAR
Post by: JasonPratt on April 10, 2020, 06:51:31 PM
Soviet troops during the Mongolian blitz may have been 26 times fewer in number than the Polish blitz, but neither were they trying to conquer and control a nation the size of Poland; and compared to the Nazi blitz they were armed to the limit with the most sophisticated modern weapons of the day.

Moreover, Poland in the very early autumn of 1939 was ripe blitzkrieg territory, with the Polish armies spread thin around a perimeter that they had been ordered not to fall back from. (Eastern Poland is not so great for blitzing, but the Soviets were able to easily get through this time due to Polish troops being drawn off to meet Hitler.) The Poles had to defend two thousand eight hundred kilometers against the Nazis -- and then had to defend the Soviet border against both the Soviet and Nazi invasions! The only serious water barrier was the Vistula, and Hitler arranged for his troops to attack on both sides of it to capture crossings.

From the main Germany border to the capital Warsaw, was 230km; from Eastern Prussia, was only 110km. No need to relocate supply bases close to the borders; peacetime supply bases would suffice. A thrust at Warsaw would not even need refilling the fuel of the tanks, aside from Polish defense resistance! -- but there were no good natural defensive areas and few fortifications. Aviation bases did not need to be moved up before the attack. Only small groups of mobile commanders (such as Guderian and his famous commanders) had to be moved forward to start the attacks.

With all these advantages, Hitler's blitzkrieg failed.

His conquest succeeded, thanks to the blitz, but he couldn't keep the blitz going. By September 15th, the Nazis were almost completely out of fuel; and without fuel, the tanks had to stop rolling forward, and the air force activity dropped off sharply. Hitler had gotten far enough by then to chip onto the green and putt in, so to speak, but suddenly the question of whether Poland could be conquered in time to be prepared for rescue attempts by Britain and France, was gravely in doubt!

Nazi high command adjusted accordingly on future operations -- one result being that they underestimated what could be accomplished in France! But another direct result of this experience, and subsequent calculations, was a grimly realistic expectation of how far they could hope to feasibly blitz in Barbarossa later: a calculation they will nail exactly. (More on this later...)

In any case, Stalin's propaganda about entering Poland to prevent Hitler from invading Russian territory was manifestly a lie for several reasons, but for this reason, too: the Polish campaign had expended the Wehrmacht, and Soviet high command knew that Nazi high command knew the lesson of Napoleon about trying to invade across the endless steppes in autumn against General Mud and General Winter. On the contrary, Soviet high command timed its entry into Poland right as the Nazi blitz was running out of ammo, bombs, and fuel! By finally coming in, as an ally to Hitler not an enemy, Stalin allowed Hitler to transfer forces tasked for conquering Eastern Poland, over to finishing off Warsaw and the western pockets. Suvorov thinks with the tanks and planes out of fuel, the surviving Polish cavalry might have foiled the invasion without Stalin's timely help! (Unlikely, in my estimate: the cavalry had already been butchered and weren't numerous enough to cause real problems to the Wehrmacht infantry; they might have counter-blitzed early against Nazi supply lines, but that time had passed.)

The Nazi blitz and its aftermath also failed in two grand strategic senses: first, it left Hitler at war with two mighty nations plus potentially the United States, with only Stalin watching his back; and second, it didn't even knock Poland out of the war!

Polish resistance starts immediately (despite Stalin trying to disband Polish partisans, more on this soon), and the Polish government evacuates with a conservative count of 350,000 trained and experienced troops including officers. At any given time afterward, around one million Polish troops will be fighting against Hitler until 1945 -- when ironically the Soviet Union will know Poland permanently out of the war and into a more brutally effective occupation for decades! But before then, the 1st and 2nd Polish armies will be part of the final assaults from the East Front into the main German homeland and into Berlin.


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