Hi, I'm new too to this forum, and this is the first topic I've looked at and I can see this is gonna be a great place to hang around.

Anyway, my view:

It's pretty much a given that the Japanese army would have had their behinds handed to them by the Soviets. They did have 6 or so years experience fighting on the continent, but with light and disserayed Chinese and other asian countries. However I can't help but think what if the Japanese had engaged in a heavy air campaign over eastern USSR and bombed them to smitherines much like the Allies did to Germany in the west? Much of Russia's "turn-around" was due to re-enforcements from the east, and transfering of factories out of reach of Luftwaffe bombers. If Japan had began a bombing campaign en masse to strip Russia of its eastern assets might that have been good enough for Germany to take Moscow, and even if it werent that successful a campaign, would it have been enough to give the Germans the extra 50 or so km's it needed to get to Moscow?

That would have to depend on the strength of the Red Air Force in the east. Assuming Japan could get the drop on Russia they might have waged an air campaign, but the Reds might have rolled over Manchuria then sent most of those forces back to the West.

__________________
"If your gonna buy the angel s**t, you might as well go for the zombie package as well."
-George Carlin

In this matter I do agree with many of you but have to make some important points:

-The Germans obviously knew about the Japanese defeat in Nomonhan.
-The Japanese Army was indeed not equipped to fight the professional Siberian Red Army (you should remember that these forces WERE NOT purged as the rest of the Red Army was), an élite force. And by the huge extention of territory involved it was needed that the Japanese would have bombed with ships and aeroplanes the important ports and cities in Russia's far East. Maybe puting them under siege. And advance inland would have been idiotic! There are 6.000 kilometres of snow and nothing before you reach the Urals and ANY Army was capable of achieving that even if they were adequately equipped... The important matter in here is that if the Japanese, exploiting their naval, aerial and numerical superiority would have attacked Vladivostok and other cities, the Siberian Red Army would have stayed there to fight them and even if the Japanese didn't achieve anything important the Siberian divisions would have remained there. Then who would have counterattacked in Leningrad, Moscow and Rostov? The war would have ended by spring 1942! This didn't require much of the Japanese military power and it could have been done at the very same time than all the other Japanese campaigns in the Pacific in December 1941 and early 1942. We say often that "Japan could not fight a two front war". They DID! In a month they invaded the whole Pacific! From Burma, Thailand and Indochina, Hong-Kong, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, Indonesia, etc., etc. That seems to me like a 10 fronts war...

__________________
"War is less costly than servitude, the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau." - Jean Dutourd, French veteran of both world wars

"A mon fils: depuis que tes yeux sont fermes les miens n’ont cessé de pleurir." - Mère française, Verdun

I agree.

So Russia could have been beaten by Germany and Japan at the end of 1942.

__________________

Disagree.

This is like saying that America won the Whole WW2 while Russia would have collapsed if America did not open a 2nd front. Which is simply not true.

If there was no Second Front launched then the Russians would have faced a much larger force. The Second Front put off a lot of pressure on the Russians and forced Germany to move manpower to the West. But without the Allies launching a second front it is very debateable whether the Red Army would have been obliterated or not.

__________________
And when he gets to heaven
To Saint Peter he will tell
One more soldier reporting sir
I have served my time in hell

If the Japanese would use all their troops to attack the area around Vladivotstok - instead of using them in the Pacific - then they might defeat the Siberian divisions.

If no Siberian divisions, no - or at least after a very hard fight - way they could stop the Germans from capturing Moscow.

With Moscow out of the picture, Russia would surrender. Stalin would probably have been dead. he wouldn't have left the city.

__________________

Also, one more thing. Why do you think that Russia would have capitulated? People would rather die then surrender.

In fact they didn't like Stalin and at first they welcomed the Germans. But when it turned out that Hitler disliked the Russians, they fought bravely.

If Hitler would have treated the Russians softly, then there wouldn't have been so much guerillia fighting.

__________________

I would have thought that the Russians would have kept fighting whether the Germans treated the Russians softly or not because during battles the Germans offered the Russians to surrender and end the hell that they were going through, but instead the Russians chose to fight bravely and proudly for their country.

__________________
And when he gets to heaven
To Saint Peter he will tell
One more soldier reporting sir
I have served my time in hell

IMO, the germans needed FAR more than that to "get to Moscow", let alone mount any sort of significant offensive. By the time the germans began their campaign against Moscow in late 41, they were alreday at the end of a logistical system which could not support them. Food, fuel, ammo, replacements- all of these things would have been needed in massive quantities to take Moscow. An aerial campaign from Japan would have had no influence on the logistical situation the germans were in.

Plus, there's a major geographical problem with this "what if?"- Japan was even further away from the russian industries than Germany was!!! Look at a map- the russians moved most of their industries to the area around the Ural mountains. This area is HUNDREDS of miles from Japan.
I even wonder if the Japanese planes could have made it such long distances, let alone back again.
Look at the problems the germans had during the BoB- and they were only across the channel!

Final issue- this would have needed for the Japanese to postpone/cancel their attack on Pearl Harbor...

Aha... and based on what Kai just posted-
So the suggestion here is clear- the Japanese themselves also did not have the logistical capability to mount any kind of significant offensive against the russians.

One final thing- From everything I've read, the russians did in fact look favorably on the germans when they first invaded in summer 41. Stalin had been very, very repressive- and many people did see the germans as potential "liberators". But the conduct of the germans in russia quickly turned this all around, and once word spread of germans excecuting hordes of russians, most all russians truned against the invaders.

my 2 cents...

__________________
Seriously, all today is missing is free cotton candy and the annual Bay State Hooker Parade to make it any better.

You are thinking Ukrainians, there is a difference.

Off course the Ukranians and a lot of other minor groups thought that there would be a liberation, but instead he (Hitler) was as a bad as Stalin.

But I really think that also a lot of Russians saw him - at first - as a liberator.

__________________

I highly doubt it. Stalin was a man who made a agracultural nation into an Industrial superpower.
Dont you think that for good of 300 million 30 thousand is a small price to pay? They may have not had any huge love for stalin, but for example: When hitler died, no one cared; When Stalin died, thousands weeped.

This is confirmed by Keegan and Erickson, among other sources.
The russians had suffered massive purges of the military, and massive purges of anyone in politics... thousands of russians had been sent to Siberia before WW2 started.

Dosen't mater what we think. What matters is what the russians thought- and every bit of evidence I've seen clearly suggests that early in Barbarossa, the Russians were at the least curious about the germans, and in some cases openly welcoming.

Stalin did turn russia from an agricultural nation towards industry- the result of which being thousands of russians starved to death...

__________________
Seriously, all today is missing is free cotton candy and the annual Bay State Hooker Parade to make it any better.

Indeed, how many farmers and other people on the ocuntryland did Stalin sent to the cities to built industrial facilities.

__________________

If he didnt, German tanks would sweep clean the Agracaltural Russia.

They did anyway. But that's not the point here.

We're trying to say that the Russian people didn't forget the horrible acts that Stalin did to them by sending them to the cities of Siberia.

__________________

Do not make a mistake of confusing those few 10's of Thousands that he did purge and the rest of the people.

I know for a fact that those who were not affected by purges/deportation did not have anything against Stalin. Well unless you count in every strugle nations people suffer while transitioning from an Agroculture to Industry based economy, which i think is irrelevant.

Irrelevant, Dima?

We have the luxury today of being able to say "its irrelevant", as we weren't there at the time. Never underestimate the angst in a community in a time of massive upheaval.


Anyone have the stats on the number of people killed and jailed during the purges?

Found a figure, but one source istn't very reliable.

As ruler of the U.S.S.R. from 1929 to 1953, Joseph Stalin was in charge of Soviet policies during the early phase of the Cold War. Born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili on December 21, 1879, he adopted the name Stalin, which means "Man of Steel," while still a young revolutionary.

Stalin first rose to power in 1922 as secretary general of the Communist Party. Using administrative skills and ruthless maneuvering, Stalin rid himself of all potential rivals in the party, first by having many of them condemned as "deviationists," and later by ordering them executed.

To ensure his position and to push forward "socialism in one country," he put the Soviet Union on a course of crash collectivization and industrialization. An estimated 25 million farmers were forced onto state farms. Collectivization alone killed as many as 14.5 million people, and Soviet agricultural output was reduced by 25 percent, according to some estimates.

In the 1930s, Stalin launched his Great Purge, ridding the Communist Party of all the people who had brought him to power. Soviet nuclear physicist and academician Andrei Sakharov estimated that more than 1.2 million party members -- more than half the party -- were arrested between 1936 and 1939, of which 600,000 died by torture, execution or perished in the Gulag.

Stalin also purged the military leadership, executing a large percentage of the officer corps and leaving the U.S.S.R. unprepared when World War II broke out. In an effort to avoid war with Germany, Stalin agreed to a non-aggression pact with German leader Adolf Hitler in August 1939.

When Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R. on June 22, 1941, Stalin was not seen or heard from for two weeks. After addressing the nation two weeks later, Stalin took command of his troops.

With the Soviet Union initially carrying the burden of the fighting, Stalin met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Tehran (1943) and Yalta (1945), and with Churchill and Roosevelt's successor, President Harry S. Truman, in Potsdam (1945), dividing the postwar world into "spheres of influence."

Though the U.S.S.R. only joined the war against Japan in August 1945, Stalin insisted on expanding Soviet influence into Asia, namely the Kurile Islands, the southern half of Sakhalin Island and the northern section of Korea. More important, Stalin wanted to secure a territorial buffer zone that had ideologically friendly regimes along the U.S.S.R.'s western borders.

In the wake of the German defeat, the U.S.S.R. occupied most of the countries in Eastern Europe and eventually ensured the installation of Stalinist regimes. Stalin said later to Milovan Djilas, a leading Yugoslav communist, "Whoever occupies a territory also imposes his own social system." He believed that the Americans and the British "imperialism" would clash and eventually "socialism" would triumph.

After initially approving the participation by Eastern European countries in the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan (1947), Stalin forbade it. Stalin also sought to gain influence in Germany, though his exact goals remain controversial. Denied access to the western German occupation zones, he agreed to the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in October 1949.

Encouraged by Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, Stalin gave the green light to North Korean leader Kim Il Sung to attack South Korea in June 1950.

His confrontational foreign policy and his domestic terror regime (the "Stalinist system") had an impact on Soviet society and politics well beyond the dictator's death of natural causes at age 73 on March 5, 1953


Found it on:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war...ofiles/stalin/

__________________

Stalin had a mania of "following" ( dont know correct translation of russian term).

He was also really mistrusting.

We deviated from the topic, btw [img]smile.gif[/img]

Stalin wastn't the only one who thought that everyting wanted to kill him or was plotting against him. So did Hitler.

__________________

I thought they weeped because they were free at last..not for sorrow.

I think if one compared the fear of your Generals taking the power from you, Hitler would have killed Goering, Goebbels,Bormann, Halder, Brauchitsch, Keitel,Jodl,Himmelr, Heydrich etc and then you could compare that Hitler was as afraid of a coup as Stalin. After 20th July 1944 Hitler was going crazy about the plotters, but Stalin got all his "friends" executed for the reason they might treason against him all the time when he was in power. And their families as well.And anyone related to them...That´s true paranoid dictatorship and a policy that kept him in power for some 35 years!

__________________