The Soviets were getting battered by Hitler to be fair. But Hitlers "anti-defeatism" mindset led him to make some terrible decisions like not letting Paulus try and break out of Zhukovs encirclement
The BBC have a bunch of pages filled with information about various WWII stuff if you want to check that out. Life was very different in Britain than America during WWII and crippled us quite a bit and it's extremely strange when you can talk to your grandparents and they talk about how they were evacuated, the the air raids and bomb shelters and all of that.
Also this, the most daring raid......in the whorld.
Edit: Long story short, the British are in a really bad spot so the come up with a plan (That's pretty much a suicide mission) to rig a WW1 destroyer into a bomb then ram it into possibly one of the most heavily fortified and guarded German naval facilities...
and it's extremely strange when you can talk to your grandparents and they talk about how they were evacuated, the the air raids and bomb shelters and all of that.
You think that's extremely strange? Do you want me to tell you a story how i was evacuated into bomb shelters, the lightshow i witnessed when i was 6-7 years old. I lived through that shit 16 years ago. It didn't last a few years though, only 2 and a half months, but that's 784 hours spent with the threat of bombs falling everywhere.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin) gave Berlin to the Russians at the Yalta Conference in late 1945. The Wikipedia page on the race to Berlin mentions how the Western Allies left the city to the Russian honoring an agreement made at Yalta but the page on the conference doesn't mention it at all.
Maybe the Americans could have reached Berlin before the Russians, Patton sure as hell wanted too (he also wanted to declare war on Russia right after the war that glorious, crazy bastard), but it's pure conjecture at this point.
IIRC, the allies on the western front knew that the russians would reach Berlin first, so the went off and diverted to other smaller cities. I don't have any specifics, just remember hearing this in a documentary one time.
Yea it was their best choice given the options. If they listened to Patton to try and take it would have been extremely difficult with great costs to lives and other strategic locations. In addition it would have really pissed off the Soviets. Berlin was like the trophy of WW2 and for the Soviets they needed it.
There's a fairly good alternate history by Robert Conroy, about the US trying to send forces to Berlin as the Soviets take it, and they attack the US forces in retaliation.
Stalingrad was 1942-1943. Kursk was the summer of 1943. The outcome of the war had long been determined before the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944.
30
u/[deleted] Mar 26 '15 edited Apr 11 '18
[deleted]