http://booksbikesboomsticks.blogspot.com/2014/10/roi.html
At the link, you will read about a real-world example of the "turkey shoots" that I discussed as applies to my post below.
You will recall that I made the argument that, contrary to popular belief, the allies could have bested the German Wermacht without the help of the Russian Army. Many people, based on sheer numbers alone, argue that we could never have beaten the Germans without Russia, since Russia committed so many millions of troops to the effort.
I argue that with allied air superiority, that battles, such as the tank battle at Kursk, which consumed so many millions of lives, would never have even happened had it been Britain and American fighting on the allied side. Russia ALWAYS loses a lot of men when it goes to battle.
America and Britain, however, owned the skies, and any time the German Army tried to move without the cover of bad weather, we systematically picked them apart using air power, with ground forces to hem them into the killing field. The one time post-D-day that they managed to mount an offensive that set us back, was when the weather did not allow large-scale air sorties to occur. As soon as the weather cleared, the offensive crumbled. We had our struggles fighting the Germans before we held air superiority, but once we bested the Luftwaffe, it was only a matter of how many German sholdiers we'd have to kill before Hitler capitulated.
Tam discusses the killing fields at Falaise. I was born in 1980, so I never saw them in real life, and I've only seen a few pictures, but the idea of what happened there - the sheer magnitude of the suffering and death - haunts me.
Falaise is why we did not need the Russians to win. We killed and captured more German soldiers at Falaise than the Russians did at two Kursks, and our loss of life was negligible in comparison. The Russian involvement in the war did nothing, really, other than to raise the total allied body count. We could have handled the Wermacht without them, but it would have been immeasurably horrible for the poor Germans on the ground.
Any one of the three Allied powers alone would have eventually beaten the Germans, or at least fought them to a standstill and a negotiated peace.
ReplyDeleteYour typical Wehraboo will reply with "But if somebody other than Hitler, someone with some military sense, was in charge...!"
...then WWII wouldn't have happened, because nobody with sense picks a fight they can't win.