That's like saying "Suvorov" in response to the observation that there is no hard evidence for the Icebreaker Theory. All Radzinsky has offered amounts to badly sourced speculation but not a single archival document indicating such a plan, despite the enormous amount of paperwork the planning and preparation for such an operation would produce. It's conspiracy theory mongering, not actual evidence.
No? Your explanation is that the Americans treated the Soviets like that because they still needed them to fight Germany. But Germany was defeated by Potsdam and Truman even expressed reservations about the need for the Soviets (if privately), yet American behavior still did not change.
The US flew a daily average of 15,000 tons of supplies over the Hump. The difference are many orders of magnitude. Your ideas about this being in anyway mutually exclusive with the Soviet ability to support their own forces over their railways is quite patently false: the Soviets can be quite competent at running their railroads and still have the inability to simultaneously support their own and unable to handle the addition of Anglo-American forces for lack of physical capacity.
Receiving a briefing on the situation is not the same thing as being able to show a comprehensive understanding of the situation in a off-the-cuff conversation and unscripted conversation with a foreign. You might argue that Stalin might have extensively rehearsed but then that would (A) require Stalin to have foreseen himself having such a conversation with Alan Brooke and George Marshall and (B) indicate Stalin has a incredible memory... which is a strong indication of great intelligence. Indeed, if Stalin was as stupid as you are claiming then the briefing should have done nothing for him.
No, your just dodging the issue.
Had Truman not cared about public opinion, he would have fired MacArthur in 1945 and not 1953. As it was, he prevaricated for months, afraid of the public backlash from the action, before he obtained enough evidence that the backlash wouldn't be that bad. And it was MacArthur who was wrong about Mao, not Marshall. You did not write any of this, that is flat out lying.
Except it is? The Soviets rolled into Manchuria in 1945 and turned it over to the Chinese communists. That proved they had both the capacity to do so and the inability for Truman to do anything about it.
Because Radzinsky hasn't been able to provide any actual documentation to support his claim. I'm not sure precisely what your on about with the CIA in 1953, who are operating in a different environment then Radzinsky is, but the lack of any hard evidence is pretty damning.
Most of the Soviet rail equipment used during the war was made in rail plants stretching across the bulk of European Russia and Eastern Ukraine and the personnel running the lines in '45-'45 were very much the same bunch as those running them in 1936... or 1943, for that matter.
The facts on the ground was that the Luftwaffe was being killed across multiple fronts, including Germany and the Mediterranean... and the Eastern Front. Quite notably, the division of German air loss figures in 1943 are strongly correlated with the division of German aircraft.
No, I do. The handful of Luftwaffe planes that managed to launch had a field day. No IFF or AWACS back then, so in a sky full of friendly planes, it was impossible to pick out the small flight of 109s or 190s. Its counter-intuitive, but beyond a certain point, numbers actually don't matter much in individual air battles (they still matter a great deal in overall air campaigns). In a contest of pilot vs pilot, what matters most is position and initiative, and since larger formations are easier to spot and harder to maneuver, there are actually some pretty decisive advantages for small flights.
All told, the Luftwaffe claimed 24 kills on 6 June, 18 for JG 2 and 6 for JG 26, with JG 2 losing no aircraft in aerial combat and JG 26 losing one in the air. JG 2 did lose another two planes in "operational accidents," which some historians think may be some fudging of combat damage, but that's still a good kill ratio. At least 11 of these kills can be matched with Allied records, with some more possibles. JG 2 ace Herbert Huppertz personally claimed five that day, four of which (two Typhoons, and two P-51) can be confirmed from Allied records. So overall, it can be said that the Luftwaffe achieved a 3.6:1 kill ratio in their favor on D-Day.
I don't see how that conflicts with my claim: the document claims 19 enemy shot down for 2 losses on June 6. If anything, that's an even better loss ratio then what I cited above. What is it with you and posting sources that prove the opposite of what your claiming?
Except it hasn't? I was talking about British units flown by British pilots which were indeed dispatched to Murmansk. You haven't even attempted to answer these questions.
The timeline says your wrong:
Husky: July 9th
Suvorov: July 12th
Rumyanstev: August 1st
Left-Bank D'niepr Operation: August 23rd
Avalanche: September 9th
Arranged chronologically, one can see how Husky and Avalanche were strategically coordinated with the Soviet offensives to keep the Germans off-balance by presenting them with a series of crisis one-after-another. Also, nothing about Rumyanstev was influenced by the weather: the original plan was to launch it on the 16th of July, but that slipped because of logistical issues.
Which would have rendered it impossible for him to take and hold power. That he was in the very position of leading the Soviet Union required he possess serious ability to rationally organize tasks in proportion to reality in order to outmaneuver his opposition and take and hold power.
And being a psychopath is in no way mutually incompatible with being intelligent. There is no strong correlation between psychopathy and intelligence.
I can't read Russian so I can't see any evidence that might or might not be in there. Although given the track record, I wouldn't be surprised if it flatly is contradicting your assertions. Perhaps you would care to provide a translation?
Sure, but it only proves Stalin's paranoia... not any lack of intelligence.
If Roosevelt's enemies wrote things that prove to be true about him, then how does that disprove that Stalin's enemies are wrong about his intelligence? If anything, it's the opposite. And as I observed, it's not just his enemies: it's also pretty much any half-decent history written about him with full access to documentation describes him as such. Hell, even your darling Radzinsky up there ascribes tons of intelligence to Stalin...
No it doesn't? Stalin took Zhukov's advice at Kursk, but it was still his decision to do so. While STAVKA's advice was incorporated into the orders, it was still Stalin from whom they originated.
The decision to fight in Korea was a quite deliberate one undertaken by Truman: we have signed orders and everything. You are clearly forgetting everything that is important: by the time the Soviets defeated the last German forces in Stalingrad, their economy was already rebounding, the suspension of fighting and return of territory up to the 1939 border will greatly lessen their burden, and what the US forces have in 1943 doesn't really matter if they can't get them to Manchuria, which they can't since the Japanese are in the way. And yes, fighting in Korea was popular when it first started: a grand gesture to finally oppose communism went down extremely well with the public: polling shows 78% of Americans approving of Truman's decision to deploy military forces to fight North Korea. It was only later as the cost of the war became apparent that the war lost popularity, but it was a bit late to go back then. There is no "YMMV" here and nothing that's up for interpretation.
10,000 locomotives? The Soviets only imported 2,000... the same number as they lost during the war. Your numbers for railcars also don't match with the reality: they imported only about a 1/3rd of your cited number, not even enough to cover their far larger losses of 166,000. I'm having trouble tracking down numbers on track gear but given your inaccuracies it's more likely to have been around 25-30,000 kilometers. This in a time when the Soviets replaced 48,000 kilometers of rail lines in the reconquered territory and built an additional 7,800 kilometers
Notably, the literature surrounding Soviet rail construction during the war I've been able to find indicates that all of the new line construction was to support the war industries. Nothing about expanding the capacity of the Trans-Siberian Railway. So that rather shoots your claim in the head quite nicely.
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