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re: Ww2 question: If France(+England) declared on Germany for invading Poland.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 10:12 am to bayoubengals88
Posted on 11/20/18 at 10:12 am to bayoubengals88
quote:
Turns out he was never ready.
Had they invaded USSR in early May 1941 like they originally wanted to do as opposed to late June then very likely Moscow goes down
The early Winter wouldn’t have caught them in time
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 10:13 am
3
Posted on 11/20/18 at 10:16 am to Napoleon
quote:
Ww2 question: If France(+England) declared on Germany for invading Poland.
How come they didn't also declare war on the USSR?
Because Chamberlain?
Posted on 11/20/18 at 10:18 am to Napoleon
I asked this question myself and apparently the treaty that between France , England, and Poland stated anyone can invade you except Germany . The real question is what if the British had bombed the oilfields of Russia before Germany invaded Russia. Apparently the British had the mission planned but weather forced a delay and before the mission was planned again Germany invade Russia.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 10:22 am to PhillyTiger90
quote:
Had they invaded USSR in early May 1941 like they originally wanted to do as opposed to late June then very likely Moscow goes down
The early Winter wouldn’t have caught them in time
Very true. And unlike when Napoleon took Moscow a century before, had the Germans took it in 1941, Russia would have collapsed. The strategic value of Moscow was massive. Had the Soviets lost it, they’d have lost control of all of European Russia. Basically the northern half of the country would have been totally isolated from the south due to the fact Moscow is the central transportation hub for European Russia. With the both and south isolated from one another, the Germans could have crush each region in turn.
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 10:24 am
Posted on 11/20/18 at 10:33 am to Napoleon
1) Britain, and probably France, would have pussied out of declaring ear if it hadn't been for a traety agreement with no wiggle room.
2) Russia was allied with England and France in WWI. I'm not sure what type of mutual support agreement Communist Russia had with them before WWII.
3) The Russian/German non-aggresion pact was secret, I believe. Stalin wasn't ready to fight Gemany in the late '30s
4) The Russian invasion of Poland was depicted as a "stabilization" action and was providing protection against further Gereman aggression.
2) Russia was allied with England and France in WWI. I'm not sure what type of mutual support agreement Communist Russia had with them before WWII.
3) The Russian/German non-aggresion pact was secret, I believe. Stalin wasn't ready to fight Gemany in the late '30s
4) The Russian invasion of Poland was depicted as a "stabilization" action and was providing protection against further Gereman aggression.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 11:17 am to Napoleon
quote:
How come they didn't also declare war on the USSR?
It's odd that isn't discussed more. Churchill seemed to want war with Russia. Some in US general office did too (cough) Patton(cough).
To quote Winston Churchill:
quote:
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 11:57 am to ILeaveAtHalftime
quote:
France and Britain (correctly) assumed that any cooperation between stalin and hitler would be short lived.
All you had to do was read Mein Kampf to know this. Hitler regarded Britain and France as mere nuisances to his actual plans, and those plans were to wipe out every non-Germanic person East of Germany to create Lebensraum. If France and Britain refused to attack Germany for anything he did in the East, then Hitler would have left France and Britain alone, at least until he wanted to spread the Holocaust their way.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:08 pm to GetCocky11
quote:
The Anglo-Polish Agreement in 1939 pledged UK and French support of Poland if they were attacked by Germany I think.
This^^^^^
And even a staunch anti-communist as Churchill knew that there was no way they were defeating Germany without help from the Soviet Union. During the war in Europe in WWII, about 80% of the German military resources were tied up on the Eastern front. Even Churchill knew that the more immediate threat at the time was Nazi Germany.
Churchill's deal with the Devil
“If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
– British Prime Minister Winston Churchill
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 12:11 pm
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:11 pm to OMLandshark
quote:
All you had to do was read Mein Kampf to know this. Hitler regarded Britain and France as mere nuisances to his actual plans, and those plans were to wipe out every non-Germanic person East of Germany to create Lebensraum. If France and Britain refused to attack Germany for anything he did in the East, then Hitler would have left France and Britain alone, at least until he wanted to spread the Holocaust their way.
Well considering the first unabridged English translations came out in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the situation becomes complicated. Everyone knew of Hitler's rhetoric towards the USSR, but with the pact, the thought was that Nazi Germany would turn its eyes toward the British Empire, as Orwell noted in a review of the unabridged English translation in 1940.
Also, if you don't couch Hitler within a milieu of Pan-German nationalism, it can be easy to miss why Britain and France were more concerned with Germany than they were with the USSR. British and French leftists were enamored with the USSR, as knowledge of the gulags wasn't widely known until Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and it took until 1940, with Max Eastman's book on Stalin, for the first leftist critiques to appear. Fascism didn't have the same appeal among the French and British right (though the French right helped the Nazi's and were branded as traitors after the war), while Hitler's rhetoric was more vitriolic than Stalin's.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:20 pm to Darth_Vader
quote:
This is a very good question. And to be honest, I’m all my decades of studying WWII, I’ve never been able to find a good answer
If you've studied WWII as much as you claim, then you'd know that at the time Britain and Churchill signed the agreement of mutual assistance with the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany was the more immediate threat to Europe. Even Churchill, as much as he hated communism, was pragmatic enough to know he needed the Soviet Union on his side if Nazi Germany was going to be defeated. It was a Faustian bargain, yes, but the only practical move at the time for Great Britain.
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 1:16 pm
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:21 pm to Napoleon
quote:
How come they didn't also declare war on the USSR?
Because they thought the USSR was there to repel Germany and then would go home.
THe USSR was an ally at that time.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:25 pm to Napoleon
Simple answer: the Allies knew Hitler was a staunch anti-Communist and despised Stalin, and it was only a matter of time before they breached the pact. Hitler has already gone back on his promises to stop invading after taking over the Sudetenland. So they knew the M-R pact was a load of BS.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:26 pm to foshizzle
quote:
Poland was just the tripwire to check the rearming of Germany
Germany was already "re-armed" by the time it invaded Poland in 1939. France and Great Britain missed their chance to prevent a re-armed Germany when they didn't stand up to it when Germany re-occupied the Rhineland in 1936. The last golden opportunity to stop Hitler was when they caved in to the Germans at Munich over the Sudetenland. There were members of the senior German officer corps who were prepared to stage a coup had France and Britain rebuffed Hitler at Munich. And the Czechs had a very good army and mountainous frontiers, and were ready to fight.
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 12:53 pm
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:26 pm to Napoleon
Because, it wasn’t widely known how deep the USSR involvement was in the invasion until long after the war.
It wasn’t until the 1990s when a lot of mass graves were being unearthed that a lot of people realized the atrocities the Soviets were committing during the polish blitz
At the time, the soviets and Germans were uneasy allies and the west just the USSR as using the Germans to get back it’s lost WWI territory
It wasn’t until the 1990s when a lot of mass graves were being unearthed that a lot of people realized the atrocities the Soviets were committing during the polish blitz
At the time, the soviets and Germans were uneasy allies and the west just the USSR as using the Germans to get back it’s lost WWI territory
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 12:28 pm
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:30 pm to GetCocky11
quote:
Besides, UK and France probably knew declaring war on the USSR would have been suicide
Yep. As it was, during WWII about 80% of the German military resources were tied up in fighting the Soviet Union, and the war still lasted until 1945. Britain had no hope of defeating Nazi Germany without the Soviet Union. And we must remember that the United States was still neutral at the time of the Anglo-Soviet agreement.
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 12:31 pm
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:34 pm to Tigeralum2008
quote:
Germany had killed/wounded 5% of the UK and French populations in WWI. I don't blame them for being heavily focused on defeating the Nazis and making the USSR an afterthought
At the time, Nazi Germany was waging aggressive war and had the most powerful army in Europe. Even a staunch anti-communist as Churchill knew that the more immediate threat was Hitler.
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 12:55 pm
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:40 pm to Mike da Tigah
Yes, the western Allies made a Faustian bargain with the Soviet Union, but it was the smart move. Nazi Germany was clearly the more immediate threat at the time. It was waging aggressive war against its neighbors. As bad as Stalin and the Soviet Union were, it was obvious that Nazi Germany had to be defeated. And without the Soviet Union's help, it would have been very tough to do that. About 80% of German military resources were tied up in fighting on the Eastern front.
This post was edited on 11/20/18 at 12:49 pm
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:42 pm to PhillyTiger90
quote:
Had they invaded USSR in early May 1941 like they originally wanted to do as opposed to late June then very likely Moscow goes down
The early Winter wouldn’t have caught them in time
In the long run, it wouldn’t have mattered. The fall of Moscow wouldn’t have ended the war for the Russians. Outside of Stalin, the government was already operating from Kuybyshev, and most of the industrial facilities had been relocated to the Urals. Supplies were already thin for the Germans, and an extra month or two wouldn’t have enabled them to overcome all of those issues and reinforce enough for a winter occupation of a major city. Once winter set in, they would have been sitting ducks for a Red Army counter attack.
And to answer the OP, my guess would be that France and England realized that they did not have the ability to conduct an offensive against Russia and defend against the Germans at the same time. They likely also (correctly) calculated that of those two, Germany was the only threat to expand westward enough to threaten their borders.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:43 pm to PhillyTiger90
quote:
Had they invaded USSR in early May 1941 like they originally wanted to do as opposed to late June then very likely Moscow goes down
And had Hitler not diverted Guderian's 2nd Panzer Army southwards to complete the encirclement of the Kiev pocket. Moscow was well within reach of the Germans in late August. That was a VERY serious mistake by Hitler.
Posted on 11/20/18 at 12:43 pm to Napoleon
Geography
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