Germany/Russia cannelled each other out.The road to war as a mathmatical formula,recognised could be avoided?

Question

WW1 was suposed to be the war to end all wars...Do you remember that...?..
Then WW2...!!
we seemed to have fogotten that idea ...I say we need to actually learn from this and understand the make-up & reason for misunderstanding & loss of co-operation between countries...between 2 individuals on a smaller scale
WW2 seems to have been a muddle...something that grew on its own once the touchpaper was lit.
We need to understand the mathmatical formula for deciding on war and then being able to recognise it...AVOID IT!
WW1 and 2 were a tragedy
Dont put this down to naivety or nazism again as some have my other questions
I just want to get this idea across.
Again I say Churchill was a warmonger and drew us to conflict when we could have negociated and kept peace in Western Europe as Hitler only wanted land in the East at this point he was NOT certain to be a global threat
I hope for good answers.
WW2 was NOT inevitable with good leadership based on a science of decision

Answer 1

So you would think it right that the Germans could have Poland? Once again I stick to my point about the Versailles Treaty that created so many new countries and did so along the lines of natural borders,not cultural ones. As we've seen only too recently in the case of the old Yugoslavia, where Serbs, Croats and Kosovans were lumped together with no consideration to their history or religious beliefs. Also, a large amount of Poland was created from Prussia which left a lot of native Germans in that area along with those in Czechoslovakia and Alsace- Lorraine. The two ways to have avoided WW2 were either to have created a better and more financially stable Germany in 1918 or to have stopped them dead before 1933 when they weren't strong enough to wage war against anyone. Appeasement rarely works with dictators, a lesson that the leaders of today still seem to fail to grasp.

Answer 2

the lead up to ww2 was far more complicated than being able to use any mathmatic formula.
your argument is flawed on many levels. hitler wanted only land in the east you say.maybe that was true but once he had that land he was not going to stop.he was intent on invading russia and if he had won that battle and taken moscow the whole continent of europe would have altered.he failed because he had to fight a war on 2 fronts.his invasion was delayed as a result and the weather and russian defense held him back.
when they invaded poland we declared war on germany. if your saying this isnt justified then how do you justify the fact that hitler went on to kill thousands of polish intellectuals and professionals. and how many jews would have survived had hitler had the time and ability to deal with.how many eastern europeans would have ended up in slave labor camps helping to build the great german empire!
how would the west if they had stayed out of the war cope with an all powerful reich.never would we have seen the europe of today where we can trade freely and travel to and from in peace and become a united continent.
yes churchill was warmonger but chamberlain's hesitency and peace making only convinced hitler that he could get away with taking what ever land he wanted without armed resistence by the west.and then churchill only came along after the declaration of war.
if hitler truely believed britain and france would go to war with him upon any invasion of foreign territory he may have stopped at austria.possibly even the rhineland.
there are so many invariables to this debate there could have been no simple or easy solution to the question of going to war.
my opinion is that war was going to happen.it could have been delayed, but without a drastic change in the german leader ship war or conquest ws going to happen and could not be avoided. it is just wishful thinking to have thought otherwise.

edit:i can see where your coming from and your exactly right in saying we need to learn from what happened and use that knowledge to avoid it happening again and i think some of it has been learned i.e.in the nuclear arms reduction of the 80's and greater communication and diplomacy now used between opposing powers.
but it will never be a simple process and there will always be grey areas-nothing is black and white.it is too easy to say that all things are avoidable.there can be no formula.human nature is just too complex for that.

Answer 3

Check your history, Churchill did not become PM until AFTER the invasion of Poland. The commitment to defend Poland was made by Chamberlain & was part & parcel of accepting the Nazi overun & absorbtion of Checkoslovakia as part of securing "...peace in our time".

WW2 was the result of the cumulation of a host of mistakes, but was all but inevitable after the Reichstag Fire secured Hitler's place as undisputed/absolute leader of Germany.
Part of the justification for Hitlers war was to counter the Anglo/American Dominace of the high seas by uniting the Eurasian landmass under a Geman/Japanese Alliance.
Also remember that the Germas have always feared the 2-front war scenario, and that any invasion to the east would only be predicated by securing the Western Front, i.e overrunning Paris & neutralizing France.
Also, you must again look at the Nazi naval build-up, especailly submarines & commerce raiders. These were designed for only one purpose-cut of England from the colonial resources it needed to support its War effort. This naval build-up was happening even before the overrun of Checkoslovakia.
English neutrality during WW2 would have only resulted in the destruction of the British Empire & allowing Barbarossa to include most of the German forces used to garrison W.Europe or commited in N.Africa.

Answer 4

I see you are thinking out loud. I am not sure if you will get any good answers, since your question appears to be: "Could we avoid a war (Could we have avoided World War II)? using a mathematical formula?"

Are you seriously suggesting that as long as Hitler "only wanted land in the East (Poland, Russia. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) he would not have been a threat and there would not have been a war?"

Better to be dead than to live like a slave under Nazi occupation. Millions of Eastern Europeans can tell you that...

Answer 5

Don't be silly. Churchill was not leader in the run up to WW2. The policy of appeasement was disastrous. Hitler was intent on war. Study History before making frivolous remarks.

Austria
Czechoslovakia
Poland

Ever heard of the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact?
The Rhineland?
Sudetenland?
Danzig?

See "Mein Kampf"
See " The rise and Fall of the Third Reich"


You have no idea what you are talking about.

Answer 6

read this equation , Human greed +ambition +indifference to humanity+disagreement =War , we are human beings not machines physics play no part in the human psych. And without Churchil you or i would not be here , as for handing out other peoples countries when a monster demands it or else, cowards our forbears were not

Answer 7

You started out by saying Russia and Germany cancelled each other out. On what level? Germans were far superior militarily; it was the Russian winter that halted the Germans.
As to Churchill being a warmonger, I will say: Viva warmongers! Better to have a war...You know, better to be dead than to be red.

Answer 8

Hitler was a liar. Each concession was followed by a further demand.

Answer 9

~The United Kingdom, honoring treaty agreements with Poland and France, in response to Fall Weiss, the German invasion of Poland on September 1, declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. (But they did not declare war on the USSR, who had also invaded Poland on the 1st in accordance with Molotov-Ribbentrop) Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in May, 1940. Just how do you lay the fault on him?

Hitler was only looking to the east? Methinks the Rhineland is in the other direction. Austria is south if I'm not mistaken. Churchill replaced Chamberlain largely because of the British failure in Norway and the fall of Norway, Sweden and Denmark to the Germans. (Isn't Scandinavia north of Germany?)

After the UK and France declared war, they sat back and did nothing. The Phoney war (or, as Churchill called it, the Sitzkreig) lasted for 6 months. Meanwhile, Hitler and Stalin continued their romp through Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. The Germans did send out some peace overtures during this lull, but they fell on deaf ears. The total lack of resolve on the part of the Brits and the French convinced the German General Staff to invade the Low Countries and France and to engage the UK in the Battle of Britain. I guess they got confused with their maps and thought those were east.

On December 11, 1941, the Germans declared war on the US. The declaration was provoked by ongoing and ever escalating violations by the US of her claimed neutrality, including the order by FDR in September, 1941, that any German warship seen in waters unilaterally called the American zone of protection would be fired upon on sight. In his fireside chat of September 11, 1941, Roosevelt bragged of the aid he was sending the British to use against the Germans. The US, having chosen sides, then having actively taken a role in the conflict while claiming to be neutral, was not going to negotiate a diplomatic solution to the war any more than Hitler or Stalin were.

As to Germany and the USSR canceling one another out, just what does that mean? The Red Army crushed the Werhmacht and won the war. The US and UK really had little to do with the outcome. As Churchill told FDR in 1941, the only force that could take on the Wehrmacht in a war on the continent was the Red Army. He was right. That is why the US got involved, finally, in November 1942, with Operation Torch in Africa. What was Rommel doing in Africa anyway? The Germans were only interested in the east you said.

The weather did not beat the Germans in Russia. Superior Soviet weapons, tactics strategy and resolve did that. Although the Russian lost the first Battle of Smolensk, the resistance they put up there in the summer of '41 so delayed the Germans and so forced the Germans to revise their campaign strategy that Operation Barbarossa was repelled. The initial Soviet response to Barbarossa was to engage in a fighting retreat while Stalin moved his factories beyond the Urals, stepped up production - especially of tanks - and establish defenses on the defensible ground where he decided to make his stand: Stalingrad. Stalin was still rebuilding his command structure because the masterstroke of Goebbels and Heydrich in convincing him that his generals were planning a coup has caused him to purge the army. The Germans totally misjudged Soviet industrial ability (second only to the US at the time), the caliber of Soviet weapons, Soviet resolve and Soviet will to fight. American history perpetuates that misguided thinking by claiming the Germans were beaten by the weather. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but kids still believe in Santa Claus, too.

The winter did not beat the Germans at Stalingrad. Vasily Chuikov, Georgy Zhukov, Andrei Yeremenko and 750,000 dead Soviet troops did that little job. The Soviets lost more men in that one battle than the Brits and Americans combined lost in both theaters of the war during the entire war. Operations Uranus and Mars were launched before the weather set in. Uranus was a stunning success. There is no way that the weather decided the battle, and the battle sounded the death knell for the Germans at Stalingrad.

Mars was initially a severe defeat for the Soviets, so much so that Stalin purged all record of the battle for Soviet histories of the war. In the long term, however, the losses suffered by the Germans in repelling the attack eventually forced Model to withdraw Army Group Center from the Rzhev salient, thus ending any chance of taking Moscow. Of particular interest is that the winter set in in earnest as Mars progressed. The Red Army was the attacking force. The weather delayed some phases of the battle plan, prevented others and made resupply of the Red Army a logistical nightmare. The Red Army was beaten by the Russian winter in Mars, and the weather saved the Wehrmact.

Operation Saturn was launched in the middle of December, when the winter had taken hold. The Soviets achieved only limited success because the ice in the Volga made it difficult and at times impossible to get supplies to the forces on the other side of the river. Again, the weather worked to the advantage of the Germans. The limited success of Saturn did force Manstein to retreat with Army Group Don, leaving Paulus and the Sixth Army to their fate. The surrender of the Sixth army at Stalingrad marked the beginning of the end of the and it was Soviet tactics and Soviet arms that brought about the surrender, not the weather. The weather played an equal role on both sides and prevented the Soviets from attaining an even more remarkable and decisive victory than the one they won.

The second Battle of Smolensk, August to October '43, was a decisive Soviet victory. There was no snow that summer. The Red Army won, not the weather. The German loss at Smolensk followed on the heels of their defeat at Kursk in July. As the US and British were landing in Sicily, Zhukov was again kicking Manstein's and Model's butts. The Soviet strategy at Kursk was so brilliant that it is still used as a model in war colleges the world over. The Afrika corps, not the best German troops to begin with, had been denied supplies and replacements because the were needed on the Eastern front. The Sicily defenses were likewise stripped because of Stalingrad and the anticipated battle at Kursk. The Soviets did wonders in pulling German strength away from the theaters in which the British and Americans were fighting. By the time Normandy rolled around, the Wehrmacht was a shadow of its former self and troops and supplies were still being diverted to the east.

No, the Germans and Soviets did not cancel each other out. The Soviets canceled out the Germans and won the war with only limited help from the British and even less from the US. The Red Army was actively engaged against the Germans from June 1941 until the German surrender in May 1945. The US didn't get involved until November 1942 and only landed on the continent in June 1944. The Brits were in Africa in '40 but they were fighting the Italians until the Afrika Korps was created and sent in to help Mussolini's boys out. Even so, the Brits and Americans never faced the numbers the Soviets did. By way of comparison, there were 152,000 Axis troops at 1st El Alamein and 116,000 at 2nd El Alamein and only 22,000 at Kasserine pass. There were all of 380,000 defending the beaches at Normandy. The Soviets took on 850,000 at Stalingrad, 725,000 at Leningrad, 800,000 at Kursk, 850,000 at Smolensk.

Mathematical formula for avoiding war? Not while we have free will, national governments, conflicting political ideologies, differing religions, diverse races and money and natural resourses. Human nature has never allowed it, and, without some major overhauling, never will. What is the good leadership that would have avoided WWII. Nevil Chamberlain? Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year for 1938 because of his leadership and the good things he had done for Germany. FDR was elected four times - he must have done something right. Yeah, WWI and WWII were tragic. So was Vietnam. So are Afghanistan and Iraq. Remember the overwhelming support for the latter 2 invasions, I was in the 2% opposed then, and the abuse I took for speaking out against conducting illegal, unjust and immoral invasions is pretty much all the answer you need. Of course, I said then that history proved that neither of those wars could be won. There is little satisfaction in the 'I told you so' today. And there is now overwhelming support to pull out. That would be even more immoral and a bigger mistake than going in in the first place. Now that we've created the hell we've created, we can't just walk away until it's fixed. If we do, we'll be back when the real war starts. So it goes.

Answer 10

Chamberlain was rubbish at maths.