"Keith Willshaw" wrote in message ...
"Stuart Wilkes" wrote in message
om...
"John Mullen" wrote in message
...

snip

We did not badly to win the air and sea battles with Nazi Germany.
Neither
was easy and both had costs attached. Of course we couldn't have won
overall
without the support of the USA and the USSR, both of which in their own
ways
hedged their bets until the decision to enter the war was forced upon
them.

Not by their choice. The Soviets had alliances with Czechoslovakia
and France since 1935, and offered Great Britain and France a full-up
Triple Alliance with all the trimmings on 17 April 1939. Too bad
Chamberlain refused to take it seriously, preferring to pursue
Anglo-German agreement.


Given that Stalin had

1) Reneged on his agreements with Czechoslovakia when that nation
asked the Soviets to intervene in 1938

False. The Czechoslovak government never made any request for Soviet
aid. The Czechoslovak government decided on their own that they would
accept the Munich dictate. In his memoirs, Benes maintains that the
Soviets were willing to go beyond the committments they had made,
should the Czechoslovak government desire. The Czechoslovak
government made no such request.

2) Just finished decimating the Red Army by killing three out of five Soviet
marshals, fifteen out of sixteen army commanders, sixty out of 67
corps commanders, and 136 out of 199 divisional commanders
and 36,761 officers.

Hm. One wonders how this purged Soviet Army managed to inflict over 3
times as many German KIA in the first seven weeks of Barbarossa as the
combined Franco-Anglo-Belgian-Dutch armies managed in the six-week
campaign in the West.

And the purges themselves had no impact on Western estimates of the
Soviet military. They derided it before the Purges, and the derided
it after the Purges. Tukhachevskii was discovered in the West to have
been a military genius only after he was safely dead.

3) Had just presided over the man made famine in the Ukraine

Its scarcely suprising that Soviet promises were viewed with
a degree of scepticism.


Of the two, that of the USSR was IMO the less honourable.

They had been excluded from the prewar European diplomacy, and their
alliance offers to the Western Allies refused. Once that was clear,
they looked after themselves. Nothing dishonorable about that.

The secret codicils to the Soviet-German non-aggression pact
were scarcely honorable,

With Chamberlain determined on Anglo-German agreement, it would have
been highly unwise for the Soviets to pass up the offer.

neither was the Soviet invasion
of the Baltic states and Finland,

It also would have been unwise for the Soviets to have let Germany
occupy the Baltic States.

unless you consider that
the Finnish hordes poised to sweep across the borders
of the USSR were a major threat to the Rodina.

Fact is Stalin was already secretly negotiating with Germany in 1938

And the British had been openly negotiating with Nazi Germany since
1935, concluding agreements that permitted German naval rearmament, as
well as selling Czechoslovakia out.

and thought he could cut a cosy deal with his buddy
Adolf and carve up Central Europe between them.

No sense letting "good old Neville" hand it all to Adolpf.

Oops

Got a better alternative for him?

I thought not.

Stuart Wilkes