Lenin survives into old age

[Adam in Stroud]

Aug 25, 2020 11:38:42 GMT john07 said:

Aug 6, 2020 18:47:06 GMT greenchristian said:

My understanding is that one of the factors driving the purges was Stalin's personal paranoia. Lenin does not appear to have had this particular personality flaw, so whilst it's likely there would have been some purges (this is, after all a totalitarian dictatorship), it seems very likely that they would have been less extensive.

It's also worth noting that without the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Nazi invasion of Poland might well have started later (since there would be less assurance of success) and would have taken longer (since he would have needed to conquer the entire country, rather than just half, and the Poles wouldn't have had to defend against the Soviets at the same time).

Are you sure about that?

The account I read stated that the Soviets conspicuously didn't move until the Germans had overrun the Polish Army. This was presumably an attempt to deflect blame.

Either way, the Polish Army with its elite cavalry would never have been able to put up much resistance against Panzers.

Freiser ("The Blitzkrieg Legend"*) argues that the German campaign in Poland was a conventional 1914-strategy of "kettle battles" (i.e. pushing in on both flanks while simultaneously holding back the centre - AKA the Cannae manoeuvre - so that the enemy can be bombarded from all sides and eventually encircled and forced to surrender) using infantry and artillery, rather than an armoured Blitzkrieg. The Polish problem here was the fact that with the Anschluss and the fall of Czechoslovakia the whole of Poland was essentially in a "kettle" with East Prussia in the north and Slovakia to the south, negating the obvious Polish strategy of holding the river lines flowing south-north (Carpathians to Baltic) and therefore across the line of advance eastward from Silesia and Brandenburg. I agree that it is hard to see the Polish army successfully defeating the Germans even without the Soviet threat in these circs, though if one can imagine a non-Stalinist USSR resulting in no "Munich" agreement, or even a Soviet intervention in Poland's favour, then the scenario is much more plausible.

The Battle of France - which undoubtedly was a Blitzkrieg - was not achieved by panzers smashing through infantry or lighter armoured forces, but by achieving a breakthrough at Sedan with infantry, through which the panzers could move at speed and thereafter cut the supply and communication lines to French front line forces, leaving the latter incapable of responding. I.e. the merit of the panzer division was not its ability to crush opposition but its speed of manoeuvre. This makes sense when you look at the nature of German armour in 1939-40, which was largely made up of Pz Is and Pz IIs.

The Polish cavalry had been highly effective vs the Red Army in 1920 and were a credible force for use on the eastern front where the enormous distances made it hard to create a continuous heavily defended front and where terrain, poor roads, and long supply lines made equine transport (which is the essence of cavalry formations in the C20th - these were infantry divisions mounted on horseback for purposes of strategic manoeuvre) cost-effective - indeed German infantry divisions 1939-1941 were notoriously dependent on horse drawn transport. During the war German cavalry forces were significantly increased (from a single brigade to 6 divisions, a bigger cavalry force than the Poles deployed in 1939 - albeit several of them being "Cossacks")

Incidentally my grandfather commanded a company of equine transport in the BEF in 1940 (Indian Army mules rather than actual cavalry) Since the British Amy had deliberately eliminated horses from Regular home forces and my grandfather's unit had to be transported from Baluchistan, someone must have decided that equine transport was needed, but I've never discovered to what end.

* "Myth" would be a better translation