sburke

I wasn't really trying to spur a discussion of whether we could have fought a war with the Soviet Union or not. It was more to pose a counterpoint to Munich where the decisions while similar are not viewed in the same vein. However having already headed down that road - we'd have to assume a couple items that weigh heavily against the Soviet Union. 1- Lend lease stopped immediately with the termination of hostilities. No more trains, engines, wheat etc etc The USSR would have to fight with it's own resources which while many were also geared a certain way based on what it had been acquiring from the US. From wikipedia: Much of the aid can be better understood when considering the economic distortions caused by the war. Most belligerent powers cut back severely on production of non-essentials, concentrating on producing weapons. This inevitably produced shortages of related products needed by the military or as part of the military-industrial complex. The USSR was highly dependent on rail transportation, but the war practically shut down rail equipment production: only about 92 locomotives were produced. 2,000 locomotives and 11,000 railcars were supplied under Lend-Lease. Likewise, the Soviet air force received 18,700 aircraft, which amounted to about 14% of Soviet aircraft production (19% for military aircraft).[16] Although most Red Army tank units were equipped with Soviet-built tanks, their logistical support was provided by hundreds of thousands of U.S.-made trucks. Indeed by 1945 nearly two-thirds of the truck strength of the Red Army was U.S.-built. Trucks such as the Dodge 3/4 ton and Studebaker 2½ ton, were easily the best trucks available in their class on either side on the Eastern Front. American shipments of telephone cable, aluminium, canned rations, and clothing were also critical. 2- The oil fields that Germany tried and failed to reach would likely have had different problems from allied aircraft operating from Iran. Without fuel, the Soviet tank park sitting in East Germany would have faced a serious dilemma. While the allies had all paid a price for victory, the US economic engine was untouched. The USSR on the other hand was functioning on a level that was not sustainable on it's own resources. If war is essentially a matter of logistics, then the Western allies were heavily favored. The USSR had no Navy to threaten us with, the ability to counter the US and British air forces on multiple fronts is doubtful. Think for a moment what the US naval forces could have done to Soviet Logistics from the Baltic with the size of our carrier fleet. Just the threat would force dispersion of Soviet aircraft defenses, which in turn would leave Soviet ground forces in Germany vulnerable to ground attack.

cool your site actually is still permitted here so I get to see images. Damn you two are having a great seesaw of a battle. Nice show (though I am sure you'd prefer more see and less saw, or is it the other way 'round?)

LOL friggin hysterical. To think this place was even nuttier at some point in the past.

Yeah I would say that is a pretty succinct sum up. LOl wasn't trying to say you were sir although I like your response better.

This is all getting just a might bit too personal. While I might disagree with noob that the position while sounding admirable is hoplessly impossible to apply and not have someone else pay the price for it, I don't disagree with his overall sentiment. I'd prefer to not do something I know is wrong rather than trying to justify it later. And noob, painting everyone else in the broadbrush of being the same as the axis powers isn't really all that helpful either. You want to know why you are arguing with 5 other people who feel just as strongly as you, it is simply they also recognize there is a cost to your position which they feel is immoral to ask others to pay. We are all not going to agree here which frankly is probably a very good thing. Moral dilemmas should not be easily answered.

Almost, but would appeasing Hitler and not having gone to war have stopped civilian casualties? Do the concentration camps not count? I am just being devil's advocate here PT, I am not saying that is your position. Civilians can suffer in many ways with a military action never having occurred.

May you never be faced with the results of your position and find them as morally repugnant as you now think your opponents positions are. It isn't a fun place to be. And never asume it can't happen. Life has a way of making you realize how small your concerns are. You have already stated killing "combatants" is okay. What moral dilemma did you face that made you decide taking a life is something that could be found acceptable?

LOL and honestly Noob, I don't really want to change your mind. We should look on civilian casualties with abhorrence. Convincing anyone including yourself that there is a grey area to morality is not how I want to be remembered. I have just had a lot of experiences in my life that have taught me that whenever I am convinced I am supporting something that is morally right, I later find things weren't quite so clear cut. An example? In my youth I got involved in demonstrations against apartheid and ended up participating in events to raise support and awareness for the struggle in what was then Rhodesia. In my own small way I helped the Zimbabwe African National Union achieve victory. Now I watch as Robert Mugabe has become one of the worst despots in Africa and ZANU victimizes it's own people to maintain power. This is what I helped do. It is not something I am particularly proud of now. Was apartheid wrong, certainly. Was there another answer other than ZANU and the patriotic front, not really. However that doesn't make me feel better when I watch the wretched existence the Zimabawean people continue to endure and know I had even a very small part in it.

Arrgghhh a cliff hanger with no screenshots. Man I hate coming to the PRC. I can't see squat in images.

That is actually something that has been around since CMBN at least. Sniper fire by Main gun.... I don't think I have ever seen an explanation or discussion, but I have observed it a lot. It tends to happen mostly with infantry in the open as there are no intervening objects to cause the round to detonate. You then get to see the individual trooper getting nailed as the round sails blithely on (hopefully to detonate against some other unseen opponent, but usually heading for the horizon). I think the first time it really stood out to me was a QB Pbem broadsword and I played where I watched my StuGs repeatedly take out individual infantry this way and the one thing I did note was in most cases the overall squad was obscured by smoke, dust etc and I only had a clear view of maybe one or two individual members of the team.

oh there's your issue. You are using Ghost protocol. Sorry can't see the pics, am in the wonderful land of internet censorship. My I feel so warm and fuzzy being protected from bad thoughts... and with the incredibly lousy air quality I am mostly prevented from seeing them too.

I am really straining the few brain cells I have left but I seem to recall a discussion about C2 links and higher HQs etc where they were always set as established. I am wondering if that isn't playing out here as you start the scenario with what you have and the team doesn't include the RO. Personally I'd agree I'd prefer to see him out of communication. If that could be remedied by proximity to another RO from another team that would be cool, if you have none left you should be screwed. There should be some penalty for getting your comm links shot to hell. Do you recall what was the situation of the FO in the scenario prior where the RO was taken out? Oh wait, those aren't brain cells, well I'll be damned...

"Ogres are like onions" "They stink?" "Yes. No." "Oh, they make you cry." "No." "Oh, you leave em out in the sun, they get all brown, start sproutin' little white hairs." "NO. Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers." "Oh, you both have layers. Oh. You know, not everybody likes onions." God I love that scene. Parfaits!

I think the same could be said for Munich. WW1 was still very fresh in everyone's minds. Europe was still suffering the effects of so many young men being lost in a single generation. I am not advocating that a different decsion being made in Potsdam. I am simply pointing out the similarity of the two. Hindsight serves to show that the cost at Munich was world war 2, Potsdam was the cold war. However at the time of the decison the knowledge of where either would leave was unknown and the expectations were similar.

True, but supposing the US, Britain and France had taken a harder line and the Soviets had backed down. Supposing we knew in hindsight that that was possible (not saying it was, just trying to create a comparable situation to Munich). Would that not mean Potsdam was a failure and a failure on the same terms as Munich. A failure of nerve to stand up for others at your own risk? He did not know what Hitler was going to do after Munich so we evaluate Chamberlain based on info we have that he did not. I always felt that history has treated him poorly exactly because we know the result, not based on what he knew at the time or the standards of the world he lived in. We still had the nukes in August 1945 and Russia did not, what's more they KNEW we had them and we KNEW they did not. There was a brief window there of absolute military superiority that we could potentially have exploited. Instead we acquiesed to an occupation that would last many decades. I don't think it is really all that different than what Chamberlain thought he was doing in Munich and for a lot smaller number of people affected.

I won't have a chance to look at it for about a week, but I'll PM you. If you can send me a copy of the file I can take a look.

That is exactly what you are advocating. You think Chinese/Korean women and children were not suffering under Japanese occupation? Because you feel better not having ordered their deaths doesn't make you not complicit if you could have stopped it but chose not to do so because Japanese women and children would die. There is no good option. War turns us into something we would rather not be. It is what it is. You can only hope to get through it and still recognize that what you may have had to do is frankly immoral. The nuke question to me is something of a red herring. Firebombing Japan was causing more casualties and the famine that would have resulted from invasion or blockade would have been far worse. Fact is the US was faced with a dilemma, how to end the war for everyone involved as quickly as possible for all. So we had to act and whatever we decided was going to cause destruction and death to someone. So we take an action we are not proud of, but one which we have to commit as the consequences of not doing so are worse. Look at the famine in Holland after the failure of Market Garden. If we had nukes would we not have been justified in using them in 1944 if we could have force the surrender of Germany in Nov 1944. Would we not have been immoral to have not done so and stopped the slaughter in the concentration camps etc?

That's debatable. I sincerely wish it was true, but if it all disappears when the s**t hits the fan, did it really mean anything? I sit and watch the political debates in my country and watch how much has a very thin veneer over incredibly racist beliefs not to mention the sexism that still seems to be completely acceptable and wonder how much progress we have really made. Seems to me everyone is willing to be nice and share when times are good - mostly anyway. When times go bad, what is under the surface is rarely so good. The statemnt itself implies a position that the East is somehow still suffering from not being as enlightened as the West. That sounds not at all different than quotes from the turn of the previous century.

Sorry, you lost me on this one. Too many posts on this thread, either I missed it or I simply don't understand the comment. Can you explain?

So you think it is okay to kill women and children? Only kidding Michael, I just couldn't resist. Personally I think it goes back to the question of consequences. All choices have them. Sometimes we feel better thinking that we made a "passive" choice. Somehow we talk ourselves into feeling better about it when in reality all we have done is absolved ourselves of the consequences of those choices because it was passive and somehow we are not responsible then. It takes passive aggressive to a whole new level. Chamberlain made a decision to not act allowing others to bear the burden of his decision. On the other hand suppose Germany had not defeated the Allies in the battle for France. Assume for the moment that the attack through the Ardennes failed. What would we now say about Munich? That it was the right choice and eventually Germany forced our hand or it was the wrong choice even then? In hindsight we know he was wrong and that he was talking to an absolute madman. Chamberlain on the other hand was working with a Europe acutely aware of the cost of war not 20 years prior. It was something they felt they needed to avoid at all cost. Hitler was not that far extreme from a lot of the politicial right. Hitler had folks in many countries agreeing with his viewpoint including the US and Britain. Again hindsight offers us more perspective than what was available at the time. Anti semitism isn't new and in fact the allies response to the Jews trying to flee Germany reveals at least partly why we really didn't understand the threat. What might be more interesting is if we do not then ask if Potsdam wasn't a Munich all over again? Was it okay to leave Eastern Europe to Soviet Russia if we feel Munich was wrong? What is the fundamental difference?

The problem as I see it Noob is you are working on absolutes without recognizing that your absolute prohibition has consequences that in turn raise moral questions. You can adhere to your absolute if you think it absolves your conscience, but that is simply like covering your eyes, ears and mouth and hopefully not have to recognize the inconsistency. The fact is that the war created many dilemma where there were only more or less evil alternatives. You have found a way to justify killing to absolve your conscience, but is that really justifiable? Says who? What makes that any more moral? If all you are after is people feel repugnance for an act they nevertheless feel bound to commit (which is I think a line you already crossed when talking about killing combatants) fine. Acting has consequences, not acting has consequences. In both situations the consequences are innocent people will die, what do you do - not act so you feel you are not responsible for the deaths? Sorry not that easy not acting is a choice. You are still responsible. What makes you the "good" guys is not that you don't make a choice, but that you at least are repulsed by it and yet accept the responsibility for having done so. As to the quotes about Japan's willingness to surrender or not. That is all hindsight discussion and even then they really aren't sure how events would have gone. The Japanese government's slaughter of it's own civilians on Okinawa was what the US had come to expect. There was a cultural divide there that was not going to be bridged while the war was still being fought. Japan's actions were incomprehensible to the allies and they saw only one way out.

do you have a save of the file?

But then it wouldn't be the internet. And that isn't a kubelwagen, it is the volkswagen "thing" http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=volkswagen+thing&qpvt=volkswagen+thing&FORM=IGRE Me I don't need a justification to see something, hell I'd like motorcycles with side cars!

heh heh heh yeah this one is spiraling down pretty quick. Back on point, I almost completely agree with you noob as I think we do have to hold ourselves to a higher standard if we are going to regard ourselves as the "good guys". Whether we really are that or not is a different question. However I still can't say I believe the "right" thing to do was to be willing to allow upwards of a million allied casualties to prevent Japan from suffering more. I think that is asking too much and putting one on a moral highground that simply becomes words. If I were Truman as much as I would like to think of myself as a moral person, I am not sure I would not have done the same thing. How could I face a million American families and tell them I sacrificed their family members to prevent civilian casualties to the nation that had attacked them. I think the moral issue here is simply not that easily delineated. Is it more moral to allow Americans to die than it is to allow the aggressor population to suffer? Is it simply age or gender that defines morality? Did we end up actually saving more total lives by doing what we did than if we hadn't? How do you frame the question of what is the correct moral stance? If you really want to lay out the higher ground position we should have used peaceful nonviolent resistance to the Axis powers. Once you decide violence is a legitimate response you have already made a moral decision that killing is okay. Justifying it that "they attacked us" is a pretty thin veneer to hold on to for the moral high ground.

This is a fairly sensitive subject in my household (my spouse is Japanese), but honestly why should we be so willing to disregard our soldiers lives to save the lives of an aggressor? Japan was clearly in total denial about the state of the war, there was no question they were finished and yet Japanese troops still occupied significant portions of Asia inflicting those nations with a brutal occupation. At this point in the war it was Japan's decision as to what was going to happen, to insist that the Allies pay with their blood to achieve what was already a foregone conclusion is simply wrong. I am not one who favors war on civilians nor am I totally callous about it. On the other hand our soldiers were fathers, brothers and sons to families back home, they were civilians forced to war by Japan and no less so now that they had to don a uniform. They had as much right to go back to a peaceful life as the Japanese and would be able to do so if the Japanese government would take the only step they had left - surrender.