Mike

Comment Threads

• paws4thot commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  That looks authoritative, but Haynes' Spitfire manual quotes weight of fire from the 8x0.303" Browning fit as being 8lb from a 3s burst and they can't both be right....
• Jason commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  Nile, You are seriously confused about interwar and early war Soviet military history. The Red Army had embedded commissars for its entire existence before Barbarossa. And Stalin's Great Purges of the late 1930s further solidified his control over the Army. I'm not sure that I understand your second point because the consolidation of the armaments factories in the Urals and points east actually did very little to rationalize Soviet heavy industry, which was pretty much already rationalized when built in the late 1920s-early 1930s. The whole process was incredibly inefficient and some factories actually returned to the Moscow area in...
• Martin commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  Regarding famines in 1945-46, ISTR comments that it was a very hard winter. Add to that the wreckage caused by Army Groups sweeping across the countryside in both directions, (sometimes three times over if Polish), and a lack of farm hands caused by either continued military service, or continued imprisonment (if you want scary, see how long it took for many Germans captured by the USSR to be released post-war; or their survival rates between capture and return. It was a terrifyingly brutal and vicious theatre of operations, and very much "sow the wind and reap the whirlwind"). You can...
• Martin commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  Sorry, that should read "7th/9th Royal Scots" - they were Charlie's local TA infantry unit, headquartered in East Claremont Street....
• Jason commented on A brief, bitter quiz
  AFAIK the winter of 45-46 was very hard with lots of starvation in the fought-over areas, although I haven't heard much about Allied occupation forces doing a whole lot to help the starving civilians. Interesting story about the Royal Scots over there....