Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
"Despots throughout history have employed the Big Lie to beguile, manipulate, and control would-be vassals. The Master Conspiracy. . . for instance, has for over two centuries honed the technique into a razor-sharp tool for sculpting its New World Order. And the biggest of its corpulent fabrications may be the pretense that the United States has been the world's foremost bulwark against communism.
In reality, the historical record brims with hard evidence that rather than effectively opposing communism, our government has consistently nurtured communist leadership with material aid and offered crucial strategic support for communism's advance. In short, our government, contrary to the "official history", has been the single most powerful benefactor of the Master Conspiracy's communist arm."
Against that backdrop, Ernst sent me a rather large and somewhat technical
essay entitled "14 Days That Saved The World" by Paul Ballard.
I am breaking it into three parts to keep the content "bite-sized".
Here is Part I of why and how the Third Reich Wehrmacht went to war against
the Soviet Union:
"The critical moment of World War Two - if not the entire Twentieth Century - is generally accepted to have been Adolf Hitler's decision to launch an "unprovoked" attack on a hitherto neutral and peaceful Soviet Union. Up until recently, this (Fuehrer decision) has been regarded as a mistake, which doomed Nazî Germany.
'Icebreaker' by Russian military historian Viktor Suvarov exposes this picture as nonsense. This extensively researched piece of historical revisionism provides compelling evidence that Operation Barbarossa was a reluctant pre-emptive strike against a massive Soviet military machine poised to invade not just Germany but the whole of Western Europe.
Suvarov quotes top secret Soviet documents which make it crystal clear that Soviet military theory was based on offense and the conquest of territory "for the World Revolution." And this theoretical plan for offensive war was matched by practical preparations in every branch of the armed forces.
In 1939 Adolf Hitler came into the war with a total of 3,195 tanks, fewer than the Kharkov Works in the "peace loving" Soviet Union was producing every six months on a "peace time" footing. The works produced the BT high speed tank, which was capable of 100 kmph and had a range of 700 km. Based on a design by the American tank genius J. W. Christie, these had their engines and transmission systems at the rear and were 25 years ahead of their time. By 1936, BT tanks were fording deep rivers under water and driving along river beds.
On unmade roads the Mark BT operated (although not very effectively) on heavy tracks, but once on good roads, their tracks were discarded and the tanks raced ahead on wheels. The only real roads were to be found in western Europe, in particular the German autobahn network, for which the tanks were intended. The claim that Stalin's tanks were not ready for war is not true; they were not ready for a defensive war.
The same applied to Soviet aircraft in both numbers and quality. Communist falsifiers in the post war period claimed that although the Soviet Union had many aircraft, they were inferior. In fact, the most heavily armed fighter in the world in 1939 was the Russian Polikarov I-16. The type 17 had two synchronized 7.62 mm machine guns and two 20 mm cannons mounted on the wings, conferring a weight of fire twice that of the Messerschmitt 109E-1, and nearly three times that of the Spitfire 1.
Soviet aircraft builders created a plane, unique in the world, which had an armoured fuselage. The IL-2 was virtually a flying tank with extremely high powered weaponry, including eight rocket launchers. Soviet planes were the first in the world to use rockets in combat.
The fatal weakness in this formidable airforce was that none of its pilots had been trained for dogfights with enemy planes. The Soviet battle plan relied on a massive surprise attack to knock out the enemy airforce on the ground in the first hour of the war.
By mid-June 1941, in final preparation for such a blow, Stalin's planes themselves presented an ideal target, packed wingtip to wingtip on temporary airstrips immediately behind the front line, rather than dispersed several hundred miles to the rear - as they would have been in preparation for a defensive war.
Likewise, airborne assault troops are only useful to an aggressor. Countries concerned with defense need very few. Hitler had created only 4,000 paratroopers by 1939, but Stalin already had more than a million - 200 times more than the rest of the world, including Germany, put together. There were 10 Corps, each supported by airborne artillery and even battalions of light amphibious tanks.
Soviet engineers were also hoping to land hundreds, or even thousands of tanks in the west. Antonov, the aircraft designer, suggested that the ordinary tank be fitted with wings and a tail with its hull used as a framework. The tank crew controlled the flight by turning the turret and raising the barrel of the cannon! The entire construction was astonishingly simple. The risk of flying it were unusually great, but human life was cheap to Stalin. Just before landing the tank engine started up and the tracks revolved at maximum speed. The KT then landed on its tracks and gradually braked. Prototypes were actually flown but, like the millions of paratroopers, they were no use in the unexpected defensive war started by the German invasion.
Once the paratroopers had seized key points and airfields, the Soviet plan then called for huge numbers of reinforcements to be flown in. As well as building massive numbers of C-47 (Dakota) heavy transport planes under license from the U.S. government, Stalin ordered a huge glider building programme. The ten different designs included Antonov's multi-seater assault glider - the A-7 and the KZ-20, which could carry 20 soldiers.
The human cost of this extravagant expansion was horrific. Having sold Russia's artistic treasures and vast reserves of gold, platinum and diamonds, the Bolsheviks began their notorious collectivization programme. The peasants were driven by force into collective farms so that crops could be taken from them without payment. Ten to sixteen million died from collectivization and the resulting famine, compared with 2.5 million Russians in World War I.
Yet Stalin sold five million tons of grain abroad every year. . . "
To be continued as follows:
ZGram May 12: "Stalin's Line."
ZGram May 13: "The Stalin Plan Failed."
Thought for the Day:
"In confronting communism, the individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."
(Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover)