Churchill wanted to use captured Nazi troops to drive the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe

It is estimated that around 3.5 million of 5.5 million Soviet POW's in German captivity died through ill-treatment.
In regards the survivors, according to Soviet sources, they liberated 1,836,562 Soviet POW's from German captivity, of these nearly 1,000,000 were sent back to service in the Soviet Army, another 600,000 were sent to labour battalions, and only the 233,400 who were suspected of collaborating with the Germans (ie Hiwis) were sent to the gulags

 

I would think many of those deaths were of starvation. I would think anybody would know that the Germans could never feed the amount of POWs they had; it makes sense the Russians got less then Westerners. Racism strikes yet again.

 

Even before the invasion the Nazi leadership had calculated that due to weaknesses in their logistics they would have to plunder the foodstuffs of the local population in the invasion areas in order to feed their troops and horses to such an extent that it would lead to mass starvation amongst the the civilian population, let alone any POW's who fell into their hands.
This didn't cause any concern as the de-population of these areas was an important part of the Nazi plans for German farmers to settle in these areas

 

I have seen on AHF much lower figures (I think 2.5 )of dead POW
About the survivors :the numbers are not plausible :the Hiwis sent to the Gulag were not POW and could not be liberated by the Soviet Army .Most of the Hiwis captured by the Soviets were shot .
Thus :who were the men sent to the Gulag ?
An other point:don't forget Stalin's infamous order of 1941 ,in which all POW were declared traitors ,thus I think all Soviet POW were candidates for the Gulag .

 

I do think that the Hitlerjugend and Volksturm were a minority

 

When you look at areas like Yugoslavia, Greece, Norway and Italy that had large occupation groups; it would seem that they would be Static with the manpower they had before.

 

I believe this was also Patton's plan. If the Soviets ever invaded a once-free Europe Patton wanted to use his tanks, Britain's airforce and Germany's SS against the hordes of Soviets.

 

Why only the SS, there were far more experienced, battle hardened and reliable men in the German army then the SS.

 

Most of these by the end of the war were garrison troops. Troops who even the Germans in their desperate situation didn't consider fit for use on the front line, all the useful units had been withdrawn months before.

 

It is an interesting scenario: the Western Allies v. the Soviet Union and its allies in a war for Eastern Europe. The US would have had to resort to using atomic weapons against the USSR. I don't think that the West would have won a conventional or non-atomic war against the Soviets in the immediate post-war period. The article portrays Churchill as a realist when dealing with Stalin and the Soviets; and when dealing with Stalin and the Soviets, one most definitely ought to have been of a realistic cast of mind. Had the Western Allies taken Berlin and advanced further eastwards across Germany and possibly Poland and further into Czechoslovakia, it would have definitely placed Stalin and the Soviets in the position where they would have to honour the commitments that they had made to the Western Allies, especially preserving or re-instituting a free and democratic Poland. I think that there can be little doubt about this.

 

At Yalta Roosevelt and Churchill had recognized Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe:the Russian armies were already there ;that Berlin would be occupied by the Soviets was a fact .
About a war with the SU :it's only phantasy :every body in the West was looking on Stalin as Uncle Joe,a great democrat,and NO ONE was willing to die for the liberation of Eastern Europe ;no one did give a damn about it;the US wanted only one thingeace and returning home .
After the war the US were dominant and could at every moment (till 1957 )have started a victorious war against the SU to liberate Eastern Europe,but they did not ;why ? Because no one was willing to die for the Czechs ,Poles ,.....

 

Both of the ex-German Heer soldiers that I knew from my youth expressed the same opinion, while confined to POW cages, that they were fully expecting the Anglo-American Allies to give them weapons, along with some training with appointed German officers leading them, before returning to the Eastern Front to drive the Russian invaders from their lands, except this time, with the British on one flank and the Americans on another..

 

B 29 at Night? See in this forum:

WW II Soviet RADAR

 

Wasn't that what the B-36 was designed to do as well. Didn't see service but in part that was becuase it was obvioulsy not going to be needed.

 

Yes it was the Peacemaker, B-36 that was first put up as a design in case "Britain fell" and we (America) didn't have a base from which to fly into Germany. The atomics weren't part of the original design concept, but they could and did carry them later during the "cold war".


In 1941 a requirement for a bomber capable of bombing European targets from the Western Hemisphere was requested by the Army Air Corps/Force. The Peacemaker was designed by Consolidated to meet those specifications, which included the ability to carry up to 72,000 pounds of bombs. In November 1941 a contract for two prototypes was given by the Air Force. Consolidated was already busy building the B-24 Liberator, and later the B-32 Dominator so progress on the XB-36 was slow. Consolidated Aircraft merged with Vultee Aircraft Inc. in March 1943, which lead to the unofficial name "Convair" (which didn’t become official until April 1954).

Even with Britain "holding tough", it was in June of 1943 that General Hap Arnold placed an order for 100 examples of the B-36, with the first prototype to be ready for flight by September 1944; just in case. By mid-1944 the war was going quite well for the Allies, and the priority level of the XB-36 was reduced again in light of the success of the B-29 in the Pacific Theater. Progress continued slowly, but even with the first XB-36 only being rolled out on September 8, 1945, and not achieving its first flight until August 8, 1946, if it had been needed, say Britain had fallen to the Nazis at some stage and we didn’t have a base for our bombers, those delays would not have happened. The B-36 was far from a "perfect" plane, but it was another quantum leap in conventional propeller driven bombers just like the B-29 had been.

However, even the A model could (in theory) take off from a base in Maine, fly to Berlin and back without refueling carrying a single atomic bomb, or 10,000 pounds of conventional ordinance, at nearly 40,000 feet. The B model was even better, the first B-36B took off on its maiden flight on July 8, 1948, but would it have been that long in development if the Nazis were still being a "problem" in 1944?

The B model’s performance was even much better than expected. The B-36B could carry up to 86,000 pounds of bombs for short distances (1000 mile round trips). And an average cruising speed of 303 mph could be maintained. At its combat weight of 227,000 pounds, the B-36B had a top speed of 381 mph and a service ceiling of 42,500 feet. Ironically (as a test), on December 7th through the 8th in 1948, a 7th BG B-36B flew a 35 1/2 hour round-trip simulated bombing mission from Carswell TX., to Hawaii. It was undetected by the even more modern Hawaiian radar systems, and the aircraft's 10,000 pound dummy bomb load was dumped in the ocean a short distance from Oahu, on the seventh anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.

In this example the total distance flown exceeded 8000 miles. You could park a B-29 under one wing of a B-36 BTW, and the air is so thin at those altitudes that fighters like the F-86 would loose lift and fall into a stall trying to catch the "Peacemaker" when it did lazy "S" turns. The Peacemaker remained in service in the USAF until 1958, when the last one was phased out as a bomber, and the B-52 became America's primary bomber.


Much of the data is from Joe Baugher’s excellent site on the B-36:

http://home.att.net/~jbaugher2/b36.html

That site has had some "dead days" lately, but it comes and goes.

 

Well, the thread is about Churchill, and he lost the elections in 1945. Even if he had won, the date is too early for the B 36.

Dat limit: The first atomic bomb made by the USSR was detonated on August 29, 1949 in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. This way, yes, the B-36.

At night?