Comments on: Mongolia 1939 - Stalin's Shrewd Opening Act

By: Frank Fox

Frank Fox — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 02:48:53 +0000

Yes, I am. Please contact me @ Frank.Fox15@Verizon.net.

By: Stuart Goldman

Stuart Goldman — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:21:43 +0000

Mr. Fox, would you be the same Frank Fox who studied at Penn State/Capitol Campus in the 1970s?

By: Frank Fox

Frank Fox — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 21:05:14 +0000

I believe that you are the formost expert on this subject.

By: Kim Jong-il, Vaclav Havel, and the Origins of World War II « stuartdgoldman

Kim Jong-il, Vaclav Havel, and the Origins of World War II « stuartdgoldman — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 21:12:03 +0000

[...] Changkufeng/Lake Khasan was a tactical victory for the Red Army. But a month later, Munich was a strategic defeat. The Soviet united front policy had failed; Moscow was isolated; and Stalin suspected London and Paris of channeling German aggression eastward. Taken together – as they rarely are by western historians – Changkufeng and Munich show that the Soviet Union too faced the danger of a two-front war. Japan and Germany were allies in the Anti-Comintern Pact, which Tokyo now sought to upgrade into an anti-Soviet military alliance. A year later, as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, Japan provoked a small undeclared war with Russia that raged from May-September 1939 with 30,000-50,000 killed and wounded. The fact that this coincided precisely with the Hitler-Stalin pact and the outbreak of the war in Europe – and that there is a causal link between these events – is the subject of my forthcoming book: NOMONHAN, 1939: The Red Army’s Victory That Shaped World War II. This is not some crackpot theory. I’m a respected scholar. My publisher, the U.S. Naval Institute Press (http://www.usni.org/navalinstitutepress), produces serious military history, books on international relations, and the occasional blockbuster (they were the original publisher of The Hunt for Red October). For a “sneak preview,” check out my article in World War II magazine: http://www.historynet.com/mongolia-1939-stalins-shrewd-opening-act.htm. [...]

By: Stuart Goldman

Stuart Goldman — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:09:06 +0000

Soviet rhetoric during the period of cooperation with Nazi Germany (Aug 1939-June 1941) included much semantic gymnastics aimed at obscuring the cynical and sinister aspects of this odious pact. You are quite correct in saying that the German-Soviet Nonaggression pact was actually an alliance. But Stalin did not consider the Nazis to be "socialists" in the Marxist-Leninist sense. Before 1939 and after 1941, Soviet rhetoric was emphatic in denouncing the Nazis as fascist/militarist capitalists. Russian historiography maintains that line to this day. Soviet propagandists were troubled by the official name of Hitler's party: German National Socialist Workers' Party, which sounded like a socialist party. Soviet propagandists (and Russian historians even today) prefer to use the term "fascist" rather than "Nazi" to describe Hitler's Germany. Stalin DID NOT "popularize" the abbreviation "Nazi."

The U.S. and British governments did indeed struggle to obscure the fact that they had to ally themselves with one totalitarian dictator (Stalin) in order to fight the other totalitarian dictator – Hitler. All the kind words about our heroic ally, "Uncle Joe" Stalin, ring hollow today. That said, without the help of the Soviet Union, it is questionable whether Nazi Germany would have been defeated.

Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were similar in many ways, perhaps most significantly in that they were the most brutal and extreme forms of totalitarian dictatorship at that time.

It has long been believed that the Soviet regime murdered more innocent civilians than Nazi Germany. That was the conclusion of Robert Conquest's monumental study, "The Great Terror" (1968). Since the end of the USSR and the opening of some Soviet archives, recent new scholarship shows that the Nazis murdered more civilians than the Soviets. See Timothy Snyder, "Bloodlands." (2010).

By: Chico

Chico — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:03:12 +0000

This line makes me wonder if I should keep reading: "[I]t kept Stalin out of the intracapitalist war in Europe…" That seems to push the false notion that the National Socialists of Germany were, in fact, capitalists like the West. In fact we know from the obvious, as well as recently disclosed sources, that this pact was actually an alliance between "brother socialists" to use Stalin's term in the meeting with Von Ribbentrop.

Stalin even said that Russia would not watch their socialist brethren fall to the capitalist powers. Likewise, Hermann Goering confided in his diary that if the Germans had to lose, it'd be better to end up with the Soviet Socialists than to go capitalist like Britain.

Finally, we should always remember that even the abbreviation "Nazi" was popularized by Stalin after Hitler's betrayal to remove the term "socialist" from the name whenever possible. The west went along with all of this rather than face the fact that they were teaming up with a very unsavory, evil nation that had been allied to Hitler and had death camps of their own — ones that would eventually outdo the Nazis for sheer numbers of dead.

By: Stuart Goldman

Stuart Goldman — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:13:59 +0000

Many of the units that Zhukov commanded at Khalkhin Gol were transfered to the Moscow front in late 1941. But These Khalkhin Gol vetrans were only a fraction of the total forces transfered from the Far East to the Moscow front at that time. I'm not sure what percentage were Russian and slavic. I haven't followed them after the Battle of Moscow, so I don't know to what extent these same units were involved in the Stalingrad campaign.

By: Chic Lurch

Chic Lurch — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:40:21 +0000

Where these Soviets units from khalkhin Gol to same units that came to the rescue at Moscow and Stalingrad?

What was the predominant ethnic makeup of the units from Khalkhin Gol?

By: Stuart Goldman

Stuart Goldman — Sat, 09 May 2009 10:46:13 +0000

Paul Penrod's comment about similar Japanese errors at Khalkhin Gol and Guadalcanal has a surprising basis. TSUJI Masanobu, who bears so much of the responsibility for the disaster at Khalkhin Gol, was in the thick of the ighting on Guadalcanal, where he again caused a military disaster.

By: paul penrod

paul penrod — Tue, 05 May 2009 17:14:02 +0000

Notice the parallel with Guadalcanal-The Japanese committed forces in a very piecemeal and indecisive fashion against an unfamiliar enemy and on both occasions got burned for it.

Excellent research-I enjoyed Zhukov's ploys to lull the Japanese into not expecting an attack. The Germans pulled the same stunts on the Russians preceding Barbarossa