Aww man, and just as I'm taking time off for a week's worth of seminars about ... wait for it ...

American history.

I reserve the right to resurrect the thread when I get back on the 21st. See you jokers then.

Throw history around and you're guaranteed to get a Donger and Amnorix sighting. Raw meat is less appealing to starving lions than history is to us, especially WWII history.

The more interesting question is what happened to Patton?

Was the car accident an "accident" or not?

Did it prevent a war?

Bastard.

:spock:

Even if Patton wanted a war with the Soviets (which I presume your are talking about), he had already been relieved of his post at Third Army at the time of his accident. Eisenhower certainly didn't want a war with them, nor did Truman.

So, no, his death didn't prevent a war and if he had lived, there wouldn't have been a war.

Cool.

Why was he relieved? End of conflict? Slap another soldier or insult someone?

Amazing the things one learns on CP! :)

How Hitler Could Have Won the War is a great book, a little scary even. A lot could have changed on decisions that his generals suggested but was ignored.

Going from memory, the final straw was when he compared NAZI members to not being any different than Republicans and Democrats. Just "party members."

His increasingly erratic behavior probably hastened his dismissal as military governor and as head of Third Army, but the Army was very rapidly demobilizing anyway.

The conspiracy theories around his death are fairly absurd. He had no power or authority or ability to start a war with the Russians, and had never shown any MacArthur like delusions that he was a separate power, above and not answerable to his commanding officers and the President. MacArthur's delusions were fed in part by his long, LONG tenure away from home, and away from any more senior military officers. Patton never had that.

And, suffice to say, since Ike had punished him for slapping an officer, and then relieved him of Third Army, and since Truman would later dismiss MacArthur, NEITHER would be afraid to dismiss Patton completely from service if they felt it was warranted.

[QUOTE=Donger;11546360]Going from memory, the final straw was when he compared NAZI members to not being any different than Republicans and Democrats. Just "party

Ouch!

I posted this to my FB page this past D-Day Anniversary. Truly incredible how many sacrificed their lives. o:-)

All he had to do was one thing: enlist the help of the revolutionaries in the Baltics and the Slavs in the South (Ukraine & the Caucusus). Both were ripe for the cause and overt sympathizers when they arrived, hating Stalin and the Communist regime. Had he done that, he'd have taken over Leningrand - probably - and the Caucuses with their oil fields - certainly.


Without having to divert Army Group Centre down to Ukraine, he could've pushed through the last 20 miles to Moscow and knocked out their command apparatus. And would've avoided the loss at Stalingrad down South, and commandeered all the oil in the Caucuses.

Germans were close to developing weapons that would have beat America. Glad we had luck on our side.

I watched that video, and it had a few interesting tidbits. I knew that Stalingrad was big, but I didn't realize that it was that big.

However, the numbers in this video seem larger than numbers I see elsewhere. The video reports "half a million Nazis died", plus roughly 100,000 POWs. But the numbers in other sources show the figures as being much lower: http://necrometrics.com/battles.htm