Once Barbarossa failed all the great generals of history rolled into one couldn't have saved the nazis. It was over. Hitler fought exactly the right strategy to prolong his life. It had disastrous consequences for the German people and Wehrmacht but it prolonged his rule as much as could possibly be done.

The first aspect is one Hitler would have never tolerated. Nor his apparatus.

The Minsk encirclement doomed Barbarossa but eliminated 1 million Russian soldiers. If Moscow is taken it cuts almost all the rail lines the government is forced to fail back to the Urals and at best Stalin can stalemate the Germans going forward. The Minsk encirclement was backed by Hitler and his generals that feared a million Russians on their flank. Had the weather not changed it would have been a moot point. Both would have collapsed.

Well...how far off was he, really?

the spear of destiny
the ark of the covenant
philosopher's stone
the holy grail
the brass monkey
the jewel of the nile
the last of the mohicans

you know shit like that

and that dude's false eye

You forgot the monkey fist.

Man, people were sick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes

Yes. Unit 731 is almost unknown in the West but they were the Japanese version of Dr. Mengele. IIRC, their strain of bubonic plague is still killing people in China.

BTW, thanks for the post Amno. That was an extremely insightful video. I'm a WWII buff. My Pops was a pilot for the U.S. Army Air Corp from 1939-45. Loved talking to him about his experience when he served - when he would actually talk about it, which was somewhat rare. Anyway, thanks for the link!

In high school and thereabout I wouldn't consider myself to have been a real civil war buff, but I did a lot of reading about it.

WWII is so interesting though, and the volume of what's been written about it and the scale of the conflict just leave it to where it's one of the most fascinating topics in human history to study. You can find more of these riveting stories every day, and you could study it as an interest for the rest of your life and probably never run out of new material.

I always find myself asking, what would I have been doing if I'd been alive then? Being in that situation must bring things out of you that you never knew were there, both good and bad, and undoubtedly would change you forever too.

I heard from an aged relative once, now deceased, that in Korea the brutality of the two Korean sides toward each other was shocking even to people who had fought against the Japanese a few years earlier. I don't know as much as I should about Korea, but it sounds like those two sides were just ruthless.

The North Koreans were absolutely brutal when they invaded the South, basically purging whole entire villages and such. When the tide of the war turned the South Koreans paid them back in kind.

It was pretty ugly on both sides.

Based on this thread, let's see where you would have been if you had joined the Navy: http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showt...287316&page=16

(Rolling dice.)

You would have been on the Fletcher-Class Destroyer USS Wedderburn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Wedderburn_(DD-684)

You would have seen some action but your ship was never damaged, so you would have come home with some good stories and little trauma.