How is British history taught in schools?

[Harleyman]

Give that man a cigar . The actual pedantic answer is of course The Allies but you're correct, without the Russians we would most probably have lost.

 

The Russians were responsible for 80% of all German troops killed in action.

To illustrate the enormity of that fact, hold your hand up in front of your face with the palm facing you, fingers extended. Each digit represents a German combatant. Then close four of your fingers into your palm, those four were killed by the Russians. It took the combined might of the British, Americans,Canadians, South Africans, Indians & assorted other Commonwealth & resistance groups to kill that other soldier.

 

Thank God for Georgy Zhukov the greatest General of WW2 & arguably of all time.

 

As Hillpig stated it was General Winter which killed off a great percentage of German troops in Russia.

During the battle of Stalingrad which was the main turning point of the war there were more Germans who died from frostbite, illness and privation than those killed in combat.

 

Zhukov was one of the best generals of WW2 but he was also indifferent to the number of losses suffered by his soldiers in combat.

Stalin also encouraged the intense rivalry between both Zhukov and Konev to his own advantage especially in the closing weeks of the war when both Zhukov's and Konev's armies were advancing on Berlin and preparing to take the city

[mjw47]

Harleyman. The three greatest battles of WW2 fought against the Germans were fought on Russian soil. Stalingrad, Leningrad & Kursk, Zhukov was in charge of all of them & won all of them. He was the first Field Commander in the Soviet Army to be made a Marshal of the Soviet Union during the War & is acknowledged as 'the best of the best' by his peers including Eisenhower & Montgomery. On both the number & the scale of victories to his name Georgy was the man.

 

As to being indifferent to the losses suffered by his men you need to factor in the circumstances. He was faced by the best trained, most efficient army in the world at that time & had an inferior (in terms of experience, training & equipment) force to face them with. Losses were bound to be substantial.

He also had a psychopathic lunatic as a boss who kept 'sticking his oar in' as & when he felt like it.

Despite which Zhukov prevailed, & effectively got exiled by Stalin for his trouble.

 

It also has to be said that not many Generals lose sleep over losses. They probably wouldn't make very good Generals if they did, a certain callousness is in the job description.

[callippo]

Callipo I've come to the conclusion that you are simply not worth debating anything with. You apparently live in your own little self delusional world where you appear to believe that a debate entails you questioning everything which is said, displaying a breathtaking lack of knowledge in the process, & then asking people to provide you with proof.

 

 

lack of knowledge? You are the one talking total nonsense about 'puppet states' and the USA. Just take back your stupid statement that the USA has any 'puppet' states when it should be obvious to anybody that there are none - which is why you have refused to name any.

[LeMaquis]

lack of knowledge? You are the one talking total nonsense about 'puppet states' and the USA. Just take back your stupid statement that the USA has any 'puppet' states when it should be obvious to anybody that there are none - which is why you have refused to name any.

 

Article here about US client states http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/the-decline-of-american-client-states/245592/#slide2 including South Korea, Colombia, Bahrain, Iraq, et al.

[callippo]

He also had a psychopathic lunatic as a boss who kept 'sticking his oar in' as & when he felt like it.

 

that is also not really true. Stalin did interfere tactictally sometimes, but not all that much. Not as much as you might assume a dictator would. Not as much as Churchill did, who often got quite involved with detail. Of the 'big 4' i.e. the Yalta leaders plus Hitler, obviously Hitler interfered the most, but Churchill was probably second. Stalin third. Roosevelt, the least.

 

---------- Post added 09-05-2013 at 21:26 ----------

 

Article here about US client states http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/09/the-decline-of-american-client-states/245592/#slide2 including South Korea, Colombia, Bahrain, Iraq, et al.

 

yawn. Trouble is nobody has ever defined what a so-called 'client state' is supposed to be - though I must admit I have used the expression myself, I am not too sure what it is supposed to mean. It is certainly a lot different than a 'puppet state'. I've come to the conclusion that the expression 'client state' is a term bandied about by people who mean just ally, but because they don't like the notion of that particular alliance, decide to call it something else that sounds a bit more sinister, but which doesn't actually mean anything different.

[mjw47]

lack of knowledge? You are the one talking total nonsense about 'puppet states' and the USA. Just take back your stupid statement that the USA has any 'puppet' states when it should be obvious to anybody that there are none - which is why you have refused to name any.

 

Oh dear me it's getting silly now. Read Hillpigs post at 83 above. He answered Your 'stupid statement' that there are no American Puppet States by giving you a list of them & saving me the trouble.

In doing so he also made nonsense of your statement above that I am the 'only one' talking about them. He did that at 12.27 almost 9 hours before your above post.

 

Callipo, get a grip, you appear to be the only person in the western world that is not aware of what's going on.

Please, before you make an even bigger fool of yourself than you have already, do some reading, start with the book I recommended.

[callippo]

no. A puppet state is like the Japanese Manchukuo, or these days, maybe South Ossetia, or Northern Cyprus. The USA doesn't have anywhere like that. As I said, client state is a rather pretentious modernist expression that means ally. Obviously you would expect major powers like China and the USA to have allies. But even North Korea is not a Chinese 'puppet state'. It's not even a reliable ally of theirs these days. And if North Korea is not a 'puppet state' of the Chinese, then South Korea, which is a full free and fair democracy for crying out loud, certainly isn't the USA's.

 

---------- Post added 09-05-2013 at 22:04 ----------

 

Had you asked that question some years ago you would have included much of South America, western Europe and the middle and far East.

 

of course. That is because the west, spearheaded by the USA, won the Cold War. In 1980, when Reagan became President, there were only a handful of Central and Latin American countries that were NOT dictatorships of one sort or another. By 1989, there were only a handful, that weren't.

 

of course it never occurs to the USA bashers to give them any credit for that, even though the USA are supposed to totally dominate the politics of their 'backyard'. They only want to bash them for when something bad happens, like a coup, and not for when something good does, like emerging liberal democracy which is what happened in that hemisphere, starting in the 1980s.

[mjw47]

Callipo. you have admitted that you don't know what the term ' client state' means. It means that the senior politicians & administrators of that State are 'bought & paid for'. It means that if the US wants something from that State it gets it. It means that a foreign power exerts an undemocratic influence over another State. It means that that State is merely a Puppet of the US.

 

As for your claim that Stalin didn't interfere. You are aware that he had Military Commanders executed for not performing to his satisfaction?

Don't know about you, but if I was stood up against a wall facing a firing squad I would definitely regard it as interference.

 

---------- Post added 09-05-2013 at 22:19 ----------

 

And for my views on the USA reread my post no. 76

[callippo]

of course Stalin would have executed officers. Churchill might have done that as well if he could. He certainly thought the execution of Admiral Byng was a jolly good thing in the history of the admiralty. You just couldn't get away with doing that sort of thing in Britain by the 1940s and he had to content himself with just sacking them, which he did a lot of.

 

there is no definition of a client state. It is a stupid expression that means ally. Obviously alliances shift with the times. China has been embarking on a massive campaign to build alliances with African nation states, as well as others, in the past decade or so - dozens of them. Obviously China is miles more powerful than Zambia is, just like the USA is miles more poweful than Djibouti. However China's alliance with the much weaker Zambia, does not make Zambia a Chinese 'puppet state'. It doesn't even make Zambia a 'client state'. The two, China and Zambia, are just allied at the moment, just like the United States and South Korea are - except South Korea is, unlike Zambia, a very significant frontline global security arena.

[buck]

I hope that history is not about lists or faces and more about understanding.

 

When Henry VIII was alive how many children would have recognised him without his regalia? Should we not explain that the images made then and after are inaccurate and more importantly why?

 

Why Eisenhower and Churchill did not proceed to remove Montgomery from command in Normandy in June 1944 is a very good example of good leaders seeing beyond failure- the image of Montgomery was more important to the outcome than his battlefield skill.

 

Perhaps we should be more concerned about what adults think history education is about.

I'm sorry tto challenge you on Montgomery. He took over the 8th Army in the desert after Wavell made such a mess of it. In the end he and his desert rats marched through the desert along with his American allies into Sicily and into Italy. He was then appointed by Churchill as second in command to Eisenhower. He was ordered to take Caen after DDay, but faced enormous problems getting there. His greatest concern was the lives of his men, instead of rushing headlong into a wall of fire. Too many good men had been lost in WW1 doing just that. He was loved by the men who served under him, regardless of what Patton and also Hollywood made of him. I was a kid at the time, and knew the respect our people had for him then.