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@Aegis270 @Uncle_J_Wick guys thats cool and all talking about Barbarossa, Hitler ideas and German-Soviet relationship. But it does not really matter all that much in discussion about Finland. Finland simply has to be aggainst Soviets like said earlyer and Sweden did not really fight anyone.
Exactly. Sweden was basically on both sides while Finland only had full scale war with soviets (while having mainly german gear and swedish supply and every other game puts them on axis side).
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Well no? Swedish-Finland tree is only aggainst Axis rn in simulators.
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Well those are top tier and its air battles. We are talking about ww2 mainly 1-3 rank in which Finland actually fought something. + does not make sense to talk about Axis vs Allies at 8.7-9.7 as thats rally just cold war era.
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Nation-sets are the same for all BR’s, I can choose all these sets for any BR 1.0-12.7
Hmmm well I could not really tell as I dont play air sim battles. Does not look very “simulatory/historicall” for ww2 era BRs if there can be set ups such as germany+france+china vs italy+israel+japan. But yeah in ground sims its always Axis vs Allies (like shown in original post with sweden-finland on allied side) until end of ww2 era tanks and then its everyone vs Soviets+Chinese. Thats the issue we are facing. Never noticed air sims are even more unrealistic.
Well, it’s necessary for top-tier. Air Sim would essentially die overnight if Axis didn’t have some help on their team
I mean in top tier we are no longer talking about Axis as thats just ww2 thing.
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I’m aware, I’m just referring to that team as axis. “Red team” is probably better.
USA players massively outnumbers all other nations at top-tier, there’s already issues at top-tier of the Russian team not having enough players whilst at the same time being stomped by western jets due to them being superior.
A big reason to this is obviously the greater appeal for that tech-tree, but also the fact that Gaijin decided to give them like 5 top tier jets (3 F16’s, 2 F14’s) before nations like Sweden and GB even got their first one above 11.3 with the addition of the Gripen.
There was a period before air superiority where Blue team players for months kept 95-100% win-rates, I only got my first win in the 29SMT after 22 games IIRC. It’s a bit better now thanks to Su27 and nations like Sweden being on Russias team, but win-rates are still overwhelmingly on blue-teams side afaik
‘Realism’ is good and all but it won’t work simply due to the player distribution between nations alone, and that’s not getting into Blue-side having far greater avionics and Flight performance on top of that.
yes, for example, a Finnish Panzer IV should fight on the Axis side. I fully agree with you.
as I said, the problem is that the tech trees are designed for AB and RB and nobody at Gaijin thinks about how the tech trees affect Sim!
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As detailed very well by Tooze in “The Wages Of Destruction”, there was a simple reason for the USSR to support the MR pact. It had the potential to upend the balance of power in Europe. Doing the opposite and siding with the western powers would only reinforce a status quo that Moscow already found stifling and dissatisfying. From a purely material point of view, Germany would always have more to offer. This was explained in cold logic to British ambassador Cripps by his Soviet colleague who said that Britain would count air losses in the Battle Of Britain as two opposing columns of entries, whereas the Soviet Union would just add them up.
Also at the same time, supporting the weaker party in the war - Germany - fostered inter capitalist war. This made it less likely that Stalin’s nightmare scenario of an anti communist alliance between the western powers and Nazi Germany would ever materialise.
It’s also important to note that the MR Pact always operated on the spirit of bilateral imperialism, with spheres of influence clearly defined between the two powers. In that sense, yes, Finland and the Baltics were assigned to the Soviets by the pact. Initially Lithuania was supposed to fall in the German sphere, but this was later exchanged to the Soviets in return for a larger share of central Poland to the German “general government” administration in Krakow.
Both sides had very good reason to pen the deal when they did, but it’s important to keep in mind that over time, the economic aspect of MR was making the Soviet position relative to Germany stronger and stronger. Hitler always intended to break the pact, but one of the reasons it happened with the timing of OTL is because Hitler understood that the pact would soon start benefiting the Soviets more than the Germans, if it wasn’t already.
Hitler never cared about Danzig specifically. At multiple times during his tenure in office he expressed his disdain for the way German nationalists would fixate on, for example, the borders of 1914. Symbolic lines on a map were not what Hitler was after.
Ever since the very first draft of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s interpretation of the balance of power was this: the European powers were being eclipsed by the “flanking powers” (USA and USSR) because the latter had been able to create territorially contiguous colonial empires, which were immune to blockades, economically self sufficient, and with an internal market large enough to hit critical mass and benefit from mass production in full.
Hitler believed that the only recipe for Germany to compete was to carve its own contiguous colonial empire in Europe, and that obviously this would have to be in Eastern Europe, which naturally implied genocidal policies on a vast scale towards the local population. When Hitler made his famous quote about “who remembers the Armenians today”, he wasn’t speaking about the Jews, but about the Poles.
Maybe even more importantly to the Danzig argument, the logic of rearmament put massive pressure on Hitler. He was perfectly aware that Germany did not have the industrial resources to compete on an even footing with all of its enemies. It had an initial advantage because of early recovery from the Great Depression and early rearmament, but Allied rearmament after the fall of Prague in March 1939 was going to erode that advantage, so it becomes a matter of “use it or lose it”. Which is why Hitler greatly accelerated his plans, and over the summer of 1939, would tell anyone who would listen that Germany had nothing to gain by waiting.
When I was still living in Germany, I had the privilege to directly research the development of the Nazi economy through both primary and secondary sources, so there’s a lot that I could recommend in terms of reading material, but I think Wages is a really good place to start. Imho still the best book on The Thord Reich I’ve read by any historian.
As for War Thunder, the only reason Sweden is in the Allied camp is to manage queue times for simulator. It’s sad, but true, and unless someone has a serious solution to address that player imbalance issue, that’s unlikely to change any time soon.
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While most of what you say is correct, the resource question tied to Barbarossa is way more complicated than this. I’m mostly replying here now to remind myself to expand on this later.
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As a fellow player above is correct regarding the relevance, i used a spoiler for my answer.
Summary
I was are of that Finland was not included, that why i asked :-)
As previously mentioned you might be too focused on the pact itself - that was, ofc, valid to the secret protocols too. So therefore i see the pact in itself just as a manifestation of already planned foreign “politics” (with or without weapons).
I do not know you well enough, but in case you have time: Try to find sources regarding diplomatic activities of Germany (“Auswaertiges Amt”) to find some rather interesting facts regarding the ultimatum for Poland, reactions of Britsh leaders and the willingness to cancel the attack (even in the last week before the outbreak). It boils down that the Polish leadership wanted the war too (as they had a very strong army), and trusted that they will get support from UK. Whilst the UK was not interested in supporting Poland.
This is imho also rather a conclusion, than an objective fact. It is not about concessions, it is about the general view on things.
So if you see the Silesia / Sudeten crisis we just had German majorities cut away by the Versailles treaty and nothing more. Just look up the land swaps and various referendums and you see that this was not a matter of concessions.
The corridor question was mainly a question of disrupting the enclave by the Poles with several measures, also almost erased from history. Based on common sense the German ultimatum to Poland was reasonable - even for UK leaders, that’s why they convinced British newspapers not to publish these points - simply because the public opinion would have not supported to go to war for a country that is unwilling to provide basic access to Danzig and the protection of all minorities within their borders.
Just show me the deviations from this quote:
Imho you simply forgot to take Romania into your general view on things. The strategic importance of Romanian oil plus several claims by Stalin regarding Romania as being part of the USSR sphere of influence is well documented.
I do agree that certain mental conditions and believes (purity of race, eugenics, untermenschen, etc.) might be a part of the ideological clash, but if you spend a few hours outside the internet you find a hell of well researched books regarding Hitler and Stalin and their mindset.
Imho our overall opinion is the same, we just took other paths.
Positioning that amount of manpower and war material without any defensive positions simply debunks any “defensive” character.
As a summary:
I respect your pov on certain aspects, but imho we are far away from being even close regarding our views regarding economic and geo-strategic aspects of inter- and pre-war period regarding European powers in this era.
So as initially mentioned, i try to the to see things from a holistic and neutral pov - so i recommend to close this exchange and agree to disagree.
Have a good time!
Say what-
Finland never fell to the USSR, neither were they occupied. The finnish story in WW2 is… interesting, to say the least. They fought against both to soviets and the germans. (Against the soviets in the Winter and Continuation wars, and against the germans in the Lappland war.) They were also very interesting in the postwar years, being somewhat close to the soviets (Not accepting marshall plan aid), but were still firmly independent.
Honestly Sweden/Finland are a wild card. If I could decide on this matter it would be to place them on the Axis side for WW2, and allied side post-war- especially since they are in NATO now.
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I guess so, but, technically speaking, the earliest Swedish tanks, are technically Cold War.
Nope. Strv m/31 is 1930, Strv m/38 is 1934, Lago I is 1935…
There are plenty of prewar swedish tanks, not to mention finnish tanks.
Finnish yeah, but they Op’ed those tanks untill the late-40’s and early 50’s
To be fair we also used shermans till '57, and T-34s were used as well for the USSR for a while.
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