Ww2 mvp

[ElKarlo]

Excellent points, well made. Also, I'm surprised no one's mentioned(unless I missed it)Eisenhower yet.

Not a good general. Put against an opponent that if superior, I don't think Ike could win. On the Allied side, Patton, and what's his face in the Burmese front were the only generals who could win, if the odds were not in their favor.

Now Ike knew how to get jerks like Monty and Patton to work well together. He was awesome at that. Brilliant beyond my explanation really.

 

[ElKarlo]

I don't think there was an opportunity to be brilliant vs Germany or Japan. Both countries were too powerful to lose by any means other than to be ground down (except of course with dropping a-bombs). Even with brilliant victories like Battle of Britain, Midway, and Stalingrad it still took years to bring about the end.

As much as the Soviets are maligned in the early war don't forget they beat the crap outta the Japanese in an undeclared war in '39 on the Manchurian/Mongolian border.
And I know everyone is going to say of course its the Italian's but the Brits thoroughly kicked ass in North Africa before the Afrika Korps got there. Still they did everything right. So both did have moments of brilliance.

Not Japan, Japan had 10 carriers and good pilots for said carriers. Outside of that, that had bunk.

The British command and general staff were mostly bad, as can be seen in WWI. Even in 1918 they were taking absurd loses, while EVEN the French had adapted tactics and strategies. The UK and the French really didn't do a good job in grooming good candidates, and ignored the young officers who had good ideas.

Khalkhin Go, wasn't that massive of a win. Also the Japanese weren't in WWI, and really had light infantry with poor artillery support, and "tanks" that sucked, and no doctrine. Not an impressive win at all/

 

[Cid]

Soviet Russia.

Drunk, incompetent, whatever it doesn't matter.

If Michael Jordan turned up off his face to still win game 7 of the playoff's scoring 27 points and 10 assists Scotty Pippin doesn't get MvP for scoring 25 with 8 assists because he did better than expected.

 

[ElKarlo]

If we're looking at people who did the most single-handedly in the front lines, I'm pretty sure Hans-Ulrich Rudel comes up on top no matter how you cut it. Numbers for these kind of guys are probably extremely inflated all around, though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Rudel

"Rudel flew 3,530 combat missions claiming a total of 2,000 targets destroyed; including 800 vehicles, 519 tanks, 150 artillery pieces, 70 landing craft, nine aircraft, four armored trains, several bridges, a destroyer, two cruisers, and the Soviet battleship Marat."

Sounds unbelievable? It probably is, but he was an active dive bomber pilot on combat duty for six years, and most of them on the eastern front.

Oh yeah, love the guy. His squadron shot down over a thousand planes! They as in 20 guys, destroyed what would have been an entire air force of other countries.

 

[Flamma]

Overall I'd pick General Zhukov.

 

[ElKarlo]

True, although Churchill was man enough to admit it(more or less). When asked how he, a life-long Tory, could stomach an alliance with the Soviet Union, he replied,

"If Hitler invades Hell, I'll make an alliance with Satan himself.":icon_twis

True. He did but he came to power when it was too late.
FDR was a dope. Thought Stalin was a reasonable person

 

[xilliun]

Without Lend Lease from the USA, which was delivered by the UK North Atlantic Convoys, Russia would have gassed long before they reached Berlin. They were excellent cannon fodder, and the best gang rapists in the world, but the idea that the Soviets defeated the Third Reich single-handed is laughable.

Definitely. Round 1 of Germany-Russia was a clear 10-7 round to the Germans.

 

[Xuh]

There's something to be said for minimizing your casualties. Amazingly tho the French couldn't even manage that. They actually had more WWII deaths than the US did, despite managing to do fuck-all.

only if you civilian deaths, something which the US didn't have to face much of, again due its location, also ironically many of those civilian deaths were the result of allied tactics after D-Day (bombing of cities, etc)

The Italians were also complete shit, but they performed pretty much as expected, and weren't in nearly as strong of a position.

It might be tough to choose between Fra. or Italy as the worst, but Mussolini was so incompetent in the war, he flushed away any legacy he might have had, and a case can be made that he even cost the Germans the war, so it's not just a case of bad performance but performance so bad it hurts your allies.

Mussolini invaded France after it was already almost defeated, despite his Generals telling him not to & that they were not prepared (his answer was that he needed casualties so he could have a stake in the spoils!). Despite launching a sneak attack,

32 Italian divisions attacked France in the Alps region defended by 6 French divisions. The French repulsed the attack with a loss of 79 killed. Italian losses were 1,247 KIA, 2,631 WIA and 3,878 POW. .[1]​

derp.

Not content with failing there, he invaded Greece, despite Hitler asking telling him not to; and failed again; The Germans bailed them out as usual, but delayed their invasion of Russia by months; something that could have had big consequences as the Germans might have had considerably more time to take Moscow before grinding to a halt in snow and mud. At the same time, the Italians were completely crushed by smaller British forces in North Africa and the Med, with the effect of again drawing away significant German resources.

"Looking back near the end of the war, as Germany​

 

[lfd0311]

LOL, just the total crap I would expect to hear on a western MMA forum talking politics.

Possibly as high as 93% of casualties for the Germans took place on the Eastern Front yet the WW2 MVP will come from the West.

Go figure. LOL.

Came in to say somthing along the lines of this. Churchill did more for his country, but Russia won the war.

 

[Irenaeus]

Hitler in the early stages had such incredible luck. The Polish camp went through, despite the Germany military not being prepared fully. ie MK I tanks!!!
The Norwegian camp, somehow worked, the Sitzkreig, Falweis (invasion of France), Yugoslavia, and so on. Guy was like an inside trader.

He even went against his generals, who were pretty amazing, and somehow Hitler was right. Guy had stupid luck stupid luck. He was like Sokoudjou, but in this world, he KOed like 8 guys in a row.
,

Hitler as Sokoudjou made me laugh. Hitler p4p best evah in the first two months of a campaign.

A lot of the luck was judgement calls that turned out to be correct, I think he deserves some credit for this, just like Soko deserves credits for his KOs. He also had a much greater mastery of the masses than any other leader at the time. It's a little funny, though, that when he started getting really bad, it wasn't really with his gambling ways, but his timidity that usually fucked things up in the later war. He tended to give troops in a dynamic position static orders, a tendency to put off time-critical decisions, and a fright of downprioritizing anything to get something more important done. We saw early tendencies of this in e.g. the decision-making around Dunkirk.

Crazy gambler Hitler > Hitler with decision paralysis

 

[D3THRONED]

Soviet Russia.

Drunk, incompetent, whatever it doesn't matter.

If Michael Jordan turned up off his face to still win game 7 of the playoff's scoring 27 points and 10 assists Scotty Pippin doesn't get MvP for scoring 25 with 8 assists because he did better than expected.

No...

 

[Rod1]

Hitler and Stalin where the greatest players, but not because of its command abilities, but the ability to turn a broken country into a world class athlete.

Hitler is Greg Jackson and Stalin is Bob Cook.

 

[D3THRONED]

Hitler and Stalin where the greatest players, but not because of its command abilities, but the ability to turn a broken country into a world class athlete.

Hitler is Greg Jackson and Stalin is Bob Cook.

Hitler lost and died, Stalin lost 20 million people during the war. Wouldn't call that MVP material.

 

[Striderxdj]

Georgy Zhukov

This.

 

[Cid]

No...

Yeah.

Eastern Front accounts for about 75% of German casualties.

The hint is in the term most valuable player. When you have one army that accounts for 75% of the casualties for the winning side they're the most valuable player.

If you wanted to remove any single army from the allies for the greatest change in effect it would be the soviets.

 

[Cid]

Hitler lost and died, Stalin lost 20 million people during the war. Wouldn't call that MVP material.

Stalin "lost" around 20 mil after as well.

Evil incompetent bastards army still killed the most germans by far.

 

[aus101]

Did as much possible with what they had? It's hard to overlook Stalin even though he was as bad if not worse than Hitler. The Eastern Front was so massive in scale it's hard to put into perspective. And the fact he had to race to improve industry was also key. But he's far too monstrous to be MVP IMO.

I'd give it to Churchill.

Countries like Russia and the U.S may not even have entered the war if they weren't invaded. Great Britain gets a lot of points for standing up to Germany when things were at their most critical.

Taking over France so easily really caused a huge overestimation of the axis ability.

 

[aus101]

Yeah.

Eastern Front accounts for about 75% of German casualties.

The hint is in the term most valuable player. When you have one army that accounts for 75% of the casualties for the winning side they're the most valuable player.

If you wanted to remove any single army from the allies for the greatest change in effect it would be the soviets.

Well Great Britain could of fallen, although I don't see that invasion being easy or swift. The Germans didn't even consider contested landings possible, so the Germans would likely have had to invade by the million.

No matter what you have to somehow stop the manhattan project before 1945/6 to beat the allies. Forget Russia's land armies, they are obsolete in atomic warfare.

 

[ElKarlo]

Again, Churchill was lucky. The Allies were maybe at most, a few days away from being at war with Sweden, Norway, and the USSR as well

In 1940 Germany was extremely dependent on iron ore from Sweden, to such an extent that the Allies believed that disruption of ore supply of even a few months could virtually destroy the German war effort. During the months when the north Baltic Sea wasn't frozen, Germany could ship the ore from the Swedish port of Luleaa. However, in the winter the Germans could only get the ore by having it shipped by rail from the Swedish mines of Gaallivare and Kiruna to the northern Norway port of Narvik, after which it would be loaded on German cargo ships which closely hugged the coast of Norway to avoid being sunk by the Royal Navy in international waters.

For months after declaring war on Germany, the British and French debated whether to invade parts of Norway and Sweden, and/or to mine Norwegian territorial waters, to cut off Germany's iron ore supply. It's reasonably well known that just ONE DAY before the Germans invaded Norway, on April 8, 1940, Britain - with absolutely no inkling of Germany's invasion plans - violated Norwegian neutrality by mining Norwegian waters.

What's less known is that about a month before the German invasion of Norway, after a great deal of dithering, Britain and France had come within mere hours of invading Narvik and striking out overland into Sweden with the unstated goal of taking over the Swedish iron ore mines. The pretext for this mission was to be that the Allies were "responding" to an appeal from Finland for assistance in fighting the USSR in the Winter War, and in fact the Allies lobbied Finland to make such an appeal. But the truth, as fascinatingly laid out in Francois Kersaudy's excellent book "Norway 1940" as well as other sources, was that the British and French saw helping the Finns as merely a convenient fig leaf. The true Allied goals were to cut off the iron ore, and also to respond to powerful political pressure that the Allies "do something, anything" during the interminable Sitzkrieg.

Amazingly, the prospect of Britain and France going to war against Norway, Sweden and even the USSR came within only a few days or even hours from happening. The initial force of ships, men and materiel had already been assembled for this half-baked crusade in early March 1940 when, hours before "Operation BK" was to start on March 13, it was called off when word came that the Finns and Soviets had signed a peace agreement. With rumors of an imminent peace deal, Neville Chamberlain had already uttered his thoroughly uninspiring parting words to his commanders: "Good-bye and good luck to you - if you go

 

[ElKarlo]

Hitler as Sokoudjou made me laugh. Hitler p4p best evah in the first two months of a campaign.

A lot of the luck was judgement calls that turned out to be correct, I think he deserves some credit for this, just like Soko deserves credits for his KOs. He also had a much greater mastery of the masses than any other leader at the time. It's a little funny, though, that when he started getting really bad, it wasn't really with his gambling ways, but his timidity that usually fucked things up in the later war. He tended to give troops in a dynamic position static orders, a tendency to put off time-critical decisions, and a fright of downprioritizing anything to get something more important done. We saw early tendencies of this in e.g. the decision-making around Dunkirk.

Crazy gambler Hitler > Hitler with decision paralysis

Haha thanks.

Hitler seemed to have the Chinese mandate of Heaven up to late 42. All the crazy stuff he did, paid off, as he was just a baller and bold about it. It seemed that fate just made anything he did, seem like the right thing to do.

Even Crete wasn't the disaster that people make it out to be. Sure a lot of paras died, but they still denied Crete as a forward base of operations, and seized airfields via airdrops (wtf!), and captured a lot of Commonwealth troops in the process.

The same campaign, the UK gets Yugo to stage a coup and go pro Allied. The UK sends supplies and troops, almost all of which are wasted in the Balkans. Was a massive CF compared to Crete.