kevin@lasspvax.UUCP (Kevin Saunders) (01/10/85)
In article <> david@fisher.UUCP (David Rubin) writes: >Tony Johnson rightly points out that the USSR's leadership would >likely "accept" a higher number of casualties than the US would. >However, the Soviet leaders will not find the destruction of their >state acceptable, and the Soviet state is far more fragile than ours. > Ditto, from my point of view. Were it not for the fundamental racism of the Nazi regime (*very* anti-Slav) and the corollary Gestapo terrorism against Russians, the Germans might well have succeeded with the invasion of the SU. As it was, Stalin was forced to appeal on behalf of "Mother Russia" to generate enthusiasm for defending the Soviet state, and it took years, and a lot of penal battalions wasted in frontal assaults ("don't look back, our guards are leveling the .50's at us!"), to retake the territories originally netted by the Germans. This despite the fact that from the beginning, the Soviets possessed overwhelming numeric advantages in almost every area. Kevin Eric Saunders lasspvax.kevin@cornell.arpa