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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

> Britain did not in fact "win" the Battle of Britain. It ended with a hard-fought draw, where Germany had needed a clear win before invasion.

What a weird take!

In what possible way is the stopping of the enemies goals interpreted as anything except a win?

That's like saying "X tried to invade Y, but Y threw than back. So it was a draw"

> By its end, Russia was massing its troops at the border with Germany, by all appearances preparatory to its own invasion.

It's almost certian that Stalin did not intend to attack Germany in 1941, and no evidence at all that Hitler thought he was planning to attack[1]. The opposing theory is based on Viktor Suvorov's book in the 1980s, but it isn't widely supported.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_offensive_plans_controv...

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England was beaten bloody. Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized.

Much of the history of the war has had to be rewritten since Soviet records became available in the '90s. That has not penetrated far even yet.

"No Simple Victory" by Norman Davies goes some way in that direction. Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.

Russian mobile forces massed at the border needs explanation if not preparatory for invasion.

> England was beaten bloody. Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized.

England was already beaten bloody before the Battle of Britain.

> Germany could have continued as long as they cared to, but England was much closer to its limit than is widely recognized

I think it's very widely recognized that England had been at the limit, but by the end of the Battle of Britain they had proven they could obtain resupply from the US and Germany couldn't stop enough convoys.

> Germany lost, in total, well under a month's later production of warplanes, remarkably few per sortie. Its capacity to wage war was wholly undiminished. Germany could have continued as long as they cared to

No one is arguing Britain won the war then, just that specific battle.

> Aside from Atlantic naval operations, the western war was nearly a sideshow.

I think most people who've read about the war in Europe would acknowledge this - at least between 1941 and 1944.

There were no exceptionally unusual Russian mobile forces massed along the Soviet/Reich-occupied border during 1941. In fact, Stalin pulled a number of forces back from the very border itself while a transition was being made between the partly abandoned Stalin Line and the (further west) newly developed but still unfinished Molotov Line of border defenses. Almost everything Stalin did in mid 1941 before June 22 reeked of two things: A heavy application of desperate appeasement towards Hitler and secondly, a lackluster defense preparation that was a pragmatic minimum whose absence would be too much to justify even by appeasement standards.

It's amazing how much Viktor Suvorov's completely discredited book and its arguments still carry weight with many people today. There was NO serious Soviet invasion plan of what Germany controlled in 1941, only hypothetical scenario planning and poorly designed plans for near future offensive power. The one thing the USSR was doing right however, as part of a more general strategy was gearing up a massive rearmament and war production program. This had been in progress since even before 1939 but only really picked up steam in the early 1940s.

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