Warbird Information Exchange

With the other cases of Russian/Soviet "friendship" pointed out above, what would you expect from a thug like Stalin?
IMHO, he was as bad as Hitler, and probably worse in terms of killing his own people. Modern historians and left-leaning revisionists have really given him a "pass".

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I figure if you wanted my opinion on items unrelated to this forum, you'd ask for it.

Dunno, I had a history class in middle school that compared Hitler and Stalin. The conclusion was that both were really nasty pieces of work, but that Hitler was ever so slightly better, in that he was at least more honest and open about much of his nastiness.

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Lest Hero-worship raise it's head and cloud our vision, remember that World War II was fought and won by the same sort of twenty-something punks we wouldn't let our daughters date.

Stalin, in my mind, was worse in some ways. Hitler had very specific (and narrowly defined) groups he wanted to be rid of. Stalin killed for political gains, and mostly his own citizens (and in many cases, people he knew personally). Hitler sent political adversaries to the camps, but Stalin would usually send the entire extended family, too.
Some say that Lavrentiy Beria poisoned Stalin. If so, they should make a statue of the man somewhere even though Nikita Khrushchev and Marshal Georgy Zhukov had him arrested and executed soon afterward.

This is one of those things that your average person doesn't know but anyone who's ever picked up a book on the subject or spent any time looking into it, knows well.
Reminds me of how Lincoln didn't care much about 'people of color' and freeing the slaves was a political move to keep England and France out of the war in favor of the Confederacy as well as justifying what he'd do to the South by the end of the war and allowing blacks to join the fight in blue. Any student of the 1860s knows this, but the average American thinks of him in a lofty (and innacurate), saint-like view as the "Great Emancipator."

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Yes, Stalin was a bad man. But the USA could have considered threatening the USSR by withholding Lend-Lease material till all the Allied prisoners were released. They could have given a guarantee that the released prisoners be sent to the European theatre of war, which would be to Russia's advantage. I am sure Russia was not that concerned about what Japan thought of the situation.

And quite right about Lincoln. So much of American history has been totally misconstrued into myth. Millions of people from the USA still seem to believe the nonsense that Christopher Columbus discovered their country. He never went there, ever.

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I'd say Russia was quite concerned about what Japan thought of things. Remember the Japanese occupation and control of much of China ended only with the overall surrender in 1945. Until 1944 there is no way Russia could have even considered fighting on a second front in eastern Asia. The IJA would have been more than happy to oblige , and with the European front taking so much in the way of resources, the USSR couldn't have put together another team of 'ringers' like they had in Khalkin Gol. Some trickle of support to the CPC was all they could realistically muster and Stalin knew it.



Arguably Lincoln beat Debs as the first Socialist presidential candidate. Given his roots he was more likely to quote Marx than Jefferson.

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Lest Hero-worship raise it's head and cloud our vision, remember that World War II was fought and won by the same sort of twenty-something punks we wouldn't let our daughters date.

The funny thing is kids still learn that Columbus discovered the Americas when it was actually the Norse around 500 years earlier. There is no doubt in the archeological data that they had a settlement on Newfoundland and there is also plenty of proof that they made it further south to Maine as well,Norse coins ect

Bryan Moon did go to China in the 1990's and recover pieces of at least 1 Doolittle Raid B-25:
http://www.doolittleartifacts.com/artifacts/

They learn both, as I did decades ago. At least in North Texas they do. But Columbus made the connection that got us where we are today, literally. So they're both important.

But neither of them had anything to do with warbirds.

Columbus never made any connections. He absolutely thought he was in the Indies, as in the East Indies which were a known quantity that he had intended as his destination, and he never had any idea he'd stumbled onto a whole different continent and hemisphere. He was in fact at what was later called the West Indies when someone else worked out his error, he'd just assumed because he'd never been there before that he was in the Indies and so he naturally dubbed the locals there he met the Indians.

He went back and forth from Europe to 'The Indies' three times but never actually set foot on nor ever knew anything in his lifetime about the existence of mainland continent of North America. Despite this several seaside towns in the USA have statues on their beach claiming that is where he first set foot in the USA, which is utter bollocks. Some history writers have big imaginations.

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