The Myth of Soviet 'Aid' to the Spanish Republic [Archive]

Invader Zim

22nd August 2012, 16:50

Given a recent discussion of this topic in another thread, I think it is time to slay this particular Stalinist 'sacred cow'.

"Perfunctory"? Really? Sending Soviet tanks and generals is perfunctory? Being the only major country to defend the Spanish Republic on the world stage is perfunctory? Being the only country to actually send aid to the Republic (sans a shipment of arms from Mexico) is perfunctory? Organizing anti-fascists worldwide to publicize the Spanish struggle and even send ordinary people to fight fascism is perfunctory as well?

"To Kaganovich, Chubar. CC of the VKP(b), Moscow.

I consider it necessary to sell oil to the Spaniards immediately on the most favorable terms for them, at a discounted price, if need be. If the Spaniards need grain and foodstuffs in general, we should sell all that to them on favorable terms...

Stalin.
No. 4
18 August 1936"

Well, this requires further examination, and poses at least four question. What aid did the Soviet Union actually send, what was its quality, and how much did it cost the Spanish republic and how did they pay for it?

Let us address each of these points, one at a time:

1. What aid did the Soviet Union actually send?

This is a question that has produced wildly different answers over the years - primarily because both the Soviet and Spanish archives were, for many years, not open to researchers. Therefore, figures produced were either the product of 'official' releases from the Fascist Spanish government and Soviet government.

From the 1974 to the late 1990s commonly cited figures (and some historians such as Beevor still cite them) were those produced by the USSR's Academy of Sciences, which stated that the Soviet Union sent 806 aircraft, 362 tanks, 1,555 artillery pieces, 500,000 rifles and 15,113 machine guns, plus assorted other military equipment and ammunition. Bizarrely however, in the same year, the Institute of Military History of the USSR produced different figures. It contended that 648 aircraft, 347 tanks, 1,186 artillery pieces, 20,486 machine guns and 497,813 rifles were shipped to Spain.

However, recent archival access since the 1990s has revised some of these figures downwards significantly to 627 aircraft, 331 tanks, 950 artillery pieces (including 427 largely useless light anti-tank guns, and 64 anti-aircraft guns, that unlike the German 88mm could not be used as field artillery), 294,645 rifles and 12,578 (plus a further 85,000 rifles and 2,430 machine guns bought in Europe by the USSR with Spanish money and delivered to the Republicans). So as we can see, especially in terms of rifles and machine guns and rifles, archival evidence requires we substantially reduce estimates.

2. What was its quality of these weapons?

In terms of both tanks and aircraft, the quality of the arms sent by the USSR was broadly - though certainly not universally, of a high standard. Among the items sent were 280 T-26 tanks, which were a light tank as good as any other tank of its type at that time. In terms of Aircraft the Soviets sent, among others, 93 SB Katiuska bombers which were, for their day, exceptional aircraft capable of outpacing fighter interceptors until the introduction of the German Me 109, similarly the Polikarpov I-16 (400+ were delivered to Spain) proved effective until the introduction of the Me 109. However, in both cases the superior numbers of Nationalist aircraft limited their effectiveness. So while the USSR sent good kit, it didn't send anything like enough.

However, in terms of everything else, from rifles to artillery, the quality of weapons sent was often very low, and not only that they were not uniform in calibre or design. For instance, in 1936 the USSR sent a total of 58,183 rifles to Spain, 13,357 of which were 11mm Vetterli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetterli_rifle) rifles, which had been built in 1871. Similarly, a further 11,821 11mm Gras-Kropatschek (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebel_Model_1886_rifle) rifles made and designed 50+ years before and decades out of date. 5,000 7.92mm Mausers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.92%C3%9757mm_Mauser) were also sent. Furthermore, only limited ammunition was sent for these rifles, the Vetterlis rifles were sent with only 185 rounds each, the Gras with 395 and the Mauser's with 500. This meant that they were effectively useless after only a few days or weeks use.

The Soviets also sent 200 ancient Maxim machine gun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_machine_gun)s, 400 Chauchats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauchat), 300 St-Etiennes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._%C3%89tienne_Mle_1907), and a number of Lewis guns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_gun), most of which were produced back in the First World War if not earlier. These ancient weapons were notoriously inaccurate and temperamental and practically useless in combat.

The situation in terms of artillery was very similar, the USSR sent ancient junk, with limited ammo and was practically useless. For example they sent 94 Vickers 4.5 in. M1910 Mk1 howitzers, and 30 Maklen 37mm M1917 field guns. Both were products of an earlier generation, the latter in particular was designed as a light-infantry support weapon for trench warfare, and of little practical application. They also sent 20 de Bange 155mm M1877 field guns that had been obsolete for decades.

So, with the exception of the limited numbers of tanks and aircraft (which were to be eclipsed and outclassed by the end of the war) which did not arrive in sufficiently significant numbers to be as effective as they might have been, the Soviet Union used Spain as an opportunity to sell a lot of its ancient junk from its arsenals collected over the years. These weapons were inefficient, inaccurate, prone to malfunction and did not arrive with sufficient ammunition to last several weeks, let alone the many months of campaigning before further ammunition was acquired.

3. How much did this aid cost the Spanish Republic?

As Ismail noted, Soviet officialdom contended that, out of fraternal ideological solidarity, the gear being sent to Spain was at discount prices, as much as 50% off market value. However, in reality discounts only applied to those goods that the USSR bought on Spain's behalf. And what little discount was actually applied was in fact swindled away by arbitrarily allocating prices. For example, the M3 anti-aircraft gun was valued by the Russians at $20,000-30,000, while its vastly superior German counterpart was valued on the international arms market at $13,000. The DP light machine-gun cost $225 dollars, while the international market placed the value of the German MG34 at $135.

Furthermore, the Soviets also operated an exchange-rate scam. The exchange-rate was 5.3 roubles to the dollar. However, unbeknownst to the Spaniards when it came to charging them for weapons, the Soviets significantly reduced the exchange rate being used to figures such as 3.6 roubles to the dollar, in order to acquire elevated profits from the arms sales. To give you an example, the Soviets were charging as much as $600 for a Maxim gun when the actual exchange rate determined that they should have charged $283. The historian Gerald Howson estimates that for every $20 million of Soviet aid charged to the Spanish $6 million was through fraudulent cooking the books to over charge the Republicans.

4. How did the Spanish pay for this?

Well, in order to preserve its substantial gold reserves, which at that time was valued the 5th highest in the world, the Republic decided to ship $518 million of its gold to the USSR for 'safe keeping'. In modern money that is $7,780,403,629.04. What the Soviets did was, rather than keep the money safe, charge the Republic for the aid it was sending from that considerable pot of money. By holding the gold, banking it and converting it, they were able to pull the clever scam they had going regarding over-charging for weapons.

So, when in 1938 the Soviet government informed the world that the Spanish only had run out of money, in reality they would have actually had at least $50 million in funds had the Soviets not been cooking the books.

For the facts and figures cited see: Gerald Howson, Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War (London, 1998), pp. 136-153.

Ocean Seal

22nd August 2012, 17:09

So, when in 1938 the Soviet government informed the world that the Spanish only had run out of money, in reality they would have actually had at least $50 million in funds had the Soviets not been cooking the books.

From what you wrote it doesn't sound like they were overcharging them as you claim. Which is not to say that the Soviet government didn't pursue its own agenda. And lastly, why exactly was it so wrong for the Soviet Union to hold the gold reserves, why didn't the capitalist countries attempt to do the same thing? Gold reserves can't stop a fascist war machine.
However, well-written and quite unbiased as a whole, should provoke a good debate with Ismail.

khad

22nd August 2012, 17:44

Problem is the Maxim and Lewis guns were the most reliable machine guns in the Soviet arsenal in 1936. The Maxim is mechanically identical to the Vickers, whose legendary reliability you Brits practically sing songs about. The Lewis had an equally illustrious career, seeing battlefields in the hands of commonwealth soldiers all the way to Korea. I guess what qualified as the go-to LMG of the ANZACs was unmitigated crap when put in the hands of Spanish republicans, right?

And FYI, the Maxims sold to Spain were produced by the Tokarev plant in 1926-27. Many were were a modernized, air-cooled light variant that were quite easy to barrel change and maintain in the field.

The Maxim's replacement, the DS-39, didn't even enter full scale production until 1940. And the DP-28 LMG was a finicky piece of crap until they ironed out the kinks in WW2.

Ironically, you should be thanking Stalin for bringing Soviet industrial capabilities to the point where they could modernize and standardize their light arms stocks.

DDR

22nd August 2012, 17:52

khad

22nd August 2012, 18:32

An article worth of Pio Moa (a historian who claims that the SCW began in 1934 with the rise of the Asturian Miners and the proclamation of the Republic of Catalonia). Is the same old story of Moscow's Gold, how crappy the soviet weapons were, etc. I've been lisening about this all my life, but you know what? The USSR and Mexico were the only countries which helped the Republic, and that shouln't be forgotten.

It saddens me how low people in this site goes to discredit m-ls.
I think this episode demonstrates the extent of commitment the USSR had to Spain. It's ironic how the USSR gets all the blame when the French government gets off the hook for the wholesale looting and destruction of Spanish war supplies, because it seems that western Europeans like to point fingers at everyone but themselves.

It appears, therefore, that the Soviet leadership was already convinced of the Republic's dire need for weaponry, though perhaps further moved by Cisneros' presentation. Archival documents indicate that the Soviets quickly dispatched to the Republic a shipment of weapons valued at $55,359,660. These arms included 40 T-26 tanks, 134 aircraft of various types, 15 torpedo boats with 30 torpedoes, 359 artillery guns with 1,382,540 shells, 3,000 machine guns, 40,000 rifles with 100 million cartridges, and 1,350 tons of gunpowder. M. S. Shumilov, a Soviet advisor who oversaw the reception of the arms in France, confirms Cisneros' claim that the transfer was carried out by seven ships, and that all of these sailed from Murmansk via the North Sea to French ports.

By all accounts, only a fraction of these weapons made it to the last Republican resisters fighting in Catalonia. Maiskii claims that in late 1938 and early 1939, French officials refused to allow across the frontier a major shipment of arms purchased by the Republic, including planes, torpedo boats, a large number of artillery pieces, and other war materials. According to Meshcheriakov, of the arms dispatched from Russia, only 27 planes, 20 artillery guns, 40,000 rifles, 2,400 machine-guns, and a large quantity of ammunition reached Spain. The rest, claims Shumilov, if not destroyed or absconded with en route, were sent back to the Soviet Union. Little is known about Moscow's reaction to the difficulty of transfer across French territory. A letter from Voroshilov to Stalin in mid-February 1939 expresses regret, though at this stage the question of additional supply is plainly unrealistic:

The latest request of the Spanish Government for the sale of arms, which was announced through Cisneros was, to a significant degree, met by us and if the Spanish Government could not agree with the French government about the timely transfer of these arms to Spain then we can only deplore that. To demand new deliveries of arms for Spain at the present time, when the weapons already supplied by us in enormous quantities are in the territory of France and risk falling into the hands of the French fascists as trophies is, at the very least, inopportune.But these sources do not conclusively resolve the issue. As Bolloten points out, the final shipments do not appear to be completely reflected in the weapons amounts listed in the third period (25.12.38-28.01.39) of Table IV-2. 83 Figures for rifles and machine-guns in this table are quite close to those given in RGVA data, but no account is given of the airplanes, tanks, and artillery. Is it feasible that the planes sent across the border in January 1939 and cited by Meshcheriakov were not the ones that left Murmansk in late December? If so, it is plausible that most or all of the aircraft and tanks dispatched in the last seven ships to Spain were eventually returned to the Soviet Union, and thus were not figured into the final lists of weapons sent. If, as some have claimed, the weapons fell into Franco's hands or were destroyed, one would still expect to find them included in official lists.

In any case, the documentary evidence is sufficient to refute the abandonment thesis. Weapons deliveries from Russia slowed from late 1937 on, but there is no denying that the Soviets later undertook a risky and costly relief effort at a time when every other state in Europe considered Franco's victory a fait accompli. Moreover, as was demonstrated in Chapter Six above, in late February 1939 the Soviets provided the Republic with humanitarian relief of 5 million francs, earmarked specifically for the refugees amassing on France's southern border. It appears that, if Moscow's military aid could not get through, the Kremlin was committed to at least play a role in caring for the beleaguered fighters and civilians who had escaped Franco's advancing troops.So what went missing? Let's see--40 tanks, 107 aircraft, and 339 artillery pieces. Funny how this accounts for most of difference between the figures provided by the Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Military history.

Now we have a probable explanation for your supposed discrepancy in shipment figures. No massive coverup, no nefarious plot--except on the part of France, that is.

From the 1974 to the late 1990s commonly cited figures (and some historians such as Beevor still cite them) were those produced by the USSR's Academy of Sciences, which stated that the Soviet Union sent 806 aircraft, 362 tanks, 1,555 artillery pieces, 500,000 rifles and 15,113 machine guns, plus assorted other military equipment and ammunition. Bizarrely however, in the same year, the Institute of Military History of the USSR produced different figures. It contended that 648 aircraft, 347 tanks, 1,186 artillery pieces, 20,486 machine guns and 497,813 rifles were shipped to Spain. [Difference: 158 aircraft, 15 tanks, 369 artillery pieces]

However, recent archival access since the 1990s has revised some of these figures downwards significantly to 627 aircraft, 331 tanks, 950 artillery pieces (including 427 largely useless light anti-tank guns, and 64 anti-aircraft guns, that unlike the German 88mm could not be used as field artillery), 294,645 rifles and 12,578 (plus a further 85,000 rifles and 2,430 machine guns bought in Europe by the USSR with Spanish money and delivered to the Republicans). So as we can see, especially in terms of rifles and machine guns and rifles, archival evidence requires we substantially reduce estimates.

However, well-written and quite unbiased as a whole, should provoke a good debate with Ismail.
Well, too bad I inserted myself in this "debate," if I can call it that. The fact that we are even talking about the USSR's supposed role as saboteur when Western European governments were directly responsible for destroying and interdicting war material meant for the Republicans is an exercise in absurdity.

But first and foremost, learn about your own country's damn guns. Yeah, I guess they're commonwealth wogs, but hey that's no excuse ;) (and in case you can't tell, that's fucking sarcasm)

http://www.ww2australia.gov.au/underattack/images/airraid/ART22720large.jpg

But I've said my two bits. Ismail can now "debate" to his heart's content.

Ismail

22nd August 2012, 19:31

My focus is on the politics of the conflict, not the armaments, so I can't really contribute anything here like how Khad's doing.

It's amusing though how no matter what the Soviets did, they were evil. If the Soviets did absolutely nothing in Spain whatsoever they'd be shitted on forever after and this would be seen as confirmation of how Stalin and Co. were "nationalists," the evils of socialism in one country, etc. If they actually came to the aid of the Republic, as they did, they did it for ulterior reasons.

The fact that we are even talking about the USSR's supposed role as saboteur when Western European governments were directly responsible for destroying and interdicting war material meant for the Republicans is an exercise in absurdity.Yes. The British and French pretty much sought the defeat of the Republic in all but public (though not private) words. FDR said that there was nothing illegal about US companies circumventing the embargo on the conflict by selling stuff to Nazi Germany for them to send to the Francoists (a position he later regretted taking.) Neighboring Portugal, led by a fascist and backed by Britain, also assisted the Francoists.

The fact is that the Soviets initiated a massive campaign of international solidarity for Spain which extended to having everyday people fight for the Republic from around the globe, from the USA and Canada to Argentina, from Ireland to Albania and so on. In any other instance this would be a great example of the Soviets once more showing the world the danger of fascism (as Soviet media was constantly doing in the 30's as it criticized the narrow positions of Britain, France, etc. which feared Communism significantly more than Fascism), but instead the International Brigades' members become "Stalinist dupes," just like anyone who was seen as an ally of the PCE in the Republic was likewise a "useful idiot" who the Soviets would use on their path to establish a dreaded "People's Democracy" (always used with scare quotes) in Spain, while simultaneously defending capitalism from the glorious workers' revolution. These two positions coexist in Anarchist and Trot thought without producing contradictions in the minds of their adherents.

khad

22nd August 2012, 22:23

However, in terms of everything else, from rifles to artillery, the quality of weapons sent was often very low, and not only that they were not uniform in calibre or design. For instance, in 1936 the USSR sent a total of 58,183 rifles to Spain, 13,357 of which were 11mm Vetterli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetterli_rifle) rifles, which had been built in 1871. Similarly, a further 11,821 11mm Gras-Kropatschek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebel_Model_1886_rifle) rifles made and designed 50+ years before and decades out of date. 5,000 7.92mm Mausers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.92%C3%9757mm_Mauser) were also sent. Furthermore, only limited ammunition was sent for these rifles, the Vetterlis rifles were sent with only 185 rounds each, the Gras with 395 and the Mauser's with 500. This meant that they were effectively useless after only a few days or weeks use.

One last bit, to debunk this brazen misrepresentation.

This is a partial but nevertheless representative list of major weapon deliveries to the Spanish republic from the USSR. From the first few shipments onwards, standardized, relatively new weapons were provided in great quantities.

1936
09/26/36 Obsolete Foreign Rifles 20,350
10/22/36 Obsolete Foreign Rifles 15,655
11/06/36 Lee-Enfield Mk3 1,000
11/06/36 French 8mm Lebel 900
11/15/36 Misc Foreign Rifles 1,920

1937
01/04/37 Mosin-Nagant M91 25,500
03/06/37 Mosin-Nagant M91/30 24,580
04/29/37 Foreign Rifles - Various 10,000
04/29/37 Mosin-Nagant M91 15,000
07/30/37 Mosin-Nagant M91/30 39,550

1938
02/13/37 Mosin-Nagant M91/30 40,100
03/01/38 Czech vz. 24 Mauser 50,000It's convenient how only 1936 is mentioned, as if the use of selective date ranging weren't painfully obvious. The Civil War began in July, so it wasn't like anyone had much time to organize coordinated arms shipments to the Republic.

It is certainly true that obsolete black powder rifles were shipped to the conflict, but that's probably more due to the fact that those antiquated rifles were what the USSR had on hand at that moment just sitting in warehouses. Unless you think fairy dust makes the world go 'round, it takes time to gather the weapons and then prepare them for shipment.

A wholly different picture emerges once you take a look at the progression of Soviet rifle shipments over time. It is clear that as the conflict dragged on, the light arms that the USSR provided improved in both QUANTITY and QUALITY. From the beginning of 1937, the USSR began providing M91 Mosins and quickly supplanted these with the newly-produced M91/30s. Furthermore, as many collectors know, the Czech model 24 Mausers (which were purchased by the USSR for Spain) were some of the highest-quality Mausers ever manufactured. Far from demonstrating "abandonment" of the Republic, these shipments demonstrate nothing less than an increasing Soviet commitment in Spain.

Of course, some will now take the opportunity to rehash the "evil Stalinist takeover" thesis.

ВАЛТЕР

22nd August 2012, 22:42

http://www.unc.edu/~chaos1/egdnd.pdf (http://www.unc.edu/%7Echaos1/egdnd.pdf)

The political and logistical problems behind large-scale commitment of Red Army
ground troops led the Soviets to focus on more discreet intervention, primarily sending war
material and military "advisors." While Stalin's desire to preserve a thin veneer of nonintervention
slowed the flow of aid to the Republic, the scale of Soviet assistance to Loyalist
Spain was nonetheless substantial, totaling 600–800 aircraft, around 350 tanks, 1200 to
1500 artillery pieces, 500,000 rifles, millions of rounds of artillery and small arms
ammunition, and a variety of miscellaneous military equipment. Accompanying the Soviet
war material was a substantial number of Soviet officials and military advisors. Though an
anxious Stalin had admonished Red Army officers to "stay out of range of the artillery fire,"
Soviet advisors frequently took direct command of Republican forces in the heat of battle.

In addition, there were two Soviet combat units directly involved in the fighting. A
Soviet armored unit of at least brigade strength comprised the bulk of the Republic's tank
corps throughout the war. Likewise, a Soviet air unit composed of about 1,000 pilots and support personnel under the command of a Red Air Force general operated the Republic's
Soviet-made aircraft. A Russian NKVD unit also traveled to Spain and was instrumental in
the organization of the Republican political police apparatus, in addition to working behind
the scenes to promote domination of the Loyalist government by the Spanish Communists.
Idk about you all, but that sounds like a hell of a lot of support given the situation at hand. The Soviet Union wasn't some superpower at that time. They sent what aid they could afford to send. The fact that they not only sent weapons and ammunition, but also advisers, NKVD troops, and even their trained pilots, as well as an entire armored brigade I think shows the devotion to the struggle.

RaÃºl Duke

22nd August 2012, 23:26

Unless the reason is primarily for historical accuracy, no matter how bad one might consider the USSR and if one considered their role in the civil war to be negative (i.e. the narrative of the Soviet Communists stabbing the back of the CNT-FAI, workers, POUM, the revolution; etc.), I don't see a reason why to downplay Soviet aid to Spain. I figured it was pretty substantial, but ultimately not enough to stop the German/Italian backed fascists.

Prometeo liberado

22nd August 2012, 23:29

And lastly, why exactly was it so wrong for the Soviet Union to hold the gold reserves
For whatever it's worth Mexico also held on to some $300 million in bank reserves from the Republican Government as well. Also nefarious motives? I doubt it. It wasn't wrong for the Soviets to do it nor for others who chose to not stand idly by. If the Soviet Union had saved the Republic y'all would be blaming them instead for cheating the Anarchist out of some historic victory or some such nonsense.

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 01:54

Well, this has gained a lot more responses than I had imagined it would after only a few hours.

From what you wrote it doesn't sound like they were overcharging them as you claim.

Well, they charged the Republic well over the odds prices for often inferior hardware. As noted, for every $20 million the Soviet Government charged the Republic $6 million was fraudulent.

And lastly, why exactly was it so wrong for the Soviet Union to hold the gold reserves

You misunderstand me, I wasn't trying to suggest it was wrong. The point that I think is ethically repugnant was that the Soviets took advantage of that trust to fleece the Republic to the tune of tens of millions of dollars.

However, well-written and quite unbiased as a whole, should provoke a good debate with Ismail.

Thanks.

Problem is the Maxim and Lewis guns were the most reliable machine guns in the Soviet arsenal in 1936.

No doubt, had they been freshly manufactured or well maintained. However the issue was that the actual weapons they sent were often aged weapons that had been left at the back of a warehouse for years - and when they arrived they were in poor condition, inaccurate and subject to regular malfunction. Furthermore, they were sent with minimal ammunition making them entire useless after only very limited use. It is all very well sending weapons, but unless you provide ammunition then they are useless.

The Maxim is mechanically identical to the Vickers, whose legendary reliability you Brits practically sing songs about.

'You Brits'? And what is your point, unless you are challenging the contention that the 200 ancient Maxim the Soviets sent to Spain were new, well maintained, reliable and accurate?

I guess what qualified as the go-to LMG of the ANZACs was unmitigated crap when put in the hands of Spanish republicans, right?

No, the fact that they were weapons produced during WW1 and had been languishing without maintenance in various stockpiles since is what made them crap. And one of the reason's the Soviet's sent ancient weapons often not made in the Soviet Union itself, was because they wanted to make the weapons more difficult to trace. Perhaps you should look this up?

Is the same old story of Moscow's Gold, how crappy the soviet weapons were, etc. I've been lisening about this all my life, but you know what?

Well, the major revelation regarding the fleecing of the Republic via exchange rates was the product of archival research only possible in the 1990s, and the major book in question was published in 1999 - so either you are very young or you are chatting crap. However, you are right that people have been pointing out that the weapons the Soviets sent were often of exceptionally low quality - since 1936, in fact. I'll let you contemplate why that might be.

The USSR and Mexico were the only countries which helped the Republic, and that shouln't be forgotten.

By executing communists, sending antiquated hardware, limited ammunition and robbing them blind? You're right, it shouldn't be forgotten.

It saddens me how low people in this site goes to discredit m-ls.

In what respect do you imagine that I have attempted to discredit Marxism Leninism? What I've done is make a post about the quality and cost of weapons shipments from the USSR to Republican Spain. If you feel that has questioned your ideology, or anybody else's, I think you need to have a good long hard look at that ideology. And I have also produced a balanced summary, noting when the Soviet's did send state-of-the-art technology, in the form of tanks and aircraft - albeit in limited numbers.

I think this episode demonstrates the extent of commitment the USSR had to Spain.

A commitment to making a huge profit on low quality weapons? A commitment to purge the international left of dissenting factions? Well, in those respects it strikes me that the USSR was indeed committed to Spain. However, I am far less convinced that their efforts to actually protect Spain were anything less than perfunctory.

It's ironic how the USSR gets all the blame when the French government gets off the hook for the wholesale looting and destruction of Spanish war supplies, because it seems that western Europeans like to point fingers at everyone but themselves.

Err... they don't. And, in terms of sharing the blame among 'Europeans', Howson, in addition to pointing out Soviet confidence tricks also points the finger of blame for the failure at the British. Oh, and last time I checked the Soviet Union was a major European power.

So what went missing? Let's see--40 tanks, 107 aircraft, and 339 artillery pieces. Funny how this accounts for most of difference between the figures provided by the Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Military history.

So, you've posed all that stuff (which, incidentally, you prove no source for) - yet I'm at a loss to know what you think you've proved or done, beyond solve a minor quandary of mine regarding the discrepancy in the 1974 sources. It does not alter the fact that the archival evidence suggests that the USSR sent far fewer weapons. Indeed, that was the point - that until comparatively recently historians have relied on figures that are, in the light of new evidence, somewhat inflated.

Now we have a probable explanation for your supposed discrepancy in shipment figures. No massive coverup, no nefarious plot--except on the part of France, that is.

I never said there was. I said that it was bizarre.

Well, too bad I inserted myself in this "debate," if I can call it that.

It would be a stretch to suggest it is a debate, because as of yet you have yet to make a counter argument. What you have done is straw-manned me, pretending that I somehow argued that Maxim and Lewis guns were inherently inferior, and that noting a discrepancy in early (and wrong) weapons exports estimates is evidence of something - neither of which I claimed. My argument is that the Soviets sent only limited useful hardware, a lot of useless hardware, and embezzled many tens of millions of dollars from the Republic for this 'service'.

The fact that we are even talking about the USSR's supposed role as saboteur when Western European governments were directly responsible for destroying and interdicting war material meant for the Republicans is an exercise in absurdity.

Who said anything about sabotage? Again, you are addressing an argument that has not been made. My point is that Soviet aid was in fact not anything like as benevolent as has been suggested - rather that it was perfunctory, and was, in fact, also used as a means to defraud the Spanish Republic out of many millions of dollars and net the Soviet Union a very tidy profit.

But first and foremost, learn about your own country's damn guns.

And I suggest that you learn how to read, that way you might actually be capable of making a valid point.

If the Soviets did absolutely nothing in Spain whatsoever they'd be shitted on forever after and this would be seen as confirmation of how Stalin and Co were "nationalists," the evils of socialism in one country, etc. If they actually came to the aid of the Republic, as they did, they did it for ulterior reasons.

Well, there is, of course, a third scenario - that Soviet aid was anything greater than perfunctory, that they had shipped modern high-quality weapons in sufficient numbers and with sufficient ammunition, and that they had not stolen tens of millions of dollars from the Spanish Republic by deliberately cooking the books during the arms deals. Had the Soviet Union behaved as it said it would, and claimed it did, then there would be no criticism to make. As it happens, they did send junk to Spain and they did cook the books. The evidence, provided historians like Howson are honest (and there is no reason to think otherwise), is incontrovertible.

The British and French pretty much sought the defeat of the Republic in all but public (though not private) words.

Which is not in dispute - or relevant to the point being made. This isn't about the well documented anti-communist position that Britain and France took towards Spain and their passive-aggressive non-intervention policy. It is about the actions of Spain's supposed ally.

It's convenient how only 1936 is mentioned,

Not really, they just happen to be some of the most egregious examples of the fraud in question.

This is a partial but nevertheless representative list of major weapon deliveries to the Spanish republic from the USSR.

Partial? It includes only rifles, and, of course, no source. And nor does it comment on the massive issue of over-charging, the failure to send anything like adequate supplies of ammunition, the physical age of a great many of the rifles, which included the Mosin-Nagant which had been in production since 1891, or the state of a lot of the other crap the Soviet Union shipped to Spain, including hundreds of light anti-tank weapons of limited practical application, 19th century field artillery and machine guns that hadn't seen service since WW1, throughout the duration of the war. So yes, partial.

but that's probably more due to the fact that those antiquated rifles were what the USSR had on hand at that moment just sitting in warehouses.

As usual, what you know wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp. The reason they sent that shit to Spain, particularly the beginning, was because because those weapons were largely untraceable and provided veneer of plausible deniability of Soviet involvement - not because Soviet arms manufacturing had been non-existent since 1922.

Idk about you all, but that sounds like a hell of a lot of support given the situation at hand.

It sounds like a lot, because it is, in fact, more than they actually sent, fails to take into account the vast prices they made the unwitting Republicans pay and fails to comment of the inferior quality of much of what they sent.

Furthermore, as many collectors know, the Czech model 24 Mausers (which were purchased by the USSR for Spain) were some of the highest-quality Mausers ever manufactured. Far from demonstrating "abandonment" of the Republic, these shipments demonstrate nothing less than an increasing Soviet commitment in Spain.

And again you highlight your own ignorance, the vz.24's were not produced by the Soviet Union and sent to Spain. They were bought by the Soviet Union, with Spanish money, and then shipped to Spain. That is not the Soviet Union providing 'aid' or even generous discounts, that is acting as a broker - which they did incredibly dishonestly throughout the conflict.

khad

23rd August 2012, 02:04

And again you highlight your own ignorance, the vz.24's were not produced by the Soviet Union and sent to Spain. They were bought by the Soviet Union, with Spanish money, and then shipped to Spain. That is not the Soviet Union providing 'aid' or even generous discounts, that is acting as a broker - which they did incredibly dishonestly throughout the conflict.
Again ignoring the fact that 70% or more of the rifles shipped by the USSR were relatively modern Mosin-Nagant rifles.

Red Army standard issue.

Those "antiquated rifles" you speak of were a miniscule proportion of the total and only shipped in the first few months of the conflict.

comment of the inferior quality of much of what they sent.Wah wah wah. Inferior quality. I guess what was standard for the Red Army, ANZACs, and USMC turned into inferior garbage once it got into the hands of Spanish irregulars. Must be magic, bro.

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 02:16

Those "antiquated rifles" you speak of were a miniscule proportion of the total and only shipped in the first few months of the conflict.

Well, actually they, and the rifles that the Soviet Union purchased for the Republic, at vastly inflated prices represented around a third of the total weapons shipped - hardly minuscule. And, while I will need to examine the literature again for figures, a considerable portion of the Mosin-Nagant rifles were also aged pieces, the 91 model, from WW1 if not older - as I presume you are aware based on your use of the term 'relatively' - which, is accurate given the extreme age of some of thousands of the weapons the Soviet Union shipped to Spain, by that standard I suppose they were relatively modern. It was not until the Soviet's had shipped tens of thousands of the aged models that they began shipping the modernized 91/30 model - which they sent something in the region of 70,000, as I recall - a sizable fraction (though fraction nonetheless) of all the rifles actually sent from the Soviet Union. Everything else was either foreign weapons bought with Spanish money by the Soviets, the junk I spoke of earlier, or aged Mosin-Nagant rifles manufactured prior to the 1930 design.

And, of course, you are ignoring everything else I noted, particularly the amount the Spanish were charged for these rifles - testament to the bankruptcy of your position.

Wah wah wah. Inferior quality.

And thus we have, in a nutshell, the full intellectual extent of your 'argument'.

turned into inferior garbage once they got into the hands of Spanish irregulars.

I've already addressed this above.

khad

23rd August 2012, 02:24

And thus we have, in a nutshell, the full intellectual extent of your 'argument'.

I've already addressed this dishonest garbage above.
Languishing in some warehouse? Knock off the cosmoline and they'd be good to go. You'd be amazed how durable weapons are, especially old workhorses like Maxim guns and mausers.

This is one example of a typical arsenal in a remote Russian village. All this gear was bought off black diggers (treasure hunters who dig at old battlefield sites) and restored to working order. These weapons were literally sitting in the ground.
This is, of course, notwithstanding the fact that many of these supposedly antiquated items were relatively new production. Many of the Maxims sent to Spain were of the Tokarev variant produced in 1926-27.

http://savepic.org/289503.jpg

Ismail

23rd August 2012, 02:25

On Spanish gold and whatnot see: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/frames/fkod16.html
And the same source in-re hardware: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod15.html

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 03:20

On Spanish gold and whatnot see: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/frames/fkod16.html
And the same source in-re hardware: http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod15.html

Indeed, and it states:

"The Kremlin could not have profited from the war if the prices the Soviets charged the Republic were fair ones, prices that reflected market values. Howson's research reveals in incontrovertible fashion that, throughout the entire period of Soviet military assistance, Moscow was overcharging the Spanish Republic for nearly all the weapons sold. 33 The Soviet authorities succeeded in gouging the Spaniards by manipulating exchange rates between rubles to dollars and dollars to pesetas. Thus, while the ruble remained steady against the dollar throughout the late 1930s at approximately 5.3:1, the Soviets were converting the ruble at anywhere from 3.95 to 2.0 to the dollar, then converting the higher dollar value to pesetas for final billing to the Republic. The Spaniards never saw the original ruble price, and were thus never aware that the prices they were being charged were, on average (per Howson's estimate), over 25 percent higher than they should have been. 34 Howson believes that this price-jiggering resulted in overcharges of not less than $51 million."

and:

"The research of Gerald Howson reveals that in the areas of rifles, machine-guns, and artillery, the Soviets sent their Spanish friends weapons that were either obsolete, in poor repair, or exceedingly difficult to maintain and arm. 29 Howson demonstrates that the Soviets delivered rifles of at least eight different nationalities, ten different types, and six different calibers. Nearly a quarter of all rifles supplied to the Republic were 11-mm French and Austrian pieces dating from the 1880s; the 11-mm caliber had been obsolete worldwide since the turn of the century. Similarly, Soviet-supplied machine-guns and heavy guns were sufficiently mixed in origin and date to make reliable ammunition re-supply all but impossible. Of course, Howson is not the first to allege that in the categories of small arms and artillery the Soviets simply shipped their surplus or outdated equipment, much of which dated from the revolutionary era or earlier. 30 The issue, however, has been excessively belabored. A recent memoir makes multiple references to the "Russian relics from World War I" that the Soviets passed off as rifles and machine-guns. This vintage seems far more ancient today than it would have to those living in the years before World War II."

And, of course, we have Khad here trying to tell us that many of the tens of thousands of the WW1 Mosin-Nagant 91 relics (a rifle that had been in service for decades by the introduction of the improved 91/30 in 1930 - the self same genuinely modern Soviet rifle that was sent to Spain in any significant numbers) sent to Spain were modern armaments.

Languishing in some warehouse? Knock off the cosmoline and they'd be good to go. You'd be amazed how durable weapons are, especially old workhorses like Maxim guns and mausers.

This is one example of a typical arsenal in a remote Russian village. All this gear was bought off black diggers (treasure hunters who dig at old battlefield sites) and restored to working order. These weapons were literally sitting in the ground.
This is, of course, notwithstanding the fact that many of these supposedly antiquated items were relatively new production. Many of the Maxims sent to Spain were of the Tokarev variant produced in 1926-27.

So, I guess all that trumpeting you were doing regarding modern Soviet weapons being shipped to Spain in vast quantities is irrelevant (or maybe obsolete?), because apparently now it doesn't matter how old any of it was - because weapons last for ever, and it only requires a quick lick of WD40 to restore an aging rifle that has been in storage for decades into a state-of-the-art fighting machine, capable of unerring accuracy and unquestionable reliability. Yet, funnily enough, that didn't seem to be the case is Spain, I guess it just must have beyond their meagre technical capabilities - right?

khad

23rd August 2012, 04:40

Literally, taking the piss. The Vickers/Maxim was literally a weapon you pissed into to get working, These were battle-tested, reliable, and solid designs. The Lewis gun as well as the maxim variant M1917 browning were issue for the US marine corps throughout the early phases of WW2, even though many of the examples dated back to WW1. The British Army kept its Maxim variant, the Vickers, in service until 1968. The particular Maxims earmarked for Spanish export were produced at the Tokarev plant in 1926-27. FYI, 10-20 years is literally NOTHING for a gun. Hell, in African battlefields today most guns are older than that and they manage to keep them working even without skilled armorers.

Over in Afghanistan, the Taliban have been resurrecting their grandfathers' Lee-Enfields. These guns are at least 70 years old but still function reasonably well for precision shooting, giving them a designated marksman role.

http://www.strategypage.com/dls/articles/Afghans-Rediscover-The-Lee-Enfield-1-22-2009.asp

The Lee-Enfield is one of the oldest, and still widely used, rifles on the planet. Over 17 million were manufactured between 1895 and the 1980s. While there are more AK-47s out there (over 20 million in private hands), these are looked down on by those who use their rifles for hunting, or killing with a minimum expenditure of ammunition. The 8.8 pound Lee-Enfield is a bolt-action rifle (with a ten round magazine) noted for its accuracy and sturdiness. The inaccurate AK-47 has a hard time hitting anything more than a hundred meters away, while the Lee-Enfield can drop an animal, or a man, at over 400 meters.

There are millions of Lee-Enfields still in use throughout India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and even Iraq and other Persian Gulf nations. These are largely World War II leftovers. In the early half of the 20th century, the British gave out millions of these weapons to allies, or those being courted. Noting the accuracy of the Lee-Enfield (.303 caliber, or 7.7mm), the locals came to prize the rifle for hunting, and self-defense. There are still many gunsmiths throughout the region (and at least one factory in India) that will refurbish century old Lee-Enfields to "like new" condition. Ammunition is still manufactured, with the high quality stuff going for a dollar a round, and lesser quality for 25 cents a round. These rifles sell in the west for $500-1,000. The Lee-Enfield will carry on well into the 21st century.

One place where the Lee-Enfield found lots of fans was Afghanistan. There, the Afghans had been introduced to rifles in the 19th century, and they treasured these weapons. This was particularly true with the introduction of smokeless powder rifles in the late 19th century. Many Afghans were still using black powder rifles well into the 20th century. But once Lee-Enfields began show up in large numbers after World War I (1914-18), no one wanted the larger, heavier and less accurate black powder rifles (which always gave off your position, with all that smoke, after you fired a round.) Now, wealthy drug lords are buying expensive hunting and sniper rifles for their militias, but so far, the Taliban Snipers appear to be using grandpa's old Lee-Enfield.
we have Khad here trying to tell us that many of the tens of thousands of the WW1 Mosin-Nagant 91 relics (a rifle that had been in service for decades by the introduction of the improved 91/30 in 1930 - the self same genuinely modern Soviet rifle that was sent to Spain in any significant numbers) sent to Spain were modern armaments.

How many facepalm pics do you want for this ass load of fail? 1? 2? 5? a dozen?

Bolt rifles can't get much simpler. They're basically a pipe and a breech lock. As for the Mosin rifles, the only significant difference (http://7.62x54r.net/MosinID/MosinM9130S.htm) between the 91 and the 91/30 was the sights, graduated in meters instead of Russian imperial yards (the hexagonal receivers weren't replaced with round ones until 1936). They weren't ancient relics--they fired the exact same round that has been the most ballistically efficient 7.62 round for the past 121 years.

Ironically, some of the later examples demonstrated a slightly lower level of worksmanship; the earlier Mosins with their hex receivers are more sought after by collectors due to their generally better finish. The round receiver, after all, was intended as a cost-cutting measure.

But you certainly are right that the 91/30 was shipped to Spain in large quantities, even if it is an obvious typo. :D

1936
09/26/36 Obsolete Foreign Rifles 20,350
10/22/36 Obsolete Foreign Rifles 15,655
11/06/36 Lee-Enfield Mk3 1,000
11/06/36 French 8mm Lebel 900
11/15/36 Misc Foreign Rifles 1,920

1937
01/04/37 Mosin-Nagant M91 25,500
03/06/37 Mosin-Nagant M91/30 24,580
04/29/37 Foreign Rifles - Various 10,000
04/29/37 Mosin-Nagant M91 15,000
07/30/37 Mosin-Nagant M91/30 39,550

1938
02/13/37 Mosin-Nagant M91/30 40,100
03/01/38 Czech vz. 24 Mauser 50,000So I guess this spared the poor, poor Spanish Loyalists the Sisyphean task of metric conversion. It must have been too much for those poor dears to handle. If we're to believe your narrative, they had planes and tanks and factories to build those planes and tanks but just couldn't figure out how to lube a bolt.

Geiseric

23rd August 2012, 04:45

I like how nobody here's argued against Invader Zim's point that 6 million out of each 20 million spent was fraudulent.

khad

23rd August 2012, 04:51

I like how nobody here's argued against Invader Zim's point that 6 million out of each 20 million spent was fraudulent.
Already addressed by Ismail's link.

The Kremlin could not have profited from the war if the prices the Soviets charged the Republic were fair ones, prices that reflected market values. Howson's research reveals in incontrovertible fashion that, throughout the entire period of Soviet military assistance, Moscow was overcharging the Spanish Republic for nearly all the weapons sold. 33 (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod16.html#note33) The Soviet authorities succeeded in gouging the Spaniards by manipulating exchange rates between rubles to dollars and dollars to pesetas. Thus, while the ruble remained steady against the dollar throughout the late 1930s at approximately 5.3:1, the Soviets were converting the ruble at anywhere from 3.95 to 2.0 to the dollar, then converting the higher dollar value to pesetas for final billing to the Republic. The Spaniards never saw the original ruble price, and were thus never aware that the prices they were being charged were, on average (per Howson's estimate), over 25 percent higher than they should have been. 34 (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod16.html#note34) Howson believes that this price-jiggering resulted in overcharges of not less than $51 million.

How do these adjustments alter the final tally? Even if we subtract Howson's $51 million in overcharges, acknowledge only the unpaid loan of $70 million, (rather than the potential $155 million), and subtract the cost of three DC-3s (roughly $360,000), the total value of the Soviet assistance provided to the Republic comes to approximately $525 million, or $7 million more than their gold should have bought. Of course, the question of the gold's numismatic value effectively throws into doubt the estimated value of $518 million. In any case, the debate over the financing of the Republican war effort is likely to rage on for years to come. Tentatively, however, we may conclude this section with a qualified assertion that, even if an allowance is made for Russian overcharging for weaponry and the initial undervaluing of the gold, it does not appear that the Republic received an exceptionally unfair financial arrangement from the USSR.

Ismail

23rd August 2012, 07:21

Indeed, and it states:Yeah, and this is what it states further:

But small arms and artillery tell only part of the story. If one examines tank and aircraft shipments, one must conclude that the Soviet hardware employed by the Republicans was equal or superior to the equipment supplied to the Nationalists by their foreign allies, at least through the first nine months of Moscow's intervention Moreover, Soviet matériel sold to the Loyalists was certainly the most advanced Moscow was able to send. Consider Soviet tank shipments. The main tank model sent by the Soviets to Spain was the T-26 (officially the T-26B1) light tank, a license-built, heavier copy of the British Vickers six-ton tank, updated with a Soviet turret and hefty 45-mm dual-purpose gun. Far from a surplus or obsolete tank crowding the Russian armor parks, the T-26 was the standard infantry tank employed by the Red Army during the 1930s, the same unit used against the Japanese at Lake Khasan in 1938, the Poles in 1939, the Finns in 1939-40, and even in the early stages of the war with Germany beginning in 1941. Compared to the machines supplied to the Nationalists during the same period by the Italians and Germans, the T-26 quickly emerged as the most formidable armored vehicle in the war. Its weight of nine tons made the T-26 three times larger than the Italian-made Fiat CV.3/35 tankette, and a third again as heavy as the six-ton German PzKpfw I. According to one recent and highly objective study, the T-26 was the most powerful tank available anywhere in the world in 1936.Not to mention what it says further about aircraft, etc.

Edit: And Khad's post above deals with the former quote.

ВАЛТЕР

23rd August 2012, 10:38

All this talk about guns "going bad" because they are old is a bunch of nonsense. So long as the weapon is cared for and isn't exposed to the elements it will be fine.

A few months ago my younger brother found a 1945 dated PPSH41 in an old abandoned house in the woods. He brought it for me to examine. The weapon had some surface rust on it, however it functioned flawlessly. I disassembled it and the parts were in perfect working order. Everything, from the bolt and trigger mechanism to the firing pin was fine. It even had some old grease left over in it. The only thing that you could say was "bad' was the barrel, as it was dirty, and had some corrosion (most likely from the fuckton of ammunition shot through it without cleaning) but even that with a little cleaning would be good to go. Considering this weapon likely saw combat in ww2, it was in stupendous shape.

Weapons, so long as they are not exposed to the elements, will be fine. I could put a rifle in a shed for 50 years and come back, clean it and it will work. Guaranteed.

DDR

23rd August 2012, 11:35

Well, the major revelation regarding the fleecing of the Republic via exchange rates was the product of archival research only possible in the 1990s, and the major book in question was published in 1999 - so either you are very young or you are chatting crap. However, you are right that people have been pointing out that the weapons the Soviets sent were often of exceptionally low quality - since 1936, in fact. I'll let you contemplate why that might be.

I'm not chatting crap, I live in Spain and everybody you ask will know about Moscow's gold, not because in 99 some book was written but since the times of Franco people were speaking about it.

By executing communists, sending antiquated hardware, limited ammunition and robbing them blind? You're right, it shouldn't be forgotten.

Well, that's thousand times more than doing nothing like the brits, stealing supplies like the french, or selling oil to the fash like the yankees did. And wich communists were killed by the USSR in Spain? Hans Beimler? C'mon...

In what respect do you imagine that I have attempted to discredit Marxism Leninism? What I've done is make a post about the quality and cost of weapons shipments from the USSR to Republican Spain. If you feel that has questioned your ideology, or anybody else's, I think you need to have a good long hard look at that ideology. And I have also produced a balanced summary, noting when the Soviet's did send state-of-the-art technology, in the form of tanks and aircraft - albeit in limited numbers.

Well because is revleft oldest trent, to piss off mls just because. The only nation who suports the republic with soldiers, adviser, ammo, supplies, etc. and it's bad because they shipped some old guns? Because the republic gave the gold to them so the fash did have it? It's sometimes silly to come to this forum...

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 17:46

Literally, taking the piss. The Vickers/Maxim was literally a weapon you pissed into to get working, These were battle-tested, reliable, and solid designs.

Well, unlike you, I do not have a disturbing fetish for 19th and early 20th century relic firearms, and nor have I ever attempted to restore a Maxim, or any other firearm for that matter. However, while what you say about the easy restoration of Maxim's may well be accurate it certainly must have been necessary, because we have plenty of testimony, such as that of Jason Gurney (Crusade in Spain, 1974), which suggests that they were ancient in age (built no later than 1916), and as a direct result of that decrepitude they were inaccurate. Yet despite that somewhat fundamental flaw they were, nevertheless, the best machine guns the Soviets provided, and that everything else, including your precious Lewis Guns which Gurney described as 'very elderly', was 'largely useless.' pp. 78-79. Their merit apparently lay in the fact that they were indeed reliable weapons that didn't break down every few rounds. The fact that weapons so old that it had lost accuracy were good because they remained at least reliable strikes me as less a victory for the quality of the Maxim's sent to Spain, but rather a cutting indictment on everything else the Soviet Union sent.

FYI, 10-20 years is literally NOTHING for a gun.

Yet, bizarrely enough given your obvious expertise in 19th century firearms and doubtless significant battle field experience, the Spanish volunteers who actually had to use these 20+ year old weapons seem to have thought otherwise. And so, apparently did the Soviet state which assured the Spaniards, and more bizarrely other arms of its own establishment, that the weapons - including those in 1936 - were brand new from 'last year's production batch'. So evidently they also saw a problem with sending aging weapons to Spain - or at least allowing other parts of the establishment to know that.

Funny that, given that you tell us that age is irrelevant to the quality of a weapon.

Over in Afghanistan, the Taliban have been resurrecting their grandfathers' Lee-Enfields. These guns are at least 70 years old but still function reasonably well for precision shooting, giving them a designated marksman role.

But the difference is, of course, they weren't using Lee-Enfield's in huge numbers. If i might return again to Gurney:

'The remaining infantry [those without machine guns] was supplied with rifles of Russian manufacture [so presumably Mosin-Nagant 91's, which were the first Russian made rifles to arrive in Spain - in January 1937]. These were very poor weapons, much lighter than the English Lee-Enfield of that period and not nearly as toughly constructed.' p. 79.

So much for these modern, high-quality weapons delivered to the Republic. I suppose they must have been thankful in August 1937 when the first shipment of genuinely modern Russian rifles first arrived. I guess it is a pity that these made up only around a quarter of the rifles that were shipped by the Soviet Union to Spain, and didn't you say that they were crap earlier?

How many facepalm pics do you want for this ass load of fail? 1? 2? 5? a dozen?

Providing that you are reserving them for yourself, because your ‘retort’, if I can even call it that, does not actually address my point at all. So, what is your problem (beyond the glaringly obvious), need reading glasses? What I did was reply to your absurd assertion that the Mosin-Nagant 91's sent to Spain were modern, when manifestly they were not. Rather they were WW1 era weapons, if not older, and the first modern Soviet rifles did not arrive until half way through 1937, and numbered 78,050 by the end of the war. Not remark on the ease of restoring bolt-action rifles. So basically, all that tired wind you just belched across the thread is utterly irrelevant and you should have saved your breath. I understand you must find it difficult, but do try to pay attention; that way you might keep up.

But you certainly are right that the 91/30 was shipped to Spain in large quantities, even if it is an obvious typo.

Actually it isn't a typo, I meant precisely what I wrote. They did represent a sizable fraction of the rifles sent to Spain.

However, the figures you provide (without any source... again) have been wrongly transcribed from Howson. Firstly, the ship that departed on 07/30/37, the Cabo San Agustin, did not contain 39,550 M91/30 rifles. It contained that many M91 rifles, and a further 10,450 M91/30.

The actual figures and dates of departure were:

07/30/37 - 10,450
01/23/38 - 26,500
02/13/38 - 40,100

Or 77,050 modern Soviet Rifles. Or 20% of the total number of Rifles shipped to Spain by the Soviet Union. Everything else was either foreign bought with Spanish money, or at least two decades old.

Maybe you should try looking this stuff up in the actual books, that way you could avoid simple errors.

1938
02/13/37

So a ship allegedly sent in 1938 was in fact sent in 1937? Typo or just not bothered reading a cut and paste job? I know which my money is on.

Already addressed by Ismail's link.

I laughed when I read the highly qualified and tenuously expressed passage in question, and then laughed even harder when I noticed why they were being so careful to quality their argument. And that is because the author knows that his/her sources don't cut it – both of them. The first, by the author’s own admission is doubtful:

‘Largo Caballero, no loyal friend of the Soviets, insisted that the Republic had received fair compensation for its gold. It should be recalled, however, that he himself had made the decision to transfer the stocks. Thus the former prime minister always had a personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked.’

And the second source is the 1941 autobiography of the American journalist Louis Fischer. So Fischer’s ‘estimate’, and that is all it is, was written without actual access to the relevant data regarding Spanish spending, Soviet book-cooking or actual arms/munitions figures. Instead, the figure must have been arrived at through interviewing the self-same Republican officials whom the author of Ismail’s article, described as having a ‘personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked.’

Not to mention what it says further about aircraft, etc.

All of which, if you care to read my opening post, I made very sure to acknowledge, but with the relevant missing qualification in the article you posted. Me:
“In terms of both tanks and aircraft, the quality of the arms sent by the USSR was broadly - though certainly not universally, of a high standard. Among the items sent were 280 T-26 tanks, which were a light tank as good as any other tank of its type at that time. In terms of Aircraft the Soviets sent, among others, 93 SB Katiuska bombers which were, for their day, exceptional aircraft capable of outpacing fighter interceptors until the introduction of the German Me 109, similarly the Polikarpov I-16 (400+ were delivered to Spain) proved effective until the introduction of the Me 109. However, in both cases the superior numbers of Nationalist aircraft limited their effectiveness. So while the USSR sent good kit, it didn't send anything like enough.”

All this talk about guns "going bad" because they are old is a bunch of nonsense. So long as the weapon is cared for and isn't exposed to the elements it will be fine.

A few months ago my younger brother found a 1945 dated PPSH41 in an old abandoned house in the woods. He brought it for me to examine. The weapon had some surface rust on it, however it functioned flawlessly. I disassembled it and the parts were in perfect working order. Everything, from the bolt and trigger mechanism to the firing pin was fine. It even had some old grease left over in it. The only thing that you could say was "bad' was the barrel, as it was dirty, and had some corrosion (most likely from the fuckton of ammunition shot through it without cleaning) but even that with a little cleaning would be good to go. Considering this weapon likely saw combat in ww2, it was in stupendous shape.

Weapons, so long as they are not exposed to the elements, will be fine. I could put a rifle in a shed for 50 years and come back, clean it and it will work. Guaranteed.

Yet, people actually in Spain who used these aged weapons in combat disagree - complaining that their aged weapons, the machine guns and artillery in particular, were well past their sell-by-date, and subject to inaccuracy and/or frequent malfunction. To be honest what you can, or cannot, 'guarantee' is wholly irrelevant. The material problems that came with the aged Soviet weapons in Spain are well documented – and you don’t need to take my word for it.

I'm not chatting crap, I live in Spain and everybody you ask will know about Moscow's gold, not because in 99 some book was written but since the times of Franco people were speaking about it.

The Franco regime actually had a subtly different, and utterly misleading, version of what happened to Spain's gold. The issue I'm raising is not the same.

Well, that's thousand times more than doing nothing like the brits, stealing supplies like the french, or selling oil to the fash like the yankees did. And wich communists were killed by the USSR in Spain? Hans Beimler? C'mon...

This is, of course, the same terrible argument being used by Ismail and Khad. It is as if you believe that by pointing out that the wider international community also betrayed the Republic, that somehow excuses the Soviet Union's unscrupulous profiteering at the expense of a beleaguered 'ally' and policy of outright theft.

and it's bad because they shipped some old guns? Because the republic gave the gold to them so the fash did have it?
I suggest you actually read what I've written, then what you just wrote, and entertain yourself with a game of 'spot the difference'.

khad

23rd August 2012, 18:45

kurr

23rd August 2012, 19:07

I like how no one noticed IZ's blatant cherry-picking of Ismail's sources.

The 'Homage to Catalonia' mentality is getting real old.

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 19:21

Well, basically, what you mean to say that the Spanish Loyalists were strictly less competent than the Taliban.

Yeeeeahhhh......

More maintenance, less whining. That's all I gotta say. (http://www.theboxotruth.com/docs/edu63.htm)

I wondered how long it would take before your responce to facts would degenerate into trolling. I thought it would take longer.

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 19:27

I like how no one noticed IZ's blatant cherry-picking of Ismail's sources.

Hardly, the link reagarding the Spanish Gold reserves makes only a highly qualified and tenuous judgement. Furthermore, that judgement, as I have since noted, is not based on actual economic evidence at all. But rather the speculation of a journalist in 1941 and the assertions of a Senior government official with what the author of the article openly admits is an obvious agenda to present misleading figures. Or, to just quote myself:

'I laughed when I read the highly qualified and tenuously expressed passage in question, and then laughed even harder when I noticed why they were being so careful to quality their argument. And that is because the author knows that his/her sources don't cut it – both of them. The first, by the author’s own admission is doubtful:

"'Largo Caballero, no loyal friend of the Soviets, insisted that the Republic had received fair compensation for its gold. It should be recalled, however, that he himself had made the decision to transfer the stocks. Thus the former prime minister always had a personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked.’

And the second source is the 1941 autobiography of the American journalist Louis Fischer. So Fischer’s ‘estimate’, and that is all it is, was written without actual access to the relevant data regarding Spanish spending, Soviet book-cooking or actual arms/munitions figures. Instead, the figure must have been arrived at through interviewing the self-same Republican officials whom the author of Ismail’s article, described as having a ‘personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked.’"

While the link reagarding arms quality didn't contradict anything I've argued in this thread. So, basically, you lied just now. Good job.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that both Khad and Ismail 'cherry picked' from them, ignoring the explicit qualifications to the points being made. Yet you don't mention that. You weren't cherry picking from the thread where you? That's right, you were, so your a hypocrite, an idiot for making it so obvious - and a liar, as we have already established. You revealed all that, in what, two dozen words? Good job.

The 'Homage to Catalonia' mentality is getting real old.

And so are trolls like you who produce only a couple of lines worth of flamebait, and lack the intellect and/or honesty to make either a legitimate contribution to discussion on this board. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is... jog on.

kurr

23rd August 2012, 19:39

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is... jog on.

Nah. I don't think so and yeah, fool, you are picking cherries and I'm catching you in the act, red-handed.

It is as if you believe that by pointing out that the wider international community also betrayed the Republic, that somehow excuses the Soviet Union's unscrupulous profiteering at the expense of a beleaguered 'ally' and policy of outright theft.

From the except that Khad posted and you conveniently left out:

How do these adjustments alter the final tally? Even if we subtract Howson's $51 million in overcharges, acknowledge only the unpaid loan of $70 million, (rather than the potential $155 million), and subtract the cost of three DC-3s (roughly $360,000), the total value of the Soviet assistance provided to the Republic comes to approximately $525 million, or $7 million more than their gold should have bought. Of course, the question of the gold's numismatic value effectively throws into doubt the estimated value of $518 million. In any case, the debate over the financing of the Republican war effort is likely to rage on for years to come. Tentatively, however, we may conclude this section with a qualified assertion that, even if an allowance is made for Russian overcharging for weaponry and the initial undervaluing of the gold, it does not appear that the Republic received an exceptionally unfair financial arrangement from the USSR.

What such evil, ruthless profiteering! Oh wait, the Soviet Union actually lost a shitload of money to the Spanish Republic. In case you still aren't reading, that's 70+ mil that they never got back.

Actually, it makes sense that you left it out. It dismantles your entire case of the big bad evil Stalinist Soviet Union betrayal. Too bad history proves you wrong.

You know, for such an "intellectual", you sure do a lot of this (http://atlaslanguageschool.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/cover-ears-up.jpg).

Rusty Shackleford

23rd August 2012, 19:54

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 20:24

I don't think so and yeah, fool, you are picking cherries and I'm catching you in the act, red-handed.

Cool story, Bro. :lol:

From the except that Khad posted and you conveniently left out:

And from the footnote you convinently left out:

"'Largo Caballero, no loyal friend of the Soviets, insisted that the Republic had received fair compensation for its gold. It should be recalled, however, that he himself had made the decision to transfer the stocks. Thus the former prime minister always had a personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked. See Mis Recuerdos: Cartas a un amigo (Mexico City: Alianza, 1954), 203-4. Louis Fischer concurred, estimating that the Republic received $720 million worth of arms, foodstuffs, and raw material from the Soviet Union: (Men and Politics, 364-65).'

And as I noted, and you also left out of your narrative of my 'cherry picking':

"And the second source is the 1941 autobiography of the American journalist Louis Fischer. So Fischer’s ‘estimate’, and that is all it is, was written without actual access to the relevant data regarding Spanish spending, Soviet book-cooking or actual arms/munitions figures. Instead, the figure must have been arrived at through interviewing the self-same Republican officials whom the author of Ismail’s article, described as having a ‘personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked.’"

So you cherry picked the article and my posts. Fool, you are picking cherries and I'm catching you in the act, red-handed. :lol:

Oh wait, the Soviet Union actually lost a shitload of money to the Spanish Republic. In case you still aren't reading, that's 70+ mil that they never got back.

According to the people who had a vested interest in presenting it that way, as Ismail's link (not Khad's) makes abundently clear and convinently ignored:

"It should be recalled, however, that he himself had made the decision to transfer the stocks. Thus the former prime minister always had a personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked."

And let's see what other people have to say about this:

'The other point that is clear from this report is that the Soviets had no intention of giving the Spanish anything. Whatever weapons or other supplies they wanted had to be paid for in hard cash [taken from the Gold Reserves]. [...] The Soviets overcharged the Republican government for these arms, inventing prices to coincide with the amount of Spanish gold in their hands.'

'The Soviets forced the Spanish to pay for every aspect of their involvement, including the cost of transporting, feeding, and maintaining the Soviet advisers in Spain. Meanwhile, they played with exchange rates and the cost of the weapons to ensure that they spent every bit of the Republican gold- and more. As this report shows, they also used Spanish gold to achieve other foreign policy and military goals.'

Radosh, Habeck, and Sevostianov (eds.), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 88; 424.

So, clearly your uncritical acceptance of Ismail's link is premature for multiple reasons, and the conclusion it draws is disputed.

In case you still aren't reading, that's 70+ mil that they never got back.

You evidently misread what it says. Allow me to highlight the actual figure it is suggesting:

"the total value of the Soviet assistance provided to the Republic comes to approximately $525 million, or $7 million more than their gold should have bought."

And, as I have noted already, their 'total' figure is based on wildly questionable sources.

You know, for such an "intellectual", you sure do a lot of this (http://www.anonym.to/?http://atlaslanguageschool.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/cover-ears-up.jpg).

Cool story, Bro. Now, are you going to get round to addressing why you cherry-picked Ismail's article (ignoring the footnotes), why you ignored my critique of the article's conclusion in post 23 (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2499751&postcount=23), or the fact that Khad and Ismail also selectively quoted from the articles, which you hypocritically ignored?

Go on, I'll give you a shot to redeem yourself.

Andropov

23rd August 2012, 20:24

Yet, people actually in Spain who used these aged weapons in combat disagree - complaining that their aged weapons, the machine guns and artillery in particular, were well past their sell-by-date, and subject to inaccuracy and/or frequent malfunction. To be honest what you can, or cannot, 'guarantee' is wholly irrelevant. The material problems that came with the aged Soviet weapons in Spain are well documented – and you don’t need to take my word for it.
This in itself proves little Zim.
I don't think any of the posters here claim that there may have been some material that may have been old or archaic in comparison to some of the material used by the Nationalists.
These written accounts are not sufficient evidence to indicate that the whole of the Soviet weaponry was obsolete.
They only provide us with a glimpse that at least some of the weaponry was perceived as obsolete.
These accounts no more confirm your opinion on Soviet weaponry than they admonish Khad or Ismail's.
Indeed these fighters, many of whom came from non-military back grounds may not have had sufficient training in maintaining such a weapon and that lack of expertise could instead be attributed to a perceived lacking with regard to the weapon.
Also when encountering such sources we must be wary that as is with many personalised texts the negatives are highlighted within ones own experiences. As such those who fought in the war and who encountered faulty weaponry whether their responsibility or the soviets were much more likely to mention such incidents in their accounts than someone who fought in the war and was using a perfectly functional weapon all day. Indeed within the context of the war I am sure their perfectly working weapon would have paled in significance to the regular horrors, trials and terrors they encountered on a regular basis and as such their weapon would be lucky to even get a mention.
As such those accounts cannot be utilised as some admission of soldier on the ground disgruntlement with Soviet weaponry, these accounts to do not provide the necessary consensus you require to validate your argument.

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 20:28

Can i just point one thing out.

If 20 years makes a rifle ancient, then ancient weapons seem to have no effective difference (for better or worse) on a conflict scale. (vietnam, WWII, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea) And the Maoists in India and Nepal have stuff one would assume they would have to preform magic to resurrect!

Actually just last year an Indian Maoist held down an entire unit of Special Police in India in an hours long battle, she only had an Enfield but managed to kill two or 3. Survived grenade attacks and all. She was ultimately killed. Whoda thunk you could do such a thing without a G36K!

Hell, your Average M1 tank in the US arsenal is just a constantly refurbished 1980s make. And not that i'm praising the marines, but, like, look at the shit they were still using in the gulf war...

20 years, minimum. And as have already shown, with direct quotes from people who were actually using these weapons in combat (as opposed to speaking about them hypothetically now), their age had already had a notable deleterious impact on their performance, ranging from reduced accuracy to impaired reliability. Or are you saying that the people in the field shooting them know less about the performance of their own weapons than we do?

Rusty Shackleford

23rd August 2012, 20:42

20 years, minimum. And as have already shown, with direct quotes from people who were actually using these weapons in combat (as opposed to speaking about them hypothetically now), their age had already had a notable deleterious impact on their performance, ranging from reduced accuracy to impaired reliability. Or are you saying that the people in the field shooting them know less about the performance of their own weapons than we do?
what i am saying is that a text reference to the age of a weapon does not determine its usefulness.

it can be poorly cared for or be treated like the popes hat.

were they wrong about the quality of the weapons? Im sure they werent if they were the ones using them. But also how was their training? Am i calling them bumbling fools? no. But on the issue of accuracy, some people have way high expectations.

Where you aim does not always determine where it will hit. The longer the distance the more the environment has an effect on the trajectory.

for example i have an M91 (Tula, 1923) that at 75 yards hits 4 inches to the right and about two inches down. but it is ALWAYS that so im assuming the sights are maligned. And at such a short distance thats pretty fucking terrible. the bore is great, the muzzle is a bit worn but at 400 yards it probably couldnt hit anything i was aiming at. And when i got it, i was thinkig that it was going to be pretty accurate based on my experience with other nagants...

regardless, i have no doubt that there were less than quality pieces in the shipments.

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 20:42

This in itself proves little Zim.
I don't think any of the posters here claim that there may have been some material that may have been old or archaic in comparison to some of the material used by the Nationalists.
These written accounts are not sufficient evidence to indicate that the whole of the Soviet weaponry was obsolete.
They only provide us with a glimpse that at least some of the weaponry was perceived as obsolete.
These accounts no more confirm your opinion on Soviet weaponry than they admonish Khad or Ismail's.
Indeed these fighters, many of whom came from non-military back grounds may not have had sufficient training in maintaining such a weapon and that lack of expertise could instead be attributed to a perceived lacking with regard to the weapon.
Also when encountering such sources we must be wary that as is with many personalised texts the negatives are highlighted within ones own experiences. As such those who fought in the war and who encountered faulty weaponry whether their responsibility or the soviets were much more likely to mention such incidents in their accounts than someone who fought in the war and was using a perfectly functional weapon all day. Indeed within the context of the war I am sure their perfectly working weapon would have paled in significance to the regular horrors, trials and terrors they encountered on a regular basis and as such their weapon would be lucky to even get a mention.
As such those accounts cannot be utilised as some admission of soldier on the ground disgruntlement with Soviet weaponry, these accounts to do not provide the necessary consensus you require to validate your argument.

Well, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision archival documentation that would be able to accurately guage the full extent of problems - so personal accounts are all taht is really left to go on to judge how these weapons performed in the field. To quote Ismail's link:

"The research of Gerald Howson reveals that in the areas of rifles, machine-guns, and artillery, the Soviets sent their Spanish friends weapons that were either obsolete, in poor repair, or exceedingly difficult to maintain and arm. 29 (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod15.html#note29) Howson demonstrates that the Soviets delivered rifles of at least eight different nationalities, ten different types, and six different calibers. Nearly a quarter of all rifles supplied to the Republic were 11-mm French and Austrian pieces dating from the 1880s; the 11-mm caliber had been obsolete worldwide since the turn of the century. Similarly, Soviet-supplied machine-guns and heavy guns were sufficiently mixed in origin and date to make reliable ammunition re-supply all but impossible. Of course, Howson is not the first to allege that in the categories of small arms and artillery the Soviets simply shipped their surplus or outdated equipment, much of which dated from the revolutionary era or earlier. 30 (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod15.html#note30) The issue, however, has been excessively belabored. A recent memoir makes multiple references to the "Russian relics from World War I" that the Soviets passed off as rifles and machine-guns. This vintage seems far more ancient today than it would have to those living in the years before World War II."

But, of course, that only relates to small arms and artillery - as noted in post one, and in the article quoted above, Soviet Aircraft and Armour was state-of -the-art at least in the beginning of the war.

kurr

23rd August 2012, 20:44

"'Largo Caballero, no loyal friend of the Soviets, insisted that the Republic had received fair compensation for its gold. It should be recalled, however, that he himself had made the decision to transfer the stocks. Thus the former prime minister always had a personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked. See Mis Recuerdos: Cartas a un amigo (Mexico City: Alianza, 1954), 203-4. Louis Fischer concurred, estimating that the Republic received $720 million worth of arms, foodstuffs, and raw material from the Soviet Union: (Men and Politics, 364-65).'

And as I noted, and you also left out of your narrative of my 'cherry picking':

"And the second source is the 1941 autobiography of the American journalist Louis Fischer. So Fischer’s ‘estimate’, and that is all it is, was written without actual access to the relevant data regarding Spanish spending, Soviet book-cooking or actual arms/munitions figures. Instead, the figure must have been arrived at through interviewing the self-same Republican officials whom the author of Ismail’s article, described as having a ‘personal stake in maintaining that his side had not been bilked.’"

So you cherry picked the article and my posts. Fool, you are picking cherries and I'm catching you in the act, red-handed. :lol:

None of this refutes the $70 mil loan that the Soviets forked over to the Spanish Republic. I'm waiting.....

And let's see what other people have to say about this:

'The other point that is clear from this report is that the Soviets had no intention of giving the Spanish anything. Whatever weapons or other supplies they wanted had to be paid for in hard cash [taken from the Gold Reserves]. [...] The Soviets overcharged the Republican government for these arms, inventing prices to coincide with the amount of Spanish gold in their hands.'

'The Soviets forced the Spanish to pay for every aspect of their involvement, including the cost of transporting, feeding, and maintaining the Soviet advisers in Spain. Meanwhile, they played with exchange rates and the cost of the weapons to ensure that they spent every bit of the Republican gold- and more. As this report shows, they also used Spanish gold to achieve other foreign policy and military goals.'

Radosh, Habeck, and Sevostianov (eds.), Spain Betrayed: The Soviet Union in the Spanish Civil War (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 88; 424.

So, clearly your uncritical acceptance of Ismail's link is premature for multiple reasons, and the conclusion it draws is disputed.

And I'm to just take Radosh at facevalue here and just accept it? Nah. Even though I find myself in disagreements and suspicion of Grover Furr, he did do a decent write-up of this book (http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/furr.html) and it's sham charges. Oh wait, it totally goes against your generic run-of-the-mill Cold War-Evil, ruthless, Stalinist Soviet Union mindset.... you'll probably just shoot it down.

Quackery ensues...

You evidently misread what it says. Allow me to highlight the actual figure it is suggesting:

"the total value of the Soviet assistance provided to the Republic comes to approximately $525 million, or $7 million more than their gold should have bought."

And, as I have noted already, their 'total' figure is based on wildly questionable sources.

Once again, the Soviet Union shelled out a $70 million dollar loan to the Spanish Republic that was unpaid, did they or did they not? You've already been proven wrong about the nature of the artillery the Soviets supplied.

Either the Spanish republicans were incompetent as all hell or you are just full of shit.

Invader Zim

23rd August 2012, 21:16

None of this refutes the $70 mil loan that the Soviets forked over to the Spanish Republic. I'm waiting.....

And I'm to just take Radosh at facevalue here and just accept it? Nah. Even though I find myself in disagreements and suspicion of Grover Furr, he did do a decent write-up of this book (http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/furr.html) and it's sham charges. Oh wait, it totally goes against your generic run-of-the-mill Cold War-Evil, ruthless, Stalinist Soviet Union mindset.... you'll probably just shoot it down.

Quackery ensues...

Once again, the Soviet Union shelled out a $70 million dollar loan to the Spanish Republic that was unpaid, did they or did they not? You've already been proven wrong about the nature of the artillery the Soviets supplied.

Either the Spanish republicans were incompetent as all hell or you are just full of shit.

None of this refutes the $70 mil loan that the Soviets forked over to the Spanish Republic. I'm waiting.....

:sigh: Obviously I'm going to have to spell this out to you, because despite the eminently simple language employed in the article, it remains beyond you. The argument the article is making is that the total minimum amount of Republican spending in the war was $525 million - which included the $70 million dollar loan. Therefore the defecit, based on the $518 million in Spanish gold being held by the Soviets leaves a deficit of of $7 million. Get it?

And yes, my response does indeed, if not, refute, then explain why the initial $525 million figure (subtracted down from $720 million) is questionable.

And I'm to just take Radosh at facevalue here and just accept it? Nah. Even though I find myself in disagreements and suspicion of Grover Furr, he did do a decent write-up of this book (http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/furr.html) and it's sham charges. Oh wait, it totally goes against your generic run-of-the-mill Cold War-Evil, ruthless, Stalinist Soviet Union mindset.... you'll probably just shoot it down.

But you will accept the author of Ismail's link, or rather his source, Largo Caballero, at face value? Similarly, you will take Grover Furr, who is actually far less qualified to pass judgement on the quality of the book than even the most reactionary conservative reviewers he laughably tries to criticise. Well, I wasn't expecting consistency from you. But your responce is entirely without merit, you choose to cite a review by a discredited hack, whom nobody in the professional historial world takes seriously (assuming that they have even heard of him), making generic and largely foundationless critiques. You also refuse to address the point actually being made, and instead rely upon Furr's politically motivated hatchet job, as if it proves the point for you, by attempting to discredit the editors. You are appealing to a false authority and you are engaging in an ad hominem to evade addressing the point.

Try again.

Once again, the Soviet Union shelled out a $70 million dollar loan to the Spanish Republic that was unpaid, did they or did they not?

Well, yeah.. that is the point the author of Ismail's link is making. That, including the $70 million loan, the Spanish deficit came to $7 million.

You've already been proven wrong about the nature of the artillery the Soviets supplied.

Really? Where? Thus far people have disputed what I have said about Soviet rifles and machine guns - what I said about artillery has, thus far, been ignored. I guess 'artillery' is a term you are unfamiliar with.

Either the Spanish republicans were incompetent as all hell or you are just full of shit.

Dude, you're the one who can't follow this simple sentence:

"Even if we subtract Howson's $51 million in overcharges, acknowledge only the unpaid loan of $70 million, (rather than the potential $155 million), and subtract the cost of three DC-3s (roughly $360,000), the total value of the Soviet assistance provided to the Republic comes to approximately $525 million, or $7 million more than their gold should have bought."

So you're not only full of shit but also incompetent - leave me and the Republican's out of it and sort your self out, Son.

Andropov

23rd August 2012, 23:39

Well, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision archival documentation that would be able to accurately guage the full extent of problems - so personal accounts are all taht is really left to go on to judge how these weapons performed in the field. To quote Ismail's link:

"The research of Gerald Howson reveals that in the areas of rifles, machine-guns, and artillery, the Soviets sent their Spanish friends weapons that were either obsolete, in poor repair, or exceedingly difficult to maintain and arm. 29 (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod15.html#note29) Howson demonstrates that the Soviets delivered rifles of at least eight different nationalities, ten different types, and six different calibers. Nearly a quarter of all rifles supplied to the Republic were 11-mm French and Austrian pieces dating from the 1880s; the 11-mm caliber had been obsolete worldwide since the turn of the century. Similarly, Soviet-supplied machine-guns and heavy guns were sufficiently mixed in origin and date to make reliable ammunition re-supply all but impossible. Of course, Howson is not the first to allege that in the categories of small arms and artillery the Soviets simply shipped their surplus or outdated equipment, much of which dated from the revolutionary era or earlier. 30 (http://www.gutenberg-e.org/kod01/kod15.html#note30) The issue, however, has been excessively belabored. A recent memoir makes multiple references to the "Russian relics from World War I" that the Soviets passed off as rifles and machine-guns. This vintage seems far more ancient today than it would have to those living in the years before World War II."

But, of course, that only relates to small arms and artillery - as noted in post one, and in the article quoted above, Soviet Aircraft and Armour was state-of -the-art at least in the beginning of the war.
Zim ill let you, Khad and Ismail slog it out with regards to the references and documentable evidence because i'm afraid when it comes to this subject i'm out of my depth in comparison to yourselves, that was my only brief point.
As regards to your above point there in your own subjective interpretation why would the Soviets send many obsolete small arms and yet send superior tanks and planes? If there policy was indeed milk the Spanish out of as much capital as they can would it not have been more rational to have a consistent policy of sending obsolete material to Spain and not just small arms?

ind_com

23rd August 2012, 23:47

Hi guys! Very informative thread. I will raise two relevant points.

1) A successful revolution is supposed to be the self-liberation of the working class. If a revolution is so weak that it has to rely on weapons supplied by another nation, then it is not worth calling a revolution in the first place.

2) Assuming that the Soviet Union successfully deceived the Spanish revolutionaries in the transactions, this indicates huge incompetency in the Spanish revolutionary rank and file. Again, it is clear that they were not mature enough to win the civil war by themselves.

Invader Zim

24th August 2012, 00:14

Zim ill let you, Khad and Ismail slog it out with regards to the references and documentable evidence because i'm afraid when it comes to this subject i'm out of my depth in comparison to yourselves, that was my only brief point.
As regards to your above point there in your own subjective interpretation why would the Soviets send many obsolete small arms and yet send superior tanks and planes? If there policy was indeed milk the Spanish out of as much capital as they can would it not have been more rational to have a consistent policy of sending obsolete material to Spain and not just small arms?

Mate, your points were both excellent and valid regarding the issue with sources, as are those of this post. An your posts are exactly the kind of valid criticism I wanted. So please, continue. Regarding your points in this post, I'll have to get back to you tomorrow if that's ok. Anyway, thanks for your contributions.

khad

24th August 2012, 00:25

Mate, your points were both excellent and valid regarding the issue with sources, as are those of this post. An your posts are exactly the kind of valid criticism I wanted. So please, continue. Regarding your points in this post, I'll have to get back to you tomorrow if that's ok. Anyway, thanks for your contributions.
Right, and you still think that the 91 and 91/30 had significant differences. There's no real debate to be had with a kid can't even agree over the basic operation of the weapons in question, someone who thinks that rifles go bad after 20 years as if they were some rotten piece of fruit.

But I'm glad that some "stooges of Moscow" actually knew how to service their firearms. Some rudimentary gunsmithing can resolve most age-related accuracy issues.

A friend of mine has an old hex receivered Mosin that shoots very nice groups. It looks like crap but shoots all day.

Anyway, we were cleaning it up one day and discovered a shim made from folded and oiled newspaper. We unfolded it and found it to be a communist newpaper clipping from Spain.

Our theory is that it was one of the guns the Soviets gave to the anti-Franco troops during the Spanish civil war. Whoever was using it knew how to make it shoot pretty dang good groups.

I have alumimnum shims inside my Isaphore Enfield that I made from cutting up a small cat food can. I moved it to a couple different spots until the formerly horrible accuracy improved to 2-3 inch groups at 100 yards using iron sights.In war, either put up or shut up. No one's fault but your own if you don't understand your own damn weapons.

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

24th August 2012, 02:00

Left Anti-Communism, the worst kind of all. "'...a bunch of communist thugs' Noam, Naom! You're not Newt, you're Noam!" (Parenti to "Libertarian Socialist" Chomsky)

Workers-Control-Over-Prod

24th August 2012, 02:19

Can i just point one thing out.

If 20 years makes a rifle ancient, then ancient weapons seem to have no effective difference (for better or worse) on a conflict scale. (vietnam, WWII, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea) And the Maoists in India and Nepal have stuff one would assume they would have to preform magic to resurrect!

Actually just last year an Indian Maoist held down an entire unit of Special Police in India in an hours long battle, she only had an Enfield but managed to kill two or 3. Survived grenade attacks and all. She was ultimately killed. Whoda thunk you could do such a thing without a G36K!

Hell, your Average M1 tank in the US arsenal is just a constantly refurbished 1980s make. And not that i'm praising the marines, but, like, look at the shit they were still using in the gulf war...

I read an article a long time back about soldiers in Afghanistan complaining about the weapons they were given. They were given M16s from the Vietnam war, lorries from the cold war not for the desert, and out of date artillery that could not be transported in thet rucks they were given. Ground invasions for the European imperialist armies were a new thing, and complaints of the European NATO soldiers were supposedly worse.

Rational Radical

24th August 2012, 02:26

It's not "anti-communist" to acknowledge that the State Capitalists gave crappy,ancient weapons to the anti-francoist Spanish and robbed them . What exactly does it take to be a communist? Is it merely calling yourself one,casting all opposition as "counter-revolutionary"or "ultra-left",praising lenin and having a red flag? Your name is Workers-Control-Over-Prod yet you sure defend state capitalism ironically.

Invader Zim

24th August 2012, 05:07

Right, and you still think that the 91 and 91/30 had significant differences. There's no real debate to be had with a kid can't even agree over the basic operation of the weapons in question, someone who thinks that rifles go bad after 20 years as if they were some rotten piece of fruit.

But I'm glad that some "stooges of Moscow" actually knew how to service their firearms. Some rudimentary gunsmithing can resolve most age-related accuracy issues.

In war, either put up or shut up. No one's fault but your own if you don't understand your own damn weapons.

I've already addressed every one of the "points" you attempt to make, and noted why and how they are strawmen. I fail to see the point in writing them again.

Rusty Shackleford

24th August 2012, 05:56

A friend of mine has an inoperable old 11mm (originally) Italian infantry rifle from 1871. Yes, that thing is horrid. All it is missing is some parts for the magazine and the firing pin spring. it had a bore adjustment to take a 6 something mm round too. it also has a rear sight that is adjustable to 2km :lol:

Like, the bolt on this looks like one of those rifles where you would actually risk the bolt flying into your cheek like in Land and Freedom. Nagants though? Secure as shit. Mausers? Even Better.

But, im looking at a 140 year old rifle that has been sitting around for quite some time that had a very early bolt-action design. Im sure in the 30s it was still somewhat operable and though it had been replaced by carcanos, ammunition was probably still in production somewhere.

There were also some domestic spanish arms that were quite terrible as well. Like the police rifles that fired pistol rounds.

those 11mm rifles being sent were probably for political reasons but if those were no longer sent after the first two shipments then i doubt the SU was just trying to pull a fast one. Especially if the majority of shipments were Nagants.

And as Khad pointed out about shimming the barrel, fixes to the older rifles can be VERY simple. Im going to be getting some cork to place between the muzzle and stock on mine as well. and sometimes all that needs to be done is a proper clean or a little bit of smithing. like knocking the front site over a bit, tightening screws and so on.

Though, lets be real, Nagants arent the best (but they work, and they can be accurate). And even fighters in the Chinese Red Army would complain about the nagants they had and would prefer to use captured mausers.

o well this is ok I guess

24th August 2012, 06:33

It is worth noting that the time in which the spanish civil war occurred was at a point in which the pace at which small arm innovation was only just beginning to slow, as well as most weapons lacking an amount of standardization that exists with modern small arms (in terms of ammunition, accesories, and action). 20 years may not seem a lot to us, but back then 20 meant quite a bit of innovation in small arms. So, to equip a unit today with a hodgepog of different modern weapons is for the most part OK, as they will more likely chamber the same ammunition or have a the same rail system than weapons from an earlier time. However, this was not a benefit that could be enjoyed back in the civil war. So, one could criticize the Soviet Union for spending money on those particular unique firearms rather than simply taking the money that was used buying them and spending it on more Mosin's, though I'm not sure if it's a very important criticism.

Regarding the Maoist who held off a special police unit, this is but one example. Certainly, it's not impossible for someone to hold off a better equipped unit with small arms considered obsolete. And we can name innumerable instances of this occurring. However, this stems more from either the skill of the operator or the way in which the weapon is utilized. Or the weapon just has qualities that make it resilient to obsolescence, like the AK series. So, if we assume both sides to have had roughly the same level of training in their respective armies, generally the side that is better equipped has the better chance of winning. So, if you're planning to take on a police unit, then it's best to spend a bit of time at the range. And I've only been there once, so I'd rather have the G36K. Though you can't exactly blame the Soviets if the spaniards were ever poorly trained.

Invader Zim

24th August 2012, 13:47

Right, and you still think that the 91 and 91/30 had significant differences.

There was me thinking that you had already trolled your self out of this thread. Guess not.

And, I never actually said that - or anything like it. So, I guess you're right about one thing at least: there is no debate to be had. And, given that you know nothing about the Spanish Civil War, there never was.

DDR

24th August 2012, 13:58

Though, lets be real, Nagants arent the best (but they work, and they can be accurate). And even fighters in the Chinese Red Army would complain about the nagants they had and would prefer to use captured mausers.

From 1893 to the mid 1950's Mauser rifles was the standard issue of the spanish army. So getting one wasn't that dificult in the SCW, even I had shoot a Mouser Oviedo Model.

Invader Zim

24th August 2012, 21:57

This issue about restoring rifles is a strawman. The point Khad made was that the rifles sent to Spain were largely modern. However, the fact is that they weren't. Less than 80,000 of the Soviet built rifles were relatively recently built. The rest were anything between 20-50 years in age. That was the point I was making. I never said that their age necessarily impaired their performance. Though testimony from people who used them in the SCW suggests that they were poor-quality weapons with major problems. So, basically, the Soviet Union cleared out a lot of its old rifles and shipped them to the Spanish, while deducting money from the Spanish gold reserves that was far higher than the actual value of the rifles. That is the point.

However, I did say that reportedly the age of the age of many of the Machine guns sent had a deleterious impact on performance.

As regards to your above point there in your own subjective interpretation why would the Soviets send many obsolete small arms and yet send superior tanks and planes? If there policy was indeed milk the Spanish out of as much capital as they can would it not have been more rational to have a consistent policy of sending obsolete material to Spain and not just small arms?

I'm not sure how it is a subjective view. Only a portion of the small arms shipped were modern. While a lot of the tanks and plains sent to Spain were undeniably state-of-the-art. That's fact, and both of which I tried to make clear in the interest of balance and accuracy in my opening post.

And, they did milk them for these weapons too, again operating the exchange-rate scam and giving them arbitrary prices which had no reflection on the prices of comparable weapons in the international arms market. But, a thought provoking question, and one I had to do some research on early Soviet tank and aircraft production to draw a conclusion that made some sense in my own mind. It is worth remembering that at that time tank and aircraft design was in its infancy, the development of the tank primarily being a response to the conditions of trench warfare in WW1. So there were actually all that many tanks to send to Spain, in any real numbers, except those which were state-of-the-art. The first experimental Soviet armour company was only formed in 1929. So not only did they wish to test out their new weapons, and there were not that many old models to give. The early Soviet effort, the T-18, only went into production in 1928, and they didn't build many of them. The T-26 went into production in 1931, and was as good as any other tank of its type by the time of the Spanish Civil War. The same was true of the BT, which went into production in 1932. And they built a staggering number of these tanks in the 1930s, and had soon eclipsed every other nation on earth in tank numbers by the Spanish Civil War. So they the only tanks they had in any serious numbers to Spain, which also happened to be among the best produced at that time.

Similarly, the mass production Russian aircraft largely began in the 1930s (another of the Stalinist regime's most fruitful ideas) having built notably few aircraft during WW1 and the 1920s. And, again, what the Soviets did build in the 1930s, in serious numbers, were very good - and the Spanish Civil War provided an excellent opportunity to trial these aircraft and tanks in combat. It is worth noting that the Germans did the same, and sent some of their latest equipment to test it out, inform future designs and trial tactics. I can't recall where, but I remember reading that the performance of Soviet tanks in Spain directly influenced future Soviet designs, including the T34. So, sending their expensive state-of-the-art armour and aircraft to Spain was a wise policy.

Ismail

24th August 2012, 23:34

Similarly, you will take Grover Furr, who is actually far less qualified to pass judgement on the quality of the book than even the most reactionary conservative reviewers he laughably tries to criticise.Grover Furr knows Russian (which is quite handy since said documents are translations from the language), is in frequent contact with plenty of Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans and supporters (and has talked to academics specializing in the Spanish Civil War), and of course being a Professor who evidently focuses much of his extracurricular activities on Soviet history, has indeed some qualifications in assessing the book rather than random conservative reviewers.

I'd say the points Furr makes are valid, from distorted translations onward. Radosh is a right-winger and former Trot who rants about Obama; his goal is to utterly crap on the Soviet role in the conflict as a way of "confirming" views he left behind long ago. Furr himself notes that many of the documents are valuable; the interpretations given by Radosh significantly less so.

Invader Zim

25th August 2012, 00:19

Grover Furr knows Russian (which is quite handy since said documents are translations from the language), is in frequent contact with plenty of Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans and supporters (and has talked to academics specializing in the Spanish Civil War), and of course being a Professor who evidently focuses much of his extracurricular activities on Soviet history, has indeed some qualifications in assessing the book rather than random conservative reviewers.

I'd say the points Furr makes are valid, from distorted translations onward. Radosh is a right-winger and former Trot who rants about Obama; his goal is to utterly crap on the Soviet role in the conflict as a way of "confirming" views he left behind long ago. Furr himself notes that many of the documents are valuable; the interpretations given by Radosh significantly less so.

Grover Furr knows Russian (which is quite handy since said documents are translations from the language)

So do all Russianists - among whose number Furr is excluded - including the Russian scholars on the editorial board for this document collection series.

is in frequent contact with plenty of Abraham Lincoln Brigade veterans and supporters (and has talked to academics specializing in the Spanish Civil War), and of course being a Professor who evidently focuses much of his extracurricular activities on Soviet history, has indeed some qualifications in assessing the book rather than random conservative reviewers.

He is, however, no expert. His expertise is in Medieval literature. What he is doing is moonlighting, while the 'random conservative reviewers', including Robert Conquest, are not. And no academic historians take him remotely seriously. Why do you think that his hatchet-job review is on his website and not in a scholarly journal? It is also interesting that of the other reviews Furr references, none of them are from the scholarly press.

I'd say the points Furr makes are valid, from distorted translations onward.

Have you actually read the book? And from the few critiques I briefly skimmed over, some overtly seem like utter bollocks. For instance, Furr's analysis of Document 43, in which he complaints about Radosh's use of the term 'in other words' (which historians use all the time), are just wrong, as is his main criticism of Radosh's interpretation of the document which is perfectly valid.

Ismail

25th August 2012, 00:40

Have you actually read the book?Yes I have. Have you actually read Furr's article?

Teacher

25th August 2012, 00:43

Teacher

25th August 2012, 00:54

"Not long after we took our position on the hill, the fascist planes appeared again. This time they were much higher, so high that the planes looked like dots in the sky. We could see trails of exhaust and could hear the sound of planes in full throttle as a dogfight took place. Soviet Chatos had engaged the fascist planes in combat. We cheered and cheered. That was only one of many times that we watched Soviet planes come to our aid

Some of the planes were shot down, and a parachutist came out of one of them. We couldn't tell whether the downed plane was Soviet or fascist. Jerry Cook, standing next to me, rifle poised and aimed toward the sky, agonized, "I can't shoot him. Suppose he's a Soviet comrade."

He didn't shoot; later we learned that the parachutist was a Spanish fascist and that he was captured by another Loyalist outfit."

- Harry Fisher, Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War

Invader Zim

25th August 2012, 01:54

That Radosh book is a complete fraud as Furr shows definitively in his review. You don't even need to read Furr's review however since the documents that are in the back of the book contradict what Radosh says.

And Furr absolutely is an expert in Soviet history he's been studying it since the 1970s. He's more widely read on the subject than most historians of the period and he's published many articles and books.

That Radosh book is a complete fraud as Furr shows definitively in his review.

Not really, most of his critiques I've bothered to look at are often extremely petty, open to serious doubt, or are based on subjective interpretation of the documents that are no more valid than Radosh's. I noted one rather illustrative example, in my previous post. To provide another, Furr cherry-picks the commentary, stating:

"Document 5, a report by Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, to the Secretariat of the ECCI (Executive Committee, Communist International) of July 23, 1936, contains the following lines:

We should not, at the present stage, assign the task of creating soviets and try to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain. That would be a fatal mistake.

Radosh claims that this statement (a statement repeated in the press release)

. . . supports the contention of some scholars that the Communists purposely disguised their true objective, social revolution. (5-6)

But it does not. It clearly states that there are "stages," the present one being the stage of "maintaining unity with the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants and the radical intelligentsia . . ." (11). Radosh's claim could only be true if he gave evidence that the Communists were denying what everyone would have expected of them -- to wish to move to another "stage," once the fascists were defeated. Radosh gives no evidence that the Communists were making any such claims to have abandoned the ultimate goal of a Soviet-style revolution in Spain. So there can be no question of "disguising their true objective.""

However, this is, in fact, a misrepresentation of what Radosh actually argues - which is that there were indeed stages, and at that time the communists had to keep the liberals on side by supporting the Republic to defeat the Fascists. Once that was done, then they could move onto their actual long term agenda, which was dismantling the Republic they claimed they wanted to preserve. Had Furr quoted the very next sentence of Radosh's commentary it would read as follows:

"The very careful use of these terms, as well as the injunction to “act under the semblance of defending the republic,” supports the contention of some scholars that the Communists purposely disguised their true objective, social revolution. They would do this in the first place by pretending that their ultimate goal was merely a bourgeois democratic regime and in the second by concentrating on winning the war with the Nationalists first. Afterward, anything was possible."

Now, this reading hinges on a translation Furr disputes. Furr may, or may not, be right about that. I don't read Russian, and even if I did, doubtless the nuances in interpreting meaning and then translating that into English would require more than just the language but also familiarity with its cultural application. So, Furr might well be right about that, but the rest of his critique of Radosh's commentary of Document Five (and several others for that matter) is misleading, and tries to make an awful lot of hay over a very minor point at the expense of the main, and actual, point being made. It is also worth noting that the document also says:

"But if our [people] begin to confiscate factories and enterprises and wreak further havoc, the petty bourgeoisie, the radical intelligentsia, and part of the peasantry may move away, and our forces are still not sufficient for a struggle against the counterrevolutionaries. Therefore, we must place before the proletariat and the broad working masses those tasks that suit the concrete conditions of the present moment, that suit the strength of the party, the strength of the proletariat. Do not rush ahead and get carried away."

and:

"We ought to advise them to go forward with these weapons, as we have done in other situations, seeking to maintain unity with the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants and the radical intelligentsia, establishing and strengthening the democratic Republic at the present stage through the complete destruction of the fascist counterrevolutionary elements, and then we can proceed from there, resolving concrete questions."

Or, in other words (a term Furr apparently doesn't like), do not give the petty bourgeoisie, the radical intelligentsia, and the peasantry the impression that they wanted to invoke social revolution, by, for example, begin the widespread nationalisation of the means of production. But, once they were in a stronger position and the fascists had been destroyed... well, that was a different matter. At least that is what I took from the commentary and documents.

And, of course, Furr actually critique's Radosh's reading of nine of the documents, and as noted many of these critiques appear to be misleading, subjective or minor. If, of course, he had any serious critiques to make of the analysis of the other 72, presumably he would provided it. So really, using a hatchet job 'review' by a Stalinist apologist to dismiss relevant assertions made in the book, which Furr doesn't actually contradict, is nothing short of laziness and intellectual dishonesty.

You don't even need to read Furr's review however since the documents that are in the back of the book contradict what Radosh says.

There are some additional documents located within the appendices, but for the most part the documents directly related to Radosh's commentary are located with the documents in the main body of text.

And Furr absolutely is an expert in Soviet history

No, he isn't. He is an English professor. The clue to where his genuine expertise lies is in his job title. Writing agenda riddled tracts in your spare time does not automatically assign the status of expert.

he's been studying it since the 1970s.

And David Irving has been 'studying' Nazi Germany since the 1950s. That doesn't make him an 'expert' in Nazi Germany or an historian. And I have yet to see any evidence that anything that Furr has ever published in the field of Soviet history has been taken seriously by the community of academic historians.

He's more widely read on the subject than most historians of the period

'More widely read'? That professional academic historian? Do you have any idea how ridiculous, not to mention unfalsifiable, that assertion is? You're too funny. I literally laughed out loud when I read that.

and he's published many articles and books.

And how many of them have passed the basic benchmark of academic quality control - the peer-review process? You see, anybody can write a book or article and get it published. However, it is a very different story to get an article into a peer-reviewed journal or a book published by an academic publishing house with a rigorous peer-review process, like, say, Yale University Press - who, incidentally, published Spain Betrayed.

Teacher

25th August 2012, 05:06

Invader Zim

25th August 2012, 07:18

It doesn't matter what he teaches primarily. David Harvey is a professor of anthropology but his primary discipline is geography and he writes a lot about economics. Chomsky's primary discipline is linguistics, I guess nothing he says about foreign policy is to be taken seriously.

Chomsky's opinions on foreign policy are just that - opinions. He is an intelligence, well read and socially conscious individual. However he is by no means an expert in international relations, and I very much doubt he would assert otherwise.

And regarding David Harvey, social anthropology and human geography share a nebulous and overlapping borders anyway. I can perfectly well see why an anthropology department would hire a geographer. Similarly, I can perfectly well see why a politics department would hire an historian. However, I fail to see the close connection between scholarship in medieval literature, which is the field in which Furr is an accredited expert, and the Soviet Union's foreign policy in the 1930s.

You don't know what you're talking about.

And because you've read a few threads on H-Net, you think you do? Damn, son. You're cracking me up.

Grover has participated in debates and discussions with other experts in the field for over a decade (at least) on H-Net

So he posts on a forum populated by academics, what do you imagine that proves? Other than the fact he is a troll. And I'm waiting for you to substantiate your claim that he is 'more widely read' that most historians of Soviet Russia - and presumably the Spanish Civil War. In fact, one has time to achieve such breadth of mastery - given that he must also require a similarly extensive knowledge of his actual field of study, analysis of medieval literature. Given that he has, according to you, achieved a level of mastery in at least three major fields of research, each of which most academics spend their entire lives attempting to master, one has to wonder at the sycophancy of your posts.

Okay first of all it is kind of weird for a radical leftist (assuming that's what you are) to put so much faith in the peer review process. How much explicitly radical scholarship do you think makes it through the peer review process?

Well, actually I can think of quite a lot. Be it the towering paragon of historical scholarship that is E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, which is, in my view, the most important historical work produced in the last half-century. It is also hugely influential and its importance is pretty much universally recognized. Similarly, we have the work of Eric Hobsbawm, another Marxist, who has been suggested to be the world's greatest living historian. Or perhaps we can turn to the work of the socialist Angus Calder, whose The People's War was first published in 1969 and remains in print to this day, because it is arguably the single most important book written about Britain during the Second World War - and believe me, there is a lot of competition. Indeed, one can cite the entire intellectual school of Marxist historiography as clear evidence that writing from a radical perspective is absolutely no boundary to success in academia. The fact is that Historical Materialism is a well established paradigm for examining and understanding historical processes, so well established that even non-Marxist historians regularly employ it or are influenced by it. There are also plenty of other strands within the historiography that are replete with 'radical scholarship', be it queer history history from below, feminist history, hidden history, etc. In many ways a great deal of scholarship is inherently radical, because examining historical evidence fundamentally requires that the historian challenge and deconstruct received establishment narrative of events.

And, as it happens, I personally know many historians with socialist politics. And you can see it in their publications. And that is because scholarship is a method. And it is also why Furr is not an historian and his writing on the Soviet Union is not of a scholarly standard - because he doesn't use the sources to dictate his destination, in my opinion, it appears that he has chosen his destination and leads the sources. And, in my view, he does so in an egregious and transparent fashion. And that is why his work would not survive the peer-review process - because it is not of scholarly standard. Where as I imagine his work of Medieval English literature is.

That being said

Yes, obvious contradiction is obvious.

Furr has been published in Russian History and Russian Review which are both peer reviewed.

Indeed, I've looked through their back issues and have thus far found two examples- out of how many decades, and how many articles and books he has penned? Just two pass the basic benchmark test? That's pathetic. And, incidentally, neither of them at first glance seem to offer the kind of polemic apologia to be found in his other writings.

The Radosh review you are trashing was published (along with many other of his major articles) in Cultural Logic which is also peer reviewed.

Evidently you aren't all that familiar with academic publishing - or if you are then you are being a little mendacious. Research articles are subject to the peer-review process, book reviews are not.

And Cultural Logic, and what is that prestigious title? I've never even heard of it.

Some time later...

After doing some reading round, it would appear to be a minor e-journal, that isn't actually a historical journal of any description. But, I suppose if has some modern Russian historians on the editorial board... oh wait, it doesn't. In fact, it doesn't have any historians on the editorial board. There are three English professors, one in social studies, one in education and a sociologist. I also looked up a few people on the advisory board - again, no historians of modern Russia. So while Cultural Logic might well be peer-reviewed, it is not by individuals who are experts in the field Furr engaging. Which really rather calls the whole exercise into question. So if this is where Furr is publishing his 'major' articles, as opposed to, say, Slavic Review, or even less prestigious journals, niché journals, including the ones you noted earlier, then really that tells us all we need to know.

Your attempts to discredit him have nothing to do with any kind of objective assessment of him as a scholar and everything to do with the fact that you don't like his political conclusions.

Nonsense, there are plenty of actual historians whose conclusions, political or otherwise, I vehemently disagree with, but whose work I can still respect. That is what much of academia is about, thesis and antithesis. As an oral historian, I think J. Arch Getty's pronouncements regarding memory (which, as I recall he described as corridor gossip or words to that effect) are off the mark, but that doesn't mean I do not recognize his scholarship even if I do disagree with it. And that is the difference, J. Arch Getty the scholarship of his work in Soviet history is, in my view, undeniable. But he is in the business of producing history, not polemical apologia. And, of course, the silly thing about your aspersion is that the obvious counter-argument is basically the same but inverted - the reason you defend him is not because you have any real familiarity with the field or willingness to examine it critically, but because it is convenient to your political assumptions to uphold his work as res ipsa loquitur evidence of negligence on the part of virtually the entire academic community that isn't Grover Furr.

Sir Comradical

25th August 2012, 09:34

Lol at people arguing with khad over military stuff. Over MILITARY stuff ffs. And yes, 20 years is brand new in rifle years.

Rusty Shackleford

25th August 2012, 12:01

I read an article a long time back about soldiers in Afghanistan complaining about the weapons they were given. They were given M16s from the Vietnam war, lorries from the cold war not for the desert, and out of date artillery that could not be transported in thet rucks they were given. Ground invasions for the European imperialist armies were a new thing, and complaints of the European NATO soldiers were supposedly worse.
do you have a link to this? I was under the assumption that most everything in the US arsenal around 2001 to present was updated to or surpassed 1980s standards.

I would honestly be shocked to see a Sheridan or a Patton or an older 155mm Howitzer in Afghanistan.

khad

25th August 2012, 12:20

I would honestly be shocked to see a Sheridan or a Patton or an older 155mm Howitzer in Afghanistan.
I'm sure there are some older stocks from the 70s, but due to the modus operandi of the capitalist defense industry, the USA does not massively stockpile old equipment for a rainy day.

In fact they've been systematically destroying things like mothballed vehicles in order to force the government to buy. This is one of the major reasons why the Stryker is so hot while it would have been more cost-effective to retool and update the M113s.

If soldiers in the field were indeed given M16s from the Vietnam era, that would represent a major logistical failure, because the old barrels are not rifled enough to stablilize the heavier NATO ball. You'd have to issue the older M193 ammunition for them, and that would lead to more confusion because it's not immediately obvious what is what since they all fire the same size of cartridge.

Invader Zim

25th August 2012, 15:33

Lol at people arguing with khad over military stuff. Over MILITARY stuff ffs. And yes, 20 years is brand new in rifle years.

Khad might have a bizarre fixation for rifle technical specifications, however, his suggestion that the the lion share of the weapons the Soviet Union sent to Spain were modern is demonstrably false, the statistics he cited were wrong inflating the number of Mosin-Nagant 91/30 rifles sent, and has assertions regarding the quality of machine guns not reducing due to age is flatly contradicted by veterans accounts.

And as for the rifle age question, the weapons had entered production 46 years, had left production and replaced by the 91/30 model in 1930 (yes, the numbers mean something). So by that standard the lion-share of the Mosin-Nagant rifles sent to Spain were not modern. More over, it would appear that the physical age were also from the First World War production lines. So again, not 'modern'. And certainly not from the previous year's production lines, which is the claim made by various element's of Soviet Officialdom. That is the standard they set, and I am using, for the term 'modern'. Indeed, I'm being generous and suggesting that all the 91/30 rifles were, by definition, modern in 1937.

Andropov

25th August 2012, 16:12

I'm not sure how it is a subjective view. Only a portion of the small arms shipped were modern. While a lot of the tanks and plains sent to Spain were undeniably state-of-the-art. That's fact, and both of which I tried to make clear in the interest of balance and accuracy in my opening post.
By your subjective view I was referring to your opinion on why you thought the Soviets sent superior Tank's and Plane's to Spain and a smaller proportion of adequate small arms, that is all.

And, they did milk them for these weapons too, again operating the exchange-rate scam and giving them arbitrary prices which had no reflection on the prices of comparable weapons in the international arms market. But, a thought provoking question, and one I had to do some research on early Soviet tank and aircraft production to draw a conclusion that made some sense in my own mind. It is worth remembering that at that time tank and aircraft design was in its infancy, the development of the tank primarily being a response to the conditions of trench warfare in WW1. So there were actually all that many tanks to send to Spain, in any real numbers, except those which were state-of-the-art. The first experimental Soviet armour company was only formed in 1929. So not only did they wish to test out their new weapons, and there were not that many old models to give. The early Soviet effort, the T-18, only went into production in 1928, and they didn't build many of them. The T-26 went into production in 1931, and was as good as any other tank of its type by the time of the Spanish Civil War. The same was true of the BT, which went into production in 1932. And they built a staggering number of these tanks in the 1930s, and had soon eclipsed every other nation on earth in tank numbers by the Spanish Civil War. So they the only tanks they had in any serious numbers to Spain, which also happened to be among the best produced at that time.

Similarly, the mass production Russian aircraft largely began in the 1930s (another of the Stalinist regime's most fruitful ideas) having built notably few aircraft during WW1 and the 1920s. And, again, what the Soviets did build in the 1930s, in serious numbers, were very good - and the Spanish Civil War provided an excellent opportunity to trial these aircraft and tanks in combat. It is worth noting that the Germans did the same, and sent some of their latest equipment to test it out, inform future designs and trial tactics. I can't recall where, but I remember reading that the performance of Soviet tanks in Spain directly influenced future Soviet designs, including the T34. So, sending their expensive state-of-the-art armour and aircraft to Spain was a wise policy.
Hmm its plausible but personally I am not convinced.
As you stated there were older models of Tank's and heavy armour, not in great numbers and early designs but these just like some of the more archaic small weapons could have been sent to Spain while also sending a smaller proportion of T-26. A credible gauge of the effetiveness of this new model of Tank could easily have been attained without sending them in such vast numbers.
Also the same argument you utilised there in relation to Tank's could easily be applied to small weapons. That the Spanish Civil War could have been a great testing ground for new weapons designs and no doubt could inform and influence future designs.
Your point is very much possible but far from convincing from my perspective.

Sir Comradical

26th August 2012, 02:05

Khad might have a bizarre fixation for rifle technical specifications, however, his suggestion that the the lion share of the weapons the Soviet Union sent to Spain were modern is demonstrably false, the statistics he cited were wrong inflating the number of Mosin-Nagant 91/30 rifles sent, and has assertions regarding the quality of machine guns not reducing due to age is flatly contradicted by veterans accounts.

And as for the rifle age question, the weapons had entered production 46 years, had left production and replaced by the 91/30 model in 1930 (yes, the numbers mean something). So by that standard the lion-share of the Mosin-Nagant rifles sent to Spain were not modern. More over, it would appear that the physical age were also from the First World War production lines. So again, not 'modern'. And certainly not from the previous year's production lines, which is the claim made by various element's of Soviet Officialdom. That is the standard they set, and I am using, for the term 'modern'. Indeed, I'm being generous and suggesting that all the 91/30 rifles were, by definition, modern in 1937.

Yeah? And the first world war was only around twenty years ago in 1936 so as khad said, relatively modern in gun years. In any case can you explain to me why the bulk of the weapons sent by the USSR were inferior, regardless of their age? Because modernity doesn't mean dick if there haven't been any qualitative leaps in rifle technology.

human strike

27th August 2012, 01:11

Generally aid isn't paid for at all, let alone with a state's entire gold reserve.

Lev Bronsteinovich

27th August 2012, 01:50

The problem with the Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War was POLITICAL!!!!! They fought to tie the workers to a bourgeois republic. This when most of the bourgeoisie was on Franco's side. They fought against the most advanced radical workers. The details of the aid/sales are interesting, but I hope comrades realize, totally beside the main issues with Soviet intervention in the war. The Soviets sabotaged the Spanish Revolution -- fought for a "people's front" against fascism and thereby undermined the armed revolutionary Spanish proletariat. They helped the bourgeois republican government in a military battle against the workers that had seized the central telephone exchange in Barcelona. They were more interested in appeasing the western powers than in fighting for revolution. Another example of the pernicious fruits of "socialism in one country."

The_Red_Spark

27th August 2012, 02:46

2. What was its quality of these weapons?

In terms of both tanks and aircraft, the quality of the arms sent by the USSR was broadly - though certainly not universally, of a high standard. Among the items sent were 280 T-26 tanks, which were a light tank as good as any other tank of its type at that time. In terms of Aircraft the Soviets sent, among others, 93 SB Katiuska bombers which were, for their day, exceptional aircraft capable of outpacing fighter interceptors until the introduction of the German Me 109, similarly the Polikarpov I-16 (400+ were delivered to Spain) proved effective until the introduction of the Me 109. However, in both cases the superior numbers of Nationalist aircraft limited their effectiveness. So while the USSR sent good kit, it didn't send anything like enough.

However, in terms of everything else, from rifles to artillery, the quality of weapons sent was often very low, and not only that they were not uniform in calibre or design. For instance, in 1936 the USSR sent a total of 58,183 rifles to Spain, 13,357 of which were 11mm Vetterli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vetterli_rifle) rifles, which had been built in 1871. Similarly, a further 11,821 11mm Gras-Kropatschek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebel_Model_1886_rifle) rifles made and designed 50+ years before and decades out of date. 5,000 7.92mm Mausers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7.92%C3%9757mm_Mauser) were also sent. Furthermore, only limited ammunition was sent for these rifles, the Vetterlis rifles were sent with only 185 rounds each, the Gras with 395 and the Mauser's with 500. This meant that they were effectively useless after only a few days or weeks use.

The Soviets also sent 200 ancient Maxim machine gun (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_machine_gun)s, 400 Chauchats (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauchat), 300 St-Etiennes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._%C3%89tienne_Mle_1907), and a number of Lewis guns (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_gun), most of which were produced back in the First World War if not earlier. These ancient weapons were notoriously inaccurate and temperamental and practically useless in combat.

The situation in terms of artillery was very similar, the USSR sent ancient junk, with limited ammo and was practically useless. For example they sent 94 Vickers 4.5 in. M1910 Mk1 howitzers, and 30 Maklen 37mm M1917 field guns. Both were products of an earlier generation, the latter in particular was designed as a light-infantry support weapon for trench warfare, and of little practical application. They also sent 20 de Bange 155mm M1877 field guns that had been obsolete for decades.

So, with the exception of the limited numbers of tanks and aircraft (which were to be eclipsed and outclassed by the end of the war) which did not arrive in sufficiently significant numbers to be as effective as they might have been, the Soviet Union used Spain as an opportunity to sell a lot of its ancient junk from its arsenals collected over the years. These weapons were inefficient, inaccurate, prone to malfunction and did not arrive with sufficient ammunition to last several weeks, let alone the many months of campaigning before further ammunition was acquired.

I want to state beforehand that I am not attempting to justify any side of this arguments position. I am not a Stalinist but I do have valuable insight to offer on this debate that is of a historical nature. There are several inaccuracies in this above section of text that I would like to touch on.

I will start first with the claim leveled at the 'ancient' rifles. I think this is an easy position to hold in the year 2012 but it would not have been so easy to make this claim in 1936. Both the Vetterli and the Gras were repeating rifles with large capacities. The Vetterli was an eleven shot bolt action rifle and bolt action rifles were the standard at the time. Yet the Mauser, first made in 1898 hence the nomenclature on the later Kar 98, had only a 5 round capacity. Were the two rifles state of the art? No, but they were not useless junk nor were they ancient and they were used in the First World War just like the Mauser was. I expect they were a welcome addition by the Spanish.

Next I want to say that the t-26 was not equal to, but superior to, the German tanks sent to Spain and caused the German General Staff to work on new designs to address this concern. It was an awesome tank at that time and was very very effective in Spain. To say otherwise is to play down its superiority and its abilities.

Next issue is the artillery. I find it odd that light anti tank guns were considered useless or compared in any way to the 88mm field piece. First because at the start of WWII these 'light' guns were the norm of the period and in fact most armies used anti-tank 'rifles' and had few artillery anti-tank guns that are now considered 'light' like the early war standard 37mm German 'door knocker'. This is an odd thing to say about any anti tank artillery of this era in general. It was probably considered a godsend at the time and no one had used 88mm guns as anti tank guns until the invasion of France though it was theorized far before then. One other point is that AA guns were the standard German anti tank guns in the first world war.

Next is the idea that the Vickers 4.5 inch howitzer was not a good piece of equipment. In fact it was used by the British military until 1942 and by British colonial troops until 1944. This is not 'ancient' or the definition of a useless piece of artillery. It was even used against the Desert Foxes troops in the Western Dessert. This claim is unsubstantiated.

The Maklen 37mm anti tank gun was used by the USSR in WWII. I guess they felt what was good for the goose was good for the gander. In fact it was lethal against many of the light tanks that were common even in the early part of WWII so I doubt the Spaniards cursed Stalin for this gift that would have been very very successful against fascist and nationalist tanks. This claim is also unsubstantiated and without basis.

Just to make a point about the common usage of old field guns that were still in major use during the outbreak of WWII I will list a few used by various major powers. Germany sFH 1918, leFH 1918, lelG 1918, and a few others. France the worlds largest army in 1936 used 37mm mle. 1916, Canon de 155 C modèle 1915 St. Chamond, Canon de 155 C modèle 1915 a copy of gun made in 1910, Canon de 105 mle 1913 Schneider, Canon de Montagne de 65mm mle. 1906 which was still in use during Israels war in 1948, Canon Court de 105M mle. 1906, and the 'ancient' Canon de 75 mle.1897 known as the French 75 which they had thousands of still in service in 1940. The age isn't a sign of its use or its effectiveness.

The last thing I want to address is the worst piece of information in the entire post. This was made in regard to the Maxim machine gun. The post said they were useless in combat. This is totally absurd considering the USSR used them right up till 1945. In fact they were used by just about every nation in Europe during the war and at times even after and it is one of the best MG's ever made. The US used it as the M1917 HMG 'Browning HMG', the USSR used it as the Pulemyot Maxima PM1910, the British used it throughout the entire war as the Vickers Machine Gun (and it was in fact the main MG), the Germans used it throughout the war in odd capacities as the MG08, and it was used by the French, until their surrender, as a substitute for the Hotchkiss MG. I could also bring up the fact that the worthless and ancient Lewis Gun remained in service right up until 1953 in the Korean War but I think I have added enough for the night. This claim is as I said; quite absurd and has no basis in reality.

Like I said I really have no desire to enter the fray as a pro-USSR or pro-Stalinist but the facts are much different than they have been portrayed. If we are going to make claims we need to make sure they are based in facts.

Andropov

27th August 2012, 09:27

Lev Bronsteinovich

27th August 2012, 14:37

Igor

27th August 2012, 17:57

Yeah? And the first world war was only around twenty years ago in 1936 so as khad said, relatively modern in gun years. In any case can you explain to me why the bulk of the weapons sent by the USSR were inferior, regardless of their age? Because modernity doesn't mean dick if there haven't been any qualitative leaps in rifle technology.

Probably not that relevant because I'm not really a gun expert, but when I was serving my obligatory military service here, my own assault rifle was nearly 50 years old. Only very few were given the new model, which only had some little improvements made and is almost two decades years old model itself. Guns really don't expire in a good while.

Andropov

27th August 2012, 18:03

Well, comrade, these things are well documented. I just wanted to say that you are arguing details that, while interesting, miss the central issues about soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War. You are missing the forest for the trees. So while it is clear that the USSR would have preferred that Franco lose to the Republicans -- their role was an overall negative. And I don't know how dickering about the modernity or quantity of weapons, or whether the Republicans were cheated or not would change that one iota.
Ok we get it, you oppose the USSR, your a super Leftist, your one of the few that can be a Communist and yet be critical of the Soviet Union, your a trail blazer, a sage, your a true asset to this forum, happy now?
This thread is in relation to Soviet Aid, not the over arching reasons behind Soviet involvement so please take your nonsense to one of the numerous other threads dealing with your exact arguement and stop cluttering up this thread with that drivel.

Invader Zim

27th August 2012, 18:48

I will start first with the claim leveled at the 'ancient' rifles. I think this is an easy position to hold in the year 2012 but it would not have been so easy to make this claim in 1936. Both the Vetterli and the Gras were repeating rifles with large capacities. The Vetterli was an eleven shot bolt action rifle and bolt action rifles were the standard at the time.

You are talking about rifles built in 1871. That would make them 65 years old. Imagine the modern US army going to war with rifles designed and built in WW2. You are talking about people going to war with rifles older than many of their grandparents. For the most part the major powers in WW2 did not send their troops to battle with weapons built in the 19th century. The British modified and produced multiple variants of the Lee-Enfield by WW2, the Russians had modified and mass-produced new Mosin-Nagant rifles (some of which they eventually shipped to Spain) from 1930 on, etc. The fact is that any major power you care to choose was in the process of building new rifles, with new designs, to replace their old weapons by the 1930s. That they were not always able to complete this process by WW2 does not speak in favour of the old rifles, it is a commentary on production.

No, but they were not useless junk nor were they ancient and they were used in the First World War just like the Mauser was.

The Vetteri rifles were indeed used in WW1, but only because the war enormously strained rifle production. They used these weapons because they literally had nothing else available - not because they were superior weapons. And, of course, we are talking about another generation (which had its own new designs and weapons) on from WW1.

Next I want to say that the t-26 was not equal to, but superior to, the German tanks sent to Spain and caused the German General Staff to work on new designs to address this concern. It was an awesome tank at that time and was very very effective in Spain. To say otherwise is to play down its superiority and its abilities.

And understates its weakness in terms of armour. But you're right, it was a better tank than the Panzer I's and CV33 tankette. But this hardly contradicts the point being made, that Soviet Armour and Aircraft sent to Spain were state-of-the-art.

Next issue is the artillery. I find it odd that light anti tank guns were considered useless or compared in any way to the 88mm field piece.

They were compared that way because the 88mm was designed to be both an anti-aircraft weapon as well as anti-armour. And it excelled in that capacity. Which returns us to the question of why the Soviets were charging far more (nearly double) for the weapons they sent than the value of the 88mm.

Next issue is the artillery. I find it odd that light anti tank guns were considered useless or compared in any way to the 88mm field piece. First because at the start of WWII these 'light' guns were the norm of the period and in fact most armies used anti-tank 'rifles' and had few artillery anti-tank guns that are now considered 'light' like the early war standard 37mm German 'door knocker'. This is an odd thing to say about any anti tank artillery of this era in general. It was probably considered a godsend at the time and no one had used 88mm guns as anti tank guns until the invasion of France though it was theorized far before then. One other point is that AA guns were the standard German anti tank guns in the first world war.

The Maklen was actually a US weapon, bought by the Tsarists in 1916. It was designed at the turn of the century (and obviously not as an anti-Tank weapon), and tested by the US army on several occasions, and turned down as being unfit for purpose every time (including one last time in 1919). Quite why the Russian Imperial Army bought a few hundred of them is beyond speculation. Regardless, when the weapons arrived they obvious concluded that an error had been made as they weren't used by either the Whites or the Reds and sat untouched for 20 years, when they offloaded a number of them to the Spanish. Oh, and each of the weapons I mentioned came with only weeks worth of ammunition to lasts for months worth of combat. So, regardless of their efficient use in principal vs. practice debate, they were after a minimal amount of time giant and extremely expensive paper weights.

The Maklen 37mm anti tank gun was used by the USSR in WWII.

When and where? Because I've never read that. Could it be like the use of the Vetteri, in that it was the only thing to hand?

Next is the idea that the Vickers 4.5 inch howitzer was not a good piece of equipment.

It was... during WW1. And the British built about 3,300 of them (only 500, or around 15%, of which were left in existence by WW2) and it had long since left production by WW2.

This was made in regard to the Maxim machine gun. The post said they were useless in combat. This is totally absurd considering the USSR used them right up till 1945.

I've already addressed this in earlier posts. The issue wasn't so much with the design, but the physical age of the actual weapons, which had left them inaccurate. While good for suppressing attacking enemies, and better than the rest of what the Soviets sent, they were not the modern state-of-the-art weapons fresh from the production lines that various branches of the Soviet State were informing other branches they were. They were old weapons off-loaded to the Spanish.

If we are going to make claims we need to make sure they are based in facts.

Indeed we do, which is why most of what you've posted needs to be heavily qualified. You suggest that because weapons of a previous era saw limited action in WW2 they can legitimately be seen as being modern. However, this is the wrong was of viewing the issue. Just because the process of rearmament had been over taken by events does not alter the fact that they were outmoded aged weapons of a previous generation.

Generally aid isn't paid for at all, let alone with a state's entire gold reserve.

Which is, of course, the other fundamental point - which has been lost in all this discussion to the minutia of detail regarding the reasonable expected length of time that a weapon might be deemed modern.

The_Red_Spark

27th August 2012, 22:07

You are talking about rifles built in 1871. That would make them 65 years old. Imagine the modern US army going to war with rifles designed and built in WW2. You are talking about people going to war with rifles older than many of their grandparents. We do right now when we use the Ma Deuce or the M-2 Browning .50 caliber heavy MG. It was actually a WWI built weapon and it is still one of the finest weapons of its kind. Age doesn't equate to useless which was the claim that you put forth. Coincidentally State of the art means on par with the current tools of the trade technologically. This term is being tossed around in your post and here a WWI weapon is 'state of the art' in the 21st century. ????? It is older than most of the soldiers in the US Army and has outlived all of their Grandparents and mine.

The Vetteri rifles were indeed used in WW1, but only because the war enormously strained rifle production. They used these weapons because they literally had nothing else available - not because they were superior weapons or even on par. So, even during WW1 these weapons were long past their sell-by-date, and we are talking about a war another generation on.
The Italians used them in WWII so I don't see them as ancient or useless. Your post refers to them as 'useless' and 'ancient' like they couldn't be used, and that they were from ancient Rome or something, and this is hardly the case. The Spanish Communists used them for the same reasons; because they literally 'had nothing else' and had little to no production on their own. There is no sell-by-date on weapons. As I said there were plenty of WWI weapons still in use during WWII and bolt action rifles were just becoming obsolete by the end of WWII. This was the state-of-the-art during this time period. The technology was the same and they were not 'useless' or 'ancient' by any stretch. The French used a rifle of the same age and type in WWII. You are playing Monday morning quarterback and not able to see that the 'state of the art' was bolt action rifles with less of a magazine capacity than the Vetterli had.

And understates its weakness in terms of armour. But you're right, it was a better tank than the Panzer I's and CV33 tankette. But this hardly contradicts the point being made, that Soviet Armour and Aircraft sent to Spain were state-of-the-art.
The armor is weak compared to a Tiger I or a Koenigstiger sure, but this was a very advanced tank in 1936 when most tanks had less armor and only MGs as armament. In Spain only the Renault FT a ancient and useless WWI tank had better armor and none of the tanks used there were as sound a design. It had better armament than all but one tank which had the same caliber of main gun but was used by both sides in limited number.

Coincidentally the Russians supplied 281 T-26 and the Germans supplied 122 Panzer ones armed with just MGs and Italians supplied 155 L3/35 L3/33 tanks armed only with Mgs, and the French supplied both sides with Renault Ft tanks which actually were armed in some occasions with a main gun but were mostly armed with MG's. This is why I said there was no comparison. They were more advanced and capable and they were not on par with any other tank. That was and still is my point. You act like they were on equal grounds and neglect to state that the USSR supplied more tanks to the Popular Front than all of the other nations supplied to the Nationalists combined 331-300. I will use your favorite source...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tanks_in_the_Spanish_Civil_War

They were compared that way because the 88mm flak was designed to be both an anti-aircraft weapon as well as anti-armour. And it excelled in that capacity. Errr! Wrong! It was never designed with this purpose in mind. The General Staff states in the TruppenFuhrung(The German Field Manual for the German General Staff) that in the event of an emergency the AA gun could be considered as a weapon to be used against tanks. This is because they had used lighter AA guns with limited success in the First World War.

They were not designed as dual purpose weapons and the original 88mm gun did not come equipped with a gun shield to protect the crew or the ability to operate as it did later once it was used to stop French Char B tanks in an emergency. This is why Rommel is credited incorrectly for discovering the usage against tanks. At that point it became popular to use against tanks and a gun shield was added to aid in the defense of the crew and it was given more flexibility in aiming on a flat trajectory, and additional sights, so it could engage ground targets effectively instead of aiming down the barrel(Read Guderians Panzer Leader if you want to argue this fact). The only 88mm guns that were used to engage ground targets before 1940 were the bunker busting guns fixed on vehicles that were built to penetrate the Maginot line.

The Maklen was actually a US weapon, bought by the Tsarists in 1916. It was designed at the turn of the century (and obviously not as an anti-Tank weapon), and tested by the US army on several occasions, and turned down as being unfit for purpose every time (including one last time in 1919). Quite why the Russian Imperial Army bought a few hundred of them is beyond speculation. Regardless, when the weapons arrived they obvious concluded that an error had been made as they weren't used by either the Whites or the Reds and sat untouched for 20 years, when they offloaded a number of them to the Spanish. Oh, and each of the weapons I mentioned came with only weeks worth of ammunition to lasts for months worth of combat. So, regardless of their efficient use in principal vs. practice debate, they were after a minimal amount of time giant extremely expensive paper weights.Indeed it was a US weapon. The US Army said the same of the Luger P08 which was used for forty years by Germany. They also said the same of the Christie Chasis which went on to become the formidable T-34 so what is the point? It went on to be used on the battlefield against all kinds of targets. That is neither ancient nor useless yet you claim a 37mm gun, which was larger in caliber than 95% of Nationalists tank's main gun, were only 'expensive paper weights' which is hardly a fact, let alone the truth of the matter, in 1936 when anti-tank rifles were the state of the art.

Yet you see nothing wrong with the claim due to a Army report????? Do you want to see the one on the worthless and flawed T-34 from the US Army? Was the T-34 useless because the US Army wrote a report that it was flawed and not suitable for their use? The question is not whether it was perfect or the best in the world but was it used to effect or was it 'useless' or 'ancient'. The answer in an absolute yes it was useful; and NO it was not useless or ancient.

When and where? Because I've never read that. Could it be like the use of the Vetteri, in that it was the only thing remaining?
I read it last night but now I can't even find the wikipedia article when I google it. I don't know why??? If I find it again I will post it but they had several hundred of them in service during the early part of the war.

It was... during WW1. And the British built about 3,300 of them (only 500 of which were left in existence by WW2) and it had long since left production by WW2.
It was used all over Europe, Asia and in Africa throughout the first 5 years of the war. It was neither 'useless' nor 'ancient' and that was the position you established at the beginning of the thread. There were plenty of field guns like this that were in use despite the fact they were designed during WWI for trenches and pillboxes. They were used to combat dug in troops and fortifications and were very effective when used. Trenches were the standard before true tank warfare was developed in WWII.

I don't consider the British Army weapon of WWII to be 'useless' in 1936 when it was widely 'used' so often and so widespread. That is an error or an outright misrepresentation. The fact that you continue to argue your point on most of this is making me wonder if giving you the benefit of the doubt is still applicable.

I've already addressed this in earlier posts. The issue wasn't so much with the design, but the physical age of the actual weapons, which had left them inaccurate. While good for suppressing attacking enemies, and better than the rest of what the Soviets sent, they were not the modern state-of-the-art weapons fresh from the production lines that various branches of the Soviet State were informing other branches they were. They were old weapons off-loaded to the Spanish.
How did you arrive at the conclusion that the were old or inaccurate due to use or age? Did you inspect them or is this based on something else that formulated the position you put forth? State-of-the-art has nothing to do with age of a weapon or wear and tear. It is about the level of technology. Here again you are using this term incorrectly and however you seem to want to use it.

Again my point was that they were not 'ancient' or 'useless'. They were probably every bit as useful as they were in WWI and WWII when they were often used to great effect despite the wear to the barrel. MG's aren't rifles and accuracy is not the prime concern; nor is it an issue when used to hold ground or in vectored fire as they would be used most often. Whether or not they were 'old weapons' or new weapons; they would have been better than nothing or what the Spanish Communists had before they arrived.

Indeed we do, which is why most of what you've posted needs to be heavily qualified. You suggest that because weapons of a previous era saw limited action in WW2 they can legitimately be seen as being modern. However, this is the wrong was of viewing the issue. Just because the process of rearmament had been over taken by events does not alter the fact that they were outmoded aged weapons of a previous generation.
No, I don't think I used the word modern in my entire post. This is a strawman logical fallacy. Though you question the qualification of my argument I have no desire to do your research for you and I challenge you to prove any of what I said to be inaccurate. Does a physicist feel the need to qualify basic theory and concepts of physics in order to prove his point to a layman? If you doubt my points look it up. I don't have time to dig out dozens of books to teach you on this.

Now back to the real point. I stated that your position that the weapons were 'useless' and 'ancient' is not a valid point and that your post demonstrates a complete inability to view this accurately or in historical context. They were not 'modern' but they were some of the very same weapons that were provided to the Nationalists by other nations. Do you believe that the French, Italians and Germans sought to sabotage their side too?

You haven't investigated the other contributions by the bourgeois powers but you immediately conclude that the USSR deliberately sabotaged the side of the Communists. This is not proven with anything by the post that you made alleging the weapons were 'ancient' and 'useless' and my post demonstrates that this is not true. It shows how even Britain used these weapons after 1936 so how were they 'useless' or 'ancient' or the means of sabotage? The very words are devoid of any legitimacy in the debate as I have shown. The word ancient is not applicable to a weapon of even 100 years of age. This is a flawed logic and an appeal to emotions through the use of distortions.

Which is, of course, the other fundamental point - which has been lost in all this discussion to the minutia of detail regarding the reasonable expected length of time that a weapon might be deemed modern.
This is important to consider. You cannot call a weapon obsolete if it is the same basic technology that all sides are using as the standard. The word modern has no meaning here. Do you consider a weapon designed in WWI as modern? Yet the M-2 Browning is a modern weapon that is in wide use. It is on every main battle tank the US military owns yet it is of WWI vintage. Or how about the standard German MG-3, in use by the Bundeswehr today, which almost the same exact weapon formerly known as the MG-42? It is a technology that is as effective today as it was in WWII and this is not disputed anywhere or by anybody.

Modern is not the point. The point is that a weapon that fires using the same basic technology as the rest of the world is still a useful and valuable weapon. This applies to the weapons sold to Spanish Communists regardless of how much you want to solidify and fortify your conclusion that this was deliberate sabotage. The evidence you offered up is faulty and it should not be used to support the claim. Period.

Invader Zim

28th August 2012, 13:55

We do right now when we use the Ma Deuce or the M-2 Browning .50 caliber heavy MG. It was actually a WWI built weapon and it is still one of the finest weapons of its kind. Age doesn't equate to useless which was the claim that you put forth. Coincidentally State of the art means on par with the current tools of the trade technologically. This term is being tossed around in your post and here a WWI weapon is 'state of the art' in the 21st century. ????? It is older than most of the soldiers in the US Army and has outlived all of their Grandparents and mine.

Are you trying to suggest that the M2 Browning has not A. undergone revision and upgrade since its introduction and production in 1933 (you confuse design in WW1 with production in the inter-war period), and B. that the US Army is fielding weapons physcially constructed in 1933 today?

Furthermore, to what extent is the M2 Browning typical? And why, if this weapon has had such longevity does it imply that all other weapons must be considered in the same light? You comparison is, basically, invalid.

The Italians used them in WWII so I don't see them as ancient or uselessWell, the Italian's used a revised version of them in WW1, which they converted from single shot weapons, as a last ditch effort to increase their rifle supply in the face of the increasing demand of WW1. This was because they retained stocks of the rifles following the decision to modernise their troops armaments by converting to the Carcano rifle - a process in which they were cut short by WW1. What evidence do you have to suggest that these rifles found use in WW2? And how extensive was that use? Furthermore, the Soviet's sent the single shot versions to Spain - not those weapons the Italian's later upgraded. So again, your comparison is wholly invalid.

Your post refers to them as 'useless' and 'ancient' like they couldn't be used, and that they were from ancient Rome or something, and this is hardly the case.Evidently you fail to fully understand what the word ancient means - it does not necessarily mean something that dates back to classical civilisation. And yes, they were extremely old, and this particular batch were Italian made single shot rifles. So all your lovely details about "repeating rifles with large capacities" is very interesting but, unfortunately, irrelevent. Of course, had you taken your own advice and tried reading some literature on the topic of these weapons, you would have known that. So, yes, I feal that, in an age of, to use your words again, "repeating rifles with large capacities", the single shot Italian Vetterlis built in 1871 can be considered inferior.

The armor is weak compared to a Tiger I or a Koenigstiger sure, but this was a very advanced tank in 1936 when most tanks had less armor and only MGs as armament. In Spain only the Renault FT a ancient and useless WWI tank had better armor and none of the tanks used there were as sound a design. It had better armament than all but one tank which had the same caliber of main gun but was used by both sides in limited number.

Coincidentally the Russians supplied 281 T-26 and the Germans supplied 122 Panzer ones armed with just MGs and Italians supplied 155 L3/35 L3/33 tanks armed only with Mgs, and the French supplied both sides with Renault Ft tanks which actually were armed in some occasions with a main gun but were mostly armed with MG's. This is why I said there was no comparison. They were more advanced and capable and they were not on par with any other tank. That was and still is my point. You act like they were on equal grounds and neglect to state that the USSR supplied more tanks to the Popular Front than all of the other nations supplied to the Nationalists combined 331-300.And again, what argument do you think you are contradicting with any of this material? Did I contend that the Soviet's sent inferior armour? Did I contend that they sent less than the fascist powers? No. So what's your point?

But before you answer, I'll provide some information that wikipedia, which you describe as my favourite source but is your only source, may not have pointed out - tanks played only a very limited role in Spain. Neither side sent enough to make any decisive impact, the logistical conditions were not condusive to the tactics and stratagies that would become evident in WW2, and most were not fitted with wirless - making communication extremely difficult. So again, your obvious love of technical details would be greatly aided, and might actually be worth writing, if you read some contextual information.

Errr! Wrong! It was never designed with this purpose in mind. The General Staff states in the TruppenFuhrung(The German Field Manual for the German General Staff) that in the event of an emergency the AA gun could be considered as a weapon to be used against tanks. This is because they had used lighter AA guns with limited success in the First World War.Fair enough, though I do love the way you leap upon a minor detail. Nevertheless:

"The 88mm FLAK (FlugzeugAbwehrKannone) was originally intended exclusively for anti-aircraft defense. But at its very first use by the Legion Kondor volunteer unit in the Spanish Civil War, the Flak gun was also used on the front lines to attack bunkers and pinpoint targets with anti-tank shells, or against enemy troops, using time-fuze shells with high exploding points."

http://www.strategyplanet.com/commandos/88mm.html

So obviously someone "had used 88mm guns as anti tank guns until the invasion of France though it was theorized far before then." It would seem that the crews were perfectly well aware of the weapons duel potential - theoretical or otherwise.

Indeed it was a US weapon. The US Army said the same of the Luger P08 which was used for forty years by Germany. They also said the same of the Christie Chasis which went on to become the formidable T-34 so what is the point? It went on to be used on the battlefield against all kinds of targets. That is neither ancient nor useless yet you claim a 37mm gun, which was larger in caliber than 95% of Nationalists tank's main gun, were only 'expensive paper weights' which is hardly a fact, let alone the truth of the matter, in 1936 when anti-tank rifles were the state of the art.

Yet you see nothing wrong with the claim due to a Army report????? Do you want to see the one on the worthless and flawed T-34 from the US Army? Was the T-34 useless because the US Army wrote a report that it was flawed and not suitable for their use? The question is not whether it was perfect or the best in the world but was it used to effect or was it 'useless' or 'ancient'. The answer in an absolute yes it was useful; and NO it was not useless or ancient.So, because the US Army rejected some weapons that proved valuable, their assessment (which seemingly was shared by everyone else except, initially, the White Russians) here must also be wrong. Nice logic.

And let us see what Gerald Howson, who has written the book on weapons during the Spanish Civil War has to say on the subject:

"The Maklen 37mm, which resembled a toy field-gun, was intended as an 'infantry support gun', a type born of trench warfare and found to be of not much use for anything."

Furthermore, for all the questionable value the weapon might have had as an anti-tank gun, the Russian's didn't send the ammunition type necessary for that purpose.

See Howson, Arms for Spain, p. 143.

And you also ignored the issue of the quantity of ammunition sent to stock the other artillery pieces you are creaming yourself over. For instance, the Vickers 4.5 in. Howitzers had 27 days worth of ammunition to last fifteen months (which included a number of major battles). So how exactly, would you argue, that these weapons, without any ammunition to fire, were anything other than paper-weights? Perhaps they could be used for constructing barricades? I don't know, you tell me.

It was used all over Europe, Asia and in Africa throughout the first 5 years of the war. It was neither 'useless' nor 'ancient' and that was the position you established at the beginning of the thread. There were plenty of field guns like this that were in use despite the fact they were designed during WWI for trenches and pillboxes. They were used to combat dug in troops and fortifications and were very effective when used. Trenches were the standard before true tank warfare was developed in WWII.

I don't consider the British Army weapon of WWII to be 'useless' in 1936 when it was widely 'used' so often and so widespread. That is an error or an outright misrepresentation. The fact that you continue to argue your point on most of this is making me wonder if giving you the benefit of the doubt is still applicable.Yet despite the fact that you wax lyrical about them, they had left production years before. So obviously the British Army might have found use for them when hard pressed, didn't see the need to produce any more of them. Strange that. But given that you obviously know more than the British Army's weapons than it did, I'll guess I'll just have to take your word for it. So point accepted. Which moves us onto the issue that these fine, useful, weapons, that the Spanish must have been overjoyed to recieved, that they didn't come with enough ammunition to last a month, let alone the 15 they were ultimately expected to last. I suppose the Soviet Government expected the Fascists to be sporting and play fair allowing the Republicans to wait over a year for some ammunition to turn up for their artillery before they attacked.

How did you arrive at the conclusion that the were old or inaccurate due to use or age?See my earlier posts.

State-of-the-art has nothing to do with age of a weapon or wear and tear. It is about the level of technology. Here again you are using this term incorrectly and however you seem to want to use it.Again, are you arguing that in the intervening decades between the production of these weapons and their use in Spain, that the Maxim had not been upgraded and modified to improve performance or to meet new developments in warfare? Is that not an alteration in technology? By the same token, is not a new car design closely modelled on an existing model, but with a number of improvements, not a more advanced model than its predecessor?

they would have been better than nothing or what the Spanish Communists had before they arrived.I'll give you that. However, that returns us to the prices charged, the swindling employed, for what were old weapons when the Soviet senior heirarchy were informing each other that they were sending new weapons straight from the production lines - and charging exorbitant rates for these 'new' weapons. To give you an idea of the age of some of the other weapons and performance, the Colt machine guns sent were so old that when the Spanish volunteers tried using them they discovered that the ammunition belts had perished. Do you deny that reduced accuracy, faulty mechanisms and persihed ammunition might impede efficency in the field?

No, I don't think I used the word modern in my entire post. This is a strawman logical fallacy.Fair enough, my apologies - though that was the implicit point being made in your post.

Though you question the qualification of my argument I have no desire to do your research for you and I challenge you to prove any of what I said to be inaccurate.You misunderstand the use of the word 'qualified'. I'm not suggesting that your points need to be backed up - though that would be nice, rather that they are limited by various conditions. For instance, you state that because, say, the Vetterli was used in WW2, that is therefore defacto evidence that because its good for one group it must be for another. This requires qualification because the Vetterli rifles being used were A. single shot, and B. it ignores the structural conditions which necessitated their use by the Italians. It is not a reflection on the quality of the rifle, but the conditions of the time. You don't make that point, which is why it requires this qualification. See?

Incidentally, if you make an argument then the onus is upon you to source it - not me. I don't have to disprove anything you say, you have to prove it.

They were not 'modern' but they were some of the very same weapons that were provided to the Nationalists by other nations. Do you believe that the French, Italians and Germans sought to sabotage their side too?Do you have any evidence for this claim, because as far as I was aware no actual breakdown of precisely what the German's sent to Spain has been discovered. However, we do know that in terms of aircraft, money spent and manpower, the Axis powers far out provided to Soviet Union.

The Italian's sent over 700 aircraft, plus a further 60,000 troops, 240,000 rifles and spent $400,000,000 on the war. While Germany spent $215,000,000, and sent 16,000 'advisors' to Spain. By contrast Soviet 'aid', while costing the Spanish something in the region of $525,000,000 likely actually should have come to far less, and sent 2,500 or so 'volunteers' to Spain.

Precisely what Fascists sent, though? Unless you are privy to data that I am not, neither of us know.

You haven't investigated the other contributions by the bourgeois powers but you immediately conclude that the USSR deliberately sabotaged the side of the Communists.because that isn't the purpose of this thread... which is about Soviet 'aid'.

This is not proven with anything by the post that you made alleging the weapons were 'ancient' and 'useless' and my post demonstrates that this is not true.On the contrary, your post shows that while you might be familiar with weapons specifications and can look stuff up on wikipedia, you aren't all that savvy when it comes to the finer details - such as precisely what it was they sent to Spain and how much ammunition went with it. It is all very well for you to tell me that that Vickers 4.5 in. Howitzer was a fine weapon, even if they weren't being made anymore, but unless you can tell me their purpose when the Soviets failed to send aummunition in any real quantity along with them, then your argument is moot anyway. Siminalrly, all your details regarding the Vetterli rifle is also rendered moot because you were unaware that the rifles sent to Spain were the Italian produced single-shot version. So really, what do you think you have actually shown - because from where I'm sitting it doesn't add up to a lot.

or the means of sabotage?Where did I say they 'sabotaged' the Spanish? I said that they milked them like a cash cow and sent them a lot of inferior and aged weapons. What were you saying about strawman arguments?

Ismail

28th August 2012, 14:08

They helped the bourgeois republican government in a military battle against the workers that had seized the central telephone exchange in Barcelona.The exchange had been granted to them by the government. They then promptly used it to spy on said government's operations. When the head of public safety in Catalonia went to the building to take control of its affairs in the name of said government, anarchists within it promptly fired on him.

They were more interested in appeasing the western powersI don't know what you mean by "appeasing" considering that the Soviets were criticized for "violating non-intervention" by these same western powers.

The rest of your post just continues the unreal analysis of Spain offered by practically all bourgeois and ultra-left commentators. On one hand you have the claim that the Soviets were holding the Republic hostage via taking its gold reserves, using its weight to get ministers not amenable to its will dismissed and replaced by "dupes/agents" who came from the ranks of the capitalist parties (which were likewise being "subverted" from within, notably the PSOE), and taking advantage of any possible victory of the Republic against the Francoists to lay the foundations of a "Stalinist" government after the war, using Negrín, Del Vayo, etc. as their "puppets." On the other there is the simultaneous claim that the Soviets were defending the bourgeoisie against any real social change and basically only came to Spain to... kill Trotskyists and anarchists, I guess.

Then World War II happened and it became pretty obvious that the Communist strategy was simple: gain the respect of the broad strata of the population by leading the way in fighting fascism, construct a People's Democratic government which was to function as a specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, expose the false "democratic" pretenses of those bourgeois parties formerly willing to ally with the Communists against fascism and who now opposed social change and growing Communist influence, and then lead the way in getting through definite and lasting economic and social changes of a socialist character. Feel free to replace "socialist" with "Stalinist" or whatever, but the fact remains that this was pretty much the exact same goal in Spain, and it was working pretty good.

Invader Zim

28th August 2012, 17:06

The_Red_Spark

28th August 2012, 18:42

A member just sent me a private message, which I have yet to research, which makes a very interesting point. Basically the member (who I have left anaonymous because the message was sent via provate message) pointed out that weapons underwent a significant change in the early 20th century following the introduction of stainless steel. The point being that the introduction of stainless steel in weapon barrels increased the lifespan of weapons.

Moreover:

"When a bullet is fired by a gun, it is actually propelled down the barrel by expanding gas detonated in the chamber. The friction between the bullet and grooves in the barrel called "rifling" causes the bullet to spin, increasing accuracy.
The friction, however, causes wear on the barrel. Eventually the barrel will be too big for the bullet, causing inaccuracy. What was needed was a harder metal that could resist higher temperatures."

http://www.vat19.com/brain-candy/accidental-inventions-stainless-steel.cfm

So, what, I wonder what the state of rifles produced in 1871 would be in 1936. Not too good. Or Maxim's that had been used during WW1 and earlier? Might that not explain their noted inaccuracy? And would not weapons produced, from this new material, be considered 'state-of-the-art'?
It is fairly obvious that A, you have zero understanding of military logistics and B that you have never been in the military to understand the details of what you are attempting to explain. Though the Ma Deuce was used for what was at one time the longest sniper shot in US military history the MG is not a weapon that requires accuracy like you are suggesting. It is used to suppress an enemy with high volume of fire and it is used in unison with several other Mgs in vectoring fire. This requires little to zero aiming and is not something that requires a new barrel to be effective. you set the tripod and it stays at the point you desire. It is that simple. Now this is the point where you jump off to show how this is not so but the Vickers was used to lob rounds like an artillery piece. How do you aim when lobbing rounds like a artillery piece? Just like you aim any MG by walking the fire into the enemy. You don't need to use a sight for that. LOL But you have never used a HMG so you wouldn't know that or the fact that tracer fire aids in aiming too.

I highly doubt that all of the MG's sent to Spain were old WWI weapons that were built in 1908 and had seen several years worth of use over the duration of WWI without any barrel changes or replacement of parts when they were worn. I guess I will have to just assume they lasted the whole war and that they had over a million rounds fired by each and every gun so that I can make the claim that this aid was not any help at all and was in fact USELESS as you have claimed. That is what the word USELESS means and the point I was making is that they were useful and not 'ancient'. Yet you continue to argue points I never made because it makes for a compelling argument when you have erred in your original position. Want an example... How about bringing up the cost and accusing the USSR of scalping the Spanish in the midst of a post about firearms and the quality and usefulness of firearms.

I am so glad you are here to educate a former armorer on the finer points of firearms. I really needed this history lesson. How about you tell me in your next post how nickel was added to the barrels of Ak's and this extended the longevity of the barrel. Or you can tell me how then the M-16A1 copied this concept. Maybe you can help me learn something about firearms. I am totally oblivious on the subject despite my military hands on experience with the subject.

Or we can go and start naming other factors like the fact the Spanish were given zero training and how this greatly effected their use of said weapons. Or we can mention how impossible it would be for an army like that to move artillery and a months worth of ammunition(which coincidentally you have no idea what a months worth of artillery shells consists of) when a front collapsed and how easy it was for the Germans to put bounties out for various equipment. Or we can talk about the price of tea in China to really spice things up instead of addressing how these weapons were 'useless' like I attempted to do in the original post. Its your call. Pick a argument you can win because you aren't doing too swell in this one.

khad

28th August 2012, 18:52

So, what, I wonder what the state of rifles produced in 1871 would be in 1936. Not too good. Or Maxim's that had been used during WW1 and earlier? Might that not explain their noted inaccuracy? And would not weapons produced, from this new material, be considered 'state-of-the-art'?
The Maxim was the M1910 was only adopted in 1910, meaning that they would have been at most 26 years old in 1936.

Most of the Maxims shipped were the air cooled Tokarev variant produced in 1926-1927. You can see this in the shipment logs yourself.

But do carry on and whine about how the Spanish Loyalists were less capable than the Taliban because, apparently, they couldn't figure out how to service practically new firearms.

The Italian's sent over 700 aircraft, plus a further 60,000 troops, 240,000 rifles and spent $400,000,000 on the war. While Germany spent $215,000,000, and sent 16,000 'advisors' to Spain. By contrast Soviet 'aid', while costing the Spanish something in the region of $525,000,000 likely actually should have come to far less, and sent 2,500 or so 'volunteers' to Spain.

Waaaah! Why didn't the whole Red Army come and fight for us? Waaaah!!!

The_Red_Spark

28th August 2012, 19:29

Oh yeah and another thing. The Maxim was water cooled to reduce heating caused by friction and to allow a higher rate of fire without the need to change the barrel for long periods of time. Air cooled weapons require barrel changes within a few minutes of firing them in combat and stainless or nickel plating won't help them a bit. When you give the model as an 1871 you are referring to the Swiss model or you gave the wrong nomenclature. One way or another it is wrong.

Lev Bronsteinovich

28th August 2012, 19:44

The exchange had been granted to them by the government. They then promptly used it to spy on said government's operations. When the head of public safety in Catalonia went to the building to take control of its affairs in the name of said government, anarchists within it promptly fired on him.

Nope, they occupied the Telefonica on their own strength, the government at the time was not strong enough to prevent it. The CNT-FAI were the mass organizations of the proletariat -- but as they were not under the control of the CP or the Republican government, they were seen as enemies. So the CP and the government waited until they thought they had the strength to do it. And the head of public safety went there to demand they give up the building. They should have shot at him.

I don't know what you mean by "appeasing" considering that the Soviets were criticized for "violating non-intervention" by these same western powers.I mean that they did not want the Western powers to think that the USSR was fostering revolution in Spain. Supporting the republic, yes, helping a workers revolution, no.

The rest of your post just continues the unreal analysis of Spain offered by practically all bourgeois and ultra-left commentators. On one hand you have the claim that the Soviets were holding the Republic hostage via taking its gold reserves, using its weight to get ministers not amenable to its will dismissed and replaced by "dupes/agents" who came from the ranks of the capitalist parties (which were likewise being "subverted" from within, notably the PSOE), and taking advantage of any possible victory of the Republic against the Francoists to lay the foundations of a "Stalinist" government after the war, using Negrín, Del Vayo, etc. as their "puppets." On the other there is the simultaneous claim that the Soviets were defending the bourgeoisie against any real social change and basically only came to Spain to... kill Trotskyists and anarchists, I guess.
That's just not true. Most bourgeois commentators at the time would have been convinced the USSR was trying to export revolution. And I don't really give a shit about the financial machinations. And the point is that the soviets were not trying to duplicate the class system in the USSR, they were trying to help create a "democratic" bourgeois republic. It would have been a great improvement, IMO, if they had created a "stalinist government" that is, overthrew capitalism, even if it was lead by a bureaucratic cabal. They wanted to have a "progressive" bourgeois republic that might be friendly with the USSR. The problem was that in the context of the Spanish Civil War, subordinating the revolutionary workers to what Trotsky called, "the shadow of the Spanish bourgeoisie," demoralized the Spanish proletariat and probably led to their defeat at the hands of Franco and his legions.

Then World War II happened and it became pretty obvious that the Communist strategy was simple: gain the respect of the broad strata of the population by leading the way in fighting fascism, construct a People's Democratic government which was to function as a specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, expose the false "democratic" pretenses of those bourgeois parties formerly willing to ally with the Communists against fascism and who now opposed social change and growing Communist influence, and then lead the way in getting through definite and lasting economic and social changes of a socialist character. Feel free to replace "socialist" with "Stalinist" or whatever, but the fact remains that this was pretty much the exact same goal in Spain, and it was working pretty good.It didn't work so good in Spain -- but what's the big deal about 40 years of Francoist rule? You write as if there really was a logical and consistent plan. Show me some primary source material from that era where those goals were stated. And the circumstances in central Europe that I think you are referencing here, don't really apply well to Spain. Given that there was a civil war and WWII had not yet happened, and Spain was a lot further away.

Apologies to the comrades that are distressed I'm not dickering about the number of Mausers or heavy artillery or tanks given by the USSR to the Republic. Like I said, it's interesting, but does little to clarify the USSR's role in the Spanish Civil War. So, it is not a myth that the USSR gave significant material aid to the Republicans. Neither is it a myth that they politically disarmed the Spanish proletariat.

The_Red_Spark

28th August 2012, 19:58

Apologies to the comrades that are distressed I'm not dickering about the number of Mausers or heavy artillery or tanks given by the USSR to the Republic. Like I said, it's interesting, but does little to clarify the USSR's role in the Spanish Civil War. So, it is not a myth that the USSR gave significant material aid to the Republicans. Neither is it a myth that they politically disarmed the Spanish proletariat.
Duly noted and I agree. The arms deals do little to prove anything here and that was the point of my post. They were on par or exceeded those of the other side and demonstrate a big fat zero. Cheers comrade.

The_Red_Spark

28th August 2012, 21:52

khad

28th August 2012, 21:59

Invader Zim

29th August 2012, 14:33

Tune in for the new thread I am writing called 'The Myth of American Aid to South Vietnam'. It presents new exciting facts revealed by renown author Joe Blow Dumasswriter including the fact that the US sent the ancient and useless rusty M-1 Garand, a worthless paperweight WWII semi automatic, the ancient barely oiled Browning M1919 LMG, MP-40, and the ancient Mauser Kar98 to the ARVN and other South Vietnamese forces at exorbitant rates. Armed with Dumasswriters book, this holy myth that is the 'sacred cow' of US Patriots, is swiftly and ruthlessly demolished by this fact based essay par excellence.

Next week will be another shining gem, aided by another obscure and literally unknown self proclaimed experts book, on how the USSR sent SKS carbines, a relic from the late forties, to North Vietnam at exorbitant costs which were utterly useless and couldn't even fire due to being stored for years in cosmoline. This required quite a bit of work to remove this petroleum product from these 20 year old weapons and the NVA and VC were left high and dry on purpose. This would have cost them the war if not for the equally poor aid sent to the ARVN by the USA.:laugh:

See, I've always been amused that this site produces individuals who will enter an otherwise largely polite discussion, and then make totally disengenous and hostile remarks. Did I say that you know nothing about guns? Did I say that I do have a vast knowledge of them? No. So why the hostility? Quite frankly I don't give a shit about guns and think people who do are idiots (though I'll make an exception in your case).

You see, it isn't my opinion that these weapons were 'old', 'ancient', 'useless', inaccurate and/or prone to mechanical failure. These are the very words used by individuals who fought on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War with these weapons. For instance:

"The Brigade artillery consisted of two old French 75s and one even more ancient English 5.2 Howitzer. .... I imagine that they were seriously short of ammunition as they frequently spent weeks without firing a shot. .... I very much doubt whether any of it was particularly valuable of effective. But they [the gunners] appeared to live a happy peaceful life, busy with the cultivation of a fine vegetable garden around their gunsite."

Or:

"The first of these [automatic weapons] was always known as the 'shosser' ... we were provided with a dozen of them ... it proved to be the most oustandingly useless weapon that I have ever seen and the whole lot were either lost or thrown away during the first day that we were in action.

[...]

For a brief time we were in possession of six, very elderly Lewis Guns ... [they] were replaced with American Colts. This was a perfectly satisfactory weapon except that the ammunition belts supplied with them were so perished that they could not feed the guns efficently. these too were all lost or discarded on the first day of action."

And as I noted earlier in the thread as you would have noticed had you bothered reading it, the only gun that Gurney had any time for was the Maxim, which he described as 'old' and that this age had diminished its accuracy, but that its 'rugged' construction and reliability meant that:

"When the Battalion finally went into action [Feb. 1937]for the first time it was heavily armed with largely useless automatic weapons, apart from the Maxims."

As for rifles:

"The remaining infantry was supplied with rifles of Russian manufacture. These were very poor weapons, much lighter than the English Lee-Enfield of that period and not nearly as toughly constructed."

My emphasis.

So, it isn't my experience you need to consider, rather it is that of Jason Gurney, a man who fought with these very weapons, saw them in action and was shot by a fascist in the very war we are talking about. So, my guess is that he is mor qualified to talk about the condition of the weapons he used and saw with his own eyes than either of us. Fair?

How about bringing up the cost and accusing the USSR of scalping the Spanish in the midst of a post about firearms and the quality and usefulness of firearms.And your disagreement with one nullifies the other, does it? You might know a lot about weapons, but what you know about the Spanish Civil War, or even elementary logic for that matter, evidently wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp.

And how about your own nonsense, like when you assumed that the Vetterli rifles sent to Spain were 'repeating rifles with large capacities', when in fact, they were single-shot rifles? Or how about when you contended that the German's in the Condor Legion would have no idea about the anti-tank capabilities of the 88mm, when anybody who has picked up a fucking book on the Spanish Civil War knows full well that it was used to that effect in the war? Or how about when you ignored the fact that for all the value you place by the artillery sent to Spain by the SU, they failed to provide sufficent ammunition to last even a month?

So again, what do you think you have proved here, beyond that the accuracy of the Maxim does not necessarily effect its efficency. Because I'll concede that (as in fact I, more or less, did pages ago). How does that one detail alter the main thrust of the argument that the Soviet Union charged the Republic excessive amount of money for new weapons, and actually sent them primarily old weapons, many of which didn't work properly anymore, and sent a lot of them without sufficent ammunition? That's the argument. Got anything to add, or are you just trolling for flames?

A Marxist Historian

29th August 2012, 18:13

For whatever it's worth Mexico also held on to some $300 million in bank reserves from the Republican Government as well. Also nefarious motives? I doubt it. It wasn't wrong for the Soviets to do it nor for others who chose to not stand idly by. If the Soviet Union had saved the Republic y'all would be blaming them instead for cheating the Anarchist out of some historic victory or some such nonsense.

Invader Zim is criticising Soviet policy to Spain on exactly the wrong grounds. Especially the bank reserves. Should they have been left for Franco? I see no reason to critique the USSR or Mexico for that matter for not letting the reactionaries get the gold.

There are a million reasons to critique how the Stalinists played the point man role in strangling the Spanish Revolution and helping Franco win, but Invader Zim has managed to pick on the only aspect of Soviet policy on Spain that is worth praise, namely the military assistance to the Spanish republic.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

29th August 2012, 18:52

Not really, most of his critiques I've bothered to look at are often extremely petty, open to serious doubt, or are based on subjective interpretation of the documents that are no more valid than Radosh's. I noted one rather illustrative example, in my previous post. To provide another, Furr cherry-picks the commentary, stating:

"Document 5, a report by Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, to the Secretariat of the ECCI (Executive Committee, Communist International) of July 23, 1936, contains the following lines:

We should not, at the present stage, assign the task of creating soviets and try to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in Spain. That would be a fatal mistake.
Radosh claims that this statement (a statement repeated in the press release)

. . . supports the contention of some scholars that the Communists purposely disguised their true objective, social revolution. (5-6)
But it does not. It clearly states that there are "stages," the present one being the stage of "maintaining unity with the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants and the radical intelligentsia . . ." (11). Radosh's claim could only be true if he gave evidence that the Communists were denying what everyone would have expected of them -- to wish to move to another "stage," once the fascists were defeated. Radosh gives no evidence that the Communists were making any such claims to have abandoned the ultimate goal of a Soviet-style revolution in Spain. So there can be no question of "disguising their true objective.""
However, this is, in fact, a misrepresentation of what Radosh actually argues - which is that there were indeed stages, and at that time the communists had to keep the liberals on side by supporting the Republic to defeat the Fascists. Once that was done, then they could move onto their actual long term agenda, which was dismantling the Republic they claimed they wanted to preserve. Had Furr quoted the very next sentence of Radosh's commentary it would read as follows:

"The very careful use of these terms, as well as the injunction to “act under the semblance of defending the republic,” supports the contention of some scholars that the Communists purposely disguised their true objective, social revolution. They would do this in the first place by pretending that their ultimate goal was merely a bourgeois democratic regime and in the second by concentrating on winning the war with the Nationalists first. Afterward, anything was possible."
Now, this reading hinges on a translation Furr disputes. Furr may, or may not, be right about that. I don't read Russian, and even if I did, doubtless the nuances in interpreting meaning and then translating that into English would require more than just the language but also familiarity with its cultural application. So, Furr might well be right about that, but the rest of his critique of Radosh's commentary of Document Five (and several others for that matter) is misleading, and tries to make an awful lot of hay over a very minor point at the expense of the main, and actual, point being made. It is also worth noting that the document also says:

"But if our [people] begin to confiscate factories and enterprises and wreak further havoc, the petty bourgeoisie, the radical intelligentsia, and part of the peasantry may move away, and our forces are still not sufficient for a struggle against the counterrevolutionaries. Therefore, we must place before the proletariat and the broad working masses those tasks that suit the concrete conditions of the present moment, that suit the strength of the party, the strength of the proletariat. Do not rush ahead and get carried away."
and:

"We ought to advise them to go forward with these weapons, as we have done in other situations, seeking to maintain unity with the petty bourgeoisie and the peasants and the radical intelligentsia, establishing and strengthening the democratic Republic at the present stage through the complete destruction of the fascist counterrevolutionary elements, and then we can proceed from there, resolving concrete questions."
Or, in other words (a term Furr apparently doesn't like), do not give the petty bourgeoisie, the radical intelligentsia, and the peasantry the impression that they wanted to invoke social revolution, by, for example, begin the widespread nationalisation of the means of production. But, once they were in a stronger position and the fascists had been destroyed... well, that was a different matter. At least that is what I took from the commentary and documents.

And, of course, Furr actually critique's Radosh's reading of nine of the documents, and as noted many of these critiques appear to be misleading, subjective or minor. If, of course, he had any serious critiques to make of the analysis of the other 72, presumably he would provided it. So really, using a hatchet job 'review' by a Stalinist apologist to dismiss relevant assertions made in the book, which Furr doesn't actually contradict, is nothing short of laziness and intellectual dishonesty.

There are some additional documents located within the appendices, but for the most part the documents directly related to Radosh's commentary are located with the documents in the main body of text.

No, he isn't. He is an English professor. The clue to where his genuine expertise lies is in his job title. Writing agenda riddled tracts in your spare time does not automatically assign the status of expert.

And David Irving has been 'studying' Nazi Germany since the 1950s. That doesn't make him an 'expert' in Nazi Germany or an historian. And I have yet to see any evidence that anything that Furr has ever published in the field of Soviet history has been taken seriously by the community of academic historians.

'More widely read'? That professional academic historian? Do you have any idea how ridiculous, not to mention unfalsifiable, that assertion is? You're too funny. I literally laughed out loud when I read that.

And how many of them have passed the basic benchmark of academic quality control - the peer-review process? You see, anybody can write a book or article and get it published. However, it is a very different story to get an article into a peer-reviewed journal or a book published by an academic publishing house with a rigorous peer-review process, like, say, Yale University Press - who, incidentally, published Spain Betrayed.

Now there's an unsavory debate, between the ultra-Stalinist Moscow Trials apologist Furr and the McCarthyite renegade Radosh. And over Spain of all things. Ick!

On this one, I think Furr wins on points. I believe Furr when he argues that the Soviets weren't interested in bringing socialism to Spain.

Radosh's J. Edgar Hoover secret Soviet master plan to take over the world stuff doesn't pass the sniff test. Furr's interpretation of what Dimitrov was saying is much more plausible. Essentially since Dimitrov if anybody was the ultimate True Believer in the Popular Front strategy. He was the one generally credited with devising it (though actually it was Bukharin).

Yes, he thought that you'd have a two stage revolution in Spain, democracy first, then socialism maybe later in the sweet bye and bye. Just like the Mensheviks in Russia. And said so publicly and repeatedly, as Furr reasonably points out, so for Radosh to claim that here we had Soviet masterminds secretly plotting evil is just McCarthyite garbage.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

29th August 2012, 19:18

See, I've always been amused that this site produces individuals who will enter an otherwise largely polite discussion, and then make totally disengenous and hostile remarks. Did I say that you know nothing about guns? Did I say that I do have a vast knowledge of them? No. So why the hostility? Quite frankly I don't give a shit about guns and think people who do are idiots (though I'll make an exception in your case).

You see, it isn't my opinion that these weapons were 'old', 'ancient', 'useless', inaccurate and/or prone to mechanical failure. These are the very words used by individuals who fought on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War with these weapons. For instance:

"The Brigade artillery consisted of two old French 75s and one even more ancient English 5.2 Howitzer. .... I imagine that they were seriously short of ammunition as they frequently spent weeks without firing a shot. .... I very much doubt whether any of it was particularly valuable of effective. But they [the gunners] appeared to live a happy peaceful life, busy with the cultivation of a fine vegetable garden around their gunsite."

Or:

"The first of these [automatic weapons] was always known as the 'shosser' ... we were provided with a dozen of them ... it proved to be the most oustandingly useless weapon that I have ever seen and the whole lot were either lost or thrown away during the first day that we were in action.

[...]

For a brief time we were in possession of six, very elderly Lewis Guns ... [they] were replaced with American Colts. This was a perfectly satisfactory weapon except that the ammunition belts supplied with them were so perished that they could not feed the guns efficently. these too were all lost or discarded on the first day of action."

And as I noted earlier in the thread as you would have noticed had you bothered reading it, the only gun that Gurney had any time for was the Maxim, which he described as 'old' and that this age had diminished its accuracy, but that its 'rugged' construction and reliability meant that:

"When the Battalion finally went into action [Feb. 1937]for the first time it was heavily armed with largely useless automatic weapons, apart from the Maxims."

As for rifles:

"The remaining infantry was supplied with rifles of Russian manufacture. These were very poor weapons, much lighter than the English Lee-Enfield of that period and not nearly as toughly constructed."

My emphasis.

So, it isn't my experience you need to consider, rather it is that of Jason Gurney, a man who fought with these very weapons, saw them in action and was shot by a fascist in the very war we are talking about. So, my guess is that he is mor qualified to talk about the condition of the weapons he used and saw with his own eyes than either of us. Fair?

And your disagreement with one nullifies the other, does it? You might know a lot about weapons, but what you know about the Spanish Civil War, or even elementary logic for that matter, evidently wouldn't fill the back of a postage stamp.

And how about your own nonsense, like when you assumed that the Vetterli rifles sent to Spain were 'repeating rifles with large capacities', when in fact, they were single-shot rifles? Or how about when you contended that the German's in the Condor Legion would have no idea about the anti-tank capabilities of the 88mm, when anybody who has picked up a fucking book on the Spanish Civil War knows full well that it was used to that effect in the war? Or how about when you ignored the fact that for all the value you place by the artillery sent to Spain by the SU, they failed to provide sufficent ammunition to last even a month?

So again, what do you think you have proved here, beyond that the accuracy of the Maxim does not necessarily effect its efficency. Because I'll concede that (as in fact I, more or less, did pages ago). How does that one detail alter the main thrust of the argument that the Soviet Union charged the Republic excessive amount of money for new weapons, and actually sent them primarily old weapons, many of which didn't work properly anymore, and sent a lot of them without sufficent ammunition? That's the argument. Got anything to add, or are you just trolling for flames?

As to that, for the USSR to send a lot of oldish weapons to Spain was a hell of a lot better than sending no weapons at all, and they were lying around unused and easy to send.

As to just how good or bad they actually were, best leave that to the experts, which in this case is not you. Seems as if those on the other side of the argument have more expertise here.

As to the soldiers' complaints, soldiers always complain about their weapons, especially when they have even better reason to complain about other things, which was most certainly true during the Spanish Civil War. No doubt some of the Soviet weapons were crappy and some were excellent and some were somewhere in between, that's what happens in all wars always. So I don't think a string of complaints about Soviet weapons in the memoir literature actually proves anything all by itself.

Anecdote is not history.

Finally, The Red Spark is touching on an issue in the forefront of consideration among military historians these days, whether or not he knows this. Namely the debate about the relative value of the AK 47 and the M 16. The consensus among military historians these days is that the Soviet manufactured AK 47, the "proletarian weapon" with its remarkable ruggedness and easiness to maintain and repair, was greatly superior to the M-16, especially in swamp conditions, and that this was one of the major reasons that the Vietnamese won and the Americans lost.

Those seriously interested should read C. J. Chivers's highly influential book on the AK 47, which has probably created more stir than any other recent work of military history.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743270762

-M.H.-

The_Red_Spark

29th August 2012, 21:59

See, I've always been amused that this site produces individuals who will enter an otherwise largely polite discussion, and then make totally disengenous and hostile remarks. I have always been amazed at how this site produces so many self qualified experts on various subjects, how it produces so many pseudo intellectuals who operate like parrots spewing conspiracy theory nonsense that adds up to squat. It flies in the face of reason but it doesn't stop them a bit. Not saying that you are that way but....

You see, it isn't my opinion that these weapons were 'old', 'ancient', 'useless', inaccurate and/or prone to mechanical failure. No you just parrot it like one mans experience makes his evaluation the rule and wide sweeping. He wrote it so it must have been true. You accept this as the standard for a qualified source yet you question my 'elementary logic'? It seems you have applied your masterful logic the same way you have applied your self professed expertise at evaluating others on logic, reason, and scholarly debate. That is like a Maxim machine gun rapid fire and typically wide of the target. Tat-tat-tat-tat

So, it isn't my experience you need to consider, rather it is that of Jason Gurney, a man who fought with these very weapons, saw them in action and was shot by a fascist in the very war we are talking about. So how is this one man qualified to make an evaluation of the quality of each and every weapon sent to Spain? Tat-tat-tat-tat wide right machine gun man. Your mastery of logic must have been on break when you made this assumption based on a few observations by a single individual and applied it to the whole. Brilliant!!!

So, my guess is that he is mor qualified to talk about the condition of the weapons he used and saw with his own eyes than either of us. Fair? I suppose he ordered a general inspection of the entire Soviet shipment to Spain? Inspect ARMS!!! He must have been an amazing man to have been able to race around Spain over several years and assess each and every weapon, piece of ammunition, machine gun belt, and every piece of equipment. I cannot fathom how they lost the civil war with all of these experts.

And your disagreement with one nullifies the other, does it?
You obviously have a reading and comprehension problem. I did not say that in my original post, limited in scope by the "2." which was referenced, and the fact that I posted just one single very specific piece of your post. Yet you continue to try to nullify my posts by venturing way off the subject of MY POST, and rattle on about prices and unrelated items to my post, as if they nullify my points about a very specific part of your post. Then you accuse me of doing this, to your whole argument, which I did not attempt to address in full context AT ALL.

So who has the faulty logic again sparky? It appears your not as sharp as you thought you were. Try reading a little slower and pay close attention to what I ACTUALLY write. It is easy if you try not to assume so much and attempt to comprehend a little more clearly. Your erratic application of logic speaks for itself here; as does the limitations of you intellect.

And how about your own nonsense, like when you assumed that the Vetterli rifles sent to Spain were 'repeating rifles with large capacities', when in fact, they were single-shot rifles?
The nomenclature you gave was a 1871 model. Show me a model with that nomenclature that is not a repeater. Even the cavalry carbine of that model is a repeater. If you had said 1870, this may not have been part of the debate, but again you have problems throughout your post. Don't get mad just stop posting the conspiracy 'holy sacred cow' nonsense. It makes us look like retards who cannot do much but attempt to put out half cocked conspiracy tales.

Or how about when you contended that the German's in the Condor Legion would have no idea about the anti-tank capabilities of the 88mm, when anybody who has picked up a fucking book on the Spanish Civil War knows full well that it was used to that effect in the war?
Show me where the 88mm was used as an anti-tank gun!!!! Please, for the love of god!!! You haven't shown anything that supports this claim. Yes 6 88mm guns were used by the Condor Legion as flak guns and were used a few times on 'ground targets' but where do you get anti-tank from pillboxes and bunkers? Didn't I post the very same thing? Did I not say they were used to engage hard targets like the Maginot line? Did I fail to mention that they were mounted on vehicles to do this very task? Is this the same as engaging 'tanks'?

Reading and comprehension seems to be quite a weak spot in the formulation of your case. Your link didn't make this claim, you did!!! I will be waiting for something that contradicts Heinz Guderian and Erich Von Manstein on this. I doubt they are wrong when they said that they were first used against French Char-B heavy tanks because the thick armor couldn't be penetrated by 'anti-tank guns' like the 37mm. Please don't dig up the one case where the 37mm did knock out one by hitting the venting on the side of the Char-B because I am aware of this fact.

The tanks used in Spain were light tanks and would not present a problem to anything short of a normal rifle minus a dumdum bullet. Yes, even a single shot Vetterli rifle with a dumdum bullet had enough power to penetrate most of the tanks(in Spain) armor. Your claim is baseless so put up or shut up. I will gladly kiss your bare arse if you can find anything from a real source to prove this.

Or how about when you ignored the fact that for all the value you place by the artillery sent to Spain by the SU, they failed to provide sufficent ammunition to last even a month?
Again you don't realize what a month worth of artillery shells equates to or why it is issued in small quantity. You are talking about something you have less comprehension of than 88mm Flak guns and their intended design. Which I corrected you on coincidentally. The same can be said of logistics. Do you think 5 man artillery crews run around with 15 months worth of shells strapped to their backs? A months worth would have been a hard thing to move when you are relying on horses. Do you understand that artillery used horses to tote their gear at this point? You don't issue shells like that and I guess you think getting supplies to the Spanish was a cake walk too.:rolleyes:

How does that one detail alter the main thrust of the argument that the Soviet Union charged the Republic excessive amount of money for new weapons, and actually sent them primarily old weapons, many of which didn't work properly anymore, and sent a lot of them without sufficent ammunition? That's the argument. Got anything to add, or are you just trolling for flames?
I don't know but you seem to apply this logic to every specific detail I offer up. I don't care about the costs; I was not talking about them at any point in the entire thread other then to demonstrate how you skip around the subject I did post about as if this negates the points I did make. Yet when I tell you that both sides provided the same kind of equipment at the same kinds of costs you make another baseless claim that no one knows how much the fascists sent despite providing you with a link on some of it. Then you give some numbers from wiki in the very next sentence. Wow!!! You are like a silly dog chasing his tail. Yet you call me the one who fails to have enough logic to cover the back of a postage stamp. Take a look at your own issues pal because you have a few.

Your ignorance of logistics and make believe qualification to decide what is and isn't sufficient ammo is amazing. I think they should have sent 20 years worth of shells to weapons that had a 10 day life expectancy in battle and which are no longer in production. That makes a whole lot of sense considering that the next gun they send may not be able to use the 20 year supply due to different calibers. Then the ammunition would have been in fact worthless and 'useless' and it would have made great 'paperweights' because it couldn't have been used at all. Thank god you weren't in charge because I would have a hard time understanding such stupid execution of logistical matters. Stick to your day job because pretending to be a historical genius isn't working out.

The_Red_Spark

29th August 2012, 22:13

Hey Khad, should I go and post some bold and pompous post, in effect placing a big fat target on my back, and then cry about it when someone posts a countering reply? Should I find one layman, promote him to expert, then post something that is intended to draw the ire of USSR supporters with hostile claims about holy sacred cows, and then cry about it when someone mocks and plays with me? He totally failed to comprehend the point that you can play this game with both sides during any conflict of this kind. It is total nonsense.

I don't make such posts because it is the equivalent of strapping a target on my back, and playing make believe intellectual isn't my thing. I detest these kinds of threads because they make us look like kooky conspiracy theorists when it is obvious to most people that these kinds of things are not true. If you are not qualified to make such assertions you should refrain from posting on these topics.

The_Red_Spark

29th August 2012, 22:26

Finally, The Red Spark is touching on an issue in the forefront of consideration among military historians these days, whether or not he knows this. Namely the debate about the relative value of the AK 47 and the M 16. The consensus among military historians these days is that the Soviet manufactured AK 47, the "proletarian weapon" with its remarkable ruggedness and easiness to maintain and repair, was greatly superior to the M-16, especially in swamp conditions, and that this was one of the major reasons that the Vietnamese won and the Americans lost.

Those seriously interested should read C. J. Chivers's highly influential book on the AK 47, which has probably created more stir than any other recent work of military history.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Gun-C-J-Chivers/dp/0743270762

-M.H.-
Good post and yes I am aware of this fact. The Soviets made weapons that any child could operate and some had firing pins that you could use a grind-ed down nail to replace it with in the field. I personally hate the M-16. it is temperamental and its plastic construction has screws that will loosen just from marching and drilling with it at times.

It was in Vietnam that they had to add features to the weapon like a ejection port cover to keep it from getting dirty and jamming. Despite the claim it didn't need cleaning LOL. It had to be modified over and over again. It had a 20 round mag at first and that was insufficient in comparison to the 30 round AK mag too. I believe the AK was and still is superior. It is not uncommon that the US Army finds rusted old AK's with worn out barrels that are still being used against us with effect from the 80's.

I enjoy your posts M.H. You add some great insight and it makes for interesting reading whenever and where ever I stumble across it. You always seem to add something that adds to the discussion and is spot on. Cheers:thumbup1:

khad

29th August 2012, 23:00

Reading and comprehension seems to be quite a weak spot in the formulation of your case. Your link didn't make this claim, you did!!! I will be waiting for something that contradicts Heinz Guderian and Erich Von Manstein on this. I doubt they are wrong when they said that they were first used against French Char-B heavy tanks because the thick armor couldn't be penetrated by 'anti-tank guns' like the 37mm. Please don't dig up the one case where the 37mm did knock out one by hitting the venting on the side of the Char-B because I am aware of this fact.

The tanks used in Spain were light tanks and would not present a problem to anything short of a normal rifle minus a dumdum bullet. Yes, even a single shot Vetterli rifle with a dumdum bullet had enough power to penetrate most of the tanks(in Spain) armor. Your claim is baseless so put up or shut up. I will gladly kiss your bare arse if you can find anything from a real source to prove this.

The Pzkw I which was the most common tank in the Nationalist arsenal had a maximum frontal armor thickness of 13mm. This is thin enough to the point where 12.7mm AP can penetrate it at any range. A 14.5mm AT rifle (PTRD introduced in 1941, so no conspiracy there) would have been overkill, let alone a basic 37mm gun. The rear/top armor was so thin it could be penetrated by any rifle.

Your ignorance of logistics and make believe qualification to decide what is and isn't sufficient ammo is amazing. I think they should have sent 20 years worth of shells to weapons that had a 10 day life expectancy in battle and which are no longer in production. That makes a whole lot of sense considering that the next gun they send may not be able to use the 20 year supply due to different calibers. Then the ammunition would have been in fact worthless and 'useless' and it would have made great 'paperweights' because it couldn't have been used at all. Thank god you weren't in charge because I would have a hard time understanding such stupid execution of logistical matters. Stick to your day job because pretending to be a historical genius isn't working out. Many of those shells probably were used as paperweights. The first shipment of 6 Vickers 4.5in howitzers came with 6,000 rounds of ammunition.

I don't make such posts because it is the equivalent of strapping a target on my back, and playing make believe intellectual isn't my thing. I detest these kinds of threads because they make us look like kooky conspiracy theorists when it is obvious to most people that these kinds of things are not true. If you are not qualified to make such assertions you should refrain from posting on these topics.Rather, I think it just makes revleft look like a bunch of dumb shits. Want an explanation why the Western left hasn't won jack all for its entire history? Look no further than Zim.

If you have the time to complain, you have the time to maintain. If a Spanish communist could fix his Mosin with nothing but a bit of oil and a folded newspaper, then so can you.

Here's one for you, redspark. Madsen 1902 LMG spotted in Rio in 2009:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704500604574483604014765892.html#s lide/10