namelessfly wrote:Most users don't have a location listed, so I don't make a habit of looking for them.
Living in Sweeden certainly explains a lot about your political point of view. Sweeden is one of the few European countries that eagerly cooperated with the Nazis. Event he Swiss managed to maintain some neutrality and they were completely surrounded by the axis powers. Certainly makes any attempt at debate futile.
Just one example, if the US invaded Iraq for the oil, why are China and Russia getting most of the oil contracts? Why aren't we just pumping all the oil and shipping it home without paying for it.
Again you show off ignorance of history.
"eagerly cooperated"?
After WWI, Sweden cut back far far too much on the military, and when the first attempts at rearming were taken in 1935 as a direct reaction to worries about Hitlergermany, it was found that those who had decent military hardware in production, wasnt selling.
The most important area, fighters, the first solution tried was to buy from USA, P-35s...
Only a handful of those arrived before USA unilaterally cancelled the order on the basis of needing the planes yourself, AND even worse also cancelling the order for highperformance aircraft engines, something that Sweden at the time had zero production of. It took until 1943 to reverse engineer some imported engines, update it to current power and start serial production.
When war was getting closer, the options looked at were buying I-16s from USSR(but they didnt want to sell bombers as well so those negotiations ran aground ), supporting the Finnish development of the VL Myrsky (but they were not close to finished and wasnt exactly the most experienced developers, so delays were totally possible(and did happen)), buying the Zero from Japan(their offer was by far the best and even included offering production licenses for both plane and engines, but actual delivery would be a nightmare, so it fell through)... In the end, a bunch of Italian Re.2000 were purchased, and a smaller batch of Fiat Cr.12 were added to the order after a vicar did a serious fund drive.
Both above aircraft were obsolescent or even obsolete even when delivered. Not until 1944 did Sweden manage to have enough even of an airforce to have a reasonable chance of successfully even resisting an invasion attempt by Germany.
Did you know that Germany had a panzer division specifically deployed to Norway for the sole reason of being ready to spearhead an attack into Sweden?
In 1943, such an attack was for a time almost realised.
Biggest deception of the war, was probably when the war started and the Swedish prime minister went out and said "Vår beredskap är god"/"Our readiness is good", which sure was correct in some areas, but militarily it was a load of bull.
But the Germans bought it.
And we know that because of Swedish espionage against Germany. Espionage that for one thing included tapping into the German communications with its troops in Norway, which gave troop movement updates regularly for ALL German fronts. That information ended up in London within days. And part of why that COULD happen was because Swedish mathematician A. Beurling in 1940 cracked the code of the German Geheimschreiber, similar to the "Enigma" but bigger, heavier and more complex.
And how to break it, that was another piece of information that went to the British. And those using this coder, was the Luftwaffe and the German navy among with the diplomatic corp.
And Swedish cooperation with the Brits was close enough that when Bismarck left the Baltic sea, less than two hours after it was spotted by a Swedish destroyer, the location, speed and direction had been fasttracked to London. Similar information going between UK and USA, officially close allies, usually took days.
Do you know anything at all about the Swedish support of the Norwegian resistance? Isnt it strange how Norwegians just "happened" to end up close to the border, with equipment, food, weapons and explosives and just "got lost", some while officially in internment camps.
And Sweden training and equipping over 10000 Norwegians as "police" for "postwar stability", oh yeah, military training and equipment, very "policey". And some of these belongs to the above category of "oops, got lost near the border".
And if the German surrender in Europe had happened 2 weeks later, the Swedish assault against German troops in Denmark would have happened as planned.
Oh and somewhat amusingly, because Germany was convinced that Sweden was a strong silent supporter and really thought Swedish military was as strong as it tried to look like, Sweden actually managed to threaten Germany away from some things a few times. One of those was that any form of "scorched earth" in Denmark or Norway would be "unacceptable". Espionage later showed that actually made the Germans be careful at least there...
Its also the reason Wallenberg could do what he did.
Oh yeah, back to military preparedness...
In 1939, if all artillery started firing constantly, ammunition would run out in a couple of minutes, antiaircraft weapons would last about twice as long (buying nitrates to produce ammunition had become near impossible after 1937).
Oh, and during the Finnish winter war, Sweden gave away 1/3 of its military rifles for the defence of Finland.
A small part of that was another attempt to make it look like there was a lot more where those came from.
Just about the only part of the military that had some strength was the navy, and that mostly due to some ships built for WWI never getting scrapped. And those were basically miniature pocket battleships. Deadly for an enemy of light ships, but easy targets for German heavy cruisers or REAL pocket battleships, or worse still for aircraft...
So, guess why Sweden had the 4th biggest airforce in the world in the early 1950s? Because that was the result of the arming that started in 1935, and was originally meant as defence from either USSR or Germany.
And why do you think until the last decade Sweden has almost fanatically maintained domestic military industry? Because the wish to not get stuck again like the late 30s.
Offical politics would have been very different if Sweden had had at least what it had in 1945 by 1939 instead.
Oh and BTW, did you know that Sweden didnt accept new contracts from Germany once the war started? In 1939, Germany got well over 1/3 of its iron from Sweden, a few years later, that number was down to around 1/10.
All contracts in existence were honored, but new ones were avoided as far possible ( which was one of the main reasons Germany almost invaded ). Officially with the "greatest regrets".
And there just happened to be the occasional delays in deliveries...
Swedish actual cooperation with Germany, was nonexistent.
There was lots of talk to make sure the Germans were suitably impressed... And then the actual cooperation, was with the British. But that was kept totally unofficial to avoid risking a German invasion, at least until military preparedness could be raised enough to have a chance to repulse such an invasion.
Please, in the future, KNOW something about the things you talk about.