Stamporama Discussions: SOR Posting From 20 August 2016

Club Business & Announcements/Tech Advice : SOR Posting From 20 August 2016

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mbo1142

I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
22 May 2017
08:59:39am

Just received (May 22, 2017) following email from SOR. Thread was Reading WWII History & Relating It To Stamp Collecting by Bobstamps and was originally posted on 20 August 2016. Sorry it is so long but how/why am I just now receiving this?

"Guthrum said,

Quote:
"I don't think many would expect the USPS to commemorate the Soviet contribution to the defeat of the Third Reich... ."

I thought so too, but I took a look at my collection, and found this stamp, commemorating the joining of Soviet and American troops at the River Elbe:

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It's one of 10 stamps -- second from the right at the top -- of the 1945 "Victory at Last" set of commemoratives:

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I suppose by 1995, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. had somewhat softened the hard line it had taken as a result of the Soviet actions in Afghanistan.

Five mini-sheets in this format were issued, commemorating only the war years 1941-1945, since the U.S. did not become involved until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Each of the sheets includes notations about the war's history on the world map. Here's a detail image of the notation concerning the Soviet Union from the sheet shown above:

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The inscriptions concerning the Soviet Union on the other mini-sheets:

1941 -- "Germany breaks 1939 Pact, invades U.S.S.R. in June, blitzkrieg almost reaches Moscow."

1942 -- "Extent of German expansion (into the Soviet Union), Summer, 1942. Russian defenders battle German forces at Stalingrad, Summer, 1942." (It's a bit misleading to indicate that the battle occurred in the "Summer, 1942". It began on 23 August 1942 and ended with the capture of the remains of the German 6th Army on 2 February 1943.)

1943 -- "Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill meet in Teheran November 28."

1944 -- "Leningrad's 900-day siege ends in January. / Advancing Soviet armies drive Germans from Baltic nations, Byelorussia, Ukraine and Balkans."

That's it. If there's any other U.S. stamp issued that has any connection with the Soviet participation in the Second World War, I'm not aware of it.

It is interesting that two of the stamps, at least in my opinion, of the stamps rather miss the story:

-- A stamp for 1943 shows a motor torpedo boat moving at high speed, with the caption "Italy invaded by Allies, September 1943." A much more appropriate picture would be infantry troops advancing under fire through the rubble of Italian towns.

-- A stamp in the 1944 sheet for 1944 shows a soldier shooting a flamethrower into a Japanese bunker on Saipan. There's no indication that the Battle for Saipan was the most costly for Americans to that date. The stamps doesn't show, obviously, the 1,000 Japanese civilians who committed suicide, many by jumping off "Banzai Cliff" or "Suicide Cliff" into the sea, to escape capture by the Americans.

Bob"