… much of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War remains obscure and imperfectly understood by Westerners and Russians alike. Worse still, this obscurity and misunderstanding has perverted the history of World War II overall by masking the Red Army’s and Soviet State’s contributions to ultimate Allied victory.
David Glantz
After the war, we had a lot of German generals in our hands and we got them to tell what happened on the Eastern Front – the war against the USSR – about which we knew very little. This presented the generals with a big dilemma. They wanted to show that, should there be a war against the Soviets, they would have useful things to tell their new owners, but they’d lost and who wants advice from losers? They solved the dilemma with what Jonathon House (see below) has called “the three alibis”. They created a story in which they would have beaten the Soviets 1) if only Hitler had let them get on with the job 2) it hadn’t been so cold 3) if the Soviets hadn’t overwhelmed them with endless hordes of men.
The first one is quickly disposed of – Hitler did listen to his generals most of the time and it can be argued that when he didn’t he was right about half the time.
Cold. Yes, Russia’s cold. But Russian feet don’t freeze at lower temperatures than German feet. The Russians have foot cloths and felt boots, the Germans have socks (which get holes) and tight leather boots. What would you rather wear when it’s 40 below? How about the choice between a Russian ushanka or a German wedge cap tied on with a scarf? Padded jacket or big floppy woolen overcoat? And so on – the Russians dressed for the cold and the Germans didn’t. How about lubricants? Something that’s nice and slippery in the summer is glue when it’s really cold. In short, the Russians were ready to fight in winter and the Germans weren’t.
But it’s the third alibi that is the least understood. The Soviets did outnumber the Germans but not by that much. What they were really good at was strategic and operational deception. And it doesn’t seem that the Germans ever quite realized this. Deception is concealing where you are and what you’re going to do and pretending to be where you aren’t and going to do something you won’t. For the first, rigorous radio silence, camouflage to make the illusion there’s nothing there; for the second, dummy equipment, radio chatter, noise making the illusion of a large force ready to attack. Then the real attack, at overwhelming odds, hits the Germans where they’re not expecting it. Certainly outnumbered there but not all along the front. It’s not clear if the Germans ever figured this out. In short, thanks to the success of deception operations, the Germans thought there were more Soviets than there really were. It takes a lot of planning, a lot of skill and a lot of resources to do deception on this scale and I don’t know of any army that has ever done as much, as often and as well as the Russians. For them it was all the time, every time. As far as I know the Western allies only did deception on this scale with Patton’s dummy army group in 1944. (And did the Red Army show them how to do it?)
These are, as House says, alibis indeed. Hitler didn’t steal the victory from his generals, they didn’t plan for the cold and the Russians fooled them over and over again about numbers.
And what were these alibis designed to explain away? To explain away the fact that the Russians were just better at war than the Germans were, good as they undeniably were. Strategically and operationally, after the initial surprise, the Soviets beat them every time. And that’s the truth the German generals were hiding.
How much of this wrong interpretation is still out there and informing the comments you see about Russia’s performance in the war in Ukraine?
Quite a bit I think. All that stuff about poor planning, incompetence, failing logistics, bad morale has its roots in the Three Alibis. Strategic and operational excellence, deception, not so much.
NOTE For those who want to explore the subject further, Dr House’s lecture on the Three Alibis is worth the hour. Some time in the 1970s or 1980s the US Army set up a Soviet studies section under Colonel David Glantz. The group did outstanding work on the war in the east and Glantz (often together with House) has published many books on how and what the Soviets did. This essay is a good starting point for his overview.
The link to the essay 404s https://sonar21.com/Users/User/Downloads/strom_pub_history_soviet.pdf
The link doesn`t work.
does not work
Try this file:///C:/Users/User/Documents/1%20MY%20DOCUMENTS/ARCHIVE%20DOCS/GLANTZ%20EASTERN%20FRONT%20SUMMARY.pdf
That is the link to a file on your PC, we do not have access to it. Or do we? 🙂
This link:
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/sti_pubs/217/
is the download page for Gantz’s:
The Soviet-German War 1941-1945: Myths and realities: A survey essay, 2001 October 11
This is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zinPbUZUHDE&t=124s
to:
How the Red Army Defeated Germany: The Three Alibis – Dr. Jonathon House
I just tried these and they work.
One goes to all the sources one had been tapping into (for info) – and all is quiet. What’s there is mostly ego and angst. (With the exception here, of course)
I’ve never heard a claim that the Soviets were better than the Germans and the manpower advantage was more than two Soviets per German. The key mistake occurred in 1943 when the Germans split their offensive forces with one army focused on Moscow and another sent after the oil fields in the South. They both failed. If they had focused on one they could have prevailed. The Soviets did better focusing on excellent reliable things like the T-34 rather than clumsy, expensive super weapons like Tiger tanks.
The fatal error you speak occurred in summer of 1942 and the two diverging axes were toward the Caucasus oilfieds and Stalingrad. The generals told Hitler to focus primarily on taking Stalingrad, and then go to the Caucasus. Germans first arrived at the gates of Stalingrad with the 6th Army and the 4th Panzer Army in reserve. The two Armies could have easily have taken the city
But suddenly, Hitler decides that he can now revert to taking both objectives so he sends the 4th southward to support the crossing of the Don River. So the 4th basically spends three months traveling back and forth between Rostov and Stalingrad. Thats the key strategic error.
Highly recommend “When Titans Clashed” by Glantz and House. ISBN 978-0-7006-2121-7.
That’s the narrative of every German General who ever wrote a biography. 🙂
No less an authority than Zhukov said Stalingrad was important to protect Army Group South as they advanced to Baku through the Caucasus. Baku was responsible for 80% of Soviet fuel production. The real difference was that the Stavka realized the danger and through everything they had both at Stalingrad and Rzhev to pin down Army Group center.
The Germans conducted a brilliant defensive battle at Rzhev but it cost them the war because it short staffed Army Group south. The Germans should have let Army Group Center get battered and sent everything to the Stalingrad campaign. But they were not willing to make a sacrifice like that.
Taking Baku was their only chance to win the war.
Keep in mind that Stalingrad was a rail hub for north/south railroads and was at a bend in the Volga river, used for barge transport. Taking and fortifying Stalingrad would have greatly impeded Russia’s ability to move south.
Vous oubliez que le groupe d’armées centre (Guderian entre autres) était parvenu à 60km de Moscou. Ce G.A.C était ce qu’avait l’Allemagne de plus puissant, sa force n’était comparable qu’aux forces rassemblées à Koursk en 1943, 2 groupes d’armées. Donc, dire a posteriori, erreur clé, c’est supposer que les soviétiques n’auraient pas prévu la force adéquate pour contrer les forces nazies…
Larry, huge fan of your web site and writing. At the risk of starting some sort of monster off topic debate, do you have any opinion on the Suvorov Thesis? Sean McMeekin in his excellent book “Stalin’s War” — the subtext of which was FDR’s grotesque man-crush on Uncle Joe — seems to lean in that direction (which isn’t to day he is endorsing it, just that there is some complexity to it that the poorly educated average American doesn’t comprehend).
FWIW, Ive been reading Caulaincourt’s memoir of Napoleon’s invasion and retreat. It’s a mistake to underestimate the Russians, especially on their own soil.
Thanks for all you do to dispel the fog of bullsh*t emitted by the organs of American power.
The rearmament of the Red Army should have been completed around 1942-1943, so all theories about “Stalin attacked first” are nonsense. The battleships of the Soviets were supposed to be not earlier than 1945.
finally people are giving the soviets their due.
Finally some people are engaging with some objective truths. The problem with the truth is that when its more profitable to believe lies then lies are what gets believed . Now even Russians are taught the western “version ” of history. In the US people were seldom or never told the truth so it was never even recorded as history except, here and there in some lost news reels and maybe some obscure professional military histories, written before 1951.
I remember reading sane accounts of WWII back when I was in elementary school, back some 50 years ago (in the 1970s).
Those books were systematically purged in the 80s, once Reagan became president.
So anyone born before 1960 **should** know this history and be ready to correct anyone who doesn’t.
Unfortunately, most of those people were quelled into silence by the McCarthy era, specifically, and the Cold war in general.
The US is well along its final leg of transformation into a fascist totalitarian state, which it started out upon with the formation of the CIA following WWII–the same organization that arranged the assassinations (with the help of the FBI) of the late 60s / early 70s.
Larry, the final link to a pdf file returns a 404 error.
I was in Germany in the US Army, and you can’t tell a Kraut much. Just like their incoming economic destruction. Ve vill vash mit wash rags und be vine. Okay buddy. The future German economy will be carving cuckoo clocks by candlelight
No, I’ve interviewed German students for internships, and almost all thought they could be managers from day one. None from the Universities can actually make something, much less understand how things actually work. The people doing much of the unskilled or manufacturing work in Germany are imported Auslaenders. Your cuckoo clocks are increasingly imported from China.
The politicians are largely “magic-thinkers.” The only politician talking pro-German-people common sense is the leftist Sahra Wagenknecht … the rest, and pretty much all of the mainstream “acceptable” German politicians don’t give a rat’s behind for Germany and the German people; they’re too busy building Europa, the politcal version of the PKw VII Maus of our times.
Another quick comment. While I was there, they had compulsory service. One day I noticed a troop pulling a tab of paper out of a round item on his belt. I asked him what it was. He showed me. It was a container that had rip off tabs counting his remaining service down day by day. It was authorized duty wear. On to current times. Germans are not having kids. Their demographic doom is upon them. There will be no Wehrmacht 2.0. Not only will they be broke, but they have no children to draft. And that is the Ukrainian strategy. Have other fools die for you. I WAS a proud veteran. If a child of mine said he joining today? I would bitch slap him. Why? To enrich the corporations? To fight forever wars? When did we last fight a war to protect the USA?
All (modern) wars are to enrich corporations, as was WW2. Ford, Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bush, et all, made fortunes there. So don’t be too proud.
When did we last fight a war to protect the USA?
1861-1865
http://kether.com/words/butler-smedley–war-is-a-racket-1.pdf
Yeah. 1861. The good guys lost.
1812
It’s always been to enrich corporations/the elites. Read “war is a racket” by two time congressional metal honor winner Gen Butler written in the 1930s (he also saved FDRs life). Nowadays, you have added issue of Army is at war with it’s own pushing the woke nonsense as an added reason to opt out and find another career path. When Obama dismissed about half of his Generals on political lines shoulda been a clue about half of us don’t belong there since merit doesn’t matter. I’m glad I’m old and live in a retirement community as I’d have to pull out an atlas if I were a young man again. America is toast for a whole host of reasons besides wokeness destroying our military – financial, moral, no borders, etc but I’m banking I die before what’s going on in America to boil over and explode.
Anyway, more on Russian Maskirovka from a blogger I’m keen on
https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/fall-like-a-thunderbolt
while the usa will be reduced to ashes by its arrogant leadership and internal civil war ; germany will survive and come back when they get rid of their fools leading them and join the brics.
. when you are in the streets eating crickets they will back to a normal life driving nice cars. the usa has allot to answer for what it has done to to world starting in korea and karma is a bitch. Either the usa changes it ways or it will be destroyed and the rest of the world will not miss it at all.
“German Europe Must Expand Eastward
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is a colorless SPD politician, but his Aug. 29 speech in Prague was inflammatory in its implications. Scholz called for an expanded, militarized European Union under German leadership. He claimed that the Russian operation in Ukraine raised the question of “where the dividing line will be in the future between this free Europe and a neo-imperial autocracy.” We cannot simply watch, he said, “as free countries are wiped off the map and disappear behind walls or iron curtains.”
Not what id call cute and cuddly.
Germany is being positioned to finish if Russia. When Germany is poor, it gets mad and aggressive and the UKUS just point at Russia and say ‘ go Fido, go!’
And off they go in their electric BMWs.
Germany (and most of Europe) has been a US asset since 1945. France almost escaped under de Gaulle but is back in the coop. So don’t blame the Germans too much, again they’re “just following orders.”.
WWII was an industrial war. Germany didn´t have a chance from the very start as her industrial capacity and her raw material base were never more than a fraction of the base of the US and the USSR combined. The majority of the generals were aware of that. Even the leadership of the Wehrmacht knew it. They were kicked out though by the fanatics before the war started. I am not writing this out of some whim. I am from a German military family and some of them were highly decorated in WWI and WWII. Why they fought nevertheless is a complicated story. Probably 80 years is not enough to look at this war with the necessary cynicism. To round out the argument: the war in the East was fought on the Soviet side with Soviet weapons but with US food, US trucks and US fuel. Germany had no fuel, no food from the middle of 1944. Not coinvidentally the US had waited until 1944 to bomb the fuel plants (Germany got her aviation fuel mostly from plants converting coal to oil). From the time of the invasion in Normandy Germany was in a vise from which she could not escape. Had she done certain things better Berlin would have been bombed instead of Hiroshima.
You hit the nail on the head Tom67. Production mattered. There is more to that too. Larry made a comment a number of postings ago about how the Sovs made more tanks the the US. My response to myself was “So What.”
The Sovs made something like 125,000 armored vehicles; the US about 86,000. But we made enough for ourselves and gave some to the Brits, and, drum roll please, to the Soviet Union.
The US made more aircraft carriers and battleships then the Sovs. You could say “So What” to that. The Sovs didn’t need any, why make them.
Here’s a nice short article on Lend Lease that should put it into perspective.
https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balance-in-soviet-fight-against-nazi-germany/30599486.html
We gave so much rail road stuff to the Sovs that the US rail system was worn out by the end of the war and didn’t get back into shape until 1955. With out US entry and Lend Lease, the Germans and the Soviets would still be fighting it out along the Urals.
BTW, aside from having relatives going ashore with Big Red One on D-day, and a father in the US Army Air Corps, I had a great uncle who was a Colonel with the German 6th army at Stalingrad. He died in a Soviet POW camp in 1948.
Sadly now the US would struggle to mass produce products.
I concur
There was an imperative for Germany to ‘go east’ after the territorial losses the country incurred in the aftermath of the First World War. Imperial Germany included a large amount of what is now western and northern Poland, and from 1917 when Russia collapsed, the Germans were able to seize (‘liberate’) the Baltic states and occupy huge territories in Belarus, south western Russia right down to the Ukraine. This vast territory was planned to be incorporated into a Greater Germany, making it self sufficient in food and resources. Few people in the west would be aware of this as their memory of the First World War is one of stalemate on the western front. Germany lost all these gains and much more in the Versailles Treaty, something that she was never reconciled with. The idea that the drive to the east belongs to Hitler is nonsense.
Germany’s industrial capacity was never really capable of supporting a long war. German foreign policy aims were to be achieved through short, sharp border wars, which proved to be far more successful than expected – Poland, France, Norway, the Balkans, etc, all collapsed within weeks. These successes set up unrealistic expectations that a Russian campaign would achieve the same result. The German government knew that it had to strike the Soviets as soon as possible as Soviet industrial capacity was growing at such a rate that it would outstrip German industrial capacity within only a year or two. If the Soviets weren’t taken out immediately, Germany would never be in a position to achieve it’s eastern goals. Nevertheless, all the war gaming done by the general staff ended in defeat for Germany – unless they could secure a lightning victory and negotiated peace. It was a huge gamble and they lost, largely because their initial intelligence about Soviet capabilities was WAY off. Intelligence chief, Reinhart Gehlen, a man who misread almost everything about the Soviet Union, ended up on the US payroll as a ‘Soviet expert.’ His – and many other German generals – incorrect assumptions and faulty analysis has infected the west, top to bottom.
https://stolzuntermenschen.substack.com/p/old-mother-hubbard
I think one thing a lot of people overlook is that Germany had to delay its attack on Russia in 1941 because their incompetent ally Italy could not subdue Greece. They had to waste a couple of vital months invading Greece before they could turn their attention to Russia. Still, I expect the result would have been the same.
Somebody asked about the story that the German attack pre-empted a Soviet attack. Glantz says it’s not true and that’s good enough for me.
https://kansaspress.ku.edu/subjects/history-military/world-war-ii/978-0-7006-1789-0.html
There used to be a guy in the comments of this blog (did not see him for a while), who was perpetrating all those questionable (to various extent) stories about the pre-emptive attack, Holodomor etc. I asked him once the reason to do that, hoping that the reason would be to the effect of establishing the truth. His reply was that he is just trying to counteract some of the thinking put forward by the author of the blog. Here you go. Very symptomatic of the majority of the public discussions these days, when people are not trying to figure out what actually is going on (were going on), but just willing to try to win an argument at all cost.
Except that the planning-intensive Germans, Hitler included, would not have been likely to rush into the USSR without adequate preparation for facing Winter.
There’s no shortage of contemporary testimony from the German officials tried at Nüremberg that Barbarossa was a preëmptive attack, and it’s not likely they thought before capture to get their stories straight, and little possibility they could do so after capture. The Soviet archives yield plenty of evidence that Glantz seems to wave away. Then there’s this from Pravda on 8 May 1991:
“Unrealistic [Soviet] plans of an offensive nature were drawn up before the war as a result of an overestimation of our own capabilities and an underestimation of the enemy’s. In accordance with these plans we began deploying our forces on the western frontier. But the enemy beat us to it.”
But the bottom line is this: There was no shortage of Soviet troops massed on the border, and they were in no defensive formation, rather they were in formation building to attack, which is why it was so easy for the Germans to kill and capture so many of them.
I’ve been forced to plan lunches with Germans six weeks in advance. As full of themselves as Germans might be, I can’t see them blundering into the USSR thinking they’d have it nailed down by Winter. The story is plausible and warrants further research.
If this be true then why was Stalin so surprised, surprised into a catatonic state, when he realized that Hitler had double-crossed him?
What I read was that Soviet intelligence saw the Germans ramping up for an invasion. Zhukov urged Stalin to pre-emptively attack the Germans. Stalin refused. This alternative story is that the Germans massed millions of soldiers and equipment in response to a Soviet build up? Are there any archival material from Hitler staff meetings that the Germans were only acting defensively in building up the largest land invasion maybe in all history?
See page 77 inter alia in David Irving’s study, Nuremberg: The Last Battle.”
—-
“Regardless of Stalin’s personal stand on precisely this issue, Soviet newspapers now began attacking the Allies for not having ex- ecuted Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Germany’s highest-ranking soldier, immediately upon capture; this kind of lawlessness made Jackson uncomfortable about any future participation of the Russians in a trial.
It seems that the Kremlin had suddenly been stricken with the same kind of misgiving as had beset Churchill since the Russians evidently fearing that if Germany were now to be charged with preparing an aggressive war against Russia, the defence would establish from German and captured Soviet documents that Moscow had been making much more extensive preparations to attack Germany than the world was yet aware of. Before General Donovan departed for Europe on May, Jackson therefore asked him to question Göring on the following topics: the Soviet preparations for war (or, failing that, the real reasons why Hitler had attacked Russia); information that might be of use to Jackson if and when Göring took the witness stand; and ‘any positions he might be taking in defense.’”
—-
At the trials, the Nazis were generally barred from presenting exculpatory evidence in order to spare the embarrassment of several Allied powers.
Germany was a dictatorship and the heads of the army had been exchanged for yes sayers. Simple as that as for the reason why Germany invaded without adequate winter supplies. There was a special medal for those that had participated in the fighting around Moscow in 1941. The grunts called it the “Gefrierfleischorden”. (Frozen meat medal)
There is a non fiction book called Icebreaker written by Viktor Suvorov, a former GRU officer who argues in his book that Stalin was planning a surprise attack on German, but Hitler beat Stalin to the punch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebreaker_(Suvorov)
https://www.amazon.com/Icebreaker-Who-Started-Second-World/dp/0241126223
One has to wonder if Putin knew this history, which is why Putin struck first rather than wait, knowing Ukrainian forces were prepared to attack the Donbass.
I scanned Suvorov’s arguments, all of them are inferences. He did NOT uncover archives documenting any plans / meeting minutes by Stalin or the STAVKA.
I found all of his arguments to be specious except for his allegation about Red Army maps. I’d have to see the documentation for that one.
His biggest argument was that the Red Army was too big for defense and therefore must be planning an invasion. Note, this is an inference, not direct evidence and it is a specious argument. The standing army had 4M men and was the same size as the Axis armies at Barbarossa. The reserve army was 15M men. I’d argue that this is a bad structure for invading other countries.
If you were planning to ivade, you would have a large active army, not a reserve one. The Reserves were not elite troops, they would receive a few weeks of training but it did provide a structure for calling them up for an emergency defense. At the eve of the war the USSR basically had a phone book of already screened men and where they lived. Compare this to a draft where you have to first catalogue and then screen recruits like the U.S. did. Instituting a last minute draft cannot be done in a timely manner. Had the Red Army adopted that practice then Moscow would be speaking German today.
I read his argument about tanks, planes, and equipment and found them equally suspect so I only decided to document the one about the size of the Red Army.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed on 23 Aug 1939. On 1 September 1939 Germany invaded Poland. But Russia didn’t invade Poland until 16 days later. Why was that? Because Stalin outsmarted Hitler and got him to invade Poland first, knowing England and France would declare war on Germany. And yet neither England or France declared war on Russia when it invaded Poland. Why was that?
Who was supplying Germany with the fuel for its invasion of France? Yup Russia. Stalin played the European powers off each other to weaken them. Then he got Roosevelt to sign the lend lease with Russia on 11 March 1941 before Germany invaded Russia on 22 June 1941. Of course none of this proves Stalin was going to invade Germany but Stalin sure play all the other powers off of each other to Russia benefit, right up until Germany invaded Russia.
Suvorov also argued Russia’s weapons were not design for defensive operations. The caliber of its guns and the large size were designed to breach defensive positions in an attack, not used on the defensive. All these clues makes one wonder what was Stalin up to?
So Stalin ‘tricked’ Hitler in invading Poland in order to start a war between Germany, France, and the U.K.? That was Hitler’s choice alone.
Back to SUvorov (not to be confused w/the great General who fought Napoleon), people here he is from GRU and assume that he has some secret documents. He does not, he is making inferences from public domain info.
Large caliber guns are more useful for defense. Large caliber guns are harder to move. An offensively structured force would have lots of mobile guns. This is my inference.
Suvorov also said that Russia had too many tanks for defense and is therefore an invasion force. Russia had a 1,000 frontier with the axis, they would go broke trying to fortify it like the Maginot line. Tanks give you the ability to respond to an invasion. At the start of the war, the Red Army wasn’t even able to move their tanks around inside their territory without running out of gas. It took them time to figure out the logistics. This is hardly the structure of a force about to invade an opponent like Germany.
Another argument against Suvorov’s thesis. He argues that Stalin was going to invade THAT YEAR and Hitler barely beat him to the punch, correct?
There is not a snowball’s chance in hell that Zhukov would be part of such a badly planned operation. Zhukov was extremely methodical. He would have conducted large scale military exercises for an invasion. As it was, Russia did not have the proper ratio of trucks to tanks, there are examples of tank forces running out of gas. Zhukov would insist on working this out before being part of an invasion force. Russia invading Germany in 1941 successfully was an impossibility.
BTW Zhukov was not a yes man. He resigned his commission in 1941 in protest over the Stavka’s decision to reinforce Kiev. He wanted an evacuation.
“Kick in the door and the whole rotten edifice will crumble” A. Hitler
It was Nazi racist ideology that led them to believe the Russians would roll over and hang the “jewish bolshevik” Soviet leadership from the lampposts if they invaded.
As far as planning went German logisticians told Hitler they couldn’t supply the Barbarossa invasion as it stood let alone in the Russians didn’t cave. In short the Barbarossa invasion was a faith based operation not a well planned military operation.
As far as plans to invade Germany of course the Red Army had plans to invade Germany … that’s what the general staff get paid to do. Canada had plans to invade the USA … they likely still do …. and the USA likely has plans to invade Canada … and Mexico … and there is probably some junior captain in the basement of the Pentagon planning an invasion of Antarctica in case some freedom loving penguins need liberating but that isn’t proof of anything.
An interesting sidebar on this subject. There is a lecture by David M Glantz on youtube where he claims the plans, maps etc. the Germans tried to pawn off as invasion plans of Germany were and Victor Suvorov held up as evidence in “Icebreaker” were the plans for the Brody counter offensive in July 1941.
It is not unusual for states to make plans for attack on their neighbors and rivals, if only to plan for eventualities and the Soviets definitely drew up plans for an assault on Germany, especially after the collapse of Poland and the two countries suddenly sharing a border. However, I don’t believe these ever moved beyond conceptual exercises. The Soviets were concerned about German attack as is evidenced by their rebuilding of static defense lines further west into the former Polish lands, but they never had time to implement these plans fully. Additionally, they were not really ready for a war until 1942-3 at the earliest.
There is a lot of confusion about the Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty and Poland despite its terms being published years ago. One must remember that Poland as a nation did not exist until it was created 1919. Prior to that, Poland was divided between Imperial Russia, Imperial Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Neither Germany nor the Soviet Union fully accepted the loss of their Polish territories and were keen to ‘recover’ them. The R-M treaty’s secret clause was not an agreement between Germany and the USSR to invade Poland together and occupy the country, but the division of Poland into ‘sphere’s of influence’, which aligned closely to the former division of the country between Germany and Russia. For example, there were significant numbers of German speakers in western and northern Poland and Russian speakers in the east. Germany and USSR agreed they would not interfere in each other’s spheres. However, when the Germans invaded and the Poles collapsed, German troops rushed eastwards in hot pursuit of the remnants of the Polish army they crossed over the prearranged ‘border’ into the Soviet sphere. The Soviets were extremely concerned by this and feared the Germans were breaking their agreement. The German ambassador was summoned to Moscow to explain, as was the Polish ambassador. The Soviets had been offering the Polish a defense pact for years in anticipation of a war with Germany, but the Poles were fundamentally opposed to the Soviets – with good reason perhaps as the Soviets and Poles had fought a bitter war in the 1920s. With no government in place in Warsaw, the Soviets took matters into their own hands and crossed the border, advancing to the agreed ‘border’. German troops on the Soviet side of the ‘border’ were escorted to the German side.
Why didn’t the Germans go into Barbarossa without winter supplies – because the war was expected to last six to eight weeks. It had to be that quick and decisive because anything longer would be ultimately unsustainable. All the other nations the Germans fought had collapsed much faster than that. German intelligence was telling the OKH that the Soviets were disorganized, the army disaffected (after the purges), led by poor quality officers (sometimes true) and ‘a good, swift kick on the door will bring the whole rotten structure down.’ They had completely misread the Soviets in the same way as the Japanese completely misread American isolationism towards the European war.
I think a lot of these sentiments are equally applicable today – the west has completely misread Russia and is still hoping against hope that its fantasy plans will come true.
Glantz — A Search on YouTube produces his lecture.
I’ve been trying to explain maskarovka to people since 2014, but they just won’t listen.
Which means, I suppose that the RF maskarovka is top quality.
My question is how much deception is possible in the age of Satellites and electronic monitoring? I have no idea.
It just seems it would have been easier in WWII. Of course, they had airplanes to fly reconnaissance and if I remember correctly from reading Antony Beevor book “Stalingrad” the German Air Force was warning about a build-up of Russian forces on the flanks before the kill shot which ended up destroying the German 6th army, and Germany’s hope for victory many say. The intelligence was simply ignored.
It seems to me electronic monitoring may be manipulated. Giving false orders and plans over the communication channels, etc.
But at the macro operational level how does any side with first-world Satellite Intelligence capabilities like Nato and Russia not see when forces are concentrating for an attack?
Literally, I read on Telegram 2 weeks before the attack in Kharkiv that many locals were reporting a build-up of forces in the Kharkiv area and Telegram channels were predicting a counter-attack in this area and Kherson as the sideshow. They ended up being correct.
Why would Russia abandon all that military equipment if this was just a deception? They could have at least destroyed it before retreating to more defensible lines or if planned still make it look like a legitimate retreat without the equipment falling into the enemy’s hand.
The other alternatives are pure incompetence or even Treason at the local commander level. Anything is possible.
This is a war until the bitter end. The quicker Russia understands that the fate of their nation is at stake the better it will be for them and the rest of us. There is no going back.
The US neocons are determined to destroy Russia as a nation and splinter them into a thousand pieces with Putin and the leaders at the end of a rope to broadcast to the world that no power is powerful enough to defy their religious aspirations.
Then a dark age will begin on Planet Earth for the next 1,000 years.
It’s a nightmarish irony that the future of human liberty, to the extent any degree of individual liberty is still possible in an uber-technological age, appears to depend on the survival and success of America’s long-time enemy, run by a former KGB lawyer. But that seems to be the reality. If Russia prevails in this war with NATO, and China doesn’t opportunistically join the globalist crusade in order to seize Russia’s boundless lebensraum and resources, it’s possible the globalist behemoth can be defeated, or at least derailed, particularly if other major countries like India and Brazil remain relatively independent and free from control by the West’s sick globalist cult.
If Russia fails, or if Putin is deposed, your prediction of a coming Dark Age is a near certainty. They are the last bulwark, hence the willingness to let Europeans freeze and starve in the dark, if only Russia can be destroyed. Even if Russia does prevail, the globalists will rain such hell on the populations of the US, Europe, and Down Under, that we will all learn what immense suffering at the hands of psychopaths and sociopaths is like. Except for members of the Ruling Class, of course.
I agree. I am Brazilian and here in my country many people have the notion that the struggle of Russia, which is a friend of Brazil in the context of the BRICS, is a struggle that is also ours. Unfortunately, many globalist traitors with the support of the mainstream media are trying in every way to take control of the country. And the presidential election on October 2nd is decisive for Brazil’s survival.
Perfectly said. I agree 100 percent.
Which is why I pray for V. Putin every day. I ask God to guide him, protect him, and fortify him.
Harlan,
Those videos of supposedly abandoned Russian vehicles had been debunked. It’s from a repair yard in Crimea. Please remain calm and realize there is an absolutely massive SBU/MI6/CIA/NATO ISPO underway. Telegram is 99 percent BS, all to instill fear, doubt and uncertainty.
Stay Strong my friend.
Slava Russia
L
“much of the Soviet Union’s Great Patriotic War remains obscure and imperfectly understood by Westerners and Russians alike.”
Some clearly understood who actually defeated the Germans but I only know of one that publicly admitted it
“I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies.”
– Winston Churchill, 1944
And Montgomery endorsed that view, albeit obliquely.
In the foreword to his History of Warfare, published in the early 70s when he was an old man, Monty listed his personal rules of warfare. Item 1 was, “NEVER march on Moscow.”
There is a youtube channel on yt called TIKhistory. A very thorough young historian, with many videos on the eastern front.
Be sure to watch this video:
https://youtu.be/_7BE8CsM9ds
(The Numbers Say it All | The Myth of German Superiority on the WW2 Eastern Front).
It’s eye opening. It is 45 minutes but it’s really worth the time. By the end he also highly recommends watching Dr. House’s lecture:
https://youtu.be/zinPbUZUHDE
That guy misses quite much though, I had to correct him and send him which book that proved he talked bs regarding to “non-existence” of a Zio-Anglo economic war on Germany that never let up until Hjalmar Schacht got free hands to counter it(Wages of destruction, Adam Tooze).
He follows the “Youtube academy” rules in that he willingly disregards anything that could remotely go against the established way of thinking because(understandable I think tbf) if he doesn´t then YouTube will kick him or take his monetization so he has to “play ball” as the Yanks say.
He´s likable and maybe even the best historian still *allowed* on YouTube but don´t expect any of the old Academic “honesty” from anyone, the rulers made us all conform to a Money-before-truth reality some time ago and the result is quite obvious in Academia.
Tl;Dr Use caution when consuming Mainstream sources.
Well….if the Russians where better at war then the Germans in the second world war…..the west is in trouble because every German soldiers was worth about 2 Western allied soldiers
Ah yes. Trevor Dupuy. But he was basing all his stuff on what the German generals said. Well before Glantz & Co.
Please “THAN” not “THEN”!
Sorry to be English Nazi use right words.
Glantz’s “Soviet Military Deception in the Second World War” can be downloaded in pdf format here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZRhNaruCtqq2L3ZyUvFNOlv6kI1d_x1b/view?usp=sharing
Thank you.
As a Armchair General of exceptional substance.
….all combat is a shit show basically, and who dares wins. The “plan,” is the canvas and the blooded palette knife is the substance.
While serving in the Australian Army I attended a combat “Nuclear Weapons Attack,” course: I learned a lot about human nature.
Radiation, blast and fire etc is absorbed best by plain old earthen barriers apparently. The course was in-depth, discussing the numerous methods of nuclear delivery. Charming!
The very last sentence in the Australian Army Nuclear Attack instruction manual said and I quote:
“ If a nuclear attack is anticipated, rapid digging is recommended.” I kid you not. It sounds very Aussie and indeedie it was and probably still is.
PS
Don’t ask for quotes, references and locations …it’s classified, then and today as far as I am concerned.
Anyroad the idiots I mingle with on the streets today don’t realise why I fear war with China, it’s because I know deep down, Washington will be circling the Carriers around Hawaii and their call sign will be, “Fuck the Kangaroos .”
Poland, are you thinking about this ? because the Nazi Ukies are not and the French are. With the Russians it’s all about, “ Here we go again, you all know the drill, let’s just do it.”
The Germans on the other hand are three time losers and don’t count anymore.
Good point about the earthworks. There’s a program called Time Team about archaeological investigations in the UK. In one episode the team were poring over a battle site from the English civil war (approx. 1641-47) and they learned that simple wicker baskets filled with earth were able to absorb cannon fire.
In addition to having read many books on the matter, I have listened to many a conference on YT given within the last decade by American military historians in military academies across the US that tend to debunk the lies of and excuses made by the losing German generals and in particular those arguments you mentioned in your nice article.
I need to add that the excuse of “poor planning…incompetency…” et cetera stemmed from the Western European inbred longstanding sense of superiority to the Russians. It is a multifaceted racist attitude that is pervasive and we’ve had a chance to observe its many aspects during the last six months all across the West. Given their disdainful attitude, it was difficult for those Nazi officers – don’t tell me otherwise, they were all that ! imbued with their sick sense of superiority could not otherwise justify being beaten by untermensch. It’s as simple as that. I’d have to say that the US played a major part in propagating that major falsification of History for propaganda reasons and because they did not want to glorify the role played of their newfound Soviet enemy. They went along with the fairy tale because it suited their aims, just as the OSS enlisted Stepan Bandera and his N@zi Banderistas to undermine Soviet power in Ukraine.
You have hit the nail on the head about racism against Russians. Even amongst mostly solid, salt-of-the-earth friends who side with me in opposing NATO’s war in Ukraine, there is an underlying perception of Russians as intellectually inferior, thuggish, simple-minded brutes. It really pains me. I try to give my friends a different perspective, but overcoming their whole lifetime of received brainwashing is very, very difficult.
And it’s not just a recent thing, either. Anti-Russian bigotry in the West dates back centuries.
God bless Russia!
Hemholtz; Thank you for the information. American history is too much for a lot of Americans. Real history is impossible to believe by many. Quite a lot is missing because it doesn’t smell good to Americans. Several of the above comments appear not to believe you. The Wehrmacht thought they were so far above everyone that they existed on ego. Ego does’t win the war. They got their ego handed to them. It was sad how the US embraced too many ego’s for the space program and the Russians(Soviets) got into space first. Many Americans don’t believe that to this day. It is another problem with egos. Once our egos are destroyed in Ukraine, perhaps, just perhaps, we will stop believing our exhaust doesn’t stink.
Simply not true. The Germans were, man-for-man much better than the Russians and in fact it was Hitler, and his interference with military operations which led to the German defeat. Two examples: 1) Hitler insisted in encircling a large Soviet Army in 1941 instead of pressing on to Moscow, the seizure of which would have deprived Russia of a major arms manufacturing center and a vital railway hub; and 2) his insistence on attacking Stalingrad directly instead of bypassing and encircling it. Finally, in today’s world, if Russia is so great, why haven’t they been able to defeat a weak paper tiger like Ukraine? Why are they begging Iran for drones and North Korea for ammo? Why are they reduced to recruiting mercenaries from Syria and combing jails for soldiers? Why are they sending obsolete T-62 tanks to Ukraine? Why don’t they have a professional NCO corps? Why don’t they encourage initiative from lower level leaders? Why is Putin celebrating the opening of a ferris wheel, which broke down after a few hours, instead of focusing on the collapse of his army in Kharkiv?
The Dr. House video deals with this alibi that Hitler caused German’s defeats. In fact, House argues (and others) that Hitler pretty much went along with his generals. And strangely, in some cases when he countered his generals he actually made the right decisions as in attacking Moscow. Also, I read that Hitler had his doubts about fighting at Kursk, but went along with his generals.
If the Russians are so bad, how come NATO weapons in the hands of the Ukrainians have yet to defeat the Russians.
For all your military assumptions and from someone who was not participating in fighting in the Eastern Front WW2 conflict. Your comprehension of todays reality is not so good.
What is the difference between SMO and Total War?
What is the difference between Baghdad and the towns and cities in the Donbas?
Iraq :500,000 little kiddies dead, “ but it was worth it,”. v’s Putin and his troops protecting all civilians. Regardless who they secretly support.
Russia is keeping its powder dry. When it’s required to unleash Its military every European will be shitting San Francisco style…in the streets.
No running water, electricity or food delivery….no gas! is starting to look, not so bad after all.(add Ukraine)
Putin is fighting with the minimal civilian casualties.
Total War against the defenceless is the sign of the Beast.
PS what’s the weather like in Kiev?
It’s rainy with temps in the 50’s – 60’s. Putin worried about civilians??? LOL!!! The only thing the Russian army is good at is killing civilians! Have you read anything about the Chechen Wars? They leveled Grozny and killed between 80,000 and 100,000 civilians. In Ukraine they fire missiles at apartment buildings, hospitals, maternity wards, etc. But I guess that’s all Ukrainian propaganda right? If the Russian Army is so great and the generals so brilliant and the soldiers 10 ft. tall, then why didn’t they just occupy Kyiv, decapitate the Ukrainian Government and install a puppet regime in 72 hours? Why draw this out for 7 months? After all there would be less civilian casualties in 72 hours of intense fighting than 7 months of drawn out fighting, no? And back to my original point, why are they begging Iran for drones and North Korea for ammo? Why are they reduced to recruiting mercenaries from Syria and combing jails for soldiers? why are they sending obsolete T-62 tanks to Ukraine? Why don’t they have a professional NCO corps? Why don’t they encourage initiative from lower level leaders? What does any of that have to do with civilian casualties? Could it be that Russia is simply getting beaten by Ukraine?
Ron,
How much is MI6 paying you? Otherwise it’s just willful ignorance or is it pure unadulterated racism?
All 3, perhaps?
Regardless, every one of your points is demonstrably false.
Try watching The New Atlas, or Andrei Martyanov or even actually reading Mr. Larry C. Johnson regularly.
Slava Russia
L
No need to respond to Ron S, Lauren. His ignorance speaks for itself. Stupidity that is ignored simply dies out on its own.
Please explain how my points are false. Is Russian not asking Iran for drones and North Korea for ammo? Is Russian not recruiting mercenaries from Syria and combing jails for soldiers? Is Russia not sending obsolete T-62 tanks to Ukraine? Does Russia have a professional NCO corps? Does the Russian Army encourage initiative from lower level leaders? Did the Russian Army just not flee in panic and disorder from Kharkiv Oblast, or did they leave all those tanks and all that ammo behind to slow the Ukrainian Army down? How is it that the greatest army in the world can’t defeat poor little Ukraine in 7 months??? Please explain this to me.
“The Germans were, man-for-man much better than the Russians and in fact it was Hitler, and his interference with military operations which led to the German defeat.”
Which “Germans” are you talking about? The German professional army that invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 or the army of hastily trained Germans, under equipped allies and ideological SS volunteers from across Europe who replaced them after the battle of Moscow?
If only the Germans could take Moscow … however you fail to account for the 750,000 highly trained German landsers killed during Barbarossa and Typhoon. Do you think the Germans would have come out with more casualties or less fighting a Stalingrad style urban battle in the dead of winter?
I mention these casualties because due to the Versalles Treaty Germany was limited to professional soldiers and forbidden to have a reserve system while in June 1941 the Red Army had 14 million trained reservists.
This starts to really play out in spring 1942. The previous year Germany was able to advance on 3 axis but by spring 1941 they could only manage one … and even then they didn’t have the forces to achieve those objectives. meanwhile the Soviets had restarted their war production in the Urals, was beginning to get lend lease materials and were building huge armies east of the Volga.
Germany lost the war in front of Moscow despite inflicting much greater losses on the Reds by losing their best soldiers while not achieving one of Barbarossa’s objectives.
1942 was a hail mary operation to get oil and war materials which failed spectacularly.
After that they backed up all the way to Berlin.
I would beyond highly recommend the YT video of Dr, House linked to by Larry. What an eye opener for anybody drowned in the post-WWII propaganda based on the books written by German generals. A propaganda that lives today in the assumptions of the Western powers about the Russian military, and I would argue, effects military decisions.
One of the most fascinating parts of Dr. House’s lecture was that Halder chief of staff went to logistics people for their take on Soviet invasion. They came back and said they could not supply the German army beyond 500km. The logistics people were spot on their assessment and predicted most the problems that occurred in invasion. Halder in his arrogance and personal agenda did not tell Hitler what the logistic people said. I wonder if Hitler knew if he would have delayed the invasion until problems solved? Makes me shiver to think about it.
I dunno , rommel take initiative in france and move toward the coast even at the protest of his superiosrs and hitler recorded calling it reckless .. and it is not hitler who cause the debacle n stalingrad , it is goering chief of staff who give erronous estimate that luftwaffte can supply the 6th army.. hitler is not at fault..
i for one always laugh at the people who blamed germany’s defeat to a single person called hitler. The historians should know better , there is a reason for the current blaming of hitler in everything in the western mind. It is as if hitler is the most evil person in history , and brand ppl they hate as hitler.. it is shallow thinking that breed these sheeps who blindly follow govt narrative in the west..
*** “The Soviets did outnumber the Germans but not by that much” ***
.
.
The nazis were warring at all points of the compass. The air war in the west required one million highly trained personnel to contest, to name one example. No offense to the Sovs, but they had the numbers and would trade blood for victory. You can blame Hitler since he was responsible for warring everywhere.
Any references and raw data to back up your claims? Except of course German generals’ memoirs who tried to vilify themselves and blame everything on Hitler.
Does anyone actually know what the Russians lost in the last 10 days around Kharkov?
How many tanks, how many artillery pieces, how many soldiers captured and killed?
and then what are the Ukrainian losses compared to those?
No released numbers on Russian losses. General consensus among the sane is that losses must be light because there aren’t Ukrainians posting pictures of dead Russians everywhere. They do that whenever they can, therefore…
Yup! Thats my conclusion too
RF had a battalion in Izium, maybe 500 or so. The rest was around 1,500 DNR military police. Basically like SWAT teams to deal with infiltrators/ sabateurs.
Originally, there were 16-20 battalions but they had been slowly drawn down in the preceding months. Unlike other areas under RF control, the street signs were never replaced with Russian ones, nor were the pylons at the edges of towns and villages repainted in the tri-color. Which would seem to suggest they knew they might be leaving at some point.
They conducted a very organized, week planned tactical withdrawal. And when those police had to hold the line for a couple days to hold the VSU back while a corridor was opened to continue their withdrawal, they fought like tigers .
Losses seemed to only around 200 or so. As to equipment, they didn’t leave much, or we’d be seeing lots of videos from the NATO mercenaries , who were leading the scout units.
Blessings
Slava Russia
L
Ukrops film everything. Most of their recent footage is about putting up or taking down flags.
Today a video of executed “collaborators” appeared. Viewing not recommended for those faint of heart.
https://t.me/intelslava/36995
This is actually a real problem. When the Russians crawled out of the nightmare of the 1990s, they began to do things other than just “survive”. One of those things was a survey of World War II veterans. They interviewed Soviet veterans, but also Germans. Of course, by 2000, many former SS-mans and Wehrmacht soldiers were dead. Many refused to talk to the Russians. So against 2,500 Russian interviews, the project “I Remember” received only a few dozen German interviews.
The guy who conducted most of these interviews said that the Germans blamed the winter, logistics, Allied aviation and, of course, the idiot Hitler for the loss. Not one of them said “we lost because the Russians were better.”
The Germans did not realize that they had lost the First World War because of the mistakes of their command and the delusions of their government. So they invented sinister Jews who ruined everything. They got rid of the Jews and decided that this time everything would work out, but again they lost.
The Germans after the Second World War did not understand why they lost. As far as I understand, they decided that they lost because they fought against the USA + Great Britain in both wars. Accordingly, to be winners, you need to be USA sidekick. The problem is that the modern analogue of the USA in 1900 and 1945 is now not the USA, but China. Great Britain, on the other hand, is in the position of Spain 1900-1945, a former great power, without economy and industry.
So, the Germans again did not understand anything and are fully ready for war with Russia. Again. And again they lose. Thank God, this is still an economic war, not a hot war.
Barbarossa 1941
The unknown fact taught by few historians anywhere is that the German attack on Russia in June 1941 was a pre-emptive strike against a vast Russian army with 10,000 aircraft and 20,000 tanks at its disposal.
Against this the Germans had 3 million men, 3332 tanks, 250 assault guns and 2770 aircraft. The Luftwaffe struck 1st and in 1 week had destroyed 4990 Russian aircraft.
The German army in 1941 was not fully mechanized. Of the 150 divisions committed only 30 – 20 panzer and 10 motorized had full vehicle transport. The remaining 120 infantry divisions had limited motorized transport and each had a full veterinary company to take care of the 5400 horses assigned to each division.
The Russian author Viktor Suvorov in his book Icebreaker (1990) discussed how Stalin was planning on attacking Germany and had set up his army to do so. The only way Germany could have accomplished such overwhelming success at the beginning of the operation is if the Russians were in frontline offensive positions and not set up for defense in depth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icebreaker_(Suvorov)
https://archive.org/details/icebreakerwhosta00suvo_0
As detailed in the book Icebreaker in chapters 31 to 33 Suvorov believed that Russia was going to attack Germany on July 6th and they would have overwhelmed the Germans .The code name for this was Operation Thunderstorm. The oilfields in Romania would have been attacked heavily by Russian and probably destroyed. Without fuel the mechanized units of the German army would have been unable to operate and the air force grounded. According to Suvorov Hitler would have ended up committing suicide by the fall of 1941 as Berlin would have fallen almost 4 yrs. earlier than it did.
One last observation re WWII from me, a German. One can sum up the thinking of the majority of German soldiers after the war, with the following:
1. The Russians did fight. Hard and tenaciously and with courage. But also without regard to the lives of their own soldiers and often attacking fortified positions without any sense. In the German army there was much more authority with the lower ranks. The so called “Auftragstaktik”. That is a command would be given and it would be up to lower ranks how the goal was reached. The Soviet approach was to micromanage everything.
2. The longer the war lasted the more the two armies started to resemble one another. That is not surprising as one learned from the other. The Soviets started to micromanage less and the Germans more. The Soviets decreased the power of their commissars and the Germans introduced kommissars in 1944.
3. One crazy little snippet that an uncle of mine told me: in the winter of 42/43 it got so cold the German side couldn´t be resupplied with food. The soldiers who were sleeping outside became terribly hungry. They snuck up in the night to the Soviet side and lined up to get food. I asked my uncle how that was possible. Easy, he said. Near the front line neither side ever used any light. It was pitch dark and nobody said a word when they shuffled to get their bowl filled. Each side knew from the other where they got their chow. He told me that one time the Germans caught a Soviet soldier who was doing the same on their side. He was only caught because the cook saw his sleeve when using a flashlight while filling his bowl.
There are more crazy stories like that. And finally: when I was a kid there where these long bearded old men begging in the streets and sleeping in the forest. I wondered who they were and was told these were soldiers who after 6 years of war could not return to a normal life. My uncle was like that as well and would have ended up in the streets if he hadn´t had a steady job with my grandfather. My uncle never had any posessions and always lived as if he would be called up to move on any minute. And although men were incredibly sought after by the women of his generation he withstood all entreaties and staid a bachelor all his life.
When I came to Russia in the beginning of the Nineties I told the story of these old German soldiers to a Russian friend I staid with. He told me that in Russia they had the very same old soldiers who couldn´t return to civilian life. I also found the same hard faces in Russia that I saw in the old generation in Germany.
I believe in retrospect war is glorified by the victors. But really the impact on the common people is everywhere the same. War is war and Germans soon realized that Russians weren´t Asiatic beasts as portrayed by propaganda and Russians realized that Germans were just as much and just as little cold blooded monsters as they themselves. I could go and on with such stories that I heard in Russian (which I speak fluently) and German. Unfortunately the war participants on both sides are now dead or very old. So the world gets ready to repeat the same old bulshit. Mankind never learns.
A thoughtful comment, thanks.
@TAKT. Do you really believe that the US and GB played no role in the defeat of Germany? Have you ever looked at production numbers, land lease a.s.o.? As a German I have always found it funny how successfully both the Russians and the Americans had been propagandized to believe that they, and they alone had defeated the Third Reich. Anyhow, whoever reads this and is genuinely interested in what German soldiers remembered about the war in their old age I recommend the following book: Die verdammte Generation
Gespräche mit den letzten Soldaten des Zweiten Weltkriegs
Christian Hardinghaus
It is the German equivalent to the collection of Russian remembrances.
And finally: I don´t know where you get your information from. But you are very wrong if you mistake published opinion in Germany for the opinion of the public. Germany is not a fully sovereign country and she was dragged kicking and screaming into this war. Remember the purpose of NATO: to keep the US in, the Russians out and the Germans down. The war in Ukraine beautifully serves NATO´s purpose.
Exactly. I am English and same thing here with respect to opinion on Ukraine. The corporate media and government are in total propaganda mode but people on the ground are nowhere near as supportive of what is being done in their name as this would imply. You do not see Ukraine flags.
The government announced major (and ruinous) subsidies of energy prices because they realise that any material hardship that can be linked to the war will just cause “support” for it to unravel. As with America, our overseas foreign policy misadventures are only possible if they do not create attributable domestic blowback.
With respect to WW2 I think Stalin said: “Britain brought time, America brought money and Russia brought blood”. It seems a reasonable summary. The UK lost circa 400k lives in WW2 (and only circa 150k of those were in the army) versus 25 million USSR citizens and something like 10% of Germany’s population I believe. Both the US and UK deliberately fought a highly capital intensive war, in Britain’s case based on a highly conscious decision not to repeat the WW1 experience.
>Do you really believe that the US and GB played no role in the defeat of Germany?
No. In this matter, I agree with this quote from Churchill (thanks mr. Henry Catchum)
“I have left the obvious, essential fact to this point, namely, that it is the Russian Armies who have done the main work in tearing the guts out of the German army. In the air and on the oceans we could maintain our place, but there was no force in the world which could have been called into being, except after several more years, that would have been able to maul and break the German army unless it had been subjected to the terrible slaughter and manhandling that has fallen to it through the strength of the Russian Soviet Armies.”
– Winston Churchill, 1944
You don’t understand what I’m talking about. I say that the modern industrial giant is China, and the Germans are stuck with the United States, which turned the “heartland” of their own country into a “rust belt” when they moved production to Asia. The Germans are again on the side of weak production and resource capacities.
>But you are very wrong if you mistake published opinion in Germany for the opinion of the public. Germany is not a fully sovereign country…
I know. None of the NATO countries (also japs) seems to be either sovereign or independent. Except, suddenly, Hungary. Nevertheless, the German Chancellor himself, again repeats the sacred words – “Guns versus butter”.
In another situation, Russians might have gone crazy from the return of German militarism, but since Scholz a political corpse that doesn’t have much time left to completely decompose, the Germans themselves are under US control, the German economy is being destroyed right now and frankly, German weapons is cold era tech in best case. So we are somewhat worried about the return of the Nazis to power in Germany, but these Nazis will be armed with rifles and ride horses, as this will be their maximum technological capabilities. So it’s a moderate concern.
I view what is happening as a tragedy for all of Europe. And yes, I see Russia as a part of Europe. Nothing good will come out of this for Russia as well. China is not some good friend. The Chinese want their pound of flesh from Russia and they will get it if Russia has to severe all ties with Europe. In retrospect it might very well be that Russia sacrificed the far East (at the very least) in the unsuccessful attempt to get regime change in Ukraine. All very sad and completely unnecessary.
>I view what is happening as a tragedy for all of Europe.
Sure.
>And yes, I see Russia as a part of Europe.
I understand you are in the minority. As I hear, most in the west do not share this opinion. And the farther west, the less people consider Russians to be Europeans.
>Nothing good will come out of this for Russia as well. China is not some good friend.
Well, they don’t fund, train and arm our old and most hated enemy. They don’t run around the world wreaking havoc here and there. The Chinese do not steal our money and property, screaming how they will destroy our economy and plunge the Russians into poverty and civil wars. Compared to Europe, this is a big improvement.
>All very sad and completely unnecessary.
From 2014 to 2022 there was a lot of time. There is no more, as well as the good will of the Russians towards Europe. I find it fascinating how Tsar Russia, Soviet Russia, and finally, capitalist and democratic Russia, has always looked to the West as an ideal, as a role model. And you just just threw it all in the trash.
You are dead wrong. With corona and everything people in Germany are getting more and more distrustful of authority. Russia has been a reliable partner for 30 years. Do you think Germans are stupid? Russia gets as much or more foreign exchange as before but Germany stares catastrophy in the face. I believe anything is possible including such civil unrest that the government falls apart. Putin, who knows Germany very well is playing a smart game. He always stresses how it is not Russia who is causing all this pain. Russia will also in the future be a reliable partner. As much as propaganda is daily being hammered into the brain of the people there is a moment when it won´t work anymore. And that moment isn´t far away. Then all bets are off.
There will be repression, arrests and even more censorship here in Germany. But then things will break. The regime is nearing its end. Our woke elites have it coming.
“DID THE GERMAN GENERALS PLAY US FOR SUCKERS? (BY HELMHOLTZ SMITH)”
The sucker play was a joint venture – “US” was not and is not the “innocent victim” of “evil doers”, but complicit as a function of still held illusions of being the smartest kids on the block, and the best fighters on the block because we come from Brooklyn or the Bronx etc.
Well, I have to smile……
There was never a better squad than the Germans from back then.
The Russians were neither tactically nor strategically a match for them, but clearly the Soviets had many men to sacrifice and therefore time to learn.
In 1945, of course, their army was immensely war-trained. You had the best opponent to learn from.
The German army that marched in in 1941 was not nearly as well equipped as it should have been.
But Germany with its 80 million could not afford more.
Because they were almost disarmed in 1933.
There were hardly any fully motorized divisions, apart from the armored divisions, and even they always suffered from a lack of vehicles. The Panzer 4 stub…… its gun was only good enough with Wollfram Ken ammunition. But only Spain could supply tungsten.
The tungsten core ammunition for the tanks was so rare that the number produced was an issue in the OKW situation reports almost every month.
Well, Hitler made a lot of mistakes, if the others would have made fewer…. I suppose so.
Whether the war would then have been won, I don’t think so, it would simply have lasted 2-3 years longer and the world would have had to try a lot harder.
If it had ended atomically …. sure, but the Germans might have joined in the bombing.
The Germans had so many innovations in development… it is impossible to estimate what would have become of them. At most even a victory or a truce.
The approximately 120 type XX-1 submarines alone would have drastically changed naval warfare.
By the way, the tactics of the Germans are also taught at Russian war schools… you can’t ignore them.
Generals like “Erich von Mannstein” were unbelievably good and they had dozens of that caliber.
The Soviets learned something new during the fights……… the better the enemy, the more you learn.
But they also always sacrificed masses of soldiers for things that were rarely done by the Germans.
Their lack of good officers has cost many lives.
What the communists did well, they forced their industry to produce vast quantities of war supplies, and they were amazingly successful at it.
What the Americans delivered was certainly welcome, but only a small fraction.
When I was young I read all the situation reports of the German “OKW” (High Command Wehrmacht). Big tomes, because there was a report every day.
For example, there was a discussion about how to dismantle submarines and bring them to the Mediterranean Sea by train. Going through Gibraltar was very dangerous for submarines….. they were just crazy good.
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If you read these situation reports, you get a very good idea of what war is.
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Germany was never fully equipped……there were far more horses than trucks. Yes, trucks were so valuable that they were immediately dug in at every front section so as not to lose anyone.
I would say the Wehrmacht was only 30% as motorized as it should have been.
Well, Germany was the thoroughbred racehorse of the armies, they could have achieved anything.
If they hadn’t attacked the communists, would Stalin have done so before? The archives will perhaps provide information about this one day.
Could the Wehrmacht have been able to upgrade for another 4 years?
Would Germany have gone bankrupt because of this and would the Soviets have stayed silent for so long?
The declared goal of the communists was to “proselytize” all of Europe
Was Hitler’s “attack” a war of prevention?
I think it was him……
You should definitely read the minutes of the negotiations with Molotov in November 1940.
But beware, some pages are usually left out……. read the complete one, not the politically desired one which one finds everywhere in Germany and which is always missing something.
In my opinion, the Germans realized that one day the communists would attack.
Molotov made the mistake of being a little too honest during the negotiations.
Unfortunately, you can no longer ask him.
“The declared goal of the communists was to “proselytize” all of Europe”
“Molotov made the mistake of being a little too honest during the negotiations.”
Following “Socialism in one country” and events in Germany post 1933, de facto “The Comintern” had other uses, then following the “Sudetenland issue” of 1938 and the situation in Spain in early 1939, de facto “The Comintern” had different uses, and de jure was terminated in 1943 for even further uses with the understanding of Mr. Dimitrov and others.
After both Mr. Kaganovich and Mr. Molotov were “retired”, some people did talk/debrief them, and Mr. Molotov confirmed that he was a messenger at the meeting of November 1940, not a principal – only “acting” as such, and the post-war arrest of his wife Polina Molotova and her subsequent release after some “prison time”, was in part encouragement to stay on script post war to avoid the consequences suffered by the principals in the Leningrad affairs of 1946 and subsequent.
All were deemed a requirement to maintain “the cult of personality” which Mr. Kruschev and his associates attempted to start renovating in 1956, destruction not being a viable option for many reasons, the hypothesis being in part confirmed in 1964 with the final hurrahs of “The Red Experts”; all facilitating subsequent efforts of a growing sum of some, which in part facilitated the ongoing transcendence of “The Soviet Union” by “The Russian Federation”, and the present “war in Ukraine”.
“the cult of personality”
To some Mr. Stalin was the bank robber who forgot to count all of the money from his initial “association” with RSDP(B).
To some Mr. Stalin was a “democrat” who shared information when it suited his purposes, but not necessarily theirs.
To some others Mr. Stalin remained the frightened beaten boy who increased his levels of vindictiveness as he grew older.
To some others he was the “bastard” who promised to leave it to the professionals after September 1941, then when Stavka’s Moscow counter-offensive appeared to becoming successful sought attribution through ordering over-extension, which he de-sought, when it became over-extension.
Mr. Stalin never attained “full spectrum dominance” and hence was both frightened and vindictive throughout his days as “General Secretary”, aided by others of similar dispositions many of whom changed these disposition over the next 30 or so years, hence his treatment of “his staff” and his observation in respect of Mr. Kalinin:
You don’t need to wear the star to be the sheriff.
And why some of a Jewish disposition smiled when he died during Purim of 1953 – Mr. Kaganovich and Mr. Kopolev refer, although Mr. Kopelev initially alleged he cried.
“ultimate Allied victory”
Although not absolute, and understandable given Mr. Glantz’s purposes and trajectories, one of the illusions underpinning Mr. Glantz’s and other’s analyses is that de facto there was a constant alliance between the British Empire, The Soviet Union, and The United States of America in the period from 1942 until 1945, instead of a de jure alliance regularly ignored, which as functions of necessity/opportunity/self-interest sometimes facilitated limited de facto co-ordinations which some continue to interpret as an alliance.
Some are of the view that Mr. Glantz’s and others’ analyses are largely, but not wholly, immersed within what may be described as military paradigms of restricted access, and hence are undermined as a function of foci and sources.
De facto the participants neither shared the “unconditional surrenders” nor their dates, nor the “victories” or their consequences, although de jure it was represented and continunes to be represented that the created legends were and remain “reality”.
One of the things that is mind-boggling to me in the present SMO is the way how the UAF is being lead into battle. The UAF is trained according to NATO standards. NATO standards teach the UAF to place its battle commanders in the back behind the fighting soldiers who are engaging in the real battle. On the allied side however the battle commanders act like ‘primus inter pares’ (the first among the equal). The battle commanders stand fighting next to the soldiers.
Now my question with regard to mr. Helmholtz Smith take on the German generals. How did the Wehrmacht fight? Did the battle commanders stay in the back and send their subordinates forward to do the hard job? Or did the Wehrmacht fight more or less in the same way as the Soviet army did, with the battle commanders fighting next to their ‘subordinates’.
Where does this NATO doctrine of saving the battle commanders come from? At present the morale within the UAF is so low that they reverted back to the Soviet army doctrine of ‘primus inter pares’.
I would like to learn more about the historical background of how NATO keeps its battle commanders at the back.
Russians were better at war, by the end of the war. That’s why they’ve won in the end.
At the start of the war they got their asses kicked in a major way. In 1941 the USSR lost more men than the strength of the entire German army. And they did have numerical superiority throughout the war, there’s no conspiracy there.
Yeah! Score one for Stalin and his attempt to take over Europe! And of course he was assisted by American lend lease. A very dark chapter in America’s history. I really dont see why you want to celebrate Stalin so much. One the scale of evil he was number 1.
I see that there are fresh attempts to resurrect the ‘apologias’ not just for Neville Chamberlain but for Adolf Hitler which ‘Viktor Suvorov’ (aka Vladimir Rezun) produced in ‘Icebreaker’ back in 1988, and Sean McMeekin has recently attempted to defend.
As ‘Helmholtz Smith’ notes, the fact that a – if not the – pre-eminent Western authority on the war in the East in 1941-5, Colonel David Glantz, wrote a book explaining ‘Suvorov’ was talking nonsense should have ‘put a stake through the heart’ of this one, when he published ‘Stumbling Colossus’ back in 1998.
However, people I used to think were not complete idiots, including Ron Unz, have embraced the ‘resurrection of the vampire’ by McMeekin. Perhaps ‘denazification’ of some parts of the Western ‘blogosphere’, as well as academic departments, and newspapers, would be timely.
For anyone not prepared to accept Glantz’s view as authoritative, I have discussed the ‘historiography’ at some lengths in responses to ‘gman’ on earlier threads.
(See https://sonar21.com/those-who-cannot-remember-the-past-are-condemned-to-repeat-it/ ; https://sonar21.com/why-russia-doubts-natos-good-intentions/ ; https://sonar21.com/the-sovietization-of-america-the-cias-recruiting-problem/ .)
A point I would like to re-emphasize is that this history really does matter, because there are very strong reasons to believe that the ways that both Vladimir Putin and Valery Gerasimov, who as ‘Chief of the General Staff’ is in charge of military planning, have handled the crisis in Ukraine very directly reflect their readings of what happened in the summer of 1941.
A 2016 article by a British scholar of Russian military thinking, Steven J. Main, on the – much misunderstood – address which the latter figure gave to the ‘Academy of Military Sciences’ back in February 2013 is I think helpful.
(See https://ur.booksc.me/book/50452519/fcd0d5 )
I do not agree with all of it, by any means, but Main was in my view quite right to suggest that this address should have been taken as a ‘wake up call.’ In my view, if serious attention had been paid to what Gerasimov said, and his remarks been read ‘in context’, people in London and Washington would not have been so hopelessly ‘blindsided’ by what has happened over the past months.
Of particular interest are the pointed allusions in the address to two of the greatest Russian ‘Clausewitzians.’
So, Aleksandr Svechin, born in Odessa to an old Russian military family, was perhaps the most important of the former Tsarist ‘genstabists’ who threw in their lot with the Bolsheviks – in his case, not, as any careful reader of his writings, then or now, can see, out of ideological sympathy – and taught the new Red Army ‘operational art.’
Meanwhile, Georgii Isserson, the Jewish doctor’s son from Kaunas, who certainly was a ‘true believer’, became a key ‘backroom boy’ for Tukhachevskii, and as such the figure who did very much of the detailed work involved in developing the concept of ‘deep operations.’
It has been suggested that the author of the incisive analysis of the ‘Special Military Operation’ published in August issue of the ‘Marine Corps Gazette’ under the name ‘Marinus’ may be Lieutenant-General Paul Van Riper. So it may be of interest that he wrote a foreword to the translation of Isserson’s key writings published by Richard W. Harrison, his biographer, in 2016.
(For the article, see https://www.imetatronink.com/2022/08/a-former-us-marine-corps-officers.html ; the ‘Kindle’ version of the book is available, relatively inexpensively, from Amazon.)
In the event, although Isserson fell victim to Stalin’s purges, and was sentenced to death, unlike Svechin and Tukhachevskii he escaped execution, to write in the ‘Seventies the account of the development of ‘deep operations’, which concludes Harrison’s volume.
The penultimate chapter is the essay on ‘New Forms of Struggle’ he published, at obvious personal risk, in 1940. It was to this which Gerasimov referred in 2013, when he remarked that:
‘The fate of this “prophet of the Fatherland” unfolded tragically. Our country paid in great quantities of blood for not listening to the conclusions of this professor of the General Staff Academy.’
Discussing the attitudes of the ‘old specialists’ to the ‘deep operations’ theories in his memoir, Isserson wrote:
‘Even A.A. Svechin finally agreed with the inevitability of shifting to the new forms of struggle and supported the concept of the deep operation, while viewing it, however, within the confines of the strategy of attrition.’
In fact, on this point, the consensus of informed contemporary Russian military opinion, as I understand it, appears to be that Svechin was vindicated.
So, he was right to ‘concede ground’ to the advocates of ‘deep operations’, after Hitler’s coming to power meant that there was an obvious danger that the Soviet Union was going to face a conflict with an advanced industrial power whose military was clearly developing equivalent strategies.
At the same time, however, it was foolish to believe that they could obviate the need, in the event of a conflict with Germany, for a protracted war of ‘attrition.’
And, facing the ‘Wehrmacht’, the appropriate strategy began with ‘strategic defence’, and ‘attrition’, postponing experiments in ‘deep operations’ until the force of the attack had been blunted, and geographical conditions – crucially relating to the sustainability of supply and reinforcement lines – were in the Red Army’s favour.
A further irony is that had Tukhachevskii, and Isserson, ‘conceded more ground’ to Svechin, Stalin would not have faced in the summer of 1941 precisely the dilemma which the latter depicted so incisively in ‘New Forms of Struggle’, in a passage Gerasimov quotes.
A crucial point is that whether a build-up is a prelude to a surprise attack, or an exercise in ‘coercive diplomacy’, may be very hard to judge. The appropriate responses, however, are liable to be diametrically opposite, depending on which interpretation one adopts.
An initial posture based on ‘strategic defence’ at the outset could have avoided, or at least mitigated, the dilemma that precisely the measures which were necessary to avert the kind of vulnerability to which Isserson had pointed were seen by Stalin as liable to make a war he still hoped to avoid inevitable.
Once one can see that a central part of the implicit criticism of Stalin which Gerasimov is making, by his reference to Isserson, is that he was too much of a ‘peacenik’ – the precise reverse of what ‘Suvorov’ and McMeekin claim – one can see that he may have been trying to drive home two points.
One is that Russia might well be find itself, even if in a less obvious way than in the 1930s, facing ‘existential threats’ – which required accurately assessing the implications of new technologies. Another that, to do this, one needed ‘extraordinary personalities with brilliant ideas’, or ‘fanatics in the best sense of the word’ – to cite his description of Isserson.
It now seems reasonably clear that, by February last year, Putin had come round to the view that he could not afford to repeat Stalin’s mistakes: that however great the risks in proceeding on the basis that conflict was inevitable were, they were less than those involved in continuing with his own instinctive preference for ‘peacenik’ solutions.
Such a conclusion, of course, can quite reasonably be drawn, even if one thinks that the costs and risks involved in going to war are very great.
But, rarely clearly, an enormous amount of intellectual effort has gone into attempting to minimise them.
An irony, I think, is that the same kind of logics which suggested that in the summer of 1941 that ‘strategic defence’ was the appropriate initial posture, in the spring of 2022 suggested that ‘offence’ was.
Anyone remotely familiar with this history, however, should have been aware that while Russian planners would have hoped that this might make Zelensky and his Western backers ‘see sense’, the last thing they would do would be to stake everything on a bid to take Kiev. Whether the persisting Western belief that this is what they were trying to do does or does not reflect, at least in part, Russian ‘maskirovka’, I am not clear.
Likewise, the notion that Russian planners had not been prepared, both in military and economic terms, for a prolonged war of ‘attrition’ is one that could only be held by ignoramuses.
A further corollary is that, in ‘deep operations’ contests, there is no way of reliably avoiding vulnerable parts of one’s defences being targeted. Precisely what is required, in such circumstances, is withdrawal with minimal losses – and careful preparation of the response.
Last but not least, it has long been a characteristic of Russian planners that they are well aware of how uncontrollable ‘escalation’ can be. The attempts on the ‘power grid’ represent precisely what I would expect: a measured escalatory response.
“Perhaps ‘denazification’ of some parts of the Western ‘blogosphere’, as well as academic departments, and newspapers, would be timely.”
Timely but not quite yet, since their foolery still has utility in their transcendence whose present trajectories reflect in part significant aspects of if-only-the-papa-czar-knewness.
Perhaps Mr. Marx’s observations in his Theses on Feuerbach as a type of prologue to Volume 36 – The German Ideology – of his collected works published by Progress Publishers from 1970 onwards as part of the trajectories to transcend “The Soviet Union” whilst being interpreted by some as sustaining “The Soviet Union”, would illuminate further, as is presently being paraphrased in Mr. Martyanov’s recent observations ?
“Likewise, the notion that Russian planners had not been prepared, both in military and economic terms, for a prolonged war of ‘attrition’ is one that could only be held by ignoramuses.”
Part of the reason why, as expected, in hope the opponents interpreted notices of intent as ultimata.
Everything you say is typical Western propaganda (both for WW2 and SMO). Ukraine is not a paper tiger, as it was (since 2014) organized, trained by NATO, heavily entrenched and with a lot of manpower. Russia in not begging Iran for drones (they have more than 1500 orlan-10s) and North Korea for ammo since they have plenty (https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/return-industrial-warfare). They are not recruiting mercenaries from Syria (they have Wagner and Chechens) and combing jails for soldiers (Ukraine is doing this!!). Simply not true. The Germans were, man-for-man much better than the Russians and in fact it was Hitler, and his interference with military operations which led to the German defeat. Two examples: 1) Hitler insisted in encircling a large Soviet Army in 1941 instead of pressing on to Moscow, the seizure of which would have deprived Russia of a major arms manufacturing center and a vital railway hub; and 2) his insistence on attacking Stalingrad directly instead of bypassing and encircling it. Finally, in today’s world, if Russia is so great, why haven’t they been able to defeat a weak paper tiger like Ukraine? Why are they begging Iran for drones and North Korea for ammo? Why are they reduced to recruiting mercenaries from Syria and combing jails for soldiers? They are sending obsolete T-62 tanks to Ukraine as mobile artillery. Not for actual offensive ops. In Kharkiv they had mainly National Guard (like SWAT) and a few Militia troops and heavy weapons and armor (not regular army with plenty of those). That is why they did not fight. Why sacrifice all your men when you cannot win the local engagement. Live to fight another day as they say. With less than 200,000 troops altogether (militia, mercs and regular army) you cannot guard this large frontlines. Let’s see now how this NATO Ukrainian force will do the same (guard and keep).
@Oblomovka
One of the very best books about WWII is by a Soviet double agent in Hitler Germany: Из НКВД в СС и обратно (From the NKVD to the SS and back). According to his analysis the Wehrmacht (and the SS) learned a lot from the Freikorps after WWI. One of lessons learned was decreasing the material distance between Officers and Soldiers. Regarding food and lodging the Wehrmacht was much more egalitarian than the old army of the Kaiser and much more so than any other army in WWII including the Soviet army. And of course it would have been unherd of of a German officer to stay back while his men attacked.
“much more egalitarian”
According to largely unpublished datastreams, the Volksgemeinschaft was more egalatarian than “The Soviet Union” from 1933 until at least 1943 for the general volk/narod facilitated in part by previously Jewish owned assets, and the Third Reich afforded greater opportunities of upward mobility than the Soviet Union not restricted to through their respective parties, in the period from circa 1933 to 1941, in order to maintain useful narratives to facilitate “The West” post 1945.
Other useful constructs included, but were not restricted to, the size of the “French resistance” and the size of the Italian communist party in 1943/4.
Not sure if any else will mention this Larry, but significant effort was put into deceiving the Germans on D Day. Besides the dummy army in England radar deception was used to suggest the landings would be in the region of the Pas de Calais.
There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
No doubt about that. Reinhardt Gehlen played the CIA like a cheap fiddle. Gehlenorg scammed Dulles the supposed “smartest guy in the room ” for total suckers, scammed millions of dollars spinning one BS tale after the next.
The Paperclip Nazis made out like bandits and the DC geniuses were never the wiser.
“No doubt about that. Reinhardt Gehlen played the CIA like a cheap fiddle. Gehlenorg scammed Dulles the supposed “smartest guy in the room ” for total suckers, scammed millions of dollars spinning one BS tale after the next.
The Paperclip Nazis made out like bandits and the DC geniuses were never the wiser.”
Thank you for your illustration of we meant well as usual, it was all the fault of these “evil doers”, illustrating that “ALEX THRACE” continues to be scammed as a function of his complicit “certainties”.
Ah Gehlen. I did something a while back https://patrickarmstrong.ca/2018/05/29/was-gehlen-a-fraud/
Good write up. Thanks
Actually, a very important element is normally overlooked as regards the concentration of forces in the Eastern Front in WW II. The Germans considered the division as the basic unit of manoeuver. A fully-fitted division was supposed to be capable of both defense and attack and its standard order of battle, both men and materiel, was much larger than the Soviet one (roughly 2:1). On the other hand, the Germans had comparatively very few higher-level (Army and Corps) units. The Soviet standard division was supposed to do no more than holding terrain, and the main army firepower was concentrated at higher levels.
In practice, this meant German heavy weapons were diluted across a very long line of contact, while it was comparatively easy for the Soviet High Command to concentrate firepower at breakthrough points. Eventual German advantages at tactical levels, such as the training that enabled the creation of effective ad hoc battlegroups (Kamfgruppen) with subunits from different divisions or the employment of unified artillery commands across divisions (Arkos)could alleviate, but not compensate for, this strategic imbalance.
A good example is Operation Bagration, the destruction of the German Army Group Centre in1944. It is little known, but, with exception of the Northern flank, all German divisions involved were either at full strength or even overstrength. Nevertheless, at all attack points, defenses eventually crumbled, even when an adjacent German division went essentially undamaged in combat.
As a few commentors have noted or alluded to, oil played a deccisive role in german defeat and this has influenced US moves in the middle east post WW2 and is now playing what could be a decisive role (in energy terms), in the de-industrialisation of Europe, to the benefit of the US it seems. Anyway, for people interested in some very informed, reseaeched and interesting background and context to this discussion, this video documentary by Tik History on the role oil played in the defeat of Das Reich in WW2 is well worth a gander.
https://youtu.be/kVo5I0xNRhg
Thank you very much for your excellent article.
In fact, here in Lisbon (Portugal) it is very difficult to find good and true information.
Now, I’m going to look for these books by David Glantz and study better what the war in the east was, in particular, the battle of Smolensk in 1941. All the best and keep up with the good work.
Once the USSR imploded, there was unprecedented access to Soviet archives and so a lot of record correction happened. And also a good deal of over correction. Glanz’s work was useful in demonstrating that the Red Army had commanders every bit as talented as in Germany or the US. Their main problem was gearing up production of things like radios and the like. We all know their tanks were very modern,though they also had limitations due to design blinkers (climb into a t34 and tell me it’s not claustrophobic) But the effort to give those commanders and fighters their due became part of the greater allied mythos of the Holy Crusade. Now it’s the German commanders who were half bright servants of an erratic tyrant. This guy tik on youtube has it that the Germans just somehow lucked their way through 3 years of on snd off success. Really, the 60s assessments of Lidell Hart stand out: the Germans didn’t lose because of God’s love for the Allies or German idiocy or Hitler’s moronic fanaticism. They had only the vaguest grand strategic conception and no end goal. The Japanese are taken to task for taking on an opponent 5 times their weight but they did have a conception of negotiations as an end goal-not the total destruction of the United States as a nation
“The Japanese are taken to task for taking on an opponent 5 times their weight but they did have a conception of negotiations as an end goal-not the total destruction of the United States as a nation.”
Negotiation like dancing takes at least two to tango.
The “Japanese” excluding Mr. Yamamoto and others did not have a conception of negotiation because they understood before December 1941 that they had no “partner” to negotiate with, whilst “The War party” in Japan had a misguided notion that they had a partner with whom to negotiate partly as a function of their belief in “Japanese exceptionalism”, whilst most of the “Japanese” population had no agency as a function of their beliefs in “being Japanese” which had symbols but rarely definition, although some will likely disagree.
“Likewise, the notion that Russian planners had not been prepared, both in military and economic terms, for a prolonged war of ‘attrition’ is one that could only be held by ignoramuses.”
Part of the reason why, as expected, in hope the opponents interpreted notices of intent as ultimata.
Dear Mr Johnson,
having gladly found and enjoyed your excellent blog for a few days, allow me as a German patriot to include some rather unknown things in here in regards to your fine article.
I think in one of the commentaries I read somebody referring to Mr Suvorovs Book “Icebreaker” and its thesis, that Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union (SU) in 1941 was basically a pre-emptive strike, crashing into the Red Army, which was already ready to attack Germany. Now I do not know Mr Suvorovs book – but I happened to read a few years back a great piece of work, written by a former NVA-General (NVA was the East-German army of the GDR, German Democratic Republic) named Bernd Schwipper, who, being fluent in Russian, worked his way through the archives in Moscow and came back with a book, also supporting said thesis. The book is called “Deutschland im Visier Stalins” (Germany in Stalin’s sights) and is very much worth the read.
His thesis, that Hitler’s attack was a pre-emptive strike is mainly based on 8 points, which I will present briefly:
1. Creation and Development of a strategic concentration area of the future theatre of war
Between 1939 and 1941 the SU created and developed a strategic concentration area of the theatre of War to come by waging the following wars/annexing the following areas:
– 17th of September 1939 – the SU attacked Poland with 72 divisions (the Wehrmacht had done so on the 01st of September with 62 divisions) and annexed Eastern Poland after the war.
– Nov39 – Mar40 – the SU attacked Finland and annexed most of Karelia (Southeast of Finland)
– June40 – the SU annexed the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia
– June40 – the SU annexed Bessarabia and the northern part of Bukowina from Romania
It needs to be added, that all these annexations happened according to the (in)famous Hitler-Stalin Pact from 1939, basically dividing the eastern hemisphere of Europe between the SU and Germany – with the exception of Finland and Bukowina, which the SU annexed anyway (which made Hitler quite angry).
All in all, this was a territory of 450.000 square kilometers and about 22 Mill people. These actions secured the Northern flank of the SU and created the concentration area against the main enemy of the SU – which was Nazi Germany.
2. Construction efforts in the annexed territory and beyond
The annexed terrain was integrated in the military structure of the SU, most of it belonging to the western military district. Furthermore, huge construction efforts followed:
– Airports were doubled in the western military district from 382 to 755 till June41.
– The railway network was greatly expanded
– as were ammunition depots and those for subsistence, clothing etc. – all for the military
– Enormous sums were given to these tasks
Speaking of the Military:
3. Development of arms
Huge efforts were made here too:
– The Number of tanks was expanded from 17000 tanks in 1937 to 23000 in 1941.
One has to add, that most battle tanks were old models – the new (and very effective) T-34 as well as the heavy KW battle tank were to be steadily increased in numbers:
– The plan was for 1941 to construct 2800 T-34 and 1000 KW (in June 41 however, there were only 135 KW and 700 T-34 constructed – but these numbers would soon explode, as we know).
Also new and powerful tank formations were created from 1937 on.
– Planes were 9380 in 1937 and rose to 11000 in 1941.
Also here, new air force squadrons were established.
– 5 new corps with 40000 airborne troops were created until June 1941 (we should note, that airborne troops can only be useful in offensive operations).
Finally, a new line of thinking was further developed in the SU military thinking – the concept of the Deep space or deep operation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_operation
Which brings us to the next point:
4. Change of Strategy
Until 1937 the SU followed a defensive strategy. From this year on, it changed to an offensive strategy (therefore the build-up in arms).
In 1940, after the Winter war with Finland, Stalin made a speech before Red Army Commanders-to-be, where he stated, that the Red Army was developing into a modern army and a modern army must be an offensive army.
The following measures may prove this point:
5. Mobilization of the Red Army
The mobilization comprised of four elements:
a) Creation of offensive troops
b) Partial Mobilization
c) Buildup of Infrastructure
d) Reserves retention
Let us cover b, since there has been already something said in regards to a and c.
Partial Mobilization
The peacetime strength of the Red Army in 1937 was 1,2 Mill soldiers. In wartime, this was to be increased to 5,3 Mill men. So 1,2 Mill men were mobilised all the time.
In June 1941, the Red Army had mobilized (before the start of the war) 5,6 Mill men. According to plan, this number was about to rise to 8,5 Mill men.
These measures were not all secret to the Germans. In Sep1940 the Loßberg Report was conducted, giving details to the strength of the SU as an opponent of Germany. In it, it was stated that a mobilization like in Germany (with the vast number of men to be mobilized only when the country was preparing for war) seemed not to be taking place in the SU. The author wondered, that the Red army already seemed to be mobilized.
5. Adjustment of Arms Industry.
The increases in arms productions were already covered (s. Point 3).
The SU government also decided on certain measures, to increase production.
From June 1940 on, all workers had to work 7 days a week (ah – the miracles of socialistic production – shall we repeat this one day….)? 😊
From Oct 1940 on, new workforce reserves of 1,5 mill workers were created from adolescents.
The arms industry grew from 1939 to 1940 for 33%.
To not loose our last readers, we’ll keep the rest very brief:
The majority of the 5,6 Mill mobilized men in 1941 (before the start of war) was stationed in the western military districts. Various operational plans for an attack on Germany were made and several manoeuvres conducted between 1940 and 1941 – all in order to prepare for the War with Germany, which – Schwipper concluded – should have started with a massive soviet offensive in July 1941.
It was Hitler, who pushed with the Wehrmacht into the deployment of the Red Army, causing havoc and confusion in the first days of war on the Soviet side. A few more weeks – and the history of the Second World War may have taken on a different course. But speculations like these are like catching the wind – so let’s come to the conclusion.
Summary:
The book “Germany in Stalin’s sights” was published in 2015. Being a historian myself, I can say that it is well-written (sometimes a bit dull, due to all the statistics of arms production etc.), intelligent and presents an understandable conclusion. Obviously, its author had done a great deal of looking into the Russian archives.
This book had deserved an open discussion of its findings – debates in TV or in the newspapers etc. And of course criticism – maybe some findings of Herr Schwipper are not true, maybe his whole thesis is false. But to come to this conclusion, one needs to have an open debate. What it got instead was a deafening silence.
Which would be understandable, would it be the book of a madman – or maybe even a layman who lost his head in conspiracy theories. But since this book is – as I said – a thorough and interesting read, well-researched and with very detailed findings, the fact, that no-one in the professional roam of historians, experts, journalists etc. even mentioned it smells more than fishy. In Germany, the government and the media are not interested in alternative views (or findings) to certain aspects of German history.
So yes, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark…. pardon, Deutschland. Ah – it’s the whole West! And it is so much rotten, that it most likely will take a change in many structures, before it gets better.
Still – as one of your countrymen once said:
It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.
So I wish you very much, Mr Johnson, that you may continue telling the truth on this wonderful blog of yours – and I hope I could’ve contributed to the search for truth too.
I thank you for your commentary.
Stephan Usedom,
Doubtless General Schwipper is fluent in Russian. Does he read English?
If he believes that ‘Until 1937 the SU followed a defensive strategy’, then he is clearly unfamiliar with the most basic English-language writing on the period.
Actually, Soviet military thinking had been overwhelmingly oriented to the development of capabilities for ‘deep operations’ at the outset of a conflict, ever since the victory of Mikhail Tukhachevskii over Aleksandr Svechin in the arguments of the ‘Twenties.
In a comment earlier on this thread, I linked to the English translation of an account of the history of the development of ‘deep operations’ given back in the ‘Seventies by Georgii Isserson. One of its key theorists, he is described by his American biographer Richard W. Harrison as ‘Architect of Soviet Victory in World War II.’
The book is summarised in a lecture, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56N9iPjQDIU .
The Kindle edition of Harrison’s anthology of Isserson’s writings, published in 2016, which contains his account of the development of ‘deep operations’, is available on ‘Amazon.de’ for €18.02.
It also contains the warning about the possibility of a German ‘bolt from the blue’ attack in ‘New Forms of Struggle’, published in 1940, to which General Gerasimov referred back in 2013, when recommending this ‘prophet of the Fatherland’ as a model to contemporary Russian strategists.
Some key points of the account Harrison gives, with the benefit of the opening of the Russian archives, were already quite familiar to competent Western scholars long before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So, John Erickson’s ‘The Road to Stalingrad’, published in 1975, begins with a description of a ‘war game’ in 1936, originally drafted by Isserson, in which Tukhachevskii played the ‘German Party’, and was trying to use the exercise to work out how to respond to precisely the kind of scenario about which ‘New Forms of Struggle’ warns.
In the event, the Chief of the General Staff, Marshal Alexander Yegorov, insisted that the war game should be constructed on the premise that the ‘Red Party’ would be able to mobilise before the German attack. So, Erickson wrote:
‘Tukhachevskii’s proposals, which in Isserson’s own phrase “met powerful opposition”, were rejected in their entirety. The war-game now proceeded on the basis of the equality of opposing forces on the frontier, with no consideration of the problem of forestalling an enemy concentration and no digression into the actual initiation of military operations. The surprise factor was ignored. Stripped of any strategic acuity, the war-game represented nothing but a frontal, meeting engagement in the form of the frontier battles of 1914. Tukhachevskii was “deeply disillusioned.”’
There are, however, complex ironies here, which General Schwipper’s apparently total ignorance of the historiography causes him to miss.
A classic article on ‘deep operations’, published in 1988, is ‘Mass, Mobility, And The Red Army’s Road To Operational Art 1918-1936’ by the now unfortunately late Jacob W. Kipp, then together with Colonel Glantz, working at the U.S. Army’s recently formed ‘Soviet Army Studies Office’ at Fort Leavenworth – now the ‘Foreign Army Studies Office.’
(See https://community.apan.org/wg/tradoc-g2/fmso/m/fmso-monographs/204276 .)
A key passage again draws on Isserson’s accounts:
‘Tukhachevsky argued that what was required to make the new operational art into a sound strategic posture was nothing less than “complete militarization” of the national economy to provide the new instruments of mechanized warfare. Committed to an operational art which would end in the total destruction of the enemy, Tukhachevsky crossed pens with Svechin, whom he accused of being an advocate of attrition. According to G. S. Isserson, one of his closest collaborators in the 1930s, Tukhachevsky came forward with a master plan for the mechanization of the Red Army in December 1927, only to have it turned down by the party leadership under Stalin. Several years later, in 1930 Tukhachevsky’s views won favor, when Stalin broke with Bukharin’s thesis on the stabilization of capitalism and began to associate the Depression with a rising threat of war to the Soviet Union. This threat the Party leadership openly used to justify the brutal processes of industrialization and forced collectivization by now linking them with an improvement in the level of national defense.’
Actually it was in 1937 – the date in which, quite against the evidence, General Schwipper believes that the Red Army shifted towards ‘offensive’ contingency planning – that Stalin’s fears that Tukhachevskii might play the ‘Bonaparte’ role caused him to unleash the military purge.
As a result, he made any sensible adaptation of existing plans very difficult – as Isserson describes in the account in the 2016 anthology.
However, to rifle through the Moscow archives and produce more and more evidence that Soviet contingency planning for war was oriented towards the offensive is actually very limited relevance to arguments about Stalin’s intentions.
If you think that Soviet planners were in any way unique in being committed to ‘an operational art which would end in the total destruction of the enemy’, you are simply wrong.
As in an earlier comment to which I linked in my previous comment on this thread, I can only refer you to a report in the British ‘Sun’ from January 2017, which is headlined ‘PLAN TOTALITY: The American Cold War strategy which could have plunged the world into a nuclear conflict.’
(See https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/2619209/the-american-cold-war-strategy-which-could-have-plunged-the-world-into-a-nuclear-conflict/ .)
Clearly, if I followed the logic used by ‘Suvorov’, McMeekin, and Schwipper, the conclusion would be inescapable.
The fact that, as early as August 1945, General Eisenhower was developing plans for President Truman, envisaging the dropping of atomic bombs on twenty Soviet cities, would then naturally be interpreted as indicating that these people were genocidal maniacs who made Hitler seem moderate.
Actually, what was at issue – as in the idea of ‘Operation Unthinkable’ which Churchill initiated at around the same time – was something close to panic at the fact that the war had brought Soviet power into the heart of Europe, and fear of further expansion.
In fact, with hindsight – which so often has 20/20 vision – it is clear that Stalin had no intentions of expanding further into Western Europe in 1945 – and that the result of Anglo-American policy was to precipitate, in 1948, precisely the shift from a ‘defensive’ posture back to offensive ‘deep operations’ which General Schwipper quite erroneously believes happened in 1937.
Again, key parts of a picture which had already become clear before the collapse of the Soviet Union were confirmed by the evidence which emerged after it.
So, you might usefully look at the 1987 Brooking Institution paper on ‘The Genesis of Soviet Threat Perceptions’ by Commander Michael MccGwire, RN, the most important post-war British analyst of Soviet military policy.
In his 1995 paper ‘THE BIG THREE AFTER WORLD WAR II: New Documents on Soviet Thinking about Post War Relations with The United States and Great Britain’, produced for the ‘Cold War International History Project’, a leading contemporary Russian diplomatic historian, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, pointed to the fact that the new evidence ‘meshed’ with MccGwire’s analysis.
(See https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1987-800-05-McGwire.pdf ; https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-big-three-after-world-war-ii-new-documents-soviet-thinking-about-post-war-relations .)
In a further irony, the account in the ‘Genesis’ paper of Stalin’s policy in the ‘Thirties, as also that provided by the Israeli historian Gabriel Gorodetsky in his ‘demolition’ of ‘Suvorov’, meshes with the interpretation advanced at the time by the – extremely capable – diplomats of the German Moscow Embassy.
(See https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1987-800-05-McGwire.pdf
The story of the long and unavailing campaign of the then German Ambassador, Friedrich Werner, Count von der Schulenberg, to prevent the ludicrous combination of panic and hubris characteristic of Hitler’s variety of ‘national socialism’ leading his country to ‘commit suicide’ is a fascinating strand in Gorodetsky’s 1999 ‘Grand Delusion’ study. I recommend it.
The main point about ‘winter’ was not so much that the Germans were not prepared, but that the Russian offensive got started 3-4 weeks later than Hitler had planned due to Mussolini’s misadventures in Greece. It seems quite accepted that the Germans were within days at least of Moscow when the winter hit and stopped them, had they been there a month earlier, things would have been very different, it is probable.