Comments by "Not Today" (@nottoday3817) on "The ACTUAL Casualty Numbers for the 2nd Kotluban Offensive (plus more) | Stalingrad Addendum 9" video.

  1. Regarding the Kotluban offensive numbers. I suspect it mgiht be a combination of both explanations: Maybe Isaev is correct in stating the numbers for a period of 20 days and reaching 88,000. I would say recoveries from injuries combined with the reinforcements would bring the fighting capability of Jukovs army back to the strength for the 2nd Kotluban. Also, what you say about 1st Guards army seems off looking at Isaevs table. 1st Guards might have taken the brunt individually speaking, but the other 2 armies are clearly taking more losses combined. Their total losses are around 1.4-1.5 times higher (35k vs 52k) By following this trend, the losses for the final period (15/18-30 September) would be well over 111,000 (and that's after continously decreasing the multiplier), and I don't really see a reason why it wouldn't follow the trend since all the armies struck almost at the same time and the Germans stood their ground with little positional redeployment (to say that the germans let those poor souls have a better day). So either is correct about the dates and the numbers or he's not correct at all. Without primary sources at hand, it's hard to make sense of any of this data. Funny enough, this reminds me of one of your Q&As when you were asked if you consider yourself a proper historian. Well, in my opinion, we've just set you to become one, since (again, personal opinion) this is what being a historian is about. Not copying something which another guy said after hearing some information from anothe dude, but yourself spending days or months over tables and records, compiling them, analysing them separately, making charts, new tables and plotting the data to see which is closer to reality. As for what to do with the video, I'm not sure what to tell you. On one side, the safety analyst and human side of me would tell you not to bother too much because you'll burn yourself out. On the other hand, the data analyst, history fan part wants you to redo the video. I suppose it boils down to what you want to achieve with this series. If you want entertainment for others, 'the greatest book is the one you already know the contents of ' so fo many it would not make a difference, some will spot the issue and look at the comments, others won't and not be bothered. On the other hand, if you aim for a bit of accuracy and disproving the myths, the Soviets, and unfairly the Russians, are getting s*** on constantly due to missinformation (and Cold War logic) about WW2 and the Western Front and leaving the information as it is will only help cement those myths even further. The best course of action in this sense mgiht be simply editing the video and cutting out the part mentioning the numbers and replacing it with a black screen directing people to this video (or to the description and this video). Or inserting the black screen after or before the numbers. Talking about WW2, funny enough, it's different from us here in Romania as well. For a bit of context, in Romania, the most popular 'common education' (aka no university or tradeschools or stuff like that) course is 12 years, split into 4 'cycles' (1-4,5-8,9-12). First class of history starts in the 4th year, history of Romania, starting from Ancient times and ending when the weeks of the year run out. 5th year, back at ancient times, but now focused on world history. 6th year, God knows what they wanted with that split, but let's say Middle Ages, Renaissance, pre-Industrial, european civilisations, moslty. 7th year, Industrial revolution and later, until the weeks run out, again. 8th year is again history of Romania. Highschool (yrs 9-12) is a repetition of the former. Funny thing, in the 8th year, we had 2 classes per week. Despite that, only in the 11th year did we spend more than 5 classes (hours) on history after 1900s (WW1 to 2000s). And I suspect those 5 hours were only because of our teacher, I suspect. She was one of the only 2 proper historians I've got to meet personally.
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  2. P.S I've jsut realised this might come as an unfair criticsim *when I talked about proper historians) of Glantz for his mistake by interpreting data from another author. I didn't mean it specifically like that. What I meant is more of a criticism towards refering to books and authors as 'primary sources'. Books can be consdiered sources, but not primary and this example clearly shows why. I have some experience in working with data (engineering) and I can say that whenever you are looking at a nice, clean table what you will mostly see is 2nd or maybe even third hand numbers. Everyone that works with data chips away at it in order to give it a meaning and turn it into information. Thus the final picture is always distorted in some way, especially with historical data when you don't have a formula to fall back on and check your own numbers. And this is why I say 'proper historians ' compile their own data from historical archives, interviews, maps and such (which Glantz has done fair share of himself) , and, as a result can say the precise nature and purpose of their information, because they are the ones who built it to look like that
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