Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Stalin’s Paranoid Military Purges - The Great Terror | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 4 of 4" video.
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@altaiaurelius : Yes. I do NOT like the fact that many people think "nationalist populism" is the way to go, just because they see it as an antidote to globalism. Globalism is simply nationalism on steroids, with a lot of folks dreaming of world empire in the mix.
Nationalism is as big a cancer as globalism. What we need are more smaller, independent states that have to cooperate between themselves in order to prosper. Something like the USA is set up, but with more autonomy on the individual state level.
That's almost impossible to make happen, when "bigger is better" in so many ways. The bigger country can bully the smaller.
Maybe the WuFlu taught us something about the folly of placing the fate of entire continents in the hands of a small number of "experts." When everybody has to do what the one guy says, the stakes are very high, and rely entirely on the one guy being right. WuFlu proves that the so-called "experts" get things wrong, all the time, assuming that the Global Warming Panic didn't teach us anything.
Much better to de-centralize and learn from each other, rather than have one-size-fits-all solutions passed down from on high by people who are entirely too powerful.
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@Blazo_Djurovic : Arguably, most of the old guard didn't understand mobile, mechanized warfare and combined arms. The REAL problem was not the purge, but the unprecedented expansion of the Red Army. With or without the purges, the Red Army was short of officers, and so they promoted good fighters from the ranks and a lot of non-commissioned officers (sergeants) were promoted to officer ranks with a few weeks' or months' training.
To most of us, the idea of giving sergeants those promotions was probably good, but even the best of them weren't accustomed to command, especially the large, combined-arms principles that the Germans were employing (air, sea, infantry, artillery, armor). Napoleon understood combined arms, which was part of his genius, but he also eschewed advances like rifles. The Germans understood combined arms, and had lots of practice before meeting the Red Army.
One of the things you see dating back to the Napoleonic era is that even when the sergeants were great leaders, the ranks didn't respect them the way they respected blue-blood, highly educated officers, who could do stuff like quote Marcus Aurelius in Latin, or discuss the literary merits of Shakespeare. (We're seeing more of that, in recent years in America, where entirely too much faith is placed in people who display all the trappings of the elite.)
Anyway, the Red Army promoted men far beyond their level of training to command large forces, when they maybe only understood things from the artillery POV or the infantry POV. Or they were tank geeks, with an exalted opinion of themselves and mechanized armor (which is nothing without infantry, when it comes to the short strokes). Even some who embraced the advent of mechanization didn't really understand logistics, combined arms or the coordination of entire armies or battle groups consisting of multiple armies.
Compared to the scale of the massive growth of the Red Army from the '30s and into the '40s, the effect of Stalin's purges was a drop in the bucket. One of the reasons that the Great Patriotic War is seen to this day as a wonderful time of unity and power, is because the Red Army was forced to become a meritocracy. If you weren't a fighter, you were DONE. If you were a fighter, promotions were fast and furious, and based on proven merit. They were still hampered by political officers, for the most part, until Stalin went into 'not one inch" mode on defense, when the political officers and the military officers got on the same page.
Also, many officers who were "purged" were back in command with very little delay. Maybe a demotion or shifted to another theater.
Stalin was a bad guy, and he bungled quite a few things. The Bolshevik practice of attaching "political officers" to military units probably didn't help. But the purges are way overblown. And much of what the West considers WWII "history" is based on self-serving memoirs by butt-hurt Nazi officers trying to cover their own asses and shed glamor on their catastrophically failed careers.
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@Blazo_Djurovic : Holdover generals from the WWI era were hardly the Soviets' best and brightest, or the best-prepared for the new combined-arms tactics, taken as a whole. The Red Army was in deep shit, regardless. Compared to the shortage of officers created by the ENORMOUS expansion of the Red Army in that period, the purges probably didn't HELP, but were a relatively minuscule factor. (I didn't know 'til just know that it ain't "miniscule," so widespread is this misspelling.)
The more I learn about this period, especially the Soviets' "Western Front," the more it looks to me like both Stalin and Hitler were better strategists than they're given credit for being, and the views on that theater of the war here in the West are very distorted by the fact that we based our theories and narratives on the writings and testimony of Nazi generals we had captured.
The drive on Moscow wasn't what Hitler wanted. He wanted to go all-out in the South, to secure resources (oil, minerals and agriculture) for Germany and deprive the Soviets of them, simultaneously. He wanted an economically self-sufficient "autarky." If he could secure the natural resources (OIL!) in the Caucasus and simultaneously deprive the Soviets of those resources, he had a theoretical win. By September of 1941, he was already critically low on fuel and logistical support. He had huge territorial gains and very little to show for it.
Even if the 1942 "Fall Blau" had achieved its objectives, Germany lacked the logistical support to retain them.
Even if the Nazis had followed Hitler's original idea to the max, it's still a near thing. They still come up against the fact that defeating the Red Army just meant having to defeat a bigger Red Army. Defeating THAT Red Army meant he had to defeat the next, even BIGGER Red Army. I think the German General Staff horribly underestimated the sheer size of the clumsy Russian Bear.
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