Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Stalin’s Purge of the Red Army and Its Effects on the WW2 Eastern Front" video.

  1. Wrong, they nearly failed at logistics. The infantry and artillery still relied on campaigns in Poland and France on horse drawn vehicles, as did (largely) infantry battalions invading the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The German armed forces continued to suffer from the lack of logistics mobility by having a scarcity of trucks and having a deficit of spare parts to keep the trucks going. Trucks were not standardized to a few types, keeping standardization and mass production supply of parts a continual issue (and of course the lack of available fuel). Rolling stock in railways were also inefficiently used and was continually in short supply. In a large long-distance land war, like Operation Barbarossa and subsequent army operations in the Soviet Union, logistics bottlenecks began to acutely tell on the effectiveness of the Wehrmacht to sustain offensives and later to defend against Soviet counterattacks. This was a major failing of OKW and OKH to put into effect BEFORE Barbarossa, but also due to inefficiencies in the total war economy production of the Third Reich (early in the war), and Hitler hurrying offensives out of personal convictions and political expedience.
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  2. The USN navy commander, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, not "Kinnel". Interesting story about Kimmel. This channel does not deal much with the Pacific War, but Kimmel was commander in Pear Harbor on the day of the Japanese carrier planes attack in December 1941. Kimmel was sacked for incompetence a few weeks later, but in reality he was a competent naval commander who didn 't have favourites in Washington,and was deliberably denied timely information on the defence of the naval base there before the attack. Hence his political "sacrifice". There are American historians who now take this view.
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  3. The Soviet archives can also be questioned as documents manipulated by political expedience of the time, seeing the propensity for the Soviet system to lie and obfuscate, fudging and distorting facts and figures throughout its existence, officially and for propaganda purposes, or simply to please the "dear leader". So I am not sure about the veracity of that source either.
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