Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "The Numbers Say it All | The Myth of German Superiority on the WW2 Eastern Front" video.
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@Strizhi
You are mistaken on this one.
Glantz goes into this in great detail.
The so-called battle of Stalingrad was actually fought well outside the city and to the north: the land bridge between the Don and the Volga. Russian losses to the Germans on this front are EPIC. This one zone had FOUR Soviet armies committed under the command of a Front. They received four times as many replacements as any received at Stalingrad, proper.
Every last time the Germans tried to swap out the motorized formations pinned down there, a new wave of attack would take off.
All accounts report Russian corpses stacked up so HIGH that you had to push through or over them to make further progress. They were not buried. So in no-time the smell wafted off for miles and miles. This last aspect demoralized the German troops. As for the Russians, they were DEAD.
This was also a situation where it was EASY for fresh Russian troops to find 'spare rifles' laying all over the ground.
These insane attacks were ordered directly by STAVKA -- and no-one else. Allowing this panzer corps any freedom of movement was seen as a lethal blow to the Soviet state.
The most intense period was at the start, when Stalingrad, itself, was very much up for grabs.
The motorized divisions HAD to be pinned down. (3m, 60m, IIRC )
It was THIS fighting that triggered most of the post-war blather about the Russians having unlimited man-power.
Which was wrong.
They only had unlimited manpower for this situation. IIRC, no less than TEN reserve armies were committed to the larger campaign. They were all totally consumed.
Uranus was launched with a fresh batch of reserve armies.
IF TEN ARMIES evaporated, then the loss ratio is much more like 3:1 maybe even 4:1. ( Soviet armies of this period tended to run about 100,000 or less. (some times much, much less, as no attempt was made to keep them at original strength, whatsoever) 6th Army had about 22ish divisions -- something like 350,000 Axis soldiers running with it. It really was an Army Group in its own right. )
[ A Soviet Rifle Division might start out with as many as 12,000 souls -- and not leave the front until it was down to the last 800 survivors. While at the front, it would receive no replacements -- accept those able to walk back from the aid station.
This philosophy was the exact opposite of George Marshall. He had the totally mad idea that you could piecemeal GIs into line formations like they were nuts & bolts. It was a disaster. Behind his back, Bradley changed things towards the German solution: integration battalions. GIs would be assigned to a beaten up division, but they'd not be sent into combat straight away. Instead, they'd be forced to meld with this or that battalion, held back in reserve, until they'd learned the ropes. Only then was the battalion sent back into action. This 'adjustment' was as commonly breached as not... depending upon war urgency.
As a rule, Bradley wasted lives at a tremendous clip.
He had a WWI mentality in WWII.
He'd have gotten far in the Soviet system.
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@Strizhi
On Glantz you've got everything backwards. ALL of his writings are based upon Soviet archives -- he scarcely ever interviews Germans. He spends virtually all of his work debunking German// Ostheer claims about their military achievments.
When he does bring up German records, in variably it's to illustrate another embarrassing factoid... like the Panther D fiasco at Kursk.
There is ONE location where picking up fallen rifles was known to happen -- and not just once or twice -- the Don to Volga land bridge. This was the Verdun of WWII.
FOUR Red Armies were lined up, side by side, across this land bridge. They were under the direct control of a Front commander -- who was just up the road, behind them.
BY FAR the bulk of the blood lost at Stalingrad was at the land bridge. Stalingrad, proper, was actually a side-show from the point of view of Soviet casualties. ( This is not true for the Ostheer. It really DID bleed in that city. )
The imbalance at the land bridge was due to the fact that the Ostheer stood pat. No attempt was ever made to advance northward. They just stood at their MG34s and mowed Soviets down by the thousand. It was this insanity that had Hitler & Co totally convinced that Russia MUST be running out of manpower.
During 1942, Stalin burned through no less than TEN reserve armies between the land bridge and Stalingrad proper.
Since we're not ever going to get accurate figures from the Soviet archives -- they didn't even establish decent records during the panic -- we'll just have to estimate that each Red army had ~100,000 souls. The implication is that Stalin burned through 1,000,000 men in less than four-months. (!!!) And that's just along this front.
The general word is that Stalin burned through 400,000 DEAD during Mars. Casualties must have also been great. But I figure that few could take a bullet and survive in that cold, the overwhelming fraction would simply be dead, most all wounds would be mortal.
Gender imbalance after the Great Patriotic War was so severe that one can only conclude that Red army losses were epic by any standard.
It's only now that the very last of the war widows are laid to rest.
BTW, when drafted, Soviet boys were often taken from the same village -- and then thrown away in the same battle. The result is that you could go into smaller villages and find virtually the entire male population erased by the war. Their widows kept waiting until the war was over -- and then kept on waiting -- since there was no military mail they had no clue that their loved one had perished in 1942 or 43.
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@Stirzhi
I don't trust battle accounts out of Stalingrad because both sides crafted totally self-serving propaganda straight through the battle.
In the case of the Soviets, they over-promoted their Russian sniper -- and glossed over astounding Ukrainian and female snipers. ( It's pretty crazy, but the Soviets ended up with a slew of female snipers with hefty kill numbers. These gals received high honors -- but were almost never publicised outside of the USSR during the war. Stalin did not want the West to realize that he was using ( forced to use ) women on a grand scale.
Further, I just can't buy that anyone at any time had the paper and pencil to write down this or that guy's heroics. Things were just too crazy.
The ten armies I mentioned were the standard Soviet recruitment cycle through their induction system. Due to the harsh weather and the impracticalities it introduced, the Russian 'system' was to induct waves of new recruits every Spring... after the harshest weather had passed, but before the snow had melted. ( You can't tromp through 5 feet of snow with raw recruits.) Training -- such as it was -- was hyper accelerated. (OJT was expected to bring the boys up to speed.)
The typical boot camp// induction center could cycle through an astounding number of men per year -- because two to three weeks was often deemed enough for the purpose.
Due to the language barrier, eastern recruits were trained to respond to but a few command words -- and to do exactly what their officer was doing.
During the 1942 period, Soviet tactics were so primitive that the above synopsis is considered to be correct. Every surviving 'cucumber' has told essentially the same tale from this period: boot camp was astoundingly brief -- and then off to the front!
I must assume that a given boot camp could process at least eight formations per year.
As for STAVKA, best as I can tell, it didn't order around units smaller than an army. Remember that a Soviet army ~ a Western corps. A 'Front' ~ a Western army.
As to whether Stalin sent eight, ten or twelve of his armies to Stalingrad, does it really matter?
It must be plain on the record that STAVKA was never going to allow the Stalingrad front to run out of blood. It's also plain that Stalin never wanted the larger world to realize how much blood had been spilt there or anywhere.
BTW, after the war, the US Army captured essentially ALL of the Heer's battle maps -- notably those of the Ostheer.
They are an eye-opener. It was after viewing them that I realized what Glantz brought up to the general audience, though I discovered it all independently YEARS before I knew Glantz existed. He was preaching to the choir, in my case.
My memory is weakening, but I do remember that the maps are available over the Internet and IIRC they are in the Dartmouth collection. If not Dartmouth, then some other classic Ivy League library. Google is your friend.
These battle maps were to the exact scale used by Hitler, and ARE those maps. They are virtually 100% perfect as to German dispositions. They are remarkably accurate as to Soviet formations that are in contact with the Ostheer. They are 'soft' WRT Red Army formations behind the front lines.
( As the Ostheer discovered to its sorrow November 1942. )
The unit designations -- of the Red Army -- give the game away. They are TOO many. They are so many because the units are rump formations after the Ostheer has shredded them during Soviet frontal attacks.
What's most remarkable is to count the Red formations along the land bridge and then count them in and around Stalingrad, the city.
Yiikes.
BTW, based upon the German maps, it would appear that the land-bridge was under a different Front than the city. This would make perfect sense as its logistical tail went up the west side of the Volga, whereas the city was fed from the east of the Volga.
Extra rail lines were extended by the Red Army during this campaign. The most remarkable I found was the one out of Astrakhan. The Germans couldn't BELIEVE how fast the Reds built out that line. It was jumping more than ten-miles a day. ( LendLease rails, BTW )
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@Strizhi
Any jerk that loves Stalin and Bolshevism -- doesn't love Russians.
That's for sure.
In his gut, Stalin largely hated Russians. It's why he kept putting Georgians in all of his critical command positions. To an astounding degree, Stalin kept Russians out of his government.
You would've thought that his government would be 99% Russian. Instead you discover it was larded with Jews, Georgians, Ukrainians ( Nikita ) -- just a slew of out-cast minorities.
His hatred of Jews and Ukrainians was unbounded. ( Nikita's diary )
He was a real 'divide-and-rule' tyrant, all right.
There are more than a few war games that illustrate Soviet reserve army creation during that war. All of them are modelled on extremely short boot camps -- based on every Russian 'cucumber's' account of their experiences. This uniquely short cycle time has to be the source of Stalin's instant armies. It certainly corn fused the Germans -- all the way up to Hitler. Western military men just couldn't imagine a boot camp that didn't even last three-weeks. Some Russians write of boot camps that didn't even last two-weeks. (!!!)
Plainly, after you've read enough personal accounts from survivors, ( these number in the thousands, more than anyone can bear to read) you come to realize that Stalin's system for recruits was a meat grinding machine. In its essence, the Red Army just got the extreme basics down, and then depended upon On-The-Job training to carry the day. Lucky for Russia that her sons had no limit for selfless bravery.
It's shocking to read personal accounts of jumping into a T34 -- right before a major action -- for the first time. It was only later that STAVKA realized that this 'training program' was not optimal.
Similarly short training cycles impaired the Red Air Force. The guys were thrown at the Luftwaffe before they were really fledged. When this was finally changed, the Red Air Force became very good.
After reading enough personal accounts -- the stuff the fellas are writing while on their death beds -- one can only conclude that both armies sabotaged their own men via grand stupidities.
Like the Ostheer letting its draft horses freeze to death in the Autumn rains. Good grief. Thumb though the vet statistics. They were reporting astounding losses, day by day, as the animals died. They must have been crying while doing so. The horses you see in those old photos became food stuffs in very short order. (Gag)
Dead horses in Autumn became dead men in Winter. Pure insanity.
And like 1812-13, the weather didn't get any warmer for the Russians. Their own losses driving the Ostheer back were also a fright... largely due to the lack of training and support from their own superiors. (Gag)
I don't know how anyone could survive a bullet wound when it's 40 below.
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@Takh
I think you meant pkwVIs...
But, your thesis is essentially correct.
It's more than production numbers. It's also a case of how LONG a given tank could remain in service and how well it could be kept fuelled. In this basis, the German heavies were DISASTERS.
1) The Nazis used forced labor// prisoners brought in from France, Poland -- even Italy (!) to build their war machine. (!!!) The result was that the second their backs were turned, the production workers sabotaged Panthers and Tigers in a way that was not easily discovered. This typically took the form of phu cking with their lubrication systems. Foreign objects// crud was rammed deep into various lubrication channels. Long after the war, recovered and restored panzers repeatedly show just such sabotage. No panzer has been discovered that didn't have jacked up lubrication systems.
The beauty of this kind of sabotage is that it passed undetected straight through the war. It did cause German panzers to break down in the field for inexplicable reasons. The Nazis could never quite put it all together. Heh.
2) The Panther had a critical weakness that the Allies never picked up on. It's final drive was too weak. The Panther was over-weight by 20,000 pounds. Those extra ten-tons were really too much for the Panther's final drive.
( Final drive = the sprocket that transmits torque to the track. )
Worse, to repair damage to this sprocket, it was necessary to TOTALLY un-build a Panther tank. You had to pull the turret up and off. Then you had to pull the engine, drive shaft and many internals. Only then could you get at the final drive and its transmission -- which were the first thing that the factory dropped into a Panther.
This process was so involved that Panthers had to be sent back to the factory. Germany never developed a field repair solution.
[ The same task took four-hours for Sherman tanks -- which could be performed under a shade tree in the field. ]
BTW, Germany had a LOT of minor factories dedicated to rebuilding panzers. You'd be astounded as to how many micro-factories the Nazis used to crank out repairs and custom modifications, especially of captured enemy tanks. ( Soviet and French )
When the Germans had 500 panzers on the western front, the Allies had 10,000 Shermans. (late 44) ( 1,000s were sitting back as 'spares' ) The Army simply assumed that losses would be stiff, so the system just kept cranking them out and sending them to France. The production tempo kept surging, too.
It got to the point that every front line division had its own tank battalion. Tank divisions would have 300 to 450 Shermans. Regardless of the official TO&E every division just kept adding Shermans. One company of the 1st Infantry Division ended up with its own (secret) tank platoon. Shades of 'Kelly's Heroes.'
By the end, Shermans were used as much as mobile artillery ( shades of the original intent of the Mark IV panzer ) as they ever were as direct fire weapons. Tank destroyers were also tasked as artillery -- most firing 10 indirect rounds for every 1 direct fire rounds.
Like the V2, the Panther and Tiger were mistakes. Strategically, they didn't pencil out. Germany couldn't keep them running, so they had amazingly short operational lives. ( commonly just one battle )
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@Ixsalit
At this scale, your best stats come from gender imbalance.
Keep in mind that the Red army used widows by the thousand, too.
The answer is stark: Russian fatalities were EPIC.
The widow count was through the roof.
BTW, the STAVKA attitude towards its troops is reflected in such terms as: 'Cucumbers.' -- Yes, that was the slang lingo for fresh meat sent to the front.
When ordered to cross the Dneiper, an entire company of cucumbers immediately followed orders -- and jumped into the freezing river. All were lost. An hour later, the engineers arrived with boats and paddles. They were pissed. All of the cucumbers were missing. Now they would be in trouble.
All of this was recounted by a 1st Lt in the Red Army. He was an eye witness to this folly. (Artillery observer, he was there should the Krauts show up on the far bank.) He had no authority -- and just sat their in amazement and disgust as his superiors threw the boys away. Later, he cried himself to sleep. With boats, the cucumbers did get to the west bank.
The cucumbers jumped into the water because of insane Red army demands. ANY cucumber questioning an officer's order was pulled out of the unit and sent to a penal battalion -- PDQ -- never to be heard from again.
Did you ever hear about Stalin's take-a-shower order? May 1943 EVERY front line trooper had to take a shower. IIRC this was a Sunday, too. (A courier had showed up at STAVKA smelling like walking chit. ) So it was with total amazement that the Germans were treated to an astounding sight: shower equipment for field troops was erected in plain sight -- right up to the front lines. Then ENTIRE formations lined up to take turns showering -- obviously as fast as possible. The Germans held their fire. And then, when it seemed as if every Red was standing in line, every German formation across the 2,000 km front opened up with mortars and machine guns, belt-fed, too.
It was time to call up for fresh cucumbers! Virtually no Soviet trooper escaped German fire. If a general attack had been authorized, the front line would've marched east at quite a clip. But it wasn't after Stalingrad, the Heer was quite happy to just sit in its trench line.
This entire travail was published in Russian, over twenty-years ago. It's one of THOUSANDS of such similar tales. Most of these cluster phu ucks could not be exposed until 1992.
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STAVKA consisted of Stalin and the generals// marshals he plopped in front of himself on any given day.
His style was to keep them seated, pretty much at all times, while he walked around their backs, interrogating them about their concepts.
Other than Stalin, himself, it's amazing how many generals moved in and out of these STAVKA meetings.
STAVKA best mirrors America's National Security Council... another committee with a totally floating membership. The only one absolutely assured of a position there being the President, himself.
[The American NSC actually ran WWII, but it was never called that during the war, itself. Afterwards, Truman formalized what FDR had long established, and thus we ended up with the NSC and CIA, etc. Both were started out is improvisations.]
Most of my 'take' on the Russians comes not from Glantz -- who I've never read, though I've heard his lecture -- but from Russians and Russophiles. ( To put it politely. )
As for the insane losses at the land-bridge, they are confirmed from all sources... most notably the survivors.
You might take a gander at the post-Cold War diary accounts from the 'cucumbers' -- they are a fright. They just go on and on and on and on. They ALL tell of crazy high infantry losses to German machine guns.
Even Stalin, himself, was pissed at wasteful commanders, and made many a statement to that effect. Said 'waste' was due to the extremely short boot camps that every 'cucumber' reports in their diaries.
There are no exceptions floating around out there in the Russian literature. If there were, they'd get PLENTY of ink from Putin & Co.
No, the Red Army took a beating at the land-bridge. Four Red armies against a single panzer corps? Yiikes. With that much man-power, they should've blown through the Ostheer. On paper, that'd be five to one odds. Obviously, something does not add up.
The ten-armies quote, BTW, comes from a Russophile -- not a German. He was gloating about the Red victory, and the stupidity of the Nazis.
&&&
The German army beat the German army;
The Red army beat the Red army;
-- right up until Stalin let his marshals run the show.
Then everything went the other way. This was also the same time that LendLease really kicked in... which was BEFORE Uranus.
Hell, there are German accounts of them capturing LendLease (American) jeeps and more still on flat cars as they rolled up to Stalingrad. The Germans were giggling and laughing because this stuff was still in American markings. How fresh can you get?
The date: September 1941.
Yeah, that tale surprised me, too.
Boston bombers arrived before Uranus, too. They were the primary reason that Army Group A was so frustrated. A-20s kept blowing up their supplies and attempts at bridging. Back at OKH, Adolf couldn't believe what he was hearing.
No, the history is clear, Stalin wasted lives at an astounding clip. Then it was Hitler's turn. German loses in the back half of the war had to be astounding. Entire divisions, corps, armies evaporated. That's as bad as anything that happened to the Russians in 41-42.
After the war, both sides wanted to fold their losses into their victories so that their extreme defeats didn't boggle the mind.
That's where you get TIK's statistical compilation.
BTW, German position maps don't carry a narrative. They just show deployments. They sure don't make the Ostheer look good, BTW.
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The tendency of WWII tanks to breakdown in the field was epic compared to the modern experience. The Panther Ds at Kursk is merely the tip off.
[ BTW, Gantz asserts that the unit history is explicit: only a trivial number of Panther Ds broke down due to fire at Kursk once committed. What did them in was the brilliant idea of parking the regiment in a hollow, out of sight, overnight. God was not with them. There was a massive downpour in the wee hours. This caused every Panther to sink down all the way to their hull. (!) It then took DAYS for the regiment to recover these Panthers.
For, you see, the only thing that could pull a Panther out of the mud was one, if not two, other Panthers. The boys fell upon their charges with shovel and bucket, but to a large degree the Germans had to wait for the mud to dry out. Since the weather was extra-ordinarily warm ( 90+ F ) the mud did dry out. ]
Because Russian tanks -- T34 -- also have such an astonishing breakdown rate, one is left lost as to what's up.
The best tank of the war, the M4 Sherman, had a breakdown rate of 500miles. The T34 had a breakdown rate of 150miles. (est) The Tiger and Panther had epic breakdown rates of 70miles and 100miles.
Much of the latter was due to sabotage at the factory. All recovered Panthers to date show factory production sabotage in their critical lubrication systems. This goes a LONG way towards explaining why most Tigers can't stay in action more than a day at a time. Heavy Tiger battalions would lose 65% of their strength even without taking any combat losses. (!!!) This can only be detected by working through unit histories. It's not something that the Heer is proud of. You won't see Germans gloating about this crazy failure rate in their personal histories. But it goes miles and miles towards explaining why you read endless German accounts of being overwhelmed by numbers. They really were, The rest of their gear was back in the rear for repair. (!!!)
German stats show that active Panthers at the front at the end of 1943 were almost the same in number as at Kursk. (!!!) Inactive// under repair Panthers were equal in number. Then there were Panthers that were in transit. Hitler's policy was to hold back tanks -- all of them -- to create new formations. Speer absolutely could not talk him out of it. The result is that the stats are skewed. An astonishing fraction of the tank force is always sitting idle back in Germany.
Late in the war, Hitler gave up on the Heer, and moved to create a wholly new army. He started creating Panther brigades. ( Typically numbered in the hundreds: 106th, 107th, etc. ) These were created by taking ardent Nazi officers of True Belief and mating them with young German draftees. Their performance in battle was horrible. I'd say that they were a tad short in the sgt department.
The bottom line is that you can't trust German stats in the least.
Further, Hitler would NOT let Speer produce spare parts. Weird, strange, I know. Speer bitterly recounted how many times this issue was run up the flag pole. In practice it meant that German repair troops had to learn to take cripples apart -- to run a junk yard -- so as to have any repair parts at all.
The Russians had their own problems, starting with their breakdown rate. Early in the war, their breakdown rate with the T34 was off the hook -- something like 50miles.
That is, 50miles of cross country transit would cause half of all the machines to break down to such a degree that they could no longer roll.
And Russia is actually a pretty flat place as things go. Later in the war, things go a lot better, but Russia could never attain what their LendLease Shermans gave them. That's why you'll see -- over and over -- LendLease Shermans leading DEEP penetrations behind German lines. Ploesti comes immediately to mind. Those old photos were Winston Smithed by Moscow after the war was won, BTW. You really have to root around for them.
German propaganda showed both British and American tanks ALL THE TIME. Because they were leading the deepest penetrations -- solely because they could keep on rolling -- and because they always had radios -- a some time thing with T34 machines.
In sum: the German army defeated the German army in Russia. And to a very real degree, the Russian army defeated the Russian army. The Soviets only stopped defeating themselves after Zhukov and his pals took over control of the Red Army. From that point onwards, Stalin had to remain sitting in on the meetings -- attempting to not look stupid and not look no longer in charge.
Asking decent questions and then rubber stamping his marshall's plans started to really work out for him.
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