Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "Советская оборонительная тактика - Курск 1943" video.

Exactly so. This is a great video and so far, the best one I have seen on the subject. It's also worth mentioning that most people spend inordinate amounts of time talking about the Tiger v T-34 or the exploits of the Ferdinand.. This is invariably at the expense of a rational discussion of how the Red Army defences and tactics managed to separate the German tanks from the infantry.
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@CrazyArcher2160 Very distorted. I am currently trying to find information on Operation Spring Awakening, one of the bigger armoured clashes of the war and the last major one. The only information I can find so far goes something like this: the Germans advanced between the two lakes and pushed the Red Army back. They drove a wedge 30 kilometres deep through the Red Army lines. Then it ends. No mention of how the Red Army managed to win a crushing victory over the Germans. They just went away. I actually have found out now the basics of what happened but you have to push a long way through to find it. You get all this stuff about what the Germans did and nothing about what the Red Army did, despite the fact that they won. The only videos I've seen on YouTube just stop when the Germans started getting hit. The battle just kind of ends. But the fact is that the 6th SS Panzer Army were decimated. They lost so much materiel that Dietrich said of them, "It's appropriate that we're called the 6th because we only have six tanks left." They received such a drubbing that it led to "The Armband Order". As you can see, information on the Germans is easy to find.
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@watersoup6270 The Germans went away. That’s a win.
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@CrazyArcher2160 Exactly. The unfortunate thing about Kursk is that it was just so big and most of the discussion circulates around Prokhorovka. That was a decisive German victory in a large scale battle they lost. People talk about Tigers vs T-34s and kill ratios without ever mentioning the outcomes or the fact that the push failed. No wonder people are confused.
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@PewPewPlasmagun Glanz is just one of a number of different sources. Part of historical research is to garner as much material as you can before drawing any conclusions and Bernhard does this. The worst part about Glanz is that his writing style is so dry it’s very difficult to read.
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@watersoup6270 It's hard to argue with that level of prejudice, especially when no sources are quoted. Let me first point out something that many people seem blissfully unaware of: the terms "Soviet" and "Russian" are not interchangeable, irrespective of the vernacular. The Soviet Union was a loose confederation of 15 republics, Russia being only one of them. Secondly, you seem to have missed the point of the whole campaign - and it was a campaign, not merely a battle. The plan was to draw the Germans into a war of attrition which the Red Army commanders knew they could ill afford. The Red Army set a trap and the Germans fell headlong into it. Once the German attacks failed, the Red Army counter attack not only held the Kursk salient but moved well beyond the city of Orel, thus joining up a significant gap in the line. Yes it was a Pyrrhic victory. It was still very much a victory. You can't spin it any other way. There were even some defeats, like Prokhorovka, along the way. But the Germans did not achieve a single objective and ultimately, the losses in men an materiel were unsustainable, whatever the Soviets lost. That's how an attrition strategy works. As abominable as it sounds to sacrifice so many, it was the correct strategy.
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@grantjohnson4810 I understand how it works but Blitzkrieg was just a memory by then. The Germans didn’t have the manpower and resources to so start another drive on Moscow and the Red Army had shown already that it was prepared to sustain whatever losses were necessary to protect that route (see Bernhard’s video about he Rzhev Meat Grinder).
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@williedesmond8201 Ooooh... lookout! Somebody's salty.
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@watersoup6270 Source please.
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@Nfsbelka While I don’t completely agree with your analysis, the basics are pretty much right. We are still recovering from a combination of Cold War propaganda and blind faith in the memoirs of the German generals. What does need to be remembered - and you kind of alluded to this - is that Eastern Europe is nothing like Western Europe. It is riven by ethnic divisions and nationalism. This is exactly why Hitler was able to exploit tensions in the east to his advantage. For many in the east, this was an opportunity to settle old scores. Those divisions are still with us today. They have always been interpreted as hatred of communism but this is a very superficial point of view. Some probably were anti communist but you will find far more who were simply anti-Moscow or anti-Russia and were prepared to hitch their wagon to the Nazi cause. It’s also extremely important what you said about the Soviet Union and Russia. Most people fail to realise that they are not the same thing. While Russia might have constituted half the population, it was only one of 15 republics in the Union and they didn’t always see eye-to-eye.
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@vladdrakul7851 "First don't you think Manstein knew that there was a mud period." Of course! "Waiting for 3 months for new tanks." Not arguing that one. "You talk about 20 Km of defense lines but those lines were NOT there when Manstein proposed the attack." I didn't say anything about 20 kms of defensive lines. "The reason he gave to Hitler for doing it NOW was precisely because he knew the Russians could build and supply themselves FASTER than the Wehrmacht. He was proven right." That's as may be. I am not disagreeing on that point.
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@vladdrakul7851 Already said it. I simply said that had Manstein gone earlier, his tanks would have had to contend with the mud from the Rasputitsa. I didn't say everything else was wrong. I was making a simple comment.
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@mikec8086 Wait a minute. The vast majority of VVS aircraft destroyed in Barbarossa were destroyed on the ground , not in the air. This was not a matter of superior German tactics or machines, unless you consider it from the point of view of catching your enemy on the toilet.
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No, that is wrong. Bernhard has made another video on that.
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@watersoup6270 Woosh
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@watersoup6270 Jesus, are you still posting this? I notice how you combined the two levels to show the Soviet casualties (which you erroneously refer to as “Russian”) but fail to do the same for German casualties (that list is incomplete anyway).
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@grantjohnson5785 There was no chance of another drive to Moscow.
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@grantjohnson4810 I don’t see how.
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Glanz is too dry and hard to read.
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They didn’t have much choice really. They could have tried during the Rasputitsa but they would have had at least as much trouble with the mud.
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@jamesxm4240 Only simpletons believe such simplistic things. This “rule” you quote that defenders should always win kind of doesn’t take into account some of the more important campaigns of the Second World War. The fall of France. The fall of Singapore. I suppose you have some simplistic answer to both of those? Mate, the world is not like that. Grow up.
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@peknive8331 That is wrong. Kursk was planned by Zhukov and Stalin only rubber stamped it. By this stage of the war, Stalin trusted his commanders while Hitler didn’t.
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@peknive8331 Fair enough.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к Unknown in 1940 but not unknown in 1943.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к That was always going to be a pincer movement. It was a salient. In 1940 nobody predicted the move through the Ardennes.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к That’s right; nobody predicted it. I don’t know why you’re arguing.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к "Facts" are only what we agree on. On this point we differ.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к Facts are only what we agree on.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к Yes but we would agree on that. This is not 2+2=4.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к You're boring me.
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@ДмитрийТрудов-х7к I got tired of you long ago.
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@williedesmond8201 Then we’d all be living under Nazi rule.
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@williedesmond8201 Is that how you disagree with people? Calling them names? Not much of a point you’re making.
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@rick7424 That's er... the point of the video.
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@michaeldunagan8268 It’s a bit different from that. The Red Army had a policy of attacking on a wide front. I suspect this was a hangover from the Russian Civil War and it seems to have applied equally to their defensive policy. It was a less that efficient use of troops against an army which was using generally more advanced tactics. Remember too that the effect of the Soviet defences was to separate the tanks from the infantry, so that any breakthroughs achieved by the Panzers could not be exploited but at places like Prokhorovka, there were plenty of Red Army infantry units on the battlefield but almost no Germans. While the battle was nominally an victory for the Panzers, it was a strategic defeat because they didn’t have the infantry to exploit it. On the other hand, a battlefield is a pretty unhealthy place to be and Soviet casualties were high. Operation Bagration represented the first major implementation of surround and destroy tactics by the Red Army. For them it was a seismic shift in policy and after that there was basically no stopping them.
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@watersoup6270 You didn’t get your figures from Wikipedia. Not raw figures, anyway.
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@Univac AI The purges we’re not a factor after about 1942.
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@199gSauerkraut Spare the ethics lecture please. Stalin had next to no influence over the conduct of the operations around Kursk.
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If he had gone early, his tanks would have been bogged in the mud from the Rasputitsa.
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@beurteilung713 Who denies that the official Soviet history is overstated? Nobody. That’s one of the reasons you should watch the video with Dr Roman Toeppel. Much of that is countered. You should get your head out of your arse, yank.
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@mikec8086 It was a tactical air war, rather than a strategic one.
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Excuse me but what language are you speaking?
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Excuse me but what language are you speaking?
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@PyromaN93 The trade off was that, because of the Treaty of Rapallo, the Germans got to train there instead of in Germany.
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