Comments by "TheThirdMan" (@thethirdman225) on "Top 7 Red Army Myths - World War 2" video.

  1.  @IrishCarney  "It's a "myth" grounded in reality especially from the German perspective because the Germans repeatedly under estimated Soviet numbers especially reserves." Yes but this has to be carefully considered in context. The Red Army numbers can be confusing. First of all, a Red Army division was smaller than a German numbers so when you see them head-to-head on a map, don't assume parity Secondly, as David Glantz says, the Red Army mobilisation was what surprised them. The Germans went into Barbarossa with 3.9 million front line troops, compared to 2.8 front line Soviet troops. But! The Germans had only about 330,000 in reserve, while the Red army had millions. The German attitude to war against the Soviet Union was that it would be a push over. They assumed that once they got to Moscow, it would be Brest-Litovsk all over again. Meanwhile, Stalin had put the entire Union on a political, social and economic war footing. It was callous and ruthless but there was, with hindsight, no alternative. "Then when at the limit of their strength at Moscow they were hit by a wave of fresh troops.” Again, be careful with this. These guys might have been fresh but they were inexperienced and not, for the most part, armed with modern weapons. They achieved what they set out to achieve but at huge cost. "Finally the behind-the-scenes Soviet bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping efforts to scrounge up manpower for the big offensives of 44 and 45 were not visible to the Germans, who only saw themselves being outnumbered by dauntingly huge numbers of attackers - so it seemed inexhaustible." This is the old German generals' excuse. Halder, Guderian and Manstein all wrote of being overwhelmed by "Russian hordes" (in fact, by the time the got to Berlin, they were mostly Ukrainian and Belarusian. It might sound pedantic but the difference is quite significant). The Germans never complained about being outnumbered when they were winning. All in all, none of this matters because it all comes back to the stupidity of German ambitions and assumptions in the lead up to Barbarossa. The German generals blame three things: 1) Hitler, 2) General Winter and 3) Overwhelming numbers. It's been shown time and again that these were excuses and not completely grounded in reality. It never occurred to them, because of their racist views, that if they went to war with the Soviet union, they would be made to pay.
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  8.  @jrus690  Reader’s Digest…? Who’da thought it? Interesting. What’s also interesting is the way the information has been skewed over time by what was available and who wrote it. The US were the first to really start listening to the German generals and actually gave Halder an award! The Soviet archives were unavailable and the official history was pretty unreliable so we took what we got. It just might have been a bit more useful if we had applied a bit more critical thinking to what we were reading. I know my late father was very impressed by Manstein. I was pretty impressed by Guderian. In both cases it was because we read what they wrote. Now that their claims have been compared with what’s in the Soviet archives, it’s possible to get not just a more complete picture by one with less personal investment. Soviet planning for total war, involving the transfer of many essential factories to the east of the Urals, as well as a much wider mobilisation of troops, showed that they were serious about the task at hand. They needed to be. But I have always been amazed by their ability to continue to produce war materiel even in places like the Leningrad tank factory where workers were not just starving but because the factory roof had been blown off, they were also freezing. They designed tanks that could be easily constructed. Whatever has been said about the T-34, it was produced under circumstances that were unique to the Soviet Union and were frequently built by old people and children because all the skilled workers were at the front. A lot of this gets dismissed because it crosses a controversial political boundary. But failing to occasionally be brave with these things has been responsible for more misunderstanding and less knowledge of what was required to win the war. Some people still seem surprised that the Germans lost. It was grand strategy that stopped them, not tactics and technology. In that respect, the Soviet Union were using the best strategy. The Red Army practice of frontal assaults appears to have been perpetuated because of the successes in the Russian Civil War. It was a lot less successful in WWII and was eventually changed to encirclement and destruction tactics from Operation Bagration onwards.
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  9.  @haroldfiedler6549  "None of them thought victory was possible with Blitzkrieg tactics precisely because the Soviet Union was so huge." Well, they didn't object. Why not? "And even if the Germans had defeated the Red Army and collapsed the Soviet Union, it would have taken a massive force just to garrison or occupy such a vast nation." After France, Germany suffered from "victory disease", something which was not unique to Germany. France suffered from it after WWI. The Unites States - and to a degree, the rest of the West - suffered from it after Iraq in 1991 and the end of the Cold War. Whatever the supply problems, the Germans actually did believe that they could kick in the door of the Soviet Union and the whole rotten edifice would come tumbling down. The Army were as guilty as anyone of making poor judgements. Hitler's directive to live off the land - another thing that was hardly unique to Germany in war - was supposed to offset the logistical problems, along with the expected victories in the Caucasus and the Ukraine. In short, the German generals talked themselves into it. The diaries of Halder, Guderian (I've read his) et al, were all written under rather peculiar circumstances in that they had a vested interest in distancing themselves from Hitler. "Secondly, it was Stalin and his thugs who vilified the Germans in racist terms to whip up the hatred of their clueless soldiers and get them to fight." They didn't have to. The Germans laid waste to every part of the country they passed through. Soviet soldiers needed no more motivation than what was done to their fellow countrymen and women. "No such thing existed in Germany. It's pure BS." I agree: Mein Kampf is pure BS. But it's all in there and in Hitler's speeches. "The SS had high ranking slavs in its ranks well before the war even started. One perfect example is Odilo Globocnik. The man most responsible for the implementation of Operation Reinhard." So what? One man. Big deal. "This thread worn tale is completely false. The real enemy of the Germans was the rasputitsa." That affected both sides. And it's not like the Germans didn't know about it. If they didn't plan for it, then more fool them. "In summary, you're a typical brainwashed no-nothing, who's thinking us all of 1mm deep. Grow the F up little boy." I'll say whatever the fuck I want and there's not a thing you can do to stop me. If you have anything intelligent to say then you've kept it well hidden. Typical Nazi: trying to silence dissent. Finally, it was never my contention that the winter stopped the Germans. The Germans, by their own record, were stopped by the Red Army. You only have to look at the state of the Army in June and compare it to December. If you could read and comprehend, you'd have understood that.
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  12.  @jrus690  Oh, I see. I thought you meant something different. I didn't realise you were being sarcastic about Hitler. Yes: the generals used Hitler as a scapegoat and man people still do to this day, as though somehow the end result was wrong. As for maintaining the manpower losses, it was a lot more complicated than that and luck played no small part in it. The fact that Stalin didn't believe the reports of massed German forces, the lack of response by commanders who had been promoted out of their depth as a result of the Purges, the total lack of fuel in most of the forward units and an almost complete lack of adequate communication and coordination. But the German attack started to slow at Smolensk. Part of this was due to the perceived and perhaps necessary need to bolster the flanks of the push to bot the north and south. But that gave the Red Army an opportunity to take a breath and they did. By the time the Germans got to the outskirts of Moscow, they had been fought to a halt not by the "Russian Winter" but by the Red Army. This was completely determined by the fact that the Germans were on a short war strategy. Either Moscow would be in German hands by Christmas, 1941 or the war would be lost. German hubris allowed them to believe their own propaganda, particularly relating to their maxim that the whole rotten edifice would come crashing down (as they saw it). This was not merely Hitler's rhetoric either. The generals believed it too. That is why their losses were unsustainable.
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