The little dinosaurs are the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a much larger fighting force than Nazi Germany, and the Soviet military strategy was to throw men into the blender and overwhelm the Nazis with sheer numbers. Additionally, it was the Soviets who captured Berlin, thus taking Germany out of WW2.
This is true, for 1941. Soviet strategy was infamously shit in 1939-1941, from Poland, To Finland to beginning of Barbarossa, due to Stalin's shitty purges that killed a shit ton of officers. But largely by 1942 those tactics has been slowly phased out for normal tactics. With some exceptions here and there.
EDIT: Not defending the regime, im just talking about military tactics.
The red army suffered higher losses than the Germans in 45, even their largest successes, like Bagration advanced slowly and suffered horrendous losses despite overwhelming numerical and material superiority. The soviets did one thing exceptionally well, and that was getting men into uniform.
To be fair, they were on the offensive in 45 and usually the offensive has higher casualties unless they have a truly overwhelming advantage. In 45 the Soviets absolutely had the upper hand, but not nearly to the same level the Allied forces in the West had. They had to burn manpower again to actually take the pushes they wanted, especially as they pushed towards Germany itself. It wasn’t a great ratio still, but it’s not like they just magically got worse without reason.
The east also had the absolute majority of axis troops, if it was flipped the other way around the western front would have been just as bloody as the east. Germany had years to dig into fortified positions and got to enjoy the position of defense (well, maybe not enjoyment in the typical sense of the word lol).
So should we compare their relative losses to the Germans when they were on the offensive? Because I promise you, that comparison would not be flattering. The red army absolutely got better, but tactically and operationally it was still by far the worst army in the war, and I am including the Italians in that.
Strategically however, it was excellent at putting men into uniform and having them die for the motherland, which turned out to be very effective, absolutely monstrous, but very effective.
Edit: The red army is the only example in ww2 of an army having a higher casualty rate on the offensive than the defensive, the Germans have a rate of 5:1 (excluding PoWs which included make it 30:1) in France, a similar one while on the offensive until 43, and the Western allies also take fewer casualties than the Germans post D-day
I’m definitely not disagreeing that they performed the worst over the course of the entire war, but the Soviet army of 1945 was actually pretty solid. Their casualty ratio was not bad at all for an offensive army and they made drastic progress. They ended up rather competent when it mattered the most to push with the rest of the Allies.
The early war Soviet methods were ATROCIOUS though.
I'd rather argue that the Germans made a whole laundry list of strategically catastrophic decisions, had trouble filling the ranks from the first months of Barbarossa, had logistics that would make Marshall bald instantly if he saw them, and thus found themselves chronically outnumbered and outgunned.
I think the red army tends to be judged unreasonably favourably simply because it doesn't end the war as the disaster it was initially.
Both can be true though and the truth, like so many other things, is almost guaranteed to be in the middle. I don’t think the Soviets magically became some wonder army at the end, but I do feel it’s undeniable that their own strategies shifted and they saw greater success with less casualties. The average training of their soldiers and officers improved, they embraced successful officers and invited them to conferences to share their knowledge, and they got MUCH better in combined arms warfare and urban warfare. Just across the board late war Soviet battles were fought so differently and to such noticeably better results.
Without the Germans failing so miserably their casualties would have been high, yes, but the late war Soviets had worked their own way up to be a large and competent military force. Not best in the world by ANY measure, but drastically better than where they started. They deserve the praise for improving and the positive impact that probably had on making the East go so smoothly towards the end.
Yea, that I can absolutely agree with. I might be tilting at windmills a bit (Perhaps due to a tankie history teacher in secondary school who more or less claimed Stalin shat gold, and so, red army hagiography really annoys me)
I mean, the difference between a surprise offence against a supposed ally, versus what the Soviets were doing - counter-attacking to reclaim ground that would have been reinforced, in an attack that was expected - isn't an apt comparison. The German army had a big advantage in that their offensive stages were in the early part of the war, when none of the nations were at full preparedness and/or expecting attack, and they were on the defensive for the back nine, where they were at their most prepared, so casualty count isn't the best gauge for success. It was easier, relative, for the Germans to attack unprepared nations in 1939-41, and they were able to make attackers suffer greatly from 1942 onwards, when they were able to prepare defences in North Africa, Italy, Eastern Europe and Western Europe. If you had a choice, you'd want to be attacking a nation that isn't fully mobilised, and you'd want to be defending when you were on favourable terrain and fully mobilised.
Because their tactics early war were god awful, like someone here previously stated. They were wasting manpower to a ridiculous degree at the start, before starting to improve and shift to a more equal exchange. In 41 they were bleeding troops to a ludicrous degree, in 45 they were doing about as well if not slightly better than most theorize an attacking army should perform.
They improved over time by a noticeable margin and the casualties only widened again when they started pushing towards Germany. Even then it was maybe a third as many casualties per German as they had in 41.
The soviets suffered 200k more casualties during Bagration, which is actually inline with similar scale operations, especially for an offensive operation with troop counts larger than all of the western front put together. They also only outnumbered the Germans 2.5 to 1, which is not overwhelming for an attacking army. The Soviets did a lot of things well and getting men into uniforms was hardly at the top of the list.
And what was the relative amount of materiel? At the outset of Bagration the soviets outnumbered the Germans 38:1 in terms of tanks, 8k aircraft to the 800 of the germans and so on. A vast majority of the casualties and the 'rapid' (which still was slower than the japanese advanced through mountain jungles) advance happened during the first week, before the Germans reallocated resources and slowed the pace to about what we see in Ukraine currently.
But as it turns out, being operationally capable is only tangentially related to winning wars.
Operation Bagration (summer 1944) is considered one of the fastest and most successful major offensives in military history.
Soldier losses between the Axis and Soviets on the Eastern Front were 1 to 1.3.
Prisoners of war are counted as military losses. Wehrmacht captured approximately 5.2 to 5.7 million Soviet soldiers during the course of the war. Of these, over 3.3 million (around 57%) died from hunger, cold, disease, or targeted executions.
On the other side, around 3 million German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Soviets. Of these, approximately maximal 1 million (around 33%) died in the camps.
If you exclude losses from prisoner-of-war camps, then losses are almost 1 to 1.
Historians like Rüdiger Overmans show that German personnel losses (killed and permanently missing) reached their absolute peak in 1945. In this final phase, the losses of the Axis powers significantly exceeded those of the Red Army.
The Soviets suffered horrific losses at the beginning of the war, when losses were 10 Sovuets to 1 Axis in encirclement battles, or 3.6 Soviets to 1 Axis in general.
If you exclude the first phase of the war and only consider the period from 01.01.1942 to 1945, then the losses are 0.98 Soviets against 1 Axis.
From 1943/1944 onwards, the Red Army was superior to the Wehrmacht not only numerically, but above all tactically, operationally, and technologically (keyword: deep operation). It carried out highly complex deception maneuvers, coordinated armored wedges with massive artillery and air support, and simply outmaneuvered the Wehrmacht systematically.
I did not claim Bagration wasn't a success, I am however claiming that if you're outnumbering and outgunning your enemy more than that same enemy did while advancing at 2-4 times your pace through the same areas 3 years earlier, it probably isn't that impressive.
You would expect the losing party, who is constantly outnumbered and ludicrously outgunned to have far higher losses than the winning one ceteris paribus, would you not? They did on the western front, and the Soviets did when the Germans were advancing early on in the war.
See above. And I don't see why one would discount PoWs, a loss is a loss, the relevant fact is whether or not the enemy can make use of a soldier, not whether that soldier is dead or maimed. The fact that both the nazis and the soviets are among the worst regimes in history isn't really relevant to discussion of whether or not the soviets were tactically and operationally capable.
The Soviets lost more men in just taking Berlin than the Americans did during the entirety of the war, and once again I refer you to the above. Note that my claim isn't that the Germans were great, but rather that the soviets were inept and wasted millions of lives by being inept.
Sure bub, if we go back to Bagration, explain how it is that the Germans, outnumbered 3:1, outtanked 7:1, outgunned 10:1, outaircrafted 8:1 somehow inflict 200 000 more losses than they take, kill 3 times more tanks than they have in total, while the soviets are attacking in the best terrain for offensive operations in Europe? That is not happening on the western front, the western allies consistently advance at about the same pace as Bagration after breaking out of the Boccage with far fewer casualties per casualty they inflict on the Germans.
“It probably isn't that impressive.” That simply doesn't follow. What matters is not just the force ratio at the beginning of an offensive, but what happens to the enemy's army afterwards. Bagration destroyed a substantial part of Army Group Centre, achieved operational breakthroughs across an enormous front and resulted in an advance of hundreds of kilometres. Numerical superiority does not make a military victory trivial.
Your comparison with the Western Front is methodologically flawed. In Normandy, the Wehrmacht were subsequently fighting under completely different circumstances. After the breakout, Falaise and the general German retreat across France. Later, the Ardennes offensive created another entirely different operational situation. Bagration, by contrast, broke through a prepared German defensive system on the Eastern Front and then exploited that breakthrough on an enormous scale. You cannot simply compare casualty ratios while ignoring the operational circumstances.
No, the losing side does not automatically have to suffer vastly higher losses. Not when we're talking about a sophisticated combined-arms operation. Casualties depend on artillery concentration, air power, reconnaissance, fortifications, terrain, logistics, tactical doctrine, command, surprise, the ability to exploit breakthroughs, and many other factors. There is no rule saying that the numerically superior attacker must necessarily inflict enormous casualties while taking almost none himself.
Berlin is actually a particularly poor argument for Soviet “ineptitude”. You are comparing an assault on a heavily fortified urban defensive complex with operations against a field army spread across an enormous front. The German forces around Berlin were concentrated in and around a prepared defensive zone, with fortifications, bunkers, trenches, anti-tank positions and urban strongpoints. The fact that the Soviets suffered substantial losses taking Berlin does not, by itself, demonstrate tactical incompetence. And more importantly, anyone using Berlin as evidence of Soviet ineptitude should also mention Königsberg. One of the most heavily fortified German cities was assaulted on 6 April 1945 and effectively fell within four days. The Soviets systematically broke through its defensive belts using concentrated artillery, air support, infantry, tanks and engineers. You cannot cherry-pick Berlin while ignoring Königsberg.
And your Bagration numbers need sources. Claims such as “3:1 manpower, 7:1 tanks, 10:1 guns and 8:1 aircraft” followed by “the Germans inflicted 200,000 more casualties than they suffered” are meaningless without specifying exactly what is being counted. German and Soviet loss estimates for Bagration differ considerably depending on whether you count killed, wounded, missing, prisoners or irrecoverable losses. You cannot mix categories and then present the result as an objective casualty ratio.
And there is an even more fundamental problem with your argument, the Soviets having overwhelming superiority is not evidence against Soviet military competence. They deliberately created and exploited that superiority. They concentrated artillery and armour at breakthrough sectors, deceived German intelligence about their Schwerpunkt, attacked across multiple sectors, penetrated the defensive system and then pushed mobile formations through the gaps to turn tactical breakthroughs into operational encirclements and strategic collapse.
That is precisely what operational competence looks like. The objective of an army is not to win with equal numbers or to minimize casualties for the sake of a statistic. It is to create overwhelming local superiority and then convert it into the destruction of the enemy's ability to conduct organized resistance.
And finally, your claim that Bagration took place in “the best terrain for offensive operations in Europe” is simply bizarre. Belarus was full of swamps, forests, rivers, poor roads and difficult terrain for large mechanized formations. Those conditions created enormous problems for Soviet logistics, engineers and armoured exploitation. The fact that the Red Army nevertheless managed to conduct a large-scale breakthrough and advance hundreds of kilometres makes the operation more impressive, not less.
You are taking Soviet superiority as evidence against Soviet competence, even though a significant part of that superiority was precisely what the Red Army had learned to create, concentrate and operationalize by 1944.
So I'm a little high right now, but your post just struck this very real feeling into me of imagining I'm a Soviet infantryman. How sickening the fear would be for me, knowing my leadership is sending me into impossible conditions. From their perspective, I'm a number on a report. But from my perspective looking up, I'm terrified of dying. I don't want to run into danger intentionally. I'm afraid of the pain, what if it is agonizing? I'm scared of dying because what lies on the other side? What if I never wake up?
Also think it's funny because the US and Britain also had a lot of boneheaded "just direct attack" fuck ups early in the war as well before they learned better.
The German counterattack towards Bagration (Operation Doppelkopf, trying to reunify the army groups) advanced way faster than Bagration did at its fastest, this despite Bagration consisting of about as many men as the Germans had along the entire front line, and the soviets having an absolutely astronomical advantage in materiel. The western allies on the other hand took land at about the same rate as Bagration did from the breakout from Normandie to the Rhein, but at a positive casualty rate (the soviets somehow sneezed away 2-300k more casualties than they inflicted on the Germans, and lost 3 times more tanks than the Germans even had). Bagration is really impressive until you compare it to literally any other non-soviet offensive in the war.
The Soviet military tactic is just human wave attacks until the enemy runs out of manpower and ammuniton. Same shit the Russians are doing in Ukraine currently.
And by the way without US-Lend Lease the USSR would of lost to Germany. Even Stalin and Zhukov stated this.
and the Soviet military strategy was to throw men into the blender and overwhelm the Nazis with sheer numbers
The Red Army did not have a doctrine of winning by deliberately sacrificing unlimited numbers of soldiers. But mass and numerical superiority were important tools within Soviet operational doctrine.
The doctrine was concentrated firepower + operational maneuver + deep exploitation + deception + industrial/logistical superiority. Saying that the Soviet military strategy was to throw men into the blender and overwhelm the Nazis with sheer numbers is misleading.
The whole "USSR strategy is to send wave after wave until the meat grinder is clogged" is an exaggeration. There were times when their logistics were shit, but if anyone is attempting to downplay the effectiveness of Marshal Zhukov then they are either ignorant or bad faith
First of all, Russia is not the USSR, they are not the same entity. Both Ukraine and Russia were part of it. Second, Russian military tactics have been heavily dependent on artillery and small teams of ground forces. Completely different tactics
It's kind of funny how much the role of Ukraine is downplayed in the day-to-day administration of the Soviet Union, both by Russian nationalists who seek to spread the same lie you believe in and by Ukrainian nationalists who feel like they have to rewrite history to build an identity for themselves.
Russian tactics were to bottle up civilians in Stalingrad and use them as human shields to draw the Nazis into urban warfare. Seems pretty bad faith to gloss over the largest battle in the whole war.
Mostly their own until after Stalingrad, the biggest battle in our species' history, and the turning point of the war. Afterwards though US aid was invaluable in helping the wrap up operations.
It was most certainly not their own after Stalingrad, trucks, bread, canned meat for soldiers meals, the US continually ramped up Lend Lease as the U-Boat threat waned. Even as Germany was clearly losing we still increased our shipments. We also sent over industrial machines and blueprints to allow Soviet factories that had been destroyed or moved from Barbarossa to be rebuilt much faster with better designs.
Something like 60-70% of their soldiers meal and meal contents came from the US even in 1945. USSR truck convoys raced across Poland and Czechoslovakia in the final months of the war in Studebakers…
Lend lease is heavily documented by both sides, a large amount of aircraft were also sent by the US, notably most of their bombers were from America and some of their Aces flew P-39s, we literally have photos of these in service and handwritten accounts from the Soviet side.
Yeah unless you were Ukrainian, or polish, or Chechen, or Turkish or Kurdish, or Jewish, or a Cossack, or religious at all actually. Also standard of living was probably significantly improved by all the food and equipment and energy from the US
Their own. Guns and ammunition delivered by lend lease were negligible because they were incompatible with the american production chain and they were already producing them at eye-watering amounts, and food deliveries via lend-lease account for about 4% of wartime production.
That’s not true, that whole conspiracy was started by Nazi generals and SS officers working for the United States War History Department to write the official US history of WW2
The eastern horde myth is propaganda from former nazi officer who couldn't concieve getting destroyed by an inferior race, by 1943 their tactics, strategy, equipment and industry was way ahead of the nazis
This is actually a myth that comes from the autobiographies of nazi veterans who wanted to whitewash their record in the eyes of the West.
The reality is that the Soviets were better at organizing planned offensives, where they would shift around soldiers from quiet parts of the front to concentrate them on key areas, only to shift them around to the next area of attack, which created the illusion of overwhelming numbers, but really the numerical superiority was only local, the total size of the Soviet army wasn’t that much larger than the Axis total at any given time, until the very end of the war when the Germans melted away completely.
And we appriciate their sacrifice "you don't win a war by dying for your country, you win a war by getting the other guy to die for theirs" takes on a whole new meaning with this.
Karmically speaking since they sided with Germany to split up Poland and it likely undercut their cold war efforts, and the U.S. came out on top after WW2.
Soviets had more tanks, planes and artillery than the Germans. You also tend to take more casualties when you’re on the assault (Soviets were on offensive for 3 years)
Their approach to manufacturing military equipment was also based on designing weapons that were easier to mass produce rather than pursuing something that was individually far more impressive on paper but more expensive, time-consuming and difficult to build, which is part of why the Soviet Ilyushin il-2 was the most produced plane of ww2 and the t-34 was the most produced tank.
After the u.s planned invasion we should add. The soviets didnt roll up the Germans until after the u.s had already started to break thru the western front.
Even nazi referred to the USSR as a country sized tank factory. Even pre was the was A Lot of tanks. Light, undersupplied, badly used but still. When industry started their conveyers they printed tens of thousands war machines.
Also without the war between germany and USSR, D-Day would have just been a suicide mission. The majority of Hitlers forces were in the east (or dead already). If Hitler stayed focused on finishing Britain off before kicking the Soviet hornet's nest, things may have ended very differently
Do you know that you literally repeat Nazi propaganda?
I am not even exaggerating: Nazi propaganda during the war, Nazi racism towards Slavic people during the war and postwar old Nazi commander apologetic war diaries propagated the myth of Red Army numerical superiority, winter and "Hitler's mistakes" being the only reason the Eastern Front was lost - because it was all aligned along the racial contempt of Nazis towards the "subhuman Slavic barbarians who are backward and stupid and would never win the war against glorious Wehrmacht if not for their brute numbers".
Fact #1: Red Army was of comparable size to the combined Axis invasion force until 1943, AFTER all of the most important battles were already won. During arguably the most important battle of the war, Moscow 1941, Red Army actually had LESS soldiers than the Axis invasion force. During 1942 and the entire Stalingrad battle the numbers were comparable. And only very late in the war the numerical superiority of the Soviets went beyond the astonishing... two to one. So the claim of the huge numerical superiority of the Soviets and 10:1 ratio is essentially the Flat Earth equivalent of the ww2 history.
Fact #2: The combined battle deaths of the Soviets of the eastern front when compared to the combined Axis deaths are of the shocking... 3:2 ratio. Going for the rough 1:1 parity in the later stages of the war.
Fact #3: Plan Barbarossa as a whole, the beginning stages of the battle of Stalingrad, battle of Kursk and operation Bagration all happened during summer.
Fact #4: The Soviet forces are generally considered superior over the Axis performance on the eastern front in terms of logistics, intelligence, and the strategic planning in general . The initial disasters of '41 and '42 and several disasters afterwards were largely results of the initial complete lack of preparation of the Soviets for the war (epic fail for sure), lack of experienced officers on the tactical level, and very often overlooked gigantic advantage Germany had in artillery ammunition industry. Battle of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk and Bagration were all catastrophic failures for Wehrmacht because Red Army was consistently capable of outwitting Wehrmacht's terrible intelligence services and planning on the strategic level.
I'm not even Russian, I'm Polish, but I absolutely fucking hate the myth of the eastern front being lost only by the "Slavic hordes, winter and Hitler's mistakes" because it's literally Nazi propaganda of the Slavic peoples being barbaric idiots who only won because of their mythical supposed "superior numbers" and nothing more.
The Soviet Union was invaded by the Nazis, they didn’t have a choice but to fight back with everything they had. Calling that “throwing men into the blender” is completely unfair. They were at an extreme disadvantage, and the Nazis goal was literally to clear the land of all communists, Slavs, and Jews, along with the other populations they considered inferior.
Not really, initially yes it was just getting bodies to the front but once the Soviets gained their footing they did something similar to blitzkrieg. They battle plans were basically break through the enemy rear and cut off logistics and then strangle the enemy like an anaconda. Rinse and repeat all the way to Berlin.
To be fair, while many soviet officers used the meat grinding strategy, by 1944 the Red Army had impro improved massively, used better tactics on both tactical and operational scales. For example, Red Army had the best (both by organization and equipment) anti tank defense of the whole WWII.
And while yes, even in 1945 in many ways Red Army was still worse then western forces, the 1941 Red Army and 1944 Red Army are totally different.
You are brainwashed. MILITARY casualties are on par between USSR and Germany (with Germany actually losing even more soldiers). Those high numbers of Soviet's casualties you most likely have seen and refer to are sum of military AND CIVILIAN casualties, and the cause of Germany losing significantly less civilians is the fact that Germany was executing genocide of civilian people and USSR was not.
Without Americans, Soviets would not have made it to Berlin. Let’s stop acting like the Russians had it all taken care of. They would’ve had to fight for a lot longer, thus Stalin would’ve probably ordered all of his generals to kill all of his own people, or “cowards” who were experiencing normal battle fatigue. Does anybody wanna give the statistics for how many Soviets were killed at the hands of Soviets?
My favorite part of the earliest COD games was playing realistic missions as the Soviet foot soldiers who were clearly sent into battle with virtually nothing. 2 men to every 1 gun and like 5 rounds of ammo.
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u/YaBoi843 9d ago
The little dinosaurs are the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a much larger fighting force than Nazi Germany, and the Soviet military strategy was to throw men into the blender and overwhelm the Nazis with sheer numbers. Additionally, it was the Soviets who captured Berlin, thus taking Germany out of WW2.