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?
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u/Fernheijm 9d ago
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.