Great Patriotic War (USSR in World War II)

The audiobook "Icebreaker" is read by the author Viktor Suvorov himself
https://youtu.be/veSwf7OKXN4 it has a segment on the Land-Lease too.
also see https://youtu.be/vQAdArS7G8I

GarryB wrote:The first is in Russian, the second is banned from Youtube as it might be offensive to some people... the people of the west might get offended if someone says lendlease didn't win WWII on its own.

Will there be a Victory Day Parade on Red Square on May 9 this year?

Prigozhin is a f*cking idiot. Stalin's pre-war 5 year plans were clearly designed to prepare the USSR for a war. The USSR in 1930 was nowhere near being able to fight off the Nazis so any slack in industrialization and military production capacity build up during the 1930s would have meant that Hitler's armies would have won.

The claim that Stalin was caught by surprise is a type of blood libel. The Germans were sending all sorts of fake signals about attacks here and there and the Soviet command was aware of this. The idea that any attack by Germany should have been met head on in a pre-emptive fashion is retarded nonsense that fits the underdeveloped brains of fanboi fiction consumers. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a brilliant delaying tactic that allowed the USSR to increase its war fighting ability by 40%. Stalin was working over time preparing the USSR for war. What is more, he was a competent leader during the war as well unlike the actual revisionist propaganda would have you believe. He enabled brilliant generals like Zhukov to get their posts and did not micromanage their activity. Contrast to Hitler, who was sort of like Zelensky in pushing political decisions on his generals.

Mercouris comes off as an idiot himself by referring to the consensus around the world as if it had gravitas. That consensus was created by Cold War revisionist propaganda. Much like the Holodomor hoax genocide. The yap about Soviet human wave attacks is part of this revisionist propaganda. The games with military deaths are clearly a key aspect as well. You have routine disregard for the deaths of Nazi allied states such as Hungary, Romania, Italy, etc. and a large number of other nazi jihadi volunteers which is well over 2 million. The 3.3 million Soviet POWs who were killed by the Nazis are basically counted as KIA. The German POW death rate in the USSR was under 20% and it can be explained by lack of food which was affecting the whole USSR (worst effect was in 1942).

I am not apologizing for Soviet excesses during the war such as the punitive battalions. I blame such features on the Trotskyist elements in the Soviet regime which were also key for the gulag system. Clearly, the whole process in development leading up to the war was not optimal. But it is not clear that any softer alternative would have 1) prevented the war and 2) had the USSR (or whatever the post-Russian Empire would have been called) be sufficiently developed to fight a war. War on Russia by the west is an ongoing 1000 year feature. So any claim that U-rope would not have united for another crusade is total BS. We see how U-rope has united again today for its anti-Russian cultural fetish.

The Soviets knew a war was basically inevitable and had been massively increasing the size of the Red Army prior to 1941. Stalin himself gave a remarkably prescient speech to military cadets where he basically predicted the year the war would start. What you could argue was that after the Germans lost the chance of starting the war in the spring, the Soviets probably expected them to postpone the war at least until 1942. Even when they had intel on the Germans invading on the exact date provided by Richard Sorge for example.

A lot of claims you hear, like that Stalin had a meltdown when the invasion started, are BS. He did several all nighters with constant meetings when the conflict started, and then he had to sleep, figure that.

You also hear a lot of claims, like that the purge of Tukhachevsky rid the Red Army of a brilliant officer, or whatever. When Tukhachevsky  was responsible for the ill fated offensives in the Russo-Polish war and he wasted lots of capital in trying to convert the whole army to use recoilless guns to replace all existing artillery. Which proved to be a major mistake.

I read on a website about World War II that US General George Patton stated in early 1945 he had the means to capture both Berlin and Prague before the Soviets did but his permission to do this was denied because Roosevelt wanted Stalin to take those cities. Patton was anti communist and didn't believe all the pro Soviet propaganda that emanated from the White House and the OSS.  

I want to know was it possible for the US to defeat the USSR and capture both Germany and Czechoslavkia in 1945? Was the US strong enough or do Americans underestimate the USSR military power? Some Americans reason that the US had the nuclear bomb and could have prevented the Russians from taking over Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe.  




https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=9958

andalusia wrote:I want to know was it possible for the US to defeat the USSR and capture both Germany and Czechoslavkia in 1945? Was the US strong enough or do Americans underestimate the USSR military power? Some Americans reason that the US had the nuclear bomb and could have prevented the Russians from taking over Germany and the rest of Eastern Europe.

The Soviet Union already had their nuclear bomb program operating by then. In case of direct conflict with the US you could bet that the Soviets would have accelerated that program even more than what happened in our timeline.

Also, the US initially had quite limited production and availability of nuclear bombs. They were made in single units. Their mass production only happened much later than 1945. And nuclear bombs had to be delivered by bombers which could be intercepted.

With German forces besieging Moscow, Stalin orders the November 7th (Revolution Day) military parade to be staged in Red Square, wanting to strengthen the resolve of the Red Army and boost the morale of the citizens.
The General Secretary of the Communist Party Joseph Stalin delivered a speech in Red Square to the soldiers, who would go into battle immediately after the parade.
Soviet troops marched in front of the Kremlin and then marched straight to the front.

Patton is overhyped and just another yanqui hater blowhard who claimed that the USSR could be taken out by the US and its western allies in 1945.
The only thing that this could possibly involve is nuclear bombs. Here Patton proved that he was an idiot since the US did not have enough of them
to win a war on the USSR in the 1940s and this was progressively true in the 1950s and later as the USSR developed its own nuclear devices and
their delivery vehicles.

The diseased thinking of Patton is endemic to the US to this day. The expectations over the proxy war in Ukraine are beyond retarded. The
US and British deciders (and their EU bootlicks) willfully ignore objective information and wallow in fantasy masturbation. That they think this
approach is viable points to them having it way too easy with their domination of 3rd world countries.

Funny how the propaganda never changes.  IIRC, the last time Russia did meat waves was some time in 1915.  Next we are going to hear Enemy at the Gates horse hock where Russia only gains ground by having 1 AK for every three soldiers.  I mean I understand the need for copium but come on come up with something original such as Russian Orthodox Church is satanically reanimating Soviet
era dead and sending them from the grave to the front.  It would be fun sci fi, an homage to Tolkein, and they could use their claims of Russia using WWII and earlier weaponry as "evidence." I mean it would be complete BS but at least it would be entertaining.

Absolutely incorrect, there were very few meat waves in WWII.  That was actually German propaganda by the likes of Franz Halder to explain how the master race lost to a bunch of slavs.  The history doesn't match.  Jonathan House and David Glantz have both written vast amounts of scholarship debunking the human wave attack myths.  You can find them both easily enough on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zinPbUZUHDE&t=198s

https://www.thecollector.com/soviets-in-world-war-ii-myths-and-misconceptions/

that's just a start. Yeah, again the human wave myth is the product of serious excuse making by the Wehrmacht generals who explained away their defeats, not to superior Soviet generalship, superior Soviet equipment, and superior Soviet strategy, but dagnabit Scholz and Van der Leyen's ancestors lost because there were just too many daggum Roooskies and they just overwhelmed the Nazis with numbers even though it was not until 1944 and 1945 that the Soviets outnumbered the Germans in numbers.

Westerners are quite stupid in their imagination of Russian soldiers. They are changing. Sometimes they are tossed ants and sometimes they are supermen like Ivan Drago in Rocky. The only thing I can answer to the Americans is that they escaped from Afghanistan from warriors who rode horses and bicycles.

Hitler abandoned the theory of inferior russians in his final days of the war. In fact, he said that the German defeat was deserved and recognized Stalin's merits in clearing the army of saboteurs (not like the one who was betrayed by the Prussian aristocracy).
In Hitler's logic based on racial war and the survival of the fittest, the Russians demonstrated superiority over the Germans and were going to conquer the world and subjugate the weak liberal democracies
And he wasn't wrong. You just have to compare the state of decomposition and mediocrity of modern Germany with the current sovereign Russia.
I always say that Germans should get closer to Russians because they can find inspiration in the Russian spirit and tradition and rebuild their own country. You should be allied peoples.
But well the Germans are being replaced. In a few decades they will no longer exist. They will be a historical relic, a museum where the Russians will travel as the Romans did with the Spartans to learn from their mistakes.

Historical revision is the saddest of copes.

So stop doing it, the Finns and Germans claimed that the Russians made meat waves and just like the Ukrainians, the Finns and Germans never provided any reliable evidence.

Absolutely wrong there are many many examples of red army meat waves tactics in the fin war and WW2 this is documented from both sides. Historical revision is the saddest of copes.

While it is true some generals of the Germans used this has an excuse when it wasn't always the case.

Also it's technically TRUE that the Germans out numbered the Russians at the start but the Russians also had a much larger pool of men to get new bodies from, the Germans where much more heavily limited in this aspect, the Germans could not afford the losses the Soviets could, double so when they had to worry about two fronts.

This is why they wanted to win the war as fast has possible and historically this shows once etue Soviets got in gear their larger manpower pool and production capabilities simply overwhelmed Germany.

German had better technology then the Russians and this is common knowledge, as stated by the Soviets themselves.

"Quantity has a quality all it's own" there is a reason this is. A well know phrase, doesn't matter if your foe can build a better tank then you when you can just build a decent one and build like 3 for that 1

You sure drank the kool aid. The Germans plus all their allies (Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland, Slovakia, Croatia, etc) outnumbered the Soviet Union in terms of troops in the Eastern Theater during most of the war. To show how they were "outnumbered" the Nazis often just count the German troops vs Soviet troops as if the others didn't exist and weren't there. And even then sometimes they can't make the numbers match up to their claim. This is just plain bullshit on their part.

Even if you go to Wikipedia, which is a pretty biased source, you will find in the Operation Barbarossa page that the German side had 3.8 million personnel, and the Soviet Union 2.6-2.9 million.

The Germans plus their satellites massively outnumbered the Soviet Union. They could count on pretty much the entire continental Western and Central Europe to provide them with manpower to run their industrial machine. This meant they could put much more of their population directly fighting in the armed forces. They had military allies from Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, and Finland. They also had mercenaries from outside their supposed areas of control. For example Spanish, Belgian mercenaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Division
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walloon_Legion

As for Finland the talk about meat wave tactics is pretty much bullshit as well. What happened is that Soviet troops had to follow fairly narrow roads across the ice, and this made them and their logistics vulnerable to be ambushed. The Soviets still won.

The claim about Soviet human waves and superior numbers by the Germans in WW2 just shows how inferior the German command and logistics were actually. The Soviets typically did probing attacks all over the front, and when they found a weakness they concentrated troops and achieved local superiority, despite never having actual superiority in troops. i.e. they just used the troops they did have better. You are seeing the same thing happen in Ukraine today where the Russians can achieve local superiority against a more numerous opponent. And you still don't get it.

As for the Germans having "better technology" it depends on what you are talking about. It certainly wasn't true in terms of tanks. The Soviets had the T-34 and KV-1 when the Germans had the Panzer III, and Panzer IV. And when the Germans got the Panther and Tiger II the Soviets had the T-34-85 and IS-2. The Soviets could have put the T-34M, T-43, T-44 in production to replace the T-34 but they didn't do it to keep the production rate up. The Germans had better fighters than the Soviets for the initial part of the war, and they had worse ground attack aircraft for basically all the war. The Soviets weren't behind on artillery either. In fact the Germans ended up having to make clones of several pieces of Soviet artillery. And that's just with conventional artillery, since the Soviets also were ahead in rocket artillery. In terms of personal weapons the Soviets had better submachine guns, and the Germans had better machine guns.

The main technological advantage the Germans had was better radios and fighters (for the initial part of the war) really.

Mistaken. The Germans had better technology but not to the point of giving them an advantage on the battlefield. Even German military tactics had already been developed by Russian militaries. The Germans underestimated the Russians. Just look at the T34.
Hitler ignored the intelligence reports. I thought the Russians had much less than they did. The poor performance of the Russians in Finland gave a misleading impression of Soviet power.
And to make matters worse, the idiot declares war on the United States on two fronts.
If Hitler had been so anti-Russian and paranoid, today Germany would dominate the world because it would not have had a conflict with Stalin, and if they went to war it would be in a safer scenario for the Germans. He could have even left the Soviets alone and stayed with the Wes, but hey, he was a good domestic politician but very stupid in geopolitics.