WW II discussion

Just having naval superiority id not enough for D-Day. D-Day required massive preparations. training and equipping troops, stockpiling ammo fuel and other supplies, building transport ships etc etc that simply had not been completed in 1943 let alone 1942. You don't just conjure 1.5m troops and supplies for them out of thin air.

Well in that case why claim to have won the war with Lend Lease, surely if they couldn't deliver D Day in a useful time frame they should have doubled Lend Lease and shipped their best stuff instead of the hand me downs and shit they didn't need or want and called it aid to a friendly country fighting Nazism instead of demanding payments and reparations...

The Germans literally revolutionized mordern warfare with their half-tracked vehicles and dedicated towing equipment.

Well they mechanised it like the other powers did to a much lessor extent because of the cost.

To suggest that the Germans rolled over the Soviet front lines all riding halftracks with towed guns being towed by motor vehicles is just absurd... most of their men walked and most of their artillery was pulled by horses.

I mean you can argue about how big of a problem it was sure, but denying the difference between german capabilities and Soviet ones is insane.

At the start of the war the Soviet vehicle fleet likely outnumbered the German vehicle fleet 10 to one, and sure most were useless T-26 or BT light vehicles, but the production skills and capacity to develop and build new vehicles was there... the delay of two years in a five year war would have been totally catastrophic and impossible to overcome for any other country on the planet, but the Soviets got things moved and back into production at record pace... and not just that, they were producing some of the worlds best equipment.

A 76mm light gun isn't going to do sh%^ in a massed offensive against well-defended entrenched positions.

76mm artillery probably destroyed more Panzer one two and threes than 45mm guns did. and were so useful in combat that the Germans put them into service in their own units and produced their own ammo when captured stores ran out.

76mm guns on the Shuka were popular right up to the end of the war as a direct fire weapon despite the problems with that vehicle in terms of how open it was to the elements.

The german army didn't have to be 100% on wheels because it didn't need to be. The mass of horse-towed artillery and marching troops that you speak of, was what mopped up those massive encirclements, while the 15% mechanized divisions went on to make new ones.

So you are trying to say the German army revolutionised mechanised warfare by being 15% mechanised... impressive.

The problem is that the 152mm guns and above couldn't be moved at any speed.

Had they planted them a few years before?

So if what you are claiming is true the Soviet god of war deserted them and they didn't have any... yet at the start of most major battles they seemed to hit off attacks by firing lots of artillery... normally criticised in western publications as being too early or too late or inaccurate so WTF should they care about losing them in battle for if they are so fucking useless?

Yes the army groups were surrounded but if you actually look at the times when forces made it out before the circle closed up, or were able to break through, it's always tanks and trucks and the artillery gets dumped behind because guess what, a stalinets or a bunch of horses are even slower than marching troops.

The first 6 months they normally didn't make it out.

From then on there were setbacks but the Germans were not overwhelmingly powerful enough to destroy every Soviet forces artillery and surround every Soviet unit every single engagement.

Also you really misunderstand the discussion about the chemicals, early on the USSR was able to leverage stocks that had been built up in years prior. It was only around end 1942- mid 1943 that the difficulty of producing artillery rounds became vital.

But if their artillery is shit and keeps getting captured and is inaccurate when they do use it then what difference would there be in actually running out of ammo?

The western allies don't want to have to fight so of course they will supply the necessary chemicals...

And since lend-lease was quite literally an agreed-upon set of goods, it shows what the Soviet leadership prioritized at different stages of the war.

No it wasn't... it was what was sent, if there was any agreement they would be sending B-17s instead of B-25s.

And, for example when it was no longer necessary, we tried to get the US to give us fancy shit like the superfortress just to reverse-engineer it.

They would never give the Soviets anything that was useful... that is the point.

The Soviets weren't supposed to win, they were supposed to keep the Germans busy in a stalemate while preparations for D Day were worked on... the real plan would have been to meet Soviet forces at Moscow rather than in Germany.

All of these Soviet fails are talked up into the stratosphere but the facts on the ground prove that this is all hot air. If Soviet lack
of half-tracked vehicles was such a show stopper, then the Nazis would have kept rolling along over the bodies of Soviet soldiers.
But they could not even take Moscow like Napoleon.

That is an interesting point... people talk about halftracks they they are some sort of miracle vehicle... in fact they are the opposite... which is why you don't see any around any more.

The idea was to improve the cross country capability and mobility of a wheeled vehicle by putting tracks on it, but in actual fact tracked vehicles are complex and slow and expensive to operate and maintain, but wheeled vehicles have poor mobility... a halftrack is the worst of both because a half track is more expensive than a wheeled vehicle but has limited cross country performance due to the wheels... it is just terrible... the dumbest idea possible, but people think they must be good because the Germans had some.

Can I just repeat what I have been saying lend lease did nothing in the first crucial 6 months of the war when the Soviets needed help and got none.

The Soviets stopped the Germans at the gates of Moscow and then pushed them back.

You can complain that their artillery was rubbish and they couldn't make their own shells after 1942 and that they didn't have as many radios per vehicle as America or Britain or Japan did, but that does not mean Lend Lease won the war on the Eastern Front... by the time it turned up the high water mark of the German forces had already been achieved.

People saying LL shortened the war, should be asking if shortening the war was so damn important why didn't the western allies do more to fight the Germans in Europe?

The same person also told me the Soviets had to use the US M4 because they had no proper tanks. I guess he never heard of the T-34.

Ignorance is everywhere... I have had chats with people who think the I-16 is just a Soviet copy of the Geebee racer... because it looks similar...

And of course the T-34 uses a Christie suspension system so it is obviously therefore a Christie tank.

Well the British bought Christies suspension but America didn't so does Christie even count as being American?

This isn't an absolutist discussion, just because a problem existed, doesn't mean we couldn't have won the war.

At the last celebration of the victory in Europe of WWII in France the Soviets didn't even take part...

The KV-2 didn't have the vertical elevation necessary, if I recall, to be used as field artillery.

It had the frontal armour to be used in a direct fire role... vertical elevation not being a problem there.

The rate at which the forces moved during the first few years of the war in the East anything that could not move would not be of any use by either side and I rather doubt they would keep replacing it if it was so bloody useless and got captured every time.

The T-20 goes in the same argument I just mentioned above, 76mm is pointless in a mass artillery barrage.

The first 6 months of the war the 76mm was an excellent piece for both anti material and also as an anti tank weapon... the only common front line weapons they had would have been 76mm, 122mm, and 152mm, but on the first rinse cycle there would be 100mm and 107mm and all sorts of odd calibres in use as well of course as rocket artillery and mortars too.

And if anybody actually ever bothers to listen to the lectures I reference, the historian even goes over the details of how the 76mm arty was over-represented in early war counter-offensives precisely because it was light enough to be transported around by other mechanized means. The problem was lack of options to transport the big 152mm stuff and above, as I understood it.

Awesome... the most mobile and therefore most useful artillery pieces were the most useless... well, it is hilarious that the 76mm gun is useless when for the first half of the war Soviet medium and heavy tanks had relatively shorter barrel versions of it mounted in their turrets... but this historian says they were pointless useless pieces of crap...

Or maybe he is wrong.

He might want to tell the Germans how stupid they are because they used every 76.2mm gun they could capture on the eastern front and put them into front line service. When they ran out of ammo they even started producing their own rounds... what idiots...

Go check out some of the lectures on tacticmedia on youtube, it's honestly good stuff, and there's more stuff there from really cool historians.

Revisionism is not my thing.

1) As usual, context is never given. Stalin had multiple intelligence reports all of them proving to be wrong. As they say
hind sight is 20/20. But to Stalin none of them were marked with a special "this is the right one" ribbon.

Stalin knew the British were effectively fighting Germany on their own and would move heaven and earth to get more countries on their side against Germany.... Churchill is famously reported to have said we are not going to lose the war when Germany invaded the Soviet Union and that we are going to win when Hitler declared war on the US after Pearl Harbour...

The British were as friendly to the Soviets as they are to Russia now, Stalin had no more reason to trust Churchill as he had to trust Hitler.

Historians are largely responsible for the bottom chart above, why should we trust them now?

Most are not much better than the western media who latch on to things that sound right and they just repeat them till they are accepted as being true.

Most sets of numbers are open to interpretation, which means your existing bias can allow you to push any numbers any way you like.

I'm not a historian, I don't know the truth, but it's an interesting theory that if anybody bothered to look at the evidence presented is quite compelling.

Evidence is used to tell a story. We already know that the Soviets struggled hard during WWII, but using their own numbers to prove they needed outside help is like using the naval evacuation at Dunkirk to show the British Army is useless and cannot fight the German Army and Air Force at all... well they dropped their equipment and ran away didn't they?

But then we learn their finest hour was the Battle of Britain... which was led and organised by a New Zealander, Keith Park... he only had to wait 50 years for a statue to be erected in his honour.

We hear about Stalins attempts to appease Hitler, but Germany was no more of an enemy to the Soviets than Britain or the US was before and after the war, and the UKs attempts to appease Hitler are ignored or blamed squarely on the man involved...

I don't doubt the lack of enough numbers of large power artillery tractors had some influence. But it does not explain most of lost battles I think. You mostly use such large artillery pieces to destroy concentrated forces in sieges or set piece battles. They will always be a problem to move around and setup to fire. I do not think there was any single factor. It was a combination of factors. Lack of air superiority, poor unit coordination with poor radios or communication infrastructure, mostly green troops after huge conscription drive, etc.

It is also a bit rich claiming it is a Soviet problem... the Soviets effectively concentrated on artillery weapons of 152mm and 203mm in terms of land weapons, it was Germany that had a wide range of very exotic weapon types they spend enormous amounts of money on for often not that much return...

Would be interesting to see figures that were actually useful like the percentage of Lend Lease production and material as a fraction of total western potential capacity to show how the west bled to give the Soviets assistance... bled to give them stuff they didn't want any more as new replacements had already arrived of course.

I would say the Lend Lease stuff, while inferior and late got the best bang for buck of all equipment and material produced in the west because it killed more german soldiers that the rest did...

Most of the bombs of the west damaged houses in Germany and killed the women and children and old men living there and the men unfit for military service who were in Germany itself while the military age men fought on the eastern front.

Essentially shows who the Germans and their turncoat allies were actually fighting (exterminating) and where.

A more fascinating consideration would be why with the modern depiction of modern states that didn't exist then... like a separate Ukraine and a separate Belarus, that Russias losses should be so high... if you look at that actual map German forces didn't actually encroach on very much actual Russian territory at all... the Baltic states and Belarus and Ukraine and Crimea were occupied for long periods, but they didn't really get a huge distance into Russia as depicted on this map... they surrounded Leningrad and reached the gates of moscow but got pushed back from there... in fact based on that map they barely occupied 12.7 percent of Russia... but then of course Russians were involved in fighting from the boundaries of Poland to Moscow and back to Berlin... fighting all the way.

I would add that on one thread there were complaints about the Soviets raping German women...

Note, my like to Odins post does not mean I am happy with what he said, it means I am happy he said it and this sort of stuff is not forgotten or more likely brushed under a rug because it would embarrass a new ally and reflect well on the current designated enemy.