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I have to agree that USSR was not an opponent that could be beaten by the Germans as things actually stood. There are possibly too many variables that would have to change to even make it viable. Logistics, command, resources, other fronts are just a few obstacles that would need serious changes to give the Germans a chance. I believe that they were doomed the second Hitler decided to attack. The black hole that is USSR simply absorbed all that manpower and equipment.
Now if some of those things were different, I believe they could have defeated the USSR. IF they had a more competent European ally (I'm looking at you Italy) then they may have been able to free resources that were wasted in the Balkans and Africa. They also could have started the attack in the spring giving them as much as 8 more weeks of time to reach their objectives. If Hitler had trusted his generals in the field a bit more and had a bit less ego then many troops would not have been lost to stupid no retreat orders. Better logistical support and concentration of engineers to rebuild infrastructure.
The list is long but sometimes it seems that it would only take a few changes to improve their chances. All except Hitler that is. He was easily one of their biggest obstacles to victory.
Its early so this seems to me like a jumbled mess. So in short, I think in a perfect Nazi world they could have won a limited victory (capitulation but with limited terms of occupation/annexation) but in reality there was no chance of winning.
Now if some of those things were different, I believe they could have defeated the USSR. IF they had a more competent European ally (I'm looking at you Italy) then they may have been able to free resources that were wasted in the Balkans and Africa. They also could have started the attack in the spring giving them as much as 8 more weeks of time to reach their objectives. If Hitler had trusted his generals in the field a bit more and had a bit less ego then many troops would not have been lost to stupid no retreat orders. Better logistical support and concentration of engineers to rebuild infrastructure.
The list is long but sometimes it seems that it would only take a few changes to improve their chances. All except Hitler that is. He was easily one of their biggest obstacles to victory.
Its early so this seems to me like a jumbled mess. So in short, I think in a perfect Nazi world they could have won a limited victory (capitulation but with limited terms of occupation/annexation) but in reality there was no chance of winning.
The Russian reluctance to admit how much their other allies helped them rebuild their army, feed their people and improve their logistics after Barbarossa is really coloring this discussion. The Russians claim to have carried the Eastern Front on their own through sheer red bravado, and that claim is reinforced by German generals trying to excuse their failures, so it's become the popular narrative.
Certainly there were no great numbers of foreign nationals manning the Soviet front lines. But those lines would have collapsed into starvation and anarchy without a lot of Allied assistance, in particular American assistance, in upgrading Soviet communications, industrial and logistical infrastructure.
Would Russian victory be "inevitable" if the USA hadn't basically gifted them 70,000 tons of steel and half the food the Soviets used on the front lines? If Roosevelt had been less generous and the soldiers were starving and freezing to death in the front trenches as they did in WWI, is Russian morale still unbreakable? Because it seems to me that history shows that Russia is fully capable of surrendering if checked by a sufficiently powerful force. And let's all be honest here. The Russian government is not as fragile as it was under the Czar, but it's still a one man state that rises and falls on Stalin's mental state. Confidence in the government of a man like Stalin was not guaranteed if his paranoia and fear became his defining characteristics rather than his ruthless determination to drive out the invader.
Stalin's excesses were tolerated because he brought them victory. If Stalin kept bringing Russia humiliation and defeat for even a few more months, especially in the wake of a potential fall of Moscow and Leningrad, he would have been out the door and Russian leadership would have become fractured. When that happened, if the army was in a weak enough state, it's theoretically possible that a Germany that was still unbeaten on the field could have forced the Soviets into a treaty that subordinated them and forced them to give massive concessions of land, raw material and reduction in military forces and put them out of the war.
Certainly there were no great numbers of foreign nationals manning the Soviet front lines. But those lines would have collapsed into starvation and anarchy without a lot of Allied assistance, in particular American assistance, in upgrading Soviet communications, industrial and logistical infrastructure.
Would Russian victory be "inevitable" if the USA hadn't basically gifted them 70,000 tons of steel and half the food the Soviets used on the front lines? If Roosevelt had been less generous and the soldiers were starving and freezing to death in the front trenches as they did in WWI, is Russian morale still unbreakable? Because it seems to me that history shows that Russia is fully capable of surrendering if checked by a sufficiently powerful force. And let's all be honest here. The Russian government is not as fragile as it was under the Czar, but it's still a one man state that rises and falls on Stalin's mental state. Confidence in the government of a man like Stalin was not guaranteed if his paranoia and fear became his defining characteristics rather than his ruthless determination to drive out the invader.
Stalin's excesses were tolerated because he brought them victory. If Stalin kept bringing Russia humiliation and defeat for even a few more months, especially in the wake of a potential fall of Moscow and Leningrad, he would have been out the door and Russian leadership would have become fractured. When that happened, if the army was in a weak enough state, it's theoretically possible that a Germany that was still unbeaten on the field could have forced the Soviets into a treaty that subordinated them and forced them to give massive concessions of land, raw material and reduction in military forces and put them out of the war.
at least there seems to be a pleasant lack of, or at least not ridiculous amounts of wehraboos yet
It is one of the greatest misconceptions about USSR. Soviet Union under Stalin wasn't 'one man state' and there are plenty of people around who would succeed him. As it was demonstrated actually after his death. Transition of power was 'clean'.
.....wait, I think the horse may have twitched a bit. Better flog it some more until it's reduced to a fine puree.
Barring either a severe political crisis in the Soviet Union leading to a total collapse of will to resist, or the removal of Hitler in Germany, I can't see any other way that this could have ended aside from an occupied or annexed Germany.
Barring either a severe political crisis in the Soviet Union leading to a total collapse of will to resist, or the removal of Hitler in Germany, I can't see any other way that this could have ended aside from an occupied or annexed Germany.
ok
if the soviet winter offensives would have failed spectacularly for whatever reason (germans hold earlier/ soviet incompetence/ luck/ black magic) then it becomes quite likely the soviets give up in the sommer of 42 when the germans advance again.
The basic issue with any situation where the Germans win Barbarossa is that they need a bunch more things to go right for them, where as for it to fail only a very small number of things need to occur. If even one of the Soviet mechanised corps had been well deployed, properly fueled and supplied and well led then it is probable that at least one panzer spear head would be badly mauled and held up for a significant period of time. If Stalin had given the mobilisation orders even just a few days earlier then the crushing of the first echelon of Soviet forces would have taken considerably longer and the crippling C&C isses that plagued the Red Army for the first year or so of the war would have been significantly lessoned. If Stalin had been slightly less paranoid or less impatient or more militarlily competent then the Soviet forces would have been considerably stronger than they were by the end of 1941...
The list of ways the Germans could have lost faster and harder is massive and requires very little from alien space bat territory to make most of the changes, while the Germans need multiple, increasingly unlikely, thnigs to go their favour to even improve on their performance, let alone actually win.
That being said, a more professional attitude to logistics and logistical planning would have helped a great deal in late 1941.
The list of ways the Germans could have lost faster and harder is massive and requires very little from alien space bat territory to make most of the changes, while the Germans need multiple, increasingly unlikely, thnigs to go their favour to even improve on their performance, let alone actually win.
That being said, a more professional attitude to logistics and logistical planning would have helped a great deal in late 1941.
Yes but the whole German planning revolved around planning the first few weeks of the campaign and we are going to see how it develops.
It worked in France (but note the limits, they did not know what shall be the next step... they had no warplan against Britain). And it worked against the Soviets till the point it was planned. Typhoon was already improvisation and it failed to no small parts because of that.
(But more careful planning could not help the German military, knowing the British industrial production figures and/or the Soviet population figures would just show it is impossible)
Well, I must note that Barbarossa as a plan went off the rails in the first week of the campaign. So everything that Germans did beyond 'broad strokes' was an improvisation.
The "plan" was to create large cauldron battle where the armies of the soviet western military districts are annihilated... that was achieved succesfully. Anything beyond that was not really thoughtout anyway (like minor details how the f*ck will the occupied territories provide the strategic resources for the German economy which was the whole point of the campaign).
The strategic goals of Barbarossa were to destroy the Red Army and hence the Soviet state in a timeframe between 6 weeks and three months. In this, the Germans failed completely and utterly. The encirclement battles (as Hitler himself had to remember his generals once) were not an end in themselves, but a means to accomplish that goal. And as a means, they failed to deliver the strategic goal; even if they were very fine examples of the German Army's mastery in modern maneuver warfare, neither the Red Army was destroyed nor the Soviet state collapsed.
By August 1941, it was clear to Hitler, the OKH and the leading German generals in the Ostfront that the strategical goal could not be attained, and thus that Barbarossa was a strategic failure. The Kiev encirclement of September 1941 revived briefly the hopes of a Soviet collapse, but when this did not happen either, Typhoon was a late desperate attempt to bring it forth, and it failed again.
And what was worse, Germany lost in Barbarossa more than 800,000 experienced soldiers and officers (disproportionately concentrated in the motorized and armoured divisions who bore the brunt of the fight, seriously eroding the German qualitative advantadge) and burned away a large part of its strategical (and dwindling) reserves of fuel, together with large amounts of motor vehcles, especially trucks. Never again would the Wehrmacht be able to conduct an offensive on such a scale, along such a long front with so many men at once. Barbarossa was another "all or nothing" gamble, and it failed.
Nothing that wouldn't be the total achievement of the initial strategical goal of the campaign was a disaster for Germany, because it simply lacked the resources (material and human) to pull out a slugging fight with a heavyweight like the USSR. The great encirclements were, at the end, just glitter, brilliance and fireworks, but little else.
The Soviets in 1946 were an exhausted nation. Not as exhausted as Germany but exhausted to the point of famine. Germany might have been unable to compete with the pre-war Soviet Union but after half their population was occupied by an invading army, the situation was much closer to parity. And Germany had allies. The Soviets had allies as well but none of them were on the continent for the first year.
Soviet famine of 1946-47 was caused by sending supplies to Eastern Europe. Comrade Stalin was very much ready to sacrifice some more people for political gains.
No, but they also probably would not have it without sending food to Europe.
Okay so the exhaustion took place it's just a question of how much.
Something similar to this was said by one of the german high-ranking commanders, but I dont remember who exactly.
Despite the enormous material and human losses suffered, the USSR was not an exhausted country in 1945. Badly mauled, yes. Exhausted, no.
After the emergency mobilization of 1941, the USSR only mobilized the classes of men who came of age at each successive year. In 1942, and that was enough to cover the army's losses, together with the "booty troops" recruited by the advancing Soviet Fronts in the areas recovered from the Germans. The USSR never had to resort to such desperate measures as recruiting militias of teenagers and grandpas like Germany was forced to do with its Volkssturm.
The Red Army indicted more than 2 million recruits in 1943 and 3 million in 1944 and 1945, more than enough to replace losses. It lost 2.3 million killed and missing in 1943, 1,760,000 in 1944, and 800,000 in 1945, far fewer than the number of new recruits. Soviet military strength on the eastern front remained stable above 6 million men from 1942 on.
The reason for this surprising fact was simple: the USSR had the youngest population in Europe. Germany had a population of 80 million people (Greater German Reich, including Austria and the Sudetenland), of which about a third was under 20 years of age. While the Soviet Union had a total population of 194 million (without counting the 22 million living in the areas annexed after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), of which a half were younger than twenty.
If we add to these numbers all the men of military age up to 50 years old, the Soviet mapower pool in 1941 amounted to more than 50 million men. The best informed account of Soviet military losses during the war was made by G.F. Krivosheev in 1993 when the Soviet war archives were opened. he total number of losses for the Red Army (including the VVS) was of 29,629,205 efectives. Of them, 11,285,057 were "irrevocable losses" (in Soviet jargon), that is, killed, captured, missing or permanently disabled (of men wounded in battle, about 30% became irrevocable losses, and the rest rejoined the army, most of them in less than three months, a percentage very similar to the one in the German army).
Soviet partisans and militia are rather famous and they certainly weren't all prime military age men.
So let's start with 50 million men. Then let's suppose the Germans are more successful in their battles and retain more territory so 25 million of them are unavailable for recruiting because of enemy held territory. Now we have a pool of 25 million men. 11 million KIA or severely injured or POW. So now it's a pool of 14 million men. 6 million of them need to be on the frontlines. So now that's 8 million men. 3 million of them need to be part of the non-frontline military apparatus. Then you have another million men serving in the far east. Yes these are mostly green conscripts being trained in the far east before being transferred against Germany but they are still military age men and that is the population we are considering. So how much is left as the manpower pool keeping the economy going? 4 million men running the railroads, in the mines and oil wells and doing the heaviest lifting in the factories. And this is very, very threadbare numbers.
I believe this theoretical tally exercise shows that had the Soviets not reclaimed territory with their offensives in 1943 and 1944, they would not have been able to maintain their frontline strength in 1945 or perhaps 1946. The Soviets did not have infinite manpower with which to overwhelm the Germans, they had to successfully outfight the German army on equal or perhaps even disadvantaged terms in order to win the war.