A Meditation on Twentieth-Century Political-Military History

The Casualties of the Red Army during World War II. Whenever I look at these numbers, and try to imagine what they mean, I wander around in a daze for an hour or so.

What do they mean? The best short thing I have seen is the opening scene of the movie "Enemy at the Gates." It shows the Russians trying to reinforce Chiukov's 62nd Army clinging to the west bank of the Volga River at Stalingrad in 1942.

We Americans and Europeans (and others) have not even kept up on the interest due on our debt to the survivors and descendants of the soldiers of the Red Army and the workers of Magnitogorsk for what they did and suffered during World War II.

Red Army: Battle Strength and Casualties During WWII

	Quarter	Strength at the Front	Killed and Missing	Wounded and Sick
	1941Q3	3,334,000	2,067,801	676,964
	1941Q4	2,818,500	926,002	637,327
	1942Q1	4,186,000	619,167	1,172,274
	1942Q2	5,060,300	776,578	702,150
	1942Q3	5,664,600	1,141,991	1,276,810
	1942Q4	6,343,600	455,800	936,031
	1943Q1	5,892,800	656,403	1,421,140
	1943Q2	6,459,800	125,172	471,724
	1943Q3	6,816,800	694,465	2,053,492
	1943Q4	6,387,200	501,087	1,560,164
	1944Q1	6,268,600	470,392	1,565,431
	1944Q2	6,447,000	251,745	956,828
	1944Q3	6,714,300	430,432	1,541,965
	1944Q4	6,770,100	259,766	1,026,645
	1945Q1	6,461,100	468,407	1,582,517
	1945Q2	6,135,300	163,226	609,231
	TOTAL		10,008,434	18,190,693

---

Source: David Glantz and Jonathan House (1995), When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence, KS: Kansas University Press: 0700608990).

IIRC, the United States lost about 300,000 killed in the European Theater of Operations during World War II.

Comments

[Barkley Rosser]

That very few Americans are aware of these numbers, or anything approaching them, seriously distorts our relations with all of the former Soviet Union. Few can understand what I saw with my daughter a few years ago in Moscow, an old man deeply bowing before the bust of Stalin's grave behind Lenin's tomb in Red Square. (That Stalin brought much of this on by his deep mismanagment, purges, etc. is ignored or forgotten by those folks.)

[Sam Taylor]

Brad-

I recall doing some research a few years ago on historical human populations and finding that one of the good summaries was done by Brad DeLong. You continue to reassure me that there is hope for some of the terribly bright people who become involved in the morass of economic theory.

These are another set of numbers that provide a perspective we so often lack and tell their own story... which I am sure will inspire many interpretations.

Thanks.

Sam

[dearieme]

If only all Stalin had been guilty of was "deep mismanagment" and "purges". If only fighting the Germans was all the Red Army had done.

[P. Gregory Neilan]

Brad,
The Red Army did suffer terrible losses when Hitler decided the clock had run on the Ribbentrop/Molotov Agrt. (non-aggression). But two things need to be borne in mind.

First, Stalin purged (and shot) most of the competent senior officers of the Red Army in the years preceding the war.

Second, Stalin, like Hitler, insisted on directing the battle from his headquarters. Stalin wasn't as lucky. If you look at some of the operational history of Barbarossa (the German invasion), you'll find that Stalin ordered entire armies to stand their ground and fight rather than pull back to a more advantageous position. As a result, the blitzkrieg advances of the Germans left these men -- entire armies -- cut off and surrounded by Germans. We're not talking small numbers of Russian soldiers, by the way. Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were killed or captured this way, and being captured for most of them was worse than being killed on the battlefield.

I also recommend Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad, which was written after the fall of the Soviet Union when many Red Army documents became available for the first time.

So, yes, the Red Army did suffer. But Stalin himself bears part of the responsibility.

Regards,
PGN

[RKKA]

One wonders how the un-Purged, non-led-by-Stalin Western Allied armies managed to lose ~2,000,000 troops killed or taken prisoner in 6 weeks the year before.

[Brad DeLong]

That Stalin was a paranoid and genocidal madman does not affect the debt we owe to the soldiers of the Red Army and the workers of Magnitogorsk...

[don majors]

As a young platoon leader based in the Fulda Gap after the Occupation of Germany (1956), I was amazed that virtually all Germans I encountered who had been in WWII said they served on the Russian Front. I wondered about that. When I came home and worked with immigrant Austrians, Hungarians, and Germans they all seemed to have served on the Russian Front as well. Then when I read about remarks Stalin made in Yalta regarding a Second Front it occured to me that the Axis powers were in retreat by D-Day June 6, 1944. And while many of our forces died thereafter, the scale of the losses on the Russian Front were unbelievable. I think the Russians resent not being recognized by the West for their efforts in the defeat of the Axis.

Virtually all Russian and Slav prisoners perished in captivity because of the Sub-human(Untermensch)race propaganda as compared to their Axis Super Race.

Another fact forgotten by Americans were the Axis Powers allied with Germany: Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Rumania, Croatia, Finland, and a few other countries.

Back in 1956 I couldn't imagine the necessity of the "Cold War". Trips into Berlin and Poland during that time convinced me that the Eastern Bloc was in ruins and not wanting war -- most young soldiers and students as well as ordinary citizens and "Displaced Persons" would not have answered an East Bloc call to arms. Our troops were in Europe too long! Maybe that same syndrome affected our geopolitical thinking in the aftermath(Viet Nam, Lebanon, Balkans, Iraq etc.)

[Movie Guy]

You might thank Hitler as well for concentrating so much effort on the Russian Front.

BTW, I would put the overall losses of the Russians, including civilians, higher than your figures. Numbers along the lines of 21-23 million would be a more appropriate figure for total losses. Or higher.

[nate]

sad

[Derelict]

It is no excuse for the West not to recognize the sacrifice the Russians made through WWII. However...

When we look at the hollow shell that was left of the office corps after the purges, we can see that Stalin left his armies leaderless.

When we look at the tactics employed by the Russian generals throughout the war, we can see that more than half of the casualties were completely needless. For example, the tactic used even toward end of the war of sending a couple of platoons of men armed only with rifles and grenades against a dug-in tank with infantry support. That is nothing short of criminal, and certainly a profligate waste of troops.

When we look at the practice of rounding up stragglers, men who had simply become separated from their companies during a battle, and men who had committed some infraction and sending them forward as Straf units--basically, sending them out to detonate the mines before the real troops attacked--we can see again simple (and criminal) wastefulness with men's lives.

Yes, the Russians made huge sacrifices during the war. It is right and proper to acknowledge that. However, it is also proper to acknowledge that much, or perhaps even most of that sacrifice was unnecessary. (BTW, do your number account for the estimated 2 million Russians who were sent to the gulags after the war for the simple offense of having been captured by the Germans during the war?)

[neutrino]

Victory in the east was despite Stalin, but he certainly exploited it. If anyone doubts the incredible heroism shown in the East by the Red Army, there is story of the Sapper in the Battle of Kursk. He was so dedicated to the task of blowing a railroad bridge to hamper the Germans that he flung himself and the explosives onto a rail bridge. (There was not enough time to set everything
as the Germans were nearly on to him. He survived but was blinded for days and only by luck and pluck managed to evade capture by the Germans.

[Stuart Levine]

The 300,000 US casualties is for both theaters of the war.

[Max]

My deceased grandfather was on the "west"front fighting along the soviets,and I vividly recall his stories after so many years. He was a Romanian officer, and Romania fought along the Soviets after August 23,1944. The Russians forced Tisza with Romanians infantery along. On high ground, the Hungarians (still with Horty or his succesor) and the Germans. On low ground the Russians and Romanians. The high ground was fortified. Imagine how many Russians and Romanians poor infantry man took the fire and get killed... "Enemy at the Gates" is a good restatement of what my grandfather recall. The russians get drunk in my grandfather stories, before the fight and had not choice but to take the fire or get executed,on the back, by the criminal soviet commisars. Soljenitsine has good stories about the war, too, he got arrested after 3 years of first line(I think that the fact he was in artilery saved his life; artilery was usually a couple of miles beyond the line. You do not have such luck if you are infantryman).
Another deceased oncle of mine remebered the Eastern Front(Romania fought against Russia, too). His most vivid story was about a defense line on the Don river battle (of 425,000 Romanian soldiers in the battle 125,000 were lost, the majority as prisoners)when the Romanian and Germans kept throwing bullets at the advancing soviet infantry, and the Russians kept comming...The general impression about the soviet troups-at least in Romania,but also in other "liberated" countries-was that of savage hords,loothing and killing at will, respecting only a bare order,imposed on them by ruthless commisars. This is not to say that the ordinary Russian infantryman was not heroic or did not sacrifice enormously for its country,no... Is just to say their sacrifices and the sufference of civil population in "liberated" country was made worse and brought to a climax by the Soviet criminal regime, by Stalin and the criminals who ruled the Soviet Union at the time.

[Jason Briggeman]

My economics training and my knowledge of history -- to the extent that either is valid -- suggest to me that the cause of the casualty differential is that the Russian leadership (in both the military and political/economic spheres), for a long time previous to and during the war, placed a lower value on human life relative to capital than did the Americans.

I have to side with the commenters who regard this as a sad, terrible tragedy primarily brought on by the totalitarian nature of the Soviet and Nazi states. I'd say that part of what we owe these victims is a good fight against any future regimes of that sort.

[Bruce Webb]

And yet you get those nut-jobs who suggest we should have just abrogated Yalta and wheeled around and taken the Soviets out. Which pretty much melded into the nut jobs that insisted that all would be saved in China if we just "unleashed Chaing Kai-Shek". Which well and truly melded into the nuts that cooked up "hearts and minds" in Vietnam and "cakewalk" in Iraq.

Some people have the recurrring fantasy that the recipe for victory in every circumstance whatsover is "take the US Army, add two cups of water, and stir" without any understanding of what happens to the military and its individual members when it is diced, sliced and parbroiled.

[Gary]

While I agree with Mr. Briggeman's analysis of the life/capital calculations made by the Russian and American "sides" of the Alliance, I would point out that the Americans placed more value on *their soldiers'* lives. They had no problem dropping tons and tons of highly-explosive capital on their opponents' cities.

I'm sure Mr. Briggeman is well aware of this, and I in no way mean to contradict his point (the paragraph above doesn't). And while I'm as much as an apologist for the Allies as you can find, I just wanted to point out that little additional factor.

[Max]

Bruce, the general impression in Eastern Europe was(not at the moment of the Victory,of course) that the U.S. sold out these countries, without being necessary forced to do so. Another impression was that, despite its sheer numbers of soldiers, the Soviet Union could not amass enough tanks and materials to make the big advancements in the western front,without the generosity of American help( I do not have the numbers)? And another impression is that the Americans(and Britons,to a far lesser extend) won the war and lost the subsequent 50 years of peace. For this matter FDR is not seen as a hero in EE,even if his sickness at the time could not make him a good negociator,this without speaking that he faced Stalin at the "round" table.

[Ralph]

Eisenhower was aware that if he rushed into Eastern Europe this would ignite a war with the Soviets and he sanely wanted to avoid such a disaster no matter what the Eastern Europeans many of whom supported Hitler thought of his decision.

[P.M.Lawrence]

I have somewhere heard a remark attributed to Stalin. It said that the British provided time, the Americans wealth, and the Russians blood.

Of course, it was not "wasteful" to use those troops that way, from Stalin's point of view. He had very different values.

[JK]

The important things have been said, but to emphasise the key points:

1. Brad is correct that in terms of human suffering, the Second World War was about the Eastern front.

2. Stalin and the Stalinist social formation was responsible for much of this suffering. (Incidentally I hold Stalin more personally responsible for Stalinism than Hitler for Fascism, but in both cases it is obviously ridiculous to blame only single individuals.) The deportations that followed the war, for which Stalinism alone was responsible, should not be forgotten.

3. The war on the Eastern front had a peculiar visciousness due to racial ideology on the Nazi side. The holocaust was the clearest consequence, but the war on the Eastern front took on a genocidal character through out. This is reflected in the suffering of both soldiers and civilians.

[wkwillis]

When we delayed the second front in Europe to bleed the Russians, we underestimated their ability to recuperate from the Germans. We delayed invading France an extra year and lost Eastern Europe to Russian occupation as a consequence.
In the long run that may have been a good thing.

[RKKA]

Again, the un-Purged, non-led-by-Stalin Western Allies managed to produce a similar military disaster in 1940, whose impact was mitigated mainly by the brief duration of the ground fighting in the West, and the non-genocidal nature of Hitler's intentions concerning western non-Jewish populations.

[Simon]

I think RKKA's point is a good one, which I hadn't thought of. I think the parrallel between what happened to the French and other armies in 1940 and what happened to the Soviet army in 1941 is obscured by the fact that where both had millions captured, the Nazi treatment of prisoners in the east caused far more fatalities.

Re eastern Europe, while most of those countries had been German client states, my impression is that they didn't see themselves as having much choice - ie better a German client state than forcibly occupied by Germany (in the case of eg Romania), or by the USSR (in the case of Finland). Kudos to the few countries like Greece & Serbian Yugoslavia which refused to join the Nazis and suffered the consequences, though. They tied up a lot of German troops on anti-partisan duty and helped us win the war.

[liberal]

The correct way to measure "in what proportion did the Western Allies (vs the Soviets) contribute to the fall of Nazi Germany" is to count *German* military deaths and casualties.

I did a rough calculation once, based on some internet searches. I came up with "5/6 of the victory was due to the Soviets".

Not as lopsided as the figures of Western and Soviet casualties would indicate, but still lopsided.

[liberal]

Max wrote, "the general impression in Eastern Europe was(not at the moment of the Victory,of course) that the U.S. sold out these countries, without being necessary forced to do so."

An "impression" is not an argument.

[liberal]

JK wrote, "The holocaust was the clearest consequence, but the war on the Eastern front took on a genocidal character through out."

Right. IIRC the Nazis killed 3 million Jews in Poland, but also upwards of 3 million non-Jews.

Soviets killed on the order of 10^5 Poles. (Not implying that overall Soviets/Stalin are more "moral"; just citing the numbers for this particular example.)

[Fifi]

Brad,

Correction needed . As Stuart Levine noted, the 300,000 figure is the total US casualties for the whole of WW2 on both theaters of the war, Europe and Pacific, nearly all of them, military.

[ilsm]

The antipathy between the Western Allies toward Russia is ancient. Napolean took on the Tsar and caused the Prussians to uniquely ally themsleves eastward. Prior to that they and the Poles were mortal enemies of the Tsar.

The French and British sided with the Turks against the Tsar in the famous although pointless Crimean War in 1858. See the recent issues where the Russians side with the Serbs as protector.

The alliance with the Tsar in 1914 was more convenience and necessity against the central powers. After Tannenbaum the Tsar was done although Kerenski was too humane to the Bolshevists and could have exterminated them early on.

Point is no-one in west ahd central Europe has ever allied themselves with the great power to the East unless of necessity to gain in their internal disputes.

That being said: Stalins purges left Chuikoff and Zhukov, two fo the great leaders of the century. If you look at the lying careerists running the pentagon one may conclude Stalin needed to get them out of the way and let real soldiers run the place instead of toads enriching the military industrial complex.

We need no one telling us we are winning in Iraq when we are losing. Stalin likely revitalized the Red Army when it needed to get rid of top heavey corruption.

Last, point while we waited to invade France, Stalin did the Japanese and Mao Dsedung a great favor by staying out of Manchuria and Korea. We and Kiang needed second front in China as badly as Stalin needed Nazi divisions moving toward the west.

None can dismiss the dedication and sacrifice of the Great Generation including those good Red Army soldiers and there were many in Axis armies.

[a]

"I think the Russians resent not being recognized by the West for their efforts in the defeat of the Axis."

Maybe this Westener would recognize their efforts a little more if they hadn't been on the side of the Germans at the beginning of the war, and if they hadn't invaded Poland in a war of conquest. In the confusion of bluff and counter-bluff in the summer of 1939, Hitler might very well not have tried to invade Poland if he hadn't known there was a decent chance of striking a deal with the Russians.

[spencer]

A lot of good comments, but wkwillis, we did not delay our invasion by a year. We invaded as soon as we were able.

[Monte Davis]

"...it occured to me that the Axis powers were in retreat by D-Day June 6, 1944"

It's always been uncomfortable, when not simply unspeakable, to point out that the German forces we faced from D-Day to V-E Day were qualitatively a tattered remnant of the Wehrmacht of 1941, and quantitatively less than 30% of those fighting the Red Army in the same period. The Germans *lost* more men in the East in June-July 1944 than they *had* in France. To acknowledge that is not to denigrate how Western forces fought -- and a second front had great psychological impact beyond the purely military -- but many people seem to think it is.

Re spencer's "we invaded as soon as we were able": the US and UK had the strategic luxury of the Atlantic and the Channel, so "able" translated to "when we had a great enough preponderance to minimize the odds that D-Day would be another Norway, Dieppe, Anzio (or for that matter Gallipoli)." We could most certainly have invaded sooner, and put the Iron Curtain farther east, *if* we'd been willing to bear the level of casualties that the Soviets had no choice but to take.

The other comforting misreading, which we adopted from German generals' memoirs, is that the USSR won by sheer force of numbers (akin to the Lost Cause mythology that Confederate commanders had all the brilliance and the Union simply wore them down.) Yes, Soviet command was grossly inferior in 1941-1942, but by Kursk in mid-1943 they were consistently better than the Germans at what the Germans had pioneered in 1939-1941... and by 1945, I suspect, better than we'd had combat time to become. Had the Yaltaphobes' fantasies of "unleashing Patton" been realized, they might have had a very unpleasant surprise.

[James Wimberley]

Stalin's jibe about the British providing time, the Americans wealth and the Russians blood ia still the general Russian understanding of the war. But it reflects the perspectives of a land power. If you look at the three branches of warfare, the Wehrmacht was indeed largely defeated by the Red Army - but the Kriegsmarine was defeated by the Royal Navy and the Luftwaffe by the USAF. (The highest proportional casulaties of any military branch on either side were I think suffered by the German U-boat crews, about 3/4 dead).

The Germans had overwhelming air superiority in the summer of 1941, and regional air superiority a year later for the Caucasus and Stalingrad campaigns. But no longer for Kursk, and still less for the great 1944 advances. The Red Air Force was of course partly responsible for the recovery. But the change in the balance in 1942-43 must have had a lot to do with the German need to divert resources (good pilots more than planes) to air defence of Germany. In the spring of 1944, the USAF long-range daytime fighters essentially destroyed the Luftwaffe over Germany. On D-Day and after, the Allies faced negligible Luftwaffe resistance; it can't have been much stronger over the eastern front.

[RKKA]

"Maybe this Westener would recognize their efforts a little more if they hadn't been on the side of the Germans at the beginning of the war"

Maybe they would have been, if the Chamberlain and Daladier had wanted the alliance the Soviets offered them in April 1939.

"and if they hadn't invaded Poland in a war of conquest."

How would leaving all of Poland to be conquered by the Nazis have done anything but improved germany's prospects for Barbarossa?

"In the confusion of bluff and counter-bluff in the summer of 1939, Hitler might very well not have tried to invade Poland if he hadn't known there was a decent chance of striking a deal with the Russians."

Tell me, what did Hitler not want in 1939? And did he fear the Soviets in 1939?

[Dan Tompkins]

Ralph Levering, in American opinion and the Russian alliance, 1939-1945 (1976), notes that the USSR suffered and caused -- I believe that's his phrasing -- 95% of the European casualties in WWII. He also notes the pressure in the US to start a second front in Europe from fall '42, noting that Eisenhower and others favored this and that Roosevelt seems to have told Stalin he would do so. And he says that James McGregor Burns said that failure to open a second front contributed seriously to be beginning of the Cold War.

What conclusions does one draw from this? Different people will view it differently, as we're seeing. But Brad is right: the magnitude of Russian suffering in that war is amazing. (I'm not denying Stalin's contribution to the suffering.)

Best,

Dan Tompkins

[(not an American)]

I still think the American effort and sacrifice stands out, considering the circumstances it was achieved under:

-unlike the Soviets, the US could have chosen to stay out of the ground war
-the US apparently executed only 1 soldier for desertion and were a democracy

[RKKA]

"Maybe they would have been,..." should read "Maybe they would have been on the Allied side in 1939,..."

[srogerscat]

RKKA writes: "Again, the un-Purged, non-led-by-Stalin Western Allies managed to produce a similar military disaster in 1940, whose impact was mitigated mainly by the brief duration of the ground fighting in the West, and the non-genocidal nature of Hitler's intentions concerning western non-Jewish populations."

Which, I think, serves to highlight the high quality of the pre-Purge Red Army. Even after its' instituional memory and cohesion were shattered, it still managed to do about as well during it's baptism of fire as the Westerners.

One thing to remember about the purge in question: It did not fall solely on the Army. Soviet industrial output, and R&d in general were impacted. No purge and your get a better Red Army, with signifcantly more of those lovely T-34s and KV-1s, and a Red Air force with more modern aircraft.

[srogerscat]

RKKA writes: "Tell me, what did Hitler not want in 1939? And did he fear the Soviets in 1939?

In 1939? Yes, I think he did. The Russo-Finnish war of 1939/40 showed the Hollow Legion aspect of the Red Army. The Germans noted this and assumed that the Russkies would be meat on the table when their time came.

Fortunately, the Soviets came to the same conclusion and started to repair the damage, which effort was unfortunately not expected to be completed untill 1942.

[RKKA]

The point I want to make is that it is necessary to take the Germans into account when discussing this. I agree that the Purges were detrimental militarily and economically, but in the absence of them, a German demolition of the Red Army in 1941 was still highly likely. If nothing else, the experience of two major ground-air campaigns and one major air-sea-ground campaign (Norway) was invaluable for the Germans. The Western campaign in 1940 involved over 120 German divisions and a huge aerial fleet operating over a major chunk of territory to a great depth, and the Red Army had exactly zero recent experience of combat operations on that scale in 1941.

[RKKA]

"In 1939? Yes, I think he did."

I will pay you the compliment of saying that you are not Hitler. Your thoughts are not his. You are not burdened with the notion that Germans are the Master Race, and that Slavs are "subhumans".

Hitler was. Again, did Hitler fear the Soviets in 1939?

[Nicholas Mycroft]

The war on the Eastern Front was the largest event in human history. The U.S. helped to win that struggle, primarily by sending trucks, weapons, and supplies, but the victory, and thus victory in World War II, was won by the Soviets. There would have been no D-Day without Stalingrad and Kursk. As Monte Davis points out, it is an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact that the U.S. army did not defeat the German army, although I would bet that 98% of Americans would say that it did if asked.

Just one indication is the opposition the Allies faced on D-Day--the only high-quality, veteran German unit in Normandy was the 352nd infantry, which not coincidentally created hell on earth for the GIs on Omaha Beach. Other sectors were defended by "static" regiments composed of older, unfit, and younger Germans, Ukrainians, and Poles.

I can certainly understand why a Russian would be anywhere from irked to outraged with the typical American "we saved the world in WW II" narrative. Yes, we played a big role in doing so, but we did not bleed like the Soviets did, and we did not face the most terrible enemy.

As I've written before here, Guy Sajer's -The Forgotten Soldier- is an memoir that to an astonishing degree manages to recreate the experience of war on the Eastern Front. Gabriel Temkin's -My Just War- is also a wonder.

I'll also append an http--this picture has haunted me for years (the CD is quite something, also, btw). What on earth was going through this man's mind?

http://www.prokofiev.org/recordings/album.cfm?aid=000104

[srogerscat]

RKKA,

Hitler's actions in the summer of 1939 speak for themselves.

Yes, I do think that Hitler feared the USSR in 1939. Memories of the two-front Great War and all that.

In 1941 the Soviet Military was going to get the worst pounding any army has ever gotten, purge or no purge but there is a hell of a difference between a WWII with a German high tide at Stallingrad and a WWII with the Axis held more or less at the Dnepr/Dvina river line - which _may_ have been possible for a non-purged Red Army.

There is a common belief that Hitler refused to listen to or trust his Generals. He certainly had that tendency, which grew dramaticly as the war continued, but up to late 1943 he was willing to listen to (a few) of his commanders when they said things he did not want to hear.

In 1939 he was not quite so convinced of his own godhood, so when officers who had participated in the secret training and advisory programs with the Red Army in the 1920s and early 1930s told him that said Red Army was a formidable force, he gave their reports some weight. The Finns convinced him that his caution was unwarrented and we all know the rest.

[RKKA]

"Hitler's actions in the summer of 1939 speak for themselves."

In other words, you have nothing specific on Hitler's actual thoughts, fears, and intentions in the summer of 1939.

"Memories of the two-front Great War and all that."

Um, a hypothetical Soviet action supporting the Poles in 1939 would not have turned the German attack on Poland into a 2-front war. It would have turned it into a bigger 1-front war.

"In 1939 he was not quite so convinced of his own godhood, so when officers who had participated in the secret training and advisory programs with the Red Army in the 1920s and early 1930s told him that said Red Army was a formidable force, he gave their reports some weight."

Who told Hitler this, and when? The Germans were decidely unimpressed by what they saw of the Soviets in Spain in 1936 and 1937. And the Chief of the German General Staff, General Halder, believed that Soviet intervention in the coming Polish war was only a minor concern if the Poles could be defeated in 2-3 weeks, which he confidently predicted. This is from geoffrey Megargee "Inside Hitler's High Command" University of Kansas Press, 2000.

[aretino]

the Red Army had exactly zero recent experience of combat operations on that scale in 1941

True. But the Soviets used a force of over 20 divisions in the war with Finland, which gave them far more experience than the Western allies.

[Monte Davis]

On Hitler's fear of/contempt for the USSR: why not both at once? Remember his split-brained hatred of Jews: they're subhuman, irredeeemably inferior, but so *deviously clever* that they subvert our culture, take over our finances and seduce our _madchen_. And of course it's the Jews who are behind Bolshevism: no simple-minded Slav could have come up with that unaided.

Add in his ambivalence toward the east in general (it's the natural, beckoning lebensraum for German growth *and* it's the source of endless threatening hordes). It shouldn't be surprising that he could believe simultaneously that Barbarossa would be a walk-over *and* that he had to do it ASAP, before a Slavic tide was loosed upon the world.

[andres]

Nobody denies that Stalin was a paranoid mass murderer, not to mention the totalitarian system he ruled over. But most commie-bashers give Stalin way too much credit for the Soviet Army's horrific losses in 1941-45. In particular I don't see anyone giving enough credit to where it's really due: the soldiers, officers, and weapon designers of Hitler's Wehrmacht.

Stalin's one fatal decision was to post the army in forward positions in occupied Poland and the Baltic states, and then not give it any warning about the impending attack. After June 1941, however, there was little Stalin could have done to reduce the Soviet casualties: even if he had allowed the armies to retreat, the non-motorized infantry masses of the Soviet army usually could not have moved fast enough to prevent encirclement by the Panzer divisions.

In general, the huge Soviet losses were owed to the tactical and technological superiority of the German army. The Wehrmacht was an army of professional line soldiers as well as professional officers operating with up-to-date technology in comparison to the Soviets, who did not have enough professional officers after the purges and did not have soldiers skilled enough to use any but the most basic equipment. A few examples:

* Germany had much better optical range-finding equipment, so German guns were more accurate than Soviet guns of the same caliber.

* Although it had a huge amount of artillery, the Soviet army had very few personnel trained in artillery ballistics and so most Soviet artillery was not capable of performing infantry-targeted indirect fire. The German army, by contrast, had a tradition going back to WWI of using artillery as the main killing component of its infantry divisions, who were trained in the calling in of artillery strikes.

* Germany had much better radios than the Soviets did. In many cases, Soviet tanks either lacked radios or had only radio receivers, which put whole tank companies out of action in case the transmitter-equipped command tank was knocked out. The lack of good command-and-control procedures for their tanks handicapped the Soviets in mobile battles, which was a tragedy given that the only real Soviet technological advantage was in tank design.

* Until the losses of 1944, German infantry were trained in the use of MG firelanes, artillery support, and anti-tank tactics, whereas Soviet infantry were given little but rifle-training and had to learn most such tactics the hard way.

During 1941-42 when the German edge in these factors was highest, each German division was easily a match for 3-4 Soviet divisions due to its advantages in coordination and correctly-applied firepower. The Soviets often had to launch mass human wave attacks (a la Enemy at the Gates) not because Soviet commanders were stupid (though many were) but because such attacks were the only way to wear down the Germans and prevent them from advancing.

One other factor should be mentioned: the Germans, having swallowed the Nazi untermensch philosophy, slaughtered mass quantities of prisoners either directly or indirectly through starvation, adding to Soviet casualty totals and eventually to their own as the Russians paid back in kind.

In general though, the 1941-45 war shows what happens when you pit a professional army against one which, however large, has still been improvised from the ground up: only the older Russian soldiers had any prior combat experience, and this only in the equipment-scarce Russian Civil War, where battles often were decided by cavalry charges or human wave assaults. Though the brutality of the Soviet system was an undeniable reality, it is not _directly_ to blame for the 20+ million casualties suffered in 1941-45. The German army is, which is why the eventual Soviet victory shouldn't be forgotten.

[srogerscat]

RKKA writes: In other words, you have nothing specific on Hitler's actual thoughts, fears, and intentions in the summer of 1939.

By your own proposed standard of "I am not Hitler, so how could I know what he was thinking" Of course not. The fact remains that Hitler went to considerable trouble to take the USSR out of play in 1939.

Monte Davis: Your point about the split perception Hitler had af the USSR is probably right on the money.

As to what the German Army thought about the Russkies, track down Panzer Division, by Kenneth Macksey. It was one of the old Ballantine History of the Violent Centry WWII books. One of the early chapters deals with German/Soviet military cooperation in the interwar period. It also contains a passage concerning a complaint by members of a Red Army delegation in early 1940, griping because the German Army wasn't showing the best tanks it had to offer, based on the Soviet officers belief that the Germans were ahead in tank design, but the vehicles that were on disply were not as good as the Red Army's newer models. That raised a few flags, but the warning was discounted.

As to your one-front war, that depends on the French and British sitting it out while the Germans and Soviets tore each other apart. Quite likely, given French and British attitudes at the time, but obviously Hitler didn't want to gamble on that.

I'm beginning what it is we are arguing over, exactly. We started with a debate over the impact of the Great Purge on Soviet military ability but we seem to be drifting a bit.

[Terry Karney]

Speaking as one who loves history, has been a soldier for the past 13 year (and studied history for a decade before that) and a speaker of Russian.

The most telling scene in Enemy at the Gates was the beginning, where the troops are being handed a box of cartridges (20) and; every other one, a rifle.

The losses in attack were that high, much of the time.

TK

[charles_utwater_ii]

(Written before I saw Andres's excellent post)

Anyone who thinks that the political purges were *primarily* responsible for those huge losses has no clue. Look at the very first line:

1941Q3
Manpower 3,334,000
Killed/MIA 2,067,801
Wounded/sick 676,964

Causalty rate: 82%

The number of dead *in this quarter alone* represented ca. 20% of the total for the war.

When one games the German advance toward Leningrad (see www.eclectic.kennett.net/Barbarossa/north.htm) for example, the entire forward Soviet army is enveloped in hours by Panzers and torn apart, flesh against tanks and aircraft.

Great officers would have done no better than apparatchiks. The problem was that they were too close to the border and with inadequate transport, air, and armor to form up a defense.

Remnants of the Soviet Army escaped to Dvinsk and eventually to Leningrad, but the majority of the losses are in the first weeks. Barbarossa was the Soviets' Pearl Harbor.

Stalin was responsible for leaving the army exposed and for putting politics over merit. But blaming these massive losses on the politicization of the army is itself an attempt to politicize one of the largest tragedies in human history.

[RKKA]

"Stalin's one fatal decision was to post the army in forward positions in occupied Poland and the Baltic states, and then not give it any warning about the impending attack."

This was probably Stalin's biggest mistake at the time. General Shaposhnikov, Chief of General Staff, advised him to keep the main body of the Red Army behind the old borders, sending only covering forces forward, until the fortifications on the new border could be completed. Add in a bit of Maskirovka, and Barbarossa's initial punch might have hit nothin' but air, preserving a lot of the 1941 Red Army until it could get over the initial shock of the attack.

[Colin Danby]

John Keegan's WWII history several times points out the particularly effective use the Russians made of U.S. material assistance. One gets the sense that the boots, trucks, and food sent to the USSR were a far more effective investment of resources than, say, those put into bombing Germany.

I find the reflex efforts by some posters to pin the blame for Russian losses on Stalin odd. Stalin has much to answer for, and sure, an unpurged army might well have had fewer losses, but it's hard to see how even a better-officered military could have absorbed and ultimately turned back the Eastern front assault without human loss on an enormous scale. Look at the scale of Axis loss on the same front and make the obvious comparisons to other fronts, as others have suggested. That's the debt owed.

[DuckedApe]

In a TV documentary, a Russian gunsmith whose rifles are famous world-wide today, explained that he was motivated to design and produce them because the Russian soldiers on the German front only had about one gun to share for five...I don't recall if he also spoke of ammo...but basically they were cannon fodder, the unarmed recovering the arms of the fallen to carry on.

A butterfly in the global arms race?

Subsequently, over the past fifty years over one hundred million of his Kalashnikov rifles have been manufactured and helped arm the world.

[Nicholas Mycroft]

Other resources:

von Mellenthin -Panzer Battles- (including an objective appreciation of the rapid development of Soviet tactics during the war)

A. Tarkovsky "My Name is Ivan" (film/DVD)

G. Chukrai "Ballad of a Soldier" (film/DVD)

"The Russian-German War" (documentary/VHS) has good footage at least if you can find it--lots of "Stalin's Organs"....

and I'll add, OT, "Talvisota" (film/DVD), about the Russo-Finnish war.

All these films should be viewed with chilled vodka, cucumbers, dill, and pickled mushrooms at hand to strengthen one's constitution.

[Simon]

>>As Monte Davis points out, it is an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact that the U.S. army did not defeat the German army, although I would bet that 98% of Americans would say that it did if asked. <<

America didn't beat the German army, but what you guys did do in the American-led liberation of western Europe was give democracy a fighting chance against totalitarianism when it looked like the future of Earth, at least outside North America, very well could be Orwell's boot stamping on a human face forever. Without the USA's intervention, all of continental Europe would eventually have been united under a totalitarian dictatorship, whether Nazi or Communist, and I'm not sure if Britain could have survived forever as an island of liberty off the coast of Mordor.

[srogerscat]

In the spirit of bipartisanship, I concur with RKKA's 1236 pm post.

As to Charles Utwater's post, I pretty much go along with that, with the caveat that the true test of an army's ability is not how it responds to victory, but how it handles defeat. Even the pre-purge army would have been pasted but good given the deployment decreed by Stalin, but trimming the Q3losses by as little as 10 percent makes a big difference in the rest of 1941, and a huge differance for the rest of the war. The Germans had absolutely no margin of safety in Barbarossa, so anything at all that tips the balance towards the USSR, however slightly, has huge knock-on effects

Colin Danby writes: "I find the reflex efforts by some posters to pin the blame for Russian losses on Stalin odd. Stalin has much to answer for, and sure, an unpurged army might well have had fewer losses, but it's hard to see how even a better-officered military could have absorbed and ultimately turned back the Eastern front assault without human loss on an enormous scale."

Stalin is also responsible for the Red Armys' forward deployment boondoggle. If you gather near absolute power over a State, you pretty much get near absolute responsibility. But not accountability, alas.

[Barkley Rosser]

While Stalin's errors may have compounded the military personnel deaths through forward positioning and purges of officers (Khrushchev certainly took the latter very seriously when he denounced Stalin in 1956), there were also enormous civilian losses. The civilian deaths in the Siege of Leningrad alone were about three times the entire military deaths of Americans in WW II.

In this regard I remember well visiting the beautiful Hotel Astoria in then downtown Leningrad a few decades ago. They showed a copy of the menu and guest list for a dinner party Hitler planned to have at that hotel exactly one month after his invasion of the USSR began. He never was able to give that dinner party.

It is a tremendous irony that on the one hand Stalin and most Soviets wanted the US and UK to open a western front sooner than they did, but on the other if they had the Soviets would probably not have controlled so much of Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the war. Those who think "unleashing Patton" against the Red Army where it was sitting after Yalta would have altered anything are simply delusional, no matter how much finger wagging and guilt tripping has been done by various people from those countries ever since.

Even more ironic is that the main distraction from such a western front invasion was the North African campaign (and the later one in Italy, perhaps more useful). The main motive for the North African campaign was Churchill's anachronistic obsession with British control of India and hence the prime importance of maintaining control of the Suez Canal (El Alamein!). That they lost this control in 1947 while millions of Central and East Europeans got to live under Soviet rule is pretty absurd, especially from the guy who invented the concept of the "iron curtain."

[JK]

Andres and charles utwater ii make the point that the purges do not explain the devastating losses on the Soviet side. While I largely agree with their points, it is a common error to believe that Stalin's impact on the military performance was narrowly to do with his myopia about Hitler or the impact of the purges in the military. In fact, the disasterous performance of the Soviet Union, including the initial tactical errors were the culmination of over a decade's consistent policy.

Amongst other things, andres points to superior German hardware and technology. But this followed from the pre-war reliance of Soviet economic development on slave labour, terror and foreign technology (and even foreign technologists could be subjected to random terror).

Andres writes: "Stalin's one fatal decision was to post the army in forward positions in occupied Poland and the Baltic states, and then not give it any warning about the impending attack." Charles utwater ii adds: "Great officers would have done no better than apparatchiks. The problem was that they were too close to the border and with inadequate transport, air, and armor to form up a defense."

But this mis-understands the source of Stalin's error. It was not just a failure to take note of intelligence. Rather his naive underestimation of the threat posed by Nazism followed naturally from the whole political strategy to "build socialism in one country" by "exploiting contradictions between the imperialists", which had guided the twists and turns of Soviet foreign policy since Stalin's ascendency to power.

It was this that resulted in both long and short term failure to prepare - forward deployment was complemented by extensive pre-war industrial investment in the Western USSR, vulnerable to attack.

Colin Danby says: "I find the reflex efforts by some posters to pin the blame for Russian losses on Stalin odd." I have no desire to make Stalin personally responsible for every death, reflexively or otherwise. But even leaving Russians to one side, I'm sure that Colin will acknowledge the losses of millions of Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Bessarabians, Ukranians, and Caucasians along with Romanian, Hungarian and other prisoners who perished in Soviet executions and camps are the responsibility of the USSR, not the Nazis. In other cases, such as the Warsaw Rising, it is harder to divide the blame. But the role of Stalinism is clear.

For what it's worth, in the end I judge Nazism the greater evil (and even that, from those on offer, Bolshevik revolution was the best option in 1917). The fact that, at the end of the Second World War, in many places the Soviets were welcomed as liberators is measure enough of the brutality of Nazi rule.

I have no intention to downplay the sacrifices of Eastern Europeans, or to exagerate the contribution of the other allied powers to defeating Nazism. But return to Brad's initial meditation: "Whenever I look at these numbers, and try to imagine what they mean, I wander around in a daze for an hour or so." Look at the category under which it is posted: "moral responsibility". When we meditate on the meaning of the Second World War the role of Stalinism cannot be ignored.

[Monte Davis]

"They showed a copy of the menu and guest list for a dinner party Hitler planned to have at that [Leningrad] hotel exactly one month after his invasion of the USSR began."

If you're going to attack a country that much bigger (population, production potential, sheer depth for retreat), you *have* to believe that you can wrap things up very quickly. Cf. the Japanese belief that the US/UK would accept a fait accompli after Dec. 1941... or _bushido_ would outweigh a great economic disparity... or something would turn up.

What's the alternative -- to join the reality-based community? We're living through yet another demonstration of how reluctant some are to do that.

[erg]

Its not just Stalin who can be blamed for the devastating losses on the Eastern Front. Many Soviet Generals used manpower in a very wasteful fashion, with unimaginative head on attacks. I read somehwhere the truly chilling statement that since front line Soviet troops were only expected to survive 2 weeks in the more brutal stages of the combat, they were only given 2 weeks of rations.

Certainly a humane political leadership would not have wasted the flower of Russia's youth in these battles, but the Soviet Generals also deserve a great deal of blame. Its too easy to blame Stalin for everything.

FYI -- I've read that until the Normandy landings, the Soviet Union faced around 90% of the strength of the Wehrmacht and even after that, they faced around 66% of the strength of the army. There should be no doubt that the Soviets suffered enormously and broke the back of the German Army.

[Jacob Davies]

A good book on the myths about WWII:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0679436022/qid=1128379705/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-0869769-8456606?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

The different stories of WWII in Britain & the US are pretty interesting to hear. In Britain, of course, lots of complaining about how long it took the US to come in, and the price they demanded. In the US, the rest of the world are helpless children saved by the might & goodwill of the US of A - and of course, the war really started in 1941. Plenty of inaccuracy on all sides, but nothing compares to the way the Russian contribution is ignored. In 1941 the Russians faced 98% of the German army. 98%!

Mind you, the French get it from us too. Sad to say but the events at Dunkirk are not exactly Britain's finest hour, nor was the British defense of France anything like whole-hearted. You wouldn't know that from history class there, though.

[Anderson]

Re: the 300,000 figure, that's total U.S. *dead* in both theaters, not "casualties," which includes wounded, sick, etc.

Anyone in the comment thread wondering why we're "blaming Stalin" for at least some of the high casualties, isn't reading all the comments. The forward positioning of the Russian army in 1941 was nightmarishly bad. This is no reflection on his morals, politics, etc.

[J Thomas]

Some mornings I feel like I'm getting old, and this was all over before I was born. But you people are arguing it like you lived through it.

This looks like a good place to apply the explanation/justification dichotomy. I find explanations a lot easier than justifications.

So, before the war a lot of americans regarded the nazis and the russian communists as not that different. The big difference was the russians had a lot more people and a lot more resources, so if they ever got organised they'd be more dangerous. Given that, doesn't it make sense we'd want to use the nazis to bleed the russians as much as we could? "Too bad they can't both lose." But it's hard to judge that sort of thing. We couldn't be sure how much of the supplies we sent russia would even get through. They used our radios and optics and trucks. They had no use for our dinky tanks. If we sent them less stuff or less-useful stuff they would win slower, but if we overdid it they might win too slow. Let the germans take the caucasus, let them get another oil supply....

And then there was Churchill. The british had been our allies for over a hundred years. We naturally paid attention to what they wanted. Churchill didn't want D-Day to come too soon, and we were staging it from his island. We couldn't just ignore him.

In lots of ways Stalin looks incompetent. He lost a million men in one operation. On the other hand, the operation that Hitler got distracted from while taking those million men was supposed to take Moscow. Stalin could afford to lose a million men easier than he could afford to lose Moscow. It isn't clear to me that better soviet officers would have had a much-better result. If the russian army was better at that point, maybe Hitler would have stuck to business and been stopped about where he was stopped in reality. If he'd paid attention and made fewer mistakes maybe he'd have done better than he actually did.

And then there were the strong russian forces facing the japanese. Stalin had hoped that Hitler would put off attacking until it was certain the japanese army wouldn't (or couldn't) attack. Stalin needed those forces in the east -- if the japanese took Vladivostok he'd have a hell of a time getting it back. He had to keep sufficient force in the east to stop the japanese army, because once he started losing a two-front war.... In reality we know it was a blunder to trust Hitler, because we know Hitler attacked. But if Stalin had gotten away with that gamble he would have done very well. We can say that Stalin was immoral for not attacking both japan and germany when he was waiting. (Arguing about Stalin's morality -- what a waste!) But russia wasn't as ready to fight a two-front war as we were. It doesn't take much explaining why they didn't. Justifying it morally is something else.

Could we have all been a happy family together after the war? I can't see it. Sure, we could ignore Franco until he died of old age, but we couldn't ignore Stalin. If we hadn't had the atom bomb, Stalin would surely have taken advantage. If eastern europe was a good buffer zone between him and us, the english channel would be even better. Churchill as a schoolboy learned a poem that ended

"...for we have got
the Gatling gun, and they have not".

But now "they" did have BARs etc. There would inevitably be "wars of national liberation" all over, and the soviets would inevitably be involved. We had a lot of people who knew all that, who didn't know about the bomb. They made their plans. And when they found out about the bomb it wasn't clear what it would mean and it was too late to change their plans. The Cold War was probably inevitable from the time the germans were certain to lose. Maybe there was a way to avoid it, but that way would have had to involve some subtle effect that isn't obvious. Everybody who thought seriously about the problem knew it was inevitable but they publicly put it aside until after WWII was won. All those people thinking it was inevitable made it inevitable -- unless something with more effect than the atomic bomb could change things. It wouldn't have to be something as obvious as an atom bomb. Some little change that most people would hardly notice, that happened early enough, might do it. I have no candidate for what could prevent the Cold War, so I call it inevitable.

[Max]

"Liberal", by "impression", I did not mean an argument; I just used an euphemism.
Do you remember the piece of paper on which Churchill shared with Stalin the areas of influence(10% russian influence in Greece, for example),when Churchill realized the Americans do not want another front in Balcans ? It was widely circulated by the communist propaganda to show the "liberated" people that they hope in vain for Americans to come...
And what do you think it was the "impression" of milions sent by Soviets and their national servants to the Gulag? That they were "bought" up by Americans and the Western allies?
Or you might think these people had time to make a reasoned argument in the middle of the night, when the NKVD and its eastern counterparts came to pick them up?
This is not to say that an American invasion of Eastern Europe was "feasible" or very possible at the time, is just to explain how the people of occupied territories think at that time, about what happened. The Soviets were seen as a "pest",and there was a huge symphaty for the western allies. But the allies did not come for 50 years.

[Monte Davis]

Max, I'm sure you know that Eastern Europe had active (and in several cases ruling) fascist movements of its own in the 1930s... and that Rumania, Bulgaria and Hungary contributed significant forces to the invasion of the USSR.

That does not excuse the Soviet occupation and oppression, but it does complicate the picture of hapless "captive nations" that Americans were served during the Cold War.

[Movie Guy]

Matthew White has pulled together the broadest multiple source records of WWII casualities, campaigns, battles, and massacures.

The following links offer excellent information and the campaign breakdown adds appropriate perspective to the discussion.

For the record, I maintain that U.S. losses during WWII are understated. The figure used by the American Battle Monuments Commission states that over 400,000 Americans lost their lives during the war. "Of the 405,399 Americans that lost their lives during World War II, there were 78,976 Missing in Action. Of the remainder the next of kin of 93,245 elected to have their loved ones buried at our cemeteries."

National Death Tolls of the Second World War
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/ww2stats.htm

Major Battles and Massacres of the Second World War
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/battles.htm

30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/atrox.htm

WWII Casualties - American Battle Monuments Commission
http://www.abmc.gov/abmc45.htm

The total losses of World War Two are rivaled by the loss of life in China during the period 1949 to 1975. Depending on which accounts you endorse, China's government killed as many as 40 million to 72 million citizens during this period.

Naturally, it's not politically correct to point out that information these days, whether a wild eyed liberal pinko or a neo-con fascist freak. Both political elements are sucking up to China.

China has performed crimes under its present form of national government that rival the dispicable crimes of Hitler and Stalin. Yet, the U.S. is running large and growing trade and current account deficits with China. So much for American credibility and morality among its citizens.

Make sure you click on the map located at '30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century'. That puts everything into perspective.

[Max]

If you take in consideration that the French, Italians and Austrian had fascists too ( I do not speak about western Germans) and still “better off” without Soviet, what can I say?
The Czechs probably were hanging on the left, without the (czech) Germans and the Polish did not have fascist movements, as I know, and also fought in great numbers, on Allies side, but they were, nevertheless delivered to Stalin.
I cannot make an argument now about Bulgaria & Hungary fascist parties role in the decision of attacking the Soviet Union, but in Romania’s case, the decision to side with Hilter, was taken after the fascist party, the Iron Guard, was removed from temporary power it enjoyed and outlawed, and only after the Soviet Union, acting on the “basis” of Ribbentrop-Molotov captured a whole part of Romania (approximately what is today the republic of Moldova plus the counties that went to Ukraine),while Hungary took another part. Basically , the dictator of that time, who was a general, has an easy sell to attack the Soviets to liberate Romanian territory, and a harder sell, when the Romanian troops kept fighting deeper in Soviet territory (Stalingrad, Crimea, Don, etc). For this sin he was executed later on, in 1946, by Soviets, but probably any allied power or the Romanian themselves (he was arrested by the Romanian King in 1944).
I think we should not lose from sight the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939(and its secret protocols). Poland was divided then, the Baltic countries, and also Romania. Stalin attacked these countries, not these countries attacked the Soviet Union because some fascist party influence. And nobody condemned this act although it contravened directly all the treaties of non aggression signed by the Soviets at the end of twenties.
Strictly speaking about the post WWII period, we had the East Germans movement in 53, the Hungarian revolution in 56, the Polish movements and the Czechs 68, all put down with Soviet help or direct intervention (a smaller and lesser know episode is the Romanian partisans resistance, in the Carpathian mountains, until the end of fifties). What these movements mean? That these nations were not “captive”? And I did not say something about the countless send to Russia’s(by the way, the Soviets took the ethnic Germans-civil population- from their satellites to a “trip” to Gulag) or “national” Gulags.
But I believe I went to far from the scope of this posting.

[Jussi]

"Another fact forgotten by Americans were the Axis Powers allied with Germany: Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Rumania, Croatia, Finland, and a few other countries."

Excuse me, but Finland was not an 'Axis Power'. It saddens me when people say this.

[Simon]

Finland's position is unique - it was fighting the USSR for national survival back when the USSR was officially allied to Germany, yet Finland was supported by Germany. Finland did what it had to do to survive as a free country, including taking aid from Germany and taking part in the invasion of USSR as far as Leningrad - in fact the territory Finland invaded was historically part of Finland. I don't think Finland did anything 'wrong', it just managed to do what nobody else in the area except neutral Sweden did, and avoided being occupied by any of the great totalitarian powers. AIR Finland was made to pay reparations to USSR after the war as an 'aggressor' power, which understandably rankled with Finns since the USSR attacked them first, and the departing Germans had burned a lot of the country when Finland made peace with USSR after Viipuri. So on the one hand its hard not to see how Finland wasn't an axis power in that she fought alongside Germany & the other German client states, OTOH she never attacked anyone who hadn't attacked her first & she just did what she had to to survive.

[enfant terrible]

don majors wrote:
"Another fact forgotten by Americans were the Axis Powers allied with Germany: Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, Rumania, Croatia, Finland, and a few other countries."

You have some serious factual errors here. Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy, and Romania were allied with Germany as you say (although, arguably, all of them except Italy had little choice in the matter). I don't know enough about the role of Finland. Austria didn't exist, it was annexed by Germany. Croatia was not a sovereign state, but a German/Italian occupied and controlled territory with symbolic attributes of statehood, that were not recognized either by the world outside the Axis, or by the majority of its own people. Croatia was a major area of resistance and thus its role resembles Norway, rather than the other countries on the list.

[enfant terrible]

Simon says:
"Kudos to the few countries like Greece & Serbian Yugoslavia which refused to join the Nazis and suffered the consequences, though. They tied up a lot of German troops on anti-partisan duty and helped us win the war."

Again a repetition of popular lies. When you write "Serbian Yugoslavia" you presumably mean the parts east of Drina (what is now S&M minus parts of Vojvodina, and FYRM). But that is not where most of the resistance in the Balkans was staged. Most of the resistance was in the territory that Germans and Italians named (most cynically) "Independent State of Croatia" (and what is now Croatia, Bosnia, and parts of Vojvodina). Until the Red Army liberated Serbia in 1944, the overwhelming majority of Tito's Partisans were from the so-called ISC, and most of the resistance was staged in what is now Bosnia.

[contemplatif]

Two amazing things:

1) the speed at which any discussion of russian suffering at the hands of the nazis derives into a discussion of stalin's crimes.

2) the fact that most were prepared to believe post-WWII that a russia that had lost this many people was getting ready for wars of agression. Defensive posture on a paranoid level, sure, certainly, thus the formation of the east bloc, but agressing western europe, that was likely a totally unrealistic fear.

[Nicholas Mycroft]

contemplatif--

Kind of like Godwin's law, I guess. If all roads don't lead to Hitler, they lead to Stalin.

A probably semi-mythic account identifies one Herostratus, who burned down the temple of Diana at Ephesus (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world) solely to ensure that his name and memory would live forever.

Easy to mistake Soviet post-war buffer-building as aggression, but I also cannot imagine the Soviets doing anything that they thought would trigger large-scale conflict with the West--at least until Kruschev, and if memory serves one of the reasons he didn't last very long is that his brinksmanship was seen as too dangerous.

[cranium182]

It is good for the world that the soviets lost so many people in WW2. How much more powerfull would they have been throughout the cold war if they had lost much less? Also take into account that birthrates were much higher in Russia in the past, so that every million people lost back then translates into considerably more than a million less people today.

I know all this is callous, but an American dominated world is much preferable to a Soviet dominated one. This statement holds true for everyone except ethnic Russians. Despite Communist propaganda, the Soviet project was a pure and simple attempt at Ethnic Russian expansion. Many soviet areas had many people deported to siberia and ethnic russians imported in thier place.

[Barkley Rosser]

In 1926, Poland was taken over by a dictator in a coup, Marshall Pilsudski, who was succeeded after his death in 1935 by a group of military officers. While not pro-German or anti-Jewish, its state policy was corporatist along fascistic lines, and it was certainly not a democracy.

Hungary had been ruled by a military dictator, Admiral Horthy, since the fall of the brief Bolshevik regime of Bela Kun in 1919, with policies somewhat similar to those in Poland. Horthy freely allied with Germany due to promises that Hitler kept that Hungary would regain territories lost at the end of WW I in Yugoslavia, Romania, and Czechoslovakia. He did protect the Jews while in power and they only became endangered when he was removed near the end of the war and a hard Nazi regime took over.

Bulgaria always protected its Jewish population throughout the war, with one of the best records in this area of any county allied with or ruled by Germany, perhaps matched only by Denmark. (Happy Rosh Hoshana, and Ramadan Kareem everybody!)

Nothing good can be said about the puppet Ustashi regime in Croatia. It was run by Ante Pavelic who used to keep eyeballs of those he had killed in a glass jar in his office and his death camps killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs. It is far from obvious that he was not supported by a majority of his own population, and it is correct that Bosnia was the center of the Titoist resistance to the German and Italian supported puppet regimes (Slovenia was directly ruled by the Germans, and Kosovo was directly ruled by the Italians).

[J Thomas]

Right after the war it wasn't clear to americans how much the russians had lost. We'd heard some propaganda about that, but it wasn't clear how much to believe. Similarly it wasn't clear how much to believe about the death camps. But our troops liberated some of the death camps. We didn't liberate the USSR.

Also, just looking at the numbers, the russians were beating 3 timas as many germans as we were. Their armor was a lot better than ours and their infantry was a lot better. If it had come to a fight, could they win? Well, probably our airforce was a lot better than theirs, maybe we could disrupt their supply too much? I dunno. And then there was the atom bomb, which we could bluff with, we could pretend we had another one.

If you believe they *could have* beaten us then it turns into a question whether they would have. Of course they wanted to stop fighting; so did we. If one way or another things hadn't worked out, would they have fought? Probably. Probably so would we. And if they had to fight, and if they could push us all the way back to Normandy and beyond, why would they stop sooner?

It would have been hard for Stalin to get them moving against us without a big provocation on our part. But looking at it, doesn't it seem like we were trying to make just barely less provocation than that?

[Jussi]

"So on the one hand its hard not to see how Finland wasn't an axis power in that she fought alongside Germany & the other German client states"

Drop the argument, Simon. If you are convinced of that, then you must also be convinced that the US, UK etc were 'clients of the USSR' because they fought alongside the Sovs so readily - and pampered them with supplies, which were also used against Finland, fyi.

One might also mention, that the west-ally attack on France in 1944 was supposed to be matched by a coordinated Sov attack on Germans - but it wasn't: the attack came from 250,000 Russians on Finland at Tali-Ihantala.

50 years after the event, It would be nice to know you understood this, because I think you don't - (YOU = anyone in the west)

[Max]

Findland is a perfect case of what the Soviet army could or could not do, in spite of Soviet generals "heroism".
Findland's resistence,changed a lot the mood in E-European cancelaries with regards to Soviet military capabilities.
Findland is also a perfect case of what kind of wars (agrression) had Stalin in mind before he got pray to Hitler.
Of course, the Russian did improve the production & everything during the war, from the pre war levels, but if you look at Paul Kennedy's old "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" you see the sheer superiority of western allies in war materials production at the end of the war, in comparison with the Axis or the Soviets. It is not clear for me where the tanks used by the Soviets at the Kursk battle(arguably one of the most important one of the Eastern front) came from?

[Barkley Rosser]

The tanks at Kursk came from Magnitogorsk overwhelmingly, the ultimate triumph of Stalinist command central planning, and why even now many people still bow to busts of the old guy, however undeserving.

Nobody knows what Stalin or anybody else would or might have done under different circumstances in 1945. Certainly there is plenty of evidence that both sides were completely exhausted and uninterested in further fighting, except for a few extreme ideologues. There were very few adjustments of borders relative to where the troops were sitting, with one of the largest being an American pull back from western Czechoslovakia (and in 1946 the Soviets pulled out of northern Iran).

Very likely Stalin was hoping for a takeover in at least France and Italy by their very strong, local Communist parties. This was blocked in Italy partly by OSS/CIA assistance to the Christian Democratic party. Of course the Italian CP was much more liberal than many and probably would have been pretty independent, like Tito, if they had come to power.

In France, the US and UK backed de Gaulle and provided Marshall Plan aid that blocked the French CP, this in spite of the long conflicts between de Gaulle and his allies. Efforts to support him included the fateful decision in March 1945 by FDR, one of his last, to support the French in reoccupying Indochina, something the OSS people on the ground did not learn of for six months while they continued to work with Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese invaders (Truman confirmed the decision later also).

That many thought Stalin might run to Paris partly reflects historical memory. When Napoleon's invasion of Russia failed, the Russians did run all the way there. The word "bistro" is of Russian origin, from a word meaning "quickly." The original bistros of Paris were started to serve Russian soldiers who wanted their drink and food "quickly."

[Simon]

>>Again a repetition of popular lies. When you write "Serbian Yugoslavia" you presumably mean the parts east of Drina...>"So on the one hand its hard not to see how Finland wasn't an axis power in that she fought alongside Germany & the other German client states"

Drop the argument, Simon. If you are convinced of that, then you must also be convinced that the US, UK etc were 'clients of the USSR' because they fought alongside the Sovs so readily - and pampered them with supplies, which were also used against Finland, fyi.<<

I'd call the US & UK "allies" rather than "clients" of the USSR only because they were all 3 big powers. But in political terms Finland wasn't a German client state like Hungary or Romania, I take your point. Maybe "client" is a bad word, I'm British and I occasionally refer to the UK as an American client state, but only to my American (and part-Finnish) wife...
I'm a big Finnophile and my point was that Finland was only defending itself against the USSR & doing what it had to do to survive as an independent country, which involved fighting on the side of an evil dictatorship - Nazi Germany. As you said, UK & USA did the exact same thing, fighting alongside another evil dictatorship - USSR.

[Simon]

>>Again a repetition of popular lies. When you write "Serbian Yugoslavia" you presumably mean the parts east of Drina...<<

This blog always seems to cut chunks out of my comments. :( I tried to say: Sorry, my bad, I should just have said Yugoslavia.

[RKKA]

"Drop the argument, Simon. If you are convinced of that, then you must also be convinced that the US, UK etc were 'clients of the USSR' because they fought alongside the Sovs so readily -"

In the case of the US, because Nazi Germany declared war on the US. In the case of the UK, because the Germans defied the British ultimatum of early September 1939.

"and pampered them with supplies, which were also used against Finland, fyi."

The defeat of Nazi Germany was an interest of the UK, and eventually of the US, because of German actions. If the Finnish government had wished to avoid UK supplies and eventually US supplies being used against them, then joining Germany in attacking the USSR was not well-advised.

"One might also mention, that the west-ally attack on France in 1944 was supposed to be matched by a coordinated Sov attack on Germans - but it wasn't:"

Yes it was. Operation Bagration for instance drew German forces from as far away as Holland.

"the attack came from 250,000 Russians on Finland at Tali-Ihantala."

Your use of the singular case here is incorrect. This attack was only one of many Soviet Army conducted in the summer of 1944, and far from the largest.

As far as the Germans are concerned, Soviet attacks in the summer of 1944 smashed Army Group Center and Army Group South Ukraine, and heavily defeated Army Group North and Army Group North Ukraine. The Germans diverted forces from the West in response. So I'd say that the Soviet Army supported Operation Overlord pretty well.

[save_the_rustbelt]

Does anyone but me wonder what could have happened if Hitler had been less crazy and more cunning? If he hadn't spread his forces so thin so quickly?

Awful to comtemplate.

Early in the war the Soviets had to fight a tough enemy with limited logistics. The courage of the people far outweighed the incompetence of the ledership - fortunate for the world.

[enfant terrible]

Barkley Rosser:
"Nothing good can be said about the puppet Ustashi regime in Croatia. It was run by Ante Pavelic who used to keep eyeballs of those he had killed in a glass jar in his office and his death camps killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Serbs. It is far from obvious that he was not supported by a majority of his own population, and it is correct that Bosnia was the center of the Titoist resistance to the German and Italian supported puppet regimes (Slovenia was directly ruled by the Germans, and Kosovo was directly ruled by the Italians)."

I agree that nothing good can be said about Ustashas (not "Ustashi"), and (obviously) that Bosnia was the center of resistance. But the middle of your post is mythical. Pavelich was a psychopath, but there is no evidence for the story of eyeballs in glass jars. "Hundreds of thousands" is an exaggeration whose source is Serb propaganda that itself led to genocide. And the support for the Ustashas even among the ethnic Croats never exceeded 20%. (Support for an independent state, among those naive enough to believe they had one, was a different matter. But few of those thought of Ustashas as the legitimate regime in that state.)

[andres]

It's a pain when reality prevents one from following a particular line of argument closely. But before I follow up on my previous post, I'm surprised nobody called cranium182 on the following bit of bilge worthy of the National Review:

"It is good for the world that the soviets lost so many people in WW2. How much more powerfull would they have been throughout the cold war if they had lost much less? Also take into account that birthrates were much higher in Russia in the past, so that every million people lost back then translates into considerably more than a million less people today.

I know all this is callous, but an American dominated world is much preferable to a Soviet dominated one. This statement holds true for everyone except ethnic Russians. Despite Communist propaganda, the Soviet project was a pure and simple attempt at Ethnic Russian expansion. Many soviet areas had many people deported to siberia and ethnic russians imported in thier place."

It is _not_ true for ethnic Russians. Perhaps someone would like to point out to hollowcranium the millions of Russians who died fighting for the Whites in the Russian civil war, or the thousands, possibly millions of honest Russian Bolsheviks who were killed or tortured in the purges. As for the Ukrainians, their only real difference with Russians is linguistic, so perhaps we can add their millions as well. Come to think about it, perhaps cranium182 could explain to us how Joseph Stalin, a Georgian, brainwashed himself into thinking that he was an Ethnic Russian(tm). Or could it be that the genocidal crackpot truly believed that he was creating a non-ethnic communist nation?

As for your first paragraph, you must be one of those Poles or Lithuanians who crawled out of whatever cave they were hiding before 1992 and are now an embarrassment to their proud country. Were even a large minority of Russians who died in 1941-45 faithful followers of communist ideology and willing to follow their governnment into any atrocity? Were the political officers that kept them fighting armed with pistols, or did they believe that Russians would willingly give their lives for communism or Russian chauvinism?

Perhaps you and yours would have been better off if Adolf had succeeded in wiping every Ethnic Russian(tm) off the face of the planet. I think that there are other blogs which will be more receptive to your genocidal fantasies, a******, but this isn't it.

[andres]

JK, I think, tries to stretch the point too far in arguing that the huge Soviet losses were the products of decades of bad (i.e., communist) policy. But a counterfactual that argues what would have happened if the Russian Revolution had led to a western-style democracy would not, in my opinion, have produced radically different results. Perhaps a democratic government would not have been caught totally flat-footed in June 1941 (then again, there is the Pearl Harbor example...) but in most other cases it's hard to see how a different government would have done much better in the face of Wehrmacht efficiency and Nazi brutality.

One thing I'll give JK: the Soviet regime did shoot a huge number of soldiers for (supposed) cowardice in the first year and a half of the war, not surprisingly because many Soviets, Russian or otherwise, were unwilling to die for communist ideology or Papa Stalin. Once the brutalities of the Nazi regime became clear, however, it became clear that all of the slavic countries, not just Russian, were fighting for their very survival and so the shootings became much less frequent (and also a lot of political officers were killed by their own men...)

In most other aspects though, the character of the regime made little difference. If all the officers who were killed in the purges had been spared, they would still have been immolated in the cauldron battles of 1941 caused by Stalin's awful deployment and his callous disregard for intelligence warnings. And Stalin's blunder did _not_ owe to some long-winded ideological theory about the tendency of capitalist countries to go to war with each other, but due to his paranoia that Britain, the U.S., and their accomplices in Germany and even the USSR were trying to push him into a (premature) war with Germany.

With regards to the tactical and technologica advantages of the Wehrmacht, JK states:

"Amongst other things, andres points to superior German hardware and technology. But this followed from the pre-war reliance of Soviet economic development on slave labour, terror and foreign technology (and even foreign technologists could be subjected to random terror)."

Err, no. If this had been truly the case, the Soviets would not have had the edge that they did on tank design and rocket launchers. The German technological edge owed simply to the inability of any government, democratic or communist, to obtain the huge number of skilled technicians needed to equip a modern army, out of the chaos of Revolution, Civil War, and war-induced famine which occurred in 1918-1921. Remember that before 1917, the bulk of Russia's population was illiterate whereas the vast majority of Germans had been literate, numerate, and mechanically trained for almost a century.

The communist government made huge efforts to catch up, but it was impossible to sustain both a massive industrialization drive _and_ a drive to technically train a large part of the population. The result was that the Soviet army had a serious shortage of soldiers capable of plotting artillery indirect fire, or of dismantling and maintaining complicated equipment such as radios. And the emergency conditions after June 1941 also meant that Soviet production of things like radios and range-finding lenses had to focus on quantity rather than quality. The argument that the Soviet regime had a contempt of technology as opposed to slave labor doesn't stand up given the writings of Marx, Lenin, and even Stalin. What does stand up is that the communist economic system created disincentives for individual factories to adopt new technologies, but that's another story.

[Jussi]

"If the Finnish government had wished to avoid UK supplies and eventually US supplies being used against them, then joining Germany in attacking the USSR was not well-advised"

Excuse me, but it was the USSR that attacked Finland in all cases. I'm disappointed you don't know this.

[Barkley Rosser]

enfant terrible,

Well, there are quite a few books out there, including some written while the Slovene-Croat Tito was still ruling Yugoslavia by non-Serbs, that make the claim about Pavelich and the eyeballs. But, I am not going to go digging through all of their original sources to discern if I can learn absolutely whether this was true or not. What is your source that this is a myth?

Regarding the number dead in the Ustasha camps, the number that I keep seeing repeatedly is 300,000, again from books not written by Serbs from when Tito was still running things. This does not look like "Serb propaganda" to me. Do you have a believable source with a more reliable number? Or is this some kind of Croat equivalent of those Turks who get all hot under the collar when Armenians complain about 1915?

I did not make a definite statement about how many Croats supported the Ustasha, a number that probably varied over time anyway. Where do you get your "not more than 20%"? I am unaware that there were reliable polls then, much less elections. If their support was so weak, then why in hell was their first post-Yugoslav leader, Franjo Tudjman, renaming squares in Zagreb after Ustasha politicians in the 1990s?

[RKKA]

""If the Finnish government had wished to avoid UK supplies and eventually US supplies being used against them, then joining Germany in attacking the USSR was not well-advised"

Excuse me, but it was the USSR that attacked Finland in all cases. I'm disappointed you don't know this."

In 1939, yes.

In 1941, no.

Finland was host to thousands of German troops in 1941, and German aircraft that had laid mines along the mouth of the Neva river near Leningrad landed on Finnish airbases to refuel. Late on 21 June, German minelayers that had been hiding among Finnish islands laid mined the Gulf of Finland. Finnish submarines laid mines in international and Soviet waters in the hours before Barbarossa, between Suursaari island and Estonian coast. ]

So Finland facilitated German attacks on 22 June 1941, and participated in some, before the Soviet Air Force bombing attacks on the 25th

[J]

"Finnish submarines laid mines in international and Soviet waters in the hours before Barbarossa, between Suursaari island and Estonian coast"

No. Soviet waters did not extend that far in 1941. Later, when they 'incorporated' Estonia, maybe, but not in 1941.

The Sovs were flung out of the League of Nations for violating the peace in 1939. And rightly so. Arguing for them against a nation that only sought to defend itself, and had no territorial ambitions, is incomprehensible, imho.

So excuse me for disagreeing.