How the Red Army Defeated Germany: The Three Alibis, by Dr. Jonathon House.
Posted Jan 22, 2021, 12:56 AM UTC
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Here's a longer video of the same talk with better images of his slides. https://youtu.be/I98P1AxQRUM
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Extreme weather and terrain
Shouldn’t the supposedly highly professional German staff officers have taken that into account. My scant understanding is that right from the beginning the Germans found conditions much more challenging than they had expected. The dust of summer caused vehicles problems, and then with the rains came the mud. Not sure if this is a myth, but I’ve read the Germans has winter uniforms and equipment for 41/42, they didn’t just have the transport to deliver it.
I’ve also read how significantly more effective and efficient the Soviet rail system was compared to the Germans. Evidently the Soviet were much better at supplying operational units. Rail was well organised and prioritised in a way the Germans never matched.
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At that time nobody could truly predict the whether, and it was surprisingly bad in 1941.
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Dr. Jonathon House presents the German-Soviet Eastern Front and explains its development while debunking Nazi Germany's three alibis:
- Hitler's incompetent interference,
- Extreme weather and terrain,
- The robotic, suicidal Soviet hordes.
In short, the main argument presented by the German generals is "if that amateur Hitler hadn't meddled so much, we would have won". As Dr. House shows Hitler wasn't always wrong and the generals weren't always right. Also, the Soviets achieve higher levels of sophistication and managed to answer the German maneuvers.
How is the third one even an alibi? "We lost because they mindlessly threw hordes of bodies at us" is not an argument that's viable after 1886.
Depressingly common amongst Wehraboos.
Ha. That'd a new term for me.
Why 1886? That's oddly specific
Maxim gun entered service in 1886
Even if it's true, you'd think they should be smart enough to counter such a simple tactic after 4 years of fighting.
I mean if you have enough men and materials then you can win any fight. It is just expensive.
Especially this! I can't emphasise this any further. The Soviet doctrine of deep battle was in many ways better and more coherent than the ad hoc German "blitzkrieg". Every level of military domain have been considered and the expectation on each domain are carefully formulated. Not to mention that the incorporation of maskirovka have made deep battle even far more sophisticated and effective.
It is indeed unfortunate that Cold War politics wrongfully tarnished the Red Army's reputation. And forever became the face of the annoying meme that keeps being perpetuated as the Red Army being Asiatic hordes throwing countless bodies to win and being sent to battle without weapons.
What was and is called "Blitzkrieg" was not considered in any way new by contemporary German staff officers, generals etc. Instead, it was simply considered to be the derivative of "Bewegungskrieg" (maneuver warfare) by incorporating technological and organizational innovations, and therefore called "moderner Bewegungskrieg".
A new myth.
The 'alibis' aren't actually all that wrong, House's revisionism probably does more to obscure the reality than clarify it. For all the 'Soviet sophistication' they still relied heavily on mass even in 1945 and were it not for the Wallies drawing off German reserves and smashing their production there is no way the Soviets could have won.
The Germans were geniuses because they massed panzer army sized schwerpunkt attacks against weakened Red Army gaps in their line, often avoiding all enemy if possible when to make their breakthroughs into the operational rear.
But the Red Army attacked in hordes and only won because numbers when they relied on mass and depth to attack weakened foot mobile German units to create breakthroughs.
Yeah, that's fair.
He says as he relentlessly strawmans.
Read more than Glantz and House: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23503953-how-the-war-was-won
Its not a strawman if you claim the alibi's are real, one of which is the horde/mass myth. Then I'm legitimately addressing the discussion. Which is stupid, because massing is a principle of war that the Germans especially promoted, meanwhile the fans bitch when their enemy do it.
Its like when 39-42 exploits they're celebrated for combined arms air/ground coordination, but suddenly 43-45 its not fair when they lose air superiority, the Allies are cheating. So full of excuses...
I just took a look at some reviews for this book, and I can't really say that I'm incredibly impressed by it. There is a grave temptation for historians trying to stake a claim in the historiography to declare that "A, B, and C, didn't win the war, it was X!" The problem with this book (which, according to its reviews, lays the credit for victory on the shipping and materiel side of the war while declaring that none of the land battles were decisive), is that it falls into that trap, and as a result does no justice to the true complexity of the situation.
Germany lost the war the minute they invaded the Soviet Union - between Russian and American industrial power, the Axis powers could never have won based on war materiel alone. But that wasn't the only thing that led to their downfall. They struck in 1939-1940 against powers whose armies were not ready to fight - the French and British (and Russian) armies objectively sucked. But from 1941 onwards, they got better and the Axis armies didn't. There's a reason that Germany stops winning major victories after the middle of 1941. By the end of 1943 they were outclassed by everybody else (and the Red Army was one of the best in the world by the end of 1944).
You also can't ignore the element of attrition. All major wars have attrition - in the case of WW2, the attrition was inflicted on the Eastern Front. The German offensives against Russia break the back of their army.
But you can't point to just one of these factors and say "this is why they won!" They all had a role in the Allied victory.
For a much more balanced look at the war, I would strongly recommend Gerhard Weinberg's A World at Arms - as far as I can tell, it's the gold standard for WW2 general scholarship.
Yeah, that's called concentration of forces. The goal during a war is to smash the enemy while keeping your casualties as low as may be, not to win a chivalrous 1 vs. 1 engagement on a frictionless infinite plane.
Its called steamroller tactics by the Soviets. You can mass at a point without using your men as cannon fodder, see the US and UK for Allied forces that did it without irresponsibly massacring their own men.
No shit, which is not what the Soviets did. Stalin demanded as much success as possible as quickly as possible nearly regardless of cost to control as much of Europe as possible before the peace deal.
The fuck kind of strawman statement is that? Obviously.
Hey maybe if you're doing to parrot the human waves myth you should get an account not named after an SS division, it looks less suspicious that way.