The Soviet Union is often seen through the lens of the myth of "Asiatic hordes". This myth was adapted by the Nazis as "Bolshevistic Hordes", but the principal existed prior to them. The Nazis propagated that the Soviet people are a lesser, near subhuman race, which they believed needed to be exterminated, and that the political system in place in the USSR was degenerate and weak. When they began experiencing fiercer resistance than they had expected they rolled out the old excuse of hordes, arguing that purely because of sheer numbers the Soviets were able to overwhelm the Germans by engulfing their lines with poorly trained troops in "human wave" offensives. This is completely false, and Soviet weaponry and doctrine was among the most advanced in the world at the time. There is however a kernel of truth that the Soviet Union did suffer an enormous and disproportionate number of military casualties, especially early in the war, but was mostly able to replace them. So what do you think? What role did the size of the Soviet population play?
The association of Russian armies with asiatic hordes dates back all the way to the 16th century, where in Polish propaganda Russians were portrayed as asiatic hordes vs knightly, european Polish armies . The rhetoric nearly died out with decline of Polish Lithuanian empire, but was picked up in 19th century with arrival of European racism and colonialism, portraying Slavs as a lesser race to be subdued by superior Europeans.
Thanks for posting this part. It's sad to see how in the 21st century on the internet, how much literal Nazi propaganda still gets spouted when discussing WW2 history
Honestly, the role of the Soviet's large population doesn't have that much to do with directly fighting. Like, sure, it helped to have a load more people you could send to fight, but it's as important (if not more so) to have a massive manpower pool to fuel your industry and logistics that drives the war effort.
I hear the phrase ' integrity of the unit' thrown around a few times in this episode. This is an academic way of putting it. To the average soldier, when your life literally relies on the man next to you to do their job properly, having an 18 year old boy with practically no training be that man, you'd better believe that you are going to be less confident going to war. Just my thoughts from a soldier's perspective, since this channel usually (rightly) focuses on more large scale warfare. Great episode from Indy and the crew.
why are surprised that a group of academic historians are using “academic” terms? honestly what verbiage would you, in your “soldiering experience” prefer?
heel 18 yr old untrained try a 20-22 year old with IQ of less then 70 Mac's boys For those of u here to young to know what I refer to I am Vietnam vet McNamara was Sec Def. He needed bodies to fight in that Dirty Little War. He was not getting enough b/c kids rather then go in Army where going to collage even a poor two yr one would do. Kids that would of other wise have not gone to collage but gone and gotten jobs. So he lowered the IQ for drafting thus did he sent over 15000 kids to die who other wise have been rejected I would rather have that kid be 18 with no training then have a kid 20-22 who had training but no brains on who to use it Note i call them all kids I do this b/c they all are U are not a full adult until around or after age 25 when brian has fully developed
That's why practice of refitting units on the frontline was abandoned. According to a lot of memoirs and lists of replacements, usual process was next: depleted units were moved to the rear and have "reserve" lable attached. You can hear Indy naming "reserve " units sometimes in regular episodes. These were being refitted with men and material and usually That's where recruits after basic training were assigned. There, under leadership of survived officers and soliders they trained in field whenever they could. Usually technical and disciplinar parts of training were told on basic courses, while advanced tactics and fortification constructions were told in reserve units. Than, when unit was needed, it was called back to frontline. But this system created difference in unit's effectiveness depending on time that it actually had to train recruits, and for example, in the battle of stalingrad, a lot of units moved to the line didn't have enough time to teach recruits, and had serious casualties in first days of combat
@@WorldWarTwo This would be a good basis for comparison with the US replacement system devised by Craig and Marshall and that emphasised indivual replacement. Stereotypically the USSR are often associated with quantity and the western allies are associated with quality, with quality and quantity put in a juxtaposition. However due to the fact that the US "only" mobilised a land force of around 100 division in favor quality, they failed to rotate their units which in turn led to combat fatigue and low integrity. Instead the USSR achieved quality through quantity as they could rotate and keep their units fresh and cohesive.
Makes sense given their circumstances. The Soviet union spend years industrializing the European front only to have to industrialize the Urals. The industry in Germany was well behind their lines, but long supply lines made their output useless. Later shortages started to set in as the attrition grounded equipment unless.
Big strong tanks aren't much against overwhelming air power and the Soviet efficiency of making more and more tanks. Soviet doctrine is extremely underrated and underanalyzed by historians. Although they did hide a lot of it until 1991.
@@kristianfischer9814 bit of a common myth, the Germans in WW2 had many successful weapons which weren’t overly complicated. STG-44, Me109, FW-190, STUGs, Hetzer…
it didn't really recover, otherwise it would not be using women soldiers and penal battalions and would not be using US and UK food fuel radios spare parts and even weapons.
Fun Fact: General Zhukov actually said that Stalin's chief military value was as a military economist. And given the large number of Soviet forces later in the war. There was some truth in that statement.
That was probably the main reason Stalin was given top leadership position in Soviet Union, cause all other Soviet communist leaders in 1920-s were impressed by his management including micro-management abilities no matter the task and no matter the cost. There is a letter from late 1920 where they asked him to share some power and his reply was - u know guys, I am really tied and would be happy to retied, so u can have all power you want. They reply - no, we are good, forget about it. These bastards were too lazy to do the real administrative job everyday. The irony is - in late 1930-s Stalin killed them all.
@@JJJBunney001 Yee, because the picture of Stalin (and H-ler btw) is distorted because of ideological issues... Plus if u are not fluent in Russian u are limited to very fragmented and simplified picture. Plus most people's brains hate "complex pictures", so I have no doubts most people will doubt what I said.
@@lexbor3511---I have no doubt Stalin said that. He was really manipulative. I heard that after causing his wife to kill herself in the 1930's. Stalin for the one and only time in his career offered to resign. But the communist governing body of Russia begged him not to leave.
@@lexbor3511---Yeah their's some truth in what you said about complex. But I wouldn't say that people's brains hate complex. I would say it's really that people can't handle it. Unless someone is holding their hand while explaining a complex situation. Like some child.
the Russian redeployment/moving of their factories to then out produce the Germans in 1942 is one of the most remarkable stories of the war. The population advantage of Russia is obvious the ability to adapt their technology advantage was not
Does not take mutch to out produce Germany since they did not fully mobilize their nation for war before they started to lose and by then it was too late and factories were bombarded by the allies Also Russian technology was poor but simply they had more respurces so they produced quantity instead of quality T34 for example was poor quality but had enough metal on it and was easy to fix so it worked German panthers and Tigers especially were way more advanced if we are talking about technology Overall not mutch advance was done in technology when making the T34
@@KLRJUNE A little clarification =) We left, if possible, only the boxes. Everything that could be dismantled - resources, metal structures, wires, etc. - was also taken out. The sites with communications were already laid for the factories before the war, but the buildings did not have time. Therefore, indeed, some of the factories were located in an "open field". And what to do? From June 1941 to February 1942 and in the spring-summer of 1942, 2,743 enterprises, including 1,523 large ones, were transported from the western and southern regions of the country to the east.
There was no population advantage on Soviet side. Sinde entire German Grossdeutsches Reich (Germany including occupied territories) 3 times higher population than entire Soviet Union.
It's interesting how the initial Soviet replacement system, mentioned at 7:13, was almost exactly the same as that of the U.S. army: send the replacements staight up to the front lines, and integrate them with their new unit while it was engaged in combat, the idea being to keep the unit at full strength. Just as the Soviets found, the American army found this did not work out so well. Often the NCO's who had to size the FNG's up and figure out where to assign them was himself newly promoted into the job and had relatively little leadership experience. The new guys got killed at disproportionately high rates because of their lack of experience and limited training. And it was hard for them to get the needed experience to survive, because the veterans generally wanted nothing to do with the newbies, and this is because A) you really don't want to get close to and come to like a guy who is likely to get killed, and B) the experienced guys didn't want to get killed themselves thanks to a mistake made by one of the greenhorns. The difference is that in the Red Army, this counterproductive practice was quickly recognized as bad policy and forbidden under orders from Stalin himself. The U.S. army didn't stop this practice _until after the Vietnam War._ I swear I sometimes wonder how we ever won most of the wars we've fought.
@M J The way the Germans worked (and ultimately the Soviets after they changed the policy) was better. Let the unit stay in combat, despite losses, until it has either dropped below a certain strength, or is due to come off the line anyway. Then integrate the replacements into the unit while it is resting and refitting. This gives the newbies a chance to integrate into the unit without being under the pressure of combat, it gave them a chance to undergo a little more training and learn how to function in that unit, it gave the veterans a chance to impart some of their experience, and it made the veterans more readily accept the replacements. It was a better policy in every way.
Two reasons I can think of for the US Army's approach: 1) Experience from the Civil War tought that reinforcing existing units with new recruits resulted in better knowledge transfer from veterans to newbies. Constantly forming new units instead led to the veteran units being severely understrength and the new units being much less effective. Of course, it helped that in the 19th century, battles were 1-3 day affairs so there was plenty of downtime for veterans and greenhorns to get to know each other. 2) When you're fighting 100-1000 km from home it's easy to rotate units back after hard fighting for rest, refit, and integrating new personnel. When you're fighting expeditionary wars across an ocean, transporting the entire unit back is much less practical. The reason it worked for the US is that casualty rates were much lower than for the Soviets, so the "veterans don't want to get emotionally attached to newbies" effect is much weaker.
With reference to your last point, mainly by entering them late and providing the 'coup de grace' after other nations had already done most of the heavy lifting. See the First and Second World Wars as perfect examples. Even the Pacific Campaign, despite the massive and disproportionate cover it gets, was actually a sideshow when compared to the war in China and the India/Burma campaigns; the Japanese had the vast majority of their resources concentrated in those theatres. The Korean war was a different affair but the US and UN forces were almost defeated in that, and the US army suffered its longest-ever retreat. With the exception of the Civil War and the War of Independence, one could argue that the rest weren't really 'wars' as such. This being due to the undeniable weakness of the opposing forces. See the conquest of the Western United States, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Mexican-American War, the various invasions of small Caribbean and Latin American countries, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the so-called 'War on Terror' etc. That is not to underplay the enormous material contributions that the US made that helped facilitate the victories gained by others; contributions without which the victories in the 'big wars' would have been virtually impossible.
@@hailexiao2770 "When you're fighting 100-1000 km from home it's easy to rotate units back after hard fighting for rest, refit, and integrating new personnel. When you're fighting expeditionary wars across an ocean, transporting the entire unit back is much less practical." They don't have to go all the way back home. Units come off the line and rotate to the rear where they're out of combat, but they're still in the theater, waiting to be put back into combat. It is during these phases that the replacements should be integrated, and in fact some division commanders recognized the problem and did just that, and instituted short, but effective training programs to try and teach the greenhorns something before they had to go into combat, and integrate them into the unit before. Units that did this saw much lower casualty rates among the replacements. But this was merely something that individual division or brigade or battalion commanders might do on their own initiative; it was not army policy (though it should have been).
@@Idcanymore510 That's frankly bullshit. The Pacific wasn't a sideshow when the USN beat the IJN hands down, while soloing the island hopping campaign, while also supporting the CBI theater logistically, while also building up their second strategic bombing campaign that ultimately ended the war. As for Europe, the US was the dominant land power on the Western Front suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties, while having to cross the Atlantic to get there, while also having the largest part of the European bombing campaign, and supporting the Soviets with supplies without which they would not have been able to counterattack. They did all this simultaneously, which is a kind of heavy lifting that no other nation has ever done. If the standard for "real" war is the Eastern Front of WW2, then only two countries have ever been in real war, and I hope it stays that way.
As miraculous as the resilience of the Russians was, what is still often overlooked big picture-wise, is that no other country could have absorbed the savagery and technical might of the German offensive. And, sure, the Americans performed their own miracle of industrial production, and they and the Brits (and the millions of their Commonwealth soldiers) fought bravely and tenaciously, including my own uncle, who never made it back, but if it weren't for the vastness of Russia and the courage of the Red Army, the Western Allies would never have been able to defeat the Wehrmacht that, alone of all the combatants, had been preparing for this war for years before they finally launched it. Hats off to the Russians, because without them, we would be living in very different world today.
Yes, without the Russians we would be living in a very different world - a world in which Germany was reduced to a radioactive wasteland beginning in 1945. Remember that the German atomic weapons program went nowhere (thanks in part to the failure of German scientists to figure out they could have used plentiful graphite as a neutron moderator rather than the scarce heavy water for which they had only one source - the vulnerable Vemork plant in occupied Norway). Defeating Germany without either atomic weapons or help from the USSR would have been exceedingly difficult for the USA, and even more difficult if Germany could have knocked the UK out of the war. But assuming the UK stays in, once we had nukes it would have been over fairly quickly. By 1946 the USA was making around 50 atomic bombs/year and could have just vaporized one German city or military base after another at its leisure until the Nazis surrendered.
@@danielmocsny5066 Absolutely correct. And, as you say, if it came down to American A-bombs defeating the Nazis, just imagine how many of them would have been needed, absent the Russian meat grinder that consumed/absorbed fully 80% of the Nazi war machine. American military planners were very pleasantly surprised that it only took two nuclearly decimated cities to bring about Hirohito's command decision to surrender (and that only after pitched gun battles in the Imperial Residence with the fanatical warhawks.) In Germany's case, as long as Hitler was alive, all of her cities would have been sacrificed, which we know for a surety, given his orders to Speer to suicide all of the Reich rather than capitulate.
@@danielmocsny5066 In this imaginary scenario by the 45th all of Europe would be in Nazi hand and the war was long over. There would not be any reason to bomb Germany in this case. Japan was done in 1945, it had no allies and was loosing the war on all fronts. Bombing Japan was unnecessary and was a crime agains humanity. I'm pretty sure this will be covered on this channel in due time.
People really underestimate the ability to field millions of men into the army, imagine how many administrative works need to be done to recruit, trained, organize and deploy millions of troops, not to mention, industrial capacity to equip these troops and infrstructure needed to transport millions of these men and their assets, in all of these sections, the soviet union are far far more successfull than their Imperial Russia predecesors and one of the most successful among the countries involved in ww2 only matched by USA
@@TotalTryFails The US did not have to produce while fighting off the biggest invasion in the history of warfare, all at the same time. Most of Soviet industrial resources were directly in the path of the invasion in the western, European part of the country.
My own grandmother was evacuated from Leningrad with two children in winter of 1942. She worked at still mill for 14 hours a day in the city that called Ekaterinburg now. I glad to say she won't be ashamed of her grand and grandgrand children. That's where manpower came from - our women.
I believe that the Soviet society was the first and perhaps the only one, where equality between the two sexes was achieved. In terms of rights and obligations, taking into account the peculiarities of the female sex. A great example was the female partisans in the rear, the female pilots of combat aircrafts, the first female astronaut, etc. All these, 70 and 80 years ago,
More specials yes please, Indy. I've been dusting off my old books and re-reading them once again; so good to know I'm not the only one who loves the topic, if not the real-life hell and misery it caused.
Brilliant episode, as always, guys. Can we expect in the future specials about the minor Axis armies with their exploits and the shortcomings that plagued them?
We won't offer any kind of event-based special coverage of them as all of that is in the regular series or in our Instagram. Specials on the logistics or numbers of minor Axid armies is a possibility but we don't have anything like that planned so far. Do you have any ideas on specific content?
@@WorldWarTwo thanks for answering. Since I imagine info on the minor Axis allies will be more scarce compared with the big players, I was thinking of general overviews of the armies and nations allied with Nazi Germany, combined with short bios of the leaders involved (Horty, Antonescu, King Michael, etc). As for release dates, it's all up to you, though my suggestion would be linking them to events in which those nations were involved: battles or switching sides in the war. Taking Romania as an example, a special on the nation's involvement in the war would fit nicely either near the time of Op Tidal Wave or during the 23rd August coup. Hope this helps and keep up the great work, guys!
Worth noting that small arms and crew weapon concentrations were very different between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Soviets had a huge number of mortars compared to the Germans, and a lot more submachine guns as well.
Yeah. The Germans may have pioneered the use of submachine guns, but it was the Soviets who utilized them to their fullest extent. It should be said that the Soviets massively outproduced everyone (even the US) when it comes to SMG production, especially the Germans.
It was really in 1942 that mass use of submachine-guns started in the Red Army. In 1941 the Red Army had used them much like the Germans did, issuing them to officers and NCOs for the most part.
@@stevekaczynski3793 Not to mention that Soviet SMG designs used prior to 1942 (so PPD-38 and PPD-40) weren't exactly optimal, too expensive and plagued by reliability issues. But when the PPSh-41 entered mass production by Spring of 1942, it allowed the Soviets to start issuing SMGs on wider scale than anyone else. By the end of 1942, around 1.5 million PPSh-41s were produced. In comparison, around 1.1 million MP38s and MP40s were produced in total, from 1938 to 1945.
Huge number of all kinds of tube artillery was omnipresent in Soviet Army. But it worth mentioning, that the actual expenditure of shells (especially of heavy calibres) was higher for Germans up until 1944. So, it can be said, that Soviets compensated their inefficiencies in logistics and mobility by spreading the tubes around in higher numbers. They never had resources to use large portion of their equipment to the same level as their opponent.
Somewhat like McArthur in the Philippines but even more so because he had 10 hours previous warning from the Pearl Harbour attack. Despite radar picking up Japanese aircraft when they attacked the two main American bases the aircraft were still on the ground, parked in rows.
@@danielmocsny5066 debatable. PTSD pushed many ex soldiers to borderline insanity. Sometimes even suicide. And that's without talking of the poverty and physical damages. A quick death is not so bad when compared to a life time of trauma and suffering.
A longstanding comment about military matters is "amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." From a logistical standpoint, the USSR absolutely crushed the Germans, finding ways to get supplies to forces and civilian populations in tough situations, recover from losses and train new personnel, and develop the tools they needed to win the day. My impression is that the Germans really haven't understood the degree that logistical problems behind the front (e.g. transport problems) matter a great deal for the front, and that's going to cost them dearly sooner or later.
I think the Germans understood logistics, but there wasn't much they could do about the situation once Barbarossa failed to achieve a major victory over the Soviets. They were already in desperate straits because of the economic blockades well before 1941 and making a huge, last-ditch effort to seize the resources they needed (mainly food and oil) before they lost their ability to conduct such a major operation was a calculated risk. Their only other options were to hold what they had and slowly wither away due to economic attrition, or try to make peace with the UK.
This is an excellent point indeed. If one watches the Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels from the first days of Barbarossa, they already depict men pushing trucks through dusty rutty roads-- and this was long before the autumn rains and freezing winter set in. The plan to beat the USSR in three months' time was based largely on the logistical limits of the food and fuel supply and shortage of reserves available. Soldiers were thus expected to loot the landscape they overran for food and other supplies and this is shown in those newsreels, as well, with Wehrmacht soldiers chasing and butchering pigs and chickens on farms all along the front.
Funny thing is, Germans understood it as well. They decided to ignore it, although not to such a crazy degree as the Japanese who decided to go to a war that, from purely logistical point of view, was impossible to win, and nearly impossible to manage.
sadly its still the case for most people here in the west. Cant imagine what the veterans feel about their efforts towards victory being reduced to "human waves" and "hitler incomptent"
@@hailexiao2770 Most TV documentaries are still based on old ideas, plus they have to show something and that something tends to be German wartime propaganda of endless German tanks and endless "Soviet hordes".
Hi Indy! Always enjoyed these specials, I feel they give a ton of context to the main series. I was wondering, since you already talked about the blitzkrieg, if you could also make a special on it’s Soviet counterpart aka. “Deep battle”, since I think it will really help to understand the strategic operation the red army undertook at the later stages of the war.
A Russian told me one time that in the west, that the Germans were fighting less than a kilometer from a rifle factory and despite this the factory continued production and that rifles were test fired from a second story window at the German lines.
There were cases where tank factories would turn out tanks, not even bother with the paint job, and send them out to the front line a couple of miles away.
Not really. By weight of shells fired, the Wehrmacht was out-shooting the Red Army until late 1944, which was one of the reasons why the Soviets had such monstrous casualties even in the offensive in 1943-44. Massing guns for a pre-planned bombardment before an attack could pour lots of firepower onto the Germans, but the Red Army lacked the ability to call that level of support at will, particularly to support breakthroughs, for pretty much the entire war.
This disparity is pretty much exemplified by the fact that the most common divisional gun (meaning integrated in a division) in powers other than soviets was somewhere round 100mm. Soviets meanwhile mostly used aforementioned 76mm ones. 105mm shell has SIGNIFICANTLY more explosives than a 76mm one. Which is why when you look at raw number of German vs Soviet guns, it's deceptive, since in weight of explosives thrown Germans tended to still outweight Soviets. This is FURTHER worsened by lack of training on Soviet side which led their artilery formations to either just target whole areas, or need to be in visual range and fire directly on target. Germans meanwhile could rely on targeted artilery strikes that support them as they move from the back. So if a German unit came under attack they could allways hunker down and call in artilery to inflict horrendous casualties on Soviets. Soviets meanwhile could only rely on artilery support if battery could literaly see the enemy. Of course this does not mean there were no sophisticated Soviet artilery units, but existence of those tended to depend on training and ability and drive of commanders and men of those units. Oh, ALSO, Soviets seems to have suffered from HEAVY shortages of key chemicals needed to produce explosives. Getting some of those from Allies is probably one of most important things Allies helped with. This is why also Soviet artilery batteries tended to have significantly fewer shells issued to them per day or per mission.
@@Blazo_Djurovic It was not number of guns or cal of guns that made the dif. it was lack of radios Soviet production of them was never big Without radios how can a front line unit call in arty Germans had lots of them so they could Now not as many as USA made and had In fact it was not until 44 when USA began sending large numbers of radios to Soviets that they could even begin to train the Arty people in the use of them along with front line troops
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE yet it`s worth mentioning that pretty much all the way up to 1945 the Soviet army was suffering much higher losses in almost every operation. They needed less Zhukovs, and more Tolbuchins.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE yes, the USSR actually fought quite few countries after invading them in agreement with the Molotov - Ribbentropp pact. Too bad Germans decided that`s not enough, eh? Also, if you knew a bit about American approach you`d have known how did they manage to keep their losses that low throughout the war. Soviets just did not care, their losses even in 1944 - 45 perios when they had overwhelming advantage were still very high.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE ah, I see, a troll or a special tankie. Therefore, just one question: if Poland was the best friend because of a non agression pact as the country did not like the idea of being attacked by the Germans and because we did the stupid thing of occupying a piece of Czechoslovakia then what about USSR? I mean, cooperation with Germany since 20s, helping to circumvent the Versailles treaty, signing pacts and then attacking several countries in agreement with Hitler.
Manchuria was the Red Army's Magnum Opus. Utilising both the massive industry built up through the War, and the Technological and Strategic advancements made through the fighting.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE You sound like a propagandist. 1 thing I never understood is why does the current Russian government continue protecting secret Soviet documents and promoting old Soviet propaganda? In every other part of the world, when a regime is overthrown, the new government does its utmost to discredit the past administration. That hasnt happened in Russia. The current Russian government owes the brutal Soviet dictatorship nothing. Why protect their secrets?
You guys are great. I really appreciate all of the different videos on different topics on WW2 that you all put out. I hope that the week by week and special videos series continue with the Vietnam war and all the wars until present day because all wars deserve to be recognized in such ways as Time Ghost portrays them. Keep up the good work!!!!
45mm was the most popular anti tank gun of the war. Soviet soldiers nicknamed it "Farewell Motherland" as losses in crew were tremendous. They would also get monetary bonuses for every German tank destroyed
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa zis 3 was for arty. and using this gun for AT was on the start just improvisation. for AT there was 45mm and for main AT plan was zis 2 57mm
@@fuksji They stopped producing the zis2 in such large numbers didn't they? Zis 3 had both artillery and AT roles during the war, with respective ammo loadouts.
I liked your objective and honest analysis without bias. There are no Nazi myths about winter, bad roads and other stuff that people come up with to justify the defeat of the Nazis.
Great episode, interesting and informative. The USSR did the impossible by recovering from the biggest sneak attack in history, a feat of arms still unequalled in modern history. I am still astounded by how they did this with sheer grit, determination and massive sacrifice against all the odds, absolutely amazing. Western political propaganda aside we here in the UK have a lot to thank the old Soviet Union for, that is often forgotten.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE Thanks for the great breakdown. Don't be mistaken, I wasn't trying to propagate the old myth of russians swarming the germans and winning merely because of superior numbers. I just found it amazing how they were able to basically reform the Red Army after it was shattered in a way that perhaps no other army could have recuperated from.
Everyone always focuses on the USA and it's ability to so quickly manufacture war goods like tanks planes heavy trucks but the USA was never invaded what the Soviets accomplished was truly amazing thanks for the great episode
Totalitarian regimes do have the big advantage, that they are responsible only to themselves. It was simple, victory or death. And they could mobilize at will, no catches whatsoever. If somebody resisted, he was an enemy of people and was punished harshly or even executed. Both Stalin and Hitler acted quite identically here.
Hockey Krack, In war all regimes become the same. placing foreign nationals in camps, suppressing news shooting looters etc yet another fallacy about the good and the bad guys. Some of what happened during the war is still classified, so the only way democracies can retain their balance is to not go to war. Seeing how many wars the USA has been involved in since WW2, and the suppression of news a la executing civilians exposed by Juan Assange, does even democracy actually exist, if it doesn't suit the powers that be.
During the 1930's the Detroit industrial architect Albert Kahn designed numerous factories in the Soviet Union for building agricultural equipment, specifically tractors. It doesn't take a huge leap to go from producing a tractor to a tank, so the Soviets rebuilt their tank units with American-designed factories and techniques.
It also doesn't take a huge leap to go from manufacturing almost anything to manufacturing almost anything else, as countless factories in the USA demonstrated by switching from whatever they made in peacetime to war production.
Thanks for the reality post. The Christie Suspension gave the T34 it's speed over difficult terrain. The Soviets were very intelligent in their procurement of American genius. However, the efforts of the Soviet Rocketeers at Voronezh in producing the KATYUSHKA was all Russian ingenuity and design.
@@philipambler3825 The Soviets also received a significant number of M4 Shermans and the 76mm variants. They were very popular with their crews, who afffectionately referred to them as "Emchas" because the spacious and comfortable interiors when compared to Russian tanks. They also liked the Thompson SMG's that came with every M4. When Emchas were knocked out they were often swarmed by Soviet soldiers who wanted the leather off of the tank seats because they made comfortable boots.
@@Conn30MtenorYes but it was never feasible for the USSR to build an american style tank. In 1931 Stalin remarked that they were 50-100 years behind the developed powers, and that they must make good of that distance in 10 years or be annihilated. They did, and of course, uncomfortable seats are a good tradeoff when the alternative is annihilation and genocide
There is an old anecdote about Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign. A few weeks later, he received a call from frightened officials from Eastern Siberia^ - We urgently need several trains with vodka!. The population has sober up and asks us ""Where did the Czar disappear to?"
Radio, newspapers and trains have been operating in these territories since the time of the Russian Civil War, long before World War II. And the revolution happened precisely with the help of the support of the proletarian class, including farmers. So yes, you are talking nonsense.
Excellent Video, the fact the soviets recovered from 1941 at all is astonishing. In hindsight we laugh at the Germans thinking they'd won the campaign in the first few weeks, but what other nation in history has lost MILLIONS of men in 6 months and recovered? There's no doubt that manpower advantage played an important role in the soviet unions war effort on the eastern front. However, it's worth remembering that when we look at population numbers for Germany vs Soviet union, we're often looking at the numbers pre-invasion. During 1941 large parts of the western soviet union (were most of the population live) were occupied, only a small proportion of the soviet population lived east of the Urals (You covered this to a degree). So not only did the soviets have to recover from losses in the millions in 1941, they had to do it without access to a significant part of their manpower resources. Lend lease helped to a degree, sharing some of the production burden to free up men for the forces, but Germany used slave labour to achieve a similar effect. It's also worth remembering that every day that soviet territory was occupied by the Germans, thousands and thousands were dying. So the Red Army knew it had to liberate that land, even if the blood cost was high, because not liberating it also had a blood cost. Whereas the British, Commonwealth and American forces never had that same urgency, it wasn't their families or countrymen/women under occupation, so it's natural they would prioritize casualty avoidance a lot more. Perhaps because of this, our perception in the west is of an unsophisticated army not caring about losses, but the real picture is more complex. SPOILER ALERT; Looking ahead, during 1943 and 1944, the liberation of the occupied parts of the soviet union enabled the Red Army to get replacements from these areas that it couldn't access during 1941/42. This helped mitigate the losses required to take back the land. In many cases partisans were essentially recruited straight into the red army, is possible in roles that would suit them (e.g. scouts, snipers etc). Also, between the Battle of Stalingrad and the end of the war the Red Army didn't actually massively increase in size. However, the number of Tanks, Artillery and Aircraft increased by factors of 2-3 times. By the end of the war a full HALF of industrial workers in the soviet union were women, they were nearing the end of manpower resources in many respects so better equipment had to substitute for manpower.
@@danielmocsny5066 One way to explain this is with one history a guy told me here on these comments. His whole family was squashed under the british empire about 1800, he was from those small islands that are just not powerfull enough to break free from the empire. Their sin was to fight against over tax, for civil representation and no right to bear arms. At the end, the fight was so bloody that they were allowed to police themselves. This dude was proud of his ancestors due their fight against injustice and for survival. He was proud that they were there when other people needed them. In his comment he was proud of his blood even though he have bad teeth and is ugly as hell, his history carries nothing to be ashamed of. Future generations will have nothing to be proud of, in this you are right about accomplishment. Maybe we'll rise against injustice again? May those old Gods help us.
Yeah but no. There are a lot of former Soviet territories where people were treated as dust all the time before, during, and after the war. Many of their descendants would probably spit you in the face if you'd call their great-grandfathers and -mothers "Soviet heroes". On the other hand many of others have nothing else to be proud of, so yes, they do feel an immense pride. As for me, my male Soviet ancestor was most probably executed in the early Soviet era presumably for being a pole and kulak. Information of others is scarce as it is for most ppl around - because of the war and state terror. Personal pride really wasn't a trait encouraged and cultivated amongst Soviet people. Proud people tend to be free and independent.
My Grandfather fought for the Soviets but as a Pole he was persecuted before and after the war. The Soviet Union was evil and its only redeeming trait is that they weren't as bad as the Germans, which they were allied with in the early phases of the war...
Nas mnogo! Jokes aside, the Soviet simplicity in production was something quite brilliant. Germans had a habit of not only overengineering their vehicles but also to have an incredible amount of specialized types which made production really complicated.
Also quality tended to simply vary since production was quite distributed between a WIDE variety of factories some of which never really did this type of job. This is probably best exemplified by some of late war big cats that had their frontal plates utterly shattered and broken on seams by HE shells which really should not have inflicted such catastrophic damage had the plate and welding been done per spec.
The idea of "quality over quantity" is often massively overrated by the public, because quality is associated with cool, luxurious and high-tech things and quantity with some form of useless garbage. In reality, whatever works best is best. It depends on the situation.
Here is where the under education of the Soviet population came in handy Designers knew they would have kids in these things who were lucky if they had 2nd grade ed let along have driven anything other then a horse so they know they had to keep thing simple and so they did Just another example of Slavic ingenuity
Thank you for another informative and very well written and presented video. I really enjoy learning new things about history no matter the time period. I am always happy when I see that The Time Ghost Army has produced another video which I am sure will be a great treat to watch.
11:36 - About impatience. The 1st Tank Army was launched into battle when the Kharkov operation was over. The first battle took place in July 1942. The Red Army went through a cycle from the need to create huge mechanized corps in 1940 to breaking up tank troops into separate tank brigades. Then the idea came again that massive tank formations were needed, only they were not called mechanized corps, but tank armies. It was precisely such a 1st Tank Army that the future Marshal Kirill Moskalenko was entrusted to command in June 1942.
A 1941/42 mechanized corps is the equavelent of like the 1940 tank division while tank armies were the 1940 mechanised corps comprising 2 mechanised(1940 tank) corps but with a lot more artillery trucks and SPG's. Tank brigades made up a mechanised corps. Even in 1940 a tank brigade was supposed to be under the command of a rifle corps. So the soviets wanted to like solve the germany VS france debate both ways pre war.( Tank brigades for infantry support and mechanised corps for giant spearhead attacks).
The shy ☺️ blush on that tie makes everything perfect. The yellowish golden green standing strong from the blue shirt. And the contrast between the vest with the big-sleeved shirt enhanced your manliness to perfection. My eyes. Approve. 4.8/5
Speaking of the Soviet tanks in 1941... well, the problems were a bit different than present. Yes, most of the force consisted of light tanks, such as those of the BT family, or T-26. However, they weren`t really that obsolete compared to Pz II or some of the older Pz III variants still in use, at least in terms of mobility, protection and firepower. The problem relied more on lack of training and coordination, hampered by the fact that most Soviet tanks did not have radio and relied on signal flags. That`s what made these big numbers of tanks much less effective in actual battles. Next, Soviet tanks were mostly either grouped in armoured corps, or dispersed between rifle divisions. Those that assisted rifle divisions were too few, and too badly coordinated to make any real difference. The armoured corps, on the other hand, had way too many tanks for their logistics to cope - on paper these units were extremely strong, but in reality they were slower to move and concentrate than German infantry divisions, which is pretty much the contradiction to what armoured units are about, that is speed and ability to move where needed to deal heavy blows to the enemy.
Thanks for that. I was going to make a similar comment on "obsolete and unreliable" Soviet light tanks before I saw yours. And you did not mention Pz 38 (t) that, together with Pz II and some smaller number of Pz I and Pz 35 (t) made nearly 50% of the Barbarossa tank force. These tanks were not superior to T-26 or, especially BT. I share a POV that a major cause of the Red Army defeat in 1941 was lack of motivation: the army primarily consisted of peasants who had been robbed of their property and made slave workers in the collective farms. They had seen Holodomor, repression and humiliation so they hated Communists and simply were not ready to sacrifice their lives for the regime. That resulted in mass desertion, abandoning positions and surrender (3,5 mln in 1941).
@@ivanpetrov6075 thank you! I did not want to get into all the details as they would have made the comment rather lenghty. You are correct and thanks for pointing out the morale issue. Indeed, there is a reason why Germans were often greeted as potential liberators and many Red Army soldiers were not exactly keen on fighting to the death for Stalin.
It would surely have been intresting to see how the BTs and the T-26 would have performed against in better hands. However I am also sure that these "better hands" would have produced tanks with better relaiability, optics, communications system, ergonomics, larger crews, armor that was not prone to spalling etc. Also I have read that expereince in the Spanish civil war showed that the T-26 could be penetrated by metal piercing MG34 bullets at some ranges. In Spain, the T-26 crews dealt with this by staying out of this range when engaging. However this might have worked better in the open Spanish terrain than in forrested Eastern European terrain?
@@henrik3291 actually, much of Eastern Europe is pretty flat, with only occasional woods here and there. Which means that the distance could work in the Soviet Tank`s favor. I`ve read about the experiences from Spain - it also mentioned that Pz I and II generally avoided T-26 as their 45mm guns could penetrate German armor at most ranges. Generally, in 1941 these tanks were past their prime, but not really that obsolete. I mean, we should also consider that German attacked with quite a few obsolete tank on their side. Also, these tanks, as mentioned, had decent guns and armor but the greatest hindrance were usually very bad observation systems and poor ergonomics in general. Lack of radio also meant terrible situational awareness and little chance of any actual coordination. In general, as you mentioned with better crews they would have performed better, but they would still require serious update on communication and observation to make it a real difference.
Incredible Episode, I wrote my master of history on the eastern front, and usually people get a lot of things wrong, details and minor stuff. It is very rare I watch a video on something like this, and cannot think of anything, I would say was wrong, misrepresented or lacking. As precise and it is concise, what a good job you guys!
@@Fred_the_1996 Almost certainly. It would have been transported through Iran. Quite a few of these tanks were in the path of Blau in the summer of 1942.
My great grandfather worked in the KGB for some time on Persian Gulf lend lease. Do you happen to know if there are any publically available databases out there that contain details about the program, names of officials who worked in it, etc?
@@ML-xp1kp Not aware of anything like that, and I sometimes trawl through Russian-language websites. There may well be documents in Russian archives. But on the Internet I have not seen anything like that.
A great video that makes an important point. That it’s more important to spend research into streamlining the production process than to make slightly improved versions of tanks that were harder to produce and maintain
I don’t think thats generally true. In the beginning of the war Germany did really well with its armament in breadth, which allowed its army to quickly become effective and to overwhelm its enemies in the first two years of the war. This was of course a strategy that depended on quick and decisive wars, which couldn’t be archived against the Soviet Union. Only then, after it managed to hold off the Germans in its first offensives, did the Soviet strategy of armament in depth really pay off. It all depends on the length and attrition of the war.
@UCBXnt-F-SeIzD6vHoQf7j_Q i love how dumb fuck westerners think the Soviet people had to be forced to fight when its the Germans who forced them to fight
@@paulritchie5868Retreat, and you give up Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, which means defeat. Then you get executed by the Germans. Fighting was the only option
Its nice to see the Soviet army explored from this perspective. Most people don't know that they had a manpower shortage pretty close to Germany during the war
Hope @PotentialHistory is watching this video and nodding along. The more we learn about the Eastern Front from the newly opened soviet archives, the more we realize how badly Germany underestimated the USSR. And the harder it get's for Wermacht apologists to tapdance around their chosen side's atrocities in Eastern Europe.
This is one of your best videos. The soviet hability to mobilize the entire country in the way they did is probably the biggest reason for allied victory in ww2.
@@MrHockeycrack Largely? The aid from US/UK was significant, but far from "largely", aside some specific areas. The USSR production of armaments was high on its own.
Why did you remove the nationalist China flag ? First, I am to thank you for the great production and I m following every episodes, learning many things on ww2 As a Frenchman, I appreciate you put the free french flag, and like many other armies and troops from occupied countries, Poland, tchecosslovakia, Norway and many others, they provided a significant contribution against the axis forces to fight for freedom But Nationalist China was a major country fighting hard for many years in a war against imperialistic Japan,, and unfortunately there are less known information about this theatre of operation and they are like the unsung hero… In respect of their contribution, would appreciate to see their flag back, so people don t forget that during all these years of conflict, even if there s no coverage of action, China was still fighting.
Soviet tanks in 1941, even the "old" tanks like the BT were quite capable. It was the few experimental super-heavy T-35s which just plain sucked. In the main soviet tanks even the "outdated" ones were as capable in terms of guns and armor as German tanks albeit lacking radios or good optics or effective leadership.
The US Army in Vietnam had "shake 'n bake" NCOs who went through an accelerated training programme. They were somewhat looked down on but seem to have been at least as good as the other NCOs. A good many "shake 'n bakes" were killed in action.
@@stevekaczynski3793 Shake and Bake (also called Easy Six because top graduates became SSGT) appealed to Collège graduate draftees as it did not add to their 2 year commitment like going to OCS.
So interesting video of Red Army 1942. The simplistic nature of Soviet armor was brilliant vs the German tanks and armor which needed a lot of maintenance,constantly. I am reading along with David Glantz, When Titans Clashed. Strategy and tactics in eastern theater.
@@michaelwier1222 in this context class means year of birth, not year of graduation. those born in 1922 and thus to be recruited no earlier than e.g. 1937. Germany uses this same concept. The classes of 1922-1924 basically had no children and all died on the front.
Logistics for the Soviets was a nightmare when reorganising their factories etc. As the USSR was mainly building tanks for their army, the lend lease Studebaker trucks from the USA helped greatly for transport. It's also important to note that Red Army soldiers weren't paid during war time & had to live of the land or pillage. I hope you also cover the Red Air Force as they had huge problems with training pilots & crews as well as aircraft production. Another great episode.
I think getting paid was least of Red Army servicemen's thinking given that country is attacked. It would have been considered duty to serve and familly and solder should have been provided by the state with things they need. Red Army did have field kitchens and like which was supposed to cook for the troops, so food should not have been an issue. Of course anyone would preffer to snag some chicken or some eggs than eat whatever mass produced gruel field kitchen made. Bigger problem for RA men will be that they have just lost their breadbasket regions, so now all food they could rely on would need to come from the Central Asia and like which is less fertile and developed than Ukraine and Don regions were. Also when RA starts advancing support elements would tend to lagg behind, and advancing elements tended to carry little more than fuel for viehicles and ammunition in orther to be able to advance quicker since they had learned a hard lesson that they must not allow time for Germans to recover.
@@Blazo_Djurovic I totally agree with you & I understand why the Red Army wasn't paid during the war. The USSR was on total war economy footing. The devastation to industry and farmlands were horrendous & that there were famines in the USSR during and after the Great Patriotic War. I did read in his book, Khrushchev Remembers, that Khrushchev said without Spam we wouldn't have been able to feed our army. My grandfather who was in the Royal Navy was on the Arctic Convoys (also on Convoy PQ-17) said that the people in Mumansk & Archangel were always starving so whatever they had on the ships, they gave foodstuff to the people. Whether this was traded on the blackmarket is another story, but they did what they could at the time. It was a time of upheaval for the USSR, but they triumphed in the end.
My great-grandfather was an aircraft maintenance technician in the officer rank, received a salary throughout the war, but he was an officer in the pre-war period, not a wartime mobilized officer.
It's quite surprising that the Soviets realized that constantly feeding men into units at the front was a bad idea early on and changed it while the US kept doing so until the end of the war.
It depends on how many new people are added. A few at a time can be trained to work with the unit but a very large replacement group would be like herding cats. The correct procedure would be to replace the unit and re fit it in the rear and allow the new people to work with the older people.
Let's also be fair that Allies generally employed tactics to preserve as many friendly lives as possible, where the Soviets prioritised quick victories through rapid exploitation. There's a quote somewhere from a German officer at Normandy that the Americans used artillery generously, but if it were the Soviets they would have attacked already. I might be misquoting, I'm sure there's someone out there with a source.
It's my understanding that, as envisioned, the US replacement system was supposed to feed in replacements when units were in the rear. The system was abused by commanders at the front through the autumn of '44, but when word got to the top brass they put a stop to the abuse. Through the winter of '45 it worked mostly as it was supposed to work.
The US replacement policy was indeed criticised. Replacements were treated as lost souls whose lack of combat skills risked getting the more experienced soldiers killed, wounded or captured, and the new guys were often treated as pariahs.
You can read what happened to them on wikipedia actually. Just look up Barrikady, Krasnyi Oktyabr steel plant, and volgograd tractor plant. They were all rebuilt and up and running again.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE Хорошо конечно, но как твой комментарий относится к вышенаписанной похвале служившим советским женщинам? Спамя это всюду не к месту ты лишь понижаешь доверие людей к приведённым данным, даже если они правдивы.. такова психология. И за тебя стыдно..
The belief that history is a video game where the victor has a higher KD is precisely why they’ll never hold power again. The modern fascist is both historically and actually illiterate.
It is important to mention that a lot of people in peace time USSR received basic training with weapons and military drills: Ready for Labour and Defence of the USSR abbreviated as GTO was the All-Union physical culture training programme, introduced in the USSR in 1931.
It’s fairly easy to explain how. The Soviet military was very well equipped for the army it was designed to be. Contrary to the popular belief of 2 men per rifle there was actually an insane overproduction of mosins both during and prior to the patriotic war. (Roughly 54 million Nagant pattern rifles). Soviet artillery while having simpler and less accurate methods of spotting beat the Germans by weight of shell and number of guns. Soviet tanks while criminally crude until 1942 were still very useful as defensive strongpoints or support weapons. And all this is aided by lend lease which provided both raw materials and equipment for just about anything one could ask for. The Soviet Union also maintained a sizable amount of military reservists who were conscripted in years before the war for routine service or use in wars against Finland. While not “elite” in any stretch of the imagination they were capable enough for the red army’s needs. Lastly one cannot ignore that this was a fight for survival. The fascists would not stop until every single citizen of the USSR was either enslaved or dead. They did not have the luxury of the western powers.
I like that you have such a great set . Yiu should go a little further and put on a rageddy old ww 2 combat uniform . Just a suggestion . Well done . good content well presented .
When I first read the title, I though Indy made a special about the long and coslty Battle of Rzhev, known as "The Rzhev Meatgrinder" but HEY I'll take a good tale about a nation of millions, who got attacked, suffered casualties beyond anything the world had ever seen.......and still manage to hold out, recover, learned from past mistakes and forge a Soviet Steamroller of nightmarish proportions :)
@@mihadeth I can absolutely see why, given the amount of casualties originated from a variaty of both military decisions, scale of attrition and mobile battles and the utter hatred between german and russian soldiers on the field
@@WorldWarTwo Holly smokes! Thanks for the information guys. I should've known it was being covered there, given I havent heard Indy speaking about the Soviet Rzhev Summer offensive during the weekly episodes of July and September :)
A Red Army division could be anything between 4,000 and 10,000 men and sometimes also women, although the higher figure was nearer the intended establishment strength. In heavy fighting a division could quickly be reduced to a few hundred effectives.
Sometimes "divisions" is actually lumped together Brigades, Independent Regiments, and Fortified Sectors(made up of Independent Battalions), as well a Partisan and Militia units(varying strength).
Thank you for making this video. It is a very helpful corrective to the German-eye-view that you tend to take in the weekly episodes. We hear *a lot* more about German decision making and the Soviets turn up as an adversary, a force of nature like the weather or geographical conditions. Of course, that isn't the case, as you make very clear here. But I would really like to see more of a balance of agency in the weekly videos too. Both have really interesting human stories to tell.
That’s what I think most accounts lack, the Soviets are portrayed as a monolith or as almost inhuman. They were just as much flesh and bone and their adversaries, such is the tragedy of war. Never forget.
Lack of Russian sources unfortunately due to the difficulty in getting access to their archives under communism. There still is a lot but hardly anything compared to German, American, British perspectives etc
@@cshaffrey3438 I would say that the problem is not in the inaccessibility of Russian sources, the problem is that only a small part of them are translated into English.
Great episode. Not long ago, I saw a short video about Siberian units, who were the most successful in piercing German defences. Is it possible to have an episode dedicated to them? Thank you.
It's shocking how the Soviets are viewed contemporaneously. They went from one of the weakest countries in Europe that couldn't even muster national support against Japan to the being a total powerhouse. Their living conditions boomed, education shot up, were the first to have men, women and black people in space. They fought in the worst of it for almost the entire duration of the war. Then marched on Berlin beat the Nazis and Wehrmacht. Yet, America declared themselves the sole winner, pardoned Nazi war criminals to build NASA, divided Germany for reparation's and attempted to exclude the Soviets from those reparation's and then conspired with Churchill to invade Russia. Yet, Americans are good and we should be happy with these benevolent overlords
As much as Americans deserve to be criticized, they did not sign the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with the Nazis, effectively expanding their own empires through diplomacy. At the onset of the war, the Soviets got caught playing imperial games with a depleted and unfit army. I'm pretty sure the Poles still don't celebrate Russian sacrifice in WW2. But I digress, the Soviets did carry most of the load and had most of the sacrifices in the war. For that, we must recognize it. Yet, we must also keep in mind that the Soviets, like the Americans, weren't acting for the good of humanity, for good vs evil. And that is why I refrain from throwing flowers on either of them.
Can we please get a chronological (with specials) playlist Indy? Like with your last project? I loved listening to the old one as a “podcast” if you will.
@Brink, As an addition to my other response, we have two other playlists. One is called "For the Folks at Home" and it is all of our videos in chronological order, but with the graphic content removed. The other is called "War Is Hell" and it is JUST the weekly WW2 videos and Sparty's War Against Humanity videos. It's Sparty's personal recommendation if you want a playlist that gives you the most real experience of the war. I put these all together specifically because, like you, I LOVED that playlist from The Great War, and I knew the audience would love one here. Thus, please do enjoy it, since I made is specifically for viewers like you! - T.J.
Really interesting video. It’s impressive how the Soviets were able to do the enormous restructuring of their army logistics whilst losing population and facilities to the Germans and also holding off the German army.
It was the then 200-million-population and its cruelly forced mass power. And waste landscapes to retreat with "scorched earth". King Karl XII of Sweden and Emperor Napoleon could have some interesting stories about that. So, massively more cannon fodder for generalissimus J. V. Stalin. One million more or less to the meat grinder was just secondary, didn't make much difference for the Big Boss in Kremlin main office. That regime did not care a bit about losses, how massive they ever were. The same goes to Nazis, but even they with their arrogant madness had to sort of try to save their more limited reserves and resources. Whereas western Allied Leaders had to listen to and respect their people's opinions much more carefully. You know, some more boys lost and there was quickly huge noise in media, especially in the USA. That is the big difference between totalitarian and democratic systems.
Quick technical question for a channel with one of the highest production values on RUclips: Do you colorize your own clips? Has colorization become that easy? It really adds the high visual quality of your terrific videos...
The Germans captured and made prisoners about 6.5 million Russians. Less than half survived. In the Pacific theatre, after the initial Japanese victories, virtually every battle was fought to the death, without any thoughts of surrender by either side. The Iwo Jima atoll is about one quarter the size of DFW air, but 27,000 men died there. My dad and uncle were both WWII disables veterans who fought in the Pacific [ RIP ]. I was with the Air Cav in Vietnam. 'Surrender' was not a word in our vocabularies.
What is your point? French and poles had even higher numbers of POW ratio. Pacific was different - japanese soldiers preferred to die than to surrender - soviets noticed that as well during Khalkhin-Gol campaign. Also how many americans became POWs after capture of Phllipines?
@@spqr1945 Read my post more carefully. I stated after the initial Japanese victories. No surrender was the norm in the Pacific because the Japanese believed that surrender was weak and disgusting [ that's why Japanese POW's were treated so horribly ], and NOT to surrender. The allies stopped surrendering when they discovered, very quickly, just how disgustingly the Japanese treated their POW's. Some Japanese generals were hanged for war crimes.
@@perihelion7798 after initial german victories Soviets discover, how Germans treated their POW and later in war mass surrenders were rare. German soldiers were brainwashed by propaganda and didn't surrender in large numbers until later in war.
@@perihelion7798 - Lots of American pilots surrendered to Japanese forces after being shot down. What other option did they have? To fight it out with their M1911 pistol and two clips?
@@danielmocsny5066 In the case of downed pilots, surrender was an option. Not so for the groundpounders -- they were just killed, even if wounded in the Pacific theater.
"The best, is enemy of good enough!" Old Russian saying! Voltaire, actually.... After Russian general got Stalin, to stop playing general, and focused him on supply and logistics. General started to make head way. Zhukov, genius general, knew how to work with Stalin, talked about reading his moods. He beat the Germans, after whipping the Japanese.
After the Weapon Games also marshall Zhukov became "unpopular" and was ousted and nearly thrown to Gulag, IIRC? Stalin was extremely suspicious and had always fear of rivals. So much for reading "moods" of Stalin. Zhukov was much less useful after V-Day.
True fact: The Red Army had 11 million men in its organization in April 1945, it's peak strength in ww2 Also a True Fact: Those 11 million men of the Red Army represented the last of the USSRs surplus manpower. If the war hadn't ended in May 1945, the Red Army would have slowly hemorrhaged strength and numbers over the next year, and would have resorted to cannibalizing partially intact units to keep its strength.
From "Life's Picture History of WWII", In 1941, Soviet tanks were weak, but Russia sacrificed enough of the strong men inside to finally stop the German advance. Thanks for the video.
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The Soviet Union is often seen through the lens of the myth of "Asiatic hordes". This myth was adapted by the Nazis as "Bolshevistic Hordes", but the principal existed prior to them. The Nazis propagated that the Soviet people are a lesser, near subhuman race, which they believed needed to be exterminated, and that the political system in place in the USSR was degenerate and weak. When they began experiencing fiercer resistance than they had expected they rolled out the old excuse of hordes, arguing that purely because of sheer numbers the Soviets were able to overwhelm the Germans by engulfing their lines with poorly trained troops in "human wave" offensives.
This is completely false, and Soviet weaponry and doctrine was among the most advanced in the world at the time. There is however a kernel of truth that the Soviet Union did suffer an enormous and disproportionate number of military casualties, especially early in the war, but was mostly able to replace them.
So what do you think? What role did the size of the Soviet population play?
The association of Russian armies with asiatic hordes dates back all the way to the 16th century, where in Polish propaganda Russians were portrayed as asiatic hordes vs knightly, european Polish armies . The rhetoric nearly died out with decline of Polish Lithuanian empire, but was picked up in 19th century with arrival of European racism and colonialism, portraying Slavs as a lesser race to be subdued by superior Europeans.
Thanks for posting this part. It's sad to see how in the 21st century on the internet, how much literal Nazi propaganda still gets spouted when discussing WW2 history
undertrained?
often in fact: untrained.
Honestly, the role of the Soviet's large population doesn't have that much to do with directly fighting. Like, sure, it helped to have a load more people you could send to fight, but it's as important (if not more so) to have a massive manpower pool to fuel your industry and logistics that drives the war effort.
Imagine being so bad at fighting that you lose to people running at you with no guns.
I hear the phrase ' integrity of the unit' thrown around a few times in this episode. This is an academic way of putting it. To the average soldier, when your life literally relies on the man next to you to do their job properly, having an 18 year old boy with practically no training be that man, you'd better believe that you are going to be less confident going to war. Just my thoughts from a soldier's perspective, since this channel usually (rightly) focuses on more large scale warfare. Great episode from Indy and the crew.
@Matthew Thank you for watching and for giving your perspective here.
why are surprised that a group of academic historians are using “academic” terms? honestly what verbiage would you, in your “soldiering experience” prefer?
heel 18 yr old untrained try a 20-22 year old with IQ of less then 70
Mac's boys
For those of u here to young to know what I refer to I am Vietnam vet
McNamara was Sec Def. He needed bodies to fight in that Dirty Little War. He was not getting enough b/c kids rather then go in Army where going to collage even a poor two yr one would do. Kids that would of other wise have not gone to collage but gone and gotten jobs. So he lowered the IQ for drafting thus did he sent over 15000 kids to die who other wise have been rejected
I would rather have that kid be 18 with no training then have a kid 20-22 who had training but no brains on who to use it
Note i call them all kids I do this b/c they all are U are not a full adult until around or after age 25 when brian has fully developed
That's why practice of refitting units on the frontline was abandoned. According to a lot of memoirs and lists of replacements, usual process was next: depleted units were moved to the rear and have "reserve" lable attached. You can hear Indy naming "reserve " units sometimes in regular episodes. These were being refitted with men and material and usually That's where recruits after basic training were assigned. There, under leadership of survived officers and soliders they trained in field whenever they could. Usually technical and disciplinar parts of training were told on basic courses, while advanced tactics and fortification constructions were told in reserve units. Than, when unit was needed, it was called back to frontline. But this system created difference in unit's effectiveness depending on time that it actually had to train recruits, and for example, in the battle of stalingrad, a lot of units moved to the line didn't have enough time to teach recruits, and had serious casualties in first days of combat
@@WorldWarTwo
This would be a good basis for comparison with the US replacement system devised by Craig and Marshall and that emphasised indivual replacement. Stereotypically the USSR are often associated with quantity and the western allies are associated with quality, with quality and quantity put in a juxtaposition. However due to the fact that the US "only" mobilised a land force of around 100 division in favor quality, they failed to rotate their units which in turn led to combat fatigue and low integrity. Instead the USSR achieved quality through quantity as they could rotate and keep their units fresh and cohesive.
It's fascinating seeing that the German and Soviet tank manufacturing doctrines were essentially exact opposites of each other.
Makes sense given their circumstances. The Soviet union spend years industrializing the European front only to have to industrialize the Urals. The industry in Germany was well behind their lines, but long supply lines made their output useless. Later shortages started to set in as the attrition grounded equipment unless.
Big strong tanks aren't much against overwhelming air power and the Soviet efficiency of making more and more tanks. Soviet doctrine is extremely underrated and underanalyzed by historians. Although they did hide a lot of it until 1991.
Germany over-engineered every weapons system they ever made.
@@kristianfischer9814 bit of a common myth, the Germans in WW2 had many successful weapons which weren’t overly complicated. STG-44, Me109, FW-190, STUGs, Hetzer…
@@kristianfischer9814 the success of the MG42 says otherwise its still in use today
It is miraculous how the Red Army managed to recover after the massive losses of 1941-1942.
Seriously. Pretty stunning.
Even after enormous losses after battle of Dnieper or battle of Kursk
Your defeatist behavior is detrimental to the motherland
A lot of cannon fodder and space
it didn't really recover, otherwise it would not be using women soldiers and penal battalions and would not be using US and UK food fuel radios spare parts and even weapons.
Fun Fact: General Zhukov actually said that Stalin's chief military value was as a military economist. And given the large number of Soviet forces later in the war. There was some truth in that statement.
That was probably the main reason Stalin was given top leadership position in Soviet Union, cause all other Soviet communist leaders in 1920-s were impressed by his management including micro-management abilities no matter the task and no matter the cost.
There is a letter from late 1920 where they asked him to share some power and his reply was - u know guys, I am really tied and would be happy to retied, so u can have all power you want. They reply - no, we are good, forget about it. These bastards were too lazy to do the real administrative job everyday. The irony is - in late 1930-s Stalin killed them all.
@@lexbor3511 Somehow I doubt that.
@@JJJBunney001 Yee, because the picture of Stalin (and H-ler btw) is distorted because of ideological issues... Plus if u are not fluent in Russian u are limited to very fragmented and simplified picture. Plus most people's brains hate "complex pictures", so I have no doubts most people will doubt what I said.
@@lexbor3511---I have no doubt Stalin said that. He was really manipulative. I heard that after causing his wife to kill herself in the 1930's. Stalin for the one and only time in his career offered to resign. But the communist governing body of Russia begged him not to leave.
@@lexbor3511---Yeah their's some truth in what you said about complex. But I wouldn't say that people's brains hate complex. I would say it's really that people can't handle it. Unless someone is holding their hand while explaining a complex situation. Like some child.
the Russian redeployment/moving of their factories to then out produce the Germans in 1942 is one of the most remarkable stories of the war. The population advantage of Russia is obvious the ability to adapt their technology advantage was not
Does not take mutch to out produce Germany since they did not fully mobilize their nation for war before they started to lose and by then it was too late and factories were bombarded by the allies
Also Russian technology was poor but simply they had more respurces so they produced quantity instead of quality
T34 for example was poor quality but had enough metal on it and was easy to fix so it worked
German panthers and Tigers especially were way more advanced if we are talking about technology
Overall not mutch advance was done in technology when making the T34
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE k
@@KLRJUNE
A little clarification =) We left, if possible, only the boxes. Everything that could be dismantled - resources, metal structures, wires, etc. - was also taken out. The sites with communications were already laid for the factories before the war, but the buildings did not have time. Therefore, indeed, some of the factories were located in an "open field". And what to do? From June 1941 to February 1942 and in the spring-summer of 1942, 2,743 enterprises, including 1,523 large ones, were transported from the western and southern regions of the country to the east.
@@KLRJUNE So different people have written about it. The economic side of war is a broad topic.
There was no population advantage on Soviet side. Sinde entire German Grossdeutsches Reich (Germany including occupied territories) 3 times higher population than entire Soviet Union.
It's interesting how the initial Soviet replacement system, mentioned at 7:13, was almost exactly the same as that of the U.S. army: send the replacements staight up to the front lines, and integrate them with their new unit while it was engaged in combat, the idea being to keep the unit at full strength. Just as the Soviets found, the American army found this did not work out so well. Often the NCO's who had to size the FNG's up and figure out where to assign them was himself newly promoted into the job and had relatively little leadership experience. The new guys got killed at disproportionately high rates because of their lack of experience and limited training. And it was hard for them to get the needed experience to survive, because the veterans generally wanted nothing to do with the newbies, and this is because A) you really don't want to get close to and come to like a guy who is likely to get killed, and B) the experienced guys didn't want to get killed themselves thanks to a mistake made by one of the greenhorns.
The difference is that in the Red Army, this counterproductive practice was quickly recognized as bad policy and forbidden under orders from Stalin himself. The U.S. army didn't stop this practice _until after the Vietnam War._ I swear I sometimes wonder how we ever won most of the wars we've fought.
@M J The way the Germans worked (and ultimately the Soviets after they changed the policy) was better. Let the unit stay in combat, despite losses, until it has either dropped below a certain strength, or is due to come off the line anyway. Then integrate the replacements into the unit while it is resting and refitting. This gives the newbies a chance to integrate into the unit without being under the pressure of combat, it gave them a chance to undergo a little more training and learn how to function in that unit, it gave the veterans a chance to impart some of their experience, and it made the veterans more readily accept the replacements. It was a better policy in every way.
Two reasons I can think of for the US Army's approach:
1) Experience from the Civil War tought that reinforcing existing units with new recruits resulted in better knowledge transfer from veterans to newbies. Constantly forming new units instead led to the veteran units being severely understrength and the new units being much less effective. Of course, it helped that in the 19th century, battles were 1-3 day affairs so there was plenty of downtime for veterans and greenhorns to get to know each other.
2) When you're fighting 100-1000 km from home it's easy to rotate units back after hard fighting for rest, refit, and integrating new personnel. When you're fighting expeditionary wars across an ocean, transporting the entire unit back is much less practical.
The reason it worked for the US is that casualty rates were much lower than for the Soviets, so the "veterans don't want to get emotionally attached to newbies" effect is much weaker.
With reference to your last point, mainly by entering them late and providing the 'coup de grace' after other nations had already done most of the heavy lifting. See the First and Second World Wars as perfect examples. Even the Pacific Campaign, despite the massive and disproportionate cover it gets, was actually a sideshow when compared to the war in China and the India/Burma campaigns; the Japanese had the vast majority of their resources concentrated in those theatres. The Korean war was a different affair but the US and UN forces were almost defeated in that, and the US army suffered its longest-ever retreat. With the exception of the Civil War and the War of Independence, one could argue that the rest weren't really 'wars' as such. This being due to the undeniable weakness of the opposing forces. See the conquest of the Western United States, the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Mexican-American War, the various invasions of small Caribbean and Latin American countries, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the so-called 'War on Terror' etc. That is not to underplay the enormous material contributions that the US made that helped facilitate the victories gained by others; contributions without which the victories in the 'big wars' would have been virtually impossible.
@@hailexiao2770 "When you're fighting 100-1000 km from home it's easy to rotate units back after hard fighting for rest, refit, and integrating new personnel. When you're fighting expeditionary wars across an ocean, transporting the entire unit back is much less practical."
They don't have to go all the way back home. Units come off the line and rotate to the rear where they're out of combat, but they're still in the theater, waiting to be put back into combat. It is during these phases that the replacements should be integrated, and in fact some division commanders recognized the problem and did just that, and instituted short, but effective training programs to try and teach the greenhorns something before they had to go into combat, and integrate them into the unit before. Units that did this saw much lower casualty rates among the replacements. But this was merely something that individual division or brigade or battalion commanders might do on their own initiative; it was not army policy (though it should have been).
@@Idcanymore510 That's frankly bullshit. The Pacific wasn't a sideshow when the USN beat the IJN hands down, while soloing the island hopping campaign, while also supporting the CBI theater logistically, while also building up their second strategic bombing campaign that ultimately ended the war. As for Europe, the US was the dominant land power on the Western Front suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties, while having to cross the Atlantic to get there, while also having the largest part of the European bombing campaign, and supporting the Soviets with supplies without which they would not have been able to counterattack. They did all this simultaneously, which is a kind of heavy lifting that no other nation has ever done.
If the standard for "real" war is the Eastern Front of WW2, then only two countries have ever been in real war, and I hope it stays that way.
As miraculous as the resilience of the Russians was, what is still often overlooked big picture-wise, is that no other country could have absorbed the savagery and technical might of the German offensive. And, sure, the Americans performed their own miracle of industrial production, and they and the Brits (and the millions of their Commonwealth soldiers) fought bravely and tenaciously, including my own uncle, who never made it back, but if it weren't for the vastness of Russia and the courage of the Red Army, the Western Allies would never have been able to defeat the Wehrmacht that, alone of all the combatants, had been preparing for this war for years before they finally launched it. Hats off to the Russians, because without them, we would be living in very different world today.
Yes, without the Russians we would be living in a very different world - a world in which Germany was reduced to a radioactive wasteland beginning in 1945. Remember that the German atomic weapons program went nowhere (thanks in part to the failure of German scientists to figure out they could have used plentiful graphite as a neutron moderator rather than the scarce heavy water for which they had only one source - the vulnerable Vemork plant in occupied Norway).
Defeating Germany without either atomic weapons or help from the USSR would have been exceedingly difficult for the USA, and even more difficult if Germany could have knocked the UK out of the war. But assuming the UK stays in, once we had nukes it would have been over fairly quickly. By 1946 the USA was making around 50 atomic bombs/year and could have just vaporized one German city or military base after another at its leisure until the Nazis surrendered.
@@danielmocsny5066
Absolutely correct. And, as you say, if it came down to American A-bombs defeating the Nazis, just imagine how many of them would have been needed, absent the Russian meat grinder that consumed/absorbed fully 80% of the Nazi war machine. American military planners were very pleasantly surprised that it only took two nuclearly decimated cities to bring about Hirohito's command decision to surrender (and that only after pitched gun battles in the Imperial Residence with the fanatical warhawks.) In Germany's case, as long as Hitler was alive, all of her cities would have been sacrificed, which we know for a surety, given his orders to Speer to suicide all of the Reich rather than capitulate.
Without American Lend-Lease aid, the Soviets would have still won, but it would have taken ten years instead of four.
@@danielmocsny5066 In this imaginary scenario by the 45th all of Europe would be in Nazi hand and the war was long over. There would not be any reason to bomb Germany in this case.
Japan was done in 1945, it had no allies and was loosing the war on all fronts. Bombing Japan was unnecessary and was a crime agains humanity. I'm pretty sure this will be covered on this channel in due time.
@@darklysm8345
Okay, naziboy.
People really underestimate the ability to field millions of men into the army, imagine how many administrative works need to be done to recruit, trained, organize and deploy millions of troops, not to mention, industrial capacity to equip these troops and infrstructure needed to transport millions of these men and their assets, in all of these sections, the soviet union are far far more successfull than their Imperial Russia predecesors and one of the most successful among the countries involved in ww2 only matched by USA
Actually the US dwarfs Soviet production in nearly every capacity.
@@mihadeth Explain how they were 'expendable armies of slaves'?
@@mihadeth you are mistaken, germans had slaves but even they worked in factories and not at the front.
@@TotalTryFails The US did not have to produce while fighting off the biggest invasion in the history of warfare, all at the same time. Most of Soviet industrial resources were directly in the path of the invasion in the western, European part of the country.
Even moving a division from one place to another (something like a 20km march) is already quite a difficult task.
My own grandmother was evacuated from Leningrad with two children in winter of 1942. She worked at still mill for 14 hours a day in the city that called Ekaterinburg now. I glad to say she won't be ashamed of her grand and grandgrand children. That's where manpower came from - our women.
Thank you for sharing that with us. We're glad your grandmother survived that hellish battle.
I believe that the Soviet society was the first and perhaps the only one, where equality between the two sexes was achieved. In terms of rights and obligations, taking into account the peculiarities of the female sex. A great example was the female partisans in the rear, the female pilots of combat aircrafts, the first female astronaut, etc. All these, 70 and 80 years ago,
@@Jimmy-hx8mq100% true. Marxists always emphasise that without women the revolution is destined to fail.
More specials yes please, Indy. I've been dusting off my old books and re-reading them once again; so good to know I'm not the only one who loves the topic, if not the real-life hell and misery it caused.
Thank you for watching along with us. Please stay tuned.
Brilliant episode, as always, guys. Can we expect in the future specials about the minor Axis armies with their exploits and the shortcomings that plagued them?
We won't offer any kind of event-based special coverage of them as all of that is in the regular series or in our Instagram.
Specials on the logistics or numbers of minor Axid armies is a possibility but we don't have anything like that planned so far. Do you have any ideas on specific content?
@@WorldWarTwo thanks for answering. Since I imagine info on the minor Axis allies will be more scarce compared with the big players, I was thinking of general overviews of the armies and nations allied with Nazi Germany, combined with short bios of the leaders involved (Horty, Antonescu, King Michael, etc). As for release dates, it's all up to you, though my suggestion would be linking them to events in which those nations were involved: battles or switching sides in the war. Taking Romania as an example, a special on the nation's involvement in the war would fit nicely either near the time of Op Tidal Wave or during the 23rd August coup.
Hope this helps and keep up the great work, guys!
@@mariusionita266 I recommend the channel "History Hustle" For this
Worth noting that small arms and crew weapon concentrations were very different between the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Soviets had a huge number of mortars compared to the Germans, and a lot more submachine guns as well.
Soviet shock rifle units also wore early forms of body armor and carried vast quantities of grenades.
Yeah. The Germans may have pioneered the use of submachine guns, but it was the Soviets who utilized them to their fullest extent. It should be said that the Soviets massively outproduced everyone (even the US) when it comes to SMG production, especially the Germans.
It was really in 1942 that mass use of submachine-guns started in the Red Army. In 1941 the Red Army had used them much like the Germans did, issuing them to officers and NCOs for the most part.
@@stevekaczynski3793 Not to mention that Soviet SMG designs used prior to 1942 (so PPD-38 and PPD-40) weren't exactly optimal, too expensive and plagued by reliability issues. But when the PPSh-41 entered mass production by Spring of 1942, it allowed the Soviets to start issuing SMGs on wider scale than anyone else. By the end of 1942, around 1.5 million PPSh-41s were produced. In comparison, around 1.1 million MP38s and MP40s were produced in total, from 1938 to 1945.
Huge number of all kinds of tube artillery was omnipresent in Soviet Army. But it worth mentioning, that the actual expenditure of shells (especially of heavy calibres) was higher for Germans up until 1944. So, it can be said, that Soviets compensated their inefficiencies in logistics and mobility by spreading the tubes around in higher numbers. They never had resources to use large portion of their equipment to the same level as their opponent.
Yup, The Soviets were caught with their pants down during Barbarossa. Officers sent out scouts, not to find the enemy, but to locate their own troops.
Somewhat like McArthur in the Philippines but even more so because he had 10 hours previous warning from the Pearl Harbour attack. Despite radar picking up Japanese aircraft when they attacked the two main American bases the aircraft were still on the ground, parked in rows.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE What are you trying to prove here? :D
I’m so blessed to not have had to lived through this mess
YES
And the folks who lived through it were more blessed than the folks who died in it.
@@danielmocsny5066 debatable. PTSD pushed many ex soldiers to borderline insanity. Sometimes even suicide. And that's without talking of the poverty and physical damages. A quick death is not so bad when compared to a life time of trauma and suffering.
Don't worry, you wouldn't have lived..
A longstanding comment about military matters is "amateurs study tactics, professionals study logistics." From a logistical standpoint, the USSR absolutely crushed the Germans, finding ways to get supplies to forces and civilian populations in tough situations, recover from losses and train new personnel, and develop the tools they needed to win the day. My impression is that the Germans really haven't understood the degree that logistical problems behind the front (e.g. transport problems) matter a great deal for the front, and that's going to cost them dearly sooner or later.
I think the Germans understood logistics, but there wasn't much they could do about the situation once Barbarossa failed to achieve a major victory over the Soviets. They were already in desperate straits because of the economic blockades well before 1941 and making a huge, last-ditch effort to seize the resources they needed (mainly food and oil) before they lost their ability to conduct such a major operation was a calculated risk. Their only other options were to hold what they had and slowly wither away due to economic attrition, or try to make peace with the UK.
This is an excellent point indeed. If one watches the Deutsche Wochenschau newsreels from the first days of Barbarossa, they already depict men pushing trucks through dusty rutty roads-- and this was long before the autumn rains and freezing winter set in. The plan to beat the USSR in three months' time was based largely on the logistical limits of the food and fuel supply and shortage of reserves available. Soldiers were thus expected to loot the landscape they overran for food and other supplies and this is shown in those newsreels, as well, with Wehrmacht soldiers chasing and butchering pigs and chickens on farms all along the front.
@@weirdshibainu similar to America situation but they lose
Funny thing is, Germans understood it as well.
They decided to ignore it, although not to such a crazy degree as the Japanese who decided to go to a war that, from purely logistical point of view, was impossible to win, and nearly impossible to manage.
Logistics was German military achilles heel.
Our perception about eastern front has been very wrong! Thank you Franz Halder for writing the most biased untrue stories on the eastern front
sadly its still the case for most people here in the west. Cant imagine what the veterans feel about their efforts towards victory being reduced to "human waves" and "hitler incomptent"
@@bernardobiritiki That might have been true 20 years ago, and perhaps with boomers today, but I don't think that's true (or as true) anymore.
@@hailexiao2770 Most TV documentaries are still based on old ideas, plus they have to show something and that something tends to be German wartime propaganda of endless German tanks and endless "Soviet hordes".
Hi Indy! Always enjoyed these specials, I feel they give a ton of context to the main series. I was wondering, since you already talked about the blitzkrieg, if you could also make a special on it’s Soviet counterpart aka. “Deep battle”, since I think it will really help to understand the strategic operation the red army undertook at the later stages of the war.
Deep Battle was partly covered in that Blitzkrieg special but yes, if and when the Soviets go on the offensive we will likely cover it again in-depth.
A Russian told me one time that in the west, that the Germans were fighting less than a kilometer from a rifle factory and despite this the factory continued production and that rifles were test fired from a second story window at the German lines.
There were cases where tank factories would turn out tanks, not even bother with the paint job, and send them out to the front line a couple of miles away.
"The Red Army had a shortage of artillery..."
Really? They overcame that big time.
Not really. By weight of shells fired, the Wehrmacht was out-shooting the Red Army until late 1944, which was one of the reasons why the Soviets had such monstrous casualties even in the offensive in 1943-44. Massing guns for a pre-planned bombardment before an attack could pour lots of firepower onto the Germans, but the Red Army lacked the ability to call that level of support at will, particularly to support breakthroughs, for pretty much the entire war.
This disparity is pretty much exemplified by the fact that the most common divisional gun (meaning integrated in a division) in powers other than soviets was somewhere round 100mm. Soviets meanwhile mostly used aforementioned 76mm ones. 105mm shell has SIGNIFICANTLY more explosives than a 76mm one. Which is why when you look at raw number of German vs Soviet guns, it's deceptive, since in weight of explosives thrown Germans tended to still outweight Soviets.
This is FURTHER worsened by lack of training on Soviet side which led their artilery formations to either just target whole areas, or need to be in visual range and fire directly on target. Germans meanwhile could rely on targeted artilery strikes that support them as they move from the back. So if a German unit came under attack they could allways hunker down and call in artilery to inflict horrendous casualties on Soviets. Soviets meanwhile could only rely on artilery support if battery could literaly see the enemy.
Of course this does not mean there were no sophisticated Soviet artilery units, but existence of those tended to depend on training and ability and drive of commanders and men of those units.
Oh, ALSO, Soviets seems to have suffered from HEAVY shortages of key chemicals needed to produce explosives. Getting some of those from Allies is probably one of most important things Allies helped with. This is why also Soviet artilery batteries tended to have significantly fewer shells issued to them per day or per mission.
@@Blazo_Djurovic It was not number of guns or cal of guns that made the dif. it was lack of radios Soviet production of them was never big
Without radios how can a front line unit call in arty
Germans had lots of them so they could Now not as many as USA made and had
In fact it was not until 44 when USA began sending large numbers of radios to Soviets that they could even begin to train the Arty people in the use of them along with front line troops
@@coryhall7074 Where did you get the info regarding weight of shells comparing Soviet and German artillery?
@@caryblack5985 The Dupuy Institute, which is basically a historian's collective designed around quantifying historical events.
I'm looking forward to the main series getting to the 1945 manchurian strategic offensive. that one was epic
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE yet it`s worth mentioning that pretty much all the way up to 1945 the Soviet army was suffering much higher losses in almost every operation.
They needed less Zhukovs, and more Tolbuchins.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE yes, the USSR actually fought quite few countries after invading them in agreement with the Molotov - Ribbentropp pact. Too bad Germans decided that`s not enough, eh?
Also, if you knew a bit about American approach you`d have known how did they manage to keep their losses that low throughout the war.
Soviets just did not care, their losses even in 1944 - 45 perios when they had overwhelming advantage were still very high.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE ah, I see, a troll or a special tankie.
Therefore, just one question: if Poland was the best friend because of a non agression pact as the country did not like the idea of being attacked by the Germans and because we did the stupid thing of occupying a piece of Czechoslovakia then what about USSR?
I mean, cooperation with Germany since 20s, helping to circumvent the Versailles treaty, signing pacts and then attacking several countries in agreement with Hitler.
Manchuria was the Red Army's Magnum Opus.
Utilising both the massive industry built up through the War, and the Technological and Strategic advancements made through the fighting.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE You sound like a propagandist.
1 thing I never understood is why does the current Russian government continue protecting secret Soviet documents and promoting old Soviet propaganda? In every other part of the world, when a regime is overthrown, the new government does its utmost to discredit the past administration. That hasnt happened in Russia. The current Russian government owes the brutal Soviet dictatorship nothing. Why protect their secrets?
You guys are great. I really appreciate all of the different videos on different topics on WW2 that you all put out. I hope that the week by week and special videos series continue with the Vietnam war and all the wars until present day because all wars deserve to be recognized in such ways as Time Ghost portrays them. Keep up the good work!!!!
45mm was the most popular anti tank gun of the war. Soviet soldiers nicknamed it "Farewell Motherland" as losses in crew were tremendous. They would also get monetary bonuses for every German tank destroyed
@@carkawalakhatulistiwa zis 3 was for arty. and using this gun for AT was on the start just improvisation. for AT there was 45mm and for main AT plan was zis 2 57mm
They had their uses in urban combat like Stalingrad, even as they became increasingly obsolescent against improved German tank models.
@@fuksji They stopped producing the zis2 in such large numbers didn't they? Zis 3 had both artillery and AT roles during the war, with respective ammo loadouts.
@@miguelangelcifuentescruz689 yep they stop it. But i wrote "plan was" And "zis 3 wasnt at gun on start" :D
I liked your objective and honest analysis without bias. There are no Nazi myths about winter, bad roads and other stuff that people come up with to justify the defeat of the Nazis.
Great episode, interesting and informative. The USSR did the impossible by recovering from the biggest sneak attack in history, a feat of arms still unequalled in modern history. I am still astounded by how they did this with sheer grit, determination and massive sacrifice against all the odds, absolutely amazing. Western political propaganda aside we here in the UK have a lot to thank the old Soviet Union for, that is often forgotten.
спасибо, друг!
That is one very interesting episode! Thanks for having made it
So, basically: soviet tank, artillery, and recruits printer machine goes *BRRRR*
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE Thanks for the great breakdown.
Don't be mistaken, I wasn't trying to propagate the old myth of russians swarming the germans and winning merely because of superior numbers. I just found it amazing how they were able to basically reform the Red Army after it was shattered in a way that perhaps no other army could have recuperated from.
Excellent video! I love how at 12:36 the devastating ZIS-3 76mm cannon is presented in a photo being swarmed by Finish infantry, lol!
Colour and design, but damnit this tie is obscured once again! We need closeups! 4/5
My point exactly.
Guess the optics haven't improved *THAT* much by 1942.....
Everyone always focuses on the USA and it's ability to so quickly manufacture war goods like tanks planes heavy trucks but the USA was never invaded what the Soviets accomplished was truly amazing thanks for the great episode
@Aaron Thanks for watching
Totalitarian regimes do have the big advantage, that they are responsible only to themselves. It was simple, victory or death. And they could mobilize at will, no catches whatsoever. If somebody resisted, he was an enemy of people and was punished harshly or even executed. Both Stalin and Hitler acted quite identically here.
Hockey Krack,
In war all regimes become the same. placing foreign nationals in camps, suppressing news shooting looters etc yet another fallacy about the good and the bad guys. Some of what happened during the war is still classified, so the only way democracies can retain their balance is to not go to war. Seeing how many wars the USA has been involved in since WW2, and the suppression of news a la executing civilians exposed by Juan Assange, does even democracy actually exist, if it doesn't suit the powers that be.
During the 1930's the Detroit industrial architect Albert Kahn designed numerous factories in the Soviet Union for building agricultural equipment, specifically tractors. It doesn't take a huge leap to go from producing a tractor to a tank, so the Soviets rebuilt their tank units with American-designed factories and techniques.
It also doesn't take a huge leap to go from manufacturing almost anything to manufacturing almost anything else, as countless factories in the USA demonstrated by switching from whatever they made in peacetime to war production.
Thanks for the reality post. The Christie Suspension gave the T34 it's speed over difficult terrain. The Soviets were very intelligent in their procurement of American genius.
However, the efforts of the Soviet Rocketeers at Voronezh in producing the
KATYUSHKA was all Russian ingenuity and design.
@@philipambler3825 The Soviets also received a significant number of M4 Shermans and the 76mm variants. They were very popular with their crews, who afffectionately referred to them as "Emchas" because the spacious and comfortable interiors when compared to Russian tanks. They also liked the Thompson SMG's that came with every M4. When Emchas were knocked out they were often swarmed by Soviet soldiers who wanted the leather off of the tank seats because they made comfortable boots.
@@Conn30Mtenor They especially loved american trucks and the likes. Studebaker is a lovely icon of the war.
@@Conn30MtenorYes but it was never feasible for the USSR to build an american style tank. In 1931 Stalin remarked that they were 50-100 years behind the developed powers, and that they must make good of that distance in 10 years or be annihilated. They did, and of course, uncomfortable seats are a good tradeoff when the alternative is annihilation and genocide
Happy Birthday Indie!!!! I hope you enjoy a great celebration as you truly deserve it!
It was actually fairly calm, but that's kind of what I wanted. Played baseball all day and had a lovely Italian dinner at night with my honey.
Thank you for all your fascinating information on WW II. It is appreciated.
@matthew Thank you for watching. We couldn't do it without the enthusiasm and support of you and the rest of the TimeGhost Army.
siberian farmer: "what war? what do you mean we're communists? what's a communist?"
Joseph Stalin? Is that the new Tsar?
There is an old anecdote about Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign. A few weeks later, he received a call from frightened officials from Eastern Siberia^
- We urgently need several trains with vodka!. The population has sober up and asks us ""Where did the Czar disappear to?"
@@jangrosek4334 I’ve got a better one:
Vladimir Putin? Is he the new Khan?
Nah. You're talking nonsense.
Radio, newspapers and trains have been operating in these territories since the time of the Russian Civil War, long before World War II. And the revolution happened precisely with the help of the support of the proletarian class, including farmers. So yes, you are talking nonsense.
Excellent Video, the fact the soviets recovered from 1941 at all is astonishing. In hindsight we laugh at the Germans thinking they'd won the campaign in the first few weeks, but what other nation in history has lost MILLIONS of men in 6 months and recovered?
There's no doubt that manpower advantage played an important role in the soviet unions war effort on the eastern front. However, it's worth remembering that when we look at population numbers for Germany vs Soviet union, we're often looking at the numbers pre-invasion. During 1941 large parts of the western soviet union (were most of the population live) were occupied, only a small proportion of the soviet population lived east of the Urals (You covered this to a degree). So not only did the soviets have to recover from losses in the millions in 1941, they had to do it without access to a significant part of their manpower resources. Lend lease helped to a degree, sharing some of the production burden to free up men for the forces, but Germany used slave labour to achieve a similar effect.
It's also worth remembering that every day that soviet territory was occupied by the Germans, thousands and thousands were dying. So the Red Army knew it had to liberate that land, even if the blood cost was high, because not liberating it also had a blood cost. Whereas the British, Commonwealth and American forces never had that same urgency, it wasn't their families or countrymen/women under occupation, so it's natural they would prioritize casualty avoidance a lot more. Perhaps because of this, our perception in the west is of an unsophisticated army not caring about losses, but the real picture is more complex.
SPOILER ALERT; Looking ahead, during 1943 and 1944, the liberation of the occupied parts of the soviet union enabled the Red Army to get replacements from these areas that it couldn't access during 1941/42. This helped mitigate the losses required to take back the land. In many cases partisans were essentially recruited straight into the red army, is possible in roles that would suit them (e.g. scouts, snipers etc). Also, between the Battle of Stalingrad and the end of the war the Red Army didn't actually massively increase in size. However, the number of Tanks, Artillery and Aircraft increased by factors of 2-3 times. By the end of the war a full HALF of industrial workers in the soviet union were women, they were nearing the end of manpower resources in many respects so better equipment had to substitute for manpower.
Its basically an episode a day from these guys, love it.
Hearing the numbers it's just amazing at how much raw potential was there, and brought online to feed the war machine.
@VosperCDN Thank you for watching. The numbers are often difficult to grasp, some of the most consistently fascinating things about the time.
Didn't even know Indy was back! Missed your awesome presentations Indy! Damn, now I won't get anything done the next week or so! Thanks, Indy!
What do you mean "I'm back"? Where did I go? I've been here for years.
@@WorldWarTwo ruclips.net/video/MjrYof7zQ7c/видео.html
I can just imagine the pride of being descendent of a soviet war hero. Real man.
Congratulations people from ex soviet territories.
I can't. On what basis can one be proud of something one did not accomplish?
@@danielmocsny5066 Pride in accomplishment is only one form of pride. This retort is overused and, quite frankly, foolish.
@@danielmocsny5066 One way to explain this is with one history a guy told me here on these comments. His whole family was squashed under the british empire about 1800, he was from those small islands that are just not powerfull enough to break free from the empire. Their sin was to fight against over tax, for civil representation and no right to bear arms.
At the end, the fight was so bloody that they were allowed to police themselves.
This dude was proud of his ancestors due their fight against injustice and for survival. He was proud that they were there when other people needed them. In his comment he was proud of his blood even though he have bad teeth and is ugly as hell, his history carries nothing to be ashamed of.
Future generations will have nothing to be proud of, in this you are right about accomplishment.
Maybe we'll rise against injustice again? May those old Gods help us.
Yeah but no. There are a lot of former Soviet territories where people were treated as dust all the time before, during, and after the war. Many of their descendants would probably spit you in the face if you'd call their great-grandfathers and -mothers "Soviet heroes". On the other hand many of others have nothing else to be proud of, so yes, they do feel an immense pride.
As for me, my male Soviet ancestor was most probably executed in the early Soviet era presumably for being a pole and kulak. Information of others is scarce as it is for most ppl around - because of the war and state terror.
Personal pride really wasn't a trait encouraged and cultivated amongst Soviet people. Proud people tend to be free and independent.
My Grandfather fought for the Soviets but as a Pole he was persecuted before and after the war. The Soviet Union was evil and its only redeeming trait is that they weren't as bad as the Germans, which they were allied with in the early phases of the war...
Love these specials. You guys put out a lot of CJ tent and it’s all quality. Amazing work.
Thanks for all the love and support Ryan! We can only make so many of these because of all the generous donors over on Patreon.
Nas mnogo!
Jokes aside, the Soviet simplicity in production was something quite brilliant. Germans had a habit of not only overengineering their vehicles but also to have an incredible amount of specialized types which made production really complicated.
Also quality tended to simply vary since production was quite distributed between a WIDE variety of factories some of which never really did this type of job. This is probably best exemplified by some of late war big cats that had their frontal plates utterly shattered and broken on seams by HE shells which really should not have inflicted such catastrophic damage had the plate and welding been done per spec.
The idea of "quality over quantity" is often massively overrated by the public, because quality is associated with cool, luxurious and high-tech things and quantity with some form of useless garbage.
In reality, whatever works best is best. It depends on the situation.
There's supposed to be a saying from the Soviet Military. Perfection is the enemy of good enough. And, quantity has a quality all it's own.
Here is where the under education of the Soviet population came in handy
Designers knew they would have kids in these things who were lucky if they had 2nd grade ed let along have driven anything other then a horse so they know they had to keep thing simple and so they did Just another example of Slavic ingenuity
@@frederickbays405 Yeah is also the empire legally
Thank you for another informative and very well written and presented video. I really enjoy learning new things about history no matter the time period.
I am always happy when I see that The Time Ghost Army has produced another video which I am sure will be a great treat to watch.
@George Thank you for watching. Our team's work wouldn't be possible without the support of TimeGhost Army members like you.
11:36 - About impatience. The 1st Tank Army was launched into battle when the Kharkov operation was over. The first battle took place in July 1942. The Red Army went through a cycle from the need to create huge mechanized corps in 1940 to breaking up tank troops into separate tank brigades. Then the idea came again that massive tank formations were needed, only they were not called mechanized corps, but tank armies. It was precisely such a 1st Tank Army that the future Marshal Kirill Moskalenko was entrusted to command in June 1942.
A 1941/42 mechanized corps is the equavelent of like the 1940 tank division while tank armies were the 1940 mechanised corps comprising 2 mechanised(1940 tank) corps but with a lot more artillery trucks and SPG's. Tank brigades made up a mechanised corps. Even in 1940 a tank brigade was supposed to be under the command of a rifle corps. So the soviets wanted to like solve the germany VS france debate both ways pre war.( Tank brigades for infantry support and mechanised corps for giant spearhead attacks).
The shy ☺️ blush on that tie makes everything perfect. The yellowish golden green standing strong from the blue shirt. And the contrast between the vest with the big-sleeved shirt enhanced your manliness to perfection. My eyes. Approve. 4.8/5
Speaking of the Soviet tanks in 1941... well, the problems were a bit different than present.
Yes, most of the force consisted of light tanks, such as those of the BT family, or T-26. However, they weren`t really that obsolete compared to Pz II or some of the older Pz III variants still in use, at least in terms of mobility, protection and firepower.
The problem relied more on lack of training and coordination, hampered by the fact that most Soviet tanks did not have radio and relied on signal flags. That`s what made these big numbers of tanks much less effective in actual battles.
Next, Soviet tanks were mostly either grouped in armoured corps, or dispersed between rifle divisions. Those that assisted rifle divisions were too few, and too badly coordinated to make any real difference.
The armoured corps, on the other hand, had way too many tanks for their logistics to cope - on paper these units were extremely strong, but in reality they were slower to move and concentrate than German infantry divisions, which is pretty much the contradiction to what armoured units are about, that is speed and ability to move where needed to deal heavy blows to the enemy.
@Karol Thank you for this extra information and perspective.
Thanks for that. I was going to make a similar comment on "obsolete and unreliable" Soviet light tanks before I saw yours. And you did not mention Pz 38 (t) that, together with Pz II and some smaller number of Pz I and Pz 35 (t) made nearly 50% of the Barbarossa tank force. These tanks were not superior to T-26 or, especially BT. I share a POV that a major cause of the Red Army defeat in 1941 was lack of motivation: the army primarily consisted of peasants who had been robbed of their property and made slave workers in the collective farms. They had seen Holodomor, repression and humiliation so they hated Communists and simply were not ready to sacrifice their lives for the regime. That resulted in mass desertion, abandoning positions and surrender (3,5 mln in 1941).
@@ivanpetrov6075 thank you! I did not want to get into all the details as they would have made the comment rather lenghty.
You are correct and thanks for pointing out the morale issue. Indeed, there is a reason why Germans were often greeted as potential liberators and many Red Army soldiers were not exactly keen on fighting to the death for Stalin.
It would surely have been intresting to see how the BTs and the T-26 would have performed against in better hands. However I am also sure that these "better hands" would have produced tanks with better relaiability, optics, communications system, ergonomics, larger crews, armor that was not prone to spalling etc.
Also I have read that expereince in the Spanish civil war showed that the T-26 could be penetrated by metal piercing MG34 bullets at some ranges. In Spain, the T-26 crews dealt with this by staying out of this range when engaging. However this might have worked better in the open Spanish terrain than in forrested Eastern European terrain?
@@henrik3291 actually, much of Eastern Europe is pretty flat, with only occasional woods here and there. Which means that the distance could work in the Soviet Tank`s favor.
I`ve read about the experiences from Spain - it also mentioned that Pz I and II generally avoided T-26 as their 45mm guns could penetrate German armor at most ranges.
Generally, in 1941 these tanks were past their prime, but not really that obsolete. I mean, we should also consider that German attacked with quite a few obsolete tank on their side.
Also, these tanks, as mentioned, had decent guns and armor but the greatest hindrance were usually very bad observation systems and poor ergonomics in general. Lack of radio also meant terrible situational awareness and little chance of any actual coordination.
In general, as you mentioned with better crews they would have performed better, but they would still require serious update on communication and observation to make it a real difference.
Incredible Episode, I wrote my master of history on the eastern front, and usually people get a lot of things wrong, details and minor stuff. It is very rare I watch a video on something like this, and cannot think of anything, I would say was wrong, misrepresented or lacking. As precise and it is concise, what a good job you guys!
Thank you very much for your support!!
Knocked-out Stuart tank in the background at 11:45. The tank still has a US .30 calibre machine-gun on the turret. Foreground is a Soviet howitzer.
Probably a lend-lease
@@Fred_the_1996 Almost certainly. It would have been transported through Iran. Quite a few of these tanks were in the path of Blau in the summer of 1942.
My great grandfather worked in the KGB for some time on Persian Gulf lend lease. Do you happen to know if there are any publically available databases out there that contain details about the program, names of officials who worked in it, etc?
@@ML-xp1kp Not aware of anything like that, and I sometimes trawl through Russian-language websites. There may well be documents in Russian archives. But on the Internet I have not seen anything like that.
A great video that makes an important point. That it’s more important to spend research into streamlining the production process than to make slightly improved versions of tanks that were harder to produce and maintain
I don’t think thats generally true. In the beginning of the war Germany did really well with its armament in breadth, which allowed its army to quickly become effective and to overwhelm its enemies in the first two years of the war.
This was of course a strategy that depended on quick and decisive wars, which couldn’t be archived against the Soviet Union. Only then, after it managed to hold off the Germans in its first offensives, did the Soviet strategy of armament in depth really pay off.
It all depends on the length and attrition of the war.
The incredible bravery of the individual Soviet soldier never ceases to amaze me. Attack after hopeless attack, yet they kept coming.
They had no choice,retreat and die,fight you might die...
@@paulritchie5868 Because if you retreat, you allow your family and your country to be wiped out.
@UCBXnt-F-SeIzD6vHoQf7j_Q i love how dumb fuck westerners think the Soviet people had to be forced to fight when its the Germans who forced them to fight
@@paulritchie5868Retreat, and you give up Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad, which means defeat. Then you get executed by the Germans. Fighting was the only option
Glad to see the viewing numbers are high. Top quality production will triumph!
Its nice to see the Soviet army explored from this perspective. Most people don't know that they had a manpower shortage pretty close to Germany during the war
Yeah, in the battle of Moscow the soviets were even outnumbered
they won the war by not losing. effective every time
@@xuanquang9815 tactics 101:
1. Don't lose.
2. Just go around the enemy
3. Food is more important than bullets
@@Fred_the_1996 *IQ*
Happy Belated Birthday Indy! Keep up the good work!
Hope @PotentialHistory is watching this video and nodding along. The more we learn about the Eastern Front from the newly opened soviet archives, the more we realize how badly Germany underestimated the USSR. And the harder it get's for Wermacht apologists to tapdance around their chosen side's atrocities in Eastern Europe.
The best WW2 series. The quickest 20 mins in my week.
Thank you!
This is one of your best videos. The soviet hability to mobilize the entire country in the way they did is probably the biggest reason for allied victory in ww2.
Mobilisation is nothing without material (incl. food), which was largely produced & delivered by the USA & some by the UK too.
@@MrHockeycrack Largely? The aid from US/UK was significant, but far from "largely", aside some specific areas. The USSR production of armaments was high on its own.
Thank god I see such myth debunking videos more and more often.
Thanks for your work, sir, and for the education.
Why did you remove the nationalist China flag ?
First, I am to thank you for the great production and I m following every episodes, learning many things on ww2
As a Frenchman, I appreciate you put the free french flag, and like many other armies and troops from occupied countries, Poland, tchecosslovakia, Norway and many others, they provided a significant contribution against the axis forces to fight for freedom
But Nationalist China was a major country fighting hard for many years in a war against imperialistic Japan,, and unfortunately there are less known information about this theatre of operation and they are like the unsung hero…
In respect of their contribution, would appreciate to see their flag back, so people don t forget that during all these years of conflict, even if there s no coverage of action, China was still fighting.
from what i saw they just like to keep switching up flags
There's a wave of Americans in media that really don't want to offend the CCP for some reason.
@@CC-8891 WW2 is produced in Germany.
The flags are always changing
@@derrickdeherrera2476 that statement makes zero sense.
I’m glad too see how popular you guys are getting, you all deserve it.
@Brandon Thank you for your support. We would not be able to keep producing this content without the generous support of the TimeGhost Army.
Soviet tanks in 1941, even the "old" tanks like the BT were quite capable.
It was the few experimental super-heavy T-35s which just plain sucked. In the main soviet tanks even the "outdated" ones were as capable in terms of guns and armor as German tanks albeit lacking radios or good optics or effective leadership.
And that is the reason why simple 1:1 comparisons lead to wrong conclusions. Like history, tank warfare does not happen in an empty bubble.
It's remarkable what mass production with all hands on deck can accomplish.
Tik roast your ass in a new video lol
The BT-7 and T-26 were easily the equal of the Pz III. IN THEORY. Lack of radio, optics, gun sights and training made up for that.
@@harzzachseniorgamer5516 today we even have 1:1 comparisons of tanks vs anti-tank missiles.
Excellent narrative! Can't get enough of this guy!
The US Army in WWII also produced "Ninety Day Wonders" infantry Platoon Leaders at Officer candidate Schools.
Let’s face it,no matter now much training you give a young officer he only learns when he meets his platoon Sgt.
The US Army in Vietnam had "shake 'n bake" NCOs who went through an accelerated training programme. They were somewhat looked down on but seem to have been at least as good as the other NCOs. A good many "shake 'n bakes" were killed in action.
@@stevekaczynski3793 Shake and Bake (also called Easy Six because top graduates became SSGT) appealed to Collège graduate draftees as it did not add to their 2 year commitment like going to OCS.
Maybe I am just a old man but this is the only channel I look forward too ever week.
Love this channel!
Thank you History & Chill ASMR, stay tuned for more episodes every week.
That was absolutely amazing, i enjoyed every minute
Petition to put the left engine of the model He-177 back on the plane!🤣
So interesting video of Red Army 1942. The simplistic nature of Soviet armor was brilliant vs the German tanks and armor which needed a lot of maintenance,constantly. I am reading along with David Glantz, When Titans Clashed. Strategy and tactics in eastern theater.
Happy Birthday Indy, hope it's a good one. Stay the cool guy you are 🔥🔥💪💪Greetings from Cape Town South Africa 🇿🇦
Something doesn't seem to add up to me. When Indie says "class of 1922" does he mean "birth year 1922"?
Yes.
Yes.
I think what he means is a 'class' of people. Not a High School graduating class. Many in the Soviet Union were uneducated, or under educated.
@@michaelwier1222 in this context class means year of birth, not year of graduation. those born in 1922 and thus to be recruited no earlier than e.g. 1937. Germany uses this same concept. The classes of 1922-1924 basically had no children and all died on the front.
In some Eastern European countries the class of… is defined by the year the children were born
The Red Army only had one rifle for two men ... the other man had a submachine gun
Logistics for the Soviets was a nightmare when reorganising their factories etc. As the USSR was mainly building tanks for their army, the lend lease Studebaker trucks from the USA helped greatly for transport. It's also important to note that Red Army soldiers weren't paid during war time & had to live of the land or pillage.
I hope you also cover the Red Air Force as they had huge problems with training pilots & crews as well as aircraft production. Another great episode.
I think getting paid was least of Red Army servicemen's thinking given that country is attacked. It would have been considered duty to serve and familly and solder should have been provided by the state with things they need.
Red Army did have field kitchens and like which was supposed to cook for the troops, so food should not have been an issue. Of course anyone would preffer to snag some chicken or some eggs than eat whatever mass produced gruel field kitchen made.
Bigger problem for RA men will be that they have just lost their breadbasket regions, so now all food they could rely on would need to come from the Central Asia and like which is less fertile and developed than Ukraine and Don regions were.
Also when RA starts advancing support elements would tend to lagg behind, and advancing elements tended to carry little more than fuel for viehicles and ammunition in orther to be able to advance quicker since they had learned a hard lesson that they must not allow time for Germans to recover.
@@Blazo_Djurovic I totally agree with you & I understand why the Red Army wasn't paid during the war. The USSR was on total war economy footing. The devastation to industry and farmlands were horrendous & that there were famines in the USSR during and after the Great Patriotic War. I did read in his book, Khrushchev Remembers, that Khrushchev said without Spam we wouldn't have been able to feed our army.
My grandfather who was in the Royal Navy was on the Arctic Convoys (also on Convoy PQ-17) said that the people in Mumansk & Archangel were always starving so whatever they had on the ships, they gave foodstuff to the people. Whether this was traded on the blackmarket is another story, but they did what they could at the time. It was a time of upheaval for the USSR, but they triumphed in the end.
@@Blazo_Djurovic You should also mention that the German soldiers were expected to live off the land in the USSR and did so.
@@caryblack5985 Yeah and when they lost, they try to destroy all the remain of the land of ussr
My great-grandfather was an aircraft maintenance technician in the officer rank, received a salary throughout the war, but he was an officer in the pre-war period, not a wartime mobilized officer.
It's quite surprising that the Soviets realized that constantly feeding men into units at the front was a bad idea early on and changed it while the US kept doing so until the end of the war.
It depends on how many new people are added. A few at a time can be trained to work with the unit but a very large replacement group would be like herding cats. The correct procedure would be to replace the unit and re fit it in the rear and allow the new people to work with the older people.
Let's also be fair that Allies generally employed tactics to preserve as many friendly lives as possible, where the Soviets prioritised quick victories through rapid exploitation. There's a quote somewhere from a German officer at Normandy that the Americans used artillery generously, but if it were the Soviets they would have attacked already. I might be misquoting, I'm sure there's someone out there with a source.
It's my understanding that, as envisioned, the US replacement system was supposed to feed in replacements when units were in the rear. The system was abused by commanders at the front through the autumn of '44, but when word got to the top brass they put a stop to the abuse. Through the winter of '45 it worked mostly as it was supposed to work.
The US replacement policy was indeed criticised. Replacements were treated as lost souls whose lack of combat skills risked getting the more experienced soldiers killed, wounded or captured, and the new guys were often treated as pariahs.
@@stevekaczynski3793 Band of Brothers depicted that situation rather well, in my opinion.
Fantastic narration 🙏
What happened to these factories after the war? Were they returned to the west or left in the east?
@@MrVlad12340 A lot were left where they were, in case NATO invaded.
Some were repurposed(some started building spacecraft and rockets), but the Industry in the "west" was rebuilt.
You can read what happened to them on wikipedia actually. Just look up Barrikady, Krasnyi Oktyabr steel plant, and volgograd tractor plant. They were all rebuilt and up and running again.
Thank you for your brilliant analysis!
Much respect to the fighting women of the USSR, their snipers were legendary, I'm smitten with Roza Shanina.
@GREAT RUSSIA 1945 FIRST IN SPACE Хорошо конечно, но как твой комментарий относится к вышенаписанной похвале служившим советским женщинам? Спамя это всюду не к месту ты лишь понижаешь доверие людей к приведённым данным, даже если они правдивы.. такова психология. И за тебя стыдно..
I absolutely love that Patton poster
wehraboo be like "but but the numbers"
The belief that history is a video game where the victor has a higher KD is precisely why they’ll never hold power again. The modern fascist is both historically and actually illiterate.
One man get rifle, other man get submachine gun!
It is important to mention that a lot of people in peace time USSR received basic training with weapons and military drills: Ready for Labour and Defence of the USSR abbreviated as GTO was the All-Union physical culture training programme, introduced in the USSR in 1931.
It’s fairly easy to explain how.
The Soviet military was very well equipped for the army it was designed to be.
Contrary to the popular belief of 2 men per rifle there was actually an insane overproduction of mosins both during and prior to the patriotic war. (Roughly 54 million Nagant pattern rifles).
Soviet artillery while having simpler and less accurate methods of spotting beat the Germans by weight of shell and number of guns.
Soviet tanks while criminally crude until 1942 were still very useful as defensive strongpoints or support weapons.
And all this is aided by lend lease which provided both raw materials and equipment for just about anything one could ask for.
The Soviet Union also maintained a sizable amount of military reservists who were conscripted in years before the war for routine service or use in wars against Finland. While not “elite” in any stretch of the imagination they were capable enough for the red army’s needs.
Lastly one cannot ignore that this was a fight for survival. The fascists would not stop until every single citizen of the USSR was either enslaved or dead. They did not have the luxury of the western powers.
I like that you have such a great set .
Yiu should go a little further and put on a rageddy old ww 2 combat uniform .
Just a suggestion .
Well done . good content well presented .
When I first read the title, I though Indy made a special about the long and coslty Battle of Rzhev, known as "The Rzhev Meatgrinder" but HEY I'll take a good tale about a nation of millions, who got attacked, suffered casualties beyond anything the world had ever seen.......and still manage to hold out, recover, learned from past mistakes and forge a Soviet Steamroller of nightmarish proportions :)
Meat grinder was and is a default Russian military doctrine
@@mihadeth I can absolutely see why, given the amount of casualties originated from a variaty of both military decisions, scale of attrition and mobile battles and the utter hatred between german and russian soldiers on the field
@Alex Check out our Instagram for coverage of Rzhev
@@WorldWarTwo Holly smokes! Thanks for the information guys. I should've known it was being covered there, given I havent heard Indy speaking about the Soviet Rzhev Summer offensive during the weekly episodes of July and September :)
Check out Star Media on YT. A Russian WWII history series with English subtitles.
What’s up Indy love the channel man!
One thing that bugs me is this repeated mention of "Divisions" yet there are no numbers to indicate the size and strength of these.
A Red Army division could be anything between 4,000 and 10,000 men and sometimes also women, although the higher figure was nearer the intended establishment strength. In heavy fighting a division could quickly be reduced to a few hundred effectives.
@@stevekaczynski3793 That sounds a little high if the numbers in the video are correct.
Sometimes "divisions" is actually lumped together Brigades, Independent Regiments, and Fortified Sectors(made up of Independent Battalions), as well a Partisan and Militia units(varying strength).
Great episode!! Very very interesting!! Way to go!!
Thank you!
Thank you for making this video. It is a very helpful corrective to the German-eye-view that you tend to take in the weekly episodes. We hear *a lot* more about German decision making and the Soviets turn up as an adversary, a force of nature like the weather or geographical conditions. Of course, that isn't the case, as you make very clear here. But I would really like to see more of a balance of agency in the weekly videos too. Both have really interesting human stories to tell.
That’s what I think most accounts lack, the Soviets are portrayed as a monolith or as almost inhuman. They were just as much flesh and bone and their adversaries, such is the tragedy of war. Never forget.
@Isaac Thank you for watching, we appreciate your feedback
Lack of Russian sources unfortunately due to the difficulty in getting access to their archives under communism. There still is a lot but hardly anything compared to German, American, British perspectives etc
@@cshaffrey3438 I would say that the problem is not in the inaccessibility of Russian sources, the problem is that only a small part of them are translated into English.
Thank god for the timeghost army!
Germans in Summer 1941: Man, this is easy! The Reds are finished!
Russians: Autumn 1942: I have not yet begun to fight.
America: Doesn't set a foot on mainland Europe until the German army has already been broken, then takes credit for everything.
@@andrewcharles459 Some people say that the only reason they get involved, because otherwise whole Europe would be Red
Great episode. Not long ago, I saw a short video about Siberian units, who were the most successful in piercing German defences. Is it possible to have an episode dedicated to them? Thank you.
It's shocking how the Soviets are viewed contemporaneously. They went from one of the weakest countries in Europe that couldn't even muster national support against Japan to the being a total powerhouse. Their living conditions boomed, education shot up, were the first to have men, women and black people in space. They fought in the worst of it for almost the entire duration of the war. Then marched on Berlin beat the Nazis and Wehrmacht. Yet, America declared themselves the sole winner, pardoned Nazi war criminals to build NASA, divided Germany for reparation's and attempted to exclude the Soviets from those reparation's and then conspired with Churchill to invade Russia. Yet, Americans are good and we should be happy with these benevolent overlords
As much as Americans deserve to be criticized, they did not sign the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact with the Nazis, effectively expanding their own empires through diplomacy. At the onset of the war, the Soviets got caught playing imperial games with a depleted and unfit army.
I'm pretty sure the Poles still don't celebrate Russian sacrifice in WW2. But I digress, the Soviets did carry most of the load and had most of the sacrifices in the war. For that, we must recognize it.
Yet, we must also keep in mind that the Soviets, like the Americans, weren't acting for the good of humanity, for good vs evil. And that is why I refrain from throwing flowers on either of them.
Can we please get a chronological (with specials) playlist Indy? Like with your last project? I loved listening to the old one as a “podcast” if you will.
@Brink,
As an addition to my other response, we have two other playlists. One is called "For the Folks at Home" and it is all of our videos in chronological order, but with the graphic content removed. The other is called "War Is Hell" and it is JUST the weekly WW2 videos and Sparty's War Against Humanity videos. It's Sparty's personal recommendation if you want a playlist that gives you the most real experience of the war.
I put these all together specifically because, like you, I LOVED that playlist from The Great War, and I knew the audience would love one here. Thus, please do enjoy it, since I made is specifically for viewers like you!
- T.J.
Really interesting video. It’s impressive how the Soviets were able to do the enormous restructuring of their army logistics whilst losing population and facilities to the Germans and also holding off the German army.
It was the then 200-million-population and its cruelly forced mass power. And waste landscapes to retreat with "scorched earth". King Karl XII of Sweden and Emperor Napoleon could have some interesting stories about that. So, massively more cannon fodder for generalissimus J. V. Stalin. One million more or less to the meat grinder was just secondary, didn't make much difference for the Big Boss in Kremlin main office. That regime did not care a bit about losses, how massive they ever were. The same goes to Nazis, but even they with their arrogant madness had to sort of try to save their more limited reserves and resources. Whereas western Allied Leaders had to listen to and respect their people's opinions much more carefully. You know, some more boys lost and there was quickly huge noise in media, especially in the USA. That is the big difference between totalitarian and democratic systems.
Quick technical question for a channel with one of the highest production values on RUclips: Do you colorize your own clips? Has colorization become that easy? It really adds the high visual quality of your terrific videos...
We have our own colorization server using third party AI Software to do the basic colorization, then we enhance it by hand.
The Germans captured and made prisoners about 6.5 million Russians. Less than half survived.
In the Pacific theatre, after the initial Japanese victories, virtually every battle was fought to the death, without any thoughts of surrender by either side. The Iwo Jima atoll is about one quarter the size of DFW air, but 27,000 men died there.
My dad and uncle were both WWII disables veterans who fought in the Pacific [ RIP ]. I was with the Air Cav in Vietnam. 'Surrender' was not a word in our vocabularies.
What is your point? French and poles had even higher numbers of POW ratio. Pacific was different - japanese soldiers preferred to die than to surrender - soviets noticed that as well during Khalkhin-Gol campaign. Also how many americans became POWs after capture of Phllipines?
@@spqr1945 Read my post more carefully. I stated after the initial Japanese victories.
No surrender was the norm in the Pacific because the Japanese believed that surrender was weak and disgusting [ that's why Japanese POW's were treated so horribly ], and NOT to surrender.
The allies stopped surrendering when they discovered, very quickly, just how disgustingly the Japanese treated their POW's. Some Japanese generals were hanged for war crimes.
@@perihelion7798 after initial german victories Soviets discover, how Germans treated their POW and later in war mass surrenders were rare. German soldiers were brainwashed by propaganda and didn't surrender in large numbers until later in war.
@@perihelion7798 - Lots of American pilots surrendered to Japanese forces after being shot down. What other option did they have? To fight it out with their M1911 pistol and two clips?
@@danielmocsny5066 In the case of downed pilots, surrender was an option. Not so for the groundpounders -- they were just killed, even if wounded in the Pacific theater.
You guys should do a special on the merchant marine
Interesting comment about 66 million people of the USSR living under Nazi occupation in 1942. Approx. 1/3 of the total population.
"The best, is enemy of good enough!"
Old Russian saying!
Voltaire, actually....
After Russian general got Stalin, to stop playing general, and focused him on supply and logistics. General started to make head way. Zhukov, genius general, knew how to work with Stalin, talked about reading his moods. He beat the Germans, after whipping the Japanese.
After the Weapon Games also marshall Zhukov became "unpopular" and was ousted and nearly thrown to Gulag, IIRC? Stalin was extremely suspicious and had always fear of rivals. So much for reading "moods" of Stalin. Zhukov was much less useful after V-Day.
Hey Indy, 28th September, Happy birthday (my birthday too)
Also my birthday. Happy Birthday to you guys
"Inadequate Weapons And Tactics" sounds like SWAT 4 when played by SovietWomble and Cyanide... 🤣
True fact: The Red Army had 11 million men in its organization in April 1945, it's peak strength in ww2
Also a True Fact: Those 11 million men of the Red Army represented the last of the USSRs surplus manpower. If the war hadn't ended in May 1945, the Red Army would have slowly hemorrhaged strength and numbers over the next year, and would have resorted to cannibalizing partially intact units to keep its strength.
From "Life's Picture History of WWII", In 1941, Soviet tanks were weak, but Russia sacrificed enough of the strong men inside to finally stop the German advance. Thanks for the video.