Re: [GZG] Point Systems

["Eric Foley" <stiltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@xxxxxxxxx>
> On 11/5/06, Eric Foley <stiltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Yeah, this is largely true.  In a way, the Greeks against the Persians 
> > were
> > probably the best example of quality defeating quantity -- as opposed to 
> > the
> > Napoleonic French against the Russians or the Germans against the Soviets 
> > in
> > WW2, where the opposite occured.

> I'm going to dispute at least the latter point.

> The Soviets were light-years ahead of the Germans in both strategic
> thinking and fighting at the operational level.

Well, I've got a pretty simple observation on this:  the Soviets' political 
leadership eventually figured out to get the hell out of the generals' way, 
and the Germans' didn't.  The Soviets were hurt very badly by the fact that 
most of their officers who had any brains in the European Soviet Union got 
purged before the invasion of Poland, which was a lot of why the Soviets 
fought like idiots in Finland and early in the war against the Germans. 
After the Finland war Stalin realized that he'd kind of fucked up his own 
armies over petty politics and started to reorganize in early 1941.  They 
weren't finished reorganizing by the time the Germans came in the summer, 
and the Germans went in and cleaned their clocks early on.  Eventually, 
Zhukov and his ilk figured out how to run things and Hitler kept interfering 
and micromanaging his generals' efforts, and after that point, yeah, the 
Soviets generally had a pretty good handle on things.

>  They also tended to
> have better equipment in the most vital categories (tanks, assault
> guns, individual weapons, close support aircraft).  Most (90%+) of the
> German Army was fighting with equipment no better than their fathers
> carried into Russia in 1914, other than the MG 34/42 family.

The Germans got beat on a lot of fronts with logistics and equipment issues, 
yes.  The Germans didn't take the time to plan how they were going to fight 
in the Russian climate (especially but not limited to the winters). 
However, the tanks and aircraft the Soviets had in the early phases of the 
war were simply terrible and obsolete.  Something like 10% of the entire 
Soviet air force got destroyed on the ground in the first day, 
serviceability was awful, and so on.  The Soviets had about six times as 
many tanks as the Germans did at the beginning of the invasion and about the 
same ratio of aircraft, and still didn't establish air superiority until 
1943 and didn't get an effective tank corps until about the same time.

However, it _is_ true that once the Soviets got their act together on the 
tactical front, they also got their act together on the logistical and 
equipment front, and their equipment in the later part of the war was 
probably as good or better than what the Germans had left.

> The myth of the mighty ubermensch fighting with sophisticated tanks
> and fighters against hordes of subhumans who choked their racial
> superiors with their blood is born from the post-war
> self-justifications of the Nazi generals, and was lapped up by their
> racist adherants after the war.  It is myth, not fact.

> The Soviets never outnumbered the Germans by more than 2:1 across the
> front.  What happened was that they would ruthlessly concentrate all
> resources (tanks, planes, artillery, troops) at the decisive point,
> smash through the pathetic German defenders from some line infantry
> division (or Romanians, or Italians), and make the stunts of some
> scratch 'fire brigade force' (which was generally diverted into
> counterattacking against a feint) utterly irrelevant.  The Soviets
> fought smart, the Germans didn't, and that is all Clio wrote.

The estimates I'm aware of, of German military deaths in the war on all 
fronts were about 5.5 million; Soviet military losses totaled between 8.7 
and 10 million, depending on who you asked.  Yes, most of the German 
military dead were on the eastern front, but even if you assume the Soviets 
were responsible for every single German military man killed that's still a 
kill ratio approaching two to one.  Pile on the 10-20 or so million civilian 
deaths and add up how many of those were in the line of fire because they 
got conscripted into "people's militias" or forced labor against the German 
offensive and it gets that much more disgusting.

I'm not sure which part of those kill ratios is "fighting smart".  Yes, they 
did fight smarter on some level but they also did it by having absolutely no 
concern for how many bodies they piled up along the way, and the numbers 
pretty well back it up.

E 


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