Re: [GZG] Point Systems

["Eric Foley" <stiltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: "John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@xxxxxxxxx>
> On 11/5/06, Eric Foley <stiltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 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.

> Yeah, old Joe wasn't planning on fighting the Nazis for another couple
> years.  BFD.  The fact of the matter is that in 18 months, after
> relocating their entire industrial base hundreds of miles east, they
> outproduced the Germans, and their entire production was quality
> equipment, unlike the Germans who had at several points 5 or 6 models
> of medium tank in production at the same time, practically none for a
> production run of more than 2,000 or so.  There's no excuse to change
> your tank models so quickly that you hit the 'M' model of a line in
> less than 5 years.

> For the vast majority of the war, the Soviets had better equipment.
> You're quibbling about the edges.  Further, the majority of the German
> fighter strength was in the West by 1943, and a significant number of
> the better tanks also went West in 1944-45.  Baffling, but there it
> is.

And 18 months into the invasion was still in 1943, which is still almost 
half the total time they were fighting.  And at this point, basically all 
the major Allies were outproducing the Germans, for a few different reasons. 
One is that Germany was playing a guns-and-butter game throughout the war 
and never really put its entire industrial strength into it.  A second is 
that after 1943, the western Allies had begun bombing every war-producing 
factory they could find from the British isles -- American B-17s by day, 
British Lancasters by night.  It's not that difficult to fathom why the 
Germans put most of their fighter strength in the west by this time, because 
the Soviets just weren't hitting as hard on strategic bombing as the British 
and the Americans did; they put most of their air power into tactical 
support aircraft which, while very, very effective at their assigned roles, 
wasn't visibly hitting at the home front the way the western guys were.

> > 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.

> If they were in people's militias or labor battalions, then they were
> military deaths.  The 10-20 million civilians are those shot, tortured
> to death, starved, or killed by exposure when those heros of the
> German Volk in the Whermacht kicked them out into the winter.

Or because they were conscripted to dig ditches, joined partisans who fought 
a guerrilla war behind German lines, and so on.  I'm not sure if the 
military deaths includes all of these or not -- the military deaths may only 
be including people who were part of the regular Soviet armed forces. 
Although yes, a lot of people died just out of plain siege warfare in places 
like Leningrad and Moscow.

> According to RÅdiger Overmans, Deutsche militÃrische Verluste im
> Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000, the Germans suffered 3.1 million
> KIA/MIA on the Eastern Front, plus 3.3 million troops captured by the
> Soviets.
> ...
> Compared to Vadim Erlikman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke:
> spravochnik. Moscow 2004 which says the Soviets took 7.6 million
> military KIA/MIA and had 5,200,000 captured by the Nazis, of whom 2.6
> million died.

> Furthermore, since the Soviet won, they liberated the remaining 2.6
> million POWs, rather than depending on the good will of their
> conquerer to return them.

Presumably, yes.

> The whole "no concern" for casualties is a myth.  The Soviets were
> extremely pragmatic about casualties, but no more so than US Marines
> in the Pacific or Georgie Patton's Third Army.  Oddly enough, that
> attitude produces far better results (and in the long run, lower
> casualties) than a cautious, conservative, ineffective
> Montgomery-style obsession with casualties.  What the Soviets did have
> was fewer resources to deal with the casualties that did occour.

As compared to what the western Allies took, there was a fair amount of meat 
grinding going on in the eastern front.  While it is true that the Soviets 
bore the brunt of the defeat of the Germans in World War II, and perhaps 
that the western Allies don't give them nearly enough credit in the history 
books for doing so.  Nonetheless, for all that "pragmatism" you're 
attributing to Patton as opposed to the "cautious, conservative, ineffective 
Montgomery-style obsession with casualties", the UK and the US both took 
400,000 military dead in the war, give or take 20k.  That's the US total for 
the war, fighting both Germany and Japan, btw.  The French lost about 
200,000, the Poles another 400,000 military dead (and about 5 million 
civilians).  If I'm missing anyone major, let me know, but I'm still getting 
a total of about 1.4 million non-Soviet Allies KIA against about 2.4 million 
Germans.  Compared to that, I'm perfectly willing to take your figures for 
7.6 million Soviet KIA against about 3.5 million Axis.

Do the math.  12:7 kill ratio in the western Allies' favor as opposed to 
under 1:2 for the Soviets.  The western perception that the Soviets were 
perfectly willing to throw however many warm bodies into the meat grinder 
that it took seems perfectly justified to me in that light.  And frankly, 
I'm not sure where you're getting the part where you're saying that they had 
fewer resources to deal with the casualties that occured -- their 1939 
population was a little over twice Germany's, and ultimately they lost about 
the same percentages of their population that the Germans did.

> It's
> one of the downsides of fighting a war of survival against a genocidal
> monstrosity that had already overrun most of Europe and wished to not
> only defeat, but depopulate Russia.

For what it's worth, there's a certain amount of historical room to question 
whether or not Hitler actually managed to kill more Russians than Stalin 
himself did.

E 


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