Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I cannot believe some of the revisionist dribbling on this thread.
The Soviets won the war against Germany. It's not some kind of Commie conspiracy, it is historical fact. By the time of the Normandy landings, the Russians had already broken the back of the Nazis. The German divisions left in France were a shadow of the army that had wreaked havoc across Europe. But the Russian victory came at an enormous cost in casualties.
You can't pretend that history is some kind of opinion show on FOX News where you make up your own reality. Well I guess you can pretend if you want, but please be aware that you come across as incapable of absorbing any objective facts.
I humbly suggest that some of you lot read some books instead of getting your opinions from movies. Every self-respecting historian (even if they are Republican!) acknowledges that the Russians broke the back of the Nazis and that the Russians suffered enormous casualties. The fact that this is not common knowledge is a shameful indictment of the quality of historical education in the US.
FWIW, this is probably one of the weaker threads on this topic, though there have been many. This thread ran for many pages and you would need to read through most of it to get into the more indepth analysis of Barbarossa:
I don't personally see the point in responding to counterfactual statements people made 2 years ago when the debate has been hashed out many times already in other threads.
Quote:
Originally Posted by 383man
It seems the Soviet commanders did not care about their casualties as long as they won and they put most of their men in the army to make up for casualties. The US did all it could to not have many casualties. And the USSR was so large they could keep retreating and thin out the German lines and then counter attack ! The number of people in the USSR that could be thrown into the army and the size of the USSR land mass is what really saved them. I dont consider their generals good in my book when they let their men take so many casualties. Ron
The "Soviet's had no value for life" statement isn't exactly true. Soviet commanders were issued orders specifically requiring them to not waste lives unnecessarily and many commanders were reprimanded and removed for engaging in reckless attacks that incurred high casualties. Much of the myth is rooted in the early days of Barbarossa where Stalin issued several orders not allowing retreat or surrender and large numbers of units were sacrificed. All of these orders were eventually rescinded. Yes, the Soviets continued to take large numbers of casualties, especially through mid-1943, but then the situation stabilized. The majority of Soviet casualties occurred during Barbarossa and Stalingrad early in the war. Once the Soviets had stopped the invasion and began to push the Germans back, they became a little more conservative.
Among the Russian commanders, there were certainly some great strategic thinkers and planners. The sheer scale of the battles required that. Men like Rokossovsky, Malinovsky, Chuikov, Konev and Zhukov (though his brilliance seems to be debated today) were brilliant commanders and often found themselves doing more with less to carry the day.
It is difficult to reconcile the total Russian dead from WWII at 27-30 million and add in from the same era the 20+ million allegedly killed in the GULAG system. In his epic literary masterpiece 'The Gulag Archipelago' Solzhenitsyn claimed 66 million dead. How could any nation sustain that kind of population loss and still be the superpower Russia came to be after the war. Some people claim Russia rolled the two events together to hide the actual Gulag deaths and make it look like war deaths.
Another quote from Stalin at the height of Stalingrad was 'It doesn't matter if the nation dies as long as the Party (i.e.-Stalin) survives. Stalin was an ethnic Georgian so sending millions of ethnic Russians to their deaths in battle or to be worked to death in the labor camps was inconsequential. The Party after all expected the camps to provide 10% of the national economy.
It is difficult to reconcile the total Russian dead from WWII at 27-30 million and add in from the same era the 20+ million allegedly killed in the GULAG system. In his epic literary masterpiece 'The Gulag Archipelago' Solzhenitsyn claimed 66 million dead. How could any nation sustain that kind of population loss and still be the superpower Russia came to be after the war. Some people claim Russia rolled the two events together to hide the actual Gulag deaths and make it look like war deaths.
The 1939 Soviet census pegged the population of the USSR at about 170 million. 27 million Soviet dead in World War II is the high end of the estimates of serious historians. Now, as for the Gulag - your numbers are way off. Factoring in those who died shortly after release (Soviet authorities had a tendency to release the dying so they could die elsewhere and be someone else's problem), the extreme high end for those who were killed in the Gulag system is about 10 million, and that spans a period of a quarter century. I don't think anyone even claims 20 million people were ever even sent to the Gulag, much less died there. And 66 million? That's just absurd. Maybe you're conflating Gulag casualties to also encompass those killed in the Great Purge, but those were less than two million. A horrific number, to be sure, but a comparative drop in the bucket of the national population nonetheless.
You also have to factor in Soviet population growth due to territories seized during World War II. The post-war USSR had incorporated territory from Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Japan. The territory seized from Poland alone added almost 10 million people to the USSR. In total, over 20 million people became Soviet citizens in this manner.
It is also worth bearing in mind that, aside from war casualties, life expectancy in the USSR soared from the 1920s (when it was about 44 years) to the 1950s (when it had climbed to about 68 years). Also, the Soviet birth rate was still high in the 1930s and post-war - it would not really become stagnant until the 1970s.
Finally, the Soviet census of 1959 showed a population of 208 million, while eleven years later the Soviet census of 1970 showed a population of 242 million, a 16% increase in 11 years. So really, it's not all that surprising to imagine the country growing by close to that rate over the 20-year span from the 1939 census to that of 1959, even allowing for the usual birth-rate crash during wartime.
Put them all together - the numbers generally accepted by historians, rates of natural increase and increasing expectancies and tens of millions of people added through territorial annexations - and it's not surprising the population increased. And as for superpower status, they were a country sitting on enormous sources of raw material wealth and they enjoyed the usual technological acceleration that goes hand in hand with wartime, all backed by a reasonably strong foundation in the sciences (with a few glaring exceptions, such as genetics) and a government that could wring quite a bit from its citizenry, and it shouldn't really be any surprise that they could manage some level of global force projection capacity, or superpower status - the USSR did have more people than the U.S., after all.
Quote:
Another quote from Stalin at the height of Stalingrad was 'It doesn't matter if the nation dies as long as the Party (i.e.-Stalin) survives. Stalin was an ethnic Georgian so sending millions of ethnic Russians to their deaths in battle or to be worked to death in the labor camps was inconsequential. The Party after all expected the camps to provide 10% of the national economy.
Yes, Stalin was a monster. I have no idea how that's supposed to make it surprising that the USSR was able to become a superpower, however.
I thought most sources state the population of the USSR at the begining of WWII at 193 million. I remember saying to myself that the USSR had more people in it the the USA (about 132 million) and Britian (47 million) combined. Ron
During the period 1945-1992, scholars had to rely on Soviet World War II casualty statistics made available by the Soviet government. Soviet government statistics were generally thought to be unreliable, because the Soviet government had a policy of fabricating statistics for policy, propaganda or disinformation reasons.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest, among others, argued that official Soviet mortality figures from the 1930s were artificially low, and that official mortality figures from 1941-45 were artificially high, not only to absorb unreported deaths from the 1930s, but to justify (on the basis of the sacrifice of Soviet lives in the defeat of the Nazis) the seizure of Poland, the Baltic states and the Balkans.
After the fall of Soviet Communism, scholars gradually began to get access to internal statistics that had never been publicly released by the Soviet-era government. In 2007, Kazuhiro Kumo, Takako Morinaga, and Yoshisada Shida of the Russian Research Center at Tokyo's Hitotsubashi University published a comprehensive review of Russian population statistics from 1867 through 2002, based on newly available sources.
Their study found that during the ten years from 1931 through 1940, the Soviets actually suffered some 21.7 million deaths, or about 2.2 million deaths per year. During the five years from 1941 through 1945 -- including the period when the Soviet Union was at war with Germany -- Soviet deaths (including deaths from natural causes) actually totaled only 8.4 million, or about 1.7 million deaths per year. This would seem to offer some tentative corroboration for Conquest and Solzhenitsyn's claim that Stalin transferred some of the deaths that occurred during the 1930s to the period 1941-1945, in order to come up with the official Soviet figure of 20 million Soviet war dead.
The most common figure for Soviet casualties (dead) is 27 million total, out of which about 9 million were soldiers. About 10.5 million "irrecoverable" military casualties that are sometimes cited include POWs, some of whom returned after the war.
As to why the casualties were so high:
1. As has been pointed out, the scale of the conflict was much great than anywhere else. Even after D-Day, over three quarters of all German forces were concentrated in the East.
2. The Germans were incredibly brutal to the civilian population. Much of the fighting occurred in cities and densely populated areas. Over a million people starved in Leningrad, which was almost completely cut off from supplies for over a year. German soldiers routinely confiscated food, livestock, clothes and other necessities from the Russian people, leaving them to starve and freeze during the cold winter.
3. Soviet POWs were treated horribly, often no better than Jews. They were either employed as slave labor or simply gassed to death.
The Germans sent in SS extermination squads as they invaded and probed deeper into the Soviet Union. These groups enlisted Wehrmacht soldiers and local civilians, especially in the Baltic States and Ukrane, to do a lot of the killing.
It is difficult to reconcile the total Russian dead from WWII at 27-30 million and add in from the same era the 20+ million allegedly killed in the GULAG system. In his epic literary masterpiece 'The Gulag Archipelago' Solzhenitsyn claimed 66 million dead. How could any nation sustain that kind of population loss and still be the superpower Russia came to be after the war. Some people claim Russia rolled the two events together to hide the actual Gulag deaths and make it look like war deaths.
Another quote from Stalin at the height of Stalingrad was 'It doesn't matter if the nation dies as long as the Party (i.e.-Stalin) survives. Stalin was an ethnic Georgian so sending millions of ethnic Russians to their deaths in battle or to be worked to death in the labor camps was inconsequential. The Party after all expected the camps to provide 10% of the national economy.
The answer is - it couldn't.
Therefore all those "20-60 million killed by Stalin" were never true.
These figures were pure speculations to begin with.
This would seem to offer some tentative corroboration for Conquest and Solzhenitsyn's claim that Stalin transferred some of the deaths that occurred during the 1930s to the period 1941-1945, in order to come up with the official Soviet figure of 20 million Soviet war dead.
As a side note, a Soviet census taken shortly before WWII in 1939 delivered such bad information that Stalin had the statisticians and demographers "gulaged" and quickly ordered a new census. Not surprisingly, the new census did not reflect the actual death toll from the manmade famine in Ukraine, de kulakization, deaths in the gulag and a host of other smaller famines.
It is actually about 4%, not 90%. And most of those imprisoned were returned to active duty before or after the war began.
It was my long held belief that Stalin had indeed removed some of the best generals but that saved him from a very real possibility of a coup in 1941.
The problem with Soviet army was also that it greatly increased in size just before WW2, without having the number of triaines officers to support this increase, so many commanders at the mid and high level were holding positions way above what their experience and training would justify.
Nevertheless, Germany was defeated in the East, at a terrible price.
And the number of 20 million total war casualties that was for a long time the only official number coming from the Soviets was too low. The real number of over twice that seems far more plausible. There was just too much starvation, decease, and outright murder, especially in the German occupied territories. The 20 million casualty figure was picked to be sufficiently scary without showing the full extent of the results of Stalin and Party's failure to be prepared for war.
That's what happens when you pit poorly trained, poorly equipped, and poorly disciplined soldiers (the Russians) against highly trained, fantastically equipped, and extremely motivated troops (the Germans). The Russians won through superior numbers. They just kept throwing bodies at the problem.
The following quote should give you some idea of their approach:
"Quantity has a quality all its own." --Joesph Stalin
The Russians won because the Germans made a tactical mistake of fighting on two fronts. Three if you count Africa. If he simply fortified on the eastern front, knocked the crap out of GB, and waited to get his jets, missiles and tech up and military infantry, armor and AF a bit more set, he would of won eastern front too. Then Africa would be frolicking through the tulips set up a submarine net across the Atlantic to keep US away.
The Italians were securing the southern side of the Med, and he should of made the Japanese hold off bombing Pearl and kept US out of the war totally. We would of stayed out of it and maybe tried a Fortress America scenario.
Then once the Russians were cleaned up, (and they would of been) then come across the Atlantic using Iceland, Greenland and probably through Canada setting up a supply and advancement route. Blitzkrieg the hell out of NY and northern states, The Japanese then could of bombed Pearl, and advanced through the Asiatic countries setting up supply routes and bases. Hit Alaska hard set up a supply route and then come down through Washington Oregon and California.
They would of squeezed US like a tube of paste
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
