North Korea

[Username17]

Actually, Stalin is the first on the genocide list if you add the Interbellum period.

No. Absolutely nothing anyone has ever done by any metric ha ever added up to what the Japanese did in China. Ever.

Numbers that put him ahead of Hitler in the genocide race rely upon holding him responsible for every single person in the Soviet Union who died during his tenure in control of the Soviet Union. Really over excited reports like The Black Book of Communism hold him responsible for more than that.

There are perfectly respectable murder accountings that put Stalin either ahead or behind in the race with Churchill. But the ones that claim he is worse than Hitler, let alone Tojo are the kinds of completely pointless historical revisionism that I'm complaining about. If you want to condemn Stalin you can go ahead and compare him to Lenin or FDR and show him coming off unfavorably. At the point where you think you need to make shit up to make your political point, maybe your political point is just wrong.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

Numbers that put him ahead of Hitler in the genocide race rely upon holding him responsible for every single person in the Soviet Union who died during his tenure in control of the Soviet Union. Really over excited reports like The Black Book of Communism hold him responsible for more than that.

I would think that starving the Ukrainians would already put him ahead of Hitler (especially since you count Churchill "starving the Indians"), though yes I forgot about the interbellum genocide of the Chinese by the Japanese. However - Stalin was the Soviet leader during the interbellum. Tojo was not, coming into power only in 1941.

So he'd still be 2nd I'd say, and 1st if you count only leaders and not nations.

He'd also be way ahead of Churchill.

[Username17]

Even the most over excited historians don't count the Ukrainian Famine as more than 10 million (most put it at around 3), and the Holocaust was 11 million by the smallest estimates available (most put it around 13). That's just numbers fail.

Basically you can hold up Stalin's Holodomor in 1932 and Churchill's Bengal Famine of 1943 and they are both about 3 million people. If you want to quote a historian that claims one is larger than the other, that's totally a reasonable thing to do. I don't really care one way or the other, nor does either event make it at all difficult for me to root for the Soviet Union or the United Kingdom in their war against Nazi Germany, considering that the Nazi's managed to murder more than twice as many people as both events combined in concentration camps. And you can make a valid argument that neither Churchil nor Stalin actually intended millions of people to starve to death when they initiated the policies that made those deaths inevitable.

-Username17

[Zinegata]

Never mind. I'm sleepy and I keep forgetting the 6 million figure for the Holocaust counts only the Jews.

[Starmaker]

I would think that starving the Ukrainians would already put him ahead of Hitler

First of all, no one starved the Ukranians. You can ask the Ukranians themselves. They tried to count actual deaths when Yushchenko still was in power and came up with Memorial Books listing 882,510 dead:

Ukrainian Institute of People's Memory[/url]]У мартирологах зафіксовано понад 880 тис. імен людей, що померли в Україні у голодні 1932 – 1933 роки.

To get this number, they counted every death in 1932 and 1933. The books also list ethnicities (~70% Russians) and causes of death (hit by a bus, alcohol poisoning, murder, mine collapse, typhoid fever, erysipelas, killed by a bull, etc). This is the most Yushchenko could come up with.

So what happened? State-wide hunger, due to bad weather and bad management. Industry development plans were lagging, there was a call for more workers and people moved to cities en masse, two million rich peasants got deported to shittier regions and quite a number of peasants killed their work animals instead of donating them to the collective farms. Then bad weather struck. Grain for sowing got systematically stolen and replaced with grain ruined in storage, peasants did not fight grain diseases (more work? yawn) and a substantial amount of grain was used as decoy in the Far East to deceive Japanese spies.

USSR reliance on a couple of regions to produce food for the whole country was well known. It (and three wars and two revolutions) caused the hunger of 1921-1923. This time, it got better in a year. Bad management? Yes. But it wasn't catastrophic and sure it wasn't intentional.

Basically, a way to detect bullshit about the USSR is watching out for:
- pregnant men;
- mentions of people being sent to "gulags";
- disregard for proper bureaucratic procedures;
- state-sanctioned antisemitism.

The Barbarossa fail is explained thusly: there was a lot of contradictory intel data floating around. One piece in particular was the failed British plan to attack Soviet oil production sites in Baku, found in France and published by the Germans. The absolutely worst-case scenario was Hitler signing a separate peace with Britain and attacking the Soviet Union two to one through the Med and Turkey. Failing that, Hitler was considered to be likely to strike at Turkey all by himself. A direct attack was a suboptimal plan. The British intelligence reported the Nazi forces gathering near the border on June 9 1941 and they couldn't say whether it was a decoy or preparations for an actual war.

Furthermore, to successfully hold the border, the defending force has to be some eight times as large as the attacker. The Soviets obviously didn't have one. What they could do was prepare for war and sap the strength of the main Nazi force with flank attacks once the war began. That was the plan because it couldn't have been anything else. The myth about Stalin's incompetency was concocted by Khrushchev.

There's yet another myth: Stalin being evil and preparing to attack Germany, a more recent invention. This is of course bullshit for the above reason.

Stalin saw the Nazi threat from the very beginning. After the revolution, USSR and the Weimar Republic were best friends forever. The Weimar Republic provided industrial support and the USSR was exporting food. Even basic tools (like scythes) were imported from the WR and that was seen as good and proper because one of those days there was going to be an international revolution and workers would help each other out for free and there was no need to develop industry.

Stalin decided to forget the world revolution and bring some semblance of order to the state and got branded a traitor for that. When Hitler rose to power, Stalin ceased all support to international revolutionaries and joined the League of Nations, previously condemned as the bourgeois tool of exploitation (traitor traitor!). Peasants convicted for small property crimes received amnesties (again, this was not Stalin personally convicting people and amnestying them willy-nilly, he overrode the party's own plan which was essentially "if anything's wrong, grab a passerby and blame everything on him being a white guard supporter") which helped to end hunger in 1933, a shittier year than 1932. Discrimination against non-members was ended.

What's more, Stalin planned to replace the incompetent leaders with actually capable and educated people. The last stage of getting rid of discrimination was giving non-members the right to vote. And the party leadership liked that particular plan even less and began systematically destroying Stalin's would-be power base in response (zomg white guard rearing its ugly head!). Stalin fought back by investigating and subsequently jailing or shooting his opponents. Civilians jumped on the bandwagon and started reporting on their personal enemies because why not.

[Zinegata]

I said I was sleepy when I posted that, although again if the Indian starvation counts then so should the Ukranian famines .

Do I have to write up an official apology to the corpse of Joseph Stalin?

[Blasted]

USSR reliance on a couple of regions to produce food for the whole country was well known. It (and three wars and two revolutions) caused the hunger of 1921-1923. This time, it got better in a year. Bad management? Yes. But it wasn't catastrophic and sure it wasn't intentional.

What is the limit to catastrophic? Which actions weren't intentional? the weather? Stalin sure was intentional about 'reorganising' the agricultural sector.

- mentions of people being sent to "gulags";
- disregard for proper bureaucratic procedures;
- state-sanctioned antisemitism.

So you're asserting that gulags didn't exist, the state was not bureaucratic and there were no pogroms?

The Barbarossa fail is explained thusly: there was a lot of contradictory intel data floating around. One piece in particular was the failed British plan to attack Soviet oil production sites in Baku, found in France and published by the Germans. The absolutely worst-case scenario was Hitler signing a separate peace with Britain and attacking the Soviet Union two to one through the Med and Turkey. Failing that, Hitler was considered to be likely to strike at Turkey all by himself. A direct attack was a suboptimal plan. The British intelligence reported the Nazi forces gathering near the border on June 9 1941 and they couldn't say whether it was a decoy or preparations for an actual war.

There wasn't contradicting data; everyone - including the soviet intelligence agency (I'll have to get out a text book to look up its name during that period) knew that Barbarossa was on. Most countries had estimates on how long the soviets were going to hold out.

What they could do was prepare for war and sap the strength of the main Nazi force with flank attacks once the war began. That was the plan because it couldn't have been anything else.

It wasn't the plan. The initial plan (as ordered by Timoshenko and Zhukov, on orders from Stalin) was to stand and fight.
Note that Zhukov was actually in Siberia, fighting the Japanese at the time, these were the preinvasion orders.

The myth about Stalin's incompetency was concocted by Khrushchev.

Garbage. The first thing Stalin did was go incommunicado for a week. WTF??
No orders, no announcements, nothing.

There's yet another myth: Stalin being evil and preparing to attack Germany, a more recent invention. This is of course bullshit for the above reason.

Although I disagree with the assertion, the guys who write about this have lots to back them up and the reasons for disagreeing have nothing to do with any of the reasons you listed.

Stalin saw the Nazi threat from the very beginning.

So he thought that signing a military alliance, supplying them war materials and expertise and allowing them to develop their war machine in Soviet factories would be the way to go?
While Stalin (and communists in general) were ideologically opposed to Nazism, Stalin was a pragmatist and to say he thought that there was a direct or imminent threat clashes badly with his actions.

What's more, Stalin planned to replace the incompetent leaders with actually capable and educated people.

By killing off the best of his senior army staff, including Mikhail Tukhachevksiy, who was the originator of the "Deep Battle" method of combined arms.
You remember "Deep Battle", right? the method of fighting Stalin ordered abandonded because of his dislike of Tukhachevksiy, then readopted and famously used during bagration as well as forming the basis of the Soviet plans post invasion?
In no way were the staff that Stalin killed incompetent.

Stalin fought back by investigating and subsequently jailing or shooting his opponents. Civilians jumped on the bandwagon and started reporting on their personal enemies because why not.

riiighhht... Stalin was acting in self defence.

Your attempt to rewrite history in favour of Stalin is flagrant and very wrong.
Stalin does not need your defence. He dragged Russia kicking and screaming out of the medieval period. But he killed lots of people and did vast amounts of unnecessary harm. To spray perfume over his corpse serves no one.

[Zinegata]

As somebody who played a fairly realistic and historical simulation of Barbarossa from the Soviet side...

Yes, definitely fuck Stalin and his defense plan.

[cthulhu]

As somebody who played a fairly realistic and historical simulation of Barbarossa from the Soviet side...

Yes, definitely fuck Stalin and his defense plan.

Everyone involved was a fuck up - even Zhukov demonstrated that in Operation Mars. However, it wasn't the defensive plan that the Soviets lost on, it was their complete absence of a functional logistics system. They had way, way way more better thanks than the Germans, but they where just incapable of actually getting them functional and to the fight.

They actually lost a tank division in a swamp. It was amazing.

[Zinegata]

As somebody who played a fairly realistic and historical simulation of Barbarossa from the Soviet side...

Yes, definitely fuck Stalin and his defense plan.

Everyone involved was a fuck up - even Zhukov demonstrated that in Operation Mars. However, it wasn't the defensive plan that the Soviets lost on, it was their complete absence of a functional logistics system. They had way, way way more better thanks than the Germans, but they where just incapable of actually getting them functional and to the fight.

They actually lost a tank division in a swamp. It was amazing.

Logistics aren't gonna help much when you've allocated several hundred thousand men in a bulge on the line that only serves to become their death pocket though .

But yeah, Soviet logistics suck too. Many people compare the game I played (Proud Monster) as "Germans vs Zombies" because of the way the Soviets shambled to the front.

"Where are the fucking trains?!"

[cthulhu]

As somebody who played a fairly realistic and historical simulation of Barbarossa from the Soviet side...

Yes, definitely fuck Stalin and his defense plan.

Everyone involved was a fuck up - even Zhukov demonstrated that in Operation Mars. However, it wasn't the defensive plan that the Soviets lost on, it was their complete absence of a functional logistics system. They had way, way way more better thanks than the Germans, but they where just incapable of actually getting them functional and to the fight.

They actually lost a tank division in a swamp. It was amazing.

Logistics aren't gonna help much when you've allocated several hundred thousand men in a bulge on the line that only serves to become their death pocket though .

But yeah, Soviet logistics suck too. Many people compare the game I played (Proud Monster) as "Germans vs Zombies" because of the way the Soviets shambled to the front.

"Where are the fucking trains?!"

Two KV-1's held up a German Army Corps for two days. It was literally invulnerable to every portable AT weapon the Germans had from any angle at any range. The T-34 tank featured better cross country mobility, better Armour, a better gun and better HE capability than anything the germans could field. They had more T-34's (all classes) alone than the germans had tanks - including outdated P-IIs that couldn't even scratch a russian tanks paintwork.

The Russians had more artillery units with a better gun and a consistent tube so logistics should have been simplified. They had more AT capability. They had better equipment at the platoon level. They had better everything!

The Russians should have smashed the germans. By the next year they could. Stalin's defensive plan had nothing to do with it.

The problems were and have been recognized as an across the board failure of doctrine and logistics. Even if it did, what, were you going to use instead? All the soviet senior officers and high command lacked the capability and experience required to plan and execute. Even if they had a better plan they'd still lose - all the 76.2MM guns in the world are useless if you cannot get ammo to the guns. The soviets were institutionally fucked, stalin or no. Sure, I don't think Stalin did the BEST thing or even close to it, but ascribing the primary failure mode as 'bad theatre strategy' when they seriously lost a entire tank division in a swamp is just dumb.

[Zinegata]

Here's the thing though: Having enormous masses of their army cut off and surrounded gravely exacerbated the logistics problems. It's kinda hard to resupply your guys when German Panzers are roaming the rear areas and even the lowly Mk IIs can gleefully blow up supply trucks or machine-gun horse wagons.

With a stable front, the Soviets were actually much more able to resist. Kiev for instance was actually able to hold out against Army Group South for weeks until Army Group Center was diverted to take it by the rear (resulting in a massive encirclement battle). Logistics in that front was still a mess, but at least entire Divisions weren't surrendering because they weren't getting any orders from Stavka anymore and they stopped getting ammo resupply just because a Panzer II overran the nearest telephone tower.

Getting wrongfooted early in the war can be very decisive. France was defeated not just because of superior German logistics, but because the bulk of its mobile divisions were in effect destroyed when they were surrounded in Belgium.

The Russian losses in the first few weeks because of their mind-numbingly bad deployment knocked out a big chunk of the army as well, with the added catastrophe of cracking the front wide open and allowing the Germans to wreack havoc in the rear.

In the game I played (Proud Monster) - the central thesis is that the German Army's advance into Russia was always balanced on a knife's edge. Sure, they could kill off Russian by the hundreds of thousands (and in that game a Russian Division dies to 1 hit. A German infantry division can take 2 hits, while Panzers take 4, which is justified by the designer based on each side's logistics).

But you need to keep that kill rate up for multiple weeks until the Russians literally run out of men. If you fail to do that, the Russian line solidifies (ala Kiev) and unless you can encircle them you're pretty much screwed. In a game where I managed to delay the entire German Panzer Armee for just one week (at the cost of 60,000 men), the German position ended up becoming hopeless by the end of July and their advance hadn't even reached Minsk.

[cthulhu]

Here's the thing though: Having enormous masses of their army cut off and surrounded gravely exacerbated the logistics problems. It's kinda hard to resupply your guys when German Panzers are roaming the rear areas and even the lowly Mk IIs can gleefully blow up supply trucks or machine-gun horse wagons.

You know why the Germans broke through? More than 80% of the Armour strategic reserves were not operational on any given day. The way to deal with breakthrough attempts is with a strong, immediate counterattack. The soviets could not counter attack, because their logistics meant that the units were not available, and their doctrine did not support it.

Getting wrongfooted early in the war can be very decisive. France was defeated not just because of superior German logistics, but because the bulk of its mobile divisions were in effect destroyed when they were surrounded in Belgium.

The french lost via doctrine - again, they had vastly superior equipment (the Somua tank can only be destoryed at point blank range to a weakpoint at approximately 50 minutes). But their tank divisions got rolled - because the germans went somewhere else and the french doctrine and command and control was completely unable to manage counter attacks (Somua wasn't really good at that either, again because it was designed to meet the needs of french doctrine.

The Russian losses in the first few weeks because of their mind-numbingly bad deployment knocked out a big chunk of the army as well, with the added catastrophe of cracking the front wide open and allowing the Germans to wreack havoc in the rear.

In the game I played (Proud Monster) - the central thesis is that the German Army's advance into Russia was always balanced on a knife's edge. Sure, they could kill off Russian by the hundreds of thousands (and in that game a Russian Division dies to 1 hit. A German infantry division can take 2 hits, while Panzers take 4, which is justified by the designer based on each side's logistics).

This is dumb - cool fact, the Russian casualty rate (number of deaths per front line riflemen) post 1941 was exactly the same as the US casualty rate in the same circumstances. Russian rifle divisons were just as capable of absorbing a beating as anyone else. The reason the Russians got turned into chop suey was because they lost blocks to encirclement attacks. Why did they lose to encirclement attacks? Their doctrine and poor logistics render them completely incapable of counter attacking when encircled.

[Starmaker]

What is the limit to catastrophic? Which actions weren't intentional? the weather? Stalin sure was intentional about 'reorganising' the agricultural sector.

The limit to catastrophic is something you can/can't recover in a fucking year. WWI was a catastrophe because however shitty the Russian Empire was, it took a long time to reach pre-war levels of production. The 1932-1933 hunger wasn't.

The agricultural sector needed some reorganizing. Hungers happened once in 10 years in the first half XIX and once in 6-7 years in the second half. Read Leo Tolstoy, he did some hunger relief work and had no reason to sympathize with Bolsheviks.

Stalin published his plan in 1930 ("Dizziness from success") and it wasn't followed. The plan, without shitting on the official party policy outright, argued for step-by-step collectivization where the current optimal stage included transferring tool ownership to communal farms but allowed people to keep houses, kitchen gardens, a number of milk-producing cattle, small animals, fowl etc. This plan wasn't followed and communes (where everything is collective property) were forced on unprepared peasants who naturally resisted.

"Who needs this idiotic rushing ahead? Irritating the communal farmer with 'collectivizing' housing, all dairy cattle, all small animals, fowl, while the grain problem is not yet solved, while the co-op type of communal farms is not yet established - isn't it clear that such a policy could only be profitable to our enemies?"

So you're asserting that gulags didn't exist, the state was not bureaucratic and there were no pogroms?

Not exactly.

You look at the source.

If it mentions people being sent to gulags, it is crap. Historians who write about the Gulag without knowing what it was cannot be trusted to write anything more factually accurate than a 40k manual.

If it mentions NKVD shooting people without asking first and disposing of corpses in a way that prevents proper accounting, it is crap.

Pogroms? Like, rioting in the streets and destroying communal or state property? Fuck no. Pogroms were common in the Russian empire (which was a huge pile of shit by XX) where anti-semitism was indeed a state policy. By contrast, a lot of party officials, functionaries and intellectual workers were themselves Jewish. The USSR inherited popular prejudices but not the empire's racist policies. Now, upward movement in the hierarchy was difficult with promotions based on personal preference, so if you were a Jew and your boss was a fuckhead you were out of luck. Wikipedia, though, has some shit about kicking Jews out of science, which is a lie as everyone who's ever studied in a Russian U can attest: a lot of Soviet scientists were Jews. A lot of University textbooks (that are still in use) were authored by Jews.

There wasn't contradicting data; everyone - including the soviet intelligence agency (I'll have to get out a text book to look up its name during that period) knew that Barbarossa was on. Most countries had estimates on how long the soviets were going to hold out.

The Soviets found out Hitler signed the order to prepare for war with the USSR, "to be started in March 1941 once Britain gets conquered". Other dates mentioned in reports were April 1 and 15, May 1, a planned invasion via Finland on May 14, May 20, June 2 and 15. The British caught wind of forces amassing on the Soviet border on June 9, and even then they weren't sure whether it was for real, because Hitler himself (not to mention Bismarck) wrote that war on two fronts was a shitty idea.

In reality, preparations for war were to be ended on May 15 according to the original plan, and the order to actually start a war was issued on June 10 (and everything could still be called off until June 18, and the armed forces wouldn't know the final decision until 1 pm on June 21). Before June 10, the precise date and direction did not exist.

Comrade Merkulov: You can tell your 'source' from German aviation HQ to fuck himself. It's not a source, it's a disinformant.

See that line about British intelligence I bolded? No, they weren't incompetent. The Nazis were amassing forces in preparation for the invasion (from 30 to 81 divisions), Soviet spies reported a fixed number of 120 and the total amount planned for war upwards of 200. So everyone knew the Nazis put some forces on the border, but the tremendous growth in the last three months wasn't noticed until two weeks before the war and even then, it wasn't "enough".

Note that Zhukov was actually in Siberia, fighting the Japanese at the time, these were the preinvasion orders.

The Soviet-Japanese war ended in 1939.
Zhukov attended the war meeting at Stalin's study on June 21, along with a number of other people. And yes, it was him who developed the plan after having won war games with a blitzkrieg strategy playing for Nazi Germany in 1940.

Garbage. The first thing Stalin did was go incommunicado for a week. WTF??
No orders, no announcements, nothing.

Source: Khrushchev, "Time. People. Power." Bullshit.

First, we have the contemporaries' diaries. You know, stuff they wrote for themselves. here's what Dimitrov wrote: "Molotov, Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Malenkov are at Stalin's study. Stalin and the others are surprisingly calm and assured. Editing the official announcement that Molotov has to make on the radio. Issuing orders for the army and the navy. Mobilization and war footing. Underground HQ prepared."

Second, we have visitors' entrance-exit logs. June 21, the inner circle and high command stayed until 11 pm. June 22, first visitors arrived at 5:45 am, people come and go until 16:45. June 23, there's a conference from 3 to 6 am and another one later in the day, etc.

Basically, Khrushchev was a fuckhead.

So he thought that signing a military alliance, supplying them war materials and expertise and allowing them to develop their war machine in Soviet factories would be the way to go?

The USSR had strong ties to Weimar Germany. The USSR supplied raw resources and Weimar Germany exported tools and built factories in the USSR until 1926. From 1926 onwards, Soviets and Germans exchange military expertise instead. In 1933, all military collaboration ceases and trade reduces.

Code: Select all

year - import - total, million Reichsmarks; also, I'm too lazy to make a proper table
1931	762,7 1065,8
1932	625,8 896,7
1933	282,2 476,3
1934	63,3  286,3
1935	49,3  241,0
1936	126,1 219,3
1937	117,4 182,5

From 1933 onwards, the Soviets were buying (and stealing) German technology. In 1935, the Nazis lent the USSR 200M RM to spend on ordering high-tech devices for research and industry; the USSR was supposed to pay back in trade goods from 1940 to 1943 (they never started).

In Feb 1941, when preparations for Barbarossa were underway, Hitler ordered to dedicate military production to supplying the wehrmacht and the USSR in order not to lend any hints.

So who else exported resources and goods to Germany?
Britain: copper, wool, nickel, aircraft motors, marine artillery ammo
Canada: nickel
Sweden: iron
US: oil (Standard Oil doing their thing during WW2 through Spain), aircraft motors

Among German foreign investors were Standard Oil, GM, ITT, Ford, Vickers, Babcock and Wilcox, Danlop Rubber. Secret Krupp factories were located in Spain and the Netherlands.

German import, thousand ton

Code: Select all

              1933           1934             1935
Resource  Total   USSR   Total    USSR    Total   USSR
Iron       4527   24.5    8264     1.9    14061    2.7
Oil        2428  505.5  3094   458.6     3766  491.9
Cotton      220    — 	   260     5.9      329    3.4

By killing off the best of his senior army staff, including Mikhail Tukhachevksiy, who was the originator of the "Deep Battle" method of combined arms.

In 1937, the Soviet army had 206 thousand officers. By June 15 that number increased to 439 143 (exactly). The percentage of officers with higher education increased. From 1937 to 1939, 36898 officers were fired from the army, around 30000 complaints were filed and a number of them were restored in office. 25720 got fired permanently and among those, only 8122 were actually arrested and either 'camped, jailed or shot.

As for Tukhachevsky himself - well, he planned a military coup. Info about the coup first leaked associated with the names of Peterson (the commandant of Kremlin) and Yenukidze (the secretary of Central Executive Committee) in 1935. Stalin kept waiting. In Jan 1937, Artuzov, second-in-command in Red Army Intel, got fired for being a failure (not arrested, just told to gtfo) and decided to ingratiate himself by supplying data on Peterson and Yenukidze. Peterson pointed out Tukhachevsky and data started piling up. In May, Tukhachevsky was arrested and wrote a 143 page confession in solid handwriting, with chapters, subheadings and notes. Khrushchev made a little speech condemning the traitors. In June, Tukhachevsky and company were found guilty and got shot with all expedience, since three regiments in Kiyev started rioting demanding that Yakir (one of the arrested) be returned and the ones who unjustly arrested him were brought to justice.

Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, doesn't mention that particular coup at all, instead claiming that Tukhachevsky was framed by Nazis, probably in order to weaken the Soviet army. General Kostring reported to Hitler that the arrests had no consequences for the Soviet army and its ability to fight.

In 1961, a legal team was formed to investigate the case of Tukhachevsky and in 1964 they reported their findings, which is remarkable because Tukhachevsky was cleared of all charges seven years earlier without any prior "unbiased" investigation at Khrushchev's whim.

Also remarkable are the Wikipedia references, especially this:

Wikipedia, You call that a source? What the fuck?[/url]]"20. There were scores of Red Army commanders with military records more impressive than Stalin's during the Russian Civil War. Some of them had been present when Stalin forbade his fellow army commander to assist in a drive on Poland, leading to a series of defeats and withdrawal from that country. Later, virtually every one of them was shot."

and four references to Alexander Barmine's book, which has this:

According to Alexander Barmine's book One Who Survived Tukhachevsky's twelve-year-old daughter learned of his death at school one day, when her classmates began to taunt her as the child of a "fascist traitor". Deeply traumatized, she went home and hanged herself. Tukhachevsky's widow was arrested by the NKVD the day after the girl's suicide; she later went insane and was last seen on the eve of her deportation to the Ural District, wearing a strait-jacket.

Actually Svetlana Tukhachevskaya, the Marshal's only daughter, did not hang herself but was sent to a special orphanage for the children of the people's enemies. She was arrested in 1944 and sentenced by an extrajudicial body Special Council of the NKVD to five years in the Gulag. She died in 1982.

Can anyone rely on the factual accuracy of the other three references to that book?

As somebody who played a fairly realistic and historical simulation of Barbarossa from the Soviet side...

To hold the border against invasion, you need to have roads going parallel to the border to move forces where necessary. The Soviets didn't have any, nor did they have enough vehicles to transport infantry.

[Zinegata]

You know why the Germans broke through? More than 80% of the Armour strategic reserves were not operational on any given day. The way to deal with breakthrough attempts is with a strong, immediate counterattack. The soviets could not counter attack, because their logistics meant that the units were not available, and their doctrine did not support it.

The Soviets never really developed the ability to perform counter-attacks in a timely manner however. They only managed it at Kursk (and lost more tanks in the process anyway) because... well, they had the Germans wade through huge masses of dug-in infantry before they could break the line.

Moreover, attacking the head of a blitzkrieg is actually the wrong way to deal with a breakthrough. What you need to do - like during the Bulge - is to maintain strong "shoulders" and have the counter-attack attack the neck. Blitzkrieging tanks are very vulnerable to being cut off and wiped out - but that's contingent on the front line holding its ground.

In 1941, the line was too thin to hold anywhere. By 1943, the Russians learned their lesson and made the defensive lines monstrously thick at Kursk.

Such defenses in depth didn't exist back in 1941, but the way they positioned the troops meant that huge numbers of men would still be surrounded just because the very thin front line broke at a few places.

The french lost via doctrine - again, they had vastly superior equipment (the Somua tank can only be destoryed at point blank range to a weakpoint at approximately 50 minutes). But their tank divisions got rolled - because the germans went somewhere else and the french doctrine and command and control was completely unable to manage counter attacks (Somua wasn't really good at that either, again because it was designed to meet the needs of french doctrine.

I don't really see how the deployment wasn't the decisive factor here. If the French War Plan had been to block the Germans strongly in the Ardennes, the Germans would be screwed.

The French War plan's problem is that it was meant to fight the Germans in Belgium... at the expense of offensive action everywhere else. Now, you can claim that a better logistical network may have allowed the French to change the plan - but the truth is the German plan really couldn't be changed much either.

The Germans were committed to an attack through the Ardennes, and then a run to the sea to cut off the British and French mobile forces. Divisional commanders among the Panzer Corps displayed outstanding energy, drive, and initiative during this attack - but ultimately they were still following the main battle plan. If they deviated from it too hugely, they'd be in deep trouble because the rest of the German Army - horse drawn and marching on foot, wouldn't have been able to catch up and support the Panzers.

Honestly, major redeployments by entire armies didn't just happen overnight in World War 2. The only army that was ever capable of it was the United States Army - when it turned Patton's Third Army to smash up the German offensive in the Ardennes in 1944 (which demonstrated just what a mess it could have become in 1941 if the French just didn't garrison it with a tiny group of horsement)

This is dumb - cool fact, the Russian casualty rate (number of deaths per front line riflemen) post 1941 was exactly the same as the US casualty rate in the same circumstances. Russian rifle divisons were just as capable of absorbing a beating as anyone else. The reason the Russians got turned into chop suey was because they lost blocks to encirclement attacks. Why did they lose to encirclement attacks? Their doctrine and poor logistics render them completely incapable of counter attacking when encircled.

I fail to see how this doesn't reflect the fact that Russian Divisions do in fact tend to evaporate much more quickly just because they get encircled.

It's also worth noting that some Russian Infantry Divisions in Proud Monster actually have better stats than the Germans (although you can't tell the good ones from the bad because their combat values are all hidden at-start), so the game does acknowledge some Russian units are very good.

[Zinegata]

...

Talking to the wrong guy dude.

[Koumei]

Zinegata, have you ever said anything that wasn't a load of shit?

And since when were vidya games an accurate source? I have it on good authority that some Nazis were actual giants who duel-wielded chainguns and Hitler had a mecha suit.

[RandomCasualty2]

Zinegata, have you ever said anything that wasn't a load of shit?

And since when were vidya games an accurate source? I have it on good authority that some Nazis were actual giants who duel-wielded chainguns and Hitler had a mecha suit.

That's actually true, but was suppressed since the Allies felt that it backed up the Germans claim of being the master race. In fact, I'm pretty sure Japan only allied with Germany because they had mecha.

[Zinegata]

Zinegata, have you ever said anything that wasn't a load of shit?

And since when were vidya games an accurate source? I have it on good authority that some Nazis were actual giants who duel-wielded chainguns and Hitler had a mecha suit.

It's not a video game. Don't be a bitch.

[Zinegata]

Zinegata, have you ever said anything that wasn't a load of shit?

And since when were vidya games an accurate source? I have it on good authority that some Nazis were actual giants who duel-wielded chainguns and Hitler had a mecha suit.

That's actually true, but was suppressed since the Allies felt that it backed up the Germans claim of being the master race. In fact, I'm pretty sure Japan only allied with Germany because they had mecha.

... No .

That being said, video games may not always be accurate. But wargames do tend to have a bit more research. Of course not everyone will agree with each game's thesis, but again that doesn't mean it's a bad game.

If you want I can start quoting books too. But even those are gonna come under contention because historians don't fucking agree either (although most would probably indeed agree there aren't chain-saw wielding Nazi divisions suppressed by the Allies)

[cthulhu]

You're confusing doctrine for other issues.

The entire structure of french forces was flawed. All the way from divisions to small units were being drilled in a warfighting plan that was fundamentally unworkable. French high command even relaised this in about 1938, but did not have sufficent time to overcome the organisational inertia and structure and retrain their forces.

No matter what leaders you swapped out you would have had the same issues. If you took the key german leaders and swaped them for their french equivelents, then subjected them to the respective doctrinal regime, the same thing would have happened.

This is why it is irrelevant if Stalin, or the Chief of the Army or the head of the soviet infantry school did the war plans - they all still would have lost because

A) They'd all be trained to make incorrect plans
B) Even if they had the correct plans, the russian army was literally unable to conduct them.

incidently, please note that it wasn't 'some motorised divisions were good' literally EVERY division was good.

[Koumei]

Chainguns, Zine. See: Wolfenstein 3d.

[Zinegata]

You're confusing doctrine for other issues.

The entire structure of french forces was flawed. All the way from divisions to small units were being drilled in a warfighting plan that was fundamentally unworkable. French high command even relaised this in about 1938, but did not have sufficent time to overcome the organisational inertia and structure and retrain their forces.

No matter what leaders you swapped out you would have had the same issues. If you took the key german leaders and swaped them for their french equivelents, then subjected them to the respective doctrinal regime, the same thing would have happened.

The French were organized to conduct a defensive war - with the exception of the Belgian offensive. The thing is, the Ardennes is an easily defensible territory. If their plan just anticipated an Ardennes attack as opposed to a repeat of 1914, the German advance in the Ardennes would have likely been bloodily repulsed.

Organization matters a lot. This is true. But terrain does too.

A) They'd all be trained to make incorrect plans

Aren't you just giving the reason why the deployments of the French and Russian armies that retardedly dumb?

The French were trained to think the war will be a repeat of 1914.

The Russians were trained to do whatever Stalin fancied - which generally involved "Not One Step Back"!

incidently, please note that it wasn't 'some motorised divisions were good' literally EVERY division was good.

Uh, depends. I kinda doubt the 8th People's Volunteer Division armed with one rifle per two men is gonna be as good as say, a fully equipped Rifle Division based near Moscow .

Also, the ethnic makeup of the Divisions tend to affect their quality. Some ethnicities were more willing to resist than others.

[Zinegata]

Chainguns, Zine.

But chainsaws make everything better.

[mean_liar]

You're confusing doctrine for other issues.

What you wrote looks like a criticism of doctrine to me. What am I missing?