Most Elefant losses were actually due to mines blowing off the running gear and the vehicle then being abandoned, infantry destroyed few and possibly none of them. The other side of the equation is the Elefants at Kursk were crediting with destroying as many as 500 Russian tanks (total Russian tank losses at Kursk being about 1600) for the loss of 40 Elefants from all causes. They were pretty much impervious to most Soviet tanks in 1943 which explains the very lopsided kill ratio.
This statement simply has no basis in fact that I can discern. T-34s were relatively easy, as tanks go, to keep running, and had a much, much higher rate of in-service workability than any German tank.
Following up on Rickjays point this has no basis in fact. The T-34 was a particularly good tank, regarded by many as the finest tank of the war, hardly a ‘disaster’. It was fast, reliable, and well armoured with good performance in winter conditions. It was also mechanically simple and easy to construct in huge numbers, almost the perfect tank for WW2 conditions. As for your implication that the Russians built all these tanks ‘mostly’ with foreign aid this is complete nonsense. The Russians had an enormous industrial base and produced colossal numbers of tanks even in peacetime, at the time of their entry into the war in 1941 they already had more tanks then the rest of the world combined. It is certainly true that much of their initial tank fleet was outdated but their pool of modern tanks exceeded the number of modern tanks available to any other nation. By 1942 they had concentrated production almost exclusively on the T-34 and churned out over 50,000 of them before the war was often. Almost none of the foreign aid supplied was useful for soviet tank production nor was it necessary to provide aid that would have been. They wanted trucks, food and high octane aviation fuel from the west, not help in producing tanks which is about the last thing the Russians would need.
Not quite. They considered foreign tanks generally inferior to their own design (although the crews liked the Shermans they received late in the war for their mechanical reliability). In 1941, during the dark days of Barbarossa, Stalin offered the blueprints of the T-34 to Roosevelt (Roosevelt declined) for the Americans to produce it for them. AFAIK, it is the only time the Soviets asked for help from the West in tank production.
I read somewhere (sorry, no cite handy) that it was generally considered necessary to commit at least 5 Shermans to take on 1 German Tiger. However, this wasn’t too difficult to achieve, as the US was able to churn out Shermans in the necessary numbers, and Germany could not produce anywhere near the numbers of Tigers to stop them - even though the US forces needed a 5-to-1 tank advantage.
I may have been unclear: Western economic aid to Russia allowed them to do so. Without new machines, supplies, trucks, and oil, they could never have devoted resources so. Troops need clothing, boots, and so on (and believe me, Russia got over 2 million pairs of boots alone). Factories need trucks and fuel to run them. Russia had neither boots nor trucks, and desperately needed lots of other things as well. (I understand American-made spare parts were a big hit over there). Wuithout them they could never have pumped out military supplies enough, and had they survived at all, would have faced total economic collapse.
I think it would be a mistake also to overplay the Battle fo Stalingrad. The Germans were still on the offense thereafter. It wasn’t the the beginning of the end (Kursk or even Bagration itself was). But it was the end of the beginning. Or maybe the beginning of the end of the beginning.
After Stalingrad the Germans did attempt one offensive action of consequence but it failed disasterously. That was at Kursk where the Germans attempted to break through but were unsucessful.
Maybe Stalingrad and Kursk should be taken together as the end of the advance into the Soviet Union. The failure at Kursk following on the heels of the disaster at Stalingrad were successive blows from which it would be hard for any army to recover.
I’m pretty much in agreement with what others have said. Operation Bagration was a far worse disaster for the Germans than Kursk was. The Germans lost about 650,000 casualties in Bagration as compared to about 230,000 casualties in Kursk.
I also agree with the consensus on Soviet tanks - they were generally better than their German counterparts and the Soviets did build them without foreign aid. The Soviet government made tank production a priority before the war and their efforts paid off. Totalitarian governments have a lot of flaws but they are capable of getting maximum effort focused into specific areas.
You’d radically overstating the importance of lend-lease supplies. First off very little of it arrived in the critical period of 1941 and Russia survived its danger period on the basis of its own resources (which happen to be enormous). Secondly the overwhelming majority of foreign aid arrived in the post-Kursk period by which stage Russia had not only survived but had bled the Wehrmacht white and the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt. With or without foreign aid, Russia was simply too big to be defeated by Germany. Foreign aid was certainly useful in many areas, especially in the trucks (in excess of 400,000) which significantly increased mobility of the Red Army in its final offensives, but Russia was a bigger industrial economy then Germany and was always going to be able to produce enormous quantities of war material in its own right. As for your 2 million pair of boots figure, you should view this in the context of in **excess of 20 million men ** who served in the Red Army in the course of the war (ie maybe one man in 10 ever saw a pair of American boots.)
Stalingrad (and Kursk) is certainly overplayed. They were just signposts on a road to inevitable defeat, in themselves neither was particularly significant. Germany lost an army at Stalingrad, but then the Soviets had already lost many armies, in itself it would have meant little if the underlying strategic balance hadn’t already fundamentally changed in Russia’s favour. You’re right that Germany remained on the offensive after Stalingrad but it wasn’t like former German offensives. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 it was a massive overwhelming offensive along the entire frontier. The following year, after the winter 1941 Russian counter-offensive, Germany resumed its offensive. But she was no longer strong enough to attack along the entire front and was only capable of attacking in the southern sector of the eastern front. Even this had been achieved by stripping units in the northern sectors of men and especially vehicles to restore offensive capability to units in the south. In 1943 the German offensive (at Kursk) was reduced in scale yet again and consisted of an attack in just one area of the southern part of the eastern front.
They weren’t beaten by particular battles as much as they were ground down by the massive cumulative losses of the entire campaign. Even the initial 1941 campaign cost the Germans over 900,000 men which in context was more then their cumulative losses on all other fronts for the entire war up to that point. This is equivalent to removing 60 divisions from the field and this is from the comparitively easy and successful opening months of the war against Russia. The effects of such a loss rate (and it continued) were a rapid weakening of German strength. In the French campaign almost every German infantry division had been rated as a category A division, meaning capable of offensive operations in its own right. Every year thereafter the percentage of divisions in this category declined. The German infantry divisions shrunk in strength as replacements were too few to replace losses. They declined in artillery support. They lost their mobility as all mechanised transport was stripped away (replaced by horses) to maintain the mobility of an ever-shrinking pool of first rate units (mainly the panzer divisions). The Germans could have won both at Kursk and Stalingrad and nothing would have changed.
Russia was just as big compared to Germany in WWI but continued defeats discouraged them to the point of giving up with the revolution serving to end their participation in the war…
I would treat with extreme caution any figures of Russian losses issued by the Russians themselves.
I have no cite but I recall a T.V. programme about battlefield archaeology on some of the sites at Kursk and the evidence was of much greater Soviet losses then they owned up to even after the war.
Russia was only as big compared to Germany in WW1 with respect to the population balance. In WW1 the Russian industrial economy was dwarfed by Germany, this situation had radically transformed between the wars with the growth of Russia as an industrial giant. Soviet Russia in WW2 possessed an ability to support a war effort to an extent that just hadn’t been available to Czarist Russia. Also needs to be pointed out that Russia had been in revolutionary turmoil even before WW1 (note the 1905 revolution) and while defeats in WW1 had aggravated this and served as a catalyst for revolution, the defeats had not created such turmoil. Imperial Russia also never had the iron grip over the armed forces and society that totalitarian Russia did. With all this in mind I really don’t see any possibility of the Soviet Union dropping out of WW2 as a result of hypothetical defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk especially when such a peace could only be at the price of sacrificing much of western Russia to German rule. The Russian General Staff were very well aware that time was on their side and that they were not going to lose, I dont see they were going to give up much of their country just because they weren’t going to win as fast as they might have wanted.
From accounts of the battle (Kursk) it seemed that the German generals were shocked that their carefully prepared offensive was stopped cold. This should have provoked some serious thought-like maybe reverting to defensive warfare. They knew at this point that they couldn’t win.
True but to argue that the great battles on the eastern front are irrelevant
is pretty extreme. Yes, with the advantage of being able to analyze the affair at leisure and knowing the result it is true that Germany’s defeat in the east was inevitable.
I maintain that arguing that is the same as arguing that defeat was inevitable when Hitler took power. In Mein Kampf he stated three main objectives. 1) To unify all German speaking peoples (Ein Volk) in one nation (Ein Reich) under one leader (Ein Fuhrer). 2) To provided this population with adequate space and resources Germany needed additional territory (Liebensraum) and such land was available only to the east. 3) To purify the Aryan race of all lesser bloodlines. There was a subsidiary objective of fighting communism.
Given 2) an attack on the Soviet Union was inevitable once Hitler gained power, given the disparity in resources that attack was bound to fail, ergo the actual combat was just the trival details that confirmed what was preordained…
What is important as far as turning points go is what the people at the time thought and how it affected their morale. This is anecdotal but the Germans I know who were there say that after the loss of the 6th Army at Stalingrad there was a general sinking feeling the pit of the stomach and that they were going to lose.
I agree 100% that many of us greatly exaggerate the contribution of lend-lease to the Soviet success. The trucks were important but I don’t believe they were crucial. Yes they greatly improved Soviet mobility however even without them their mobility was probably equal to the Germans. It needs to be recalled that the Germans still used considerable horse drawn transport in WWII. Considering the huge scale of operations in the eastern front the idea that the supplies coming through a couple of ports, both icebound for a considerable part of the year, is a real stretch. However, the claim does bolster our inflated opinion that “we saved the world from Hitler.”
In clarification I haven’t stated and dont believe that the great battles were irrelevant but that in themselves they weren’t the causes of German defeat and their significance in this regard is overstated. So I don’t share your view that Stalingrad was a turning point, if any single campaign in Russia was a turning point I would class the battle of Moscow as the one. The Germans lost primarily because they had bitten off more then they could chew, were being outproduced in war material, and were sustaining casualties beyond their ability to replace their losses. The German losses at Stalingrad were very heavy as you earlier rightly pointed out and were part of this overall pattern and were significant in this regard. I also agree with you on the demoralising effect that the Stalingrad defeat had for the Germans. But as heavy as the Stalingrad losses were, the cumulative German losses on the eastern front by the time of the surrender of the 6th Army were already equal to several Stalingrads. The losses occured in countless battles that were individually less dramatic then Stalingrad but their combined impact was no less disastrous for that.
Lets suppose that the Germans had captured Stalingrad in November 1942 and the 6th Army was never encircled and destroyed. A city of largely symbolic value would have been taken. Stalingrad was not critical to the Soviet war effort and nothing fundamental would have been lost to the Soviets. Even a victory here would still have left the Germans in a strategically untenable position. They would still have been incapable of effectively supporting forces with such massively extended supply lines. They also would still be incapable of adequately manning such an enormously long front line and would still have needed to have large stretches of the front manned by Rumanian and Italian forces incapable of defending their positions from Russian assault.
In the same fashion, the Battle of Midway and all the battles for islands in the Pacific were not the cause of the Japanese defeat. That happened because Japan didn’t have the resources or population to combat the US even in their own back yard. Having superior resources is necessary but not sufficient. You must take advantage of those resources and exploit them properly. That’s where the actual action enters the picture.
I suppose in a cerebral analysis of the Soviet-German war in the east, the big battles were not crucial, an equivalent battle at any other place would have done just as well.
It doesn’t matter whether or not Stalingrad or Kursk were important places. The German losses at those places were outstanding features of that “wearing down” that you spoke of. As long as morale doesn’t crack to the point that one side gives up, all wars are wars of attrition.
Germany’s ONLY chance to win in Russia was thrown away, very early in the game. Hitler had decided to invest Russian cities-he had 500,000 men tied up (Army Group North) around leningrad. The insane desire to take Stalingrad made NO sense. The only way that the Germans could have won: send the panzer armies deep behind Russian lines, and barrel in to capture Moscow. It is likely that the capture of the capital might have broken the Soviet command structure-and they might have even cptured Stalin!
Second: treat the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Tartars with respect! Instead, Hitler had the SS come in and treat these peoples like slaves. Third: equip the troops with winter gear! Many German casualties were from frostbite and exposure-leather boots are no good in the Russian winter.
My scenario: Guderian’s Panzers drive in through and capture Moscow (November 1941). Soviet resistance falls apart-Stalin is captured and put on trial in Berlin. Russia signs an armistice, and Russia breaks up into seperate regions.