<Insert joke about the feasibility of increasing the likelihood of the surrender of whole units of Italians.>
According to certain informal accounts I heard (an Italian neighbor), many Italian POWS did no better than the Germans. In the late 40s, 50s & early 60s, some Communist Party members approached family members in Italy, & promised to help bring the POWS home, if the families would vote fot the People’s Front.
Those promises were worthless. Most were already dead.
Perhaps the following, quoted from Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (2006) will resolve the question of the relative number of casualties in the Red Army during the Second World War. On page 4, Merridale writes:
Red Army losses–deaths–exceeded eight million…[t]his figure easily surpasses the number of military deaths on all sides, Allied and German, in the First World War, and stands in stark contrast to the losses among the British and American armed forces between 1939 ans 1945, which amounted to fewer than a quarter of a million each.
On page 188 she writes, “On average, Soviet losses outnumbered those of the enemy by at least three to one.”
The bulk of the Soviet losses were suffered in 1941-42, when they were on the defensive and found themselves getting encircled and destroyed by the Germans. That had more to do with Stalin than it did his generals.
Here’s the famous passage a German soldier wrote about the battle:
“We have fought during 15 days for a single house,” writes a
German officer, "with mortars, grenades, machine guns, and
bayonets. Already by the third day 54 German corpses are strewn
in the cellars, on the landings, and the staircases. The front is
a corridor between burnt-out rooms; it is the thin ceiling
between two floors. Help comes from neighboring houses by fire
escapes and chimneys. There is a ceaseless struggle from noon to
night. From story to story, faces black with sweat, we bombard
each other with grenades in the middle of explosions, clouds of
dust and smoke, heaps of mortar, floods of blood, fragments of
furniture and human beings. Ask any soldier what half an hour of
hand-to-hand struggle means in such a fight. And imagine
Stalingrad; 80 days and 80 nights of hand-to-hand struggles. The
street is no longer measured by meters but by corpses…
“Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous
cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the
reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those
scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the
Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of
Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the
hardest stones can not bear it for long; only men endure.”
A masterpiece of Nietzschean rhetoric, but perhaps an accurate impression of how the men themselves actually felt.
Re: the Italians. There’s film of their army joining the invasion of Russia, showing them riding in on their bicycles. It was made as a propagand film, but in hindsight it’s hard to watch it and not think “they’re invading Russia…on bicycles.”
Fair point - but consider what other posters have pointed out, with regard to the relative paucity of mechanized troop transport among the Axis powers. If you have decent roads, putting some infantry troops on bikes instead of marching makes a degree of sense - it’s certainly faster. You can’t easily fight from a bicycle seat, so it’s useless near the front - but it’s not a stupid idea in rear areas.
Tour de Ostfront?
I’m just glad the Germans didn’t have Lance Armstrong on their side.
Related to that, one very curious tale from WWII came from the Pacific front reported by the documentary “The World at War”:
British troops were being routed by the Japanese close to Singapore, one battalion was hiding next to a road and they were ready to continue fighting but they decided to surrender as soon as they heard that Japanese tanks were coming. The British had virtually no tanks at the beginning of the war in the Pacific.
So they prepared the white flag and walked forward only to surrender to a battalion of Japanese soldiers that were riding bicycles.
After so many days of biking and a rushed offensive, the Japanese did not have the time to fix the tires of their bikes so they were riding with no tires, only with the metal rims. The noise made by so many bikes with no tires on the pavement did sound just like a tank on the distance.
I wouldn’t read too much into the reasons the British gave for surrendering at Singapore. That whole campaign was spectacularly mismanaged from the get-go. The Japanese had fewer troops at the start and fewer at the finish, and (contrary to the mythology at the time) no experience in jungle warfare. The British began by barricading the roads and leaving their flanks hanging in the jungle; all the Japanese had to do was walk around their positions and the Brits had to flee. By the end of the campaign, the Brits retreated into their fortified works, covering everything except their water supply. The arriving Japanese seized the water resources and the British were instantly consigned to defeat in the length of time they could go without water.
I’m sure someone claimed the tires sounded like tanks, but probably the pusillanimous, panicky, disorganized troops would have surrendered to anything that would accept a surrender; everything else was self-justification. Probably the lowest point in British military history.
Probably the worst aspect of the Singapore defeat was the way they kept sending reinforcements to the city right up to the final week. Some units were sent to Singapore just in time to be surrendered to the Japanese.
I did not say that it was the whole army surrendering because of that at Singapore, only that some British soldiers reported that in some locations in Malaya. Brigadier Sir John George Smyth reported that by the time the Japanese invaded Malaya the British had other priorities like defending England from the German blitz, Fighting in North Africa and occupying the Middle east. Malaya was like the 4th item in their priorities, so in Malaya they got the less experienced troops and less support.
Of course, mismanagement still gets a big chunk of the blame. But the Japanese also got complete aerial superiority early on, and the Japanese not only did go around the barricades trough the jungles, they had control of the sea so they also made sea landings around those defenses.
One of WS Churchill’s blunders, and before that he denied Malaya Command the resources needed, but gave them abundently once defeat was assured to ensure that an obscene amount of troops were lost.
Makes one wish he had gone a morale building trip to the island circa 8th Feb 1942.
General Percival was responsible for the debacle at Singapore. He had about 3X the number of the Japanese forces-yet he retreated and failed to mount a coherent defense. Of course, sending Admiral Tom Philips to his death was a major blunder-and losing two battleships was NOT a morale booster.
The odd thing was, General Percival had correctly predicted (before the war), the Japanese landing point (Khota Bharu)-and yet, failed to adequately defend the place.
The Japanese had no tanks, no heavy artillery, and damn little besides determination.
Percival had a well-equipped army, but did squat.