Diehard has a point, though: What did prevent the Jews, the French Resistance, and the various other partisans from fighting much dirtier than they ever actually did? What dissuaded them from inventing the car bomb and blasting the hell out of some Nazi soldiers? Presumably the Jews knew they were going to die anyway, so why didn’t they engage in suicide bombings? (Even if they had no full idea about the camps, they knew what a pogrom was and they knew the general Nazi attitude towards Jews. There was no way they thought the trains were taking them anyplace happy.)
(Of course, the fact the camps themselves apparently didn’t have any major internal disturbances is dismaying. There is, apparently, an edge you must walk to have a prison riot: It can’t be too decent or nobody wants to fight, it can’t be too cruel or nobody has the physical energy to do anything. The Warsaw Ghetto apparently walked this line until the end, but the camps themselves never did.)
[QUOTEThere is clear historical evidence that the USSR would have attacked Germany if the Germans hadn’t beaten them to the punch (and Victor Suvarov claims that the inital German successes were partly due to the Soviet forces having been caught in the midst of a change from a defensive to an offensive position as a preliminary to an attack).[/QUOTE]
I have never seen the first assertion anywhere but in propaganda justifying the Nazi attack on the USSR. Do you have a cite?
I don’t think Soviet forces were strong enough to consider launching a preemptive attack in 1941.
Initial Germand successes had something to do with the 150 divisions they hurled against the Soviets.
Certainly no defense is perfect and it is the attacker’s job to circumvent and/or overcome those defenses. Nevertheless the defender usually has the advantage. Prepositioned supplies are staggered in. Some at the front, more a little ways back and yet more further back still. The attacking army needs to drive their supplies forward making for a much more difficult logistical problem (defenders can blow up the attacker’s supplies too, take out bridges, etc.). I believe the Germans were so successful in some attacks that their armor outran their supply and had to stop and wait for it to catch up to them. A defender will fallback to yet more supplies…less an issue for them. Also, I find it hard to credit the Russian airforce with successfully attacking an undamaged Luftwaffe to the point of controlling the air (assuming the OP and the Luftwaffe is in defensive mode).
Trenches would be used as were foxholes in WWII. Just because you are in a trench doesn’t mean you can’t get out of it. If the enemy goes somewhere else and you have to chase him so be it. If he comes at you where you already are you are better off in a trench or other prepared defensive structure. Militaries today still have soldiers dig holes all the time and it is not just for punishment.
You seem to think a defender needs an unbroken line 1000 miles long to defend themselves. This ignores terrain and high value targets. A defender will concentrate defense where it matters and has a better chance of picking the battlefield to give themselves every advantage they can. If the attacker can go around them then good for the attacker but 8in the chess match that is war your opponent will try and force the situation to their benefit and the defender has advantages in this.
Bottom line is attacking is usually more difficult than defending. Sometimes an attacker surprises a defender and catches them with their pants down but in the history of war that is not the common experience. Most times you have to dislodge the defender out of his prepared positions and that can be a bitch.
I think that attack is more difficult for the individual because you have to expose yourself in order to more forward. However, the so-called defensive front line is really a chain of strong points that are connected by areas covered by pre-aimed artillery, machine guns, land mines, barbed wire, etc. Since the attacking individuals are exposed, local superiority in numbers is needed. This is usually gained by massing the assault force at one place and conducting fake assaults at other places to keep the defenders in place there and to delay the movement of reserve forces to the actual point of assault as long as possible.
As has been pointed out, the attacker has the advantage that the location of the defenders is relatively well known while that of the attacker is problematic as are his actual intentions.
Yes. The German armor outran supply lines and had to stop and wait. The Russians would not have that problem going from Eastern Poland to Berlin. The distances involved are just much smaller.
As for Russian air, by the end of the war Russian fighters were superior to standard German fighters. I will admit that I do not know at what point in the war they passed Germany, and it is possible that in 42 Germany still held an edge. But that edge would still be lost in historical time frame.
And thinking like this is why the Germans blasted through enemy lines early in the wars. High value targets and defendable terrain would simply be bypassed, as the Germans did to the Russians and the French. High value targets unable to be resupplied soon starve out. Defendable terrain is no value if no-one attacks you there. The Defenders DO have to defend the entire length of the border. The attackers only have to attack at isolated spots and penetrate behind the lines.
The only time the Germans were forced to try for high value targets was when they needed shelter in the harsh Russian winters. Russia would have no such obstacle in invading Germany.
The German forces would be fresh, but you are forgetting that the Russian forces would be fresh as well. The Russians lost MILLIONS of men just to the initial German advance. Russian casualties far outpaced German losses on the Eastern Front. Russia had to rebuild almost their entire industrial base beyond German reach. Without those initial losses of men and equipment, Russia would be in fine shape to drive the 500 miles across western Poland to Berlin.
Losses of such an attack would be huge on both sides. But the Russians had the manpower to do it, and all the fighting would be on Polish, German, and Rumanian ground, not Russian ground.
The distances are plenty big enough to still present a logistics problem. China ran into this during the Korean War. Emboldened by their initial success against UN troops rather than stopping and consolidating their gains at the initial borders prior to the war they pressed their attack thinking to toss UN troops off of the peninsula altogether. China overextended their supply lines and their push faltered and was driven back. Korea is no bigger in size than the distances you are talking about. Not saying it necessarily would happen like that but merely having your supplies on one side of a river with your armor on the other and a blasted bridge between them can screw-up an advance…no matter that they are only 100 yards apart.
I am not so sure about this. As the war progressed Germany lost most of her experienced pilots. Good pilots were much harder to replace than planes. Per the OP we assume that the Luftwaffe would still be largely intact as they didn’t grind themselves to pieces on the Eastern Front. In an initial Soviet attack the Soviets would be pitting their undertrained pilots in aircraft no better and largely worse than German aircraft against an experienced Luftwaffe that honed its skills over Poland and then France. In actual history the German pilots owned Soviet pilots to the point of almost being silly. Do not forget that Stalin had gutted the ranks of his airforce along with the purges of the rest of his military prior to WWII. US pilots are considered an Ace with 5 kills. Many German pilots racked up over 100 kills over the Eastern Front with their best pilot scoring something over 350 kills.
The Germans however made the same mistake the Japanese did with regard to their pilots. They had no rotation policy like the Americans did where experienced pilots would be brought back to train the next set of pilots. German and Japanese pilots fought till they died. Eventually they got bled dry and the numbers show it. US and Soviet air-to-air success rates climbed and turned the tables on Japan and Germany despite Japan and Germany having quite good airplanes at their disposal. The Soviets of course had one more advantage…numbers. They could and would accept losses that would be intolerable to Americans and Germans and just keep throwing more pilots and planes at the problem. Eventually this simply wore the German airforce down and gave the Soviets the edge.
Still, in our proposed hypothetical from the OP it is unlikely the Soviets would have been on a total war footing even when planning an attack. By war’s end pretty much everything the Soviet economy did was geared towards the war. Every able bodied person who could fight was drafted, every resource given over to military production. This would not be the case if the Soviets were at “peace” with Germany and planned to attack. Certainly they’d ramp up production but it would be nowhere near what they were cranking out by 1943-44 (not to mention we have not speculated on what resources the US/Allies would give to Russia, if any, for this endeavor…US support was critical to the Soviets early on in the war). It is conceivable the Germans could have stalled and turned back a Soviet advance where they’d be forced to pull back and regroup as the Soviets simply would not have had the logistics to replace armor and planes and such.
As you said yourself the distances in Poland and Germany are smaller compared to the open tracts found in Russia. Bypassing and entrenched enemy may be fine but you risk leaving an enemy on your flank or in your rear. One way or another they need to be accounted for. The Germans certainly would not just sit still and wait for the Soviets to come to them. Cutoff units would still try to fight their way out and that can be quite a problem if those troops are motivated and they’d pretty much have to be as they’d have few options at that point.
Here’s another lesson from the Koreran War. I think it was the Battle of Chosin. 20-25,000 US troops were cutoff by Chinese forces numbering around 120,000. It was a 13-day walking battle for US troops out of there under constant pressure from the Chinese. While the battle was a retreat for the US and a technical loss the Chinese paid a huge price going after them. The US suffered 6,000 killed/wounded/captured with another 6,000 suffering from forstbite. The Chinese suffered 72,500 casualites (killed/wounded/frostbite…thousands supposedly froze to death alone).
Of course, sometimes such positions just get overrun by the attacking army. The lesson though is you just cannot ignore them and hope they will go away and you can count on the Germans not to sit still and wait for it.
Indeed they did. Russian forces might well be fresh as well but they were not well trained or well led or experienced. German troops were all of those things.
That’s the rub. In the end Russia’s advantage was numbers and the willingness to spend those numbers easily. Germans and Americans simply never really get this method of fighting and frankly have a real problem dealing with it when it faces them. If a German or American division was losing at 10:1 rates they’d stop the attack and try something else. Russians and Chinese are two who would just keep stuffing more bodies into the gap till it overwhelmed their enemy. As someone (Stalin?) once said, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
I am not so sure about this. As the war progressed Germany lost most of her experienced pilots. Good pilots were much harder to replace than planes. Per the OP we assume that the Luftwaffe would still be largely intact as they didn’t grind themselves to pieces on the Eastern Front.[\quote]
But Germany didn’t lose all her pilots on the eastern front. Many were lost in the ill conceived Battle of Britain. Those pilots would still be gone.
[QUOTE=Whack-a-Mole]
Still, in our proposed hypothetical from the OP it is unlikely the Soviets would have been on a total war footing even when planning an attack.[\quote]
This is of course the major factor. We seem to disagree on the answer. I think that given the nature of Stalin and the Communist leadership, Russia would have been on total war footing. There was no need to pull back production to provide civilian ammenities as the civilians had never experienced those ammenities before. USSR showed a marked propensity for increasing military spending at the cost of civilian standard of lving all throughout the Cold War. I think that they would have been no different in a cold war with Germany. Germans, on the other hand, did know what decent living standards were.
This would probably be a decent comparison with the Russia German scenario. Your numbers are a little misleading given the high proportion of frosbite to the Chinese.
(http://www.answers.com/topic/battle-of-chosin-reservoir) with non-frostbite figures being only around 25,000 killed vs 2500 killed for the UN. Oddly enough, we seem to take opposite lessons from this. Seems to me that the Chinese blasted through in a matter of a couple of weeks with acceptable casualties and continued their advance.
The numbers I read largely agree with yours on actual kills. My numbers however did include wounded/captured/frostbitten as well (for both sides) as people in those lists are essentially out of the war. Sure, some may well come back and continue to fight but more often than not being wounded on a battlefield is usually the end of your fighting days. As such consider those troops out of the picture as well.
Odd what youu consider acceptable losses though. Even just taking the actual kills the Chinese suffered a 10:1 loss ratio. If we include all casualties (frostbite, the works) the Chinese lost over 72,000 troops to our 12,000 (a 6:1 ratio). Losing 60% of your army in one engagement, even if some troops will return, is definitely going to slow you down and perhaps even stop you for a good while till that army recovers which has repercussions for the war as whole.
I suppose a Chinese general with a near limitless supply of fresh bodies and little concern for their welfare this might be acceptable but I cannot think any American General would be viewed favorably for giving up losses like that.
No they didn’t but then the Battle of Britain was over near a year before Barbarossa kicked off and the Germans still demolished the Soviet airforce (IIRC it was so bad for the Soviets that Stalin had whoever it was heading up the Soviet Airforce executed). The Germans still far outclassed the Soviet airforce at least until attrition set in.
Well, you still have to account for allied supplies sent to Russia during WWII and whether or not you think those supplies would still have been given or given in as big amounts under the OPs hypothetical. The allies did not supply much in the way of military equipment but as I understand it the US provided a huge number of support vehicles (trucks mostly) and food. Do not underestimate the need for support vehicles. Many will claim the most important single vehicle for the US in WWII was the humble Jeep.
Without allied supply the Soviets would need to leave enough people behind to account for production of those items (food, trucks and so on). That’s fewer people on the front lines, fewer factories making tanks or ammo because they are building trucks, fewer resources to go towards tanks and guns as they are diverted to trucks, etc…
Even with all of that and even with the total control Stalin had over the country I still cannot see the USSR being on quite the same total war footing prior to a war than they were in WWII. It is one thing to switch production and grab people everywhere for war when you are fighting for your life and another to expect to get a country rolling like that when the threat is somewhat less obvious.
So, did the Dutch make car bombs? Did they go on suicide missions? Did they use recognizably terroristic tactics?
I’m not interested in which group of partisans was the most effective. I’m interested in which groups used tactics we now associate with extremist Islamist groups and other recognizably terroristic organizations.