And the radios. It was a critical advantage in the early days, and was the key difference (along with strategic and tactical doctrine in the use of armor for deep penetration and concentration of armor, instead of dispersing it in penny packets all along the front) that set the Germans above their enemies.
Even worse is the notion that tanks ever formed a large part of the German ground forces. Throughout the war the vast bulk of the Army was foot bound infantry relying on horses for supply transport and towing artillery; the German army used more horses in WW2 than in WW1.
Watch me jinx it, but I’m a bit surprised I’ve never seen Vladimir Rezun’s (aka Viktor Suvorov) Icebreaker nonsense claiming Stalin was just about to attack when Hitler beat him to the punch in a preemptive strike with Barbarossa come up in a what if Stalin attacked first or similar thread here.
AS for the Airforce, the exceedingly good ground attack aircraft, the Il-2 was first rolled out in production in March and April of 1941. Given a few years of production, plus adequate training time for the pilots and ground crew, and I think the Il-2 would have had a major impact on those armored spearheads the Heer was so fond of.
In addition, while the Yak-1 wasn’t GREAT, it was adequate, and what would become the Yak-9 was already in testing before Barbarossa… and the Yak-9 was easily a match for the 109. Testing had been cancelled to deal with the invasion, without the invasion it’s certainly possible a much better prepared air force, with superiority of numbers, waits to chew the Luftwaffe into so much catsmeat.
A more historically relevant question is: What if Soviet Union had attacked Hitler as allies of and in concert with France and Britain? According to Churchill, Stalin had made repeated overtures to the Western Allies, and had finally agreed to the Non-Aggression Pact only after continued refusals.
Stalin had offered to join the West in attack upon the violation of Czechoslavakia. The big drawback, from the West’s standpoint, was that Soviet had no common border with Germany and the states in-between feared Stalin more than Hitler.
Yes, and 3-man turrets in the Pz III and IV helped. One man to load the gun, one to aim and fire it, one to command the tank.
The French S35 and B1 were good but their commanders, in little 1-man turrets, were as busy as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. They had no time to command, they were so busy.
What about a thread?
I can’t see the results being good however that would turn out.
Agreed, but the Germans weren’t that much ahead of the French in this regard. The Pz-III and IV were very much a minority of the tanks available to the Germans during the Fall of France; and the Pz-IV was an infantry support tank at the time armed with a short barreled low velocity 75mm gun. The tanks that made up the great majority of available German armor, the Pz-I, II, 35(t) and 38(t) all had one or two man turrets. The two man turret in the 35(t) and 38(t) was rather cramped as well as it was designed as a one man turret but the Germans managed to cram in a loader by removing some of the ammunition.
Stalin was an opportunist, as his post-war conduct showed. The non-aggression pact with Germany secured the USSR’s borders, at least in the short term. Stalin banked on the fact that Hitler would not want a two-front war, and the non-aggression pact seemed to confirm this. Stalin probably assumed that the Germany would have its hands full with the Western allies for the next several years. If Germany was defeated, the Soviets would be the sole power in the East. If Germany survived, they would be weakened while the Soviets were building up their forces. Accordingly, there was no strategic imperative for the Soviets to attack Germany.
Ignoring the strategy, however, and focusing on the hypothetical: I would have to say (IMHO) that the Germans would have eaten the Soviets alive. The USSR was only able to defeat the German invasion due to weather, long supply lines (for the Germans), and resurgent patriotism as a result of defending one’s home soil. A Soviet invasion westward would have lacked all of these advantages.
This.
Stalin’s entire strategy in 1939-1940 was based on the assumption that the Second World War would be much like the First, and that the capitalist countries would bleed each other white. France’s rapid collapse was a very unpleasant surprise indeed, and after that, to the very end of the war - I mean, literally to when Allied troops were crossing the Rhine - Stalin was endlessly suspicious that Britain would give up and stop fighting Germany. (Britain’s PR mishandling of Rudolf Hess’s weird defection did not help.) It was because of that that Stalin was happy to sign the April 1941 nonaggression pact with Japan, unaware that Germany already had Barbarossa and the Hunger Plan worked out.
When De Gaulle fought one of the rare tank battles of the campaign of France, he had runners carrying his orders from tank to tank.
And it wasn’t only tanks. The French high command rejected radios on the basis that, contrarily to phone landlines, communications by radio could be intercepted (remember that it expected a WWI style static war) The net result being that as soon as the Germans cut through the French lines, or even as soon as an unit had to move in a hurry, communications were cut off. Officers could have to rely on the nearest village’s café’s telephone to send informations and receive orders (assuming that phone lines hadn’t been cut by the Germans). Nobody knew where anybody was or what was happening exactly on the front.
This issue alone was indeed crippling.
Stalin was a doctrinaire communist-he was Lenin’s understudy. He believed in Marxian theory, and he saw in Nazism the last stage of capitalism. Hence, he expected that the Hitler regime would (eventually) evolve into socialism-he thought that Germany would be vulnerable in the final years of the Nazi regime.
Hence, I think that Stalin did plan for war with Germany-when Poland was carved up in 1939, Stalin made certain to grab regions that would be useful for military operations.
So the two dictatorial regimes eyed each other uneasily…Stalin needed German machine tools and technology, Germany needed Russian iron ore, oil, and grain. It was only a question of time , as to when Stalin would plan an attack. His seizure of the Baltic states must have given Hitler god reason to accelerate
operation Barbarossa.
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Stalin didn’t ‘grab’ any regions in Poland and the occupation of the Baltic states was of no surprise to Germany; the division of Poland, the Baltic states, Romania and Finland into Soviet and German spheres of influence was agreed upon in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact before the invasion of Poland. Lithuania was even originally going to go to the Germans but the terms were renegotiated giving it to the USSR in exchange for a chunk of Poland that had previously been allotted to the Soviets. Barbarossa wasn’t accelerated.
True, but equally true of the French Somuas and Char Bs. Most of the French armour was light tanks - R35s and H39s and WW1-vintage :eek: FT17s.
The Soviets attempted to use signal (semaphore) flags, where the lead tank would have some guy sitting on top with two flags to direct the other tanks in battle. I think the US (one of the countries that was a pioneer in radio) tried some weird thing using pigeons with messages strapped to their legs. The French, I believe, only put a radio in the command tank (I think the Brits did something similar to your ‘runners’, with messengers).
Putting radios into the tanks gave the Germans a huge tactical advantage in the early days. Fortunately for the US we were able to learn this lesson before we entered the war, and the Soviets and the Brits picked it up quickly enough. The French just never had a chance to learn from their pre-war miscalculations like the other countries, since they weren’t able to trade space and millions and millions their soldiers lives for time, sit out the early years of the war while observing the tactics and strategies being used, or live on an island and protected by one of the premier navies of the world at the time.
One thing always puzzled me about Stalin-he had an excellent general in Georgy Zhukov-Zhukov knew how to coordinate armor and air attacks (“Blitzkrieg”), and had delivered a sound thrashing to the Japanese Army in Manchuria (Khalkin Gol). In fact, Zhukov destroyed two Japanese divisions, and scared the Japanese off from ever tangling with the Red Army again.
Instead of the grossly incompetent Budyenny, Stalin should have given over command to Zhukov-or was he scared that Gen. Zhukov might launch a coup against him?
There you go.
It goes back to what I wrote earlier about Stalin being afraid to take any risk. There was no particular reason for Stalin to think Zhukov might launch a coup. But it was theoretically possible so it was a risk to allow Zhukov to have power. Stalin figured it would be safer to put Budyonny in charge of the military - a man who was too servile and too incompetent to be a threat.
Even during the war itself, when it became too dangerous to leave the military in the hands of incompetents, Stalin never gave too much power to any one general. He always made sure his generals were rivals of each other and none of them had enough troops to defeat the others if they tried.
Stalin was a man driven by fear and suspicion. The culture he grew up in was Darwinian to the extreme. He was probably also a sociopath, if not an outright psychopath. So no guilt, no remorse, no empathy. He was totally about power - how to get it, how to keep it, how to use it to crush anyone who stood against him - and sometimes even against those who stood with him with less than convincing enthusiasm. He came from a tradition where the individual meant nothing and masses of people were just an object to be used. When his own soldier son was captured by the Germans, Stalin’s only reaction was that the son embarrassed him by not committing suicide rather than be captured.
I think the evidence is clear that Stalin eventually planned to attack the West, if for no other reason than his paranoia. However, he was a complex man and his distrust of his own army officer corps led him to decimate them just before the war. (There is some evidence that the Germans planted evidence to enhance Stalin’s paranoia about his officer corp’s loyalties.) In any event, it worked against his own plans to attack the West before the West attacked him.
There was actually some suggestion that the Soviets were planning to attack Germany rather than wait- deployments suggested this. However, there is little evidence to support this (although apparently Zhukov supported this). The Soviets had more tanks than the rest of the world combined.
However, it is likely they would have come off worse than ever.
As has been mentioned, Stalin expected Germany and the Allies to bleed themselves to death and he was hoping to then swoop (so it goes). However, he was faced with Germany with an astounding string of victories and stronger than ever. He was not a fool- he wanted to rebuild and modernise.
The deployment of Soviet troops is some of the strongest evidence against the claim that the Soviets were preparing to attack.
The Red Army was spread out all along the Soviet border - that’s a defensive formation not an offensive formation. If they had been preparing for an attack, they’d have been grouped up in the areas where they planned on invading. And they were building fortifications, which makes no sense if you’re planning on attacking. If you’re planning on attacking you build up your transportation reserves - you bring up trucks and trains and supply depots because you expect to have your army on the move. And the Red Army wasn’t doing this. And while the Luftwaffe was flying recon flights over the Soviet Union, the Soviets weren’t doing any recon flights over German territory - again, something you’d do if you were planning on invading that territory.
I won’t say that there were no Soviet plans for an attack someday. As you pointed out, Zhukov and others had argued for a pre-emptive attack. But the evidence is that Stalin (who was the only one who got a vote) turned them down and had no plans for an attack in 1941.
Of course the Red Army was spread out over the frontier. How else was it supposed to stop the German Army? It was not the surprise that imagined in some quarters that there was not to be an attack by the Germans. Are you going to group them and allow the Germans to encircle you extremely easily?
As for the Red Army not bringing up reserves- do you have a cite for this?
If you read this under “Secret Deployments” you will find ample evidence of Soviet mobilization. Whether you agree with Suvorov or not, it is clear that there was movement of Soviet Forces. Whether or not that was for invasion or to deflect an expected attack is arguable but it does not support your unsubstantiated post.