I have to disagree with this wholeheartedly. The USSR was never dependant upon lend-lease for its very survival. Lend-lease shipments were a trickle in 1941 and not much better in 1942. It was only from 1943 that the floodgates opened, largely due to the opening of routes through Iran (after it had been occupied) and pacific ports where US build freighters were handed over to the USSR at completion and sailed to the USSR under a Soviet Flag and with a Soviet crew. If they’d been American flagged, they’d be sitting ducks to Japan, but as Soviet vessels, Japan left them alone for fear of going to war with the USSR. 1941 and 1942 were the years that the USSR was fighting for its life, and it survived with minimal lend lease support. By 1943 Germany could only afford a minor offensive to close a salient at Kursk as their summer offensive, and after it failed the USSR was continuously on the offensive until the end of the war. The torrent of material arriving 1943-45 no doubt aided the speed of the German defeat greatly, but I have no doubt that the USSR would still have won without any lend lease, it simply would have taken a year or two longer.
Though the issue was raised by the horse that alas shall never be consul now, it’s worth noting that the USSR was the #2 industrial power in the world at the time, and it actually outproduced the USA in tanks and artillery during the war.
True, the loss rates get a bit skewed from all the mass surrenders in encirclements at Minsk, Smolensk, Kiev, Vyazma, etc some of which netted over 600,000 prisoners at a time. Roughly 6 million prisoners were taken in the first 6 months of the war. Regarding radios, in their defense most armies didn’t have enough radios to go around at the beginning of the war, Germany was the exception. In the USSR, France, Poland and I think the UK initially only the platoon or sometimes company commander had a radio and had to communicate orders to his subordinates with signal flags. It may be an apocryphal tale, but I’ve heard that some Soviet tanks were still using signal flags in Berlin.
The Sherman Tanks were nicknamed “Ronsons” by British soldiers because of their tendency to burst into flames when shot by other tanks, panzerfausts, and anti-tank weapons. (Ronson is a once-presitgous brand of cigarette lighter, in case anyone was wondering).
Dissonance is right- the Soviets would still have beaten the Germans without Lend-Lease. In the early stages of the war, Lend-Lease gave them Stuart Tanks, Thompson SMGs, Dodge trucks, Jeeps, Tractors, Rolling Stock, and even Aircraft (the British even sent Hurricane Fighter/Bombers to the Soviets during the War), but after about 1942-1943 the Soviets were cranking out T-34s, PPSh-41s SMGs and Mosin-Nagant rifles, Yakolev and Sturmovik aircraft, Gaz trucks and jeeps, and all the rest of the sort of things needed to fight a war at such a rate that it really boggles the mind. There’s a reason you can buy a WWII vintage Mosin-Nagant M91/30 rifle in the US for under $50 and it isn’t because they aren’t good rifles (quite the opposite, in fact).
Yes. It constituted the entirety of the German 1943 Summer offensive, and it’s only goal was to nip out a salient all of 190km wide by 120km deep left over from the Soviet 42/43 winter offensive - and failed to come anywhere near close to succeeding. Compare this to the '41 summer offensive, which was Barbarossa. It had the overly ambitious goal of defeating the entire USSR in one summer campaign and reaching the AA Line (Arkangelsk-Astrakan), but its success was nonetheless impressive; it drove the Soviets back across the entire length of the front from central Poland and the Rumanian and Hungarian borders all the way to the gates of Leningrad, Moscow, and Rostov. The '42 summer campaign had to dial down ambitions greatly from a front wide offensive since Germany could not support it, but rather an offensive only by Army Group South with the goal of taking the Caucasus while anchoring the flank on the Volga River. Again, overly ambitious, and all of their gains and more were lost in the '42/43 Soviet winter offensive.
Which leads back to 1943. All that Germany could try for a summer campaign was a very limited objective offensive on a very small part of a very large front, and even that turned out to be overly ambitious. There’s no reason that the USSR couldn’t have taken the initiative in the summer of 1943, but they knew through spies that the Germans were going to attack the Kursk salient (not that they even needed that, a simple look at the map by anyone with a modicum of military sense could see it) and choose instead to let the Germans expend themselves on defenses and then launch a powerful riposte. This counter-offensive drove the entire southern front of the line back to and across the Dnieper River by the end of 1943.
“Largest armored battle in all of history,” is a bit overplayed in regards to Kursk, if it’s just total number of tanks or even worse volume of tanks per square km, Israel vs. Egypt in 1967 or '73 beats it easily.
Apologies for droning on, but yes, it was a minor offensive in the greater scheme of the scale in WW2.
It may not have been that ambitious in terms of territory, but that salient contained (according to Wikipedia) “…some 1,300,000 men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery pieces and 2,792 aircraft. This amounted to 26% of the total manpower of the Red Army, 26% of its mortars and artillery, 35% of its aircraft and 46% of its tanks.” If the Germans had managed to encircle and destroy a good portion of that, they would have achieved much more than pinching off a salient.
Wiki is a terribly unreliable source (I’d bet a lot of those numbers include forces on the flanks that launched the riposte, reserves, etc - and 3,600 AFVs being 46% of Soviet tanks my ass- hell, they were cranking out 1,300 T-34s alone a month at this point), but in any event: at no point did the Germans get anywhere close to encircling and destroy this salient. In the very unlikely event that they did succeed, it’s highly unlikely that they could bag much in an encirclement. The huge losses in encirclements in '41 were very largely due to Stalin’s “Not one step back” orders in the face of any military logic. To his credit, Stalin started listening to his generals and stopped issuing such suicidal orders, and in the '42 German summer offensive no massive bags of prisoners were taken because the Soviets withdrew rather than follow orders completely out of touch with reality. Hitler on the other hand, seemed to think that “No Retreat,” was some sort of panacea to fix any military problem.
In any event, the goal of Operation Citadel was to conquer a not terribly large salient and demonstrate German prowess; even in the wildest hopes of its success there was no plan to do much past that, much less to cripple the USSR in the years to come or take even Moscow, the days of even dreaming that had long since past.
Kursk is pretty much overplayed, much as all ‘turning-points’ are to one degree or another. It was the German '43 summer offensive, but a sober look at it shows that even in the event it succeeded, Germany was on the ropes. They had gone from a front-wide offensive in '41 to a southern front offensive in '42 to nipping out a salient in '43 - which is something that hardly called for an entire summer offensive in the past (see 2nd battle of Kharkov, etc). In fact Manstein wanted to conduct a limited tactical counter-offensive against a small part of the Kursk salient in the spring which would have made sense to do at the time, but waiting ‘til summer and trying a full scale strategic offensive (such as could be attempted) that was the entirety of what Germany could scrape up in '43 in retrospect was folly. Not that it would have changed the results of the war in the end , but not throwing away troops and attempting a fully defensive stance from '43 on might have lasted Nazi Germany past its expiration date of May '45.
That’s kinda like saying “my penis is perfectly fine for it’s masturbatory mission, it only fails in coitus”. Technically true, but a meaningless distinction : any tank that can withstand small arms fire, grenades and non-specifically anti-tank weapons will support infantry fine… until a tank-hunter squad or a tank from the other side joins the party.
Not every tank is meant to be a heavy tank nor do you want it to be. There are many weapons systems each with its own good and bad points.
The Sherman was fine if used for its intended role. Unfortunately when enemy tanks would show and ALL we had was Shermans they’d throw the Shermans at the enemy tanks. Whoops…bad idea versus the more modern German tanks and they got their arses kicked (IIRC there was a story of a King Tiger rolling out of some woods and blasting a Sherman…the other Shermans in the group hit the Tiger four times almost immediately afterwards and the Tiger just drove off). Their only advantage here was numbers. Quantity can have a quality all its own (ask Stalin or the Chinese). Small comfort for the Sherman crews though.
Still, in some roles it was fine. Just not in an anti-tank role.
Like being turned into a newt, it got better. They eventually up-gunned it as well as up-armored it. It was fairly fast for it’s day, very manuverable, had a quick rotating turret, was easy to maintain in the field and very robust and reliable…and you could make a shit load of them really quickly.
It was never a great tank (in the tank vs tank role) and was seriously flawed (that’s what you get for not maintaining your military during the peace years and then rushing something untested into mass production), and one on one it was terribly over matched…but then again, it didn’t fight tigers or panthers one on one. If you are willing to throw away 4 tanks (and their crews) to get the 5th one behind the tiger or panther, then in the end you are going to ‘win’ the fight. And we WERE willing to do that. It’s the price we collectively paid for letting our military slide and cutting our research and development to save some money after every war we were ever in up to fairly recently. At least we seem to have learned THAT lesson…sort of.
The numbers were from an external source. I assume the numbers refer to all Soviet forces in the battle, not just inside that salient, but it’s not clear. I don’t consider a Wikipedia article to be “terribly unreliable” when it cites to external sources.
Even if the Germans couldn’t hope to ever match the level of offensives they were launching in 1941, it was such a gigantic effort on their part that I can’t consider it minor. The best case result of Kursk would have been an encirclement, a new defensive line on the Don, and rendering the Soviets incapable of their own offensive in 1943. This would have only bought the Germans time, but maybe they would have wised up and prepared for a defensive battle in the east in the meantime.
I don’t think the importance of Kursk is overplayed at all. The Germans went for broke and lost.
It wasn’t such a gigantic effort, it was simply the best that they could muster. Any hope of an encirclement, driving the Soviets to the Don and preventing any Soviet offensive in 1943 was at best an absurd pipedream. The days of mass encirclements and destruction of Soviet troops had long since ended, they were largely caused by no retreat orders in the face of any military logic in '41. There were no huge bags of prisoners and material in the '42 summer offensive; the Soviets retreated rather than stand and be destoyed in such situations. The reality of Kursk was that it was stopped dead in its tracks in 9 days with very little territory having been taken at a very heavy cost. Worse, it was followed up by Soviet offensives made far easier by the heavy deployment for Citadel that pushed the entire German line back hundreds of kilometers for the rest of the summer. Both the '41 and smaller '42 German summer offensives lasted the whole summer and took great swathes of territory.
This is where it gets messy; including all Soviet forces in the battle means including the forces not in the salient that launched counter-offensives north and south of Kursk once Citadel stalled and the Germans had committed what reseves they had to it. As to Wiki, it just bugs me that Wiki has become the source of most cites here rather than actually digging for the source that Wiki itself relied on, and calling it “terribly unreliable,” is indeed an overstatement and overreaction on my part which I apologize for and regret using. Just an old fart I guess. In any event, if you look at the external sources relied on, most of the citations and almost all the numbers come from one source. Not that this makes it unreliable, it just makes it Wiki.
There wasn’t a broke for the Germans to go for. It stood no realistic chance of success, and the best success it could have achieved would have been minor at best, and would still leaving them facing immediate major Soviet offensives both north and south of Kursk.
In any event, we seem to just be arguing over an adjective, minor vs major.
And of course there was a still more effective solution: keep the fuel, ammunition and spares from reaching the Tigers and Panthers, and for preference, send in the Typhoons and P47s to dump on them rather than fight tank versus tank.
It’s true that the vanilla Sherman was a poor tank-buster. Equally the Elefant was a shite anti-infantry weapon on account of, for a start, a complete absence of machine-guns. Both AFVs were a darned sight better when used what they were meant for.
Yes, and it was best used at a thousand yards from the enemy raining long-barrelled 8.8cm death and destruction on them rather than getting up close and personal, especially with infantry. Unfortunately (at least from an AFV purist’s POV) it was, I understand, grossly misused at Kursk with disastrous consequences.
There’s nothing magical or forbidden about invading Russia from the west. Just don’t try to do it in 4 months. Especially if a few of those months are winter. It’s a different battlefield, so the same old blitzkreig/overwhelming force attack won’t work, because they just keep retreating and burning their cities. Advance slowly while maintaining supply lines, set up strong defenses for winter, and watch as the Russians burn their country to the ground and litter it with their own bodies.
Hitler’s mistakes have been covered ad nauseam. Napoleon guaranteed his own failure through greedy arrogance and lazy attacks. His generals literally begged him to camp for the winter instead of going for Moscow. The Russians just bait dictators dumb enough to follow them too quickly. If we had the same problems against Russia as Napoleon and Hitler, they’d be easy to avoid.