Russian WW2 interesting stats and facts

Are you saying there was some truth in the movie "Enemy at the Gate", about Stalingrad that one guy got a rifle and anouther just got ammo and did not get a rifle until the other guy got shot ?

 

I suppose Za you´ve read books by German soldiers in ostfront in 1941 describing the Red Army attacks. Drunk men wave after wave who were shot to the ground by schrapnel rounds and there could be up to ten waves during one attack. These men did not have a choice even to get close to the enemy so I´d wonder if you really would give them even guns (?) because they could never use them. I´m always saddened by waste of soldiers so I´m not really happy about the attack method here. In 1942 the situation was quite different.

If you read the stonebooks.com article on the book it really gives a creepy look on the warfare.

And Stalin , would he care if he already had killed millions and even his closest comrades in the 1930´s? All he cared was to get the Germans stopped and killed.

In comparison remember that that the Volksturm men had approx 5 bullets each in 1945 so not at all good for them later on either. And their guns were whatever they could get. Maybe you could say that bullets for 10 days is rather good...

[ 22. March 2006, 10:41 AM: Message edited by: Kai-Petri ]

 

On the regrouping of Red Army soldiers

Perry Pierik: From Leningrad to Berlin

Whilst the German armed forces grew weaker by the day the units on the Soviet side were being rotated. Above all else, the Russians had considerably less complicated methods than the Germans;they were not hampered by things like military tradition and divisional sentiment.The Infantry units continued fighting until they had been eroded and had become small residues no longer able to operate independently. Whole units would then be absorbed into new infantry units and so the process would be repeated . As many as 469 divisions were simply pumped out...

 

Just watched a battelfield DVD on the Crimea opeations in WW2 and I was even more convinced of Manstein´s capability watching how the operation "Bustard hunt" went :

Manstein called the first phase OPERATION BUSTARD HUNT, a "bustard" being a well-known European game bird. The peninsula was linked to the rest of the Crimea by a isthmus 18 kilometers (11 miles) wide, and the Red Army had heavily fortified the line, with a wide water-filled antitank ditch backed up by minefields, barbed wire, and pillboxes. OPERATION BUSTARD HUNT went forward on the morning of 8 May 1942, with German artillery and Luftwaffe Stuka dive-bombers trying to soften up the Soviet defenses while sappers cut paths through the obstacles.

The initial German attacks were driven back, but Manstein was undisturbed, since they were only meant as diversions anyway and were not being pressed hard. While the Soviets were distracted, German assault teams in boats landed behind Red Army lines on the south shore and promptly unhinged the defense. Soviet troops took panic and fled eastward, pursued by German panzers. Many managed to escape over the straits to the mainland, but by 17 May Manstein could report the capture of 170,000 prisoners and large amounts of equipment. All that was left was mopping up.



http://www.vectorsite.net/twsnow_06.html

--------------

All this might seem pretty simple in writing but once you see the troop movements on map you can see how clever a trap it all became for the Red Army troops. So if you can buy the Battlefield version of the battle for the Crimea if you don´t have it!

 

Kai, that *is* a grate sight! Went into my Favorites!

http://www.vectorsite.net/twsnow.html

Which DVD was that?

 

Za,

the Battlefield series version which I think has been rereleased recently ( at least here in Finland ).

http://www.directart.co.uk/mall/more.php?ProdID=7783

 

thanks very much, Kai!

 

And now it may be renamed back to Stalingrad:


"Russia's veterans battle to bring back glorious name of Stalingrad
Nick Paton Walsh in Moscow
Sunday December 1, 2002
The Observer

It was the scene of the greatest battle of the Second World War, where the Nazi war machine began to crumble and at least two million men lost their lives. The jewel of the Soviet industrial empire, to which Hitler laid siege in 1942, it has been immortalised in epic books, movies, and a square in Paris. And now the town of Volgograd, still considered a monument to Russian bravery and sacrifice, wants again to be named after the dictator Josef Stalin.

The town may revert to its Soviet-era name of Stalingrad, following a request to Russian President Vladimir Putin from the local Parliament and hundreds of thousands of war veterans.

The campaigners want Russia to have a referendum to decide the issue before the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Stalingrad siege, on 3 February 2003. A change would give the town, which was defended by the Soviet Army to the cost of 1.3 million soldiers, its fourth name in a century.

'The glory of Stalingrad belongs to all Russia,' said Vladimir Andropov, vice-chairman of the Volgograd regional assembly.

'We want to get back the name for the sixtieth anniversary of the great battle ending, as an act of respect to the memory of millions who died in the fight against Nazism. Stalingrad is a world symbol of the victory of mankind over the Nazis, and we want to immortalise their heroic deeds, not the memory of Stalin.'

The Volgograd Parliament will vote on 26 December to send a formal request to the Russian State Duma, or Parliament, and to the Kremlin, for the name change.

Volgograd was originally called Tsaritsyn, after the Tsarina, Catherine the Great. During the civil war in 1918 that followed the Bolshevik revolution, Stalin helped secure victory in a key battle between the Communist Red Army and the tsarist White Army. The town was renamed in Stalin's honour, and rebuilt to house a massive tractor factory, and important parts of Russia's industrial complex. Hitler decided the city was vital in his attempts to shatter the Soviet military machine, and decided to lay siege in September 1942.

German General Friedrich Paulus began a major offensive to capture the whole town on 14 October. Yet the Russians were too well dug in and the Germans were caught up in nightmarish urban warfare.

Stalin seized his chance, and his forces broke through the poorly defended German flanks, and encircled the quarter-million-strong Sixth German Army. The German soldiers were forced to eat the corpses of their horses, and their morale and numbers were eroded. Despite Hitler forbidding Paulus to surrender, the general and his last troops gave themselves up on 3 February 1943. More than 90,000 German troops were taken prisoner. Only 7,000 made it back to Germany after the war.

It was the worst loss of life in one battle of the war, and the turning point for the Nazis. The Soviet Army then marched on to Berlin.

The move to rename Volgograd comes at a time of increasing nostalgia for the 'great' times past of the Soviet Union. The fiftieth anniversary of Stalin's death is on 5 March next year.

Professor Yuri Zhukov, a history professor specialising in Stalin's rule, said: 'The world knows Stalingrad as the place from where the Nazi military machine began to crumble. But few people in the world know what 'Volgograd' is.

'Russians are disappointed by life today and their hopes for the future, so they begin to look more to the past for reassurance.'

War veterans want the change to commemorate their fallen comrades. Yuri Nekrasov, chairman of the Regional War Veteran's Committee, said: 'This is not about Stalin, but about a town entered in world history as Stalingrad.'

During the 'de-Stalinisation' after Stalin's death, the town was named Volgograd, as Russia tried to forget the horrors of Stalin's terror.

The names of many Russian towns have changed as the tide of adulation for fallen leaders has receded.

During the presidency of Boris Yeltsin, Leningrad was renamed St Petersburg, and Gorki, named after the Soviet sycophant writer, was renamed Nizhni Novgorod." </font>[/QUOTE]Did anything ever come of this attempted re-naming of Volgograd? Sorry if it is stated somewhere later in the thread, I simply haven't had the time to read every post yet.

 

I think it is still Volgograd...

 

I wouldn't be opposed to renaming it back to Stalingrad.

 

Some info Volgograd

 

WW2 pics from the Finnish front

 

More...









This last one is a bit nasty but you had to take the dead somehow- and they don´t need clothes...

 

Maybe one explanation why Stalin "did not hear early enough" news on German preparations on Barbarossa:

From Murphy, David E. What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa.

http://www.sonic.net/~bstone/archives/050703.shtml

Filipp Golikov, chief of the Military Intelligence Directorate, in the same situation "simply suppressed or altered analyses of the German threat to fit Stalin's mistaken ideas." Golikov was rewarded with promotions and, despite proven incompetence on the battlefield, assumed a series of important field commands during the war. (Golikov also stated in 1965: "I admit I distorted intelligence to please Stalin because I feared him.")

(Ivan Proskurov, the previous head of Military Intelligence, had been kicked out of his position partly for telling bad news of Hitler and Germany, I guess?? )

For his part, as late as the early 1960s Golikov apparently still believed Sorge had been under hostile control. In the middle of a screening of the Franco-German film Wer Sind Sie, Dr. Sorge? to senior officers, Marshal Zhukov, angry at not having been shown the Sorge reports predicting the war and its exact date, stood up in the theater and called out to Golikov: "Why, Filipp Ivanovich, did you hide these reports from me? Not report such information to the chief of the general staff?" Golikov replied, "And what should I have reported to you if this Sorge was a double, ours and theirs?"

 

agreed, I would have no problems, but maybe people wouldn't like it becuase of the Stalin part and how he was some what of a evil dictator -.-

 

Sepp Allerberger: Sniper on the eastern front

According to Sepp eating Nivea creme would cause a jaundice-like appearance....

 

I am confused....is the jaundice-like appearance for camoflage or trying to get assigned away from the eastern front ????

 

TA152,

it changes your skin to yellow as if you had hepatitis i.e. infection of liver. Just wondering if this is mentioned in any other books as it seems to me this would be rather an easy way to get away from the front. I mean if the other option is to shoot yourself in the foot...

 

Desperation is the mother of all invention.

 

Another tradition of the 44.Infanterie-Division was instituted on March 23rd, 1944 while it was stationed in Italy. Members of the 44.Infanterie-Division (RGDHuD) were granted the right to wear a metal emblem upon their uniform shoulder-boards known as the Deutschmeister-Kreuz. It was a small blue-enameled Maltese cross edged in gold with a Reichsadler and banner in the center reading "Stalingrad". For this reason the emblem was also known by soldiers of the unit as the Stalingrad-Kreuz. The metal emblem was worn by any soldier or officer of the unit and was based on the cross worn by the chevalier monks of the Deutschmeister-Orden that were a part of the knightly orders of the 12th Century.

http://www.feldgrau.com/InfDiv.php?ID=40

The cross at the bottom 1/3 of the next site

http://www.wehrmacht-awards.com/uniforms_firearms/uniforms/shoulder_boards/Rank.htm