This is correct, indeed the Party made strenuous efforts to keep the partisans as firmly as possibly under it's control, in order to maintain them as a tool of Central Governement. Otherwise there was the serious risk they would go too free-thinking or outright anti-soviet - see what happened to Gen. Vatutin. After the war the former partisans had a number of problems being under a cloud of suspicion of less than enthusiasm for the Central Government due to the typical Stalinist paranoia.

Sorry, sloniksp, but I don't buy this comparison at all. What is fueling the Iraq insurgency is religion. The Iraqi insurgency is heavily weighted towards suicide bombers - men (and women) who have religious sanction for their actions and believe that they will immediately enter paradise when blowing themselves (and hopefully a few others with them) up. The communist philosophy hardly inspired such fanatic devotion.

Not at all. Iran is a completely independent nation with a very long history of bad relations with Iraq. Don't forget that while the Iranians are helping out their fellow Shia in Iraq, the Iranians are ethnically Persian (an Indo-European group) while the Iraqi Shia are Arab. The Shia in Iraq don't actually want Iran to take over the country; the partisans in WWII were fighting with Soviet assistance to help the Soviets retake the western Soviet Union.

The Partisans were indeed far more effective closest to the frontline, being less effective the further away from the Russian frontlines that they were. Allow me to quote from the wikipedia article on Soviet Partisans that directly addresses your points:

"However, as the frontline moved further away, the logistical conditions steadily worsened for the partisan units, as the resources ran out, and there was no wide-scale support from over the frontline until March 1942. One outstanding difficulty was the lack of radio communication, which wasn't addressed until April 1942. The support of the local people was also insufficient.[9] So, for several months, partisan units in Belarus were virtually left to themselves. Especially difficult for the partisans was the winter of 1941-1942, with severe shortages in ammunition, medicine and supplies. The actions of partisans were prevailingly uncoordinated.

In the circumstances, the German pacification operations in Summer and Fall 1941 were able to curb the partisan activity significantly. Many units went underground, and generally, in the late Fall 1941—early 1942, the partisan units weren't undertaking the significant military operations"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_partisans

So the Soviet partisans were indeed not very effective in areas distant from the Russian frontlines. However, they were effective close to the Russian front. I think your vision of partisan operations is problematic as you seem to think they would be a huge drain on the Soviet Union's materiel. On the contrary, most of the partisan operations used small arms or explosives to blow up rail lines. The Soviet Union lost a lot of small arms in the first months of the war but they could easily produce those in large numbers.

I think you need to reconsider those numbers. "Indeed, if early Soviet accounts are to be believed, the Germans suffered more than one million casualties from guerrilla activity alone - about one-sixth of all their soldiers who fought in the East. At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, General Jodl, Chief of Operations of the Wehrmacht High Command, in whose interest it would have been to exaggerate the menace of the partisans, doubted whether German casualties in the Soviet Union at their hands were as high as 50,000. Recent studies suggest that they were even less, at between 15,000 and 20,000, not including those of the Eastern volunteers who also took part in security operations. In this sense, at least, the phantom war lived up to its name, appearing to possess immense form but, in reality, having little substance. This, however, was often overlooked by the Germans, who, in the extreme violence of their security measures, appeared not only to have misunderstood the proper conduct of anti-guerrilla warfare, but also to have overestimated the partisan danger. As the Head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, admitted a few months before the Germans were driven from the Soviet Union: ‘Perhaps we have overreacted to these bandits, and by this have caused ourselves needless problems."
Matthew Cooper: The phantom war: The German struggle against Soviet partisans, 1941-1944
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_...s#_note-cooper

Sloniksp, I'm not arguing that the US has conquered Iraq and defeated the insurgency. They won the war in 2003, however, the war against Saddam Hussein's regime. While the Soviet partisans in WWII were fighting the Germans in hopes of bringing Russian territory back into the fold of the Soviet Union, almost none of the insurgents in Iraq are fighting to bring back the old Baath regime. In fact, one of the biggest causes of the continuing insurgency is the difference of opinion over what form the new Iraq should take.

In many respects, you are probably alright, and I'm not arguing that Iraqis are better off now than before the war.

Sorry, Za Rodinu, but your attempt to prove your point through a humorous list of German mistakes merely documents Germany's falling fortunes in war, and the concomitant reduction in forces they had at their disposal. In war, if the odds are increasing against you (as they were as Germany went through the war and the forces of its enemies grew at a greater rate than its own) you don't sit back and wait until you reach parity with the enemy - something that is never going to happen. You have to keep fighting and so your focus is necessarily going to shrink.

Your trouble seems to be that you don't see that by focusing only on the ultimate end goals of course you are going to figure that the Allies had the better strategic vision since they achieved their end goal - the defeat of Germany. Since Germany didn't win the war it necessarily follows that they did not achieve all of their strategic and tactical goals. And if you aren't achieving your goals then I would hope that your tactics and immediate strategy would change.

Funny, if the Germans were so bad at making plans or sticking to them how is it that they handily defeated Poland in 1939, the Allies in Norway and western Europe in 1940 (even after the Allies found a copy of Fall Gelb), and Greece and Yugoslavia in 1941? Your hypothesis doesn't stand up to the fact that Germany was continuously victorious for two years over almost all of the land armies of Europe. The reason why Germany lost the war in Russia thus is to be found not in some fundamental internal failing of the Germans but in Russia itself. The huge Russian landscape, the extremes of the Russian climate, and the fighting spirit and enormous reserves of Russia much better explain Germany's loss.

I agree this was quite unlikely. However, note that I brought up Japan in terms of the scenario where Germany actually captured Leningrad, Moscow and Stalingrad. That didn't happen and would have been tough for Germany without some major changes to the historical timeline. However, if Germany did capture those three cities, I think the temptation for Japan to stab the Russians in the back would have gone up, especially if they weren't yet involved in a Pacific war. Japan was if anything even more opportunistic than Germany in WWII. They didn't decide to focus on Southeast Asia until Germany had defeated France and the Netherlands in May, 1940. A lot of Japan's decision for the Pearl Harbor attack came due to US hostility and especially the embargo. I don't think it takes too many changes to the historical timeline to have Japan ready to stab the USSR in the back.

I thought it was more that since Russia was clearly embroiled in a fight for its life on its western frontier the Japanese figured they had nothing to fear from the Russians in Manchuria and so could finally focus all of their attention on the attack on Britain, the Netherlands, and the USA.

I don't think it is correct to compare what happened in the war against the USSR with the campaigns against Poland, Denmark and Norway, France and Benelux, Greece and Yugoslavia. The latter were campaigns executed within much smaller timeframes (weeks, months), against much smaller geographical locations and against clearly defined military objectives.

There was no time nor occasion for, for instance in France, to 'stop on the way to the Channel, divert to the rearguard of the Maginot line, and after we clear this we can revert to the original objective'. Even then we are aware of the stop orders, the 'cold feet', the halt before Dunkirk, etc. IF (God, I hate ifs!) the French command were not so incompetent, which it was and there is no way about this, things would not have run so smoothly. But that's not the point, the point is the French campaign was guided by clear objectives and little wavering.

The Germans were victorious in Europe for two years as you say but these two years were not defined by continuous campaigning, there were large intervals of inactivity between each spurt, the Polish campaign took five weeks followed by the invasion of Norway six months later.

As for of course these help explain Germany's loss but these are not the only factors, factors include the lack of competence in general terms and for a number of reasons shown during the conduct of the campaign as discussed above. The Russian kilometers do not shrink for Russians, nor is the Russian mud any less sticky for Russian trucks, nor the blizzard less biting for Russians. If the latter indeed was, then it is not a mark of competence to plan for a good weather campaign and disregard the possibility of Russian winter.

The Russian defenders were much more acustomed to the cold than the Germans. I recall reading that on the onset of winter the Soviets found the cold to be healthy and felt they had the advantage. They also knew their own land and were used to the extremities. As for the mud I will give that to you. "Rasputitsa" favored no one. But my point is that the Russian soldier definitely had a lot of advantages over the German soldier.

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And the German soldier had a lot of different advantages over the Russian soldier.

Now concerning Winter. Iin World War I the Germans had fought since 1914 on an Eastern Front, plus they occupied Ukraine for a significant amount of time after the war. Also Caulaincourt's memoirs of Napoleon's 1812 Russian retreat, as well as War And Peace were well know, plus Baron Marbot's works, etc. There had always been a German close presence in Russian soil since the Teutonic Knights. There simply is no possibility at all the Germans were not aware of the meaning of the Russian winter.

Of course if you convince yourself the campaign is going to be another Blitzkrieg to be over in weeks or a couple of months, so you just hope for the best and don't count on winter, then the least thing you are is irresponsible.

What is this, then? Incompetence? Hubris, closely followed by Nemesis? I pity the Landser, so mistreated by his higher superiors. "Lions led by donkeys" indeed!

Yes, if some of the upper echelon idiots had had the sense to realize and plan for a prolonged campaign, history may have been a bit different. If that ignorant corporal had looked into what happened to the French back in 1812, I think he would have come to the conclusion that Soviet Russia was not France, Poland, or The Netherlands. The Steppe in the dead of winter was more deadly than a company of T-34's.

To get back to the origninal question: I believe that the triumph of Soviet will and perseverance over the lack of German foresight and planning was how the war on the Ostfront was won.

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How is it wrong for me to point to German successes in earlier campaigns when your argument is that the Germans were fundamentally incompetent. I refer you to your own words: "The Germans were not that good at making plans, or rather sticking to their plans and making them work." Clearly you are wrong since the earlier campaigns do not exhibit the claims that you are trying to level against them. I'm sorry you don't like the facts, but just because they contradict your pet theory doesn't invalidate them.

So now you admit that the Germans were, at least in the French campaign, able to follow through on their plans. You now contradict your earlier words.

Again, your logic is seriously flawed. Of course these two years were not a period of continuous campaigning. One of the most crucial aspects of strategy is knowing when to attack and when not to attack, but I assume you already know this. So, I have to ask, what was your point here? In no way does this fact cast any aspersions on German abilities.

You showed no general lack of competence on the German side. (Boy, talk about hubris, especially after your claims were so easily shown to be baseless.) Za Rodinu, if Germany managed to defeat all those other nations, including the Allies in France in truly astounding time, your claim that the Germans were generally incompetent simply appears beyond ridiculous. The Germans were quite good at campaigning. The only place they ran into problems was in Russia. So what was it about Russia that explains why the Germans lost? Not general incompetence because the Germans steamrolled over the Russians right up to the start of winter weather in Russia. I've already gone through the reasons that make sense about why Germany lost the Russian war. Your attempt to cast the Germans as a bunch of Colonel Klinks has no basis in fact.

The rasputitsa always helps out the nation on defence for the simple reason that it slows offensive movements down to nearly a halt, allowing the defence extra time to arrange a better defence. In 1941 it most definitely helped out the Russians because not only were they on the defence, they were on the defence just outside of Moscow. Their supply lines were many times shorter than the German ones, and the German ones were bad to begin with as they had to transfer rail lines to their own gauge and repair transportation routes that had already been fought over and damaged. It is also well known that Russian vehicles and weaponry were often designed to function in the bitter cold of the Russian winter while the German vehicles and weaponry were not built with such winters in mind.

Now, I agree that the Germans seriously miscalculated how long it was going to take to defeat the Russians and their ability to absorb crushing defeats. However, this mistake in no way demonstrates a general incompetency amongst Germans.

There is a big difference between being aware of something and being actually prepared for it. The Germans knew about winter but hadn't planned on fighting a war in it and so did not have equipment or clothing that could function properly in winter weather.

Your characterization of the German attitude as simply "hoping for the best" is mistaken at best. The Germans didn't just hope for the best but their problem was underestimating Russia; its size, its ability to absorb defeats, its weather etc.

Given how you've already been seen contradicting your own earlier pronouncements and how your arguments are so easily dismantled I would be more cautious in talking about incompetence and hubris if I were you. Try to be less partisan and see the world in more than just black and white and you'll have a better understanding of why things happened the way they did in the past.

So Hitler was an "ignorant corporal" and you are the man to pronounce on his abilities. Care to tell us how many nations you've conquered in your lifetime? Sorry to make fun, Miller, but pride goeth before a fall, as they say. You, like Za Rodinu, need to stop viewing the world and history through partisan glasses. Yes, Hitler made a number of mistakes and certainly badly misjudged the situation in Russia. (And I agree completely with you that the key was recognizing that Russia was not like any western European country that he had so easily dispatched in the years prior.) However, he wasn't just some ignorant corporal; no "ignorant corporal" could have done what he did, often in spite of opposition from many of his generals. Give the man the credit he deserves and then your criticism of his abilities will sound all the more erudite. Simply shouting out the epithets you've learned from others merely shows that your understanding of WWII hasn't progressed beyond a basic level.

Your claims is contradicted by the fact that in the first months of the war the Soviet armies were soundly beaten by the Germans; in the summer of 1941 the Soviets exhibited little of the will and perseverance that you extoll. The Germans certainly did have poor foresight of the Russian war, I'll grant you that, but they were not generally incompetent and nor was Soviet will and perseverance the only reason they won the war. Soviet will was extraordinary but they didn't win through willpower alone.

Never the less I stand by my point. It wasn't because of Hitler that the German army was so successful. Hitler was giving the orders, not executing them. It wasn't his blood being spilled on the battlefield. His homeland wasn't in ruin. The only good thing that came out of Hitler was restoring Germany to some degree of order after the hardships of the Versailles Treaty and the Weimar Republic. It was the Generals like Manstein, Guderian, Rommel, Von Runstedt, and the soldiers dying at the front that kept the war going for as long as it did. It would have gone on for longer if Hitler had left the decisions to his generals.

I will not give credit to a man who caused so much hardship to the millions of Germans who fought and died for his war. I give the credit to the German soldier.

Well yes, because the initial first two months or so of Barbarossa were a success. The Reds were caught with their pants down. Didn't last long though.

Incompetent is a word I would never use to describe the German Army from 1939-1945. In my opinion I would go as far as calling it one of if not the most effective army in the history of man. One on one the average Landser who underwent full training (more in the first half of the war) was superior to any other soldier in the world. Many of the training techniques my father went through in Marine Corps OCS he told me were derived from Wehrmacht infantry tactics used during WWII.

And yes you are correct. It was not only the will and perseverance that won the war for the Soviets. The Soviet population was quite a bit bigger than that of Germany. That is more people to build planes, tanks, and other weapons. What it really comes down to is the fact that Stalin could afford to lose a lot more Russians than Hitler could of Germans.

Yeah, a good chunk of 'em fought because they were just as afraid of their own bullets. Kill a Facsist or be killed by a kommisar.

May be due to the fact that I am still in high school and have only been studying this war for a few years. Forgive my lack of intelligence. Some day hopefully I will have acquired as much knowledge of the subject that many here posess.

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So now you are contradicting yourself. The Germans DID have experience in the Russian winter and on more then one occasion. In fact even the Teutonic Knights experienced the cold weather on April 5, 1242. Germany was also aware of other countries experience with cold weather in Russia. The fact that the Germans had all of this information and personal experience and not forseeing as to what may happen shows not only were they incompetent but also very arrogant ( not very surprising from the supreme beings which they thought they were ) thinking they could accomplish something that till this day has never been done by any of the conquering nations including themselves, which was conquer a unified Russia not to mention in 6 months.

Absolutely... I credit him with invading numerous countries, with the destruction of thousands of towns, villages and cities. I will credit him with the deaths of millions of innocent people and millions more left in misery. I will also credit him for leaving his very own country in ruins and the brilliant speeches which he gave while at the same time preaching hate, which till this day is an insperation to all hate groups around the world.

Oh and sorry I forgot, he was a good painter.

I would also say strongly overestimating their own.

This is mostly due to Germans launching a surprise attack. Remember the Russians ( speaking of the average soldiers and officers ) simply did not imagine that Germany would attack especially considering that less then 2 years earlier signed a non-aggression pact. Also the fact that the Russians had no exerience in German captivity. Last but not least the fact that in the beginning of the war the Russian soldier in some cases didnt even have a gun, complicated his efforts in destroying the unexpected overwhelming odds against him.

What I find interesting is that more Russians were captured in the first 6 months of the war, then in the next 3 years.

Marieburg, with all of the disadvantages that you have accredited the Germans with having on the Eastern front, I fail to see any of the disadvanteges given to the Russian soldier, such as starvation, why is this?
From what I understand, the Russian soldier had a lot more problems to deal with then just winter, mud or long supply lines.

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The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful and unrelenting harshness. -Adolf Hitler

Quite frankly I’m beginning to feel your tone is becoming a tad too aggressive for my taste. I’m not used to this kind of attitude in this forum, so I’m not going to fuel this for much long.

> MB - I'm sorry you don't like the facts, but just because they contradict your pet theory doesn't invalidate them.
> MB - Again, your logic is seriously flawed.
> MB - …your claims were so easily shown to be baseless
> MB - …your arguments are so easily dismantled…

This is the kind of tone I was saying above I am not used in this forum.

> MB - … Clearly you are wrong since the earlier campaigns do not exhibit the claims that you are trying to level against them.
> MB - …So now you admit that the Germans were, at least in the French campaign, able to follow through on their plans. You now contradict your earlier words.

What happened here was that the Germans did quite well on the smaller campaigns but then seemed to be overwhelmed when they had bigger fish to fry, say a variant of the Peter Principle applied to military organizations. As is generally known, the Peter Principle states "In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence". In the current instance, in general terms a military organization will be fully competent to it’s task but problem will be when the task becomes too big for it’s capacity. That was what happened here, the Germans performed very well up to the moment they encountered an enemy too big for their competence level.

>> ZR - The Germans were victorious in Europe for two years as you say but these two years were not defined by continuous campaigning, there were large intervals of inactivity between each spurt, the Polish campaign took five weeks followed by the invasion of Norway six months later.

>MB - Of course these two years were not a period of continuous campaigning … So, I have to ask, what was your point here? In no way does this fact cast any aspersions on German abilities.

This was written in reply to your “Your hypothesis doesn't stand up to the fact that Germany was continuously victorious for two years over almost all of the land armies of Europe.” of May 11th. I was showing trying to say that as those two years were not continuous (what does Sitzkrieg mean?) your sentence sounds like a fallacy.

> MB - …The Germans were quite good at campaigning. The only place they ran into problems was in Russia. So what was it about Russia that explains why the Germans lost? …

As I said above, the task became too big for their ability.

>MB - The rasputitsa always helps out the nation on defence for the simple reason that it slows offensive movements down to nearly a halt...

While defensive movements keep running as if nothing happens?

>MB - In 1941 it most definitely helped out the Russians because not only were they on the defence, they were on the defence just outside of Moscow.

Operation Typhoon was launched when the frost came making ground passable again. The mud season had already passed, so the mud excuse does not work at least for this phase.

>MB - Their supply lines were many times shorter than the German ones, and the German ones were bad to begin with as they had to transfer rail lines to their own gauge and repair transportation routes that had already been fought over and damaged. It is also well known that Russian vehicles and weaponry were often designed to function in the bitter cold of the Russian winter while the German vehicles and weaponry were not built with such winters in mind.

Again, is it a mark of competence not to prepare for these extreme weather and bad infrastructure conditions and their implications on equipment?

MB - Now, I agree that the Germans seriously miscalculated how long it was going to take to defeat the Russians and