They could have at least waited till the red army is completely subdued before wiping out the Slavs though.

Same as doing off the Jews. Fight the war first, consolidate then begin the extermination.

I meant these in a purely tactical way. In no way am I pro-nazi or agree with their policies.

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The Two World Wars

This is truely amazing. I have always thought that the Soviet Union is very backward technological and industrially.

If they could build so much, yet spend less.

Could it be perhaps the main reason is that the Soviet Union used forced labour for their war industries?

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The Two World Wars

No, I think it's more a case of the gargantuan Soviet GDP versus the comparatively tiny British & Empire GDP, Hands. Remember that Britain didn't abolish rationing until 1954 despite winning the war, and only recently finished paying off war debts to the US.
Also Britain was fighting Hitler from day one, and later Japan on a global basis, whereas Stalin started as Hitler's ally and later found himself fighting to the death in Europe. The Soviets could afford to concentrate on one front, because they were never as thinly spread as the rest of the Allies.
'Forced labour' is a difficult one too, since technically you could say the same about British industry (thinking of the Bevan Boys!).

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Gordon
History Vault Bookshop
FortressScotland-http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y20/Historian/

That is interesting information. As for concentrating on one front, they were thinly formed on the intial stages of Barbarossa even though Stalin had enough manpower to put up an effective front. After the winter of 41/42, he did have the ability to consolidate and provide effective operations against the Germans.

Stalin may not have needed the Western Allies' help but their help did speed up what Stalin could do. The American trucks seem to be the most valuable contribution. Provided the Soviets with higher mobility to keep pressure on the German's withdrawal.

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American by birth, TEXAN by the grace of GOD!

I should add that anyone interested in that book can find it here

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Regards,

Gordon
History Vault Bookshop
FortressScotland-http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y20/Historian/

The problem is that, in Hitler's mind, the main enemy were not the US, UK and USSR, but world Jewry. Jews were going to be exterminated at all costs, even at the expense of the German war effort.

Which is not true. The USSR outproduced Germany in all military assets since 1939 until 1945, without interruption. Not even in 1941, when the USSR lost 3/5s of her industry and moved the remaining 2/3s to Asia, did the Germans build more guns, tanks or planes than the USSR.

Also, we could say that Soviet technology in many aspects (if not all) could match or was superior to German one, whether it is in tanks, guns, planes or hand guns.

The answer is no. The number of Soviet captives in the Gulag system was not bigger than 2,5 million at any stage of the war. If we compare this to the 11 million slave workers Germany had in 1944…

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"War is less costly than servitude, the choice is always between Verdun and Dachau." - Jean Dutourd, French veteran of both world wars

"A mon fils: depuis que tes yeux sont fermes les miens n’ont cessé de pleurir." - Mère française, Verdun

It could be that the forced labour includes peasants and even city workers as well as those in the prisons who were not paid for their services?

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The Two World Wars

Perhaps that's the plan Stalin to get his troops into order. Trading land for time.

Slowly wearing out the germans before striking an decisive blow ?

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The Two World Wars

The Red Army tactics as far as I know was to do the fighting in the enemy area ( 1940-41 ) that´s why during the 22nd June 1941 Stalin ordered the troops to beat the Germans back and attack into German territory. By the time however the German tanks were 50-100 kms behind the Red Army troops that were close to the border. So they were "sacked " and the orders drove them into confusion because they could not fulfill the orders required. Later on Stalin´s
" Not a step back" only led to massive losses and definitely did not serve its purpose. In summer 1942 the Red Army withdrew with new tactics in good order and Germans did not get many prisoners which led to Hitler´s " The Russian is dead " quote which was far from the truth as Stalingrad etc proved.

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Russia's strategy developed after learning some hard lessons in combined arms warfare. When they did learn it was very decisive in their fight with the Germans. By developing their defensive lines in depth and allowing fronts that had been penetrated to fall back to the next line rather than staying and being enveloped, the Russians prevented the capture of large numers of men and every defensive line that was encountered was strengthened by the retreat of the line that had been in front.

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PEOPLE SLEEP PEACEABLY IN THEIR BEDS AT NIGHT ONLY BECAUSE ROUGH MEN STAND READY TO DO VIOLENCE ON THEIR BEHALF. GEORGE ORWELL

I thought it was a defeatist crime to retreat. It was punishable by death (shot on the spot). Wouldn't the retreating soldiers be shot by their own men when they reached their lines? Maybe this only started around the time of the Stalingrad offensive...

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"The death of one man is a tragedy; The death of millions is a statistic" -Joseph Stalin

The Russians learned after a while that not retreating = massive encirclement of your own forces. Thats why Barbarossa netted so many prisoners at first, the Russians refused to retreat and it cost them dearly.

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"If your gonna buy the angel s**t, you might as well go for the zombie package as well."
-George Carlin

Ironically, Hitler ordered his men not to retreat one inch when fighting against the Russians after Kursk and many of them too were surrounded and captured.

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The Two World Wars

Thank God for historians, they dig up the most incredible sources all the time

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Yes, but you must take into account that productivity from demoralised and unskilled labour will be very low.

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Not offense to russians, but i have this idea that the su is extremely backward and rural.

how is it that for a country majority of peasants (at that time) and certainly not much education and economically disadvantaged, be technological and industrially superior than Germany?

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I am not a student of Soviet history, but I have some impressions. Soviet military planning and execution were like their industry. Things were centrally planned, there were leaders, and then there were the troops. The Soviet industry was not as technologically advanced, but it was solid. It was also placed on a 24/7 schedule immediately. THAT is one of the biggest differences that I have seen illuminated here on the forum. The German industrial machine COULD have out produced the Russians before the allies eventually made serious dents in the production. The problem is that they did not. It was not until 1943 that they reached their potential. That is too late. When you add to this that they could not decide on one or two solid designs and maximize reliability instead of doing new research and it becomes easy to see how the Russians could move all of their industrial tooling accross the country and still out-produce them.

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PEOPLE SLEEP PEACEABLY IN THEIR BEDS AT NIGHT ONLY BECAUSE ROUGH MEN STAND READY TO DO VIOLENCE ON THEIR BEHALF. GEORGE ORWELL

That's the problem with stereotypes, it all depends on what you hear all your life. If you only listen to redneck jokes you would only get the impression that the USA* is "extremely backward and rural", to quote yourself.

You'll have to bear in mind that Russia had not been touched by the Industrial revolution until well into the communists came into power, actually it was only under Stalin's dictatorship that things started moving in a big way (and at enormous cost) and in fact when the war started the military-industrial complex, to use Eisenhower's phrase was in full swing.

Building a 22,000 tank force (for an instance) can't be done just by throwing acorns to pigs. For that you need large plants like the ones at Stalingrad, Voronezh, Kharkov, Tula, Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, and later at Nizhni-Tagil, renamed Tankograd for a good reason [img]graemlins/hsu.gif[/img]

Also it helped that sticking to two damn good designs worked, the T-34 and KV-1 and their respective successors instead of that plethora of designs the Germans made. This may be terribly exciting to a modeller but industrially it's a disaster! And the problem was the Soviets weren't making any models, they had their hands full already trying to win a war!

The Germans managed to make two good tanks as well from inception (well, almost), the Panther and Tiger, but only made this when they realised their own tanks were not nearly good enough and had to do pull their pants up and design something good to face the better Russian tanks!

Or do you care to compare the T-34s and KV-1s with the 37mm and short 50mm gunned Pz IIIs or the short 75s Pz IV the Germans invaded with? Totally outclassed! Luckily the Pz IV had some development potential which the PzIII didn't any more, so they managed to field a decent tank after a while.

Sorry, no, until the Germans came up with the tanks above they were improvising like mad to try and keep up.

Cheers!

* please note I wrote "USA" with capitals, not simply "su" as you did...

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Stalin himself noted when he started the 5-year plans that if the USSR does not succeed in industrialization of the country it will be crushed by the western powers in war.

Unfortunately for people the welfare and production of the land was used for making factories and for instance in Ukraine people died like flies early 1930´s in famine. Thanx to Stalin that is.

Here´s some stats on 5-year plans

http://www.johndclare.net/Russ11.htm

The Ukraine famine

The death toll from the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine has been estimated between six million and seven million. According to a Soviet author, "Before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings." Yet one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine stated in 1933 that the famine was a great success. It showed the peasants "who is the master here. It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay."

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/ukra.html

http://209.82.14.226/history/famine/gregorovich/

Was it six million jews in Holocaust? It was as much in Ukraine 1932-33 alone!

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arrgggghhhhh....you are banging my balls because i wrote without caps ? you can write usa without caps if you wish . fine with me.

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The Two World Wars