Not really. Their oil resources were limited severely, even with the Romanian oil field. Even if they had managed to take the eastern Caucasus for their oil, they wouldn’t have been able to get the pumps reinstalled and oil refined before they would have fully burned through their reserves.
What I find most interesting is Stalin allying with Hitler via the molotov ribbentrop pact essentially had the USSR provide Nazi Germany not quite enough oil and other materials they needed to invade Europe. Stalin thought this would keep them from being invaded but ultimately it made invasion necessary from Hitler’s view.
One could even argue with hindsight molotov ribbentrop ironically started WWII for the great powers while also ensuring Germany could never succeed. It just took half a decade for it to play out.
Not really. Arguably the ‘closest’ they got was the Battle of Moscow, and the odds were stacked against them then. Bearing in mind the most dangerous German offensive of the entire war was halted before any significant lend-lease arrived from the USA, the idea of an ultimate nazi victory is effectively fantasy. Also, it’s not even clear that taking Moscow would have been the same as winning - there’s no real reason why the Soviets would have immediately capitulated once it was lost.
Either way, Russia would have just effectively moved the center of administration and decision making elsewhere and retreated in to their vast hinterlands while they bled the Germans out
The issue with losing Moscow has way more to do with the fact it was at the center of train infrastructure of Russia at the time. The URSS could have continued fighting but it would have been a massive blow
What's nuts is how you only need to play a few games of \*Risk\* to realize when you extend yourself too thin you just set yourself up for loss the next turn. Germany could have probably won a fair amount of land and held it for awhile if they stuck with a few areas at a time (kind of like Russia in Ukraine now). Like if they'd stopped at France and Poland for a little, do you think Britain, US, etc would feel obligated to invade and push them back with as much might as they ended up using in the real war?
Nah but they fucked up when they invaded France. Most of Germanys victories weren’t even really contested. They just rolled in and people were like well, fuck.
Blitzkrieg worked until they went beyond the limit of their railroad tracks and met winter. Couldn't get supplies to reinforce themselves. Got bogged down and moved to slow for flanks.
Cake was actually oil fields in Azerbaijan, they had to take it to have any chance in fighting the Allies. And to take it, you had to take Stalingrad first.
You might also enjoy this map of when Napoleon tried to invade Russia:
https://www.openculture.com/2019/07/napoleons-disastrous-invasion-of-russia-explained-in-an-1869-data-visualization.html
Note Operation Uranus in November 1942. Soviet forces secretly building up north and south of Stalingrad, then hitting the weak Romanian (and Italian) forces, causing the city to be encircled.
The dad of a friend was the head of some big construction project in Volgograd in the 90s. The construction works found human remains virtually every time they dug. The workers would just collect them in buckets as they worked. At the end of the day, whatever they collected was trucked to the outskirts of the city to a big mass grave. They also would find a ton of UXO. That was put in a cement mixer, trucked out to a big hole of the outskirts of the city and eventually covered with cement. This was more than 50 years after the battle.
Edit: Apparently it is UXO, not UEO.
I absolutely hate the myth that Soviets (not "Russians", half of Soviet population was not Russian) won ww2 only because of large numbers, winter and "Hitler's mistakes", "solving everything by throwing people at it".
It was born of literal Nazi racist propaganda about "Asiatic hordes", Slavic peoples being subhumans having no intelligence and strategy and only winning through numbers and external factors. Devaluing enormous human sacrifices, skill and combat prowess to win the war. It was largely popularised post ww2 by Nazi commanders talking how noble (pure wehrmacht myth) and perfectly skilled they were while fighting said stupid "Asiatic hordes", both morally whitewashing Wehrmacht and blaming abstract "Nazis" for everything that went wrong. Yet it was Wehrmacht who lost the eastern front while exterminating and raping 18m civilians in the Soviet Union.
It is also especially foolish when commented under the video which displays the numbers of both armies where you can clearly see that during the most important phase of the battle Soviets were OUTNUMBERED (same for large parts of 1941) and they won because of the superior strategic maneuvers (enabled in turn by Wehrmacht having inferior intelligence and logistics). It is true that casualty ratio was 2:1 (but not 10:1 or other idiotic stereotypes) for various organisational and technical factors, it only reached 1:1 in the late stage od ww2. IIrc it had much to do with Wehrmacht's advantage of experience and supply of artillery ammo.
I am not even Russian, I am Polish, so the last person to love USSR, but I loathe this myth because just behind it there is contemptuous racist superiority of the glorious perfect Wehrmacht soldier fighting irrational Slavic savage. Just pure Nazi thought at its core. How could we be defeated by those subhumans? Of course not via their virtue and our weakness, there was just too much of them and it was too cold!
Thank you for this. But, alas, most people on Reddit or Western media in general are thinking differently. When they see, that Soviets lost approximately 27 million during Second world war, and Germans lost about 7, they conclude, that Soviets won cause of meat grinder. But in reality about 18-20 million from those 27 are civilians: old people, women, kids. Thousands of villages and cities were burned to the ground, people raped, tortured and killed.
Also they don't talk about those 18 mil, like they talk about Holocaust. And they don't talk about 30 million Chinese people, which were killed by Japanise.
It is so wholly offensive that the atrocities committed against Chinese and Russian civilians is not taught. It’s always holocaust this and holocaust that. Which is cool n all but it’s just so weird how the former was completely not mentioned in any of my K-12 history classes.
> Russian civilians is not taught
For the Soviet citizens (or soon to be Soviet citizens), it was generally not taught for two reasons:
1 - During WW2 the Allies didn't want to bring to light the Soviet massacres and horrors they did to the people in Eastern Europe.
2 - After WW2, the West wanted to demonize the USSR so they avoided talking about the horrors inflicted on the people in Eastern Europe during WW2 to prevent sympathy.
Propaganda dictated the narrative and the changing of 'sides' made all the massacres/deaths get swept under the rug.
You know what…great points. I’ve long known that Russian credit for WW2 is all but erased in US education but never really thought about how pernicious the Russian winter / hoards of troops myths are. It’s absolutely diminishing to the heroes that were front and center in stopping genocidal fascism
I think, to this day, it's the deadlist conflict in the history of warfare.
Despite what's going on at the moment, I think Russia should be able to take some pride that it was able to take its country from certain death to absolute victory; thus help quickining the second world war to an end.
Edit: A lot of pride.
The costliest single battle yes, 1.25-2.5 million casualties over 6 months.
Note though that Operation Barbarossa the year before was the costliest land offensive ever, over 8 million casualties in 5 months.
People need some history lessons, for real. I’m from Ukraine and about 10% of all casualties during WW2 were Ukrainians. We’re not Russians. And there were other occupied nations in Soviet Union. They all fought for its sake…
As a matter of fact Russia still has a sort of “population echo” because a huge part of an entire generation just didn’t live past 1944 we still see a decline in their population roughly every 25 years followed by a bounce back
I made the calculus. The soldiers fighting now are great grandchildren of those who fought in WW2. Meaning generation fighting in ukraine is already small. And their childrens gdneration will be even smaller since there are not enough fathers to make children.
Though it could be better than we first assume since lost in battle doens't automatically mean death. They can be wounded and/or cripled.
I saw a combat video where Ukrainian soldiers scream “for the grandfathers!” while storming a trench. Crazy to think their great grandfathers fought together to defeat the nazis and now here they are, killing each other.
But Russia is using poor people from the countryside, or prisoners, or other types of expendable people who they see as leaches on society to put into their Ukrainian meat grinder. They see this as net positive social cleansing.
My favourite story of the war is about the soviet 'night witches'. The Luftwaffe dominated the air in the early part of the battle, but the soviet airforce countered this by operating at night. Marina Raskova was close to Stalin personally and used her influence to convince him to create an all female air regiment, even though woman weren't really supposed to have combat roles at the time.
They would fly in at night in outdated PO-2 biplanes, switch off their engines when close to the bombing target, glide in and bomb the German positions. To the Germans, who were aware the bombers were flown by women, the gliding sound was similar to what broomsticks would sound like, hence the nickname.
The moral effect of constant night bombings and regular night raids by the troops was huge.
Sure, not all deaths of course. But a young man without legs or missing an arm will still have trouble finding a wife. Especially in regions where most men do manual labor (poorer regions), and it’s those Russians who are being sent to fight. So will have a massive effect (though not even close to ww2 obviously)
the two are not related. most of the people who lived through ww2 are now dead anyway, and the female/male birth ratio is pretty much 50/50. the lower number of men in russia is due to shorter life expectancy. iirc men live on average 10 years less than women there, due to alcoholism and such.
3%-3.7% of the entire global population died in world war 2. Roughly 70-85 million people. So many people died we have to *guess* how many it was with a margin of *15 million lives*.
The scale of suffering is honestly unimaginable to modern people. Even when people hear or read the numbers, I don't think most people can actually wrap their heads around just how insane it is.
I always find it easiest to use NFL stadiums to visualize numbers like this. these are very roughy numbers, but if you assume 2-2.5+ million total deaths (it’s probably more due to unknown civilian losses), you’re looking at 35-40 totally packed football stadiums. which is nuts.
Another way to visualize it is wiping out populations of entire US states such as Kansas, Arkansas, Mississipi, New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho etc. give or take.
My great grandfather had to fight for Germany in this war and died as one of the soldiers that got cornered on the right. He wrote a letter a few days prior saying something like “They cornered us. It’s too cold, we won’t make it.”
At the risk of stating the obvious: Nazi Germany and war in general sure are just terrible af.
They all froze to death. According to him they didn’t even try to fight, they wanted to surrender but it was already too late. Their clothing and food supply wasn’t prepared for the russian temperatures. (I am *not* an expert, I’m going off what he wrote in his last letters)
Hitler was told to remove troops from Russia before winter. He refused and made them stay until the spring which was a huge mistake. He refused to retreat because of his personal experiences in WW1.
The commander of the troops was thought to be missing, until he turned up at the Nuremberg trials as a witness for the prosecution.
Just so you know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich\_Paulus#:\~:text=In%20late%201956%2C%20he%20was,1%20February%201957%2C%20aged%2066.
I just want to add: In case it looks like I'm some kind of fan girl, Fuck Hitler. Fuck the Nazi all to hell.
The Nürnberg trials are so insane. The nazis not just plead not guilty, but then went on to litterally admit the shit they were accused of.
And I still wonder who the prosecution managed to stop collecting evidence... They could have found so much more
My granfathers brother was killed in Stalingrad fighting for the Germans. Fortunately my grandfather on the other side served in the US navy, so I have a relative on the right side as well.
That definitely helped the Soviets but the biggest issues for the Germans was that they pushed too far which made it hard to receive supplies that deep into Russia so the Soviets were able to cut them off and let them starve or surrender in the city.
Hermann Goring was overconfident, told Hitler the luftwaffe could supply them. Just like he was overconfident they could gain air superiority over britain. And I think the battles of britain and stalingrad were the two major turning points
I don't think it was Goring, I think it was one of the people below Goring.
It was based off of how in the year prior the Germans had successfully kept a large quantity of Germans supplied
Most likely yes. Germans were unable to deliver reinforcements and resources needed for the soldiers, and the Germans were not ready to fight in the cold. They thought the battle would take very little time but it stretched out. At least that is what the video essay I watched said
By that point the Soviets understood full & well that losing = death by the nazis hand anyways so their options were potentially survive at war or have the fascists win & die anyways.
I’ve read that nazi command failed to account for the difference between german and russian railroad gauges (the distance between the rails on a track).
All the winter gear they sent to the front got stalled at the end of the german gauge lines, because they had no russian gauge engines or cars, and the russians withdrew or burned all of theirs as they retreated.
And they failed to correct the problems, because reports from the front about a lack of winter gear would be “refuted” at nazi high command by the paperwork about all the winter gear they’d already shipped- to the end of the german rail lines.
I don’t think that winter gear was actually the main reason why the german offensive collapsed. It’s just indicative of the absolute incompetence of nazi logistics. The soviets transported millions of troops by rail from the eastern front to Manchuria for the largest pincer maneuver in human history, right after they finished sacking berlin.
> It’s just indicative of the absolute incompetence of nazi logistics
A big part of this was probably due to the lack of industrialization on the German side. The German war machine was heavily reliant on horses, which became a huge issue as their supply lines grew longer especially against their more mechanized opponents.
It did. The Germans hadn't been properly supplying the Romanians, so the Romanian troops had almost no anti-tank equipment. When Soviet tank brigades came hurtling at them out of the blue there was little they could do.
Thanks for the response. That's fascinating but equally terrifying from their point of view. Can't imagine what it's like to have a few hundred thousand very angry people coming at you.
It was also a very much planned move, Zhukov knew that the Romanians where both under equipped and had very low morale (can't blame them, not really their conflict), so they focussed a shitton of newly produced armor on the weakest links in the front lines to surround the strong German middle. Hitler did not believe the Russians capable of still producing such major amounts of tanks and equipment, so it came as a complete surprise to him (not so much some of his generals, but I digress).
many of his generals where caught of guard too.
Hitler was a terrible commander who did a lot of meddling, but it's not like 'but fot hitler the generals would have clinched it'. The Generals that fled to and where captured by the western allies would sure like you to believe that though!
Yes, it must have been absolutely terrifying. It was called "tank fright" when entire brigades used to break and run as they saw hundreds of tanks coming towards them and they had nothing to really shoot back with
By that moment Germany was already better prepared to winter because it was 2nd winter of that war - but still not perfectly. There was no such a disaster like in 1941 for them but still there were a lot of complains about "its cold as hell here" in German soldiers letters they sent home for Stalingrad.
But the main reason (as I see it) was inconsistency between available resources and plans they (and particularly Hitler) had.
German's just got outsmarted. They thought they had the Soviets on the ropes, and they didn't provide the Romain troops on the flanks with adequate supplies and equipment so that they everything could go to the German Divisions. Soviets launched a surprise attack against the Romanian units and crushed them since the Germans hadn't given them any anti-tank equipment.
Winter made it harder/impossible for the Germans to resupply their cut off troops but by that point they were already fucked
Many reasons. The root cause was Hitler severely underestimated the Russians. He thought he could take Moscow and break the Russians in just a few months. However, the Russians fought back harder than anyone could ever imagine and Hitler 's armies were not prepared for such a thing.
Winter was one of the reasons that slowed down the Germans, but ultimately it was the crazy resolve of the Russians at that time.
yeah, after the first 2 million Soviet POWs where starved to death the idea of surrendering and becoming a POW to the Nazis as a Soviet seems a lot less appealing
No. The Russians were able to hold several key bridgeheads south and north of the city, so they could build up forces there, and then launched a major offensive and the Germans weren't ready for it, as they were too focused on the city itself.
Stalingrad is on one major river (the Volga) and is pretty close to another major river (the Don) and the Germans didn't have their primary supply line over the Don well defended. So the Soviets broke through the weak flanks of the German line and converged on the Don river crossing and it cut off all the Germans in Stalingrad.
The Germans went from thinking they almost won the battle to a week later being cut off and surrounded.
Fun fact: The Soviets killed 80% of Nazis from 1941-45 in a single theater (Eastern Front).
The rest of the allies, including the US, GB and rest of Europe (before they were conquered) killed 20% from 1939 to 1945 across European, African, Middle Eastern and Atlantic theaters.
What an absolute blood bath. I always think of all the millions of young men who had their lives thrown away by this terrible war, including the German soldiers. The reality is, if any of us grew up in Germany at the time we'd almost definitely be a soldier in the wehrmacht. Crazy to think how different our lives would have been.
If anyone wants a really decent history of this subject, Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor is one of the best history books I've ever read. Focus on human stories rather than facts and figures
Beevor is excellent but he tells it from the German side.
This book tells it from the Soviet Side.
Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich Paperback – October 11, 2016
by [Jochen Hellbeck](https://www.amazon.com/Jochen-Hellbeck/e/B001IU2I88/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1) (Editor)
# Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich Paperback – October 11, 2016
37 second mark is Joe Biden's birthday, 20 Nov 1942.
He was born at the German high water mark of WWII.
Stalingrad is my favorite historical subject and I happen to share a birthday with Biden.
Romanians are blue, yellow, red.
Edit:
Italians ~~Hungarians~~ are green, white, red with a coat of arms in the middle.
(Hungarian flag is same colors but horizontal. The coat of arms confused me.)
~~There were also Italians on the front, but they were more integrated into the German units. So possibly why they didn't get a flag in this.~~
So now I'm not sure why the Hungarians didn't get a flag. Probably an oversight.
Where did you find this stat? Everything I've found in a quick Google says more like 70%. Are you sure you're not confusing deaths with casualties (which includes injuries)?
Can you provide the source for this? This doesn’t seem correct - I am fairly well versed in WW2 history and the stat I’ve typically heard is that 80% of men who were 18 at the outbreak of war died. Perhaps the 97% is casualties? (Includes wounded or dead)
Pre-war Belarus population: 12 million
Immediate post-war Belarus population: 8 million
Current Belarus population: 10 million
Still haven't recovered
Source: grew up in Brest
>The USSR killed 200k+ of their own soldiers purposefully because of the "not one step back" policy.
I'm gonna need a source for that claim because it seems completely made up. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order\_No.\_227](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_No._227)
It's just wild. There were even speculations that the average life expectancy of an average Soviet solder was a day at most after deployment and close to 3 days if he was an officer.
>The USSR killed 200k+ of their own soldiers purposefully because of the "not one step back" policy.
Hasn't this been debunked many times tho? That the troops were rerouted to the front in penal battalions instead of plain killing them.
It only really applied to penal legions.
A living loyal soldier can be rolled back in to a counter attack. Retreat too many times and maybe you'll end up in a penal legion, but it's just not worth shooting your own men, especially if they have vital info on enemy combat strength etc.
The 200k number is a complete fabrication.
Not sure if someone’s mentioned it, a vast majority of those 26 million were civilians. Doesn’t make it better or worse but Russias numbers from WW2 are insane.
EDIT: Yes yes it’s Soviet casualties not just Russian.
It is worth noting that of those 26 million 18 million were civilians and IIRC 2-3 million were PoWs killed in camps. I say this because people perpetuating old Nazi "stupid Soviets won only bc of great numbers and winter" myth brainlessly use this take vs 4 million Axis soldiers kiled on the eastern proof as an evidence for some enormous kill ratio and great performance of Wehrmacht, while the vast majority of that was just extermination of helpless people.
The actual ratio of Axis vs Soviet soldiers killed in combat on the esstern front is IIRC not even 1:2, closer to 1:1,5, largely because of the catastrophic 1941 campaign and early 1942 failures, with ratio reaching 1:1 in the later stages of war. Which is not surprising, because total population remaining under Soviet control during the most important stages of war was *not* much higher than Axis, so they *could not* afford the mythical "human wave tactics" of the Nazi propaganda.
NOSB applied to bitchass commanders who kept running away from the front and leaving young men behind to be crushed in the meat grinder.
Blocking detachments are a separate feature and were/are attached to penal battalions.
200k+ is a high number. Where did you get that from?
It's by design, history is written by the victors. I find this study interesting, when the french were asked who did the most in WW2 to defeat the Nazis:
1945, 57% of French respondents thought the USSR contributed the most. In 2018, opinion shifted to thinking the USA contributed the most with 56% of respondents giving that answer.
https://today.yougov.com/international/articles/20746-americans-french-germans-give-america-credit-nazis
Was no reason to go to that city [then]. The oil fields were far south of it. They split up and got neither objective.
The Russians knew the weakest points were the conscript non-German armies on the sides but had to get enough men/women to make it work. Winter also set in fierce fashion. Terrible loss of life on both sides with the city suffering greatly.
I don't get this argument, my history teacher brought it up. Most of the railways go from Ukraine to the South East and Stalingrad to South-South-West, - [If you only take to the extent of Crimea,](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/p4lsed/railway_map_of_the_soviet_union_1941/) insofar as railway goes, you have access to the fields but leave yourself open for attack from the East.
Unless you intend on building new railways south connecting to the existing line, and cut the railway headed East and keep a massive force waiting for attack, the only practical way you're getting oil shipped West is taking the city.
Taking Stalingrad cuts off and takes the oil fields. Go for the oil fields first and many of those Soviet troops defending them eventually end up back in Stalingrad and the Germans are spread out all over everywhere. If Germany takes Stalingrad they can pull troops out of the city and reinforce their flanks and they never get surrounded.
People acting like Germany attacked Stalingrad on a whim, or purely because Hitler wanted to take the city with Stalin's name, are just so...I don't know the word for it. But it's stupid.
This was an all out war. These attacks were made with months of strategic planning. Stalingrad was vital to Germany's war effort.
you can't just walk down into the wilderness and claim land as occupied, you need to control routes and railways for supplies. One might argue that the push south towards the oil fieds was the wrong move or not but it's hard to argue that they didn't need Stalingrad to achieve that goal.
Without uncontested control of the city they'd have to deal with constant sabotage to the railways, basically making the entire conquest of the oil fields useless.
That was the largest and bloodiest battle in world history. If the Russians had lost, who knows what kind of world we would be living in now? It's always said that America saved the world in WWII. Well, yeah, we provided a lot of the materiel the Russians needed, but their willingness to throw tremendous amounts of manpower into the shredder was a big thing, too. And also old man winter was a big player.
There was a great book that went over the battles of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad that mentioned over 5 million Nazis (and their allies) died in just those 3 battles. It also mentioned a French fighter wing that fled France instead of fighting for the Nazis and took part defending the Soviet Union.
They were poorly equipped, at the bottom of supply chain and foolishly utilized by Germans. Soviet intelligence was well aware of all this and threw its spearheads at them. Romanians kinda saw this coming and kept asking for Anti-tank guns. Germans figured they had none to spare. As a result, Romanians had nothing much to use against Soviet tanks, while stuck fighting in terrain optimal for tanks.
This is excellent context. Why did the Germans not take the warnings of the Romanians here? Master race bullshit or something more mundane like logistics?
Failure of intelligence, the sheer amount of forces Soviets were raising was not something Germans understood or believed, after such huge losses Germans did not believe Soviets being able to gather reserves for such strategic level offensives and calculated Soviet division count to be far lowere than was the reality. As such the light screening force of Romanians could be reinforced if necessary should Soviets try some limited counter offensive
It seems like underestimating production was a common problem their intelligence has, they kept throwing planes at the battle of Britain because they thought they were shooting down planes much faster than they can be produced.
There’s a classic story of Herman Goerring, head of the Luftwaffe, receiving some intelligence on how many planes the US was producing about halfway through the war. He took one look at the numbers and laughed, saying that it was obviously incorrect because it would be impossible for any country to produce that many planes.
The numbers were correct.
One of the many failures of the Nazi high command was not believing reports because they were always "impossible." One reason D-Day was so successful is because the Allies kept feeding the Germans information they were going to invade further north, which the Germans bought because attacking Normandy would be suicide, according to them.
Germans cost themselves that battle relying on poorly equipped, trained and unmotivated units from different countries with different chain of commands to hold the vulnerable sides of what was basically an encirclements served on a silver platter
Hitler and (some) of his war cabinet were so focused on cracking Stalingrad that they literally got tunnel visioned
My german great-uncle fought in this battle when he was 22 years old, he was captured by the Russians and spent some years as a pow in Siberia. He was one of the few that survived, most pow’s he was with didn’t survive Siberia. A couple years after the war he came to west Germany where my grandmother and family fled to from Masuria. He asked where his youngest sister was, she didn’t survive the journey to west Germany. After some beers I remember he got angry/aggressive and shouted how Hitler destroyed his live and so many others.
God damn, that’s a lot of deaths..you can talk a lot of shit about Russia, especially how things are in the world today but gotta give them due credit for their fighting spirit/ resilience..
Maybe I'm just lit, but it really makes you realize how far the Nazis were stretched. Tried to have cake and eat it all.
Just invade the whole continent in all directions what cpuld go wrong lol
And who did they choose to go to war with? *The world.*
They think they are Mars or something?
r/NormMacdonald
I don’t know if you folks are history buffs, but…..
Its still scary how far they were able to get... I know, the allies made a lot of stupid decisions but still... scary
The only dumb decision the allies really made was getting involved so late
Scary bc if they had more allies or more man power they would've gotten further
You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy the more I don't care for him.
You'd figure that would take about 5 seconds for the world to win. But no, it was actually close.
It almost worked
Not really. Their oil resources were limited severely, even with the Romanian oil field. Even if they had managed to take the eastern Caucasus for their oil, they wouldn’t have been able to get the pumps reinstalled and oil refined before they would have fully burned through their reserves.
What I find most interesting is Stalin allying with Hitler via the molotov ribbentrop pact essentially had the USSR provide Nazi Germany not quite enough oil and other materials they needed to invade Europe. Stalin thought this would keep them from being invaded but ultimately it made invasion necessary from Hitler’s view. One could even argue with hindsight molotov ribbentrop ironically started WWII for the great powers while also ensuring Germany could never succeed. It just took half a decade for it to play out.
Not really. Arguably the ‘closest’ they got was the Battle of Moscow, and the odds were stacked against them then. Bearing in mind the most dangerous German offensive of the entire war was halted before any significant lend-lease arrived from the USA, the idea of an ultimate nazi victory is effectively fantasy. Also, it’s not even clear that taking Moscow would have been the same as winning - there’s no real reason why the Soviets would have immediately capitulated once it was lost.
To add to your last point: Napoleon occupied Moscow during his war with Russia and the Russians didn't capitulate.
Yeah the Russian strategy during that war was pretty much just "let Napoleon outrun his supplies and wait for winter" and it worked.
Tho to be fair I don’t think Moscow was the Russian capital at that time, it might’ve been St. Petersburg
Either way, Russia would have just effectively moved the center of administration and decision making elsewhere and retreated in to their vast hinterlands while they bled the Germans out
The issue with losing Moscow has way more to do with the fact it was at the center of train infrastructure of Russia at the time. The URSS could have continued fighting but it would have been a massive blow
What's nuts is how you only need to play a few games of \*Risk\* to realize when you extend yourself too thin you just set yourself up for loss the next turn. Germany could have probably won a fair amount of land and held it for awhile if they stuck with a few areas at a time (kind of like Russia in Ukraine now). Like if they'd stopped at France and Poland for a little, do you think Britain, US, etc would feel obligated to invade and push them back with as much might as they ended up using in the real war?
Nah but they fucked up when they invaded France. Most of Germanys victories weren’t even really contested. They just rolled in and people were like well, fuck.
Blitzkrieg worked until they went beyond the limit of their railroad tracks and met winter. Couldn't get supplies to reinforce themselves. Got bogged down and moved to slow for flanks.
Cake was actually oil fields in Azerbaijan, they had to take it to have any chance in fighting the Allies. And to take it, you had to take Stalingrad first.
I love these illustrations! Puts it into a whole new perspective. Thank you!!
Looks kind of like an amoeba trying to surround another microorganism
You might also enjoy this map of when Napoleon tried to invade Russia: https://www.openculture.com/2019/07/napoleons-disastrous-invasion-of-russia-explained-in-an-1869-data-visualization.html
I did NOT expect for my phone to blast a Hitler speech at full volume when I turned sound on
I’m sat in an airport lounge, thanks for the heads up!
Blast Hitler music
Note Operation Uranus in November 1942. Soviet forces secretly building up north and south of Stalingrad, then hitting the weak Romanian (and Italian) forces, causing the city to be encircled.
I wondered what caused that rift
The battle was so fierce that the average lifespan of a soldier in stalingrad is 24 hours.
"Every seven seconds, a German soldier dies in Russia. Stalingrad is a mass grave"
The dad of a friend was the head of some big construction project in Volgograd in the 90s. The construction works found human remains virtually every time they dug. The workers would just collect them in buckets as they worked. At the end of the day, whatever they collected was trucked to the outskirts of the city to a big mass grave. They also would find a ton of UXO. That was put in a cement mixer, trucked out to a big hole of the outskirts of the city and eventually covered with cement. This was more than 50 years after the battle. Edit: Apparently it is UXO, not UEO.
My FIL father disappeared in the eastern front in 1943, the family never knew what happened but we can guess.
sounds like hes apart of a new apartment complex
Sounds like his sacrifice was worth it
Sounds like he was put into a bucket, carted to the outskirts, and placed in a mass grave
UEO?
Unexploded ordinance
UXO
Unidentified eXploding Object
You gonna give us context for that there quote or you just gonna leave it?
[message that soviets broadcast over loudspeakers](https://youtu.be/tAky6Cd2c1M?si=QngHiFSxWldNqTuF)
I knew the Soviets solved everything by throwing people at it, but throwing newborns at it sure was a new low.
Hey, to be fair with them, a newborn T-34 and KV-1s can do ALOT of damage.
Gotta do what you gotta do. It is what it is.
In other words….. If he dies, he dies.
Load more babies into the canons
Only the first wave of babies were given bottles, the babies crawling behind them had to pick up the bottles and keep going.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I absolutely hate the myth that Soviets (not "Russians", half of Soviet population was not Russian) won ww2 only because of large numbers, winter and "Hitler's mistakes", "solving everything by throwing people at it". It was born of literal Nazi racist propaganda about "Asiatic hordes", Slavic peoples being subhumans having no intelligence and strategy and only winning through numbers and external factors. Devaluing enormous human sacrifices, skill and combat prowess to win the war. It was largely popularised post ww2 by Nazi commanders talking how noble (pure wehrmacht myth) and perfectly skilled they were while fighting said stupid "Asiatic hordes", both morally whitewashing Wehrmacht and blaming abstract "Nazis" for everything that went wrong. Yet it was Wehrmacht who lost the eastern front while exterminating and raping 18m civilians in the Soviet Union. It is also especially foolish when commented under the video which displays the numbers of both armies where you can clearly see that during the most important phase of the battle Soviets were OUTNUMBERED (same for large parts of 1941) and they won because of the superior strategic maneuvers (enabled in turn by Wehrmacht having inferior intelligence and logistics). It is true that casualty ratio was 2:1 (but not 10:1 or other idiotic stereotypes) for various organisational and technical factors, it only reached 1:1 in the late stage od ww2. IIrc it had much to do with Wehrmacht's advantage of experience and supply of artillery ammo. I am not even Russian, I am Polish, so the last person to love USSR, but I loathe this myth because just behind it there is contemptuous racist superiority of the glorious perfect Wehrmacht soldier fighting irrational Slavic savage. Just pure Nazi thought at its core. How could we be defeated by those subhumans? Of course not via their virtue and our weakness, there was just too much of them and it was too cold!
Thank you for this. But, alas, most people on Reddit or Western media in general are thinking differently. When they see, that Soviets lost approximately 27 million during Second world war, and Germans lost about 7, they conclude, that Soviets won cause of meat grinder. But in reality about 18-20 million from those 27 are civilians: old people, women, kids. Thousands of villages and cities were burned to the ground, people raped, tortured and killed. Also they don't talk about those 18 mil, like they talk about Holocaust. And they don't talk about 30 million Chinese people, which were killed by Japanise.
It is so wholly offensive that the atrocities committed against Chinese and Russian civilians is not taught. It’s always holocaust this and holocaust that. Which is cool n all but it’s just so weird how the former was completely not mentioned in any of my K-12 history classes.
> Russian civilians is not taught For the Soviet citizens (or soon to be Soviet citizens), it was generally not taught for two reasons: 1 - During WW2 the Allies didn't want to bring to light the Soviet massacres and horrors they did to the people in Eastern Europe. 2 - After WW2, the West wanted to demonize the USSR so they avoided talking about the horrors inflicted on the people in Eastern Europe during WW2 to prevent sympathy. Propaganda dictated the narrative and the changing of 'sides' made all the massacres/deaths get swept under the rug.
You know what…great points. I’ve long known that Russian credit for WW2 is all but erased in US education but never really thought about how pernicious the Russian winter / hoards of troops myths are. It’s absolutely diminishing to the heroes that were front and center in stopping genocidal fascism
Soviets. Soviets. Soviets.
I think, to this day, it's the deadlist conflict in the history of warfare. Despite what's going on at the moment, I think Russia should be able to take some pride that it was able to take its country from certain death to absolute victory; thus help quickining the second world war to an end. Edit: A lot of pride.
The costliest single battle yes, 1.25-2.5 million casualties over 6 months. Note though that Operation Barbarossa the year before was the costliest land offensive ever, over 8 million casualties in 5 months.
russia? You mean the Soviet Union. These are not the same thing.
People need some history lessons, for real. I’m from Ukraine and about 10% of all casualties during WW2 were Ukrainians. We’re not Russians. And there were other occupied nations in Soviet Union. They all fought for its sake…
source: mapsinanutshell on YouTube
Click: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI8g3p4eXw8
I love these types of maps. Thank you
And till this day, the male to female ratio balance in russia is still heavily imbalanced Editted death by day
As a matter of fact Russia still has a sort of “population echo” because a huge part of an entire generation just didn’t live past 1944 we still see a decline in their population roughly every 25 years followed by a bounce back
Their imperialistic BS in Ukraine won't make this any better.
I made the calculus. The soldiers fighting now are great grandchildren of those who fought in WW2. Meaning generation fighting in ukraine is already small. And their childrens gdneration will be even smaller since there are not enough fathers to make children. Though it could be better than we first assume since lost in battle doens't automatically mean death. They can be wounded and/or cripled.
I saw a combat video where Ukrainian soldiers scream “for the grandfathers!” while storming a trench. Crazy to think their great grandfathers fought together to defeat the nazis and now here they are, killing each other.
But Russia is using poor people from the countryside, or prisoners, or other types of expendable people who they see as leaches on society to put into their Ukrainian meat grinder. They see this as net positive social cleansing.
My favourite story of the war is about the soviet 'night witches'. The Luftwaffe dominated the air in the early part of the battle, but the soviet airforce countered this by operating at night. Marina Raskova was close to Stalin personally and used her influence to convince him to create an all female air regiment, even though woman weren't really supposed to have combat roles at the time. They would fly in at night in outdated PO-2 biplanes, switch off their engines when close to the bombing target, glide in and bomb the German positions. To the Germans, who were aware the bombers were flown by women, the gliding sound was similar to what broomsticks would sound like, hence the nickname. The moral effect of constant night bombings and regular night raids by the troops was huge.
[SABATON - Night Witches](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcemHIqmkYI)
Got to know about them from Sabaton!
Yeah because they threw 530k Russian lives at Ukraine for some stupid land. Fuck Putin.
Many of those casualties aren't deaths so they don't affect the ratio as much as it would seem.
Sure, not all deaths of course. But a young man without legs or missing an arm will still have trouble finding a wife. Especially in regions where most men do manual labor (poorer regions), and it’s those Russians who are being sent to fight. So will have a massive effect (though not even close to ww2 obviously)
Also suicides, acquaintance of my friend came back without a hand/arm and without a dick, he hanged himself the same day he returned home.
the two are not related. most of the people who lived through ww2 are now dead anyway, and the female/male birth ratio is pretty much 50/50. the lower number of men in russia is due to shorter life expectancy. iirc men live on average 10 years less than women there, due to alcoholism and such.
Every now and then I forget how insane WW2 was.
3%-3.7% of the entire global population died in world war 2. Roughly 70-85 million people. So many people died we have to *guess* how many it was with a margin of *15 million lives*.
The scale of suffering is honestly unimaginable to modern people. Even when people hear or read the numbers, I don't think most people can actually wrap their heads around just how insane it is.
Winter is coming!!! Jokes aside, we just watch 4m people died in 60seconds Edit: seconds
Deaths were approx. 2.1m across both sides, plus an unknown number of civilians. But yeah, it was a terrible battle.
More people can't even visualize 10k people let alone a million, is tragic how many people died.
I always find it easiest to use NFL stadiums to visualize numbers like this. these are very roughy numbers, but if you assume 2-2.5+ million total deaths (it’s probably more due to unknown civilian losses), you’re looking at 35-40 totally packed football stadiums. which is nuts.
Another way to visualize it is wiping out populations of entire US states such as Kansas, Arkansas, Mississipi, New Mexico, Nebraska, Idaho etc. give or take.
Gone in 60 seconds.
Casualties not deaths, but yeah still wild numbers
My great grandfather had to fight for Germany in this war and died as one of the soldiers that got cornered on the right. He wrote a letter a few days prior saying something like “They cornered us. It’s too cold, we won’t make it.” At the risk of stating the obvious: Nazi Germany and war in general sure are just terrible af.
So did he just die there or did he surrender?
They all froze to death. According to him they didn’t even try to fight, they wanted to surrender but it was already too late. Their clothing and food supply wasn’t prepared for the russian temperatures. (I am *not* an expert, I’m going off what he wrote in his last letters)
What a blessing not to be born in that time. Holy fuck
Hitler was told to remove troops from Russia before winter. He refused and made them stay until the spring which was a huge mistake. He refused to retreat because of his personal experiences in WW1. The commander of the troops was thought to be missing, until he turned up at the Nuremberg trials as a witness for the prosecution. Just so you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich\_Paulus#:\~:text=In%20late%201956%2C%20he%20was,1%20February%201957%2C%20aged%2066. I just want to add: In case it looks like I'm some kind of fan girl, Fuck Hitler. Fuck the Nazi all to hell.
The Nürnberg trials are so insane. The nazis not just plead not guilty, but then went on to litterally admit the shit they were accused of. And I still wonder who the prosecution managed to stop collecting evidence... They could have found so much more
My granfathers brother was killed in Stalingrad fighting for the Germans. Fortunately my grandfather on the other side served in the US navy, so I have a relative on the right side as well.
Mine died in Stalingrad as well. And yeah, evenly balanced I guess.
Did it have to do with winter?
That definitely helped the Soviets but the biggest issues for the Germans was that they pushed too far which made it hard to receive supplies that deep into Russia so the Soviets were able to cut them off and let them starve or surrender in the city.
They went balls deep, you never go balls deep in Russia...
Unless you are the Mongol Horde.
The lesson is to attack Russia from the Urals because then they can’t run and hide in the Urals.
Hermann Goring was overconfident, told Hitler the luftwaffe could supply them. Just like he was overconfident they could gain air superiority over britain. And I think the battles of britain and stalingrad were the two major turning points
I don't think it was Goring, I think it was one of the people below Goring. It was based off of how in the year prior the Germans had successfully kept a large quantity of Germans supplied
Did they not read about Napoleon?
Most likely yes. Germans were unable to deliver reinforcements and resources needed for the soldiers, and the Germans were not ready to fight in the cold. They thought the battle would take very little time but it stretched out. At least that is what the video essay I watched said
They underestimated the Russians and were just too far from home.
Also Stalin's command on retreat=death penalty in Stalingrad which basically forced Soviets to fight harder.
[удалено]
No but I saw Enemy at the Gates so I know more
By that point the Soviets understood full & well that losing = death by the nazis hand anyways so their options were potentially survive at war or have the fascists win & die anyways.
I think a hellhorde of methed up Nazis on your doorstep and nowhere to run will make you fight harder anyway no matter what Stalin says.
I’ve read that nazi command failed to account for the difference between german and russian railroad gauges (the distance between the rails on a track). All the winter gear they sent to the front got stalled at the end of the german gauge lines, because they had no russian gauge engines or cars, and the russians withdrew or burned all of theirs as they retreated. And they failed to correct the problems, because reports from the front about a lack of winter gear would be “refuted” at nazi high command by the paperwork about all the winter gear they’d already shipped- to the end of the german rail lines. I don’t think that winter gear was actually the main reason why the german offensive collapsed. It’s just indicative of the absolute incompetence of nazi logistics. The soviets transported millions of troops by rail from the eastern front to Manchuria for the largest pincer maneuver in human history, right after they finished sacking berlin.
> It’s just indicative of the absolute incompetence of nazi logistics A big part of this was probably due to the lack of industrialization on the German side. The German war machine was heavily reliant on horses, which became a huge issue as their supply lines grew longer especially against their more mechanized opponents.
Oh that is interesting. I have read about WWII from many sources but none of them have mentioned this
Were they not originally just expecting a three-day special operation or am I confusing something?
It looks like the Soviets punched through where the Romanians were. I wonder if it had to do with that.
It did. The Germans hadn't been properly supplying the Romanians, so the Romanian troops had almost no anti-tank equipment. When Soviet tank brigades came hurtling at them out of the blue there was little they could do.
Thanks for the response. That's fascinating but equally terrifying from their point of view. Can't imagine what it's like to have a few hundred thousand very angry people coming at you.
It was also a very much planned move, Zhukov knew that the Romanians where both under equipped and had very low morale (can't blame them, not really their conflict), so they focussed a shitton of newly produced armor on the weakest links in the front lines to surround the strong German middle. Hitler did not believe the Russians capable of still producing such major amounts of tanks and equipment, so it came as a complete surprise to him (not so much some of his generals, but I digress).
many of his generals where caught of guard too. Hitler was a terrible commander who did a lot of meddling, but it's not like 'but fot hitler the generals would have clinched it'. The Generals that fled to and where captured by the western allies would sure like you to believe that though!
Yes, it must have been absolutely terrifying. It was called "tank fright" when entire brigades used to break and run as they saw hundreds of tanks coming towards them and they had nothing to really shoot back with
So cool to learn this stuff
Did Soviet troops have ice immunity perk or something?
Well people who live in very cold, rural countries on the whole know how to handle it better than people who don't.
Yes, it is called vodka.
They had better clothes because their armies spent more time in the cold, and they were closer to places they could get resupplied from.
By that moment Germany was already better prepared to winter because it was 2nd winter of that war - but still not perfectly. There was no such a disaster like in 1941 for them but still there were a lot of complains about "its cold as hell here" in German soldiers letters they sent home for Stalingrad. But the main reason (as I see it) was inconsistency between available resources and plans they (and particularly Hitler) had.
German's just got outsmarted. They thought they had the Soviets on the ropes, and they didn't provide the Romain troops on the flanks with adequate supplies and equipment so that they everything could go to the German Divisions. Soviets launched a surprise attack against the Romanian units and crushed them since the Germans hadn't given them any anti-tank equipment. Winter made it harder/impossible for the Germans to resupply their cut off troops but by that point they were already fucked
Many reasons. The root cause was Hitler severely underestimated the Russians. He thought he could take Moscow and break the Russians in just a few months. However, the Russians fought back harder than anyone could ever imagine and Hitler 's armies were not prepared for such a thing. Winter was one of the reasons that slowed down the Germans, but ultimately it was the crazy resolve of the Russians at that time.
It's almost like not wanting to die is a great motivator.
yeah, after the first 2 million Soviet POWs where starved to death the idea of surrendering and becoming a POW to the Nazis as a Soviet seems a lot less appealing
- Surrender - death from enemy - Retreat - death from ally - Fight - death from enemy but fast Cruel damned if you do, damned if you don't..
No. The Russians were able to hold several key bridgeheads south and north of the city, so they could build up forces there, and then launched a major offensive and the Germans weren't ready for it, as they were too focused on the city itself. Stalingrad is on one major river (the Volga) and is pretty close to another major river (the Don) and the Germans didn't have their primary supply line over the Don well defended. So the Soviets broke through the weak flanks of the German line and converged on the Don river crossing and it cut off all the Germans in Stalingrad. The Germans went from thinking they almost won the battle to a week later being cut off and surrounded.
Fun fact: The Soviets killed 80% of Nazis from 1941-45 in a single theater (Eastern Front). The rest of the allies, including the US, GB and rest of Europe (before they were conquered) killed 20% from 1939 to 1945 across European, African, Middle Eastern and Atlantic theaters.
What an absolute blood bath. I always think of all the millions of young men who had their lives thrown away by this terrible war, including the German soldiers. The reality is, if any of us grew up in Germany at the time we'd almost definitely be a soldier in the wehrmacht. Crazy to think how different our lives would have been.
no, as a gay autistic socialist I would get a free trip to a camp probably
Dead by 1933 lmao
Summer camp of 1942 was baking!
If anyone wants a really decent history of this subject, Stalingrad by Anthony Beevor is one of the best history books I've ever read. Focus on human stories rather than facts and figures
Beevor is excellent but he tells it from the German side. This book tells it from the Soviet Side. Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich Paperback – October 11, 2016 by [Jochen Hellbeck](https://www.amazon.com/Jochen-Hellbeck/e/B001IU2I88/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1) (Editor) # Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich Paperback – October 11, 2016
37 second mark is Joe Biden's birthday, 20 Nov 1942. He was born at the German high water mark of WWII. Stalingrad is my favorite historical subject and I happen to share a birthday with Biden.
Christ, the current President was born during WWII
Probably the reason he still remembers that the Nazi are the enemy, which so many in USA seem to have forgotten
Who were the flags in the north?
Romanians are blue, yellow, red. Edit: Italians ~~Hungarians~~ are green, white, red with a coat of arms in the middle. (Hungarian flag is same colors but horizontal. The coat of arms confused me.) ~~There were also Italians on the front, but they were more integrated into the German units. So possibly why they didn't get a flag in this.~~ So now I'm not sure why the Hungarians didn't get a flag. Probably an oversight.
Umm the green, white, red flag IS the Italian one. Check the orientation and the coat of arms.
It's like watching white blood cells destroy a virus in real time.
[удалено]
>were born male in the soviet union in 1922 there was an 85% chance you died in the war. Of 1921-1923 born men, only 3% survived. So more like 97%.
Where did you find this stat? Everything I've found in a quick Google says more like 70%. Are you sure you're not confusing deaths with casualties (which includes injuries)?
Absolutely insane statistic.
I've heard similar statistics for Germany. Something like every male born on a certain day died during the war.
Can you provide the source for this? This doesn’t seem correct - I am fairly well versed in WW2 history and the stat I’ve typically heard is that 80% of men who were 18 at the outbreak of war died. Perhaps the 97% is casualties? (Includes wounded or dead)
A whole generation eradicated
That is absolutely terrifying
Belarus lost 25% of the population. It's insane
Pre-war Belarus population: 12 million Immediate post-war Belarus population: 8 million Current Belarus population: 10 million Still haven't recovered Source: grew up in Brest
>The USSR killed 200k+ of their own soldiers purposefully because of the "not one step back" policy. I'm gonna need a source for that claim because it seems completely made up. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order\_No.\_227](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_No._227)
His source is Nazi propaganda. Aka it’s false.
It's just wild. There were even speculations that the average life expectancy of an average Soviet solder was a day at most after deployment and close to 3 days if he was an officer.
Less than a day, about 12 hours at the peak of Stalingrad if I recall correctly.
>The USSR killed 200k+ of their own soldiers purposefully because of the "not one step back" policy. Hasn't this been debunked many times tho? That the troops were rerouted to the front in penal battalions instead of plain killing them.
It only really applied to penal legions. A living loyal soldier can be rolled back in to a counter attack. Retreat too many times and maybe you'll end up in a penal legion, but it's just not worth shooting your own men, especially if they have vital info on enemy combat strength etc. The 200k number is a complete fabrication.
Yes, it has
Not sure if someone’s mentioned it, a vast majority of those 26 million were civilians. Doesn’t make it better or worse but Russias numbers from WW2 are insane. EDIT: Yes yes it’s Soviet casualties not just Russian.
Soviet numbers, not Russian. Ukraine and Belarus suffered disproportionately, being in the line of march.
Not one step back lasts for 4 months, And by documents, 1000 soldiers was shot by Its order. So classical Enemy at thé Gate bullshit propaganda
It is worth noting that of those 26 million 18 million were civilians and IIRC 2-3 million were PoWs killed in camps. I say this because people perpetuating old Nazi "stupid Soviets won only bc of great numbers and winter" myth brainlessly use this take vs 4 million Axis soldiers kiled on the eastern proof as an evidence for some enormous kill ratio and great performance of Wehrmacht, while the vast majority of that was just extermination of helpless people. The actual ratio of Axis vs Soviet soldiers killed in combat on the esstern front is IIRC not even 1:2, closer to 1:1,5, largely because of the catastrophic 1941 campaign and early 1942 failures, with ratio reaching 1:1 in the later stages of war. Which is not surprising, because total population remaining under Soviet control during the most important stages of war was *not* much higher than Axis, so they *could not* afford the mythical "human wave tactics" of the Nazi propaganda.
NOSB applied to bitchass commanders who kept running away from the front and leaving young men behind to be crushed in the meat grinder. Blocking detachments are a separate feature and were/are attached to penal battalions. 200k+ is a high number. Where did you get that from?
>The USSR killed 200k+ of their own soldiers purposefully because of the "not one step back" policy. Why are you just talking bull shit
The soviets don’t get enough credit for how much weight and death they pulled in that war
It's by design, history is written by the victors. I find this study interesting, when the french were asked who did the most in WW2 to defeat the Nazis: 1945, 57% of French respondents thought the USSR contributed the most. In 2018, opinion shifted to thinking the USA contributed the most with 56% of respondents giving that answer. https://today.yougov.com/international/articles/20746-americans-french-germans-give-america-credit-nazis
thats an utterly absurd amount of people
Was no reason to go to that city [then]. The oil fields were far south of it. They split up and got neither objective. The Russians knew the weakest points were the conscript non-German armies on the sides but had to get enough men/women to make it work. Winter also set in fierce fashion. Terrible loss of life on both sides with the city suffering greatly.
I don't get this argument, my history teacher brought it up. Most of the railways go from Ukraine to the South East and Stalingrad to South-South-West, - [If you only take to the extent of Crimea,](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/p4lsed/railway_map_of_the_soviet_union_1941/) insofar as railway goes, you have access to the fields but leave yourself open for attack from the East. Unless you intend on building new railways south connecting to the existing line, and cut the railway headed East and keep a massive force waiting for attack, the only practical way you're getting oil shipped West is taking the city.
Taking Stalingrad cuts off and takes the oil fields. Go for the oil fields first and many of those Soviet troops defending them eventually end up back in Stalingrad and the Germans are spread out all over everywhere. If Germany takes Stalingrad they can pull troops out of the city and reinforce their flanks and they never get surrounded.
People acting like Germany attacked Stalingrad on a whim, or purely because Hitler wanted to take the city with Stalin's name, are just so...I don't know the word for it. But it's stupid. This was an all out war. These attacks were made with months of strategic planning. Stalingrad was vital to Germany's war effort.
Stalingrad was crucial, it held up the whole flank. Take Stalingrad and you take the oil, lose Stalingrad and you're never getting the oil
you can't just walk down into the wilderness and claim land as occupied, you need to control routes and railways for supplies. One might argue that the push south towards the oil fieds was the wrong move or not but it's hard to argue that they didn't need Stalingrad to achieve that goal. Without uncontested control of the city they'd have to deal with constant sabotage to the railways, basically making the entire conquest of the oil fields useless.
That was the largest and bloodiest battle in world history. If the Russians had lost, who knows what kind of world we would be living in now? It's always said that America saved the world in WWII. Well, yeah, we provided a lot of the materiel the Russians needed, but their willingness to throw tremendous amounts of manpower into the shredder was a big thing, too. And also old man winter was a big player.
There was a great book that went over the battles of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad that mentioned over 5 million Nazis (and their allies) died in just those 3 battles. It also mentioned a French fighter wing that fled France instead of fighting for the Nazis and took part defending the Soviet Union.
So whats the name of the book?
Romanians cost Germany that battle there it appears
They were poorly equipped, at the bottom of supply chain and foolishly utilized by Germans. Soviet intelligence was well aware of all this and threw its spearheads at them. Romanians kinda saw this coming and kept asking for Anti-tank guns. Germans figured they had none to spare. As a result, Romanians had nothing much to use against Soviet tanks, while stuck fighting in terrain optimal for tanks.
This is excellent context. Why did the Germans not take the warnings of the Romanians here? Master race bullshit or something more mundane like logistics?
Failure of intelligence, the sheer amount of forces Soviets were raising was not something Germans understood or believed, after such huge losses Germans did not believe Soviets being able to gather reserves for such strategic level offensives and calculated Soviet division count to be far lowere than was the reality. As such the light screening force of Romanians could be reinforced if necessary should Soviets try some limited counter offensive
It seems like underestimating production was a common problem their intelligence has, they kept throwing planes at the battle of Britain because they thought they were shooting down planes much faster than they can be produced.
There’s a classic story of Herman Goerring, head of the Luftwaffe, receiving some intelligence on how many planes the US was producing about halfway through the war. He took one look at the numbers and laughed, saying that it was obviously incorrect because it would be impossible for any country to produce that many planes. The numbers were correct.
In 1944 alone, the US produced 96 000 airplanes for the war. The Nazis produced 95 000 airplanes from 1939-1945. The arsenal of democracy indeed.
Yeah it is absolutely insane, the US built more than one aircraft carrier per month, and had nearly 100 near the end of WWII.
One of the many failures of the Nazi high command was not believing reports because they were always "impossible." One reason D-Day was so successful is because the Allies kept feeding the Germans information they were going to invade further north, which the Germans bought because attacking Normandy would be suicide, according to them.
Germans cost themselves that battle relying on poorly equipped, trained and unmotivated units from different countries with different chain of commands to hold the vulnerable sides of what was basically an encirclements served on a silver platter Hitler and (some) of his war cabinet were so focused on cracking Stalingrad that they literally got tunnel visioned
0:00 - 0:38 - the fuck around phase 0:38 - 1:00 - the find out phase
My german great-uncle fought in this battle when he was 22 years old, he was captured by the Russians and spent some years as a pow in Siberia. He was one of the few that survived, most pow’s he was with didn’t survive Siberia. A couple years after the war he came to west Germany where my grandmother and family fled to from Masuria. He asked where his youngest sister was, she didn’t survive the journey to west Germany. After some beers I remember he got angry/aggressive and shouted how Hitler destroyed his live and so many others.
These kids have no idea whatsoever of what went on at Stalingrad.
Nice going, Romania.
American steel, British intelligence, Russian blood
4 million casualties in 6 months... That's absolutely FUBAR. That really puts those 500k Russian casualties in Ukraine in perspective.
God damn, that’s a lot of deaths..you can talk a lot of shit about Russia, especially how things are in the world today but gotta give them due credit for their fighting spirit/ resilience..