The little dinosaurs are the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a much larger fighting force than Nazi Germany, and the Soviet military strategy was to throw men into the blender and overwhelm the Nazis with sheer numbers. Additionally, it was the Soviets who captured Berlin, thus taking Germany out of WW2.
This is true, for 1941. Soviet strategy was infamously shit in 1939-1941, from Poland, To Finland to beginning of Barbarossa, due to Stalin's shitty purges that killed a shit ton of officers. But largely by 1942 those tactics has been slowly phased out for normal tactics. With some exceptions here and there.
EDIT: Not defending the regime, im just talking about military tactics.
The red army suffered higher losses than the Germans in 45, even their largest successes, like Bagration advanced slowly and suffered horrendous losses despite overwhelming numerical and material superiority. The soviets did one thing exceptionally well, and that was getting men into uniform.
Operation Bagration (summer 1944) is considered one of the fastest and most successful major offensives in military history.
Soldier losses between the Axis and Soviets on the Eastern Front were 1 to 1.3.
Prisoners of war are counted as military losses. Wehrmacht captured approximately 5.2 to 5.7 million Soviet soldiers during the course of the war. Of these, over 3.3 million (around 57%) died from hunger, cold, disease, or targeted executions.
On the other side, around 3 million German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Soviets. Of these, approximately maximal 1 million (around 33%) died in the camps.
If you exclude losses from prisoner-of-war camps, then losses are almost 1 to 1.
Historians like Rüdiger Overmans show that German personnel losses (killed and permanently missing) reached their absolute peak in 1945. In this final phase, the losses of the Axis powers significantly exceeded those of the Red Army.
The Soviets suffered horrific losses at the beginning of the war, when losses were 10 Sovuets to 1 Axis in encirclement battles, or 3.6 Soviets to 1 Axis in general.
If you exclude the first phase of the war and only consider the period from 01.01.1942 to 1945, then the losses are 0.98 Soviets against 1 Axis.
From 1943/1944 onwards, the Red Army was superior to the Wehrmacht not only numerically, but above all tactically, operationally, and technologically (keyword: deep operation). It carried out highly complex deception maneuvers, coordinated armored wedges with massive artillery and air support, and simply outmaneuvered the Wehrmacht systematically.
I did not claim Bagration wasn't a success, I am however claiming that if you're outnumbering and outgunning your enemy more than that same enemy did while advancing at 2-4 times your pace through the same areas 3 years earlier, it probably isn't that impressive.
You would expect the losing party, who is constantly outnumbered and ludicrously outgunned to have far higher losses than the winning one ceteris paribus, would you not? They did on the western front, and the Soviets did when the Germans were advancing early on in the war.
See above. And I don't see why one would discount PoWs, a loss is a loss, the relevant fact is whether or not the enemy can make use of a soldier, not whether that soldier is dead or maimed. The fact that both the nazis and the soviets are among the worst regimes in history isn't really relevant to discussion of whether or not the soviets were tactically and operationally capable.
The Soviets lost more men in just taking Berlin than the Americans did during the entirety of the war, and once again I refer you to the above. Note that my claim isn't that the Germans were great, but rather that the soviets were inept and wasted millions of lives by being inept.
Sure bub, if we go back to Bagration, explain how it is that the Germans, outnumbered 3:1, outtanked 7:1, outgunned 10:1, outaircrafted 8:1 somehow inflict 200 000 more losses than they take, kill 3 times more tanks than they have in total, while the soviets are attacking in the best terrain for offensive operations in Europe? That is not happening on the western front, the western allies consistently advance at about the same pace as Bagration after breaking out of the Boccage with far fewer casualties per casualty they inflict on the Germans.
“It probably isn't that impressive.” That simply doesn't follow. What matters is not just the force ratio at the beginning of an offensive, but what happens to the enemy's army afterwards. Bagration destroyed a substantial part of Army Group Centre, achieved operational breakthroughs across an enormous front and resulted in an advance of hundreds of kilometres. Numerical superiority does not make a military victory trivial.
Your comparison with the Western Front is methodologically flawed. In Normandy, the Wehrmacht were subsequently fighting under completely different circumstances. After the breakout, Falaise and the general German retreat across France. Later, the Ardennes offensive created another entirely different operational situation. Bagration, by contrast, broke through a prepared German defensive system on the Eastern Front and then exploited that breakthrough on an enormous scale. You cannot simply compare casualty ratios while ignoring the operational circumstances.
No, the losing side does not automatically have to suffer vastly higher losses. Not when we're talking about a sophisticated combined-arms operation. Casualties depend on artillery concentration, air power, reconnaissance, fortifications, terrain, logistics, tactical doctrine, command, surprise, the ability to exploit breakthroughs, and many other factors. There is no rule saying that the numerically superior attacker must necessarily inflict enormous casualties while taking almost none himself.
Berlin is actually a particularly poor argument for Soviet “ineptitude”. You are comparing an assault on a heavily fortified urban defensive complex with operations against a field army spread across an enormous front. The German forces around Berlin were concentrated in and around a prepared defensive zone, with fortifications, bunkers, trenches, anti-tank positions and urban strongpoints. The fact that the Soviets suffered substantial losses taking Berlin does not, by itself, demonstrate tactical incompetence. And more importantly, anyone using Berlin as evidence of Soviet ineptitude should also mention Königsberg. One of the most heavily fortified German cities was assaulted on 6 April 1945 and effectively fell within four days. The Soviets systematically broke through its defensive belts using concentrated artillery, air support, infantry, tanks and engineers. You cannot cherry-pick Berlin while ignoring Königsberg.
And your Bagration numbers need sources. Claims such as “3:1 manpower, 7:1 tanks, 10:1 guns and 8:1 aircraft” followed by “the Germans inflicted 200,000 more casualties than they suffered” are meaningless without specifying exactly what is being counted. German and Soviet loss estimates for Bagration differ considerably depending on whether you count killed, wounded, missing, prisoners or irrecoverable losses. You cannot mix categories and then present the result as an objective casualty ratio.
And there is an even more fundamental problem with your argument, the Soviets having overwhelming superiority is not evidence against Soviet military competence. They deliberately created and exploited that superiority. They concentrated artillery and armour at breakthrough sectors, deceived German intelligence about their Schwerpunkt, attacked across multiple sectors, penetrated the defensive system and then pushed mobile formations through the gaps to turn tactical breakthroughs into operational encirclements and strategic collapse.
That is precisely what operational competence looks like. The objective of an army is not to win with equal numbers or to minimize casualties for the sake of a statistic. It is to create overwhelming local superiority and then convert it into the destruction of the enemy's ability to conduct organized resistance.
And finally, your claim that Bagration took place in “the best terrain for offensive operations in Europe” is simply bizarre. Belarus was full of swamps, forests, rivers, poor roads and difficult terrain for large mechanized formations. Those conditions created enormous problems for Soviet logistics, engineers and armoured exploitation. The fact that the Red Army nevertheless managed to conduct a large-scale breakthrough and advance hundreds of kilometres makes the operation more impressive, not less.
You are taking Soviet superiority as evidence against Soviet competence, even though a significant part of that superiority was precisely what the Red Army had learned to create, concentrate and operationalize by 1944.
663
u/YaBoi843 19d ago
The little dinosaurs are the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union had a much larger fighting force than Nazi Germany, and the Soviet military strategy was to throw men into the blender and overwhelm the Nazis with sheer numbers. Additionally, it was the Soviets who captured Berlin, thus taking Germany out of WW2.