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 welshhoppo wrote:
From the four devisioms stationed at Normandy, one was declared "unfit for active duty." And one other was comprised entirely of Russian and Eastern Prisioners of war.

Yep. They were speedbumps for the divisions behind them.

Well the prisoners of war were being used as labor to beef up defenses. It's not surprising they were there, given that at the time German command thought that an attack further up the coast was more likely.

Coincidentally this is where Yang Kyoungjong was stationed, supposedly. Assuming he isn't just another thing Stephen Ambrose made up out of his ass

To return to the original point of the thread, IDK if it really is "anti-western revisionism" but the Soviet Union probably could have beaten Germany after May 1944 without further help from the western allies. It would have taken them a lot longer, of course.

However it is a completely unrealistic scenario given (A) the western allies' commitment to a second (or actually a third) front in Europe and (B) the previous history of the war, during which the western allies not only supplied a lot of materiel to the SU but also gave the Axis several varieties of good kickings.

Thus I would say on the whole that the scenario has been chosen to present the SU in a good light.

 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
Sir John Keegan, respected military historian, has the German loses at Bagration as around 400,000. Still a massive defeat, but nowhere near the scale of Normandy.

Where the hell did I get 2 million from? I was not well on Friday

As for technology, I stand by my point about the Allies fighting a modern war.

Why are you "standing by it"? It is a basic reality of the war that no-one in this thread is challenging. I think you've misread somethings and likely misunderstood the counterpoints being raised against you.

This is why it is generally better to quote individual blocks of text you are debating, rather than block quoting everything and dropping a general summary response.

Arguably, the invasion of Russia was made possible by the vast number of vehicles captured from the British, the French, and the Czechs.

The captured vehicles gave the German army a massive increase in mobility. The only reason your claim would be 'arguable' is that even with the captured vehicles the invasion of Russia was still impossible.

Anyhow, you seem to have narrowed your argument down to defending a point that no-one is actually arguing against. The Western Allies had modern, fully mobilised armies, this is a basic fact that everyone agrees with. It is your other claims, that Britain somehow 'got off lightly' in the war, that the Soviet and Germans armies could be simplified down to be crude, brute force armies, that Russia ran smaller units at the end of the war because they had run out of troops... these are all claims you made that are just wrong.


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 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
It's an old argument: what would have happened if the Germans could have put the 4 million men they needed in Russia, and instead, transfered them to the Western Front? Would the war have been different?

I would argue no.

Germany: Here's 4 million men and thousands of extra tanks. Take that allies!

Allies: Here's round the clock bombing raids from 1000+ British and American bombers. Let's see how long your men and tanks last. And forget about another Dunkirk, as we have complete air superiority, and if your tiger tanks get to close to the coast, our battleships will pulverise them with 17 inch guns...
Oh, and here's a few atomic bombs for German cities...

The Germans were bringing a knife to a gun fight...

You are chronically underestimating the difficulty the Allies already had in combating the Germans troops that were present. Go read about the operations in Normandy. It eventually broke into a nice encirclement for the Allies, but the fighting before then was incredibly brutal and included many bloody repulses and reversals of fortune.

You seem to have taken some ideas about the problems the Germans had on strategic and logistical levels and passed those all the way down through the ranks. But while those issues still remained, on a tactical level the Wehrmacht was excellent - they had a command structure that allowed for rapid adaptation to battlefield circumstances, they had excellent discipline, and they had excellent machine guns and anti-tank weapons in large numbers.

You can't just dismiss the hypothetical of adding another 4 million troops to that kind of war machine.

Although you are right that any hypothetical German hold out only lasts until the US has the bomb.

Without the western allies, the soviets would have hit the floor like a cheap prom dress, without the soviets, there is likely not much that could have saved the western allies. the nazis were not defeated by either of them, it took both and it took a hell of a lot to pull it off. the allies needed time, the soviets needed lend lease. and alot of those soviet divisions werent available until it was clear the japanese were not gonna take siberia from them. there were alot of mistakes and miscalculations on both sides.

tneva82 wrote:
USSR was screaming at first. At the end they were winning and they knew it. German was doomed. The second front had tiny number of German divisions in numbers AND in quality. Best of Germans were on eastern front. And most numbers.

You shouldn't make the mistake of thinking what is known now was known by everyone at the time. Remember, we know now that the war was well and truly lost for Germany by 1943, but the Soviets and Germans still engaged in serious peacetalks that might have worked if, funnily enough, the Germans had been a bit more serious in their demands.

Pretty much only reason that prevented US/Brit vs Soviets was logistical trouble US/Brits had(they weren't ready for large scale fight with Soviets right off the bat) and Soviets were worried about the A-bomb(as it is dropping those to Japan was deterrant for Soviets to keep them from getting funny ideas about Europe).

And you know, there is a natural reluctance to send more men off in to a meatgrinder, when you're winding up one of the most brutal conflicts in human history.

This isn't fething Risk.

Anybody thinking US did that out of good will and selflessness is kidding themselves. No country does that. US came here because it suited their politics to not have red europe and for that I'm thankful. While not quaranteed it's likely my life wouldn't be as nice now as it is had they not come(then again...Me now wouldn't exists in that case so hard to compare).

That's a fairly contrived kind of cynicism. The US didn't do it out of goodwill, they just did it to suit their own politics, which just happened to be to create free and democratic countries instead of socialist dicatorships. Which is basically the closest thing you will ever get to goodwill in international politics.

But on your overall point about Overlord, you are absolutely right. Overlord didn't change the outcome of the war, merely helped hasten the end. This shouldn't diminish the strategic and operational excellence of the campaign, nor the skill and bravery of the soldiers who fought.


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Col. Dash wrote:
Granted the Germans were defending and odds usually favor the defenders three to one but there are many instances of the German troops, especially the Fallshirmjagers beating up superior forces that should have been able to walk over them.

People often look at the early stages of the war with its dramatic breakthroughs and big encirclements and think WWII favoured the attacker throughout. But new strategies were quickly developed to overcome blitz style operations, and meanwhile a machine gun was still a machine gun, pre-sighted artillery was murderous and a guy hiding in a foxhole was still an absolute bitch to clear out.

The Germans adapted over the war, moving from mobile warfare to dogged inch by inch defence, and in doing so were able to grind Allied offensives to a halt. But make no mistake this merely meant changing from 'losing' to 'losing a bit more slowly'. The Germans were rapidly losing the ability to launch counter-offensives, let alone an actual offensive of their own.

You can see this with their one last offensive in the Ardennes. The strategic circumstances couldn't have better suited the Germans - they got the weather they needed, and the Allies were as unprepared as you could ever hope for. It was still ended as a debacle for the Germans. And a look at Bastogne will tell you why - the troops there were of course of the highest quality and incredibly heroic, but it was also a case of the Germans now experiencing what the Allies had been experiencing since 1943. Dislodging well prepared troops was extremely difficult, and this meant the old freewheeling offensives of 1939-41 the Germans had relied on were now all but impossible.


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 Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
Lehr was fully equipped. 2nd and 17th SS Panzer divisions were also fully equipped. I'm not buying this under-strength divisions theory.

It's not a theory for you to buy or not. It is what it is. The Germans had some favoured units that were better supplied than others, and so it is pretty silly to look just at the favoured units and ignore the shortages across all divisions, East and West.

And what's more - the size of German divisions isn't just about whether they were at full strength. As I already said, even at full strength a German tank division had less tanks in it than an American infantry division. The Germans in the latter war just had smaller divisions on paper than other armies. That their divisions were frequently a long way from their paper strength adds to that.

Building an elite fomration like Lehr carries on this maxim, and fits in with the German doctrine of focusing maximum strength on one point, and a war of manouvere.

So, IMO, Lehr makes perfect sense to the Germans.

If Lehr suited the German dictum of maneuver warfare so well... why didn't it engage in any actual breakthrough operations? That's the issue with making a handful of very elite units - sure they're more capable than anything of ripping a whole in the enemy and punching through it, but they never get used for that.

Maneuverability requires a measure of expendability - when you push a unit through a breakthrough it might achieve, but it might also get swallowed up. When you make divisions that are too precious to lose, you lose the ability to use them in breakthrough operations.

 sebster wrote:
You can't just dismiss the hypothetical of adding another 4 million troops to that kind of war machine.

Although you are right that any hypothetical German hold out only lasts until the US has the bomb.

The second part is why you can dismiss the hypothetical. Adding another 4 million troops to that war machine just means another 4 million troops to kill, whether through continued conventional bombing or an eventual nuclear attack. Germany can't take the permanent aircraft carrier floating just off the coast or attack the factories out-producing them at obscene rates, so the only real question is whether the US can grind down German forces to the point where an invasion at a somewhat later date becomes possible or if the war drags on to the "screw it, turn Germany into a radioactive wasteland and buffer against the Soviets".

 thekingofkings wrote:
Without the western allies, the soviets would have hit the floor like a cheap prom dress, without the soviets, there is likely not much that could have saved the western allies. the nazis were not defeated by either of them, it took both and it took a hell of a lot to pull it off. the allies needed time, the soviets needed lend lease. and alot of those soviet divisions werent available until it was clear the japanese were not gonna take siberia from them. there were alot of mistakes and miscalculations on both sides.

Once again, the British received vastly more lendlease aid than the Soviets did. This didn't turn the British into a Berlin conquering juggernaught, because that is just not the scale that lendlease operates at. It was supplemental aid - it supported domestic production, it didn't take over for it. The trucks and railway carriages the Soviets received were excellent and made many offensives more effective than they would otherwise have been, but they weren't transformative. As I said earlier, the dominant reason the Soviets had so much stuff is because they made so much stuff.

To look at 1943 for instance, we have 11,750 German tanks and self-propelled guns produced in total. That includes just 740 Tigers and 1,849 Panthers. Almost half are variants based on the light Panzer II, III and 38(t) chassis. In comparison, the Soviets built 24,162 tanks. This included more than 15,000 T-34s. The Soviets were outproducing Germany at a rate of more than 2:1, and that gets more severe when you look at medium and heavy tanks - the ratio is 3:1.

 Peregrine wrote:
The second part is why you can dismiss the hypothetical. Adding another 4 million troops to that war machine just means another 4 million troops to kill, whether through continued conventional bombing or an eventual nuclear attack.

At this point I'm not even sure what the hypothetical is. Is there a ceasefire in the East, or was there never any war at all? Are the Soviets still supplying raw materials to the Nazis?

All of those things will impact greatly on the quality of the army Germany is fielding. And yeah, none of it will matter one bit once the US turns up with nukes.

But if we're talking about what happens before the nukes then we're looking the bloody grind of stuff like the Caen campaign, and you then extend it to every French town, and multiply it by a couple of orders of magnitude for Paris. With an extra 4 million German soldiers, the breakthrough of Operation Cobra isn't possible, and without that then the Normandy campaign and capture of France becomes a bloody grind, town to town.

Germany can't take the permanent aircraft carrier floating just off the coast or attack the factories out-producing them at obscene rates, so the only real question is whether the US can grind down German forces to the point where an invasion at a somewhat later date becomes possible or if the war drags on to the "screw it, turn Germany into a radioactive wasteland and buffer against the Soviets".

I don't think there'd be any delay in using nukes once they're available. They were originally intended for Germany, afterall. When you are losing whole divisions as a matter of routine, and then you get a war ending weapon then you use it straight away.

 sebster wrote:
But if we're talking about what happens before the nukes then we're looking the bloody grind of stuff like the Caen campaign, and you then extend it to every French town, and multiply it by a couple of orders of magnitude for Paris. With an extra 4 million German soldiers, the breakthrough of Operation Cobra isn't possible, and without that then the Normandy campaign and capture of France becomes a bloody grind, town to town.

Yeah, but what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter if it becomes a bloody grind. The allies have more men and more industry, by ridiculous margins, and their supply of men and equipment is immune to (meaningful) German attacks. Even taking nukes out of the scenario a war of attrition is inevitable defeat for Germany, outside of the unlikely possibility of allied leadership giving up and letting Germany keep their conquered territory. An extra 4 million men makes the war uglier for the allies, it doesn't make the scenario any better for Germany.

And then of course there's the option of delaying the invasion and implementing a "bomb them to rubble, then bomb the rubble" plan until those extra 4 million men are either dead or out of supplies. Adding extra men with rifles watching the heavy bombers fly overhead doesn't solve Germany's problems with aircraft production and fuel supplies, and rescheduling Normandy by a year or two doesn't change the outcome of the war.

I don't think there'd be any delay in using nukes once they're available. They were originally intended for Germany, afterall. When you are losing whole divisions as a matter of routine, and then you get a war ending weapon then you use it straight away.

Well, even assuming there's no reluctance to use nukes immediately for political reasons there's still a production issue. Do you attack Germany immediately with the two bombs you have ready and try to intimidate them into surrendering, knowing that if they refuse you won't have your next bombs ready for a while, or do you wait and accumulate nukes for a single massive attack on multiple targets that erases Germany from the map before they have any idea how the war has changed? In this case there would be no "use it now, before the Soviets get into the war" pressure like with Japan.

 sebster wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
Without the western allies, the soviets would have hit the floor like a cheap prom dress, without the soviets, there is likely not much that could have saved the western allies. the nazis were not defeated by either of them, it took both and it took a hell of a lot to pull it off. the allies needed time, the soviets needed lend lease. and alot of those soviet divisions werent available until it was clear the japanese were not gonna take siberia from them. there were alot of mistakes and miscalculations on both sides.

Once again, the British received vastly more lendlease aid than the Soviets did. This didn't turn the British into a Berlin conquering juggernaught, because that is just not the scale that lendlease operates at. It was supplemental aid - it supported domestic production, it didn't take over for it. The trucks and railway carriages the Soviets received were excellent and made many offensives more effective than they would otherwise have been, but they weren't transformative. As I said earlier, the dominant reason the Soviets had so much stuff is because they made so much stuff.

To look at 1943 for instance, we have 11,750 German tanks and self-propelled guns produced in total. That includes just 740 Tigers and 1,849 Panthers. Almost half are variants based on the light Panzer II, III and 38(t) chassis. In comparison, the Soviets built 24,162 tanks. This included more than 15,000 T-34s. The Soviets were outproducing Germany at a rate of more than 2:1, and that gets more severe when you look at medium and heavy tanks - the ratio is 3:1.

 Peregrine wrote:
The second part is why you can dismiss the hypothetical. Adding another 4 million troops to that war machine just means another 4 million troops to kill, whether through continued conventional bombing or an eventual nuclear attack.

At this point I'm not even sure what the hypothetical is. Is there a ceasefire in the East, or was there never any war at all? Are the Soviets still supplying raw materials to the Nazis?

All of those things will impact greatly on the quality of the army Germany is fielding. And yeah, none of it will matter one bit once the US turns up with nukes.

But if we're talking about what happens before the nukes then we're looking the bloody grind of stuff like the Caen campaign, and you then extend it to every French town, and multiply it by a couple of orders of magnitude for Paris. With an extra 4 million German soldiers, the breakthrough of Operation Cobra isn't possible, and without that then the Normandy campaign and capture of France becomes a bloody grind, town to town.

Germany can't take the permanent aircraft carrier floating just off the coast or attack the factories out-producing them at obscene rates, so the only real question is whether the US can grind down German forces to the point where an invasion at a somewhat later date becomes possible or if the war drags on to the "screw it, turn Germany into a radioactive wasteland and buffer against the Soviets".

I don't think there'd be any delay in using nukes once they're available. They were originally intended for Germany, afterall. When you are losing whole divisions as a matter of routine, and then you get a war ending weapon then you use it straight away.

there was a distinct difference in the type of aid to the soviets and british, the soviets did not have an inexhaustable pool of manpower or resources. They were heavily reliant on aid. there is a reason their casualties were greater than anyone elses, they were never a prosperous nation to begin with. with most of their best land already in german hands, they werent doing themselves alot of favors.

 Peregrine wrote:
Yeah, but what I'm saying is that it doesn't matter if it becomes a bloody grind. The allies have more men and more industry, by ridiculous margins, and their supply of men and equipment is immune to (meaningful) German attacks. Even taking nukes out of the scenario a war of attrition is inevitable defeat for Germany, outside of the unlikely possibility of allied leadership giving up and letting Germany keep their conquered territory. An extra 4 million men makes the war uglier for the allies, it doesn't make the scenario any better for Germany.

No argument there. With allied air dominance then German offensive power becomes close to zero, and it is just a case of a bloody grind.

I was really countering the idea that the Normandy campaign was such a clear win for the Allied war machine that adding another 4 million troops wouldn't have changed anything. That was ignoring that most of the Allied gains came from the encirclement of Cobra, and Cobra isn't possible if the Germans had another 4 million troops. Instead if becomes a bloody, town to town grind.

And then of course there's the option of delaying the invasion and implementing a "bomb them to rubble, then bomb the rubble" plan until those extra 4 million men are either dead or out of supplies. Adding extra men with rifles watching the heavy bombers fly overhead doesn't solve Germany's problems with aircraft production and fuel supplies, and rescheduling Normandy by a year or two doesn't change the outcome of the war.

Yeah, these are all considerations I don't know if we can account for because I have no idea what actual hypothetical we're discussing here

Well, even assuming there's no reluctance to use nukes immediately for political reasons there's still a production issue. Do you attack Germany immediately with the two bombs you have ready and try to intimidate them into surrendering, knowing that if they refuse you won't have your next bombs ready for a while, or do you wait and accumulate nukes for a single massive attack on multiple targets that erases Germany from the map before they have any idea how the war has changed? In this case there would be no "use it now, before the Soviets get into the war" pressure like with Japan.

A production issue and a reliability issue. They weren't 100% certain the bombs would go off - you can't ever be certain the first time you use anything. In a live war against an enemy that still has a competitive army that becomes a much bigger risk.

But again, a lot of this depends on where the Soviet Union is in all this. Are they out of the war because they signed a peace agreement pre-Kursk. Were they ever invaded? Are they taking a threatening stance (they'd be spending big on military expansion no matter what, but is it on fixed defences or force projection?)


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 thekingofkings wrote:
there was a distinct difference in the type of aid to the soviets and british, the soviets did not have an inexhaustable pool of manpower or resources. They were heavily reliant on aid. there is a reason their casualties were greater than anyone elses, they were never a prosperous nation to begin with. with most of their best land already in german hands, they werent doing themselves alot of favors.

None of this means anything when we have the actual production numbers.
They didn't produce as much as they could have if they had their best land... they still massively outproduced Germany.
They were never a prosperous nation to begin with.. they still massively outproduced Germany.

They got a lot of aid. But most of it came from 1943 onwards, when the war was moving in to its grinding endphase. The contribution of lend lease the Soviet war effort in 1941 was less than 1% of Soviet war production, for instance. It helped, but to claim it save the Soviets, or changed the course of the war is just wrong. It is impossible to look at figures that show the Soviets outproducing the Germans in tanks in a ratio of 2:1 and conclude that the Soviets were saved because they got some M3 Lee tanks they used for training purposes.

You can see this with their one last offensive in the Ardennes. The strategic circumstances couldn't have better suited the Germans - they got the weather they needed, and the Allies were as unprepared as you could ever hope for. It was still ended as a debacle for the Germans. And a look at Bastogne will tell you why - the troops there were of course of the highest quality and incredibly heroic, but it was also a case of the Germans now experiencing what the Allies had been experiencing since 1943. Dislodging well prepared troops was extremely difficult, and this meant the old freewheeling offensives of 1939-41 the Germans had relied on were now all but impossible.

I liked to point out in a paper once the number of German tanks involved in the Battle of France to the number of AFVs in the Battle of the Buldge; 3000 to 600. By mid 1944, German industry completely was insufficient. they weren't keeping up, and most of what they made went East, not West. They were a lot more scared of the Soviets than the Western Allies.

the soviets did not have an inexhaustable pool of manpower or resources

Except comparatively speaking inexhaustable pool of manpower and resources is exactly what they had. A lot of the high material and manpower loses of the Red Army in the later stages of the war are explained much more by a recognition that "we have reserves" than incompetence or general inferiority. The Soviets had numbers in spades, and much like Ulysses Grant and Publius Decius Mus , they abused that advantage all the way to winning. The US did it in the Pacific with the US Navy. It's not like we were that much better than the Japanese Navy. The Japanese Navy was extremely professional, well trained, well built, and well equipped. We just swarmed them down with carriers, planes, and battleships. We were churning out boats by the dozen daily. We literally built faster than they could sink.

Turns out Zerg Rushing is an age old and much maligned (pretty much any General who ever got nicknamed "Butcher" was nicknamed such for employing this strategy) but no the less effective means of waging war.

these great soviet advances were not made by the t-34 or by the hordes of infantry, they were made possible by trucks. those trucks all had their most critical components made in the US midwest,
AMO vehicles - Moscow plant - assistance through Brandt.
GAZ vehicles - Molotov Nr. 1, Gorky plant - assistance through Austin and Ford.
GAZ vehicles - Nizhni-Novgorod plant - assistance through Austin and Ford.
YAZ vehicles - Yaroslav plant - assistance through Hercules.
ZIS vehicles - Kuznetsk plant - assistance through Autocar and Brandt.

simply put it was decisive. The t-34 was pretty good, but the soviets still nearly lost the battle of kursk, they had terrible time trying to work their will on army group courland, an essentially already beaten force. There is a glaring myth of soviet military prowess that simply was not there. They lost nearly a generation of young men, these guys were near;ly 50 years behind western europe technologically and prior to ww2 were basically a peasant agrarian culture. They learned alot during the war years, but they didnt do it on their own. just 46 ships from seattle brought them in 1944
22.000 tons of steel provided by U.S. Steel.
3.000 truck chassis, by Ford (the Soviets also assembled U.S. trucks from parts).
3.000 truck differentials from Thornton Tandem Co.
2.000 tractors by Allis Chalmers Co. (agricultural and military use)
1.500 automotive batteries from the Price Battery Corp.
1.000 aircraft provided by the North American Aviation Co.
612 airplanes from the Douglas Aircraft Co.
600 trucks from Mack.
500 Allison aircraft engines.
500 half-tracks from Minneapolis Moline Co.
400 airplanes from Bell Aircraft
400 electric motors from Wagner Electric Co.
400 truck chassis by GM (see Ford above)
310 tons of ball bearings from the Fafnir Company.
200 aircraft provided by the U.S. Navy
200 aircraft engines by Aeromarine
100 tractor-trailer units by GM (trucks)
70 aircraft engines by Pratt & Whitney
that was 1 convoy, there were many more like it.

 thekingofkings wrote:
but the soviets still nearly lost the battle of kursk,

They didn't even come close to losing the Battle of Kursk.

They lost nearly a generation of young men, these guys were near;ly 50 years behind western europe technologically

That'll depend on what kind of technology we're talking about. In terms of tanks, the Soviets were ahead of pretty much everyone. Massive investment was put into tanks by the Red Army. In 1941 the KV-1 and T-34 were the most advanced tanks in the world (there just weren't a lot of them until 1942). By 1945, they'd long surpassed the tanks being made by the US and UK. There was nothing in the arsenal of the western allies that could compete with IS-2s and IS-3s, and the T34-85 was still a damn good tank. The west wouldn't match Soviet tank quality until the sixties.

 LordofHats wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
but the soviets still nearly lost the battle of kursk,

They didn't even come close to losing the Battle of Kursk.

They lost nearly a generation of young men, these guys were near;ly 50 years behind western europe technologically

That'll depend on what kind of technology we're talking about. In terms of tanks, the Soviets were ahead of pretty much everyone. Massive investment was put into tanks by the Red Army. In 1941 the KV-1 and T-34 were the most advanced tanks in the world (there just weren't a lot of them until 1942). By 1945, they'd long surpassed the tanks being made by the US and UK. There was nothing in the arsenal of the western allies that could compete with IS-2s and IS-3s, and the T34-85 was still a damn good tank. The west wouldn't match Soviet tank quality until the sixties.

yeah pretty much disagree with everything you said, especially since the centurion made the t-34 extinct in korea. the king tiger was considerably better than the kv1 which was little better than a pillbox. the a-34 comet was far better than the t-34 and the pershing could kill pretty much any of them nearly at will. though to be fair, usually the western allies simply killed tanks with the mustang and hurricane

 thekingofkings wrote:
especially since the centurion made the t-34 extinct in korea.

Well yeah, but by then the Soviets were pawning off their t-34s to make room for the T54s, and no sooner were Western armored vehicles matching the T54 than the T55 rolled out. The West spent a good 20 years playing catch up on tank development after WWII. You can grab up a bunch of tanks from the post war years and compare them to wartime vehicles, but that's a rather dull attempt at dismissing reality. The post-war Victory Parade held in Berlin on 7 September 1945 saw the US bring forth some Shermans, the UK bring out some Cromwells and Comets, and the Soviets roll down the street in brand new IS-3s. The bulk of the Western Allies' armor arsenal was so insufficient in that moment Truman and Churchhill both commented on. It was no coincidence that Stalin was the one who proposed the parade. It was a purposeful show of force, and it worked because the force was conventionally far greater than what the Western Allies were at the time capable of handling.

kv1 which was little better than a pillbox.

Which is probably why the it gave the Germans so much trouble during Barbarossa. A single KV held up the 7th Panzer for three days, because even though its tracks were shot, nothing in the German arsenal at the time could penetrate its armor. They eventually hammered the tank with so much artillery the crew was killed by the shock waves.

The King Tiger while technically impressive, came down the line much later than the KV-1, so its not really an apt comparison. By 1944 the Soviets were phasing the KV line of tanks out. They were too slow, and too costly. The IS series of heavy tanks were poised to replace them, and the IS tanks chewed through both variations of Tiger and were more numerous. The Pershing meanwhile was the product of WWII's very own F35 development disaster. It was a terrible vehicle that looked great on paper, but was hard to use in the field. A small incline was sufficient to destroy its suspension. We phased that thing out so fast in part because of the Berlin Victory Parade and the realization that it was woefully inferior. The resulting M46 wasn't much better though. And a hearty chunk of our tank force in the Korean War was still Shermans, which to be fair are sadly underrated tank.

But yes. In terms of aviation the West was way ahead, and the Soviets spent a good 15 years playing catch up.

the pershing was in service in WW2 and was superior to the is-3 and is-2

 thekingofkings wrote:
the pershing was in service in WW2 and was superior to the is-3 and is-2

There were 20 Pershings in Europe in 1945 (22 if we count the really silly looking Super Pershing). Only two of them actually fired any rounds before the war ended. The war was over before the Pershing had a chance to serve. The US had largely allowed its heavy tank program to start languishing in 1943*, and rushed the Pershing out in response to the Battle of Buldge (because the U.S. initially learned the wrong lessons from that battle, but don't worry we'd figured it out by 1946!). The IS-2 was woefully superior to the Pershing. About the only parity between the two was similar top speed, despite the IS-2 being 10 tons heavier! Larger gun, thicker armor, (on top of more advanced armor technology), better range, and in terms of usability, the IS-2 didn't risk tear itself apart just driving over rough terrain.

The IS-3 blew it out of the water. There's a reason the Western Allies rapidly cycled through a number of armored vehicles in the late 40s and 50s while the Soviets didn't.

*A very good book about the US Tank Development programs is Faint Praise by Charles Baily. The book is nominally about the failure of the US military to produce a replacement for the Sherman (and whether or not it really was a failure), but it goes into great detail about the botched development of America's heavy tank program and the production of tank destroyers for the US Army Tank Destroyer Force.

 thekingofkings wrote:
these great soviet advances were not made by the t-34 or by the hordes of infantry, they were made possible by trucks. those trucks all had their most critical components made in the US midwest,

I'm all for talking about the importance of the non-glamorous logistics stuff, and as I already said the trucks and railway carriages provided by the US played a huge role in ending the war sooner.

I think it all comes down to a basic failure in how many people start to address the question of whether lendlease was decisive. They just look at the scale of lendlease, note that it involves some stupendously big numbers and then conclude that it must have been essential. That's basically what you did - you look at this big list of numbers, lendlease was huge... therefore it was essential.

But having extra help isn't decisive when the situation without that help was already massively in your favour. So let's just look at what the Soviets were making compared to the Germans, without any lendlease considerations. We'll use 1942 as that's before Lendlease really kicked in to gear.
The Germans produced 1,370,000 rifles and carbines. The Soviets produced 4,049,000 rifles and carbines.
The Germans produced 117,000 machine guns. The Soviets produced 356,000 machine guns.
The Germans produced 9,800 mortars. The Soviets produced 230,000.
The Germans produced 41,000 guns and artillery pieces. The Soviets produced 128,000.
The Germans produced 6,200 tanks and SPG. The Soviets produced 24,700 tanks and SPG.
The Germans produced 11,600 combat aircraft. The Soviets produced 21,700.

Only rifles and mortars are unusual figures for 1942, in all other categories the results are fairly consistent with following years (in those two categories the Soviets were rebuilding lost basic weaponry). The point being, as the figures should clearly show, whatever impact lendlease might have had, things were already massively in favour of the Soviets.

but the soviets still nearly lost the battle of kursk

That is just not a very sensible thing to say. It was certainly a brutal fight, and one in which the Germans showed they still had significant technical and doctrinal advantages over the Soviets, but they got nowhere close to completing the encirclement. And from there you have to remember that past German campaigns involved many successful encirclement and breakthroughs, and still hadn't done enough to actually defeat the Soviets, and this time around the Germans had enough strength for just one major operation, and couldn't even complete that one.

 sebster wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
these great soviet advances were not made by the t-34 or by the hordes of infantry, they were made possible by trucks. those trucks all had their most critical components made in the US midwest,

I'm all for talking about the importance of the non-glamorous logistics stuff, and as I already said the trucks and railway carriages provided by the US played a huge role in ending the war sooner.

I think it all comes down to a basic failure in how many people start to address the question of whether lendlease was decisive. They just look at the scale of lendlease, note that it involves some stupendously big numbers and then conclude that it must have been essential. That's basically what you did - you look at this big list of numbers, lendlease was huge... therefore it was essential.

But having extra help isn't decisive when the situation without that help was already massively in your favour. So let's just look at what the Soviets were making compared to the Germans, without any lendlease considerations. We'll use 1942 as that's before Lendlease really kicked in to gear.
The Germans produced 1,370,000 rifles and carbines. The Soviets produced 4,049,000 rifles and carbines.
The Germans produced 117,000 machine guns. The Soviets produced 356,000 machine guns.
The Germans produced 9,800 mortars. The Soviets produced 230,000.
The Germans produced 41,000 guns and artillery pieces. The Soviets produced 128,000.
The Germans produced 6,200 tanks and SPG. The Soviets produced 24,700 tanks and SPG.
The Germans produced 11,600 combat aircraft. The Soviets produced 21,700.

Only rifles and mortars are unusual figures for 1942, in all other categories the results are fairly consistent with following years (in those two categories the Soviets were rebuilding lost basic weaponry). The point being, as the figures should clearly show, whatever impact lendlease might have had, things were already massively in favour of the Soviets.

but the soviets still nearly lost the battle of kursk

That is just not a very sensible thing to say. It was certainly a brutal fight, and one in which the Germans showed they still had significant technical and doctrinal advantages over the Soviets, but they got nowhere close to completing the encirclement. And from there you have to remember that past German campaigns involved many successful encirclement and breakthroughs, and still hadn't done enough to actually defeat the Soviets, and this time around the Germans had enough strength for just one major operation, and couldn't even complete that one.

we are not going to agree, and since I am not gonna sit and trade barbs with you, I will leave it at yeah, it was essential, materially and morale wise. you are also assuming that all the soviet production was soviet alone, it was not. out of those near 25k tanks and spgs, how many of those pistons were made in the ussr? few, very few, they assembled them in the ussr, but you will find "made in detroit" on alot of those engines.

 thekingofkings wrote:
how many of those pistons were made in the ussr?

Probably all of them.

The USSR had very few vibrant industires when it first formed in the 1920s, but there was one that was already well established; Tractors. When Mikhail Tukhachevsky did his first calculations for the Soviet Union's industrial potential in wartime, he used the growing Soviet tractor industry as a basis for how many tanks the USSR could produce. Turns out tractor engines have a lot of the qualities you want in a tank engine; hearty, durable, and a lot of horse power. Pretty much all the powers in WWII struggled with engine limitations in tank design. The Germans never managed to field a good diesel engine. The US had good ones, but ours had a tendency too... um catch fire. The Soviets on the other hand had some great engines owing to earlier developments in their domestic tractor industry. Turns out that when a country recklessly pursues industrial capability to the point of not caring that people are starving to death down the street, they can make a lot of gak.

The funny thing about facts is that you don't agree with them. You either acknowledge them, or ignore them because facts can be inconvenient.

 LordofHats wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
how many of those pistons were made in the ussr?

Probably all of them.

The USSR had very few vibrant industires when it first formed in the 1920s, but there was one that was already well established; Tractors. When Mikhail Tukhachevsky did his first calculations for the Soviet Union's industrial potential in wartime, he used the growing Soviet tractor industry as a basis for how many tanks the USSR could produce. Turns out tractor engines have a lot of the qualities you want in a tank engine; hearty, durable, and a lot of horse power. Pretty much all the powers in WWII struggled with engine limitations in tank design. The Germans never managed to field a good diesel engine. The US had good ones, but ours had a tendency too... um catch fire. The Soviets on the other hand had some great engines owing to earlier developments in their domestic tractor industry. Turns out that when a country recklessly pursues industrial capability to the point of not caring that people are starving to death down the street, they can make a lot of gak.

The funny thing about facts is that you don't agree with them. You either acknowledge them, or ignore them because facts can be inconvenient.

the thing about "facts" is when they are either in direct disagreement with each other. then it remains debatable as to the truth of said "fact"

 thekingofkings wrote:
we are not going to agree, and since I am not gonna sit and trade barbs with you, I will leave it at yeah, it was essential, materially and morale wise. you are also assuming that all the soviet production was soviet alone, it was not. out of those near 25k tanks and spgs, how many of those pistons were made in the ussr? few, very few, they assembled them in the ussr, but you will find "made in detroit" on alot of those engines.

They're 1942 figures. Before lendlease scaled up. We've been over this.

 sebster wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
we are not going to agree, and since I am not gonna sit and trade barbs with you, I will leave it at yeah, it was essential, materially and morale wise. you are also assuming that all the soviet production was soviet alone, it was not. out of those near 25k tanks and spgs, how many of those pistons were made in the ussr? few, very few, they assembled them in the ussr, but you will find "made in detroit" on alot of those engines.

They're 1942 figures. Before lendlease scaled up. We've been over this.

US companies were in the ussr well before the 40's providing and selling, it wasnt called "lend lease" at the time but that was what it was.

 thekingofkings wrote:
US companies were in the ussr well before the 40's providing and selling, it wasnt called "lend lease" at the time but that was what it was.

So now you're arguing not for the policy of lendlease, but for international trade in any form?

The Soviets were selling to Germany, so...

 sebster wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
US companies were in the ussr well before the 40's providing and selling, it wasnt called "lend lease" at the time but that was what it was.

So now you're arguing not for the policy of lendlease, but for international trade in any form?

The Soviets were selling to Germany, so...

To get back to the original point i was making afore this got derailed it is this : "The soviets did not win ww2 alone, they did need the western allies." every bit of aid was needed, it could be considered decisive. There are too many myths of soviet invincibillity and thats all they are, myths.

 thekingofkings wrote:
the thing about "facts" is when they are either in direct disagreement with each other. then it remains debatable as to the truth of said "fact"

Sentiments are in disagreement, not facts.

The closest you ever actually got to arguing based on facts was your list of the contents of a lend lease convoy, which was rather effectively replied to, and to which you simply respond with one of the most bold face asspulls I've seen in awhile.

I'll try putting it another way; between 1941 and 1945 the US provided the USSR with 2.3 million tons of steel via Lend Lease. The USSR produced 14.5 million tons of steel in 1941 alone. Drop -> Bucket.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 thekingofkings wrote:
There are too many myths of soviet invincibillity and thats all they are, myths.

I don't think anyone is really arguing for Soviet invincibility so much as they're arguing against a myth invented by Cold War propaganda to allow the US to claim credit for the Soviet i"ndustrial miracle."

 LordofHats wrote:

 thekingofkings wrote:
the thing about "facts" is when they are either in direct disagreement with each other. then it remains debatable as to the truth of said "fact"

Sentiments are in disagreement, not facts.

The closest you ever actually got to arguing based on facts was your list of the contents of a lend lease convoy, which was rather effectively replied to, and to which you simply respond with one of the most bold face asspulls I've seen in awhile.

I'll try putting it another way; between 1941 and 1945 the US provided the USSR with 2.3 million tons of steel via Lend Lease. The USSR produced 14.5 million tons of steel in 1941 alone. Drop -> Bucket.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 thekingofkings wrote:
There are too many myths of soviet invincibillity and thats all they are, myths.

I don't think anyone is really arguing for Soviet invincibility so much as they're arguing against a myth invented by Cold War propaganda to allow the US to claim credit for the Soviet i"ndustrial miracle."

that and i am saying you are full of ...that goes in said bucket,

Remember to be polite guys, we're discussing details behind WW2 on a forum dedicated to toy soldiers. Just chill with your responses a bit, no one wins if it gets nasty

 thekingofkings wrote:
To get back to the original point i was making afore this got derailed it is this : "The soviets did not win ww2 alone, they did need the western allies." every bit of aid was needed, it could be considered decisive. There are too many myths of soviet invincibillity and thats all they are, myths.

You're not so much getting back to your original point, as much as restating the claim in order to avoid responding to all the ways in which it has been shown as false. You claim the aid was needed and could be considered decisive... but I've shown you production advantaged the Soviets on a rate of 2:1 or higher before lendlease meaningfully started.

The Soviets were, of course, not invincible. But Germany was not capable of a sustained war of production against a country with the resources and brute force industry of Soviet Russia. Once they lost their fast war the game was over, and that happened long before lendlease really kicked in to gear.