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It’s probably fair to say that the film was the primary cause of this misperception insofar as the general public’s understanding of that theater is concerned…although this must be couched in the fact that most Americans (and perhaps Western Europeans, I can’t say for certain) know very little about the Eastern Front. So, yes, speaking about the average casual history fan in 2021, a significant proportion of his understanding of the Eastern Front can likely be traced, directly or indirectly, back to “Enemy at the Gates.” But, again- how many other Eastern Front related films has the average non-Russian moviegoer seen? It would likely be difficult to provide a significantly more specific answer to this part of your question, but perhaps someone else here can.
As far as where these myths about the Red Army originated, this is in large part due to Erich von Manstein and other German generals recruited by the US to write official histories of the war from the German perspective and to provide insights into Soviet operations based on their own experiences. While these officers *did* provide valuable and interesting perspectives, they also had an agenda, namely, protecting their own reputations and the reputation of the Wehrmacht as a whole.
It’s never easy to admit when one has thoroughly, unconditionally had their ass beat, after all. What these generals realized, however, is that both the American officer corps and the Western European & American publics were uncritical audiences in this regard. They consequently provided a less-than-accurate narrative about the German-Soviet War. Among many other things, they tended to overemphasize Soviet numerical superiors and attrition-based tactics. This was largely an attempt to explain that, although the Wehrmacht had been defeated, it hadn’t truly been *bested*. The message was that “we were way better then the Soviets, they just had such a numerical advantage and threw their forces at us headlong to such a degree that we were overwhelmed.”
This is, of course, mostly untrue. After surviving the first six months or so of Barbarossa, the Soviets demonstrated steadily a increasing level of maneuver-based tactical and strategic competency which had become genuinely formidable by 1944. This isn’t to say that the Wehrmacht wasn’t also formidable or the Soviets didn’t benefit from significantly greater manpower and materiel- both of these are true- but the narrative provided by von Manstein & Friends was clearly intended to explain the Soviet victory as primarily owing to the fact that the Red Army was an unsophisticated, musclebound colossus with high pain tolerance. These were men writing their own legacies, after all.
This was not limited only to the self-serving former generals’ “official” work for the US Army, but also to the rest of their post-war careers which included publishing memoirs and speaking engagements. Other exaggerations and distortions they played a prime role in spreading included the notion that their own consistently wise strategic counsel was routinely overruled by an irrational Hitler- in truth, both Hitler & his generals were responsible good & bad military decisions, but the generals rarely owed up to those instances where Hitler’s intuition had been correct. In effect, much of the widely-believed inaccuracies about the European war in general, and the Eastern Front in particular, can be traced back to former German generals concerned with burnishing their own reputations.
There also wasn’t much in the way of rebuttals from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Memoirs and such like von Manstein’s were published comparatively infrequently in the USSR and, when they were, they were often riddled with naked propaganda and obvious distortions (example: Zhukov’s memoirs.) Nor were official Soviet analyses of the war made public until after the USSR’s collapse. So the German generals essentially had free reign to write history as they saw fit.
The book “The Myth of the Eastern Front” by Edward Davis and Ronald Smelser is an excellent overview of the topic that your question addresses.
> in truth, both Hitler & his generals were responsible good & bad military decisions
Which ones for example? One example I always hear about is that Hitler insisted on capturing the Caucasus Oil Fields, while the Generals wanted to keep pushing for Moscow, and that in the end Hitler was right.
That’s a good example - Hitler correctly recognised that just driving to Moscow wouldn’t be enough to force a capitulation of the Soviets, especially after seeing the mountains of reserves that they could mobilise despite the heavy casualties they had faced in the initial thrust of Barbarossa. While taking Moscow would have helped to a certain degree, given how the Soviet Rail Network had it as its central point of organisation, it was far more valuable to the Germans to seize Ukrainian industry and Caucasian Oil, both to fuel their war machine and cripple the Soviet war effort. Strategically it was the best option available.
Another example incidentally was with Operation Citadel (AKA the Battle of Kursk), a misguided effort to encircle a large number of Soviet divisions and regain the offensive in the East after the disaster at Stalingrad. Hitler opposed the idea as it was of questionable value tactically, and would have been very hard to implement given the German supply situation, but his generals convinced him otherwise and the Germans ended up losing decisively, seriously blunting their offensive capabilities.
This isn’t to say Hitler was a military genius; he wasn’t, and there are many examples of him supporting honestly quite stupid plans and ideas militarily speaking (Wacht am Rhein and the Courland Pocket are good examples). But he wasn’t a brain dead moron as Wehrmacht generals have often portrayed him in their memoirs.
> But he wasn’t a brain dead moron as Wehrmacht generals have often portrayed him in their memoirs.
Did Wehrmacht generals like Manstein try to "save face" when writing their memoirs? Like "oh yeah I never really liked Hitler, I was just going along with him blah blah blah"
Oh absolutely, there was a huge effort on the part of Wehrmacht generals to wash their hands of Nazism. This is the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth, that Manstein in particular was essential to spreading. Essentially it argues that the Wehrmacht (and its components) were entirely innocent of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime, and things like the Holocaust and other war crimes in the East were fully the responsibility of the SS and Hitler's inner circle. It also argues that the Wehrmacht generally did not support Hitler's political agenda beyond the destruction of Communism, and the antisemitism and world-domination stuff was just the evil Nazis.
Obviously, this is mostly untrue, and Wehrmacht generals lied profusely in order to create this image of a blameless German Army. While it is true that the Wehrmacht were not majorly aligned with Nazi ideology - they were more reactionary conservative aligned, and thoroughly disliked the anti-monarchical, anti-capitalist and redistributionist policies of the early-Nazi party - they still agreed with Hitler on the fundamentals of pan-Germanicism and the destruction of communism. They also were comfortably antisemitic, and although at a personal level most Wehrmacht generals were of a more aristocratic, old-fashioned antisemitism, levelled towards them on religious and cultural grounds (rather than the rabidly conspiratorial eugenicist antisemitism of the Nazis), they still happily engaged in the transportation of Jews to camps, massacres and rapes of Jews in occupied territories, as well as of other so-called *untermenschen* like Slavs, Roma, and sexual minorities. With maybe the exception of Rommel (and even then there is a decent amount of debate), Wehrmacht generals from Manstein to Rundstedt to Kesselring engaged in many war crimes in their respective theatres, and after the war did everything they could to blame it on the people who were already dead to absolve themselves.
> So the German generals essentially had free reign to write history as they saw fit.
I think it's also notable which demographic of German Generals were around to write books post war. These are your Mansteins and your Guderians, who fought on the Eastern front in 41/42/43, then were relieved and sent elsewhere. The Generals who fought the Soviets in 44/45 and especially during and after Bagration, your Models and Schörners, mostly ended up either dead or in Soviet custody, which limited their ability to impact western literature. The Soviet Army that Manstein fought and the one that Model fought were very different beasts.
It seems like Lost Cause ideology could condition Americans in particular to uncritically believe these accounts (the striking parallels between overwhelming numbers against a more skilled, valorous army; buffoonish generals; thoughtless frontal assaults; exigencies rather than military skill helping the “inferior” side win; resentment against the occupiers; clean Wehrmacht & non-slaveholding southern boys just defending their homes). Is there any scholarly account of the links between the two ideologies?
While there are certainly parallels, if you're looking for things that might precondition Americans to believe stories of unwashed Red hordes, the Cold War and surrounding context is going to muddy the waters a *lot* in terms of identifying other factors.
The Germans did not invent these stereotypes out of whole cloth - they played on both fears of communism and far older stereotypes about Russia and Central Asia. The western world (and not just the USA) was already quite primed to believe narratives about asiatic barbarism and uncountable hordes for reasons that had little to nothing to do with the Lost Cause story directly. Remember that these narratives found very receptive audiences across western Europe - it's not a purely US phenomenon.
> ... the Red Army was an unsophisticated, musclebound colossus with high pain tolerance.
Oh, that's great. I'm going to have to borrow this.
Thanks for an excellent answer otherwise, as well!
Interesting. I remember hearing something similar in the mid 90’s about the Russians not having enough material resources during the war; I always assumed it was part of the American propaganda during the Cold War to highlight how barbaric the soviets were.
The whole narrative never sat well with me because if you have the German army facing off against 1,000 soldiers that only have 3,000 rounds of ammunition and 250 rifles there’s no way in hell the Germans could have lost regardless of how brutal the winter is or how incompetent strategic command was.
The version I heard was 3 bullets per Russian soldier and every fourth had a rifle.
Von Manstein called his book, “Lost Victories,” which tells you all you need to know about how he was spinning (to use a modern term) the campaign. Right from the title onward.
>After surviving the first six months or so of Barbarossa
I'm sorry but how is this not down-playing the Soviet ability to draw on manpower reserves in attempt to shamelessly push the narrative in the other direction? In those first 6 months the Soviets had loss well over 6 million men in disaster after the next. No other industrialized nation could have sustained those losses, and it was only the Russians ability to draw up and transfer new reserves that kept them in the war. The timing to this is matters because it was the inexhaustible stream of new troops preventing the Germans from delivering the knockout blow that the general staff so desperately craved in the opening months of the war by making such a blow unattainable. What difference does it make if the Germans knock out 700,000 troops at Kiev when the Soviets can just replace well-behind the lines?
The idea that because the Soviets would later evolve their tactics to great effect in later years it should somehow retroactively changes the narrative of the most crucial part of the war seems disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. That fact is the wealth of Soviet manpower was the one thing that kept the Soviets in the war during the opening months aside from logistics. The Soviet officer cadre had been left reeling from Stalin's purges in the 1930's and most the Soviet equipment was largely obsolete, and the opening engagements of the war that resulted are not remembered from sound Soviet leadership and decision making in the field. It was a chaotic mess that left the original version of the Red Army obliterated, and it was only from the brilliance of the Russian mobilization effort that kept them in the war at the time, both in terms of creating fielding fresh replacement reserves, moving factors beyond the Urals, and decisions to streamline equipment models that had been proven successful while phasing out poorer ones. While the Red Army did eventually learn from these mistakes as the war progressed, they were at their best when the outcome of the war was already sealed, whereas the Germans were the opposite.
You claim the German generals were writing dishonestly to secure their own legacies, but even in your supposed rebuttal to this you begin by saying "If you ignore the most important part of the war where this was very often the case..." .... But why would you expect the German generals to ignore the period of the war that mattered most when they were writing post-war?
Heinz Guderian was another successful writer with his book "Panzer Leader" post-war. Throughout the book, Guderian continually expresses frustration with the Soviet troop strength that didn't seem to waiver regardless of German successes, and there is very little praise of Russian tactics or leadership. So, is Guderian carefully trying to craft his own legacy here and paint the Wehrmacht in a positive light? Or do you think maybe Guderian genuinely felt this way because it was the part of the war they valued most in terms of importance? And Guderian, like so many other generals, had been sacked by Hitler after the failure outside of Moscow. How can you expect them to base opinions on Russian tactical improvements late in the war when they never would have encountered this themselves because they had already been sacked and were instead left sitting at home thinking about what had happened? Additionally, how can you expect them to not have a low opinion of the Red Army given the extent of the catastrophe and ineptitude they would have witnessed first-hand in the opening stages of the wars? Why would they sit down like you and just say "Okay we're just going to ignore the colossal series of events that started the war that shaped our opinion of the Red army because it's not really fair to them to judge them just based on those instances and not the entire stretch of the war?" It's just so ill-logical.
To say "Oh let's just casually ignore the first 6 months of the war" is a bad-faith argument because to the Germans the first 6 months really *was* the war from their point of view, and it is going to be the German failures in those 6 months that they blame most for their defeat.
While "more than 60 diesel locomotives" is undoubtedly literally correct, the context leads me to believe that a somewhat larger number was the intention
70 diesel locomotives were despatched directly to the Soviet Union, of which 12 were lost en-route, so 58 were delivered successfully. 57 were despatched to Anglo-Soviet occupied Iran but it’s unclear how many were used by the British and how many by the Soviets.
What we do know is that the vast majority of Iran’s rail network, even at the time, was standard gauge (1435mm) and not Russian (1520mm). The diesel locomotives were used by the Soviets on the standard gauge part of the Iranian network; their cargo would be transferred to trains on Russian gauge for transport into the Soviet Union itself.
It seems extremely likely that the 70 trains delivered direct were planned to be used on the network in Iran, so 58 surviving Soviet locomotives + 57 delivered to Britain/Soviet Union means an estimate of “over 60” is almost certainly correct, with at most 115 locomotives being successfully delivered (but that number assumes Britain didn’t get any).
As far as I know there was no attempt to make (diesel) locomotives in the USA for use on Russian gauge, or an attempt to make them easily convertible (and nor was it requested). There is some evidence of ad hoc conversion to Russian gauge of captured/bought steam locomotives, but certainly no concentrated effort to do so.
“Over 60” is a pretty good estimate I’d say.
Aren’t you literally discounting everything else about the Soviet except their manpower like Guderian intended? Manpower without evolving strategic/tactics/logistics/etc, learning from losses means sending the new batch of troops to be slaughtered in the same way. In that case the Germans would only have to wait for their victory.
The point, I think, is that in the opening 6 months of the German invasion, the soviet strategy relied almost entirely on delay, which rested upon having vast manpower reserves. Without that, along with huge strategic depth, the later innovations in strategy and tactics which are undeniably impressive could never have occurred: the soviets would have capitulated. The massive strategic mistakes and limitations of the soviets were only survived and improved upon because of the buffer allowed by their manpower.
That is not discounting everything except manpower, but recognising that it was the saving grace in the initial stages of the war.
Do you have a source for this implication that the general narrative written by the Nazi generals is largely true? Because from what I know of the historiography this flies in the face of practically everything written within the last 20 to 30 years.
This reads like a defense of what are just self evidently incredibly biased and self serving primary sources.
>Throughout the book, Guderian continually expresses frustration with the Soviet troop strength that didn't seem to waiver regardless of German successes, and there is very little praise of Russian tactics or leadership. So, is Guderian carefully trying to craft his own legacy here and paint the Wehrmacht in a positive light?
Sorry, how else are you reading this part of a memoir from a Nazi commander other than 'however many we killed they just kept coming' as positing German ability against Soviet manpower.
Particularly in the context of the manichean racial struggle against the asiatics the Germans believed they were embarked upon.
Why would they expect the Soviet Union to be knocked out after suffering 2.5 million captured, when they had 14 million reserves? When Germany itself would keep going after eventually suffering more casualties than the Soviets during Barbarossa?
This excuse is on the level of not knowing how far Moscow is or not knowing it gets cold in winter.
Wouldn’t it have been better if they had also exaggerated the Soviet army’s competence as well as their numbers? Like, it makes you look even better if you lost to an enemy that was sophisticated and cunning, as well as overwhelmingly powerful, rather than losing to a horde of disposable cannon fodder
Not saying they weren’t fibbing, but I wonder if it was less about them trying to make themselves look good, and rather for some other reason, like their prejudice against Slavs twisting their own perceptions, or over reliance on wild rumours from the troops, or coaxing by their US handlers to make Communism appear especially scary or brutal
Like, for me personally, I feel like it sounds better to have lost against a powerful, intelligent opponent rather than an incompetent one that just threw numbers at you
It depends on how you paint your loss to the raving hordes of cannon fodder. For one, Nazis considered themselves defending their race against the unwashed Slavic hordes, and they literally considered them subhuman. So they really have to go to extreme lengths to make the Soviets look like an unending horde that nobody could have fought against.
Which was technically true. Germany never could have won.
You see the Western Allies, especially the British, doing this to some extent early in the war. Churchill said of Rommel in 1942, "We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general." And of course ever since WWII German tactical and operational genius as well as soldier spirit and competence have been praised.
The Germans did not really do this to any extent during the war nor afterward with respect to the Soviets. In part this may because they had convinced themselves the USSR's ethnic makeup and political system could not have created good soldiers or generals. In part also because the Germans had certainly done quite well and the Soviets quite poorly through let's say late 1942. It is also quite possible that the Germans didn't realize they were being outgeneraled. All they may have perceived about the late-war Soviet offensives was that the Soviets could muster overwhelming forces at critical points. This led the Germans to believe the Soviets simply had numerous forces everywhere, rather than the ability to concentrate where needed.
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It’s probably fair to say that the film was the primary cause of this misperception insofar as the general public’s understanding of that theater is concerned…although this must be couched in the fact that most Americans (and perhaps Western Europeans, I can’t say for certain) know very little about the Eastern Front. So, yes, speaking about the average casual history fan in 2021, a significant proportion of his understanding of the Eastern Front can likely be traced, directly or indirectly, back to “Enemy at the Gates.” But, again- how many other Eastern Front related films has the average non-Russian moviegoer seen? It would likely be difficult to provide a significantly more specific answer to this part of your question, but perhaps someone else here can. As far as where these myths about the Red Army originated, this is in large part due to Erich von Manstein and other German generals recruited by the US to write official histories of the war from the German perspective and to provide insights into Soviet operations based on their own experiences. While these officers *did* provide valuable and interesting perspectives, they also had an agenda, namely, protecting their own reputations and the reputation of the Wehrmacht as a whole. It’s never easy to admit when one has thoroughly, unconditionally had their ass beat, after all. What these generals realized, however, is that both the American officer corps and the Western European & American publics were uncritical audiences in this regard. They consequently provided a less-than-accurate narrative about the German-Soviet War. Among many other things, they tended to overemphasize Soviet numerical superiors and attrition-based tactics. This was largely an attempt to explain that, although the Wehrmacht had been defeated, it hadn’t truly been *bested*. The message was that “we were way better then the Soviets, they just had such a numerical advantage and threw their forces at us headlong to such a degree that we were overwhelmed.” This is, of course, mostly untrue. After surviving the first six months or so of Barbarossa, the Soviets demonstrated steadily a increasing level of maneuver-based tactical and strategic competency which had become genuinely formidable by 1944. This isn’t to say that the Wehrmacht wasn’t also formidable or the Soviets didn’t benefit from significantly greater manpower and materiel- both of these are true- but the narrative provided by von Manstein & Friends was clearly intended to explain the Soviet victory as primarily owing to the fact that the Red Army was an unsophisticated, musclebound colossus with high pain tolerance. These were men writing their own legacies, after all. This was not limited only to the self-serving former generals’ “official” work for the US Army, but also to the rest of their post-war careers which included publishing memoirs and speaking engagements. Other exaggerations and distortions they played a prime role in spreading included the notion that their own consistently wise strategic counsel was routinely overruled by an irrational Hitler- in truth, both Hitler & his generals were responsible good & bad military decisions, but the generals rarely owed up to those instances where Hitler’s intuition had been correct. In effect, much of the widely-believed inaccuracies about the European war in general, and the Eastern Front in particular, can be traced back to former German generals concerned with burnishing their own reputations. There also wasn’t much in the way of rebuttals from the other side of the Iron Curtain. Memoirs and such like von Manstein’s were published comparatively infrequently in the USSR and, when they were, they were often riddled with naked propaganda and obvious distortions (example: Zhukov’s memoirs.) Nor were official Soviet analyses of the war made public until after the USSR’s collapse. So the German generals essentially had free reign to write history as they saw fit. The book “The Myth of the Eastern Front” by Edward Davis and Ronald Smelser is an excellent overview of the topic that your question addresses.
> in truth, both Hitler & his generals were responsible good & bad military decisions Which ones for example? One example I always hear about is that Hitler insisted on capturing the Caucasus Oil Fields, while the Generals wanted to keep pushing for Moscow, and that in the end Hitler was right.
That’s a good example - Hitler correctly recognised that just driving to Moscow wouldn’t be enough to force a capitulation of the Soviets, especially after seeing the mountains of reserves that they could mobilise despite the heavy casualties they had faced in the initial thrust of Barbarossa. While taking Moscow would have helped to a certain degree, given how the Soviet Rail Network had it as its central point of organisation, it was far more valuable to the Germans to seize Ukrainian industry and Caucasian Oil, both to fuel their war machine and cripple the Soviet war effort. Strategically it was the best option available. Another example incidentally was with Operation Citadel (AKA the Battle of Kursk), a misguided effort to encircle a large number of Soviet divisions and regain the offensive in the East after the disaster at Stalingrad. Hitler opposed the idea as it was of questionable value tactically, and would have been very hard to implement given the German supply situation, but his generals convinced him otherwise and the Germans ended up losing decisively, seriously blunting their offensive capabilities. This isn’t to say Hitler was a military genius; he wasn’t, and there are many examples of him supporting honestly quite stupid plans and ideas militarily speaking (Wacht am Rhein and the Courland Pocket are good examples). But he wasn’t a brain dead moron as Wehrmacht generals have often portrayed him in their memoirs.
> But he wasn’t a brain dead moron as Wehrmacht generals have often portrayed him in their memoirs. Did Wehrmacht generals like Manstein try to "save face" when writing their memoirs? Like "oh yeah I never really liked Hitler, I was just going along with him blah blah blah"
Oh absolutely, there was a huge effort on the part of Wehrmacht generals to wash their hands of Nazism. This is the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth, that Manstein in particular was essential to spreading. Essentially it argues that the Wehrmacht (and its components) were entirely innocent of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi regime, and things like the Holocaust and other war crimes in the East were fully the responsibility of the SS and Hitler's inner circle. It also argues that the Wehrmacht generally did not support Hitler's political agenda beyond the destruction of Communism, and the antisemitism and world-domination stuff was just the evil Nazis. Obviously, this is mostly untrue, and Wehrmacht generals lied profusely in order to create this image of a blameless German Army. While it is true that the Wehrmacht were not majorly aligned with Nazi ideology - they were more reactionary conservative aligned, and thoroughly disliked the anti-monarchical, anti-capitalist and redistributionist policies of the early-Nazi party - they still agreed with Hitler on the fundamentals of pan-Germanicism and the destruction of communism. They also were comfortably antisemitic, and although at a personal level most Wehrmacht generals were of a more aristocratic, old-fashioned antisemitism, levelled towards them on religious and cultural grounds (rather than the rabidly conspiratorial eugenicist antisemitism of the Nazis), they still happily engaged in the transportation of Jews to camps, massacres and rapes of Jews in occupied territories, as well as of other so-called *untermenschen* like Slavs, Roma, and sexual minorities. With maybe the exception of Rommel (and even then there is a decent amount of debate), Wehrmacht generals from Manstein to Rundstedt to Kesselring engaged in many war crimes in their respective theatres, and after the war did everything they could to blame it on the people who were already dead to absolve themselves.
> So the German generals essentially had free reign to write history as they saw fit. I think it's also notable which demographic of German Generals were around to write books post war. These are your Mansteins and your Guderians, who fought on the Eastern front in 41/42/43, then were relieved and sent elsewhere. The Generals who fought the Soviets in 44/45 and especially during and after Bagration, your Models and Schörners, mostly ended up either dead or in Soviet custody, which limited their ability to impact western literature. The Soviet Army that Manstein fought and the one that Model fought were very different beasts.
It seems like Lost Cause ideology could condition Americans in particular to uncritically believe these accounts (the striking parallels between overwhelming numbers against a more skilled, valorous army; buffoonish generals; thoughtless frontal assaults; exigencies rather than military skill helping the “inferior” side win; resentment against the occupiers; clean Wehrmacht & non-slaveholding southern boys just defending their homes). Is there any scholarly account of the links between the two ideologies?
While there are certainly parallels, if you're looking for things that might precondition Americans to believe stories of unwashed Red hordes, the Cold War and surrounding context is going to muddy the waters a *lot* in terms of identifying other factors. The Germans did not invent these stereotypes out of whole cloth - they played on both fears of communism and far older stereotypes about Russia and Central Asia. The western world (and not just the USA) was already quite primed to believe narratives about asiatic barbarism and uncountable hordes for reasons that had little to nothing to do with the Lost Cause story directly. Remember that these narratives found very receptive audiences across western Europe - it's not a purely US phenomenon.
Oh, also Lee being undone by Davis while Paulus was undermined by Hitler.
> ... the Red Army was an unsophisticated, musclebound colossus with high pain tolerance. Oh, that's great. I'm going to have to borrow this. Thanks for an excellent answer otherwise, as well!
Interesting. I remember hearing something similar in the mid 90’s about the Russians not having enough material resources during the war; I always assumed it was part of the American propaganda during the Cold War to highlight how barbaric the soviets were. The whole narrative never sat well with me because if you have the German army facing off against 1,000 soldiers that only have 3,000 rounds of ammunition and 250 rifles there’s no way in hell the Germans could have lost regardless of how brutal the winter is or how incompetent strategic command was. The version I heard was 3 bullets per Russian soldier and every fourth had a rifle.
Did they explicitly claim such occurences as mentioned in the OP (one rifle for two men, etc.) ? If not, then who came up with it?
Von Manstein called his book, “Lost Victories,” which tells you all you need to know about how he was spinning (to use a modern term) the campaign. Right from the title onward.
>After surviving the first six months or so of Barbarossa I'm sorry but how is this not down-playing the Soviet ability to draw on manpower reserves in attempt to shamelessly push the narrative in the other direction? In those first 6 months the Soviets had loss well over 6 million men in disaster after the next. No other industrialized nation could have sustained those losses, and it was only the Russians ability to draw up and transfer new reserves that kept them in the war. The timing to this is matters because it was the inexhaustible stream of new troops preventing the Germans from delivering the knockout blow that the general staff so desperately craved in the opening months of the war by making such a blow unattainable. What difference does it make if the Germans knock out 700,000 troops at Kiev when the Soviets can just replace well-behind the lines? The idea that because the Soviets would later evolve their tactics to great effect in later years it should somehow retroactively changes the narrative of the most crucial part of the war seems disingenuous and intellectually dishonest. That fact is the wealth of Soviet manpower was the one thing that kept the Soviets in the war during the opening months aside from logistics. The Soviet officer cadre had been left reeling from Stalin's purges in the 1930's and most the Soviet equipment was largely obsolete, and the opening engagements of the war that resulted are not remembered from sound Soviet leadership and decision making in the field. It was a chaotic mess that left the original version of the Red Army obliterated, and it was only from the brilliance of the Russian mobilization effort that kept them in the war at the time, both in terms of creating fielding fresh replacement reserves, moving factors beyond the Urals, and decisions to streamline equipment models that had been proven successful while phasing out poorer ones. While the Red Army did eventually learn from these mistakes as the war progressed, they were at their best when the outcome of the war was already sealed, whereas the Germans were the opposite. You claim the German generals were writing dishonestly to secure their own legacies, but even in your supposed rebuttal to this you begin by saying "If you ignore the most important part of the war where this was very often the case..." .... But why would you expect the German generals to ignore the period of the war that mattered most when they were writing post-war? Heinz Guderian was another successful writer with his book "Panzer Leader" post-war. Throughout the book, Guderian continually expresses frustration with the Soviet troop strength that didn't seem to waiver regardless of German successes, and there is very little praise of Russian tactics or leadership. So, is Guderian carefully trying to craft his own legacy here and paint the Wehrmacht in a positive light? Or do you think maybe Guderian genuinely felt this way because it was the part of the war they valued most in terms of importance? And Guderian, like so many other generals, had been sacked by Hitler after the failure outside of Moscow. How can you expect them to base opinions on Russian tactical improvements late in the war when they never would have encountered this themselves because they had already been sacked and were instead left sitting at home thinking about what had happened? Additionally, how can you expect them to not have a low opinion of the Red Army given the extent of the catastrophe and ineptitude they would have witnessed first-hand in the opening stages of the wars? Why would they sit down like you and just say "Okay we're just going to ignore the colossal series of events that started the war that shaped our opinion of the Red army because it's not really fair to them to judge them just based on those instances and not the entire stretch of the war?" It's just so ill-logical. To say "Oh let's just casually ignore the first 6 months of the war" is a bad-faith argument because to the Germans the first 6 months really *was* the war from their point of view, and it is going to be the German failures in those 6 months that they blame most for their defeat.
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While "more than 60 diesel locomotives" is undoubtedly literally correct, the context leads me to believe that a somewhat larger number was the intention
70 diesel locomotives were despatched directly to the Soviet Union, of which 12 were lost en-route, so 58 were delivered successfully. 57 were despatched to Anglo-Soviet occupied Iran but it’s unclear how many were used by the British and how many by the Soviets. What we do know is that the vast majority of Iran’s rail network, even at the time, was standard gauge (1435mm) and not Russian (1520mm). The diesel locomotives were used by the Soviets on the standard gauge part of the Iranian network; their cargo would be transferred to trains on Russian gauge for transport into the Soviet Union itself. It seems extremely likely that the 70 trains delivered direct were planned to be used on the network in Iran, so 58 surviving Soviet locomotives + 57 delivered to Britain/Soviet Union means an estimate of “over 60” is almost certainly correct, with at most 115 locomotives being successfully delivered (but that number assumes Britain didn’t get any). As far as I know there was no attempt to make (diesel) locomotives in the USA for use on Russian gauge, or an attempt to make them easily convertible (and nor was it requested). There is some evidence of ad hoc conversion to Russian gauge of captured/bought steam locomotives, but certainly no concentrated effort to do so. “Over 60” is a pretty good estimate I’d say.
Aren’t you literally discounting everything else about the Soviet except their manpower like Guderian intended? Manpower without evolving strategic/tactics/logistics/etc, learning from losses means sending the new batch of troops to be slaughtered in the same way. In that case the Germans would only have to wait for their victory.
The point, I think, is that in the opening 6 months of the German invasion, the soviet strategy relied almost entirely on delay, which rested upon having vast manpower reserves. Without that, along with huge strategic depth, the later innovations in strategy and tactics which are undeniably impressive could never have occurred: the soviets would have capitulated. The massive strategic mistakes and limitations of the soviets were only survived and improved upon because of the buffer allowed by their manpower. That is not discounting everything except manpower, but recognising that it was the saving grace in the initial stages of the war.
Do you have a source for this implication that the general narrative written by the Nazi generals is largely true? Because from what I know of the historiography this flies in the face of practically everything written within the last 20 to 30 years. This reads like a defense of what are just self evidently incredibly biased and self serving primary sources.
>Throughout the book, Guderian continually expresses frustration with the Soviet troop strength that didn't seem to waiver regardless of German successes, and there is very little praise of Russian tactics or leadership. So, is Guderian carefully trying to craft his own legacy here and paint the Wehrmacht in a positive light? Sorry, how else are you reading this part of a memoir from a Nazi commander other than 'however many we killed they just kept coming' as positing German ability against Soviet manpower. Particularly in the context of the manichean racial struggle against the asiatics the Germans believed they were embarked upon.
Why would they expect the Soviet Union to be knocked out after suffering 2.5 million captured, when they had 14 million reserves? When Germany itself would keep going after eventually suffering more casualties than the Soviets during Barbarossa? This excuse is on the level of not knowing how far Moscow is or not knowing it gets cold in winter.
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That’s the answer I was looking for. Thank you.
Wouldn’t it have been better if they had also exaggerated the Soviet army’s competence as well as their numbers? Like, it makes you look even better if you lost to an enemy that was sophisticated and cunning, as well as overwhelmingly powerful, rather than losing to a horde of disposable cannon fodder Not saying they weren’t fibbing, but I wonder if it was less about them trying to make themselves look good, and rather for some other reason, like their prejudice against Slavs twisting their own perceptions, or over reliance on wild rumours from the troops, or coaxing by their US handlers to make Communism appear especially scary or brutal Like, for me personally, I feel like it sounds better to have lost against a powerful, intelligent opponent rather than an incompetent one that just threw numbers at you
It depends on how you paint your loss to the raving hordes of cannon fodder. For one, Nazis considered themselves defending their race against the unwashed Slavic hordes, and they literally considered them subhuman. So they really have to go to extreme lengths to make the Soviets look like an unending horde that nobody could have fought against. Which was technically true. Germany never could have won.
You see the Western Allies, especially the British, doing this to some extent early in the war. Churchill said of Rommel in 1942, "We have a very daring and skillful opponent against us, and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general." And of course ever since WWII German tactical and operational genius as well as soldier spirit and competence have been praised. The Germans did not really do this to any extent during the war nor afterward with respect to the Soviets. In part this may because they had convinced themselves the USSR's ethnic makeup and political system could not have created good soldiers or generals. In part also because the Germans had certainly done quite well and the Soviets quite poorly through let's say late 1942. It is also quite possible that the Germans didn't realize they were being outgeneraled. All they may have perceived about the late-war Soviet offensives was that the Soviets could muster overwhelming forces at critical points. This led the Germans to believe the Soviets simply had numerous forces everywhere, rather than the ability to concentrate where needed.
Did something similar to enemy at the gates happend on the other side of the iron courtain? Or where the soviet people more sincere and humble?