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MontanaBB wrote:

K.Rokossovski wrote:

It is still a pity that so little is know about the Eastern front warfare in the English-language sources, and that a subject like this is generally unknown in the West.

There are a handful of Western military historians who specialize in eastern front history, and they had a small window during the 1990s when they had mostly open access to long-closed Soviet/Russian state archives -- before Putin's regime essentially reclassified everything.

If the full story of the Great Patriotic War is not known in the West, it is mostly because the full story is not generally known in Russia, either.

David Glantz was first and foremost among those Western specialists in Soviet military history whom I had in mind. He had written extensively on the subject before getting access to Soviet archives during the 1990s, but revised/rewrote several of his own histories on point based on the newly available archive material. A number of his university, academy and U.S. Army War College lectures are available online, including through Youtube. Fascinating stuff. There are massive battles from 1941-42, and even 1943 and 1944, that simply do not appear anywhere in Soviet/Russian history books.

Quasi-duck wrote:

In all fairness, how many Westerners do you know that have heard of the Flying Tigers and Unit 731, as well as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria?

And, of course, 72 years on, the level of interest of the third generation after the fact is one of ho-hum, that was great-grandpa's thing.

My point, however, is this: the Flying Tigers, Unit 731, and the Soviet-Japanese war are fairly well documented in western military history books. The history of the eastern front of the German-Soviet war is not properly documented even in Russia because of Soviet era censorship and propaganda that carries forward into the present day.

And speaking as an American student of history, one of the great, mostly untold, stories of WWII are the massive amounts of materiel aid that the United States and Britain sent to the Soviet Union in 1942-45 that kept the USSR in the fight during the darkest days of 1941-42. Jeeps, trucks, locomotives, fighters, bombers, transports, destroyer escorts, even tanks. Without those transfers, it is quite likely the Soviet regime would have collapsed. Even Stalin, in several unguarded moments, acknowledged the critical importance of American industrial output and American transfers to the USSR. Modern Soviet/Russian histories emphasize the enormous sacrifices of the Russians and other Soviet peoples, but never acknowledge that many of those losses were the direct result of Soviet incompetence in the first half of the war, and Soviet indifference to military and civilian casualties throughout.

MontanaBB wrote:

have largely buried most of their own war-time history to hide some of their own massive failures and blunders in the first half of the war

Erm, the bodies were already discovered during the war by the Germans, in 1942 or 1943 iirc... they used it for propaganda.

DannyBoyCH wrote:

This has included the Katyn massacre near Smolensk that happened in WW2 where around 5,000-10,000 polish officers were shot in the back of the head by the NKVD . . . .

Most of the dirty laundry in Western democracies eventually gets aired; that's the nature of a free society. Truly ugly secrets are almost impossible to keep in a functioning democracy -- some whistleblower will always rat out the bad guys. In Russia, on the other hand, they are still in denial about many of the crimes committed by Stalin's regime, even though the Communists themselves have repudiated Stalin's reign of terror. The national psychology of "Stalin nostalgia," in the aftermath of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, strikes me as very much akin to the "stab in the back" mentality of many Germans in the 1920s and 1930s. So many older Russians are simply in denial about the nature and causes of the loss, and younger Russians avoid the subject. Even the present ongoing crisis in Ukraine is viewed through that lens.

Russia may have to bury another generation (and the current leadership) before Russians can begin to talk honestly and openly about the almost unbelievable scale of the murderous crimes committed by the Soviet regime from 1923 to 1953. Stalin killed more members in good standing of his own CPSU than Hitler, and that's before we even begin to discuss the average, non-party schmucks who were falsely accused of "counter-revolutionary" acts or "bourgeois" sympathies and sent to die in the gulag for it. Or the peasants who were starved to death because they resisted collectivization. Or the thousands of loyal Red Army officers who were purged because Stalin thought they might be a threat.

A French scholar and historian, Helene Carrere d-Encausse, wrote a book called "Decline of an Empire" in the late 1970s, which included a statistical study of pre- and post-revolutionary Russian birth rates and population censuses, and showed that even allowing for the appalling war-time losses of the Soviets in the war against the Germans, that the Soviets were missing something like 20 million people from their population in 1979 -- missing Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Tatars, Turkmen, Armenians, Georgians, etc. -- who were killed during the 1920s and 1930s. Communism was a crime against humanity whose enormity was as great as National Socialism's crimes ever were, but most of Soviet communism's darkest secrets still lie buried and cloaked in deniability.

MontanaBB wrote:

A French scholar and historian, Helene Carrere d-Encausse, wrote a book called "Decline of an Empire" in the late 1970s, which included a statistical study of pre- and post-revolutionary Russian birth rates and population censuses, and showed that even allowing for the appalling war-time losses of the Soviets in the war against the Germans, that the Soviets were missing something like 20 million people from their population in 1979 -- missing Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks, Tatars, Turkmen, Armenians, Georgians, etc. -- who were killed during the 1920s and 1930s. Communism was a crime against humanity whose enormity was as great as National Socialism's crimes ever were, but most of Soviet communism's darkest secrets still lie buried and cloaked in deniability.

How the Soviets did so much killing, both of themselves and other nations, while becoming a super-power in around 30 years after originally being just a Middle Age nation with modern(for the time) weapons, is just truly astounding.

Quasi-duck wrote:

How the Soviets did so much killing, both of themselves and other nations, while becoming a super-power in around 30 years after originally being just a Middle Age nation with modern(for the time) weapons, is just truly astounding.

Just imagine if the Great Leader's judgment had not been addled by amphetamine-and-steroid cocktails, and the Reich had stopped and consolidated all of its gains through the spring of 1941 . . . would we now be talking about the remarkable material and technological progress that Germany had made in so short a time?

BTW, d'Encausse's book is still in print and used copies are available online for about $4.

MontanaBB wrote:

Yes, it is astounding. But I ask you, QD, at what human cost? Whether it was the 3 million now officially acknowledged victims of the Soviet regime, or closer to the 20+ million postulated by d'Encausse, that cost is too high for any material progress.

MontanaBB wrote:

would we now be talking about the remarkable material and technological progress that Germany had made in so short a time?

MontanaBB wrote:

BTW, d'Encausse's book is still in print and used copies are available online for about $4.

MontanaBB wrote:

Whether it was the 3 million now officially acknowledged victims of the Soviet regime, or closer to the 20+ million postulated by d'Encausse, that cost is too high for any material progress.

Hitler started WWII because he wanted Lebensraum in the East, meaning the USSR. So, WWII started over land in the USSR and Poland, whatever way you look at that is what it came down to. So pretty much any tech that came from WWII, be it German rockets, British jets, Soviet assault rifles, or American proximity fuses, it can be stemmed from the need to defeat German, or the USSR, which all came from land in the USSR.

Now obviously Japan has little to do with the USSR, so tech from the Pacific theater can be excluded, though the Japanese were eyeing Siberia

Quasi-duck wrote:

In the future we be viewing the Soviets as a people who did much the same thing, albeit lower population rather re-forestation.

That said, I strongly suspect your perspective on "re-forestation" will probably change when you have a wife, children and grandchildren. Those human costs, measured in millions of lives, are too easy to view antiseptically, unemotionally and amorally. There's a probably ephemeral quote attributed to Stalin, to the effect of "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."

In your personal life and morality, QD, I urge you to be a poet, not a statistician.

MontanaBB wrote:

That said, I strongly suspect your perspective on "re-forestation" will probably change when you have a wife, children and grandchildren. Those human costs, measured in millions of lives, are too easy to view antiseptically, unemotionally and amorally. There's a probably ephemeral quote attributed to Stalin, to the effect of "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."

MontanaBB wrote:

Quasi-duck wrote:

How the Soviets did so much killing, both of themselves and other nations, while becoming a super-power in around 30 years after originally being just a Middle Age nation with modern(for the time) weapons, is just truly astounding.

Yes, it is astounding. But I ask you, QD, at what human cost? Whether it was the 3 million now officially acknowledged victims of the Soviet regime, or closer to the 20+ million postulated by d'Encausse, that cost is too high for any material progress.

Just imagine if the Great Leader's judgment had not been addled by amphetamine-and-steroid cocktails, and the Reich had stopped and consolidated all of its gains through the spring of 1941 . . . would we now be talking about the remarkable material and technological progress that Germany had made in so short a time?

BTW, d'Encausse's book is still in print and used copies are available online for about $4.

-random message

MontanaBB wrote:

Ir

MontanaBB wrote:

Ironically, the mass murder of the Polish officers and civilian professionals at Katyn (and two other locations) is now better known than many of the losing battles the Red Army fought in 1941-43, which had no contemporary coverage in the Western media. The Katyn massacre was known at the time because the Germans found the mass graves in 1941 or '42, and the Nazis and Soviets traded accusations of responsibility in their propaganda. Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged the regime's complicity in the Katyn massacres in 1989, and Boris Yeltsin provided the classified documentation to Lech Walesa in 1991.

Quasi-duck wrote:

Nearly all of these have been suggested before

DannyBoyCH wrote:

Quasi-duck wrote:

Nearly all of these have been suggested before

Well I couldn't have known as for I've only been on the forums by a week now.

Quasi-duck wrote:

I'm not picking a fight, I'm just saying. I think you would understand my position if you say the same suggestions once, twice, or maybe even three times a week

DannyBoyCH wrote:

If your are looking at other peoples ideas that are like mine then I understand, it would get repetitive and annoying in a way.

Welcome to the Forum, DB.

Damn we're talking about the Eastern front in WW2 here... looks like my favourite topic of study is being brought up any questions?

darksoul111 wrote:

Damn we're talking about the Eastern front in WW2 here... looks like my favourite topic of study is being brought up any questions?

darksoul111 wrote:

Damn we're talking about the Eastern front in WW2 here... looks like my favourite topic of study is being brought up any questions?