Eastern Front - Final Victories (WW2HRT_31-06)

[Music] good evening thank so many people for coming out on a terrible night and we promise you a great program this evening i want to ask the world war ii veterans that are here i know we don't have any eastern front guys but i know we got some world war ii veterans how bud thank you for coming [Applause] i'm going to bow out tonight doug becky is the moderator and taking care of the program and it's nice to kind of sit down and let some of our new experts take over usually when we have a russian front program i start out by saying a few things to help americans understand what went on in the east because most americans barely even know that there was a war in the on the eastern front and if you could imagine that the auditorium here is the population of the united states so often what i'll have is that someone i'll have someone in the front row stand up about three quarters of the way not even fully fully standing up and i say that represents american battle deaths in in world war ii and then i'll have at least the first two rows stand up maybe the first three rows and say that represents soviet battle deaths in world war ii um the vast majority of german casualties took place in the east and if you can imagine soviet suffering if if everything east of the mississippi river in the united states was in some way damaged in world war ii every bridge every town every house every city every road every airport everything was damaged in some way that's what the soviet union went through versus the united states which which suffered a minimal amount of damage at pearl harbor a couple of cars a couple buildings i'm talking about the civilian world now and and the japanese floated some balloon bombs to the west coast and killed a couple people and started a few fires there's no comparison and yet most americans don't have a clue about what went on in the east so it's important to study it and it helps understand soviet attitudes so anyway we're lucky tonight to have our speaker back jonathan house he's a professor emeritus of military history at the the us army united states army command and general staff college he's a leading authority on soviet military history with an emphasis on world war ii and the soviet influence upon modern operational doctrine together with david glance he wrote multiple books on the red army operations on the eastern front most notably when titans clashed how the red army stopped hitler which was described upon initial publication in 1995 as belonging on every college library and on the shelves of all world war ii historians the book was reissued in 2015 as in an expanded edition it was described as the best overview of combat record of the soviet of the red army in the second world war professor house is a retired colonel of military intelligence he served as an intelligence analyst for the joint chiefs of staff at the pentagon during both the 1991 and 2003 conflicts with iraq and he's the author of six books combined arms warfare in the 20th century a military history of the cold war 1944 to 62 towards combined arms warfare a survey of survey of the 20th century tactics and doctrine and organization military intelligence 1870 to 1991 controlling paris armed forces and counter-revolution 1789 8 and his current book that's the subject of tonight's topic of a program stalingrad and co-authored with david glance when titans clashed and the battle of kursk and a four volume set on the battle of stalingrad this is his fourth visit to the round table i guess i should explain as i tried to say briefly with the students ahead of time that i am the boswell to david glances johnson i am a general historian as you can tell by the way range of different weird topics you heard doug read off by me i am in the business of trying to summarize and explain what david's research is for those of you not familiar with it david glance is a retired colonel the u.s army field artillery but he is so recognized that he was elected to the russian academy of sciences because even they recognize that he knows war about the the soviet union and the soviet army than they do and you can't get much higher recommendation than that i think and so what we're talking about here is as doug said sort of the the reader's digest version as i call it the summary of what is four volumes of accounts which he painstakingly to reconstruct what was going on as well as a fifth volume of documents so i always call it the five volume trilogy we said i originally to write one book and then it ended up being i i have no idea probably over two thousand pages before then i got asked to go back to the original project what i want to do tonight is not try to reconstruct the battle of stalingrad we all recognize it as an epic of courage and sacrifice on both sides and it certainly was what i want to do is both simpler and more complex tasks which is to try to give you an overview about how it was that the german army lost and the red army won to do that we need to go back to the end of the first cycle of operations you know the germans invaded soviet union on 22nd of june 1941. uh six months later in december of 41 uh the soviets counter-attacked by the end of january 1942 both sides are just strung out and incredibly overextended give you an idea what i'm talking about there were 16 poncer divisions that is armored divisions on the eastern front but on the first of february 1942 those 16 divisions between them had 140 operational tanks enough for one of the divisions you can't get much worse than that so both sides are engaged in frantically trying to rearm and re-equip and get ready for the next round in the springtime and i suspect that subconsciously each side thought that the other guy would be just as weak as he was in january while they were going to get strong again i know that's irrational but that's the only way i can explain to you some of the things that they then tried to do the soviet union as you perhaps know had shipped 500 major factories east of the euro mountains in 41 to keep them out of german hands and now they start to produce a flood of new equipment with that equipment the soviets not only re-equip their shattered divisions they start to create new and more complex organizations specifically in 41 about the only thing they did in the way of armor was to form tank brigades to support the infantry 50 or 60 tanks a couple of mechanics a commander sent them out but now in 42 because they have the ability and the time to do it they are creating the next higher level of complexity they called them cores we would call them divisions and rather small divisions of that somewhere in the order of 8 000 to 10 000 men instead of 50 tanks you're talking about 150 tanks roughly there are various tables of organization we no need to bore ourselves with there were ultimately in the course of 1942 28 tank cores which is the name implies is armor heavy they had tanks they had field artillery they had a certain number of engineers and a certain number of infantry but mostly tanks there are also eight slightly larger mechanized cores which again still have tanks and artillery and all this stuff but they have a much larger balance a majority if you will of truck mounted infantry and this is their effort to try and compete with a a german pouncer division or motorized division but in order to do that that means by the way something i'm going to harp on over and over again that the soviets in most cases took a successful brigade commander and promoted him to the next higher level of complexity and i'm whatever your career is in your life i'm sure you've had this experience that when you get promoted to the next higher level there's a learning curve involved isn't there because you're not going to get everything right the first time and so part of the story of 1942 is the red army learning the hard way in 1941 they learned just how to stay alive now they have to learn how to actually conduct coordinated combined arms operations on a more sophisticated scale and sometimes they manage it and sometimes they don't they're still better off in the germans though because the germans simply cannot replace their losses of world war where of 1941. about the finally what the germans decided to do was to prioritize their shortages you may recall that when the germans invaded the soviet union there were three army groups that is groups of armies army group north up by leningrad army group center centered on moscow army group south it's pretty much the southern half of the front well all right now they decided that they would give priority to army groups south and when you see the plan you'll understand why they wanted to do that for 42 and consequently therefore the divisions in army group south got to let's say 85 strength not perfect but a lot better than they've been doing in the winter time but in order to do that then they have to actually reduce the strength of the rest of the german army and east and so the typical infantry division on the eastern front in army group center or north was reduced from nine infantry battalions of let's say 500 700 men each down to six artillery batteries reduced from four guns to three instead of having reconnaissance cars we're going to have bicycle mounted troops to go do our scouting for us they're built all kinds of rather extreme uh measures of conservation of economy of force so they can be able to do something down in the south when you get done with this process you can sort of look at the strengths and weaknesses of both sides the germans let's face it still have the experience advantage because in most instances paulus is an exception by the way but in most instances the germans in 1942 are commanding at the same level they did in 1941 and both of their staff officers had been in the same position in 1941 so they know what they're doing it's not that they don't make mistakes i'll point out one or two mistakes they do make but that they're basically they know you know this is we're going to try again not true as i've said for the soviets who have to learn because they've all been promoted upwards and that's a major issue the germans were able to achieve which i find astonishing operational surprise i mean okay they surprised him in june 1941 but fool me once fooled me twice you know what i mean how did they do this the second time the germans had a very sophisticated deception plan called operation kremel or kremlin which was designed to convince the soviet leadership that the objective 1942 was to capture moscow which it wasn't at all true and it was fairly successful it kept a large number of soviet troops up around moscow for a long time when they should have been elsewhere and we'll talk about where they should have been a while the soviets have a enormous power it is much more of a real totalitarian regime than germany ever was or maybe it's just more efficient at being a totalitarian regime take your pick uh but the the soviets have this centralized control not only in the state which allows them to do things like pack up whole factories and ship them over the euros imagine trying to do that in tennessee but also in terms of the military command and the wartime headquarters is the the is always referred to as the stavka think of it as general headquarters presided over by of course joseph stalin but also by his senior generals and they are very much into very strong centralized control as i tried to say in our earlier session for those of you who are there stalin felt that he almost won the war and we have to give him credit for managing his very slim assets effectively in 41 to stop the germans in time so inevitably when you're losing it's very hard to allow your subordinates to make mistakes isn't it and so they have very tight control in the course of 1942 he relaxes that control he gets greater confidence and trust in his subordinates but initially and indeed for most of the year you're going to find the stavka is micromanaging the field commands and often the stovka makes a bad situation a lot worse for the commanders out there as we said the soviets have a lot of new equipment not everything you need but a lot and they probably still have about six million trained reservists that they haven't even mobilized yet whereas the german germans for reasons that i don't want to get us off if you want we can talk about a discussion question but the germans have absolutely no reservists trained everybody who has ever worn the uniform is on active duty pretty much and so uh the germans then have to find another source of manpower and what's that source going to be it has to be their allies right the best allies that the germans have available or the finnish army but finland is only in the war to regain the land that it had lost from the soviet union in the winter war of 1939-40. so in 1941 the finnish army advances to their old frontier stops and digs in that's as far as they're going for the next three years so then there has to be intense diplomatic pressure by germany on all of their allies and satellites and whatever else and they scrape over a remarkable thing it's not on this slide but eventually they persuade their allies to cough up 52 divisions of troops for the new campaign and as you can see even in the south where the main attack's going to be almost one quarter of the troops available are not germans they are axis satellite whatever you want to call them troops now there are problems there obviously because of motivation but i think that we do these troops a disservice because there is some a myth out there that somehow or other these troops were incompetent or stupid or cowardly or something like that at one point the germans when the fronts were quiet the germans used to yell across the front line uh to their the soviet counterparts their their russian counterparts specifically and say hey you want to trade at uzbek for a romanian even though the romanians were taking a higher proportion of casualties than the germans were i think the real issue here the main issue is that these allied troops don't have the equipment to fight this kind of war if germany can't re-equip itself what are the odds they've done a good job about equipping their allies wrong answer right it's just common sense that that picture down the right hand corner of your screen that is the standard tank found in the first romanian armored division and also in any hungarian armored formations you might come across in world war ii it's called the ro1 it is literally a kit built from pieces it's designed based on the czech t-38 tank it's obsolescent very thin armor very small gun the germans wouldn't have used them anymore but that's primarily what the romanians and the other allies have to use for or take the italian army mussolini of course was put on his medal you always can appeal to his pride and he'll do something right and he increased italy's contribution on the east from fifty thousand to a hundred and ninety thousand between forty one and forty two problem is they don't have the equipment to go with it to provide any any aircraft guns for this new german italian field army they had to take the air defense guns away from rome the capital of italy okay does that give you an idea of how desperate these cars and they have no trucks if you are an italian troop and there's there's been some histories written in the italians memoirs that confirmed this that you go to the end of the railroad line and you get off and you start walking and it may be i don't know 200 miles before you get to the front uh this could be a real handicap so what i'm suggesting to you is regardless of how good or bad these troops were they were not capable of fighting in the front line and yet they had to um they were perfectly good for light weapons infantry for for rear area security as you might say to try and chase down the partisans the resistance in the rear but if one of these units comes into contact with one of these new russian tank cores forget it it's it's a suicide they have no any tank weapons that will penetrate a t-34 all very few little uh in the way of any tank mines or barrier materials or anything like that so they've got a real problem on their hands right there are three operations that are preliminaries that occur in may and june i want to take no more than five minutes but we need to sort of mention them for you to put things in context and explain why it is that they started so late for the before we even get to the stalingrad campaign the first of these and they're two basically two uh german up attacks and one soviet attack and all three of them turn out badly spoiler alert for the soviets okay the first one is in the kirsch peninsula if you don't recognize this amoeba-shaped thing in the middle of the the screen there that's the eastern end of the crimean peninsula okay and crammed in there are over two hundred thousand red army soldiers and three field armies with tanks and artillery and all the goodies uh opposite them is the the german eighth army i has eleventh army i hesitate to say german eleventh army because there's more romanians in it than there are germans it's it's commanded by uh uh eric von munstein who's gonna appear over and over again and monstein is a great general and i don't want to belittle him we could talk about how he conducted his maneuver warfare in this case but the real reason that the soviets are defeated in the kirsch peninsula is this man the photograph in the lower right hand corner lev necklace the soviets have developed a technique uh by which for to help the stavka supervise their subordinates and it's called a representative of the stavka someone whom stalin and his other senior commander's trust is sent down locally to keep an eye on these guys to make sure they don't do anything stupid and most of the time that works because they're people like vasilyevsky the chief of staff or zhukov the deputy commander-in-chief but in this case they made a mistake they sent lev necklace who is a political officer a commissar his whole reputation is based on his ability uh to be ruthless that when in 1941 when a soviet unit was defeated necklace would show up with a firing squad and shoot the commander no questions asked as they as they said there is no there's no logical explanation they won't accept the idea that the other guy had more tanks or anything like that you're you're you're lost you die and he uses the same tactics now that he's supposed to be a representative estafka he rearranges uh the staffs he reappoints one of his own staff guys to replace the chief of staff of the operation generally terrifies and mucks up the entire soviet defense and that's before monstein attacks and you can see what happens as a result in the space of about a week the germans and romanians completely overrun uh the kirsch peninsula to the tune of about 190 000 red army soldiers killed or captured the second having cleaned up the eastern end of crimea then eric von munstein commander of 11th army cleans up the western end he attacks the fortified naval base at opal and which this is if you may recall this is the area that they fought over in the crimean war 80 some years previously and it has fortifications both 19th century and 20th century very thoroughly dug in monstein does not have a lot of troops but what he does have is um he's got first of all priority on dive bombers for a couple of weeks and secondly has the very small number of german siege guns in both world wars if you ever noticed the germans are fascinated with big guns i guess it's sort of like measuring nuclear buttons or something but uh but in all seriousness they have uh they make available to to muenstein a 360 millimeter railway gun i mean that's that's a battleship that's 14 inches okay and measuring across the back of the shell so it's we're used to those out at sea in a battleship but on a railway car throwing shells at a fortress fortress this is incredible and so this combination of firepower and again some fairly intelligent tactics you know doing an amphibious landing right in the middle of downtown for example monstein after the course of four weeks despite desperate russian resistance captures stiffest opal for which he is promoted field marshall as a reward he becomes hitler's fair-haired boy and you know he's going to reappear later in our story but each of these three operations has cost the the the soviets army and navy total you know we're talking probably seven or a thousand men killed and wounded and in most cases because i haven't even got to the third one in most cases it's about leadership rather than any failure on their part the third one is the one major soviet offensive here we have marshall semyon konstantinovich timoshenko one of the great heroes of the russian civil war two decades before he's an old uh bolshevik someone that stalin trusts well maybe he shouldn't have because timochenko like every other commander wants to please his boss it's especially important to please your boss if you're dealing with a homicidal dictator right and so uh he promised stalin that he he could do what stalin wanted him to do which was to recapture the city of uh kharkov right there in the left center of the map karkov um this by the way is the area that's still being fought over today this is the don boss did you hear very periodically about that the uh ukrainians are fighting against the crypto russians it's the same area okay and has the same value than is now industrially uh but kharkov uh is the objective of the offensive timoshenko launches the attack you can see what he's doing there he's basically got two pincers reaching out to encircle the city but i remember i told you they're sort of inexperienced so one staff officer forgets to instruct the two tank cores that are supposed to be the exploitation force to move forward what they needed to do was every night so the germans couldn't see them sneak forward another 20 miles or so so they'd be in the right place when it was time for them to attack well somebody forgot to do that so they're 50 miles behind the lines when they need them and and mistakes like that they happen they really are i mean i sometimes think that people who win battles are the ones who make fewer mistakes nobody ever wins a battle by being perfect i'm sorry but in this case they can't afford to make mistakes because they're up against the first team the germans are surprised initially but they recover their uh their their nerve and get reorganized and as you can see by the blue arrows after about a week they counterattack and cut off the two pincers that timoshenko has aimed eastward and again as i said it's another disaster for the red army and all of this happens in may and june before we even get to the actual offensive which time i got to the the campaign we're talking about what are the germans trying to do here it's expressed in a fewer order dated the 5th of april 1942 and uh basically is drafted between hitler and its hindi staff officers so it's a cross between a vague strategic expression and a general staff paper the first thing we need to recognize about this german plan is it's not about stalingrad the whole plan only mentions stalingrad once sort of in passing and what it says if i can translate it from germany's into plain english is it would be desirable not essential but desirable since you're going to be in the neighborhood anyhow if possible you should either capture stalingrad or at least get close enough you can fire artillery shells into it and ruin their whole day mess them up and that's the only time stalingrad's mentioning the whole plan well okay if this plan for 42 is not about stalingrad what is it about i bet everybody knows if you think about it it's about oil you i'm sure many of you are quite aware of the fact that that is germany's logistical weakness there are small oil fields in hungary and romania but nowhere near enough fuel to supply this war machine that by 1942 the the german navy when they go to sea is going to see with their fuel tanks half empty because they simply can't provide enough diesel and things like this to supply the whole war effort and so where is the oil the petroleum in the soviet union way down in the southeastern corner uh in the caucasus mountains down in the same areas you hear about today you're going to hear me saying names that should be really familiar that are associated with azerbaijan where the oil fields are with chechnya which the russian federation still doesn't want to let go because it's still full of oil and oil pipelines it's the same area than is now that's very important uh economically and politically and so hitler is it may be a dreamer but he's not a totally unrealistic dreamer he recognizes that you know even if i get there it's going to be really hard to get a lot of petroleum out of there he's hoping maybe he can produce enough fuel for the troops locally but his main thought is i think even if i can't get too much oil out of there for germany i can deny the soviet union the use of that fuel and that in itself will be a big deal because the bigger picture here what's what hitler doesn't put down on his uh anywhere and so i have to sort of engage in a little bit of uh tea leave reading uh is that he feels that he's running out of time and he's right that he believes that he has to finish knocking knock the soviet union completely out of the war in 42 because if he doesn't then the soviets the british and the americans will gang up on him and 43 and 44 and it's going to be very very difficult and this you need to stick this in the back of your mind we have the memoirs of hitler's generals all of whom criticize him we don't have his memoirs do we and he is thinking that clock is ticking here we gotta move move move and so he gets frustrated very easily and he's not the only commander in history you look at 91 you can find general schwarzkopf getting frustrated about the rate of advance of the us army for example right i could tell you a story about explains that one but that's another story uh the point here is that no commander is ever happy with how fast they work but in this case hitler really has caused cause to want to get them to go so he's got this plan planned blau that's to advance southeast into the caucasus mountains and to get the oil fields so why does it fail first thing we do is just talk about sheer what did you call it earlier the tyranny of of distance okay look at the straight line distance from where they start at karkhoff to where they want to get which is grozny the the capital of chechnya today by the way center of oil fields and oil refineries if the straight line distance is 760 kilometers roads don't go straight lines and furthermore you've got a maneuver against the enemy so we're probably talking well over a thousand kilometers call it 600 or 700 miles that you're going to have to cover and it's not just a walk in the park this is some of the harshest terrain imaginable down there southeast of uh below where it says don river in stalingrad you have this high arid very hot semi desert and then beyond that you have the highest mountains in all of europe the caucuses that you have to get through not an easy task and that's without even factoring in the so the red army that's going to be defending it's going to be a very very difficult task and it's not just that you got a head for grozny you can't just put pedal to the metal and keep going in the best armor tradition right but you have to instead think about while i'm advancing southeast towards the lower right hand corner on that map what's what are the soviets going to be doing they're going to be pounding in on my left flank and my left flank is going to get longer and longer every day and we have to find some way to protect that left flank so the basic conception is twofold first we want to destroy the german are the excuse me the red army as far west as possible do a bunch of encirclements like 1941 wipe them off the map and so if we have less troops to fight against we can send smaller forces forward and simplify our logistical problem but besides doing that number two is we want to protect our left flank that means you mostly get line up with the don river down there sorry from southeast of voronish why the don river i think it's pretty obvious that that's a nice wide river it makes a good defensible position anybody wants to come at you is going to have to do a salt river crossing to bear at the very beginning to get at you so their basic conception is we're going to do a two-fold operation head for the oil fields with one hand protect the left flank with the other and then if on top of that you inadvertently as they did blunder into a battle at stalingrad that's several bridges too far isn't it there just aren't enough resources to begin with but that's in the future so bear that all in mind as we look at what happens the german offensive because of those previous operations because they've had to take time to re-equip the german offensive doesn't begin until the 28th of june 1942. what's wrong with that date remember we said that the year before they started on the 22nd which is the uh the summer solstice the longest day of the year or another way of putting that is halfway to the next winter okay and now we're going to attack six days later what's wrong with this picture but they really didn't have any choice because of their other considerations they had to do again they kick off their offensive and for a while for a couple of weeks it looks like it's good old days again the german army is roaring around across the step scattering soviet troops right and left dive bombers screaming down everything looks to be doing great except there aren't very many prisoners in 1941 in the first six months of the war the german army and the and its allies captured more than three million red army soldiers as prisoners that's not counting the guilt just prisoners three million in this whole operation i don't really can't really give you an accurate figure i'm not sure anybody's added it up but it's it's only more like say 80 000 still a significant number from our point of view but that it's it's not there they just are not making taking the kind of prisoners they used to why because the soviet commanders are getting better and so they're learning how to fight they still can't necessarily win but they're learning how to fight better and they're able to maneuver against the germans and things are just not going the way the germans wanted them to and the upshot of this is both of the dictators and their higher headquarters don't understand what's going on at the front and they both get frustrated from the point of view of the staffka from the point of view of moscow it's very simple stalin sends out teletypes messages to his field commanders that say things like i gave you a thousand tanks the germans have 500 why haven't you defeated them it's just not that simple is it but again if you're a marxist that's your approach to things let's reduce this to statistics and and hardware right um and so the staff gets impatient and what does dystopia do when it's impatient it hurries the counter-attack you don't have to be a military genius to recognize that warfare is probably the most complex form of human activity and to make any kind of an attack you have to take your time and plan and organize things you have to make sure that your supplies and troops are in the right place that you have your signal plan set up that all your supporters know what they're supposed to do as part of the plan who's going to attack when and all those other things right and that's going to take in the best army of possible a couple of days but all this time mustafa is pounding we want you to counter-attack now now now so what happens well it's the soviet union you're going to attack now right and then once you attack you're not ready so how successful are you not very but now you're the commander in a red army and you're losing are you going to stop and cut your losses no that might be you might not collect your pension that way let's put it this way okay and so they keep going and attacking when they should have basically said oops and started over and this happens literally probably an average of at once every two weeks for four months it is truly frustrating and of course the people who pay for this are the red army soldiers hitler on the other hand is equally frustrated and equally doesn't know what's going on and it's not just hitler it's his senior commanders they can't see that down there where the rubber meets the road the red army is a lot better than it was the year before from the point of view of hitler he expects this to be a replay of 1941 and and so when he sees his commanders he doesn't recognize that out there at the tactical level if you're a german regimental or division or core commander you say you know to quote napoleon in 1813 these animals have learned something right that you need to think about how it you know it's not going to be easy you still think you can win and indeed tactically they could always win but you have to be more careful you also have to plan your attacks you have to protect yours your flanks you have to have reserves because if you get over extended uh sure is shooting another couple of those tank cores are going to show up on your left flank uh and really mess up your plan so from the point of view the tactical manners their commanders are moving as fast as they can but from the point of view of hitler these guys are being too fussy they are quote letting them get away unquote because hitler thinks it should be just like 1941 and it never is and the net result is that hitler gets more and more frustrated and this is always depicted as hitler being unrealistic and an amateur but he's also the man carrying the burden by the way i don't want to sound at all sympathetic to hitler or stalin they're both homicidal maniacs okay but we have to think ourselves into their shoes i think to understand what happened any event on the 13th of july is the first time that hitler's impatience shows up by this time the initial attacks have gone on army group south has reached its initial objectives and they have as planned split into two army groups army group a you can tell by the priority right is headed for the oil in the caucasus army group b is responsible for protecting that left flank but hitler decides on the 13th july that phil marshall from bach who had commanded army group south and now commands army group b is just too slow and hitler has tried to be reasonable he's gone out and talked to him and said you know i need you to do this and bach says uh-huh but bach thinks he's got flexibility and he doesn't so he gets fired and replaced by one of his field army commanders maximilian vice a very competent general who does what nobody's ever heard of but he does a very good job for the rest of the year at the same time hitler wants to speed things up make up for lost time so he reorganizes and reinforces the advance what does he do in plain terms he moves more of his armored forces to army group a to head for the oil because that is the priority isn't it okay well but what does that mean for army group b you've got your own objectives to take and you don't have a whole bunch of forces to do it and this is where we come to our friend friedrich paulus not fun paulus by the way he is not a nobleman except i guess guilt by association he married a romanian countess so maybe he's he's an honorary nobleman i don't know but he's actually a very hard-working middle-class staff officer who by the way he is the one exception when i talk about german experience his last command in the 1930s was a peacetime battalion and in 1942 he's appointed the commander of a field army because he is probably considered to be the best staff officer in germany and so it's time to give him his command hmm may not work right what's his job he's part of army group b that's supposed to protect that left flank that means he's advancing to try to secure the don river and he's moving into what is called the uh the great bend of the don river if i can grossly oversimplify here the don river generally runs parallel to the volga river let's say 200 kilometers apart but right here in the area we're talking about south uh between vorniez and stalingrad the don river curves eastward the volga river curves westward and right there on the map in the upper right corner it says colic and stalingrad the distance between the two is only about 70 kilometers call it 40 miles and that's one reason why stone ground so important by the way it is a natural transportation hub for railroads intersecting with the volga river and making it easier to tranship over to the don river that's one of the things besides its factories that makes stalingrad important so it's it's policy's task to get there but we've got some problems going first of all the terrain looks nice and open on that map it's not there are a lot of uh small rivers running north south sort of perpendicular to his advance and all those rivers have very high banks what does that mean that means that except at the the existing crossing sites where there are bridges which could be blown up but except that the existing crossing sites the it's going to be very difficult to cross the river and that in turn means that paulus has to do not one not two not three but four deliberate attacks just to get to stalingrad four times he has to stop collect his supplies organize his troops repair his vehicles do an assault river crossing and each time he is successful because the german army is still more competent than their counterparts more experienced but they'll penetrate a couple dozen miles and then the soviets stopped them again so he has to do four different assault attacks to get cover a hundred kilometers roughly and it takes him about six weeks finally on the fourth try uh oh by the way i forgot to mention he has only one poncer division one tank division and two motorized divisions as far as mechanization is concerned a motorized division struck mounted infantry with one battalion of say 50 tanks when on a good day okay and that's all he's got the rest of his let's say his other six or eight divisions are because it varies over time our leg infantry and their artillery and their supplies and their wounded are pulled by horses and draft animals like that so this is not your high speed low drag high-tech blitzkrieg operation he simply doesn't have the compounded cam power to do it the only reason he finally pulled it off the last time is that hitler realized that army group b needed reinforcements and so on the 30th of july hitler had re-re-prioritized things and shifted the fourth panzer army which despite its name only has one more tank and one more motorized division uh the rest of its again leg infantry shifted them away from the caucasus towards stalingrad there's an old saying in the army order counter-order disorder uh in other words that if you keep changing things too many times somebody's going to screw up true anyhow in this case uh what happens was the germans made a planning mistake well i always i'm not badmouthing just the soviets here in this case when the germans diverted this large formation they forgot to tell the logisticians to change the shipping priorities does not take a real military genius to recognize that a mechanized formation takes a lot more fuel and spare parts and ammunition and everything else to make it function than a leg infantry division is right and so as a consequence of that uh when they are they're given more resources and they're given more troops but not more resources and inevitably that means that the whole advance on stalingrad is running they're getting about one quarter of the supplies they really needed because there's limits to railroads and limits to what germany has and the priority is to the other front now eventually uh the germans figure out they've screwed up and they correct the mistake but my point here is one reason why it takes uh our friend paul is so long to get to stalingrad is he's literally living hand to mouth he's waiting on the next train to show up or the next couple of trucks or horse cars to show up with enough ammunition and fuel for him to make the attack and the net result is he doesn't have that much more combat power than his opponents i skipped over that second bullet there but i didn't forget about it trust me the 16th posture division is one tank division finally breaks through goes roaring out and reaches the volga river just north of the city of stalingrad hooray but they almost got they got cut off and almost destroyed because the red army's not stupid they immediately cleared counter-attacking and cut off the 16th ponce division general hans hubba the commander of 16th poncer has orders to stand there and fight but he decides i can't do this so he calls his subordinate commanders together and says i'm taking the responsibility to disobey orders it's not your fault but i'm going to take the rap because we need to get out of here and the 16th sponsor almost had to break out and abandon their success until fortunately higher headquarters got enough supplies and fire support in there just in time like by bombers and so on to keep them alive but the fact that it's that close run before they ever get to the city of stalingrad should tell you this is not the glorious german army advancing majestically across the step is it this is the germans and the soviets being almost even maybe 55 45 and it's a very very difficult task for the germans we ought to finish the story of the oil in the caucasus because that after all is what the campaign is about before we actually get to stalingrad itself army group a remember is responsible for heading for the oil and it has a number of field armies under it like 17th army and so on but the real spearhead the cutting edge his first puncher army you see there in the lower right hand corner of the map and first panzer army on paper has a really impressive number of units it has three poncer divisions three armored divisions and four large fat high priority motorized divisions and again as a motorized division is infantry heavy but it's still got tanks on all the other bells and whistles and in this case we're talking about the gross deutschland division and fifth ss viking division and so obviously these are some really high quality troops but again they're operating at the end of a long long logistical uh chain across very difficult terrain and so they have they've rapidly find themselves in the same position as paulus they have to stop repair the tanks build up the supplies attack again the red army eventually stops them and then they got to do it over and over and over again and you see that they do get to the northernmost oil field place called makeup that's down there where it says 10 august because that's the date to remind me of it and at makeup they it looks like kuwait in 1991 if you remember the pictures of all the oil wells burning the soviets obviously are not going to turn these over in good condition to the new occupants and so the the germans have to spend several months and they do let's give them credit repairing and re-drilling and all this other stuff to get the oil out of the ground and they do finally succeed it but by that time it's november or december and as we're going to see they have to retreat out of there pretty quickly so that's as close as they got to the oil meanwhile you can see that squiggly line that goes through the words 10 august that's about as far as our friends in this german army ever got because big surprise just as it's snowing around here it starts snowing in the mountains down there about the middle of september and the germans do not know where they're going their maps are 40 years old they have to send out light planes looking for the roads to find out which where to go next it's very very difficult and they move very very slowly and what do you suppose hitler thinks about that x would have deleted even in german germa hitler remember has to worry about the entire war again his his generals in their memoirs their they got they're focused on what's happening right in front of them they don't recognize that he has to worry in the west because which is closer to getting to moscow normandy or moscow excuse me we're closer to getting to to berlin normandy in the west or moscow and east if the allies ever get ashore in the west it is really going to be difficult for germany and you may recall a little operation in august of 1942 called dieppe where the canadians got sent by the british let's not enter that one i i think princess patricia's light infantry has never forgiven the british for that one and they do an amphibious landing at the fortified french port of dieppe and they're defeated but boy does that get hitler's attention and you have to recognize that he's got a reason to be concerned so he starts pulling units out of the east and shipping him westward that's further going to weaken his attack net result is hitler's understandably impatient on the 9th of september he's already relieved one commander of army group b now he released the commander of army group a theater marshall from list down there in the lower left and for a couple of months he doesn't even appoint a new commander on paper he's the commander of army group a and all he does is basically taught talk every day by teletype to the commanders of the field armies and the chief of staff of the army group who are down there and you may say that's micromanagement and i cannot disagree but again from his point of view the commanders have simply failed and what else is he going to do two weeks later he gets really impatient and he fires halder franz halder is the chief of the german general staff he has for the last four years loyally done whatever hitler wanted him to do given hitler honest advice but by this point hitler decides that he's become too pessimistic and maybe he's right that's a very high priority high stress environment so he fires halder and replaces him with a younger more gung-ho chief of the general staff kurt zeitzler but zeitzler while he may be gung-ho is not an a fool he is a german general staff officer eventually in fact he pulls hitler's side aside in very like politely gives him the explanation i gave you earlier about hey we're trying to go to the oil field we're trying to protect our left flank and now we're going to get stalingrad and we've got a problem here boss and hitler did not explode at him you know you always have this image of hitler's always spitting at his support it's not he was very very calm and recognized that yes i understand what you're saying there is a problem here but he decided that zeitzer was being a little bit down-hearted need to be motivated says yeah i understand this problem we'll get through it buck up keep going and that's about all that happens to it uh let's finish the story of the oil so we can finally get frag and stalingrad right but and it happens in a place and forgive me those of you who speak russian i'm probably going to mangle this down the lower right hand corner there the unpronounceable name of origen there are actually two towns of this name in the russian federation but this is the eastern one the other one the other one i think is in ukraine somewhere but uh at original kitsa is a point 115 road miles away from grozny remember where all the refineries are it is within striking distance of getting there and the 23rd poncer division gets that far despite the snow at the beginning of november but here's where we come to this man the picture here you've probably never heard of before yvonne vladimirovich chulanif who is the totally forgettable commander of the trans-caucasus front a front if you're not familiar is a is a soviet field army a collection of different armies it's the next higher headquarters 2nf does not have a lot of nice troops supplied to him by moscow he has to pretty much at this point because he's cut off by moscow there's germans between him and the rest of the country so he pretty much has to his only solution is okay i'm going to call up the local reservists form them into a unit give them a couple of weeks to train together and send them off to fight and you can imagine that doesn't work too well but in this instance two of these improvised units the tenth guards and eleventh guard rifle cores which between them have less than ten thousand troops managed to encircle the twenty-third ponzor division at the beginning of november and the commander first ponce army christ does in fact rescue them he rearranges his troops breaks through and enables the soldiers of the 23rd poncer to escape however even the german records reflect in that week when they were encircled the ju the 23rd poncer lost 85 of its 119 tanks so here in this totally forgettable place with this totally forgettable enemy commander is ultimately the failure of the intention of the whole campaign because that's as far as they get what is finally as you say get on to stalingrad the there are various headquarters in and around stalingrad but the principal defense calls to the red six falls to the red 60 second army commanded by vasily ivanovichoff who has written his memoirs and therefore become famous to us some of his memoirs sound a little bit too heroic to be true but basically he is he is a phenomenal commander he is not a guy who just screams at troops he cajoles them and stiffens them and builds consensus and does all the things you would want a commander to do he does not have large amounts of troops most of the time he's just basically collecting together a couple hundred guys with a couple of light guns and maybe a light tank and using them to plug a hole and slow the germans down it's during this period of time when both sides get tunnel vision and get fascinated with stalingrad in september and october of 42. and to some extent it writes itself imagine you are working in the ministry of propaganda for gerbils in germany and i tell you we are attacking a city that's been renamed in honor of the soviet dictator can you just see the options the opportunities of that from the point of view of what we today call information warfare okay well can't you at least imply that if you take stalingrad you've defeated stalin and after a while i think the german the soviet i suspect that the soviet uh defenders are more concerned about saving helping their buddies than anything big and highfalutin but i after a while they probably could order themselves and say you know we're not going to let these exporters deleted take the town and so both sides just get tunnel visioned in on stalingrad even though it really doesn't matter in the big picture of things gradually grindingly in the course of september they clear the germans clear southern stalingrad and central stalingrad during this time though chewie cough is developing his tactics that enable him to be so successful i like to call them hugging tactics he didn't invent them you can find similar tactics used by the the north vietnamese in vietnam in the later 60s but basically it's a very simple solution once you think of it if you're up against somebody in this case the germans who have better fire support than you do they have more accurate artillery they have more dive bombers how do you neutralize their advantage it says it up there right you get as close to them as you can so they don't dare shoot for fear of killing their own people and so a lot of the battles of a lot of the time in stalingrad is fought with one block between the two sides or one road between the two sides sometimes i think one wall between the two sides in a building makes for very little sleep as you can imagine and this is the era that's been uh uh you know made romanticized of snipers on both sides and it certainly did happen by the way uh some of you have heard of zaitsev the sniper who got the uh incredible number of kills and was get made a hero of the soviet union uh david glance found this a captain zaitsev seems to be the same guy in 1945 who got another medal of honor hero of the soviet union for salt river crossing down in romania so the guy is just one of those people has no fear they're probably not healthy to be around because the rest of us tend to get hurt when you have a commander like that right but in any event they're fighting this inch by inch at great cost and both sides are bleeding out in the course of about five weeks i don't know if you can read this but you can get the idea just by that adds up to about nine divisions worth of troops that are fed into chewy coughs to keep him going it's not easy to do this however i must tell you because in order to get them to chewy cough they have to go across the don river first of all not the the red navy doesn't have boats big enough to move like t-34 tanks or anything like that and secondly the germans are spend all their time shooting at them trying to interdict them and so a lot of stuff just never gets there or gets there with great difficulty has to be infiltrated at night but over the course of a set of about about let's say five weeks there in september october we're talking probably a hundred thousand soldiers are sent to reinforce chewie cough who started out with about fifty thousand but as far as i can tell it no time in the battle did he ever have more than 54 000 troops actually in stalingrad with him that's the ferocious level of casualties and if we're having casualties like that on the red army side what are the germans doing do they have any reinforcements or replacements no all they can hope for is a few guys who are lightly wounded recover come back to duty um for a while uh and the german commanders do what they can they're not stupid uh our friend uh paulus rotates troops take if a unit's been in the fighting in the city for too long he sends them out to this the countryside and and swaps out another unit for a while but eventually even that doesn't work so um vice who is his next higher commander the army group b commander scrapes together five combat engineer battalions call it maybe three 000 troops guys are supposed to be able to fight his infantry and also know about explosives and puts them in as the last sort of gasp to reinforce the german advance because the germans are just plain flat out of troops give you one figure don't like to give lots of figures because we've got a lot of cover here and i'm doing my fast as they can but the 24 fourth poncer division which is the only new poncer division in the east in 42 it had been a horse cavalry division the year before it was converted to tanks um the 24th ponzi division starts the campaign in summer of 42 with probably close to full strength let's call it 14 000 soldiers but amongst those 14 000 soldiers there are guys who drive tanks there are artillerymen there are mechanics there are medics and cooks exactly they're bad they have bakery companies in the german army okay that's my kind of an army but the but that means that out of those 14 000 troops maybe 4 000 are what you call dismounts guys who can get down out of a vehicle with a weapon and go into a building and clear it and that's what it's about in stalingrad they start with four thousand by halloween by the 31st of october when they fall out for yet another assault on the factories in northern uh stalingrad the 24th positive division is down to one thousand and one officers and men as dismount troops they've lost three quarters and that's pretty typical of what happens here okay meanwhile the red army is giving chewick off these troops there's a lot of argument about whether they're giving him everything they could or giving him just enough to keep him alive that's debatable either way but what they're doing meanwhile is conducting all kinds of counter-attacks on the flanks of you know here's sixth army in germany in stalingrad itself and the soviets are making all kinds of counter-attacks through here and down through here trying to take the pressure off of the uh this the 60-second army inside the soviets i should have probably misspoke the soviets are counter-attacking against the germans all the way through here and they're having no success because remember what i said about the impatience of higher headquarters and over and over and over again red army soldiers are being told to attack and they're just getting slaughtered meanwhile this means though the germans are just playing out of troops they need troops in the in the caucasus to take the oil fields they need troops in stalingrad so this is where all those axis satellite troops show up to replace them from a air for a stretch of about 360 kilometers between the city of voronez up off the map and stalingrad you have three different uh axis satellite armies the second hungarian eighth italian and 3rd romanian and then if you continue on south of the city of stalingrad stalingrad they're in the process of forming another romanian army fourth romanian down there to the south each of these armies has a few german divisions and a few any tank detachments in there for reinforcement but basically their dismounted horse cavalry in light weapons infantry out there on the step in the snow without any barrier materials in some cases the the front is so convoluted they don't even have the river between them and and the soviets and they're just hanging out literally in the wind and the commander of third romanian army is not a fool he understands this he keeps saying to the the german army group b is next to our headquarters we need to give me a little extra combat power let me try to straighten up this front and shore up my defenses and even hitler recognizes that they should do that and they start planning to do that but we're too busy fighting and stalingrad we figure the red army is worn out it's winter time we'll take care of it next year just it put goes in the too hard to do category right then and that of course is the problem this is the background then finally going to get to the real attack in stalingrad for operation uranus marshall shukoff in his memoirs claims responsibility or or that he is the originator of this idea unfortunately there's no indication that he talked to stalin at the time that the idea first came up he was out of town fighting on other fronts that we won't talk about instead as far as we can tell the commander who comes up with the idea is this guy here andre ivanovic armenko which again you've probably never heard of unless you're a real expert on this uh he is the commander of the stalingrad front the next higher headquarters above 60-second army is political officer is anybody know khrushchev yes exactly which is one reason why when you get in when khrushchev is in charge he thinks he knows more than his generals and well maybe he's right he's certainly been shot at he said that the only thing you know ever and he had to go by the way every weekend up to stalin to report what was happening in stalingrad and he said in his memoirs every friday i was never so glad as to see stalingrad in my rear view mirror and every sunday i was never so glad to see the kremlin in my rearview mirror and go back because he really has a difficult job but anyhow aramenko and chuschoff are told at the beginning of october time for another counteroffensive and they say yes sir yes sir three bags full of course we will do this but this is stupid we're going to waste our troops and so aramenko says look why don't we think bigger instead of attacking on the against the germans who are well fortified and know what they're doing why don't we go against the romanians we know the romanians don't have a lot of equipment why don't we take a bigger piece of the pot piece of the pie try to encircle them and this he doesn't really come up with a plant all by himself there's a lot of modifications there's always are but ultimately he comes up with this co you know they come up with this conception of observation uranus and there's two things i want you to recognize one they're attacking the weak point of the enemy and two for the first time properly in the whole war they take their time to get ready for an offensive and stalin gives them several extensions moves the whole thing back by ultimately about 10 days so they can do it right they're still not perfect nobody ever is ready for everything but they finally for the first time launch a major offensive on the 20th of november uh see here the southwestern front and the don front up here counter attack and break through the romanians headed southward and then a day later because it has a shorter distance to go the stalingrad front is attacking in the other direction to link up west of stalingrad and circle the the german defenders that's the plan again one of the myths about this is that the romanians ran away no they didn't actually romanians did a remarkable job of standing up and stopping them a guy a fantastic general in the romanian army who of course my name completely escapes me at the moment so i better stop and look up but the commander the commander of one of the divisions in the romanian army recognizes oh yeah mikhail leskar that he's got to do something he pulls together the remnants of about four romanian divisions and for four days he desperately holds up the soviet advance and the local counter-attack forces including the first remaining armored division do their job and further just disrupt and disorganize the germans the soviets rather so the soviet advance is not nearly as nice and neat as it looks on a map but ultimately they do succeed in encircling stalingrad so we finally got the stalingrad right not going to at this late date because where i want to finish there quickly try and fight the whole battle let me however make a few points that are misunderstandings or maybe even misconceptions myths about it the first of these is that a lot of critics then and since then have said that the sixth army should have broken out as soon as they got encircled that paulus was fool not to just break out and attack westward and escape while he could a couple problems with that first of all paulus knew perfectly well that if he tried to do that he would be relieved and hitler would put somebody else in who would stay secondly hitler never thought he would lose stalingrad that's true but he also had a reason and it wasn't just politics for holding on to stalingrad he figured correctly that as long as the german troops were defending in stalingrad that the soviets would have to tie up a lot of soldiers that would otherwise be exploiting into his rear area now he thought that he could rescue them a lot quicker than he could but he had a reason for what he was doing again gotta gotta look think the way the dictators think thirdly there's a little matter of horses i don't know if you can even see it back there see this horse-drawn cart up there remember in most of the german army as like most of the red army that's the standard transportation mode the problem is at the beginning of november thinking it was winter time and the war was almost over for the year the germans had packed up most of their horses put them on railway cars and shipped them off so they could rest and get fat for the next season what's that mean if if the sixth army now tries to break out what's going to happen it's just going to be individual infantrymen wandering around the snow can't take any heavy weapons can't even take their wounded with them that's great for morale um and so really it wasn't a practical alternative to be honest with you another misconception is the idea that herman goering who is nominally hitler's number two and the commander of the luftwaffe amongst many other jobs he has every job you can imagine including forrester of prussia but one of his jobs he's commander of the luftwaffe and he has a different uniform for everyone by the way but he is supposedly blamed for having promised hitler to resupply by air well but the truth of the matter is as far as we can determine he didn't talk to hitler for the first 10 days after the sixth army was encircled it wasn't going but rather guring's professional general staff trained chief of staff han shishonic who eventually committed suicide for other reasons but who who went to hitler because he was the guy available to hitler when it happened and not knowing how many troops were encircled and not knowing how long the encirclement was likely to last thinking about what they'd done previous winter with smaller encirclements he said yeah i think we can do that now give you sonic credit though he went off and talked to the local air force leaders came back and said i'm sorry i made a mistake i we cannot do this but hitler's not the only man in the world who likes to take the answer he likes and ignore subsequent comments right that's just sort of human nature again you can find all kinds of figures about the airlift let me just give you a few it's been estimated it would have taken 300 tons a day of food and fodder for the remaining horses just to feed the sixth army it would have taken about 750 tons a day to completely supply them fuel ammunition spare parts medical whatever that in turn 750 tons a day meant if you allow for maintenance availability and so on about a thousand and fifty ju-52s you're not familiar with it ju52 is the standard german twin-engine transport aircraft they use other aircraft but mostly it's ju52's the entire luftwaffe has only three quarters that number and they're not all available for stalingrad we're in november 1942. what happened in northwest africa in november 1942 torch exactly give the man a prize and the germans are in involved in a frantic airlift from sicily to tunisia to bring in troops to stop the british and americans so they cannot and they they lose a lot of very scarce heavy aircraft and gliders and everything else up there so the germans simply don't have the airlift to do this um they never got close to the figures they needed i mentioned 300 tons as a minimum only two days in the in the 70 days roughly of encirclement did they actually get up to 290 tons over the course of the 70 days the average airlift is about 117.6 tons per day it's not enough by any stretch of imagination to keep the german encircled forces alive because there's about a quarter million germans and romanians and other people inside of stalingrad i will say this though they evacuated 25 000 germans many of them the badly wounded sometimes a few key commanders and specialists so there's some value to it but it certainly was i don't think any air force in the world including the us army air force could have done this in 1942 and you'll talk about that next next time when you talk about the airlift right remember that 1948 49 was a very mild winter thirdly monstein like chewykoff wrote his memoirs 10 years later from memory without access to the records and i think i've said before we all remember things the way they wish we wish they had happened and in monstein's case he rearranges the dates and the events in his mind to blame hitler and blame paulus and yet he is put in charge by hitler of army group don that's supposed to save the the sixth army and yet never did he actually go to hitler and say we have to break out now he doesn't accept his own responsibility for this part of it furthermore if you read memoirs by people like munstein it seems as if they almost made it to save sixth army they have a plan which it's not a bad plan on theory basically they took two poncer corps headquarters notice i said headquarters and then they had to scrape the troops together underneath them 48th sponsored corps is operating from west of style gratataki eastward 57th ponce core is operating from south of stalingrad attacking northward the idea was the two of them would converge and get apollos out of there but that's the way the germans tell the story if you look at what actually happened 48th ponce corps was never able to launch an offensive they were the soviets hit them so hard and so rapidly that they basically just got pushed out they never did an organized attack the 57th ponce corps that's what that picture is down the bottom moving across the snowy fields did actually launch an attack about i think the 6th of december and for about nine days they made some progress they advanced maybe one-third of the distance there's about 120 kilometers they have to cover they manage one-third of the distance north towards stalingrad and then they run into the second guards army one of the brand new highly equipped soviet formations that they've built and the second guards army kicks them all the way back to where they began and in the process 57th ponce core lost i think the figures are 120 tanks and and 170 tanks and armored cars 170 artillery pieces uh so they really had never had any chance so it didn't matter whether our friend monstein tried to break out there was nobody there to meet him despite being shortly short on supplies the sixth army is still a very dangerous animal and constantine rocosovsky the commander of the dawn front is very concerned about believe it or not this doesn't sound like any soviet general you've ever heard of about saving the lives of his soldiers he is remembered as the gentleman commander the guy who never swore at people and who tried to do things we might think of it as the american way lots of firepower he masked as much artillery he could rather than asking the troops to do it uh he rotated his troops forward he let a division attack for two days then swap them out let him come back get warm in the tents before they have to do it again because it's bitterly cold and he's under enormous pressure from the stovka from stalin to finish the job knock out the germans instead he took three weeks to capture the city on the starting on the 10th of january ending on the 1st of february they capture paulus himself the next day organized resistance stops but that to clear out that pocket that never had more than two quarter 250 000 men in it cost the red army 1.3 million killed wounded frostbite and other casualties like that so what are we supposed to get from all this first of all the germans were trying to do too much they're trying to get the oil in the caucuses they have to protect their left flank then they get involved in stalingrad nobody could do this i might add by the way that after this operation the uh is over the axis satellite troops are so shattered that except for romania their governments take them all home and germany is not able to have those troops available so not only they lose sixth army they lose the equivalent of three other armies as well the balance of combat power between the two sides is a lot closer than we think it was the germans were having a lot harder time than we like to to to believe doing it and finally as i said we have these over and over again premature soviet counter attacks which reinforce the soviet the the right excuse me the german prejudice that the soviets are idiots but in this case it's just bad senior leadership and the local commanders are learning at a very expensive price how to do things when they finally do a deliberate offensive in november at operation uranus they are finally successful and that pretty much sets the pattern for the rest of the war questions from the audience uh can you please explain uh what the exact uh system was for training soviet troops basically from the beginning of the war towards the end of the war because there was this misconception that the soviets were pretty much ill-trained but from you know operation uranus on that changes very greatly so i just like to know a bit more about that um it varies over time i wish i could give you a straight answer as i said first of all the germans began excuse me the soviets began the war with 13 million people who had been drafted and trained for at least six months between the wars so right away they've got a basis to operate on there is also a system that later becomes standardized where in the soviet public schools they teach everybody the basics how to read a map how to fire a rifle how to put on a protective mask things like that so they don't have to worry about that and so they can send them straight to troop units they have an elaborate system as any army does of training sergeants and officers but they have a tendency and desperation to empty out those officer schools and use them as troops and as the war progresses not at this stage but if you go forward starting a year later you find that the german the soviets are running short of troops and what they basically do is go through and sweep up anyone that they can find and throw them in the ranks so the training varies a great deal from pretty well trained to you know just shut up and get on the truck kind of attitude but the same is true of the germans we tend to think of the germans as highly trained that's only true through about 41. from then on they're they're pretty much training people at the last minute as soon as somebody turns 17 or 18 they run them through three months of training and ship them off to the front so i don't know that the soviets are really that much worse trained that's a very rambling answer but i think you say there isn't a simple answer to that was there any better way for the germans to protect their left flank than to go and fight a building by building battle in stalingrad very good point i think that uh it's always it's as an historian i have 20 20 hindsight but to answer your question i think your implied in that is if they had stayed out of stalingrad they would have been a lot better off and i'm inclined to agree with you about that that as i said they became sort of suckered into the mystique of let's take the city and all they did was get blood to death and their rate of advance fell from 20 kilometers today to two blocks a day so yeah i think that probably would have been i'm not sure they would have won but surely it would have helped better what kind of tank production did the soviets get out of the tank factory in the stalingrad um initially they got a pretty good uh production there there was actually a i think a t-34 factory uh in north in northern stalingrad and there are accounts in august of tanks that have not even been painted yet rolling off the front line and going to the front but that stops pretty quickly if only because they can't get the raw materials into the city and very quickly they have to call up the factory workers and use them as militia so i i don't know that anybody has any accurate figures but i'd surprise if they got anything after august if that answers the question dr speak a little bit to the purges of the 30s because that also decimated the officer corps for the russians as he started in 40. that's very much the case one of the reasons why the german the soviet leadership in the military is much less experienced than the uh the german experiences germans are this because of that very purge now there's controversy about there's some people have written a book saying it's all exaggerated but it's been the generally accepted opinion is that about 60 percent of the professional officers in the entire uh soviet army were at one time another arrested that doesn't mean they were all killed i showed you that picture i don't know if i can get back to it here constantine rockasofsky's an example rakosovsky was in 1937 implicated by somebody i think it was being a case of somebody being tortured so they frantically just spit out anything they could think of he was arrested refused to admit that he was guilty never was sent to siberia spent three years being beat up in the prisons he lost all his teeth in 1940 the german the soviets realized they need him to fight the germans took him out of prison stopped long enough to give him a set of steel teeth sort of like jaws in the james bond movies and sent him to the front where he started the war as a division commander and ended it as probably the third ranking soviet command commander okay so yeah there the purges obviously hurt them but we have this misconception that everybody was killed lots of guys like rajkosovsky were recycled so to speak in all of this with the russians learning and as they go along how important was it that they that they were being fed intelligence from the ending machine speak the question if you can't hear is the the the influence of enigma we we the british more than the americans were giving them at least selectively products of enigma uh and so they had some understanding of it but then you run into the problem that and those of you ever done intelligence know this rarely indeed you get one message that says i'm going to invade poland tomorrow at three o'clock hell me signed hitler you know you know you don't get those messages what you get are little bits and pieces that you try to put together to picture and that is subject to interpretation as and as an intel puke who has been ignored by political uh political leaders i can tell you that uh they're going to interpret things their way that was certainly true in the warnings leading up to night to the german attack it's probably true even here there is an uneasy relationship and there have been a number of books written about this about we tried to give them information in some cases the british inserted soviet trained agents into western europe at the soviet request but the you're right that they didn't get nearly as what you would think they should have out of their intelligence cooperation how much did the allies supply the russians yeah the question is how much the allies pride the russia the russians an enormous amount which of course in soviet mythology was downplayed they don't want to admit how much was done i mentioned second guard's army for example second guard's army was equipped almost entirely with british len lease tanks um the british the soviets did not like lindley's tanks very much but they loved glen lee's uniform something like 34 million uniforms given to the red army and 17 million pairs of boots um and literally tons for the local color of spam okay one historian remarked that the the allies won world war ii with russian blood and paid for it in spam but but they they gave them a lot of raw materials and a lot of supplies the only uh the only as far as i know the only request that was disapproved was in 1943 the soviet union asked for four tons of pitch blend anybody know which pitch blend is you remember your marie curie right what is it uranium uranium ore why do you suppose they need uranium ore in 1943 yeah they tried to tell us it was for luminous compass styles wrong answer but as far as i know that's the only one we disapprove seriously so yeah i mean we prior to the nordis thing i still think the red army would have won but it'd probably take another year or two without allied aid how significant were the soviet partisan attacks behind the lines um they were just becoming really effective uh and the part of this was that the just as the staff i wanted to centrally control was going on at the front they also wanted to essentially control the partisans and so they were parachuting a lot of in many cases female telegraph operators with portable radio telegraphs in to the rear to try and link up with the partisans so they could get better control eventually by 43 and the next major offensive you find they have a very carefully organized system that gives them not only intelligence but organized systematic sabotage you know blow up all the bridges on this railroad on this night kind of thing but i think it's only just filtering in it's not really fully effective in 42 if that's what you're asking germans had to administer all the land that they had conquered as they moved into russia and i'm sure that took some effort you mentioned that three million prisoners that uh i assume not all of them were killed no but a lot of them they just literally starved to death the germans did not do very much to take care of them i hate to say it but i was just wondering how much of a drag this was on the german it's a good point that the germans in fact they have something called the general direction a general administration that's supposed to administer the rear areas the problem is that the troops going through in some cases have wrecked everything in front of them either the soviets withdrawing or the germans pursuing them there's one case up by near leningrad that somebody is documented where the general administration comes in to administer what's left of the soviet population and they find that they the troops have left them so little food they actually have to import food from germany to feed the soviets which is exactly the opposite of what they plan to do right so yeah they have an administrative problem they also have to come to the previous point each of the army groups starts out with three low priority divisions for area security with older troops and limited weapons and vehicles and so on and so forth so they do have something in the way to do this and i mentioned that the other the axis troops pull out about the only thing the axis troops other than the romanians do in the war after 42 is they do some partisan fighting and helping the rear area but they're you're absolutely right there's a very thin crust of german administrators in many cases they're simply putting soviet citizens into positions and some kinds handing them weapons to be guards and things like this by one calculation i don't entirely buy it a million soviet citizens served in uniform for the germans what role did richard play the japanese spy yeah um richard swords of course is the one who supposedly through the japanese learned of the the impending attack the short answer is the the soviet leadership didn't believe him because stalin didn't believe anybody i have to be skeptical i don't pretend to be an expert on this but i don't think the so the german the germans and japanese did not cooperate very much so i don't know how much detail in japan could have got about what the german plants were just to give you an example hitler did not know that the japanese were going to attack at pearl harbor so i don't know how much information you could have got through the back door that way but didn't he say that the japanese are not going to attack russia oh okay that part you are correct that he is one of the sources on which the uh uh thank you i'm sorry i'm sorry i misunderstood you he uh swords is one of the sources on which the uh soviets conclude that they can withdraw some of their troops from the east now they didn't denude the the east what they did is create new formations of reservists and leave them there and then take the more competent better trained units and ship them west on on the railroad but so yeah to some extent that helped them but again i'm not sure whether we can put too much um stress or emphasis on the actions of one person regarding the t34 i heard that some of them were only radio equipped um that's true originally uh first of all there's two models of t-34 two basic models with constant little changes the t-3476 76 millimeter gun is what we're talking about here um the pre-war once the the soviets did not see a need to put radios in all of their tanks and that had been true and they were not the only ones like this only the british army initially really understood that every tank has to have a two-way radio okay it took a while for people to understand that effective maneuver requires two-way communications for these guys so yeah there were undoubtedly some tanks but the standard crew of a t-34 as i recall was five men because it included a radio operator i could be wrong but i'm pretty sure that's the way it is regarding the t-34 did i have that out of american suspension with it and then how did they design that that the russians take like the best designs from different the russians bought the copyright or or the yeah should we call it copyright uh the patents excuse me uh from christie that he had tried to sell to the americans and they incorporated some aspects of that in a lot of their tank design and not so much the t-34 i think is the earlier ones the bt-7s and so on but the other thing the russians did is quite openly they contracted with ford motor company to come to uh russia this is in between the wars and lay out their fact their factories for best mass production because the of course the russia the ford motor company invented the assembly line for vehicles and so they got a lot of technical help which they paid for from the u.s to to produce all kinds of vehicles including t-34s the homework assignment for all of you is to spend the rest of the week in your backyard yeah get in touch with the russian front yeah thank you sir thank you very much for coming [Applause] support for this program provided by viewers like you thank you additional support provided through the katherine b anderson fund of the st paul foundation upcoming roundtable topics can be found at [Music] www.dot.gov [Music] 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Channel: World War II History Round Table

Views: 256,928

Rating: 4.7547836 out of 5

Keywords: WWII, Battle of Stalingrad

Id: VP_QaNU5Uys

Length: 96min 4sec (5764 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2018