How the Red Army Defeated Germany: The Three Alibis - Dr. Jonathon House

hello and welcome my name is Quinn Reid and I am a member of the Dole Institute's Student Advisory Board I'd like to welcome you to the Dole Institute of Politics on this wonderful May Day and thank you for attending today's presentation the dole Student Advisory Board is composed of K U students committed to the work of the Dole Institute we attend regular meetings assist in events like this and plan an essay be sponsored program every semester members of the SI b receive great opportunities to network with our special guests if you are a student and would like to join please contact the Dole Institute the Dole Institute would like to hear from you if you enjoyed this afternoon's program please let us know by contacting us on facebook twitter or through our website email if you prefer to write us a note there will be a notepad and pens on a table as you exit the building your attendance and feedback helped shape future programming before we begin today I'd like to remind you to please turn off your cell phones after the interview at the end of the program we will have some time for audio audience questions and answers if you have a question please raise your hand and I will be by with a microphone to answer your question please ask just one brief question and now please welcome the director of the department of military history jim Wilbanks thank you I'd like to echo Quinn's welcome to you and appreciate you coming out in this whatever this weather is here it is spring according to the calendar it's my pleasure to introduce John house who will be the fourth speaker in this series looking at particular aspects of World War two all of the presenters are from the department military history at the US Army Command General Staff College John is the William a stuffed history chair he has a specialty on World War two combined arms warfare and as a book out recently on the Cold War and you have his bio there so I won't take any more of his time so without further ado John first what dr. Wu banks always forgets to mention is one of my highest achievements as having taught him when he went to the Staff College 30 years ago we won't talk about that right any event what I would like to talk to you about today is a problem that we have in history and that is for three generations or well three three decades I guess I should say at least after World War two we didn't know how the Soviets defeated the Germans I say the Soviets I'm not belittling anything that anybody other allies did against the axis but the fact is that eight out of every 11 German casualties was suffered fighting the Soviets and yet as they said we really didn't know very much about it why didn't we know about it well because of this man and people like him Franz Halder the chief of the German General Army General Staff during the glory years was relieved by Hitler in the fall of 42 when things started to go bad and after the war he and a large number of other generals and Colonels were arrested by us first of all imprisoned by us and eventually we put them on the payroll and asked them to write their recollections in most cases without records I might point out their recollections of what happened from their point of view so that we when we wrote the US official history of World War two we had both sides which is really what you need to do to good do a good history I don't see how we're going to get that for say Afghanistan we're never going to find out what the other side really thought right any event when we asked them to do this they did pretty much what we wanted but we sort of forgot the process involved Franz Halder sort of appointed himself the unofficial editor and everybody's manuscript before it was turned in to us he sort of put spin on it made sure it all gave us a common viewpoint of what was going on it wasn't that the Germans were lying to us but they were telling us there exceptions their recollections which is not necessarily reality and once they started doing this I mean the Germans are so friendly and so professional and the Soviets in those days of the Cold War were so suspicious and standoffish that it was very natural of us to believe what the the Germans told us and so the Germans gave us their sort of alibi version of how we lost the war despite the fact we're the greatest army in the world you know we keep we all still today we spent all our time studying the German army even though they're oh for two and then so we need to then sort of look at first what they said and then why there may be some problems with their explanations for it and the first thing got to recognize is that there's three sort of what I like to call alibis sometimes when I'm being blunt with myself I call them lies but they weren't deliberately lies three explanations that the Germans give to themselves and all of you know enough about your own lives to know that we tend to rearrange facts and our memories of it fits things nicely and it makes us more comfortable it's not necessarily the truth but we all are guilty of it to some degree or another and what does the German said basically was first of all that idiot Hitler secondly the severe weather and terrain of the Soviet Union and thirdly the fact that they were simply overwhelmed by the Soviet numbers well want to focus really on that third one the question of numbers because obviously yes the Soviets did outnumber them but I want to talk to you about some ways in which I think the Germans perhaps sort of were misled or exaggerated how much they was but before we get to talking about numbers let's talk briefly about these first two first thing we all have to recognize and I'm sure you're aware of this is that Adolf Hitler is the universal alibi for everything that happened in Germany for 12 years you'd think there was no one else alive or making any decisions in Germany it's all a Dolf Hitler Adolf Hitler Alif Hitler and I have no doubt that I recollect that's the way they remembered let me ask you as a start and I apologize for doing this but I think you'll see the point when you get done I'm going to show you two rather long quotations one after the other they're both from a field-marshal munch time who is lionized in the West he published his memoirs as soon as we let him out of prison for war crimes and they were translated instantly became a best-seller and that we they are sort of what we all rely upon to a certain extent and they reflect what a lot of German memoirs told us about what happens so let me ask you to just read the first one allow a certain amount of time then we'll go on to the second slide you with me this one's kind of longer and therefore the type is smaller I apologize now I venture to say that if you've even if you've never read maan Stein you have read ideas like this okay as I said it's what he's saying if you want to boil it down is if that amateur Hitler had only allowed his professional officers to run things we would have been reached fought to a draw and maybe even defeated the Red Army well I'm no big fan of Adolf Hitler obviously he is a genocide Ulm a niak let's not make two ways about it but there's a number of problems with this argument and we need to talk about them first of all most of the time Adolf Hitler did what his commanders recommending we tend to forget that they talk about the times where he disagreed with him we'll get to them in a moment but throughout 1943 in some cases and I'll give you an example even in 1944 Adolf Hitler did what the commander's told him was the smart thing to do even if he didn't necessarily agree with it but they as I said we all sort of conveniently forget our responsibility in these things right for example the German officer corps by and large was very much in support of invading the Soviet Union in 1941 they believed as did Hitler that they could defeat the Soviet Army in the Soviet state in a matter of weeks one good swift kick and it'll all be over was the attitude and they therefore didn't really have any problem as a matter of fact it is the commander of the German army brow chest who actually urges Hitler to start planning to invade Russia before they even fought the Battle of Britain in 1940 I'm not saying Hitler wouldn't have arrived at the same ID himself but I'm saying they're fully involved in this thing the only people who didn't agree with that in the German army and the German General Staff were the logisticians the supply guys and I'm sure you've all heard enough to know that that's sort of a cliche in the military that amateurs talk about tactics and professionals talk about logistics in this case the loggia stations knew what they were doing but nobody listened as usual in the fall of 1940 after they'd studied this problem they said not so much and basically the argument they said and was remarkably prescient the the head of logistics see if you will the g4 of the German army said look what's going to happen is we'll get about five hundred miles seven eight hundred kilometers into Russia and we'll run out of fuel and ammunition and at that point the roads are so terrible and the railroads will all have to be rebuilt because as you perhaps know the German railroads are at a narrower gauge than the Russian railroads and we're just simply not going to be able to support you in your great blitzkrieg maneuvers after the first two months and so after that it's going to be start/stop you're going to have to wait for the supplies and the infantry by the way to catch up with your tanks and then lunge forward again righto supplies again start stop start stop start stop and that's pretty much as what described the next two years they were absolutely on the money about it as far as I know nobody ever allowed Adolf Hitler to hear this explanation it was our friend Franz Halder the chief of German General Staff who basically said well forget about it will fake it but again we all have our sort of selective memories and two years later some of the generals had had second thoughts Guderian vaulter modal were not at all happy but most of the generals were still saying attack attack attack and I'm referring here to what perhaps many of you know about the last major German offensive on the Eastern Front is the attack on the Kursk bulge in July of 1943 and at that time they were all in favor of it Adolf Hitler was sort of saying why are we doing this so I'm not quite sure what the point of all this is but he went along with the generals anyhow and let them attack and it was the first time the blitzkrieg sort of failed to launch it never got through to the breakthrough stage so we never really had a chance to do all their great maneuvers that they were planning up if you even get down to the sort of the lower level you can find that the professionals often made mistakes as well I'm going to give you just one example but I'm sure we could think of others if we tried most of you are perhaps aware that in November of nine 42 the Red Army encircled the German 6th army at Stalingrad and there is a legend out there that Herman Goering well-known drug addict and head of the Luftwaffe promised Hitler that they would resupply the 6th army by air until he relieved it the problem with that is that Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering weren't even in the same country for ten days after the Soviets encircled Stalingrad Goering was back in Germany doing all the other functions that Hitler had given him as number two and it wasn't Goering it was his professional chief of staff general honcho Sonic the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe who said yes mein Fuhrer I think we can resupply Stalingrad now I must tell you in his defense that you shawna quent looked at the facts and talked to the local people of that night and said you know we can't do it went back and tried to convince Hitler otherwise and eventually hashanah committed suicide I'm not saying that was the cause I think it was actually another cause but I don't want to say that he is totally you know the villain here my point is simply that people make mistakes but we only remember when Hitler makes mistakes the other part about this as I said is that sometimes when Hitler didn't follow what their advice he wasn't always wrong and they weren't always right Hitler sort of instinctively figured out very early in the war that this war was going to drag on it was going to be an attrition 'el war rather than a quick blitzkrieg and therefore he started to focus on economic targets like getting the oil fields in son-of-a-gun Chechnya why we keep talking about Chechnya today and places like that whereas his commanders were still thinking of sort of the traditional terms his commanders were saying well if the only capture of Moscow if we only capture Leningrad will succeed well how we go back and look Napoleon in 1812 captured Moscow did the Soviets or the Russians at that time surrender no so to some extent Hitler is right and one of the classic examples of course of Hitler being right maybe for the wrong reasons but still he turns out to be right is on the outskirts of Moscow in 1941 the Soviets launched a relatively weak counter attack the German commanders who are already overstretched because of their logistics decide we can't go any farther and they want to retreat and Hitler says no stay right where you are now you can argue that's a world war one corporal thinking don't give up the trench and maybe you're right but the fact is that if you go look at the circumstances had the Germans retreated they would have had to give up all of the shelter that they had they really would have literally frozen to death so Hitler made the right decision and probably save the German army in the process or at least what was left of it any event next we talked about weather and terrain well doesn't that affect both sides shouldn't they have known this was coming another one of the great myths of 1941 is that the Germans did not have any winter clothing they did have winter clothing maybe not enough for everybody but for you know several hundred thousand guys the problem wasn't that they didn't have the clothing the problem was they couldn't deliver it to the troops because remember what I said about the logisticians saying hey your railroads aren't going to work we can't do this logistically well it became obvious the farther they got away from Poland and the closer they got to Moscow the harder it was to resupply in the beginning of November 1941 not a Dolf Hitler but the Chiefs of Staff of the three German army groups in other words three General Staff officers decided well we don't have enough transportation to move both the winter clothing and the food and ammo the troops the troops need ammo fuel food we're going to have to wait on the clothing but that's not the way the history is usually told is it okay so much then for sort of this background I guess I should show you just briefly for those of you not familiar I'm going to just click this through so you get some sense of the thing this is what the campaign looks like for the first couple of months they reach small ensk which is surprisingly enough about 700 kilometers from where they jumped off and son of a gun they ran out of fuel and they had to stop and sort of stop start and from there on by that time they had an open flank down to the south towards Kiev so they had to cut that off and for the rest of the time they're living hand-to-mouth from there on but let's talk about numbers first thing we have to recognize is the Germans did not complain about being outnumbered when they were winning even in 1941 the Red Army outnumbered them by 4 to 3 in manpower 3 to 1 in aircraft about three and a half to one the tanks and yet the and in fact in the first year of the war for six months of the war the Red Army suffered 4.5 million men killed wounded and captured that's a hundred and fifty percent of the size of the invading force from the axis so it's not about just being outnumbered it's about the other advantages the Germans have not only did they achieve strategic surprise that we could spend all night talking about why Stalin was surprised let's not please but not only were they surprised strategically but also the Soviet Army was caught in transition they were changing their leaders their organization their doctrine their training their locations for defense plans everything was in flux just when the Germans chose to attack the Germans could not have chosen in the short run a better time to attack and that is the reason the principal reason why they were so successful now a year later you fast forward the middle of 1942 and by that time it's been sort of the Darwin Awards those surviving Soviet commanders know what they're doing and suddenly the Germans are not nearly so successful when they launch operations I'm not saying the Red Army always gets things right but certainly that they're not a bunch of stumble bombs they were for the first six months or a year and therefore but the Germans don't want to recognize that that was that that advantage is what gave them such great deal that they were able to succeed they can't sort of it's built into their minds indeed what I'm trying to suggest here is that the command the generals like monste I need be the war got it into their heads that we are so much better than the Russians that they never bother to reassess their opinion later on in the war and as sort of natural first impressions and all that other stuff we we defeated this team last year so we're going to expect to defeat them this year not realizing that yeah maybe they've changed as much as we have right over all the second fallacies not so much that they are outnumbered they knew they're outnumbered didn't they they must have but rather the the belief that part of the Germans that Julie didn't matter doesn't matter the route number we're still so good we can defeat their enemy so rapidly the numbers don't matter seem to remember something like that in 2003 but let's not go there right and it works in the short run it just doesn't work in the long run any event Germany in fact is the poster child for what we like to call the Western Way of war the idea that a well-trained force can achieve rapid offensive decisive victory by superior discipline maneuver and equipment well that works part of the time but if you account or somebody who is not willing to say he's defeated as the Soviets were not and then you encounter somebody who an addition that has all that vast terrain then eventually you your plan gets sorted and forced Germany into a long drawn-out attritional war that they certainly weren't simply weren't prepared for they were set for the short sweet let's get it over with war that which is what blitzkrieg was all about and instead they got the four-year grinding war of annihilation and wonder why we have problems well okay let's talk about the numbers here first of all sort of at the big picture level of the Soviet Union's population and there's a lot of ifs about these figures was twice that of Germany to begin with more than that the Soviet Union has an enormous advantage in terms of trained reservists trained military manpower at the time that the Germans attacked there are about five million men on active duty in the Soviet military but there were 14 million reservists who'd been - through two years of training available to use to build up the army when you needed to to remains and so on by contrast you look at the Germans well the German involve often SS and ver mock together total about seven million in 1941 at which a little over three million we're actually on the Eastern Front but there's no reservists there's 321 thousand men who just finished basic training in May that are available for replacements and that's it and they ran through that many casualties in the first three months why didn't the Germans have reservist well two problems first of all Germany is proportionately a much more industrialized in the Soviet Union so therefore they need the very highly educated skilled people the severe guys you want to be your leaders and your technicians in the army are also the people you want to keep in the factories and indeed some of you know that the so the Germans went back and forth they would mobilize for a particular campaign then a couple months later they'd release people back in a to go back to the factories because their employers the factory men owners are complaining there's a matter of fact of sort of an idea of how unrealistic the Germans were about this on the 21st of May 1941 the okw operations staff that is what we would call to the Joint Chiefs of Staff I guess we'd say issued a memo to the German industrialists saying we're only intend to keep your workers on active duty for four months from the 1st of June to the 30th of September in other words the Soviet Germans really thought they could defeat the Soviet Union and demobilize in four months oops didn't work that way did it secondly the bigger problem is it says up there was a VIP street some of you may remember this if only from high school the Versailles peace treaty imposed on Germany at the end of World War one and it limited the German army to 100,000 men all of whom were enlisted for no less than 12 years that was deliberately done to make sure that the Germans would not have reservists okay now did they cheat on the edge of course they did did Hitler start telling the secretly do a little training on the side as soon as he took office and 3:33 yes he did but basically for about 12 years from say 1922 1932 the Germans don't get to train any of the young men who were coming of age any of the 18 year olds they're called the white years or the blank ears in German history and so the this whole system of training reservists and banking them for future needs broke down then when they did start training in 1935 they openly began drafting people again and said to heck with the Veilside peace treaty when they did that they found that they didn't have enough barracks and enough weapons enough ammunition to train with because Germany had shortages of ammunition and raw materials and they just as with the US Army in 1940 242 which you've heard stories about how you know training with broomsticks and things like this the same thing sort of applies to the Germans if you don't have the weapons the equipment and the ammunition you can't train the people under those circumstances prior to 1941 the Germans never had the training space that you know bunks in the barracks if you will to go back and train those blank ears a very few people if they were technicians let's say electronics guys or somebody who really needed wood almost as a favor be given three months of basic training and that's it so Germany was not able to sort of Bank reservist for the future the way it had done for a century before even the age groups that they did draft were under strength under sized why well think about it if you draft an eighteen year old in 1936 when was he born 1918 conceived in 1917 what's going on in Germany in nineteen seventeen eighteen they're being blockaded and starved to death and now a that most of the young men are off at the front not getting home to see their their girlfriends or wives very often anyhow so you can imagine there are a relatively fewer births there than there would be in an ordinary year more than that as it says down there in that bottom bullet they're really short of leaders everybody likes to talk about how well-trained a hundred thousand man rice fair was well how far it is ninety four and guys because they had to give 6,000 to the airforce Luftwaffe how far did 94 thousand guys go to provide the cadre for an army of seven or eight million eventually not very far right so where do they find those cadres they have to go back to the veterans of World War one and the first sergeants and company commanders and battalion commanders in 1939-40 even going into Russia in 1941 they're all in their 40s they're all veterans of World War one through half a million World War one veteran's in the combat units of the German army in 1941 and back at home they got some of the staff officers running the training operation or 70 years old and it only gets worse than their so you know if some people like to say well the Germans are just so good at this that it doesn't matter that Soviets have got more trained reservists because they're all over aged and badly trained well maybe so but I'm trying to suggest to you if the Germans have much the same problem they run out of people really fast their training has to get shorter and shorter and shorter because they need the guy sent to the front and so they really don't have the people anymore if anything they have far less chance for leadership and so on and then the Soviets do okay so much for sort of big broad generalizations let me talk briefly then about some big issues of why the Germans would think they had more enemies than they really did first is something that is sort of a convention of intelligence and that is you always assume your enemies at full strength unless you're absolutely sure he's not you don't want to underestimate him so you assume that he's got a hundred percent strength if you doubt me I was in the room when the Central Intelligence Agency in the Defense Intelligence Agency decided to do just that about Iraq in 1990 before we invaded them we have to assume that a hundred percent of the tanks and a hundred percent of the men are there so if you compare the enemy's ideal strength to your own actual strength and you know that somebody's in the hospital somebody's home somebody's you know broke his leg or whatever you're inevitably going to exaggerate how strong enemy is compared to you true secondly we tend to think of these huge numbers of forces on a single battlefield but in fact they're not there's a little thing called terrain gets in the way take for example some of you may have heard the word prokhorovka by reputation the largest tank battle in ever in history for German high priority mechanized divisions versus fived soviet tank cores in July of 1943 well it happened but it actually happened on four different battlefields no one of those battlefields had more than 600 tanks that's still a lot of Tanks I grant you but it's not the vast Vista jiz this is you know of endless troops and tanks that we sort of imagine in our memories and you sometimes see in the movies it just didn't happen that way thirdly it's worth noting that in many cases the Germans were defeated not by actual numbers but by phantom numbers by deception plan shadow armies that the Soviets portrayed as being there that weren't really there this is called master Oska you can see the word mask in it right the Soviet doctrine is you combine deception operations to portray something that isn't real with operations security to hide what is real so the other guy doesn't know what you're really doing where the Germans always tricked no they usually figured it out but they didn't figure out in time and so therefore they were often were fighting against imaginary enemies they would concentrate the troops in the wrong place and things like this let me give you sort of two brief examples in the interest of time one I don't have a map for but I think you're going to visualize it very clear weird place in southern Western Ukraine on the knepper river called Corson chef gun coughs key I'm glad I didn't have a beer before I tried to do this but they have and Carson chef Kim coughs key happens to be on the boundary line between two Soviet fronts that is army groups groups of armies huge organizations and they've decided to cooperate with each other and they want to encircle two German cores maybe 50 60 thousand guys right there at the intersection obvious to the Germans too so they're watching for it so how do the the Soviets trick them well the commander of one of these fronts a marshal you've anconeus manages to make one of his main tools his offensive striking force the 5th guards Tank Army appear to be in two places at once how well first he has them attack about 100 kilometers south of where they really plan to attack and after they met a local little attack and so the Germans know they're there they then put in all those deception measures you remember hearing about with relation to tricking the Germans at Normandy you know dummy tanks fake radio conversations lots of noise things like that in the woods to give the impression that 5th guards tank army still there meanwhile the 5th guards packs up and as silently as you can with a but with 500 tanks moves northward 30 or 35 kilometers to in preparation for helping to encircle of course in chef gand coughs key managed it twice I better quit while I'm ahead any event the Germans 8th Army the defender has figured out after 48 hours but that 48 hour headstart meant that the Germans were not ready to defend themselves when 5th guards tank army came crashing in and into the world for them that's just one example of what I'm talking about the most famous example perhaps the largest example of deception is something called Operation by Grazia sometimes known as the death of Army Group center on the 3rd anniversary of the war 22 June 1944 which is my birthday why'd all the disasters happen on my birthday anyhow but I'm on the June of 1944 army group nor center pretty much gets wiped off the map if you can look at this map here you see where that solid red line bulges eastward to around Smolensk and Minsk that's the sector of Army Group center it's an obvious target for the Soviets to attack so the Soviets need to rig the deck they by their calculations remember I told you it's all perceptions they only outnumber the Germans by about a million to 850 thousand which you know that's no advantage at all if the enemy has 85% of what you do that's not going to work so they secretly move in another 400,000 troops three thousand tanks ten thousand gun tubes forty thousand tons of supplies you know just your average run-of-the-mill little logistical movement they certainly move it in and meanwhile they are noisily pretending that they're going to attack where that dashed arrow is down south a notional attack into the Balkans the commander down there in Army Group North Ukraine of ultra modal is really tempted by this he wants to believe it because it appears to give him an opportunity to do a counter attack you don't have to be a military genius to figure out that gee I can just chop in from the north so to speak on that advance and attack their flank and destroy them so vaulter modal goes to a Dolf Hitler notice it's not Hitler's idea remember what I said about blaming Hitler Valter modal goes to Hitler's idea and convinces the Fuhrer that they the 56 sponsor Corps which is the main counter-attack force for Army Group center should be moved south in preparation to attack this entirely imaginary Soviet front and then when the Soviets attack as planned in the place that they wanted to up north they destroyed 25 German divisions in about two weeks hmm not good right that's sort of the kind of problems you have now let's if we in it's worth noting by the way that it all depends again on how you count things the sir the Soviets think they only outnumber the Germans two to one but the US official history written on the basis of all those German accounts says that the Soviets outnumbered the Germans there at three point five to one see what I mean about deceptions tricking everybody any event we're going to sort of skip details because I want spend on one of the things you got to recognize though is that Soviet military science tends to focus on numbers and ratios you aren't a good Soviet officer if you don't have tables and charts and graphs because you perhaps know that for the Communist Marxism is a science not an art and therefore you have you got to have tables and graphs look at Karl Marx this is three volumes of of tables and graphs trying to prove his point well okay so whenever the Soviets looked at this stuff they would always count what is the force ratio what they would call the correlation of forces how many gun tubes have I got per kilometer front versus how many does the enemy have and I want to have of course overwhelming numbers and they would that's the scientific way to do things let me back up to that map that I wanted to show you just really briefly show you an example of this you see that white line in the middle there where it goes from Minsk to small ends to Moscow that's the Minsk Moscow highway one of the very few paved roads a lobbyist place that the Soviets would like to get ahold of the Germans understand that they put an entire Infantry Division just straddling the road to defend it however the Soviets are darn well determined to break through and so they concentrate on a five-mile wide front five divisions and a separate tank brigade against one perhaps slightly stronger German Division and there are four other places on the long front that you have the same kind of force ratio now at that exact point when the Germans tell you they're outnumbered hopelessly yeah that's true but what they don't want to talk about is the deceptions involved or the fact that in other places the Soviets have sort of stretched things out what's called economy force but a few guys with a lot of machine guns and guns artillery pieces to pretend to be a much bigger unit so that you can in fact concentrate your forces where you want to this is in fact part of Soviet doctrine they had a war doctrine before the war called deep operation in glue bokya parofsky and their idea was it was similar to blitzkrieg I'm not going to say they didn't learn something from the Germans but they had their own ideas and basically what they want to do is use rifle armies and artillery and air power to blow a hole in the enemy defenses and then and past these very large combined-arms mechanized forces like our friend 5th guards tank army through it and exploit as far as keep running till the enemy cannot defend reorganize to defend himself as deep as 400 kilometers 400 kilometer that's a long way right how do you do that well it helps if you have four hundred and twelve thousand US supplied Lindley's trucks okay they would not have been able to do it quite so easily without that they would have had us just like the Germans they would have got a short distance and then run out of fuel and amylin had to do it again they probably would have won the war anyhow but it would have been much longer and bloodier so what I'm trying to suggest here is the Germans tend to talk to us about how a number they work yeah of course they were outnumbered but what I suggest you is that the Red Army is successful because of combination of deception concentration of force and a few narrow sectors very rapid deep exploitation so the enemy can't reorganize and I already mentioned this next point that the German commanders who were there in 1941 42 they're the guys whose memoirs we all read Guderian Melanson mon stein people like that what about the commanders of 1943 245 well with one exception I can think of they didn't get to write their memoirs because they're either dead in or in Siberia in prison camp for 10-12 years and so our view of the war is distorted its equivalent to as I like to say something like this supposing that we wanted to write a history of how well the US Army did in World War two and our basis for deciding how well the US Army did in World War two is we're going to ask the Japanese and the Germans how well we fought in 1942 and early 43 and I don't think we'd come off looking - Berto - well out of this okay so yeah of course they're outnumbered but they knew that coming up front didn't they and of course the Soviets like to emphasize numbers so every time the Soviets published another report full of tables at ten to confirm our notion that they're outnumbered but my point to you simply is it's also about it's not so much about being outnumbered at the strategic level at the overall big picture it's about the fact that the Red Army is able to deceive the enemy so they can outnumber them at a particular brain through point and then exploit from it thank you you know you have the microphone anybody got questions I already put you asleep one point I thought you might have raised at least is that it after all was not just a German army that invaded the Soviet Union was a multinational army and I think it was a army that was very difficult to coordinate in many ways part of this comes from a family connection my wife's father in fact from Slovakia was on the Eastern Front presumably fighting for the Germans or you know supply capacity I don't know which but there was there was a bunch of Slovak Sturm satellite state of Slovakia and quite a few of those people never came home as her father did not and at least one uncle was badly wounded at the siege of leningrad so i think that that's a side of the war that is often somewhat slighted that it was a a lot of different nationalities involved and i think that must have been in some ways a real headache for the commander's trying to deal with all of these different nationalities we do know that the soviets at times tried to pick on for example the Italians or the rumen this kind of thing that were they were very aware that their enemies were multinational and so they tried to pick out the weaker ones so I just won a day at that point too you know you're absolutely right that's the other side of not having enough Germans as they start getting their allies in in terms of Slovak service a Slovak regiment captured at Stalingrad there was a Slovak sort of Ponce err division lightly equipped Ponce for division down in the Caucasus trying to get the oil fields and they were just about wiped out in their survivors mutant needs so they were sent home there were the Romanians proportionally suffered more casualties than the Germans did throughout the war I mean he took horrendous casualties after Stalingrad everybody but the Romanians pretty much went home the Hungarians I mean that is to say there were a few units left behind but only the Romanians tried to reconstitute their units everybody else said we've had enough and they went home having suffered enormous casualties the italians sent 220 thousand to the flank outside of Stalingrad and out of that 220,000 only a hundred and twenty-five thousand came home and about ten thousand came home as prisoners five years later and the rest of them are just all gone lost so you're absolutely right and so then the so the Germans turn around and try to get the local nationalities though I'm just right now working on a master's thesis with my Latvian officer talking about the two Latvian divisions so you're right that's part of the problem and then the Hungarians and Romania's would rather fight each other than fight the Soviets for example so they have to put the Italians in between them on the front I'll have the lessons learned from deception influenced today's use of psychological operations that's a good point I'm not sure we can say this in the 1980s we were very fascinated with deception with Muskoka my mentor David glance has a whole book from which I stole those examples to be honest with you called the Soviet military deception in World War two I think the deception people have always looked at them and the psychological operations people have looked at them and to some extent but I can't say that we cite those examples every day this is still sort of an overlooked part of the world though we know a lot more about it than we did 20 30 years ago what affected the invasion of on the Western Front in France so forth in June and July of 44 have two things first of all Hitler was always very nervous about having such a front so that he kept a lot of troops in the West which wasn't always bad they could sort of go there to rest and rebuild and so he oh the very threat of that even before it happened obviously affects these secondly what happens is once the Allies invade the ally the Russians think they're in a competition and so the UH number of occasions the Russians speed up and decide they're going to make their next attack and take casualties for it because they want to make sure they get to Berlin before the the Allies so yeah I did there actually is some very large level coordination between the two like after the bat would battle the bowls when the Germans attacked us we asked the Soviets for help so they speed it up their next attack by a couple of weeks to a bit to bail us out and vice versa okay there's all kinds of hands here I don't know I think that gentleman's next isn't he thanks for coming did either side the Germans or the Soviets have an advantage in the air the German the good point uh the Germans obviously had much more experience because they've been flying and fighting since Spain in 1937 and they managed to catch the Germans the Soviets as I said as they're transitioning in aircraft just as they're transitioning and tanks it took a long long time for the the Red Army to get as good as the Germans I'm not sure they ever were as good but they didn't really become competitive till the end of 1942 the oddly enough the argument I like to use is this that the British and American bombing of Germany whatever it did about industry and you can debate that one all day it caused the Germans to spend a lot of their fighters and a lot of their famous 88 millimeter anti-aircraft guns to bring them home to Germany to defend Germany which indirectly helped the Soviets get air superiority earlier than they would have otherwise but that's not in any manual for air power how do you explain despite all the shortcomings of the German army that it took four years to be defeated because they're very good I didn't say they were not good I just said that they were in a situation that fundamentally they were not capable of winning obviously they were very good and the Soviets were not did not always do things perfectly by any means they didn't even really start to get their act together for the first year and a half of the war but obviously the Germans are very good and also of course as you were saying that earlier they're they're their allies they're their axis satellites did a lot of fighting Germans necessarily give them credit for that the Germans sort of looked down on them because they were trained differently not equipped very well but they certainly did a lot of the fighting and dying process yeah no I didn't mean to suggest the German army isn't good I mean to suggest that we sometimes we tend to exaggerate just how good it is because particularly in the Cold War we thought well we'll do the same thing we and the West German army will be able to stop the Soviets the same way the Germans slowed the Soviets down okay I wonder if you could say a little bit about the purges of the 1930s and the impact that had on the red army High Command enormous one I sort of alluded to that by saying they were transitioning leaders would be actually right if you didn't perhaps understand what he's talking about something on the order of 50% or more of all the commanders from Colonel on up were purged by as part of the great purges in the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1940 41 then when it became obvious that Germany was going to attack eventually some Perce does not always mean executed a lot of those poor guys were sent to the prisons in in the gulags in Siberia and then let out a favorite example of this is Marco marshal Rokossovsky he was then a general who was basically arrested on suspicion sent to Siberia and in nineteen spring of 1941 they realized they need him so they took him out of the prison camp stopped off in Moscow to replace all his teeth because he'd lost them all think of jaws in that movie right and sent him to the front to command a division that's how desperate they were for leaders when they figured it out but you out you're very right that they had lost a lot of the most experienced leaders and made everybody sort of hesitant they would second-guess themselves you know they're sort of looking over their shoulder to see if the secret police are there by the middle of 1942 part of their recovery is that Stalin's learned to trust his generals and he starts to give them more authority and more trust thank you I've always heard the technology of the Germans was significantly better than the Soviets in 1941 is that true in 1941 no in 1940 I think we want to have for anyone you have to say the newest Soviet tanks were superior to what the Germans had now when people talk about this the technology of German tanks are usually talking about what I call the third generation that is to say the Panthers the Tigers things like that that are fielded in 1943 they have certain amount of teething problems but they are magnificent machines the problem is that they are such an investment in manpower and labor to make this magnificent machine that they are outnumbered the total number of tiger tanks produced in World War two is equal to about three months of German of a Soviet tank production of t-34 and the war went on for three and a half years okay so yes that that's another one of those sort of myths that the Germans just simply were better at using what they had in 4142 until as they said the the Soviet sort of overcome overcame all their problems including the purges and then then it became more of an even operation in many cases the the Soviets had better equipment I think it's really bad if you talk about the axis I mean I happen to be reading a book about the Italians they're still carrying a rifle designed in 1896 and they're fighting against the Soviets who have submachine guns you just can't deal with that difference in firepower my most vivid memories of the war I was a child at the time was late 44 the Battle of the Bulge mm-hmm so that must have entailed a tremendous shift of material and manpower from the eastern front to the Western Front but you go into that a bit what really happened there I think you put your finger on it that Hitler his hope was that he could repeat 1940 basically that he could punch through the Allies in about the same area that they punched through the French in 1940 pinned them back against the coastline in another in the Netherlands and Belgium and so on and eliminate a large part of the four in the West so the then he could turn around and fight the Soviets but as you suggest to do that he took many of his very best units from the Eastern Front from Hungary as I recall specifically at that point and sent them to the Western Front and then they did not succeed not that they didn't a good job but they just they didn't have the same opportunities and they did not succeed and so in that case he probably speeded up his defeat in the east but you can argue that's the kind of gamble that the people like munch time were begging him to do all the way during the war and he didn't want to do it until then that point he really doesn't have a bull bunch of choice that except as you say to shift forces from one front to the other that's my basic point that the the Soviets were more efficient I don't know we can argue all day about about efficiently how efficiently the British and Americans were but I think they were certainly better supplied right please so that so we can get this on tape forgive me one of the issues that you've alluded to but is critical I think in strategically and during this period of time is the role of logistics ultimately where the Germans ever going to have enough logistics to fight on either side and win well no the basic problem that Germany has is the matter how good they are at designing and fighting they don't have enough raw materials and they don't have enough labor to produce sufficient weapons and supplies to keep them going you're absolutely right and so there and if you the more troops you send to the front their only alternative is I hate to say this go to slave labor not just a Jewish slave labor but captured Soviet citizens and POWs put to work and so you're right they just do not have the resources to do what they need to do logistically yeah you still need stuff and from the very goodman albert speer who is a minister of armaments from 42 to 45 says I have to be careful Speer usually told us what we wanted to hear but he says that they would have run out of raw materials in another six months even if we had not occupied Germany you said that you said that the German High Command should have anticipated the problems of terrain and weather that they would face but didn't they should have anticipated the problem of the Soviets greater numbers but didn't I wondered if they considered or planned for or anticipated the challenges of partisan warfare that they would face in the Soviet Union I think they definitely did not anticipate the the challenges of partisan warfare you're absolutely right about that one the when they first entered the Soviet Union as many of you know a number of the minorities you yellow Russians Latvians Estonians Cossacks Ukrainians were very unhappy with Soviet rule and had they been treated properly they might have gotten better as it was a certain number than were recruited to to the German side but the German treatment of them as being basically just occupied people did not help let's put it that way and it sort of provoked even before Moscow got organized this kind of partisan warfare in the rear areas which makes it very hard to move everything or do anything yeah all right thank you for attention folks oh I forgot to mention here and see if I get it back up again how did this happen yeah that's what we need to have up the next slide but I know if it'll work for me our next speech okay yeah here we go pretty quickly but this is what we're going to do next month we hope you'll come out we hope the weather will be better and thanks again for coming today yeah next time thank you you just get this SuperDuper fancy that year it's my brand-new computer and I can't make

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 854,884

Rating: 4.6370816 out of 5

Keywords: 2013, Ft. Leavenworth, WWII, Dole Institute of Politics, Dole Institute, KU, University of Kansas, For Leavenworth, Military History, Soviet Union, Germany, Operation Barbarossa

Id: zinPbUZUHDE

Length: 55min 35sec (3335 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/wewladendmylife]

A must watch for people who fall for German myths about the war. His segment on the "outnumbered" Wehrmacht is essential in understanding the Eastern Front.

[u/yuckyucky]

awesome talk, he really knows his stuff, well worth watching. thanks!