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JcDent posted:OK, so, Battle of Kursk: how do the Soviets start out with a 2:1 or even 3:1 advantage in anything, have well-prepared defensive positions, and still lose about 3-5 times more of everything than Germans do? Was it training, technical poo poo, or whatever? Relatively poor tactical leadership - even in 1943 the Germans were still just much more effective at the tactical level than the Soviets were for a whole host of reasons. There was also a very costly counteroffensive by 5th Guards Tank Army around Prokhorovka (which led Stalin to berate it's commander along the lines of "What have you done to my tank army?!"). One other important note is in the comparison of self-reported German numbers vs self-reported Soviet numbers. Germany considered Kursk to last from 5th-16th July, while the Soviets also included the subsequent counteroffensives which lasted well over a month, so often it's not like for like that is being compared with the casualty figures.
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Mar 20, 2018 14:40
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JcDent posted:OK, so, Battle of Kursk: how do the Soviets start out with a 2:1 or even 3:1 advantage in anything, have well-prepared defensive positions, and still lose about 3-5 times more of everything than Germans do? Was it training, technical poo poo, or whatever? Off the top of my head -- by the time of Kursk they still didn't have the 85mm T-34/85 in production, the Germans still had an air force capable of taking to the skies
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Mar 20, 2018 14:48
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JcDent posted:OK, so, Battle of Kursk: how do the Soviets start out with a 2:1 or even 3:1 advantage in anything, have well-prepared defensive positions, and still lose about 3-5 times more of everything than Germans do? Was it training, technical poo poo, or whatever? The short version is that you really need to think of the Battle of Kursk not so much as a battle that was lost by the German military, but a German strategic offensive that was halted. Think about the 1941 invasion and the massive breakout on the southern flank that happened in 1942. Kursk was supposed to be the beginning of another one of those in 1943, but the Russians stopped it cold. The way the Soviets set up Kursk is basically defense_in_depth.txt. The Germans are able to achieve localized superiority in plenty of places and achieve local objectives, but then you have the fortifications on the next hill over that prevents that breakthrough and subsequent encircling action. Think of offensives in WW1 to give you a good idea. Even if you achieve your day 1 objectives you've taken the first in a belt of defenses. Part of defense in depth is understanding that your objective isn't necessarily to destroy the enemy (that's a job for your counter attack) or to even minimize your own casualties, but to blunt and turn what could otherwise be a catastrophic break through. As for the losses, there are two things working in parallel. First off, the casualties suffered at Kursk are a bit controversial. First off we only have a portion of the German casualty figures. SOme of the pertinent documents were captured by the US and sent back to DC after the war, and some were captured by the Russians. The ones that sit in the Soviet archives still haven't been worked over well. There are some who say that after the war German losses at Kursk got played down. The other issue is one of record keeping and the difference between how the Soviets and the Germans counted that poo poo. This thread has already talked a lot about it with regards to tanks. In the soviet records the same tank might show up as destroyed two or three times because of how they determined losses - units get written off on the battlefield and are subsequently repaired and returned to service. Meanwhile you have the Germans only counting total write-offs as "destroyed," leading to jokes about how a panzer division might only suffer two confirmed losses, but 15 of its vehicles are on fire and 15 miles behind enemy lines (but hey, we might be able to recapture and repair them!). THEN you have the issue of non-combat issues that render vehicles ineffective for the fight but which aren't technically "losses." The performance of the Panther in the battle is a great example of this. The Germans had something like 140 of the brand new tank on the line when the battle started, but only 10 of them were operational at the end. That's a staggering number of vehicles rendered ineffective, but only something like 20 of those were recorded as losses because they were total write offs. Some of the remainder were damaged in a way that they were recoverable and many others failed due to mechanical issues. So, on paper the Germans take relatively few losses with these fancy new tanks however by the time the operation is at an end something like 92% of them are combat ineffective and worthless for, say, creating a break through or defending from a Soviet counterattack. That said, it's also the perfect storm for creating those lopsided figures. The Wehrmacht in the summer of 1943 is still mostly well equipped and mostly skilled veterans. Meanwhile the Soviets just finished rebuilding the Red Army from the losses sustained in the first year of the war and you still have a lot of people figuring out best practices. In a lot of ways Kursk is the debut of the Red Army that will become so effective over the next two years, while it's also the high water mark of the Wehrmacht that was so effective over the previous two. A lot of the Soviet losses were sustained in counter-attacks also, so it's not just a simple case of the Germans mysteriously solving the puzzle of how you assault an entrenched enemy and kill more of them than they kill of you. You also have an unusual concentration of the heaviest German weapons in terrain that was really favorable to their use. There is a large concentration of Tigers, for example, and ironically the fact that a break out is never achieved means that they get to be really goddamend effective at doing what they did as their lack of strategic mobility never came into play to the extent that it could have. The steppe around Kursk is also the sort of terrain that really advantages the force that has long reaching, powerful armaments on their vehicles. 1943 era tigers facing off 1943 era T34s across open fields is pretty much a wehraboo tank nut's wet dream. In a lot of ways Kursk is that tiny nugget of truth that creates those fantasies about 5:1 K/D ratios for German soldiers and all the pud pulling over the superior German soldier facing off the waves of inferior Russian conscripts. It's a pretty exceptional battle that was ultimately a loss for the Germans because operational initiative shifted decisively in the favor of the Soviets after that point, and after this it's all down hill (from the German perspective) both in terms of military losses and raw loss ratios. note that this isn't anything like a full answer.
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Mar 20, 2018 14:50
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Nm, beaten
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Mar 20, 2018 14:52
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feedmegin posted:Are you getting those figures just by looking at Wikipedia, out of curiosity? Because eg if those loss and kill stats are coming primarily from German sources they are of dubious reliability. Taking a quick glance at the Wikipedia entry it looks like the Soviet figures are based on some good scholarship by people who weren't Nazis and were looking at Soviet records. The real issue is a categorical one - how do we define when the battle took place, how do we categorize things like people who are wounded and return to duty, and how do the German and Russian practices compare? Plus the issue of the half complete German records, the tales German generals were telling about their own prowess and ability to husband their resources after the war, etc. The tl;dr on Kursk is that it really is an ugly situation for the Soviets. I spell it out more in my longer write up above, but it's that kernel of truth to the wehraboo fantasies. The issue is that your typical wehraboo extrapolates Kursk out to the rest of the war when the reality is that it's much, much more nuanced than that.
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Mar 20, 2018 14:54
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bewbies posted:Why weren't the AA light cruisers more effective? It seems like a really good drat idea. Because anti-aircraft weapons in ww2 were only really effective at pretty short ranges so having a separate ship do it is not particularly useful.
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Mar 20, 2018 14:58
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bewbies posted:Why weren't the AA light cruisers more effective? It seems like a really good drat idea. Because other ships did the same job better and because it didn't really fit USN doctrine. The light cruiser was historically something of a doctrinal bastard that rarely had a well defined identity or purpose in a fleet - the commerce raider role was largely obsoleted by submarines and aircraft, leading light cruisers to mainly a destroyer leader role. For the AA role, bigger ships carry more and bigger AA suites, and this is what lead to the likes of the Alaska and Iowa classes. These were larger ships, carrying more and bigger AA batteries than any AA light cruiser, and the USN typically operated in large, cohesive task forces where big ships with big AA batteries was much preferred over smaller ships with smaller AA batteries. Something popular history often forgets is that one of the main jobs of big surface combatants in WW2 ended up being huge AA platforms. This was something the Iowa class particularly excelled at, being fast enough to keep up with the fleet carriers and carrying enormous throw weight of AA firepower coupled with sophisticated fire control systems. AA light cruisers were a fine idea, there were just other ships serving the same strategic role and doing it better.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:02
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Cythereal posted:Because other ships did the same job better and because it didn't really fit USN doctrine. The light cruiser was historically something of a doctrinal bastard that rarely had a well defined identity or purpose in a fleet - the commerce raider role was largely obsoleted by submarines and aircraft, leading light cruisers to mainly a destroyer leader role. For the AA role, bigger ships carry more and bigger AA suites, and this is what lead to the likes of the Alaska and Iowa classes. These were larger ships, carrying more and bigger AA batteries than any AA light cruiser, and the USN typically operated in large, cohesive task forces where big ships with big AA batteries was much preferred over smaller ships with smaller AA batteries. I realize this is very ex post facto but The AA suites of the Atlantas was the more or less the same as the heavies, right? I've no idea how many light cruisers you could build for the cost of an Iowa but I bet it is quite a few. According to my vast knowledge of Air Defense Operations (and assuming the same basic principles translate to surface ships with mid 20th century armaments), having more and dispersed platforms makes one's air defenses a whole lot more effective than a single centralized platform. In other words, it seems like building a lot of CLAAs and distributing them throughout the fleet would've been the most efficient way to build a surface AA capability. Is there any analysis on why they didn't arrive at the same conclusion?
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Mar 20, 2018 15:18
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bewbies posted:I realize this is very ex post facto but Probably because even if a CLAA is cheaper than a battleship, a battleship can still be used for shore bombardment and other things, while a CLAA is only going to be effective at air defense. Meanwhile, destroyers are even cheaper than light cruisers, are fast enough and handy enough to do all kinds of poo poo, and the later ones like the Sumner Class ships still hefted a fairly heavy AA armament. Edit: For comparison: Late Atlanta class cruiser: Displacement: 6,718 long-tons (standard); 7,400 long-tons (loaded) Complement: Officer: 47 Enlisted: 766 12 × 5 in (127 mm)/38 cal guns 8 × dual 40 mm/56 cal anti-aircraft guns 16 × 20 mm/70 cal anti-aircraft cannons 8 × 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes Alan M. Sumner class destroyer: Displacement: 2,200–2,220 tons standard, 3,515 tons full load Complement: 336–363 6 × 5 in/38 cal guns (127 mm) (in 3 × 2 Mk 38 DP mounts) 12 × 40 mm Bofors AA guns (2 × 4 & 2 × 2) 11 × 20 mm Oerlikon cannons 2 × Depth charge racks 6 × K-gun depth charge throwers 10 × 21 in (533 mm) torpedo tubes Acebuckeye13 fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 15:24
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Probably because the Clevelands had a similar number of 5" guns and more 40mms along with a better surface armament (also on a much larger hull).
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Mar 20, 2018 15:28
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Why is the bigger and more pointy M82 shell performing worse than the M77?
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Mar 20, 2018 15:30
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Probably because even if a CLAA is cheaper than a battleship, a battleship can still be used for shore bombardment and other things, while a CLAA is only going to be effective at air defense. Meanwhile, destroyers are even cheaper than light cruisers, are fast enough and handy enough to do all kinds of poo poo, and the later ones like the Sumner Class ships still hefted a fairly heavy AA armament. Pretty much. Larger ships also offer more stable firing platforms with better fire control, and are more resilient to incoming damage than CLAAs - particularly important given the kamikaze threat. Battleships were in part greatly valued for air defense because they were very tempting targets for kamikazes, and could take kamikaze hits much better than lighter ships while the ship's larger size and weight offered improved accuracy. The USN also made extensive use of battleships as makeshift oilers, thanks to USN battleships being remarkably fuel-efficient for their size and carrying massive fuel bunkers that were often called upon to help refuel the rest of the task force. bewbies posted:According to my vast knowledge of Air Defense Operations (and assuming the same basic principles translate to surface ships with mid 20th century armaments), having more and dispersed platforms makes one's air defenses a whole lot more effective than a single centralized platform. These were not the conclusions the USN reached during WW2. The American doctrine for fleet air defense was to curl the fleet up in a giant spiny ball of AA death, and larger AA platforms were more attractive for that doctrine, combined with the USN having generally the best flak and fire control of any fleet of the war. Dispersal and maneuver were the Japanese preference.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:30
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Is it really cheaper to build a bunch of CLs than a single BB? What are the construction costs of each, both in terms of shipyard time and materials? Intuitively I could see a CL being significantly cheaper, but I could also see building ships on those scales being a huge enough undertaking to begin with that the difference isn't as large as might be suspected. fake edit: some quick google-grade "research" points to an Iowa costing $100 million. I can't find info on light cruiser specifically, but a Baltimore-class heavy cruiser was $40 million. Depending on how much more effective, survivable, etc a BB was getting a ton of CVLs might have been a false economy.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:33
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Late Atlanta class cruiser: This makes sense - did the destroyers have comparable fire control? Cythereal posted:These were not the conclusions the USN reached during WW2. The American doctrine for fleet air defense was to curl the fleet up in a giant spiny ball of AA death, and larger AA platforms were more attractive for that doctrine, combined with the USN having generally the best flak and fire control of any fleet of the war. Dispersal and maneuver were the Japanese preference. "Dispersal and maneuver" on a naval scale isn't really what I meant by "decentralized" - more like, having 6 or 8 CLAAs or a bunch of destroyers screening a battle group space a couple thousand yards apart seems like it'd be a much more effective AA Death Ball than a couple of centrally located battleships.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:38
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PittTheElder posted:Didn't European medieval peasants have like a poo poo load of days off in the year though? Like yeah planting and harvest time is tough going, and the local lord will probably corvee some days of labour, but I was under the impression a lot of their time was down time. I can't remember where I read that mind you. What we have that ye olde peasants didn't have: Electric lighting that allows you to work outside even after the sun has set Mechanical beasts of burden that don't tire from working around the clock (what is a clock?) Roads and vehicles that make it effortless to get to your place of work, be it the field or an office Water that doesn't need to be manually carried from the closest well or river which might not be that close Water & weather proof clothing Coffee Take any of those away and our civilization would collapse and we'd be back to being naked villagers who'd never be able to find back to their home village again
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Mar 20, 2018 15:40
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bewbies posted:This makes sense - did the destroyers have comparable fire control? No. quote:"Dispersal and maneuver" on a naval scale isn't really what I meant by "decentralized" - more like, having 6 or 8 CLAAs or a bunch of destroyers screening a battle group space a couple thousand yards apart seems like it'd be a much more effective AA Death Ball than a couple of centrally located battleships. It doesn't work like that. WW2 naval AA is short-ranged and not particularly accurate even with radar and fire control. Kamikazes were very difficult to intercept and bring down except in their terminal phases, and they weren't going after destroyers and light cruisers as a general rule. And again, other factors that have nothing to do with the AA batteries themselves - larger ships make for more stable and accurate firing platforms, are much more resistant to damage, and have considerable utility for non-AA tasks that CLAAs did not. Your arguments would have more merit if we weren't talking about the late phase of the Pacific Theater when the air threat was primarily kamikazes rather than traditional naval air power. The kamikaze threat was a very unique one in military history, and produced a very unique environment.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:42
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Is there any data showing the difference in accuracy (and throw weight too, I suppose) between a battleship and a lighter ship? I still feel like the math would show lots of lighter ships being more effective, especially considering the limitations in accuracy. It also seems like kamikaze-avoidance would favor the use of smaller/lighter platforms but I have no idea how hard it is to hit a ship with a plane.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:52
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bewbies posted:It also seems like kamikaze-avoidance would favor the use of smaller/lighter platforms but I have no idea how hard it is to hit a ship with a plane. It's pretty easy if you don't intend to survive. Kamikazes did miss occasionally, but bear in mind that they almost always were targeted at the big ships - carriers, battleships, oilers, ships like that. Late war USN battleships were not only covered in AA guns with radar and the best fire control systems of the war, they were also valuable ablative armor for the carriers which were much more vulnerable.
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Mar 20, 2018 15:56
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Nenonen posted:What we have that ye olde peasants didn't have: What's pretty interesting is we now have places which still don't have the list above, but do have cell phones.
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Mar 20, 2018 16:09
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Cythereal posted:It's pretty easy if you don't intend to survive. Kamikazes did miss occasionally, but bear in mind that they almost always were targeted at the big ships - carriers, battleships, oilers, ships like that. Late war USN battleships were not only covered in AA guns with radar and the best fire control systems of the war, they were also valuable ablative armor for the carriers which were much more vulnerable. I remember an episode of Hardcore History starting with a story about Dan's dad telling a younger Dan about serving on a WWII radar picket destroyer, and how he had internalised the fact that he was absolutely going to die via kamikaze at some point (because as you point out, that was his ship's job), and it being a real mindfuck when the war was ending and he realised he was actually going to survive.
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Mar 20, 2018 16:14
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PittTheElder posted:Didn't European medieval peasants have like a poo poo load of days off in the year though? Like yeah planting and harvest time is tough going, and the local lord will probably corvee some days of labour, but I was under the impression a lot of their time was down time. I can't remember where I read that mind you. There's a big gap between medieval times and a couple of hundred years ago. Working hours were already very long by the 17th century. For example evidence suggested that printers in early modern London theoretically worked more that 14 hours a day, six days a week. Of course, we also have evidence of workers regularly getting pissed at lunch, going to three hour plays, and apprentices had enough free time to get into riots, so we should probably assume there was some leeway. But it was less than two hundred years ago that working hours in England for women and children was limited to 10 hours, so I feel pretty safe in assuming that the average Western worker today works fewer hours than they did a hundred, two hundred, or four hundred years ago, although possible less than they did fifty or 800 years ago. Life for white collar workers, on the other hand, has got harder. A British civil servant in the 19th c worked 10 to four, with a gentlemanly hour off for lunch, with a half day on Saturday.
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Mar 20, 2018 16:25
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Coming in late on the Kursk discussion, but IIRC part of the difference also comes from the Soviets basically writing off vehicles the Germans would have recovered and repaired. There are a number of reasons (most good, a few bad) why the Soviets did it that way, but at least part of the discrepancy is that.bewbies posted:Is there any data showing the difference in accuracy (and throw weight too, I suppose) between a battleship and a lighter ship? I still feel like the math would show lots of lighter ships being more effective, especially considering the limitations in accuracy. The high level part I remember is that large ships with large guns turn out to be significantly more accurate and long-ranged than smaller ships until you're pretty late into the 20th century. Add in the armor advantage of large ships and the idea of fewer BBs being more valuable than lots of CLs or even CAs in a fleet engagement begins to really sink in. It's a bit analogous to fleet carriers trumping escort carriers unless you literally need something in two places at once, though the underlying causes are different. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 16:42
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Where do nomadic groups living within settled societies or making their living trucking goods between settled societies fit in in the argument over settlement or hunter-gathering? Last book I read that touched on the whole subject implied that there's intermediate levels between hunter-gathering and settled agriculture, I have no idea how that works. PittTheElder posted:Didn't European medieval peasants have like a poo poo load of days off in the year though? Like yeah planting and harvest time is tough going, and the local lord will probably corvee some days of labour, but I was under the impression a lot of their time was down time. I can't remember where I read that mind you. According to QI, some medieval french peasants just straight-up hibernated through the winter. Not the most reliable source though. If you go back and look at people's past predictions on how the future would be, there's a big expectation that all the labor saving devices in the future would reduce the labor force's overall workload, as opposed to what did happen where as labor got reduced, affected industries just reduced the amount of laborers.
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Mar 20, 2018 16:46
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SlothfulCobra posted:Last book I read that touched on the whole subject implied that there's intermediate levels between hunter-gathering and settled agriculture, I have no idea how that works. This sort of lifestyle becomes really inconvenient to keep up once all the land around is technically somebody's property. At that point it's easier to put down stakes and invest in a proper farm. Siivola fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 17:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:According to QI, some medieval french peasants just straight-up hibernated through the winter. Not the most reliable source though. David Attenborough voice: "As the green shoots of spring break from the thawing soil, the French peasant rises from his winter burrow. He will spend several weeks grazing on the lush green grass, before stripping off his coarse smock, and heading off naked into the fields. Most likely he will perish, drowned in a river or run over by an ox cart, but if he is lucky he will find a female peasant roaming the fields, and the great cycle will continue. Either way, it is certain that he will never find his way back to this burrow before winter falls."
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Mar 20, 2018 17:20
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Mr Enderby posted:David Attenborough voice: This really needs the accordion music from 'Allo 'Allo playing in the background.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:40
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SlothfulCobra posted:Where do nomadic groups living within settled societies or making their living trucking goods between settled societies fit in in the argument over settlement or hunter-gathering? For sure Pastoralism is a thing, and there's no shortage of Pastoral societies to check out.
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Mar 20, 2018 17:54
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Coming in late on the Kursk discussion, but IIRC part of the difference also comes from the Soviets basically writing off vehicles the Germans would have recovered and repaired. There are a number of reasons (most good, a few bad) why the Soviets did it that way, but at least part of the discrepancy is that. It's not that the Soviets wrote off less damaged vehicles than the Germans, it's that in after action reports the Soviets counted a combat ineffective vehicle destroyed, while for the Germans to count a vehicle as destroyed it had to be damaged beyond reasonable repair. This is a big factor (but not the only factor) in the k/d ratios Wehraboos love to jerk over. "Destroyed" Soviet tanks often came back to haunt the Germans, but destroyed German tanks stayed destroyed. They simply had different methods of tallying it up.
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Mar 20, 2018 19:26
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What I find so interesting about Kursk isn’t the failed German offensive of Operation Citadel. It’s that the Red Army was now so massively powerful that they not only parried that offensive but then immediately followed it up with an even larger counter offensive that absolutely blew the Germans away. The Germans put everything into attacking the Kursk Salient and still the whole thing was basically a side show prelude to what the Soviets were planning to do that summer. Is it too much to say that the only reason that the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front didn’t completely collapse in 1943 was because they had so much space to keep falling back and so the Soviets just tired themselves out before long? That’s basically what happened in the winter 1941-42 and 42-43 counteroffensives except this time they didn’t give up three hundred miles of new territory to the Germans first. Shimrra Jamaane fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 20:42
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To be fair the Red Army had also been cramming a absurd amount of men and materiel into the Kursk salient for over six months prior to the offensive. There were so many anti tank guns in the Kursk salient that for every nine infantry there was a AT gun and crew. Add to that the Germans were thoroughly owned on the intelligence front - The RA started bombarding the German artillery positions precisely one hour before the Germans' own preliminary bombardment was scheduled to start - And you have a foregone conclusion. The Soviets spent six months turning the Kursk salient into the most heavily defended area in history. Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 20:58
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:What I find so interesting about Kursk isn’t the failed German offensive of Operation Citadel. It’s that the Red Army was now so massively powerful that they not only parried that offensive but then immediately followed it up with an even larger counter offensive that absolutely blew the Germans away. The Germans put everything into attacking the Kursk Salient and still the whole thing was basically a side show prelude to what the Soviets were planning to do that summer. Kind of, but the Germans did manage to retreat in good order in places and generally made it so the Soviets couldn't run completely wild in the rear. If you want to see what THAT looks like take a look at the summer of 1944. Bagration, and the shattering of Army Group Center. That's what a collapsed line looks like. The advances made on a day by day basis were, in that case, frequently limited more by logistical concerns than the resistance of the Wehrmacht. In 1943, not so much.
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Mar 20, 2018 21:01
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Geisladisk posted:To be fair the Red Army had also been cramming a absurd amount of men and materiel into the Kursk salient for over six months prior to the offensive. There were so many anti tank guns in the Kursk salient that for every nine infantry there was a AT gun and crew. Yeah and that makes what the Red Army did all the more impressive. All of that effort and resources into defending the salient and it was still just a sideshow to the summer offensive that they themselves were planning.
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Mar 20, 2018 21:02
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Yeah and that makes what the Red Army did all the more impressive. All of that effort and resources into defending the salient and it was still just a sideshow to the summer offensive that they themselves were planning. Oh yeah, absolutely - But it is understandable when you take into account that they had six months advance warning to plan not only the defensive but the counteroffensive as well.
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Mar 20, 2018 21:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:Kind of, but the Germans did manage to retreat in good order in places and generally made it so the Soviets couldn't run completely wild in the rear. If you want to see what THAT looks like take a look at the summer of 1944. Bagration, and the shattering of Army Group Center. That's what a collapsed line looks like. The advances made on a day by day basis were, in that case, frequently limited more by logistical concerns than the resistance of the Wehrmacht. In 1943, not so much. Yeah Bagration completely annihilated the Germans in the East. Doesn’t Glantz posit that the Soviets could have made a beeline and taken Berlin as early as January 1945 if Stalin wasn’t far more concerned with the geopolitical goal of taking the Balkans?
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Mar 20, 2018 21:14
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JcDent posted:OK, so, Battle of Kursk: how do the Soviets start out with a 2:1 or even 3:1 advantage in anything, have well-prepared defensive positions, and still lose about 3-5 times more of everything than Germans do? Was it training, technical poo poo, or whatever? Worth pointing out that those values for Soviet strength at Kursk are basically what the Soviets have in and around the Kursk salient, not necessarily what actually faced the teeth of the German offensive. The latter being focused on a very narrow area. Edit: as you might expect, the armies of the likes of Chibisov and Chernyakhovsky didn't have much to do but stand there during the battle, though they are still counted as part of Soviet defences for the salient. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Battle_of_Kursk_%28map%29.jpg Fangz fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 21:14
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https://twitter.com/ThomasWictor/status/976177425557045248 Keeping an eye out for this
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Mar 20, 2018 21:53
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Doesn’t Glantz posit that the Soviets could have made a beeline and taken Berlin as early as January 1945 if Stalin wasn’t far more concerned with the geopolitical goal of taking the Balkans? Or the timing of taking/not taking Warsaw. Cessna fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 21:54
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The Soviets were going at their own convenient pace post-Kursk. They knew the war was won, it was only a matter of winning it in the most advantageous way. They halted 60km from Berlin for almost two months after the Vistula offensive, for instance.
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Mar 20, 2018 22:09
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Geisladisk posted:The Soviets were going at their own convenient pace post-Kursk. They knew the war was won, it was only a matter of winning it in the most advantageous way. They halted 60km from Berlin for almost two months after the Vistula offensive, for instance. and even so it cost a phenomenal amount to take Berlin. Just because someone is obviously going to win doesn't mean it's not going to be costly. "Convenient" is a bad framing, except for the part where they threw the Poles under the bus, that was bad. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 20, 2018 22:39
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Geisladisk posted:The Soviets were going at their own convenient pace post-Kursk. They knew the war was won, it was only a matter of winning it in the most advantageous way. They halted 60km from Berlin for almost two months after the Vistula offensive, for instance. Eh I think that’s going a bit too far. Stalin wasn’t still screaming for a Second Front in 1944 for nothing, it was a miserable slog for the Soviets. By 1945 they were basically running out of soldiers.
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Mar 20, 2018 22:46
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