It's funny because my high school history class tried to teach me the human wave tactic line and I basically went "That makes no sense, they had other weapons besides rifles, they would at least hand off sidearms or smgs like in the video games"
That's right folks, I didn't believe the propaganda because I played too many games
Also, why would you ever cross the Volga during the daytime lol that would be suicide
The idea that the Soviets shot tons of deserters is a lie that won't die. One of the jobs of the infamous "Blocking units" was to round up deserters and send them to a gathering area from which they'd be sent back to their unit. They might get some kind of official reprimand or get beat up by their comrades, but for the most part they were just put back to work. idk if it's because people understood that most desertions were panic, not malice, or that people were just too valuable to take off the front line, but the notion that huge numbers of deserters were shot is nonsense. The same goes for the other armies. The US only shot a handful, and from what I understand the Nazis likewise ordered very few deserters or even mutineers killed.
Well, it was also because people would sometimes wander off or wait behind the unit to scavenge and get lost. The point was to make sure you knew where everyone was, and more importantly, make sure they knew where they were and were supposed to go. Soldiers are not, particularly in this era, omniscient, and there are many examples, from both WWI and WWII, where American troops would get surrounded and halved because they would lose communication, push out too far and get surrounded. If they had had blocking units they were in constant contact with to fall back towards and protecting their rear, this wouldn't happen and they would be able to save on manpower. Soviet losses were rarely because of these kinds of tactical missteps (although they did happen), and more due to the sheer level of firepower that they were facing and the gains they were attempting to achieve.
That role is so important. During Shiloh Grant had the huge number of attempted deserters, stragglers, and people separating during retreats rapidly reformed into new units regardless of their existing ones. Rather than find who they belonged to or send deserters back to their correct unit, he made new ones and reinforced. This helped turn a rout into a victory. And just like the Soviets, he was called a "Butcher". Grant was correct as was Stalin.
The Grant documentary from a few years ago dramatizes this well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6hehVbFYG8
The ”muh Soviet human waves” shit is propaganda invented by a Nazi.
And by that I mean he did it after WWII and managed to get Western countries to accept it.
Best part is, Gen Patton literally did that shit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_fire
I think the first thing any army needs to do if it wants to achieve victory is shoot the general officers.
The only reasonable version of "Human waves" I've ever heard is that during the Korean war the Korean and PLA troops had very limited radios. Fighting at night without radios, they'd send an assault group forward, wait ten minutes, and then having heard nothing back from the assault group they'd send the next group forward to join the assault.
This would normally be fine, since they assumed if the assault was repulsed the group would retreat back to them and they'd know not to send the next group. But what allegedly happened was the communist troops were either wiped out, or pinned down and unable to retreat, so the next group and next group and so forth were being sent in to a meat grinder due to poor command and control.
I don't know if it's true, but it makes slightly more sense than "lol we have more men than they have bullets" or whatever the fuck.
Even wikipedia points out that the "human wave attack" thing is a US invention and born out of racist confusion upon seeing short attack tactics
A typical Chinese short attack was carried out at night by numerous fireteams on a narrow front against the weakest point in enemy defenses.[29] The PVA assault team would crawl undetected within grenade range, then launch surprise attacks against the defenders in order to breach the defenses by relying on maximum shock and confusion.[29] If the initial shock failed to breach the defenses, additional fireteams would press on behind them and attack the same point until a breach was created.[29] Once penetration was achieved, the bulk of the Chinese forces would move into the enemy rear and attack from behind.[31] During the attacks, the Chinese assault teams would disperse while masking themselves using the terrain, and this made it difficult for UN defenders to target numerous Chinese troops.[32] Attacks by the successive Chinese fireteams were also carefully timed to minimize casualties.[33] Due to primitive communication systems and tight political controls within the Chinese army, short attacks were often repeated indefinitely until either the defenses were penetrated or the attacker's ammunition supply were exhausted, regardless of the chances of success or the human cost
So yeah radios made these go on too long, but the whole thing was an actual tactic and hardly waves being thrown
In response to the media's stereotype of Chinese assault troops deployed in vast "human seas", a joke circulated among the US servicemen was "How many hordes are there in a Chinese platoon?"
The RKKA achieving worse kill ratios than the WAllies is pretty true though. This is not really well understood, but for almost all points of the war the RKKA operated under deficencies of artillery, whether it be from ammunition shortages1, quantity of tubes or simply a lack of radios for fire control. The real conclusion you should draw is that it says a lot about how well commanded and solid Soviet doctrine was that they were able to accomplish so much so quickly with such limitations. If the RKKA could equip their formations as lavishly as the WAllies did with armoured transports, radios and as much CAS and artillery as the WAllies had they would have been in Berlin by mid '44.
1 Explosives for shells etc. were produced in Ukraine, which was obviously occupied.
It's genuinely hard to overstate the tactics and sacrifices of the soviets in their hard fought defense of the lives of their people.
Also, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the typical 6 million number thrown out for the Holocaust is a result of western propaganda, not because the genocide of 6 million Jewish people wasn't an atrocity of world shaking proportions, but because this number has been touted so regularly that it dismisses the 11 million other various civilians who were targeted and murdered and sent to camps, including 5.7 million Slavs (which excludes 1.3 million Jewish Slavs).
From what i gathered, most holocaust research indeed usually omits Jews killed for other reasons. Victims of purely political repression, for instance, especially the ones from before the whole thing officially started. And you know, Nazis did say one true thing about them: that is Jews being overwhelmingly left-wing back then. Do i even need to elaborate on the implications?
Also, the hell is "Jewish Slavs"? Ashkenazi Jews are their own culture, with different language and identity.
I'm talking about the discussion normally had that ignores the Soviet citizens murdered for lebensraum as part of the Holocaust. Also, the hell you mean what are Jewish Slavs? That's just Jewish people that lived in the Soviet union that get counted in the tally for the particular genocide of Jewish people, as opposed to other Soviet civilians. I'm really not sure what you're trying to get at even.
Yes, and i was just adding to that.
As for the other thing, i'm pointing out that the word "Slav" refers to people of particular language/culture group. Not everyone from eastern europe is a Slav, you know? It makes as much sense as calling indigenous Americans or Chicanos "Anglos".
Yeah, sure I get ya. Non-jewish Soviet citizen would probably be the more precise way to describe what I mean, which is just people living in that geographic area. Though I suppose to the Nazi genocide machine, everyone east of Berlin was a Slavic judeobolshevik or some other such drivel.
I do think it's a bit reductive to say that Ashkenazi Jews throughout the European diaspora wouldn't have different subcultural characteristics that are related to the cultures they reside around. It's not like that's a monolithic ethnic group any more than another continent spanning group.
This is a good video about it here
love how the people they're shitting on were people who actually lived, and unsurprisingly the red army veterans didnt enjoy the movie.
Yes, main.
I also loved it when I fire saw it and I am very mad about it.
I do remember that call of duty mission. I don't remember much about it except that crossing the Volga was intense in a way no other game had managed up to that time. Sucks that it was propaganda bullshit. They deserve a better memorial than this. : (
And despite all that bullshit, it still managed to be by far the best and most badass Call of Duty campaign ever.
One of the things YouTube recommended on that video.
I'm a little surprised to see an HOI4 youtuber push back against that bullshit.
its population was nearly 350 million people
don't get to count occupied europe as nazi germany's "population", but it can be pointed out that the nearly 80 million of nazi germany on the eve of war was nothing to sneeze at, and the addition of italy (42 million), romania(20), hungary (14), and bulgaria (5) very nearly made the axis at parity with the USSR in population. but of course the resources of these countries including germany were not exclusively committed against the USSR.
60 divisions in the western front
this is a complete nonsense number, the nazi commitment against Wallies varied very widely thru the war, from as low as 36 to as many as 150 in the Battle of France to 107 toward the end of the war. the only way you get to pretend the Wallies occupied such a pittance of the Nazi war effort is by only counting (post fall of france) nazi commitments in France. i suppose all those nazis in italy were fighting greeks or something, mainly
don't get to count occupied europe as nazi germany's "population",
Why not? There were at least half a million non Germans in the Waffen SS. Certainly Germany would were more careful about who they recruited from occupied territories but they still did recruit from them and have a reasonable amount of support.
And in addition to recruiting the nazis had access to the labour and resources of the occupied countries to feed their war effort
Yeah, occupied Europe might not be prime recruitment grounds, but that doesn't matter when you're going to force the population to produce for your war effort whether they're ideologically comitted or not.
they required military occupation and mass slavery to exploit these territories, most of which had not insignificant military insurgencies.
equivocating Soviet territorial limits with Nazi occupied europe is not a good look
i accidentally cancelled and deleted a huge ass writeup on why i think @Dolores@hexbear.net is correct and i cba retyping it so instead just think a moment on the fact that this 130 million worth of occupied population somehow only contributed 500.000 soldiers to germany's war effort, and consequently what that says about the effective value of those occupied populations.
This showed us this movie in my
high school history class to teach us about WWII on the eastern frontOne of the best schools in the entire province too...
One of the best schools in the entire province too...
Having listened to all the Dan Bodecker chapo episodes I bet after watching that movie your class did a field trip to the local monument commemorating the Ukrainian 37th Waffen SS division victims. Victims as in "victims of communism", because of course that's how Canadia would remember Ukrainian nazi collaborators, right?
Ukrainian 37th Waffen SS division
14th Waffen SS was Ukrainians, 37th looks like it was Germans from Hungary.
When I was n grade school, my teacher showed the class The Notebook to teach us about WWII. Still better than anticommunist propaganda.
1m24s "The Soviets want new territories"
who the fuck is this shithead
idk, i couldn't find a time lapse of similar quality without shitty commentary, but I also didn't look very hard
Saving this, Opponent at the Portcullis has been responsible for so many brainworms and it's always nice to have some facts to push back with
yh I remember my supposedly leftist teacher showing this film to us in high school.
Honestly nuts the degree to which this infantilized the heroism of the soviets for millenials.
Doesn't some Call of Duty or Medal of Honor or Whatever of Fuck game have a Soviet campaign that copies this propaganda 1:1?
I dunno, but doesn't one of the earlier CoD games end with the player storming Berlin with the Red Army and planting the Soviet flag?
Good to hear, because this stuff from the very first Call of Duty is very bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tGB0qq2-28
oh jesus christ they literally just recreated enemy at the gates
Yeah, and they also pushed an Saving Private Ryan thing in there, like, they're are landing on a beach...but not to save a private! And also extremely worse than
AmeriWestern Allies!
I don’t remember which cod it was but I distinctly remember the “when he dies, you pick up his rifle” trope as you were offloaded on a barge in Stalingrad, being ordered to just run uphill into German machine gun fire in a human wave attack.
