Soviet Storm WW2 in the east doc.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwGzY25TNHPC_SsXFcIH-ba0nWuNbHOM6

Good documentary. Love CGI of battles and weapons. Made in Russia but it does not have beating the Communist Good, Nazism Bad dead horse. trying to hammer that into the viewer.

Those Russians, how they won the war? I am on first episode and its a constant if you retreat from the Germans even with orders and approval from Soviet high command, the officers from LT to Generals were be arrested and shot for treason. They had no officers and in some battles, only corporals and sergeants to lead large group of soldiers.

Russian Officers and Generals were taken prisoners, they were arrested by SMERSH after their release when the war ended. Then put on trial for treason, cowardice, insubordination, crime against Russia and many were found guilty and executed. I am sure no one in the Russian army wanted to be promoted to officer. It's a job no one wanted.

That's horrible. You were away from home prolly before Germany invaded Russia in 1941. Then you get taken prisoner and you in a prison camp until 1945. You only want to go home and find your loved ones and hope they are still living and enjoy your freedom after being in a POW camp. Instead your own people arrest you. Fak them Commies!

Thanks for the link NFB..I'll be watching it and russian brutality towards it's own troops were well known,,That was what commissars were for go forward or get shot!!

In Enemy at the gates they machine gun their own troops for retreating and one rifle and a few bullets for 2-3 soldiers. Did they really do that? I think you want every live body to fight the Germans. Ain't none left if you kill them all yourself or don't give them enough weapons and ammo to fight!

Saw this series years ago... it's ok, but bias Russian... obviously, lol

Because, Mother Rossiya!

Enemy at the gate is just ... Hollywood. :))

But the Wiki entry for the Stalin Order no. 227 - "No steep back", say that initially the "blocking detachments" behind Russian troops shoot around 1000 "panic-mongers and cowards".

But latter this practice are abandoned, because this blocking detachments have better use fighting the Germans, and so the majority of "cowards" - hundred thousands, are sent for penal battalions, because a "coward" dead is just... a dead, worth more for Motherland if receive a 2nd choice and put fighting Germans again.

British tanks made up 30-40 percent of the entire tank strength of Soviet forces defending Moscow by the beginning of December 1941. Around 15 percent of the aircraft defending Moscow were P-40's or Hurricanes. And in early 1942 huge quantities of machine tools and raw materials (aluminum, rubber etc) were supplied to get Soviet industry back on its feet. A bit later the Russian army was utterly dependent on US food, clothing and transportation. And the US provided the USSR with enough steel to build practically every T-34 Russia produced in WWII.


"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war, we didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with." Soviet General Georgy Zhukov, post WWII.

"The USSR could not produce gasoline with high octane. However, it was this fuel that was used by the equipment supplied by the Allies. In addition, the Achilles heel of the Soviet Army was communication and transport. The Soviet industry simply could not meet the demand either in number or in quality. For example, the army lost 58 percent of its vehicles in 1941 alone. To recover these losses, the Allies supplied more than 400,000 vehicles, mainly trucks, to the USSR." - National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow) History professor Oleg Budnitsky

"The Allies supplied 1900 locomotives to the USSR, while only 446 locomotives were produced in the country itself during the same period, as well as 11,000 carriages, while only a few more than 1,000 were made in the USSR. It is impossible to imagine how the Soviet economy would have functioned without these supplies. For example, the telephone cable provided by the Allies could wrap the Earth at the equator. The Allies’ aid was also critical in the reconstruction of production in the liberated regions of the country, including the role of seeds for the resumption of agriculture. Specific products were also supplied; the Allies delivered 610,000 tons of sugar to the USSR, whereas the USSR itself produced little more than 1.46 million tons." - Oleg Budnitsky

"Without American production the United Nations [the Allies] could never have won the war." - Stalin, Tehran Conference, 1943

"The significance of Western supplies for the Soviet war effort was admitted by Khrushchev in the taped interviews used for his memoirs, but the following passage was published only in the 1990s: 'Several times I heard Stalin acknowledged [Lend-Lease] within the small circle of people around him. He said that... if we had had to deal with Germany one-to-one we would not have been able to cope because we lost so much of our industry.' Marshal Zhukov, in a bugged conversation in 1963 whose contents were released only thirty years later, endorsed the view that without aid the Soviet Union 'could not have continued the war.' All of this was a far cry from the official history of the Great Patriotic War, which concluded that Lend-Lease was 'in no way meaningful' and had 'no decisive influence' on the outcome of the war." - Russia's War: A History of the Soviet Effort: 1941-1945 by Richard Overy

My question was they shot all their own officers and had nothing but new inesperienced officers or no officers to lead the troops.

It's a decent series. You need to combine it, like most things, with some other books and shows to get a non bias view. There is a ton of great audio books on Youtube as well, i listen whilst building models or doing dinner etc.

Anthony beevors Stalingrad, the profile includes parts 2 and 3.





Berlin





Armour and Blood- The battle for Kursk





Hitler and Stalin Parallel lives is a great insight as well, good book. Then there is also a lot of talks on the following youtube channels US Army War College, USAHEC, The National WWII Museum, World War II History Roundtable. Good stuff there, especially since they break down a lot more info on the Eastern front that came to light after the Soviet Unions dissolution.

NoFly, Stalin was insecure and suspicious of nearly everybody. In the late '30s he became convinced that his top generals and their staffs were plotting against him and purged thousands of high-ranking officers. Due to this, when war broke out he was without his most experienced leaders and the Soviets paid for it dearly. Plus, the people who replaced the purged officers were reluctant to give honest opinions on strategic decisions and often lied about battle results and losses.

The Soviets were so strapped for weapons, troops, and ammunition that during the Battle of Stalingrad they brought troops from basic training to the battlefield without weapons and told them to scavenge weapons from the dead to fight with.

The Soviets lost so many young men in WW II that it is causing the population of Russia to decline to this day. This is actually a problem that is making news in Russia right now.

Thank you 4 the insight vocatx.

The estimate agreed upon by most historians is that the USSR lost about 20 million people during WW 2. This includes both military and civilian.


For comparison, the most utterly destructive war the US ever experienced when it comes to deaths is the ACW and the estimate there for the Union and Confederacy combined is roughly about 700,000. That figure is only for military though. There is no reliable accurate number for civilians that were killed during the war.