Why the WW2 Red Army was/is so dramatically underestimated ?

[josykay]

That's the kind of thing the German generals said afterward. They did not wanted a cheap mass produced tanks, they wanted Panthers.

Funny thing of the Panther: It was actually fairly cheap, with around 20% more costs, than the PzKpfW IV Ausf. H.
The Tiger on the other hand was just eating up money and ressources, easily costing twice as much as a Panther, while funnily enough, offered nothing spectacular. Even the 75mm gun of the Panther had higher penetration values. Panther had in addition agility, speed, and thanks to sloping, effective armor. It was over all, the better tank. Performance wise, and in terms of costs.

[sarahtasher]

They thought the way they treated their men worse then beaten dogs and sent them to die in droves was a sign of desperation not a expedature tactic.

Not even the Germans could of predicted their ruthlessness and savagery.

Again, that's not fracking true. The Red Army did not won with human waves, they won with masterful deception and complex strategic operations. A defence in deep like at Kursk was not ''sending people without guns to die''

[breadisfunny]

what i learned through history is there is no evil big bad guy or good guy, but reasons, its not a novel, its not world of warcraft.

what makes u think the alliance was not as evil as hitler? they did horrible things, all of them, starting from Stalin ending to Roosevelt/Truman.

stalin was more an ally of convenience rather than an actual trusted ally.

[Ripster42]

Because they were fighting on their own territory and still lost troops at a higher rate than the germans, who were fighting a war on multiple fronts. The idea that the red army was good because the germans were strategically inept is a stupid one. Just because one pile of shit is bigger than another pile of shit, doesn't mean only one of the piles of shit is a pile of shit.

[primalmatter]

Again, that's not fracking true. The Red Army did not won with human waves, they won with masterful deception and complex strategic operations. A defence in deep like at Kursk was not ''sending people without guns to die''

It was a masterful deception but it was sending people without guns to die.

[sarahtasher]

It was a masterful deception but it was sending people without guns to die.

One, they did not send people without guns to die. That's in movies and in German generals salty about losing memoirs

Two, the Red Army consistently misled the Germans from mid 1943 to Berlin. Thinking that the dudes who are utterly destroying your amies are animals unable of basic strategy tend to be a bad approach.

[Spectral]

OP sure has a weird obsession with being mad at Germans.

[Devonitar]

With all that land-lease, an enemy fighting two fronts and a total disregard of human life it'd hard for the Soviet Union to not win.

Although, both Hitler and Stalin seemed like they didn't want to win the war, judging on some of their decisions.

[sarahtasher]

With all that land-lease, an enemy fighting two fronts and a total disregard of human life it'd hard for the Soviet Union to not win.

Although, both Hitler and Stalin seemed like they didn't want to win the war, judging on some of their decisions.

By the time there was even a alleged second front in Italy, the Nazis had been defeated by the Red Army. The Axis lost the strategic initiative at Kursk.

[Easo]

Well, I dont know OP, but it just miiight have something to do with the Winter War and the disproportionate losses against the much smaller and inferior enemy, or the absolute failures of 1941. They did learn from mistakes, they rebuilt the army, Lendlease helped too and the battle results became much better. Still, it took years and not all of the mistakes were resolved. Offensive in Eastern Germany cost a lot of bodies.
If you really wanted to know, you would have researched.

Soviet army right after the war was easily the most experienced and powerful (at least on the land) in the world, though bled dry (yes, even the Soviet manpower was not infinite) and having issues with logistics.

[TheImperios]

With all that land-lease, an enemy fighting two fronts and a total disregard of human life it'd hard for the Soviet Union to not win.

Although, both Hitler and Stalin seemed like they didn't want to win the war, judging on some of their decisions.

The entirety of Europe kind of proves otherwise. Foreign aid did not exactly help them.

Lend lease was an important part of the war which is why Americans were valuable allies, but it was not the only factor. Sausages did not kill Nazis.

[Magnagarde]

Only in the US. Europeans know better.

[Amorac]

IIRC Germany had to invade Russia if it wanted to keep on fighting, resources (oil for instance) where scarce so Germany had to secure that. Hitler also thought it was better to attack Russia first before they attacked Germany (debatable if Russia would have, there was a non aggression pact), hoping for a fast push like Spain and the Netherlands/Belgium/French move (Russia was hardly mobilized I think at the time) before the Russian army would have time to react properly. Hitler knew the Russian army would be a big problem.

In hindsight, they never should have split their forces to try and defeat Russia and taking the oil fields, may have been better to capture Moskou and then go for the oil perhaps. And if they had known the RAF was as good as defeated and an invasion of the UK may have worked things could have turned out somewhat different.

Been a while since I read up on it tho, might be mistaken.

[Deleted]

(This is a thread to get a slightly different subject than ''SJW'' or ''Migrants'' or ''a youtuber said X'' )

It keeps popping, here and elsewhere, that the Red Army (or for that matter the Viet-Cong/PVNA, or the Chinese Communists) did not actually ''won'', because they took more casualties, or that they somehow ''cheated'' because there was the winter or because they were more numerous .

While the tactics and training remained relatively poor throughout the war, that the Red Army used crude human wave tactics (that even the North Koreans or Chinese Communists actually used such tactics remain to be seen) is a misconception put forward by German generals after the war. The Red Army strategy after 1942, while not always served by good battlefield tactics, was markedly superior to the German one, as the supposedly crude Soviet managed time after time to catch the Germans wrong footed.

Operation ''Citadel'' and ''Bagration'' come to the mind. The supposedly inferior Red Army lure the Germans in one masterful trap in one case and in the other managed to utterly misled them about the direction of the attack. For a supposedly superior army, the Heer never managed to get another battle plan than ''Cannae style encirclements'....

Pretty sure you're the only person on here that mentions it

[Holofernes]

the main problem of the red army was stalin. He killed / murdered 3 quarters of the officers before the war against finland, because of political reasons. The remaining officers didnt dare anything that would not be "politically correct" in stalins sense.

It took a lot of time and mistakes to take on the german army. But the russians in the later stages of the war had way more man equipment and resources than the germans.

For example battle of stalingrad: germans and allies: 850.000, 300.000 lost. Soviet: 1.8 million, 1.1 million lost. The amount of dead german warhorses rotting in stalingrad was estimated to be 300.000. 300.000 horses. while the soviets produced nearly 100.000 tanks in ww2. The german tank production in the whole nazi area was less than 30.000. Germany was outnumberd 5:1 in tanks alone against the soviet union.

[Independent voter]

US Lend-Lease in millions of 1942 dollars

British Empire 31,387.1
Brazil 372.0
Soviet Union 10,982.1
Mexico 39.2
France 3,223.9
Chile 21.6
Republic of China 1,627.0
Peru 18.9
Netherlands 251.1
Colombia 8.3
Belgium 159.5
Ecuador 7.8
Greece 81.5
Uruguay 7.1
Norway 47.0
Cuba 6.6
Turkey 42.9
Bolivia 5.5
Yugoslavia 32.2
Venezuela 4.5
Saudi Arabia 19.0
Guatemala 2.6
Poland 12.5
Paraguay 2.0
Liberia 11.6
Dominican Republic 1.6
Iran 5.3
Haiti 1.4
Ethiopia 5.3
Nicaragua 0.9
Iceland 4.4
El Salvador 0.9
Iraq 0.9
Honduras 0.4
Czechoslovakia 0.6
Costa Rica 0.2
Total 48,395.4

US supply 1/4th of Soviet aviation fuel, iron, aluminum and things like 2000 locomotives and over 10,000 rail cars.



Katjuscha rockets mounted on a US Studebaker truck.

[Deleted]

(This is a thread to get a slightly different subject than ''SJW'' or ''Migrants'' or ''a youtuber said X'' )

It keeps popping, here and elsewhere, that the Red Army (or for that matter the Viet-Cong/PVNA, or the Chinese Communists) did not actually ''won'', because they took more casualties, or that they somehow ''cheated'' because there was the winter or because they were more numerous .

While the tactics and training remained relatively poor throughout the war, that the Red Army used crude human wave tactics (that even the North Koreans or Chinese Communists actually used such tactics remain to be seen) is a misconception put forward by German generals after the war. The Red Army strategy after 1942, while not always served by good battlefield tactics, was markedly superior to the German one, as the supposedly crude Soviet managed time after time to catch the Germans wrong footed.

Operation ''Citadel'' and ''Bagration'' come to the mind. The supposedly inferior Red Army lure the Germans in one masterful trap in one case and in the other managed to utterly misled them about the direction of the attack. For a supposedly superior army, the Heer never managed to get another battle plan than ''Cannae style encirclements'....

Well when the Soviets stopped killing their own generals I guess they were able to actually do something else than throw people forward.

[Arrowset]

The Red Army was not underestimated. The truth is that time and again during the war, several hundreds of thousands of Red Army troops were captured in encirclements by the Germans (e.g. Kiev, Vyazma-Bryansk). By comparison, the biggest body of US troops to be captured at once was in December 1944 when half of the 106th infantry division (about 6k troops) were captured when the Germans launched their surprise attack in the Battle of the Bulge. That doesn't take away from the bravery of Red Army troops at places like Stalingrad, but it's not good when you lose 700,000 troops or so in a single encirclement. The Red Army had a herd mentality where a lot of them could either show great bravery together or completely collapse together.

[Dhrizzle]

(This is a thread to get a slightly different subject than ''SJW'' or ''Migrants'' or ''a youtuber said X'' )

It keeps popping, here and elsewhere, that the Red Army (or for that matter the Viet-Cong/PVNA, or the Chinese Communists) did not actually ''won'', because they took more casualties, or that they somehow ''cheated'' because there was the winter or because they were more numerous .

While the tactics and training remained relatively poor throughout the war, that the Red Army used crude human wave tactics (that even the North Koreans or Chinese Communists actually used such tactics remain to be seen) is a misconception put forward by German generals after the war. The Red Army strategy after 1942, while not always served by good battlefield tactics, was markedly superior to the German one, as the supposedly crude Soviet managed time after time to catch the Germans wrong footed.

Operation ''Citadel'' and ''Bagration'' come to the mind. The supposedly inferior Red Army lure the Germans in one masterful trap in one case and in the other managed to utterly misled them about the direction of the attack. For a supposedly superior army, the Heer never managed to get another battle plan than ''Cannae style encirclements'....

I don't think I've heard anyone "underestimating" the WW2 Red Army. Criticisms of its choke-em-with-bodies techniques are certainly valid but crude tactics don't mean the generals didn't have overall decent strategy for pushing back the Germans.

As for the Viet-Cong, I thought it was generally accepted that they were phenomenal jungle/guerrilla fighters. Even American movies where they are the antagonists so the VC to be deadly opponents.

- - - Updated - - -

The generals said that AFTERWARD.

The argument about winter is ridiculous either. I'm Canadian, and I don't have some sort of genetic superpower to deal with snow, except of having a shovel and a big coat (IE, Russians had to deal with snow too. If you are too stupid to consider that fighting in Russia might require coats and boots, then you are obviously not as smart as you assume)

Invading Russia during winter isn't difficult, the trick (that Napoleon and Hitler missed) is to wait for them to fall into a period of political instability.

[Kokolums]

The problem with grading war generals is that far too often, once people select a grade they become bitterly biased in an effort to defend the grade given. Once someone says the germans were poor tacticians in WW2, you simply get a never ending stream of every error they made while all correct moves they made are omitted until some people are left wondering how the germans won a single fight.