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This isn't new for Russian Army. You win wars with staying power and quick adaptation. The funiest millitary book I have ever read was Decision in the Ukraine

• MilStdJunkie 3y ago
  Indeed. In the vast historiography of WW2's Eastern Front, the winning qualities of the Red Army have changed nearly as fast as the roster of writers enunciating them. German generals, American spooks, British professionals, then the post-Fall ex-Soviet source equipped historians, all with their own different verdict on what fueled that dramatic reverse[1]. With one single exception: the fact that Russians learned very, very rapidly. Being not one generation separated from Russian émigrés myself, that resonates with my outsider's view of the national character: charismatic, paranoid, chimeral, but deeply brilliant. It's unfortunate that these qualities somehow never gave rise to secular skepticism, but perhaps such a large land mass doesn't have much room for that kind of civitas. [1] Or not so dramatic at all. With better numbers, historians of the 21st Century have become increasingly certain that the reverse was not so dramatic, and that German victory in the East might well have been impossible. It never feels like that at the time, of course; go ask any unfortunate American veteran how in control of events they felt on the streets of Fallujah.
  • chewz 3y ago
    My favorite example is reactive armour of 1945. When Russian tanks entered German towns in 1945 they had been greeted with Panzerfaust... So the Russian tankist started welding spring beds to their armour making Panzerfaust useless in city warfare.
    • MilStdJunkie 3y ago
      Yup. And started using captured Panzerfausts to make flank progress from basement to basement. Blasting through walls. The list of Red Army improvisations and peculiarities during WW2 is huge and impressive, with several of them having significant impact: * Later war, setting off kerosene fires on their tanks at the start of action, which made enemy gunners think the tank had been knocked out. "Why is the dead tank moving?" might seem obvious, but remember it's not uncommon for a knocked out tank to continue to advance, even with the crew mulched. So, short of ammo, which the Germans most certainly were, no one risked a follow up shot . . until the Russian machines were on top of them. * It also turned out that sunflower oil worked great as bolt lube, and although "the Ivans" were basically starving the entire time, Red Army always seemed to be able to find sunflowers. * Grenade improvisations: several ingenious incendiary layouts and formulations including many with powdered aluminum and elemental sodium; more than a few molotovs had mixes that when ignited were basically chemical weapons; harnessing (fish?)hooks to thrown grenades (to catch on netting and slats, to explode higher) against embrasures; improvised shape charges from recovered plastic explosive (reverse-engineered from Faustpatrones); wooden cases for mines and incendiaries to evade magnetic sweeps. * There's more artillery improv than I could list here. The Red Army seemed much more canny with smoke and flare than the Wehrmacht did, perhaps because the German infantry had a very strong reliance on offense and, well, shooting straight. Red Army made no such assumptions. Probably the best known arty "invention" is the double-usage of corps-level artillery like the 152 mm (ML-20) as self-propelled assault guns that accompanied smaller groups as surprise antitank guns or as good old fashioned bomb tossers. A surprising number of life's problems can be eliminated by yeeting 50 kgs of high explosive at them. * The 7.62×25mm Tokarev was (is) an extremely spicy pistol round, and made the massed SMG fire of Red Army conscripts as much as 20% longer ranged than the enemy's 9×19mm equivalent. Not until the 7.62mm Kurz would (some) German infantry have better automatic fires at the individual level (although German GPMGs - specifically the MG-34 and particularly the MG-42 - were almost certainly the best of the war). Konev was aware of this range difference between PPD/PPSH/PPS and MP40, although he felt that the Russian round's advantage was in greater cover penetration (which, honestly, he might have been right on that, busting cover creates a lot of secondary fragmentation - see also youtubes re: "could you survive in a shot up car"). You know what they say about imitation: Wehrmacht troops would fill their hands with PPDs at the first opportunity, which says a lot. * The overpowered 14.5×114mm anti-tank rifle (PTR series) stayed relevant long after the equivalents in German (using 7.92x94mm Patronen) and British (using .55 Boys) service passed into obsolescence, and was pressed into all sorts of usages: anti-aircraft, extremely long range anti-personnel, and what we would today call anti-materiel (radio masts, landing lights, map boxes, fuel dumps) * Something more tactical they started doing towards the end of the war was to "fight out" an enemy unit but leave a tunnel through the envelopment. While it seems inferior to destroying the force, the Red Army found that destruction of a unit that started in good fighting trim was generally not worth it, and you would be better off having them route (losing heavy equipment, fuel, and most weapons) into their supporting units, where they would dilute stores. It's one of those little tweaks that shows just how much freedom Stalin was giving his commanders towards the end of the war. He'd come down on the entire country like a ton of bricks after the surrender, of course, and the Red Army would wait another fourteen years for their revenge on Beria. Death of Stalin is not a documentary, but it gets the rhythm exactly right, even if it's tightly compressed. Reading about WW2's Eastern theatre is always frickin' haunting to me, no matter how jaded I think I am. I know: we've had recent campaigns fought at that intensity - Fallujah comes to mind, Shahikot valley too - but nothing that went on and on and on with millions of people for years and years without pause. Two peoples, each bent on the other's destruction. Like Rwanda with white people; pre-1945 Europeans did not dick around. I should say pre-nuke Europeans. Human-powered genocide got obsoleted right quick in 1945.
  • sam_lowry_ 3y ago
    > secular skepticism This and cheap alcohol are the only things in abundance in Russia.