Just a reminder that the Germans trapped in the Stalingrad pocket during Christmas learned over the radio that they had 'decided' to sacrifice themselves by fighting to the very last man. Merry Christmas!
When I was in the U.S. Army, we referred to headquarters above the division level as "echelons above reality." Often, we weren't too sure if there was any sense coming from division HQ.
TIK, doctrinally speaking, the attacking side always carries tactical initiative. Like you said, counterattacks were an attempt to stabilize the front. Additionally, it was an attempt to gain some kind of initiative, even on a limited scale, this should cause the enemy to take defensive measures and stop advance in process.
Strongly agree. I think the attacks at Kotlaban were initiated so as to distract some German formations from supporting operations in Stalingrad for a few days. Every day counted as the Soviets needed more time to better organise the defences within the city. Seen in isolation, the attacks would appear to be a stupendous waste of men and material.
The problem with the passive defense is it lets the attacker dictate everything. Though the counter attacks were horrible, it kept the Germans worried. In a passive defense you are waiting for the attacker to encircle your passive defense. On a small scale it works, on Operational and Strategic not so good though if you can concentrate you do. Thus the entire way the Germans fought. Attack, destabilize, and keep pushing so the other side can't organize.
Yes however its also no good to throw infantry with no support straight off the trains into German defensive positions. Counter attacks were necessary just not how the soviets did it in the early years
@The Colonel I'm no general but at the very least i would give up on trying to defend the current front and create a new front anchored on defensive terrain, i understand a big reason the soviet counterattack was so disorganized and unprepared was because the high command had no clue what was going on on the ground, However imo they tried too hard in the early stages of the war to immediately stop the german advance at the front, perhaps they thought they were winning even, since the officers on the ground were all probably afraid of being erased from history. This probably is the biggest reason the german managed all those hundreds of thousands of men encirclement in the first year the soviets throwing men into sections of the front without even knowing the situation, i mean in some of those cases it's kind of baffling why there are even that many men manning such a small section of the front while the germans seem to encounter little resistance while walking around them. At some point one just has to cut their loses and form a line deeper into ones own territory. Ofc hindsight is 2020, i probably wouldn't have done any better if i was a front commander in 41 but since we live in 2019 we can analyse and criticize the past as much as we want to learn from it.
@The Colonel They were definitely not conducting a defense in depth from the start? Stalin stationed his forces right on the board even though the soviet forces were not even fully equip for combat and British intelligence was telling him that the Germans were about to invade yet he refused to believe this and kept poorly equip troops in terrain which is not easy to defend (the central European plains of Poland and Ukraine). Yes the soviets defended the boarder regions for political purposes but that doesn't mean it was the right choice? Once they knew the invasion was coming they needed to pull back to rivers, forests and mountains to dig in. Don't pretend it was all part of some master plan that the Soviets had before the war started to get hundreds of thousands of troops encircled in a few months, also how the fuck did they have a defend in depth if they got encircled every other day lmao a defense in depth is supposed to prevent being encircled by having multiple lines of reserve troops to plug breaches. Lastly How would i organise counterattacks? A depth in depth is what they had at kursk not these battles around cities in the Ukraine and Poland where tens to hundreds of thousands of troops are completed engulfed. I wouldn't stage large formations at the boarder in the first place however if that had already happened i would try to pull back from the boarder and save as many division as possible and pull the front in the north back to the forests and rivers in Russia proper then concentrate a force in the south where the Ukrainian plains favor an attack, ofc this is only a strategic level plan but i'm not enlightened to the details at a tactical level for every Soviet divisions so i cannot plan on the tactical level, but i do know that any plan would have been better then the sporadic counterattacks the Soviets conducted with no goal in mind, except to relieve pressure from the division to the left or right, when on the strategic level there is clearly a complete collapse of the front as a whole which relieving one division somewhere is not gonna fix.
The description of upper management as cluelessly bothering both customers and employees is priceless, painfully accurate, and worth the price of admission on its own
@@scotthickie5860 "The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand. ..... The winning general plans effectively and can change easily..... Every battle is won before its fought." - Sun Tsu
My tought on this: It depends. The counterattacks at smolensk for example were very effective at atritting the Germans and costing them time, but many others were a waste of lives and materiel. One would have to look at them individualy to evaluate.
I fully agree that we would have to look at them individually. (There's always exceptions to the rule.) But, to avoid giving an "indecisive" answer which would be interpreted by many viewers as a "cop-out", I thought I'd give a solid answer that could apply to most instances and see what people thought :)
@@TheImperatorKnight I thought that was a very good evaluation of the early Soviet war. Highly trained and motivated troops cannot be beaten and only matched with difficulty. At the battle of Blenheim, a French Cavalry Officer was picked up and carried on his horse 600 hundred paces by the ferocity of the attack. Unless you forces prepared to deal with such an onslaught, that momentum will not be checked. And if as you mentioned, a possible defensive line to stop the Axis invasion, where would you draw that line? All being said and done, both sides did what they could with what they had at the time. Hindsight is almost always 20/20, and when your asshole is up to your elbows in alligators, it's sometime difficult to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp. Everything else is just rumor and conjecture.
@@_Abjuranax_ How do you know these things? That what war gaming is for. Using the best intelligence available of your enemy and an assessment of your capabilities that is based on reality and not on ideology. Of course, you wont know with any degree of certainty, but just the practice of collecting this kind of information and thinking about the problem you are facing will, in itself, increase your fighting effectiveness. The Soviet high command, Stalin specifically, allowed ideology to restrict the response of the Soviet army such that there was only a single option and they had to make it work whether or not it was the most effective option. Would be interesting to see what would have happened with a plan from the military that was free to think outside of the restrictions put on them by Stalin were in place. Are we not talking about an alternative strategic plan to counter the Germans or just what to do after Stalin had already half screwed the pooch?
@@dondajulah4168 The boss is still the boss, and Stalin was the boss. The one thing upper management needs to know is what is within 10 feet of the man on the floor. That apparatus was not in effect at the beginning of hostilities, and until the Axis reached the extent of their penetration could the Soviets hope to throw the invaders back. By that time they had learned from their mistakes and could capitalize on the Germans' weaknesses. But you are correct in stating that the Doctrine of Flexibility was not present in either Army.
I'd like to add my thanks to the patrons who make TIK's work possible, and without which I wouldn't get to learn so much. Cheers, guys, and merry Xmas to you.
In any fighting sports after a successful block or redirect of the attack going against you, you want to counter attack as soon as possible (even if you are not "ready") as the other side is in less stable position and at least less able to defend himself or with luck have an opening to exploit. If you just try to defend, regroup and prepare for a "proper attack," unless your opponent runs out of steam and collapses, you will lose - Opponent will constantly be pushing back causing you to restart preparations and eventually will find a weakness in your defence that will allow him to defeat you, while you will never be "ready". Same logic goes for war...
Generally true, but the Germans would have had challenges advancing and attacking without any Soviet counter-attacks due to logistics and the toll taken by the weather and the poor Soviet infrastructure. That the Soviet had a nearly endless flow of reserves at that point made that tactic less harmful had that not been the case. It is also true that the Soviets lost a lot of the better trained armies with these failed counter-attacks so one can only speculate what the net impact was.
@@dondajulah4168 TIK has an excellent video where he analyzes the "endless reserves" legend, and proves that it had no factual basis. if i remember correctly it was ua-cam.com/video/Ux0cwy8jHnw/v-deo.html
With regard to the strategy of attrition: It is a perfectly reasonable and viable strategy for a military force with significant advantages in manpower, material and resources. The best example that comes to mind is Grant's campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia in 1864/65. He knew at the outset that he would almost certainly lose more men than Lee - but that these could be replaced - while losses suffered suffered by Lee's forces would eventually bleed that army white. In fact Lincoln had chosen him primarily for his doggedness and willingness to engage in bloody attritional warfare - in 1863 after a series of defeats and retreats by Northern generals commanding the Army of the Potomac Lincoln said " no general has yet been found who can face the arithmetic ". The overwhelming advantage in manpower and material enjoyed by the North meant that they could easily afford to lose 2 men for every Confederate one - which Grant pretty much did - but persevering in doing so would destroy the Southern army - which is what happened. While I would agree that a strategy of attrition was not operative in the Soviet response during the turmoil and panic caused by operation Barbarossa, the massive losses in men and material incurred by the Soviets in continued offensive operations for the duration of the war demonstrates both a willingness and a calculated decision by Soviet high command to engage in a most costly war of attrition to defeat their enemy.
When discussing defensive posture you shouldn't forget that you can never guess where the enemy is going to strike. And given the vast size of the USSR you can not make your defensive lines equally strong along all their full length. It's simple maths, so counterattacking is the only option. Kursk in 1943 was an exception because the Soviets knew where the Germans were going to strike. But they still failed to predict the striking power of the attacks and in the South the Germans almost broke through the triple defence lines.
There is plenty of area in the Central and Northern parts of the front that are natural defensive positions that are capable of holding up an attacking force with relatively few resources required. The lack of good roads also created very advantageous lines of attack that were few in number in which you could concentrate your forces forcing the Germans along slow routes of attack wearing down their vehicles and causing supply issues. Leveraging the natural defensive terrain and lack of infrastructure would reduce the requirements in defending along the entire front, at least in the sections north of Ukraine.
Almost broke through does not count any more than almost kicking a goal. I have also read that there were several further deep lines. They may not have been fully manned but they were there. And as the attack was fully expected, the codes deciphered and the whole salient was considered as bait by the Russians. then there was no way the Russians would have let them through at that stage of the war.
I wanted to add that the ukraine region is flat land, making horrible for defense, and the soviets were being overrun, where do you build your defensive line if the german are still advancing ? 100 km from the front line maybe, but thats too much land loss and i doubt even the soldier are willing to give that much
@@karimchaffai5922 Yes, the Southern front is worse from a defensive standpoint, though ironically where the Germans had the most difficulty advancing at the start of Operation Barbarossa because Stalin had his strongest units there anticipating that would be the objective of any German attack (which he didnt think would happen in 1941). I dont think the idea there would be to create a single defensive line, but rather a defense in depth which would slow down any German advance keeping them from a deep advance while inflicting severe losses - somewhat like what occurred at Kursk but not as successful given the overwhelming superiority of the Germans at the time. The larger failing was in not anticipating the attack from the Germans and therefore not developing a solid plan to counter a German invasion. This plan could have included counter-attacks but they would have been co-ordinated and planned counter-attacks rather than the helter-skelter ones that were thrown together out of desperation. To the extent that these were successful at all, it is only due to the much greater factor of lack of German logistical capabilities, abysmal roads throughout most of the country which wore out German vehicles, incompatible rail gauges which required conversion for German rail stock, etc.
Raillines were critical, and them being rare meant that most of the time the axis of attack was close to one, with significantly fewer forces far from railli es. Obviously motorized units could utilize such weaker fronts depending on their logistics to encircle the enemy, so encircling became a logistical problem primary and secondly a breakthrough-nature one.
True to some degree, but the Germans would have become bogged down by logistics before the end of 1941 in any case and would have had a difficult time even taking Moscow in 1941 with a Soviet army discarding tactical counter-attacks.
One of the small joys of following the channel is watching that bookshelf fill up a little more each video. You should really take a "shelfie" picture for our gratification.
I am not sure how the Soviets would have achieved this passive defensive barrier to slow down the German offensive? It seems they were not always aware where the front was in the first place, and preparing defences take time. A group preparing defences could be suddenly struck by a bunch of panzers and meanwhile the enemy is deep in Soviet territory doing God knows what. More info is needed on how the Soviets could have achieved that in the condition they were in, and the knowledge they had at the time.
AmitaBha hi! maybe they could have made with the manpower multiple defence lines behind the front. so if the germans penetrated the first line of defence 50 kilometres behind they would fall into a more cohessive line, and then a third which would be more ready prepared and a fourth which would have time to be a very good line of defence as it would have time, to make landmines set lines of fire, dig multiple trenches and maybe some concrete bunkers. anyway that's what comes to my mind. what do you think?
Not to mention, that the Russians didn't really know where the "front" was, and with very faulty communications new orders(say one ordering a new defensive line after receiving reports about the German position) would take so much time that the Germans would already have bypassed it. Also, when TIK says that troops attacked right after arriving by train, I think it's safe to say that the Germans are very near and moving fast. Also, the Soviet Union is a vast space to make a massive line of trenches, and the Stavka doesn't have all the people needed to make this massive project because the Soviet manpower is not in the same place at the same time. A passive line of defence, though more plausible in theory than a fixed line, would have to take on the forward elements of the German armies, which (see MHV's latest videos on panzergrenadier manual) have a very high amount of firepower (compared to other 'light' units) and are very experienced. First, you would have to know where the Germans are to do basically anything and this is easier said than done.
@@derekbaker3279 Hi Deker! The kursk salient defences were very effective. But Kusari mentions in the next post i think correctly, that defences couldn't be made all along the frontier as russia's front was 1500-2000(?) kilometres. maybe fortify key cities to death, and prepare them as a horrible attrition point. i really don't know how they could have made it, as the deep battle doctrine wasn't discovered (I think) yet. i just think that anything rather than making pointless WWI attcks on machineguns would be better.
Pedantic Alert: At 6:20 and 23:10 photos of tanks not available in 1941. "But it is December and well, you know how it goes... " lol -- I have never heard of Soviet tanks being put into the field without rifled barrels. However many of the T-34s had not been bore-sighted. Evidently the crews had not been trained how to do that yet. The Germans picked a perfect time to attack. The Soviets were in the middle of a huge overhaul of their military. Units had been placed, but no systems of supply or support had been organized yet. Merry Christmas to you too TIK. I always look forward to your videos.
In all fairness, once the Soviet armies began pushing the Wehmacht back along the entire front late in the war, the German high command insisted on immediate counterattacks that cost the German armies many needed soldiers in the defense of the Reich.
Really great amazing job on the Battlestorm series (Im going through it right now), it's fascinating to get into the nitty gritty of the more obscure parts of the soviet front (if you're a WW2 nerd like me lol), and it's especially cool with the moving parts on the map. Thanks
The Soviet unorganized attack did force the Germans to expend supplies, this placed extra pressure on already inadequate logistic pipeline. This would slow the Germans more than the direct impact of the battles would suggest.
Good point. The question is whether this could have been done even better using a combination of initially setting the bulk of forces back from the front line into defensive positions taking advance of the features of the country that naturally favor a defender. Even by simply acknowledging that a German invasion in 1941 was a possibility and developing a plan based on this would have resulted in a better outcome for the Soviets in 1941 than what occurred. You could have counter-attacked similar to what was done in reality, but had a German plan been anticipated as a possibility, these counter attacks would have been more successful. Units that were surrounded also may have been better off blending into the countryside acting as well organized partisan units instead of counter-attacking and being killed/captured by the Germans. There was an ideological barrier to the kind of plan that would have been most effective in that it would require Stalin to admit that he had weakened the Soviet armed forces to the point that they were vulnerable to the Germans where they would initially need to surrender tens or even hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory while going on the defensive to absorb the initial phase of a German invasion. The Soviets had spent a lot of resources on defense in the years leading up to 1941 which was supposed to have made their military vastly superior to any other in the world according to Soviet propaganda. How do you then even consider a defense plan that does not dictate immediately going on the offensive should another nation be so foolish as to attack the Soviet Union? Also, the deal made with Hitler was Stalins crowning diplomatic achievement so now he cannot allow the military plannners to even consider that Stalin was conned with his pact with Hilter
With 100% hindsight, pulling back foces and using the terrain for defensive positions, while destroying infrastructure would likely have been the best way to fight the war of attrition. The hasty counter attacks did cost the Germans in terms of supplies, but doing so further away from the intial starting lines and while holding better postions woud have cost the Germans even more. As it was the Germans were presented a great deal for the cost of supplies, since the counter attacks often led to soviet troops exhasuting themselves in getting in position and attaking. So much that when the attack got bogged down due to their own logisitcal issues they where left without the ability to move or fight (inadquate transports, fuel, ammunition). Making it easier for the next german attack to gobble them up, with negible costs. Quite frankly the soviet forces were generally in no condition to sucessfully go on the offensive, since their own logistics were simply not good enough.
@@dondajulah4168 "You could have counter-attacked similar to what was done in reality, but had a German plan been anticipated as a possibility, these counter attacks would have been more successful." I think TIK is saying that the situation on the ground as it were _made this impossible._ The command structure was such that pel-mell attacks were the worst-best option for local commanders. "Units that were surrounded also may have been better off blending into the countryside acting as well organized partisan units instead of counter-attacking and being killed/captured by the Germans." I might be unaware but is there any evidence that this did not happen? I know for a fact that once it became clear the Germans would not be stopped anytime soon by conventional forces, the southern military district under Zhukov organized hefty partisan units in Ukraine that stayed behind to wreak havoc once the Germans rolled in.
Well, you have to keep in mind, that the soviet union had to move it's factories, get them ready and start producing. So loosing a lot of land, for a more passive defense was not an option. Napoleon reached Moscow sooner than Hitler. Also, by the end of 1941, even before the winter, Germany suffered huge loses, and that were the best division the wehrmacht had.
@@AFT_05G Germany could have attacked in 1940, but the Italians needed help with Greece, so the attack was postponed. But even so, the plan was from the start to attack on 3 main objectives, north, center and south. As they devided their forces, to attack on 3 "fronts" so the soviets had to devide their forces to defend this fronts. Even if the Germans had concentrated the attack on Moscow, the soviets would concentrate the defense as well. And even if they captured Moscow, that wouldn't change the outcome. Besides capturing Ukraine was far more important than Moscow, after all the soldiers have to eat haha
@@AFT_05G Yes, but the encircled Russian forces in Ukraine were not giving up, they were trying to brake free. Germans simply needed more troops to finish them. And Germans couldn't also just attack Moscow and keep encircled Russians in Viazma pocket (the same reason: Russians were not giving up). German power was not big enough to go anywhere they wanted (because of continuously resisting Russians).
This is mirrored by Martin Van Crevald ' Supplying War'. The Germán's were totally ill prepared for the railheads that were ESSENTAIL for supply. ERGO Loose the war.
As a waiter I ask how your meal is to see if anything is wrong or if you need anything else. Granted I work at a good locol restaurant with a small staff and one owner, but that is the reason. A thumbs up or down will do. Your videos always get a thumbs up. Thank you and Happy New Year. Fuck Christmas.
I think the deal with asking you about the meal is more some sort of calculated mechanism to solicit additional orders OR condiments or something like that. Anything like that, that would also show up in the training films, has usually been tested and/or focus grouped in regards to achieving the desired effect. In commercial management the issue is less remoteness and more managers needing to spearhead things to justify their own position. Some VP somewhere justified his job for a few cycles by increasing per visit revenue by an additional 0.5% because customers were triggered to spend more by being asked if everything was alright before they started eating vs after or never.
Attrition as a military strategy/tactic would apply to essentially killing more than the other side can sustain while keeping your own losses within your country's ability to sustain said losses. And in this, it wouldn't necessarily have to be killing more than you lose. And that sort of result could apply to the war in the East, in that the Red Army often did take heavier losses than they inflicted, but by 1943-1945 they were advancing as the Germans began running out of men to replace those lost from 1941-1943... That said, that may be the result, but I wouldn't think that generals would purposely plan out battles of attrition. For even if you're prepared, things are well planned out, and supplies gathered... that doesn't necessarily mean that things will work perfectly or in a way that wouldn't lead to heavy losses and no general would purposely advocate that position. For then if it goes wrong, the general would be facing the ax, as it were. Falkenhayn in WWI is most famously associated with this with regard to Operation Gericht and the Battle of Verdun and when that battle began to go really bad for the Germans, he was fired and Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over... Though I'd think the primary purpose at Verdun was more the shock at the loss of the fortress city and hurting French pride more than anything else. It could lead to suicidal counter-attacks, but that wouldn't be the primary purpose of the operation... And Gericht was well supplied. And Haig would face constant pressure from above, particularly after 3rd Ypres in 1917, in which the British government found his attacks to be leading to massive losses in campaigns that Haig often advertised as breakthrough battles that deteriorated into battles of attrition. I'd think that much of the fighting on the Eastern Front would fit the same sort of situation as these battles of WWI... Attrition was more the result but not necessarily the intent.
@@derekbaker3279 I'll be teaching high school first since getting the masters degree will take time, and I dont expect too many questions since most of the students will likely be thinking about what to do when they get home but I think some will surprise me. The ultimate goal is to teach at a university level since high schools in the U.S. don't really let teachers go deep into Russian/Soviet, German, Czech or even Scandinavian history, and the English history we do cover in the states in public schools is very limited. We talk about the battle of hastings briefly, the black death, the renaissance, colonization a bit more extensively and then Britain is only really mentioned for the revolutionary war, 1812, then again for the world wars. I like the European history, especially places more in the North or in the east that people don't talk about, and most teachers I had myself in HS and have talked to since mainly either like the wars America was involved with and the Germans, or they liked things like the women's suffrage movement and the roaring 20s. I'm hoping to encourage students to develop an interest in the more obscure countries and largely unknown parts of history and the world when I do teach. I've accomplished that a bit when tutoring but thats a handful of teens at most compared to entire rooms of them daily, or young adults in a room that payed to be there instead of being stuck there because the state mandated it. I'm for public school but I feel like kids are less interested in learning when its forced.
@@ajohnymous5699 Hi Ajohnmouse. Thanks for sharing your plans. 🙂 It sounds as if you have thought carefully about your career path, which is great! FYI, I taught high school Physics, Chemistry, Earth & Space Science, general Science, and Math for 30+ years, here in the Province of Ontario, in Canada (I'm close to Toronto), so I appreciate your commitment to educating youth (and eventually young adults)! 👍👍 I have heard about the limited scope of history that is taught in high schools throughout much of the U.S.A. It's a shame, because so much of European history & world history has shaped the politics & culture of the U.S.A. . I think it's great that you want to reach students with the somewhat neglected topics you mentioned. I wondered if you could do so via extra-curricular activities. For example, you could start a 'History Club' in the high school where you will work, and use it to expand their horizons beyond the U.S.A.-focused curriculum. I guess its possible that you could end up teaching in a district where 'politics' is rather influential & doing so may ruffle some feathers, but hopefully not. Perhaps you could focus on attracting fans of "World of Tanks" and other History-oriented video games , then encourage discussion on related topics & work on dispelling myths like TIK does. Or, perhaps you could use TIK's videos as starting points for discussions/debates? Another idea would be to see if there are trivia competitions between schools (e.g. a "Reach for the Top" league?) & form a team. World history & Geography would be major topics, so the students could expand their knowledge & awareness as they prepare for the competitions. This is one of the activites I ran in my school for years, and it was a blast ! Based on my experiences, I am confident that a club or team would also attract the sorts of students who are fundamentally curious & will ask the sorts of questions you'd like to hear. So, not only will the kids benefit greatly, but it will be a rewarding & inspiring experience for you too! 🙂 Ok...I have to go, as I am hanging out with family today (Christmas dinner, etc) These are just some ideas that popped into my brain when I read your message. They were not intended as any form of criticism or 'lecturing' on my part. I just wanted to share them as 'food for thought'.🙂 cheers, Derek
@@derekbaker3279 Merry Christmas! And thank you for the ideas, I have thought about running a history club or something akin to a model UN club but instead having it be a palace, castle or villa owned by a powerful influential figure in a society from history meeting with diplomats and leaders from neighboring countries/tribes like a Roman Emperor meeting with kings from Gallic/Germanic/Briton tribes, the Pharaoh from Egypt, or having the emperors, kings and elected sovereigns from the great powers involved in WW1, maybe even have the club play out WW2 in hearts of iron 4, which is a video game that is very complicated in that you have to manage your nation politically, have factories build each weapon, tank, ship, etc and then you create the format of each army division and choose to have radio teams, support artillery that has to be made in factories, basically its the perfect game for people who are interested in WW2! Like you suggested with world of tanks, and also include suggestions towards watching TIK and Lindybeige. My german military history professor actually used a video from Forgottenweapons to talk about the Dreyse needlegun for the Franco-Prussian war and while public schools would crucify me for showing a video talking about guns like F.W., I will still recommend it for bonus points. I also hate how America manages its schools, and I especially hate that most teachers here go to university to learn how to "teach", which is to say following protocol and being familiar with the bureaucratic elements of schooling instead of learning the subjects they teach and being able to explain the importance and relevance of the topics being taught to them. My sister tried doing a program that does just that and the scariest part was this one woman said that if she had any disciplinary problems that she would call the police on campus and have them removed from her class, and she was praised and validated by the person running the programs. I also hate it because this system leaves most students with the opinion that its all a waste of time and the time would have been better spent learning how to do taxes, when they are being taught when talking math classes, or how to fix their car, which they would get their feet wet in by paying attention in science classes when taught about electricity and wiring. I have the advantage of learning the material and knowing a great deal about it, I have experience and quite a bit of raw talent for teaching since I was an assistant ice hockey coach at age 13, tutored fellow students in my spare time, and have even taught more than twenty people on how to drive a manual transmission vehicle. I'm just a natural at teaching and if students ask why they need to know history I can tell them that we should know how the world and our current geopolitical climate became what it is today, learn why societies are the way they are and what they used to be like, where certain terms or phrases came from, talk about the history of other fields like math, the various sciences, even literature and explain the importance of learning those subjects and inspire students to know what they want to be when they become adults or get their degree. In American schools our teachers weren't generally able to explain why their subject was important and my history teacher junior year was a baseball coach who knew nothing about history. My first day in his class they went over the American civil war and asked who led the confederacy/union and when the class answered for Grant, my answer sounded different and he thought I was mistaken about Grant's first name, tried correcting me and I told him I listed off the many generals of the Potomac army that served as the top general in their army since they had went through several before choosing Ulysses S. Grant and sticking with him, which confused my teacher and he eventually asked for my input whenever he was teaching a new module because he was a coach who knew very little about history and knew I was very passionate about it and gave me the idea about teaching because the people sitting next to me asked me to help them study whenever a test or quiz was coming up. I originally thought about becoming a lawyer, but that class ultimately made me realize I enjoyed teaching history and it would make my hobby of studying it into something that would help with the career I am working towards. Teaching is what I love, but if I could eventually become a reformer for education, even if its just on a state level vs. national, and improve the quality of teachers and teach them more advanced content and cease prioritizing standardized testing by having entire days or even a full week or two dedicated to teaching tricks on how to do better for multiple choice sections and process of elimination to increase the statistical likelihood of getting answers right by chance when just teaching the material and having it memorized through being memorable would be more effective and more respectful towards the subject they're supposed to learn.
i immediately thought of this book Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941-1942: Schwerpunkt the first half of the book from Day 1 Barbarossa to somewhere in 1942 is fascinating, the daily losses by armor type is staggering. i still remember horrendous #s of BT-7s and obsolete Russian armor lost in the first months. like 800 somthing 1,200 somthing tanks lost in a day and also the first encounters of the KV-1, KV-2, T-34 and how only the 88s could take them out or infantry running right up to them just mindblowing the losses and 350,000 prisoners in a week and the Russian generals executed for failure. like said here, the armor and troops arrive piecemeal and they cant even wait 2 or 3 days to consolidate, they just throw them out as they come in so 4 or 5 small attacks over the days all with 90% losses so that is top down Stalin's uncompromising method and these were the survivors of the 1930s purges so they knew too well the price of failure or even appearing to not be 100% in agreement with Stalin that losses did not matter, only stopping them.
I always felt that the Soviet Army attacked in such a manner, whether at times deliberate or desperate to instill some kind of psychological effect on the German Armies that the Soviets were not going down gonna go down easy.
All the decisions were being made by Stalin and it does seem that he genuinely had a higher degree of confidence in the Red Army capabilities than was warranted. Of course, the counter-attacking did have the effect that you mention and Stalin may have chosen the tactics that were chosen even if he believed his army to be over-matched.
@The Colonel OK, so you are going to take Stalins statements that are entirely self-serving and that contradict every piece of written history at face value? OK, you go ahead and do that. The helter-skelter, fruitless counter-attacks by the Soviet army in the opening weeks of the war were an unmitigated disaster based on an inappropriate military doctrine and complete breakdown of communication between commanders at the front and the high command in Moscow that were a result of Stalinist political doctrine. Commanders were not even allowed to gather their forces together before sent in to counter-attack when allowing for preperation and coordination with other units in the area as little as 24 hours would have had no negative impact on the outcome. TIK has it all laid out perfectly in this video. The choice was not stupid reflexive counter-attacks or cede the country to the Germans. There were many other tactics available that would have been much more effective than what the Soviet High Command choose to do .
@@dondajulah4168 source on "all decisions were made by Stalin"? That's entirely false. Read the memoirs of Shaposhnikov, Zhukov or Rokossovsky. He consulted his staff and was always open to counter arguments
@@maximvorobyov3691 What phase are you talking about? I am talking about the planning leading up to the German invasion. By the time the German attack occurred the military options were quite limited. I am aware that as the war progressed, Stalin was more receptive to advice provided by senior military staff. One must also keep in mind that, with a person like Stalin, advisors will pre-censor their advice so that the options from which Stalin would select would already be limited in scope due to the fear he instilled. You would not want to mention something to Stalin even as a suggestion if there were any chance he might interpret it negatively.
@@maximvorobyov3691 Memoirs that are written about events that occurred years and sometimes decades in the past are often selectively biased either intentionally or unintentionally. They tend to almost always inflate the importance of the subject, especially so in the setting of the Soviet Union in the period in which these memoirs were published. WW2 was ultimately a success for the Soviet Union so it would not serve their interest to state that their advice was routinely ignored. I am not saying that they are lying and I even tend to believe that what they say has much truth depending on the specific stage of the war and whether the advice was purely military or impacted political objectives as well.
No I think you are absolutely right and it fits perfectly with the Soviet Cold War mindset of turning obvious blunders into reasonable explanations of why their actions were in fact well thought out responses to events that dictated their actions
It is amazing how poor the Soviet command and control was. Merridale also has some interesting thoughts about how large the idea of attack was in Soviet media and propaganda in the pre-war era. Soviet citizens did indeed watch films where a German incursion was met with a triumphant Soviet counter-attack.
Very interesting! I guess that the Russians' experience during WWI would have made them somewhat suspicious of Germany during the interwar period. Do you have any links or references to these propaganda films? They would be interesting to watch.
That's a good assessment. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I think if soveits were passive and defensive, they would've fallen like french.
Oh God TIK. You're retail analogy (Correct word here?) really hits home. Were 2 people barely are able to keep the store up and running, for the next 3 months after new year we're only going to be 1 person on work at a time. 1 person, we're a popular store chain, Ive worked 8 hours alone and you get barely anything done and not nearly enough. And what about my lunch break? By law I have 30 min unpaid break, Im gonna have to work during that break, if I wanna use the toilet I need to call mall security to watch the store. The richest family in the country owns the chain, I wanna yell at them. Have them work on the floor alone and see how it is. If I didnt need the money I'd quit. Wish me luck, Im gonna need it. And Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas, I think you are right, in the early stages desperation was definitely a factor, attacking in unfavorable circumstances might just save a commander his position and his head, retreating forces intact and allowing an encirclement, bridgehead, or city to be captured may mean questions to be answered; if your forces are annihilated at least you tried in the face of a superior enemy, and incompetence is less of a sin than cowardice.
re: the bit about waiters asking how everything is...it's damage control. If something isn't quite right and the person is too shy or passive to find the waiter and complain, it gives the customer a chance to air their grievances earlier (so management has more time to make a decision about how to improve their experience). it's a way to prevent bad online reviews, etc. at least, that's if it's done right. Realistically speaking, I rarely get asked how everything is by a waiter if they aren't already refilling a glass, taking off an empty plate, etc that would give them a reason to be there already.
No clear cut or black n white answer it seems, but in my mind it looks like the Soviets were in a bit of a weird catch-22 situation in 1941/1942. Looks like the Red Army in terms men/equipment/logistics, organization, leadership etc. was (in retrospect) utterly unprepared/unsuited to fulfill the tasks they were expected to fulfill in terms of doctrine and general (grand)strategic ideas all the way down to the tactical level) in 1941/1942, even if the seperate parts in itself weren't all bad, and arguably in some areas may even have formed the core of what was to become the war winning machine of 1945. And while keeping a strictly defensive posture has merit, I'm not entirely convinced the pros of (arguably) keeping the Red Army of 1941/1942 more or less in tact by giving ground and not waste it in fruitless, ill-prepared, desperate counter attacks would have out-weighed the cons. Choosing to give ground quicker (the vastness of Russia evidently permitting) yet possibly surrendering an even larger part of the area that is the most industrially developed and has the majority of the population living in it) without a fight of sorts or even an attempt to try and take it back seems like a somewhat dangerous path to go down as well. In my mind they were ill-prepared to do what they were expected to do on all levels, yet doing less then what they did in 1941/1942, seems like a slipperly slope into the abyss of defeat as well. I guess what you're ultimately left with, is having to make do with what you have at the time on a day to day basis, and hoping and praying things will take a turn for the better (I guess that might be desperation) ....and they did. Seems like the German offensive ran out of steam on certain levels in late 1942 and at the same the Red Army on all levens began to come to an understanding of what was needed on a (grand)strategic, operational and tactical level, what their capabilities were, make some decent plans taking all that into account and carry them out accordingly.
@Phil Hall I guess the Red Army was (contributing to) winning in the early stages of the war, by at least not completely losing and for better or worse staying in the fight for another day, until they figured out how to proceed to victory on a strategic, operational and tactical level that was within their capabilities. I guess that takes a certain degree of desperation.
In the face of defeat, it is easy to wish you had better options to deal with the threat; But when push comes to shove and the chips are down, you play the cards you have to the best of your ability until you can slip new aces up your sleeves.
Also the Russian logistics were a factor as it was run differently. Most units were kept under supplied ( with only enough to function ). So units moving in to the front would have started under supplied let alone those on the front. The idea which worked later was to prioritize those units in planned attacks over the rest as they could not supply all their forces fully,
Hey Tik. Want to wish you a Merry Christmas. Your video last week was interesting. Basically, your argument boiled down to the Weimar Republic having poor economic policies, not having a clear way out of them, allowing for Hitler for come in with his promises for a better Germany. I’ve had a lot of mind so I may have mixed it up, but was that the argument in a nutshell?
Thank you Vass! Merry Christmas to you too! And yeah, I guess that's about right. I would add that the world-wide Great Depression was a big factor, and that Brüning was actually pursuing the right policies to cure the crisis before he was ousted. But the perception at the time was that Weimar (and capitalist economics) had failed. This pushed people to vote for an alternative. And, since the Germans didn't like Bolshevism (Marxist-Socialism), they went for something similar - National Socialism. Do you agree, or disagree?
TIK I don’t know too much on the Weimar Republic to analyze that in depth. From what I read from Wolfram Wette’s “Myth of the Wehrmacht,” it is stated that much of the Army, in particular the Officer corps, did not support the Republic. I agree that the Great Depression had world wide economic repercussions. I’d argue that the factors above influenced the German people. The Republic May have had better policies to fix the problems on the way, but perception is different from reality. I’d state that factor in the Army’s stance on the republic, and it would curve to the path of National Socialism. It may not be the best argument I have, but if the general public feel the current form of government isn’t working, in conjunction with economic struggle, then there will be a clamor for a new form. I need to further read up on this though, my books right now are on holocaust denial and the Eastern Front.
@@TheImperatorKnight Economy is one and the only trigger for any war. Well fed and satisfied people never want to fight a war, but ruined economy is a disaster waiting to happen. That should be a history lesson No.1 for everyone to learn. Merry Christmas everyone.
@@damyr This is not true. Status is a fundamental human need (to some people beyond self preservation) and thus many well fed and satisfied people through history have gone to war for status. Status itself has many forms, there is status through possession (wars for financial gain), status with the gods (holy wars), status of the family (honour wars), status of the nation (patriotic wars). Personal and civic status has been the driving factor of most human warfare since the bronze age. National status was added once nationalism became a thing. Generally people who are hungry and dissatisfied do not go to war since war is wasteful and humans do not generally want to increase their level of discomfort even for gain in status. There are exceptions but usually only in desperate circumstances (survival raiding by nomads in harsh winters for example). So WW1 ended because the German peoples discomfort outweighed the perceived status loss attributed to defeat. The German soldier who experienced the status loss and had not actually experienced the discomfort (relatively speaking) did not buy that.
@@DoddyIshamel and the reason is that status trumps money in the sexual marketplace whats the point of living if your bloodline ends with you ? but for the rest your right an undernourished population might want to go to war but if they do they better act fast or they will be too emaciated to be able to fight, an army marches on its stomach! do pay attention when i say undernourished is diferent then what we might think of people today nowadays most people in the west could go on 1/4 rations for a year and they would probably be in better shape and with increased agression to fight but back then 1 to 2 months without proper fodder and people wont have the strenght to fight and the death by starvation would already be up to 5-10% due to hunger combined with disease(first the old then the children fallowed by the men and finally the women since they have all the fat they might hate it today but back then it meant you would survive)! the german army lasted 2 months in stalingrad without proper food in situations where you would need 2 to 3 times more food due to the conditions of cold probably tik can answer better on this but do remember muscle is worse then fat when it comes down to survival in hibernation!
I know it's a bit outside of your general field of research, but all your talk on the desperate state of the soviet union has me thinking. If after the war the united states and britain decided to attack the soviet union with the limited goal of liberating eastern europe would the soviets have stood a chance? Even if you left out the use of the atomic bomb which likely could not have been used prolifically due to their limited supply, it seems like by the end of the war the soviets had used up almost all the men they had left. Couple that with their not so great supply situation, I mean they did take back Ukraine but it was left devastated by the german army so could they have brought their food production back up to pre war levels that soon, and the fact that lend lease supplies would no longer have been coming in, would they really have been the threat that western allies feared they would be? I feel like the threat of the soviets invading western europe was mostly bluster to justify the continual growth of the U.S. arms industry in the post war era to keep them profits rolling but maybe I'm mistaken.
This was evaluated by the west, and it was found that the odds of a quick western victory were long. Allied troops would have been in the field through a Soviet winter, just as the Germans had been a couple years before. See "Operation Unthinkable".
@@jackuzi8252 I can imagine. The allies already had trouble supplying their push over the Rhine fighting against 20 to 25% of the Wehrmacht. I cannot imagine what would happen if they had to push through devastated Germany and push into the Sovjet established supply lines. Britain was out, the US Army was not prepared or even planning to mobilize for a total war in Europe. I don't know the figures, but it wouldn't surprise me if the US fielded more units during WW1 (post armistice) in Europe than during WW2.
one major point counterattacks allowed soviet industry (around 1000 factories) and 20m workers to relocate on urals , with that move soviets strategically won the war , if sovets withdrew alot of those industries would fall in axis hands
22:53 The Soviets - as they saw it anyway - couldn't fall much further back than Moscow, because then most of their population would be behind enemy lines and therefore unavailable for mobilization. I think they were generally making the best out of a horrendous situation.
Hallo (schön einen deutschen zu sehen :D) ich hab bereits nach einer deutschen Übersetzung geschaut aber allerdings keine gefunden. Ich befürchte es gibt keine.
@@julius7643 Hallo. Danke, hab ich mir schon fast gedacht. Dann les ich es halt im Original. Bin übrigens nur Auslandsdeutscher; in dieses Deutschland möchte ich echt nie wieder zurück, aber das ist ein anderes Thema. Grüsse aus Athen
@@AnMue2109 Hallo, ich kann deine Entscheidung auszuwandern vollkommen nachvollziehen. Ich werde das Buch wahrscheinlich auch im Originalen lesen. Alles gute und schöne Grüße aus Deutschland, NRW. :)
Just watched a video on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow and it seems that the Germans and French had similar issues: great distance and scorched earth. French and German armies were great, no doubt, but the distance...and Russian refusal to collapse. Also learned from the Napoleon vid that more French actually died during the summer advance from disease and such, than in the winter cold during the retreat. Did not know that (maybe should re-check that EDIT: just did, video says correct.) Anyone see a similarity between French and German invasions?
I think these Napoleon references are ridiculous, because von Bennigsen and Wittgenstein were generals of the Russian army in 1812. Mannerheim also commanded a Russian division under Brusilov in 1916. My point is that the Napoleonic era was a completely different political situation.
@@jussim.konttinen4981 I was referring to what struck me: both the French and Germans faced great distances, which I suspect was their primary downfalls. TIK and others can argue that the German Army really was not that good, but one CANNOT say that about the French Army and Napoleon, who is arguably one of the greatest military commanders of all time. Then again, regarding great distance, there is the First Crusade, one of the longest military marches in history and when it landed on the shores of an Islamic world I liken it to the first D-Day. I think it much more difficult to attack long distances to the East rather than going West because the West has more cities, towns and farms closer together for support, while the East has less over a larger space. Why the Germans called it Living Space. Great distance going East - the great downfall of the French and Germans.
You could make the argument that the continuous offensive strategy of the Soviets was basically the only tactic they were really familiar with due to their training.
hey TIK, Lindybeige did a very interesting piece on a action in the african theater yesterday, id love to see it from the exellent perspective of one of your maps, but i cant recall you covering that action in your africa series. did i miss it or was it indeed not covered by you yet? its about a brittish advance in a depression called snipes where they dug in and fought off a big panzer force with their 6pder anti tank guns ;)
The WW2 armies had very limited training systems. Usually classroom lectures. No real time war games. No training maneuvers against an OPFOR. When the US Army established the National Training Center with force-on-force combat with MILES ( laser bullets), the units performed poorly. And that’s company level. How do you realistically train battalions and divisions? Worse for the Soviets because Stalin killed a lot of his military leaders. The American solution by DARPA was SIMNET where larger ‘units’ could fight in a realistic simulation. So the explosive multi pronged German invasion caught a poorly trained Soviet Army by surprise ….. an army that had never trained at those levels in the field. BTW there are quite a few folks who can’t ‘see’ terrain in a map. So surprised and poorly trained leaders did what they could by counter attacking. I wouldn’t be surprised if units didn’t have adequate ammunition. Realizing ‘hindsight’ is 20-20. X
The next issue is what is the state of the Soviet Army? Stalin had killed Army leadership who had previously trained with Germans. Political commissars ‘supervised’ unit leaders. Force structure and training were poor. I’m surprised the Soviets did as well as they did.
Good video! I wonder if they (the Soviets) were thinking that "the best defense is a good offense". And, I think that applies to Hitler's decision to hit the Soviets before Stalin decided to take Europe.
But those emails to 'rate our service' are just as bad....don't you want to review the product. Also I buy one mattress online and all I get are ads for mattresses, if they had any sense they wouldn't advertise a mattress to me for 5 years....
@@billbolton "But those emails to 'rate our service' are just as bad." Two wrongs don't make a right. Most people who look at mattresses don't buy the first time they look at them. Hence the adverts. To avoid aimed adverts, use an adblocker on your main device. To support YT channels you follow, try watching their videos on other devices such as your TV. Or make a $1 per year PayPal donation to the channels you watch which will more than cover the ad revenue they've lost through you using adblocker.
@@ukkev7056 thanks, however you shop, online or instore they are going to bother you for worthless information, management needs to show it is doing something to justify its existence and providing data on customer experience is part of that. Mattresses was just an example of how wrong they can be.
So was this desperate counterattacks strtategy best solution in worst scenario? I tnink if we talk about 1941 where germans have huge advantage in mobile forse and operational deployment, answer is more likely to be yes becouse its any way better to die in desparate counterattack then starve to deth in german prison camp affter another big encirclement.
But they where also poorly timed, launched non-stop, i guess there were several occasions when soviets could have more encirclements just by timing their counterattacks, instead of shattering their own strength as soon as trouble looms over the horizon
Falling back had plenty of room for application. "These Germans are going to lose no matter what." Thanks for your presentation. No doubt it you know what made the Generals of both sides Tik.
Sometimes the urgent has to take precedence over the important and listening to this analysis it appears the Russians were stuck in this cycle for quite a while. Anyway very interesting video, thanks TIK!
Hi TIK, I don't know if you have time to answer this, but could the North German, Matzen, and Schoonebeek oilfields have changed German performance in the war? These oilfields were accessible with 1930s drilling tech, and had each of these oilfields been discovered prior to the war and gotten to peak production by 1940, they would have produced about 10-12 million tons of oil. You have said that Germany was still about 15 million tons short even with Romania, so this would go some distance to helping Germany. Here are the peak years for each field: 3,608,211 Long Tons - Austria 1955 7,801,994 Long Tons - West Germany 1967 2,357,400 Long Tons - Netherlands 1965
re: 20.47 where the suggestion is made to charge like idiots, is that guy holding a fedorov (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedorov_Avtomat) or an SVT(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVT-40#SVT-38)?
Isn’t the motive for counterattack to strike the enemy when at his weakest (supplies strung out, soldiers exhausted, not dug in, reinforced or rearmed yet?) The attrittion idea makes no sense because, all else equal, attackers take higher casualties than defenders.
Hi TIK, i don't know if you ever plan a Battlestorm towards Moskow or more precisely the battles at Wjasma and Brjansk... (i hope you do some day :) the problem with these very uncoordinated and very very costly counterattacks was the breakdowns in communikation.. often and repeatedly... and so even when the counterattacks were successfull , it could not be exploited and the germans had time to organize their troops...
It would make sence counterattacking and lose more than the enemy if it buys you more time than only defending. If you need more time organising your army and improving your pruduction be it in quality (new weapons, vehicles) and or quantity. Buying time is important because factories and transportationhubs overrun by the enemy are more important than the extra units you lose by buying time.
Just a reminder that the Germans trapped in the Stalingrad pocket during Christmas learned over the radio that they had 'decided' to sacrifice themselves by fighting to the very last man. Merry Christmas!
I dont think they had any radio communication inside the city at that point.
@@lloydchristmas1086 you ruined the joke
When I was in the U.S. Army, we referred to headquarters above the division level as "echelons above reality." Often, we weren't too sure if there was any sense coming from division HQ.
Kind of works the same way in the corporate world. At least that is so where I work.
Lol I remember some German general referring to decisions made in hitler staff as decision made in the stratosphere
TIK, doctrinally speaking, the attacking side always carries tactical initiative. Like you said, counterattacks were an attempt to stabilize the front. Additionally, it was an attempt to gain some kind of initiative, even on a limited scale, this should cause the enemy to take defensive measures and stop advance in process.
Strongly agree. I think the attacks at Kotlaban were initiated so as to distract some German formations from supporting operations in Stalingrad for a few days. Every day counted as the Soviets needed more time to better organise the defences within the city. Seen in isolation, the attacks would appear to be a stupendous waste of men and material.
The problem with the passive defense is it lets the attacker dictate everything. Though the counter attacks were horrible, it kept the Germans worried. In a passive defense you are waiting for the attacker to encircle your passive defense. On a small scale it works, on Operational and Strategic not so good though if you can concentrate you do. Thus the entire way the Germans fought. Attack, destabilize, and keep pushing so the other side can't organize.
Yes however its also no good to throw infantry with no support straight off the trains into German defensive positions. Counter attacks were necessary just not how the soviets did it in the early years
@@randomdude4136 I agree. Just commenting on TIK Saying a passive defense was the plan. But you know, just words discussing things.
@@randomdude4136 Soviets did what they could.
@The Colonel I'm no general but at the very least i would give up on trying to defend the current front and create a new front anchored on defensive terrain, i understand a big reason the soviet counterattack was so disorganized and unprepared was because the high command had no clue what was going on on the ground, However imo they tried too hard in the early stages of the war to immediately stop the german advance at the front, perhaps they thought they were winning even, since the officers on the ground were all probably afraid of being erased from history. This probably is the biggest reason the german managed all those hundreds of thousands of men encirclement in the first year the soviets throwing men into sections of the front without even knowing the situation, i mean in some of those cases it's kind of baffling why there are even that many men manning such a small section of the front while the germans seem to encounter little resistance while walking around them. At some point one just has to cut their loses and form a line deeper into ones own territory. Ofc hindsight is 2020, i probably wouldn't have done any better if i was a front commander in 41 but since we live in 2019 we can analyse and criticize the past as much as we want to learn from it.
@The Colonel They were definitely not conducting a defense in depth from the start? Stalin stationed his forces right on the board even though the soviet forces were not even fully equip for combat and British intelligence was telling him that the Germans were about to invade yet he refused to believe this and kept poorly equip troops in terrain which is not easy to defend (the central European plains of Poland and Ukraine). Yes the soviets defended the boarder regions for political purposes but that doesn't mean it was the right choice? Once they knew the invasion was coming they needed to pull back to rivers, forests and mountains to dig in. Don't pretend it was all part of some master plan that the Soviets had before the war started to get hundreds of thousands of troops encircled in a few months, also how the fuck did they have a defend in depth if they got encircled every other day lmao a defense in depth is supposed to prevent being encircled by having multiple lines of reserve troops to plug breaches. Lastly How would i organise counterattacks? A depth in depth is what they had at kursk not these battles around cities in the Ukraine and Poland where tens to hundreds of thousands of troops are completed engulfed.
I wouldn't stage large formations at the boarder in the first place however if that had already happened i would try to pull back from the boarder and save as many division as possible and pull the front in the north back to the forests and rivers in Russia proper then concentrate a force in the south where the Ukrainian plains favor an attack, ofc this is only a strategic level plan but i'm not enlightened to the details at a tactical level for every Soviet divisions so i cannot plan on the tactical level, but i do know that any plan would have been better then the sporadic counterattacks the Soviets conducted with no goal in mind, except to relieve pressure from the division to the left or right, when on the strategic level there is clearly a complete collapse of the front as a whole which relieving one division somewhere is not gonna fix.
The description of upper management as cluelessly bothering both customers and employees is priceless, painfully accurate, and worth the price of admission on its own
Fun game, take a drink anytime he says "desperate" or "desperately".
You'll definitely have a Merry Christmas if you do that!
@@TheImperatorKnight You mean Yule have a merry Xmas?
achievement unlocked: drink like a Russian
Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face - Mike Tyson.
No plan of operations reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main force- Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder.
No plan survives contact with our troops let alone the enemy.
@@scotthickie5860 "The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand. ..... The winning general plans effectively and can change easily..... Every battle is won before its fought." - Sun Tsu
My tought on this: It depends. The counterattacks at smolensk for example were very effective at atritting the Germans and costing them time, but many others were a waste of lives and materiel. One would have to look at them individualy to evaluate.
I fully agree that we would have to look at them individually. (There's always exceptions to the rule.) But, to avoid giving an "indecisive" answer which would be interpreted by many viewers as a "cop-out", I thought I'd give a solid answer that could apply to most instances and see what people thought :)
@@TheImperatorKnight yeah of course. Much apreciated tik!
@@TheImperatorKnight I thought that was a very good evaluation of the early Soviet war. Highly trained and motivated troops cannot be beaten and only matched with difficulty. At the battle of Blenheim, a French Cavalry Officer was picked up and carried on his horse 600 hundred paces by the ferocity of the attack. Unless you forces prepared to deal with such an onslaught, that momentum will not be checked. And if as you mentioned, a possible defensive line to stop the Axis invasion, where would you draw that line? All being said and done, both sides did what they could with what they had at the time. Hindsight is almost always 20/20, and when your asshole is up to your elbows in alligators, it's sometime difficult to remember that your original goal was to drain the swamp. Everything else is just rumor and conjecture.
@@_Abjuranax_ How do you know these things? That what war gaming is for. Using the best intelligence available of your enemy and an assessment of your capabilities that is based on reality and not on ideology. Of course, you wont know with any degree of certainty, but just the practice of collecting this kind of information and thinking about the problem you are facing will, in itself, increase your fighting effectiveness. The Soviet high command, Stalin specifically, allowed ideology to restrict the response of the Soviet army such that there was only a single option and they had to make it work whether or not it was the most effective option. Would be interesting to see what would have happened with a plan from the military that was free to think outside of the restrictions put on them by Stalin were in place. Are we not talking about an alternative strategic plan to counter the Germans or just what to do after Stalin had already half screwed the pooch?
@@dondajulah4168 The boss is still the boss, and Stalin was the boss. The one thing upper management needs to know is what is within 10 feet of the man on the floor. That apparatus was not in effect at the beginning of hostilities, and until the Axis reached the extent of their penetration could the Soviets hope to throw the invaders back. By that time they had learned from their mistakes and could capitalize on the Germans' weaknesses. But you are correct in stating that the Doctrine of Flexibility was not present in either Army.
great editing in this video. i like the showing of the pages of the book and the behind the scenes shots and such.
I'd like to add my thanks to the patrons who make TIK's work possible, and without which I wouldn't get to learn so much. Cheers, guys, and merry Xmas to you.
In any fighting sports after a successful block or redirect of the attack going against you, you want to counter attack as soon as possible (even if you are not "ready") as the other side is in less stable position and at least less able to defend himself or with luck have an opening to exploit. If you just try to defend, regroup and prepare for a "proper attack," unless your opponent runs out of steam and collapses, you will lose - Opponent will constantly be pushing back causing you to restart preparations and eventually will find a weakness in your defence that will allow him to defeat you, while you will never be "ready".
Same logic goes for war...
Generally true, but the Germans would have had challenges advancing and attacking without any Soviet counter-attacks due to logistics and the toll taken by the weather and the poor Soviet infrastructure. That the Soviet had a nearly endless flow of reserves at that point made that tactic less harmful had that not been the case. It is also true that the Soviets lost a lot of the better trained armies with these failed counter-attacks so one can only speculate what the net impact was.
@@dondajulah4168 TIK has an excellent video where he analyzes the "endless reserves" legend, and proves that it had no factual basis. if i remember correctly it was ua-cam.com/video/Ux0cwy8jHnw/v-deo.html
With regard to the strategy of attrition: It is a perfectly reasonable and viable strategy for a military force with significant advantages in manpower, material and resources. The best example that comes to mind is Grant's campaign against the Army of Northern Virginia in 1864/65. He knew at the outset that he would almost certainly lose more men than Lee - but that these could be replaced - while losses suffered suffered by Lee's forces would eventually bleed that army white. In fact Lincoln had chosen him primarily for his doggedness and willingness to engage in bloody attritional warfare - in 1863 after a series of defeats and retreats by Northern generals commanding the Army of the Potomac Lincoln said " no general has yet been found who can face the arithmetic ". The overwhelming advantage in manpower and material enjoyed by the North meant that they could easily afford to lose 2 men for every Confederate one - which Grant pretty much did - but persevering in doing so would destroy the Southern army - which is what happened. While I would agree that a strategy of attrition was not operative in the Soviet response during the turmoil and panic caused by operation Barbarossa, the massive losses in men and material incurred by the Soviets in continued offensive operations for the duration of the war demonstrates both a willingness and a calculated decision by Soviet high command to engage in a most costly war of attrition to defeat their enemy.
When discussing defensive posture you shouldn't forget that you can never guess where the enemy is going to strike. And given the vast size of the USSR you can not make your defensive lines equally strong along all their full length. It's simple maths, so counterattacking is the only option.
Kursk in 1943 was an exception because the Soviets knew where the Germans were going to strike. But they still failed to predict the striking power of the attacks and in the South the Germans almost broke through the triple defence lines.
There is plenty of area in the Central and Northern parts of the front that are natural defensive positions that are capable of holding up an attacking force with relatively few resources required. The lack of good roads also created very advantageous lines of attack that were few in number in which you could concentrate your forces forcing the Germans along slow routes of attack wearing down their vehicles and causing supply issues. Leveraging the natural defensive terrain and lack of infrastructure would reduce the requirements in defending along the entire front, at least in the sections north of Ukraine.
Almost broke through does not count any more than almost kicking a goal. I have also read that there were several further deep lines. They may not have been fully manned but they were there. And as the attack was fully expected, the codes deciphered and the whole salient was considered as bait by the Russians. then there was no way the Russians would have let them through at that stage of the war.
I wanted to add that the ukraine region is flat land, making horrible for defense, and the soviets were being overrun, where do you build your defensive line if the german are still advancing ? 100 km from the front line maybe, but thats too much land loss and i doubt even the soldier are willing to give that much
@@karimchaffai5922 Yes, the Southern front is worse from a defensive standpoint, though ironically where the Germans had the most difficulty advancing at the start of Operation Barbarossa because Stalin had his strongest units there anticipating that would be the objective of any German attack (which he didnt think would happen in 1941).
I dont think the idea there would be to create a single defensive line, but rather a defense in depth which would slow down any German advance keeping them from a deep advance while inflicting severe losses - somewhat like what occurred at Kursk but not as successful given the overwhelming superiority of the Germans at the time.
The larger failing was in not anticipating the attack from the Germans and therefore not developing a solid plan to counter a German invasion. This plan could have included counter-attacks but they would have been co-ordinated and planned counter-attacks rather than the helter-skelter ones that were thrown together out of desperation. To the extent that these were successful at all, it is only due to the much greater factor of lack of German logistical capabilities, abysmal roads throughout most of the country which wore out German vehicles, incompatible rail gauges which required conversion for German rail stock, etc.
Raillines were critical, and them being rare meant that most of the time the axis of attack was close to one, with significantly fewer forces far from railli es. Obviously motorized units could utilize such weaker fronts depending on their logistics to encircle the enemy, so encircling became a logistical problem primary and secondly a breakthrough-nature one.
I'll BET one thing, had the Soviets NOT constantly counter-attacked the Germans might JUST have rolled the Russians right past the Caucasus...
It certainly led them to respect the Soviet soldier in a higher regard than they were initially led to believe.
True to some degree, but the Germans would have become bogged down by logistics before the end of 1941 in any case and would have had a difficult time even taking Moscow in 1941 with a Soviet army discarding tactical counter-attacks.
Jay Santos agree, the Germans were in a logistical nightmare by this point
@@_Abjuranax_ YES, and sowed DOUBT with the common German Soldier thus negating the propaganda they were so subject to!
@Phil Hall 100%
One of the small joys of following the channel is watching that bookshelf fill up a little more each video.
You should really take a "shelfie" picture for our gratification.
Hope you have a good Christmas TIK
Valta I agree with you
Valta says “have a good Christmas” he says that he wants TIK to have a good Christmas.... but is that the case?
Your a 1000% spot on with the corporate comments!!
I am not sure how the Soviets would have achieved this passive defensive barrier to slow down the German offensive? It seems they were not always aware where the front was in the first place, and preparing defences take time. A group preparing defences could be suddenly struck by a bunch of panzers and meanwhile the enemy is deep in Soviet territory doing God knows what. More info is needed on how the Soviets could have achieved that in the condition they were in, and the knowledge they had at the time.
AmitaBha hi! maybe they could have made with the manpower multiple defence lines behind the front. so if the germans penetrated the first line of defence 50 kilometres behind they would fall into a more cohessive line, and then a third which would be more ready prepared and a fourth which would have time to be a very good line of defence as it would have time, to make landmines set lines of fire, dig multiple trenches and maybe some concrete bunkers. anyway that's what comes to my mind. what do you think?
@@sifis172 That is very much like the defences the Soviets built for protecting the Kursk Salient. Those defences took months to build.
Not to mention, that the Russians didn't really know where the "front" was, and with very faulty communications new orders(say one ordering a new defensive line after receiving reports about the German position) would take so much time that the Germans would already have bypassed it. Also, when TIK says that troops attacked right after arriving by train, I think it's safe to say that the Germans are very near and moving fast. Also, the Soviet Union is a vast space to make a massive line of trenches, and the Stavka doesn't have all the people needed to make this massive project because the Soviet manpower is not in the same place at the same time. A passive line of defence, though more plausible in theory than a fixed line, would have to take on the forward elements of the German armies, which (see MHV's latest videos on panzergrenadier manual) have a very high amount of firepower (compared to other 'light' units) and are very experienced. First, you would have to know where the Germans are to do basically anything and this is easier said than done.
@@derekbaker3279 Hi Deker! The kursk salient defences were very effective. But Kusari mentions in the next post i think correctly, that defences couldn't be made all along the frontier as russia's front was 1500-2000(?) kilometres. maybe fortify key cities to death, and prepare them as a horrible attrition point. i really don't know how they could have made it, as the deep battle doctrine wasn't discovered (I think) yet. i just think that anything rather than making pointless WWI attcks on machineguns would be better.
@@amitabhakusari2304 I watch MHV but i missed this video. thanks for telling me about it!
Pedantic Alert: At 6:20 and 23:10 photos of tanks not available in 1941. "But it is December and well, you know how it goes... " lol -- I have never heard of Soviet tanks being put into the field without rifled barrels. However many of the T-34s had not been bore-sighted. Evidently the crews had not been trained how to do that yet. The Germans picked a perfect time to attack. The Soviets were in the middle of a huge overhaul of their military. Units had been placed, but no systems of supply or support had been organized yet. Merry Christmas to you too TIK. I always look forward to your videos.
As always your analysis of strategies do have an outstanding qualitiy. Merry Christmas from Bavaria
In all fairness, once the Soviet armies began pushing the Wehmacht back along the entire front late in the war, the German high command insisted on immediate counterattacks that cost the German armies many needed soldiers in the defense of the Reich.
Merry Christmas everyone, and keep up the good work TIK!
Thanks for this Tik! Happy Holidays!!!
Really great amazing job on the Battlestorm series (Im going through it right now), it's fascinating to get into the nitty gritty of the more obscure parts of the soviet front (if you're a WW2 nerd like me lol), and it's especially cool with the moving parts on the map. Thanks
The Soviet unorganized attack did force the Germans to expend supplies, this placed extra pressure on already inadequate logistic pipeline. This would slow the Germans more than the direct impact of the battles would suggest.
Good point. The question is whether this could have been done even better using a combination of initially setting the bulk of forces back from the front line into defensive positions taking advance of the features of the country that naturally favor a defender. Even by simply acknowledging that a German invasion in 1941 was a possibility and developing a plan based on this would have resulted in a better outcome for the Soviets in 1941 than what occurred.
You could have counter-attacked similar to what was done in reality, but had a German plan been anticipated as a possibility, these counter attacks would have been more successful. Units that were surrounded also may have been better off blending into the countryside acting as well organized partisan units instead of counter-attacking and being killed/captured by the Germans.
There was an ideological barrier to the kind of plan that would have been most effective in that it would require Stalin to admit that he had weakened the Soviet armed forces to the point that they were vulnerable to the Germans where they would initially need to surrender tens or even hundreds of thousands of square miles of territory while going on the defensive to absorb the initial phase of a German invasion.
The Soviets had spent a lot of resources on defense in the years leading up to 1941 which was supposed to have made their military vastly superior to any other in the world according to Soviet propaganda. How do you then even consider a defense plan that does not dictate immediately going on the offensive should another nation be so foolish as to attack the Soviet Union? Also, the deal made with Hitler was Stalins crowning diplomatic achievement so now he cannot allow the military plannners to even consider that Stalin was conned with his pact with Hilter
With 100% hindsight, pulling back foces and using the terrain for defensive positions, while destroying infrastructure would likely have been the best way to fight the war of attrition. The hasty counter attacks did cost the Germans in terms of supplies, but doing so further away from the intial starting lines and while holding better postions woud have cost the Germans even more. As it was the Germans were presented a great deal for the cost of supplies, since the counter attacks often led to soviet troops exhasuting themselves in getting in position and attaking. So much that when the attack got bogged down due to their own logisitcal issues they where left without the ability to move or fight (inadquate transports, fuel, ammunition). Making it easier for the next german attack to gobble them up, with negible costs. Quite frankly the soviet forces were generally in no condition to sucessfully go on the offensive, since their own logistics were simply not good enough.
@@dondajulah4168 "You could have counter-attacked similar to what was done in reality, but had a German plan been anticipated as a possibility, these counter attacks would have been more successful." I think TIK is saying that the situation on the ground as it were _made this impossible._ The command structure was such that pel-mell attacks were the worst-best option for local commanders.
"Units that were surrounded also may have been better off blending into the countryside acting as well organized partisan units instead of counter-attacking and being killed/captured by the Germans." I might be unaware but is there any evidence that this did not happen? I know for a fact that once it became clear the Germans would not be stopped anytime soon by conventional forces, the southern military district under Zhukov organized hefty partisan units in Ukraine that stayed behind to wreak havoc once the Germans rolled in.
BATTLESTORM STALINGRAD EPISODE 4 WILL BE THE BEST GIFT I COULD EVER RECEIVE FOR CHRISTMAS. AWESOME JOB TIK
Getting "when titans clashed" for christmas!
Fantastic! I hope you enjoy it and get as much out of it as I do
Merry Christmas!!!
I have learned a lot from your video s .... Thank you
Well, you have to keep in mind, that the soviet union had to move it's factories, get them ready and start producing. So loosing a lot of land, for a more passive defense was not an option. Napoleon reached Moscow sooner than Hitler. Also, by the end of 1941, even before the winter, Germany suffered huge loses, and that were the best division the wehrmacht had.
Germans could attack far earlier to Moscow,but they attacked and destroyed Soviet units in Ukraine.
@@AFT_05G Germany could have attacked in 1940, but the Italians needed help with Greece, so the attack was postponed. But even so, the plan was from the start to attack on 3 main objectives, north, center and south. As they devided their forces, to attack on 3 "fronts" so the soviets had to devide their forces to defend this fronts. Even if the Germans had concentrated the attack on Moscow, the soviets would concentrate the defense as well. And even if they captured Moscow, that wouldn't change the outcome. Besides capturing Ukraine was far more important than Moscow, after all the soldiers have to eat haha
@@AFT_05G Yes, but the encircled Russian forces in Ukraine were not giving up, they were trying to brake free. Germans simply needed more troops to finish them. And Germans couldn't also just attack Moscow and keep encircled Russians in Viazma pocket (the same reason: Russians were not giving up).
German power was not big enough to go anywhere they wanted (because of continuously resisting Russians).
This is mirrored by Martin Van Crevald ' Supplying War'. The Germán's were totally ill prepared for the railheads that were ESSENTAIL for supply. ERGO Loose the war.
Excellent discussion! TIK, I'd like to wish you all the best in this season of gratitude & celebration! 🙂 Merry Christmas!! 🙂
Yes! You really nailed this down. The feedback! You can't force it. If you force it, it immediately stops to be real feedback.
2:59 tik moment glantz clearly states that stalin didn't have a breakdown, but tik says goes on if stslin may or may not have breakdown
Merry Christmas mate, thanks for all the great content !
amazing video with great analyze as always :) thank you for your great work.
YES!!!!!! "Bye for Now" is back!!!!! Merry christmas to you too!!
Preventing encirclements is the main reason for counterattacks - like said to relief the pressure of the encirclement.
As a waiter I ask how your meal is to see if anything is wrong or if you need anything else.
Granted I work at a good locol restaurant with a small staff and one owner, but that is the reason. A thumbs up or down will do.
Your videos always get a thumbs up.
Thank you and Happy New Year. Fuck Christmas.
Merry Christmas!
William Bolton Ha! Ha! Danka mein Freund! It shall be a Merry Christams yet!!!
I think the deal with asking you about the meal is more some sort of calculated mechanism to solicit additional orders OR condiments or something like that. Anything like that, that would also show up in the training films, has usually been tested and/or focus grouped in regards to achieving the desired effect.
In commercial management the issue is less remoteness and more managers needing to spearhead things to justify their own position. Some VP somewhere justified his job for a few cycles by increasing per visit revenue by an additional 0.5% because customers were triggered to spend more by being asked if everything was alright before they started eating vs after or never.
Attrition as a military strategy/tactic would apply to essentially killing more than the other side can sustain while keeping your own losses within your country's ability to sustain said losses. And in this, it wouldn't necessarily have to be killing more than you lose. And that sort of result could apply to the war in the East, in that the Red Army often did take heavier losses than they inflicted, but by 1943-1945 they were advancing as the Germans began running out of men to replace those lost from 1941-1943...
That said, that may be the result, but I wouldn't think that generals would purposely plan out battles of attrition. For even if you're prepared, things are well planned out, and supplies gathered... that doesn't necessarily mean that things will work perfectly or in a way that wouldn't lead to heavy losses and no general would purposely advocate that position. For then if it goes wrong, the general would be facing the ax, as it were. Falkenhayn in WWI is most famously associated with this with regard to Operation Gericht and the Battle of Verdun and when that battle began to go really bad for the Germans, he was fired and Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over... Though I'd think the primary purpose at Verdun was more the shock at the loss of the fortress city and hurting French pride more than anything else. It could lead to suicidal counter-attacks, but that wouldn't be the primary purpose of the operation... And Gericht was well supplied. And Haig would face constant pressure from above, particularly after 3rd Ypres in 1917, in which the British government found his attacks to be leading to massive losses in campaigns that Haig often advertised as breakthrough battles that deteriorated into battles of attrition.
I'd think that much of the fighting on the Eastern Front would fit the same sort of situation as these battles of WWI... Attrition was more the result but not necessarily the intent.
Eric Zadravec asked a solid question, I hope to hear questions like these when I start teaching history.
At what level will you be teaching? High school? University?
@@derekbaker3279 I'll be teaching high school first since getting the masters degree will take time, and I dont expect too many questions since most of the students will likely be thinking about what to do when they get home but I think some will surprise me. The ultimate goal is to teach at a university level since high schools in the U.S. don't really let teachers go deep into Russian/Soviet, German, Czech or even Scandinavian history, and the English history we do cover in the states in public schools is very limited. We talk about the battle of hastings briefly, the black death, the renaissance, colonization a bit more extensively and then Britain is only really mentioned for the revolutionary war, 1812, then again for the world wars.
I like the European history, especially places more in the North or in the east that people don't talk about, and most teachers I had myself in HS and have talked to since mainly either like the wars America was involved with and the Germans, or they liked things like the women's suffrage movement and the roaring 20s. I'm hoping to encourage students to develop an interest in the more obscure countries and largely unknown parts of history and the world when I do teach. I've accomplished that a bit when tutoring but thats a handful of teens at most compared to entire rooms of them daily, or young adults in a room that payed to be there instead of being stuck there because the state mandated it. I'm for public school but I feel like kids are less interested in learning when its forced.
@@ajohnymous5699 Very nice to know and share!
And surely sound like some good and accurate teacher that won't spread myths or misconceptions.
@@ajohnymous5699 Hi Ajohnmouse. Thanks for sharing your plans. 🙂 It sounds as if you have thought carefully about your career path, which is great!
FYI, I taught high school Physics, Chemistry, Earth & Space Science, general Science, and Math for 30+ years, here in the Province of Ontario, in Canada (I'm close to Toronto), so I appreciate your commitment to educating youth (and eventually young adults)! 👍👍
I have heard about the limited scope of history that is taught in high schools throughout much of the U.S.A. It's a shame, because so much of European history & world history has shaped the politics & culture of the U.S.A. . I think it's great that you want to reach students with the somewhat neglected topics you mentioned. I wondered if you could do so via extra-curricular activities. For example, you could start a 'History Club' in the high school where you will work, and use it to expand their horizons beyond the U.S.A.-focused curriculum. I guess its possible that you could end up teaching in a district where 'politics' is rather influential & doing so may ruffle some feathers, but hopefully not. Perhaps you could focus on attracting fans of "World of Tanks" and other History-oriented video games , then encourage discussion on related topics & work on dispelling myths like TIK does. Or, perhaps you could use TIK's videos as starting points for discussions/debates?
Another idea would be to see if there are trivia competitions between schools (e.g. a "Reach for the Top" league?) & form a team. World history & Geography would be major topics, so the students could expand their knowledge & awareness as they prepare for the competitions. This is one of the activites I ran in my school for years, and it was a blast !
Based on my experiences, I am confident that a club or team would also attract the sorts of students who are fundamentally curious & will ask the sorts of questions you'd like to hear. So, not only will the kids benefit greatly, but it will be a rewarding & inspiring experience for you too! 🙂
Ok...I have to go, as I am hanging out with family today (Christmas dinner, etc) These are just some ideas that popped into my brain when I read your message. They were not intended as any form of criticism or 'lecturing' on my part. I just wanted to share them as 'food for thought'.🙂
cheers,
Derek
@@derekbaker3279 Merry Christmas! And thank you for the ideas, I have thought about running a history club or something akin to a model UN club but instead having it be a palace, castle or villa owned by a powerful influential figure in a society from history meeting with diplomats and leaders from neighboring countries/tribes like a Roman Emperor meeting with kings from Gallic/Germanic/Briton tribes, the Pharaoh from Egypt, or having the emperors, kings and elected sovereigns from the great powers involved in WW1, maybe even have the club play out WW2 in hearts of iron 4, which is a video game that is very complicated in that you have to manage your nation politically, have factories build each weapon, tank, ship, etc and then you create the format of each army division and choose to have radio teams, support artillery that has to be made in factories, basically its the perfect game for people who are interested in WW2! Like you suggested with world of tanks, and also include suggestions towards watching TIK and Lindybeige. My german military history professor actually used a video from Forgottenweapons to talk about the Dreyse needlegun for the Franco-Prussian war and while public schools would crucify me for showing a video talking about guns like F.W., I will still recommend it for bonus points.
I also hate how America manages its schools, and I especially hate that most teachers here go to university to learn how to "teach", which is to say following protocol and being familiar with the bureaucratic elements of schooling instead of learning the subjects they teach and being able to explain the importance and relevance of the topics being taught to them. My sister tried doing a program that does just that and the scariest part was this one woman said that if she had any disciplinary problems that she would call the police on campus and have them removed from her class, and she was praised and validated by the person running the programs. I also hate it because this system leaves most students with the opinion that its all a waste of time and the time would have been better spent learning how to do taxes, when they are being taught when talking math classes, or how to fix their car, which they would get their feet wet in by paying attention in science classes when taught about electricity and wiring. I have the advantage of learning the material and knowing a great deal about it, I have experience and quite a bit of raw talent for teaching since I was an assistant ice hockey coach at age 13, tutored fellow students in my spare time, and have even taught more than twenty people on how to drive a manual transmission vehicle. I'm just a natural at teaching and if students ask why they need to know history I can tell them that we should know how the world and our current geopolitical climate became what it is today, learn why societies are the way they are and what they used to be like, where certain terms or phrases came from, talk about the history of other fields like math, the various sciences, even literature and explain the importance of learning those subjects and inspire students to know what they want to be when they become adults or get their degree. In American schools our teachers weren't generally able to explain why their subject was important and my history teacher junior year was a baseball coach who knew nothing about history. My first day in his class they went over the American civil war and asked who led the confederacy/union and when the class answered for Grant, my answer sounded different and he thought I was mistaken about Grant's first name, tried correcting me and I told him I listed off the many generals of the Potomac army that served as the top general in their army since they had went through several before choosing Ulysses S. Grant and sticking with him, which confused my teacher and he eventually asked for my input whenever he was teaching a new module because he was a coach who knew very little about history and knew I was very passionate about it and gave me the idea about teaching because the people sitting next to me asked me to help them study whenever a test or quiz was coming up. I originally thought about becoming a lawyer, but that class ultimately made me realize I enjoyed teaching history and it would make my hobby of studying it into something that would help with the career I am working towards.
Teaching is what I love, but if I could eventually become a reformer for education, even if its just on a state level vs. national, and improve the quality of teachers and teach them more advanced content and cease prioritizing standardized testing by having entire days or even a full week or two dedicated to teaching tricks on how to do better for multiple choice sections and process of elimination to increase the statistical likelihood of getting answers right by chance when just teaching the material and having it memorized through being memorable would be more effective and more respectful towards the subject they're supposed to learn.
Merry Christmas TIK!
Another excellent video!
Thank you very much...TIK...Happy Holidays
i immediately thought of this book Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front, 1941-1942: Schwerpunkt the first half of the book from Day 1 Barbarossa to somewhere in 1942 is fascinating, the daily losses by armor type is staggering. i still remember horrendous #s of BT-7s and obsolete Russian armor lost in the first months. like 800 somthing 1,200 somthing tanks lost in a day and also the first encounters of the KV-1, KV-2, T-34 and how only the 88s could take them out or infantry running right up to them just mindblowing the losses and 350,000 prisoners in a week and the Russian generals executed for failure. like said here, the armor and troops arrive piecemeal and they cant even wait 2 or 3 days to consolidate, they just throw them out as they come in so 4 or 5 small attacks over the days all with 90% losses so that is top down Stalin's uncompromising method and these were the survivors of the 1930s purges so they knew too well the price of failure or even appearing to not be 100% in agreement with Stalin that losses did not matter, only stopping them.
I always felt that the Soviet Army attacked in such a manner, whether at times deliberate or desperate to instill some kind of psychological effect on the German Armies that the Soviets were not going down gonna go down easy.
All the decisions were being made by Stalin and it does seem that he genuinely had a higher degree of confidence in the Red Army capabilities than was warranted. Of course, the counter-attacking did have the effect that you mention and Stalin may have chosen the tactics that were chosen even if he believed his army to be over-matched.
@The Colonel OK, so you are going to take Stalins statements that are entirely self-serving and that contradict every piece of written history at face value? OK, you go ahead and do that. The helter-skelter, fruitless counter-attacks by the Soviet army in the opening weeks of the war were an unmitigated disaster based on an inappropriate military doctrine and complete breakdown of communication between commanders at the front and the high command in Moscow that were a result of Stalinist political doctrine. Commanders were not even allowed to gather their forces together before sent in to counter-attack when allowing for preperation and coordination with other units in the area as little as 24 hours would have had no negative impact on the outcome. TIK has it all laid out perfectly in this video. The choice was not stupid reflexive counter-attacks or cede the country to the Germans. There were many other tactics available that would have been much more effective than what the Soviet High Command choose to do .
@@dondajulah4168 source on "all decisions were made by Stalin"?
That's entirely false. Read the memoirs of Shaposhnikov, Zhukov or Rokossovsky. He consulted his staff and was always open to counter arguments
@@maximvorobyov3691 What phase are you talking about? I am talking about the planning leading up to the German invasion. By the time the German attack occurred the military options were quite limited. I am aware that as the war progressed, Stalin was more receptive to advice provided by senior military staff. One must also keep in mind that, with a person like Stalin, advisors will pre-censor their advice so that the options from which Stalin would select would already be limited in scope due to the fear he instilled. You would not want to mention something to Stalin even as a suggestion if there were any chance he might interpret it negatively.
@@maximvorobyov3691 Memoirs that are written about events that occurred years and sometimes decades in the past are often selectively biased either intentionally or unintentionally. They tend to almost always inflate the importance of the subject, especially so in the setting of the Soviet Union in the period in which these memoirs were published. WW2 was ultimately a success for the Soviet Union so it would not serve their interest to state that their advice was routinely ignored. I am not saying that they are lying and I even tend to believe that what they say has much truth depending on the specific stage of the war and whether the advice was purely military or impacted political objectives as well.
No I think you are absolutely right and it fits perfectly with the Soviet Cold War mindset of turning obvious blunders into reasonable explanations of why their actions were in fact well thought out responses to events that dictated their actions
Hey Tik, when is a new battlestorm stalingrad episode coming?
"Soon" is my official answer at the moment. As I mention in the video, I have been working on it (am about ~35% through editing the video)
@@TheImperatorKnight When will you do a video on the ideological conviction of the Soviet liberators?
Give him a chance, its obvious a huge task
@@Digmen1 yeah yeah easy, it was just a question
Have a merry christmas and a happy new year TIK and everyone too!
Thank you! And Merry Christmas & Happy New Year to you too!
@@TheImperatorKnight thank you TIK
Great video.
Merry Christmas to you too!
We don’t always have the best plan. . . . but that’s okay
It is amazing how poor the Soviet command and control was. Merridale also has some interesting thoughts about how large the idea of attack was in Soviet media and propaganda in the pre-war era. Soviet citizens did indeed watch films where a German incursion was met with a triumphant Soviet counter-attack.
Very interesting! I guess that the Russians' experience during WWI would have made them somewhat suspicious of Germany during the interwar period. Do you have any links or references to these propaganda films? They would be interesting to watch.
@@derekbaker3279 The film was "If There is War Tomorrow" - Efim Dzigan 1938. Catherine Merridale discusses it in "Ivan's War" from pages 23-27.
@@HistoryClarified Excellent. Thank you! 🙂
Indeed. It was so poor they won.
Luke Bruce It was undeniably poor in 1941 and into 1942.
Congratulations on 300k, Tik.
That's a good assessment. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I think if soveits were passive and defensive, they would've fallen like french.
Oh God TIK. You're retail analogy (Correct word here?) really hits home. Were 2 people barely are able to keep the store up and running, for the next 3 months after new year we're only going to be 1 person on work at a time. 1 person, we're a popular store chain, Ive worked 8 hours alone and you get barely anything done and not nearly enough. And what about my lunch break? By law I have 30 min unpaid break, Im gonna have to work during that break, if I wanna use the toilet I need to call mall security to watch the store. The richest family in the country owns the chain, I wanna yell at them. Have them work on the floor alone and see how it is. If I didnt need the money I'd quit. Wish me luck, Im gonna need it. And Merry Christmas
Sorry mate. That sucks.
Merry Christmas, TIK!
Merry Christmas, I think you are right, in the early stages desperation was definitely a factor, attacking in unfavorable circumstances might just save a commander his position and his head, retreating forces intact and allowing an encirclement, bridgehead, or city to be captured may mean questions to be answered; if your forces are annihilated at least you tried in the face of a superior enemy, and incompetence is less of a sin than cowardice.
re: the bit about waiters asking how everything is...it's damage control. If something isn't quite right and the person is too shy or passive to find the waiter and complain, it gives the customer a chance to air their grievances earlier (so management has more time to make a decision about how to improve their experience). it's a way to prevent bad online reviews, etc.
at least, that's if it's done right. Realistically speaking, I rarely get asked how everything is by a waiter if they aren't already refilling a glass, taking off an empty plate, etc that would give them a reason to be there already.
Merry Christmas to you and yours Tik.
No clear cut or black n white answer it seems, but in my mind it looks like the Soviets were in a bit of a weird catch-22 situation in 1941/1942.
Looks like the Red Army in terms men/equipment/logistics, organization, leadership etc. was (in retrospect) utterly unprepared/unsuited to fulfill the tasks they were expected to fulfill in terms of doctrine and general (grand)strategic ideas all the way down to the tactical level) in 1941/1942, even if the seperate parts in itself weren't all bad, and arguably in some areas may even have formed the core of what was to become the war winning machine of 1945.
And while keeping a strictly defensive posture has merit, I'm not entirely convinced the pros of (arguably) keeping the Red Army of 1941/1942 more or less in tact by giving ground and not waste it in fruitless, ill-prepared, desperate counter attacks would have out-weighed the cons. Choosing to give ground quicker (the vastness of Russia evidently permitting) yet possibly surrendering an even larger part of the area that is the most industrially developed and has the majority of the population living in it) without a fight of sorts or even an attempt to try and take it back seems like a somewhat dangerous path to go down as well.
In my mind they were ill-prepared to do what they were expected to do on all levels, yet doing less then what they did in 1941/1942, seems like a slipperly slope into the abyss of defeat as well. I guess what you're ultimately left with, is having to make do with what you have at the time on a day to day basis, and hoping and praying things will take a turn for the better (I guess that might be desperation) ....and they did. Seems like the German offensive ran out of steam on certain levels in late 1942 and at the same the Red Army on all levens began to come to an understanding of what was needed on a (grand)strategic, operational and tactical level, what their capabilities were, make some decent plans taking all that into account and carry them out accordingly.
The Germans had six months fuel in July 1941 - they ran out.
@Phil Hall I guess the Red Army was (contributing to) winning in the early stages of the war, by at least not completely losing and for better or worse staying in the fight for another day, until they figured out how to proceed to victory on a strategic, operational and tactical level that was within their capabilities.
I guess that takes a certain degree of desperation.
In the face of defeat, it is easy to wish you had better options to deal with the threat; But when push comes to shove and the chips are down, you play the cards you have to the best of your ability until you can slip new aces up your sleeves.
We wish you a Merry TIKmas
We wish you a Merry TIKmas
We wish you a Merry TIKmas
And a Happy New Year
I’m sorry but I couldn’t help myself
Good one! 👍😁
Also the Russian logistics were a factor as it was run differently. Most units were kept under supplied ( with only enough to function ). So units moving in to the front would have started under supplied let alone those on the front. The idea which worked later was to prioritize those units in planned attacks over the rest as they could not supply all their forces fully,
Hey Tik. Want to wish you a Merry Christmas. Your video last week was interesting. Basically, your argument boiled down to the Weimar Republic having poor economic policies, not having a clear way out of them, allowing for Hitler for come in with his promises for a better Germany. I’ve had a lot of mind so I may have mixed it up, but was that the argument in a nutshell?
Thank you Vass! Merry Christmas to you too!
And yeah, I guess that's about right. I would add that the world-wide Great Depression was a big factor, and that Brüning was actually pursuing the right policies to cure the crisis before he was ousted. But the perception at the time was that Weimar (and capitalist economics) had failed. This pushed people to vote for an alternative. And, since the Germans didn't like Bolshevism (Marxist-Socialism), they went for something similar - National Socialism.
Do you agree, or disagree?
TIK I don’t know too much on the Weimar Republic to analyze that in depth. From what I read from Wolfram Wette’s “Myth of the Wehrmacht,” it is stated that much of the Army, in particular the Officer corps, did not support the Republic. I agree that the Great Depression had world wide economic repercussions. I’d argue that the factors above influenced the German people. The Republic May have had better policies to fix the problems on the way, but perception is different from reality. I’d state that factor in the Army’s stance on the republic, and it would curve to the path of National Socialism. It may not be the best argument I have, but if the general public feel the current form of government isn’t working, in conjunction with economic struggle, then there will be a clamor for a new form. I need to further read up on this though, my books right now are on holocaust denial and the Eastern Front.
@@TheImperatorKnight Economy is one and the only trigger for any war. Well fed and satisfied people never want to fight a war, but ruined economy is a disaster waiting to happen.
That should be a history lesson No.1 for everyone to learn.
Merry Christmas everyone.
@@damyr This is not true. Status is a fundamental human need (to some people beyond self preservation) and thus many well fed and satisfied people through history have gone to war for status. Status itself has many forms, there is status through possession (wars for financial gain), status with the gods (holy wars), status of the family (honour wars), status of the nation (patriotic wars). Personal and civic status has been the driving factor of most human warfare since the bronze age. National status was added once nationalism became a thing.
Generally people who are hungry and dissatisfied do not go to war since war is wasteful and humans do not generally want to increase their level of discomfort even for gain in status. There are exceptions but usually only in desperate circumstances (survival raiding by nomads in harsh winters for example). So WW1 ended because the German peoples discomfort outweighed the perceived status loss attributed to defeat. The German soldier who experienced the status loss and had not actually experienced the discomfort (relatively speaking) did not buy that.
@@DoddyIshamel and the reason is that status trumps money in the sexual marketplace whats the point of living if your bloodline ends with you ? but for the rest your right an undernourished population might want to go to war but if they do they better act fast or they will be too emaciated to be able to fight, an army marches on its stomach! do pay attention when i say undernourished is diferent then what we might think of people today nowadays most people in the west could go on 1/4 rations for a year and they would probably be in better shape and with increased agression to fight but back then 1 to 2 months without proper fodder and people wont have the strenght to fight and the death by starvation would already be up to 5-10% due to hunger combined with disease(first the old then the children fallowed by the men and finally the women since they have all the fat they might hate it today but back then it meant you would survive)! the german army lasted 2 months in stalingrad without proper food in situations where you would need 2 to 3 times more food due to the conditions of cold probably tik can answer better on this but do remember muscle is worse then fat when it comes down to survival in hibernation!
awesome vid
Merry christmas!
I know it's a bit outside of your general field of research, but all your talk on the desperate state of the soviet union has me thinking. If after the war the united states and britain decided to attack the soviet union with the limited goal of liberating eastern europe would the soviets have stood a chance? Even if you left out the use of the atomic bomb which likely could not have been used prolifically due to their limited supply, it seems like by the end of the war the soviets had used up almost all the men they had left. Couple that with their not so great supply situation, I mean they did take back Ukraine but it was left devastated by the german army so could they have brought their food production back up to pre war levels that soon, and the fact that lend lease supplies would no longer have been coming in, would they really have been the threat that western allies feared they would be? I feel like the threat of the soviets invading western europe was mostly bluster to justify the continual growth of the U.S. arms industry in the post war era to keep them profits rolling but maybe I'm mistaken.
Are you reffering to Patton?
This was evaluated by the west, and it was found that the odds of a quick western victory were long. Allied troops would have been in the field through a Soviet winter, just as the Germans had been a couple years before. See "Operation Unthinkable".
@@jackuzi8252 I can imagine. The allies already had trouble supplying their push over the Rhine fighting against 20 to 25% of the Wehrmacht. I cannot imagine what would happen if they had to push through devastated Germany and push into the Sovjet established supply lines. Britain was out, the US Army was not prepared or even planning to mobilize for a total war in Europe. I don't know the figures, but it wouldn't surprise me if the US fielded more units during WW1 (post armistice) in Europe than during WW2.
Eurasia was starving.
@@hermitoldguy6312 Eurasia was starving since the 1920s
one major point counterattacks allowed soviet industry (around 1000 factories) and 20m workers to relocate on urals , with that move soviets strategically won the war , if sovets withdrew alot of those industries would fall in axis hands
22:53 The Soviets - as they saw it anyway - couldn't fall much further back than Moscow, because then most of their population would be behind enemy lines and therefore unavailable for mobilization. I think they were generally making the best out of a horrendous situation.
A counter Merry X-Mass to you TIK and the rest of the viewers!
Hi. Does anybody know if there's a german translation of Glanz Clash of titans? Thanks in advance
Hallo (schön einen deutschen zu sehen :D) ich hab bereits nach einer deutschen Übersetzung geschaut aber allerdings keine gefunden. Ich befürchte es gibt keine.
@@julius7643 Hallo. Danke, hab ich mir schon fast gedacht. Dann les ich es halt im Original. Bin übrigens nur Auslandsdeutscher; in dieses Deutschland möchte ich echt nie wieder zurück, aber das ist ein anderes Thema. Grüsse aus Athen
@@AnMue2109 Hallo, ich kann deine Entscheidung auszuwandern vollkommen nachvollziehen. Ich werde das Buch wahrscheinlich auch im Originalen lesen. Alles gute und schöne Grüße aus Deutschland, NRW. :)
Merry xmas every one, and once again a very good video
Merry Christmas from Spain!
Just watched a video on Napoleon's retreat from Moscow and it seems that the Germans and French had similar issues: great distance and scorched earth. French and German armies were great, no doubt, but the distance...and Russian refusal to collapse. Also learned from the Napoleon vid that more French actually died during the summer advance from disease and such, than in the winter cold during the retreat. Did not know that (maybe should re-check that EDIT: just did, video says correct.) Anyone see a similarity between French and German invasions?
I think these Napoleon references are ridiculous, because von Bennigsen and Wittgenstein were generals of the Russian army in 1812. Mannerheim also commanded a Russian division under Brusilov in 1916. My point is that the Napoleonic era was a completely different political situation.
@@jussim.konttinen4981 I was referring to what struck me: both the French and Germans faced great distances, which I suspect was their primary downfalls. TIK and others can argue that the German Army really was not that good, but one CANNOT say that about the French Army and Napoleon, who is arguably one of the greatest military commanders of all time. Then again, regarding great distance, there is the First Crusade, one of the longest military marches in history and when it landed on the shores of an Islamic world I liken it to the first D-Day. I think it much more difficult to attack long distances to the East rather than going West because the West has more cities, towns and farms closer together for support, while the East has less over a larger space. Why the Germans called it Living Space. Great distance going East - the great downfall of the French and Germans.
You could make the argument that the continuous offensive strategy of the Soviets was basically the only tactic they were really familiar with due to their training.
hey TIK, Lindybeige did a very interesting piece on a action in the african theater yesterday, id love to see it from the exellent perspective of one of your maps, but i cant recall you covering that action in your africa series. did i miss it or was it indeed not covered by you yet? its about a brittish advance in a depression called snipes where they dug in and fought off a big panzer force with their 6pder anti tank guns ;)
Faça um video sobre o lend lease por favor? E coloque legendas em portugues !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The WW2 armies had very limited training systems. Usually classroom lectures. No real time war games. No training maneuvers against an OPFOR.
When the US Army established the National Training Center with force-on-force combat with MILES ( laser bullets), the units performed poorly. And that’s company level.
How do you realistically train battalions and divisions?
Worse for the Soviets because Stalin killed a lot of his military leaders.
The American solution by DARPA was SIMNET where larger ‘units’ could fight in a realistic simulation.
So the explosive multi pronged German invasion caught a poorly trained Soviet Army by surprise ….. an army that had never trained at those levels in the field.
BTW there are quite a few folks who can’t ‘see’ terrain in a map.
So surprised and poorly trained leaders did what they could by counter attacking. I wouldn’t be surprised if units didn’t have adequate ammunition.
Realizing ‘hindsight’ is 20-20. X
The next issue is what is the state of the Soviet Army? Stalin had killed Army leadership who had previously trained with Germans. Political commissars ‘supervised’ unit leaders. Force structure and training were poor. I’m surprised the Soviets did as well as they did.
TIK, when is the next Stalingrad video coming out?
Merry Christmas TIK hope you and your family have a good one 😊
15:03 - attrition , acceptable losses - isn’t that what Haig ? did in ww1 ?
Good video! I wonder if they (the Soviets) were thinking that "the best defense is a good offense". And, I think that applies to Hitler's decision to hit the Soviets before Stalin decided to take Europe.
10:28 I mostly shop online because of staff in shops annoying me by orders from above.
But those emails to 'rate our service' are just as bad....don't you want to review the product. Also I buy one mattress online and all I get are ads for mattresses, if they had any sense they wouldn't advertise a mattress to me for 5 years....
@@billbolton
"But those emails to 'rate our service' are just as bad."
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Most people who look at mattresses don't buy the first time they look at them. Hence the adverts.
To avoid aimed adverts, use an adblocker on your main device. To support YT channels you follow, try watching their videos on other devices such as your TV. Or make a $1 per year PayPal donation to the channels you watch which will more than cover the ad revenue they've lost through you using adblocker.
@@ukkev7056 thanks, however you shop, online or instore they are going to bother you for worthless information, management needs to show it is doing something to justify its existence and providing data on customer experience is part of that. Mattresses was just an example of how wrong they can be.
Merry Christmas TIK!
So was this desperate counterattacks strtategy best solution in worst scenario? I tnink if we talk about 1941 where germans have huge advantage in mobile forse and operational deployment, answer is more likely to be yes becouse its any way better to die in desparate counterattack then starve to deth in german prison camp affter another big encirclement.
But they where also poorly timed, launched non-stop, i guess there were several occasions when soviets could have more encirclements just by timing their counterattacks, instead of shattering their own strength as soon as trouble looms over the horizon
When is season two of Stalingrad coming
Script is done, been editing episode 4. Can't give a date yet, but hopefully in a couple weeks
Okay because I can’t wait to see it and I like your beard
8:30 These weren't mere stragglers. They were stranglers. They didn't come to play. They came to win!
And I love your content a lot
Falling back had plenty of room for application. "These Germans are going to lose no matter what." Thanks for your presentation. No doubt it you know what made the Generals of both sides Tik.
Sometimes the urgent has to take precedence over the important and listening to this analysis it appears the Russians were stuck in this cycle for quite a while. Anyway very interesting video, thanks TIK!
@3:44 What are those tanks? Captured T-somethings?
@9:40 The last line of the that page sums up the entire German problem with the Russian campaign.
Hi TIK, I don't know if you have time to answer this, but could the North German, Matzen, and Schoonebeek oilfields have changed German performance in the war? These oilfields were accessible with 1930s drilling tech, and had each of these oilfields been discovered prior to the war and gotten to peak production by 1940, they would have produced about 10-12 million tons of oil. You have said that Germany was still about 15 million tons short even with Romania, so this would go some distance to helping Germany.
Here are the peak years for each field:
3,608,211 Long Tons - Austria 1955
7,801,994 Long Tons - West Germany 1967
2,357,400 Long Tons - Netherlands 1965
Merry Christmas, we'll be home by it
re: 20.47 where the suggestion is made to charge like idiots, is that guy holding a fedorov (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedorov_Avtomat) or an SVT(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SVT-40#SVT-38)?
Man, that keep to tanks line really got to him. Whoever said must've thought Tik doesn't celebrate Xmas.
All good and that, but my fav line is "Ep 4, coming soon!"
Isn’t the motive for counterattack to strike the enemy when at his weakest (supplies strung out, soldiers exhausted, not dug in, reinforced or rearmed yet?)
The attrittion idea makes no sense because, all else equal, attackers take higher casualties than defenders.
Merry Christmas TIk
Very good again. I tend to agree on the desperate way the Soviets counter attack. In many ways it is harder to hit a moving target.
Each time combat occurred in the Eastern theatre, the side with the advantage of logistics and transportation won decisively.
Hi TIK,
i don't know if you ever plan a Battlestorm towards Moskow or more precisely the battles at Wjasma and Brjansk... (i hope you do some day :)
the problem with these very uncoordinated and very very costly counterattacks was the breakdowns in communikation.. often and repeatedly... and so even when the counterattacks were successfull , it could not be exploited and the germans had time to organize their troops...
It would make sence counterattacking and lose more than the enemy if it buys you more time than only defending. If you need more time organising your army and improving your pruduction be it in quality (new weapons, vehicles) and or quantity. Buying time is important because factories and transportationhubs overrun by the enemy are more important than the extra units you lose by buying time.