Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 194 - The Battle of Kursk Part 1: Hitler is Bad at His Job

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

The USSR baits Nazis Germany into bleeding their army to death on 200 miles of death traps. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources for all related episodes: Showalter, Dennis. (2013) Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk: The Turning Point of World War II. Guderian, Heinz (1937). Achtung – Panzer! Nipe, George (2011). Blood, Steel, and Myth: The II. SS-Panzer-Korps and the Road to Prochorowka, July 1943. https://web.archive.org/web/20140912164146/http://www.uni.edu/~licari/citadel.htm Hill, Alexander (2017), The Red Army and the Second World War,

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities

like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the Legion of the Old Crow by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me is Liam. Hi Liam. Hi Joe. me is liam hi liam hi joe so liam since you've joined us here on on the donk cast i believe donk i believe the longest series that you've had to sit through was three parts yes we didn't record all that at once i think we did two and then one two and one i think yeah i think the longest marathon recording session I've ever done was

three episodes. I've done back-to-back three hour episodes as part of all There's Your Problem. Yeah, that's something that you guys definitely have a tendency to do. And if you can pull it off, more power to you. I need to lead this with this is Liam's fault.

As I occasionally get lost in my own wormholes or whatever, and I get trapped on like one subject, I often ask my co-hosts or my producer, you know, what would be a good episode or series? And I realized we haven't done in a long series in a while since the Chechen series, which is before you joined us.

And then you immediately said, we need to do the Battle of Kursk. And I was like, oh, that's going to be one or maybe two parts, and it's four. So this is going to be the longest one Liam's ever been a part of. It's the longest one we've done in several months. And I do need to lead this off

with a bit of a disclaimer. I will be talking about Nazis at length. Shocking. I know. It's the Battle of Kursk. They were there. Yeah. We kind of have to. Yeah.

At no point while discussing these Nazis as people, am I attempting to whitewash anything that they done? We did a whole episode about the clean Veramok theory, and I encourage you to go listen to it. I, however, cannot stop every paragraph and say, fuck them.

They're Nazis. They'll get tiring after four hours. So here's your blanket. nazis from the beginning uh i'll co-sign that fuck nazis yeah because we do have to talk about them their tactics uh their vehicles their weapons and their intentions uh all bad uh but you know universally bad yeah we cannot uh stop every sentence and say fuck nazis i get tired i will be doing that actually this will now be a nine hour grinding series nine hour grinding series which ends with me purchasing a ticket to go to philly and punching you in the throat i could probably take you for about 30 seconds so the battle of kursk is well known for its enormity um normally when you read about the battle of kursk you read about numbers and statistics um because it's something that

could truly only exist in the eastern front you don't hear it talked about alongside things like stalingrad barbarossa or the battle of the bulge. You don't hear it lined up with those things. These are some of the biggest battles and operations that spring to people's minds when you talk about World War II. Maybe some more obscure ones if you have to be a special kind of nerd like us. There's a reason for that, though. These battles all outline something. They show a total defeat or total victory or a major turning point written in the staunch blood of heroic

defenders. They've been lionized and written about for generations. Movies, video games, songs and TV shows have been made from probably every single one of those and probably from other angles that maybe we shouldn't explore too much. Yeah.

But on the eastern front, there's a gap there. After Barbarossa and after the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, it wasn't just a route back to the heart of the Nazi Empire, ending in the triumphant picture of the Red Army soldier. This is a time known by the German Military History Research Institute as the Forgotten Year, spanning from the summer of 1943 to the summer of 1944, that many in the popular narrative or armchair general types don't look at too hard. And this is because this is the time of inglorious retreats of the German side paired with

inglorious victories for the Soviets. Little is to be gained militarily or even historically from studies of these battles. Hell, they aren't even inspiring. Instead, they would become a tribute to uninspiring, hard and brutal fighting and immeasurable colossal human suffering that the world would never know before and probably never will again.

No, because now we have atom bombs. Yeah. That's over quick. I can hardly see any future war where like no let's line up a million people and just make them beat the shit up like at any point that plan has come to the table someone slung a nuke or six you know and that is why we're going to be talking about one of these inglorious battles and one of the largest ever fought by anyone in history and it includes the largest tank battle the world has ever seen and that is of course the battle of kursk i am gonna launch right into it but i do have to say something because someone will be like joe

what about this okay i will confront this in the beginning some historians have said that the largest tank battle in history was actually the Battle of Brody, which occurred during the invasion of Ukraine two years before Kursk happened. And the largest tank battle in history generally believed to have happened, happened within Kursk, called the Battle of Pokorova, and has been cited for decades since. Now, in my opinion, this is missing the forest for the trees, as the Battle of pokorova was within the battle of kursk so like it makes a lot of sense to call this entire thing the largest tank battle in history which is immeasurably larger than the battle of brody and this includes kursk operation citadel which is the german operation you know which was what they called the battle of kursk so it's a real microscope thing and i believe it's wrong um so yeah there i addressed it moving on if you want to argue that the singular battle of brody is bigger than the singular battle of

pokorova you might got something there but that's also like splitting hairs at the very least it's it's dumber than that because the battle of curse is called the battle of curse committing everything that occurred within it is one battle now that is also strange but also i agree with that because it is all one goal uh you know the germans operation citadel is one battle because they were attempting to destroy the kursk salient and the soviet battle of kursk is one goal as well because their goal was to make sure that didn't happen so it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to split up into one or two little things unless you're talking about specific battles in within regions of the larger battle which we will do and i'll do my best to make those make sense how exciting yeah but it's like saying um the battle of normandy oh we're talking

specifically about dog beach why would you fucking do that? The whole map is called Office. Yeah. So, yeah, the gene seed for this massive battle was planted two years before it ever started. When the Nazi hordes Blitzkrieg stalled and the initial offensive that was Operation Barbarossa failed in bringing down the USSR. The reasons for this somewhat simplistically here can be boiled down to overextension, underestimation and attrition on the part of the Nazis. Barbarossa's spearheads

towards Leningrad, Moscow and Kiev discounted the possibility of effective resistance throughout and were slowly worn down from an iron spearhead to a pile of corpses as they crossed the entire massive expanse of the U.S. Nazi corpses.

Yeah. I'll give you one. Yep. Now, most people believe that this is the inertia that the Nazis carried with them all the way into Stalingrad. And yes, I will be referring to Stalingrad a lot. And we will cover Stalingrad later. But I do have to refer to Stalingrad to talk about Kursk. Our first

28 part series. I think someone asked if we're going to talk about the Eastern Front I was like, what? Hilarious, that's it. Are you aware it took me 7 fucking hours to talk about the Soviet-Afghan war? I saw the Eastern Front show, that's Soviet-Afghanistan.

Or someone asked if I was going to cover the entirety of the American war in Afghanistan. Like, how about we give it a year, man? 30 parts. Part one. Uh-oh. Yeah. Now, it's generally thought that the inertia of the Nazi offensive carried into Stalingrad, the battle thereof, where they were then broken. And this is not what happened. By winter of 1941 and into 1942, the Germans had been brought to an effective stalemate

with Soviet authorities as they began to slap together a defensive force that could effectively resist the invasion, as well as a mean to support it through the help of their allies. Now, as the bodies began to pile up, both sides took this stalemate as a chance to shift their plans somewhat the germans knew their chance at a short war that meaning you know storming into moscow take the oil fields and bounce oh no that's coming next that's actually their second plan and it's far dumber than that sounds on the surface now their original plan was a storm through stake a heart into moscow because Moscow because the USSR is a vampire in this analogy for some reason. And that will just kill it dead. Napoleon thought the same thing, right?

I will simply invade Russia, take over Moscow, and Russia will collapse. And then the Russians were just like, oh, no, we just don't have Moscow now. We're going to keep shooting at you. It's very old brain thinking of war. You take the capital, the war is over because the government collapses, despite fact that the soviet union already had like contingencies in place for that they believe that if they just storm in take moscow the world be over they'll put in whatever puppet puppet government they're going to do to be able to implement the ost plan east or whatever and that would be that but that failed on the gates of moscow and the soviets are looking for

their chance to swing back um this is also on the same time that hitler himself took personal command of the german army in the east whoa yeah despite the fact i think i've talked about this before that man was never more than a corporal uh during world war one and he was a messenger like you i mean he was wounded he saw combat or whatever but this is like if i became president and like personally commanded an entire army despite the fact that yes we get it commander in chief but that's more of a quotation mark like that's it's not actually supposed to command anything now this eventually resulted in directive 41 published in april 1942 um yes i understand it's confusing uh this outline the german like that the nazis are so annoying they even have

to make their numbers stupid now this outline the german plan for the coming summer the nazis focus would shift with the idea of taking moscow least in the short term, lost. It was now time to fight the Soviet war machine in a way that would cripple future war making efforts, which, of course, in their brain, we knock out these things, we'll be able to defeat them later on in the long war that's developing. Now, this meant driving into the Caucasus to destroy the Soviet station there, but more importantly, capturing the Baku oil fields. like it says, to destroy the Soviet station there, but more importantly, capturing the Baku oil fields.

This would make mechanized warfare and industrialization in the Soviet Union pretty much impossible, while giving the Germans badly needed oil that they do not have. Now, I say all of that, that this is happening in the mind of the German planners, not reality, because none of that's true, other than the fact that it would, in fact, give Germany oil. By German planners, I mostly just mean hitler here um he seemed to be the only person i really believe this is a good idea uh the secondary target was the city of stalingrad but not for its own sake people often believe that hitler purposely circled song right on a map because it was named after

joseph stalin and that's not true i was taught that i figured it wasn't true but i was taught that it may have turned into that in the mind of the two idiots commanding these armies but that was not the plan right the reason for this is stalingrad itself is not strategically important but it is on the volga river which is right i've seen enemy indicates joe i played call of duty historical documentary yeah uh now the reason why the volga is important is if you capture that it cuts off supplies and more importantly it protects the main assaults flank going towards the oil fields because you're forcing them to cross the river or right, right, right, right. And not to mention this is an area where urban warfare

is to be avoided at all costs. It's, I mean, to this day that's still kind of the rule because urban warfare is fucking hard. It's just a meat grinder. Dude, I play Warzone. I don't go into buildings, Joe. And this is not from the

aspect of worrying about civilian casualties, because as we're talking about World War II here, nobody cared about those. I'm talking about from a strategic standpoint of fighting in a city fucking sucks. So the goal was to screen the city, that is, go around it and cut it off. The original plan was not, in fact, to hemorrhage a million people fighting over kitchens and living rooms within the city of Stalingrad. Sort of added up that way. Yeah, pretty much. While this operation was an operation within an operation, that being the screening of Stalingrad as a smaller part of Directive 41, the main goal of Directive 41 being to seize the oil fields. If it wasn't already for the concept of Operation Barbarossa, Directive 41 would still be one of the larger offenses of the entire war.

Because this included hundreds of thousands of Germans and their fascist allies, mostly Italians and Romanians, would advance a 500 mile long front, creating a salient. And when I say that, I'm going to use the term salient interchangeably with the word bulge. It just means like a line that extends outward with no friendly secured on their flanks. Okay. Now this salient that it would create would expand for 1300 miles. What make this possible? Now that seems ambitious for comparison.

This is roughly the distance between New York City and Kansas. So you texted me that, I think, one day, and I was like, that doesn't seem like it'll work out in their favor. Yeah, and spoiler alert, it does not. Now, despite the obvious drawbacks in this plan, even if this would have worked, it would have hardly knocked the Soviets out of the war.

Now, there's a couple of reasons for this, most importantly being that the British and the Americans had opened up a massive pipeline of supplies going straight to the Soviet Union constantly around the clock at this point. The goal was to, no matter what happens the soviets in the war right um like they they need the soviets in the war to kill as many nazis as possible keep i mean this was their goal in world war one as well like during the polar bear expedition or whatever which we will talk about at some point it's like look we don't care about anything we just need the russians in the war because they're a giant manpower sieve and that they, they were going to pump as much supply as they soak up.

Right. Exactly. And not to mention they're keeping a million plus Nazis looking the other way. And obviously Stalin's like, okay, we can do that, but we want a second front,

which will become important later. Uh, but you know, they'd wanted the Soviet to stay in the war no matter what. so ergo giant supply line not to mention the soviets had other fucking oil fields like baku was is was and is a very very large oil field but like the soviet union is a really big country yeah they're like yeah oh no one's down look out like it would have slowed them down sure but america would have then sent them even more oil to make up for it like it wouldn't have fucking mattered i get a lot of questions

from the legion stuff like what if this happened what if that happened what if this happened there is no situation here where germany wins i don't know how many times i need to point that out like you cannot fight the soviet union in the united states States of America and end up the victor on the other side of the war. Right. If you fuck up so badly, you make those two team up. You're done, man. Like it just industrial and material. Endless pits.

Not to mention all the manpower. Or the two best friends that anyone can have. Now, at the same time, the Soviets assumed any German attack would still drive towards Moscow again. So, like, their idea was that they might have to act. But Soviet leaders like Georgi, the best about machine

Zhukov, and Semyon Tomashenko, about, like, five people might get the reference I just made, thought that they should actually use this downtime to rebuild their army, which had just barely managed to hang on while their counterparts believe that a counterattack was in order to drive the Germans back.

So that's what happened. Cause Stalin wanted a counteroffensive. He believed that the next attack was coming towards Moscow. Well, Zhukov was like, that seems unlikely. They just learned that's a attack was coming towards Moscow. Well, Zhukov was like, that seems unlikely. They just learned that's a stupid fucking thing to do. So they're probably not going to do that again.

So, of course, then they'd had a counterattack. So the Soviets tried driving towards the city of Kharkov and being completely mangled. Two full armies, two tank corps and 600,000 casualties later, their offensive stalled within three days. That's rough. That's the thing about the Eastern Front. It's like World War I numbers whenever anything happens. In the Western Front,

you don't see that so often. It's like, oh yeah, the offensive stalled. There's a couple hundred dead, a couple thousand wounded. In the East, it's like, oh, we attempted to take over a city. Almost a million people died, but we'll try again next week.

We'll see you next week boys yeah now the soviet failure at kharkov was evidence enough to the germans that going ahead with directive 41 which then got changed into being called operation blue was a good idea because it was clear to them that the soviets despite their increasing military capacities still cannot beat them in a straight up fight. Just to explain that a little bit further, the way that the Germans looked at the Soviets at this time was that defensively, they could hold them off, obviously, because that happened. They learned that lesson. But they didn't have the capabilities to push them back. They weren't going to beat them in a straight up counter offensive against Germany. Now as we all know

Operation Blue, Direct 41, whatever the fuck you want to call it, would eventually turn into one of the biggest slaughters of men in human history. This operation was virtually directionless and distracted from the beginning, slowly pouring up, peeling more and more soldiers off the main target, that being the

oil fields, onto side targets, meaning Stalingrad. This eventually would turn into the Battle of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, so much manpower had been pulled away from the oil fields operation that those also failed. Eventually, the Germans in Stalingrad were crushed, leading to something of a panicked but successful defensive stabilization of the German line by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein. Now, this defense is studied as something of a minor miracle here because Manstein was able to take the tattered remains of like survivors of Stalingrad, random bits of just some dudes, just some Nazi dudes. Like rear echelon troops, any soldier that had, any German or Romanian or whoever who had a gun, he was able to knit them together

in the aftermath of Stalingrad into a mostly cohesive whole. And he was able to score a victory in the third battle of Kharkov, retaking the city and routing the Soviets only a few months after Stalingrad. Wow. Yeah, this stopped a Soviet counteroffensive in the winter and destroyed three more of

their army corps, because of course it did. Oh, they care. They got 14 more in the sentence you just made. You're pretty much right. Into the big render you go, lads. This ends up being a very interesting attitude in the Soviet army. And we'll talk about that a little bit. Now, this minor miracle at Kharkov for the Germans was just that. Because if there was a good chance that the Soviets succeeded and their drive into Europe starts a whole lot sooner than it actually does.

And Kursk never would have happened. They just want, I guess, this is 43. Do they just, you know this is 43 do they just you know i hate to distract from the main narrative do you think they just punch straight through to berlin are the nazis weak enough at this point um it's hard to tell honestly i think as we'll find out later there's a lot of german officers that realize that everything they're doing right now is pointless and they should be withdrawing. Right. Because they just simply lack the ability to keep fighting and they need to solidify their defenses somewhere. Namely, not in Russia as the winter closes in again. So the German line retreats maybe all the way back to Germany.

At least some of the surrounding Baltic states for sure. Right. Right. Okay. Just curious what you thought. That's what it seemed like most of them wanted to do. Unfortunately for them, their boss is Adolf Hitler. Not a good HR guy either.

No, it's like working for fucking Blizzard. Although the complimentary cyanide pills are a nice touch. Cyanide pills, whether consensual or non-consensual, gunshots to the head if you happen to be in his bunker. whether consensual or non-consensual gunshots to the head. If you happen to be in his bunker after this fight, after the third battle of Karkov, this left both armies described as two boxers who had gone nine rounds, meaning they were so concussed. They forgot,

but they were still somehow say it's the, it's the noted style of Homer Simpson. Right. But just because the two of them had beaten the noted style of Homer Simpson. Right. But just because the two of them had beaten the shit out of each other constantly did not mean they're both in the same condition. During the same winter

offensive that ended in disaster at Kharkov, the Soviets had driven a hundred mile long bulge around the city of Kursk and into German lines. Now, if you look at the situation on a map, it would have looked like a gigantic upside-down S-shape. And this happened completely on accident by everybody involved.

Nobody planned this. Now, this is getting into the part of the war where they generally think of the Soviet army as, I would put it, getting its shit together. But that's not really true. Doesn't need to get its shit together. Doesn that's not really true. Doesn't need to get shit together. Doesn't matter. 98 new divisions.

This is Yuri, Ivan, and Yuri. They come from farm country. There's a certain amount of getting it shit together on the supply side of things and the logistical side of things, which is one of their major fuck ups early in the war on top of command and control. And I would argue that only half of that ever truly got fixed stalingrad being the peak of you have nothing and wait till the next guy dies which is historically accurate to some extent it wasn't as widespread as popular history would have you believe but there was a lot of deprivation um but even in post-stallingrad red army life that still hadn't quite been fixed there were still countless deeply ingrained problems in the soviet military that i think would be argued now that

i've been unfortunately studying soviet military history for three years now um that survived until the death of the soviet army now this was shortages of everything and everyday life was quote marginal uh even by old czarist standards it's been politely called a institutional malaise uh within the military and a concept known as nichivo uh which i'm going to roughly translate here means fuck it all right fair enough now the idea was is whenever a problem got brought up it would jokingly be brushed off as nichivo meaning fuck it we can't do anything about it or fuck it this is just the way it is fuck it we can't change it. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah. The common soldier became passive to their own very existence

due to scarcity and abject misery of military service. That's fair. Now this is, again, in the 40s, and I think I said that exact same thing talking about the Soviet army in the 70s, so... Heritage is important, Joe. Yeah, that's right.

Not all, like, military heraldry and heritage is the backbone of all healthy militaries now no junior professional leadership was developed your non-commissioned officers like sergeants and the like were mostly just there to hit people and keep them in line while everything became top heavy with even the most unimportant duties and jobs being run by officers. This, as you can imagine, led to a nosedive in training standards and a knee-jerk reaction to jump back in time

and make discipline the most important part of army training rather than say, basic tactics. This happened all around the same time as the start of the war, as the Soviets watched Germans' concept of combined arms warfare steam through europe leading to the soviets attempting to copy their ideas which isn't a bad idea mind you like you see something that works you steal that shit make

it work for you right now when the things the germans really did the blood there's nothing revolutionary revolutionary about blitzkrieg with like if I was to nitpick, it would be that the fact that they had a lot of radios was a really good idea. Like they had a very good system. Yeah. Right. And the idea that ground troops could talk to air support, right?

Like all these things kind of revolutionary, but also like the concept of combined arms warfare is nothing new they just made it work better and they're fighting people who didn't want to fight a war that certainly helps however this is the wrong time for the soviets to attempt this because this kind of reform would have been systemic quite honestly they would have needed a competent junior leadership corps which they didn't have a competent staff officer command which they also didn't have uh it could have been done if you had you know a decade or two but they didn't this is right they have to do it right now yeah war started um war were declared yeah war were declared uh now massive units of mechanized infantry and

tanks are hard to control effectively and due to recent purges as well as a steady downtrend of professional military education and a massive lack of communication systems meant that complex formations... That sure sounds Soviet to me. Yeah, I mean like the concept like

we simply didn't have enough radios would take literally years to fix and mostly with the help of allies to just pump radios into the USSR until their manufacturing capacity kicked into gear. It's hard to explain really how hard it is to control massive formations of tanks and mechanized infantry and air support. And all of these things need to work in concert together to make combined arms warfare work. They didn't have that ability, but they tried to do so anyway which led to you know the first part of operation barbarossa um and there's also a downtrend here as some of the good officers and ncos or whatever that maybe have learned some lessons from the winter war or maybe were just good at their jobs uh they died uh

because the casualty list was insane as the war started so that led to a a slow downtrend in military education as well okay now after about a year of war and a lot of simplification of tactics communication and even command structures the soviets began to make things work in what has to be the highest death rate for on-the-job training in history. Oh, no. And this, honestly, ended up working great for them. So, congrats. For instance, rifle divisions were never up to strength.

And it never mattered because there are simply so many of them. Right. In practice, they were regarded as expendable. Oh. They were kept in the front and just stayed there until they were destroyed, at which point they would be labeled like combat ineffective and then just be folded into whatever other new units that hadn't died yet. Genius. Yeah. It's genius.

I think the best way to describe this is the way one regimental political officer put it. Quote, we don't have enough paper for all the funeral notices. Oh, my God, guy. And that's the political officer. He's the one that's supposed to make this sound good. And this wasn't just rifle divisions. The backbone of the Soviet tank corps was the tank brigade, and they, too, would operate in the same manner and at this point that vaunted T-34 had yet to roll onto the battlefield in effective

force meaning that the main weapon was the T-60 and I'm not going to go into a lot of like tank logistics here because that's I'm a huge tank nerd and I know that that's just some people's eyes are going to roll into their back of the heads when I start talking about this stuff

and some people get very into it. So I'm going to take the middle ground here. I will simply say the T-60 is a very bad tank. It had a very, very small gun that could not penetrate the armor of a German tank that the Germans would be using. Like a comparable German tank. And it had about as much armor as my Prius.

So very heavily armored. 50 mil autocannon right on top for dealing with those pesky Taurus. The T-60 would be used. I mean, it would be phased out manufacturer wise, but they would just be ran to the ground. Its gun was worthless. And as you're probably wondering, how does this work out for Soviet tankers? Well, throughout the war, around 400,000 tankers were trained by the Red Army.

The exact numbers. So they get 400,000? 400,000. Okay. How many of them do you think never went home? 325,000. 300,000. Oh, I gave them too much credit. Now this is plus or minus some because the records are kind of iffy.

Because some people just vanished. They climbed coffins, man. Yeah, yeah. So it's not great. And, you know, another thing the Red Army was working on was like, you know, a tank that could actually fight. But the main thing that they really, really liked was artillery. Arguably the best thing it's known for. There's a reason for that. Stalin really fucking liked artillery.

To the point he gave it a bitchin' ass nickname nickname which i will fully give him credit for he called it quote the red god of war which slaps yeah fair enough now in the west in comparison obviously western army still used artillery but they preferred artillery that could move fire mobility was very important fire mobility and accuracy because we simply did not have the mass of artillery. Right. Now, the Soviets decided, and to be fair, that is harder to do. It requires more complex logistics,

education, leadership, all things the Soviets were lacking early war. Right. So they simply decided they would have to make up for that. And they did the next best thing as well. We don't have mobility. We don't have mobility. We don't have accuracy, but we can have a lot of fucking artillery. Yeah.

Put it on trucks and we have to, goddammit. Yeah. So that led to Mass being the name of the game, much like, I don't know, a bodybuilder in the offseason. Some guy affixing rocket launchers to trucks and just screaming, it's bulking season. of fixing rocket launchers in trucks and just screaming, it's bulking season. By the start of the Battle of Kursk, there would be 26 artillery divisions,

each with 200 guns plus 108 heavy mortars, as well as seven rocket launcher divisions, each being able to fire a solid of 3,400 rockets at once. Holy shit. Which is insane. Holy shit. They adopted a better version of world war one artillery tactics of artillery mass concentration over accuracy or as one person put it a baseball bat to the

kidneys it's dumb but incredibly effective when it connects which yeah as anybody who's taken a shot to the kidney will attack. That shit fucking hurts. It doesn't feel good. No, it does not. I love to piss blood. Just all like the outline of Germany. It's like the Kelvin pissing picture, but it's the Nazis pissing blood, like the outline of Germany pissing blood. Now, another thing impressed into the Red Army was oppression.

Mostly NKVD oppression, the worst kind of VD. That's good. Any kind of defeatism or disobedience. And to be fair, defeatism was a very loose term. Like even like some pretty simple complaints were considered defeatism. Pretty simple complaints were considered defeatism. If your local political officer ended up being an asshole, all of this is dealt with an immediate and violent iron fest. Going back to the emphasis on discipline during the war, at least 150,000 red army soldiers would be executed for various violations.

It's thought this is way higher. And Soviet minorities were impacted much heavier by this for reasons I'm sure are not racist. They're racist. No, they're racist. They're racist. A lot of this is like miscommunication and stuff like that being considered simple disobedience. It's wild. Again, this is like not universal.

I read firsthand accounts from like Sovietviet tank veterans specifically that said that that was never enforced in their tank units and i think that has more to do with the fact that armies and soldiers are universal right they love pissing on stuff they they love pissing on stuff but culture wise tankers are very very close-knit you have to be and that leads to less of a snitching culture so and i can speak to that personally as well laws and regulations tend to slip away when you're locked in a metal box with the same four people it's the same reason why um during world war ii and the nazi side the uh the u-boat force was kind of well known for like open disobedience right despite the fact that like

obviously they were loyal until the end doing their job until their shitty boats killed them but like her first-hand accounts always remarked that like people could openly shit talk hitler nobody gave a shit because the the culture is different when you're trapped in a box no secrets between sailors and so on yeah the inter army violence was mostly focused on infantry units which were as per minority population very highly populated by them so one thing another now they also dug into one of my favorite old napoleonic themes oh no fancy uniforms and awards yeah soviets love the name shit as we've been over this is where that comes from um during the

revolution that being the russian revolution at the french one i know i just brought the point uh a lot of effort was made to making the soviet army look as non-militaristic as possible why this is due to political ideas at play where peasants and workers were soldiers and that soldier was not a job title or a skill or a class it was like no we're all peasants we're all workers when the time arises we're also soldiers soldier was not a job that you had right um now of course this didn't count for like high-ranking generals who lived fat lives and like their doctor or whatever uh don't look don't look at them don't look at the soviet union base joe we've been over this oh for anyone who wants to get mad at me in our comments later my name is

nate bethea did please direct all complaints to nate who has actually told me some people have done that which is funny that's funny i think people think he's my boss i'm not really sure now this was simply a duty that everybody had to perform, kind of like the same culture that, like, conscription-based armies have, because that's what this was. Quite literally until 1946, the Red Army's official name was the Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. So, like, this is something they fully let into.

Now, with the beginning of World War II in the East, you know, nationalism came back, you know? And to be fair, who could blame them? No, it worked. You know, it started being referred to as a motherland again. You got a sick statue of a woman with a sword that's like 500 feet tall. Sure. No, it's like it was at one point the tallest statue in the world, dude.

It's like 500 feet tall. Or, sorry, Volgograd now. Volgograd, I think. There's a lot of other nationalistic messaging, but with that came a lot of other old stuff. Because Russian generals and Stalin himself realized that soldiers will do a lot of wild shit for some cool pieces of metal to pin to their chest. Yeah. Uniforms were changed to bring back shoulder boards, make rinks stick out more, standing collars were brought

back, as well as a huge amount of awards that ensured that someone got something, assuming you didn't die of cholera at the draft office or whatever. Everyone from snipers down to cooks had their own awards for distinguished service. The title of Guards, which was used

during the Tsarist era, was also reintroduced to refer to elite formations of troops, and they handed that title out very liberally. Yeah. I want the Cook Award, whatever that is. And they had the idea, which, honestly, they're not wrong

that the culture that you build within a unit, the esprit de corps, whatever the fuck you want to call it, will impact the soldiers within it so if you constantly tell soldiers that they are elite they're guards they'll act like it i mean as dumb as that sounds soldiering is that simple in terms of just the idea of i don't i don't really know what i want to say here but like if you in the same manner if you call something put a gun in someone's hands and call them weak until they're violent. Like if you say over and over, no, you're doing a great job.

Like at some point you're going to be like, oh, I really am doing a great job. Even if it's like a five, 10% difference. Pretty much. And now while these things helped in the short term and by the time we're talking about two years into the war, that shined worn off a bit. That's fair. Even victory in Stalingrad didn't mean much if you were a regular army soldier. You've heard about it. Maybe you fought in it, but did it really mean anything to you? Probably not.

We think it was this giant switch that was flipped and suddenly they were winning. But in reality, Red Army morale was described as dead. Yeah, that makes sense. They don't have anything. Remember where their conscription base comes from. They knew about the devastation of German advance.

They probably lost family members in it. Right. If they came from a place of... If they're a refugee from Belarus or something, it's like being a Holocaust survivor. Right. Right. They had no hope.

Effectively, they were mentally... Your village burned to the ground. You don't really feel like fighting for copex a day yeah and i mean whatever of course everybody likes it like well they were fueled by revenge and they really weren't either i mean these are mostly children yeah but like at some point you're just you're just breaking down like some dudes are going to be fueled by revenge a lot of people just like what do you do your entire family which is probably a big family because you're agrarian right is you know 12 you're the last survivor of 12 people you want to fight or you just want to put a bullet between your eyes like i'm not saying that to like be funny like no no you're 100 right it's been called a spiral

into nihilism is how people uh describe the red army morale at the time ask me about losing my virginity joe uh and i mean not to mention this is trauma compacting trauma right maybe they witnessed the nazi advance they heard about it but now they're in the army and they're fighting the most disgusting devastating battles that that humans have ever run against their friends all their friends are dying yeah and all of their friends are dead and you know it's not like they're gonna go talk to the goddamn therapist. It's World War II. The armies don't give a shit.

Right. Soldiers were often portrayed as being hate-filled and wanting revenge, etc. But in reality, that isn't true as much as propaganda would have had us believe. Instead, there are millions of new draftees plucked from their normal lives from wherever, from dozens of different ethnicities, all crammed together with the only real unifying factor being a uniform on their back and a sense of overwhelming loss that only immense trauma can inspire. And these people are all together now. Right. Not to mention, while Russian education, the Russian language was compulsory, a lot the soviet minorities didn't speak russian well

right so they would like be thrust into these units being given orders in russian and they're like i have no fucking idea what anybody's saying you know yeah it's hard yeah it's a rough fucking life the idea that we get is based on soviet propaganda where all of this is melted away and they were all just were fueled by wanting to kill fascists, which is sure it's true for some of them. But a lot of them just fucking hated their lives, which is the soldier experience. Right. And pissing in porta potters with their doors. Yeah. Sometimes you get to.

I'd rather do that 10 times. I would rather go through everything that I went through 100 times before I lived through fucking three months of the Soviet soldier's life in 1943. Okay, moving on. Generally speaking, conscription in Russia was seen as, at worst, a death sentence and at best, a punishment. Oh, good. Remember back to our series on Napoleon's invasion of Russia. our series on Napoleon's invasion of Russia, when people were drafted into the Imperial Russian Army, they

literally had a funeral for them before they left because they knew they would never see you again. Right. The tradition is you're drafted into the army. Oh, God. It's a death sentence. Yeah. At no point was this considered an integral part of society or any kind of rite of passage into manhood or

whatever. This was not lionized and made a good thing. That was not the case for Germany. It's probably good that it's not, but I don't really... Maybe this? It depends on what your relationship is with the military. I guess that's true, because if you're lionized, you're slipping pretty

quickly into a society that values military above civilians. It depends. There's a lot of nations that have conscription they consider service an honorable and right thing to do and part of your induction into adult citizenship or whatever but also they still consider them civilians because everybody's done it i'm not saying conscription's good i'm just saying it can exist and not be nazi germany but you know for the germans that was not the case despite its

new nazi leaders at the head germany just absorbed imperial german military tradition which had absorbed prussian military tradition and simply stamped a swastika on them as well as most of their leaders as well thanks for nothing count von zeppelin prussian military culture is famously rigid and unrelenting, but its inscription into it was considered a rite of passage for young men, and this continued into Nazi years. Soldiers were well-clothed, fed, and treated well, assuming you were in the Nazi military.

Beating soldiers for discipline, which was common in a lot of places, was frowned upon in the German military, at least at first. And I mean, this is a concept so elementary, I feel weird having to point it out, but simply doing live fire training was incredibly common, which made them good soldiers. Who would have thought that shooting guns makes you better at shooting guns? And this is considered pretty rare in other militaries. Like you could be conscripted into the Red Army and never fire your weapon. If you happen to be conscripted before or after the war. Right.

Because ammo is expensive. Guns break down. Commanders don't want to arrange that shit. Whatever. Like it's all a pain in the ass. It's on a smoke break. Yeah. Just go sweep the fucking parking lot and do your year of military service and fuck off.

Don't call here again. Now, you could see how this could both produce a crop of professional and skilled soldiers. And not that. As well as how easily that could be turned into a propaganda machine and do horrible things. Right. All of this is not to mention a competent officer corps, until the Dale died anyway, which meant that German soldiers really didn't want for anything during this war. Yes, there's the normal traumatic experience of being at war. But outside of, you know, getting greased by a fucking like 15 year old Kazakh farm kid with a gun, your life was pretty comfortable.

What an embarrassing way to go, too. When you weren't fighting, you were going to get food. If your boots fell apart, you'd get a new pair of boots. It's the simple things that make soldiering life not completely horrible.

And this is, of course, assuming they weren't, say, trapped in Stalingrad because of a bad battle plan. Your experience may vary. Your violence may vary. Your violence may vary. Generally speaking, they are well supplied in everything they needed to do.

All of those horrible things that they went on to do, they would have. Oh, good for them. They are also allowed a ton of freedom, much like the US military. In a comparison I don't feel comfortable making. Where if something... In a tactical way, doctrine wasn't rigid um i think i've

brought this up before if something didn't work okay your junior leaders could then change the plan on the fly assuming they were still operating under the same guidance that their officer gave them it wasn't so top heavy that small unit leadership became impossible so it was a it was a fluid leadership process until a certain level like we're not talking like field marshals were able to like work on the fly because then it's political as long as you're below the political level you're good to go which is generally like company level leadership it seems of course this would slowly get taken away from them this is all like best case 1939 scenario we're talking about here. This would all rapidly decrease as people began to die. Starting a war in Russia, however, pretty much chucked everything I just said into a

dumpster. The losses the Germans were experiencing in man, material, and everything else was higher than even the worst Nazi fever dream and their worst case scenario that they dreamed up for their invasion. Never know when you're going to get domed by a 14-year-old farmhand named Mikhail who woke up after plowing the crops

at 4.30 and shows violence. Yep, sometimes like, oh, there's a blonde guy in my yard. I'll be right back. Look, Ma, I made a scarecrow. Nazi guts just leaking all over the place. More importantly than losing all of these people,

which normally I need to point out, they don't care about, the important part is they weren't able to replace them. When you start losing so many people in droves, especially well-educated leaders, you lose the ability to rapidly replace

them. And this went double for tanks and anything that required complex manufacturing. So the so-called armored spearhead of Blitzkrieg, i.e. their tanks, turn into a backbone. This is an important thing to point out here german tanks

were not expected to fight other tanks that's not what they were for nobody's was like so a lot of ideas were still working under the concept of infantry support not tank on tank warfare because tanks were meant to move fast smash through enemy lines and then circle back around they weren't supposed to like get bogged down and like the bullet by bullet minutiae of slugging through trenches and taking enemy tanks they're supposed to be fast maneuver hard leave yeah that stopped they began the backbone of every german operation expected to fight in every battle with the responsibility in in those battles expanded and expanded and expanded

far beyond their point of effectiveness. This created a feedback loop of shit where tanks were asked to do more, they did more, they took more casualties, but in doing so, they would not be able to be replaced. Well, they'd be breaking down more because they're asked to do so much more. That too, especially with fine German engineering at play.

And you've said before, and correct me if i'm wrong one of the problems the germans ran into was that they basically couldn't repair their own tanks right because they were so technically complex yeah well we will definitely talk at length about that because this will go into it wasn't that they're technically complex they're peddly engineered um i know that's probably irk it like some people's hairs are standing up in the backs of their necks. I drive a GTI. It's fine. But they over-engineer things.

The Germans? And as you over-engineer things, you make more pieces that can break. And as you make more pieces that can break, more pieces break, which means you need more pieces to replace them. Joe, you ever ridden a 2009 Porsche with the cup holders that come out of the dashboard on the passenger side how often are those like every time those broke yeah yeah

i drive a toyota prius and uh let me say it is a fine motor vehicle that's never once broken down on me never broken down on me my name is joker and it is 10 years old literally the only thing i have to do is change the fucking oil on it. I can change my own oil, but it's a massive pain in the ass because the Germans invented disposable plugs for my car. That sounds stupid. Joe. 93 octane GTI,

Joe. I can't say that I'm a completely practical-minded person. I own a motorcycle. I get that ooh goes fast. I get it. And they own a motorcycle. I get that ooh goes fast. I get it. And they own a Crop Rocket too. Not to distract from the main point again, but it's something really fucking funny

about being in my GTI, which is just like a normal red hatchback. And then absolutely putting the hammer down and be like, I'm going to accelerate all of you. Really? I'm going to go fast. I also buy things knowing that mechanically it's going to be

a pain in the ass because my motorcycle's British and they're known for not being reliable, but they go fast. Yeah, that's what I care about. That's what I value. And that's how the podcast will end. I will eventually careen right into a wall on that motherfucker. Yeah, I feel that.

Does Lord's Torx do anything to you? That's the feedback loop of German tank warfare at this point. They would ask to do more. They would do more. They would take more casualties, ask to do more again, rinse and repeat until you have no fucking tanks left. Right. By winter of 1942, 18 divisions

of tanks only had 600 working vehicles within them. The system of replacing losses also fell apart as they were asked for reinforcements they just didn't have to the point that when a tank division asked for new tanks, sometimes they would get transport trucks, horses, or literally nothing.

This baby. German vehicles in World War II were also notoriously unreliable. Like in bad terrain, they were fickle. They were mud and dust and snow, which would just play havoc with their engines and air intakes, which guess what? Russia's famous for all of those things. So German vehicles now. Also, yes.

I will give credit where credit's due. The Leopard is a fine tank. I wouldn't pick it, but it's fine. I wouldn't pick it, but it's fine. But the Russians had bad weather and terrain in surplus, meaning that a lot of German tanks were breaking up before they even saw combat. Right. Because of the wonders of German engineering, this meant tons of little things could break, meaning each vehicle needed more replacement parts of the various different kinds, leading to even more logistical problems, which would then cause a backlog and traffic jams of various little odds and ends that they needed to function. Right.

This wasn't limited to just vehicles and equipment. The army ate losses at a level that they had to fundamentally change who was allowed into the army in the first place, as well as the attitude of the army began to rapidly shift. By 1942, anybody over the age of 16 could become an officer in the German army. Oh. Assuming that they were Nazis and kind of well connected. There was a bit of

political purity at play, which of course means quote unquote racial purity. But this is more SS side. I'm talking Wehrmacht. Not that I'm going to put too much of a difference on the two because we've talked about this. But I thought the Wehrmacht was clean. Nope.

This went hand in hand with the Nazification of Prussian traditions within the army and what the army was founded upon. Soon the professionals within the army that were outside of staff officers and the like, the people that were in the army before the war were all pretty much dead. They ate through them pretty fast.

Now, this is because the eastern front cost the germans more than a hundred thousand dead per month jesus fuck now this is not even counting the amount of wounded which who knows how many of them would be able to return to duty right by march of 1943 the nazis were down to its last half million fit men not already in uniform and had come to age yet so literally like digging like you're through the bottom of the barrel here you're you're now turning the barrel upside down and some great last hope i'll put this in like a in a personal standpoint you're drunk it's late at night and you're kind of hungry and you're just like drunk and you're just scraping the bottom of something because you want some peanut butter whatever i've seen me do it but like there's nothing left joe but there's

that's just enough at the tip of the spoon like they're doing that but with like millions of dead bodies um do we need to talk uh but yeah i hope everybody has that picture in their mind now uh but like this so they had to start fucking with draft uh standards and rules a bit now weirdly enough this is actually something that hitler wanted though he probably would have been happier with the purity quote-unquote purity of his army happening without feeding millions of germans into a wood chipper because you know he needed those uh but right he saw the prussianized army as a threat to his nazi rule and wanted to Nazify its structure, which was made harder with all those old Prussian stalwarts around.

Right. Right. Legitimately, one of his long-term plans was, you know, if Nazi Germany survived or won World War II, was to make the entire army the SS. Ugh. And by that, I mean racial and politically pure. Right. By his own standards.

There could be a lot of people that would probably would have ended up in camps if they weren't in the army. Like there's quite a few Jewish people ended up in the Wehrmacht and just kept their mouth shut to save their own lives. They got drafted, showed up, and nobody fucking noticed. I mean, it just shows how stupid their bullshit race science is because it's not real. His own hatred for his own military was intense to the point that he wanted to fire all of his best officers, including Manstein, who, despite being a massive piece of shit and one of the birth fathers of the clean Wehrmacht theory, was legitimately one of the best officers in Germany at the time. Quality didn't matter. Loyalty and purity mattered.

And that's the only thing he cared about. And that's why they lost. I mean, right now, the mentality of soldiers, their culture, and I guess something of their support system had developed into something combining convenience and indifference, which was boiled down to this idea of hardness. was boiled down to this idea of hardness, which didn't define itself into outright cruelty or fanaticism, but rather expediency. This expediency

was nurtured by Nazi ideology that would lead to people becoming indifferent and impersonal, and that depersonalization was very important, and we know exactly where that leads. i wonder why yep it wouldn't be for genocide would it oh yeah i mean genocide on top of war crimes when a soldier

becomes so intensely depersonalized uh with the support system that supports that kind of belief that's how you get your insane amounts of violence and war crimes right you don't generally see those things in a vacuum they They're systemic and institutional. And of course, there would be orders passed down through the Wehrmacht later on that would encourage them to do so and be told that they would not be held accountable for anything they did in the Eastern Front. That wasn't the foundation. That was the pinnacle of it.

The foundation to make that possible already would have happened. Right. That's the reason why, I mean, there was effectively war crimes memos written by American commanders and American soldiers simply didn't do happened. Right. That's the reason why, I mean, there was effectively a war crimes memos written by American commanders and American soldiers simply didn't do it. Right. Like there was a, an order to kill all SS soldiers after the Malmedy massacre. Right.

And because there wasn't a foundation of indifference placed on American military culture, it didn't really happen. Like it happened, but not a ton. And it was mostly by units that were personally connected to the people killed at Malmedy. But that's the difference that military culture can make. And also why you see that being much different in the Pacific Front.

Well, yes, race is certainly a huge part of it. But the other part is the culture of like, no, we're, we're all just going to kill each other. Like there's no order being taken and that is understood here. But now with the backgrounds of the armies at this point covered, let's move on to just how dumb everything else was.

Cause who would? Now, so Manstein had managed to stabilize things pretty much were to the point that every other German officer in high command knew it was time to go on the defensive like we previously talked about. Right, right. Everyone was battered to shit and they needed time to fix the logistical nightmare that a world war happens to create, it turns out. Not that some of these guys should have known about that. They had fought in the last one.

Some of them had pointed out that they should actually fall back and allow the Soviets to push forward as some kind of ruse. They believe this was because the Soviets wouldn't be able to maintain an offensive. They would overextend themselves, at which point they could strike back. And maybe that could have worked. Now, unfortunately for them, none of this mattered because Hitler thought defending meant accepting defeat, accepting you need to go on defense. He was a good general. He was a good general. He was a good corporal general. Yeah.

Corporal general. The most cursed rank ever. He believed even establishing a defensive perimeter and realizing like, okay, we're not going to go on the defensive. We're not going to withdraw. We're going to dig in here and make the Soviets fight us. He thought that was defeatism too. What?

It turns out Hitler, not good at his job. Oh. Yeah. He demanded that they go on the attack. And at this point, Hitler caught himself in the old sunk cost fallacy. I'll never want to get caught in that. Instead of the sunk cost fallacy of, like, I can't sell my Jeep, I can simply repair it or whatever.

Jeep equity, baby. Yeah. It's a war destroying the entire planet and hemorrhaging your population into it you know same thing right it's like buying a wrangler used don't do it no don't do it we don't do that uh especially if it's your military base how would you like your apr to just be insane is this just the infinity not that it's like soldiers love jeeps because it's i don't know jeepers are weird i've talked about this before but like they also don't take care of

anything so it might only have like 800 miles on it by the time they sell it because they get orders to go somewhere else but they've been treating it like shit and the recently will still be fucking huge now both italy and japan had approached Germany at this point, pointing out that maybe we should try to negotiate with the Russians and end this shit show and focus on this whole American problem we have going on. Really? But Hitler refused. At this point, Operation Barbarossa. Hitler, again, not a good leader. At this point, Operation Barbarossa.

How serious were those inquiries from the Japanese and the Italians? Well, the Japan was all aboard, like, yo, let's not fight the Soviets. That makes sense. Japan is a little bit more insistent than others because if this shit turns bad, they're right next door to everything that I'm taking over. I really don't feel like dealing with this.

At this point, Operation Barbarossa had cost so many men and so much material in Germany that in his mind, anything other than victory, seizing the material and manufacturing capabilities of the USSR along with it meant total defeat for Germany. And to be fair, he was right. I mean, he was going to lose either way, but he was also right on this.

And politically, he could have been right since they were telling him this all the way back in 1941 and 1942. There is actually a pretty good chance Hitler might be able to talk into an armistice or something like it. Like, I think that maybe the Soviets would have talked their way out of it as well. Because even this, even after Stalingrad, the Soviets pushing out of the Soviet and into berlin was by no means a for sure thing right that's a lot of land to get through and there was not a hundred percent sure that they're going to turn this thing around the soviets may have been in favor of hitting the metaphorical

pause button on this whole thing right i mean this would have allowed the germans to focus on the western theater where they also would have eventually lost we've we can't talk about this they would have lost no matter what just simply manpower time development of the atom bomb yeah just sheer industrial industrial power i imagine take that history channel circa 2005 uh now virtually every one of hitler's allies is starting to see how bad this whole russia thing was going and was going to continue being. Italy and Hungary withdrew their soldiers. Romania was getting to that point, and Finland didn't give a fuck about

Nazi war aims and fighting their own goddamn war. Right. We're going to be alone! Hitler needed a victory to impress them, let alone to know his empire of doom wasn't collapsing in on itself like a neutron star. He also thought a big

enough victory might talk Turkey into joining the war effort, as they were economically close to Germany, but probably remembering what happened last time they joined the Germans in the war, they wanted to sit this one out. And to be fair, that probably also would have worked if Turkey thought that the Nazis were

going to win, they could sweep into the Caucasus and retake all their old alderman shit. Oh, congratulations, boys. Yeah. So with Hitler's mindset on the offensive, Manstein planned one, and it would be a massive effort. Rolling his eyes. Just like, I don't want to fucking be here.

It would be a massive effort involving army groups south and center, driving towards the Kerr salient from two directions, cutting off the salient and forcing the Soviets and all of the reserves of the region into a hammer and anvil maneuver, crushing them. It's commonly referred to as a textbook offensive. Now, if this pie-in-the-sky bullshit worked, it wasn't going to win the war. The Germans needed this win just to keep things the way they were going. Oh, that's tough.

Yeah, that has to be the worst way to accept an offensive. Like, no, no, no, this isn't like the state. We're not going to learn this, boys. We have to hemorrhage a million people just to keep the status quo for another week. That sucks ass. I mean, fuck the Nazis. That sucks ass. Currently, they were defending a nearly 500 mile long front

while badly hurting for reserves. Manstein's masterful pie in the sky plan, if successful, would have simply shortened the front to about 150 miles and buy them time. It's genius. This is just so low stakes, it might just work.

It won't, but it might just. It will not, yeah. Manstein insisted that if this plan was to be done, it had just work. It won't, but it will not. Manstein insisted that if this plan was to be done, it had to be done now before the Soviets could keep building up their forces and before the end of the dry season, before the Western allies could get a foothold in continental

Europe, all of which was about to happen. Instead, that wouldn't happen. Hitler would instead wait and wait and wait. and that is where we'll pick up next time i loved waiting he was very insistent on things happening when there was his idea and then when someone came up with an idea he's like nah hold on that sounds like it sucks like i said it's one of the problems that you often see in like dictator-based militaries and it's like completely dependent we've talked about this ad nauseum but if hitler had stayed his ass out of command and

control the nazis still would have lost but they would have done better right like there's a reason why the soviets militarily do significantly better tactically at later on is because as bad as stalin is and as heavy handed for the most part because he trusts Georgi Zhukov. Now that would change later on, but like at this point in the war, Zhukov gets to where the fuck he wants, but

that's what we'll pick up next time. Liam, thank you for joining me for part one. You're not welcome. And until next time, don't invade the Sovietviet union folks i mean also don't do that bad things happen