Why was red army casualties so high?

Why was red army casualties so high?
The purge of Russia's officers by stalin as well as the lost of equipment and men/ surprise of the attack were reasons for the defeats earlier in the war. Late war battles, featuring experienced/ well equipped Russian soldiers featured the same trend of high soviet casualty rates. Why is this so? Is it because of the Russian's rush to Berlin? Inb4 wehraboos pic unrelated

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Well they were attacking and attacking army usually suffers more casualties.
Keep in mind Soviets were playing constant catch-up, they were caught with their pants down and decimated so they had to rebuild their army almost from scratch, and they lacked experienced officers and NCO's. They learned the hard way.

Because the Reds were fighting for survival. Losing meant being exterminated.

epic thread
this is why so many Veeky Forums users advocated for years for a Veeky Forums board, so threads like this can be created.

>Why was red army casualties so high?
because they got purged, they got caught with their pants down, and they faced a better trained enemy (at least initially)

furthermore, about a third (!!!) of all soviet soldiers killed in the war were not killed on the battlefield but died in POW camps

>Late war battles, featuring experienced/ well equipped Russian soldiers featured the same trend of high soviet casualty rates.
definitely not the same trend, also they were on the offensive then - but without the advantages of germany early in the war

>The Red Army sustained high casualty rates due to what John Erickson termed “the Soviet style of war.” This Soviet style, as Erickson puts it, was an amalgam of Stalin’s will along with collective societal will—actualized on the battlefield through sheer numbers.The Soviets were able to transform their war efforts into a more effective methodology following the onset of Operation Barbarossa—although still experiencing high casualty rates. The Soviet style of war, its doctrine, “was adjusted but more important implemented with requisite ‘norms’ of armament and equipment (not simply sheer numbers) and the relationship of ‘will’ to professional competence substantially refashioned.”[1]

wwiidiaries.com/2012/10/08/235/

>The Soviet state was able to sustain these high casualty rates through the transformation of their former lackadaisical code of military justice to that of a rigid, unconditionally rigid set of norms for Soviet soldiers, as noted by Erickson: “Obedience was henceforth to be unconditional, the execution of orders prompt and precise, Soviet discipline to be marked by ‘severer and harsher requirements than discipline in other armies based upon class subjugation.’ ”[2] Part and parcel to this new discipline was the newly imparted patriotism of the Soviet state following the 1917 Revolution. The Soviet Red Army also enjoyed what must have seemed a never-ending supply of trucks, rail engines, and railroad cars, through Lend-lease. This Allied program gave the Red Army a devastating advantage over Nazi Germany. Glantz and House suggest that “every Soviet offensive would have stalled at an earlier stage, outrunning its logistical tail in a matter of days” without the program. [3]

wwiidiaries.com/2012/10/08/235/

>Glantz and House note that the Red Army was able to deceive and ultimately decimate the Wehrmacht by “concentrating all available forces on a narrow frontage at an unpredictable point.” They add that the Red Army did not have an unlimited number of men available, as their deception had purported.[4] The enormous victory over Nazi Germany helped to unify the post-war Soviet Union. With its sense of new-found pride followed the burdens of defending a state now paranoid of another foreign invader. In defense-by-proxy, and keeping another aggressor far from Soviet borders, as experienced in Cuba and Vietnam, the Soviet economy was doomed, along with the Soviet Union itself which ultimately collapsed.[5]

wwiidiaries.com/2012/10/08/235/

that's true, they would take higher casualties being on the offensive, but after much research, I feel it is because of the Soviet high command's insensitivity to casualty rates. The western allies would never had the stomach to push, at the cost of men lost.

>Bibliography
>Erickson, John. The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
>Glantz, David M. and Jonathan House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

wwiidiaries.com/2012/10/08/235/

We cannot ignore the Soviet's talent for strategic command. The encirclement at Stalingrad and Bagration was very carefully plan and carried out!

dis
Lend lease, came in it's most effective late war, when soviet troops on the offensive needed the trucks and logistics to link up the supply lines of their late war offensives

gud post

True. Pop history tries to paint the war as a german overextension that ended in stalingrad which was followed by inevitable defeat. The truth is though that the soviets were able to stop the german offensive (with lend and lease just not that much) shit like bagration wouldn't have been possible without lend and lease.

You do realize that the Soviets suffered about 33-40% of their losses within the first nine weeks of the war, right? They took lumps after that, but never anything close to the initial rush.

that's true, but lend lease didn't even reach the Russians early war in battles in 1941, only in 1942 did the tanks, used in fronts like the southern Caucasus front or leningrad became more common. By giving the Russians food and fuel, the americans allowed the Reds to be able to focus on making tanks and arms

not true.
>Lumps
every battle had at lease 50,000 soviet casualties or more
at Bagration they had 800,000 casualties to the Wehrmacht's 300,000
at every battle it was almost always a 1:2 ratio

>every battle had at lease 50,000 soviet casualties or more
this is literally a lie though

Causalities were high at first because shit equipment, shit soldiers, shit leaders etc
Causalities were high at the end because the soviets were on attack and most soldiers were conscripts from farms, they actually did exceedingly well all things considering

British weapons were used in the defense of moscow. Not in huge numbers but they were used.

The most critical lend and lease aspect (apart from food maybe) were logistics equipment. The trains and trucks delievered allowed the SU for modern offensive warfare.

>trains
no
>trucks
yes

Soviet logistics were highly based on the use of locomotives. Most of which were delievered by l and l. There was next to no wartime production.

i will let you ponder one factor which you have completely overlooked in your post for a few more minutes

Speak your mind.

not yet
my riddle has something to do chiefly with your second sentence

>every battle had at lease 50,000 soviet casualties or more

Not at all true. For instance, Yelnya, which was near the beginning.

>at Bagration they had 800,000 casualties to the Wehrmacht's 300,000

You might want to do a more thorough research than looking at the low end estimates of Wikipedia.

>at every battle it was almost always a 1:2 ratio

Kishniev, Belgrade, half the open offensives in 1945.

Think about it this way. The Germans, according to Rudiger Overmans's widely accepted work, had roughly 1:2 losses overall for the war against the USSR. Every German dead/wounded/captured, you have two Soviets the same.

The early battles had a way more lopsided ratio than this. If the later battles didn't make it up, how do you arrive at an overall 1:2?

Not him, but what he's alluding to is that the Soviets had little wartime production because they were sitting on a massive inventory of train engines and rolling stock pre-war. Even Lend Lease itself was about 12% of their pre-war inventory (albeit generally more modern. Plus, I'm not sure as to their train losses, but I don't think they were that heavy)

why was the western allies able to push into Germany within a year? Was it because most of Germany's forces were in the east?

It's less the force ratio (which by the close of 1944 was actually pretty hefty in the West), but the distance.

Operation Bagration started at around Smolensk for Galitsky's corps, and was more or less a straight north to south line at that point.

Distance from Smolensk to Berlin: 1429.3 km

At (roughly) the same time, you have D-Day, landing at Normandy. The distance from say, Caen (western Normandy landings) to say, Dusseldorf (on the Rhine in Germany) is about 660 km.

The Soviets had a lot further to go.

good thread

Adding on what others have said, I'd suggest NCOs were a big factor. Afaik, whereas the generals and general staff were as good if not better than their German counterparts, their NCOs never reached the same level.

>Believing le "Hitler wanted to exterminate Slavs" meme

Oh really? What was he going to do then after taking over Russia? Hand out cake and ice cream?

When Titans clash is a phenomenal book on the subject. Also the Wehrmacht was probably the most tactically proficent Army of WWII. So they were able to match Soviet Forces over match for a time through inflicting horrific casuakties. But Soviet Operational level strategy proved far superior, and are the only ones who seemed to master it, after Stalin let the Stavka "do their thing" later in the war. The "Deep Operation" countered German Tactical superiorit through Operational level encirclements.

>So they were able to match Soviet Forces over match for a time through inflicting horrific casuakties.
They inflicted 2:1 K/D ratio over all of WW2. Even during Barbarossa casualties rates were horrific for both sides.

Their kill ratio vs. the Soviet armed forces (not simply civilians they murdered) was barely over 2 to 1. That's bad considering the Wehrmacht were at the top of their game when the invasion began.

>bait this low quality

>Russians are Slavs

Nice meme faggot