Why did the Soviets perform so poorly(massive losses) despite having superior equipment?

DUDE TROTSKYIST PLOTS LMAO

the russians had horrible command structure, military doctrine and Inept leadership throughout most of the war and took extremely heavy casualties during the first 6 months of fighting.

Because during the opening stages of the conflict the Red Army was poorly led (conseuqences of the purges), poorly equipped (the good equipment was only available in large quantities later), and was strongly discouraged from retreating by Stalin (over a million USSR PoWs died of neglect).

During the later stages of the conflict, Germany was defending tenaciously with a lot of land to sell dearly (1600 km from Moscow to Berlin), and the Red Army's commanders were judged ny Stalin more for their rate of advance than by their minimisation of losses.

At first it was because they were caught ridiculously with their pants down. The initial German advance was a slaughter, Soviet armies encircled, thousands of aircraft destroyed, losses reaching 23,000 a day.

Later on, when it became apparent they were probably going to win, they just didn't give a fuck. They had the people and could sustain the casualties.

You're confusing quantity with quality

No he's not. Soviet equipment was good individually, and you sure as fuck need to take ease of manufacture into account when judging "the best".

I poorly summarized this up a while ago.
Don't base any history papers off it, but for someone completely new to the Eastern Front this may help a little.

...

Stalin had more than 60% of his Generals exiled or killed. Poor equipment, the military basically had hand-me-down weaponry and armor. There wasn't enough for everyone, also the about of famine that they had experienced. It is a surprise that Soviet Union was able to function afterward.

Shit low-rank officer corps and Stalin.

I have a question regarding some plastic soldiers I own. I got these Russians online some time ago, they're all pretty nicely detailed with realistic weapons and gear, but strangely they were packaged with Napoleonic-era field guns, even painted in camouflage.

Is there any historical basis for this, was there ever a time that things were so desperate for the Red Army they pressed such museum pieces into service against the Germans?

>discouraged from retreating by Stalin
When will this meme die

Over 60,000 Russians were killed for retreated in WW2.
This is the Soviet official number. No telling how many were killed in total, but it was definitely more than the official figure.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrier_troops#Barrier_troops_in_the_Red_Army

>what is Order No. 227

>won the war
>preformed poorly

Well yeah dude, America and Britain also won and they did that without crawling over a mountain of their own corpses.

No training, leadership didn't care about casualties, orders coming from politician not a general, etc

>vulture

ty for your quality copy-pasta

Oh, evil Stalin keeps soldiers from running away.

stalin's ego and his refusal to heed his generals' advice.

>Is there any historical basis for this, was there ever a time that things were so desperate for the Red Army they pressed such museum pieces into service against the Germans?

no

The oldest cannons in use were old 76,2 cannons of Russian Empire and M1914/15 AA gun

>Soviets perform so poorly
>won the war

???

You can win and still perform poorly if the odds are in your favor.

Winning is by definition performing good enough.
You could've performed better, surely, and that is always the case.
But if you won, you were good enough (to win). Not poor.

America and Britain weren't invaded by land...

You can discuss with your future employers whether having performed "good enough" is reason enough to hire someone.

If you don't get hired, you didn't do good enough.
You are literally arguing against the definition of the phrase.

When a team wins the Superbowl by one point they get the same trophy as the team that wins by 30. A win is a win nigga.

>I must unite the Russian peoples under one graveyard
T. Zhukov

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

A Pyrrhic victory is achieved on the battle level, not on the war level.
If you won the war, you did well enough.

>not on the war level
Tell that to the French in WWI.

They weren't on drugs

The french won WWI. They were good enough to stop the german advance, and push back.

And lost so many men that they were unable to field an actual reserve in WWII. The war was a Pyrrhic victory for the French.

Loss less men than Germany in WWI. Lack of men wasn't the reason for the WWII defeat.
Read a book, nigger.

You're right, being unable to field a fucking reserve was. Something they couldn't do because they didn't have the men for it.

>wehraboo talking about inability to field sufficient reserves

The french army was outmaneuvered, not grinded out.
And army size has more to do with morale and popular opinion, not with actual manpower.
If the French fielded as big a percentage of their population as Serbia did, they'd march form Paris to Moscow in victory.

Again, read a fucking book. I won't respond to your uneducated claims anymore.

unironically the answer is better tactics

>can't field a reserve after your main force got swept past
>claim it had nothing to do with the lost later on and tell others to read books
Lol

implying it wasn't both

people love to wax lyrical about the New Deal "golden age" but take one good look at how much we spend on entitlements now and tell me how worth it those twenty years were.

>wehraboo still talking about inability to field reserves

@2124939
>implying the Wehrmacht didn't field a reserve
>implying the Volksgrenadiers and Volksturm didn't exist
Still not getting any (You)'s from me fampai

qualitypost

It is obvious why the Soviet Union lost so many infantry, but not why they failed to make good use of tanks and aircraft.

It seems like every power in ww2 made huge blunders, but the democracies were better placed to remove incompetent generals like Fredendall while the Germans inherited a capitalist economy to play with, so their incompetence levels were lower.

@2124945
>wehraboo so buttblasted at his country's crippling inability to field sufficient manpower reserves that he has to cite old men and children for his counter argument

The Soviets won the finno-russian war
They mist have performed well in the war to win it

I suppose they must have performed well enough, else they would've lost.

They performed well enogh to win, but the performance was still abysmal.

Was it abysmal? They won. They did good enough.

>the heavily industrialised USSR losing a third of a million troops compared to 70,000 finns is a good performance

>USSR making a claim on X land
>X land is denied to them
>they go to war
>they win the war
>they gain X land, and also Y land as well
>and they force Finland out of certain alliances
>and they humiliate Sweden and Germany who didn't join the war despite popular protests, empowering communist movements

They won. Was it expensive? It was. All winter war is, and unlike the memes about Napoleon or Hitler invading in winter, the war with Finland actually was planned for and fought in winter. It wasn't even a too slow victory, they won in 3 months, and got everything they wanted and extra.

A victory. They did well enough, and got what they wanted, and more.

The goal was to conquer the whole of Finland. Their tactics were terrible and took huge casulties to Finns who often relied on motoliv cocktails when they lacked anti-tank guns.
The soviets were massively superior in terms of military strength, and yet achieved reduced war goals for casulties much higher then expected.

>The goal was to conquer the whole of Finland.

Yeah, no.
The goal was to take over a specific region, which was requested peacefully before the war, and war was declared when the request was denied.
The war ended the moment the desired territory was occupied, before the western countries can intervene. Despite the high casualties the USSR could have continued fighting, Finland was practically out of men, and every demand the USSR made would've been accepted.

Finland suffered a complete surrender and gave away its largest city and all its factories and its two ports that didn't freeze.
You underestimate the value of the land they lost, and overestimate the value of the land that was not demanded of them.

>Better tanks
No, just cheaper

>Best anti-tank rifle
Irrelevant

>Better sub-machine gun
Irrelevant

They had equipment advantages, such as artillery, but not where you're looking

Ok the soviets got their war demands but the thing is that a Soviet Victory was inevitable. But you just don't seem to see just how much they fucked up in the process. They should've won with ease amd yet routinely fought battles with 5x the losses that rhe finnd took. A finnish vivtory would've required another napoleon, but they still performed better than the Russians in every way, thry were simply dwarfed by the sheer size of the soviet military, not their tactics or performance.

Also historians believe that the USSR intended to make finland a puppet state, but the designs outside of the original war goal but were not realised because of the extend of the soviet losses during the invasion.

You are grasping at straws when the raw fact is that they won an absolute victory, got everything they wanted plus tip, thus they did good enough.

It wasn't an absolute victory, they took horrendous losses far in excess of what they should've taken and weren't able to puppet or conquer finland. They should've been able to take more for less casulties but didn't because they performed badly.

I am done responding, you can scroll up and reread my previous posts which already address everything you say.
I'll urge you to learn to argue before getting passionate about it.

>>Best anti-tank rifle
oh wow, what a game changer.

>If you don't get hired, you didn't do good enough.
Good enough to get a degree does not imply good enough to get hired.

If you got hired, you are good enough to get hired you shitstain.
Not that you would know.

>I have no response so I will handwave away all criticism

Yes, this is plausible as the russians would also give 1 clip of ammo each to 2 men but only 1 of them would have a rifle and when he died his comrade would then pick up his rifle and carry on the charge

>Yeah, no.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact

>The goal was to take over a specific region, which was requested peacefully before the war, and war was declared when the request was denied.

It was denied because the claim was baseless and retarded. Finland was very determined to remain neutral and had no interest in starting a war with Soviet Union. They weren't aligned with any of the Soviet enemies either, so the demands where total bollocks and no one bought them.

>Finland suffered a complete surrender and gave away its largest city and all its factories and its two ports that didn't freeze.
You underestimate the value of the land they lost, and overestimate the value of the land that was not demanded of them.
Yes, and in the progress Soviet Union was humiliated beyond believe, lost its League of Nations membership and directly caused German invasion against them. Meanwhile, Finland gained reputation and aid from all around the, retained its sovereignty to this very day and in the long term came far better off than Soviet Union, which (COLLAPSED) and left behind a legacy of barely functioning shitholes.

Absolute Victory indeed. Good revisionism my man.

>1942 they turn it around
>War lasts until '45
>Somehow that counts as most

Are you trying?

>I played COD world at war and think it's historical fact

>1942
They didn't turn it around until '43. Germany was still executing offensive operations until Kursk.

>we lost half our population, all out industry and our only ports, but in the end we actually won the war, because i make more monthly wage in 2016

Are you fucking retarded?

>finnish nationalist

Whaddya think?

>the soviet union collapsed in 1991
>this means even though finland lost it's most valuable parts of the country it came out ahead in the run up to the second world war.

>better tank
Nope, on paper the T-34 is better, better mobility, better armour, but it had terrible gun sights and only the command vehicles had radios, and had to Communicate with the rest via signal flags, this it performed poorly against panzer 3 and 4.

>better submachine guns
And more, but Russia didn't have enough qualified leadership at the start, so their men were ineffectively lead, despite not being as poorly trained as they were often accused of. Besiddes, the differences in infantry weapons were not significant enough to really make a noticeable difference outside of close City fighting such as in Stalingrad.

>anti tank rifles
Largely obsolete in WW2, and the germans had better anti tank rocket launchers because the russians had none outside of lendlease and scavenging, until they made their own in 1944.

>all out industry and our only ports
Which forced our government to industrialize and creat it out of nowhere otherwise it woudln't have happened. There was some fortune in that thing. And we didn't become a warsaw pacter you can pretty much see the differences when you go 10m off the eastern border.

Fuck you cunt.

>we lost everything, so we had to build from scratch
>this is good fortune

I hope you are as fortunate in the future, makes for good comedy.

It was a clear pyrrhic victory you tard. They had planned victory parades week past the declaration fo war.

We were literally not industrialized at all. The population was 80-90% farmers. even with our industrial holdings in Karelia. The war forced us to build an economy which we couldn't have built up in peace time because of our politicians own beliefs on how to proceed.

Pyrrhic victory is a meme, you mongoloid, and it still means a victory.
They won the war, they got what they wanted, they got more than they wanted, they humiliated their opponents by doing a drive by during winter, so nobody could reinforce Finland before it fell, England and Germany both didn't have the time or the will to react.

USSR won the war. Finland lost the war. USSR achieved their objective, and extra. Finland lost their objective.
Stop being a nationalist twelve year old taking pride in a military defeat that your grandfather wasn't born to see, let alone you.

>see, we are the real winners, because even though we lost all our factories, we didn't have many to begin with lol

Are you?

>Half our population
False.
>All of our industry
False again, sizeable part was lost but after the war was rebuilt
>All our ports
>What are Turku, Kotka, Pori and Rauma

Oh, we are dealing with a raving commie revisionists. Now the bullshit starts to make since.

i also heared the guys with no rifle distracted the mchine gunners so the snipers could pick them off.

Pretty much. while Ukraine and Russia was getting the good ol' treatment of uncle Stalin finland was enjoying a pretty good status already.

youtube.com/watch?v=A0XlkUNx8mE
Btw someone of you mentioned They had no annexation plans, which is complete bogus and judging form the aggressiveness i'd dare to argue your most likely russians.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Democratic_Republic

Not the original argumentor here but still, far as icare we came in as the winners atleast in the long run. We have strong economy, one of the best welfare countries alongside sweden and norway. Best education by any standard. Now what does the warsaw pact has under it's belt other than famine, deaths gulags and lovely cold war.

the war was pretty much lost in 42 overall tho,maybe even in 41 when they failed to take moscow.

The USSR had plans for the whole world, its called communism. They signed the worst peace deal ever to end WWI with the assumption that they are getting all that clay back when the german communist party joins the revolution in a couple of years.

Are you aware that even today Canada has plans to invade the USA, and the USA has plans to invade Canada? Multiple detailed plans.
Its what every country does. I am sure Finland has plans to attack Russia as well, doesn't mean it realistically thinks it can.

Calling me a communist/russian/soviet/bolshevik or whatever else you check for under your bed isn't an argument.

Lol what an fucking post.

>Ofc they had plans for everyone and you sure might have too xD that stil won't mean when they enter armed conflict they won't pursue those plans whilst they've already set up the puppet government

Really fucking weak. And no, we don't have any plans to attack russia. Only thing we're prepared for is Russian aggression which is the backbone of our defense.

They were still executing offensives in 1945 (Lake Balaton). Doesn't mean that the tide of the war hadn't turned against them, and badly.

Not the user you're responding to, but I would point out that a lot of the flaws you've mentioned in the T-34 have to do with doctrine rather than the tank per se.

And it's less accurate to say it performed poorly against the PZIII and IV than it is to say it performed badly against German anti-tank guns, much more so than the panzers performed against Soviet ATGs; armored clashes were pretty rare in the opening phases of Barbarossa.

The battle of the bulge was an offensive German action, in 1944's latter days- come on mate, don't be thick