Very true. Its like when they say the red baron shot down 400 planes? Did he really or was it a propaganda thing?
Enemy at the gate is on the history channel in 39 minutes
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Very true. Its like when they say the red baron shot down 400 planes? Did he really or was it a propaganda thing?
You got some right but actullay at the rjev meat grinder ther wete doing frontal attack on german mg they loose like over a million men or more there
Now that would be a movie!
Availability of guns has nothing to do with arming the soldiers. Yeah it sounds barbaric for Western world, but terror was the way to run Soviet Union and terror was effective way to force Soviet soldiers to fight. How about sending troops with no guns at all in 1943? How about not enlisting some of them to reduce official number of casualties? How about not giving them anything - no uniform, no training, huh? No movies and no English books about that? Still there's a living memory of folks who witnessed.
Are sure you want to compare "waffen" or "army" units of SS that were not different from Wehrmacht units with NKVD? NKVD btw also had some battle units, not all were sadists and killers, not to mention Border Guards were part of NKVD.
Yeah right, we all believe that Soviet statistic was the most honest statistic in the world as well as soviet history science.
And if you think that it takes veterans to win the battle then just compare Soviet and German troops losses. It's all about resources. All kind of resources including human.
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There is no record, on paper or anecdotal, that suggests the "one man gets a rife, the other a 5-round stripper clip" trope ever occured at the battle of Stalingrad. Find a credible source and I will be very impressed. The only Soviet soldiers who were sent into combat unarmed were the poor bastards sent to the penal battalions. There is nothing in the movie which directly indicates that the opening scene involves a penal battalion (this is likely where the idea came from though). You have no proof for any of your claims. Stalinist Russia was one of the worst regimes in history, but that doesn't give Hollywood the right to skew history and potenitally tarnish the legacy of the men who fought at Stalingrad. Russia was invaded by a foreign power, the Soviets hardly needed terror to get their men to fight. As I said before, the vast majority fought for the reasons that any soldier does.
You're right, I meant the Schutzstaffel, of which the Waffen SS was an armed wing. Only five out the roughly 40 Waffen SS divisions were not found guilty of widespread war crimes, so comparing them to the Wehrmacht is not fair at all. The NKVD weren't all sadists and killers, but, like the SS, as an overall organisation they had plenty of blood on their hands and deserve a bad reputation in history.
Such documents were kept hidden until the collapse of the Soviet Union, most likely becasue there is some degree of truth to them. Naturally, this led the Soviet regime to withold them from their citizens as they wanted to supress the knowledge that any significant amount of men were executed. Soviet documents should be viewed with some skepticism, but no more than those of any major power during that era.
It obviosuly does take veterans to win battles. The fact the Soviets got slaughtered for the first year of Barbarossa demonstrates it very well. Uncle Joe, in his infinite paranoia, had most of the Red Army officer core killed in the 30s. Despite the fact that Soviet equipment was technically on par with that of German forces in 1941, a lack of good leadership and organisation left the Red Army completely ineffective as a fighting force. One of the reasons the tides changed on the Eastern Front was because those in leadership positiones became more competent through combat experience.
Commissars would certainly shot their own.
"the Captain (Commissar in the Russian) shot him there and then for refusing to obey an order" 18:00 mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BNHlme2--A&index=2&list=PLO6eBumltfhgr2OYVZFdifpFDWR8k66pr
GunsNotPuns
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Not confined to the Soviet army, one reason officers carried pistols.
It is just a movie, a very good one! The movie is design to give the viewers an idea of the historical event, it does not have to be accurate from the historical point of view. IT IS NOT A DOCUMENTARY!!! After all, who really knows the truth what was going on back then, even veterans don't know it all. For those of you questioning the "truthness" of the movie - well, guys, the actors were also using blank ammo....
Again, the movie is great, it does represent the spirit of those events.
Again, the movie is great, it does represent the spirit of those events.
That's exactly right.
"Russia" that got invaded was in fact Soviet Union and many nations of Soviet Union did not think that Germans were invaders. Moreover in 1941 until German changed thier policies they were welcomed by Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian peasants as liberators. I don't know about Belorussia and Russia but on the Ukraine territory if captured Red Army soldiers was able to prove he is Ukrainian either by speaking Ukrainian or with help of relatives he got released immediately. In 1941 most regular folks of Soviet Union (especially from rural areas) had enough of Red terror and by that time Germans did nothing wrong, so who was the enemy for them? What to fight for? For those bastards that were terrorizing citizens of their own country?
I've been studying WW2 for nearly 20 years, not including my teenage years when I had numerous opportunities to speak to veterans and regular folks who survived the WW2. My two grandfathers were veterans of WW2. And after all I saw, after all conversations I had, after all documents and books and numbers I say the terror was the way to run the state and run the army. Quoting Trotsky "…red army soldier has to be presented with choice of either honourable death in the fight or or inevitable and shameful death by firing squad.." and thus famous Order #227. Everyone's entitled to his own's opinion but opinions don't change the facts.
You also wrong in your opinion that executions were not commenced in front of the troops. There are numerous proves to that.
Now, also you statement "The only Soviet soldiers who were sent into combat unarmed were the poor bastards sent to the penal battalions" is not correct. I don't have time to present enormous amounts of memoirs and facts and systematizing them and I'm not even sure they were translated into English, but practice of sending poorly armed or unarmed units into the fight were traced until the 1944. Here's one typical story, I'll Google-translate it for you. This is the typical story of most guys that were "liberated from evil Nazis" and immediately thrown into battle. And I saw enough names on my village cemetery epitaph and I heard personal stories like this many times to know it's true.
"When the village was "liberated", all men between 16 and 60 years - all that were barely able to walk, deaf or blind - no matter - were taken into the army. We were "armed" - given half-brick and - "go, atone blood guilt" because we were in the occupied territory. We were said "you throw bricks, and the Germans may think that it grenades!". They put us about 500 souls on ice reservoir, on the opposite side - a complex building, Germans knocked in the wall slits. The wall - height of three meters. Try and climb on it if you can make through the ice. The Germans hit us with intensive fire. We could not get back - there were SMERSH (my comment - I think old man mistaken in the unit name, as normally SMERSH was not involved into such things) aiming at our backs with machine guns ... I remember I was trying to hide behind bodies of men killed on the ice and I was pushed back along with bodies on the slippery ice as machine gun fire was so intense so it was pushing bodies back. Mine detonated and then I did't remember anything... When I woke up, I found somebody picked me up and brought to hospital and this half-brick was still in my hand, it got frozen to palm. My legs were frost bitten too. I, like a true soldier, did not leave "weapon" on the battlefield (laughs). The boys said that out of 500 souls, only 15 survived..."
As I said I don't have much time to elaborate and my quick searchex did not bring up anything on this subject in English, but this topic was discussed on historical forums and some documentaries exist in Ukrainian and Russian languages.
Unfortunately there are still tons of documents that are considered as "secret" by Russian government. Especially in such sensitive areas like mass repressions etc. I had been working with documents from different sources and nobody's perfect, but only Soviets were "smart" enough with documents to present killed civilians in the battles to pump up the numbers of killed enemies and stupid enough to report much lower numbers of captured weapon... with proportions sometimes 20 dead enemies to 1 captured rifle. That is not about German soldiers, that's another conflict, but it gives the idea of my trust into single document. As I said - only complex analysis of many documents and evidences and memoirs could help there.
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So the writing in bold, where is that from?
These are from interviews of Anatoly Dimarov, writer. He just happen to be known person who used to be one of those soldiers and thus his interviews were published in the newspress. He also witnessed for couple of documentaries. But it's nothing new for many families.
http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дімаров_Анатолій_Андрійович
P.S. I found by googling his name in English and apparently there's a translated article with same part of his video interview, much better translation and much better overview of events
"Liberated, Only to Be Sent into Battle" - http://ukrainianweek.com/History/74746
While article focuses on event that happened on the soil of Ukraine, during several discussions with historians from Belorussia and Russia they mentioned that they had been able to gather similar facts about similar even on liberated parts of their countries.
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