Russia and Ukraine

[Thumpalumpacus]

Probably more a result of T-34s and Il-2s hitting the battlefield in numbers rather than leadership genius, I think. Look at the loss ratios in soldiers between the Wehrmacht, the British, the Americans, and the Soviets. That didn't improve much throughout the war in terms of KIA.

Of course, early-war Soviet POWs subsequently killed in camps probably skews those ratios too. But surrenders on the battlefields are mission-kills anyway, and the Soviets presided over several of the largest surrenders in history in the early stages. Given the brutal camp conditions, that probably inflated the Wehrmacht kill-ratio against them.

The Russian soldier has historically been a pretty stout soldier, but we're definitely not seeing that in the last twenty years or so.

The T-34 didn’t have as much effect on the course of the war as often attributed to them.  some of the attribution came from post war german accounts design to explain why the germans didn’t do better, as their boasts of the superior tactical skills of the germany army imply they should. 

When the T-34 had a decisive superiority over german tanks, which is in 1941 and early 1942, there were very few of them.   Maybe 5% it the russian tank forces were T-34s.  By mid 1942, they were still superior to vast majority of germany tanks, but by a much smaller margin as the germans have introduced better tank guns and heavier armor on their existing tanks.  yet T-34 still only made up a small part of the Russian tank force.    By mid 1943, the germans have largely caught up in the technical quality of tanks by further upgrades of existing model as well as new models that were considerably superior to the T34.   Yet even then, T34 still made up less than half of the strength of each soviet tank division. The other half were still made up of light tanks that were not competitive with even the German tanks of 1941.    

Yet by autumn of 1943, the russians have beaten the germans in stalingrad, at Kursk, and  have completely seized the strategic and tactical initiative from the germans, and further have driven the germans largely out of much of ukraine.

The T-34 excelled in numbers, which I specifically mentioned in my post. If you look at Soviet tank production (by 1943, the Soviets were cranking out 1,300 T-34s per month), you'll see German tank production in the rear-view mirror. The Soviet tank also had much better mobility and somewhat better reliability than any German tank fielded in the war (needless to say, in much smaller numbers). Of course it was inferior to some German tanks, but how many of those did the Germans field? I'll let you look up those numbers yourself. You'll get a rude shock, I think.

The T-34 didn't win the war for the Russians, but the numbers of them sure helped. Between 1940 and 1945 the Soviets turned out almost 58,000 T-34s of various stripes. Now throw in 36,000 Il-2s, and you'll see that operational art isn't really needed, which, again, is shown by the Russian casualty rates. Compare those numbers to total German tank production, or total Stuka production, and see for yourself.

So, where are these factories nowadays pumping out thousands of tanks and planes a month? Oh, that's right, there are none. It follows therefore that using the WWII strategy of throwing masses at a problem and swamping it will not work nowadays with a smaller and weaker Russian army which seems to have forgotten some of the basic rules of warfighting, like cover your flanks, defend your supply lines, and combined arms operations.