http://ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] ryder-p-moses.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] talkpolitics 2010-04-12 07:23 am (UTC)

Man how did we get into military history chat, crazy.

Yeah, his unwillingness to micromanage was to his credit, something Hitler fortunately lacked. His big accomplishments that really shifted the war were in revving up Soviet industrialization and military production. They won Bagraton in large part because they had like five times the military forces the Germans did and were better supplied, which was an accomplishment in itself.

I guess you could say he was a great military commander in that he was smart enough to not worry about the actual fighting stuff so much as figuring out how to make a billion billion Mosins and T-34s using an economy one generation away from preindustrial agrarianism while his country was being actively genocided by the Wehrmacht. I've never seen or heard anything where WWII Russian military strategy was described as anything but crude, but they didn't really need finesse.

Dunno how that really ties in with the scorched-earth retreat during Barbarossa, that whole early part of the war was mostly them panicking and fucking up everything.

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