That is an excellent point about logistics, Kirk. On the other hand, Stalin would not have shed a single tear if the entire population of Holland had starved to death.

Many years ago, I met a guy who had been in the front lines of a US unit when it met up with the advancing Red Army. He described it as like a Mongol Horde on the move. The Red Army lumbered forward not just with the usual camp-following women — they had chickens, pigs, cattle. WWII Soviet logistics may have been difficult for us to understand. Despite the devastation in Poland and Eastern Germany, the Red Army reached Berlin in force and carried on moving West.

By the way, Kirk, you are absolutely right about the surprise that France collapsed so quickly in WWII. After all, France (with some help) had held Germany to a near-stalemate for 4 years in WWI.

I think it is clear if you follow The Chief Culprit by Viktor Suvorov (2008). He makes a damn good case.

The glitch that confuses you is that while prepared for offense, no one gave the word. Meaning Stalin. So no one knew whether to attack or retreat or defend or what. In the wonderful workers paradise that Stalin crated if you fucked up and did what you thought needed done instead of what you were ordered to do it was very likely that you would end up with a bullet in the back of your head. THAT is what paralyzed the Russians.

After the attack didn’t Stalin freeze for a few days and no one would even try to get him to give orders? Seems I read that. Tie that into the absolute panic from the German attack but even then no one would push Stalin to do anything.

https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/stalin-suffered-nervous-breakdown.html

So one year to change the narrative. But it did not happen. Like I said, Songs for John Doe was released in May 1941.

After the fall of France, the Soviet Union was still calling the war against Nazis an Imperialist War for capitalist profits.

Stalin had no idea at all how effective the German military had become. He misjudged the outcome, and expected that the Germans would need all the help they could get to be able to dismantle the French Army, which was very highly rated before the war. That was the first miscalculation, followed by the second, which was that Hitler would not be able to digest the conquests and use them to attack eastwards in any rational time scale. In that, he was correct–Hitler never mobilized Western Europe effectively. Captured military industries were looted, equipment sent back to Germany, which then sat there unused. Hitler still attacked the Soviet Union, even as unprepared as he was. It was an insane decision.

Minor anecdote–The Soviets had meetings with the Germans prior to Barbarossa, extensive ones. Their people were shown all around German industrial and military facilities, and they kept seeing the utter lack of any real German heavy armor equivalent to the KV series and T-34 as being “obvious” disinformation. They thought the Germans were hiding a program of heavy tanks that they weren’t, and that was one reason Stalin was so bamboozled by the whole thing. He was sure the Germans knew about T-34, and somewhat certain from other sources that nobody was working on heavy tanks in Germany, either. From one perspective, it’s almost a given that the Germans would have had conniptions if they’d really known about T-34, and would have really crapped the bed had they known about how many divisions the Soviets could raise. Stalin’s secretiveness about those two factors probably did more to convince the Germans that an invasion could work than anything else, which is ironic as hell…

I watched an interview with a Wehrmacht general, once. He was asked “What would have happened if you’d known in ’41 what you knew in ’45? Would you have still obeyed Hitler, followed his orders?”. His reply was pretty emphatic that if the German General Staff had had any idea what the Soviets were going to be able to throw up against them, there would have been a mutiny and “We’d have shot Hitler…”.

Granted, that’s a self-serving survivor of the war, but…

“Consider any man who, via a long series of bold plays where he bet everything and won, has risen from obscurity to uncontested rule over a great nation. Does the thought “maybe I should cash in my chips and retire” ever cross such a man’s mind?”

Yes he was a gambler, every concession made to Hitler embolden him to more do or die.
But the worse part is that Germans people started to see him like a genius after all those diplomatic victories based on threats (besides Spanish CW) and the Allied caved in. France was morally decrepit as society with an army 5 years behind Germany’s in ideas.

Logic. If Stalin was expecting to attack German Army why the directives to Communist parties and compagnons de route to sabotage Britain, France?

If Communists would want to take on Nazi Germany the correct path is to have Germany more bloodied from that war.
Besides strategically German was a land power and the only real competitor to Soviet Union and was also now the neighbor.

By the way, Pete Seeger’s Songs for John Does was released in May 1941; it was retired from being sold after the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union one month later.

I would submit that the idea that the Soviets would have simply continued on to the English Channel all by themselves is, at best, nuts.

By the time they reached the stop lines at what became the Inner German Border, they were at the end of their logistical tether. The Germans did a very good job of tearing up the infrastructure as they retreated, and the blithe idea that that wouldn’t make a difference is logistically laughable. Sure, the Soviets operated with an austerity that we’d love to match, but… Ya just can’t whip up the logistics to support even a Soviet army in terrain that’s been systematically looted and pillaged for four years, which is what Western Europe was. Can you imagine the results the Soviets would have gotten, trying to feed their armies in Holland, after the Hunger Winter? They, and the Dutch populace, would have starved. All the food they’d need was already taken up by Germany, shipped east, and consumed.

Stalin might well have wanted to keep going until he hit the Atlantic, but… Yeah. Not happening, not in 1945 Europe. Might have worked in ’36, might have worked again in ’50, but there wasn’t anything at all there to work with Red Army logistics in ’45. Germany had already raped that out of the various economies.

I yield to no-one in my admiration for General Patton — an amazing leader. But we have to look at the broader picture.

The Germans had been in retreat from the Red Army since Stalingrad in early 1943 — over a year before General Patton got his chance. If the Normandy landings in mid-1944 had failed, the Red Army would simply have kept going until it reached the English Channel. And today, we would see something like the EU, only with Russia rather than Germany as its prime mover.

Victor Hanson makes a good case in his book “The Second World Wars” that the Axis powers never really stood a chance. They had some brilliant generals and great troops — but in the longer term they were simply out-numbered, out-resourced, out-produced.

The First World War was fought for a very specific reason, you know: technoindustrially ascendant Germany threatened to eclipse its rivals and dominate Continental Europe, and from Continental Europe, all of Eurasia. But short years, 1933 to 1939, undid all of the good done by the Weimar Period.

Today, we can say that the Germans should have played for time, sat on their collective ass, and waited out the British Crown. But they, then, didn’t have the luxury of hindsight. They went to war with the weapons that they had and they came within a whisker of winning.

Fortunately, the great General George S. Patton was there to put a stop to that.

Sooner or later, you rise to your natural level. The key is to notice when you’re there.