Originally posted by Sir Ralph
Without wanting to offend Serb, but I have the same opinion. It took place especially in the first 2 years of the German-Soviet war. Tanks and planes still weren't available in a sufficient number, and conscript armies with 3 inf divisions of 10000 soldiers each, with 2 regiments of artillery (as written by Zhukov, for comparison German divisions had 20-25000) were quickly pumped out.
Without wanting to offend Serb, but I have the same opinion. It took place especially in the first 2 years of the German-Soviet war. Tanks and planes still weren't available in a sufficient number, and conscript armies with 3 inf divisions of 10000 soldiers each, with 2 regiments of artillery (as written by Zhukov, for comparison German divisions had 20-25000) were quickly pumped out.
This is really only a partial picture though- in the run up to the Red Army purges, Soviet tank design and theory were ahead of the field- thanks mainly to the likes of Tukachevsky paying great attention to the theories espoused by Fuller and Liddell Hart. In an era when French military thinking (save for the prescient De Gaulle) was tied to linear defence and ignored the lessons of Cambrai and Amiens, Tukachevsky and others knew the value of the shock tank attack, supported by air and followed up by infantry. Naturally his successors wanted to distance themselves from the tainted thinking associated with the dead men, so inevitably Soviet military thinking, tank design, production and maintenance stagnated in the purges' aftermath.
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