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Originally Posted by Zucchini Lend lease was major for the Russians, but much of it came in the form of trucks, railway equipment, and cargo ships. Those things make a big difference. They did get warplanes.
Normandy was an important battle, but it wasn't a turning point.
If you look at the Russian army, not long after its humiliating defeat by Finland, a country with virtually no air power, little armor, and meager artillery, and combine that with the supposed victories of Germany's lightening war in France and Poland, then I think you can make a pretty good case that the Battle of Moscow was the actual turning point of the war.
So many things were at issue. The biggest one was the continuation of Russia in the war. If they had lost at Moscow, that would have meant the results in Finland were final and binding - that the Russian army just plain sucked and was going to continue to suck until quickly eliminated in mass by a truly superior strategy.
In point of fact, those results were not final. What the Fins exposed was that lightening war was full of inherent weaknesses. The Fins survived all aspects of lightening war: air power, fast tanks, and fast and massive infantry. The key was having a rear (depth) and never giving up. Lightening war had no knockout punch, and it wore itself out. It was too easy for meager forces to inflict crippling casualties on it.
The Fins proved infantry, with improvised explosive devices and battlefield wit, could eliminate large numbers of tanks. They proved that air power, as it existed in WWII, was easily survivable by a fighting force, and they proved that reliable submachine guns in the hands of dedicated fighters could destroy large numbers of bolt-action infantry - certainly enough to force a superior force to accept peace.
All the Russians had to do was to turn all of that around on the attacking Germans, and it took them just a matter of months to get it done.
The outcome of the war, other than the rest of the dying, was decided. Blitzkrieg was an overhyped failure as a strategy. For the rest of the war in Europe it would continue to fail. It became the ETO's version of the Banzai in that, regardless of who used it, it was usually a gift to its opponent.
The Americans never gave up on it, and it never really worked very well for them either. And their blitz was the fastest and most sustainable in war.
The Russians discovered the war's victorious strategy, and they discovered it very early in the war: pray for more blitzes, then kill them. |
If you're referring to the Winter War, the Finns didn't survive Lightning War at all because the Soviets in 1940 had no idea how to practice it. Lightening War, or Blitzkrieg, was 'introduced' to the Soviets in 1941 and it took until 1943 onwards before the Soviets fully grasped the principles behind it. The Finns won that war because they utilized all their strengths and were fighting in terrain that they knew inside out whereas the Soviets went in utterly overconfident and with no clear tactics or back-up plan.
How can you say that Blitzkrieg was an overhyped failure when it humbled France as no nation had been humbled for centuries and drove the BEF back into the sea. Moreover, Blitzkrieg inflicted on the Red Army in 1941 and 1942 more casualties than any other army had suffered in history. To say that Blitzkrieg had no 'knockout punch' is to demonstrate a flawed understand of the process. It was precisely this concept of 'Panzerfaust', or 'Armoured Fist' that was one of the main tenets of Blitzkrieg. Guderian argued that "Man schlägt jemanden mit der Faust und nicht mit gespreizten Fingern", translated "You hit somebody with your fist and not with your fingers spread." By this he meant that you must use overwhelming force at weak points along your enemies line to smash through and penetrate to their rear area.
Blitzkrieg came to grief for the Germans for 3 reasons. One being that once the momentum of Blitzkrieg is checked it becomes difficult to re-establish. Another being the fact that the sheer distances involved in the Soviet Union took a huge toll on the Panzers and men involved - Blitzkrieg does not work well as an extended operation unless time is given for the rear units and supply convoys to catch up. Finally, Germany's enemies adopted Blitzkrieg as their own and thus Germany no longer had the same operational and tactical edge they enjoyed in the early years of the war.
Blitzkrieg is still around today and used by all modern armies in a modified form. Blitzkrieg was the first operational use of combined arms theory in war - hardly an overhyped failure.