Post by Tristan Herman on Jul 9, 2012 20:34:09 GMT
"To retreat further - means to waste ourselves and to waste at the same time our Motherland." Ioseph Vissarionovich Stalin; Order 227
When the second World War broke out in Europe, to say that the Soviet Union was unprepared would be an understatement on many levels. This was demonstrated in the brief, yet telling, Winter War with Finland in 1939. While officially viewed as a Soviet victory, the outcome for what turned out to be a few thousand square kilometers of territory was nothing short of disastrous. A quarter of the Red Army's total manpower was lost in action, while Finnish casualties was less than a quarter of that, by comparison. The Soviets had been, for all intents and purposes, embarrassed by a smaller nation, with their own, discarded, and obsolete equipment.
So when the German Third Reich, with all it's power and might, came to bear upon the Union, the initial slaughter was nothing short of apocalyptic in nature. The violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty on June twenty-second, nineteen-forty-one somehow cam as a surprise to Stalin, who had repeatedly ignored pleas from his military staff to mobilize Soviet forces. As a result, it took only six months for Soviet military casualties alone to to surpass the four million mark, while three million Soviet troops were taken prisoner by the advancing German army.
Finally, seven months after German forces were pushed back at Moscow (at the cost of, reportedly, over a million Soviet casualties), Stalin issued Order 227; one of the most infamous, inspiring, damming, and altogether historical documents to ever be produced by the Union. The order made retreat, be it strategic or emotional in nature, an offense punishable by death, unless the retreat was ordered by command-level officers. It also facilitated the drafting of penal legions: battalions of prisoners (political or otherwise) to fight for the Union, which were enforced and commanded by the NKVD. It, finally, also allowed for political officers (commonly referred to as "commissars") to remove from duty or execute commanders who demonstrated cowardice in the field, or ordered retreats, and further allowed such Commissars to take command of the units after the fact.
This doctrine, while effective, would lead to the deaths of millions of Soviet troops throughout the war. Stalin would later be quoted as saying:
"It takes more courage to retreat than to advance in [the Red Army]."[/i]
The result of Order 227, while bloody and costly, was the successful defense of the city of Stalingrad, the liberation of Leningrad, Sevastopol, and, ultimately, the march on Berlin. The march forward into Europe was a long and grueling one, met with fierce German resistance on a fanatical level.
It would take two years and nine months of hard fighting on the bloodies front in human history for the Soviets to eventually take Berlin, which turned into something of a campaign itself. After the German empire had been crushed, the union turned its attention to Manchuria, declaring war upon Japan. Soviet gains would be negligible, though, as the war would end soon after their entry into the Pacific/Far East theater.
The Soviet Union would go on to annex and divided up the territory it received after peace talks into what became the East Bloc of the Soviet Union; an amalgam of poorly maintained and heavily oppressed buffer states.
If you wish to know about specific battles, conflicts, or Soviet involvement in the second World War, post here, and I will write up on the topic in this thread.
