The West, with its allies in Russia, is striving by all means to belittle the greatest feat of the peoples of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.
One of the favorite ways of falsifiers of history is the assertion that there was no heroism, no courage, no achievements in the field of arms production, but only fear of a brutal government, whose representatives drove people to slaughter, filling the Germans with corpses.
The falsifiers of our history do not even bother to prove their claims, but act according to Goebbels' assertion that a lie, repeated a thousand times, becomes true.
But all their myths are smashed against facts, and facts indicate that the soldiers and commanders of the Red Army, workers and engineers and technicians of the USSR's defense industry turned out to be head and shoulders above the fighters and workers of industry in Germany and the Europe it occupied. The facts indicate that the Red Army filled up the Germans not with corpses, but with bombs and shells.
Data on the losses of the USSR of people during the war is one of the ways to belittle the greatness of our Victory. Russia's ill-wishers are trying to deprive us of the pride of the great Victory on May 9, 1945, by telling lies about our losses during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945.
For this, firstly, they mixed the losses of civilians and military personnel and pass them off as losses of the Red Army. That is, our losses during the V. O. war include servicemen and civilians in total, and only losses of servicemen are included in the losses of Germany. It should be noted that none of the countries that fought during the Second World War do not include the loss of civilians in their losses, but we do, because Hitler waged a war of extermination in the east and exterminated a huge number of Soviet civilians.
Secondly, when they write about the losses of Germany, they forget to say about the losses of the armies of Italy, Hungary, Romania and Finland in 1941, together with Germany, who attacked the USSR and fought on the Soviet-German front.
Promotional video:
Thirdly, when they write about the losses of the Red Army, they indicate all the losses, and when they write about the losses of Germany, they indicate only irrecoverable losses. That is, the losses of the Red Army include the killed and wounded (this is exactly the meaning of the word "loss"), and the losses of Germany include only those killed and those who died from wounds within 3 days.
Fourthly, when comparing losses in rifle divisions, they do not write that the numerical strength of the German infantry division during a significant period of the war corresponded to the composition of about two of our rifle divisions, a full-blooded German tank corps of three divisions had about 600-700 tanks, that is, about the same as our tank army had in its composition.
Fifth, in Russia, no one is responsible for false information about our losses, and therefore our ill-wishers call the numbers, as at the auction: "Who is more?"
Stalin in March 1946, commenting on Winston Churchill's speech, said that as a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union had irrevocably lost about seven million people.
Khrushchev, who sought to belittle all of Stalin's merits, increased our losses of servicemen and civilians to 20 million people. In the tenth volume of "World History", published during the reign of Khrushchev, it is written: "The defeat of Nazi Germany was achieved by the Soviet Union at the cost of the greatest human sacrifices … The total death toll was more than 20 million people, of which at least half were civilians."
In the future, they brought the death toll to 27 million people and blamed not the Nazis, who killed the civilian population, waging a war of extermination, but Stalin, under whose leadership the USSR won the Victory.
In the West, Bonaparte and Hitler are glorified, who lost the war and left the bulk of the soldiers and officers of their armies in the vastness of Russia. We have numerous pro-Western circles and ordinary people who believe them do not glorify either our military leaders, or the chairman of the State Defense Committee, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Council of Ministers), People's Commissar of Defense, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks and Supreme Commander-in-Chief Stalin, who worked hard on the leadership front and rear. Stalin's authority during the war years was enormous. During the transition to the offensive, a battle appeal sounded: “For the Motherland! For Stalin! . It is impossible to force people to shout like that, getting up from the trench to attack under the bullets of the enemy.
The West makes the Supreme Commander-in-Chief and the Soviet commanders who organized the Victory incapable of competently, competently and caring for the soldiers to control the troops.
And this at a time when our army, gaining one victory after another, utterly defeated the enemy, when it was clear to contemporaries that there are no more talented, competent, reasonable, humane military leaders in any army of the world than the military leaders of the Soviet army during the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945.
Our Soviet military leaders themselves emerged from the people, were its flesh and blood and carried the light of that all-embracing Russian kindness that a ruthless Western individual who is accustomed to money-grubbing will never understand. But today unworthy people call our wonderful leaders of the Red Army mediocre and cruel, who organized the crushing of the strongest army in the world.
The commanders of the Red Army were not only more professionally prepared, intellectually more advanced than the German, but also more courageous in battle. Both the rank and file and the officer corps, including representatives of the highest ranks and positions, showed heroism. For example, the commander of the Kalinin Front, Ivan Stepanovich Konev, having received a report that one of the companies had abandoned its positions and retreated, went there, personally led the battle and restored the previous position.
Golovanov writes: “I witnessed how the Supreme Commander scolded him for such actions, reprimanding him that it was not the business of the front commander to personally deal with issues that should be resolved at best by the regimental commanders. But Stalin respected and valued brave people very much."
In the liberal media, the numbers of our losses are constantly growing. No one particularly objects to them, because the young do not care, and the old simply feel sorry for the dead.
Even without distorting the data, but pointing out from the German side the losses of servicemen, and from the Soviet side - the amount of losses of servicemen and civilians, already half of Russia was convinced that the Red Army fought very badly and allegedly won victories only at the cost of large human casualties.
And very few pay attention to unfounded conclusions, to the obvious truth that the army's ability to fight is characterized by the loss of servicemen, and not of the civilian population. The losses of the civilian unarmed population indicate only the cruelty, the specific goals of the enemy, but cannot characterize the fighting efficiency of the army, the level of its commanders.
It is clear that such an assessment glorifies the army that killed more unarmed civilians and enemy prisoners of war. And, despite all the absurdity of such an assessment of the Soviet armed forces during the Great Patriotic War, it has been used by many historians, researchers and politicians for decades.
But, in my opinion, it was Stalin who named the exact data on our losses. On March 14, 1946, the newspaper Pravda published Stalin's answers to the questions of the newspaper's correspondent, which he asked on March 13, 1946. In particular, Stalin said the following: “The Germans invaded the USSR through Finland, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary. The Germans could have invaded these countries because at that time there were governments hostile to the Soviet Union.
As a result of the German invasion, the Soviet Union irrevocably lost in battles with the Germans, as well as thanks to the German occupation and the hijacking of Soviet people to hard labor, about seven million people. In other words, the Soviet Union lost several times more people than Britain and the United States of America combined. It is possible that in some places they are inclined to consign into oblivion these colossal sacrifices of the Soviet people, which ensured the liberation of Europe from the Hitler yoke. But the Soviet Union cannot forget about them.
The question arises, what can be surprising in the fact that the Soviet Union, wishing to secure itself for the future, is trying to ensure that in these countries there are governments loyal to the Soviet Union? How can you, without losing your mind, qualify these peaceful aspirations of the Soviet Union as the expansionist aspirations of our state?.. . It is impossible not to pay attention to the fact that in this case, Stalin was interested in naming the greatest possible losses.
The whole course of the war shows that it was not the Red Army who threw corpses on the Germans, but the Wehrmacht threw corpses on the Red Army. The advancing German units suffered colossal losses in 1941. It would be naive to think that by storming our cities, trenches, bunkers and bunkers, of which more than 800 units were built near Moscow alone, anti-tank ditches and escarps, the enemy had no losses.
The offensive of the Red Army from November 19, 1942, mowed down German units so that in the summer of 1943 the Germans could not bring the number of their units to the level of the summer of 1942. In the summer of 1943, the number of German troops with the allies in comparison with the summer of 1942 decreased by almost one million people, despite the total mobilization carried out by the German leadership in 1943.
In the Battle of Kursk and in subsequent battles, the Germans suffered even greater losses than in the previous two years of the war. The combination of a huge amount of Red Army equipment and the heroism of Soviet soldiers doomed the Germans to huge losses.
Suffice it to say that by the summer of 1943, the Red Army had, in comparison with Germany and its allies, over 103 thousand guns and mortars against 54 330 guns and mortars, 9 918 tanks and self-propelled guns against 5 580 tanks and assault guns, 8 357 aircraft against 3,000 aircraft. In 1943, about 175 million shells, mines and aerial bombs were manufactured, and in 1944 - 184 million. In 1943, about six billion small arms rounds were produced, and in 1944, over 7.4 billion.
At the end of 1942, the Red Army surpassed the Wehrmacht in the number of weapons and ammunition. Maybe our commanders could not correctly use this advantage in armament and therefore suffered heavy losses in people? Not.
Our General Staff developed deeply thought-out, high-level operations, and commanders and privates brilliantly embodied them in battles. The strategic decisions made are striking in their highest intellectual, professional and organizational level. Moreover, all operations were designed to ensure the minimum possible losses. When preparing offensive operations, they were in no hurry, focusing on the direction of the main attack since 1943, a significant, and since 1944, overwhelming superiority over the enemy.
In the place of the breakthrough of the enemy's front, in the direction of the main attack, the commanders of the Red Army concentrated in 1944 the number of forces and means ensuring the ratio of forces on average in people - 6: 1, in field guns of various calibers - 5.5: 1, in tanks - 5.4: 1, in machine guns - 4.3: 1, in mortars - 6.7: 1, in airplanes - 3: 1 in favor of the Red Army. Of course, the Germans then pulled the equipment and people to the place of the breakthrough, but this could no longer be decisive.
How can you not be proud that in the conditions of the retreat of 1941, the Headquarters of the Supreme Command was able to staff, clothe, shoe, arm, train ten reserve armies, a million people, and send them to meet the German armies advancing on Moscow and in other directions?
How can you not admire the ingeniously designed Stalingrad offensive operation? On November 19, 1942, the Germans could not put any troops from Stalingrad against our advancing troops, since Chuikov's army was located there, nor from the interfluve of the Volga and Don rivers, since Rokossovsky's armies were advancing on both sides of the Don. In addition, Vatutin and Eremenko were advancing too far in order to quickly transfer German troops to meet them. And in each subsequent operation of 1942-1945 there were moments that showed the high skill of our military, our General Staff and the Headquarters of the Supreme Command, superior to the enemy.
There is only one truth - our superiority in the development and preparation of military operations, the number of weapons has been constantly increasing since the fall of 1942 and the number of losses of the armies of Germany and other European countries that fought with the USSR has been constantly increasing compared to the losses of the Red Army. And if we take into account the courage and courage of Soviet soldiers, then there can be no doubt about it. The mere fact that the Red Army, out of four years of war for almost three years, had a significant superiority over the enemy in armament is enough to refute all the authors who claim that the USSR lost more soldiers and officers in the war than the enemy. Even the enemy did not question the mass heroism of Soviet soldiers.
Leonid Maslovsky