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David Frigault
WriterFeb 12
With 26 million Russians dying in the Eastern Front against 4 million Germans, how was the USSR still able to overwhelm Germany with numbers? What would it take for the USSR to run out of manpower?

For all of those who are claiming “26 million includes civilians and military personnel” here are two things to remember:

According to a 1996 study by Russian historian Boris Sokolov, the number of Red Army losses really did exceed 26 million… 26,400,000 in fact (plus 16,900,000 civilians)
For obvious reasons, Soviet officials tried to downplay their numbers (the number of combined civilian and military losses was estimated at twenty million before the end of the Cold War, including seven million Red Army personnel)
World War II casualties of the Soviet Union - Wikipedia Republished // WIKI 2

Those who died in the war 1941 1945. How many Soviet soldiers went missing during the Great Patriotic War. Have the letters survived?

How many children died in World War II. Soviet losses in the Great Patriotic War. Irrecoverable losses of the enemy's armed forces

Sokolov’s estimate in regards to Red Army losses is more than THREE times the “official” Red Army count that was revised some years after the Cold War (8,668,400) though even Russian officials at the Central Defence Ministry Archives acknowledged that the number of dead and missing Red Army military personnel that they have on their database — not including those who died without surviving documentation, or those whose records may yet be found — is in fact 13,850,000…

World War II casualties of the Soviet Union - Wikipedia

Investigations are still ongoing — one that former Russian President Dimitri Medvedev vowed to make a priority to surviving Red Army veterans at Konstantin Palace on January 27, 2009 — though the true numbers will never be known, due to a lack of reliable record keeping, added by a general disregard from the authorities to challenge official Stalinist statistics until after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.


To be fair, not every Russian historian goes as far as Sokolov’s calculations.

Some believe the numbers to be around fourteen million… others seventeen million… some twenty-three million… a few even go beyond thirty million.

Why would Soviet officials downplay their losses?

Admitting actual losses would be an admission that the surviving population of the Soviet Union was far lower than on paper… making the empire more vulnerable to attack from outsiders
This would indicate that the kill ratio was far more lopsided against the Red Army… another factor that would make the Soviet Union appear even less threatening, not to mention the reduced fighting population
Here is another possibility:

STALIN WANTED TO SEE ONLY WHAT HE WANTED


In other words, while part of the reason for downplaying the true losses may have had to do with the possibility of a successive war against the English-speaking world, it is also very plausible to believe that Red Army officials would routinely find ways of making the battlefield casualties for the Red Army appear several times lower.

A few years before the Second World War, Stalin promoted Trofim Lysenko on the grounds that he was going to be able to create an unimaginably plentiful harvest with his agronomist and biological studies.

Not long after the Second World War, Mao Zedong would go through with a similar attitude and orchestrate the Great Leap Forward, resulting in the deaths of fifty million Chinese — a policy that Mao refused to believe was so bad until one of his nephews came before him half-starved and told him that he had just enough grains to see him in person, but not enough to make it back to Hunan.

When you are under the authority of a leader who will stop at nothing short of miracles, you better make sure that he at least believes that the impossible is true.

That is why throughout the course of the Second World War, you see claimed Soviet battlefield statistics indicating German losses to sometimes be twice the number of Red Army soldiers.

Seeing as the Wehrmacht was several times smaller than the Red Army, it would not have lasted for four years — fighting on multiple fronts, AND dealing with the Lend Lease aid provided to the Red Army by the Allies — if Red Army statistics were accurate.

Here are some photographs that show the cost of Red Army human wave attacks:





Mind you, the pile of bodies was most likely taken after the battle, but one can get an appreciation for the strewns of bodies littering the battlefield when one has faces to look at.

According to the ‘Gulag Archipelago’, more than sixty million people died during the Stalinist era, and while this may not have been meant to state that Stalin killed this many people in peacetime, it is very likely to be a truer representation of the losses on the Eastern Front — both civilian and military.

Keep in mind that Alexander Solzhenitsyn was himself a Red Army officer during the war years, who criticised the senior leadership running the military — perhaps rightfully.

By the time the war was over, the fighting age population had been reduced to such an extent that anywhere between 68–80% of males born in 1923 were no longer alive by the time the 1946 census came about — and females born in that year, as well as other males and females in their age group are unlikely to have done much better.

Even with quantity of troops on their side, the Red Army could never have hoped to breach Warsaw — let alone, capture Berlin — if not for the aid supplies provided by the West, which not only allowed Soviet officials to send millions of would-be farmers to the battlefield in haste, the tens of thousands of tanks, jeeps, and aircraft most certainly reduced the number of Red Army losses by millions.


'We Would Have Lost': Did U.S. Lend-Lease Aid Tip The Balance In Soviet Fight Against Nazi Germany?

Below is a statistic detailing the amount of supplies provided to the Red Army through Lend-Lease according to the Russian Embassy website — and keep in mind that the figures listed below do not include the tanks, airplanes, boots, uniforms, and medical supplies provided by Canada and the United Kingdom:

400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food
https://ru.usembassy.gov/world-war-ii-allies-u-s-lend-lease-to-the-soviet-union-1941-1945/?source=patrick.net


Red Army troops storming Berlin with American-made Sherman tanks

Stalin himself had no serious intention of pushing to Berlin unless the Allies could assure a proper opening on the Western Front, and yet it is very likely that he had no idea just how close the Red Army’s onslaught had come to burning out the manpower of his own country.

In the end, members of the Red Army — in their overwhelming tens of millions of ground infantry, backed by the accomodation of generous Western military material, food, medical supplies, as well as the opening of two fronts — were able to stubbornly force their way into the heart of Germany and force the capitulation of the Wehrmacht.


To put it in simpler terms:

They were able to overwhelm Germany with ruthless determination — albeit one that was very crippling for those forced to take part in the form of tens of millions of lives taken — combined with the help of the Western Forces, whose presence would have made it all but impossible for even the suicidally aggressive Red Army to take Berlin.

Perhaps some of his commanding officers could have tried to explain the real cost of human wave attacks and request some serious revision in the Red Army… but that would probably have gotten you labelled a defeatist.

Remember that even during the battle for the city inside Berlin, some 80,000 German soldiers — most of whom were either wounded veterans or members of the far less experienced Hitler Youth — were able to fend a Red Army that was estimated to number 1,500,000 for ten days… and even upon surrender, the defenders had a fighting strength of 10,000.


Red Army troops charging through downtown Berlin

Such lopsided battles where the Red Army outnumbered the Germans by 20:1 were very common.

Therefore, even if the Red Army routinely lost ten or fifteen men in battle for every fallen Axis soldier — something that many Eastern Europeans believed to be the case, and one that is shared by a growing number of historians — their numbers alone ensured that these losses would be quickly replaced right up until the armistice was signed.

As for the last question in regards to manpower:

While it is not known just how much longer the Red Army could have continued thrashing out endless millions of infantry — thus ensuring that the Red Army was bigger than the quantity of bullets immediately available to the Wehrmacht — due to lack of proper record keeping, it is unlikely that the Red Army could have kept up such large-scale infantry offensives for another year, considering the fact that as many as four-fifths of the fighting age population of the ENTIRE Soviet Union (not just Russia) was already dead… and not just injured.


Over Two-Thirds of Soviet Males Born in 1923 Did Not Live to the End of World War II

Was the Soviet 1923 Male Birth Cohort Doomed by World War II?

Did 80% of Soviet males born in 1923 die in WWII?

Chances are very good — based on what we now know about the true scale of Red Army losses during the war — that if the Wehrmacht had directed what is historically known as the Ardennes Offensive against the Soviet Union, Berlin itself would not have been annexed anywhere near as soon as it was… at least not by the Red Army.

Some people may point out that the best German troops had themselves been largely spent during the 1941 offensive, and while that may be true, it is also undeniable that the Red Army’s losses were probably several times higher than what was claimed on paper… meaning that the damage that this first German offensive inflicted on both the army and population at loss was far deeper than reported.


OOORRRAAAHHH!!!… The four-year Banzai Red Army charge has paid off!

And for anybody who relies on Soviet census records to try and argue against these newest findings, I recommend you read on the history of the 1937 Census.

Soviet Census (1937) - Wikipedia

NOTE: I also find it interesting that this question has 26 followers… now just imagine this number a million times over, and we may be getting close to what the true number of Red Army personnel who died in the war… never mind the number of civilians, whose losses are now believed to have been twice the thirteen million claimed during the Stalinist era.

Red Army charge as depicted in Enemy at the Gates — while some people may criticise this scene, in part due to not a single German soldier casualty being sustained, it is nonetheless closer to the truth than Soviet-era propaganda that tried to depict a handful of Red Army men holding off several divisions of well-trained Germans and tanks at the same Battle of Stalingrad for a total of fifty-eight days (Pavlov’s House)

Pavlov's House - Wikipedia

For those looking for a video game explanation — here is what a field Red Army charge would have looked like if Stalin had been in command of the Russian Empire during the Great War

For those looking for a little Red Army patriotism, the video above may suffice.

Even though the “Stalin” shown above is an imposter used for the 1949 film, ‘The Fall of Berlin’, the Red Army soldiers seen celebrating are genuine veterans who managed to survive up to four years of human wave attacks… many of their comrades did not (aside from arriving in Berlin by train instead of airplane, the movie’s historical inaccuracies nonetheless impressed Stalin so much, that when he saw how the film depicted his arrival, he was reported to have said “I wish this was true”)


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