Did the Russians win any war by doing something other than just

>>577088
Some of the later Russo-Turkish wars (late 18th century onwards), perhaps, because Mehmets were even worse.

>>577088
Well, you had all of the wars expanding east into Suberia. And the really kicked the crap out of Lithuania under Ivan the third.

They won this battle against a significantly more numerous tartar horsemen army by putting wheels on wooden walls and bringing them to the enemy's rear.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Molodi

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>Did the Russians win any war?

Fixed.

>>577088
They sometimes won wars even despite the fact they weren't present

>>577147
An absolute meme madman

>>577147
Isn't there one missing?

>>577159
Finland.

>>577159
Finland?

>>577159
Winter war?

>>577153
They're all true, though.

Russia had one of the best armies in Europe

>people also forgetting alexander suvorov

>>577224
Suvorov is a shitty meme.
>Fight against Turks
>Fight against various insurgents
>Run away from French which Russians consider as a victory because some of his soldiers actually survived
GREATEST COMMANDER TO HAVE EVER LIVED

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>>577088
Yes, once they retreated before an invading army while burning their own cities (thus dooming millions of their own citizens to poverty or death) so the invaders would die of starvation (+ cold as the tards invaded in winter)

>>577349
Kind of Ironic how the Tatics that they used to win Their two Patriotic Wars againts Napoleon and Hitler was used againts them in the Afghani war and caused them to lose their superpower status

Thing with warfare is you always have to play to your strengths. Russia always had an abundance of manpower and a general disregard for human life, so it's understandable they considered soldiers to be largely disposable and didn't flinch while sacrificing them to death.

But only a total pleb would think that absolute manpower advantage wins / is a decisive factor in every war. China always had a lot of people but they've been steadily getting blown the fuck out by everyone around them for the last 1500 years.

>>577372
You really can't compare how they defeated Napoleon to how they defeated Hitler

In 1812, they avoided the French army and destroyed their own country in attempt to make it starve
It worked well, and starvation + cold wiped it out during the retreat (retreat caused by a need for food, not by a Russian counter-offensive).

In WW2, they did fight the German army, and eventually they did beat it militarly (unlike against Napoleon) thank to much greater numbers and literal zerg rush.

>the russians only won in the second world war because of sheer weight of numbers
wehraboos are the worst

>>577431
You're the Stalin poster are you not

>>577431
The Russians only won in the Second World War because of sheer weight of numbers.

>>577392
>>577442

By the time they were actually winning, 1943 onwards, they were hitting the Germans harder than they were being hit in return. Go look up offensives like Bagration, Belgrade, Kishniev.

Numbers allowed them to absorb the massive blows they took in 41 and 42 and keep going, but they weren't winning by drowning the Germans in bodies; in fact, that was more what they were trying to do earlier, and it didn't work so well.

>>577457
They drowned them in tanks.

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Did the Romans win any war by doing something other than just throwing bodies at the enemy?

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>>577349
>(+ cold as the tards invaded in winter)
>i know nothing about history and yet i must post in a history related board

>>577511
Well, they invaded in late summer, but then they sat in Moscow for months and ended up retreating in winter

>>577237
don't forget he helped suppress the poles during the final partition. shameful desu

>>577349
It isn't actually known for sure why Moscow burned down. It happened only after the French captured it. But it most probably was Russian saboteurs who were left behind. It was a good move actually because it robbed Napoleon of any sense of victory whatsoever and also of any means to negotiate any settlement.

Also there were more factors involved in dooming the French army besides winter.

>>577567
>Also there were more factors involved in dooming the French army besides winter.

Yep
Starvation, disease...but certainly not the Russian army

>>577591
Surely an ability to retreat in good order and deny the Germans any benefit from the land they subsequently occupied is a military skill? Theres a difference between just retreating and taking actions whilst retreating that deny the enemy valuable resources

Gonna ask here because it's the closest thread I'll get: what's a good book covering the Eastern Front in WW2? There are plenty that deal solely with Stalingrad, Leningrad, push to Berlin, etc but I want something a bit more general since I don't know much about the Russian involvement since I'm American and we hate talking about Russians in our schools.

Stalin was willing to waste 500,000 men just to invade Finland (totally insignificant region with almost no-relation to actual WWII ) and only gained 10% of the land. Not to talk about Eastern front casualties against Germany.

If you were a foot soldier in the Soviet Army in WWII you probably had higher chances of dying than anybody else.

At the same time, I also admire Stalin how he was able to mobilize the whole country in a seemingly overnight and launch counter-attack that puts even Operation Barbarossa to shame in it's scale.

Even Hitler had no idea what kind of "resources" Soviets had, Germany got caught off-guard, this is from a secret recording of Hitler visiting Finland's Marshall Mannerheim:

[Hitler:]
>We have destroyed – right now – more than 34,000 tanks.
>If someone had told me this, I’d have said: “You!” If you are one of my generals had stated that any nation has 35,000 tanks I’d have said: “You, my good sir, you see everything twice or ten times. You are crazy; you see ghosts.”

>This I would have deemed possible. I told you earlier we found factories, one of them at Kramatorskaja, for example. Two years ago there were just a couple hundred [tanks]. We didn’t know anything. Today, there is a tank plant, where – during the first shift a little more than 30,000, and ‘round the clock a little more than 60,000, workers would have laboured – a single tank plant! A gigantic factory! Masses of workers who certainly, lived like animals…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8raDPASvq0


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClR9tcpKZec

>>577625
It's pretty odd to hear Hitler's normal conversational voice.

>>577591
What else do you attribute the Russian army avoiding early decicive battles to, if not the Russian army?

Face it, the Russian generals were good enough to avoid any large scale confrontations with the strongest army in the world while it still held the advantage.

Only one single time they fought the French before the tides of war turned and that was Borodino, in which Napoleon blundered massively and failed to secure the absolutely only chance he had for a victory. His fuck-up cost him the war and eventually everything he ever attained. The battle only occurred because of mounting pressure from Russian monarchy to fight them and from the fact the French were advancing on Moscow.

Contrary to what you may have thought the French retreat wasn't just the fall back of a beaten army. It was littered with battles in which the French were the clear losers. It was never Napoleons plan to forfeit his campaign in Russia. He thought he was going to resume this war after the winter but the Russians absolutely steamrolled right up to Paris without giving a single moment of breath to the French.

>>577640
>Only one single time they fought the French before the tides of war turned and that was Borodino, in which Napoleon blundered massively and failed to secure the absolutely only chance he had for a victory.
Both sides failed at Borodino
The battle happened because the Russians didnt want to lose Moscow, yet they did

>It was never Napoleons plan to forfeit his campaign in Russia. He thought he was going to resume this war after the winter
But couldnt because his army was destroyed by starvation and cold
He went one and built a new army for what was to come next, but it was never on the level of the previous one (which counted many vets that had been fighting since 1792).

>>577659
>The battle happened because the Russians didnt want to lose Moscow, yet they did
They only fought due to the pressure from nobility. It wasn't militarily feasible.

>But couldnt because his army was destroyed by starvation and cold
Do not forget desertions. And the constant Russian harrassment. And the fact that starvation was the result of scorched earth strategy conducted by the Russian military.

Do not underplay the role of the Russian army. If there was no army Napoleon would've marched into Moscow with negligible minimal casualties. It is the decisions of Russian military personnel that lead to his defeat. Winter was only something they took advantage of, but it wasn't enough to defeat Napoleon by itself.

>>577467
The T-34 was a better tank than any tank in use, Nazi or otherwise

>>577618
Bloodlands nigga

Though it's not so much military history as, well, slaughter history.

>>578064
Bloodlands is as far away from "general" as one can get. A great insight on the fate of the people and how USSR and Nazi Germany are the same thing (which barely anyone actually admits) but that's not a good book to recommend for a newbie.

>>577681
I read that there was no scorched earth "strategy".
It was just a series of "let's hole up there and... oh fuck he's already here there's no time let's burn everything and try again in the next town."

>>577968
Which is why it consistently, even in 1944, took three T-34s dead to kill one piece of German armor.

Before you ask, here's sauce.

(20) G.F. Krivosheev , et al, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century, Edited by Colonel General G.F. Krivosheev, Greenhill Books, London, 1997. p. 253, table 95.

>>577088
>Did the Russians win any war by doing something other than just throwing bodies at the enemy?

Yeah, by destroying their own cities and letting General Winter do the actual battle.

>muh zerg
>muh winter

Russophobic myths

Typhus decimated Napoleon's army before it even reached Moscow.

Also, I would love to know. How many Russian civilians died as a result of the invasion? Surely the destruction of those cities must have had an effect.

>>577968

The Sherman could take it.

>>579003

Overall whole war/battle sources can be enormously misleading though; especially in the later parts of the war, where Allied tank casualties were overwhelmingly caused by fixed ATGs and mines, not enemy tanks. I'm more familiar with American armor performance as opposed to Soviet armor performance, but casualty ratios of Shermans vs German tanks is way, way different than overall German tank losses vs American tank losses.

>>579003
>took three T-34s dead to kill one piece of German armor.
No. This has been discussed to death on /k/. Three T-34s (more likely just any armor) were lost for every German AFV lost, but that was to all causes, including
>tanks
>artillery
>mines
>aircraft
and most importantly
>anti-tank guns

Germany always had far more anti-tank guns at their disposal than they did AFVs, so, unsurprisingly, they ended up doing the bulk of the anti-tank work.

Tanks do not exist in a vacuum. I don't understand why you retards can't understand that. Yes, the T-34 was a good tank, and yes, it had its failings, but regurgitating loss ratios without looking at the underlying causes of those losses is meaningless.

>>579579
I also have to wonder about how the supply/logistics doctrine of tanks effected things. Presumably, this is counting tanks kept permanently out of service.

If the soviets and germans had different standards of "Fuck it, get a new one" were different, there's another factor messing with these statistics.

>>577088
They were pretty good against Japan.

>>580021
>If the soviets and germans had different standards of "Fuck it, get a new one" were different, there's another factor messing with these statistics.
That was part of it. The Soviets counted something as a combat loss if it was disabled during the battle. That meant you had many "losses" that could be (and were) salvaged at the end of the battle and returned to service.

Germans, on the other hand, only counted a vehicle as lost if the vehicle was completely unrecoverable.

>>580027
The IJA was seriously second fiddle tier in WW2.

>>580041
Germans were also really good at recovering their vehicles.

>>579117
>How many Russian civilians died as a result of the invasion? Surely the destruction of those cities must have had an effect.

Hundreds thousands Russian civilians died as a result of the scorched earth policy.
That's partly why Napoleon was extremly shocked by this move

Alexander I was pretty insane, and his willingness to sacrifice huge masses of his own people to avoid having to honor a treaty (yes, Napoleon's invasion wasnt aiming at annexing Russia but at forcing it to honor economical engagements) was largely influenced by the fact he firmly believed that Napoleon was the Antichrist

>>580041
Yeah, I'm also wondering, especially with how the war situation was going, what the Germans deemed 'urecoverable' versus the Soviets view on unrecoverable.

I can't figure either way whether the absolute absurd bullshit of German Tank Production would encourage them to write off more or less tanks as 'completely unrecoverable.'

But especially after 42-43, I can easily see the Soviets, while on the offensive writing of tanks with comparatively minor damage, because there's literally thousands more being cranked out due to economy of scale, while the Germans try to continuously repair completely fucked tanks because supplies are 'intermittent' at best.

Oh, and one last factor is that the Soviets spent a longer period of the war on the offensive, which is a greater strain on the tank.

>>580052
Yup. There's tons of factors in play when comparing materiel losses in WW2.

It's even worse with aircraft. Other than the post-Barbarossa analysis of captured Soviet airfields (where the Germans actually under-reported the number of enemy aircraft destroyed at first), German claims were retardedly high. I'm talking things like having a single wing of a Geschwader claim more aircraft in a month than the VVS committed over the course of an entire 5-month campaign.

>>577088
nope

>>577159

1237-1240

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>>577099
He asked without throwing bodies at the enemy