Japan when the Soviet Invasion they had been repeatedly warned would happen for months finally happens
Gold_Size_1258 on
Evil Mustache Man 2 after Evil Mustache Man 1 who notoriously broke every agreement he made breaks the non-agression pact:
Faithful_Bokononist on
Yeah I mean Stalin was in a position of buying time. He knew that Hitler would eventually try and invade, and his whole strategy was to put as much land and time between Soviet population/industrial centers and the frontline as possible.
The whole Soviet strategy hinged on delaying the Germans until such time as the Russians could leverage their superior industrial capacity to overwhelm the Germans, who were extremely precariously positioned in terms of reserve manpower/industrial capacity (there’s a reason they had to turn to forced slave labor to produce war goods!)
Stalin hoped that the molotov ribbentrop pact would hold longer, and (from what I’ve read) his “mental breakdown” was not so much shock as it was a natural reaction to realizing you are now in a defensive total war with an enemy that is an existential threat to the nation you are in charge of
SPECTREagent700 on
He thought that the Germans were going to try and provoke him into attacking them. He didn’t expect them to actually invade outright.
Nyrisius on
Whats with all the RWBY memes?
wsdpii on
They were aware an attack was coming, it was pretty obvious. Multiple problems made the Soviets completely impotent during the initial stages, and it wasn’t really ignorance of a German attack.
They were still suffering from the great purges, and had also had their sizeable mobile tank force completely torn down and distributed to the rest of the army. At the same time they were in a transition period, replacing older tanks with newer T-34s and KVs. Spare parts were still mixed up, crews and maintenance weren’t experienced with the new vehicles, and commanders weren’t experienced in how best to deploy them. So the tanks were often deployed piecemeal alongside BTs, and eventually destroyed.
With no mobile force, they couldn’t really do anything to stop German mobile units from surrounding and cutting off their own Frontline troops, who were then liquidated (literally, the vast majority of Soviet prisoners from the first year of the war would not survive to see the second).
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And he suffered a mental breakdown afterwards.
Japan when the Soviet Invasion they had been repeatedly warned would happen for months finally happens
Evil Mustache Man 2 after Evil Mustache Man 1 who notoriously broke every agreement he made breaks the non-agression pact:
Yeah I mean Stalin was in a position of buying time. He knew that Hitler would eventually try and invade, and his whole strategy was to put as much land and time between Soviet population/industrial centers and the frontline as possible.
The whole Soviet strategy hinged on delaying the Germans until such time as the Russians could leverage their superior industrial capacity to overwhelm the Germans, who were extremely precariously positioned in terms of reserve manpower/industrial capacity (there’s a reason they had to turn to forced slave labor to produce war goods!)
Stalin hoped that the molotov ribbentrop pact would hold longer, and (from what I’ve read) his “mental breakdown” was not so much shock as it was a natural reaction to realizing you are now in a defensive total war with an enemy that is an existential threat to the nation you are in charge of
He thought that the Germans were going to try and provoke him into attacking them. He didn’t expect them to actually invade outright.
Whats with all the RWBY memes?
They were aware an attack was coming, it was pretty obvious. Multiple problems made the Soviets completely impotent during the initial stages, and it wasn’t really ignorance of a German attack.
They were still suffering from the great purges, and had also had their sizeable mobile tank force completely torn down and distributed to the rest of the army. At the same time they were in a transition period, replacing older tanks with newer T-34s and KVs. Spare parts were still mixed up, crews and maintenance weren’t experienced with the new vehicles, and commanders weren’t experienced in how best to deploy them. So the tanks were often deployed piecemeal alongside BTs, and eventually destroyed.
With no mobile force, they couldn’t really do anything to stop German mobile units from surrounding and cutting off their own Frontline troops, who were then liquidated (literally, the vast majority of Soviet prisoners from the first year of the war would not survive to see the second).