Staggering Red Army losses
24th July 1941: The Germans are shocked by crude Soviet tactics that send line after line of infantry into frontal assaults that are soon mown down
If Hitler thought that the Barbarossa campaign was as good as won, and the whole war nearly over, his soldiers in the East were beginning to see things differently. The Red Army remained very much ‘in being’ and was capable of fielding hundreds of thousands of men.
It was an unbelievable sight, a machine-gunner’s dream target ...
The first response of the Soviet High Command had been to deny reality, to prevent their front-line troops from responding to the opening German attacks. The next response was to issue fantasy orders to retake ground that had long been overrun by the Germans, even to order them to advance into territory held by the Germans prior to 22nd June.
Gradually, the reality on the ground began to filter back to Moscow. There were plenty of reserves who could be brought into battle. As it became clear that the central thrust of the German assault was headed toward Moscow, major battles began to unfold. The area around Smolensk was a key location to block the advance.
… no attempt at concealment but trusted in sheer weight of numbers to overwhelm us.
The Red Army tactics were very crude, so poor that the Germans were shocked. But there was one underlying reality. The Soviets had hundreds of thousands of men, millions. And they kept coming forward1:
I can never forget the first mass atack by Russian infantry ... I could not believe that in the Second World War the tactics of the First Great War could still be used by any one of the major combatants.
The whole assault was so ineptly handled that I found it difficult to believe that it was being carried out by a professional army. That incompetence reinforced the belief held at the time by many German officers, that the Red Army was being handled no differently to the Tsarist army. It was the same old steam-roller.
