College paper examining Stalin's leadership abilities in WW 2 - Comments please.....

The big problem I find is that the battles of Moscow and Stalingrad seem to be changing places and then back in "normal place". This is extremely important because if you don´t get the year and battle correct it could be asked whether you know what you are talking about.I know this requires a big job but like you said you used " copy and paste" so you really need to check the possible wrong points. I just hope it´s not all copy and paste...

 

I don't even know what you are referring to as far as changing places is concerned...I'm a little confused.

 

One example from the text:

"In the build up towards the humiliating loss in the major Battle of Stalingrad, Hitler makes many tactical errors as a military and political leader. First, he delayed the plan to invade Russia by five weeks in order to secure the Balkans. This would cause his soldiers to run into a bitterly, cold winter in the middle of their invasion."

Does this sound good to you??

 

The verb tenses are all messed up too. Everything happened in the past and need to be in the PAST tense. (MADE instead of MAKES)

 

Ok. An honest assessment.

I'll forego an English lesson and concentrate on just the historical aspects.

First off, your sources are thread bare at best. You have just three secondary / teritiary works of average value cited. None really does justice to the Summer 1942 campaign of Army Group South.

Next, you failed completely to discuss the situation AGS found itself in, nor the situation of the Wehrmacht in general in the East, at the outset of that campaign. Had you researched this better you would have been able to discern that the Germans themselves set up their own failure in that campaign and that Stalingrad was just a result of the conditions the Germans faced going into the campaign to start with.

Your recessation of Overly's Lend-Lease figures is irrelevant. Most of those supplies arrived long after Stalingrad. You also give no more than passing mention to the fact that almost half of Army Group South at the time was composed of Italian and Romanian divisions of dubious quality; the single biggest factor in the success of the Russian counter offensive.

You give no discussion of the failure of the Luftwaffe's air lift efforts both before and after 6th Army is surrounded. Nothing is mentioned of the logistical situation of the Germans and their horribly tenious supply lines that were unable to keep up with the advance well before the Soviets counter attacked. These factors, like the heavy inclusion of German Allied troops in Army Group South, had far more to do with the German defeat than any weapons system the Soviets deployed.

I also suggest you preuse this very board for discussions of the Sino-Soviet situation in Siberia / Manchucko during the war. You will find that the Soviets never let their forces there fall to restrictively low levels. In fact, for virtually the entire war the Soviets maintained several times the troops and a near infinite amount more armor, aircraft, and artillery than the Japanese forces they faced. Making a claim that this front was denuded is ridiculious.
Further, making the assertion that Japan could have turned the tide in the East is equally amateurish. It shows a complete lack of knowledge of the situation in Siberia and equally of geography. The Japanese stayed out of a conflict with the Soviets simply because they realized that they lacked the means to win such a conflict and were smart enough to accept that.
Of course, compounding this was that by the time of Stalingrad the Japanese were also embroiled in a war with the United States, and were now teetering on the verge of losing that war. Expanding the conflict in Siberia with a greatly inferior force against the Soviets was suicide.

As for Stalin's leadership here, the crux of the paper, I don't follow your line of reasoning. Zhukov was no mastermind. He put togeather a sound, if not highly original, plan for the Soviet counter offensive. STRAVKA managed their resources well during this period, something Stalin had little input into directly. I can't see where you make any case that it was Stalin's leadership alone that drew a success out of this battle. If anything, a stronger case is made that Hitler directly interfered in negative ways that cost the Germans.

This is just "off the cuff." If you really want a deep, footnoted version you'll have to pay for it just as jocks did when I went to college.

If I was your "prof" you'd be getting a low C or D for your efforts.....

 

The paper was not about supposed to be about Stalingrad though.

Thanks for the points though.

 

Then given my, and apparently others, thoughts on this paper makes it even worse. The lack of clear direction and conceptual analysis of the grand scope of the Eastern Front on a Grand Strategic scale covering the entirety of that war from a point of view of Stalin's actions is never brought forward in a recognizable fashion.
That is a major problem.

 

In any case, the true reasons for Russian victory on the Eastern Front in World War II must include Hitler's madness, one of Russia's greatest generals, Georgy Zhukov, the historical Russian winter, and most importantly, the will of the Russian people.

The paper is about hand selected topics that I feel led to USSR's victory. At the same time, I was supposed to mention arguments which defended Stalin.

I mentioned things throughout Stalingrad and the Eastern Front, but the point of the paper was not to chronicle all the specific problems that occurred in Stalingrad or the Eastern Front. The paper was 14+ pages as it was - you are telling me I didn't mention enough; meanwhile, it was only supposed to be 12.....how much more could I have possibly added in?

Zhukov was no mastermind. He put togeather a sound, if not highly original, plan for the Soviet counter offensive.

That's your opinion - Erickson and Overy both wrote in their books that Zhukov was a great general.

 

Read Glantz' Zhukov's Greatest Defeat for starters. Since the Soviet Union collapsed a great deal more accurate information about the war in the East has come to light. Much of it puts a far bleaker picture on the competence of Soviet operations.
I can only go with what you put up here. If your paper was longer or had more citations and references I would not have known it.

Zhukov was only one of a number of Soviet marshalls and generals that showed a reasonable level of competence during the war. He is hardly responsible single-handedly for defeating the Germans. A great deal of credit goes to the Germans themselves for that cause.

Stalin's, and STRAVKA's most valuable input was after their initial defeats in 1941 not making too many further major blunders. Zhukov's operations Mars and Saturn of early 1942 were blunders. The Red Army lacked both the material and competence to carry these offensives out and it shows in how Zhukov was handed his ass for them by the far more tactically and operationally competent Germans.

 

Isn't there a bulldozer make with your name on it, Terry?

Now it all depends on how good or bad the prof is.

 

Its a backhoe not a bulldozer. That way I can dig your grave and bury you in it all at the same time....

 

You give Evil an entire new meaning

Back on topic, that "Zhukov's Greatest Defeat" certainly was nothing to write home about. Operation Mars was an disguised failure (see the Glantz paper here http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents/countrpt/countrpt.htm ), a paralell to Op. Saturn that did not run so well.

Later on in 1945, with all the means he had available then at the Seelowe-Berlin Offensive Operation (better known in the west as the Battle of Seelow Heights), 1st Belorussian Front (G. Zhukov) took an inordinate amount of casualties precisely due to blundering prompted by intense pressure from Above (read the appropriate chapter in Erickson's Road to Berlin). Z. did not exactly come shining out of this one but once you build a myth you can't dismantle it in the middle of an offensive.

Myths are dangerous for historians or wannabe historians like us here. Just look at how many times we have to bash Rommel's ghost inthe head.

Anyway, an interesting article I found.