Stalin's Aggressive Plan in 1941

Spasibo. Privet tovarish, kak dela?

 

This makes absolutely no sense and the author loses all credibility because of it. If Stalin was within 'days' of invading, his forces would have been more prepared (not less) to withstand Hitler's invasion. Also, Stalin would have known about the German intent to invade because of reconnaissance. What commander in their right mind would invade without conducting a thorough recce of the opposing force. Also, The Germans would have taken advantage to present to the world that the Russians were indeed ready to invade to support their own invasion. Just like the discovery of the massacre in Katyn, the Germans would have used it to their advantage. But alas, there was no such propaganda opportunity because it was just not there!

 

If this is the case then you would be able to provide more sources to substantiate any comments on Russia's impending invasion. Heck, even outside of Russia, there would be such information available to the public. Not even wikipedia has any such entry.

 

There are still a lot of classified documents in many countries on WW2. Why is that? What are all of the governments hiding? Let’s talk about victors of the war, what do Russian, British and American governments have to hide. Their cause was just and they saved the world from Nazi tyranny!!

I believe there is a lot more to the war than we know now and possibly will never know. What dark secrets are kept from people?

I do not mean any disrespect to anybody on this forum, but once upon the time, some used to prosecute people for saying: “The world is round and not the center of the universe”.

 

Hi;
The Suvorov theories are considered fantasies by most in this debate; Axis History Forum • View topic - Books of Viktor Suvorov contains a lot of myths
SO why were the Soviet forces in offensive posture in June 1941. Well it was largely a matter of doctrine. The Finnish war had proved that the Soviet forces were in no shape to fight anybody at that time, but there were reforms going on. It is unknowable if Stalin was planning an attack at sometime in the future, but 1941 proved to be the greatest disaster a nation ever suffered. To date that is, a nuclear war would no doubt prove to be much worse for all concerned.
JeffinMNUSA

 

All leading military experts before the Winter War declared that breaking through the Mannerheim Line, taking any amount of time, could not be done by any army.The Red Army did the impossible. Furthermore, it broke through the line impromptu, for it had not prepared for such limiting conditions. The Red Army broke through the line in only three months, when all the military experts of the West maintained that it could not be done in any time frame. The Red Army conducted in Finland a unique and unparalleled operation. The Red Army performed in a fashion unrivaled and unrepeated by any army in history.

Many German generals realized that Red Army, according to the results of the fighting in Finland, was assessed incorrectly. During the Battle of Stalingrad, Goering had publicly declared that the war the Soviet Union had launched against Finland was “perhaps one of the biggest cover-ups in world history.” Goering believed that Stalin deliberately “sent to Finland a few divisions, equipped with obsolete weaponry, in order to hide the creation by the Soviet Union of an unprecedented war machine” (The Winter War, 1939-40, 1: 367).
In closed circles, Hitler himself admitted the mistake. This occurred on April 12, 1942. Hitler said the following: “The entire war with Finland in 1940, just as the Russian advance into Poland with obsolete tanks and weapons and poorly clothed soldiers, was nothing other than a grandiose disinformation campaign, because Russia at that time controlled arms which made it, in comparison with Germany and Japan, a world power.” He also said, on June 22, 1942: “Back home in Russia, they created an extremely powerful military industry…. and the more we find out what goes on in Russia, the more we rejoice that we delivered the decisive blow in time. The Red Army’s weaponry is the best proof they succeeded in reaching extremely high achievements.” (Piker, Hitler’s Table Talks, 205)

 

But in 1941 the reforms and new equipment were still in the pipeline. Glantz stated that a German invasion prior to or after this year would have met with a quick repulse. If the Finnish and Polish invasions were Soviet ruses they backfired big time; in that in 1941 the Soviet Union came close to being destroyed.
Jeff
MN
USA

 

Here is another thought-

Soviets did not open any fronts before the Winter War with Finland. It almost seemed like an improv attack by Stalin.

However, Soviets opened a number of fronts even before commencement of hostilities with Germany. How do we explain that?

 

Explain this. I do not understand what you mean by "open" fronts.

 

Probably meaning the occupation of the Baltic states, the Winter War, and the Nomonhan Incident. But all of these were concluded prior to Barbarossa.

Maybe there's another front we don't know about.

 

Many explain that Stalin used Poland and the Baltic states as a buffer zone against Germany's impending attack. This is why the defensive fortifications in Russia were stripped and were in the process of being erected in the new territories but were never finished because of the invasion. Stalin also very much disliked Poland and the Baltic States, as far as he was concerned with Germany's expansion, they were just right for picking and no one would notice..... Not to mention that they used to be part of the Russia empire on 20 years prior

The fact that Stalin was erecting new defensive fortifications in the newly acquired territories should also be proof that he was not planning on invading Germany.

 

Oчень хороше, спасибо. Вы все еще в Москве?

 

No, I'm in New Jersey USA.

 

Front refers to an Army or group of Armies under unified command during time of hostilities. During peace time Soviets referred to their military groups as districts.

In 1938 there is a formation of Far East Front against Japan.

Russia attacked Finland November 30th 1939. Soviets did not open North-West front against Finland till January 7th 1940. Stalin did not open that Front before the war. Why is that?

11th September 1939 Byelorussian and Kiev military district became Belorussian and Ukrainian Fronts. Soviets invaded Poland a week later. (Poland and Russia also had a non aggression pact). After the end of operation they went back to being called military districts.

9th June 1940 Kiev and part of Odessa military districts became South front. 2.5 weeks later Soviets went into Romania and captured Bessarabia. Then South Front was disbanded.

In February 1941 Soviets named command structure for 5 new FRONTS in their military districts; all of them were facing Germany. There was also a new Far East Front.

 

I do not wish to defend Stalin in any manner,but historical facts speak for themselves.
Fact is, Stalin did not have aggressive plans in 1941.,on the contrary, he was in mortal,paralysing fear.The reason for such fear is cognition that his forces are totally unprepared for a major war.This state of the army was mostly Stalin's doing through backward doctrines he forced on the army,while simultaneously killing some 80% of high ranking officers core and little fewer lower ranking officers who disagreed with him or because of his acute paranoia.Yet he only became aware of this impotence after Winter War where they performed miserably.Red army lost 250 000 man out of 1.5 M employed,also 1000+ tanks against puny Finnish army that had almost no tanks or air force.Next even more important clue came in form of the war games conducted in January 1941, when the goal was to demonstrate how in case of German aggression,Red army would immediately counter attack,destroy German army,and occupy parts of Poland and East Prussia.The result was terrifying;Zhukov,leading the Wermacht,routed the Red army in record time.Participants were at first to afraid to report the results to Stalin.Finally Stalin came to his senses and embarked on paintful,slow,and much belated deep reform of the army that would end in summer of 1942 at earliest.To catch(attack) an army in the midst of reform would and did produce same results as if signal for a start of a 100 m race caught one of the sprinters putting his pants on and his shoes still off.Stalin knew this and was desperately trying to delay the inevitable war,even by every mean,even letting German reconnaissance operate at will and keeping forces in border military districts totally unprepared,just not to provoke the Germans.
There is absolutely no talk about Stalin wanted war in summer 1941.Any one who read 'Stumbling Colossus' by D.Glantz would be sure of it.Even more the reader will find it hard to believe that any army could be in such a state.I mean it's incredible..There are at least two dozens of reasons for defeat,with each being so crucial that alone leads comfortably to total defeat! -Most of the officers commanding major units had a few months of command experience.-Everybody completely lacked any initiative,due to a mortal fear for his life.-Army is mostly made of almost completely untrained reservist(peasants).-Enormous lack of trained specialists in every field(pilots having 3-5 flying hours).-Obsolete equipment(with new just starting to arrive).-Totally outdated tactics in all fields(tanks only advance on roads,attack in unchangeable formations,attack only frontally,don't know how to flank,drivers have few hours experience..).-Airplanes lacking airfields,making dispersal and camouflage impossible.-Lack of antitank and anti air weapons.-Unknown concept of armor infantry cooperation,total inaptness about conduct of combined arms operations.-Absence of radio communications(even between army and front HQs,not to mention radios in tanks or airplanes).-Complete inability to conduct mobile operations due to lack of transport.-Inability for almost any form of resupply of fuel of ammo again due to lacking transport means(this was one of the worst problems).-Very poor repair,maintenance and rear services(this and fuel resupply caused thousands upon thousands of tanks to be knocked out without fighting)..I could list these problems for pages only in short notes such as these,but I think the point is clear.
Apart from military reasons there are political,and geopolitical circumstances that could support the idea of USSR not being willing to wage war.
About it's aggressiveness and predatory intentions clearly revealed in occupation of Poland,parts of Finland,Bukovina,Besarabia,one must understand that those realms were part of Russian empire some 20 year earlier, and that it is not the same as embarking on a crusade of conquering whole Europe.
There is another point often completely disregarded in the west.USSR is often condemned for pact they had with Germany,and also it is used as example of it's cynical and sinister nature.This is certainly true to to a great degree.But some facts must not be overlooked.Truth is that major reason why western powers allowed Nazis to rearm and become powerful is their own cynical stand that this new aggressive power will be used in the east against hate communism,and USSR knew this.Nice example of this stance are the manoeuvres of first panzer divisions in East Prussia,symbolicly named 'exercise in the east' with representatives of western powers present and pleased..At that time Stalin would like nothing better than to stamp on this rising serpent,but in the time West wouldn't allow it(USSR was also the only one ready to help Czechoslovakia against Hitler).The west finally realized they created a monster after Hitler entered Prague,but it was to late,to stop Hitler,or to deal with the Russian,because they lost all faith in them. USSR made an agreement with a devil, a complete political and ideological nemesis,seeing the game west was playing.Stalin made a pact first,and wanted to just sit back and watch two of his opponents fight to the death,just as the west wanted to do.Not to mention distrust for the West dating from the time West tried to destroy Soviet state at it's very birth,but failed in a costly Civil war that took millions of Russian lives.

 

When I was reading other posts I noticed some arguments about offensive posture of the Red army,which I forgot to comment..
There are several possible reasons why was the army deployed so forward if not for offensive purpose.
First and obvious is that Stalin wasn't willing to let territory to the enemy without fight for which he believed until 1941 he was well prepared.
The most important reason though was that Soviet army was at peace time state and needed some 3 months after hostilities broke out to mobilize.This massive forward deployment was meant to provide this time.This mobilization was essential for Red army to wage any larger war,cause it encompassed everything from enlarging the size of the army for a few times,to acquiring vehicles for mobile warfare,setting up rear services to bringing forward supplies and even getting most of aiming equipment to artillery positions.Stalin kept the army in such state,again just not to provoke Germans.What folly!
Other arguments can be found in traditional aggressive operational mode of the Red army.Their doctrine was to respond to invasion aggressively,with all out counter attack.Stalin only dropped this fixation after '41 January war games.
That the Red army was postured for defence rather than attack is also seen through existence of multiple strategic defence belts.At least two were present by June '41.
As Fugate and Dvoretsky argue in ' Thunder on the Dnepr',there was also third secret strategic belt forming after disastrous result of war games in January and still today secret war games of February for which there are indirect evidence.They also claim that Soviet high command knew about dangers of their forward forces being surrounded and destroyed by mobile German army,but held those armies forward, not to tip off Germans and not to make panic and feeling among the forward troops and civilians that they are being abandoned,while building rear strategic echalons.They claim that these decisions about sacrifice of hundreds of thousands if not millions troops of forward echalons,only to stop the Germans in second and third is still secret today and was made after February war games.

 

Ok, a misunderstanding on the use of the word "front". I see how you're using it now.

 

Soviet soldiers and officers were preparing for a victorious march on Berlin, but the war against Germany in 1941 didn’t run according to plan. As a result, when Soviet commanders were captured, the Germans found quite interesting maps and curious orders in their bags. Thousands of soldiers had Russian-German and Russian-Romanian phrase books. Many simply did not think of the necessity to get rid of this compromising evidence.

The commander of the 5th Battery of the 14th Howitzer Regiment of the 14th Tank Division of the 7th Mechanized Corps, Yakov Iosifovich Dzhugashvili, son of Stalin, was no exception. He was taken prisoner, but at first he was not recognized. The senior lieutenant was betrayed by his subordinates. Stalin’s son was searched and questioned. A letter was found in his pockets, from a certain junior lieutenant in the reserves named Victor: “I am at the training camps, I would like to be home by fall, but the planned walk to Berlin might hinder this.” The letter is dated June 11, 1941. The contents of this letter were reported to Hitler personally; he mentioned it on May 18,1942. (Piker, Hitler’s Table Talks, 303)
In June 1941, German intelligence officers showed the letter to Yakov Dzhugashvili and asked him to clarify the statement about the “planned walk to Berlin”.
The questioning protocol recorded Stalin’s son’s reaction. He read the letter and quietly muttered: “Damn it!”

During questioning, Stalin’s son was asked why the Soviet artillery, which had the best cannon and howitzers in the world, and in incredible numbers, fired so poorly. Stalin’s son answered: “The maps let the Red Army down, because the war, contrary to expectations, unfolded to the east of the state border.”
Stalin’s son told the truth. In 1941, the Red Army fought without maps. There simply weren’t any. But the artillery couldn’t fire without maps. Direct aiming and firing was just a small fraction of the work done by artillery in war. Most of the time artillery fired beyond the horizon.

“It turned out that in Soviet Russia a map-making industry was created that surpassed everything that had ever been done before in its size, organization, volume, and quality of work,” concluded the Germans about Soviet topographic services (Petermanns geographischen Mitteilungen (Germany, 1943), vols. 9, 10)
How do we reconcile the best map-making industry in the world with the complete absence of maps?
General A.I. Lossev explained: “Storages of topographic maps, located unreasonably close to the border, were either seized by the enemy, or destroyed by the enemy during the first bomb raids. As a result, the troops lost 100 million maps.”

This is a modern-day evaluation, and the numbers are lowered. Lieutenant General M.K. Kudryavtsev, who under Stalin was director of the topographic services of the Red Army, said that during the first days of the war, and only in the Baltic, Western, and Kiev military districts, the Soviet troops destroyed during retreat over two hundred railcars of their own topographic maps.
The smallest cargo railcar in the Soviet Union in 1941 could carry twenty tons. Even if we supposed that the smallest cars were used to store the maps, four thousand tons of maps were destroyed in the three districts. Kudryavtsev said that, on average, every railcar contained 1,033,000 maps. Two hundred cars equaled 200 million maps.
Which of the two generals is right? They both are. One talked about what the Germans troops destroyed, 100 million, and the other added that the Soviets themselves destroyed 200 million maps, so they would not go to the enemy.

If the Soviet army planned to defend Moscow, Kursk, and Stalingrad, it needed maps of those regions. There was no reason to transport these maps to the state border.
At the border, the army needed maps of border regions. And, if there was a plan to advance, the army needed maps of the territories that lay ahead. If the Soviet Union planned to take over large territories, it needed the corresponding number of maps, to supply a multimillion-strong army. The Red Army did not save its maps in the border regions, because they were useless for defending the country. In 1941, the plans for the “liberation” of Europe crumbled, and the value of the maps that were kept in railcars on the border became zero. Millions of Russian-German and Russian-Romanian phrase books were burned along with the maps.
The Soviet population was expecting a war, but it didn’t anticipate a German invasion.
Therefore, once the Germans attacked, everyone was shocked. Major General of the KGB O.D. Gotsiridze remembered: “Before July 3, when Stalin made a public appearance, it was completely unclear as to what were to do. Everyone thought that the war would be quick and on foreign soil.”
“The complete demoralization among our troops occurred because…the people had planned to fight on the enemy’s territory, and our military commanders were dreaming of a blitzkrieg no less than the Germans were. But everything turned out not quite so happily…..The sudden need for defense turned into a total retreat on all fronts for the troops and the people” (A.B. Zubov, Continent, no 84 (1995))

 

Sorry to contradict you,but the manoeuvres of the 1st panzer divisions were held in East Prussia,because ...there was ample and cheap ground in East Prussia (the US army manoeuvres in 1940 were held in the South for the same reason ) .The presence of Western representative (you have a proof that they were pleased ? ),simply:they were military attachés and probably there was also a Russian one . This was and is standard practice .About the Soviet Union willing to help Prague (can't spell the name of the country ) :how ? The Soviet Union having no frontier with Prague ,had to invade Poland or Roumania ,and the treaty with Prague stipulated that Russian help would only come ,after France honouring her engagements .And concerning 1939 (not contradicting you )Stalin had 3 options 1)doing nothing and ..getting nothing 2) fighting for a capitalist,anti communist and anti Russian country from which he claimed the Eastern part and that rightfully refused an alliance with Stalin (Poland ,but you knew already ) Btw:Stalin's price was the Baltic States,but the West refused to give them . 3) Collaborating with Hitler for a fourth division of Poland and getting the Baltic States .