Originally Posted By Hostile1:
They took on the full brunt of the Wermacht. Their losses are staggering......hard to comprehend losing that many people.


Why aren't they given their due? The cold war?

Originally Posted By Bohr_Adam:
Because they dug in and occupied every inch of ground they took, created puppet socialist states, and set about on an ambitious policy of further expansion, making every wester power that helped them in any way feel like a sucker.

Maybe that.

Let's also ignore that fact there probably wouldn't have been a war, or even a Hitler, had it not been for the Soviets and their antics in the 1930s.

Originally Posted By Bohr_Adam:


Russia (more specifically, the Communist ideology installed and run out of the Kremlin) was Hitler's raison d'etre.

Suggesting he leave Russia alone is akin to the threads we have that suggest the CSA could have freed the slaves.

Originally Posted By scrum:
each finally killing his "socialist brother" in a fit of rage because their utopian dreams didn't work

Originally Posted By Bigger_Hammer:
Both nations (Hitler's Germany & Stalin's Russia) were monsters who had zero hesitation to jail or kill anyone who stood in their way.

Originally Posted By zapthycat:


Don't forget that there was another "socialist brother" in the form of FDR and his entire administration. FDR desperately wanted to be dictator with unlimited power. He desperately wanted the USSR to own eastern Europe. He desperately wanted Germany to be reduced to a agricultural society. He desperately wanted to be king.

For that matter, he desperately wanted Japan to attack Pearl Harbor so that he would get into the war against Germany, and put Japan on the back burner.

Originally Posted By VVinci:


Because...

1. 2/3rds of the trucks that moved troops, supplies and armor were American made. A sizable chunk of the railway cars too.
2. They used far more American tanks and aircraft than propaganda would have you believe. Soviet former tankers who used both in combat preferred the Sherman E8 over the T34. Some of their top aces flew American P-39's.
3. At least half their own casualties, and perhaps more, were their own fault for poor tactics and training, zampolit (political officer) incompetency and forced ideology over military judgement, and Stalin's monumentally stupid orders.
4. Oh yeah, those trucks and tanks and planes ran on US fuel and their troops marched in US-made boots.
5. A good portion of their tank production used US steel.

I could go on. Without us, the Soviets collapse.

Originally Posted By Hostile1:
They took on the full brunt of the Wermacht. Their losses are staggering......hard to comprehend losing that many people.


Why aren't they given their due? The cold war?

Originally Posted By PhilipPeake:


Mostly this.

Hitler was incredibly stupid for turning on Russia. Especially at the same time as fighting a war in the West.
Russia was really not equipped to fight that sort of war, maybe he thought it would go faster, but once winter started, it was the end for any ideas of a fast German victory.

Russia could *probably* have negotiated a cease-fire at that point. In not doing so, and continuing with the war, they undoubtedly made a large contribution to the final result.

Originally Posted By elmanotejas:
Could they have won on their own and without Lend-Lease?

Originally Posted By zoinks:
The Zen say the answer to a question is contained within the question.

In the big picture of things, first and probably most important (and Circuits up above hit the nail on the head) the Soviet account of actions and results exist only to support Soviet Propaganda claims. The Truth of Soviet war time conduct was in a lot of ways worse morally that the Nazi conduct. History is a "social" science which means that hypotheses must be tested and confirmed before being accepted, but always subject to revision with better evidence.

We can start with the end of the War first for Soviet historical claims. A few years after the War, the Soviets put up all kinds of monuments and museums in the all of the countries and zones they permanently occupied reminding the people there that they were "liberated" forever by the glorious Red Army. Anyone who would have said different, would've been jailed and beaten until they said the correct words in the correct order. That's counter-intuitive to an actual liberating Army such was the US Army in France and Luxembourg.

Sure, the US has monuments there in the form of Cemeteries. The individual French families, outside of Parisians of course, honor and take care of individual graves. (I'm sure that will end in the Future.) That never happened in the Soviet zones of occupations. The Soviets and all they did were not beloved, honored nor remembered fondly. And when the "Wall" came down, the people they brutalized for decades, couldn't wait to destroy that artifacts that reminded them of their occupation.

Jumping to the beginning of the War, the Soviets were accomplices of the Nazis since the 1920s. In 1939 after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Stalin declared Nazi Germany as "Brothers in Socialism," and then they both invaded Poland. Western Soviet Apologists never mention this, plus it wasn't until 1942 that Soviet propaganda and then the apologists started claiming that the Nazis were actually fascists for like forever, so years previous to 1942 were erased from history along with a huge number of people associated with the partnership. Dead men tell no tales.

The Soviets also murdered the same kinds of people in their concentration camps as the Nazi murdered and for the exact same reasons. The main difference is that the Soviets murdered over twice as many.

The one claim made in the OP needs to be put in perspective. The Wehrmacht fought a three-front war, so the Soviets never faced the full brunt of it. Soviet doctrine, up until 1943 when Soviet factory production and materiel from the US outnumbered what the Germans could replace, was pretty simple. Push ill-trained, ill-equipped people into machine gun and large tube artillery fire with NKVD battalions in the rear to kill anyone they thought weren't putting their best efforts forward. It's way easier to move up on an MG-34 team when they're changing a barrel than when they shooting all your friends.

I could go on. I can wax poetically about Mighty Eighth Air Force history (but that deserves its own place in History and not to be sullied by using the word "soviet" in the same paragraphs.) The main point is that if the Soviets were not involved fighting against the Nazis, it would've taken nuclear weapons to defeat them. (Don't forget the "bomb" was first developed to be dropped on the Germans.) Also, a case can be made to say that if Hitler didn't screw things up so much for the German war effort, the Soviets wouldn't have had the success they did in the later years of the war even with large amounts of US materiel.

But, I'm with Circuits, screw commies. They belong to the dust bin of History.

Originally Posted By VVinci:


Because...

1. 2/3rds of the trucks that moved troops, supplies and armor were American made. A sizable chunk of the railway cars too.
2. They used far more American tanks and aircraft than propaganda would have you believe. Soviet former tankers who used both in combat preferred the Sherman E8 over the T34. Some of their top aces flew American P-39's.
3. At least half their own casualties, and perhaps more, were their own fault for poor tactics and training, zampolit (political officer) incompetency and forced ideology over military judgement, and Stalin's monumentally stupid orders.
4. Oh yeah, those trucks and tanks and planes ran on US fuel and their troops marched in US-made boots.
5. A good portion of their tank production used US steel.

I could go on. Without us, the Soviets collapse.

Originally Posted By PhilipPeake:


Mostly this.

Hitler was incredibly stupid for turning on Russia. Especially at the same time as fighting a war in the West.
Russia was really not equipped to fight that sort of war, maybe he thought it would go faster, but once winter started, it was the end for any ideas of a fast German victory.

Russia could *probably* have negotiated a cease-fire at that point. In not doing so, and continuing with the war, they undoubtedly made a large contribution to the final result.