>Be me.
>Obershütze
>Killing Ivan in Eastern Europe
>1941
>Wars going pretty good.
>One night me and some kameraden are drinking tomato soup near a hot open fire.
>"Hey guys, I'm not very curtain we will win."
>I spit out what's in my mouth.
>we laugh.
>You fool!
>"No seriously, we are wearing the tunics we wore last year, and winter is approaching, shouldn't we have some greatcoats? I think we should of payed more attention to Britai-
>SHUT UP FELDMANN!
>he shuts up.
>fucking idiots, actually questioning our great leaders.
Where are the German women at?
The 6th army actually had a great supply of winter clothing, including great coats, during the times before the encirclement at Stalingrad. They were well supplied by railroad and there was even a huge field hospital near the city that had porcelain wares transported in from Germany. The origin of the meme that they didn't have these things is from the fact that when Manstein orchestrated his relief effort, the troops in the 6th army were told to be ready to leave and join the relief force at a moments notice, and therefore burnt a lot of their equipment in order to not be slowed down when the orders came to pack up and leave. This included things like documents, typewriters, radios, and winter clothing (among these the heavy great coats). So when Mansteins relief effort failed, many of the troops were left without proper winter clothing (not to mention the lack of food and ammunition).
>>896872
he is referring to the Moscow front in 1942, the german high command had corrected their error pretty quickly afterwards
>>896706
>1941
>Wars going pretty good.
>One night me and some kameraden are drinking tomato soup near a hot open fire.
>Stalinorgel starts playing
>The End
>Be me
>Get sent to Yugoslav theater
>Figure it will be safe, far away from the from
>'Es ist mir nicht' starts playing.
>>896706
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpNaV2Usxlc
>>896872
>They were well supplied by railroad
Weren't the russian railroad infrastructure useless to the germans because the rails were wider than the german ones and as such they couldn't use their existing carriages and locomotives?
The couple of winters during Operation Barbarossa were also extremely severe, soldiers would wear at least two greatcoats if they could get their hands on them, scavenged russian ones beneath their own and vice versa for the red army.
>>896706
You should read those WWII German soldier diary collection.
It was the worst conflict you would want to find yourself in. The Germans were legitimately distraught at how the Russians fought like demons with complete disregard for their own life.
>>899390
Am I gonna find a lot of German suffering in them?
>>899390
Link?
>>899405
https://cbweaver.wikispaces.com/file/view/Stalingrad+Primary+Accounts.pdf
https://hoangkybactien.wordpress.com/about/diariesletters-of-soldiers-of-ww2-lessons-learned/
>>899390
The threat of being shit by NKVD makes you pretty motivated to fight.
>>899418
Except threats don't work.
>>899418
oh really?
"The Germans shouted through a mega-phone: “Russians! Surrender! You’ll die just the same!”
At that moment a red flag rose over our building.
“Bark, you dogs! We’ve still got a long time to live!” shouted my orderly, Kozhushko.
We beat off the next attack with stones, firing occasionally and throwing our last grenades. Suddenly from behind a blank wall from the rear, came the grind of a tank’s cater-pillar tracks. We had no anti-tank grenades All we had left was one anti-tank rifle with three rounds. I handed this rifle to an anti-tank man, Berdyshev, and sent him out through the hack to tae at the rank point-blank. But before he could get into position he was captured by German tommy-gunners What Berdyshev told the Germans I don’t know, bur I can guess that he led them up the garden path, because an hour later they starred to attack at precisely that point where I had put my machine-gun with its emergency belt of cartridges.
This time, reckoning that we had run our of ammunition, they came impudently out of their shelter, standing up and shouting. They came down the street in a column.
I put the last belt in the heavy machine-gun at the semi-basement window and sent the whole of the 250 bullets into the yelling, dirty-grey Nazi mob. I was wounded in the hand but did not leave go of the machine-gun. Heaps of bodies littered the ground. The Germans still alive ran for cover in panic. An hour later they led our anti-tank rifleman on to a heap of ruins and shot him in front of our eyes, for having shown them the way to my machine-gun.
There were no more attacks. An avalanche of shells fell on the building. The Germans stormed at us with every possible kind of weapon. We couldn’t raise our heads."
>>899431
"Again we heard the ominous sound of tanks. From behind a neighbouring block stocky German tanks began to crawl out. This, clearly, was the end. The guardsmen said good-bye o one another. With a dagger my orderly scratched on a brick wall: “Rodimtsev’s guardsmen fought and died for their country here.” The battalion’s documents and a map case containing the Party and Komsomol cards of the defenders of the building had been put in a hole in a corner of the basement. The first salvo shattered the silence. There were a series of blows, and the building rocked and collapsed. How much later it was when I opened my eyes, I don’t know. It was dark. The air was full of acrid brickdust. I could hear muffled groans around me Kozhushko, the orderly, was pulling at me:
“You’re alive…”
On the floor of the basement lay a number of other stunned and injured soldiers. We had been buried alive under the ruins of the three-storey building. We could scarcely breathe_ We had no thought for food or water–it was air that had become most important for survival. I spoke to the soldiers:
“Men! We did not flinch in battle, we fought even when resistance seemed impossible, and we have to get out of this tomb so that we can live and avenge the death of our comrade”
>>899418
revanchism after millions of your people have been slaughtered, with you and your family risking the same fate is a pretty good motivator too
>>899418
Why do constantly I see people implying the fucking RUSSIANS, people who treat their country as a living thing, had no will or reason to defend it? Let alone revenge for millions of their slaughtered friends and relatives.
Just what kind of retard do you have to be to disregard those things?
>>899753
He isn't wrong about the NKVD blocking forces though. They definitely executed thousands of their own men throughout the war.
In 1941 the USSR was on the brink of total collapse. They lost something like five million men in that summer alone. The troops they put into the line to replace those losses were reservists or new draftees, people with little training or discipline. The Soviets needed some way of forcing their troops to counter attack.
>>899384
They would have been able to change the bogies on the carriage, and proceed from there, though it would have complicated logistics. I'm not sure how long it would have taken with equipment back then, but the procedure takes a few hours these days.
Germany was using the trans Siberian railway to bypass allied controlled waters and send goods to Japan before war with the USSR, so they'd have been used to the procedure.
>>899843
I found this source which seems to be pretty decent
http://www.feldgrau.com/dreichsbahn.html
They anticipated the problem and rebuilt much of the soviet railway infrastructure, the wide rails that were captured intact were used with modified and captured carriages.
>>899794
>He isn't wrong about the NKVD blocking forces though
Blocking detachments guarded penal battalions.
Criminals.
160,000 soldiers were shot for desertion throughout the war.
Out of 35,000,000 mobilized.
Let's go ahead and paint entire nation by what? 0,5% of their armed forces who actually happened to be cowards.
Do you know how prevalent is the image of soviet machine gunner mowing down his own, thanks to these dipshits?
>>899912
>using Russian sources
>>899917
And what are your sources?
Goebels?
Gucking Solzhenitsyn who had balls to say 100,000,000 people in 170,000,000 country were in gulags and somehow stays a respected author?
>>899921
Butthurt tankie detected
>>899922
>lmao u mad
quality, well-sourced argument
>>899925
You diverting to criticism of other sources does not prove the validity of Russian ones, tankie
>>899794
This was true for all the major armies. France was defeated in the blink of an eye and britain wasn't involved in any large fronts, but during ww1 they all had rear lines tasked with hindering and executing deserters.
If by chance Germany had gotten bogged down in France this would have been true in ww2 as well.
The NKVD might have a reputation for being brutal, but I believe that has more to do with stalin giving orders to hold the line at all costs even though the armies were exhausted to the brink of collapse. Where other nations might have organized a retreat the Red Army was forced to fight in desperation, the rear lines were neccessary for the front to hold long enough for the soviet military industry to gain momentum.
>>899934
That wasn't me
I'm done with you after this post.
Numbers of executed soldiers come from declassified archive files.
Sure they twisted them to fool your sorry ass 70 years later. Purpose: Unknown.
>>899915
IIRC, only like 200 people were executed at Stalingrad for cowardice. Also, the order was directed at officers, not soldiery.
>>899981
>IIRC, only like 200 people
That's really hard to believe and I don't think I'm biased here.
There was what? 1,300,000 soldiers on russian side in Stalingrad? During half a year of fighting?
200 seems really unrealistic.
>>900001
It was for between August 1 and October 15. 278 executions under Order No. 227.
>>899975
Butthurt tankie still posting without any proofs.
Eggcellent.
>>899981
14,000 Russians were executed for crimes just at Stalingrad. That’s the equivalent of an entire division of it’s own forces.
>>899981
Bullshit.
>>896872
>>896872
I don't think he's refering specifically to the 6th army or army group south. There was extremely widespread sabotage (putting the wrong types of uniforms/equpment and ammunition into the trains to the front and so on) going on with the supply detachments as operation barbarossa went on. However by 1941 the german army research departments had devised a special new type of uniform suited to extreme subzero/freezing temperatures which was called Opanol.
>>900092
>>900092
Oh yeah and of course these uniforms never reached the front in time (not to mention in sufficient quantities) to make a difference. Same basically with all the other new developments in the german army after 1941, there was so much shit that could've made a difference but just didn't came through or wasn't produced in sufficient quantities, the me262 being one of the most obvious and famous examples of course
>>896706
>be german soldier
>be sent to capture some oilfields
>this will deal a massive blow to the soviets and possibly win us the war
>wait a minute the furher splits the army in half and tells us to take stalingrad
>basically noone thinks its a good idea the city has 0 strategic valuve
>get sent to die pointlessly in the bloodiest battle in history just because hitler tougth it was a good idea
>ivan destroys our supporting armies and encircle us in a burnt husk of a city
>hitler sends word and tells us to just die there, we arent allowed to retreat or to try and push out
>the tide of war turns in favour of the soviets
good thing hitler was a complete moron amirite
>>900071
Only 15,000 were detained for cowardice in total, and 14,000 of those were just sent back to their distribution points.
>>900128
Stalingrad was not strategically insignificant. It was not "the" most important place to hold but taking it would have given the axis numerous advantages. It was also in immediate proximity to the allied persian corridor to the soviet union in allied-occupied Iran, which shipped huge amount of supplies to the soviets behind the Urals which they could zergrush axis forces with constantly. Owning Stalingrad meant to block all shipping coming through the river from there onwards and have access to the caucasian oil fields, which were already temporarily occupied at that point. Plus there was also the symbolical significance of it. Basically the city would have been taken with ease if the romanians didn't fuck up and let the flanks break
>>900142
>Stalingrad was not strategically insignificant
well i guess thats more or less true since it became the turning point in the war
but hitler was strongly advised against it by literally everyone who hade a fucking say
the only reason hitler wanted the city was because it was named after stalin and it would deal a massive moral blow to the soviets
stalingrad could have been ignored, there where other easier to take places wich would give them acess across the volga, the city could literally been circumvented and the strategic outcome would have been the same, if they would just have pushed south and captured the cacausus region
>Basically the city would have been taken with ease if the romanians didn't fuck up and let the flanks break
the thing is tho that the area around stalingrad (from a german perspective) was very hard to defend, big flat land where soviet tanks could just roll over any opposition even harder since the romanians just as you said never actually set up any defensive positions along the river,
the part that was the major fuck up here was the fact that hitler split the german army between the oilfields and the city, if the german efforts would have been concentrated at either objective then code blue would without a doubt have been a german victory
good thing hitler was either a idiot or a trying to lose on purpouse
>>899412
>>https://cbweaver.wikispaces.com/file/view/Stalingrad+Primary+Accounts.pdf
>tfw Manstein is not coming for you
