this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Superior tactics my ass. It was meat waves all the way down. The difference is that by the late war their materiel superiority was so huge that the outcome was a foregone conclusion.
Soviet deep battle was well-developed and, perhaps more importantly, well-practiced by 1944. After Stalingrad was over, the idea of Soviet forces using 'meat waves' is a popular, but incorrect presumption. The Soviets were running short on manpower (without resorting to the kind of insane gambits that Nazi Germany was at the same time during the war) in 44 and 45, so they had every incentive to be (relatively) sparing about their troops, even if their tolerance for losses was still much higher than we would regard as acceptable today.
Acceptable today by whose standards, though? The russian army is literally doing meatwave tactics these days...
It's curious - when that started happening, I remember a few folks online musing that Russia had undone years of work by historians fighting the pop culture myth of Soviet 'human wave' tactics.
But the Russian Federation isn't known for its... well, for its anything but corruption and incompetence.