Why did the Soviet Union lose so many soldiers in the second World War ?

Question: Why did the Soviet Union lose so many soldiers in the second World War !?

According to the statistics, the Soviet Union lost 10!.700!.000 soldiers in the second world war, about 65% all all allied military casualties!. This is absolutely immense compared, for example, to the UK's 382!.600, the UK being another major participant in the war!. What is the reason behind this !?

You can find the statistics at http://en!.wikipedia!.org/wiki/World_War_I!.!.!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

~You can go with the myths or you can go with the truth!. Jim T hits it pretty good!. Add to your 10 million troops deaths another 15 or so million civilians dead!.

The Red Army won the war, almost single-handedly!. The bulk of the fighting in Europe was on the Eastern Front!.!. Churchill told FDR in 1941 that the only power on earth that could possibly take on the Wehrmacht in a war on the continent and have a chance in surviving, let alone winning, was the Red Army!. Churchill was right!.

Look at the battle statistics!. Pay particular attention to places like Stalingrad, Leningrad, Moscow, Kursk, Kharkov and Smolensk!. The Soviets faced off against armies numbering from 750,000 to 1!.2 million men!. The US and UK never went up against such opposition!. The elite troops and best commanders of the Wehrmacht were in the east, and they had the best German equipment!. Supplies, reinforcements, fuel, food and spare parts originally allocated for other theaters were diverted to the Russian Front, thus further weakening the already depleted foes the US and UK were fighting!.

During 3 weeks of Operation Mars, the Soviets suffered almost as many casualties as did the US in all branches of service in all theaters, including the Atlantic, the Pacific, Africa, Italy, Asia and Europe during the entire war!. Over three days at Kursk, the Soviets handed the Germans more casualties than the US or UK suffered in the entire war!. Soviet suffered losses at the of about three to one, but they were responsible for the vast majority of the 3!.2 million German troop dead!.

While the Red Army was deciding the outcome of the war at Moscow and Stalingrad, the US and UK were still puttering around in North Africa!. Rommel, contrary to the propaganda, was not one of Germany's best field commanders!. The elite couldn't be spared and they were sent east where they were needed!. The Afrika Korps was a thrown together outfit assembled simply because the Italians couldn't hold Africa!. Rommel could not get fuel, spare parts, replacements, supplies or reinforcements!. The great battles of North Africa, such as Second Battle of El Alamein , were contested by only a fraction of the troops as were the battles between the Volga and the Oder!. Generally, the Western Allies outnumbered their opposition by about 2 to 1!.

By the time the Western Allies hit the beaches of Sicily and Italy, the Soviets had decided the outcome of the war at Stalingrad and were getting ready to beat the Wehrmacht into submission at Kursk and Smolensk!. After Kursk, the Germans never went on the offensive again and they were steadily beaten back to Berlin!. Overlord and Normandy had very little to do with the fall of Berlin or the outcome of the war and by comparison to the major battles of the Eastern Front, it was a small scale operation!. Read the numbers in the Orders of Battle for the various fights!. The numbers say it all!.

I won't go into the slaughter of the wounded and POWs!. The troop deaths were by no means all combat deaths!. Suffice it to say that a Russian POW had a very short life expectancy whether he remained in German hands or was returned to the USSR!. Disobedience of orders to stand and fight and not retreat or surrender pretty much had to be obeyed!. The option was all but certain death in most cases, with many notable exceptions!. Of course, Churchill and FDR promised Stalin at Yalta that they would return any Soviet prisoners that they liberated to the USSR, thus making the US/UK hands as bloody as Stalin's in that regard!. The farce of Andrey Vlasov may be helpful to you on that issue!.

The Soviets had excellent weapons!. The T-34 was the best tank in the field until at least late '43 and upgrades maintained Soviet tank supremacy well after the war!. The Soviets had almost three times as many of them as the Germans had Panthers and Tigers combined!. Over about 8 hours at Prokhorovka, during the battle of Kursk, the largest tank battle in history took place and the T-34s, outnumbered by more than 5 to 1, destroyed about half of Germany's remaining strength of Panzers!. The Yakovlev series of "Yak" fighters were among the best planes in the air, as the ME 109s found out time after time!. During Prokhorovka, the costliest day of aerial warfare in history took place and the Soviets downed Luftwaffe planes at a kill rate of over 3 to 1!. (Of course, the actual casualty figures, especially in tanks and planes, varies with the source of the account!. I find the Soviet figures to be generally inflated and the German numbers to be underestimated - which tends to bear out the simple fact that the Red Army made an excellent showing of itself!.)

Goebbels and Himmler had run an intelligence operation before, and in anticipation of, Barbarossa!. Through propaganda and misinformation, they caused Stalin to purge the Red Army!. During the early stages of the war, while the new officer corps was earning its spurs, Soviet losses were high!. Soviet tactics left something to be desired, as battle movements were pre-planned and little discretion was left to the field leadership!. The Germans were allowed a much freer hand to adapt to conditions!. This resulted in unbalanced body counts!. When Barbarossa was launched, Stalin was smart enough to realize that he could not defend against blitzkreig tactics on the plains of the Ukraine, and he was wise enough to realize that he didn't have to!. He ordered a fighting retreat to defensive positions of his choosing and he ordered his commanders to buy him the time he needed to move his factories and production behind the safety of the Urals and to get them into production!. At the same time, he constructed his defenses at places like Stalingrad, Moscow and Leningrad!. The German onslaught killed tens of thousands, but Stalin's plan worked!. The Germans out-advanced their supply lines and the logistics of continuing the advance were all but impossible!. When the Wehrmacht reached the designated areas, they ran into the meat grinder the Eastern Front became!. Guys like Zhukov, Vatutin, Konev and Rokossovsky were excellent commanders, every bit the match for their Wehrmacht counterparts, and certainly superior to prima donnas like Patton and Montgomery!.

The Western allies delayed opening the second front in Europe until after the Soviets had written the conclusion of the war!. Africa and Italy were minor skirmishes by comparison and by the time June 6, 1944 rolled around, the Germans had been in full retreat for more than a year and a half!. History proved Churchill to have been correct!. It is blatantly obvious why the Soviet death toll was so high!. Europe owes the Red Army a debt of gratitude for ending the Thousand Year Reich in a little under four years!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Two reasons, really!.

The first was that much of the war was fought on Soviet soil, while the British fought in France until Dunkirk, and then in the Middle-East until about the time the US came into the war!. Had Germany invaded Britain, I think the casualty total would have been much, much higher!. Desperation and patriotism (for Mother Russia if not the Soviet Union) forced the Russians to throw men into the breech to stop the Nazis!.

Secondly, the Soviets were, initially, at least, poorly armed, poorly trained and indifferently led!. Stalin had just about gutted the officer corps, and his focus was much more inward upon domestic security and control than outward!. When the first German thrusts came in 1941, very large numbers of Russian troops, without adequate anti-tank capacity, armor or mobility, cut off and crushed!. Russian forces were still employing horse cavalry in fairly large numbers early on, remember!. Against the superbly trained , equipped and led and veteran Wehrmacht, the Russians took disproportionate losses for the first year or two!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

In very simple words: you throw away way what you can best afford to miss!. America was highly developed, so was Germany!. The USSR wasn't much industrialized!. But they did have a lot of people!. That began after communism took hold, and wasn't completed by a long shot!.
A (crude) example:
If a US commander lost all his tanks, and none of his soldiers, no big deal!. If he lost none of his tanks and all his soldiers, he'd be in big trouble!.
If a USSR commander lost all of his soldiers, and none of his tanks, no big deal!. But loosing his tanks would send him to the penal battalions in a hurry!.
The Germans were sort of in between!. They couldn't afford heavy losses either way!.

One of the reasons why the USSR won the battle of Stalingrad was attrition!. They could afford to send in battalion after a battalion as canon fodder just to harass the Germans!. The North Koreans tried the same with human wave attacks during the Korean war!.

Watch the movie 'The enemy at the Gates' to get the idea!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

Non-combat deaths were high because neither the Germans or the Soviets gave quarter, but there was also famine and disease and the cold Russian winter which contributed to many soldiers and civilian deaths!. About 2/3 were non-combat deaths!.

http://wiki!.answers!.com/Q/Why_so_many_pe!.!.!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Cause they didnt give them guns, if they gave them guns they were crappy guns, they told them to charge mg positions to take them out!.
they were shot if they retreated!.
they were basically used as disposable soldiers

ex!. stalin would send 10,000 unarmed soldiers to overwhelm a MG position!.

Play the russian missions on the first COD for pc, and you will see waht i meanWww@QuestionHome@Com

Briefly, because most of the fighting took place in the Soviet Union, the troops were poorly equipped, and commanders (seems like an old tradition for Russia, from Ivan the Terrible on) were very careless with their lives!. Www@QuestionHome@Com

Agree with darth toast and the fact that the Soviet Union was extremely huge!. But if you compare it to Germany loses it actually wasn't alot for a nation of that size!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Because they started out with a larger Army!. There were more people in the USSR than in the UK!. also Russia didn't give them an option!. They served in the Army or they died!. They did not wait for them to volunteer!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Because they had to defend a vast area from 1941 until 1945 and the Germans would often shoot prisoners and the prisoners in the camps were often starved to death!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

Because rhe Geman military is very strong!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

they do not have gun to fight!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

The other hard, cold reality is, since Soviet civilians were murdered by the million, ALL casualty figures on that front are estimates!. First, although most Americans are completely unaware, the Soviet Union bore the brunt of the Axis effort for almost four years!. About 9 out of 10 German or other fascist soldiers lost were lost in that vast theater!. There were many futile and bloody defenses early in the war, and Stalin insisted upon quite a few which were pointless, and so entire garrisons would be killed!. And of course, the Nazis murdered prisoners, too, so there was no question of repatriation!. Once on the offensive, Soviet commanders were under tremendous political pressure, and used men in HUGE quantities!. Over the winter months, it was common, too, for soldiers of both sides to just "disappear", dying of illness or exposure or combinations of both!.

I have written scholarly papers and articles on this subject!. There were many millions of Nagant and Tokarev rifles produed during the war, and additional millions of PPS and PPsH submachine guns!. Past 1942, the Soviet Army was beautifully equipped!. And the T-34 is widely regarded by those who know as the best tank of the Second World War!.

But there is an overriding factor: This was a huge, landlocked war, far larger than operations in the west, and there were hardly even short lulls in the fighting, so it was constant!. Just look at a map!. The fighting slowed down from time to time, but it NEVER stopped from June 22, 1941, until Nazi capitulation, May 8, 1945!.

Fascist/Nazi casualties were proportionate, by the way!.Www@QuestionHome@Com