A very interesting read that works to dispel the western myth that the Red Army was a barbaric hord reliant on sending more men than the nazis had bullets to put the fascist beast to pasture.

Users question:

The (oversimplified) public stereotype is that the Wehrmacht was extremely competent and professional, whereas in the USSR military innovation was hampered by Stalin’s purges.

Yet in reading Prit Buttar’s books on the Ukrainian campaigns of '42-3, I am struck by (according to him) how rigorously and systematically the Red Army analysed their performance and made improvements at every level after every major engagement. Yet the Wehrmacht doesn’t seem to engage in nearly as much post-battle analysis.

Is this erroneous, due to a cultural difference between the two institutions, or was it because the Wehrmacht was so skilled it had little to improve upon (besides the unaddressable blunders of the Nazi administration in geopolitics, strategy and industry)?

Historian answer:

Jonathan House (Professor of history at the Army War College and former intelligence officer) says it is true, (at least after 1942) for ideological reasons. Marxist-Leninists conceived of Marxism, and especially Marxist-Leninism, as “scientific.” This can actually be traced back to Engals, but the Bolsheviks really made it a thing. Socialism was an empirical endeavor, and military doctrine should follow Socialist principles. Therefore, gathering detailed statistics on battlefield performance, and revising praxis based on that data, was considered good socialism. The more detailed the data, the better. House’s writing partner, and the foremost Soviet archival researcher, David Glantz, adds that the organizational redundancy of the Red Army actually generated two sets of after action reports for each engagement. One from the military commander and one from the political officer. The encouraged honesty and thoroughness, as well as just applying two sets of eyes to the problem. The depth and detail of these reports was not known to Historians until after the USSR dissolved, since they were all classified. There are well documented cases where battlefield commanders misled or misinformed the Stavka, but over the course of the war, the system generally worked.

Whether you agree with House and Glantz about the source of this organizational characteristic of the Red Army, these documents exist. And the Red Army steadily and continuously improved in organization and effectiveness throughout the war.

By contrast, Nazi documentation is confusing, and has inspired widely divergent estimates of battle outcomes. As /u/TankArchives (Peter Samsonov) has documented in some detail on his website, local commanders routinely obfuscated their after action reports, and arguably outright lied. Every action resulted in overwhelming localized German success, which somehow never translated into them holding the field of battle at the end of the engagement. And these successes not only didn’t match Soviet records, they didn’t even match Soviet records of what units and equipment were in the area. No less an authority than Glantz himself has endorsed Samsonov’s research.

Beyond that, German accounting for at least tank losses, by design, was not all that useful for operational planning. Tanks losses were not defined as lack of availability for combat. To be considered a combat loss, a tank had to be completely destroyed or captured and unrecoverable. If the chassis of the tank still existed, and could be sent back to Germany for rebuild, it was listed as damaged, even though it was unavailable for use in any reasonable time frame. Even crazier, they sometimes didn’t count vehicles destroyed by their own crews to prevent capture as combat losses. There is no way to use such statistics for operational or strategic planning, or tactical edification.

Perhaps, if we accept House’s logic for the Soviet practice, the root of the German problem also lay in ideology. Nazism prized internecine competition, without scruple or principle. Unflattering statistics were politically unrewarding. Goering would not benefit by telling Hitler that his Air Force could not defeat the RAF over Britain. That would just make him more vulnerable to Himmler’s political machinations. Likewise, in 1945, when Goering’s fighter commanders objected to the continued offensive use of their resources, and demanded the Luftwaffe needed to concentrate on interception, he sacked them. Abandoning offense, while obviously the correct move, was not politically viable. The fact that SS units were decidedly more liberal in their after action exaggerations and fabrications lends some credence to this hypothesis. At any rate, by 1943, it should have been obvious to most German officers that the war was lost, and they had little incentive to do anything but cover their asses and hope for the best. German records are confusing enough that recent historians gleaning statistics regarding German tank losses in the July 12 1943 engagement at Prokhorovka came up with numbers ranging from 162 to 5. (Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943: An Operational Narrative, Zamulin, Valeriy and Britton, Stuart)