What the popular historian is mistaken and overlooked
The name of Alexei Isaev is very well known today to all Russians interested in the military chronicle of our country. He is often invited to television and radio studios for discussions, programs dedicated to the events of the 40s of the twentieth century, he often acts as a commentator in documentary films, again telling about that time.
But, perhaps, almost two dozen books written by him brought Alexei Valerievich no less fame. Moreover, undoubtedly, the most complete credo of the young 35-year-old historian is set out in the work "Ten Myths about World War II", which has been regularly republished in his book for several years in a row and is perceived by many readers as a real revelation, completely destroying myths as about Soviet, and about Western historiography. That is why this book by Mr. Isaev can be considered a landmark work for the Russian historical consciousness.
IMAGINARY ADVANTAGES OF CAVALERIA
However, Alexey Isaev, exposing old myths (in particular, about the idiocy of Soviet military commanders, who allegedly insisted on strengthening the role of cavalry before the World War, about forty-degree frosts at the beginning of the Finnish campaign, the benefits of a defensive mode of action for the Red Army, and many others), right there creates new ones, and his revelations themselves turn out to be not entirely correct.
So, proving that cavalry, which in the Red Army on the eve of World War II was much more than in the armies of other great powers, was very useful in hostilities, Mr. Isaev does not tell the whole truth. He tries to present the Soviet cavalry only as a riding infantry, practicing attacks on horseback in exceptional cases when the enemy is upset and cannot offer strong resistance. Meanwhile, such examples during the Great Patriotic War were far from rare. At the same time, more than once cavalrymen were thrown at the enemy, who managed to take up defenses and had a sufficient amount of firepower. As a result, the cavalry was subjected to a real beating. Here one can recall the tragic consequences of the use of two cavalry divisions of the 16th Army near Moscow in November 1941.
Alexei Isaev claims that the Germans, who disbanded their only cavalry division in 1941, were soon forced to re-create cavalry units. Therefore, in mid-1942, every German army group on the Eastern Front had a cavalry regiment. The historian only forgot to mention that all these regiments, as well as the SS cavalry brigade, later deployed to the 8th SS Cavalry Division, were used primarily in anti-partisan operations in wooded areas and did not undertake mad attacks on enemy positions.
As for the two SS cavalry divisions formed in Hungary in 1944, the personnel of these formations were largely recruited from representatives of the local German population who had experience in handling horses. The German command had neither the time nor the funds to train and equip these divisions as motorized ones.
But in the Red Army, cavalry was considered not as a palliative, designed to compensate for the lack of motorized rifle units and formations, but as an independent branch of the army, which has its own advantages over motorized troops in certain conditions. However, the main advantage of the cavalry, which Mr. Isaev points out, is that the much lower need for fuel was reduced to naught by the need to constantly replenish forage for the horses, which in the environment, by the way, turned into an almost impossible task and naturally converted the cavalry into infantry. But even if the cavalry units did not find themselves in the enemy ring, but successfully advanced forward, the fodder problem became the main reason for the slowdown in the offensive. Unfed horses could not carry riders for a long time, and complaints about the fatigue of the horse staff are a constant leitmotif of the reports of the cavalry commanders.
The command of the Red Army, in contrast to the leadership of the Wehrmacht, used cavalry corps directly at the front and even some kind of armies in the form of mechanized cavalry groups. For the latter, the cavalry soon turned into a burden, since they moved a little faster than the usual infantry.
GOING TO SLAUGHTER
When Alexey Isaev writes that “Poland in September 1939 ceased to exist, despite the fact that there were still more than a million draft-age people in it,” he prefers not to specify that the Red Army, which invaded to the eastern regions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth on September 17. However, the author of "Ten Myths …" needed the example of the Poles in order to justify the theory of "permanent mobilization", which was used in practice by the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War.
Mr. Isaev puts it this way: “According to this theory, the formation of new divisions does not end when the deployment of the regular army is completed, but is a continuous process. Some divisions are surrounded, destroyed, simply incurred losses, while others are being formed, trained and going to replace the first."
Looks pretty on paper. It was thanks to the constant influx of freshly formed divisions to the front to replace the knocked out, according to Alexei Isaev, that the war was won. In reality, this meant massive death on the front lines of untrained and often unarmed reinforcements.
The historian proudly writes: “Instead of 4887 thousand people, according to the mobilization plan of February 1941, conscripts of 14 ages were called up, the total number of which was about 10 million people. Thus, already in the first five weeks of the war, those calculations on which the developers of "Barbarossa" based their forecasts about the timing and possibilities of conducting a short-term campaign against the USSR were blocked."
True, Mr. Isaev forgets to say at the same time that the overwhelming majority of the recruits sent to the active army did not receive proper training, and some did not even receive rifles. Stalin simply sent few skilled fighters to the slaughter. The Germans, of course, did not expect this, and in this respect, of course, they miscalculated.
BETTER TO START?
The author insists that the offensive was the best way of action for the Red Army, and criticizes the adherents of defensive tactics. In particular, using the example of the first Kharkov battle in May 1942, Aleksey Isaev proves that the insufficient density of the defense of the Soviet troops caused the breakthrough of the positions of the 9th Army and the encirclement of the Soviet strike group, which sought to capture Kharkov.
At the same time, the researcher for some reason does not ask the question: what would have happened if the Soviet formations had not moved forward, but were preparing to defend the Barvenkovsky ledge, using a number of divisions of the strike group to strengthen the weak sectors? The density of the defensive orders would surely increase. Perhaps, even then the Germans would still have occupied the ledge, but with heavy losses, and at the same time a much larger number of Soviet troops would have been able to safely retreat to the east.
Mr. Isaev assures that any defense in World War II was easily swept away by artillery fire and air strikes, inflicting huge losses on the defenders even before the enemy attack began. Yes, this is a pretty convincing argument, but the author of "Ten Myths …" for some reason did not think about the following. When the same bombs and shells fell on the Red Army men going on the offensive in thick chains (otherwise, poorly trained fighters did not go to the enemy), the damage turned out to be even greater: trenches, dugouts, dugouts at the very least, but they shelter the soldiers from enemy fire (there is nothing to say about bunkers or bunkers in this regard).
Alexey Isaev is also trying to prove that if a group of enemy tanks and motorized infantry broke through to our rear, it is absolutely impossible to determine where it will be in a few hours, and even more so in a day or two. Therefore, they say, it is useless to build defensive structures, you will still miss, but it is better to stop the enemy with a counterattack on the flanks, which the Soviet command did, sometimes successfully, sometimes not very well.
But the art of war boils down to the most accurate prediction of the enemy's plans and, in accordance with this, to plan the future actions of our troops. The Soviet commanders and commanders also had maps, so it was possible to assume which roads the enemy column would most likely follow and at what speed (it was not particularly difficult to determine), to which point the enemy would first of all rush. Based on this, build a defense to prevent the implementation of his plans.
By the way, before launching a counterattack, you still need to conduct a thorough reconnaissance in order to find out where the enemy units are. Otherwise, the blow will hit an empty spot or will meet the enemy who has prepared in advance to repel counterattacks. Unfortunately, Soviet generals very often inflicted counterattacks on enemy tank groupings, not bothering with reconnaissance or even reconnaissance of the area, which led to unnecessary losses.
IT'S NOT ONLY IN THE TANK …
The book proves that the superiority of thirty-fours and KVs over German tanks at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War is also a myth that the Germans in most cases successfully fought against the latest Soviet armored vehicles, and individual failures of the German troops were the result of tactical mistakes they made. This is quite fair, but Aleksey Isaev does not explain why this happened, only vaguely remarking that in the Red Army "in 1941-1942 there were certain problems with the tactics of using tanks."
The trouble, however, is that these very "certain problems" did not disappear anywhere in 1943-1945, when the irrecoverable losses of Soviet troops in tanks were still many times higher than the German ones, and in some battles - dozens of times.
The historian lists the disadvantages of the T-34 and "Klim Voroshilov", which boil down mainly to the imperfection of the chassis, which is especially characteristic of the KV. It maneuvered poorly, had a low-power engine for its mass, poor transmission and gearbox. But each tank has its drawbacks. And therefore, the task of any ordinary tanker, tank commander and military leader is precisely to make the most of the strengths of their vehicles and the weaknesses of the enemy vehicles, to try to minimize the advantages of enemy armored vehicles, without giving the enemy tanks a chance to implement all of the inherent in them. opportunities. By the way, the same should be said about aviation technology.
And here, sadly, it must be stated: with regard to the skills and abilities that determine the level of combat skill of tankers and pilots, the Panzerwaffe and Luftwaffe were very significantly superior to the Red Army Air Force and Soviet armored vehicles. Even by the end of the war, this gap narrowed, but by no means disappeared.
In addition, Aleksey Isaev does not write that a significant advantage of German tanks was a more comfortable arrangement of crews compared to Soviet vehicles, and this allowed them to act more efficiently in battle. In the Wehrmacht, the tank was an attachment to the crew, and in the Red Army, the crew was an attachment to the tank, and the space for placing tankers was reduced due to more powerful armor and weapons.
Nevertheless, the T-34 was a very good tank, and at the beginning of the war, with proper use, it prevailed over all German tanks. It is not surprising that the Germans often used captured "thirty-fours" in battles to fight the enemy's armored vehicles.
A LOOK AT AVIATION
One cannot but agree with Aleksey Isaev, when he quite rightly notes that all sides significantly overestimated the data on the losses of enemy aircraft, since in the heat of real military clashes this figure was difficult to determine precisely. At the same time, the author provides correct information regarding the results of the Soviet-Finnish war. We are talking about 53 Finnish aircraft shot down in air battles (Soviet aces claimed 427 victories). But next to it is presented as a reliable other figure - allegedly Soviet anti-aircraft artillery destroyed 314 Finnish vehicles.
Meanwhile, in the Finnish Air Force during the Winter War, there were only about 250 aircraft, and the damage caused to them by Soviet anti-aircraft artillery was negligible. In fact, the Finnish aviation irretrievably lost, both during the fighting and for technical reasons, only 76 aircraft, while the Air Force of the Red Army and the Baltic Fleet, according to the calculations of Pavel Aptekar, made on the basis of the RGVA funds, lost 664 aircraft.
Alexey Isaev, which is very valuable, recognizes the relative technical backwardness of the Soviet aircraft industry, associated with accelerated and delayed industrialization, when "it was not possible to reach the level of European countries in 10 years." However, from this objective statement, the author does not draw an obvious conclusion about the low level of training of pilots and the bad tactics of the Soviet Air Force. He only shows that both of them lied in the reports, both of them were wrong in the battles, but he does not formulate a general conclusion about the ratio of combat skill and losses of the parties during the war as a whole, because such an outcome would be disappointing for the Red Army. …
With regard to the struggle for air supremacy, such a conclusion was made, for example, in the fundamental book by Andrei Smirnov, "Combat work of Soviet and German aviation in the Great Patriotic War," to which I refer readers (it proves, in particular, that all types of Soviet aviation in their combat effectiveness was two to three times inferior to the Luftwaffe).
Mr. Isaev proudly declares: "In the USSR, it was quite deliberately made a choice in favor of a massive air force with an inevitable drop in the average level for any mass event." But in the work of Alexei Valerievich it is not said that the losses in both aircraft and pilots in Soviet aviation were several times greater than those of the enemy. But this could well have been avoided if pilots and air commanders were trained in the USSR as carefully as in Germany and Western countries. In most cases, our fighters did not defend their troops from enemy aircraft, but uselessly "ironed the air" in those places where the Luftwaffe planes were not supposed to appear.
It is characteristic that Aleksey Isaev criticizes the Germans' fascination with Me-262 jet fighters, arguing that the same results in the fight against "flying fortresses" could have been achieved with the help of piston fighters, which would have to make only 20-30% more sorties. Therefore, it would be necessary to increase the production of machines not with the latest jet, but with the old piston engines and the training of pilots for them. But the author overlooks the fact that the losses of jet fighters per shot down "flying fortress" were 2-3 times less than piston ones, and accordingly fewer pilots were out of action.
Incidentally, the hypothesis of Mr. Isaev that if the Me-262 had been developed as a bomber since the spring of 1943, it could have prevented the Allied landing in Normandy, is hardly sound. After all, the historian himself admits that the main limiting factor in the production of jet aircraft was the lack of engines, and this circumstance did not depend on whether the aircraft was a fighter or a bomber. Before the start of Operation Overlord, the Germans had managed to assemble a total of 23 jet vehicles (all of which were in bomber version). Of course, they could not change the course of the war.
HARMFUL MESSAGE
Aleksey Isaev considers it a myth that the Soviet commanders were forced by their superiors to "attack, rushing in hundreds on a scribbling machine gun in the style of a" human wave ". Unfortunately, such "human waves" of Red Army soldiers, mowed down by artillery and machine-gun fire from unsuppressed firing points, were sufficiently abundantly captured in soldiers' memoirs and letters from both the Soviet and German sides, and there is no reason not to trust them.
Alas, this was indeed the case, the Wehrmacht fought better than the Red Army, which did not save Germany from total defeat. In another way, Stalin's Russia could not win. In essence, it remained a feudal country, where the masses of the people were only a consumable for which the Germans had to spend their ammunition.
However, Mr. Isaev does not want to think about the real cost of victory, but leaves the readers with the general impression that we, in general, fought no worse than the Germans, and by the end of the war it was definitely better. And all the mistakes that Soviet commanders made can be found in the command of both the Wehrmacht and the armies of the Western Allies.
This is by no means a harmless message, since it is intended not only to preserve the myth of the Great Victory in memory, but also to justify the current Russian military doctrine with a focus on a mass conscript army. But such a doctrine today can only do harm.
For a multi-million trained reserve (trained, however, no better than in the days of Stalin), Russia no longer has a mass of modern tanks and aircraft. It is not possible to use this reserve either against China or against America in a conventional war, since potential opponents have an order of magnitude more trained reservists. And the predominantly conscript structure of the Russian army that is retained strongly inhibits its modernization and does not allow for the proper development of professional units of constant combat readiness.
