While soviet troops waited on the other side of Vistula for the uprising to fall, because they wanted to be the ones to "liberate" Poland, and not the Polish resistance.
How much extra losses would you expect Soviet troops take in an unprepared operation? The official story is that Stalin warned them against the uprising.
I can't speak for current Russian doctrine, but Soviet "human wave" attacks during WWII are mostly German propaganda. It's true they took [1] heavy losses during their operations, but "human wave" attacks wasn't a tactic the Soviets used.
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[1] They took and accepted heavy losses, but given the alternative was total extermination, their tradeoffs were entirely different to the Western Allies'...
> I can't speak for current Russian doctrine, but Soviet "human wave" attacks during WWII are mostly German propaganda
Also Western (considering silly movies like Enemy at the Gate). They had more than enough equipment outside of some brief periods to make something like that entirely unnecessary.
BUT the Soviets were much more tolerant about manpower losses than the allies and even the Germans. They regularly traded massive amounts of casualties (in ways that would have been entirely unacceptable in Britain/US) to sped up their advance (or due to political reasons).
Agreed about Enemy of the Gates! Such an awful and misleading movie.
As for your last point, I think the tradeoffs the Soviets were forced to make were entirely different to the Western Allies, especially say the US. If the US lost the war, their soldiers got to go back home. If the USSR lost the war, about 80% of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been wiped out, as per stated Nazi plans. A terrible situation surely demanded terrible resolve to overcome.
Not in 1944/45. The Germans had lost and had no way of winning. Even if that was not obvious on the ground to some allied leadership clearly understood that.
Regardless the Soviets had almost no concerns about throwing away manpower unnecessarily due to political and other reasons.
e.g. the whole “Race to Berlin” and the ensuing battle, had Stalin and his generals had any concern about the lives of their soldiers (compared to most western generals/leaders) hundreds of thousands of Soviet lives could have been saved at a very small cost.
Race to Berlin made sense because it led to better post-war outcomes for USSR, which also had price in human lives. However, helping Polish uprising would do the opposite, as the Poles proudly tell themselves. It wasn't impossible though. Yugoslavia pulled that trick and that allowed it to remain neutral.
[Zhukov said:]“There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out channels through which our vehicles can go.”
Regardless of anything else, in this well-known quote Zhukov isn't describing a human wave attack.
He furthermore explains how the casualties of ignoring infantry mines are in the end about the same. Remember minefields were not really used as area denial but for delaying operations. An offensive operation that gets successfully delayed results in much greater casualties later on, as the enemy has more time to prepare or retreat in an orderly fashion. Which is the whole point of using minefields!
But in any case, as Zhukov explained, the casualties of ignoring mines vs taking the time to disable them would have been about the same. So no real difference in lives.
The context of Zhukov's quote also matters. Unlike the case with the Western Allies, the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany was existential. Had the USSR lost, there was no surrender or retreat possible. There was no "going back home" or being "under new management": Nazi Germany had their Generalplan Ost, most of the Soviet officers would have been executed and more importantly 80% of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe would have been executed as well. When facing this kind of outcome, the tradeoffs that must be made are different.
But this is all a tangent, because what Zhukov describes is not a human wave attack. A human wave attack is infantry charging in waves, without cover or any tactics, and getting mowed down by dug in enemy infantry, without care about casualties and without any thought for tactics. This is definitely NOT what the Soviets did; in fact commanders who wasted the lives of their soldiers in this way were reprimanded, punished or removed from their posts (with some exceptions, of course, but exceptions also happened with the Western Allies).
Well, the Eastern Front was fought with a savagery unmatched by the other theaters. It was a war of extermination after all.
There's no denying the Germans were tactically superior (and the Soviets pretty bad, especially initially, as evidenced by their disastrous performance during the Winter War), just as the Germans were logistically and operationally inferior, especially as the war progressed.
Have everybody else not did that calculation too? Were they all wrong about it and soviets were the only ones who were right it reduces loses overall?
We know soviets just pushed people through minefields.
We know soviets had huge loses - higher than everybody else.
Your reading is that it's unrelated because the guy that did it said so :)
For me this is just excuses/trolling exhibiting the typical soviet attitude towards human life. And it's very much related to their higher loses through the wars they fought.
One, this is not a "human wave", are we agreed on this at least? Human wave describes something else. Zhukov describes attacking through minefields as if they weren't there, not running recklessly and getting mowed down in waves. They actually took cover, advanced tactically, etc; they just ignored minefields.
Two, their higher losses were mostly due to tactical incompetence in relation to the Germans, plus a much more desperate situation (not comparable with anything the Western Allies faced).
As for the Allies, did they not consider this tradeoff? Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but the tradeoff was different to them. A delay in a Western Allied operation was concerning but had different outcomes for them -- what was at stake was different. A delay in a Soviet operation had vastly more disastrous and costlier consequences (in lives).
So what is the alternative? Take a very careful and time-wasting approach to minefields, such as wasting lots of time to disable them while avoiding hostile artillery and MG fire, or avoiding that avenue of approach entirely? Acceptable to the Allies, but disastrous on the Eastern Front.
What do you mean, "trolling"? For decades the accepted thinking on the Eastern Front was what the Germans told the Allies. I call that the ultimate trolling... history as told by the losers!
I recommend some reading of Glantz and House, both renowned military historians, both retired American vets, both expert on the Eastern Front.
> Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, but the tradeoff was different to them
Yes. Because they don't value human life as much. That's the point.
> What do you mean, "trolling"?
Taking pride in shocking westerners with your recklessness.
> A delay in a Soviet operation had vastly more disastrous and costlier consequences (in lives).
Notice how when it was politically beneficial - soviets waited for over a month on Vistula river bank while on the other bank Polish resistance was securing passage and fighting Germans.
> Yes. Because they don't value human life as much. That's the point.
No, that's begging the question. I'm providing a different interpretation than yours, based on reading experts on the Eastern Front.
I explained the tradeoffs, and I know you read my explanations. You cannot simply ignore them.
As an aside, in my opinion you're implicitly making an entirely unsupported assertion: that most of those lopsided Soviet infantry deaths were caused by minefields (since you provided it as an example). Unless you can support this with some references, I'll be skeptical... especially since it contradicts the stated opinion of someone who actually was there to win the war: Zhukov.
> [re: "trolling"] Taking pride in shocking westerners with your recklessness.
I'm sorry, who do you think is/was "taking pride in shocking westerners"? Zhukov was reckless in order to shock westerners? I don't follow what you're saying at all.
> Notice how when it was politically beneficial - soviets waited for over a month on Vistula river bank while on the other bank Polish resistance was securing passage and fighting Germans.
It was politically and strategically beneficial from the Soviet point of view, yes. That uprising was discouraged by the Soviets and it wasn't a Soviet-led operation, so it doesn't seem to have much to do with those alleged "human wave attacks" or "not valuing human life". Can it be criticized from other points of view? Sure, but it doesn't support your main point.
It must have also been the same Stalin who ordered the extermination of 22,000 of the educated part of the Polish society and then blamed the Germans for it
Germany had no oil after invading Poland. Almost all of it was imported over the ocean (IIRC mainly US). In theory the allies could have just waited them out. And then the Soviets sent that massive amounts of war materials due to “reasons”.. I guess. Barbarossa couldn’t have happened without that either.
France/Britain were even seriously considering bombing the Soviet oil fields in Azerbaijan and intervening in Finland before France fell.
> extra losses would you expect Soviet troops take in an unprepared operation
Not more than usual? Trading massive amounts of casualties to sped up their advance was a core aspect of their military doctrine. Soviet military leadership had no qualms about that before or after Warsaw.
Of course near the very end of the war the difference between them and the allies was heavily exacerbated by the fact that the many Germans troops were willing to fight till the death after encountering the Soviets while immediately surrendering if they ran into the US/UK forces.
> Stalin warned them against the uprising.
Well obviously. Almost entirely due to political reasons. The last thing the soviets wanted was a rival political with its own military after the war. Same reason non-communist resistance movements were purged on a large scale after the war.
I'm not sure why Poles have this audacity that many young Russians (but also some Belorussians and Ukrainians, and some Soviet Jews) had to die so that Poles had better bargaining position with Stalin later on.
This all while explaining how Russian lives are worthless anyway (a scroll worth of comments) so why bother about these.
I'm also not sure why Stalin will discard his political goals and help Polish resistance achieve theirs instead with his armies. What did they expect?
First Russians invaded Poland together with Germany in September 1939.
Then after Germans betrayed them in 1941 they recaptured Poland from them (stealing and raping their way through the country) and then kept Poland as a puppet state for 50 years, murdering innocent people, censoring press, falsifying history and enforcing the totalitarian system they put in place after faked elections with stalinist purges and communist terror.
More seriously, it seems that you are trying to pass Polish passivity and inaction as a virtue. Somehow individual Polish human beings should be treated better because their Polish state was AFK, than other human beings whose ancestors were living in other states which were assaulting each other through Poland.
That just does not sound convincing east of Rhine.
The had no issues unnecessarily dying entirely for Stalin’s political ambitions?
One might say that being one of the aggressors who started the war and by playing a massive part in the successful German invasion of France (it’s hard to imagine Germany could have pulled that off without massive Soviet material support, they basically had no oil after all..) that the Soviets had a moral obligation to right some of those wrongs.
> Russian lives are worthless anyway
That was a fact (in relative terms) mainly established by the Soviets. They indeed considered the lives of their citizen to be worth very little (compared to the allies).
> What did they expect?
That he’d prioritize the defeat of Germany and the liberation of Poland over them. Of course extremely naive…
I may be beliving that a benevolent AI has an obligation preserve our consciousness after our death, as well as treat us with free ice cream. There should be a process of reconciling your beliefs with reality.
Poland did end up on the receiving side of Stalin's benevolent dictatorship. He essentially de-partitioned Poland thus effectively recreating it. An uncelebrated founding father of Polish nation state.
Many people would think Poles suffered comparatively little and got out with comparatively much out of WW2.
This is 1984 level of bullshit. "War is peace, murdering innocent people and annexing countries is benevolent".
> [Stalin] essentially de-partitioned Poland
Are you even aware that Poland existed before WW2? There was no need to "de-" partition it if you just kept your hands to yourself. It was Hitler and Stalin who partitioned it in the first place.
And even in strictly technical terms - Poland was in one piece after 1941 because Germans took it over from soviets. There was no need to "de-partition" it after WW2 either.
On the other hand soviets did partition it AGAIN in 1945 by splitting the eastern parts and annexing them to USSR. Even including the gains in the west - Poland lost about 1/7th of its territory during WW2 because soviets just took it.
> Many people would think Poles suffered comparatively little and got out with comparatively much out of WW2.
Over 1/6th of Polish population died in WW2. About 6 million Polish citizens (half of them Polish Jews) died because Nazi Germany and Soviet Union joined forces to invade Poland in 1939 and did ethnic cleansings and political repressions there. Germans for 5 years, Russians for 50 years.
Stalin is personally responsible for ordering murder of several hundreds thousands of Poles and forced expulsion of millions of Poles from their homes in eastern Poland (which became USSR after WW2). And indirectly co-responsible for all the deaths that resulted from WW2 which he helped Hitler start.
> An uncelebrated founding father of Polish nation state.
Attack on German forces distracted by uprising, with safe places to move through the river secured by rebels would be easier and faster than waiting for Germans to mop up and destroy the city.
And of course Stalin warned against uprising - he wanted to get Poland, any independent forces were a threat to that plan. After WW2 he imprisoned anti-nazi guerilla fighters in Poland and murdered their leaders in a show trial in Moscow (after promising them safe passage).
