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).

That's the good faith interpretation.

Then you look at soviet loses vs everyone's else :)

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.

Wait, no. Two different things here.

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.

I wonder if you understand that you just quoted how Zhukov avoids human wave tactics.

I guess you have a better strategy than Zhukov has described, with more favourable tradeoffs.

Perhaps you could share it with Ukrainian command since they went with Zhukov in the summer of 2023.