> Particularly with how Germany really lost the war to the Soviets in late 1942 when they failed to subdue Russia in the early invasion. The west (US/UK/Canada) largely just cleaned up the mess from 1943-45, as the Nazi's were fighting an impossible war after that point. Even then Russia did most of the work in terms of raw combat. But even when this is noted in history books Russia's success is largely dismissed as merely due to their fortunate geography and willingness to treat their soldiers like expendable fodder. But it was in fact largely due to Russia having better technology than Germany (specifically better tanks/armour [1]) and the geography was far less of an issue to the Nazi's in 1942, who unlike Napolean had highly mobile tanks, aircraft, trains, and Blitzkrieg tactics.

That greatly overstates the USSR's role. While the USSR and the Germany were basically locked in a massive conflict hemorrhaging manpower, the USSR's side was largely propped up by the US lend-lease program, which supplied crucially needed supplies of logistics, particularly trucks. Without such support, the USSR would have faced the same problem that Germany did: a critical inability to properly supply their front-line troops.

Also, Russian geography also killed the Germans. Blitzkrieg, where every 30 miles you have to wait a week for supplies to be brought up, doesn't work when you're traversing 600 miles of terrain. It works even less well when the railroad is a single-track feature that's incompatible with your rail system, even the major roads are barely passable in the best times and impassable in the season of mud, and all of your supplies are being carted by horses (which have this nasty habit of dying in -30° weather).

There are no easy shortcuts to explaining the balance of war afford in WW2. The vast majority of the fighting did happen on Russian soil. The sacrifice of Russian soldiers is enormous. It's true that the Russian command had little problems with sacrificing the lives of Russian soldiers, but it's also likely that that sacrifice may have been necessary to stop the German advance.

Lend-lease may well have been the most important US contribution to the European theatre, because it helped the USSR to mobile their forces and move them around faster.

And the Russian tanks absolutely did matter. Russia had the best tanks in the early war, and those sufficiently stumped the weaker German tanks to make them rush the overly expensive and inefficient but powerful Tiger into production.

But it was absolutely a case where every bit helped. British intelligence and bombing, taking Italy out of the war, Overlord, it all mattered. But most of the blood was spilled in Russia.

> And the Russian tanks absolutely did matter.

Exactly, the entire German gamble of invading Russia was a repeat of their (genius) invasion of France: highly mobile overrunning of tanks combined with lethal Luftwaffe air support.

The problem was entirely the fact the Germans were completely caught off guard by the quality of Russian tanks and anti-tank guns.

The Nazi's should never have invaded Russia, but their baises against the slavs made them feel superior. Likewise in these biases still exist in North American / European accounts of WW2, where Russia's technological and industrial dominance is downplayed.

It makes sense in the context of the Cold War but in 2017 it saddens me this is still up for debate. Although the fact anti-Russian sentiment is still highly politicized in mass media this might be expecting too much from popular culture on my part...

> Russia had the best tanks in the early war

But without US-provided materials and equipment Soviets will not be able to produce tanks during 1942-1944.

> the USSR's side was largely propped up by the US lend-lease program

This is an oft repeated lie we tell ourselves. US contribution to USSR's military production was less than 1%. And by the time our "help" reached the soviet union, the soviets had already beaten the germans.

The battle of moscow ended in January 1942. That's when ww2 in europe was over. The rest was brutal clean up duty by the soviets.

> Without such support, the USSR would have faced the same problem that Germany did: a critical inability to properly supply their front-line troops.

Firstly, germany's problem was lack of oil. Not the number of trucks. Secondly, The soviet military industry was the largest in the world until we joined the war and their military production was never affected. And the soviets had tons of oil. Only second to the US.

The lend-lease history saving the soviet union is propaganda. If we had stayed neutral in ww2, the soviets would have beaten the germans. Other than stalin giving up, there was no way for germany to beat the soviet union. Look at the stats.

> US contribution to USSR's military production was less than 1%

Even most blatant Soviet propaganda put that into 4%.

Marshal Zhukov said that Lend-lease was critical to Soviet victory. And that was from a man who took Berlin.

Just a few facts: for USSR lend-lease accounted for 30% of trucks, more than half of aviation fuel and about 93% of railroad equipment.

So it's definetely not a propaganda.

> Even most blatant Soviet propaganda put that into 4%.

Does it? 4% is still nothing.

> Marshal Zhukov said that Lend-lease was critical to Soviet victory.

So did stalin. Politicians, generals, etc say a lot of things. Especially about "free" stuff.

> Just a few facts: for USSR lend-lease accounted for 30% of trucks, more than half of aviation fuel and about 93% of railroad equipment.

Facts you just made up?

> So it's definetely not a propaganda.

4% to 93%. Sounds a lot like propaganda.

  the KV-1 tank, which grinded Operation Barbarossa to a halt

Your own link says the KV-1 represented only 2% of Soviet tanks there.

The real key to the Soviet win is that they could endure 3:1 loss ratios and still outdeploy the Nazis at better than 3:1.

In the early stages of the war, the USSR had a lot of very different tanks, some of which were crap, some of which were the best tanks in the world at that time. I don't think any other country had experimented as much with different types of tanks as the USSR had. In production, of course they quickly settled on the tanks that were clearly making the difference: the KV tanks and the T-34.

But even then, the KV tanks were only a small part of their arsenal; the Russians had settled on three different categories of tanks: mobile tanks (their very fast BT tanks using Christie suspension), medium tanks, and heavy tanks. The latter category included the KV-1 and KV-2 tanks, and that was the smallest and most expensive group, but also the group that would always be at the center of any attack or defense.

The reason the T-34 was such an important tank, is that it combined aspects of all three categories; it was intended as a medium tank, but it had Christie suspension like the BT tanks, making it faster than most other medium tanks. And due to its sloping armour, it was almost as tough as a heavy tank (against tanks at least; it was vulnerable from the air). This combination made it the precursor of the Main Battle Tank.

The KV-1 was still critically at the frontlines of the German invasion in eastern europe at many critical junctures. Not to mention the Soviet Army had large reserves deep into Russian territory, what matters was what was deployed in Ukraine and elsewhere on the eastern front in 1942.

Remember the Nazi's invasion depended on their multiple tank groups making a very fast progress through this country, until they reached Moscow. It was not total war combat until much later.

Many of them were halted or destroyed when they faced a single inantry group backed by a KV-1. That was enough to cripple their invasion (among the other equivalent Russian tanks).

If you don't believe my account I highly recommend this book which is the best coverage of the eastern front, and questions much of the popular accounts of WW2 with some great research and plenty of citation:

https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Barbarossa-Germanys-Cambrid...

Unfortunately the author's analogy with the ancient silk road rings as false as the Chinese government's. For example in discussing the rail link, the author failed to note that beyond Xinjiang there lie Shaanxi and Sichuan, two of China's most populous inland provinces. And Xi'an was the ancient Chinese capital for over a millennium. The Chongqing-Europe railroad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chongqing-Xinjiang-Europe_Rail... creates real economic value, not just propaganda.

There is a lot of space to cover if we are talking about the populated parts of Sichuan and shaanxi, which are mainly east. The most western city outside of Xinjiang would be like Lanzhou, kunming, xining, etc...

The railroads to Europe are still heavily subsidized, and are coming back to china mostly empty. They'll make more sense when trade becomes more balanced, but that isn't today.

You are right that they need to find more goods to ship on the return trip. The current route actually runs on existing tracks so didn't require a lot of investment.

For cities like Lanzhou, Xining, Urumqi etc it makes sense to develop a land route. The economics are even better than Chongqing since Chongqing actually has access to the Yangtze river.

The tracks aren't as important as the trains in this case; e.g. Crews and fuel as well as not using those on more productive routes. Chongqing as a gateway to the western china is a bit weird since it actually isn't that west :) Chinese geography is a bit wonky like that.

Chongqing has access to large ships: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_of_Chongqing The advantage of rail for Chongqing is mainly shipping time, which is important for higher value electronics.

Xinjiang is west of Shaanxi and Sichuan. Please get your facts right before playing the know-it-all.

"Beyond Xinjiang" was meant to be looking into China from outside. Xinjiang is the border province.

The only reasonable way to look at it is from the perspective of the transfer of goods along the silk road from China to central asia. That is the way the article was written.

You were fundamentally wrong, and remain wrong.

> WW2 is another great example of this, no topic has had more books and films than WW2 yet the perception vs reality is incredibly wide in popular US culture.

Well, the winner writes the history books.

> Well, the winner writes the history books.

Russia was the winner.

Russia didn't have better tanks they had more tanks

'Better' is dependent on the viewpoint. Russian tanks were simpler mechanically, ran on diesel, which made them less flammable and in the early years the T34 was actually better than anything the wehrmacht had. The Panther is almost a direct copy of the T34 design. But you are right, at the end the quantities prevailed, it was a war of economies and Russia, having transferred most of its industry far east and out of reach, was going to win, even without the help from west. Most of the german generals knew they were toast after the initial blitz failed in the winter of '41.

> But you are right, at the end the quantities prevailed, it was a war of economies

My point was the German generals knew this well beforehand. Everyone knew they couldn't beat the Russians in a straight up one-on-one war over a long timespan. They only had a short time window to run them over with their tank/aircraft tactics. And that failed because the Nazi's largely underplayed the quality of Russian tanks/technology.

It doesn't matter if you have 10 German tanks vs 1 Russian tank if those ten tanks can't penetrate the armour of the Russian one. This is a critical difference. Especially when the Nazi's were already strapped for fuel and armaments. Which is why a small number of KV-1s would grind the invasion to a halt until reinforcements could arrive.

As soon as they had to wait for the supply lines and infantry to catch up then the Blitzkrieg tactics are no longer effective and Nazi Germany is now facing Russia on their terms.

It's amazing how this is seemingly such a controversial topic when plenty of well researched literature will back me up here...

The T-34 was better than what the Germans had at the time.

The better German tanks came too late and too little, true.

  The T-34 was better than what the Germans had at the time.

The T-34 platform was more effective because it vastly outnumbered all German tank models combined, ran on diesel, was easier to repair/replace, and the Soviets were willing to absorb more personnel losses.

If you're saying you'd rather go into battle with 5 fully operational T-34s than 5 fully operational Tigers, then we seriously disagree.

The Tiger was a response to the T-34. "At the time" means "at the start of the war". Eventually, the T-34 was overshadowed by better tanks, and the war saw enormous advancements in tank technology. Largely due to the Russians, who were ahead in tank technology at the start of the war.

At the start of the war, the Germans had nothing that could touch a T-34. Well, no they had no comparable tank; T-34s are vulnerable from the air, and the Germans had Stukas.

It's worth nothing that due to the need to churn out T-34s at a rapid pace, the quality sometimes suffered, and some T-34s were badly put together. Also, it was a very uncomfortable tank to use, and the turret of that early version was too small.

But assuming I get fully functional T-34s, I'd absolutely prefer to go to war with 5 T-34s than with 5 PzIV-Ds or PzIIIs, which was the best the Germans had at the time.

And the Russians were defending against an invasion that critically depended on a short (~half year from summer 1942) invasion timeline.

The German generals (and to a lesser extant Hitler) knew Russia could ramp up tank production fast and had way more soldiers then them if it turned into trench warfare or even total warfare level tank vs tank or aircraft vs aircraft fights. Largely because Germany already had to deal with the UK+America+Canada on the other front and we themselves limited in their own production ability vs the much larger Russia (regardless if the Russian industry was less advanced, it was still more advanced than the biased Germans expected the slavs to be).

The simple fact the Russian's had ANY tanks that they couldn't easily deal with, let alone not destroy at all with their own tanks, totally caught the Nazi generals off guard and slowed the whole invasion down.

The technological advantage that Russia had early on can not be downplayed. It was absolutely critical.

German "strategy" certainly helped.

Had they kept Hitler's egomaniacal lust to crush Stalingrad itself at bay and instead simply encircled Stalingrad to cut off its supplies and proceed to take the Caucasus oil fields instead, the whole war could have turned differently.

The German army used captured T-34 tanks, so they probably did not think of it as a bad piece of equipment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34#German_use_of_T-34s

Also comparing very different tanks in a general manner has its problems: each has its strong and weak points, it is very difficult to say which one of the differences would be of benefit in a given battle.

Unless of course the Germans did not factor in the idea Russians would have a comparable, let alone better, tank than them when they invaded.

They expected a repeat of the French army capitulation and found a far better army than their anti-slavic literature groomed them to believe they'd be facing.

They expected Russian farmer rednecks, not an industrialized modern army (although I refuse to extend my praise to their infantry which had plenty of issues, other than their dogged determination, which was a serious threat when Hitler was demanding quick wins, even when they did always eventually win).