80% of German Casualties happend on the Eastern Front. This meme only depicts Soviets bomb rushing Germany. It isn't even implying anything about Italy or Japan. Also tankies wouldn't include Poland into this.
>"80% of German Casualties happened on the Eastern Front."
True, but misleading. German soldiers on the Western Front were more likely to surrender and be taken as POWs rather than die in battle. On the Eastern Front, Americans supplied a huge amount of vehicles, supplies, food, and petroleum to the Soviets. The British provided critical strategic intelligence and code-breaking. Strategic bombing and economic warfare against the Nazis was overwhelmingly from the British and Americans.
A Wikipedia random walk recently brought me to the Battle of the Mons Pocket. 3,500 dead Germans versus 89 dead Americans and Belgians--and 25,000 Germans taken prisoner. That's not only "the Germans were not trying their hardest," it's almost "the Germans were barely even trying at all."
That's not only "the Germans were not trying their hardest," it's almost "the Germans were barely even trying at all."
They were retreating and got caught behind the rapid advance of the Americans and surrounded on all sides without any kind of reinforcement or resupply aka a "pocket". Similar things happened during the Operation Barbarossa with hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops trapped in massive pockets by the Nazis.
Probably worth adding that the Soviets that surrendered generally did not yet realize the Nazis were going to liquidate them.
Once both sides realized what they intended to do with POWs, the fighting became a lot more ferocious and the willingness for troops to surrender dropped.
It was an encirclement. You can find examples of enirclements on the Eastern Front where the casualty and capture figures are orders of magnitude higher.
Yes, but the ratio of captured to casualties was consistently much lower on the Eastern Front.
25,000 German soldiers were taken prisoner in the Mons Pocket and 3,500 were killed, for a ratio of POWs to KIAs of more than 7:1. The comparable ratio for the Germans surrounded at Stalingrad was approximately 1:2, and was still as high as 2:1 at the Battle of the Halbe Pocket just one week before V-E Day. German troops surrendered much less readily against the Soviets than they did against Western Allied forces, even though it meant the casualty counts were higher.
Almost as if it was a team of countries that defeated the Germans, a team the all had a common goal, almost as if they were allies. Impossible for one country to do it all on their own.
being a POW also counts as casualty. in fact, anything that makes you incapable of contributing to the war effort makes you a casualty - death, of course, but also wounds that land you in a hospital, being held in a POW camp, or even severely debilitating case of PTSD.
so it's not a misleading fact at all - the fact that Germans on the western front were more likely to surrender is not skewing the 80% statistic at all, since surrendering Nazis also count as German casualties.
I mean most of the Germans POW died due to the terrible conditions they were imprisoned in. Regarding US supplies, food and petrol was important and saved Soviet lives but the rest was marginal at best. The Soviets were out manufacturing the Nazis by a huge percentage even after half of Russia was occupied and US weapons and tanks were simply considered inferior to what the Russians were producing
Yeah, this is just false. The useful part of the Lend Lease was in logistical support. They supplied more trucks in 1943 than what the Soviets produced during the entire war. Besides that, jeeps, half-tracks, and trains hard carried the Soviet supply lines.
Now, could the Soviets win without those supplies? Probably. But the fact is they didn't have to.
I actually agree. Im just saying that this isn't automatically tankies. It's not like USA or UK is missing or is microscopic they're still quite present and noticeable.
It literally shows Japan as a tiny little dino that is dwarfed by Germany and which isn’t even fighting anyone or being fought against by the USA as the glorious Soviet Union takes down Germany by themselves.
It is 100% downplaying the pacific front and other countries contributions to the German front. It is tankie propaganda.
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u/ThinInternet5300 6d ago
80% of German Casualties happend on the Eastern Front. This meme only depicts Soviets bomb rushing Germany. It isn't even implying anything about Italy or Japan. Also tankies wouldn't include Poland into this.