Stalin's effect on World War 2

The winter did very little in halting the Germans, they were halted BEFORE the winter set in. It was only the factor that gave the Red Army breathing space.

World war two was won in part because of Stalin and saying otherwise is to be ignorant of historical fact.

http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/stalins-victory-the-soviet-union-and-world-war-ii/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9707AexNdx8

He was the first to propose an anti-Hitler alliance with Britain and France, and was turned down, twice in fact.
So he bought the USSR time to prepare for the upcoming war with the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression pact a pact that was little different than the pacts Britain, France, Estonia and Poland made with Germany and was only to the USSR's benefit.

As for the Purges,

A wave of repressions swept through the Red Army in the late 1930s and early 1940s. According to documents which have since been declassified, between 1934 and 1939, the Red Army's command lost over than 56,000 people, 10,000 of them arrested. Another 14,000 were dismissed for drunkenness and 'moral degradation'; the rest were dismissed for other reasons – illness, disability, etc. In the same period, 6,600 of the officers previously dismissed were reinstated after further proceedings. These repressions were not without reason Part of the reason the USSR lost initial fights was because several commanders did not destroy key large sections of the soviet infrastructure before retareating, giving the Nazis an easier path and available resources, these were not light mistake especially in war time.
To understand the scale of the purge, it's worth recalling that in 1937, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov said that, “the army had a total of 206,000 persons in the command structure”. The total size of the Red Army in 1937 was 1.5 million men at the time.
Admittedly, poor training of the commanders of the Red Army was a problem in the 30s, but not one caused by repression * but rather the rapid increase of men in the armed force. Already in 1939 the army had grown to 3.2 million men, and by January 1941 – to 4.2 million. By the beginning of the war the command staff amounted to nearly 440,000 officers and staff but training of officers is longer than of ordinary soldiers and thus it was out of proportion. The country was preparing for war, the army was growing, undergoing rearmament, and the training of officers really did come too little, too late

29% of Soviet military personnel had a higher education before the repressions. After them, the number became 38%. By 1941, the number had risen to 52%. Note that for the decade before the repressions, the number had remained stagnant at around 20-30%.

http://cas1961.livejournal.com/1204240.html

"Communism under Stalin has produced the most valiant fighting army in Europe. Communism under Stalin has provided us with examples of patriotism equal to the finest annals of history. Communism under Stalin has won the applause and admiration of all the Western nations. Communism under Stalin has produced the best generals in this war...
Political purges? Of course. But it is now clear that the men who were shot down would have betrayed Russia to her German enemy."

Opportunity to Win War in 1942; A SECOND FRONT IN EUROPE TO AID RUSSIA

By LORD BEAVERBROOK, Britain's Lease-Lend Coordinator in Washington

Delivered before the Bureau of Advertising of the American Newspaper Publishers Association, April 23, 1942

The Soviet Contribution to to the defeat of 'Little Fritz' can not be understated. Their massive successful contribution to the demise of the invading Krauts was made possible by Joe Stalin's Industrial, Scientific and Engineering drive. By the time Little Fritz decided to invade the Soviet Union Stalin had made it an industrial and technological giant second only in capacity to the United States. There were certainly some holes in the Russian technological base and in their level of education but the Russians were clever enough to get around those with the application of common sense, solid engineering aimed at ease of manufacture & operation, ruggedness and simplicity combined with a set of military doctrines based on the realities of enemy capability and their own capability. In that respect the Soviets and Stalin were brilliant.

Examples:
Early in the war the Soviets understood that a precision built bolt action rifle with sights graduated to 1200 yards was an expensive option and one that required considerable time and resources to train huge numbers of troops on. The Mosin–Nagant of which they made 37,000,000 was a good weapon but one that only a small percentage of their infantrymen could use to its maximum potential and as with all bolt guns was cursed with a slow rate of fire and a limited magazine capacity.

The soviets realized sooner than anyone else that 90% of infantry combat takes place at close range (<=200 meters) where full power cartridges like their 7.62mm X 54R were over powered and the bolt action rifles that fired such heavy hitters had a low rate of fire. Soviet doctrine demanded that in meeting engagements their troops should be able to establish direct fire superiority quickly and then maneuver under the cover of that high volume of fire. Of course the Germans wanted the same capability but were too slow to implement the changes required in time.

The German Solution:
Was to place light belt fed machine guns with high rates of fire such as the MG-34 with its ~900 round/min rate of fire with infantry platoons. Thus the German squad armed predominantly with bolt action rifles was centered around its base of fire the MG34.
The Soviet Solution (s):
•On one level the Soviets adopted the same solution with the 7.62mm X 54R DP-28 drum fed light machine gun acting as the base of fire and the rest of the unit armed with bolt action rifles.

•Another Soviet solution was the creation of SMG battalions where the predominant weapon was the easy to manufacture PPSh-41 sub machine gun (1000 rounds/min) that was supported by DP-28 LMG and designated marksmen armed with either Mosin–Nagant bolt guns or SVT-40 semi automatic rifles. These units could send clouds of lead at German troops while in the attack at a dead run.

Imagine 20 Germans with 1 MG-34, 4 MP-40s and 15 bolt action rifles facing 20 Soviets with 2 DP-28s, 6 SVT-40s and 12 PPSh-41s. The German unit is over matched with respect to the volume of fire it can deliver. And it take less time and effort to train a sub machine gunner than an effective rifleman.

Soviet Losses were moslty made up of Nazi Death Squads, the Comissar directive, the Jew directive and General Plan Ost which resulted in almost 3 million soviet POWs being killed or dying in concentration camps, something the Stalin had no power over.
One of the greatest crimes in Western Europe was the massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane, in which 642 civilians were murdered by a Waffen-SS battalion. But just one region in the East, Belarus, with 20% of France’s population, experienced the equivalent of more than 3,000 Oradours – some 2,230,000 people were killed in Belarus alone during the three years of German occupation, or a quarter of its population. At least 5,295 Belorussian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and more than 600 villages like Khatyn were annihilated with their entire population under the cover of anti-partisan operations.

Even veterans who knew the war and have reserved opinion, state that they would have lost without Stalin;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsWWO4y9f7Y

Soviet military losses were on par with Germanies with a 1.3:1 ratio, with the Germans being lower only because, unlike the USSR, they purposely killed or drove to death soviet POWs.

According to meticulous post-Soviet archival work (G. I. Krivosheev in Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses), the total number of men (and in the Soviet case, about 1mn women) who passed through the armed forces of the USSR was 34,476,700 and through Germany’s was 21,107,000. Of these, the “irrevocable losses” (the number of soldiers who were killed in military action, went MIA, became POWs and died of non-combat causes) was 11,285,057 for the USSR, 6,231,700 for Germany, 6,923,700 for Germany and its occupied territories, and 8,649,500 for all the Axis forces on the Eastern Front. Thus, the total ratio of Soviet to Nazi military losses was 1.3:1. Hardly the stuff of “Asiatic hordes” of Nazi and Russophobic imagination (that said, also contrary to popular opinion, Mongol armies were almost always a lot smaller than those of their enemies and they achieved victory through superior mobility and coordination, not numbers).

The problem is that during the Cold War, the historiography in the West was dominated by the memoirs of Tippelskirch, who wrote in the 1950’s citing constant Soviet/German forces ratios of 7:1 and losses ratio of 10:1. This has been carried over into the 1990’s (as with popular “historians” like Anthony Beevor), although it should be noted that more professional folks like Richard Overy are aware of the new research. Note also that cumulatively 28% and 57% of all Soviet losses were incurred in 1941 and 1942 (Krivosheev) respectively – the period when the Soviet army was still relatively disorganized and immobile, whereas for the Germans the balance was roughly the opposite with losses concentrated in 1944-45.

The idea that there were two soldiers for every rifle in the Red Army, as portrayed in the ahistorical propaganda film Enemy at the Gates, is a complete figment of the Russophobic Western imagination. From 1939 to 1945, the USSR outproduced Germany in aircraft (by a factor of 1.3), tanks (1.7), machine guns (2.2), artillery (3.2) and mortars (5.5), so in fact if anything the Red Army was better equipped than the Wehrmacht (sources – Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won; Chris Chant, Small Arms).

Here is an interview with a soviet soldier who had gone through the whole war, and he states the same things I have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N3Mo7dyGYY

Even the final hours of Japan had Stalin's involvement to thank.

http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did/

http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/LP7_AugustStormTheSoviet1945StrategicOffensiveInManchuria.pdf

"До Дня Великой Победы Союза Советских Социалистических Республик во главе с Верховным главнокомандующим товарищем Сталиным над германским империализмом осталось 6 дней."
"А у нас до сих пор происходят поразительные вещи. Отмечая День Победы, даже не упоминают имени Верховного главнокомандующего. Это всё равно, что наполеоновские войны без Наполеона!
В 1978 году за книгу «Зияющие высоты» меня выслали из СССР, и 21 год я был вынужден жить в Германии. Готов засвидетельствовать, что там никому в голову не приходит написать историю гитлеровской Германии без Гитлера.
У нас же получается, будто война прошла без Сталина. Это чудовищно!"
["Правда о войне ещё не написана" - фрагмент интервью участника Великой Отечественной войны (лётчика-штурмовика), писателя, социолога, доктора философских наук Александра Зиновьева - «Родная газета» № 16(152), 28 апреля 2006 год]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRDGWyADP3Y