J. Rockford:
<I’m so tired of hearing this. Everyone knows the Soviets ground the German army down on the Eastern Front which enabled the defeat of Germany.
In There’s A War To Be Won, Geoffrey Perrett reports that some of the Germans fighting at the Bulge had been drawn from the Russian front. The survivors reported later than the Russian artillery barrages were intense, but not nearly enough to prepare them for the American use of artillery. American forces were actually short of shells and had to use them carefully, but the combination of fire-control centers, the new Time-On-Target artillery doctrine, and the new technology of proximity fusing (used for the first time over land at the Bulge) made them an order of magnitude more effective, tube-for-tube and shell-for-shell.
Stalin, on the other hand, treated his soldiers’ lives as a cheap commodity–not unlike Napoleon.
