World War II Soviet-German military power ratio and the general flow of the war, it is not difficult to see the German army fatal weaknesses

The Soviet-German War, also known as the Soviet-German Eastern Front Battlefield of World War II, should be the battlefield of World War II with the largest scale, the most intense fighting conditions and the heaviest direct casualties. On June 22, 1941, Hitler tore up the Soviet-German non-aggression pact and attacked the Soviet Union in a three-pronged blitzkrieg with a plan codenamed "Barbarossa," which he had drawn up in advance. On July 3 of that year, Stalin made a radio speech calling for the unity of all Soviet people to fight to the death against Hitler's fascism, and the Soviet-German War broke out in full force. Re-examining this historical data, it is not difficult to see that the military strength of Nazi Germany was not much stronger than that of the vast and industrially advanced Soviet Union, and they were the aggressor and did not have an advantage in international assistance. Look at the following historical records of these data: the war has just begun the military strength of the two sides of the comparison: the total military strength: Germany 9 million, the Soviet Union 17 million; the initial direct combat troops: Germany 5 million (including Axis forces), the Soviet Union 7.3 million; the establishment: Germany 156 divisions and 2 brigades, the Soviet Union 170 divisions and 2 brigades; tanks: Germany 3800, the Soviet Union new tanks 1,475 Artillery: 43,000 German, 60,000 Soviet; Combat aircraft: 1,830 German, 1,540 new Soviet, and a large number of old aircraft; Combat ships: 192 German, 396 Soviet. In these figures, Germany only had superior numbers of battle tanks and combat aircraft to the Soviet Union. But what cannot be underestimated is the German army's advanced equipment, mobility and the combat ability of individual soldiers. Hitler also formed four armored clusters in the German army led by Hoppner, Guderian, Holt, and Kleist in order to start the war against the Soviet Union. At the beginning of the war, the Soviets were in a hurry and the Germans had a certain advantage: at 3:30 a.m. on June 22, 1941, the Germans launched a surprise attack on the Soviet Union by dividing their army into three army groups, the North, the Center and the South, on the 2,000-kilometer long front from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south. At the beginning of the war, 66 airfields in the western part of the USSR, which were almost unprepared for the war, were heavily bombed, and the Soviet army lost 1,200 airplanes in half a day, of which 800 were destroyed at the airfields before they could take off. Cities, naval and air bases, and communication facilities in the western USSR were severely damaged by the German aviation attacks, and the command structure of the border military regions was basically paralyzed. The Germans advanced 50 to 60 kilometers on the first day of the war. The Soviets had 28 divisions wiped out in the early days of the war, and 70 divisions lost more than half of their personnel and weapons. According to statistics published in the West after the war, in the first 18 days of the Soviet-German war, the Soviet Union lost 2,000 trains of arms, 3,000 artillery pieces, 2,000 airplanes, 1,500 tanks, and 300,000 Soviet troops were captured. After capturing Minsk, the Germans captured Smolensk, the gateway to the Soviet capital of Moscow, only 380 kilometers away, on July 15, 1941, again through fierce fighting. But at this point the Germans made a mistake that could have been the difference. Hitler detached part of the main force of the Central Army Group attacking Moscow to attack Kiev in the south in order to capture Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. While the Germans won major victories in the south and north, they did not quite get it in Leningrad in the north, and the center missed the best opportunity to attack Moscow and crush the Soviet Union in one fell swoop. In April 1942, the Battle of Moscow ended with a victory for the Soviet Red Army. The Soviets annihilated more than 500,000 German troops in the Battle (of which more than 100,000 were frozen to death and wounded), and 38 divisions were heavily defeated. The Soviet Red Army initially stabilized the situation on the Soviet-German battlefield and disrupted Germany's "Blitzkrieg" plan. Reversal of the situation on both sides of the battlefield in the middle and late stages of the war 1943 was a turning point in the Soviet-German battlefield. after the Battle of Stalingrad, the Soviet Army continued to develop its offensive in the direction of the upper reaches of the Don River, in the direction of Kursk and in the direction of Kharkov, and recaptured places such as Kursk. from August to November 1943, the Soviet Red Army completely purged the Caucasus of German troops on the southern front and recaptured the Donbass. In Ukraine, Dnepropetrovsk and Kiev were recaptured, and Smolensk was liberated on the center front. It is clear from the historical record that Hitler still had a very large military force in 1943, in the middle of the Soviet-German war. The total strength of the entire German armed forces at this time was 9.48 million men, but after eliminating the various reserve units, the large number of sick and wounded convalescing in hospitals, the navy and air force, and the maintenance forces in the occupied territories, they did not have as many field units available for use in the Soviet-German theater. As of early July 1943, Germany and its Allies, in the Soviet-German theater, had nearly 4 million regular land forces (200 German divisions and 40 Allied divisions), about 4,700 tanks self-propelled artillery, 3,665 aircraft, and about 40,000 artillery mortars. Solemnly since the beginning of the war, the Soviet Union has lost 14.67 million troops, with about 8-9 million non-short-term recoverable wounded. However, since April 1943, the Soviet Red Army's Supreme Commander's Base Camp Reserve, and the Far East and Southern Border Areas Alert Troops, still numbered 8,413,000 men. By July 1943, the total number of armed forces in the entire Soviet Union, including the military districts in the interior, had increased to about 10 million. Excluding the huge forces guarding Japan in the Far East and Turkey in western Asia, the bulk of the Soviet field forces were employed in the war against Germany, with a total combat strength of more than 6,060,000 men. At the beginning of 1944, the Soviet Army, with 6.35 million men, had surpassed the Germans not only in strength but also in vital weaponry. In addition, the Soviet Red Army received strong support from the people in the rear, close cooperation from nearly one million guerrilla fighters in enemy-occupied areas, and assistance from the United States and Britain. Favorable conditions were created for the strategic counter-offensive. Beginning in 1944, the Soviet Red Army launched 10 major strategic offensive operations against the Germans in a row, ten Stalin raids. Recovered all the territory of the Soviet Union and pushed the front beyond its borders. April 16, 1945, the Soviet Red Army from the Oder River ﹑ Ness River at the same time to launch an attack on Berlin, fighting for 16 days and nights, to May 2 at 3:00 p.m., the Germans stopped resisting, the end of the Battle of Berlin. The Soviet Red Army annihilated and captured more than 400,000 Germans. Two German army groups (55 divisions) entrenched in Czechoslovakia also surrendered in mid-May. The Soviet red flag was placed on the roof of the Reichstag building in Berlin, marking the end of the Soviet-German War with a Soviet victory.