Putin's Strategy Echoing Hitler's Mistakes on Eastern Front
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Putin's Strategy Echoing Hitler's Mistakes on Eastern Front
Red Army soldiers at Stalingrad, February 1943
In one of the ironies of history, while Russian President Vladimir Putin keeps calling the Ukrainian leadership “Nazis,” it is his own flawed military strategy that closely matches that of Hitler in the disastrous invasion of Russia in 1941.
Here are five mistakes in military strategy that both Putin and Hitler made:
● Their decision-making was based on an ignorant, paranoid worldview in which both believed their nations were purposely being made into “slave states” by a hostile West.
●Based upon a combination of poor intelligence and wishful thinking, they both assumed their armies could quickly punch through a weak, disorganized enemy army and force surrender.
● Both dictators surrounded themselves with yes-men and obsequious generals who lacked critical thinking and only told their bosses what they wanted to hear.
● They both believed that the United States lacked the will to fight, and if did get involved, its forces (or weapons) would arrive too little or too late to make a difference.
Paranoid Worldview
Both Hitler and Putin shared a bitter, grievance-filled outlook based on the belief that their nation was being deliberately encircled and weakened by “hegemonic” western nations. They both based their diplomatic and military strategy on the principle that they must be allowed to expand and that western nations (or “Anglo-Saxon nations”) should retreat and accept a “new reality.”
In their 2021 book, Hitler's American Gamble , historians Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman describe Hitler’s warped outlook:
He blamed Germany’s defeat (in WW I) on a conspiracy between the British, the Americans and Jewish plutocracy…In his view, the Germans had subsequently been (economically strangled) and reduced to the status of “slaves” on a plantation.
In a September 30 speech at the Kremlin, Putin accused the U.S. and NATO of creating a “neocolonial system” aimed specifically at destroying Russia. He railed against the “undisguised malice of these Western elites toward Russia,” caused by his nation’s refusal to be “robbed during the period of colonial conquest.”
The Easy Victory Fantasy
In making the decision to launch a massive invasion of a neighboring country, both Hitler and Putin relied on faulty intelligence. In both cases, they had shaped their intelligence services to tell them what they wanted to hear and eliminated any independent voices who would question their judgement.
Hitler predicted his invasion of Russia, Operation Barbarossa , would take no longer than four months. He told his confidants that the Russian people were racially inferior and the communist leadership inept. He assured his inner circle that "you only have to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down!"
Hitler’s fantasy that Stalin’s army would be a pushover was shared by the German military leadership. In 1941, it distributed a “Handbook on the Military Forces of the USSR” that assured soldiers the Red Army was “unsuited for modern warfare and incapable of decisive resistance.”
Putin’s belief, which his intelligence services endorsed, was that Ukraine’s leadership was weak and would flee Kyiv once Russian tanks drew near. He also publicly proclaimed that the Ukrainian people wanted to be part of Russia and would welcome his invasion forces.
Arun Iyer, a senior fellow at the Scowcroft Center for Strategy , noted in a recent report that “Russia’s intelligence apparatus miscalculated both the resolve and capability (of Ukraine) as well as the level of support from the international community.”
Obsequious Generals
Both Hitler and Putin insisted on personally directing the military strategy for the invasion and appointed “yes men” as army chiefs to carry out their plans.
When Hitler launched his invasion of Russia in June 1942, the German Army was commanded by General Wilhelm Keitel, a man selected for his willingness to carry out the Fuhrer’s orders without question. Other generals distrusted him and called him “Lakeitel” a pun derived from lakai ("lackey" in German).
Sergei Shoigu , who has no military experience, was appointed Minister of Defense by Putin in 2012. The son of a Communist Party boss in a distant Soviet region, he had a low-level government job under Boris Yeltsin. He gained Putin’s trust and soon became a close friend, even going on vacations with him.
Role of U.S.
Hitler and Putin both viewed the democracies in the U.S. and Europe as inherently weaker than their authoritarian regimes.
According to Timothy Snyder , a Yale history professor and author of the books On Tyranny and Bloodlands, Putin and other dictators generally believe that democracies are inherently weak: “Authoritarian regimes look efficient and attractive because they can make rapid decisions. But they often make rapid bad decisions.”
Snyder added that “Trump’s attempt to overthrow the election on Jan. 6, 2021, made the American system look fragile.” By invading Ukraine, Putin thought he would “make Biden look weak.”
In Blood and Ruins, historian Richard Overy notes that Hitler held “derogatory views of the capacity or willingness of the U.S. to wage a major war given its military unpreparedness” in 1940 and its “long history of isolationism.” At one point Hitler declared that American officers would crumble in battle because they were “merely businessmen in uniform, not real soldiers.”
Putin, according to U.S. Air Forces Secretary Frank Kendall, made a similar mistake. Kendall said the dictator “overestimated the capacity of his own military” while he “severely underestimated the global reaction the invasion of Ukraine would provoke,” as well as the “will and courage of the people of Ukraine.”
How will the war end?
Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa lasted four years, cost at least 20 million dead (civilian and military), and only ended when the Red Army captured Berlin and came within blocks of the Fuhrer’s Bunker.
Why did Hitler fight until the bitter end when virtually all of his remaining defense staff told him defeat was inevitable?
Hitler insisted that “history teaches us that all coalitions break up, but you must await the moment... we shall carry on this struggle until, as Frederick the Great said, ‘one of our damned enemies gives up in despair’.”
Hitler believed President Franklin Roosevelt was controlled by the “Jewish plutocracy.” When FDR died suddenly on April 12, 1945, Hitler celebrated in his bunker, claiming that now the U.S. would sue for peace. But President Harry Truman quickly assured the nation that he would proceed at “full speed” to win the war.
Many experts believe that Putin is stretching the war out–hoping, like Hitler–that the U.S. and European coalition will collapse and Ukraine will be forced to sue for peace.
This too is probably the fantasy of an isolated dictator. Rafael Behr, a columnist on European affairs for The Guardian newspaper , observed,
Dictators underestimate the strength of democracies because they see only weakness in leaders who submit themselves to the risk of regime change in free elections. They see robust opposition and free press as vulnerabilities to the system, making it harder to control from the top. They do not realize that those are the qualities behind the resilience and adaptability that have made liberal democracy the most successful model for organizing society in the history of human civilization.
So far, the democracies are winning. We can only hope it stays that way.
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History repeats itself.
There are many similarities between the two. With now bogged down and experiencing heavy losses of men and armor.
It is amazing to me that Shoigu hasn't meet the ''unexplained suicide''.
I disagree with the analogy. Apples & oranges.
This I really take issue with:
"Both dictators surrounded themselves with yes-men and obsequious generals who lacked critical thinking and only told their bosses what they wanted to hear."
Most of the German Army General staff was against the invasion of Russia.
And this:
"They both believed that the United States lacked the will to fight, and if did get involved, its forces (or weapons) would arrive too little or too late to make a difference."
The US didn't make the difference on the western Front (1944-1945). Germany had dedicated about 80% of it's Army to the war in the east. There was only a skeleton force behind the Atlantic wall. Once the Allies (Britain & the US) achieved air superiority it was easy going. The once feared Germany Army perished sometime in late 1943 in the frigid wasteland of Russia.
I would argue there was no eastern front without US material support of the USSR. While the USSR supplied the men who were ground up in the war of attrition, they simply couldn't have sustained the eastern front while the soviet war machine was rebuilt following the destruction of soviet industry and economy in the first year of the war.
US material support was important after 1941. Hitler was right about one thing for sure. Germany had to win that war in the summer months of 1941. That was the idea of "operation Barbarossa." From the start they were delayed because Hitler's Italian allies had screwed up in Greece and the Panzers had to be sent into Greece to secure Germany's southern flank. That meant the invasion didn't get going until June 1941. The German's estimated the Red Army to be 3 Million strong. In 6 months the 3 German Army Groups assigned to the Russian campaign had killed or captured 3 Million Russian soldiers and they were still fighting. Keeping the German Army supplied was a major problem. The Russian rail grade was different from the rest of Europe, so the Germans were literally using Railroad crews to build rail lines into Russia. It was a massive undertaking and failing to take Moscow in that first year sealed the deal.
Remember what got Hitler hooked on the idea? Finland had gone to war with Russia about a year earlier and the Finns had beat the stuffing out of much larger Russian forces. That was the war that we can say is similar to the Ukrain/Russia war.
To Hitler's face?
The OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) or German General Staff of the Armed Forces did not have the final say. Only one person had that and that was der Fuhrer, a.k.a. Adolf Hitler and his word was law in Nazi Germany. As you said, most were afraid of Hitler and only told him what he wanted to hear. Only four of his top generals were not afraid to confront Hitler to his face with bad news. Von Manstein, Rommel, Guderian, and von Rundstedt whom Hitler sacked at one time it another with the exception of Rommel, whom Hitler forced to commit suicide for his alleged support of the July assasination plot.
It may have perished but battles were fought in 44/45 with the Battle of the Bulge being the largest and bloodiest battle fought by the US in WWII and one of the bloodiest in our nation's history.
In the first two days, which were too foggy for flight, they went through the American lines like a knife through butter. On the third day when the weather improved, American air superiority took over and all that armour got blasted away without ever going into real ground combat. My father used to take some of them to allied POW camps. He once said "They were the real soldiers." My reading of history backs that up.
That once great Army is not even a memory, but...if you listen...you may once again hear them coming down the road, victorious, on parade...one last time:
Depends on how you define a "Battle"... The Battle of Normandy surpasses the killed total of both the Meuse–Argonne Offensive in WWI and the Battle of the Bulge of WWII.. The bloodiest single day in the history of the United States Military was June 6, 1944, with 2,500 soldiers killed during the Invasion of Normandy on D-Day .
List of battles with most United States military fatalities
So yeah how the battle is defined makes a difference... Now the Battle of Elsenborn Ridge (part of the Battle of the Bulge campaign) lasted 10 days and has an estimated 5k+ killed making it the bloodiest single battle in US military history...
??? ..... so Russia’s second war front is where?
I don’t see the comparison at all ..... except that both protagonists were/are nuts ...
Currently not a second front but the Central Asia countries and part of the Causauses present a serious problem for Putin. Russia formed what is known as CSTO is an intergovernmental in Eurasia consisting of six post-Soviet states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan.
These countries are having border fights between themselves and at this time Russia can do nothing about it. Armenia requested help from Russia (which is obliged to provide) and Russia has turned its back on the requests. Armenia in turn has had meetings with the US regarding some sort of resolution. Many of these countries have taken in tens of thousands of Russians fleeing the ''mobilization'' in Russia and have informed Russia that they will not be sending them back to Russia.
In fact another central Asian country, Uzbekistan has sent non-military aid to Ukraine.
These types of things would have been unheard of a year ago.
Where will they lead? I don't know but China is exerting more power in the area and IMO, the central Asian countries are more related to China than Russia.
China is now the largest importer of Russian oil, ahead of Germany. Things could get real sporty over there if Russia starts playing the petro game harder.
Real sporty ...
China has financed the pipeline from Russia to China. IMO, Russia would be suicidal to play hardball with China over oil. China's oil purchases from Russia have helped Russia stay afloat even though the Chinese were buying the oil a highly discounted rates.
Expectations for rational decisions over there right now should not be high. That said, if Russia plays games by shutting off the spigot, it won’t be to China. Yep, not even Putin is that crazy.
I have always felt that since the fall of the Soviet Union, Putin thought of Ukraine as the new Fulda Gap. He's been proven wrong this far.
Good analogy, Doc.
HA probably not.