ABSTRACT
The Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union, or, in Western terms, the war on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, saw horrendous carnage over a vast geographical area and over a sustained period of time. Two ideologically opposed regimes equipped with the modern weaponry that could be provided in huge quantities by modern industrial states fought a struggle for their very existences at the expense of millions of combatants, both volunteers and conscripts, along with their civilian populations. Both sides saw the war as inevitable. Whilst for Hitler German destiny lay in eastward expansion, for Stalin a clash with fascism, an extreme expression of capitalism, was similarly inevitable. Nazi Germany struck first as Stalin and the Soviet Union tried to buy time to rearm and reorganize in the light of war experience, and, although not explicitly, make good the damage done by the Great Purges. That German forces and their allies got so deep into the Soviet Union, and that it took Soviet forces so long to eject them from Soviet territory despite the relative initial lack of preparedness of Germany for a sustained war, is certainly testimony to the quality of German arms in the broadest sense. However, given Soviet long-term preparation for war, a qualitative parity in many aspects of equipment and numerical superiority without lower quality at least in armour and artillery, it is perhaps surprising that German forces got as far as they did. They did not capture Moscow and Leningrad and enslave the Soviet peoples for many reasons. In addition to firing Soviet will to resist through brutal, racially driven occupation policy, after having squandered resources to halt the German advance Soviet forces were able to recover a material superiority borne out of longterm planning and a complete neglect of the Soviet consumer sector of the economy, with a little help from their new allies, and then increasingly effectively use these resources to defeat their opponent. Whilst Red Army losses remained colossal throughout the war, the Red Army became a far more effective fighting machine as the war progressed, that bore the brunt of the fighting against German land forces.
