Why, in World War II, could a million Soviet troops hold Moscow, but a million German troops could not hold Berlin? Let's see what the history of the German war has to say. Rudolf Hoffmann analyzes the Battle of Moscow in The Decisive Battle of the Second World War.
Strategically, if the Germans could crush the Soviet resistance, they could muster all their forces to bring Britain to its knees. At the same time, the inferiority of the German and Italian armies in North Africa was improved, and the entire coastal region of North Africa was controlled in order to control the Mediterranean Sea from sea and air. In order to carry out such a grand battle, Germany will mobilize all the elite troops that can be assembled.
Among them, including 1 armored division in the southern cluster, 2 mechanized divisions, 3 armored divisions in the northern cluster, 2 mechanized divisions, and the 2nd armored tank unit in Kiev, a large number of armored tank units cooperated with the infantry army to attack Moscow. One of the elite 2nd armored group will break into a relatively weak defensive zone and make a large-depth breakthrough directly in the direction of Moscow.
However, the Germans encountered three difficulties, the first of which was that rail transport was very chaotic. In particular, the Poland railway system was in a state of collapse. The Poles never planned to support millions of troops to attack the Soviet Union, so the railroad system in Poland could not support such a large-scale military operation for a long time.
In 1945, when the Soviets attacked the German mainland, a large number of engineers were sent to repair and expand the Polish railway system. In this kind of operation of a million troops, it is not enough to rely on a few roads, but it is necessary to have a perfect railway system and the railway department to have complex scheduling capabilities. The lack of experience in large-scale railway dispatch, the lack of river crossing capabilities, and the excessively large and bloated logistics are not conducive to in-depth operations on the mainland.
The second reason was that the Soviets were fighting on a single front, and the Soviet Union and Japan signed a treaty, so at least 34 elite divisions from the Far East were mobilized to the Western Front to fight the Soviets. The Soviets sent dozens of new divisions to the fort areas of the Far East to confront the Japanese, balancing in both directions. The Germans found that these Far Eastern Soviet forces were obviously very strong in combat, and the Soviet army in the Far East was stronger in its will to resist; the Soviet army in the Far East no longer surrendered as the Soviet army it had encountered on the Western Front, and these Far Eastern Soviet forces fought bloodily until they were annihilated.
Germany had already invested all its reserves, while troops in Yugoslavia, North Africa, France, etc. could not be mobilized. In terms of weapons, more and more T-34 tanks were put into the battlefield, and the German No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 tanks and anti-tank guns were very difficult to deal with.
Although, the German Army Group Center claimed that on the way to Moscow, it annihilated 8 Soviet army groups, about 86 divisions, and captured 670,000 people nearby. However, the Germans have also lost 564,000 men since the beginning of the war, equivalent to 16% of the total strength. In particular, the proportion of losses of the elite troops who took the lead was even greater,
All infantry divisions in the German front were reduced by about 2,500 men, or a considerable third of their strength. The infantry strength of the armored forces was reduced by about fifty percent, and the combat potential of the armored regiments was reduced by sixty-five to seventy percent. Thus, on average, an armored division has only about thirty-five percent of its normal strength. By the time Moscow fell, the German army had reached the end of its crossbow.
The Battle of Berlin in 1945 was completely different, the Germans had no rear, and the whole of Germany was besieged by the Allies on all sides. Germany's oil facilities and armaments factories have been destroyed by strategic bombing by the US military. The Soviets could rally all their main forces into battle, including Rokossovsky's 1 tank army, 5 synthetic army groups, Zhukov's 3 tank army groups, and 8 synthetic army groups of about 2 million Soviet troops.
The German reserves, on the other hand, could only be cobbled together from the Air Force ground service, anti-aircraft artillery anti-aircraft units, the Navy and SS organs into 12 divisions as the main force. At best, these personnel can only be armed with grenades and light machine guns, and the numbers may be insignificant. Most of these people could not be used to carry out offensives at all, were unorganized, and were poorly equipped.
Zhukov and Konev's forces met on both the east and west sides of Berlin, which was completely encircled. The Soviets set up 25,000 cannons around them, an average of nearly 1,000 guns per mile, pouring twenty-five thousand tons of shells into Berlin. A week later, fighting until 2 May, the remnants of berlin were forced to surrender to the Soviets.