I find it remarkable the Soviets never fielded a bazooka or panzerfaut sort of weapon. In truth the great AK series of assault rifles were not fielded during the war, although the Germans and (as I maintain) Americans developed early modern rifles.
I find it remarkable the Soviets never fielded a bazooka or panzerfaut sort of weapon. In truth the great AK series of assault rifles were not fielded during the war, although the Germans and (as I maintain) Americans developed early modern rifles.
Soviet got land leased bazookas.
Maybe a portable rocket launcher would have been to expansive for soviet taste, they ha d alot of other ways to destroy german armor.
Its even more remarkable that Soviet outproduced Germany so badly as it did, Germany did produce more resources needed to produce stuff even with land lease resources to Soviet I think.
It may be one of the reasons why Soviet was so aggresive, because the winner could melt down both their own and the others equipment.
there has been an argument put forward that the T-34 throughout the WW2 was a deathtrap and it was the KV that stopped the Germans . Though it was very heavy for available engine power and lacked reliability so it became a gigantic slogging match . The reputation of Tiger was in the defence and it involved German throughness in preparing defensive positions . And it seems the thing could be repeated again and again . It seems the poorly trained Iraqis performed singularly bad in the 1980s and one Iranian T-54/55/59 held up two Iraqi tank brigades for days , if not weeks . Or a claim that a unit centred around 9 M-60s knocked hundreds of Iraqi tanks and APCs in a single fight .
Tanks was just a very smal part of soviets ww2 forces.
Soviet artillers was rather good, maybe they even produced the best pices of the war, cheap, light and with long range.
or they were let down by copying Krupp designs and so on . WW2 is a massive field you can always find contradictions -probably based on not reading carefully enough like my claim in this post . But ı think ı really read that somewhere .
There is an interesting youtube series about Russian airplanes called "wings of Russia". The accent is strong and it's sometimes biased but especially the shows until WWII have some interesting video material.
They claim that the Russian aircraft industry had a serious lack of low weight powerful engines at the beginning of the war.
possibly true , in that the RAF was keeping 100 Octane fuel as some sort of a secret weapon . MEaning any of those boks and discussions that compare the '109 with Hurricane and Spitfire to laud the achievements of the Britsh fliers would be somewhat wrong in the sense the Hurricane was a match for the Bf and Spit already superior .
these wings (of Russia) sure failed miserably in the first stages of German invasion. How did the Soviets develop their impressive air force after the WWII? copying and modifying? Did the captured German engineers have anything to do with, like with their nuclear program?
Russian aircraft during WW2 was so poor it actually helped the Russian cause. The maximum speed of a Russian plane was lower than the minimum speed of a German one, so to shoot at a Russian plane was difficult for German pilots who had to adjust to an enemy that was basically standing still. Quite often German pilots would overshoot their targets. And another consequence of this was that any pilot shot down by Germans had a high chance of survival because they wouldn't crash to the ground in a fiery explosion but glide down, assuming of course that their engine wasn't shot. Of course this didn't mean Russian aircraft had a high war success against Germany, but rather that they could handle losses better since trained pilots didn't die with their planes. And this also meant Russian aircraft could not be deployed in an area with any anti aircraft weaponry at all since it was slow it would be guaranteed to be shot down.
these wings (of Russia) sure failed miserably in the first stages of German invasion. How did the Soviets develop their impressive air force after the WWII? copying and modifying? Did the captured German engineers have anything to do with, like with their nuclear program?
The German advances in aerodynamics played a part, but most of it comes from simply getting a decent body of knowledge in the first place. From what I can remember the Red Army didn't place a high priority on airpower during the interwar years and as a result didn't really put many resources into it.
During the war they began putting more resources into developing a competent air force and it showed.
these wings (of Russia) sure failed miserably in the first stages of German invasion. How did the Soviets develop their impressive air force after the WWII? copying and modifying? Did the captured German engineers have anything to do with, like with their nuclear program?
By the end of WWII Russia had access to almost all the tech developments in aircraft that anyone else had. This came from several sources. Lend-lease from the US and Britain gave them direct access to Western aircraft. Captured German aircraft and equipment gave them essentially everything Germany had. So in 1946 they were effectively on par with everyone in terms of what they knew, if not what they could do with what they knew.
these wings (of Russia) sure failed miserably in the first stages of German invasion. How did the Soviets develop their impressive air force after the WWII? copying and modifying? Did the captured German engineers have anything to do with, like with their nuclear program?
Post WWII Britain sold it's most advanced jet engines to Russia due to their gigantic post war foreign debt. So there were Mig15 over Korea fighting US aircraft with British engines....
On the other hand Soviets were great in reverse engineering (e.g. Tu-4 Bull) and the Land Lease helped a lot to close tech gaps.
Another strength was the ability to mass produce and simplify complex weapon systems. A good post war example are the AK-47 and the Mig-21: easy to maintenance, easy to operate and cheap to produce.
rata vs Me-109 . There's this book from the 1950 or 60s translated to Turkish as "Attack Altitude 4000m" and it has an entire page devoted to it . 109D would have been more suited to fighting I-16s ; but Germans played the attack-disengage game with great success anyhow .
The I-16 "Mosca" or "Rata" was a good plane for its time. In the Spanish civil war it was very capable of facing up to the 109s and far superior to other fighters of the fascist side like the Fiats and Heinkels. About his top speed it was more than 500 km/h only about 100 less than that of the Me-109 which was exceptionally fast for the 30s.
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