Following the fall of the Communist Party, Russia reveals her wartime casualties in full–50 years after World War II.
By Peter G. Tsouras
Statistics have always been integral in tallying the successes and costs of military operations–and in appraising them from a historical perspective. In that regard, studies of World War II action in the Soviet Union–known there as the Great Patriotic War–have been handicapped by the vagaries of Soviet casualty figures. Since the Soviet government kept its statistics tightly guarded, the casualty figures that appear in histories of World War II are estimations that vary widely, though they are all astronomically large.
The uncertainty has finally ended. With the publication of Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (Greenhill Books, London, 1997, $39.95), edited by Col. Gen. Grigori F. Krivosheev, the frightful tally and stupendous scale of Soviet arms is revealed down to the last detail. Compiled by Professor Krivosheev and his team of authors from the Russian General Staff, this book is a vital and irreplaceable contribution to the history of war in the 20th century. Professor John Erickson carefully balances the data and places it in the correct context in a masterful foreword.
Only the collapse of Soviet power could have broken the Communist Party’s lock on this mother lode of history. In July 1992, the deputy commander of the Russian Military History Institute publicly acknowledged that the Russians had had to rely on Western sources for much of their own military history because so much of it had been suppressed by the Communist Party. As Professor Erickson points out, it was not only the party but also some of the Soviet Union’s most distinguished commanders, such as Marshal Ivan Koniev, who encouraged the suppression of the statistics. Now, information on Soviet actions from the Russian Civil War in 1918 to Afghanistan in 1989 is easily accessible.
General George S. Patton commented that one could tell a division was not fighting hard enough when not enough lieutenants (usually the platoon leaders) were being killed. The number of Soviet platoon commanders in WWII who were killed, died of wounds or were missing (categories the Russians refer to as “unrecoverable losses”) amounted to 434,510 from the Red Army and 1,861 from the Naval Infantry–more than the grand total of combat fatalities suffered by the British Commonwealth or the United States. The Soviets also lost 124,764 company, battery and squadron commanders and 20,913 battalion commanders. One can barely begin to comprehend the toll of enlisted personnel.
Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses covers every major Soviet operation from World War II in great detail, including tables that show which units participated and their numerical strength, irrecoverable losses, sick and wounded and average daily losses. Tables on medical statistics show that Soviet military doctors treated 14,324,071 wounded. Other tables categorize the surviving prisoners of war (1,368,849 of the 4,059,000 taken by the Germans survived) by rank, the years in which they were captured and their nationality. Incredibly, 4,457 of the survivors were Jews.
Sections on military production address each type of weapon from revolvers to tanks, giving production, stock and losses for each year of the war. For example, in 1944, the Red Army lost 13,500 medium tanks, or 52.7 percent of those in its inventory, including both the number available at the beginning of the year and the newly manufactured and delivered vehicles.
Although the bulk of the book deals with WWII, Krivosheev also includes gems of information about every other military operation in which Soviet arms were engaged. If a military historian needs to know how many Soviet troops were employed and lost in operations such as the Spanish Civil War, the undeclared 1939 war with Japan in Khalkin Gol, or the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, he will find it in Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century. This resource is a model of conservative scholarship contained in a thorough and precise text. World War II can no longer be seriously studied, by either the scholar or the student of warfare, without recourse to this book.
