On 3 Sep, 15:46, ®i©ardo
nowhere.com> wrote:> Fod wrote:
>> On 3 Sep, 06:44, Stimpy
yahoo.com> wrote:>>> On Tue, 2 Sep 2008 23:22:52 +0100, John Wright wrote
>
>>>> We don't teach how to manage properly - or how to lead. It must be
>>>> possible to do it to some degree otherwise we would never have won WWII.
>>> We had a decent Public School system which had evolved over many hundreds of
>>> years specifically to churn out leaders for the Army and the empire.
>
>>> A traditional public school education - with a formal hierarchy of prefects,
>>> fagging and discipline - was, essentially, the apprenticeship for running an
>>> empire and winning wars.
>
>> would you say that was what produced the leadership in the US and
>> Russian armies during WWII?
>
>> Fod
>
> Didn't Stalin, in the best of Socialist style, murder most of his own
> officers, just in case they started to get ideas above their station by
> thinking?
IIRC, he used to have any officers executed who had "failed", as
judged by him, in order to encourage the others. I suspect he also
executed the odd one or two that he took a dislike to for whatever
reason. Didn't the Soviet army also use a system of commissars etc
bringing up the rear during advances and summarily executing any
stragglers?
Perhaps Doug Bollen can enlighten us further as to the modus operandi
of his hero?
> However, with both the US and USSR, sheer weight of numbers, natural
> resources and production capacity made up for a lot of failings.
Yup. See for example, the Battle of Rzhev. Soviet losses were double
that of Germany, at up to 1 million. Of course, if you can spare a
few million men you are bound to prevail ultimately.
