WI the soviet union goes for a full militia army strategy in WWII?

*sarcastic mode on*

You all guys know how the theory of the people's army go, with a huge mobilization of the population for the greater cause of the revolution by building the mythical doomstacks of militia. By disbanding all those worthless units with fancy 'oil' for cars and 'diesel' for tanks and 'coal' for armoured trains, and making the army a huge vast swathe of men (and no small dosage of women in drag, and old men), a rifle in their hands and if they are lucky, some form of suicidal AT grenade.

*sarcasm mode off*

What if the soviets went for a full people's army doctrine, concentrating their forces on large formations of infantry (with a even higher % of the population being drafted in the army) and focused less on tanks and the air force, what would be the major changes in the war against the germans?
 

CalBear

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WAY more casualties (which is pretty horrific if you think about it) and a Reich victory.
 
WAY more casualties (which is pretty horrific if you think about it) and a Reich victory.

The germans would still have the same blunders as OTL, and the soviet will have a significant bigger guerrila force behind the lines if everyone have his own rifle at home, this means more supply problems for the wehrmacht
 
On the plus side, no Generalplan Ost.

On the minus side, that's because all the Russians died in battle.

The doctrinal shift necessary for this, however, would have to start pre-war, so its shortcomings will be demonstrated at Khalkhin Gol and the wars against Poland and Finland. Japan would probably do better the first--maybe a Soviet-Japanese War ensues?
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
The germans would still have the same blunders as OTL, and the soviet will have a significant bigger guerrila force behind the lines if everyone have his own rifle at home, this means more supply problems for the wehrmacht

They'd be different blunders, since this would be a different war. But in this scenario, all the Germans really have to do is drive straight forward, since the Russians won't have anything that could do more than scratch the paint off the side of a Panzer III.
 

CalBear

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The germans would still have the same blunders as OTL, and the soviet will have a significant bigger guerrila force behind the lines if everyone have his own rifle at home, this means more supply problems for the wehrmacht
No, actually it doesn't.

What it means is even more burned villages. It also means the Heer takes Moscow by the end of August 1941 and reaches Baku by May of 1942.

IOTL the Soviet partisan movement worked because there was a functional government in Moscow that provided support and a potent eventually over-powering Red Army in the field that occupied most of the Wehrmacht's efforts. In this scenario the entire war becomes a bug hunt, one conducted by an Army that INTENDED to obliterate the Slavic "race". This isn't the Iraqi insurgents or even the VC against the U.S. This is a bunch of guys with rifle against an army that LITERALLY would take every man, woman, and child in a village and execute them for shits and giggles (and would do it hands-on, not from 25,000 feet, but right in front of them where they could hear the babies crying).

Insurgencies don't work against those tactics. One reason the Soviet partisans were as successful as they were is that the population was MORE frightened of the NKVD than of the Nazis. In this scenario, the Soviets are going to get crushed like an empty beer can and the civilian population will rapidly figure out that: 1. The NKVD is not coming back (since its members are in mass graves) and 2. The best chance of living until the end of the week is to volunteer every scrap of information you have about the local Partisans, especially since the Germans just took everyone in the next village into the town hall, locked the doors and burned the place down around them.
 
The germans would still have the same blunders as OTL, and the soviet will have a significant bigger guerrila force behind the lines if everyone have his own rifle at home, this means more supply problems for the wehrmacht
German blunders would be pretty much irrelevant since modern war is all about firepower, logistics and mobility. Unwashed hordes of peasantry marching over the steppe clutching their bolt-actions don't have much of those, and would end up being slaughtered like sheep. You can make all the mistakes you want if there is no effective enemy force to punish them.
 
Though a significant amount of Soviet citizens were very patriotic, once you do a repeat of Lidice a dozen times (where they rerouted a stream through the village and covered everything in topsoil so there'd be no trace of its existence), the vast number of people are going to refuse to aid any insurgency if it costs the lives of them and their families for no tangible gain.

The idea of Eastern Europe becoming the Reich's Vietnam or Iraq is wishful thinking at best that has little basis in the actual facts on the ground. When one side has nothing but rifles, farm tools and Molotov cocktails and the other has tanks, aircraft, and well armed troops who lack morals there's only one way the fight is going to turn out.
 
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Deleted member 97083

Why would they adopt this strategy? The Soviets had equivalent or better tech, better tanks, better artillery, than the Germans in many instances.
 
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