This is not true. After November 1942, it was all Red Army.

In the estimation of David Glantz, byy this point the average Red Army tanker and infantryman was equal to their German counterpart. The elite Soviet units a match for any western unit.

Until the last stages of the war, the USSR did not achieve a 3:1 advantage in manpower. It hovered around 2:1 and they weee outnumbered at outset of Barbarossa.

The Soviets used operational skill to build local superiority. The converse of this claim is true, the Wehrmacht was good at killing Soviets but very bad at winning battles.

There is a range of losses for the Soviet military. Depending how you count POW deaths, an area where the official Russian study by Krivosheev falls short, they lost about 8.8 million irrecoverable military losses.

Most scholars place that number at more like 12 million dead. Germany suffered 4 million dead. But a good 30% of those Soviet miiitsdh deaths were during the first 6 months of the war when the German’s had a numeric advantage and the Red Army was reorganizing. In particular, they devised a clumsy and nearly worthless Tank Corps organization that frittered away their advantage in tanks. They lost a series of the largest encirclement battles in history.

Germany attacked at the exact right time as the Red Army had yet to consolidate their own conquests, were revising their force structure, obtaining better weapons and the Germans had beaten France. They had the wealth and truck pool of western Europe to prop up their logistics.

It was a bumpy road to Berlin but the Soviets won on their own, although the bombing campaign, North Africa, Italy, Western Front and Lend Lease did help. Some Point of View historians detract from the West’s contributions. While not as large as the USSR’s they were significant. Daylight bombing drew off fighters. 100,000 Germans were bagged in Tunisia alone. Elite Waffen SS units were raced from Kursk to Italy in July 1943z

The interesting question is why is this lowly opinion of the Red Army is so widely held? Bagration, the counteroffensive in the Ukraine after Kursk that nearly pinned Army Group south against the Carpathians, Sandomierz, Vistula-Oder, Invasion of Romania, there are so many staggeringly large and devastating theater scale operations that dwarf anything in the West, even Cobra.

I argue it’s the historiograph. Ar least in the Us, there was little access to any sources that relied on Soviet sources until the end of the Cold War.

These didn’t appear until the middle of 1990s. As an Xllennial, I had access to Seaton’s Russo-German War and Ericcson’s 2 volume work if I wanted to read a relatively dispassionate account with few Russian sources.

And these books are well-nigh underreadable for anyone who isn’t a specialist. They lack maps and the sheer scale of the battles is hard to comprehend. Compared to say Antietam, where linear tactics are underestimated and the rate of fire overestimated, but military buffs can generally envision it well enough. A stone bridge. A march. A frontage of a couple miles. A logistics train that stretches a couple dozen miles.

Other than those dry general history tomes by Seaton and Ericcson, you had the German Generals apology tour and the almost pulp Western stylings of Mellenthin.

Those were easy to read books. And it was in the author’s best interest to claim it was all super tanks and human wave attacks beating a Wehrmacht handicapped by a madman idiot in Hitler.

Only now are teachers and professors brought up in this outmoded view of the Eastern Front being phased out. I was certainly taught by believers of this human wave nonsense. And it clearly lives on.

The Red Army did lose a ton men. They were pushed to the brink by Barbarossa, Typhoon and Fall Blau. But from that point forward they were outfought and out thought by the Red Army at every turn.

On defense, they exacted a gruesome toll as the Red Army, which lost basically its entire order of battle in 1941, had to learn lessons the hard way and had a lot of churn. A LOT of churn.

But even at the end of the war, with their peak strength lower due to the scale of final battles and ramping up their Eastern front, their line infantry no worse than their western equivalents.

And before the end game and without the 3:1 attackers edge, they advanced hundreds of miles and blew apart the Wehrmacht’s ability to fight.

An economy ravaged by German conquest, produced an impressive array of aircraft, tanks, artillery, small arms, and mines. Lend lease helped and the T34 is overrated vis a vis the Sherman thanks to a similarly bizarre and false “Ronson lighter” narrative surrounding that tank which dates to the strange prominence of one Belton Cooper.

There were missteps. Mars was to be the centerpiece and Stalingrad the secondary attack if you look at the forces deployed. Hitler certainly erred with his turd hunt across the Eastern Ukraine and Caucuses when Rzhev and Moscow were much more decisive goals.

Bur Germany totally underestimated the military power of the USSR. The results speak for themselves, with Prussia erased, the capital Berlin flattened, Hitler dead and their military dismantled forcibly. They didn’t depart for 45 years.

/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov Goes into discussion where the Russians used these sorts of tactics here. While I don't have the qualifications to go into this, even this should be taken as a slice in context - when the Soviets used them. I have a hard time believing these limited tactics made up for Stalin continuing his purges several months into the invasion, and making disastrous military decisions over the heads of people who knew better (a matter Gerhard Weinberg has spoken and written about).