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Do you have a pen and notebook?
Well Nikita, let's see... For starters, I can point you towards, Zhukov's Greatest Defeat - The Red Army's Epic Disaster in Operation Mars, 1942 a 403-page book by David Glantz whose scholarship is highly esteemed and beyond reproach. (Soviet correspondence citations fully annotated.) The book repeatedly refers to finessed (misleading) Soviet intelligence, planning, operations, logistics, casualty, movement and battle reports by Soviet commanders, from top to bottom, as a major problem and cause for defeat. In fact, the very existence of Operation Mars as a major Soviet disaster that ran concurrent with Operation Uranus (Stalingrad) was finessed out of the history books by Soviet commanders and propaganda until Glantz dug it back out.
Then there is, The Stalingrad Cauldron a 512-page book by Frank Ellis. (Soviet correspondence citations fully annotated.) In Chapter 5 of the book, Ellis thoroughly examines the Konings-Zaitsev sniper duel and calls it for what it is: a fraud created by Soviet propaganda. Major Konings, (regardless of how you spell his name) never existed, Zaitsev was a propaganda instrument from the very beginning, his kills, as with all of the other Soviet snipers, were "finessed" in the official reports for propaganda. Then in Chapter 6, we have a very detailed examination of how Soviet commanders "finessed" over 70,000 Hilfswillige out of existence. Over 70,000 Soviet soldiers and citizens were voluntarily fighting for the Germans at the end in Stalingrad. The Germans had every last one of them documented in official records the day before their surrender, and the day after, the Soviets didn't account for a single one of them. To this day, those people remain missing.
But those are just the two (2) books that I've read this week. Do you really want to continue along these lines? I have maybe 500 other examples. Again: the fundamental requirement for Soviet commanders to finesse everything (lie) at every stage of reporting is so obvious and prevalent in the literature that it's not even a matter of debate. It's a fact.
Bronc
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