What the book makes perhaps clearer is the impact of the purges and the executions of high ranking officers during Barbarossa. The flow of informations up ranks to Stavka seemed to work worse the worse the massage was. It seems that a relative strict hierachic system was put in place which meant that an urgent alarm had often to be checked and re-checked practically at every level with many along the command ladder understandably clearly not being happy to report bad news. Given a false one could result in being at best accused for spreading panic if not something worse.
If one takes into account the 'blitz'* speed of some German armored thrusts in the more then usual chaos and friction of war this slow and erratic process with little mutal trust resulted in one particular instance described in the book, in which the Stavka was unaware of a German advance to the depth of a 100-120 km...
In simplistic terms in some cases thousends of lives were thrown away because it was far safer to not achieve success by following strict (and outdated) orders from far away instead of risking success and one's life by fitting them to the specific (often completely changed) circumstances. Auftragstaktik it wasn't.
P.S: It should have been 600,000 dead among the Finns, Romanians and Hungarians fighting against the Soviets during WWII. What surprised me was the quite strong reversed relationship of the Italians, Romanians and Hungarians compared to German when it came to KIA and MIA and deaths in Soviet hands. Of course MIA is a 'grey field' between KIA and deaths as POW and in the Italian case most were captured early in the war during that Winter offensive in an often sorry state by exhausted, often badly supplied troops sometimes unwilling to 'burden themselves'. Both sides are known to have shot, more often then not, prisoners unable to walk. All that greatly reduced the chances of many an Italian Alpini mentioned in 'Il sergente nella neve' to come home alive.
P.P.S: It is of course important to keep in mind that a far larger part of the German (and German occupied) war ressources, especially capital and 'high-tech', was directed towards the Western allies then the manpower employed in the East might suggest. Wages of Destruction is an essential read.
*I know, I know...
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