Following the defeat of the Germans at the hands of the Russians, though, the Soviet army planned its counterattack but the same enormous land mass that adversely affected Hitler's ability to successfully prosecute a long war against Soviet Russia also affected the Russians' efforts to invade Germany because of the enormous land mass involved in the process. As Beevor emphasizes, "Even as the German army was clearly on the run, the Soviets feared it. German soldiers remained formidable to the end, and as the Ardennes offensive had shown, they were quite capable of pulling surprises" (114).
Indeed, there was legitimate cause for concern on the part of the Russians because the entire route from Soviet Russia to Berlin was still wild with German troops and these pockets of desperate men could still deal the Red Army some serious setbacks. As a result, Stalin ordered his military leaders to overcome the distance problem involved by approaching the problem in typical Russian fashion: by throwing men at it. As Beevor points out, "Much better, if Stalin did not want to risk a similar humiliation, to concentrate on reducing the pockets one by one. And so into early April the Red Army was kept busy with a kind of grinding, inch-by-inch frontal attack on fortified lines -- an attack that no Western general, mindful of the need to keep casualties down, could possibly have ordered" (Beevor 116). Even with this step-by-step approach, though, the enormity of the distances involved crated supply line problems for the Red Army that adversely affected the Soviet's ability to continue their march completely into Berlin in one fell swoop. By January 27, 1945, Beevor reports that, "The Red Army had outrun its supply lines and needed to refit its tanks, [but] it stood at the River Oder, at most fifty miles from Berlin" (115).
Conclusion
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