[17th Miss Regt]

You have also touched on an important point here - producibility. The vehicles were fairly simple as tanks go and were suitable for mass production lines. Once the production lines were set up in the Urals area the production could proceed very quickly. Another issue was the human factor. The Soviets had to deal with a population that was not very mechanically oriented. Giving them a Panther or Tiger was a formula for failure. Tactical finesse? It took several years for them to develop it on a large scale (result of the purges). So they had fairly simple people (but lots of them) and fairly simple tanks (but lots of them) and fairly simple tactics for the first couple of years. It worked.

[dfwgator]

It’s like the German General said in the early days of Barbarossa as the Germans were quickly advancing. The Germans were the elephant and the Russians were ants, the elephant would kill millions of ants, but eventually the sheer number of ants would overcome the elephant and eat him down to the bone.

[LS]

And consider this: in 1939, the US had one car for every 4.5 people. The Germans, one for every 37. I don't know what the stat was in the USSR, but I'm guessing it was one for every 10,000. In wartime, we immediately could ask recruits, "Who here can drive?" A hundred hands would go up. "Who can drive a tractor?" 50 would stay up.

But Germany had to build a driving school to TRAIN 165,000 drivers. Now, that doesn't take a terrifically long time, but it's one more impediment to getting people into the right places in combat, quickly.