“For all their vaunted prowess, the only reason the Soviets beat the Nazis was that Hitler was an ass, fighting on two fronts and attempting to be his own General, and the fact that they simply threw bodies and materiel into the fray, heedless of cost or human life.”
I’d say that they won ALSO due to the ingeniousness and industriousness of their people when their backs were up against the wall, producing “good enough” weaponry in mass quantities under hellish conditions. Stalin supposedly said words to the effect that quantity has a quality of its own. In the meantime, the Germans kept making increasingly complex and sophisticated weaponry, at great expense with little effect. There’s a lesson to be learned in there somewhere...
If I know my history, that would probably be true of the U.S. as well. The Germans had fantastic equipment, based not only on superior German engineering and German standards of quality, but we had worse equipment in quantities such that if something broke or was destroyed it could immediately be replaced. There's a lesson in that for people fighting wars.
Yes, the Russian were tenacious fighters, and produced good rugged weapons systems. Of course, take away all the lend-lease equipment and food, and a lot of that manufacturing capacity goes towards making the millions of transport vehicles that came from Detroit and food that came from America’s heartland. How many close run fights are lost instead of won, because the Russians don’t have US or British armor to fill the gaps, or a fleet of Edsel and Ford trucks to move reinforcements and supplies, and the troops are starving, because they don’t have US rations in their bellies?
This whole revisionist history that paints a picture of the Russians defeating the Germans in the east all on their own is ridiculous.