Talk:East Prussian Offensive

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[edit] Operation to Offensive

Please see Talk: Prague Offensive#Prague Offensive Operation --Philip Baird Shearer 02:34, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wrong operation, wrong war

It seems to me that the "first" east Prussian" operation refers tot eh First World War. The Red Army has no Goldup-Gumbinen operation, however there is a Gumbinen-Gol'dup operation from August 1914. (Russian: Гумбинненско-Гольдапская операция в августе 1914 г.). So far as I know there was only the one East Prussian operation, and it was extensively treated in the last of Art of War symposiums at the US Army War College in 1986, including by a German participant. It seems like original, and somewhat lacking research to me.--mrg3105mrg3105 23:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I did wonder why the original article stated this - there was no source given, so I let it stand until it could be confirmed. As you say, Soviet forces did penetrate into East Prussia late in 1944 as part of the left flank of the Memel Operation (there is an article on the Battle of Memel, but it is very brief). I think your revision makes things fairly clear.Esdrasbarnevelt (talk) 12:25, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] I'd like to move this

...to the East Prussian Strategic Offensive Operation to differentiate it in scope with its constituent operational parts--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 09:44, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Historians such as Beevor and Glantz use the "East Prussian Offensive" designation, so why should we move it to such a more complicated one? --Eurocopter (talk) 12:05, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Its a matter of consistency. Firstly, the "strategic" was omitted by Glantz and Beevor. Secondly, if you look at the list of operations you will see that its a way to distinguish operational offensives (that would be confusing to use Operational Operations in English) from their strategic 'umbrella' operational contexts. In fact in other works Glantz has tried to translate the intent of the strategic/operational by using Front and Army in place of strategic/operational. The only problem with this is that they were usually multi-Front and involved several Armies, but in English use of Frontal is problematic, and there is no word for multi-Army (Armal!). There is another problem in that some operations were strategic, but not Front in scope, but rather stand-alone operations. For example the two Mga offensives were independent in terms of planning from the larger strategic operations.--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 02:33, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

If most historians intentionally omitted "strategic", why should we add it here? --Eurocopter (talk) 12:51, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

What do you mean by "most"? And please don't get into the Google ratings. The official Soviet Army history of the war calls it that, and they should know. If "most" of the historians did not take note of this, then they are mostly bad historians. Using original sources is not same as original research --mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 13:21, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

In the Iasi-Chisinau discussions most of your arguments were based on Google books, so why shouldn't I do the same thing? Do you have reliable sources supporting your statement? --Eurocopter (talk) 14:01, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Actually no, you were the one to first use GoogleBooks. I asked people to disregard Google books although I did use some of the sources there for expertise analysis in addition to my own library. My sources are from the Central Military Museum of the Russian Federation where the archives are kept. These have been used during Soviet Union and since in most authoritative works on the subject, though in English are only found in Erickson and Glantz because they had access to the archives--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 14:15, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

What is your problem? That it was not a strategically important operation, or that it was not a military operation?--mrg3105 (comms) ♠♥♦♣ 14:17, 29 March 2008 (UTC)