Daily Inspiration Quote by Gerd von Rundstedt

A mangled conditional - "If was" - does more than betray age or translation; it exposes the way senior commanders launder responsibility through logistics. Rundstedt, a Prussian old-hand turned Nazi Germany's field marshal, is pointing at Russia's missing railways as the hidden saboteur of German momentum. The phrasing matters: "increased by a lack" frames failure as an incremental misfortune, not a strategic miscalculation. It is the voice of a professional soldier trying to make catastrophe sound like friction.

The intent is narrowly practical. Railways in the East were the bloodstream of any campaign, and the Wehrmacht's advance in 1941-42 ran ahead of its supply lines. Different track gauges, destroyed lines, partisan sabotage, mud, snow, and overstretched rolling stock turned speed into starvation. "Bringing up supplies" is a plain, almost tender euphemism for the brutal arithmetic of fuel, ammunition, food, winter clothing, and replacements. When that arithmetic fails, everything else becomes theater.

The subtext is exculpatory. By blaming infrastructure, Rundstedt shifts attention away from the larger political-ideological insanity of invading the Soviet Union, the hubris baked into Blitzkrieg-at-scale, and the regime's criminal priorities. "Our advancing troops" romanticizes motion, implying the offensive was coherent and inevitable until the landscape intervened. It's a classic commander's alibi: the plan was sound; reality was defective.

Context sharpens the irony. Russia didn't "lack" railways so much as refuse to be conquered on German timetables. The quote reads like an epitaph for an army that discovered too late that distance is a weapon, and that modern war is won by trains as much as by tanks.