The Opel Kapitan is a German passenger car that was first presented to the public in 1939 at the Geneva Motor Show. Its serial production was carried out in 1939-1940 and 1948-1970, and in its course as many as eight of its generations.
The Opel Kapitan was developed and put into production as the successor to the Super Six model. Compared to its predecessor, it differed significantly in design, which became more streamlined and improved the car's aerodynamics. The suspension and steering were also slightly improved. However, the gearbox and engine were the same in both models. Interestingly, the outbreak of World War II did not stop the serial production of the first generation of the car, which lasted until the fall of 1940 and ended with the production of about 25,000 copies of this car. During World War II, many copies of the Kapitan model were confiscated by the German armed forces and served as staff and service cars on virtually all fronts. After the war, production was resumed in 1948 (2nd generation), and the produced model was very similar to the previous version. A radical change in technical solutions and design came only with the fourth generation of Opel Kapitan, which was produced in the period 1954-1957.
The Soviet officer corps began to form in the course of the civil war in Russia that broke out after the October Revolution of 1917. After its definitive end at the turn of 1922/1923 (although the main activities came to an end already in 1919), as well as after the defeat in the war with Poland (the Peace of Riga - 1921), conclusions were slowly drawn from these armed conflicts, which influenced in the shape of the Soviet officer corps and its theoretical and military views. This process accelerated at the turn of the 20s and 30s of the twentieth century, when in the USSR appeared the theory of the so-called deep operation, and their works were published by Tukhachevsky or less known, but very important for the development of Soviet military thought, Triandafilov and Isserson. However, in the mid-1930s, the Soviet officer corps was decimated in the course of the Stalinist purges, which was bad for his professionalism, and perhaps even more for the independent thinking of individual officers. This fact was not changed by the introduction of the professional officer corps in 1935. As a result of these purges, high command positions were given to officers with insufficient preparation, considerable lack of theoretical knowledge, but completely loyal to the apparatus of the communist state. Moreover, at the turn of the 1930s and 1940s, the Red Army underwent intensive quantitative development and generally suffered from considerable shortages in the officer corps. The shortcomings in this regard were already underlined by the Winter War with Finland (1939-1940), and they were fully heard in the first period of the war with Germany, especially in the period 1941-1942. Even the first great victory in this war (the counteroffensive from Moscow in 1941) was achieved more thanks to the enemy's exhaustion and weather conditions than thanks to Zhukov's commanding talents. With time, however, at the cost of a huge tribute of blood, the Soviet officer corps was professionalized and was able to carry out really large-scale land operations more and more skilfully. One example is Operation Bagration in 1944. Also such generals and marshals as Rokossovsky, Konev and Batov turned out to be equal opponents for the German commanders. Moreover - especially the former can be counted as one of the best commanders of the Second World War.