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It doesn't take twice as long to load separate loading ammunition. Why is this obvious falsehood still being repeated? Most of the loading process is the same, there is simply one additional and quite fast step. The powder bag is quite light.

On leveling the barrel, we did it on the M109 as well, but still shot 4 a minute. It is to facilitate ramming and has nothing to do with the shell physically falling out of the breech. On the supposed difficulty of heavy 122mm shells, they are much lighter than the 98 lbs of the 155mm shell we routinely fired 4 times a minute.

It is still a crock. The smaller caliber guns on the German heavies do deserve a higher ROF than the bigger ones on the Russian heavies, but the difference is on the order of 1.5 times, not 3 times. As for Russian crews supposedly jumping out all the time and it supposedly making sense, it is another crock. If your life depends on KOing the other tank, you stay and fire.

As for the comment that 2000 tanks a month is half the output of German industry, it was purely a matter of ramp. The German peak rate of AFV production was the same as that achieved by the USSR - it just hit that rate until 1944, and wasn't at that peak as long, in consequence. Russian AFV production is a rectangle to the German's triangle, but the height of both is the same. Russia entered the war with industrial potential equal to but not greater than Germany's. It achieved higher output in narrow but critical armaments by faster mobilization and greater focus on those categories, not by any higher overall industrial potential, which it did not have.

Put all of them together and you get the same old German commander's post war myth about how they beat the Russians easily and endlessly except they were always outnumbered 10 to 20 to 1. Which was a lie then and still is. And no, it isn't any more interesting or accurate when you all repeat it the forty eight millionth time...

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JasonC what is your basis for considering that Russian and German industrial potential were equal when the conflict in the east began? How far did the German conquests of 1938 onwards help to overcome the labour, monetary and inflationary problems identified by the German Economics Minister Schacht?

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I was CO of an M-109A1 battery immendiately after the conversion from the M-109's. As I recall the biggest change in the interior between the two models was the projo tray and rammer.

In the M-109, The projo tray was a hinged afair that swung down from the back of the turret and lined up with the breech at a preset loading elevation. The rammer was attached to the tray.

On the M-109A1, the tray and rammer were redesigned and attached to the gun, allowing the gun to be loaded at varying elevations. It also removed a massive bit of clutter from the fighting compartment. From what I can tell from various pics I have seen, the tray and rammer have been redesigned a couple of times since, but the location on the gun has stayed fairly constant.

Semper Fi,

Dave

http://armorama.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=SquawkBox&file=index&req=viewtopic&topic_id=151864&page=1

So perhaps not all M109 experience is equal. And several re-designs!

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... The German peak rate of AFV production was the same as that achieved by the USSR

Did you have some particular day, week, month or year in mind? My recollections was that peak Soviet AFV production was at least a third as much again (as German) - if not more, and a trivial check (Wikipedia - so certainly not infallible) seemed to support that impression.

I'm sure you have your good sources, but just stating that something is crock doesn't make it so.

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Ziploc, I don't think it was as much a turning point as a point after which all doors were finally closed. The initial push had gone beyond expectation, but the Red Army didn't die as the Germans had expected. The hope had been that the Red Army would suffer such catastrophic organisational failure that it would never be able to fight again. This didn't happen. Instead new elements were raised, which turned out to be pretty hard fighters for low quality troops and materiel. They even tried to push the Wehrmacht back in the winter of 41-42. This was unexpected. Given the fact that the Red Army was recreating itself leaner and meaner, and it was growing quicker than the Germans were killing it, the better generals in the German general staff agreed that if the Soviet war economy could not be collapsed before winter, the Wehrmacht would be at the Soviets' mercy. The Germans were losing troops, especially trained ones, faster than they could be replenished. They were burning through their strategic materials too fast to sustain the war for too long. And with the Nazi doctrine of war as a way of life, gearing the economy for war was a political impossibility.

JasonC, the IS2 did not have a rammer. It was not a self propelled artillery piece. All sources contradict you. Furthermore:

If your life depends on KOing the other tank, you stay and fire.
The life of a crewmember depended very much on not being inside the tank when it brewed up. Once you've been hit one time, the enemy can repeat that. You have to hope your next shot will make you safe again, but before that's ready you might have to wait a long time. You're inside a priority target. Other machines are along with you. They can and will take care of the threat. Whether or not you bail. Your life does not depend on killing the threat. It depends on not dying.

By the way, let's play spot the rectangle!

5283781827_2c7ff4e257_z_d.jpg

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From Zaloga's book on the IS tanks:

Page 41: "The A19 122mm gun had been specially modified [Late 1944:rune] for use on the IS2 tank with a semi-automatic drop breech. This variant of the gun, designated D-25T increased the rate of fire from about 2 rounds per minute to 3-4 rounds per minute"

Also noted on page 39 a problem with the Egyptian IS2s and the "low rate of fire and rudimentary fire control system".

It seems the first version of the breech were a screw type breech which may of contributed to the low rate of fire.

I will tend to believe Zaloga on this. Will see what the other book has to say on it, but to me it is case closed.

All this is available for your own viewing at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/38832517/Osprey-New-Vanguard-007-Is-2-Heavy-Tank-1944-73-Osprey-Nv-07

Rune

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ArgusEye - So you consider the war in the East was predominantly determined by a war of material attrition? Was this inevitable right from the commencement of Barbarossa or was there a period of German ascendancy which could have generated victory?

"And with the Nazi doctrine of war as a way of life, gearing the economy for war was a political impossibility." This statement strikes me as paradoxical in that if war is a way of life could not all elements of life, political and economic, have been applied to it?

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ArgusEye - So you consider the war in the East was predominantly determined by a war of material attrition? Was this inevitable right from the commencement of Barbarossa or was there a period of German ascendancy which could have generated victory?

If I might elbow my way into this discussion, your question makes the issue sound as if the answer has to be either all black or all white. It's a bit more complicated and fuzzy than that, but briefly my own humble opinion is that there were ways that Germany might have won that war, but they would require "perfect play". I.e., they never, never, never made any mistakes and they always got the best possible die rolls. Everything, or nearly everything, would have to break their way. Hitler was a gambler who was willing to take big risks, but even he admitted that in attacking the USSR he had miscalculated the odds.

Michael

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I agree with Michael. The only possibility for Germany to win would be a perfect execution of a better plan than they had.

The general staff was counting on the wrong things when planning Barbarossa. They planned an operation which was to mimic the early successes against the European powers. They wanted to encircle, demoralize, and disorganise their enemy. Which initially worked great, but the Soviets did one important thing different from what the Germans expected:

The Germans expected that the Soviets would commit all reserves to liberate their encircled forces, thus being able to wage a Blitzkrieg and force the Soviets to commit to an Entscheidungsschlacht. Instead the Soviets hung out their encircled front troops to dry, and fought a delaying action all the way to the first winter lines. This parried the original German plan, which was to overwhelm the enemy, pierce through his defenses and grab the strategic targets behind his army.

The Germans had greatly underestimated the tank forces of the Soviets, resulting in much less mobile advantage than they'd hoped. The original three pronged attack was meant to develop any prong only when and if it could break through. As it was, all three only plodded through dogged resistance, and none of the three was able to take its objective.

A war of attrition was unwinnable by the Germans. They didn't have the economy or the manpower for it. It was clear from the beginning that only a war of maneuver was winnable. And even then we're in what-if country.

If the Germans had dropped the Northern prong early on, and concentrated on either Moscow or Stalingrad, they might have achieved at least one of these objectives, and weakened the Soviet economy enough to make an attrition war unwinnable for the Soviets as well.

If the Germans had mobilised their economy to a war footing earlier than Barbarossa, they might have staved off the stalemate a few more months and have had a chance to get a little further.

If the Germans had liberated Ukraine and installed a puppet government instead of treating the populace as sub-human along Nazi lines, they might have had a well-positioned ally with a lot of manpower.

If the political elite (especially the GröFaZ) had not interfered with Räder's plans with the Kriegsmarine, Britain might have been starved into peace, freeing up a lot of troops in the West, which might have helped the East front efforts. And ended the strategic bombing.

If German troop morale had not been undermined by glaringly stupid Führer-commands, opportunities on lower operational levels would have been better exploited, gaining some offensive advantage.

But if not, the Soviets would grind down the Wehrmacht until nothing was left. Which is what happened.

As illustration, an anecdote:

One of my older colleagues used to work for an Italian producer of combat helicopters. During the Yeltsin era, the Mil helicopter factory courted them to see if there could be cooperation. A knowledge exchange junket was organised.

There had been speculation among the Italian engineers regarding the rotor suspension. The Soviets built those really small, as examples from Afghanistan wreckage showed. There were some wild theories about how the Russians had achieved sufficient dependability from the unit, because the Italians used units five times bigger.

The Russian engineer answered this question by shrugging and stating: 'We have expendable comrades.'

The Soviet way of war makes a lot more sense when viewed with this in mind. As long as you keep enough of your army intact to keep going, losses don't matter too much.

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I think the German tactical superiority allowed them to live on borrowed time, but as with any line of credit it only deferred and worsened the pain of the inevitable payback. An interesting discussion might be what would have happened if the Germans had persued a strategy of containment, toward the Soviets and not aggressive conquest. How long could they have held on to Europe and what would the allied strategy have been?

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I agree with Michael. The only possibility for Germany to win would be a perfect execution of a better plan than they had.

I'm glad for that :) But I am not entirely convinced that I agree with all your points yet.

If the Germans had dropped the Northern prong early on, and concentrated on either Moscow or Stalingrad, they might have achieved at least one of these objectives, and weakened the Soviet economy enough to make an attrition war unwinnable for the Soviets as well.

Conventional wisdom. But consider this: The problem with this scenario is that both targets, and especially Stalingrad, lie beyond the range that the Wehrmacht can reliably provide logistical support in a single campaign season. They simply were not able to move their regauaged railheads forward that quickly, nor did they have any alternative means of moving supplies in the necessary quantities those distances.

Placing an emphasis on AGN, on the other hand, would probably mean the early capture of Riga and possibly even Leningrad, along with several other minor Baltic ports. Then if—and admittedly it's a big if—those ports can be quickly brought into operation, supplies can be brought in through them and the logistical lines from Leningrad to Moscow are much shorter than from Warsaw. In the long run, I don't know how practical this strategy would have been either. It's still a long shot and I for one would not want to start a war counting on it.

If the Germans had liberated Ukraine and installed a puppet government instead of treating the populace as sub-human along Nazi lines, they might have had a well-positioned ally with a lot of manpower.

The problem with that is that if you liberate the Ukrainians instead of oppressing them, you have to feed them. You also have to find food for your army and its horses that now cannot live on the food you would have been stealing from the Ukrainians. The Nazis had practical as well as ideological reasons for starving the Ukrainians.

If the political elite (especially the GröFaZ) had not interfered with Räder's plans with the Kriegsmarine, Britain might have been starved into peace, freeing up a lot of troops in the West, which might have helped the East front efforts. And ended the strategic bombing.

I will stick my neck out and say that I don't believe Roosevelt and the US would have permitted that to happen. The US Navy would have entered the war at any point that it looked like the Germans were going to win that battle.

Michael

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The Germans expected that the Soviets would commit all reserves to liberate their encircled forces, thus being able to wage a Blitzkrieg and force the Soviets to commit to an Entscheidungsschlacht. Instead the Soviets hung out their encircled front troops to dry, and fought a delaying action all the way to the first winter lines. This parried the original German plan, which was to overwhelm the enemy, pierce through his defenses and grab the strategic targets behind his army.

I find an interesting parallel here with the 1812 campaign of Napoleon in Russia. I recently read Russia Against Napoleon by Dominic Lieven, in which he describes that it was Czar Nicholas' strategy to deny Napoleon the decisive battle near the border that he sought and instead draw him beyond his supply range and wear him down with brilliant rearguard actions, cavalry raids, and ambushes before launching his own major counter offensive. Although he never meant for Napoleon to get all the way to Moscow, the basic strategy held and worked.

Now there is nothing to suggest that Stalin or his generals had embraced the same strategy...in fact quite the opposite. But it is interesting that they had a recapitulation of that strategy thrust upon them by necessity.

Michael

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I am not entirely convinced that the Germans operated under such a narrow margin of victory on the Eastern Front. Yet rather than considering Napoleon perhaps the First World War can be more instructive in terms of comparative analysis. If the two front war was anathema to German strategic planning then during the First World War they coped with it more effectively than anticipated. Indeed, they managed to ultimately destabilise the Russian Empire and force it to conclude a separate peace. This in spite of their pre-war planning and expectations unravelling during the initial period of conflict.

As such can we consider the Eastern Front during the Second World War, with such a massive range of variables to consider, as lost by the Germans due to their failue to conduct the perfect war?

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I think Michael has highlighted the central reason for Germany's failure, a logistical system that was totally unsuited to tackling the vastness and climactic extremes of Russia. The challenge that mechanised warfare posed to LOS, with its endless requirements for POL and munitions (especially with the multitude of weapon systems) was mainly absent during WW1. The Red Army offered a great many more challenges than Imperial Russia, who struggled with poor senior leadership, a weak officer cadre and poorly motivated troops who were being aggressively courted by revolutionaries.

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Yet rather than considering Napoleon perhaps the First World War can be more instructive in terms of comparative analysis.

I wouldn't push either comparison very far. I was only pointing out that history repeated itself somewhat in that Stalin had pressed upon him a strategy that Nicholas had embraced voluntarily.

I think you underestimate the differences that had come about in Russia in the years between the first and fourth decades of the century. Two very important ones were the vastly increased industrialization of the USSR, something that the Germans had underestimated by a huge margin. This was one thing that allowed the Soviets to continue to replace losses and stay in the game long after Hitler and company thought they had won the war. The other was that Stalin had firmer political control over the country than the Tsar did. At a couple of stages, this proved critical, and it was another thing that the Germans had miscalculated.

A third difference, although it didn't really begin to tell until the middle of 1943 was that in the second war the Allies were able to maintain aid to the USSR. In the first war, Russia was doomed by the failure of the Dardanelles offensive. That meant that Russia was unable to to ship out Ukrainian wheat for foreign exchange with which to buy military supplies abroad. Coupled with higher level command problems, that meant that not only was Russia unable to force defeat on the Central Powers, they were unable to even hang on to the end.

Michael

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The problem with the "Germans should have gone north, that would have been better for their supply" argument is that it means the Germans would not have gone south. This in turn means that the Soviets would have had plenty of time to evacuate Ukraine, which was the single largest industrial concentration in the Soviet Union. As it was, the Soviets got out the super-critical things, like the Kharkov tank plant.

But partly because of the speed of the German advance, but mostly because there just wasn't the rail capacity, the Germans managed in Ukraine to overrun a good deal of war-critical industry, particularly munitions and metals manufacturing. To a lesser extent coal, ore extraction, and chemicals; you obviously can't move the underground fields, but much of the hard-to-replace extraction equipment can be moved.

The Soviets were no slouches at railroading, but rolling stock is rolling stock, and there was a limit to what they could pull out. Hitler may not have thought the RR bit through, but he was very aware of Ukraine's industrial potential, and his decision had a direct and extremely negative impact on Red Army operations: Soviet shell quality issues and shell shortages of the early years of the war are a direct result of Hitler's success in overrunning Ukraine.

Point is, you do the woulda shoulda on Barbarossa, it's easy enough to say "this didn't work out for the Germans, therefore they shouldn't have done it." But it's harder to say that some alternate decision would have definately produced a substantially better result.

The Soviets and interstingly the Russian and other former Soviet historicans after them are pretty much unanimous that, as effective as the Wehrmacht was, it was never an unbeatable force and as long as Soviet morale held it was only a matter of time before Soviet resources and military skill, I repeat, including military skill, asserted itself. There is nothing, anywhere, in the Soviet and post-Soviet historiography that considers even the possibility that the Germans might have won. We can take that with a grain of salt if we choose, but we must also admit that the war took place in their country. They might well know somethng about what happened.

According to the standard narrative, the Red Army was dispersed and poorly commanded at the beginning of the war, this because of officer corps purges, rapid Red Army growth, and German strategic surprise. Much of the German success up through about October 1941 is credited particularly to the suprise: once the Germans made the campaign fluid, the Soviets were repeatedly unable to stabilize the combat, were incapable of mobile warfare that a fluid campaign demanded, and that produced repeated Soviet disasters.

German Army combat experience - some two years for much of the entire force and especially almost all of the NCOS and mid-level officers, against none for the Soviet Army top to bottom, is also considered a crucial factor in the success of Barbarossa. According to the Russian-language histories, it was like pitting a professional football team with years of experience in the top league, against an just-founded amateur team whose coach staff had repeatedly been fire in months before the big game.

The histories however are pretty much of one voice that round about November 1941 the situation had stabilized somewhat, primarily because of Red Army soldiers fighting suicidal actions at horrible exchange rates, because there really was no other way to slow the Germans down. That combined with extending German supply lines and worsening weather reduced the pace of the German offensives, and that in turn gave an opportunity for a counter-offensive.

Much is made of that first winter offensive in Russian-language histories. They point out that this was practically the first time in the war any one had fought the blitzkrieg to a standstill, and then come back punching. They further point out that the Red Army achieved at least operational surprise of its own, by assembling troops from as far away as the Pacific provinces, and conentrating supply sufficient to support the attack. These historians argue, even the very sober post-Soviet ones, that this was not the cold, but rather a Stavka that was learning fast, and after repeated attempts to find and opportunity and exploit it only to have poor results, finally got its counterblow technique right.

The western narrative that the Soviets only managed to achieve success with massive poorly-managed attacks is, according to the Soviets themselves, absolutely groundless. They acknowledge the Red Army attempted massive, poorly-organized attacks throughout the Summer and Autumn of 1941, with awful results. They argue that the success of the Moscow winter offensive was sucessful, not because of its mass but because the Stavka finally managed to recognize opportunity, and collect force and commit it, in a situation where the blow would give a result.

The rest of the war is, according those historians, a continuation of the same narrative. As time passed the Red Army became a more and more capable organization - in terms of equipment, training, skill, experience, you name it. The view is that by late 1942 the Red Army already was able to fight the Wehrmacht more or less on par, and by late 1943 the Red Army was the superior force, and it was still improving.

Whether that's the actual case, of course, is a matter of taste.

As for me, I would say the Germans were doomed by their policy of murdering tens of thousands of Soviet civilians - first Jews and Communist party members, but later most any one whom they couldn't use for the German war effort - and then giving the the inhabitants still alive in conquered regions the status of slaves. That might have worked in a country with a medieval level of education, but the Soviets along with all their factories brought education, the Soviet society was literate and understood full well the Germans invading their country were not a superior race to be bowed down to, but fallible men.

There is of course a classic "what if" line about how if the Germans had been nicer when they invaded, then maybe Soviet resistance wouldn't have been so fierce.

The best answer to that is, if the Germans had been nicer and not convinced of their inherent racial superiority to the Russians and every other nationality in the Soviet Union, they never would have invaded the place. Only a deluded nation attacks another nation three times the size and fights them on their own land. And any European nation invading Russia of all places is bordering on certifiably nuts, it's like Montgomery said, "invading Russia is always a bad idea."

But the Nazis and their followers, as we know, were quite deluded indeed - which is what drove them into the Soviet Union, and had them murdering tens of thousands of Soviet civilians the moment they got there. Given the Nazi ideology, the Soviets would have fought all the way to the Pacific.

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Tooze, in his excellent economic disection of the Nazi economy "The Wages of Destruction, also suggests that securing valuable raw materials was a driving force for their decision to embrace the military solution. Economic neccessity coupled with facile beliefs of racial superiority normally ends in disaster, ask the Japanese.

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To expand a bit on what Vark has posted above, Hitler saw correctly that Germany would not be able to compete with—for instance—the United States on the world stage. The latter had vast agricultural areas as well as virtually unlimited strategic resources to draw on. This much was true. Where his thinking went wrong was in a belief that countries and peoples who did not dominate would be dominated and eventually disappear. As he saw it, the Germans only chance for national survival lay in securing a similar base for food and resources, and that lay in Eastern Europe, mainly the Ukraine.

Following that logic, simple survival dictated that whatever means were required to take those lands and incorporate them into the Reich were amply justified. And after all, what he proposed to do was no worse than what Genghis Khan had done 700 years previously in the same part of the world. What he failed to correctly note was the ways in which the world had changed in the intervening seven centuries. The countries known collectively as The West were unlikely to sit by while Germany rampaged all over Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Hitler was a great believer in military solutions to life's problems. After all, his own personal life was going nowhere until he found himself on the Western Front of WW I. Whereas a reasonable man might regard the use of force as a justifiable last resort, Hitler seems to have been eager to reach for it in the first instance. How much of that was due to the peculiarities of his own psyche and how much due to a shrewd calculation that time was not on his side and that he needed to strike while the Western Democracies were still reeling from the aftereffects of the Great Depression, I can't say; probably a blending of both plus some additional factors.

The thing is, that once he embarked on this course—which he did virtually from the day he took office as chancellor—there could be no turning back. In order to stand a chance against the democracies, he would have to build up his armed forces more rapidly. And since Germany's productive capacity did not come close to matching that of the combined democracies, it would be essentially burning the candle at both ends. Without going into a lot of detail (read Tooze), the German economy was going ever deeper and deeper in the hole, one from which it could only be extracted by looting conquered nations. Can anyone make out a vicious circle here?

As the war went on and Germany's victories began to run out of steam; and as the conquered territories proved less productive than might have been hoped, due to German inefficiencies in running them; and as the productive powers of the democracies and their allies got into stride; it became obvious that barring divine intervention—which all in all was unlikely—there was no way that Germany was going to win the war. And in fact there was little hope that it could even achieve a negotiated end to the war.

Hitler was a gambler. He bet on war and lost, lost hugely.

Michael

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I think Michael has highlighted the central reason for Germany's failure, a logistical system that was totally unsuited to tackling the vastness and climactic extremes of Russia. The challenge that mechanised warfare posed to LOS, with its endless requirements for POL and munitions (especially with the multitude of weapon systems) was mainly absent during WW1. The Red Army offered a great many more challenges than Imperial Russia, who struggled with poor senior leadership, a weak officer cadre and poorly motivated troops who were being aggressively courted by revolutionaries.

Which, I think, implies an interesting question.

Does this mean the Red Army somehow were actually better at logistics than the Wehrmacht?

On the face of it, it pretty much defies logic. One would think that things like railroading and spare parts tracking and committing resources to repair and supply would be eminantly German things to do. Likewise one would assume that an army that applied systematic looting and assuming the troops could starve a day or two and nothing bad would happen as a basic pillars of its logistics doctrine - which the Soviets most certainly did - would suck at a big mobile war over a massive space.

Yet somehow we are faced with a counter-intuitive result. The slovenly Red Army, with a force usually something like twice the size of the Germans', with worse-educated and less technically-proficient soldiers, and with an organization by its very nature resistant to commiting resources to things like service/support, somehow managed to succeed logistically in the East front battlespace.

Over the very same terrain, using the very same rail routes, organized by the world's best staff officers, and coming from a waste abhorrent culture, the Germans of all people failed. Wierd, huh?

Consider Romania or the Baltic states. Germany conquered those places, and that was an economic drag, the field armies whined and whined about how these places were terribly primitive, crappy roads, useless population, no worthwhile industry, we can't operate normally in these awful conditions, etc. etc.

Yet when the Red Army comes through, read the reports, every one from marshal down to the tommy gunners paying unexpected visits to farms and villages are of one voice: These are rich countries, great roads, all sorts of useful material here!

The "Russia was too big to invade" is of course a fine argument. But every time we trot it out, heck, I did a couple of posts ago, we need to remember: The distance from Berlin to Moscow, is the same as from Moscow to Berlin.

(An interesting aspect to the local supply discussion is an undercurrent resentment in Soviet histories when it comes to the relative wealth of Central Europe. From what I've read, the Soviet troops seem quite often simply to have been angered when they realized how much better people lived in central Europe. Their reaction often seems to have been "These people are so wealthy, they have houses and electricity, what in the world could they have wanted by invading us?"

The Red Army soldiers rarely, it seems, directed their anger at the Soviet regime like the Cold War would have expected, i.e., the Capitalists live better than us so obviously we should reject Communism. Rather, the Red soldiers seemed to have seen it in pretty national terms. Here I am a Russian or a Ukrainian or a Georgian or a Tartar in Europe for the very first time, of course there is the Soviet propaganda about the superiority of Communist society, but we're not fools, we know we're poorer than in Europe. So now when we actually get to see Europe with our own eyes, it turns out we're not just poorer, we're a whole lot poorer. These Romanians and Hungarians and Germans have brick houses and meat most days the week and flush toilets. And somehow, that wasn't enough. They wanted our poor country too!

I personally suspect more than a little Red Army destruction and damage to civilian Europe, including the massed rape, can be traced back at least in part to this. Sort of an emotional reaction of the conquerer from the poorer land: Well, we'll show them!

But that's another 'nuther thread.)

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Which, I think, implies an interesting question.

Does this mean the Red Army somehow were actually better at logistics than the Wehrmacht?

Perhaps so. For one thing, the USSR, particularly from 1943 on when they would need it the most to support their offensives ever farther from their centers of production, received both locomotives and rolling stock through Lend-Lease (this in addition to their own production) and huge numbers of trucks from the same source. Although the Germans were pretty good at moving things around once they got the railroads regauged, that was only after the first critical year of the war. The Germans never had enough trucks and if they had, they would never have had enough petrol or tires to keep them running.

Returning to the Red Army, it is worth noting that even with their advantages of transport, their offensives usually petered out after about 300 km, the same as everybody else's. They would then pause to bring forward railheads and supply dumps before resuming the offensive. They could afford those pauses as time generally was on their side. That was not the case for the Germans. They had to win the first time out with a campaign season not much more than three months long before the rains set in. They really couldn't afford the pauses to bring supplies forward, but they had to anyway. At each stage they grew weaker while the Soviets could replace losses.

Michael

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Could the shift of air priority from dominated by the Hilterites to a more balanced - and eventually Red dominating - setting impact the efficiency of logistics?

The Hilterites were perceived as invaders. The Reds initially (however shortly in some cases) as liberators. Could this have impacted the effect of guerilla activity on logistics?

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The "Russia was too big to invade" is of course a fine argument. But every time we trot it out, heck, I did a couple of posts ago, we need to remember: The distance from Berlin to Moscow, is the same as from Moscow to Berlin.

BD6

Your logic is irrefutable : )

The point being is the Fronts get larger as you advance into Russia and compact as you travel West. Therefore the supply requirements are diffused one way and concentrated the other. And much assisted by improved communications net going West.

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Ziploc - steel and iron production and GDP of Russia and Germany were comparable, pre war. So were there overall GDPs (about $360 billion 1990 US dollars at international prices).

Neither occupied Europe for the Germans nor lend lease for the Russians made much difference to this - each contributed less than 10% of war production to each side (about 7% for both, actually).

As for peak AFV production, both German and Russia were putting out 1500-1600 medium AFVs per month in 1944. The Russians were just also producing at about the same rate 1943 and only marginally lower in 1942, while the Germans were at only 2/3rds that rate in 43 and only about a fifth of that rate in 1942.

Russia did not defeat Germany by having 10 times its industrial potential because it flat didn't. Russia didn't defeat Germany by having 10 times the manpower either and for the same reason. Russia did outproduce German in tank 2 to 1 or better, but achieve that by more rapid economic mobilization and by concentrating a greater portion of its total economic output on narrow categories of armaments than German ever acheived, and way more than it achieved before very late in the war. This was largely an "own goal" on the German's part, due to overconfidence and the strategic shoestring gambling it continually engaged in - while Russian correctly forecast a long war of attrition would decide the issue, from the outset.

As for ramm*ers*, I never said an IS anything - nor an SU-152 for that matter - had one. (Straw man, putting words in my mouth, typical fallacy of the sort I am oh so used to here). The M109 does have a hydraulic ram and I mentioned it as an extra step. Shells for separate loading ammunition need to be fully seated in the breech - far enough forward to allow the placement of the separate powder bag behind the shell - and whether a hydraulic ram is used to achieve it or not, this is *ramming*, and a necessary part of the separate loading process. The same needs to be done for a non-SP field piece, and I mentioned it as an extra (seperable) task for a larger crew, in that case. Naturally inside a tank there isn't room for an extra person to help with this, etc.

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