Der Alte Fritz

Another good source is at Fold3 which has the following Foreign Military Studies papers: P-041R-T and T-8 Problems of Supply in Far Reaching Operations and T-7 Comments of Russian railways and roads. I did send these over to Sturmpanzer.com but I do not think he has got round to posting them on his site yet.

No idea but search the free font sites for something called "Crayons" or similar and you will find something close.

So I ended up with the Germans/Soviets ok.........6.......162 killed.....26......24 wounded.23.....26 tank........0........1 points....259.....868 and as the Germans I failed in all my missions. What happened was that the right hand strong point fell to the forces coming down from OP Bertha but only towards the end of the game. The left hand side held out but then was pushed out of the trench into the communication trench and a counter attack by all the forces from the second trench did alright but then ran into some tanks. 6.Kompanie HQ managed to hit the tank but not to knock it out and it killed a 17 members of the counter attack squad but was in turned killed by the two remnants of 1.Squad. 6.Kompanie attacks the tank

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Played this with a slightly altered set up in that I moved the HMG over to the right to be nearer to the Infantry Gun. Also I grouped the first line trench units into 2 strong points at the head of each communications trench. What I found was that my squads moved into their foxhole fighting positions and died within about a move without really accomplishing much. The squads on the right managed to stop the Soviet Sapper moving down the trench but got pretty beat up doing it. So by about half way through my force was looking a sorry state but the HMG had broken up the attack on the right while the gun crew lay dead around their gun. I think that this type of scenario pushes the game engine beyond what it can handle really - trenches do not afford the kind of protection/concealment that they did in real life and I am coming to the conclusion that the only worthwhile fighting position is a wooden bunker

With regard to the supply of fuel to the Panzer Corps, they were given a specific part of the GTR around 7,000 tonnes if memory serves me to act as a mobile fuel dump. They travelled with the Panzer Corps and off loaded their fuel as the advance continued and then hurried back to the nearest fuel depot to fill up again. They were know as "suitcases". However they was a tendency during the campaign for all the GTR to be used in support of the Panzer Corps as the lorries broke down. By the autumn the GTR was in a sorry state and was not able to support the advances to any great degree. The Germans evolved a new supply system for Operation Barbarossa which had resulted from the Marcks and Lossberg studies and the comments by von Paulus during his time in the Supply Service. How it worked was like this: the Infantry Divisions had a mixture of motor and horse drawn supply columns (in 75 Infantry Divisions they had lost their motor columns and been given extra horses to provide the vehicles for the Grosstransportraum.) which distributed supplies collected from the Army level depots and distributed them around the Division to Regimental, Battalion, etc dumps. This was done over a range of 50-100km ie. 1 day from the depot. The Army depots drew their supplies largely by motor vehicle columns from a) the railhead delivered by train Regional depots of the Supply Service over a distance of 250-300km for motor vehicles or 125km for horses. c) Direct deliveries to the Armies depots of urgent supplies by the Grosstransportraum. The Regional Depots such as the one deployed at Minsk were supplied by the Grosstransportraum at first and later by rail. These were established at roughly 300km intervals which represented the maximum 'logistical reach' of the German Army. The Grosstransportraum was great expanded for the invasion of Russia and the one regular Regiment was joined by 2 'raised from civilian service' Regiments. The expanded Regiments had a capacity of around 20,000 tonnes using 4 tonne lorries with 4 tonne trailers. see http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=108967 So at the start of the campaign, the Divisions advance to attack, their biggest supply demand is at this point and they can draw from the depots in Poland for the first encirclement battles at 300km from the border up to Minsk. The GTR is able to start moving supplies forward. The Eisenbahnpioniere are stuck behind the ID advancing up the railway lines who are holding the Soviets in check while the Panzer units and other ID race round the flanks to encircle them. The Kessels are surrounded and destroyed. The second leap forward from Minsk is supported by the GTR who supply the Army depots directly and attempt to build up a Regional depot at Minsk. The Eisenbahnpioniere change the gauge of the rails do some basic repairs and move forward. This covers the area from Minsk to Smolensk 300-600km and it s time of pursuit since the Soviets have no formed lines as such although there can be heavy fighting by some units. The supply demand is relativity low as this is a pursuit phase. At Smolensk in August, there was always planned to be a break to build up the Minsk depot and establish a new Regional Depot at Smolensk. But the Soviets effectively make a stand and there is heavy fighting which stretches the supply chain. The GTR are running from Poland to Minsk and from Minsk to Smolensk. The railway is operated by the FEDkos as far as the Minsk depot which is used by the GTR (ie still covering 300km from Regional depot to Army depot) but there are problems as the Transport Service are inexperienced and not meeting their 25 trains a day target (the Transport Officers of AG South only realises he can reach his 25 trains a day target if he unloads the trains and send them back in September - a basic error.) The Eisenbahnpioniere are working from Minsk to Smolensk. Having defeated the Soviets at Smolensk and the other problems of shifting objectives at right angles to the line of march (and hence unsupportable except by the now over stretched GTR) with a working railway line up to the Regional depot at Smolensk, the advance can now be made towards Moscow 400km away so 2 bounds forward. But the GTR is gutted with a large proportion of its vehicles under repair or lying beside the roadside. The railway lines are running a minimum service to the Regional Depots and providing supplies only, no reinforcements, no replacement weapons, no winter clothing. The advance is spectacular but largely a pursuit with low supply demands so when real opposition is met outside Moscow, there are no supplies to support a heavy attack and no transport capacity to provide replacements. The German supply and transport system is designed to support an attack over two bounds of 600km and a pursuit beyond that, just like a scaled up version of the Battle for France (one bound deep). The Soviet stand at Smolensk in August is what over stresses the system but the inherent failures were much earlier at Minsk. In order to fight heavy battles deeper into the Soviet Union, you need to do two things: 1) one wing of the encircling Panzers needs to advance up a railway line so that it opens early (too many Eisenbahnpioniere are killed in fighting in unsecured territory trying to push the railways forward faster.) this saves the GTR from hauling supplies from Poland to Minsk at the same time they are hauling supplies from Minsk to Smolensk. 2) You need to deploy strategic assets such as the DRB to re-build the railways directly behind the troops so that the Regional Depots can open and be supplied by rail immediately. This keeps the GTR operating over a 300km range and allows sideways advances to Kiev. It also allows you a higher capacity and so can send reinforcements forward and items such as replacement weapons and winter clothing. Waiting until the Spring of 1942 to deploy the DRB for a major construction programme was too little too late

JasonC in reply to your post Nr.112, I would agree that the early part of the war saw dismal Soviet logistics and the turn around only began in August 1941 and took much of 1942 to accomplish. But by 1944 they did have a good logistics system able to support their offensives of 300km depth and with 3 or 4 offensives running in sequence - all of which was a better result than the Germans. However this was an army that was managing to fight a war by the best use of limited resources. A comparison of American and Soviet offensives shows that the western campaign with its better communications routes was far easier to supply than the 'wilds' of Russia for either Germans or Soviets and sheer difficulty of operating here: The real test was who could get their railways running again quickest and in this the Soviets did far better than the Germans for both management and the level oif resources that they were able to throw at the problem.

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Great stuff John I particularly liked these dummy tanks on the railway flat cars fs-YSTINOV-02/15/Ust-1472_1.jpg and the "Clampetts" invading Germany under the watchful gaze of a Panther tank.

I re-read page 1 seeking enlightenment but only found the same old arguments and that is the problem with these Lend Lease discussions, the Russians roll out their line of "Lend Lease was only 4 % of the total war economy" while the Americans roll out their line of "we sent you SPAM Studebakers, Bostons, locomotives and radios". The problem with the Russian line of reasoning is that it is simply irrelevant, key deliveries such as food and aircraft could not be produced in the USSR and were aggregate increases to their war effort which were significant. But you can understand why their noses are put out of joint because of this attempt to link tins of beans with dead Soviet soldiers. The problem with the American line of reasoning is the catch-all nature of it. A lot of Lend Lease (although ordered by the Soviets) did not contribute to the war effort in any special way, it just added to existing Soviet production in a cumulative way and as a proportion of the whole had only a small effect. Nice to have but not really a 'killer app'. The ideal example of this is the most obvious, Allied Tanks. The Grants, Lees, Matildas, Churchills, did contribute to the war effort in that the Soviets did not have to build them, they had a fighting value but they were worse than Soviet home produced ones. Helpful rather than war winning. Some are downright misleading, locomotives being a key example. Statements such "Vital......as the locomotives, rails and rolling stock even more so, since rail was the principal way the Red Army moved its forces." are simply wrong. The USA sent 1,900 odd Baldwin built copies of the locomotives they sent during the Great War similar to the E Class freight locomotives. So no great technology transfer. But the Soviet Union had 25,000 locomotive pre-war and lost around 2,500 during the retreat. But they also lost 40% of their network so during Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk had plenty of spare motive power for both military and industry trains. When they recaptured the Ukraine and Belorussia these economies were destroyed so there was not a large increase in traffic demand other than to supply food to the people of these areas. So the 22,500 locomotives were able to deliver this. When the Soviet forces advance into Poland, they had captured so much standard gauge rolling stock that they kept the standard gauge and transhipped everything at the border. The only exception was fuel so each Front had one broad gauge line to supply this directly. So the US locomotives rather than being a vital part of the Soviet war effort fall neatly into the category of displacement activity. The Urals had one railway works could that could produce 200 locomotives a month if need be but instead it built tanks so the Lend Lease supply of locomotives helped the Soviets by supplying an item they could build themselves but did not need to and could build something else instead. Similarly the issue of technology transfer can be over played, the USA had been building factories and supplying 'under license' technology to the USSR since 1930 - the GAZ-A truck was after all a Ford copy, the Douglas Dakota was a Soviet airliner before the war So we can categorise Lend Lease aid to the Soviet Union into their effects on the war effort: Vital - unable to be produced by USSR, technology transfer or of substantial assistance: Food, aircraft such as Boston, Aircobra, and Hurricane,AT gun 4x4 towing vehicles, rubber (hi-octane fuel for LL aircraft) Effective Replacement - items able to be produced by USSR but large numbers make a significant contribution: Supplies of metals, rails, fuel, Valentine and Sherman tanks, radios, telephone cable, 2x2 supply lorries and light cars Replacement activity - items able to be produced by USSR but not supplied in significant numbers: locomotives, most tanks, some aircraft, most infantry weapons, most ships Fairly useless - items that failed to make an impact usually unintentionally Big ships such as battleships, Chevrolet trucks, 57mm AT guns, Spitfire aircraft Lend Lease was important to the USSR, some of it was vital and it did help them get to Berlin. But remember that US-Great Britain Lend Lease and technology transfer to each other was huge in comparison to that provided to the USSR. Partly this was an effect of distance and easy routes but partly a product of political viewpoint. But always remember that 16 Soviet soldiers died fighting Germany for every US soldier who died.

This is true, the Germans failed to make the best use of their limited resources often by organisational and structural setups, that as you say favoured operations over logistics. There are tables from 1941 showing impressive rates of bridge re-building and of 'first train to arrived at town X' but that did not mean a logistical flow. The growth of the army coupled with the lowly status of the supply officers meant that they were often inexperienced. It took the Transport Officer of HG Sud from June to Sept to realise that he was only going to make his target of 25 trains a day if he unloaded them as soon as they arrived - as using them as mobile warehouses although convenient stripped you of most of your carrying capacity. This was a dictum taught during the American Civil War. In the Soviet Army a Front Commander had to report the arrival of a fuel train to Moscow within 1 hour of its arrival and it had to be unloaded with 3 hours. The other dictum from the ACW was that the army should be kept well away from railway operations as they had no idea of the effect of small changes on railway timetabling. In the German Army field officers regularly interefered and in fact commanded the railways behind most of the front while in the Soviet Army, not even a Front Commander could give an order to a train. The actual structure of the Army split the logistical problem into a Transport Department and a Supply Department. This made sense in the Great War because the Transport ran the railways and the Supply ran everything from the railhead to the troops. But in the Wehrmacht, the Supply Department started to get lorries which worked at first as they still hauled supplied from the railhead to the Armies in the Polish Campaign. But in the French Campaign they started to get more ambitious and created the Grosstransportraum to replace railways on longer hauls than the normal 100km (horses) 250km (trucks) while they were waiting for the service to be restored after French destruction during their retreat. This worked because the campaign was so short and so the system was expanded for the invasion of Russia and the size of the GTR was tripled. But when Wagner and Gercke got together to discuss supply in Russia, the Transport Department tried to integrate the GTR into the railway plan so that the two could work together but the Supply Department would have none of it and wanted full independence although they were now trying to extent their responsibility from 250 km to 650 km. This duplicated effort, wore out the trucks faster and still failed to deliver sufficient supplies. One issue was that the Supply department counted supplies in tonnes while the Transport Department counted supplies in trains, the result being that when requisitions came in they could not be properly matched up to complete train loads and trains carried less as a result while often insufficient lorries were on hand to unload at the other end. The problem was not helped by the fact that the Transport Department was promoted to a Wehrmacht Department (OHW) and also worked for the Luftwaffe and the Navy. By contrast the Soviet Army's Rear Area Service was a unitary service under the command of one man Gen Khrulev who was both Commissar for Railways, Deputy Commissar for Defence and Officer Commanding Rear Area Services Department. He commanded all assets to do with Transport and the Supply Service and was independent of the General Staff although he worked closely with them. That meant that he could both set the operational parameters during the planning process (Germans did not do this) ensure that operations took logistics into account (like capturing the important rail bridge during the offensive) and then during the operation ensure that the flow of supplies if restricted went to the units that really needed them and were successful while units that got bogged down quickly found that the supply tap was turned off. (German supply requisitions came from the bottom up and they only started to 'ration' them at Heeren Gruppe level from 1943 and never came close to the Soviet system. Under the German system everyone got equal supplies). This is one reason why the Lend Lease 4x4 truck argument is so misleading. You could have given the German Army the trucks and it would not have made much of a difference as they would have been misused and anyway they had a fleet of trucks taken from all over Europe, some of which were quite good. But the superior Soviet organisation made very efficient use of what they had and they used 2x2 1.5 tonne trucks as their main supply vehicles either Gaz-AA which were joined by the Ford 6. These lighter trucks were deemed to go quite well cross country when needed as they could be pushed and hauled through mud by men and horses while the heavier 3 tonne trucks used by the Germans just bogged. The bigger 4x4 International Harvester 2.5 tonne types were simply not used for supplies but to haul guns except for the very rare STAVKA strategic units. Yet these 2x2 wheel Soviet Supply units managed to keep the 1st Ukrainian Front supplied at a distance of 650km through the snows of January in Poland during the Oder-Vistula Offensive and regularly kept the point of the spear supplied at a distance of 350km. It was the Soviet organisation and the German lack of it that made the difference in logistics.

I am afraid I will have to disagree with Michael on this one. The problem was largely structural (but for understandable reasons.) and could have been solved with enough willpower. The problem was that the Deutsches Reichsbahn (DRB) was starved of investment during the pre-war years and ignored during the planning process so that when war came it was ill prepared to meet the challenge. The DRB was vital for the war economy so the Reich Transport Ministry (RVM) tended to protect the weak DRB when occupying newly conquered territories such as France by setting up new companies to run them which came under military control or in the case of the Ostbahn in Poland under NSDAP control. They could not recruit good staff, lacked managers and had interference from soldiers. The same situation occurred during the invasion of Russia, the Eisenbahnpioniere converted the track and ran the broad gauge trains behind the front, the FedKo (Grau Eisenbahner) ran the trains in the military rear area and then in the Reichs Kommisariats the RVM set up little railway companies called HBD to run the railways. These did not work well, at one point the Gestapo arrested three senior managers because the trains were not running well and they had to rely on vast numbers of indigenous staff! Construction work was done by the Army, Organisation Todt, RAD and private German companies. The trend during the war was when Speer took over the economy and put his own man into the head of the DRB and RVM for the DRB to take over everything to do with railway and things ran much better, the Ostbahn certainly improved once the DRB had operational control and a lot of the track improvements were done by the DRB in Russia as they had the engineers, equipment and skills to do the job. The problem was that this gradualist approach meant that the Germans never really looked at the Soviet network with some railway experts. The Soviet network was very strange - it had a track length about the same as that of Germany 106,000 km and a similar number of locomotives 25,000 but it hauled as almost as much freight as the US system which had four times the length of track and double the number of locomotives. The Soviets achieved this by running lightweight trains of great length all at one speed which gave them the maximum flow through the network. Soviet military trains carried 750 tonnes net weight (ie double that of German ones) with a typical wagon loading of 18 tonnes. The lightweight trains could run on poorly constructed track and they ran at slow speed ( 15 km per hour) in order to maintain the maximum flow (A similar approach to speed and flow was used in the Red Ball Express). This allowed the Red Army to use lots of tracks while the Germans tried to upgrade a few main line tracks to meet their higher standards. If Germany had really studied the Soviet network and engaged the DRB experts at a much earlier date (- Dr.G.Garbe a German railway expert who lived in Minsk of all places before the war was writing in railway journals about the Soviet network as were other geographers and explorers.) and realised this, they could have gone into Russia with a different attitude and railway operating procedures and changed the gauge but used Kreigslok 52 on poorly constructed rails at slow speed and hauled as much freight as the Soviets did with far less effort and infrastructure which could then have been spent on bridge building and rail repair. The Soviets had a fully integrated transport system with the NKPS under the control of Rear Area Services of the Red Army which controlled the entire railway operation from factory to front and they achieved re-building rates of rails and bridges and freight haulage that the Germans never did. see here if you want to delve deeper into this subject: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=66&t=203286

The Germans did have one alternative which were the 3 Grosstransportraum Regiments of heavy trucks. For Fall Barbarossa they had marshalled 45,000 tonnes of heavy lorry of 4 tonnes trucks with 4 tonne trailers but these had largely broken down by October. Returned to Germany for refitting they returned to each of the HG and HG Sud was given 10,000 tonnes of lift for Fall Blau to supplement the railways which were expected to be slow in recovery. Other HG used them for general operations but there is no reason they could not have concentrated more in HG Sud area. These get you about 600km (ie about 200km beyond the Don river or half way from the Don to Stalingrad) to supplement the railways. But you are still limited by the fuel delivered from the Polish-Russian border. You are exactly right about the Bridge building. The main pair of Don Bridges were heavily damaged and a repair team from the Eisenbahntruppe examined them under fire at the end of July and repair started immediately with a team from Organisation Todt but even so it took until mid Sept to get a temporary bridge open and even this was only able to handle a small number of trains which was supplemented by a cable way and lorries running on a pontoon bridge.

I would agree with that conclusion whole heartedly.

It is an interesting idea but one on which JasonC has already touched upon as having supply difficulties. In 1942 Germany had a railway crisis in the East because they did not have enough capacity between the 7 railway lines and 420 trains a day reaching the Polish - Russian border and the 5 lines that crossed Ukraine and Belorussia carrying 120 trains a day. There was a programme running through the summer to upgrade the lines to 36 trains a day which would raise the total to 180 trains a day called the Ostbau 42 programme. Serving HG Sud was one line running to Odessa at 24 trains a day and another running through Kiev carrying 24 trains a day as far as the Dnepr. From the Dnepr to the Don the railways were pretty much destroyed by the Russians and temporary replacements carried around 36 trains a day maximum. The Don bridges had all been destroyed and there were two replacement crossings, one at Rostov which served a 24 train a day line running down to the Caucuses (with a single track spur running off to Stalingrad) and another crossing at Belaya Kalitwa which carried a single track line directly to Stalingrad which carried 12 trains a day which opened in mid Sept. Given that an Herren Gruppe required 24 trains a day in supplies (trains carried 450 tonnes net and so this equates to 10,000 tonnes) and then additional ones to carry replacement troops and equipment, Fall Blau was seriously short of logistical support - a fact that the Chief of the General Staff Halder had pointed out at the start of the operation as he had urged only one axis of advance by one HG - a point that had been ignored. The shortage of logistical lift was so severe that 6.Armee sent most of its horses to the rear as winter approached which reduced its mobility but reduced its supply demand as fodder was bulky to transport. Likewise the advance to the oilfields in the south was often delayed for weeks at a time by shortages of fuel as supplies were switched to support 6.Armee and 4.PzArmee advance to the Volga. Given these circumstances it is hard to raise combat capability by adding additional troops so the only gain is replacement of Allies by German troops but even then, they are operating under par as being short of supplies. One feature of the Russo-German War was the superior utilisation of railways by the Soviets.

Michael this is only partly true. Yes the UK defaulted on its Great War debt to the USA of £866 in 1932 but in turn was owed £2,300 by other countries for their war debt. Hoovers moratorium was to give time to address this issue as it was a world-wide one not just a British one. As a matter of interest the UK paid the last of her WWII debt to the USA on 31st Dec 2006 which was paid in full. You can read the full story from the BBC

I would second this post, Walter Dunn's "Stalins Keys to Victory" makes a clear explanation of how the Soviet their raised huge armies. Halder notes in his diary that by November the German's estimate that they have destroyed ALL the Soviet pre-war divisions and yet they are facing a force that is even larger when they started. Their force on the other hand has run through their replacements and is shrinking in size. Nothing illustrates more clearly the reasons for the Soviet victory in the winter of 1941.

What this debate should be about is how important are these factors in relation to one another and the nature of modern warfare in the middle of the 20th. The Russo-German War was an old fashioned war of mass armies destroying one another on the ground. On the other hand the Western Powers fought a modern war of machines which attacked the enemy population and economy by sea and by air and then defeated the Germany army in the field again by use of machines. This idea had its roots in the Great War search for a second front to break the trench deadlock of Flanders. The problem this produces is that it is hard to put a quantitative value on these two approaches and thereby compare their overall contribution to the defeat of Germany. The debate was obscured until recently by an inability to assess to what contribution air power had to the defeat. But the results of modern air power such as the bombing of North Vietnam, use of aircraft in the Bosnian Conflict, both the Iraq Wars, etc have shown that air power has an ability to utterly destroy enemy infrastruture but only a limited ability to destroy enemy military forces and does not have the effect to make political or social change. For that you need boots on the ground. This knowledge was not available until the end of the C20th which made it hard to quantify air power. The table I posted earlier showing relative casualties on each Front is too crude to assess this as it takes no account of the effect on the German economy of a diminished ability to fight due to lack of machines. This would raise the Western Allied contribution and lower the Soviet one. Under the military casualty measure, the Western Allies contributed 13% to the defeat of Germany. If you add in the effect of naval and air power you add in about 15% raising the Western Allies total to 28%. The reason the air power figure is low is that the air campaign does not become effective until middle 1943. If you add in Lend Lease aid to the USSR and estimate that it saved 1 million soldiers lives that adds a further 8% which brings your total up to around a third which I think would be more or less correct. I do not claim that these figures are correct and they are certainly open to question but this kind of calculation does attempt to show the relative values. The bottom line is that to produce political change in Germany you had to occupy the country and in order to do that, just as in the Great War, you needed to destroy the German Army which meant killing 5 million soldiers. The other factor is ease of access to killing those soldiers and in this the Western Allies were at a severe disadvantage by not having easy land access to the enemy. This made their economic cost of causing those deaths far higher. The one objective of this kind of study is to put into context the relative values of the different styles and abilities of warfare conducted by the Allied Coalition it is not a reflection of their willingness to engage the enemy. The USA spent a fortune on fighting the war but distance and geography meant that it was hard for her to engage the enemy, the Soviet Union could not help but engage the enemy but did not have the riches to spend on it.

I have patently not made my position clear since your statement of it is so far off. The simple point I m trying to make is that the the question posed in this thread "Was Lend Lease Essential in securing a Soviet Victory" is in its self immensely disrespectful to modern day Russians and diminishes the suffering of the Soviet peoples. The war was won by the Soviets because of three factors: 1) An ability to mobilise their industry 2) An ability to mobilse their population 3) A logistics system that could support a vast army at distance from their home bases 4) The creation of a doctrine that could produce German defeats albeit at the operational level in their concept of "Deep Battle" Three of these four factors were in place by August 1941 and were the factors that produced the victory at Moscow in 1941 and Stalingrad in 1942 which stopped the German advance and in doing so ensured that the won could be won later. Allied air power is not a factor and neither is Lend Lease to any great extent. However there are other factors at work that stop a successful German victory, as has been pointed out by others, Great Britains efforts in 1941, the German High Command, etc, etc. But we should not diminish the real contribution made by the Soviets themselves to that defeat. Turning to the third period of the war, was Lend Lease a contribution to the ultimate defeat of Germany, yes it was, as I posted earlier FOOD supply saved MILLIONS of Soviet lives. Did the Allied Air Offensive contribute, yes it did as did the Allied landings in Sicily, etc, etc. As Michael said there is real doubt if the Soviet Union alone could have reached Berlin unless Germany was drawn off elsewhere.

Just started reading David Glantz' new book on the battle of Smolensk between July and August 1941 which is all about the delay imposed on the German advance by a successful Soviet defence. The Battle of Moscow was a major turning point in the war, a major German defeat and there was no 'air war' to speak of, little Lend Lease or Allied aid either. It was won purely by the Red Armies ability to mobilise its population and turn them into some sort of fighting force and the Germans inability to support its force logistically at that distance from its home base. So I am afraid I am going to have to disagree with the notion that the Soviets did not win the war by themselves, since staying in the fight over that first winter was crucial and did not really involve the Allies to any great extent.

You have to read all the post *****"I do not happen to agree with these statements..... "***** but your reaction just proves the point. Imagine if you are a Russian citizen sitting in Moscow and your grandfather died in the Great Patriotic War, your aunt starved to death in the Siege of Leningrad and Stalin's OPGU shot your brother for a mis-spoken word and then some Yankee or Brit comes along and says "We won the war 'cos we have more money than you and we were able to send you over some beans to help you out. You should be really grateful to us." The point I am making is that the argument that 'Lend Lease won the war' is immensely disrespectful to the suffering of the Soviet peoples. Remember that for every US soldier (or British soldier or civilian) who died in WW2 - 16 Soviet Military men died and 40 Soviet civilians died.

It also gave mobility to the Breakthrough Artillery unit so that when they had blasted a hole in the German defences, they could move (without railways) to another section of the front to repeat the process (eg the 1st Belorussian Fronts second offensive after Operation Bagration when its Left wing attacked) or move forward and destroy the Festungplatz. More recent claims have been that certain raw materials were vital to the Soviet war effort but the reality of both the Soviet and German experience shows that in reality no 'strategic' material is a bottle neck to producing weapons as alternatives can be found albeit less effective ones. But really what this argument is about is national pride and Cold War politics. The West felt after 1945 that the USSR did not fully recognise the effort made into delivering Lend Lease and the Soviet Union felt that its sacrifice and achievement in the defeat of Germany was not fully recognised in the West. This remains true to this day, there is little note of the Soviet war in the Western public conciousness and a failure to recognise valid Russian concerns about their borders and security. The USSR lost 40% of its industry and agriculture devastated by the war equivalent in US terms from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi, they suffered casualties equivalent to 1 in 5 of their adult population and in return 85% of the casualties of the German Army were suffered on the Eastern Front. And we are saying to them "You could not have won the war without us because we sent you some trucks, tins of beans and Spam". We can see what this feels like by shining a light on other aspects of Lend Lease and the war in general. The USA could not have won the war in the Pacific without British technical help, radar, sonar and the VT fuse were vital in defeating the Japanese. Likewise vital US equipment such as the Mustang fighter were only produced because of British orders and staff requirements. The USA deliberately excluded Allied forces such as the British and Australians from the attack on Japan in order to gain post-war dominance in the Pacific. The British deliberately passed on second hand equipment to the Soviets when it received new supplies from the USA, particularly in the Middle East. Lend Lease was not the altruistic gesture portrayed as the USA extracted trade agreements from Great Britain to open up closed markets such as South America and Asia to US companies which used the war to gain dominance in these areas. Much of Britains post war decline was not simply down to loss of Empire but also due to the loss of traditional markets to the USA which gained dominance in South America, parts of Africa and Asia. I do not happen to agree with these statements, but they are based on underlying true facts and have been quoted before. But it does illustrate perhaps, the level of irritation Russians feel when the Lend Lease subject is brought up yet again.

This argument was countered in the 1960s by the rise of the counter argument that 'quality' counts and that there were certain essentials without which the USSR could not fight the war. Lend Lease contribution was around 4-7% (depending on who is counting) but in certain areas (such as rubber which was 100% imported) the totals are considerably higher or there is a technology advantage. Which is all true Lend Lease did help the Soviet War effort. And the Allied Bombing Campaign and U-Boat Campaigns did draw off German economic effort and manpower from fighting the Soviet Union. But you also have to recognize that some of these claims are propaganda (from both sides), the locomotive one is typical. The USA delivered 2,000 odd Baldwin locomotives which were copies of the old WW1 locomotives delivered to the Tsar equivalent to the Soviet E class of 1918-1927. Real workhorse, behind the front type of machine. But there are claims that these 'won' the war' for the Soviets when in reality the NKPS had 25,000 locomotives, captured thousands more and when it received the nice bright shiny new ones, simply did not repair worn out ones and pushed them to the side of the workshop until after the war. Some claims are misinterpreted like the great cross country truck debate. The USA and Great Britain delivered thousands of lorries to the USSR and so Soviet Infantry was able to drive to Berlin and defeat the Germans a lot quicker is the claim. This was made by an academic called Roberts (?) in 1963 who measured the speed of Soviet advances for each year and compared these to the deliveries of Trucks to the USSR and saw a correlation. Unfortunately this argument is bunkum as he did not allow for any other factor for the speed of advance increasing other than the one he was looking at. In reality cross country trucks were important but if you study the GATV report from 1945 you can see why. In terms of numbers, the trucks both 2 wheel and multi wheel drive were important simply because the Red Army had not been very motorised in the first place so any additions were going to help. In 1945 you had 630,000 trucks for an army of 6,000,000 and an Armed Forces of 11,000,000 which gives you a completely truck mounted Armoured Force (Tank and Mech Corps) truck hauled supplies from railhead to the front (a distance of 300km max) and enough lorries to haul the ammunition for the Rifle Divisions (40-100 trucks per division) but everything else is HORSE DRAWN. The entire supply effort is based on railways and every one of the 600 Rifle Divisions has HORSE DRAWN equipment, artillery and divisional supply. Soviet mobility did not come from 4x4 trucks. In the GATV report it is clear where the Studebakers and Dodges were deployed as they are all classed as PRIME MOVERS. The difference made by these vehicles was that it made Soviet artillery and in particular AT Artillery more mobile than the usual horse drawn or catapiller tractor drawn guns which meant that late war German Panzer attacks ran into walls of AT gun fire which was able to keep up with the marching infantry far better than when it had been horse drawn, especially now that A guns had to be larger than the 45 or 76mm guns.

There have been studies by experts in the Soviet economy such as Mark Harrison see here for some of his articles https://warwick.academia.edu/markharrison and his book Accounting for War - Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defence Burden, 1940-1945 (Cambridge Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies) and in short the conclusion that he comes to, is that the most important Lend Lease material supplied was FOOD which without this would have resulted in substantial extra deaths both in the civilian population and the labour force. The military effort would have been degraded by this loss extending the war by a number of years. Of course the element missing from this debate is some sort of quantitative analysis of delivered military effort year on year and then this can be set against the value of Lend Lease delivered from which a view can be taken as to its effectiveness. I do not have those figures but a quick look at all military deaths (as a very crude measure of delivered military effort) over the war shows : This shows quite clearly that the bulk of the defeat of Germany was achieved by the USSR and certainly the destruction of the Heer was down to them. So Lend Lease was the Western Allies aid in this and so has a value. But you cannot over rate its value because the other side of the coin is paid in the lives of Soviet Citizens and in the destruction of the Soviet economy which resulted in further deaths and in higher post war mortality until 1955.

Here we are an example Fire Plan based on the 87th Guards Fire Division sector of the attack of the 11th Guards Army on 23rd June 1944 just outside Orscha. Order of Battle of the 87th Guards Rifle Division It is based on a sector 1 km wide or a 243 GRR Regimental Sector so could be scaled down to battalion level by reducing the number of units by half or down to company level by reducing the number of units by 4. You have three different Fire Sections "FIRE ATTACK" "DESTRUCTIVE FIRE" "BARRAGE" from which you can build most Soviet barrages. You can use the earlier posted table showing these for all the major actions. So for Bagration there was a 5 minute Fire Attack, followed by a 70 minute Destructive Fire (use one followed by another) and then a 65 minute Barrage. For Oder-Vistula there was a 25 minute Fire Attack followed by 50 minutes of fire support by organic units while they tested the German defences, then another 20 minute Fire Attack phase, then 30 minutes of Destructive Fire and finally another 20 minutes of Fire Attack followed by the Barrage. You could change the number of artillery units to provide for attacks on the flanks of attacks ie. 16th GRC attack to the north. You need to keep the RATE OF FIRE the same and the targets are reasonably accurate descriptions of what each Group would be firing on. But you could alter the Duration for smaller attacks to allow for less ammunition. The point to remember is that Soviet guns did not fire at a quick rate so the effect was achieved by lots of guns. The main benefit for scenario designers is the Barrage is a reasonable portrayal and could be used in any scenario as Soviet infantry would rarely attack without it. They would be 200m behind the barrage with their tanks just in front.