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Discussion of Soviet Offensive Tactics


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The rationale behind the morale penalty for splitting is more due to the fact that the Soviets had a persistent shortage of qualified, experienced NCOs, which are the backbone of squads/platoons, throughout the war. This is one area where the Germans held an advantage.

And to be clear, it is not specific to the Soviets at all. If a German/US/British squad has a team without a leader, the same penalty should apply. For example, the new German "Straggler Group" squads do not have an assistant leader.

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And to be clear, it is not specific to the Soviets at all. If a German/US/British squad has a team without a leader, the same penalty should apply. For example, the new German "Straggler Group" squads do not have an assistant leader.

And so as not to confuse players, the penalty will not apply to any regular German/US/CW combat unit.

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A remarkable percentage of the German's problems came down to the fact that they just never got their logistic's train mechanized enough to support their fancy toys at the pointy end. I am not entirely clear how much of this can be blamed on Hitler's idiocy, the army command as whole, or simple resource restraints.

Most of it I think is due to the simple fact that the German automotive industry just wasn't big enough to turn out trucks and other vehicles in the necessary numbers and keep them coming. And even if there had been enough factories and workers, they would still be competing for strategic resources with factories building aircraft, artillery, and U-Boots.

Michael

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Most of it I think is due to the simple fact that the German automotive industry just wasn't big enough to turn out trucks and other vehicles in the necessary numbers and keep them coming. And even if there had been enough factories and workers, they would still be competing for strategic resources with factories building aircraft, artillery, and U-Boots.

Michael

A bigger part of it was how utterly inefficient German industry was. Each company produced it's own thing with it's own parts and specifications. Third Reich was, in general, a Capitalist's wet dream. Er, until the Allies won :) Well, at least those in the east. Those in the west did very well for themselves even after the war. But I digress!

Only very late in the war did Speer try to centralize and standardize production. Trucks, in particular, were supposed to conform to a few designs. In reality it didn't happen because they were so far behind in meeting demand that proprietary production lines continued to crank out incompatible parts. Which made things in some ways worse. Truck A and B were technically the same, but if Company 1 made Truck A then you needed parts made by Company 1 for the engine, maybe Company 2 for the suspension, etc. What a mess.

Contrast this with the US system. When a design was accepted it was produced by many different companies to the same specifications. OK, perhaps Company 1 made a better this or that than Company 2, but they were at least compatible parts. And for specialized parts, like a carburetor, everybody had to use the same one for the same engine for the same vehicle.

On top of this, the US system imposed very limited variations within a specific need. There was one and only one type of 1/4 ton truck (the "Jeep"), there was only one type of 3/4 ton truck (the WC), there was only... well, you get the picture :D Sure there were inconsistencies, but those were the exception rather than the rule.

The thing that's really crazy about this is the Germans DID do this sort of thing for some aspects of the war effort. Small arms is the best example. Lots and lots of companies made MG42s, for example, but they all made them to the same specifications. There weren't 10 different sub models of MG42s with incompatible parts.

Steve

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Read Tooze's 'Wages of Destruction', for a forensic dismantling of the myth of German wartime efficiency. The Germans knew they had a problem, well before the war, given the fact they had to requisition thousands of private commercial vehicles just to get the Siegfried line built. Hundreds of companies went bankrupt as they had no means to transport raw materials or finished goods. They had to rely on captured French vehicles, to boost their mechanised logistic train, which suffered badly in Russia, and as for the horses!

Steve, you are correct, but they also never mastered, or even attempted to create rapid production lines for large pieces of machinery, my favourite story has to be the Ju-88 production line. After each aircraft was built, the line stopped, assembled for stirring speeches and the new plane was read a factory dedication and a band played classical music! Meanwhile the US plants were open 24/7, endlessly rolling out 4 engined bombers.

Hitler was a gambler, whose luck held out remarkably well, but with the benefit of hindsight the end was inevitable. As they say, failure to plan is planning to fail. Nice, high tech weapons, whizzy doctrines and smart uniforms can never replace strategic industrial planning. The war revealed the Germans as talented amateurs, when it came to any strategy, not surprising, given that's exactly what the leadership of the Nazi party consisted of.

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heh... I hadn't heard that JU-88 story before. Classic :D There were also additional problems that came about later on when Allied bombing was taking a toll. They had little shops scattered all over the place making stuff. This meant they had to move around a lot of raw materials and then a lot of parts. Their infrastructure simply wasn't up to that task even without the bombing campaign wrecking rail and road networks.

"Failure to plan is planning to fail" is a great statement. My favorite, though, is "having no plan is still having a plan, just the worst one possible".

The Third Reich's entire core of being was to have competition. That way no one element could get too powerful. Be that industry, politics, security forces, political offices, etc. I have seen some historians say that not only was the high efficiency of the Third Reich a myth, but in fact that the Third Reich was the least efficient systems in the modern history of "1st world" governance. Such authors then quickly state "and we should be thankful it was, because if it wasn't..."

Steve

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The Soviets had almost the opposite problem in that they emphasized output over quality. They had a lot of the US industrial mentality, which was to focus on a few things that were "good enough" and make a ton of them as quickly as possible. Which is why Soviet production dwarfed German production. However, Soviets took this to an extreme sometimes:

"Comrade Factory Supervisor, we have not received our shipment of 80mm hardened plate armor"

"This is not good news Comrade Assembly Supervisor. Well, what do you have on hand?"

"We have 60mm plate armor, but it hasn't been fully hardened."

"That will have to do! We must keep up our production quota!"

This was mostly a problem in the 1942/43 timeframe, from what I remember. And given how desperate the situation was for them, a tank with below specs armor was preferable to no tank at all. This is not a position the Germans refused to adopt until very late in the war.

Steve

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heh... I hadn't heard that JU-88 story before. Classic :D There were also additional problems that came about later on when Allied bombing was taking a toll.

Tooze is good on the effects of Allied bombing on industrial production. He says (as you might expect if you had not read the strange versions of history based on Speer's apologetics) the bombing caused major problems right away.

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Tooze is good on the effects of Allied bombing on industrial production. He says (as you might expect if you had not read the strange versions of history based on Speer's apologetics) the bombing caused major problems right away.

In a few books I have read (None specifically detailing German industry) they have said that German industry steadily increased up until the end of the war and that bombing never severely hampered production. Is that entirely wrong?

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Speer's version was adopted very quickly by some Western historians and politicians who wanted to diminish the role of strategic bombing. Bomber Command only got an official memorial in 2012, which is a disgrace, given nearly 56,000 CW aircrew died, but a testament to how effectively its role was both demonised, politicised and belittled.

Steve, they had US factories as well, The Stalingrad Tractor Factory was based on a Ford plant I believe.

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Read Tooze's 'Wages of Destruction', for a forensic dismantling of the myth of German wartime efficiency. The Germans knew they had a problem, well before the war, given the fact they had to requisition thousands of private commercial vehicles just to get the Siegfried line built. Hundreds of companies went bankrupt as they had no means to transport raw materials or finished goods. They had to rely on captured French vehicles, to boost their mechanised logistic train, which suffered badly in Russia, and as for the horses!

Steve, you are correct, but they also never mastered, or even attempted to create rapid production lines for large pieces of machinery, my favourite story has to be the Ju-88 production line.

This is true. Nevertheless people do not recognize that either the anti-German propaganda of a planned war and world domination is correct, or Germany was not at all prepared, but was, despite all mistakes Hitler made, more or less forced into war.

An example how the lies make it impossible to understand the developments: the propaganda in the US was - very much like today - the most extreme and most stupid one I have ever seen, to turn the 90% Americans, that wanted to stay out of another war for Wall Street, into support of joining war, by fearmongering about a German navy conquering the US and South America... :rolleyes: Do not laugh. This propaganda turned the opinion of the US people and the "free media" kept them in the dark how the US president was breaking almost all rules of neutrality and when the strangled Japanese hit at Pearl Harbor, the public was glad to wage war, to "defend the USA" far, far abroad... Probably nowehre in the world people had less knowledge about the fact that Great Britain was the undisputed ruler of the world's seas and not even if all ships the Germans had would have been military ships, they would have been able to invade America. :D

Btw, I think it would make a very interesting topic of scientific research, how this system of so called "free press" and "free media" is steered and controlled in such a way, that not even dictatorships are able to reach such an efficiency of manipulation.

Only in the last few years, I guess thanks to the (still) free internet the total control of the public's opinion in the West has been weakening. It always shocks me, if I imagine that the internet would not be available and what my level of knowledge would be, if I only had the mainstream "free media" as source. And that must have been the reality all the decades before for all people in the Western "democracies". :eek:

One must understand that the German U-Boot-weaponry was a result of the fact, that Germany was vastly inferior to the British Navy (Hitlers German-British treaty of their navies even accepted the rulership of Britain).

Studying the invasion of Norway shows that the conventional German Navy was no threat to the Western Alliies. They only could hide and then "run" and hide again. Only the new U-boat weapon gave them for some time some relief. But the propaganda picture of a mighty Germany and the weak Western Alliies is just crazy.

But what strikes me most is, when people moan about Germany's war economy but do not compare it to the resources and industrial capabilities to the USA and Great Britain. At that time Britain was controlling more than 50% of all world's resources(!), and btw not by asking if the invaded countries wanted to deliver it to them, together they controlled around 75%, while Soviet Russia and France controlled big parts of the rest and then saying, how badly organized the Germans were is just - strange. :rolleyes:

Whoever takes alook at the German war machine, will see that it was one of improvisation. Well, those who claim the war against the Soviet Union was planned for years, obviously have never looked at the measures after the war against France by disbanding units, the resource management and the allocation to the civilian production and tiny pecentage to the military.

Another example:

People know the half sentence from Goebbels about "Do you want the total war?!" (Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?!), but they do not know what the speech was about. That's how people are manipulated and by turning things upside down, it makes it impossible to understand history and politics.

Without understanding the big picture and how all sides really acted and that every regime hostile to Germany tried to rule the whole world (some have been following this plan until today and since the Soviet Union was disbanded are even openly admitting to a world government of their regime...), it's not possible to understand what the encirclement and tried strangulation of the German economy meant for the Germans with their country without resources. Not to have even enough resources to feed the population on their own is not a receipe for peace! This is also important to understand when Hitler, as opposition politician, wrote in his book about "Lebensraum" in the east: the other leading nations had colonies in Africa and everywhere in the world, robbed Germany's colonies, while the thinly settled land in the east for him was the most logical solution without coming into a conflict with Britain. This becomes much less outragous, if someone also knows a bit about history, that centuries ago the Russian emperors used German settlers to cultivate big parts of the country.

And with hundreds of thousands of German children starved to death since 1918, the, in Western media hailed "treaties", the enslavement by the Dictates of Versailles and St. Germain by the Western Alliies, Hitler's and the German politics of that time can only be understood with an objective view of the international politics of ALL involved parties at that time and by learning history instead of propaganda.

Instead to search for the logical and rationale cause of actions, trying to get an understanding of action and logical reaction as main principle in politics, people in the West usually prefer to believe the grotesque pictures of crazy dictators. Be it Khomeini, Hussein, Gaddafi or Kim.

I travel a lot, but nowhere in the world people have such an infantile view of politics and history with singular evil persons as the cause of problems and therefore sadly making people incapable to understand what was going on - and much worse: understanding what is going on today - like in those countries, where people are made to believe they have something like "free media".

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This is true. Nevertheless people do not recognize that either the anti-German propaganda of a planned war and world domination is correct, or Germany was not at all prepared, but was, despite all mistakes Hitler made, more or less forced into war.

An example how the lies make...

Steiner14, paging Steiner14...

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