Russian war economy & attrition vulnerabilities

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Spook:

...I pondered on if, during the later "static" situation in front of Moscow, the German bombers (when strength and supplies were sufficiently on hand)...

But AIUI there weren't sufficient supplies on hand. After about August, German logistics were in a mess, and it only got worse the farther east they advanced. This didn't get really better for many months. Also, large portions of the Luftwaffe were withdrawn from the East at this time as they were not deemed to be effective in the severe Russian winter weather and sent to the Mediterranean, where they pummeled Malta and tried to help Rommel cope with Crusader.

Michael

[JasonC]

Bombing the Moscow rail hub in 1942 doesn't stop the relocation, which was already completed by the end of 1941. It might have a marginal impact on the Russian economy. It might make it marginally harder to redeploy army group size forces from the Moscow front to some other front. That is all it would do.

The air war was a side show. The focus on it here reflects modern doctrinal pieties, not matters of actual historical significance. Nothing like the following can be said for any decisions actually available to either side, related to side show air operations.

If the Germans had twice the tanks they actually had by the end of 1942, and a million additional infantry replacements, and conducted operations exclusively focused on destroying the Russian army at the most favorable exchange ratios possible, then Russia would have been in deep trouble in 1942 and thereafter.

Which was perfectly within German capabilities the day they decided to invade. All they had to do was be ready for it to take longer than 6 weeks and for numbers to matter, even if they hoped otherwise. Elementary prudence should have dictated this course, when resolving to attack a state as powerful as Russia.

[Spook]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Spook:

...I pondered on if, during the later "static" situation in front of Moscow, the German bombers (when strength and supplies were sufficiently on hand)...

But AIUI there weren't sufficient supplies on hand. After about August, German logistics were in a mess, and it only got worse the farther east they advanced. This didn't get really better for many months. Also, large portions of the Luftwaffe were withdrawn from the East at this time as they were not deemed to be effective in the severe Russian winter weather and sent to the Mediterranean, where they pummeled Malta and tried to help Rommel cope with Crusader.

</font>

[Spook]

Originally posted by JasonC:

The air war was a side show. The focus on it here reflects modern doctrinal pieties, not matters of actual historical significance. Nothing like the following can be said for any decisions actually available to either side, related to side show air operations.

"Modern doctrinal pieties"? My earlier queries are nothing of the sort. I certainly wasn't arguing as that the air war was the primary factor to the East Front's course of events.

It's merely that the Soviet rail system wasn't overly "netted" to allow easy bypassing of Moscow IF rail operations might have been better impeded in there. It would thus seem natural for the "if" to be more earnestly discussed than was the case, even if the end conclusion would be that German bomber efforts would have had little to no effect.

Further, citing "side show" doesn't alone qualify the sum operations and changing natures of the air war on the East Front.

If the Germans had twice the tanks they actually had by the end of 1942, and a million additional infantry replacements, and conducted operations exclusively focused on destroying the Russian army at the most favorable exchange ratios possible, then Russia would have been in deep trouble in 1942 and thereafter.

In all honesty, Jason, while you have cited tank ratios in this and previous posts threads, I still regard it to be a questionable metric when used as above.

Tank count alone doesn't suffice to describe the relative strategic/operational situation of a war theater in WWII. It's also a matter of the type of tanks, the applied armored tactics and combined arms, firepower support (as in artillery & air), terrain & climater, and of course logistics. (It wasn't just German planes under a supply bind.) Not to mention the sum abilities of the opposition; their types of tanks, how many, added anti-tank measures like AT guns & SP guns, and so on & so forth.

Which I know that you are certainly aware of all this, but that still isn't conveyed by the citation of a tank ratio between protagonists, as if it was a "primary factor" in itself.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Spook:

It's merely that the Soviet rail system wasn't overly "netted" to allow easy bypassing of Moscow IF rail operations might have been better impeded in there.

Could you go into this in a little more depth, Spook? This subject came up around the beginning of the year and I checked a couple of my atlases and found several alternate routes to get from anywhere to anywhere else that mattered to the conduct of the war that wouldn't involve Moscow. And since these were were small-scale maps, I'm sure they were only showing the trunk lines. There must have been additional lines that could have been used in a pinch. Only thing was that all my maps were post-war. Given the difficulty in getting this kind of information about the Soviet Union at any time, I'm not sure that pre-war maps would be any more accurate, though.

Michael

[Andrew H.]

Originally posted by Jim Boggs:

Thanks JasonC for sharing that.

I am actually amazed that a government considered very rigid and structured could pull off a stunt like that (re-locate heavy industry) in the face of an invasion and military needs for the rail lines.

I would have to believe that authority had to be delegated to an unheard of degree!

[snip]

Because we know, from how the Cold War came out, that central planning is not a good way to run an economy, generally, we forget that it is a good way to run a war. It's also worth noting that the USSR was very good at running a centrally planned economy.

Central planning can be very good at reaching clearly defined goals that can be reached by mass production, which is the reason that the US had a very centrally planned war effort. Specifically, Roosevelt and his advisors set specific goals (200,000 planes, 50,000 tanks), and then looked to how the available steel, automobile, aircraft, etc. plants could be utilized to reach these goals. As there was clearly a "market" for these products, this worked very well. It's interesting how much more focused the US production effort was than the diffuse and distracted German effort, notwithstanding their totalitarian system and unelected dictator.

Central planning won't work in the civilian economy, of course, because the ability to produce 1 M trucks is worthless (literally) if no one wants to buy them, and next to worthless if you can only sell 10,000 of them.

[Andreas]

Originally posted by Other Means:

if i may venture a toe into these deep waters...i think it possible that if the Germans had treated the areas captured during the offensive better, Stalin would have been a lot more wary of taking "Bonus soliders" from these areas.

As it was, they may not have been that great a bonus anyway. In a study on the German defense on the Vistula in January 1945, Magenheimer quotes an intercepted Soviet radio transmission, following a German programme of disruptive artillery strikes into Soviet concentration areas before the attack. It read: "Send the west-Ukrainians to the rear trenches. We won't win the war with them anyway."

Whether they did send them in the rearward trenches or not, I don't know, but the Red Army certainly performed well when they attacked.

[Andreas]

Those discussing transport of Ukrainian 'stuff' into the Reich etc, would do well to look up the relevant chapter in Vol.4 of the (sort of) official German history 'The German Reich and the Second World War - Vol. 4 - The Attack on the Soviet Union', in which the question of Ukraine's productive capability is discussed in depth.

The idea that better treatment of the Ukrainians would have delivered the goods is pretty much a non-starter, for various reasons, IIRC. The interesting thing though is that the Germans could have known that the planned (very bad) treatment of the inhabitants, would not deliver the goods either, because they experienced it 23 years earlier, when they occupied Ukraine in 1918. Then they also failed to unlock the productive capabilities of the country.

[David Chapuis]

Originally posted by JasonC:

The Russians got through the period of their worst loss rates with winning chances alive, only because the German replacement rate was practically zero over that same period.

Why? Overconfidence. Victory disease. Trying to win on the cheap. Military gambling. Too much faith in superior technique, not enough emphasis on being prepared for the downside and on sheer numerical strength.

Concerning this "Why" question. What, if any, political repercussions would there have been from moving Germany to "maximum military production" before attacking Russia?

To elaborate on my question:

Do you think Hitler and the Nazi’s were in a strong enough position politically in 1941 to move the country to a state of maximum military production? I have always had this conception that the German army (don’t know about the public, but I assume them too) was very wary to go to war, at least with Poland and France. Did that change before Barbarossa? Do you think the German Army/public would have accepted “total war” at that point?

I hope this is interesting.

Very interesting.

[ October 06, 2003, 02:12 AM: Message edited by: David Chapuis ]

[Tero]

Originally posted by Andrew Hedges:

Because we know, from how the Cold War came out, that central planning is not a good way to run an economy, generally, we forget that it is a good way to run a war. It's also worth noting that the USSR was very good at running a centrally planned economy.

Indeed. The West did not win the Cold War because the Soviets were lousy in running their economy. They won because the Soviets could not switch off the munitions production and they could not increase the commodities production to match the Western production of consumer items.

The Western economies were not harnessed to the munitions production after 1945 while the Soviet economy stayed essentially the same in nature from 1941 until 1989.

Central planning won't work in the civilian economy, of course, because the ability to produce 1 M trucks is worthless (literally) if no one wants to buy them, and next to worthless if you can only sell 10,000 of them.

It is even worse if you pay for the production of 1 million trucks and then give them away to your allies at a fraction of their cost. There was a market for the Soviet military produce. They just did not get the market value for it. They ended up paying for other peoples wars.

[Frunze]

Well, they did have severe quality problems, Tero. Though less in military hardware than in other areas of production.

[JasonC]

David - I don't think political inability had anything to do with it. For one thing, I'll bet most of the German people thought they already *were* at total war footing.

When they did go to total war after Stalingrad it was immensely popular. Nations don't like losing wars. "Oh, I can still have real butter but I get a form letter in place of a son" is not usually considered an enticing deal.

If you look at German propaganda at the time of the transition, there were two things they were clearly worried about. Most of all, being blamed for not having done it sooner. "Only now do we see how dastardly they are" mixed with "now is not the time for recriminations" feature prominently.

The only other concern may reflect some of the real political opposition to doing it sooner. And it is directed not at the broad public but internal to the movement and toward ideological consistency. They worried that war economy measures looked like communism. Because anti-communism was a key ideological plank.

When they went to total war the rhetoric against the idle rich was ratcheted up several notches, and class resentment toward the traditional nobility and rich deliberately stoked. All must live a spartan lifestyle, what good are beauty parlors and luxury shops, people spend too much time at spas trading rumors, yada yada.

While those were the worries during the transition, I don't think they are the cause of not mobilizing sooner. They said things internally, not for public consumption, like "kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will fall to the ground". They thought communism was disfunctional and weak, Slavs were untermenschen, yada yada. They vastly underestimated every aspect of Russian military power. The heady victories of the first few months confirmed these strongly held, ideological pre-existing beliefs.

In the autumn they thought Russian manpower reserves must be nearing exhaustion. They were off by more than three and a half years. When a Luftwaffe study IDed 2000 airfields in western Russia alone the report was suppressed as defeatest - a primitive people could not possibly have so many aircraft and infrastructure for them. At least one German leader commented afterward, paraphrasing, if we had known they really had 20,000 tanks and that wasn't all just propaganda we never would have attacked.

The campaign plan called for knocking Russia out of the war in 6 weeks. It was supposed to be over by August. They got to the Dnepr in that period of time and beat most of the army at the border. They thought that was basically the whole army they'd ever have to face. The stuff in front of AG South seemed the last holdouts.

When they won the battle of Kiev they risked the lunge for Moscow in part because they thought the Russians no longer has sufficient forces to maintain a continuous front, and had been reduced to strongpoint defenses around a few key objectives (Rostov, Moscow, Leningrad). Initially it wiped out another half a million men (Bryansk pocket etc) and they thought it was all still peaches. When Moscow didn't fall it was blamed on the mud.

Guderian writes about how at this point the farther an officer was from the front the less realistic his picture of the battle had become. Up front they were feeling exhaustion and local commanders were looking about for positions to halt on, take the defensive, dig in, and await replacements. At army level the watchword was that the Russians were even worse off but the trouble was still felt. Most agreed a last desperate effort could still win the war in a month or so. At AG and higher, there was still considerable optimism. Hitler couldn't believe Moscow hadn't already fallen after the incredible Russian loss statistics he kept hearing.

The illusion died very hard that winter in front of Moscow. When they nevertheless held off the attacks, many of them wanted to think the worst was over and it was General Winter they had to defeat, which they could accomplish by waiting. In the spring of 42 the Russians launched premature offensives - which in fact were only premature because Russians were not tactical equals of the Germans - and defeat of them helped German confidence again. When their own summer offensive tore the front wide open they again thought it was over, that it had been the last stand.

Wishful thinking can reach epic proportions. In 1942 the Russian replacement rate was as high as in 1941, but their losses plummeted. Instead of giant encirclements all along the line there was a giant retreat in the south. With heavy losses, but nothing like those experienced the previous year.

Meanwhile Stavka husbanded its tanks and rebuilt the fleet from a year start low of 7K to around 20K by the time of Uranus. The Germans had no idea their reserves were so large. During the Stalingrad battle Russian losses were extremely high by German, static-force standards, but absorbed only a fraction of new manpower mobilization and very little of the heavy equipment.

The Germans were genuinely astounded when they found out, in one offensive after another, that the Russians had held literally thousands of fresh T-34s off the line for months to unleash them all in one sequence of huge attacks. The first three of these in the south destroyed 3 allied armies directly, one each, cut off the German 6th in addition, and threatened to cut off an additional German in the Caucasus.

It was not all Russian success - additional Russian attempts in the center ended in bloody shambles because the Germans had adequate armor reserves behind that portion of the front. They didn't in the south; they assumed the Russians had thrown everything into Stalingrad and lost it.

You can't begin to understand the depth of German miscalculation of Russian strength until you realize that as late as October 1942, with a huge rolling counteroffensive gathering, the Germans thought the Russians were on their last legs. For the nth time since the start of the war. It wasn't a political constraint. They were just flat wrong about how strong the Russians were.

[David Chapuis]

jasonC - thanks for the meaty response - as always.

I also just today read that the OKH's first operational proposal for the war with France was not one that was expected to conquer France quickly, but one that would lead to a long war. So I guess I had a bad conception (as usual) about the German High command's wariness for a long war.

[HeinzBaby]

I always look forewards to reading your posts JasonC great stuff,

thou I'd beg to differ on the airwar being a sideshow... From about 43' onwards The VVS had superb machines, with their doctrine of Airsupport/interdiction the IL-2 [black death] was the most mass produced aircraft of the war, ably supported by the Pe-2-3's and covered by the La5Ns Yak9's etc. The Luftwaffe even had standing orders to avoid combat against the Yak3 below 3000 meters...Yet then again I guess you got a point when on the Eastern Front whole Corps and Armies were destroyed... especialy in the summer of 44...