What was the split of Forces between PTO and TWO in %?

[Blashy]

Anyone have a definit number on this?

I read somewhere something like 2/3rds were in the ETO. But that was just one source and not a reliable one.

[Rolend]

I would think that is a good 'ball park' number but no I do not know for certain and it shifted a lot as the war went on so I would think you would need to ask that question with a time frame added.

[Lars]

Assuming you're just looking for US?

At the end of the war in Europe there were a total of sixty-one divisions in the ETO: fifteen armored, forty-two infantry, and four airborne (one airborne division, the 13th, did not enter combat). Also, there were seven divisions in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO): one armored, five infantry (including one composed of African-American troops, the 93rd [designated Colored in the segregated Army, and a term that we will utilize without intent of prejudice in this essay]), and the 10th Mountain. There were twenty-one divisions in the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO); one cavalry (dismounted), nineteen infantry (including one that did not enter combat, the 98th, and one that was Colored, the 93rd), and one airborne.

Just Army, doesn't include Navy or Air Force.

[Maverik]

I think all the Germans where in the ETO and all the Japanese in the PTO!

Sorry, the door was wide open on that one!

[Lars]

Well, if we're going to count Chinese, I'm going 2/3 in the PTO.

[Cary]

Hm.. so includes about 2 tank groups of 7 divisions each, 4 infantry armys of 9 divisions each, a para unit, and two corps...

Strange, seems like roughly the American force pool. Wonder why that would be?

By comparison, the Germans surrender 10-15 divisions at Stalingrad, and they have about 200+ divisions involved on the Russian front -- ballpark figures from memory.

World War II may have been Detroit's war (something like x0,000 (*375,000, per Stalin's Organist's post below) trucks supplied to Russia via lend-lease I want to say 80, but I don't have the figures). But the war in the west was (*relatively*) a sideshow. The numbers below do a lot to tell the story of the war. (And reinforce just how horrific was the event that we recreate)

Wartime Casualties:

Soviet: 25 Million, 1/3 soldiers

Poland: 6 Million

Germany: 4 Million

Yugoslavia: 1.5-2 Million

Japan: 2 Million

United Kingdom: 400 Thousand

United States: 300 Thousand

(From Gerhard Weinberg A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II

Normalize these numbers by population, and one gets a signficantly different sense of each country's wartime involvement.

Global: 60 Million, including 6+ million victims of the holocaust.

http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/p4013coll8&CISOPTR=130&REC=18

is a detailed breakdown of US Army battle deaths, btw.

http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/contentdm/home.htm is, in general, anexcellent collection of digitized military history documents.

[ June 30, 2006, 12:24 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

[Lars]

Pretty good numbers here on wiki. Scroll down a bit and it has number served by country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#Casualties_by_country

The CBI just gets no respect though.

[Blashy]

I'm sorry, I meant for USA.

[Cary]

Germany, Eastern Europe, and Soviet Union literally decimated by the war... That wiki page is quite useful.

[Blashy]

Originally posted by Cary:

Hm.. so includes about 2 tank groups of 7 divisions each, 4 infantry armys of 9 divisions each, a para unit, and two corps...

Strange, seems like roughly the American force pool. Wonder why that would be?

But we have to take into account that this is what they had IN action and with that in mind this is where the limits right now are IMHO too low to be historical.

If you loose one of those two tank units, you have to rebuild it, wait for it and then ship it again.

While in reality USA had a steady flow, so with a higher number this can be properly represented. USA will not be able to field 7 tank units at once, if it does so it will lack Armies and AFs or other areas, but it will have the ability to have a pretty good constant flow of units (in production, waiting transport, in transport, etc...), which seems more historical.

[Cary]

If you loose one of those two tank units, you have to rebuild it, wait for it and then ship it again.

While in reality USA had a steady flow, so with a higher number this can be properly represented. USA will not be able to field 7 tank units at once, if it does so it will lack Armies and AFs or other areas, but it will have the ability to have a pretty good constant flow of units (in production, waiting transport, in transport, etc...), which seems more historical.

Agreed, but actually that seems to me a reasonable constraint on the use of American forces -- Roosevelt, Marshall, and Eisenhower were very concerned not to take too many casualties. In game it means that you don't commit the American troops until the German troops are thinned out, and you keep them at TO&E strength instead of attacking. Actually a very elegant way of differentiating American and Russian operational strategy.

[Rolend]

Yes Blashy there were always LARGE number of Americans in the 'chain.' that is why some US divisons took like %200 casulities durning the war but for the most part they were fully strength units and why they could be listed as 'being in the line' for the entire time from Normandy to VE day. The reinforcement system the US used I think was very effective.

Normally when a German division got beat up they would pull it out of the line, reinforce it, reequip it and then send it back into the line. This to me would represent the 'replace a destroyed unit at lower cost and quicker' system that is in the game, very well. However America tended to do it differently, they would feed those reinforcemets directly to the divisions when needed, this type of system ment you had a lot of man power that does not show up as corps or army but were there all the same.

[Blashy]

Well since we can't have the system the US was using the next best thing is the ability for them to produce more units, hence there will be a continuous flow of at least 3 unit types (Armies, tanks, airfleets).

[Guest Mike]

Trucks to Russia?

375,000 or so.

So close Cary - real close!!

[R.J.]

"Wartime Casualties: Soviet: 25 Million, 1/3 soldiers"

And iirc some 3 million of those 8 million Russian soldiers died in German captivity (because in Nazi ideology Slavs were subhuman), and probably another 2 million died needlessly because of stupid Soviet tactics that essentially wasted human lives (because in Soviet ideology everybody was subhuman). I'm not arguing that the Russians faced the bulk of the German army, just pointing out that the numbers were higher than they had to be because of the inhumanity of the two systems.

[Cheese Panzer]

Originally posted by Lars:

Assuming you're just looking for US?

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />At the end of the war in Europe there were a total of sixty-one divisions in the ETO: fifteen armored, forty-two infantry, and four airborne (one airborne division, the 13th, did not enter combat). Also, there were seven divisions in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO): one armored, five infantry (including one composed of African-American troops, the 93rd [designated Colored in the segregated Army, and a term that we will utilize without intent of prejudice in this essay]), and the 10th Mountain. There were twenty-one divisions in the Pacific Theater of Operations (PTO); one cavalry (dismounted), nineteen infantry (including one that did not enter combat, the 98th, and one that was Colored, the 93rd), and one airborne.

Just Army, doesn't include Navy or Air Force. </font>

[Cary]

Originally posted by R.J.:

"Wartime Casualties: Soviet: 25 Million, 1/3 soldiers"

And iirc some 3 million of those 8 million Russian soldiers died in German captivity (because in Nazi ideology Slavs were subhuman), and probably another 2 million died needlessly because of stupid Soviet tactics that essentially wasted human lives (because in Soviet ideology everybody was subhuman). I'm not arguing that the Russians faced the bulk of the German army, just pointing out that the numbers were higher than they had to be because of the inhumanity of the two systems.

Fair points, but I tend to think mildly colored by ideology. Note that Americans seem to laugh rather too quickly on applying the term "surrender monkeys" to the French but then diminish the blood-price Russians and Soviets paid to avoid the French "solution."

I'd like to think the United States confronted by a Nazi invasion would be willing to pay as high a blood price for independence.

Plenty of places to point out the incompetence of the Soviet regime (though for a dictator Stalin is remarkably flexible, getting rid of Commissars in 1942 and letting Zhukov basically run the show, to say nothing of reviving the Russian Orthodox church, at least for the duration of the struggle).

And certainly Stalin should bear a LOT of blame for initial nRussian military incompetence -- the Russian army in the West, particularly, was disproportionately light on junior officers and NCOs due to the purges of the '30s (a casualty rate unmatched in Siberia, notably). But this only magnified the problem that the Soviet Union had -- given the initial losses in Barbarossa, their army was inevitably going to be a conscript army, trained under emergency circumstances, and tactically incompetent. Add to that the fact that significant portions of Soviet manpower reserves were not Russian, but a whole melange of nationalities, and you get a sense of just the challenge the Soviets faced.

(Interestingly, the US/Western Allies saw saw a little bit of the crazy-quilt that made up the Soviet Army when trying to process prisoners taken from the Ost battalions in Normandy -- sprinklings of Turkic-speakers and others complicated issues significantly.)

David Glantz and others make the compelling point about the Russian military of 1943-44: what is striking is not its incompetence, but how quickly it learned.

The Russians/Soviets paid an absolutely horrific blood-price to repel the German invasion, no question, and some signficant portion of it was self-inflicted. But, ironically, much of the Soviet regime's strength and legitimacy post-war came from its ability to claim victory in the "Great Patriotic War" and, literally, to claim the loyalty of the veterans of the "Greatest Generation."

This often devolves into a political argument, but it is worth being realistic about the Soviet war effort -- Stalin may have been hated, and there were signficant pockets of armed resistance to the Soviet regime throughout the war, but the Soviet Union survived and won against the Germans because the Soviet soldiers believed in what they were fighting for.

Just to add to this, in presponse to Night's question a few posts down, one of the interesting questions about the Russian front is how much tension was there between what the Soviet soldiers believed they were fighting for and what the Soviet government wanted them to believe.

[ July 01, 2006, 11:08 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

[Cary]

Originally posted by Stalin's Organist:

Trucks to Russia?

375,000 or so.

So close Cary - real close!!

Wow!. I was low by an order of magnitude. That is actually a stunning figure. The US sent alomost as many trucks as soldiers.

I think the ASL vehicle guide had a note about the Russian soldier's interpretation of the abbreviation U.S.A. -- "Kill that Sonofabitch Adolf" Evidently they saw the abbreviation a lot.

Of course you can imagine there might be some acrimony after the war over whether the Russians owed us a debt or we them. "You never paid us back for lend-lease in World War II" doesn't go over too well with a Russian whose grandparents did not survive the war.

[ June 30, 2006, 12:28 PM: Message edited by: Cary ]

[Night]

Cary i'm really not sure what point you are trying to make here, you just come out randomly with snap-shots at America and praise for the soviets. This topic was about force numbers, not whos cock is bigger.

[Desert Dave]

True cool place, Chicago.

So my Son tells me, he

Was there notso long ago.

Havent' been 'er myself, so

I rely on Carl Sandburg's mighty

Fine free-verse words:

__________________________________

CHICAGO

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I

have seen your painted women under the gas lamps

luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it

is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to

kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the

faces of women and children I have seen the marks

of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who

sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer

and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing

so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on

job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the

little soft cities...

-- Carl Sandburg (1916)

_____________________________

However, should I ever get there,

And I hope to!

First place I go,

Wrigley Field!

Plenty of room there, and here

For folks from all over the place.

Chicago,

Boise,

Desert City,

San Diego,

Cologne.

Madrid.

Well, you get the idea.

ANY & EVERYBODY can just... saunter on in

Say what they like,

NOBODY knows it all!

Live and LET live,

I always say. :cool:

[ July 01, 2006, 06:13 AM: Message edited by: Desert Dave ]

[Cary]

It's true, Chicago's a great town; Wrigley field's a blast, but the long lakefront is beautiful; an asset few cities have.

Originally posted by Night:

Cary i'm really not sure what point you are trying to make here, you just come out randomly with snap-shots at America and praise for the soviets. This topic was about force numbers, not whos cock is bigger.

Interesting that you take these points as snap-shots at America, or comparisons of casualties as "whose cock is bigger." Admittedly, I took the thread off topic, but then the initial question was answered in the second or third post. I don't know that I'm "praising" the Soviets anywhere, particularly, though I am pointing out that the people of greater Russia sacrificed a lot.

I am attempting to inject a bit of realism into the debate over the focus of the war in Europe. It is an interesting issue just how antsy people get at being confronted with the reality that the conflict on the East front was an order of magnitude larger than that on the West. And I find it interesting that this antsiness seems to extend to finding ways of emphasizing that Russian casualties were not "well spent." Certainly some truth there, but that is a truth of any war -- SNAFU is a well-chosen acronym.

To bring it back to the original topic, if I must, the reality is that American contribution to the war in Europe was the pursuit of a "national interest" that was somewhat more distant than that felt by the Soviet Union, for example. Here I'm saying nothing more than that people fight harder to protect their own homes, and states fight harder to protect their own territory. Indeed, given that Roosevelt really did want to influence the European war, Pearl Harbor was something of an inconvenience, posing the real challenge from the Japanese against the somewhat more theoretical challenge from the Germans.

I will grant you: the point about French "surrender monkeys" and Soviet profligacy is a bit snarky, but I have a hard time seeing it as unfair. Asking the French to win and not surrender in 1940 may well have been tantamount to asking them to sacrifice an equivalent tenth of their population. One has to ask first if that is a sacrifice one is willing to accept on one's own part.

[ July 01, 2006, 11:17 AM: Message edited by: Cary ]

[Desert Dave]

It's true, Chicago's a great town; Wrigley field's a blast, but the long lakefront is beautiful; an asset few cities have.

Well, Cary,

Down 'ere in dusty old High Desert,

We got us a LONG water-front as well.

The Rio Grande River!

And "the bosque" that lines both sides

Is rife with wild-life (... animal

and human, sometimes same thing, IE,

see below, LOL!)

And all sorts of biking trails

And river-side attractions, though,

Only problem being... we've had a drought

For many years now,

And that storied River is rolling low,

And the Bosque goes ablaze

Far too often.

Highest rate of Lightning Srikes!

Here in the State where I live,

Of anywhere in the entire world,

I'll bet most didn't even know!

Too,

Idiots with their hi-explosive "fire-works"

(... there are PLENTY of places where

these are allowed, to shoot off, or only watch, but, ah, it's human nature

I'd suppose -> ta hell with anybody ELSE might like ta enjoy this place! I destroy!

what ah wants to, so there! <- Well,what ya gonna do?)

Tends to cost we the taxpayers millions

Every single year,

Seeing as how we gotta pay them

Courageous fire-responders

Who have to put 'em out.

_____________________________________

To bring it back to the original topic, if I must...

You needn't, necessarily.

Things can be serpentine,

Or kaleidoscopic,

Why not?

Most can follow the freight-train line,

Them strictly parallel rails,

Track and cinder and track,

Hitching a ride if they care to,

Like Kerouac and his Beat kind

Alway usta do, and

Ignoring enny bric a brac.

Makes things more... interestin'

Should you ask me. :cool:

[ July 01, 2006, 12:14 PM: Message edited by: Desert Dave ]