Divisional daily supply requirements for various nations

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Jon G.
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#61

Post by Jon G. » 29 Apr 2006, 22:20

For the Korean War I would guess that Chinese divisions were smaller than US divisions and that they had less artillery. Maybe a Chinese division would only be about half the size of a USMC division - the smaller per man consumption can perhaps be explained by 'simpler' Chinese rations (rice is a compact food) and more austere auxiliary services.

However, which activity a division is engaged in should mean more from a logistics viewpoint than the nationality of the division. I'd maintain that an assaulting 1950s era Chinese division would use more supplies per day than a resting US division from the same period.

Delta Tank
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#62

Post by Delta Tank » 30 Apr 2006, 22:34

Michael,

It is my understanding that the "pounds per man per day" includes everything and everyone in theater is included in the calculation. I will try to find my manual, I beleive the number is FM 101-5-10 or something like that.


Mike


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Michael Emrys
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#63

Post by Michael Emrys » 01 May 2006, 04:24

Delta Tank wrote:It is my understanding that the "pounds per man per day" includes everything and everyone in theater is included in the calculation.
That's my understanding as well, for US forces. I just want to be sure the Chinese numbers are calculated in the same way. If they aren't, then the fact that they had very little artillery at division level would drive their numbers down.

Michael

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#64

Post by arctic fox » 18 Sep 2006, 16:32

Hi all,

Combined Arms Research Library has an interesting document called "Engineer estimating data" in "World War II Operational Documents" collection. It contains all kinds of detailed data related to logistics. It's a bit "hard-core" but I found it very interesting.

Engineer estimating data (PDF)

-AF

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#65

Post by Andreas » 14 Dec 2006, 12:01

Andreas wrote:In this article http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/ww ... rlord.aspx it is claimed that a German infantry division required 100 tons, and a Panzer division 300 tons.
Okay, having done some research on the matter, I have now come to the conclusion that the 100 tons is not sufficient for a 1940/41 division in combat, if it brings all its equipment and transportation assets. I am using 1. Welle data from http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Zus ... vision.htm

21. ID used 793 tons of ammunition in combat in 12 days (15-27.07.41) - source is the divisional history. Daily use of 66 tons of ammunition for a period of relatively intense combat defending a bridgehead. It lost 36 officers and 835 men KIA/WIA/MIA in that period.

If the division has 18,000 men, with say two kilograms per men required for food etc (but not water), that is another 36 tons. You are now at above 100 tons, but your horses have not had fodder, your vehicles have not had POL, you have not got any medical, pioneer, etc. special equipment, and you are procuring your water locally. You have no spares, no replacement weapons. So the division can clearly fight on 100 tons without starving, but it is immobile, and it is losing combat capability day-in day-out. Anything less than 100 tons it either has not got enough ammunition for intense fighting, or not enough food. The majority of the supply requirement is for artillery (in this case, ca. 80% of the ammunition, or ca. 53% of the total requirement of 100 tons).

Mobility: in an ordinary division, you have ca. 5,000 of them. They require 58 tons of fodder per day if they are active, but they will require some fodder in any case, unlike vehicles, which don't use POL if they are not driven around. They also require 95-230 tons of water. ( http://members.tripod.com/HistoricalNov ... uineda.htm - I am assuming US gallons of 3.8l and imperial lb of 0.454kg) Your men will, in order to be properly hydrated, consume another 36 tons of water at least (2l/man/day), maybe up to 50. Vehicles - let's assume that a standard vehicle on average uses 8 kg POL per 100km driving, and a standard motorcycle 3kg. The division has 1,000 vehicles and 500 motorcycles. On a forced marching day using a road these would probably drive 100km, assuming trips to the railhead, etc. That's roughly 10 tons of POL, and that strikes me as conservative. If the division is resting, they consume close to 0. If the marching is cross-country, or on a Russian sand road, triple the figure. But of course, if it is marching, it is not in hard fighting, so you won't use the 66 tons of ammunition above.

So we are now at a minimum of 110-160tons (depending on whether it is marching or fighting), plus 130-270 tons of water, but we are still missing stuff, and I have no idea how the missing elements (medical, spares, replacement weapons), can be quantified.

But if I were to guesstimate, 200 tons daily supply requirement for a fighting full strength infantry division of the 1. Welle does not strike me as unreasonable, and almost certainly at the lower end of things. 110 tons appears to be the minimum on the march. If the division is resting and can live off the land, the figure can drop drastically, since horse fodder, water, and food can be procured locally. If even water has to supplied, the tonnage requirement easily doubles.

All the best

Andreas

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#66

Post by Jon G. » 14 Dec 2006, 14:38

Thanks for reviving this thread Andreas.
Andreas wrote:...So we are now at a minimum of 110-160tons (depending on whether it is marching or fighting), plus 130-270 tons of water, but we are still missing stuff, and I have no idea how the missing elements (medical, spares, replacement weapons), can be quantified.

But if I were to guesstimate, 200 tons daily supply requirement for a fighting full strength infantry division of the 1. Welle does not strike me as unreasonable, and almost certainly at the lower end of things. 110 tons appears to be the minimum on the march. If the division is resting and can live off the land, the figure can drop drastically, since horse fodder, water, and food can be procured locally. If even water has to supplied, the tonnage requirement easily doubles.
It strikes me that you could well get two different figures for divisional daily supply requirements, depending on who you asked. Some of the confusion as to just what constitutes a division's daily needs may be because we sometimes confuse consumption with needs. For example: in the case of the 21st ID, that division's I b would concern himself with finding local water sources, wells etc. and determine how much water they could deliver. Similarly, he would set out to find stables and fodder/pastures for the division's horses, and he would endeavour to find and commandeer local food supplies and then re-distribute them to his division's soldiers.

If there were shortages of any of these elementary commodities, he would perhaps ask neighbouring divisions if they had any locally commandeered water/fodder/fresh horses/etc. to spare. Some of these everyday things - i.e. water, fodder - would probably be found by the division's troops themselves without any great interference from higher headquarters, unless there was a shortage of something. The daily consumption of everyday commodities would be known beforehand, and it would apply under all circumstances whether the division was engaged in heavy combat in the middle of a desert, or if it was frolicking in some fat agricultural part of occupied Europe. The variable for how many everyday things would be delivered from external sources would depend on milieu.

Combat posture would affect the harder part of supply. Returning to the case of the 21st ID, the division I b would proceed to request supplies of everything else - i.e. ammunition, probably POL, some/all food, replacement weapons and spares etc. - to the AOK 18 quartermaster. The AOK 18 QM would then endeavour to find the supplies requested, either on a need-specific basis (i.e. 'you reported that you fired off 75 tons of ammunition off yesterday, so that's what I am sending to you'), or on a formulaic basis ('you're only allowed to fire off 65 tons of ammunition per day, so that's what you will get. I have other units to supply') Unlike the everyday needs, above, this part of divisional supply would vary strongly depending on what the division was doing at the time. And, you would probably get very different figures for the 21st Infantry Division's daily needs, depending on whether you asked the division's supply officer or its parent formation the 18th Army's quartermaster.

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#67

Post by Andreas » 14 Dec 2006, 15:28

I agree that it is a question of posture, and location. For example, a division doing a series of forced marches (40-60km/day, no rest days) won't have time to forage for much, if anything, even if they are doing it in the richest agricultural land imaginable. There simply is not the time and they will need everything to be present at their arrival point, when they arrive. A division doing reasonable marches (15-20km/day) in reasonable land, with regular rest days, is a different situation, and some foraging will be possible.

In the context of the article that provided the 100 tons figure (Sealion), I think it is safe to say that it is a serious underestimation of the average, I would set it as a lowest end figure.

All the best

Andreas

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#68

Post by Jon G. » 03 Feb 2007, 00:54

As a small point of reference, the supply needs of the southern part of the British force attacking Abyssinia is stated as 500 tons of supplies and 1,000 tons of petrol per day in March 1941, when a small Indian army contingent captured the port of Berbera. As far as I can discern from Wikipedia, the force attacking from Kenya was made up of the 1st South African Division and the 11th and 12th West African divisions - i.e. a corps-sized formation perhaps roughly the size of the DAK, operating over equally poor infrastructure - no railroads or ports after Mogadishu and until the capture of Berbera. It's unclear if the stated supply/POL needs include SAAF requirements.

More interesting than the evidently rounded figures is the fact that the stated supply needs correspond neatly with the fuel:everything else relationship which I have suggested applied to the PAA - namely 2:1 at the supply head/railhead, perhaps reversed to 1:2 at the frontline as proposed earlier - i.e. 750 tons of fuel would be needed to deliver the remainder of fuel at the frontline.

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#69

Post by Jon G. » 17 Feb 2007, 13:38

To add some data to the discussion, here follows two tables for the German 10th Army's ammunition expenditure during DIADEM - the final Allied assault on Cassino and the Gustav Line. I've lifted two tables from an article by Eduard Mark (the author of the book about aerial interdiction mentioned several times on this thread) in Military Affairs, Vol. 52 #4 p. 179 - essentially a concentrated version of his chapter on STRANGLE.

The first table shows ammunition expenditure in metric tons by the divisions in AOK 10 from May 13th to May 25th 1944.

Image

Note that Mark erronously calls the 26th Panzer Division a panzer grenadier division. The units listed in bold face expended a combined total of 5,773 metric tons of ammunition, or 77% of the AOK 10 total during the listed 12-day period.

The next table shows the changing status of AOK 10 ammunition stocks on selected dates in 1944. Ammunition stocks are expressed as Ausstattungen, that is, daily issues for a day of moderate combat for each ammunition type.

Image

Note that the total AOK 10 ammunition stock does not drop that much from May 10th to May 25th, considering the 7,498 tons of ammunition accounted for in table 1. It's actually Mark's point that the STRANGLE aerial interdiction campaign had a more indirect, but longer lasting, effect on the DIADEM land battle because the aerial roll-back of German railheads prevented a German build-up of ammunition stocks between the March battles for Cassino and the final attacks in May.

It would be very interesting to see Allied ammunition expenditure figures for the same period - particularly 5th and 8th army ammunition usage from May 10th to May 25th.

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#70

Post by Andreas » 18 Sep 2007, 10:26

In Alexander's despatch on Middle East Operations from El Alamein to Tunis, I just came across the following interesting information regardin British supply requirements.

One General Transport Company can support one division up to 50 miles from a railhead or port, if it works 7 days a week, 10 hours per day, over good road. In the desert, they sometimes needed six companies to do the work of one. On 23 August 42 8th Army had 46 GTCs in operation, and a further 7 in reserve.

Does anyone have the TO&E of a GTC?

All the best

Andreas

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#71

Post by JonS » 18 Sep 2007, 10:44

Not a GTC, but these links give the orgs of divisional tpt companys

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Chri.html

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Petr.html

http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-WH2Supp-c7.html

Frustratingly, it isn't easily accessible, and requires a bit of hunting and pecking.

From the US Army 1942 handbook on the British Army: "Each general transport company is composed of three or four platoons, each operating 30 3-ton trucks."

From Blackburn "Guns of Normandy", the standard convoy road speed was 7.5 miles/hr.

Assuming full str, three platoons, and operating at 50 miles, that gives a fwd lift of just over 200 tons per day, over good roads, for a single GTC. If we assume that each truck was able to make one round trip per day (ie, 13.5hr driving days, or 10 miles/hr) then the fwd lift goes up to 270 tons.

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#72

Post by Bronsky » 18 Sep 2007, 15:18

From:
http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse. ... &user=&pw=

"At the time of El Alamein, 8th Army possessed 36 3-ton or equivalent General Transport Companies, each with a single trip lift of 300 tons, 6 tank transporter companies, 9 water tank companies, and 1 bulk petrol company. 8,700 General Service Trucks were issued to 8th Army (of a total of 10,000 received in the Middle East apart from Russian aid) in the period 1 August 1942-23 October 1942. 25 pioneer and labour companies were assigned to 8th Army, and 24 were held in GHQ REserve, largely in support the logistical effort.

The official historians report that an armoured division required 400 tons/day in pursuit, and that a typical GTC lift was only 100 miles/day due to local operational difficulties. Therefore, it would take 130 General Transport Companies (and 13,000 3-ton trucks) to support an armoured division in Tripoli from El Alamein, not including their own maintenance needs. In fact, of course, due to their own requirement for fuel and replenishment, the number of trucks absorbed in logistic support of the supplies for said armoured division would at this distance be an order of magnitude higher than that directly required by the actual armoured division."

Actually, the above figures don't include water but as a ballpark figure for a GTC capacity they'll have to do ;-)

The 2.5-ton truck companies each had 48 trucks, with the idea being that 8 would usually be under repairs so for planning figure the lift was 100 tons.

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#73

Post by Andreas » 18 Sep 2007, 15:23

That's great, thanks!

I presume the 36 is a typo, and should be 46? Or would the 9 water and 1 bulk-petrol companies make up the missing ten?

All the best

Andreas

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#74

Post by JonS » 18 Sep 2007, 22:48

Bronsky wrote:... 3-ton or equivalent General Transport Companies, each with a single trip lift of 300 tons, ...

...an armoured division required 400 tons/day in pursuit, and that a typical GTC lift was only 100 miles/day due to local operational difficulties. Therefore, it would take 130 General Transport Companies (and 13,000 3-ton trucks) to support an armoured division in Tripoli from El Alamein, ...

...

The 2.5-ton truck companies each had 48 trucks, with the idea being that 8 would usually be under repairs so for planning figure the lift was 100 tons.
In this context I would take it that "a typical GTC" is one with four platoons of 30 trucks, for a total of 120, of which 20 "would usually be under repair" (ie the same ratio as a 2.5-ton truck company) giving a planning figure of 300 tons lift per day at a range of 50 miles (100 mile round trip).

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#75

Post by Jon G. » 19 Sep 2007, 08:45

It is interesting to see the figure from Bronsky's link about a British armoured division needing 400 tons of unspecified supplies per day when in pursuit. It compares reasonably well with the 350 tons/day (with no modifiers for posture) given earlier on this thread for a DAK panzer division. British armoured divisions of the period and theater were a bit larger than panzer divisions I think? But then it's not the size of the baby as it were that matters, it's the length of its unbilical cord that is the most important factor when calculating supply needs.

It's just as interesting to note that the Alexandria-Tobruk railroad (with a stated daily tonnage of 2,500 tons as of Dec. 1st) allowed the 8th Army to leapfrog its operations forward to Benghazi in just a matter of days, with Tobruk used as a port of transfer, rather than as a harbour for unloading supplies.

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