Horses in the Wehrmacht

[MilHist BT]

Hi Zebedee

You wrote: Absolutely. It then follows that any argument that the Wehrmacht was abundantly equipped with motor vehicles is somewhat flawed. Horses and mules still had their place in terrain which was not favourable to motor vehicles but there cannot be a question that despite having large numbers of motor vehicles the Wehrmacht was nowhere near well-provided with them considering the size of the actual forces deployed.

The Wermacht had a reasonably mechanized force. Their problem was that the vehicles they had were inadequate to the terrain and climate and were dying off in droves. First the Russian rail system had to be drastically modified before it could be used by either the Wermacht eisenbahn or the Reichsbahn, this took several months, by which point the rasputitsa had begun and all surface transport slowed to short range travel over courdoroy roads.
Once winter began the Germans found that their vehicles had to be run 24 hours a day that first winter, and that they lacked the fuel and lubricants to do this. So the engines and drive trains froze solid and were damaged since they were not designed for sub arctic climates.
Complicating this was the lubricants and fuels captured from Russian stocks. Germany captured several POL dumps only to find they mostly contained diesel fuel and incompatible lubricants the Germans could not use.
Additionally the GTM transport units were having to operate at 2 or 3 times the distances from their railheads that they were intended to, so what logistics they could deliver was days late and consumed more fuel than allowed for just to get the materials to the armeegruppe distribution centers, and resulted in a much higher than anticipated truck failure rate.
Although Germany had large stocks of trucks and cars available, there was no way to get them to the line units outside Leningrad and Moscow.

It may sound trite, but Germany basically de-mechanized themselves until the next summer. What vehicles they had could not survive the climate and replacement vehicles were stuck in Europe since the limited rail transport had to give priority to ammunition, spare parts, replacements, food and fodder. With no hard surfaced road network to use for driving the trucks to the front, the trucks and cars sat in Europe.

That's why the panje sleds and ponies became so important. The panje horses were small and scruffy compared to the European draft horses and could pull much smaller loads' while the panje carts / sleds had relatively low capacities compare to the standard Heeres wagons. But the panje horses could survive the Russian winter with far less feed and shelter requirements and the smaller and lighter panje sleds could be maneuvered more readily than the larger Heeres wagons in deep snow and typical Russian terrain. In the previous campaigns Germany could always use reasonably convenient highway and rail systems, and their horses / wagons were adequate. Now neither was true.

It says a lot that the German Ostfront troop nickname for their own standard Hf.7 Field wagon was pferdemorden / Horse killer (did I spell the tense correctly?) since even the more massive European horses proved incapable of pulling it on anything other than a hard surfaced road which of course did not exist in Russia outside of major cities.

One of the postwar evaluations by German general staff officers of Heeres ops in Russia mentions "panje regiments" which would have only a few panzers running and had their entire support and logistics transported by panje, so this was not something that only happened to a brigade or two but instead affected the entire German army in Russia that first winter.

[Jon G.]

...
The Wermacht had a reasonably mechanized force...

Cf. 'reasonably' with Andreas' post which I earlier quoted from in this thread:

...20.6.41
3,050,000 men
625,000 horses
600,000 motorised vehicles including armoured reconnaissance (PSW)
3,350 tanks (excluding PSW)...

Actually a surprisingly high number of motor vehicles, at least to me. The consensus seems to be that the 600k motor vehicles include motor cycles, although I'm happy to be corrected on this. But 600,000 vehicles weren't enough to motorize the entire Ostheer. In fact, the Germans could only muster this number of vehicles by ruthless requisitionings of vehicles across occupied Europe - and even purchasing a few trucks in Switzerland as well if memory serves me.

...
Additionally the GTM transport units were having to operate at 2 or 3 times the distances from their railheads that they were intended to, so what logistics they could deliver was days late and consumed more fuel than allowed for just to get the materials to the armeegruppe distribution centers, and resulted in a much higher than anticipated truck failure rate.
Although Germany had large stocks of trucks and cars available, there was no way to get them to the line units outside Leningrad and Moscow...

The problem of panzer spearheads operating far ahead of their bases of supply wasn't encountered for the first time in Russia. In fact, the Wehrmacht logistics services suffered appalling loss rates already in Poland in 1939 and in France in 1940. And in the east, trucks began to break down well before the onset of winter.

This thread examines German motor vehicle inventories at some length in order to find out to which degree the Wehrmacht had to depend on horses for its transport needs. I'm surprised how you can state that the Germans had 'large stocks' of trucks and cars.

[Zebedee]

Hi MilHist BT,

Apologies for it taking me a few days to reply.

The Wermacht had a reasonably mechanized force. Their problem was that the vehicles they had were inadequate to the terrain and climate and were dying off in droves. First the Russian rail system had to be drastically modified before it could be used by either the Wermacht eisenbahn or the Reichsbahn, this took several months, by which point the rasputitsa had begun and all surface transport slowed to short range travel over courdoroy roads.

Once winter began the Germans found that their vehicles had to be run 24 hours a day that first winter, and that they lacked the fuel and lubricants to do this. So the engines and drive trains froze solid and were damaged since they were not designed for sub arctic climates.

Complicating this was the lubricants and fuels captured from Russian stocks. Germany captured several POL dumps only to find they mostly contained diesel fuel and incompatible lubricants the Germans could not use.

Additionally the GTM transport units were having to operate at 2 or 3 times the distances from their railheads that they were intended to, so what logistics they could deliver was days late and consumed more fuel than allowed for just to get the materials to the armeegruppe distribution centers, and resulted in a much higher than anticipated truck failure rate.

I think I disagree with Jon G. only in a relative sense. For an army the size of the Ostheer, I do not think that 600k vehicles was actually sufficient to meet the needs of anything other than the short campaign planned. That’s not to say that 600k vehicles should just be dismissed as an insignificant number – far from it, the requisitions which were needed to meet this number crippled Europe. But in comparison to the Anglo-American armies, 600k vehicles is perhaps half of what the British (let alone the US) considered adequate for such a force. Perhaps the difference in the half-full/half-empty view of the Ostheer’s vehicles between Jon G. and myself comes from something simple like me approaching the numbers from the perspective of British army numbers and Jon from a deep knowledge of the Heer? I can certainly see Jon’s point when one considers the way in which the academic literature has swung backwards and forwards over the issue of the motorisation of the Heer.

Your argument that the ‘conditions’ were the problem is one which has been made ever since the war ended. However, the evidence seems to point to problems with German motor vehicles of a similar scale in the abysmal autumn in Poland and the horrendous summer in France. The issue, at least to me, was that German industry could not meet the demands of operating 600000 vehicles. Spare parts were in short supply (deliberate policy as well as just an overwhelming variety of types of vehicle playing a part) and the issues of maintaining the pre-war German fleet of vehicles were already problematic. The issues of fuel and rubber were also extremely difficult to resolve. On top of that, it would seem that many (the majority?) of the vehicle fleet of the Ostheer were not adequate over a (relatively) long period for even the relatively benign conditions of a military operation in France. Attrition exceeded replacements even pre-war.

The attrition of motor vehicles was severe long before conditions in the SU really started to impact upon the Ostheer. (eg Overy in ‘Why the Allies Won?’ cites DiNardo and gives: August 1941 – German tank strength at 50% of June 1941 levels, start of November 1941 (ie pre-winter) – 75000 German vehicles out of 600000 (June 1941) still working. Some divisions down to 12% of initial motor vehicles still in working order.)

Likewise, one cannot blame a failure to capture the ‘right kind’ of fuel as being responsible – if the plans for Barbarossa were based upon such a contingency, then the German logistical staff were living in cloudcuckooland. While one can point to the strategic direction as occupying such a place, the actual logistical arrangements seem to be more than adequate to meet the strategic assumptions given to the logistical team to base their operational plans upon. That the Heer advanced as far as it did is testament to the tenacity of the landser and the quickthinking of the logistical teams.

Although Germany had large stocks of trucks and cars available, there was no way to get them to the line units outside Leningrad and Moscow.

Could you point me in the direction of some research on this which supports your argument? I personally doubt there were large stocks sufficient to replace losses, unless this involves further requisitions from across the Grossraum with consequent impact upon the economies of those countries. (eg Di Nardo via Overy (op.cit) gives: 1942 – 400000 horses taken from Grossraum to SU by Heer. 59000 vehicles produced in Germany.) I would doubt whether new vehicles built in the Grossraum from June to December 1941 would be anywhere near sufficient to replace losses.

It may sound trite, but Germany basically de-mechanized themselves until the next summer. What vehicles they had could not survive the climate and replacement vehicles were stuck in Europe since the limited rail transport had to give priority to ammunition, spare parts, replacements, food and fodder. With no hard surfaced road network to use for driving the trucks to the front, the trucks and cars sat in Europe.

That's why the panje sleds and ponies became so important. The panje horses were small and scruffy compared to the European draft horses and could pull much smaller loads' while the panje carts / sleds had relatively low capacities compare to the standard Heeres wagons. But the panje horses could survive the Russian winter with far less feed and shelter requirements and the smaller and lighter panje sleds could be maneuvered more readily than the larger Heeres wagons in deep snow and typical Russian terrain. In the previous campaigns Germany could always use reasonably convenient highway and rail systems, and their horses / wagons were adequate. Now neither was true.

I agree with the general thrust here. However, you do make it seem like this was deliberate policy. I’m sure this isn’t your intent, but I thought I ought to just clarify that the situation of the Ostheer in late 1941/early 1943 was anything but what was expected. It would hardly be a sensible use of resources to allow scarce assets to just be whittled away because they were incapable of operating in the Russian winter. If DiNardo is correct, then the damage to the motor vehicle fleet was done well before winter set in (assuming Glantz is correct in his description of weather conditions).

The idea that the use of horses was somehow a sensible option is not true. The logistical demands of feeding the horses needed for an infantry division dwarfs the amount needed for the POL etc of a motorised division. This applies even more so in winter when all feed for horses has to be provided. It is inefficient to use horses if one has the capability to fully motorise one’s army. The reliance on horses was down to the fact that it was the only option not because it was the best option.

As a counter-example one could point to the Soviet use of motor vehicles in winter conditions or the recollections of Milch (via Irving, sorry) which highlight that the issues surrounding motor vehicles in winter could be overcome, and in fact were known and contingency planned for. (eg the way to cold-start engines was known, but it would appear that this information was never passed down to the troops. In the case of motor vehicles, considering how few there were left of them by the winter, I doubt this would have been significant in any case; although it would certainly have eased some of the problems faced by the Ostheer, one wonders whether the retreat would have been even greater after the Soviet counter-offensive?).

Likewise the reliance on the smaller ‘ponies’ appears to me to be down to need rather than choice. The ponies were the only show in town once the larger horses had died off. Just how much this was down to ‘conditions’ and how much this was down to other factors (eg killing for food, lack of care over prolonged periods, inadequate horsefeed) is something I’d be very interested in reading about. There certainly was no plan of ‘go to SU, lose all motor vehicles, rely on native horse breeds to ensure bare sufficiency of needs gets through to troops’.

Much of what I’ve written here can be found covered in detail within this thread, although I have tried to add some value by putting in a few figures given by Overy citing Di Nardo’s book.

All the best,

Zeb

[Bronsky]

Wow, this thread is going all over the place!
Interesting as the discussion is, may I suggest that other threads already exist to discuss the Axis (or European, I forget) food situation, European resources, Tooze's book, North African logistics, trucks, or logistics in general? Some of these issues I'll be really happy to discuss, like aircraft production choices, just not here.

A few points, some already covered and others not:

1. Horse meat is actually more tender than beef (this is for Jon's experience in East Berlin), of course, this comes with a "everything else being equal" rider...

2. There are tables with figures on horse and vehicle attrition and capture in Russia in the multi-volume German history of the conflict (DRZW / Germany in the 2nd WW), in particular volume 6 as part of the discussion about Fall Blau. I have them written down somewhere and can post it if no-one finds them before I do.

3. German requisitions of horses pre-Barbarossa only refer to these specific Barbarossa-caused requisitions. Horses captured as part of the 1940 campaign were classified as "war booty" and therefore Wehrmacht property (as were a lot of vehicles, but I won't go into that here).

4. The Vichy French army kept a fair number of horses as part of its establishment, most of the time these were loaned to the agriculture (in particular during harvest). That led to administrative battles over which horses were "military" (and therefore would be taken by the Wehrmacht) and which were "civilian" even when both categories were working side by side in a farm. As a result, there was a new wave of horse requisitions from France following the occupation of the rest of France. The figures about French cereals output mask the fact that other crops were sacrificed to keep wheat production at a minimum, not to mention cattle etc.

5. A major source of horses for the Soviet Union was Mongolia. Perfect grazing area, the country supplied 6 million horses to the Soviet war effort.

6. So far, the only comparison that I've seen has been between Germany and the US/UK, which strikes me as somewhat unfair. The latter two were the most heavily motorized belligerent, and seaborne logistics lent themselves very poorly to the use of animal traction had they wanted to (which they didn't). Add to that the availability of oil & rubber (easier to make synthetic rubber when you have a lot of oil). Better comparisons would be between Germany & the Soviet Union, France, Italy?

7. Speaking of Germany vs France, remember that in a per capita comparison, France = 40 million and Germany = 70 million bordering on 80 by 1939.

8. Why use horses rather than vehicles? Because they don't use oil, because they're available, because they can repair themselves over time, because the skill base exist, both in the army and in the countryside, to tend them whereas such skill base usually is lacking for motor vehicles. Very solid reasons as long as one isn't fighting in the desert, or planning on fast sustained advances (in which case it's better to use motor vehicles since they can't be repaired or replaced after breaking down, whereas horses can't).

No time for more, next time I'll try to contribute something meaningful for a change

[Jon G.]

I'm ever so slowly returning to this subject again after I've purchased DiNardo's book. Although I am loath to brand a book which costs in excess of 1 € per page if you discount point- and useless illustrations and chapter endnotes, DiNardo's little book offers precious little new under the sun if you have read his original article - in fact, the journal article is in some ways better than the book because DiNardo explicitly does not address the Wehrmacht's dependence on horses consequences for the civilian economy.

I'm sorry I've left you in the lurch for a long while now, Zeb. I have not had as much time for the forum lately as I've wanted to. I shall return with a lengthier response to your post later. In the meantime, I'll address Bronsky's briefer post.

Wow, this thread is going all over the place!
Interesting as the discussion is, may I suggest that other threads already exist to discuss the Axis (or European, I forget) food situation, European resources, Tooze's book, North African logistics, trucks, or logistics in general? Some of these issues I'll be really happy to discuss, like aircraft production choices, just not here.

True, this topic does go all over the place. Perhaps because it is a first (at least as far as I can discern) topic which attempts to focus on a fairly overlooked aspect of the German (&c) war effort. It's a pretty broad subject regardless, which says something with this forum counting well in excess of a million posts.

But I am open to suggestions as to how best to split off various sub-topics covered in this thread to more focussed sub-threads.

...1. Horse meat is actually more tender than beef (this is for Jon's experience in East Berlin), of course, this comes with a "everything else being equal" rider...

Heh, well, what struck me back then was that the horse was probably very old before somebody decided to turn it into a meal. I have no moral objections to eating horsemeat and have had it on other occasions where it was delicious, if not as rich as beef. Donkey, I'm told, is more of an acquired taste...although Mortadella di Asino can be quite good, too

2. There are tables with figures on horse and vehicle attrition and capture in Russia in the multi-volume German history of the conflict (DRZW / Germany in the 2nd WW), in particular volume 6 as part of the discussion about Fall Blau. I have them written down somewhere and can post it if no-one finds them before I do.

Those numbers would be interesting to see. Apart from some random pin-points which, largely, are already mentioned in his journal article, DiNardo makes little reference to horse attrition in Russia.

He does however make some interesting points about the 6th Army's horse situation, which deteriorated already quite early on, with 230 equines lost per day already in early November. This was after the 6th Army had evacuated a large proportion of its horses to rear areas by October, because horse fodder caused an intolerable strain on the army's already overburdened supply line. This, DiNardo maintains, meant that the 6th Army was operationally immobilized by mid-October.

By the time the 6th Army was trapped in Stalingrad, there were 25,000 horses left. Interestingly, HG Don requested that 22 tons out of the daily target 300 tons of supplies to be airlifted to the Stalingrad garrison be horse fodder, although apparently no fodder was ever delivered by air and, as we know, the horses eventually ended up becoming fodder themselves.

3. German requisitions of horses pre-Barbarossa only refer to these specific Barbarossa-caused requisitions. Horses captured as part of the 1940 campaign were classified as "war booty" and therefore Wehrmacht property (as were a lot of vehicles, but I won't go into that here).

OK, that does make the Lageberichte figures more credible. DiNardo mentions that 34,000 horses had been sent to Germany from France, Belgium and Holland by August 1 1940, sourcing to DRZW bd. 5.

[good stuff snipped]

...6. So far, the only comparison that I've seen has been between Germany and the US/UK, which strikes me as somewhat unfair. The latter two were the most heavily motorized belligerent, and seaborne logistics lent themselves very poorly to the use of animal traction had they wanted to (which they didn't). Add to that the availability of oil & rubber (easier to make synthetic rubber when you have a lot of oil). Better comparisons would be between Germany & the Soviet Union, France, Italy?

Regarding the unsuitability of horses in amphibious operations, DiNardo makes some interesting points about the German invasion of Norway. The loss of some 150 horses when the transport Ionia was sunk represented the loss of some 20% of the horses apportioned for the Oslo part of the invasion force - but despite this being a relatively small loss, it was enough to severely restrict the mobility of German artillery early in the campaign.

...
8. Why use horses rather than vehicles? Because they don't use oil, because they're available, because they can repair themselves over time, because the skill base exist, both in the army and in the countryside, to tend them whereas such skill base usually is lacking for motor vehicles. Very solid reasons as long as one isn't fighting in the desert, or planning on fast sustained advances (in which case it's better to use motor vehicles since they can't be repaired or replaced after breaking down, whereas horses can't)...

Yes, DiNardo mentions that veterinarians, blacksmiths and other horse specialists were never in short supply, and that they could transfer their professions effortlessly to the army because the German population, by and large, was far more familiat with horses than they were with motor vehicles. There were far more problems with transferring civilian mechanics to the panzer forces.

[Bronsky]

I'll try to dig up the figures on horse and vehicle attrition in the 1942 Ostheer, but until then to focus on a specific point:

...6. So far, the only comparison that I've seen has been between Germany and the US/UK, which strikes me as somewhat unfair. The latter two were the most heavily motorized belligerent, and seaborne logistics lent themselves very poorly to the use of animal traction had they wanted to (which they didn't). Add to that the availability of oil & rubber (easier to make synthetic rubber when you have a lot of oil). Better comparisons would be between Germany & the Soviet Union, France, Italy?

Regarding the unsuitability of horses in amphibious operations, DiNardo makes some interesting points about the German invasion of Norway. The loss of some 150 horses when the transport Ionia was sunk represented the loss of some 20% of the horses apportioned for the Oslo part of the invasion force - but despite this being a relatively small loss, it was enough to severely restrict the mobility of German artillery early in the campaign.

Right, but it goes beyond that.

When you have horse-borne logistics, you need to supply fodder. Bulk shipping and transport of fodder is impractical. Fodder decays, can't be properly packaged, takes up a lot of space, etc.

Whereas when you have vehicle-borne logistics you can ship fuel in bulk (tankers), along with spare parts etc. If a truck is contaminated with sea water, it can be repaired whereas a horse can't. If various boxes of spares (or fuel drums) are drenched, they can be cleaned up and are still usable. A bale of hay won't be.

All told, motorized logistics make a lot of sense when you have an overseas supply line. Of course, it helps that the countries who can afford waging a war on the other side of a sea or an ocean are usually the richer ones, so it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation whether Army X chose trucks because it could afford to or whether it chose them because they fit its needs better, but my point was that vehicles make a lot of sense when you're fighting overseas. They're also less manpower-intensive.

[Bronsky]

In keeping with my "let's not compare Germany with Britain", here are figures from the French side, with an army of comparable size to that of the Heer in 1939.

The French army had 580,000 horses and mules after its mobilization, but that wasn't enough to cover its needs and some 19,000 were bought abroad. Note that the figure for animals bought would have been higher had more horses been available. During the winter of 1939-1940 French horses died at an enormous rate, almost 10,000 monthly.

That was due to poor care, which itself was due to bad discipline, institutional disregard for proper care of the animals (the French cavalry in 1914 wasn't considered particularly good at horse care), and the shift between rural and urban populations i.e. a smaller proportion of the troops knew how to tend horses. The terrible climate didn't help.

I wonder about Italy. With a peacetime equine population of around 1 million (IIRC) the RE would have been very short of horses as well.

[Jon G.]

Hi again Zeb, and sorry for the huge delay in getting back to this thread. I wanted to get hold of DiNardo's book before returning to the horsey stuff, but, sadly, DiNardo's book offers precious little new under the sun relative to his article and what we have already discussed here.

... I’ll try to stick to horses in this thread. Perhaps we should have another thread to discuss wider economic/strategic/logistical planning?

Certainly this thread is a little messy, which might scare away prospective new participants. The problem is that this topic is very wide-ranging, and the temptation for little asides (which I plea guilty of) is always there, what not with Tooze being added to the discussion because he offers a delightfully coherent and wide-ranging picture of the German war economy.

...at any rate the line between public property kolkhoz horses and public property military horses is probably a little blurry.

Certainly the mobilisation plans of the Red Army in 1940/41 implied that most of the motor transport would come from civilian sources. One would assume that the same would hold true for horses due to the way in which Soviet forces were intended to be ‘fleshed out’ by reservists. How great this demand from civilian sources was, and indeed how many horses were already with their units in 1941 is something which I’ve not seen cited by either Erickson or Glantz, although in fairness, they both do say that documentation for 1941 is somewhat thin on the ground.

It would be interesting to see, but I am in no way well-versed enough in Soviet history to be able to determine if one factor behind the decision to collectivize Soviet agriculture wasn't that the kolkhoz economy also made it a lot easier for the central government to requisition horses in time of war?

The German method to the acquisition of horses from the civilian economy was by using remount commissions who would buy horses at regional horse-fair like events which could (& did) offer local farmers the opportunity to sell off pregnant mares, stallions, lame horses and other undesirable animals to the sometimes not very professional remount commissions. Some of the problems with the remount commissions were solved already prior to the war - from outright over-mobilisation of horses in preparation for Anschluss to a more targetted and better handled mobilisation of horses in preparation for the invasion of Czechoslovakia - the takeover of the Sudetenland turned out to be bloodless, but that is not really the point here.

I doubt if any monetary transactions were involved when Red Army recruiters requisitioned horses from public kolkhozes...

...As a rough, ballpark figure for Germany, I’d estimate something like 2.8 million horses in agriculture. This is from 700000 farm estates (22% of the total number of farms) of between 20 hectares and 125 hectares which would be able to sustain more than 1 horse and I've guesstimated 4 horses per estate. My maths is pretty shaky, but I think this comes out at something like 41 horses per 1000 population which isn’t too crazy as a rough guesstimate and is probably an underguesstimation. How's that for some horseplay? Sorry. It's your fault for starting the punning..

Heh, well, I could run with that figure. I think i have seen a rough figure for the German horse population somewhere. I'm just struggling to remember where that was...

Halder, whose lamentations over the German motor vehicle situation are well known, apparently also commented (in his KTB) that while horse losses in the Polish campaign were easier to make good than vehicle losses, the German army would still face a horse shortage by 1941 as a consequence of the 1939-1940 partial de-motorization plan. Halder's estimate was 4,500 horses and 2,000 horse-drawn vehicles per infantry division would be needed to implement the demotorization plan.

But then Halder was expecting a long campaign in the west. The rapid fall of France and horses captured from Poland and, later, the rest of occupied Europe came to the rescue. Occupied Europe had more horses than motor vehicles to offer; Polish breeds quickly became a Wehrmacht staple.

Sadly Glantz (in the one work of his I’ve currently got) says nothing about horses other than 88 cavalry ‘divisions’ were raised by the end of 1941 (c220 000 horses required). At most one could imply that the scorched earth tactics would mean that areas futher east would have been stripped of their horses, and that the difficulty in requisitioning sufficient motor transport to keep motorised infantry units mobile enough to keep up with their tanks would imply that similar difficulties would be encountered trying to round up horses. Glantz comments that much of the records from 1940/41 were ‘lost’, and suggests that this was due to a conscious decision to suppress anything which would show the reasons behind the catastrophic logistical situation of the Red Army. Erickson is similarly reticent on the subject of horses, although he does provide the one afteraction report, that I’ve seen at least, to describe horses being captured as part of a battle – Stalingrad, and some 18000 horses being taken by the Red Army.

Bronsky writes that Mongolia was an important Soviet horse breeding area with six million horses contributed to the Sovet war effort. So even if the Germans captured the USSR's major agricultural regions (which had large horse populations for that reason), they didn't capture the Soviets' most important horse breeding grounds.

As I wrote in my post above, DiNardo writes in his book that the 6th Army began de-horsing itself already in October in order to relieve the strain on the logistics services. Most horses were slaughtered and eaten during the siege - according to DiNardo Paulus reported on Jan 19 that there were no horses left - but some units, being perhaps too attached to their mounts, instead set their horses free in the hope that the Soviets would take care of them.

As a contrast to the deteriorating German horse situation, DiNardo writes that the southwest, Don and Stalingrad fronts combined had amassed 169,609 horses in preparation for the Stalingrad counteroffensive.

I’ve ordered DiNardo from the British library but it will be several months before I get hold of it. That’s unless the kind librarian adds it onto the huge list of books I demand she buys

That is probably the right way to acquire DiNardo's book considering how pricey (and thin!) it is. I was a bit disappointed with it but then perhaps I had too large expectations.

I can understand the problem with reconciling the figures. It does seem a little unusual in light of DiNardo’s figures. Naturally, one would assume DiNardo’s figures to be perhaps understatements of reality but it would imply either a conscious policy decision (recorded perhaps?) to restrain requisitioning in western Europe or DiNardo’s numbers are out by a significant factor...

Bronsky offered a solution as to why numbers differ in the Lageberichte; there were several types of requisitions. That said, the Lageberichte authors (i.e. the Wehrmacht commander in France) clearly had an interest in saving 'their' area from too many horse and vehicle (&c) requisitionings. The March 1941 Lageberichte mentions that village doctors (probably the most motorized civilian occupation of all) were issued horses and carts after their vehicles had been taken away...

[Bronsky]

Certainly the mobilisation plans of the Red Army in 1940/41 implied that most of the motor transport would come from civilian sources.

I'm not sure that this makes the Soviets different from other armies. Certainly, the bulk of motor transport came from requisition in Germany, Italy, Britain and France after the mobilization.

Later on, stepped up production of military vehicles would alter these proportions - with the Wehrmacht being one obvious exception, relying on loot and captures as a significant additional input - but all the WWII armies relied on requisition to provide those amenities already available to the civilians.

Maintaining a sufficient pool of horses for military use in case of mobilization would be a waste of resources. The ratio of horses to troops was about 25% in the early-war, non English-speaking, armies. So we would be talking of upwards of 2 million horses kept idle on Army budget in case of an hypothetical mobilization ? No way...

It would be interesting to see, but I am in no way well-versed enough in Soviet history to be able to determine if one factor behind the decision to collectivize Soviet agriculture wasn't that the kolkhoz economy also made it a lot easier for the central government to requisition horses in time of war?

I don't think so.

The pre-kolkhoz Russians hadn't experienced significant problems in mobilizing the requisite numbers of men and horses before, as opposed to equipping and maintaining them in the field after thay had been mobilized.

Maybe no monetary transaction was involved, but that's not really indicative of anything, given that monetary transactions weren't as central to the Soviet economy as they were in western ones. Theoretically speaking, the horses were State property anyway, so the "transaction" would involve e.g. a given amount of horses being supplied in exchange for a given reduction in the quota of foodstuffs that would be handed to the State (also free) at the end of the year.

While not a "monetary transaction" it ended up being the same thing.

The German method to the acquisition of horses from the civilian economy was by using remount commissions who would buy horses at regional horse-fair like events which could (& did) offer local farmers the opportunity to sell off pregnant mares, stallions, lame horses and other undesirable animals to the sometimes not very professional remount commissions.

...which was also the story everywhere else. Let's face it: how many people had the skills for mass purchase of horses ? Also, that volume of purchases in a relatively small market (or rather, accretion of small markets) threw the prices completely off-range.

There were both cases of buyers being sold undesirable horses, and cases of the State being so good at getting the right price that it made too large a drain in the local horse population, with direct consequences on the agriculture and local economy.

Bronsky writes that Mongolia was an important Soviet horse breeding area with six million horses contributed to the Sovet war effort. So even if the Germans captured the USSR's major agricultural regions (which had large horse populations for that reason), they didn't capture the Soviets' most important horse breeding grounds.

No, but the horses would require fodder once in RKKA service, and with the loss of agricultural regions that would be all the harder to come by. I don't have figures for horse attrition in the Red Army, but am willing to bet that it was high, in keeping with the general philosophy of "pedal to the metal, and if it breaks then it just wasn't strong enough and let's get two more".

As a contrast to the deteriorating German horse situation, DiNardo writes that the southwest, Don and Stalingrad fronts combined had amassed 169,609 horses in preparation for the Stalingrad counteroffensive.

Is this the source for this table?

Note that the men to horses ratio was 6:1 for Uranus, compared to 5:1 for Barbarossa and 4:1 in some of the early-war German corps that I have figures for.
So the right question isn't whether 169,609 horses is more than the Germans had but if it was a lot of horses. I'd say it wasn't. Put differently, even if they were less poor than the Stalingrad Germans, the Stalingrad Soviets weren't rich.

[Art]

Certainly the mobilisation plans of the Red Army in 1940/41 implied that most of the motor transport would come from civilian sources. One would assume that the same would hold true for horses due to the way in which Soviet forces were intended to be ‘fleshed out’ by reservists. How great this demand from civilian sources was, and indeed how many horses were already with their units in 1941 is something which I’ve not seen cited by either Erickson or Glantz, although in fairness, they both do say that documentation for 1941 is somewhat thin on the ground.

The number of horses in Red Army in June 1941 amounted to roughly 500 thousands. According to the February version of the mobilizational plan of 1941 the war-time army should have 1 137 thousands. The limit of horses requisitioning from civilian economy was set on 672 thousands. As the authors of the plan mentioned it equaled to 20 % of the number of horses suitable for usage in the Army. I can't help with the numbers on real requisitioning, have never seen them.

[Jon G.]

...

It would be interesting to see, but I am in no way well-versed enough in Soviet history to be able to determine if one factor behind the decision to collectivize Soviet agriculture wasn't that the kolkhoz economy also made it a lot easier for the central government to requisition horses in time of war?

I don't think so.

The pre-kolkhoz Russians hadn't experienced significant problems in mobilizing the requisite numbers of men and horses before, as opposed to equipping and maintaining them in the field after thay had been mobilized...

Sure, but my comment was more from a resource-management point of view. That is, perhaps collectivisation helped make the 1941 Soviet moblisation a less messy exercise than the 1914 Russian mobilisation?

The German method to the acquisition of horses from the civilian economy was by using remount commissions who would buy horses at regional horse-fair like events which could (& did) offer local farmers the opportunity to sell off pregnant mares, stallions, lame horses and other undesirable animals to the sometimes not very professional remount commissions.

...which was also the story everywhere else. Let's face it: how many people had the skills for mass purchase of horses ? Also, that volume of purchases in a relatively small market (or rather, accretion of small markets) threw the prices completely off-range.

There were both cases of buyers being sold undesirable horses, and cases of the State being so good at getting the right price that it made too large a drain in the local horse population, with direct consequences on the agriculture and local economy.

Yes, I presume that remount commissions outside Germany also had problems. Even so (and here I am leaning heavily on DiNardo again) the Wehrmacht was able to use Anschluss and the Sudetenland invasion as dress rehearsals for the mass conscription of horses for WW2:

For the Anschluss, the XIII Corps* mobilized no less than 14,870 horses from southern Germany - 3,660 horses were directly conscripted and sent to army units, the remaining 11,210 were purchased by horse procurement commissions in close cooperation with local agricultural authorities. In the after action report, the XIII Corps commissioners observed that local peasants had attempted to profiteer from the conscriptions, and that they had brought older, less useful animals to the procurement markets. Only 10 percent of horses acquired by the horse procurment commissions were thought fit for immediate military service. Likewise, de-mobilizing horses after the Anschluss was a mess due to incomplete record-keeping.

By marked contrast, the same XIII Corps only mobilized 4,539 horses for the Sudetenland invasion. Although DiNardo gives no total for useless horses, he does state that 'some regiments' reported that up to 30% of the horses they received were unfit for service, this still shows an improvement over the Anschluss experience. There were still examples of peasants bringing unfit horses to the procurement markets, but apparently not as many as for the Anschluss operation. The after action report suggested that the procurement commissioners be given more training, and that civilian blacksmiths were taught how to shoe army horses.

Perhaps the Anschluss and Sudetenland invasions gave the Wehrmacht some recent experience in horse mobilisation which western armies didn't get?

*DiNardo uses the term 'XIII Corps' throughout, but I suspect that horse mobilisation was the responsibility of Wehrkreis XIII, which had its HQ in Nuremberg.

As a contrast to the deteriorating German horse situation, DiNardo writes that the southwest, Don and Stalingrad fronts combined had amassed 169,609 horses in preparation for the Stalingrad counteroffensive.

Is this the source for this table?

Yes, it appears so. DiNardo sources the Operation Uranus horse numbers to Louis Retondo's book Battle for Stalingrad

Note that the men to horses ratio was 6:1 for Uranus, compared to 5:1 for Barbarossa and 4:1 in some of the early-war German corps that I have figures for.
So the right question isn't whether 169,609 horses is more than the Germans had but if it was a lot of horses. I'd say it wasn't. Put differently, even if they were less poor than the Stalingrad Germans, the Stalingrad Soviets weren't rich.

I think DiNardo provides the Soviet figures mostly for contrast, and in order to show that the Soviet rail system was capable of supporting a larger build-up than the German rail system was when preparing for Operation Blue.

He also states the 719,702 men of the Don, Southwest and Stalingrad fronts which are given as a combat unit total in the table you link to as a total. With the more precise numbers from your table the ratio comes out at about 5.5:1 for combat troops only.

Edited to clarify that the second round of horse requisitionings was for the Sudetenland invasion; the sentence got mangled in the copy-paste process.

[Bronsky]

Yes, but as there's no breakdown between combat and non-combat horses, I thought I'd take he total troop strength as well!

[Jon G.]

True, DiNardo does give the impression that the men to horses relationship was better for Operation Uranus than it actually was. He does that by only counting Soviet soldiers in combat units (719,702) and holding it against the horse total of the three Soviet fronts (169,609). He further states that 42,249 horses were employed by the III, IV and VIII Guards cavalry corps.

[Zebedee]

Hi Jon G.,

I too am somewhat snowed under.

Just a quick point re. 6th Army horses and the amount claimed as captured - it probably refers to horses captured in operations other than the kessel itself. Which seems to be a common problem with Soviet accounting in WW2 and then relating back to German records etc.

Thanks Art for the Soviet figures.

All the best,

Zeb

[Gothard]

In Fact there was a "Standard" German Infantry Wagon - the All Steel HF7 you refer to was a Heavy Infantry wagon and designed for paved roads.

The HF2 however was the "Standard" Heavy Infantry Wagon. Pretty much a makeover of the Heavy Provision 05 - this was a 3/4 ton wagon with a 1000kg payload towed by 4 horses whereas the Hf7 used only 2 horses despite weighing in a 4 times that of the HF2.

German Wagons were divided into 7 Classes:
1. Army Wagons or Hf ( Heeresfeldwagon )
Hf 1 = Light wagon
Hf 2 = Heavy wagon
Hf 3 = Small Wagon
Hf 4 = Mountain cart
Hf 7 = Steel Heavy wagon
Hf 11 = Large Field Kitchen
Hf 12 = Small Field Kitchen
Hf 13 = Large Field Kitchen
Hf 14 = Small Field Kitchen

Artillery wagons used the Prefix Af - for example the the Af 7 was the barrel cart for the 10cm K17 whereas the standard 10.5 cm guns used the older LfH Limber 98E, 18 or 18/40

The Infantry used specialised carts with IF prefix, If 5 carried the MG 34 while If 9 carried the 8cm Mortar, If 8 being the standard general purpose cart.

Army Sleds used Hs
Engineer wagons used Pf
Radio and telegraph wagons used Nf
Admin troops used Vwf

Each wagon used a second set of numbers to designate specialty The Hf 1 could be the Hf 1/1 for carrying engineer equipment or the or the Hf 1/14 Weaponmasters wagon

By 1944 due to production costs the simpliflied Erfa 40 and Erfa 43 wagons as well as the Pleskau 1 and Pleskau 2 replaced the standard wagons in production

an interesting note is 120,400 fieldwagons and 38,500 infantry carts were made in 43 and 150,000 wagons and 40,700 carts in 44... yeah modern army !
Note wagons used 2-4 horses and carts 1-2 horses you can deduct how many horses ya need just for the new stuff every year.

As far as the Panje myth thats all patootie the Hf 3 was fully comparable to the panje with a larger payload. The main users of the Panjes were in fact motorised units that had lost their vehicles thru attrition and didnt have wagons on their TOE's. The Hf 7 was never produced in substantial numbers despite being used constantly by some authors to give examples of the shortcomings of german transport. No German was going to give up his Hf 3 for a Panje.. Hf 1 maybe if there was a horse shortage Hf 7 definetely If a suitable tracked mover wasnt available.

http://worldwar2talk.com/viewtopic.php? ... c94480dd92

German Infantry Carts, Army Fieldwagons, Army Sleds 1900-1945 Schiffer Military History ISBN # 0-7643-1273-1