Hello Igor,
Okay, I see that you've got your figures in order.
Sorry if I came off as a bit impatient, it's just that this is the king of all repeat discussions and your level of expectation and patience gets worn down over the years.
There are however three problems with your logic here, as far as I can see.
One, it is well accepted that a significantly improved force relation should in itself provide a more favorable ratio of losses. Hence, the sort of improvement your figures show is to be expected as a result of that, quite apart from any improvements in performance.
Two, When you are comparing
average strength to losses, you cannot compare periods of different duration. Therefore you cannot compare the resulting figure for the second half of 1944 to the figure for 1942 as a whole and conclude that there was an improvement of 100%.
Three, how much improvement is there really? The development looks a good deal less significant if you put it in the context of relative casualty infliction:
Year.....German avg strength.....Soviet casualties.....Ratio
1942.......2,600,000................6,364,558.............2,45
1943.......2,750,000................6,550,362.............2,38
1944.......2,250,000................5,355,806.............2,38
Comparison:
2.45:0.21........11.7 times better
2,38: 0.24........9,9 times better
2,38: 0.31........7,7 times better
Is this a dramatic improvement? To focus on the Soviet per-man ratio improving from a measly 0,21 to a still measly 0,39 is to miss the wood for trees. What these figures indicate is that the Germans had an enormous margin of superiority in 1942 and that they still had an enormous margin of superiority in 1944. If the Soviet improvement is large from an internal point of view, that is because it starts from such a startlingly low base.
All this of course with the same caveat that you made: No allies included, general trends, broad outlines.
Some lesser points:
So, your ratios for 1941-43 are pretty accurate, while 1944s are a bit off.
I used Krivosheev's figures from Table 69, with Sick and Frostbites subtracted. Yours is a bit lower (where do they come from?), but for the sake of argument I'm happy to use yours - it does not much matter at the level of precision we are operating with here.
Let's try to eliminate this factor. Let's calculate hit-ratio. How many german casualties accounted to an individual soviet serviceman a year?
As mentioned, doing so does not eliminate this factor. Better force relation, better
ratio of losses, all other things being equal.
Of course, there are other factors:
Qvist wrote:...considerable relative improvements in equipment and organisation and refinements in operational techniques
But two of them (equipment and organization) are tactical-level improvements and contribute mostly to tactical performance of troops.
¨
Yes - actually, we should separate performance and tactics, which are not strictly speaking the same thing.
Then, let's recall, that Krivosheev miss about 3 mln. of KIA and MIA, most likely lost in 1941 and 1942.
This is news to me - I would be extremely grateful if you could enlighten me further about this?
cheers