What if: Hitler wins the war due to slightly stronger Barbarossa forces

[David Thompson]

Let's start seeing sources for the factual claims.

[Paul Lakowski]

Came across figures for 19th PzDiv's POL consumption in liters from June 16 to October 31: 4,222,680 gasoline, 1,013,110 diesel, 200,060 oil. From its war diary as cited by Stahel in Battle of Moscow, pg. 103.

Using 7.5 lbs/gal(imp) density, that's ~4,100 tons. Maybe it'd be 5,000t if we included its share of GTR fuel consumption?

I had settled at 10,000t per extra division earlier in the thread; that's perhaps excessive especially given the earlier conclusion to the fighting.

ROBERT FORCZYK reports VS [Verbrauchssatz] was the standard unit of fuel measured. This was the volume of fuel needed to move the entire division 100km on road , which 125cbm fuel or 93 tons.

...which means .93t/km on the road.
...which would mean ~900t for the ~1,000km from Bialystok to Moscow.
...which is obviously too low.
...which obviously raises the question of tactical/operational vs. strategic fuel consumption.
...which means this answer is obviously besides the point.
...except insofar as it relates to the extra fuel consumption of moving farther into Russia, but only assuming equal or lesser tactical/op movements.

Except - this is not a "road trip" from Warsaw directly to Moscow and the answer is absolutely central to the Wehrmacht's failure to reach Moscow.

Jentz has a reported [PANZER TRUPPEN VOL-I pp 208] listing km driven by the units panzers. The rank and file tank was 11,000-12,500km, while the command tanks were only 3200 km. This suggests tactical movement is 3-4 km for every operational km driven.

[TheMarcksPlan]

Except - this is not a "road trip" from Warsaw directly to Moscow and the answer is absolutely central to the Wehrmacht's failure to reach Moscow.

Yeah you're right. For some reason I had read your post as purporting to quantify actual campaign fuel burn, which was poor reading by me.

I remember the command/fighting mileage delta - thanks for the exact cite.
I would guess that the ratio under-represents the operational/tactical fuel burn delta. German command vehicles stayed closer to the fighting troops than merely being in the same operational space...

[MarkN]

Returning back to the original post starting this thread. A post from early May - 4 months ago...

Introductory Post
The lynchpin of this ATL is a slightly more powerful Operation Barbarossa that actually achieves its central strategic goal: destruction of the bulk of the Red Army west of the Dvina-Dniepr line. Contrary to common perception, the Ostheer largely failed at this task: the largest Red Army grouping (Southwest Front) retreated intact – though damaged – from the border battles, as did Southern Front and Northwest Front. Only Army Group Center succeeded.

Operational failure by AGS and AGN enabled Stavka to concentrate its entire first echelon of reserves (16th, 19th, 21st, and 22nd armies plus several mechanized corps) and most of the first wave of newly-mobilized forces against Army Group Center (24th, 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st, 32nd, 33rd, and 43rd armies at least). These forces reconstituted Western Front repeatedly and forced AGC into a costly and prolonged Smolensk battle that disrupted German planning and shook confidence in early victory. Relatively speaking, the Red Army contained AG’s South and North with little reinforcement. See maps from Glantz’s Stumbling Colossus below:

The Ostheer possesses 20 additional divisions (10 panzer and 10 motorized infantry) on June 22, 1941 in this ATL. Using the extra forces, Army Groups North and South encircle and destroy five armies during the Border Battles (up to July 10th) - forces that, in the OTL, impeded their advances for months. During July and August, the stronger AGS destroys the reconstituted Southwest and Southern Fronts without help from AGC; its prisoner haul includes reserves that fought AGC during the OTL Battle of Smolensk. AGN simultaneously advances against weaker opposition to reach Lake Ladoga at Schlusselberg by early August. AGC executes the Smolensk battle with little trouble, sealing the central pocket by July 20th and going over to a relatively peaceful operational pause until early August. During this pause, AGC is reinforced by one of AGN’s PanzerGruppe (6 mobile divisions) and by one of AGS’s mobile corps (2 Pz + 1 Mot.Inf divisions).

On August 6th, AGC launches Operation Typhoon spearheaded by its three PanzerGruppe, encircling nearly half of the Red Army’s standing field forces around Vyazma and Bryansk. After another brief operational pause and further reinforcement by AGS mobile forces, AGC is poised to launch the final assault on Moscow by September 6th with overwhelming force. Stalin is forced to concentrate the bulk of his undertrained new forces to defend the capital. Meanwhile, the month of August sees AGN seal Leningrad's fate by linking up with the Finns on the Svir River via a drive through Tikhvin. AGS completes its destruction of the (slightly-smaller-than OTL) Kiev Kessel during early August, breaks out from its Dnepropretrovsk bridgehead to seize the Donbass in early September, and has cleared the Crimea but for the Sevastopol fortress.

With only ~2 million men at the front in early September – many of them woefully undertrained - the Red Army can perhaps defend the capital if it abandons the fights around Leningrad and the far-eastern Ukraine. But of course Stalin can't accept that option. Leningrad falls with a massive prisoner haul in October, Moscow follows with a bigger haul in November. AGS pushes its weakened foes to the Don and takes Kharkov, Kursk, Voronezh, and Rostov by the onset of the worst weather in early December. Rundstedt is poised for Hitler’s next primary strategic goal of taking the Caucasus.

Rundstedt begins the Caucasus campaign during January, planning to reach Baku by October 1942 unless Soviet collapse enables a quicker advance. AGC and AGN resume their advance in the spring, occupying the Volga basin and cutting off or capturing Murmansk and Archangel in conjunction with the Finns. By early 1943 at the latest, Stalin – should he retain power – will be left with a population of only ~50 million aside from the dubiously loyal Central Asian republics. Perhaps as important, he will have virtually no oil production and only the Vladivostok lifeline to his Western Allies. Japan plans to sever that lifeline as the desperate Red Army rushes forces westward. The USSR will have lost all major agricultural regions, preventing any hope of evacuating most residents of the occupied territories with the retreating armies.

By the spring of 1943, Hitler can dictate harsh terms to the USSR and pivot all of his forces west, or can advance into the Urals and Central Asia with a significantly smaller Ostheer. The repeated Kesselschlacht of ’41 and ’42 have meant the Ostheer faced a much less numerous and competent Red Army after the Border Battles and has suffered far fewer casualties. The Wehrmacht has ~1 million more men at its disposal in May 1943 than in OTL and can spare at least a million more from Ostheer. Peace in the East or not, Hitler has sufficient forces to annihilate any incursion into Europe, a fact the West knows and accepts.

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I will articulate this ATL further in following posts but I’m going to do it with unconventional chronology: First, I’ll describe the ATL early battles because this truly is the heart of the project. In subsequent posts I will trace the concept backward and forward in time to explain the following:

...and so on.

The forum is still waiting for "First, I’ll describe the ATL early battles because this truly is the heart of the project."

Across at least 2 threads, TheMarcksPlan had written reams and reams of text. Some of it is creating ever more fantasy to remove the historical impediments to his narrative, some of it clearly is nothing more than diversion and distraction.

Nowhere is there a substansive description of how the early battles would be fought in his fantasy narrative. There is a lot of handwaving stating they would all be a resounding success for the Heer - such as that evidenced in the quote above. There are also demands that other posters do his research and work for him. But no attempt by TheMarcksPlan to substantiate the claims derived from his imaginary Heer and imaginary Red Army.

TheMarcksPlan fantasy natrative is explicitly based around a fantasy Heer. A fantasy Heer that did not exist in reality. A fantasy Heer that he has imagined with greater force numbers, greater personnel numbers, equipment that did not exist, logistic support that did not exist, applying a military strategy opposite to historical reality and performing tactical operations contradicting the historically dominant panzerwaffe doctrine.

Similarly, TheMarcksPlan has a fantasty Red Army opposing the fantasy Heer in his fantasy border battles. This can be teased out from his claim that 600,000 troops of Southwestern Front would be removed from the orbat in the first border encirclement. Historically, there were simply not enough troops present, nowhere near, for that claim to be valid. Moreover, his fantasy narrative timeframe doesn't provide a large enough window for enough troops to arrive in the pocket between 22 June and the fantasy encurclement closing. QED, TheMarcksPlan fantasy narrative is based upon fantasy STAVKA employing a completely different strategy with a completely diffetent deployment of Red Army forces to historical reality.

TheMarcksPlan claims, "...the ATL early battles [are] the heart of the project.". Indeed. Whether it is or is nor possible for the Heer to have more troops, more formations, more equipment, more reseources and logistic support and different doctrine and tactics is completely irrelevant if, even with all those changes and add-ons, there is no credible description of how they succeed.

[Cantankerous]

He would have had all collective farms broken up and privatized, and all state-run factories and thermal plants placed under private control, while inviting white emigres back into Russia. He would have established regularly scheduled airline service between Moscow and Tokyo, with Junkers EF 53s taking passengers to Tokyo from Moscow, Kiev, or Minsk.

[TheMarcksPlan]

He would have established regularly scheduled airline service between Moscow and Tokyo, with Junkers EF 53s taking passengers to Tokyo from Moscow, Kiev, or Minsk.

In what historians regard as his greatest atrocity, Hitler banned vodka in Russia and decreed borscht to be a puree of sashimi and sauerkraut.

[TheMarcksPlan]

...I haven't posted in this thread for a while, but I remain committed to the feasibility of the basic ATL. More of the expostulation has shifted to a follow-on, related ATL in which Germany fields only 5 more panzer divisions and motorizes 5 other divisions: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=243557.

Of particular note to the feasibility of this ATL is my post on mobilization of Western European labor resources - and production rationalization - from an earlier date: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=243557&start=45#p2216965.

As that long post argues, Germany could have inducted at least ~1 mil more laborers from Western Europe by early 1941 given sufficient political will to overcome internal resistance to further migration, which predictably would have occurred given earlier realization of Germany's strategic predicament (just as Germany plowed through these political constraints later when it belatedly realized its predicament). These laborers would be more than sufficient to substitute for the work of the ~300k additional soldiers called for in this ATL, while also providing the additional ~1% GDP's worth of weapons production to arm those soldiers.

I will continue developing the narrative of the "slightly stronger Barbarossa" in the other thread.

[tramonte]

On the issue of the feasibility of the extra equipment, here's a quick excel calculation I started a while back:



The figures aren't exact; I haven't differentiated the infantry/artillery weapons between Pz and Mot. divisions for example (this actually overstates the requirements for the 10 panzer divisions). And I'm sure there are some items missing (AA guns come to mind immediately but I'm not going back over it again, too much other work today).

But let's say I'm off by a factor of 5 and the cost of equipping these divisions is 2.5bil RM. That's still a small percentage of German war expenditures pre-Barbarossa.

The fact is that equipping a land army was, relatively speaking, cheap in 1941. For that reason you can have a poor country like Russia outgunning a rich country like Germany, which spent much more on air and naval warfare.

The biggest obstacle IMO isn't producing the extra weapons had Germany decided to enlarge its army as envisioned in the ATL. Rather it's mobilizing the extra ~400k men. Germany did so (and more) later in the war by ramping up its use of foreign labor - both "free" and forced. Its efforts in this domain were not systematic until later in the war with, inter alia, the appointment of Sauckel as plenipoteniary for labor. More could have been done earlier.

German munition production value in 1943 was estimated been 30 billion RM. According most of post Cold War studies the share of AFV (not only panzers but assault guns, tankdestroyers + self propelled guns too) of German munition production has been average 7% = ~2,100 billion RM. And when AFV production was 12,063 the average production price - and without it's weaponry - has been ~ 175,000 RM. This value add is of course those of spare parts, motors, etc... but without that weaponry of AFV.

So the claiming that building let's say modernized Pzkw IV's cost just about 100,000 RM is not true at all. More likely the real cost maintain it working (with spare parts, extra motors, etc) cost 70-80% more. And as i mentioned - without even weaponry.

Source: USSBS, European report 3, pp 276-9; Statistical Digest of the War
and Phillips Payson O'Brien, How The War Was Won

[TheMarcksPlan]

More likely the real cost maintain it working (with spare parts, extra motors, etc) cost 70-80% more. And as i mentioned - without even

Good points but for exactly these kinds of reasons I analyzed the requirements as I was off by a factor 5.

Including weapons might bump your 70-80% delta up to 100%, so we're talking a factor of 2. Still within the margin I posit of no more than 2% delta to armaments spending.

[Paul Lakowski]

Remembered reading prewar cost of new Panzer Division [OVERY?] would be ~ 1/4 billion RM, each...so I wondered why not. It seems politics blocked most attempts to expand one service branch over another...a situation dear Adolf created when he abandoned defence ministers Groener's directive [Tasks for the Wehrmacht] to establish a military CINC Wehrmacht to oversee all economic/military efforts towards war. Instead Hitler was more threatened by military so divide & rule, so he set each service branch off against the others.

ASKEY points out [correctly] that there was enough motorization within the Barbarossa bound infantry divisions to have built 75 of them as motorized infantry divisions, Since these would be using the exact same inventory of armaments/ munitions and fuel as the Historic case- it would not over burden the Barbarossa war effort.

Obviously with half as many infantry divisions , this will shift the fighting...but the balance of the personnel horses wagons & Bicycle's would be sufficient to form 65 Kavalry Korps [ponderous beasts each with >3000 wagons karts & limbers plus >12000 horses/mules etc].To act as a follow on force to sweep away all stragglers and eliminate all Pockets. Again since its using the same number of horses/personnel & fodder etc as the historic force , it to should not burden the offensive too much.

Sounds like a good 'thought exercise'.

[TheMarcksPlan]

ASKEY points out [correctly] that there was enough motorization within the Barbarossa bound infantry divisions to have built 75 of them as motorized infantry divisions

Good points but idk about motorizing everything and having follow-on cavalry forces. The Kesselschlachten relied on powerful infantry forces to fix the encircled forces in place while their flanks were broken, then later to reduce the pockets in fairly vicious fighting. Cavalry wouldn't be much good for those roles.

A less dramatic version of your idea is earlier implementation of the '42 partial de-motorization of the ID's to free up more trucks for mobile divisions. As Kreveld discusses, the "kleincolonnen "of trucks organic to the ID's were under-utilized during Barbarossa, whereas the Grosstransportraum of trucks assigned above division levels were over-utilized. There's that one example of an ID sending trucks from Russia all the way back to Germany to fetch sausage-making supplies. So plainly there was slack in the ID's truck allotments, later removed for the '42 campaign.

I've considered this idea before but have avoided proposing it because I don't have sufficient resolution into the internal function of ID truck columns to give a fair account of the effect on ID combat effectiveness of removing some portion of their trucks. Does anyone have any sources discussing how the ID's faired, relative to '41, after partial de-motorization in '42?