One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#211

Post by Aida1 » 18 Aug 2019, 16:33

ljadw wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 15:37
After WWII the German generals wanted to come back and have again a prominent role .
They could do this only by
1 convincing the German and American public opinion that they had nothing to do with the Holocaust .
Example : by hiding the massacre of Baby Yar,otherwise people could ask who owned the trucks that transported the Jews to the places where they were murdered . As it was not the SS,and it were not the Martians,the answer would be : the army .And the myth of the Clean Wehrmacht would be destroyed .
2 convincing the German and American people that not they, but Hitler was responsible for the defeat. Otherwise, the Americans could say that they would not give $ billions to constitute an army commanded by a bunch of losers .
Halder started the propaganda offensive with Hitler als Feldherr ( a new version of The Elders of Sion ) : everything was the fault of Hitler wrote the man who received and accepted Hitler's money .
Than, as we could expect, the imposter Guderian published , in collaboration with the imposter Hart,Panzerleader .
And, when he was liberated from prison, Manstein also published a book full of lies : Verlorene Siege: it was the fault of Hitler that Germany lost ,said the man who also received and accepted Hitler's gifts .
And, an other one, but not the last,was a USMC officer, who unhindered by any knowledge,but with as baggage only bias, also said that it was all the fault of Hitler .
A mass of retoric but not much substance.You seem to have a liking for accusing People of being liars when they only write things you do not agree with.Your descriptions of Verlorene Siege and panzerleader are the usual blanket statements for which no explanations are given.We are supposed to accept it all at face value.

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#212

Post by Aida1 » 18 Aug 2019, 16:43

ljadw wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 15:20
Aida1 wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 12:42
ljadw wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 12:16
Aida1 wrote:
17 Aug 2019, 20:35
ljadw wrote:
17 Aug 2019, 18:34

The Historical Division was used to innocent the WM of Auschwitz and the defeat .
Christian Hartmann in ''Halder,der verhinderte generalstabschef " p 208 :Halder was one of the architects of the myth of the clean WM.
Halder ordered the German members f the HD to emphasize the ''decent '' form of the war conducted by the army and to blame the SS for the criminal operations .(Wette : the WM History,Myth and Reality P 236 .)
Manstein held the same antisemitic and racist views as Hitler ( Smelser and Davies :The Myth of the Eastern Front :the Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture PP 97-98 ) .
And most of the texts written by the Germans for the HD were very biased and influenced by racist thinking .
Which clearly illustrates you never read any of them as they were of a pure military nature and mostly about the western front ,Italy and north africa.
They were mostly about the Eastern Front,as this was where the Americans were interested in . And they were mostly propaganda ( Erschriebene Siege ) where the Russians were described as Untermenschen ,.
Erhard Raus wrote in his paper '' Besonderheiten der russische Kampführung ''(1950 ) that the Russian soldiers had no empathy for their killed comrades .
Source : Esther-Julia Howell : Von den Besiegten lernen ? Die kriegsgeschichtliche Kooperation der US Armee und der ehemaligen Wehrmachtselite 1945-1961 P 249 .
And Peter Tsouras (retired US colonel ) used the German papers for the HD for his book :Fighting in the Hell: the German ordeal on the Eastern Front (1995 ) where he wrote that the brutaly of the war in the east was caused by the connection of the geografical situations with an almost inhuman mentality of the native population .
You are writing fiction here.Only a minority were about the eastern front because that was not what the us army was mainly interested in.If you look on the overview you will see that texts on the eastern front are a small exception.
http://downloads.sturmpanzer.com/FMS/Gu ... tudies.pdf

And that the red army was pretty callous about the lives of it's own soldiers is not a revelation.Stalins regime was very brutal.
1At the start of the Cold War,the US army was only interested in informations about the fighting qualities/capacities of the Red Army .
2 What Raus was writing was NOT about the Red Army,but about the individual Soviet soldier ,who, he said had no empathy for hid dead comrades .He did not say that the Red Army was callous : he said that for the average Russian a human live had no value . Which is not only racist, but also an attempt to excuse the murder of countless civilians,by the SS and by the WM .
That the Stalinist regime was very brutal is totally besides the question : Hitler also was very brutal .
Repeating nonsense does not make it less nonsense.The overview of foreign military studies i gave a link to should have teached you that only a minority of the studies dealt with the eastern front.You clearly did not even bother to read it.You seem not be willing to understand that US army historical division could be interested in the view of the other side when writing the history of the us army in WW2.


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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#213

Post by Cult Icon » 18 Aug 2019, 17:03

ljadw wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 15:37
After WWII the German generals wanted to come back and have again a prominent role .
They could do this only by
2 convincing the German and American people that not they, but Hitler was responsible for the defeat. Otherwise, the Americans could say that they would not give $ billions to constitute an army commanded by a bunch of losers .
Halder started the propaganda offensive with Hitler als Feldherr ( a new version of The Elders of Sion ) : everything was the fault of Hitler wrote the man who received and accepted Hitler's money .
Than, as we could expect, the imposter Guderian published , in collaboration with the imposter Hart,Panzerleader .
And, when he was liberated from prison, Manstein also published a book full of lies : Verlorene Siege: it was the fault of Hitler that Germany lost ,said the man who also received and accepted Hitler's gifts .
And, an other one, but not the last,was a USMC officer, who unhindered by any knowledge,but with as baggage only bias, also said that it was all the fault of Hitler .
This is a very weak conspiracy theory that isn't relevant today. "Lost Victories" and "Panzer Leader" are only opinion memoirs whose weaknesses and strengths are well known. The contents of these books do not match your extremely exaggerated and conspiratorial descriptions. Today, there is no sense in relying these as the bible in studying the Eastern Front with the flood of quality literature available. It's still interesting to refer to these opinions/recollections though after studying operational and campaign histories.

+ show us sources of the "massive" impact of these two books in the 70s then. You make two memoirs sound as powerful as a great religious text.

The studies written by German officers for the US are worth reading and interesting, being that they are tactical and operational in nature. One can also learn of the mindset of German officers and how they perceived the situation. They don't add weight to the conspiracy theory.

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#214

Post by ljadw » 18 Aug 2019, 20:22

Cult Icon wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 17:03
ljadw wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 15:37
After WWII the German generals wanted to come back and have again a prominent role .
They could do this only by
2 convincing the German and American people that not they, but Hitler was responsible for the defeat. Otherwise, the Americans could say that they would not give $ billions to constitute an army commanded by a bunch of losers .
Halder started the propaganda offensive with Hitler als Feldherr ( a new version of The Elders of Sion ) : everything was the fault of Hitler wrote the man who received and accepted Hitler's money .
Than, as we could expect, the imposter Guderian published , in collaboration with the imposter Hart,Panzerleader .
And, when he was liberated from prison, Manstein also published a book full of lies : Verlorene Siege: it was the fault of Hitler that Germany lost ,said the man who also received and accepted Hitler's gifts .
And, an other one, but not the last,was a USMC officer, who unhindered by any knowledge,but with as baggage only bias, also said that it was all the fault of Hitler .
This is a very weak conspiracy theory that isn't relevant today. "Lost Victories" and "Panzer Leader" are only opinion memoirs whose weaknesses and strengths are well known. The contents of these books do not match your extremely exaggerated and conspiratorial descriptions. Today, there is no sense in relying these as the bible in studying the Eastern Front with the flood of quality literature available. It's still interesting to refer to these opinions/recollections though after studying operational and campaign histories.

+ show us sources of the "massive" impact of these two books in the 70s then. You make two memoirs sound as powerful as a great religious text.

The studies written by German officers for the US are worth reading and interesting, being that they are tactical and operational in nature. One can also learn of the mindset of German officers and how they perceived the situation. They don't add weight to the conspiracy theory.
I presume that you know who is Volker Berghahn. In 2004 he called Lost Victories totally unreliable .
You know who is Jürgen Förster ? In 1998 he wrote that people as Manstein and Westphal claimed in their memoirs that the WM was a professional, apolitical force who were victims ( not followers ) of Hitler and that MOST GERMANS ( my emphasis ) accepted for too long at face value these self-serving claims .
And Robert Citino ?He said that Manstein defended his reputation and generalship and hided his participation in war crimes and blamed others for everything that went wrong .
These three well-known historians have debunked the memoirs of Manstein,which were unreliable, full of self-serving claims and hided his participation in war crimes ,but blamed the others for what went wrong .
And Förster said that most Germans believed what Manstein was saying .
The memorts from Halder and Guderian were at the same level ,if not lower .
Of course : it was a conspiracy .

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#215

Post by David Thompson » 18 Aug 2019, 21:58

A repartee opinion post from MarkN, adding nothing of factual value to the discussion, was removed as clutter pursuant to the forum rules and prior thread warnings. An insulting personal comments and repartee post from aida1 was also removed, for the same reasons.

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#216

Post by Terry Duncan » 18 Aug 2019, 22:45

Yuri wrote:
17 Aug 2019, 23:32
Terry Duncan wrote:
17 Aug 2019, 21:03
Quite possible for early Barbarossa, but by late November they had the information from their spy network that Japan had no intention of fighting the Soviets again after the two earlier debacles. This would leave all those nice Siberian divisions to hold the line, and there is no reason Stalin is forced to launch Typhoon if the Germans have been doing slightly better.
It is a myth.
In fact it was the opposite - in December 1941 from the reserve of Supreme command to strengthen the Far Eastern and TRANS-Baikal fronts was transferred to 4 rifle divisions, 2 rifle brigades, 2 tank brigades and addition 60 T-34 and 20 KV-1.
That is, not from the Far East to Moscow, but from Moscow to the Far East sent an army. For example, my father-in-law (wife's father) served in the Far East since 1939, sent West to the Soviet-European theater of operations in February 1943 (on the Central front).

A valuable Soviet spy in Japan is also a myth.
The General staff (GRU) did not consider it a reliable source, its value as a source of information is zero. Even in 1960, when Khrushchev demanded to write a presentation on the assignment Sorge the title Hero of Soviet Union, the General staff categorically refused to do it. After that, Khrushchev ordered the General Department of the Central Committee of CPSU to write such a submission.
The very valuable information on Japan Stalin received in June 1942 from American pilots, who sent to the bottom of Pacific four Japanese aircraft carrier off the island Midway.
Ok, its a myth. Where did all the well trained troops for Typhoon come from?

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#217

Post by Terry Duncan » 18 Aug 2019, 22:54

Richard Anderson wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 06:41
Um, Terry, we also have direct evidence from World War II. In HG-Mitte by mid-May 1943, a total of 78 battalions and 70 companies (the equivalent of another 17 1/2 battalions) were occupied as security troops, including Sicherungstruppen and Landeseigene Verbände.
The reason I quoted WWI is that involves a best case scenario for Germany. Russia has ceased fighting and is in civil war, Ukraine is fully in German hands ans is Belorussia, the Baltic states and parts of Russia too. With pro-German puppet governments in power, and less land held than TheMarcksPlan suggests as he proposes ending up at the Volga, Germany still needed 1.1 million men to hold the area securely. This is without large numbers of ex-military partizans operating against them. WWII is hardly likely to be very different in terms of numbers as it is simple a troop density matter.
Richard Anderson wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 06:41
It is emphatically not true that the "AGC reported only ~ 12,000 casualties in the Minsk/Bialystok battle". In fact, HG-Mitte reported 23,188 battle casualties 22 June-6 July. (RW6-556)
What is certain is that by Dec 1941 the German army was understrength and had few replacements arriving, not to mention being woefully ill-equipped for war in Russian winter conditions, a situation still not rectified a year later, especially when compared to Soviet winter equipment.

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#218

Post by Terry Duncan » 18 Aug 2019, 23:01

I would also like to add that the major problem with the German situation in 1941 is that the army is still mostly a WWI era army, relying on horse drawn transport rather than being fully motorised, and this almost always led to outrunning supply lines or suffering shortages. Most armies were the same, but maybe the extra units proposed would be better split between enhanced transport and replacements for the existing armoured units.

The other major factor would have been if Finland could have been persuaded to take a more offensive posture towards the USSR, as they could have posed a greater threat than they did.

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#219

Post by ljadw » 19 Aug 2019, 07:20

Terry Duncan wrote:
18 Aug 2019, 23:01
I would also like to add that the major problem with the German situation in 1941 is that the army is still mostly a WWI era army, relying on horse drawn transport rather than being fully motorised, and this almost always led to outrunning supply lines or suffering shortages. Most armies were the same, but maybe the extra units proposed would be better split between enhanced transport and replacements for the existing armoured units.

Yes, but as Qvist said in the past : I would like to see operate a more/fully motorised army in the USSR in 1941 .
More trucks would need more road space, and more road space was not available .
Supplies were transported by trains to the depots where they were unloaded and stocked and then loaded again on trucks to be transported to the units .
More trucks would not mean that more supplies could be transported to the units.
Example : the trains transported 1000 tons,990 could be unloaded, 970 could be stocked ,950 could be loaded on the trucks and 930 could be transported to the units .
To have 1000 tons be transported to the units,not only more trucks would be needed,but the loading,unloading and stockage capacity of the depots had to be increased .
The same problem existed in NA and also when Antwerp was used to supply the allied forces in 1944-1945 .
Without an increase of the transport infrastructure the use of more trucks would be useless .There are 268 million vehicles in the US ,they could not operate on the US pre WWII road infrastructure .

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#220

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 19 Aug 2019, 07:29

Richard Anderson wrote:Nor is it true that the "Ostheer had ~ 300,000 replacements ready when it launched Barbarossa". .... The Ersatzheer had 320,000 trained replacements available at the outset of BARBAROSSA
Typical pedantry. Whether the ~300k replacements were with the Ostheer or available to Ostheer as part of the larger Heer is not a material difference.
Richard Anderson wrote:
Terry Duncan wrote:The battle of Minsk-Bialystok does seem very disproportionate compared to other battles, and if we take the entire opening of Barbarossa up to early dec 1941, Wikipedia gives the losses as over 1,000,000 for the Germans and 4,973,820 for the Soviets.
It is emphatically not true that the "AGC reported only ~ 12,000 casualties in the Minsk/Bialystok battle". In fact, HG-Mitte reported 23,188 battle casualties 22 June-6 July. (RW6-556)
Liedtke's "Enduring the Whirlwind" gives the 12k figure but notes it's probably underreported. What's the source for 23K?

Even if AGC's casualties were underreported by 50% as Richard Anderson says, it doesn't change the fact that this is an extremely favorable exchange rate approaching 20:1, which if continued would have ensured Barbarossa's success. Terry Duncan is not wrong in his impression of Minsk-Bialystok.

Where we probably disagree, Terry Duncan, is in comparing Minsk-Bialystok to "the other battles." If you mean "compared to the rest of the 1941 Eastern Front" then you're right that the casualty exchange ratio stands out. But not if you compare it to other Kesselschlacht. And this point is critical to understanding my argument.

Zetterling's "The Drive on Moscow," for instance, cites German records for ~45k AGC casualties during the Kessel stage of Operation Typhoon, which inflicted nearly a million casualties on the Soviets. [figures are for October 1-13 in Appendix 2]. Even if we limit Soviet casualties to the Kessel stages, in which it's probably around 800k, we're still not far from a 20:1 casualty exchange ratio.

You earlier said the Kessels were unexpectedly costly for the Germans; I just don't see evidence for that.

Rather, it's outside of the Kessels that the Germans suffered unsustainable losses. AGC's defense along the Smolensk front throughout August/September, for example, had a much lower exchange ratio.

AGN's drive to Leningrad cost ~30k casualties in its first month, a period in which captured very few Soviets. See Heeresarzt 10-Day Casualty Reports for Heeresgruppe Nord (22.6-20.7.41) in BAMA RW 6/556 and 6/558. Considering that AGN claimed only 36,000 killed/captured Soviets up to August 6, the casualty ratio in AGN's sector was probably lower than 3:1.

AGS suffered 138k casualties through August 31st. Through that period, AGS had executed only one operationally-significant encirclement at Uman, where it bagged ~100k Soviets. Casualty record for this portion of the Red Army are particularly unreliable (they admit only 700k casualties from July 7 to September 26, while the Germans bagged 665k in Kiev alone), but it's hard to see them having lost at more than a 3:1 rate against the Germans, as higher losses by September 1 would have made their strength in the Kiev pocket impossible.

Closer inspection of the figures cannot support a narrative that the Kessels were particularly costly for Germany, especially in light of the damage inflicted on the Red Army. Each Soviet soldier who surrendered in large kessels is one soldier the Germans didn't have to fight, and for whose life they'd have to trade at a ~3:1 ratio. I would guess you're missing the fact that most combat on the Eastern Front did not occur in the context of Kessels, even in 1941. The Kessels get the most coverage but they're largely a matter of AGC's operational narrative and only for brief periods of time even on AGC's front. The bulk of the fighting was "normal" operations in which one side or the other attacked/defended, and in which retreats occurred without spectacular capture of soldiers (there were a lot of equipment losses in all retreats, however).

Now consider the impact on German casualties during July/August if a further ~500k Soviets lay down their arms in Ukraine during a big Kessel. At a 3:1 bloody casualty exchange ratio, that would save ~170k German casualties during subsequent operations.
Likewise for a subqsequent AGS encirclement enabled by its position of two panzer armies instead of just one.

If the Germans encircle 1,000,000 more Soviets early in the campaign, their later casualties are going to be on the order of 300k lower.

That means the "denuded infantry" component of the Ostheer's late-Barbarossa combat exhaustion is largely solved.
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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#221

Post by ljadw » 19 Aug 2019, 07:35

Casualty exchange ratio does not decide the outcome of Barbarossa .

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#222

Post by ljadw » 19 Aug 2019, 07:38

Thatr the ErsatzWehrmacht ( not Ersatzheer ) had x trained replacements available,does not mean that they were all for the Ostheer .

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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#223

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 19 Aug 2019, 07:44

Terry Duncan wrote:To be fair, the Soviets do not have to win with parity when they have so many more men that the Germans.
Yeah I realize the Soviets are going to have numerical superiority until the late-stage of my ATL, when they no longer have the ability to support large armies. I was just making the point that German combat effectiveness was always far greater than Soviet, no matter what stage of the war.
Terry Duncan wrote:Ok, its a myth. Where did all the well trained troops for Typhoon come from?
Minor correction - Typhoon describes the October German offensive to take Moscow, not the Soviet Moscow counteroffensive that Stalin unleashed around December 5th.

The Soviets called up 5.3 million men in their immediate response to Barbarossa. Of course it took months to train and equip all these men, and to form them into coherent units. They entered the field throughout Barbarossa, with something of a spike in December.
The specific armies that won the Battle of Moscow came from Stavka reserve; Stalin had been saving them up during November (not immediately deploying them as they were activated) for his grand counteroffensive. Zhukov wanted more of them released earlier and succeeded in getting some of them released before December 5th.

From Glantz's "Stumbling Colossus," here's a diagram of 1941 Soviet army formations by place and time:

Image

For folks who haven't studied the Eastern Front in depth, the map is a good reminder of a basic - but oft overlooked - fact about the Soviet Union:

It's a specific place with a specific population and economy that could generate a specific amount of force in a given amount of time. It's not, as superficial histories oft suggest, a limitless font of soldiers and of cities and farms capable of supporting them.
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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#224

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 19 Aug 2019, 07:51

Richard Anderson wrote:due mostly to those logistical problems that keep getting poo-pooed as irrelevant.
Richard this is execrable intellectual conduct. You obviously read my posts enough to understand my actual position on logistics.

Mods - is there a rule about repeatedly misrepresenting opposing opinions? There should be one. In any academic environment this behavior would get you laughed out of the room.
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Re: One more panzer group in Barbarossa, plans for a two-year campaign

#225

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 19 Aug 2019, 08:00

Terry Duncan wrote:The only real practical evidence I have about needed large numbers of troops to control occupied land is that of WWI, where just over one million men were left in the east leading up to the Spring Offensive in 1918, and that was in a situation where the majority of the population in many areas were actively pro-German and puppet pro-German governments had been set up and no frontline troops were required as the Russian army was now starting to engage in civil war.
AFAIK the German 1918 forces were larger because they were dealing with massive nascent political upheaval such as the Polish-Ukrainian war, the Finnish Civil War (not in their zone but they were supporting the anti-communists), etc. The Eastern folks knew German/Austrian dominance wasn't long for the world and were arming everywhere for the coming fights to settle new national boundaries. That isn't true of, say, my ATL 1942 where Germany controls nearly all of Europe and the U.S./UK aren't even close to re-entering the picture.

Resistance is always related to the perceived likelihood of successful resistance; greater German battlefield success (ATL 1942 versus OTL 1942 and OTL 1918) means less worry behind the front lines.
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