I did a deepish dive into PoW hauls during 11th's Army's 1941 Crimean offensive in
another thread. Based on the (admittedly imperfect) HGS reports contained in NARA T311/R264, it appears that ~half of that campaign's 100k PoW's were taken "tactically" as used in this thread - i.e. they were taken before the occurrence of operational conditions typically leading to mass surrender (here the entrapment of 51st Army in a cauldron around Kerch towards the end of the campaign).
This has a significant effect on the TacPoW/man-day calculations I presented
upthread. In that post, I limited the definition of "Kessel" PoW's by going to primary documents to see who was truly captured in Kessels and who was captured in broadly-defined campaigns that included Kessels. Kiev, for example, yielded 492k Kessel PoW's, the 665k figure seen in most histories includes large numbers of non-Kessel ("tactical") PoW's taken days/weeks prior to Southwest Front's encirclement.
When calculating the tactical PoW rate during 20.10.41-30.11.41, I deducted all 100k of the Crimean battle's PoW from the period to give a tactical Pow total. Now that I have better resolution on when Soviets were captured, I can see that adjustment was at least twice as high as necessary.
So here's a revised calculation incorporating the Crimean adjustment:
If you're following closely, you'll notice the TacPoW differential, pre- and post-Taifun, increased by up to 11% (HGC PoW figures corrected). Significant...
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Aside from this global effect on the quantitative argument, that RKKA showed signs of morale collapse in the Crimea during this period (perhaps ~1/4 of the defenders surrendered tactically) further reinforces the impression of an army approaching crisis.
HGS tallied ~43k PoW during the break-in and pursuit period of the Crimean campaign (20 days per my definition). Krivosheev gives an initial strength of 235k for the Crimean Defensive Operation, which produces a TacPoW rate of 9.1 per 1,000 RKKA man-days. This is nearly twice the tactical PoW rate that AGC achieved in its post-Taifun advance.
That does not imply, however, that morale was worse in Crimea than before Moscow in October/November '41. Rapid advances lead to more PoW; AGC was slowed by mud (inter alia) while 11th Army advanced at a decent clip across the Crimea (15km/day after breaking through at Perekop).
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In yet
another thread I've collected some data on PoW hauls during the First Battle of Kharkov ( I looked Oct. 9-24). I note some data ambiguities/problems in that post but the PoW figures should be sufficiently accurate to glean a topline trend. What do we see so far?
6th Army was taking ~1,400 PoW/day. This was, like AGC's post-Taifun advance, a slow slog through muddy conditions. Unlike AGC, 6th Army fought with negligible armored support (recall that the Dupuy study identifies armor as highly predictive of capture rate). For Kharkov's defenders to have equaled Moscow's defender's TacPoW rate of 5 per 1,000 man-days, they'd have had to average no more than 280,000.
Krivosheev says that the entire Donbas-Rostov Strategic Defensive Operation (Sept. 29 - Nov. 16) initially involved 541,600 men - this is basically all the men facing 6th, 17th, and 1st Panzer Armies. So 6th Army was matching AGC's TacPoW capture rate unless more than half of AGS's foes were concentrated against it - which seems unlikely.
Upthread (and/or elsewhere) I've hypothesized that the post-Taifun morale crisis might be limited to the Moscow front. That's beginning to seem unlikely.
More research needed, however. Time and archival access allowing, I'd like eventually to give a decent picture of the TacPoW rate across the entire front at the army level. Maybe by 2023.