ljadw wrote:...
1)who said there were only 8000 locomotives in june 1941?
On P 5 of this thread :post of Politician on 29 december :.......if you count all the locomotives produced from 1920-1949,you get around 8000
That is clearly not the same thing. Now the production number is I'll agree probably off so the conclusions are not well supported but there is a big difference between saying that 8,000 were produced from 1920-1949 and that there were 8,000 in June of 1941.
2)Certainly they were very significant :why would a loss of 4000 loc's(=15%) be significant ?
Why wouldn''t it be?
3)They also don't really tell us how many operational locomotives the Soviets had in may 1943 :they also don't tell us how many of the LL locomotives were operational in say may 1945
4)this had not been proven :without the LL loc's,the SU had 23000 loc's in may 1945,with the LL loc's,25000.This is a difference of 2000( some 8 %),saying that the importance of 8 % was immense,is,IMHO,totally wrong ,unless there are indications that,without these extra 8 % the Red Army would collaps/would be unable to launch big offensives as Bagration .The SU survived 1941 and 1942,WITHOUT the 2000 LL loc's,thus,the importance of these loc's was not immense in 1941/1942,why would the importance be immense after 1942,when the Germans were weaker,and the Soviets stronger ?
Very strange logic there. And again you are making your estimates on questionable data.
ljadw wrote: ...
1)to know what the demands are,is irrelevant :in wartime,the demands are boundless ,the only possibility to "prove" that there was not enough supply,is an exemple of an operation that was cancelled ,because of insufficient supplies .
Not really. For instance one can look at utilization rates and such and find for instance that the US or Britain had a surplus of rail transport capacity and while additional locomotives for instance might have helped some they wouldn't have been critical. However one can look at how the Soviets prepared for operations you can see how important it was. Unlike the Germans the Soviets at least in the latter war didn't launch an operation unless they felt they could support it so they waited until adequate supplies had been built up in the area. Cut the amount of supplies deliverable and operations are launched days or weeks later into stronger defences.
2)the capabilities of the Soviet railways without LL:very simple :93 %,unless one can prove that the 7 % LL loc's were much more worth than 7 % Soviet loc's .
A very questionable assumption. We don't know how many Soviet locomotives were operational at any point in time nor what their capacity was nor what their reliability was. As such numbers such as the above are worthless. It should be pointed out however that a new US built locomotive was almost certainly greater in capacity and more reliable than the average Soviet locomotive.
3)that does not mean that the Germans would not win :if von Bock said that the German army in 1942 was incapable of long range objectives (and the facts are proving that he was right),that means that the Germans were in defensive,and that they could thus not win (winning=being at the Ural)
Just because the Germans can't make it to the Urals doesn't mean that the Soviets make it to Berlin.