The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

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BDV
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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#226

Post by BDV » 17 Apr 2019, 14:32

ljadw wrote: Going to the Wolga was possible only if the Soviets were defeated west of the DD line and if they could not replace their losses: if this was so, the advance was possible and German logistic situation was irrelevant . Thus what Wagner was saying is totally irrelevant. An offensive to the Wolga was impossible: the only possible was the pursuit of a defeated enemy . And as the enemy was not defeated ......
An offensive to the Wolga was impossible in 6-12 weeks. It does not follow that it was not possible over 18-30 months.

with hindsight, we know that The Reich and its underlings had 18 months to focus on SovjetUnion. It seems Adolf et Co guessed (wrongly) that they had 6 months. It is likely they did not have 30 (WAllies have the strength to invade a lightly defended Atlantic Coast in 1943).
Nobody expects the Fallschirm! Our chief weapon is surprise; surprise and fear; fear and surprise. Our 2 weapons are fear and surprise; and ruthless efficiency. Our *3* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency; and almost fanatical devotion

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#227

Post by jesk » 17 Apr 2019, 18:21

ljadw wrote:
17 Apr 2019, 12:47
jesk wrote:
17 Apr 2019, 07:58
ljadw wrote:
17 Apr 2019, 07:52
Stolfi is not a serious historian, but a fanboy : a serious historian knows that to prove his claim,he has to give informations about the strength of both sides : saying that an advance to Moscow would be possible because the Germans would/could /should (the usual handwaving ) have more supplies, but remaining silent about the logistical situation of the opponent, is proving that one has
a hidden goal,which is :without the intervention of the Bohemian corporal, the glorious armies of the Third Reich would have destroyed the evil bolchevists .
How else to make a decision on the offensive, taking into account the logistic component? One can only believe Wagner. And he agrees with von Bock. The Germans could take Moscow in July.
Regarding the attack on Moscow, there is no need for difficult decisions. Wagner’s testimony is enough ... Logistics has never defined a German strategy. Logistics should be studied only for the sake of logistics. Combat operations separately and the connection between them is indirect.
Going to the Wolga was possible only if the Soviets were defeated west of the DD line and if they could not replace their losses :if this was so, the advance was possible and German logistic situation was irrelevant . Thus what Wagner was saying is totally irrelevant .An offensive to the Wolga was impossible: the only possible was the pursuit of a defeated enemy . And as the enemy was not defeated ......
Germans defeated the enemy easily. Without Hitler at the head, the soviets did not only get off with 5 million prisoners in the first year of war. If Russians were strong, where did so many prisoners come from?


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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#228

Post by jesk » 17 Apr 2019, 18:36

BDV wrote:
17 Apr 2019, 14:32
An offensive to the Wolga was impossible in 6-12 weeks. It does not follow that it was not possible over 18-30 months.

with hindsight, we know that The Reich and its underlings had 18 months to focus on SovjetUnion. It seems Adolf et Co guessed (wrongly) that they had 6 months. It is likely they did not have 30 (WAllies have the strength to invade a lightly defended Atlantic Coast in 1943).
Hitler always had problems. In March, 1943 he promised Germans an attack on Leningrad at the beginning of the summer. Plans changed. The offensive had to be canceled. Except Hitler were no problems. To kill the Fuhrer and... there will be no European Union. Founder of the EU. The Germans were dying for Europe!

Image

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#229

Post by jesk » 17 Apr 2019, 21:54

Thinking people for Europe!
Do not forget about the Luftwaffe. They supplied Demyansk. The emphasis on Wagner simplifies the problem. Wehrmacht was able to fly too!

http://militera.lib.ru/h/isaev_av5/06.html

The catastrophic development of the situation in the Tikhvin direction and the typhoon that broke out in the Moscow direction forced to take extreme measures and withdraw part of the troops directly from the Leningrad [351] front. From the front, 191st and 44th infantry divisions were redeployed on airplanes. By the end of October, the 92nd Infantry Division also arrived from the reserve at the headquarters in Tikhvin, and almost simultaneously with it the 60th Panzer Division was unloaded. On October 20, the 259th Infantry Division and the Katyush Division were sent to strengthen the 52nd Army from the North-Western Front.

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#230

Post by jesk » 18 Apr 2019, 08:10

Stahel in his book meticulously estimated losses of Germans in the summer of 1941. At the same time, he completely ignored problems of the Red Army. The author writes books, but unfortunately, intelligence is not enough. Stahel moron. He does not consider fighting. Theses Stahel fully coincide with ljadw. Stahel=ljadw. I blame the author for the initial low intellectual level and inability to analyze history.

https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Barbar ... geNumber=4

R. A Forczyk

A Well-Argued but Absurd Hypothesis

In his calculus, which he argues relentlessly from beginning to the end of the book, Barbarossa was "doomed to fail." Readers looking for a straight-up military history or an insightful piece of military analysis will not find it in these pages, although the author does present a great deal of information. I give him credit for laying out his case and for readers not familiar with the Eastern Front, it might even be convincing. However, rather than asking `could Germany have defeated the Soviet Union?' the author employs a Reductio ad absurdum approach that leads to no useful conclusions. In his calculus, the Third Reich lost because it had to lose.

Complex historical events, like a war between two great powers, are not usually determined by single causes, nor is it so easy to announce "this was the moment!" that a conflict became irretrievably lost. However, the author makes reference to Clausewitz's theory of the culminating point in an offensive - the point at which the attacker's capabilities no longer exceeds the defender's - to claim that the Battle of Smolensk in July 1941 was that point in the Second World War. To be fair to the author, David Glantz's has been making some similar claims for the importance of Smolensk in frustrating German plans, but without the same level of totality expressed here. Unfortunately, the author does not understand Clausewitz's theory of culmination very well; once an attacker has culminated, his forces are no longer strong enough to achieve any significant victories. However, the Wehrmacht won huge victories at Kiev, Vyazma-Bryansk and then advanced to within 10 miles of Moscow months after the Battle of Smolensk - clearly demonstrating that the Wehrmacht's combat power still exceeded that of the Red Army's until late November 1941. Yet the author minimizes these German victories, claiming that they had no real bearing on the outcome of the war.

The author also spends a great deal of time on Franz Halder and the German failure to take Moscow in 1941. It has been a truism in warfare for centuries that no plan survives contact with the enemy, but the author holds Barbarossa's intended goal of the rapid destruction of the Red Army as the only possible favorable outcome for Germany, while neglecting to mention that the Red Army never even came close to meeting its MP-41 plan's goal of fighting on foreign soil. In other words, the Wehrmacht failed to accomplish all of Barbarossa's goals and the Red Army failed to accomplish any of MP-41's goals, so Germany lost the war. How is that logical?

A large part of the author's hypothesis rests on his contention that the offensive capability of German panzer divisions declined rapidly soon after the beginning of Barbarossa and became critical after the Battle of Smolensk. He presents selected statistics to buttress his arguments but misses several key facts. First, it is true that most German panzer units were down to about 50 percent strength in tanks after Smolensk, but all of the pre-war Soviet mechanized corps were gone after mid-July 1941 and the Red Army had even less tanks on the battlefield after Smolensk. Second, the author completely misses the arrival of the 2nd and 5th Panzer Divisions from Germany in September 1941 - both at 100 percent strength - which gave the Germans a numerical edge for Operation Typhoon. The new Soviet rifle divisions raised after Smolensk had so little artillery and anti-tank guns that even depleted panzer divisions had little difficulty punching through them. The author tends to exaggerate all German losses, eventually claiming that Army Group Center was "crippled" at Smolensk, while disregarding Soviet losses and problems, stating that Soviet production could make good any losses. In fact, in 1941-42 the Germans were destroying Soviet tanks as fast as they were being produced and the Red Army did not gain a real edge in armor until 1943.

Conventional wisdom suggests the Barbarossa was a darn close thing and that the War in the East was not irrevocably lost until Stalingrad. Although well-argued with the facts and narrow perspective he chooses to use, the author's hypothesis remains unconvincing. Throughout the book, the author single-mindedly pushes his hypothesis like a political candidate trying to stay on message, rather than as a historian who objectively analyzes all relevant data, from multiple angles. The entire idea that only German actions and decisions really mattered and that Soviet victory was a given due to a superior production base is more representative of the author's a priori agenda, than objective historical method. In order to win, the Red Army had to do more than just absorb punishment - it had to demonstrate the ability to conduct successful large-scale offensive operations, which did not occur until November 1942.

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#231

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 20 Apr 2019, 07:44

Jesk wrote:. Theses Stahel fully coincide with ljadw. Stahel=ljadw. I blame the author for the initial low intellectual level and inability to analyze
It's sad but inevitable that Jesk is too stupid to understand the irony of him attacking another for stupidity. Festung Dummheit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#232

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 20 Apr 2019, 07:49

BDV wrote:An offensive to the Wolga was impossible in 6-12 weeks. It does not follow that it was not possible over 18-30 months.
Exactly.

Barbarossa was doomed as a plan for 6-week victory with literally no contingency planning for an extended campaign. How is it possible for a supposedly professional military class to assume that a country of 200 million will collapse after you kill/capture a million of its soldiers? Hitler was a maniac, yes, but at several points he demonstrated receptiveness to strongly-argued military opinion against his fantasies of German Wille. The OKH failed to provide this advice; Halder in particular couldn't see the forest for trees. Indeed he withheld from Hitler studies - Wagner, Paulus - that should have been raised at the highest strategic levels. It's hard to convince a lunatic not to be completely looney but the Mueller report reveals it's possible.

If Hitler/Wehrmacht/OKH had even minimal strategic competency and had planned for a 2-season campaign the USSR would have been destroyed or at least wounded to the point that a third of Germany's army plus allies could have held the A-A line indefinitely. At that point there's no way the West can land in Europe without decisive defeat, and no way to save broader humanity from Hitler unless Truman is willing to vaporize Europe with a hundred A-bombs.
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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#233

Post by jesk » 20 Apr 2019, 08:07

TheMarcksPlan wrote:
20 Apr 2019, 07:44
Jesk wrote:. Theses Stahel fully coincide with ljadw. Stahel=ljadw. I blame the author for the initial low intellectual level and inability to analyze
It's sad but inevitable that Jesk is too stupid to understand the irony of him attacking another for stupidity. Festung Dummheit.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

In 2011 David Dunning wrote about his observations that people with substantial, measurable deficits in their knowledge or expertise lack the ability to recognize those deficits and therefore, despite potentially making error after error, tend to think they are performing competently when they are not: "In short, those who are incompetent, for lack of a better term, should have little insight into their incompetence—an assertion that has come to be known as the Dunning–Kruger effect".[3] In 2014 Dunning and Helzer described how the Dunning–Kruger effect "suggests that poor performers are not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance".[4]
This is a typical statement of worldview. When sheets are taken out of context and consciousness (or subconscious) blocks the "wrong" information. ljadw writes in posts, Germany could not win the war. Where is the proof? They are not. The approach is similar to Stahel, what Forczyk has isolated from his work:

In his calculus, which he argues relentlessly from beginning to the end of the book, Barbarossa was "doomed to fail." Readers looking for a straight-up military history or an insightful piece of military analysis will not find it in these pages, although the author does present a great deal of information. I give him credit for laying out his case and for readers not familiar with the Eastern Front, it might even be convincing. However, rather than asking `could Germany have defeated the Soviet Union?' the author employs a Reductio ad absurdum approach that leads to no useful conclusions. In his calculus, the Third Reich lost because it had to lose.

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#234

Post by jesk » 20 Apr 2019, 08:11

TheMarcksPlan wrote:
20 Apr 2019, 07:49
If Hitler/Wehrmacht/OKH had even minimal strategic competency and had planned for a 2-season campaign
Nothing depended on the generals. All global decisions, such as the refusal of an attack on Moscow and Leningrad in 1942, were taken personally by Hitler. About this Keitel testified. Since 1938, Hitler himself determined the German military strategy.

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#235

Post by TheMarcksPlan » 20 Apr 2019, 08:20

Jesk wrote:About this Keitel testified
You definitely won't understand this point but maybe it will be helpful to others:

Offering Keitel's testimony as conclusive on why Germany lost is exactly why you're too stupid to opine about history - Ostheer or what happened yesterday.

One cannot properly read history without interrogating the motives and competency of its witnesses. You're completely incompetent and naive on this point; you behave like a child who still believes everything he has been told unless the Bad Man said it.

Learn to think for yourself if you can, Jesk, otherwise your only contribution here is - admittedly helpful - links to primary sources from countries with lax copyright enforcement.
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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#236

Post by ljadw » 20 Apr 2019, 08:26

TheMarcksPlan wrote:
20 Apr 2019, 07:49
BDV wrote:An offensive to the Wolga was impossible in 6-12 weeks. It does not follow that it was not possible over 18-30 months.
Exactly.

Barbarossa was doomed as a plan for 6-week victory with literally no contingency planning for an extended campaign. How is it possible for a supposedly professional military class to assume that a country of 200 million will collapse after you kill/capture a million of its soldiers? Hitler was a maniac, yes, but at several points he demonstrated receptiveness to strongly-argued military opinion against his fantasies of German Wille. The OKH failed to provide this advice; Halder in particular couldn't see the forest for trees. Indeed he withheld from Hitler studies - Wagner, Paulus - that should have been raised at the highest strategic levels. It's hard to convince a lunatic not to be completely looney but the Mueller report reveals it's possible.

If Hitler/Wehrmacht/OKH had even minimal strategic competency and had planned for a 2-season campaign the USSR would have been destroyed or at least wounded to the point that a third of Germany's army plus allies could have held the A-A line indefinitely. At that point there's no way the West can land in Europe without decisive defeat, and no way to save broader humanity from Hitler unless Truman is willing to vaporize Europe with a hundred A-bombs.
You have NO proof at all,that a 2-season campaign would be successful .
The Germans ( all of them ) were,rightly, convinced that, with the small available forces they could NOT defeat the SU in a 2-year campaign .
FYI : already in the 9 days of June (22-30 ) the Soviet mobilisation doubled the strength of the Red Army : more than 5 million were mobilised .
Besides, a successful 2-year campaign had no sense , as meanwhile there would be war with the US .And the aim of Barbarossa was to prevent war with the USA .
Last point : only 3 A-Bombs would be needed to finish the war :
one on Rastenburg, one on Berchtesgaden and one on the center of Berlin .

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#237

Post by jesk » 20 Apr 2019, 08:28

TheMarcksPlan wrote:
20 Apr 2019, 08:20
Jesk wrote:About this Keitel testified
You definitely won't understand this point but maybe it will helpful to others:

Offering Keitel's testimony as conclusive on why Germany lost is exactly why you're too stupid to opine about history - Ostheer or what happened yesterday.

One cannot properly read history without interrogating the motives for its witnesses. You're completely incompetent and naive on this point; you behave like a child who still believes everything he has been told except if the Bad Man said it.

Learn to think for yourself if you can, Jesk, otherwise your only contribution here is - admittedly helpful - links to pri.ary sources from countries with lax copyright enforcement.
This is all your empty logic. Facts, documents, testimonies point to Hitler’s sole leadership over the Wehrmacht. A toy that he did not lose from his hands until the last days. In May, he gave to noncompetent people. Dönitz, Kesselring did not understand much. Therefore, they capitulated. Cheating the Fuhrer worked. All history of World War II is a work on creation of illusion of weakness of Wehrmacht. In fact, the Germans were always utterly stronger than all the others.

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#238

Post by ljadw » 20 Apr 2019, 08:31

About post 230 : Forczyk is totally wrong . Germnany could not win a long war, but the SU could .

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#239

Post by jesk » 20 Apr 2019, 08:36

ljadw wrote:
20 Apr 2019, 08:26
You have NO proof at all,that a 2-season campaign would be successful .
The Germans ( all of them ) were,rightly, convinced that, with the small available forces they could NOT defeat the SU in a 2-year campaign .
FYI : already in the 9 days of June (22-30 ) the Soviet mobilisation doubled the strength of the Red Army : more than 5 million were mobilised .
Besides, a successful 2-year campaign had no sense , as meanwhile there would be war with the US .And the aim of Barbarossa was to prevent war with the USA .
Last point : only 3 A-Bombs would be needed to finish the war :
one on Rastenburg, one on Berchtesgaden and one on the center of Berlin .
This is spam. Nothing even to comment. Mobilization yielded 5 million in June. So what? The Germans captured 5 million. Occupied Belarus, Ukraine, reached Moscow.
One of directives provided invasion joint with Japanese on the American continent. USA without Hitler before Germany, a rabbit in the arms of a boa!
Last edited by jesk on 20 Apr 2019, 08:38, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: The Logistics of Barbarossa (or lack of it)

#240

Post by jesk » 20 Apr 2019, 08:38

ljadw wrote:
20 Apr 2019, 08:31
About post 230 : Forczyk is totally wrong . Germnany could not win a long war, but the SU could .
What evidence that could not? Only your senseless beliefs!

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