Hello Andreas, some remarks to this.In any case, the Red Army showed that you could achieve the results by only giving all-terrain mobility to a critical element of your force (armoured forces, AT artillery, key artillery formations), while leaving the rest of it on foot/horse. So I think it is not really necessary to equip all 140 divisions of the Heer on such a lavish scale, but e.g. just giving all divisions in the Panzergruppen this level of all-terrain equipment, with at least a regiment instead of a battalion/company of the infantry in Panzerdivisions in half-tracks (while adding third regiments to ID (mot) again, and maybe one or two additional ID (mot) per Panzergruppe, could already have helped a lot in giving more covering ability and combat power to the strike force. This could have had an operational impact.
Did the Red Army's motorised formations have more of an all-terrain mobility? I thought they were even more sparsely equipped with half-tracked or tracked transport than the Ostheer? Also, they do not to me seem to have been less limited by logistical constraints in their offensive pushes than their counterparts were in 1941/42, judging from f.e. advance rates:
Barbarossa spearheads 22-28 June:
Corps..................Days..........Distance km..adv rate (km/d)..to objective
LVI......................4.5................310.................73.7......Dvinsk
XXXIX....................4..................325.................81.3......Minsk
XXIV.....................7..................442.................63.1.......Bobruisk
Typhoon, 30 Sept. - 6 October:
LVI......................5..................133.................26.6.......Vyazma
XXXX....................3..................145................48.3........Mozhaisk
XXIV....................4...................228................57...........Orel
We can compare this to Bargation and the Vistula-Oder operations:
Bagration 23 June - 4 July
5 GTA & 11 GA...10................217...................21.7......Minsk
1 GTC & 65A.......10................178..................17.8.......Minsk
Pliyev group........15.................229..................15.3.......Slutsk
5 A.....................11.................178..................16.2.......Not clear
After 4 July, the advance rates were even slower - 5 GTA covered 166 km until 13 July, while Pliyev and 5 GTA 197 and 238 respectively until 27 July.
Vistula-Oder 12 January - 1 February:
2 GTA................19.................490..................25.8.......Oder
1 GTA................19.................460..................24.2.......Oder
4 TA...................11.................337.................30.6....... Oder
Quoted from Zetterling/Franksson, "Analyzing WWII Eastern Front Battles", in Journal of Slavic Military Studies.
Look for example at XXIV PzK during Barbarossa and the Pliyev Cavalry-Mechanised group during Bagration, who advanced on almost exactly inverse axis (NE from Brest-Litovsk and straight E over Baranovitschi and Slutsk to Bobruisk, and NW from a point well south of Bobruisk and then directly West to Bialystok respectively.) XXIV PZK covered its 442 km in 7 days. Pliyev did 426 km in 38 days. Of course, logistics isn't the only reason for that, but given that the Soviet advance rates compare so badly with the German, I find it hard to see that they indicate they had solved the logistical bit that eluded their adversaries!
As for German tracked vehicles, Liddell-Hart's point is mainly that also the supply vehicles needed to be off-road, not just the transport of the combat units. It is possible that he had an exaggerated notion of the extent to which the combat units were equipped with tracked vehicles. But anyway his point, to the extent that it is valid, would still stand even if the combat units had such an increased all-terrain capability.
cheers
