Following on the discussion in this thread, what if the OKW had ceased operations after the Battle of Kiev for the remainder of 1941 and then launched its next offensive in the summer of 1942 to take Moscow?
Leaving aside that taking Leningrad is only possible via direct assault (which is so costly as to not be worth it), the Germans never managed to inflict as bad casualties upon the Soviets when defending as they did on the attack. At worst, the Soviet ITTL winter offensive will cost them as badly as it did OTL, which still leaves them with a net gain without Vyazma-Bryansk or the fall of Eastern Ukraine. More probably is that after the first month of relatively useless hammering at the German line, Stalin calls it off (he only kept pushing offensives which achieved a big initial success), meaning the Soviets get the entire rest of the winter and spring to recuperate instead of just the OTL spring.I see this going two ways. If the Germans did succeed in taking Leningrad in 1941, all of the Russian counter-offensives horrifically fail, even though they will be much larger. Germans supply lines will be much and their best troops are fighting on prepared ground instead of freezing to death without fuel, foraging for food. The failure of these offensives can prove to be so costly in the winter, that the Germans will fight a huge battle for Kharkov in the early summer.
They do not. AGN was hovering at the bare end of it's logistical tether as it was and the terrain they'd have to cross is pete swamp filled with Soviet troops. It isn't happening.Maybe the Germans have the strength to surround Lake Ladoga.
Too late then. They've already pushed too far, strung themselves out, and broken their supply chain. That means the winter counter-offensive would be roughly just as successful as OTL in terms of losses inflicted upon the Germans and territory regained.
That means the winter counter-offensive would be roughly just as successful as OTL in terms of losses inflicted upon the Germans and territory regained.
Leaving aside that taking Leningrad is only possible via direct assault...
...the Germans never managed to inflict as bad casualties upon the Soviets when defending as they did on the attack.
...Stalin calls it off (he only kept pushing offensives which achieved a big initial success)...
They do not. AGN was hovering at the bare end of it's logistical tether as it was and the terrain they'd have to cross is pete swamp filled with Soviet troops. It isn't happening.
1. The Germans on October 16 1941 reached the point in which they were essentially pushed back to by Jan 1942. So, the Germans were just barely able to logistically keep up at that distance without collapsing.
Nope. Much of the wear-and-tear had happened before this point. There is no reason to suspect they would be any less frozen or unprepared for the Russian winter then IOTL given the Germans total incapcity of getting winter equipment to the front and the inappropriate weather conditions for fortification.2. The Germans would ITTL be defending without even more wear-and-tear, being half frozen, and completely unprepared.
And that will still be the case. The Germans don't have the time or supplies to recuperate and their front is already too long for them to avoid being overstretched. It wasn't the next month-and-a-half that overextended the Germans, it was the previous few weeks. That next month-and-a-half was just them putting their arm deeper into the bears mouth.The Russian counter-offensive IOTL met the forward elements of overstretched, worn out Germans, and then overwhelmed those lagging behind struggling to keep up.
The terrain, weather, logistics, and Soviet forces are all against it. The terrain is practically impassible for armor and the concentration of the requisite infantry and artillery forces would break AGNs supply net. So to take a page from your book:Surrounding Lake Ladoga would have led to their capitulation, but I honestly cannot comment on whether that would be possible, though if German forces were all transferred north instead of center, given the Russian rate of collapse after Sept 30th to December, with more armor and men they might be able to get it done.
Adding up the total casualties of all offensives across the entirety of 1942 is a non-starter. Looking at the Rzhev-Vyazma Offensive, the Soviets suffered a total of 776,889 losses (272,320 irrecoverable and 504,569 sanitary, from When Titans Clashed). Pinning down German losses for this period is proven to be elusive, but even with your number that is a casualty ratio of 4:1, not 6:1.Wiki puts the ratio of Germans to Russians to 1:6. The Rhzev Slaughterhouse estimates 2 million Russian casualties. The highest estimates I have seen for German losses are 200,000.
Yes, actually. After taking a quick moment to check the dates, I can actually state that if one actually examines the Rzhev offensives (note the plural), the only one that Stalin didn't call off after about 2 month was the one following the Moscow counter-offensive (the Rzhev-Vyazma Offensive). Both the Kharkov offensives and the pre-Moscow attempts at counter-offensives were even shorter then that.Like Rhzev, like Kharkov...
Terrain which is vastly more favorable to large-scale movement of troops, vehicles, and supplies (not least because it featured actual roads, including even one paved one!) then the pete swamps beyond the Volkhov river.Didn't the Germans move forward in hundreds of kilometers in the heavily forested region approaching Moscow?![]()
First, just how badly does the TTL Soviet winter counteroffensive go?
I generally read it as the Soviets expecting a quiet autumn on the whole, since they didn't expect the Germans to be so bloody stupid as to overextend themselves so close to the winter. Not the first time Stalin ascribed a degree of rationality to his opposition that didn't exist. The question of whether the Germans would be able to mount a successful deception op in the south without a previous thrust at Moscow to draw Soviet attention... is an interesting one. I can certainly see it.As I understand it, after Kiev, the Soviet high command believed the Germans had shifted their main area of effort to Ukraine, and continued to until Typhoon (which of course hasn't happened ITTL) disabused them of the notion, in addition to being surprised in general by an attack so late in the year.
After all the losses they'll take chewing through Soviet defenses in 1942 and having to go through the bloody grindfest of capturing Moscow, I'm dubious they'll have the forces to do it. Even with your proposed deception, Soviet defenses along the Moscow and Leningrad axis will be pretty tough. The loss of Moscow in '42 is a severe blow, but one the Soviets can possibly recover from, depending on where the bulk of the Politburo is when the city goes.The interesting question is what happens if we say that the Soviet winter 1941-42 counteroffensive goes really badly and the STAVKA is deceived into putting most of its reserves in the south and as a result the German attack destroys the weakened forces defending Moscow and takes it (and perhaps Leningrad as well) before the STAVKA has time to react.
We're looking at a minimum of hundreds of thousands of Soviet losses and probably several tens of thousands of Germans. That's if Stalin calls it off after a month or two. Call it 750 thousand Soviet losses and maybe... I guess a hundred thousand Germans? Maybe 150 thousand? But the Soviets will still be up 750 thousand without the loss at Vyazma-Bryansk, plus the industrial resources of Eastern Ukraine, which kind of cuts it out. In any case, defense is fundamentally about preserving ones own forces for when the time is favorable to go over to the offensive, not about inflicting damage upon the enemy. That is the job of the offense. As Clausewitz observed: "Defense is passive, its purpose is preservation. The purpose of assault is conquest."
I generally read it as the Soviets expecting a quiet autumn on the whole, since they didn't expect the Germans to be so bloody stupid as to overextend themselves so close to the winter. Not the first time Stalin ascribed a degree of rationality to his opposition that didn't exist. The question of whether the Germans would be able to mount a successful deception op in the south without a previous thrust at Moscow to draw Soviet attention... is an interesting one. I can certainly see it.
After all the losses they'll take chewing through Soviet defenses in 1942 and having to go through the bloody grindfest of capturing Moscow, I'm dubious they'll have the forces to do it. Even with your proposed deception, Soviet defenses along the Moscow and Leningrad axis will be pretty tough. The loss of Moscow in '42 is a severe blow, but one the Soviets can possibly recover from, depending on where the bulk of the Politburo is when the city goes.
The fighting itself would certainly be interesting, because unlike OTL there's very little room for the Soviet forces to fall back and German supply lines aren't going to be as stretched because there is less distance to advance.
Wikipedia's strength estimate for the Soviets is... optimistic, to say the least. They appear to have included the North Caucasus Front (when Blau's initial blow fell pretty much entirely on the Southern and Southwestern Fronts) and a number of reserve armies that were still in the process of forming up in their estimate of Soviet forces.For the Soviet side, at the outset of OTL Blue, in what they considered to be the secondary sector, there were 2.7 million.
That would be a bitch and a half which would require the Germans to cross some several hundred kilometers of terrible terrain (more so to the north of the city then the south) with no prospect for extending their railheads forward in the North, since the lines there mostly run north-south.I was thinking the Germans would try to surround the city as they planned to do in OTL Typhoon and then take it once its defenders' supplies have been cut off (like at Kiev).
There is some room for the Soviets to withdraw (the Rzhev-Vyazma-Bryansk line, the Mozhiask defence line, and finally Moscow itself both make excellent reserve lines) and their defensive works on the whole will be much tougher then what the Germans faced in Blau, as would the terrain. It is certainly going to get brutal though...
Wikipedia's strength estimate for the Soviets is... optimistic, to say the least. They appear to have included the North Caucasus Front (when Blau's initial blow fell pretty much entirely on the Southern and Southwestern Fronts) and a number of reserve armies that were still in the process of forming up in their estimate of Soviet forces.
That would be a bitch and a half which would require the Germans to cross some several hundred kilometers of terrible terrain (more so to the north of the city then the south) with no prospect for extending their railheads forward in the North, since the lines there mostly run north-south.