Berlin or Bust - An Unthinkable Operation

[ObssesedNuker]

As I mentioned before, if the Wallies we’re running around the clock strategic bombing of Soviet forces and marshaling areas, then the Soviet Air Force would have a tough time allocating planes. One of the advantages of not have dedicated CAS aircraft, is once they’ve dropped their ordinance, they are free ranging fighters again. Plus the Soviets will have their hands full with the 1945 model fighters the Wallies have to protect the bombers. Again, concentrated strategic bombing, (effects of and defense of), is something the Soviets have no experience with. Of course the condition of some of the German cities they’ve just occupied might give them pause.

As I previously observed, bombardment of Soviet force concentrations before they move into the attack* requires their timely detection ahead of time. Given the thoroughness of Soviet, or Soviet-inspired, maskirovka, this isn't exactly impossible but it isn't something the WAllies can count on to achieve with great consistency. And it is untrue the Soviets have no experience with it: they've had plenty of observation of both it's effects and limitations against German forces as well as their own experiences from when the Germans generally held air superiority, local or otherwise, in 1941/42. Fundamentally, the passive measures they can take would generally prove effective against western air forces in various Cold War conflicts under far worse air conditions, so why they wouldn't work under conditions where the Soviets can actually contest the skies is something I still haven't seen anyone able to explain.

And if fighters devoted to CAS ditch their payloads to dogfight with Soviet fighters every time, then they aren't providing close air support for the ground troops that so desperately need it and the intercepting Soviet fighters can freely disengage and move onto intercept new targets with their mission already accomplished.

*Bombing them after they move into the attack is a dumb idea: 1940s strategic bombers are not that flexible and under mobile conditions you're as likely to hit you're own forces as you are the enemy or nothing at all.

 

[Crowbar Six]

Also according to the text citation, SHAEF objected on an attempt to reduce the reserve inventory on the basis that a large percentage of those listed as on-hand were either in-transit or under repair, so yes, clearly the 6,000 figures includes inoperable vehicles by Soviet accounting. The 600 tanks you are claiming were listed as more then inoperable: they were unserviceable, which meant they had broken down in a manner that couldn't be repaired. So it's pretty clear that the American "on-hand" figure is not the same as the Soviet "operational forces" figure.

Also worth considering: the 6,059 Soviet medium tanks is not for May of 1945, but for January of 1945, and in the intervening time, the Soviets produced 22,672 AFVs (of which 12,576 were medium tanks) while suffering 13,700 irrecoverable losses (although the breakdown for the losses by type are not available: total losses of medium tanks throughout the war were 44,900 out of a production figure of 58,701, which would put end-of-war medium tank stock at 13,801). So not only are we comparing disparate accounting methods, we are also comparing disparate dates.



The time needed to ship cargo across the Atlantic was considerably more than days. Crossing the Atlantic even today takes about a week (6-to-8 days) but the big time waster was the issue of loading and unloading: prior to the mid-1950s, cargo ships could spend weeks at the mooring in order to load and unload cargo. The Soviets already showed they had all the support to operate large armored forces and even do so under air attack.

As for the Soviets, out of the 35,000 total AFVs in it's global inventory, I do recall actually once seeing a table which broke down the number of nonoperational forces. But only figures I really recall for sure in terms of the Far East and Central Asia are 3,000 and 2,000 AFVs by May, respectively.



154 rifle corps sounds about right from what I've seen. Pretty much all the tank and mechanized corps were in Europe until June, when several were transferred eastward and an additional one was formed in the Far East. 4 of the cavalry corps were also in Europe. I know that mountain corps was also in Europe: it was with the 4th Ukrainian Front. All of the sapper, AA, and AT units I mentioned are all on the European side of the Urals, although it seems something like 1/5 to 1/4th of the AA forces were part of the PVO to protect Soviet cities rather then the supply lines across Eastern Europe or the frontline formations. I'm less certain about the disposition of the other artillery and armored forces, but the same proportion can probably be applied as with the rifle formations. For the larger artillery formations (ie: the brigades and divisions), probably between or 90+% to all of them were deployed in the west.



Zaloga deals with this quite perfunctorily in the introduction to the Red Army handbook: armored formations by 1945 were staffed and equipped at or near full-strength. As for the difference in the regiments: it sorta depended on the regiments. Heavy tank regiments had 21 tanks while medium tank regiments had 41 (I misremembered and thought that tank brigades had 52 AFVs rather then 65).



First off, rifle divisions tended to bottom out at 3,600 men. It was not common for them to be substantially below that and the average was 4,000 men. Rifle and corps artillery were sustained at or near their full complement in guns, but their manpower complement was generally substantially reduced and they had to rely on non-divisional support attachments from higher headquarters to deal with anything more than routine, light combat situations. The Soviets preferred a "command-push" style of logistical resupply and support over the WAllies "demand-pull" style because it permitted army and front commanders more economical use of stocks and transport in furthering the operational aim. This system worked quite well, as C.J. Dick observes:

"As with transport, most other rear services were centralized. Tactical formations [ie: corps and below] held only enough organic rear services units to cope with routine, light combat situations. This conferred two advantages. With light logistic tails, they were more agile and maneuverable than if they had been encumbered with masses of noncombat vehicles and personnel. It also ensured that specialist and service support elements were used economically and to maximum effect. For instant, there was no point in giving a rifle division the means to deal with high levels of casualties if it was in reserve or deployed on a passive sector; a small medical battalion would suffice for day-to-day needs. If, however, that division and the rest of its corps were advancing in the expectation of carrying out an opposed river crossing in the near future, army and, if necessary, front would ensure the concentration of sufficient resources from their medical reserves to cope with the anticipated flow of casualties. The same applied to the recovery and restoration of damaged equipment. Mobile corps possessed enough technical support to cope with routine maintenance and some breakdowns. When they were committed to battle, higher-echelon recovery and repair units were directed to the area of the most intense fighting to collect and then repair damaged hardware in situ." -From Defeat to Victory: The Eastern Front, Summer 1944, Page 149.

Walter Dunn summarizes the state of organic rifle division in 1945 thusly:

"At the end of the war, the average rifle division had only 4,000 men. Divisions became the equivalent of regiments in their rifle strength but were heavily armed with automatic weapons and had the healthy support of a divisional artillery regiment, not a bad situation. The Soviets strove to give the riflemen maximum support. When a division withdrew to refit, the artillery regiment remained at the front to provide extra support to other divisions. The Russians did not maintain large rifle companies in 1945 but instead relied heavily on artillery and tanks for firepower. The rifle units were given lavish numbers of submachine guns and light machine guns, and a long as there were enough men to fire the automatic weapons, the combat value of the company was not depleted seriously." -Stalin's Keys to Victory: The Rebirth of the Red Army in WWII, Page 60-61.



Well, Soviet industry doesn't have to worry yet because it's simply out of range: the infrastructure for more anything more than pinprick bombing raids from the Middle Eastern bases doesn't exist. Given a year of development, however, that can change. The threat against Soviet LoCs is vastly more serious, but the Germans also made efforts at interdiction bombing and Soviet maskirovka methods proved quite effective both against them and against the Americans own attempts at interdiction in far more favorable air settings in some later wars against their clients. It's worth keeping in mind that throughout the history of airpower, there is no example of a military forces LoCs being completely severed through air power alone and even several instances of supply throughput managing to increase in the face of opposing air supremacy.

The WALLIES could build up airbases in Northern Iraq which would put the Ukraine, Belorussia and a portion of the 'stans within Heavy bomber range of US and RAF heavy bombers. There would also be scope for shuttle bombing of large chunks of Eastern Europe from such bases along with deep recon missions of large chunks of the Southern Soviet Union.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

The WALLIES could build up airbases in Northern Iraq which would put the Ukraine, Belorussia and a portion of the 'stans within Heavy bomber range of US and RAF heavy bombers. There would also be scope for shuttle bombing of large chunks of Eastern Europe from such bases along with deep recon missions of large chunks of the Southern Soviet Union.

Ultimately, yes. The Soviets may launch invasions into Iran-Iraq to forestall it, but the WAllies can just develop air bases further west in in Palestine and Syria to do the same thing. But it's a long-term advantage and it'll take at least a year to redeploy the engineering assets and construct the requisite infrastructure in the MidEast. Useful if the war lasts well into '46, but not something we'll be seeing overnight.

 

[Crowbar Six]

I can't think of anywhere in Europe you'd need to make an amphibious landing against the Soviets. The Baltic front would just be suicide, even if you decided to use the remnants of the Courland Pocket as a starting point. Turkey isn't going to risk getting involved to let ships through the Bosporus, for instance. And if you must have battleships, just use the British ones. There's still plenty of Royal Navy BBs that haven't been routed to the Pacific that you can use (even if some are clapped out) for shore bombardment, without denuding the Pacific operations. Same goes for carriers to some extent.

(and if you really need battleships for some reason, the impounded Regia Marina ships are also there)

The Russians were still in Northern Norway around Kirkenes, a amphibious invasion would be one way to evict the Soviets and leave the opportunity for carrier operation in the Murmansk region.

 

[Lautréamont]

It can well be said that the first steps to a full shooting war between the Western allies and the USSR harked back to the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in October 1944. This was to bring William Wallace to the Presidency and in January 1945 the dual ticket of the GOP, Dewey and MacArthur.

Broke: POTUS George Wallace
Woke: POTUS Henry Wallace
Bespoke: POTUS William Wallace

 

[Frank Hart]

Broke: POTUS George Wallace
Woke: POTUS Henry Wallace
Bespoke: POTUS William Wallace

My guess is that this William Wallace is him, right?

 

[johnboy]

The Russians were still in Northern Norway around Kirkenes, a amphibious invasion would be one way to evict the Soviets and leave the opportunity for carrier operation in the Murmansk region.

This is correct or a repeat of 1919. A landing in the courland pocket is the most aggressive option but by far the riskiest.

 

[johnboy]

Huh... the WAllies are actually weaker in the air then I thought. According to Hyperwar, the entire RAF globally was 9,200 operational aircraft in May 1945. Assuming the proportion of fighters there is the same as with the Americans, that'd be 3,680 fighter aircraft for a total of 9,683 (ignoring that some RAF fighters would be fighting Japan) up against 8,078 fighters as of January 1st (and probably more by May: the Soviets produced some 10,000 fighters in the first half of 1945, but I don't have the loss figures). Factor in the fact that the WAllies lack dedicated CAS aircraft and instead devoted a proportion of their fighter strength to that task, it's entirely possible the Soviets actually come out ahead on the number of aircraft they can devote to air superiority.

These figures are correct for the RAF, that is true, but with qualifications. It only includes front line operational aircraft, not all types and squadrons. It also does not include Dominion Squadrons or the Indian Air Force. The RAAF alone had 5,500 operational aircraft in 1945, the Canadians only slightly less.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

This is correct or a repeat of 1919. A landing in the courland pocket is the most aggressive option but by far the riskiest.

It may not be an option, should the Soviets seize Denmark. Or the pocket have already surrendered.

 

[johnboy]

3 May 1945, Luneburg Heath, Occupied Germany

Colonel James Ewart considered the brief. “Take all steps necessary to investigate the potential rearming of up to four Divisions of German troops using captured equipment and men from occupied areas allocated to 21st Army Group and from former occupation forces in both Norway and Denmark, which are to be occupied by 5th May by elements of 50th Infantry Division(Norway) and 1st Airborne(Denmark) as part of Operation Doomsday.

Note that a similar process with a view to activating up to four German Divisions using captured material will also be undertaken by United States Army 12th Army Group.”

The political implications were volcanic, especially in regards the French. It was just as well that there were volumes of captured material on hand. German manufacturing had gorged itself on slave labour, especially in the closing 18 months of the war. There would be little capacity to manufacture new armaments aside from the completion of small numbers of units from components on hand at factories that had been largely bombed and burnt out, their workforce's either liberated or scattered to the fore winds. The volume of displaced persons in Germany was beyond comprehension, food and supplies were scarce, housing nonexistent. Only those in rural areas were somewhat better off, the areas that fighting and heavy bombers had bypassed.

Ewart considered the man in front of him. Short, slightly built, with pale blue eyes, fair hair and a trimmed moustache, he looked more like a schoolteacher or accountant than a soldier. Old style spats and a thick lambswool coat completed the ensemble. Yet the man’s nickname “Unser Giftzwerg (our tough little bastard)” indicated he was highly regarded by his own men. Many regarded him as the Wehrmacht’s premier expert on defensive warfare, in particular defensive warfare against the Soviets. He had learned to hold the line with the minimum of men and at the lowest possible cost. Gotthard Heinrici was not the most famous German general, but maybe that was a good thing considering the nature of the task ahead and the politically sensitive implications of this all.

 

[Pete55]

I need to find the numbers again, but the ultimate problem facing the Soviets is their seriously contracted pool of manpower. I'll repost when I have the time, but it's important to note that the USSR had bled oceans already, and major fronts combining with certain medium term destruction of a number of cities are conditions certain to both seriously reduce manpower and vastly ramp up demands.

Not that the Wallies dont have some issues there, but the only ones really in a hard place are the British who ultimately are small dogs in the fight.

It's a fight that neither had really faced before. The Wallies dont have the multi army group battle experience, while the Russians have by and large had firepower superiority, and reconaissance superiority, for years by this point.

--

It's easy to look at number from our historical late 1945, but this is simply a different situation. The real factor overall is how the American public take the news, but with careful 'propoganda', it's really pretty easy to frame this as a stab in the back from the Reds. Oh, and sprinkle in some footage of the concentration camps with headlines like "The Soviets were just as bad in Ukraine". Yes, it fudges the record a little, that's usually the point of propoganda.

--

The terrain must be examined. Central southern German, generally where the American forces are, is hilly and difficult terrain for offensive action. North Germany though, generally a British sector, is much better for an advance. If the Soviets break through at all it's my bet that is in Nirthern Germany near Denmark and possibly Into the Low countries before fuel stocks deplete.

Further south they just dont stand a very good chance against American troops in good defensive terrain with massive firepower support. This is actually quite similar to the details up during the cold war.

--

The air war is much closer in numbers of tactical aircraft then is often noted, but the allies maintained a full pipeline of production and pilots that the Societs couldn't match. Their aircraft also tended to just be a bit more modern and certainly had better access to high quality fuel.

--

It's worth noting that it took a half dozen years of war before the Soviets gained full control over the Balkans, meaning that they're fighting a war in the rear while trying to fight a gargantuan war a long ways away. Same problems the Nazis had, honestly.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

You are making my point: the attack was vastly weaker then any Soviet equivalent, particularly in the all-important case of artillery: 55 to 65 pieces per kilometer of front is barely anything! And that the Americans described the German barrages as heavy doesn't really mean much: Americans always described German artillery fire as heavy, even when it was actually positively paltry by any objective measure. I'm not sure where the claim that German artillery in the west fired more rounds per barrel on the west comes from: German munition expenditures in the east were higher along with the number of guns they had. And certainly the claim doesn't mean much by 1945, when the Soviets were outshooting even the Americans. Nor did the Soviets by '45 suffer the sort of problems German artillery did in the winter of '44/'45: their intricate fireplans were far heavier then anything the Germans put on, planned with exquisite use of centralized personnel and equipment assets that the Soviets by '45 had quite a lot of, and the Americans don't actually have well-developed dug-in positions they have spent months in.

The description comes from Dupuy - 'a massive barrage.' Page 136 of "Hitler's Nemesis: the Red Army" states the following:

Although the Red Army fired enormous amounts of ammunition in preparation for an attack, daily use in periods of inactivity was much less. On quiet sectors the Russians fired far less than the Germans even as late as the fall of 1944. Building up munitions supplies for an offensive was a limiting factor in the Soviet offensive pattern, and there may have been a chronic shortage of shells. In a study of shell usage in November 1944, the Germans found that the Red Army had fired an average of two rounds per day from 13,000 guns while the Germans on the Eastern Front fired nine rounds per day from 4,800 guns, using nearly twice as many shells over the ten-day period. On the Western Front, the Germans fired 20 rounds per day from 2,000 guns, while the Allies fired 28 rounds from 3,500 guns. The Germans had used about the same number of shells on each front, but the Allies fired 4 times as many shells as the Russians and 14 times as many shells per gun. The Allies, especially the Americans, used enormous quantities of shells daily. The Russians used their guns sparingly except during an attack.​

The Soviets, additionally, were not outshooting the Americans even by the end of the war. Using Isaev's method The US Army fired about 900,000 to 1,000,000 tonnes of artillery ammunition in ETO/MTO alone from June '44 to VE day. In Western Europe the British/Commonwealth fired at least 330,000 tonnes and in the Mediterranean probably at another 200,000+ (similar to the US, and probably more since the British Eighth Army was over twice as large as the US Fifth). This is before air dropped munitions are even counted.

Spoiler

History of Planning Division, ASF, parts 4 and 5

US Artillery ETO June '44- May '45 (contains some approximations)

105mm howitzer M2
HE - 15,780,862 x 14.97/1000 = 236,240
Unfuzed – 1,311,838 x 14.97/1000 =19,638
HEAT – 94,765 x 13.25/1000 = 1,256
WP – 478,111 x 15.56/1000 = 7,439
Smoke – 422,040 x 14.91/1000 = 6,293
Total – 18,087,616 --> 270,866 t

105mm howitzer M3
HE – 1,986,341 x 14.97/1000 = 29,736
HEAT – 49,959 x 13.25/1000 = 662
WP – 95,513 x 15.56/1000 = 1,486
Smoke – 35,865 x 14.91/1000 = 535
Total – 2,167,678 -->32,419 t

Light 81mm mortar
HE – 5,011,570 x 3.11/1000 = 15,586
Heavy 81mm mortar
HE – 1,026,240 x 5.815 (average of M45 and M56 shell) / 1000 = 5,968
81mm mortar
Smoke – 726,167 x 4.87 = 3,536
Total light/heavy – 6,763,977 --> 25,108 t

75mm gun
HE(NC) – 60,875 x 6.76/1000 = 412
HE(SC) – 1,675,079 x 6.76/1000 = 11,324
AP/APC – 550,437 x 6.63/1000 = 3,649
WP – 364,319 x 6.76/1000 = 2,465* *weight uncertain
Smoke – 56,713 x 6.76/1000 = 383
Total = 18,223 t

75mm howitzer
HE – 1,598,439 x 6.62/1000 = 10,582
HE w/supplemental bursting charge – 202 x 6.62/1000 = 1
HEAT – 71,247 x 5.94/1000 = 423
WP – 194,854 x 6.91/1000 = 1,346
Canister – 12,180 x n/a
HE NC – 722,547 x 6.62/1000 = 4,783
Total – 2,599,469 --> 17,135+ t

76mm gun
AP/APC – 368,308 x 6.9/1000 = 2,541* avg apc/ap
Smoke – 9,612 x 3.4/1000 = 33
Total – 377,920 --> 2,574 t

76.2mm AT
HE NC – 1,383,350 x 5.84/1000 = 8,079
HE RC – 159,146 x 5.84/1000 = 929
Total – 1,542,496 - 9,008 t
76.2mm AA
HE – 3,912 x 5.84/1000 = 23 t

76.2mm AA/AT
AP/APC – 500,375 x 6.9*/1000 = 3,453
Smoke – 24,780 x 3.35/1000 = 83
Illumination – 15,233 x 3.35*/1000 = 51
Total – 540,388 --> 3587 t

90mm AA
HE – 861,194 x 10.56/1000 = 9,094
HE (PDF M48) – 465,156 x 10.56/1000 = 4,817
Unfuzed – 106,429 x 10.56/1000 = 1,124
AP/APC – 116,196 x 10.775 (avg apc/ap)/1000 = 1,252
Total – 1,548,975 --> 16,287 t

4.2 inch chemical mortar
Total – 1,595,198 x 11.34 (avg HE/WP)/1000 = 18,090 t

4.5 inch gun
HE – 736,011 x 24.9 = 18,327 t

155mm gun M1918
HE – 99,850 x 43/1000 = 4,294
WP – 2,298 x 44.5/1000* = 102
AP (together with 155mm gun M1) – 10,728 x 45.36/1000 = 487
Total – 112,876 --> 4,883 t

155mm gun M1
HE – 1,388,535 x 42.96/1000 = 59,651
WP – 43,360 x 44.53/1000 = 1,931
Smoke – 1,501 x 44.53*/1000 = 67
Total – 1,433,396 --> 61,649 t

155mm howitzer M1918*
HE – 635,529
WP – 68,236
Total – 703,765 x 43.61/1000 = 30,691 t

155mm howitzer M1
HE – 3,625,081 x 43/1000 = 155,878
Unfuzed w/supplemental bursting charge – 447,705 x 43/1000 = 19,251
Smoke – 83,248 x 43.14/1000= 3,591
WP – 87,078 x 44.55/1000 = 3,879
Total – 4,243,112 --> 182,599 t

8 inch gun (203mm) (240 lbs)
HE – 42,973 x 108.862/1000 = 4,678 t

8 inch howitzer (200 lbs)
HE – 452,989
Unfuzed – 59,837
Total – 512, 826 x 90.72/1000 = 46,523 t

240mm howitzer M1
HE (360 lbs) – 80,460
Unfuzed – 9,570
Total – 90,030 x 162.293/1000 = 14,611 t

Total weight of projectiles: c. 777,000 tonnes

US Artillery MTO June'44 - May'45

105mm howitzer M2
HE - 4,930,293 x 14.97/1000 = 73,806
Unfuzed – 108,670 x 14.97/1000 = 1,627
HEAT – 18,272 x 13.25/1000 = 242
WP – 191,187 x 15.56/1000 = 2,975
Smoke – 45,372 x 14.91/1000 = 676
Total – 5,293,794 --> 79,326 t

105mm howitzer M3
HE – 658,012 x 14.97/1000 = 9,850
HEAT – 4,774 x 13.25/1000 = 63
WP – 13,360 x 15.56/1000 = 208
Smoke – 8,701 x 14.91/1000 = 130
Total – 684,847 --> 10,251 t

Light 81mm mortar
HE – 1,425,245 x 3.11/1000 = 4,433
Heavy 81mm mortar
HE – 346,660 x 5.815/1000 = 2,016
81mm mortar
Smoke – 206,179 x 4.87/1000 = 1004
Total light/heavy – 1,978,084 --> 7,453 t

75mm gun
HE(NC) – 9,673 x 6.76/1000 = 65
HE(SC) – 726,318 x 6.76/1000 = 4,910
AP/APC – 97,253 x 6.63/1000 = 645
WP – 49,235 x 6.76/1000 = 333
Smoke – 1,882 x 6.76/1000 = 13
Total – 884,361 --> 5,966 t

75mm howitzer
HE – 745,028 x 6.62/1000 = 4,932
Unfuzed – 12,870 x 6.62/1000 = 85
HEAT – 6,322 x 5.94/1000 = 38
WP – 51,512 x 6.91/1000 = 356
Total – 815,732 --> 5,411 t

76mm gun
AP/APC – 28,518 x 6.9/1000 = 197
Smoke – 5,379 x 3.4/1000 = 18
HE- 174,773 x 5.84/1000 = 1,021
illumination - 1
Total – 208,671 -->1,236 t

76.2mm AT
HE NC – 629,274
HE RC – 52,989
Total – 682,283 x 5.84/1000 = 3,985 t

76.2mm AA/AT
AP/APC – 50,302 x 6.9/1000 = 347 t

76.2mm T&AT gun
Smoke – 11,246 x 3.35/1000 = 38
Illumination - 3,076 x 3.35/1000 = 10
Total - 14,322 --> 48 t

90mm AA
HE – 179,622
HE (PDF M48) – 190,206
Unfuzed – 47,916
AP/APC – 8,739 x 10.775/1000 = 94
Total – 426,483 --> 4,505 t

4.2 inch chemical mortar
Total – 422,463 x 11.34/1000 = 4,791 t

4.5 inch gun
HE – 76,752 (no data past oct. 44) x 24.9/1000 = 1,911 t

155mm gun M1918
HE – 5,238 x 43/1000 = 225 t

155mm gun M1
HE – 294,461 x 42.96/1000 = 12,650
WP – 8,557 x 44.53/1000 = 381
Total – 303,018 --> 13,031 t

155mm howitzer M1918
HE – 294,645
WP – 15,666
Total – 310,311 x 43.61/1000 = 13,533 t

155mm howitzer M1
HE – 785,280 x 43/1000 = 33,767
Unfuzed w/supplemental bursting charge – 71,795 x 43/1000 = 3,087
Smoke – 9,539 x 43.14/1000 = 412
WP – 15,485 x 44.55/1000 = 690
Total – 882,099 --> 37,956 t

8 inch gun (203mm) (240 lbs)
HE – 4,181 (no data after oct. 44) x 108.862/1000 = 455 t

8 inch howitzer (200 lbs)
HE – 63,245
Unfuzed – 2,613
Total – 65,858 x 90.72/1000 = 5,975 t

240mm howitzer M1
HE (360 lbs) - 18,602 x 162.293/1000 = 3,109 t

Total - c. 200,000 tonnes

British Artillery W. Europe June '44 - May '45

(Source: Max Hastings)

Field Artillery
7.2" howtizer (92 kg) x 159,898 = 14,710,616 kg / 1000 = 14,711 tonnes
155mm gun M1 (43 kg) x 148,673 = 6,392,939 kg / 1000 = 6,393 t
5.5" gun (45 kg) x 2,610,747 = 117,483,615 kg / 1000 = 117,484 t
4.5" gun (25 kg) x 267,779 = 6,694,475 kg / 1000 = 6,694 t
25 pdr (11.5 kg) x 13,828,959 = 159,033,029 kg / 1000 = 159,033 t
95mm howitzer (11.5 kg) x 13,734 = 157,941 kg / 1000 = 158 t

Total: c. 300,000 tonnes

Tank/AT guns
76mm gun (10 kg) x 9,147 = 91,470 kg / 1000 = 91 tonnes
75mm gun (7 kg) x 773,667 = 5,415,669 kg / 1000 = 5,416 t
17 pdr (8 kg) x 132,627 = 1,061,016 kg / 1000 = 1,061 t
6 pdr (3 kg) x 72,412 = 217,236 kg / 1000 = 217 t

Total: c. 7,000 t

AA
3.7" AA (13 kg) x 1,057,402 = 13,746,226 kg / 1000 = 13,746 t
40mm (1 kg) x 1,338,899 kg / 1000 = 1,339 t

Total: c. 15,000 t

Mortars
4.2" (9 kg) x 861,812 kg / 1000 = 7,756 t
3" (4.5 kg) x 1,435,406 / 1000 = 6,459 t

Total: c. 14,000 t

By all accounts, including the maps you posted, the panzer divisions largely slid around to the south in response to the failure of the Volksgrenadier, which as you already pointed out suffered from lack of adequate artillery support and armored support.

The volksgrenadier divisions proved seriously deficient and American personnel themselves expressed shock at their ineptitude and lack of drive on the offensive. Often in those tactical engagements where US troops were outnumbered 15 to 1, the attackers didn't have anything but infantry whereas the US defenders were able to call on artillery support and had tanks with them. Against Soviet combined arms armies, they'd be facing... well, combined arms.

In the linked map, the panzers broke directly through the positions of the 393rd and 394th infantry regiments, each of which held c. 3 to 4 miles of front on the night of 15 December. Here is a clearer diagram:

Spoiler

How they were met depended on the situation: often the Germans (including tanks) were only opposed by US troops with infantry weapons and there was no heavier support available; as for the VGDs, they suffered heavy casualties but weren't exactly lacking drive: in the 106th Division's sector (opposite Fifth Panzer Army) the 18th VGD attacked very vigorously in the Bleialf-Auw-Schoenberg sector and with the support of heavy armor and artillery carried out a double envelopment of the 106th Division's 422nd and 423rd Infantry Regiments, most of whom were captured after running out of ammunition following a bitter 3-day battle.

That division faced almost the entire strength of the German LXVI corps, whose boundaries were a near-exact match for the 106th's. German reconnaissance also revealed the locations of critical gaps in the 106th's 21 mile front, which they planned to exploit during their offensive; it was expected that the LXVI's divisions would converge on St. Vith by the evening of 17 December or early on 18 December.

To carry out this mission, the Germans achieved roughly the following correlation of forces over that 20+ mile area (from Dupuy, Appendices E&F):

	106th Infantry Division	German LXVI Corps	Ratio GER : US
Personnel	13,926 + 4,307 attached (18,233 total)	37,303	2.05 : 1
Tanks/TDs/Assault guns	41	133	3.24 : 1
Other AFVs	206	80	1 : 2.58
AT/Artillery pieces (excluding mortars)	109	374	3.43 : 1

In addition to this, the Fifth Panzer Army also had a further 266 AT and artillery pieces to distribute between its three corps, while the 116th Panzer Division also fought with the 106th's 424th Infantry Regiment as it attempted to break through. This table, obviously, also can't show the actual correlation at the breakthrough points themselves, which would have been much more heavily skewed in the Germans' favor.

As it happened though, despite achieving total surprise against the greenest, youngest (average age 22) Allied division in Europe under favorable weather conditions and with a large superiority in both manpower and equipment, the LXVI corps was only able to take St. Vith by the early morning of 22 December, four days behind schedule (by which time almost a quarter-million Allied reinforcements arrived to the battle). Von Manteuffel credited the defense of St. Vith with upsetting the entire timetable of the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies.

3 Panzer Divisions (5th, 4th, and 12th) and multiple infantry divisions as well as the 28th light (mountain) division, around 50,000 men all told. All were ordered out on the 24th and arrived on the 26th or 27th. The distance varied, but the average seems to have been about 400 kilometers, as-the-crow flies.

So, overall not very comparable.

Which given that German divisions could be as weak as battalions by this point in the war, doesn't really tell me much.

I don't think any German division still in the line was reduced to battalion strength, especially one ordered to take part in an offensive. The Army official history map of Nordwind is below:

I don't see why weather conditions or detectability would change. Force ratios is a matter of the Soviets ability to pinpoint weak points, and economize on forces in passive sectors secret to build up concentrations, which they proved much better at then the WAllies. And while it is true weather conditions are different, this favors the Soviets as much as it favors the WAllies.

In the Bulge, Allied aerial reconnaissance was severely hampered due to bad fall weather and darkness at that time of year. The Allies also regarded the Ardennes as a quiet front and weren't expecting serious enemy activity in that sector, choosing to cover it with only four divisions dispersed over a wide front. These divisions were either completely green (106th, 9th Armored) or battered from previous fighting in Huertgen Forest (28th and 4th Infantry Divisions). It was basically a unique situation (a combination of weak defenses, terrain, German camouflage efforts, and Allied complacency) that existed only there and at that time.

Soviet armies on the northern front would also face the not-so-small problem of crossing the Elbe river, so the full array of deception techniques and ability concentrate forces would only be available in Czechoslovakia.

Sure. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the Soviets managed it with the consistency they did from '44-on. As did their later clients in the Cold War. Maskirovka was never an optional add-on like it was in the west, but rather a mandatory accompaniment to every operational plan.

Historically, that tended to be enough.

I wouldn't exactly say the Allies were slouches in military deception. They wrong-footed both the Germans and the Japanese time and again (and, more remotely, the Soviets on at least one occasion).

I'm not sure how any of that matters when the artillery is smashed by the opening barrage after already being identified by deep-infiltration reconnaissance teams prior to the offensive (the predecessors to the spetsnatz). Assuming the Soviet fire-planners do their jobs right, there wouldn't be time to shoot or scoot, communications don't mean much if the guns are already mostly exploded scrap metal, and tactical air would face all the issues of interception and AA fire and getting routed in in a timely enough manner.

How would the Soviet infiltrators have managed to penetrate Allied lines? This wasn't the 80s. In the Pacific theater the Japanese made heavy use of infiltration tactics, but US positions were too dense for these to be effective. If the Soviet initiated the war then there's a chance they could have had some success with plainclothes operatives prior to their attack, but even then one would think that OPSEC would still have been tight enough to mitigate this given this scenario has conflict with Germany either still going on just having ended.

German maneuver forces bypassed American positions not because they couldn't crush them themselves, but because doing so would take time and expend resources the Germans knew they could ill-afford to expend. That the subsequent follow on forces, largely consisting of low-quality infantry lacking in armor and often with only a scattering of artillery (as they lacked fuel or even horses to displace their guns forward toward the pockets or bring up ammunition for them), then that they proved unable to handle these pockets of resistance should not be that surprising. To try and turn around from this and claim they'd then be able to handle the vastly greater firepower of Soviet follow-on forces, which consisted of veteran combined-arms and shock armies each mustering 400 or more AFVs and 1,100 or more artillery pieces and the ability to both transport and supply them, is dubious.

What I'm saying is that, for a Soviet-style breakthrough to take place, the attacking forces needed to tear a hole in the opponent's front line and sweep all organized opposition out of the way in order for the exploitation force to move in. To use your example, a combined-arms army with two rifle corps in the assault echelon and another rifle corps plus a tank or mechanized corps in reserve might line up on a frontage of 8 to 14 kilometers, with the flanks held by another rifle division or fortified region. If these failed in their mission, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible for the front 'exploitation' forces (tank army, etc) to jump off, since they require more horizontal space than, say, Kampfgruppe Peiper.

In other words, because the Allies were so mobile and had such enormous air power the Soviets could not have afforded being held up in the tactical depth for more than a few days. This would have required the wholesale destruction of multiple US divisions in the space of about 2 or 3 days (not just breaking them into several pockets, but actually sweeping them out of the way). This while finding a way to deal with massive air attacks that would likely start within hours and multiple armored divisions that would be rushing to the front to shore up threatened areas.

This is why I'm thinking that even if the Soviets were able to achieve success in the initial period of an aggressive war initiated by them, they probably would not have been able to actually destroy an Allied army and more likely would have forced them to retreat along a broad front. This, furthermore, is really only applicable in the Third Army sector since in the north the Red Army is separated from the Allies by the river Elbe, and I don't think the Soviets would have had a very good time against Patton.

Probably adequately. Of course the average density for a entire war over thousands of kilometers of front lasting four years is going to outstrip that of a single battle lasting a few months. What's more relevant is comparing battles and when we do that, we can see that the claim that Khalkin Ghol was the biggest air battle the Soviets ever experienced is laughable: the Battle of Kursk is remembered as the single largest tank battle of all time, but it is also the single largest air battle of all time and the number of aircraft which clashed in the skies far outstripped anything experienced in Khalkin Ghol, as even a glance at the number of aircraft will tell you... or the number of sorties (one of the main measurements of intensity). "From May 22 to September 15, 1939, Soviet aviation performed 20,524 sorties, of which 14,458 (more than 70%) were departing in August-September." By comparison, the VVS and VPO forces supporting the defensive operations during the Battle of Kursk generated about double the latter number of sorties (28,161) in about a 1/5th of the time (7 days, July 5-12, as opposed to 47 in August-September 16). Total sorties generated by the Germans are unavailable, but the first day saw 4,475 sorties generated and apparently they managed another 4,000 again for the second before steadily slackening off. The spatial scale is also similar in this specific instance: the air engagements were overwhelmingly concentrated on the German breakthrough sectors, which were also about 60-70 kilometers across.

I don't have comprehensive data, but for specific instances on the Allied side:

- D-Day 14,674 sorties by 11,590 aircraft
- Operation Veritable (2nd Canadian Army) 9,000 sorties in 24 hours
- Operation Plunder (crossing the Rhine) 11,000 sorties in 3 days (including 3,859 heavy bomber sorties and 2,000 medium bombers)

Overall, the USAAF alone flew 1,450,293 combat sorties in theaters vs. Germany throughout 1944 and the period January-August (probably May in the case of Germany), of which 438,192 were flown in the latter period. In March 1945 alone Allied air forces dropped 245,000 tons of bombs and flew up to 11,000 sorties a day.

And of course, a sortie by a B-24 will have had a lot more impact than one by a Ju-88 or Pe-2.

Bonus chart: from "The War in Western Europe" part II Appendix 8

The model of Kursk also tells us largely what to expect: the two tactical air forces cancelling each other out on the operational-strategic scale.

As seen above, the capabilities of the Luftwaffe either organizationally or operationally were not near those of the Allies; and the Soviets were closer to the Luftwaffe than either the USAAF or RAF.

Plus, if the Anglo-Americans just try and cram the maximum number of their aircraft into a singular air space, they are going to be spending a lot more time dodging each other then they are shooting at or dropping bombs on the enemy. One of those strange counter-intuitive facts about air warfare is that the larger the individual engagements got, the less lethal they became. In such really big fights, pilots spent more time dodging incoming fire and collisions than they did lining up careful shots themselves. Something that also
was hidden at the time because another fact of such really big fights is that overclaiming goes through the roof. When one enemy aircraft falls in flames, ten pilots all claim it as their kill.

The way air power was employed depended on the desired objectives. For a 'saturation' attack such as Operation Cobra, concentration of large numbers of aircraft over a narrow front (in that case over 3,000) was essential. The principle of mass is always important in an air-to-air battle too, see the carrier battles of the Pacific theater or "fighter sweeps" against Luftwaffe bases in 1944-45.

The real advantage of numerical superiority in aircraft is more operational: you can have more aircraft doing more missions at a single time. Which means that at some point, the enemy air force is just going to have to accept they can't intercept all of your sorties, prioritize the more important ones, and hope their AA and passive measures are enough to deal with those they don't.

And in this, the Allies were also far more dangerous than the Soviets, having achieved theater-wide air superiority while also maintaining the awful strategic bombing campaign over German cities. It was against the Western Allies that most of the Luftwaffe was destroyed, not the Soviets (and the Americans did much of the same to the Japanese, too).

Yes, the Luftwaffe was small. But small does not necessarily mean anemic. As a proportion of strength, the Luftwaffe in the east constituted 43% of the total Luftwaffe, a very significant minority, and included the overwhelming majority of their ground attack assets. Unlike in the west, the lack of any serious Soviet counterair campaign meant the Luftwaffe in the east never suffered the sort of decline in expertise until later on and so by maneuvering it's forces the Luftwaffe could and did still throw many of those aircraft together at a single section of the front in a fire brigade role, even if at the expense of the rest of the front. The VVS from '44 onwards tended to have air superiority, but it never enjoyed supremacy as the WAllies did and as a result the Luftwaffe was never a non-factor in either Soviet planning or execution like it was in the west.

Then, maybe a more precise wording would be "given the scale of the challenge before it the Luftwaffe was far too small to achieve its goal or have a meaningful impact on the course of Soviet ground operations." There is a remote parallel to the Allied defense against the Japanese "Ichi-Go" offensive in 1944: even though the US Fournteenth Air Force and the Chinese had 700-800 aircraft in June-July 1944 against 230-260 initially gathered by the Japanese 5th Air Army, it was not enough to prevent the destruction of several KMT armies and the overrunning of multiple American airbases. In Europe, on the other hand, there were tens of thousands of aircraft and the ground forces were extremely well equipped and battle hardened.

Possibly. Of course, fates of war are a thing and it's entirely possible that the WAllies figure things out or the Soviets just plain ol' screw up. I mean, I will admit I regard the Soviets bagging a WAllied army as something of a "best-case" scenario for the Russians.

Certainly the Soviets might not rapidly force breakthroughs: the WAllies may detect their preparations ahead of time and manage successful counterconcentrations or the Soviets might make enough mistakes to give the WAllies that sort of breathing room. But both the Germans and the WAllies (in Soviet-trained wars during the Cold War and post-Cold War-era) were rather consistently duped and taken off-balance by Soviet (or Soviet-esque) deception efforts, so while the former possibility is there, it isn't particularly likely. The latter is, however: it's not like the Soviets were perfect or anything. But in the case it did happen, the result would probably be more in line with what you said: a slugging match that drives back and bleeds the WAllies badly (suffering far worse then anything they experienced at the Germans, even if not as badly as losing an entire army outright), but is also exhausting for the Soviets.

I alluded to this briefly above (and so has @Pete55 in post 91) that the only place where the Soviets would have had all their advantages in play was in the Third Army sector in Czechoslovakia. In the north the two forces were separated by the Elbe river while the Seventh Army was beyond the Danube. I doubt that the Soviets would have been able to overrun Patton, and even if they forced a retreat the Americans would have been rapidly bolstered by reinforcements from the Sixth Army Group and maybe two corps from the First Army. Thus the hypothetical Soviet Czechoslovak offensive would have been threatened from both flanks. Also, according to ru-wikipedia their forces were relatively weak in tanks and aircraft in this theater: during the Prague offensive there were "only" 2,000 tanks and 3,000 aircraft for the 2 million troops involved; Third Army alone probably would have had a comparable number of tanks despite its personnel strength of 437,860.

Adding to this, there's the question of what exactly the Soviets would have been trying to achieve with an offensive in this direction. If they tried to swing south toward Munich they not only would have contended with the hilly country in the Sudetenland but also would eventually have run into the Danube; if they tried to attack north against the First Army in an effort to assist the northern group of Soviet forces in crossing the Elbe they would have been vulnerable to a flank attack from Third and later Seventh Armies. Trying both simultaneously would have only frittered away their strength and they probably would have gone nowhere. All the while they would be under massive strikes by the Allied air forces both in the form of support and interdiction.

That said, the characterization of Soviet offensives as simply massed infantry attacks may be wonderfully in line with post-war German stereotypes, but fits ill with actual Soviet practice by this point in the war: tendency in 1944/45 was to infiltrate the enemy positions while they were suppressed by the artillery preparation* (which would afterwards fall into an "artillery offensive" that would support the infantry through the penetration of the enemy's second line of defenses) so that by the time the barrage ended, the enemy would pop-up only to find the Soviet troops already in their positions, submachine guns already pointing at them, with escorting direct-fire artillery and armor already taken position to provide over watch fire. If the surviving American artillerists want to drop rounds on their own infantry positions and wipe out their own forces, then they are free to do so.

The initial breakthrough operations certainly involved concentrated attacks by dense groups of rifle divisions. The Soviets used their infantry to clear the way for armor or other mobile reserves.

Even leaving aside that this isn't entirely accurate (the position of major Soviet exploitation forces at the time of surrender very much put them in place to undermine considerable portions of the enemy withdrawal on a strategic scale), if you expect the Anglo-Americans of 1945 to exhibit the same sort of slavish, practically suicidal devotion to duty, that the IJA did, I have a bridge to sell you.

The point being that the Soviets weren't able to rupture the opponent's front every time, even when said opponent was much weaker than they were (which wouldn't have been the case here - if anything the Western land armies were arguably more formidable than the Red). The western Allies weren't suicidal fanatics, but they were far better equipped and more experienced in mechanized warfare than the IJA. And in Manchuria the Soviets had almost every conceivable military advantage an attacker could enjoy: tactical and strategic surprise, a gross superiority in numbers and equipment, theoretically more mobile formations owing to higher mechanization, encircling geography, air superiority, and they struck when the Japanese were in the middle of reorganizing their forces. Despite this the best they achieved was to force the Japanese to withdraw on a broad front more or less in line with the latter's operational plan (and in north Manchuria - mountainous, forested terrain, they made relatively little progress at all).

Uh, what? When did the French get such terms from the Soviet Union? When was France ever allied with countries at war with the Soviet Union in 1945 and was facing the prospect (real or imagined) of Soviet troops pouring over the Rhine to occupy it again only to receive such an offer?

The French got all these terms as part of the Allied victory in WWII, including war reparations and an occupation zone in Germany.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

The description comes from Dupuy - 'a massive barrage.' Page 136 of "Hitler's Nemesis: the Red Army" states the following:

Although the Red Army fired enormous amounts of ammunition in preparation for an attack, daily use in periods of inactivity was much less. On quiet sectors the Russians fired far less than the Germans even as late as the fall of 1944. Building up munitions supplies for an offensive was a limiting factor in the Soviet offensive pattern, and there may have been a chronic shortage of shells. In a study of shell usage in November 1944, the Germans found that the Red Army had fired an average of two rounds per day from 13,000 guns while the Germans on the Eastern Front fired nine rounds per day from 4,800 guns, using nearly twice as many shells over the ten-day period. On the Western Front, the Germans fired 20 rounds per day from 2,000 guns, while the Allies fired 28 rounds from 3,500 guns. The Germans had used about the same number of shells on each front, but the Allies fired 4 times as many shells as the Russians and 14 times as many shells per gun. The Allies, especially the Americans, used enormous quantities of shells daily. The Russians used their guns sparingly except during an attack.​

Sure, Dupuy's description is of a "massive barrage", yet Dupuy is makes no attempt to properly indicate properties of the barrage that would indicate it really was massive even by Western Front, let alone Eastern Front, standards. And yes, the Soviets preferred to conserve their tube (and rocket) artillery ammunition for major assaults, as they found that firing off artillery during quiet periods tended not to have any operational impact and thus regarded it as more of a waste of ammo. They relied on mortars much more for that sort of harassment fire. There is little evidence that this was due to any sort of shortage of ammunition on the supply side of things: Soviet production of ammo well exceeded expenditures from '43 onwards. During the ‘44 offensives, a number of unexpectedly successful breakthroughs saw artillery bombardments get curtailed or even ditched altogether in a few cases, meaning stockpiled munitions went unused.

There seemed to be a rather stark change in 1945 for some reason, given the way the shell expenditures-per-day shoot through the roof. Maybe the anticipation of the immediate end of the war convinced the Soviets to be much more profligate in expending shells? Who knows.

The Soviets, additionally, were not outshooting the Americans even by the end of the war. Using Isaev's method The US Army fired about 900,000 to 1,000,000 tonnes of artillery ammunition in ETO/MTO alone from June '44 to VE day. In Western Europe the British/Commonwealth fired at least 330,000 tonnes and in the Mediterranean probably at another 200,000+ (similar to the US, and probably more since the British Eighth Army was over twice as large as the US Fifth). This is before air dropped munitions are even counted.

Yes, they were. 1,000,000 tonnes over 336 days is slightly under 3,000 tonnes daily (2,976 tonnes to be specific). Adding the British brings it up to ~4.5 thousand tonnes a day. The corresponding Soviet figure for 1945 is 623,003 tonnes divided by 128 days, 4,867 tonnes a day. The Soviet figure excludes rocket artillery as well as air forces. So yes, Soviet artillery was outshooting it's WAllied counterparts by 1945.

How they were met depended on the situation: often the Germans (including tanks) were only opposed by US troops with infantry weapons and there was no heavier support available;

Both German and American accounts agree that American troops often had at least artillery support and often had armored support as well.

As it happened though, despite achieving total surprise against the greenest, youngest (average age 22) Allied division in Europe under favorable weather conditions and with a large superiority in both manpower and equipment, the LXVI corps was only able to take St. Vith by the early morning of 22 December, four days behind schedule (by which time almost a quarter-million Allied reinforcements arrived to the battle). Von Manteuffel credited the defense of St. Vith with upsetting the entire timetable of the Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies.

Great, but the ratios posted all show something much lower than what they would have faced against a Soviet force expected to carry such an attack breakthrough. Had the German attack been a Soviet one, it would have featured force ratios about 5 times what were actually achieved by your own numbers and consequently have smashed the enemy defenses much, much more rapidly. A Soviet assault would have also featured things like artillery able to actually displace forward to help with crushing the pocket.

So, overall not very comparable.

Same number of men, same timescale, larger distances, somehow "not very comparable".

I don't think any German division still in the line was reduced to battalion strength, especially one ordered to take part in an offensive.

Whether you think German divisions reduced to battalion strength were still in the line .

In the Bulge, Allied aerial reconnaissance was severely hampered due to bad fall weather and darkness at that time of year. The Allies also regarded the Ardennes as a quiet front and weren't expecting serious enemy activity in that sector, choosing to cover it with only four divisions dispersed over a wide front. These divisions were either completely green (106th, 9th Armored) or battered from previous fighting in Huertgen Forest (28th and 4th Infantry Divisions). It was basically a unique situation (a combination of weak defenses, terrain, German camouflage efforts, and Allied complacency) that existed only there and at that time.

The existence of weak points in a line is an inevitability, not a unique situation. It's more a question of whether each side recognizes their respective points.

Soviet armies on the northern front would also face the not-so-small problem of crossing the Elbe river, so the full array of deception techniques and ability concentrate forces would only be available in Czechoslovakia.

Crossing the Elbe is an engineering-tactical challenge, not an operational one nor one that would prohibit the Soviets from using their ability to operationally deceive and concentrate their forces. If the WAllies neglect to adequately defend a certain section of the Elbe's banks, then there's nothing preventing the Soviets from concentrating the forces and supporting engineering assets there to force a rapid crossing.

I wouldn't exactly say the Allies were slouches in military deception. They wrong-footed both the Germans and the Japanese time and again (and, more remotely, the Soviets on at least one occasion).

Strategically and tactically, yes. Operationally, not so much, although this seems to be largely an issue of concieving to do so (a product of an overall lack of operational doctrine) rather than lack of resources to do so. C.J. Dick has a rather thorough analysis of it:

"The major difference between West and East was in the area of deception. The Allies-especially the British, who led in the field-made serious, sustained, and often rewarding efforts to deceive the Germans at the strategic level in both the Mediterranean and the western theatre. They convinced the Germans that they possessed substantially more forces than in fact existed. Successful exaggeration of the order of battle, enabled principally by false radio nets, disinformation, and double-agent reports and by the denial of confirmatory air reconnaissance, made the enemy more inclined to accept as real the phony preparations for major assaults. From the end of the North African campaign until well into 1944, OKW anticipated landings in the Balkans and tied down troops there. Crucially for the success of Operation Overlord, Operation Fortitude not only deceived the Germans at to the place and time of the early June invasion of France but thereafter sustained the threat of the fictitious First US Army Group's subsequent main assault between the Pas de Calais and the Seine. This kept the Fifteenth Army and other elements out of the battle for Normandy until after the Cobra breakout. Ultra gave the Allies a useful picture of the success of this and other deceptions as the Germans reacted to them, and this enabled them to develop their narrative convincingly.

Despite the prevention of enemy air reconnaissance, efforts at concealment were only partially successful during the bridgehead battles. Hasty, insufficiently detailed planning, and, above all, poor communications discipline, especially by the American, were responsible. Fleeting tactical surprise was sometimes achieved, but not operational surprise; of course, the limited size of the lodgement curtailed the possibilities for deception. However, on the crucial question of the main effort, the persistent and expensive British attacks on the Caen-Falaise axis convinced the Germans that it lay there. These combined with logistic problems to produce a growing hollowing out of the defense on the US sector and left Seventh Army vulnerable to a well-concealed American concentration: this in itself was surprising as the Americans had previously dissipated their effort in broad-front attacks. Hard on the heels of the breakout, the British then achieved their supporting attack on an unexpected axis (Operation Bluecoat). Thereafter, the tempo of the offensive across the front, including that from the south of France, was enough to keep the initiative firmly in Allied hands. The Supreme Commander did not consider it necessary to concentrate on one or two axes and continue pinning and deception efforts on others. When momentum was lost, confidence in massive Allied superiority was so great that commanders relied on firepower rather than subtlety to cope with what they saw as a temporary check. It seems little effort was made to hide the locations of Allied formations from enemy signals intelligence. British and American efforts at operational deception were apparently spasmodic. When they anticipated a particularly difficult challenge, they made a special effort and, moreover, did the job well, but it was not routine. Consequently, the Germans' task of allocating overstretched resources to different sectors was simplified." -Page 240-241

How would the Soviet infiltrators have managed to penetrate Allied lines?

Same way as against the Germans: sneaking between positions during the dead of night. We're not talking infantry platoons and companies, moving into the assault on the frontlines. Rather we're talking 10 man squads, at the most, going out of their way to avoid fights for the sake of getting in deep and being able to monitor traffic behind the lines. Soviet plain clothes operations were also done historically at the end of the war by infiltrating Soviet agents into the mass of westward fleeing German refugees and was very successful. The Soviets also benefitted from some rather unusual sources: Bradley once past his Soviet counterpart a map detailing the positions of all of his own units shortly after the link-up between them and his forces, although whether that would happen IATL is open to question.

Given the overall situation of air parity, the Soviets would also have about as much access to tactical and operational air reconnaissance as the WAllies. Whereas the Soviets did develop techniques to deal with ongoing enemy air reconnaissance efforts (the Germans ran extensive air recon over AGCs area, as well as the rest of the Eastern Front, yet still their High Command failed to detect preparations for Bagration), I've never heard much about WAllied ability to do so.

What I'm saying is that, for a Soviet-style breakthrough to take place, the attacking forces needed to tear a hole in the opponent's front line and sweep all organized opposition out of the way in order for the exploitation force to move in.

Sure, and it's possible for the Soviets to achieve just that given that they can muster far more power then the Germans ever mustered for the Bulge against WAllied weakpoints in the line. It's also possible they might fail, but the Soviets have about 3-4 far more powerful shots at this, whereas the Germans only had one.

To use your example, a combined-arms army with two rifle corps in the assault echelon and another rifle corps plus a tank or mechanized corps in reserve might line up on a frontage of 8 to 14 kilometers, with the flanks held by another rifle division or fortified region.

That's a woeful underestimate. Based on actual 1944/'45 Soviet operations, a Soviet shock group is liable to constitute multiple, about two-three, combined-arms or shock armies on such a width of front with 4-5 rifle corps in the assault echelon, supported possibly by a tank corps and most definitely by multiple tank brigades or regiments, as well as sapper detachments and artillery groupings. Each front is liable to assemble about 2-3 such shock groupings, in addition to the operational maneuver group (usually a tank army or a mechanized-cavalry group).

In other words, because the Allies were so mobile and had such enormous air power the Soviets could not have afforded being held up in the tactical depth for more than a few days. This would have required the wholesale destruction of multiple US divisions in the space of about 2 or 3 days (not just breaking them into several pockets, but actually sweeping them out of the way). This while finding a way to deal with massive air attacks that would likely start within hours and multiple armored divisions that would be rushing to the front to shore up threatened areas.

The first might be dealt with by getting tangled up with the surging out of Soviet airpower at the start of the offensive while the second would, ideally, be dealt with by a rapid breakthrough and thus the pre-emption of their deployment through the insertion of forward detachments and OMGs. Most Soviet offensives in 1944/45 were able to achieve within the first two days, even in places where the Germans were densely defending in a manner comparable to the WAllies (like during the L'vov-Sandomierz Offensive).

I don't have comprehensive data, but for specific instances on the Allied side:

- D-Day 14,674 sorties by 11,590 aircraft
- Operation Veritable (2nd Canadian Army) 9,000 sorties in 24 hours
- Operation Plunder (crossing the Rhine) 11,000 sorties in 3 days (including 3,859 heavy bomber sorties and 2,000 medium bombers)

Overall, the USAAF alone flew 1,450,293 combat sorties in theaters vs. Germany throughout 1944 and the period January-August (probably May in the case of Germany), of which 438,192 were flown in the latter period. In March 1945 alone Allied air forces dropped 245,000 tons of bombs and flew up to 11,000 sorties a day.

Mmm. These are inline with VVS sorties for some later operations in 1944/45, although I think the WAllies do have an advantage of some 20%. Not something that’d render the VVS uncompetitive, but there.

The way air power was employed depended on the desired objectives. For a 'saturation' attack such as Operation Cobra, concentration of large numbers of aircraft over a narrow front (in that case over 3,000) was essential.

Oh, sure, for bombers mass can be important for the delivery of firepower. I'm talking for fighters in air-air fights.

The principle of mass is always important in an air-to-air battle too, see the carrier battles of the Pacific theater or "fighter sweeps" against Luftwaffe bases in 1944-45.

No it is not and air combat tactics which attempted to act on such accord are known for being ignominious failures (Big Wing, anyone?). The fighter sweeps of 1944/45 were exactly a product of utilizing numerical superiority operationally as I mentioned: Anglo-American squadrons operating in relays over a wide area running many different patrols over many different areas and thus presenting the Luftwaffe with a constant and endless fight even before they could see the bomber formations, often even when relocating between air bases. They did not do this by massing altogether at once to try and tactically overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers at a single point. It relied essentially on using the bombers as bait to draw up the Luftwaffe and the price even in 1944 resulted in some quite unfavorable kill ratios: the Americans lost 10,447 aircraft in Europe and another 5,228 in the Med. Over 6,000 of these losses were expensive four engine bombers, which represented around four times the industrial investment of a single engine fighter and 8-10 times the investment in manpower. In exchange the Germans lost 9,768 combat aircraft in the West, to both the USAAF and RAF (who lost 3,220 bombers and several thousand more fighters themselves). When we factor in the aforementioned greater expense of USAAF and RAF heavy bombers, the kill ratios here become "as bad" as anything experienced by the Red Air Force against the Luftwaffe.

Even then, their success would not have been possible had the Luftwaffe not been broken by the previous two years of attrition, in which the air war on the Eastern Front played a major part. Similarly, the attriting of Japanese air power in '42-'44 was characterized by large numbers of small air engagements, but not small numbers of large air engagements. And again: it took years.

The USAAF beat the Luftwaffe's fighter force not by exercising any sort of special operational or tactical capability. It beat them by joining the RAF in slamming into them head on from 1943, dragged them into a brutal war of attrition, and then beating them to death with endless waves of bombers and fighters. This was not a cheap or quick process, although as the Luftwaffe’s ultimate demise in early-‘44 showed, it worked. How well this would work against the Soviet air force, which as early as 1941 showed the ability to absorb incredible losses, even unfavorable ones, and come back out the other side tougher then when it first went in, is open to debate.

And in this, the Allies were also far more dangerous than the Soviets, having achieved theater-wide air superiority while also maintaining the awful strategic bombing campaign over German cities. It was against the Western Allies that most of the Luftwaffe was destroyed, not the Soviets (and the Americans did much of the same to the Japanese, too).

The WAllied achievement of air superiority was a product of environment rather than any special capability: namely, the air forces did not have massive ground wars to support, merely the relatively small expeditionary ones in peripheral theatres. This freed them up to focus the gross bulk of their energies on a counter-air campaign of attrition against the Luftwaffe that took years to unfold and broke the Luftwaffe before the major ground campaign unfolded. Had the Luftwaffe not suffered the attrition it did in 1942/43, Even granted this, it took them years of attritions against a far less resilient opponent then the VVS/PVO. This is not a luxury they would have in a Unthinkable scenario.

Then, maybe a more precise wording would be "given the scale of the challenge before it the Luftwaffe was far too small to achieve its goal or have a meaningful impact on the course of Soviet ground operations." There is a remote parallel to the Allied defense against the Japanese "Ichi-Go" offensive in 1944: even though the US Fournteenth Air Force and the Chinese had 700-800 aircraft in June-July 1944 against 230-260 initially gathered by the Japanese 5th Air Army, it was not enough to prevent the destruction of several KMT armies and the overrunning of multiple American airbases. In Europe, on the other hand, there were tens of thousands of aircraft and the ground forces were extremely well equipped and battle hardened.

That an otherwise strong air force was unable to take up the slack of an inadequate ground force is not unusual or unheard of in military history. Indeed, it is far more unusual for a air force to be able to take up the slack of an inadequate ground force. The WAllies ability to deliver air support was also undertaken in an environment where the enemy air force had already been broken prior to the demands for large-scale air support were placed on it, so by the same token it's ability to deliver such air support in an environment where there would be an enemy air force still contesting the air over the frontlines and trying to deliver it's own air support to the troops is open to question.

Also, according to ru-wikipedia their forces were relatively weak in tanks and aircraft in this theater: during the Prague offensive there were "only" 2,000 tanks and 3,000 aircraft for the 2 million troops involved; Third Army alone probably would have had a comparable number of tanks despite its personnel strength of 437,860.

I mean, if you are once again comparing only the operational AFVs (and aircraft) of the 3 fronts to every single AFV in the Third Army regardless of whether it was operational or not, yeah.

The initial breakthrough operations certainly involved concentrated attacks by dense groups of rifle divisions. The Soviets used their infantry to clear the way for armor or other mobile reserves.

And those infantry concentrations were heavily supported by equally intense concentrations of artillery and armor. Mobile armored reserves were held in the tank armies and cavalry-mechanized groups to act as the exploitation force once the breakthrough , but the whole reason the Soviets had the assortment of various independent tank brigades and regiments was so they could be handed out to the combined-arms and shock armies to provide them with organic armored support. Same reason why the American independent tank and tank destroyer battalions existed, just moved one command up. The idea that late-war Soviet offensives were just blind infantry rushes which could trivially be disrupted by some defensive artillery fire, like you claimed, is patently untrue.

The point being that the Soviets weren't able to rupture the opponent's front every time, even when said opponent was much weaker than they were (which wouldn't have been the case here - if anything the Western land armies were arguably more formidable than the Red). The western Allies weren't suicidal fanatics, but they were far better equipped and more experienced in mechanized warfare than the IJA. And in Manchuria the Soviets had almost every conceivable military advantage an attacker could enjoy: tactical and strategic surprise, a gross superiority in numbers and equipment, theoretically more mobile formations owing to higher mechanization, encircling geography, air superiority, and they struck when the Japanese were in the middle of reorganizing their forces. Despite this the best they achieved was to force the Japanese to withdraw on a broad front more or less in line with the latter's operational plan (and in north Manchuria - mountainous, forested terrain, they made relatively little progress at all).

By '44/'45? They pretty much were, yeah. Whenever the Soviets launched a strategic offensive, they ruptured the Germans front within a few days, even in places where the Germans had defense thickness comparable to the WAllies (like around L'vov). The claim that the Soviets in northern Manchuria also made little progress is without much foundation: by the time the Kwangtung Army surrendered, the forces in northern Manchuria had already entered the central Manchurian plain largely ahead of schedule. The Japanese withdrawal was also on the verge of being undone by the advance of the Trans-Baikal Front's exploitation forces, which was reaching the very railways they had to rely on to withdraw, while the bulk of their forces were withdrawing in the wrong direction (northwestward, deeper into the forming pocket, rather then southwestward). The Japanese front was fragmented, not broad, particularly in the west where they were mostly reduced to disparate and immobilized hardpoints of mostly isolated battalion-sized units.

 

[miketr]

I suspect that in short order any Western German troops are going to start to be equipped with US gear. As others noted German industry is in ruins. It will start with stuff like trucks and expand out from there. Even if there is a large cache of 98Ks / StG44s / MG-42s will there be a matching supply of bullets?

Looking forward to next chapter.

Michael

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

Sure, Dupuy's description is of a "massive barrage", yet Dupuy is makes no attempt to properly indicate properties of the barrage that would indicate it really was massive even by Western Front, let alone Eastern Front, standards. And yes, the Soviets preferred to conserve their tube (and rocket) artillery ammunition for major assaults, as they found that firing off artillery during quiet periods tended not to have any operational impact and thus regarded it as more of a waste of ammo. They relied on mortars much more for that sort of harassment fire. There is little evidence that this was due to any sort of shortage of ammunition on the supply side of things: Soviet production of ammo well exceeded expenditures from '43 onwards. During the ‘44 offensives, a number of unexpectedly successful breakthroughs saw artillery bombardments get curtailed or even ditched altogether in a few cases, meaning stockpiled munitions went unused.

Beyond what I've already posted I don't have much more information to assess the strength of the German barrage. If they fired about the same on the Western and Eastern fronts (as the previously quoted study claimed) then expenditures in the west should have been comparatively more dense owing to the shorter length of the front. In the Bulge the only other specifics I have are that the barrage lasted approximately 30 minutes (0530-0600) during the most intense phases and that in general the results were disappointing for the Germans (lack of ammunition was a factor). The shortest time period I could find was at Hoefen on the northern shoulder (20 minutes). There the 3rd Battalion, 395th Infantry Regiment, 99th Division counted about 250 to 300 rounds falling in its sector during that time.

There seemed to be a rather stark change in 1945 for some reason, given the way the shell expenditures-per-day shoot through the roof. Maybe the anticipation of the immediate end of the war convinced the Soviets to be much more profligate in expending shells? Who knows.

[...]

Yes, they were. 1,000,000 tonnes over 336 days is slightly under 3,000 tonnes daily (2,976 tonnes to be specific). Adding the British brings it up to ~4.5 thousand tonnes a day. The corresponding Soviet figure for 1945 is 623,003 tonnes divided by 128 days, 4,867 tonnes a day. The Soviet figure excludes rocket artillery as well as air forces. So yes, Soviet artillery was outshooting it's WAllied counterparts by 1945.

If the US fired 1.2 million tonnes and the British c. 800,000 in Western Europe and Italy, that works out to just under 6,000 tonnes daily (if British expenditure in MTO was "only" the same as the US Fifth Army's despite the fact that their Eighth Army's effective strength was over 2.3 times higher it still would have been 5,200 tonnes/day). Obviously, none of this includes the Pacific either.

My hypothesis as to why the Soviet Army fired more during the final months of the war is probably a combination of the sense that Germany's defeat was near and the more static combat in East Prussia demanded a greater expenditure of shells as opposed to pursuit operations in Byelorussia and Poland.

On the Western Front, it appears that US artillery expenditure peaked from November through March 1945, when the Allies were encountering the German West Wall defenses, battled the counterattacks in the Ardennes and Alsace, and pushed the Wehrmacht back over the Rhine. The end of March saw the Allies physically cross the Rhine and from April to the end of the war operations became more mobile again. To give an example, here is the monthly expenditure of 'standard' HE shells from the 105mm M2 ("History of Planning Division, ASF" volume 9 ):

Both German and American accounts agree that American troops often had at least artillery support and often had armored support as well.

Often they had artillery support, but not always. The above 3rd Infantry Battalion at Hoefen met the German attack with only infantry weapons since the opening barrage disrupted communications with the artillery for about an hour, also the I&R platoon (southernmost 99th Division unit) famously held back the Germans at Lanzerath for almost an entire day.

Great, but the ratios posted all show something much lower than what they would have faced against a Soviet force expected to carry such an attack breakthrough. Had the German attack been a Soviet one, it would have featured force ratios about 5 times what were actually achieved by your own numbers and consequently have smashed the enemy defenses much, much more rapidly. A Soviet assault would have also featured things like artillery able to actually displace forward to help with crushing the pocket.

[...]

That's a woeful underestimate. Based on actual 1944/'45 Soviet operations, a Soviet shock group is liable to constitute multiple, about two-three, combined-arms or shock armies on such a width of front with 4-5 rifle corps in the assault echelon, supported possibly by a tank corps and most definitely by multiple tank brigades or regiments, as well as sapper detachments and artillery groupings. Each front is liable to assemble about 2-3 such shock groupings, in addition to the operational maneuver group (usually a tank army or a mechanized-cavalry group).

[...]

The existence of weak points in a line is an inevitability, not a unique situation. It's more a question of whether each side recognizes their respective points.

(Cut because I think these address the same thing)

The reason for the comparison is that the battle between the 106th Division and LXVI corps is similar to what the Soviets arranged on a division to division and a half frontage during breakthrough operations (per Glantz). Obviously the German offensive also used more than one corps, and as I mentioned there were other divisions in the way of the German onslaught that didn't collapse. The circumstances that existed during the battle west of the Schnee Eifel were pretty unique on the Western Front, and although Soviet forces might have been able to achieve a higher force ratio in such and such location, those same combination of factors wouldn't have been present. Especially in terms of combat experience, out of all Patton's divisions every infantry division had seen heavy combat and only one armored division (the 16th) was relatively untested.

Same number of men, same timescale, larger distances, somehow "not very comparable".

50,000 men over 2-3 days is not the same as 60,000 men and 11,000 vehicles in one day let alone 250,000 men with 50,000 vehicles in a week. Even though the distance is farther you're talking an average of 32,000 men and 8200 vehicles daily after the first group. According to rough calculations based on Dupuy's numbers Allied strength increased by about 312,000 men and 2,347 tanks, TDs, and assault guns within 8 days and by 476,000 men and 3,397 tanks, etc in 2 and a half weeks.

Whether you think German divisions reduced to battalion strength were still in the line.

A division at battalion strength ceases to be a division. No such 'divisions' could have effectively taken part in any offensive.

Crossing the Elbe is an engineering-tactical challenge, not an operational one nor one that would prohibit the Soviets from using their ability to operationally deceive and concentrate their forces. If the WAllies neglect to adequately defend a certain section of the Elbe's banks, then there's nothing preventing the Soviets from concentrating the forces and supporting engineering assets there to force a rapid crossing.

Even if the Soviets succeeded in crossing at a number of places, what would happen then? Do you think that, once discovered, the Allies would permit them to expand their strength to a level that would permit a breakout, especially under air and artillery attack? Furthermore while this is going on First Canadian Army also likely would have had time to arrive at the front.

Strategically and tactically, yes. Operationally, not so much, although this seems to be largely an issue of concieving to do so (a product of an overall lack of operational doctrine) rather than lack of resources to do so. C.J. Dick has a rather thorough analysis of it:

"The major difference between West and East was in the area of deception. The Allies-especially the British, who led in the field-made serious, sustained, and often rewarding efforts to deceive the Germans at the strategic level in both the Mediterranean and the western theatre. They convinced the Germans that they possessed substantially more forces than in fact existed. Successful exaggeration of the order of battle, enabled principally by false radio nets, disinformation, and double-agent reports and by the denial of confirmatory air reconnaissance, made the enemy more inclined to accept as real the phony preparations for major assaults. From the end of the North African campaign until well into 1944, OKW anticipated landings in the Balkans and tied down troops there. Crucially for the success of Operation Overlord, Operation Fortitude not only deceived the Germans at to the place and time of the early June invasion of France but thereafter sustained the threat of the fictitious First US Army Group's subsequent main assault between the Pas de Calais and the Seine. This kept the Fifteenth Army and other elements out of the battle for Normandy until after the Cobra breakout. Ultra gave the Allies a useful picture of the success of this and other deceptions as the Germans reacted to them, and this enabled them to develop their narrative convincingly.

Despite the prevention of enemy air reconnaissance, efforts at concealment were only partially successful during the bridgehead battles. Hasty, insufficiently detailed planning, and, above all, poor communications discipline, especially by the American, were responsible. Fleeting tactical surprise was sometimes achieved, but not operational surprise; of course, the limited size of the lodgement curtailed the possibilities for deception. However, on the crucial question of the main effort, the persistent and expensive British attacks on the Caen-Falaise axis convinced the Germans that it lay there. These combined with logistic problems to produce a growing hollowing out of the defense on the US sector and left Seventh Army vulnerable to a well-concealed American concentration: this in itself was surprising as the Americans had previously dissipated their effort in broad-front attacks. Hard on the heels of the breakout, the British then achieved their supporting attack on an unexpected axis (Operation Bluecoat). Thereafter, the tempo of the offensive across the front, including that from the south of France, was enough to keep the initiative firmly in Allied hands. The Supreme Commander did not consider it necessary to concentrate on one or two axes and continue pinning and deception efforts on others. When momentum was lost, confidence in massive Allied superiority was so great that commanders relied on firepower rather than subtlety to cope with what they saw as a temporary check. It seems little effort was made to hide the locations of Allied formations from enemy signals intelligence. British and American efforts at operational deception were apparently spasmodic. When they anticipated a particularly difficult challenge, they made a special effort and, moreover, did the job well, but it was not routine. Consequently, the Germans' task of allocating overstretched resources to different sectors was simplified." -Page 240-241

Operationally too. We can look at the fighting in the Rhineland (Operation Veritable comes to mind) as well as Plunder - the 21st Army Group's crossing of the Rhine. In the Pacific theater Field Marshal Slim's "Operation Extended Capital" was a formidable example of military deception and maneuver against a capable enemy. The US even had an entire unit, the "Ghost Army," dedicated to battlefield deception.

Same way as against the Germans: sneaking between positions during the dead of night. We're not talking infantry platoons and companies, moving into the assault on the frontlines. Rather we're talking 10 man squads, at the most, going out of their way to avoid fights for the sake of getting in deep and being able to monitor traffic behind the lines. Soviet plain clothes operations were also done historically at the end of the war by infiltrating Soviet agents into the mass of westward fleeing German refugees and was very successful. The Soviets also benefitted from some rather unusual sources: Bradley once past his Soviet counterpart a map detailing the positions of all of his own units shortly after the link-up between them and his forces, although whether that would happen IATL is open to question.

This wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for the Japanese (pp. 12-13), but the Americans quickly adjusted to their tactics and they were not successful. In any regard, infiltrators don't seem to have had a decisive impact on either front in terms of suppression of the opponent's artillery.

Given the overall situation of air parity, the Soviets would also have about as much access to tactical and operational air reconnaissance as the WAllies. Whereas the Soviets did develop techniques to deal with ongoing enemy air reconnaissance efforts (the Germans ran extensive air recon over AGCs area, as well as the rest of the Eastern Front, yet still their High Command failed to detect preparations for Bagration), I've never heard much about WAllied ability to do so.

I wouldn't exactly call it "air parity;" but Allied photo-reconnaissance was generally excellent. In the case of counter-reconnaissance, likely this capability was limited on the German side due to the unfavorable military situation that existed for them at that time.

No it is not and air combat tactics which attempted to act on such accord are known for being ignominious failures (Big Wing, anyone?). The fighter sweeps of 1944/45 were exactly a product of utilizing numerical superiority operationally as I mentioned: Anglo-American squadrons operating in relays over a wide area running many different patrols over many different areas and thus presenting the Luftwaffe with a constant and endless fight even before they could see the bomber formations, often even when relocating between air bases. They did not do this by massing altogether at once to try and tactically overwhelm the enemy with sheer numbers at a single point. It relied essentially on using the bombers as bait to draw up the Luftwaffe and the price even in 1944 resulted in some quite unfavorable kill ratios: the Americans lost 10,447 aircraft in Europe and another 5,228 in the Med. Over 6,000 of these losses were expensive four engine bombers, which represented around four times the industrial investment of a single engine fighter and 8-10 times the investment in manpower. In exchange the Germans lost 9,768 combat aircraft in the West, to both the USAAF and RAF (who lost 3,220 bombers and several thousand more fighters themselves). When we factor in the aforementioned greater expense of USAAF and RAF heavy bombers, the kill ratios here become "as bad" as anything experienced by the Red Air Force against the Luftwaffe.

Yes, they did. This was proven time and again, and just follows common sense: more fighters in the 'battlespace' means more mutual protection and more attackers per enemy aircraft. The Allies had the numbers and resources to swarm the German airfields with 50-300 plane raids and were able to achieve success because of the massive suppressive effect this created. They didn't concentrate all their aircraft against a single target, but in each of those combats they almost always possessed a smothering advantage in numbers such that the Germans were simply overwhelmed.

Then during large-scale raids when the Luftwaffe tried to scramble they were met with huge numbers of escorting fighters and could not sustain the losses suffered attempting to intercept the bombers. From "Strategy for Defeat" p. 243:

"The attrition of German fighter pilots and aircraft reached a new high point in March . Luftwaffe units wrote off 56.4 percent of single-engine fighters available on March 1, while crew losses reached nearly 22 percent of pilots present on February 29. Nevertheless, the Germans did impose severe attrition on Eighth's bombers, Eighth wrote off 349 bombers in March . Not until May did a significant decrease in bomber attrition begin, reflecting the continued arrival of new crews and aircraft as well as the final collapse of the Luftwaffe's fighter force."​

Page 291:

"Bereft of fuel, its units ravaged by the summer attrition, the Luftwaffe was a force that no longer exercised any influence on the conduct of either air or ground operations. The price that American bombers paid to keep the Luftwaffe down was at times high. The attacks on the synthetic fuel factories from September 11 to 13th cost the Americans no less than 91 bombers, but the destruction of fuel capacity, Luftwaffe pilots, and aircraft kept the Germans from any substantial recovery. On November 2, 1944, Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces launched a massive attack on the German fuel industry . Of the 490 fighters that sortied to meet the invading formations, the Luftwaffe lost no less than 120 aircraft with 70 pilots killed and wounded. Approximately 40 American bombers fell . Nevertheless, the Luftwaffe as a force that could affect the course of the war was through."​

And from wiki:

"On one occasion German air controllers identified a large force of approaching B-17s, and sent all the Luftwaffe's 750 fighters to attack. The bogeys were all Mustangs flying well ahead of the American bombers' combat boxes, which shot down 98 interceptors while losing 11. The actual B-17s were well behind the Mustangs, and completed their mission without a loss. In February, 1944, the Luftwaffe lost 33% of its frontline fighters and 18% of its pilots; the next month it lost 56% of its fighters and 22% of the pilots. April was just as bad, 43% and 20%, and May was worst of all, at 50% and 25%. German factories continued to produce many new planes, and inexperienced new pilots did report for duty; but their life expectancy was down to a few combat sorties. "​

The same thing happened in the Pacific; "Big Blue Blanket" tactics relied on this principle. To use one example when the Americans were on the offensive, the Third Fleet's massive raid on Formosa in October '44, before the invasion of Leyte. Japanese Vice Admiral Shigeru Fukudome lamented that his aircraft were like 'eggs against a stone wall' - 1/3 of his interceptors were lost against the first American wave and the rest against the second, leaving nothing against the third. Japanese attack aircraft going after the American fleet met disaster, achieving little military gain in exchange for tremendous losses. (The Japanese fliers reported an overwhelming victory - 11 carriers sunk - that was accepted due to lack of contrary evidence, this false belief later undermined their defense of the Philippines.) In all the Japanese lost at least 312 planes destroyed in the air against 89 for the Americans. This would not have been possible if the US attacked in 'penny packets.'

I don't deny that the Soviets had a much larger air force than the Germans did in 1944/45 and that the Allies wouldn't have been able to go about as if they weren't there, but we have the known historical record of Luftwaffe operations on the Eastern Front where the Soviets weren't strong enough (or didn't have the doctrine) to completely dominate them and they were able to continue air-to-air combat and ground support until very late in the war. The Allies - who wrested air superiority over the entire theater, rather than just over the breakthrough points - possessed a capability many times greater. If the Soviets, both ground and air forces, conducted their 'business as usual' without taking this into account, the consequences for them would have been very severe.

The first might be dealt with by getting tangled up with the surging out of Soviet airpower at the start of the offensive while the second would, ideally, be dealt with by a rapid breakthrough and thus the pre-emption of their deployment through the insertion of forward detachments and OMGs. Most Soviet offensives in 1944/45 were able to achieve within the first two days, even in places where the Germans were densely defending in a manner comparable to the WAllies (like during the L'vov-Sandomierz Offensive).
I mean, if you are once again comparing only the operational AFVs (and aircraft) of the 3 fronts to every single AFV in the Third Army regardless of whether it was operational or not, yeah.
[...]
And those infantry concentrations were heavily supported by equally intense concentrations of artillery and armor. Mobile armored reserves were held in the tank armies and cavalry-mechanized groups to act as the exploitation force once the breakthrough , but the whole reason the Soviets had the assortment of various independent tank brigades and regiments was so they could be handed out to the combined-arms and shock armies to provide them with organic armored support. Same reason why the American independent tank and tank destroyer battalions existed, just moved one command up. The idea that late-war Soviet offensives were just blind infantry rushes which could trivially be disrupted by some defensive artillery fire, like you claimed, is patently untrue.
[....]
By '44/'45? They pretty much were, yeah. Whenever the Soviets launched a strategic offensive, they ruptured the Germans front within a few days, even in places where the Germans had defense thickness comparable to the WAllies (like around L'vov).

I think more context is needed for the Third Army and Soviet forces in Czechia. At the end of the war, Third Army was ordered to occupy the line Enns River - Budejovice - Pilsen - Karlsbad, or about 280 km on Google Maps using straight lines. It had four corps, 12 infantry divisions, (the 4th, 99th, 1st, 2nd, 97th, 5th, 26th, 90th, 65th, 71st, 80th, and 70th), 5 armored divisions (the 14th, 9th, 16th, 4th, 11th, and 13th), and the 474th Independent Infantry Regiment. According to the US Army official history, on that date there were also the following attached tank/TD units:

Attached to infantry divs:
4th - 70th tank bn, 610th TD bn (SP)
99th - 786th tank bn, 629th TD bn (SP)
1st - 745th tank bn (until 8 May), 634th TD bn (SP, -Co. C) (until 6 May)
2nd - 741st tank bn (until 8 May), 612th TD bn (SP)
97th - 782nd tank bn, 820th TD bn (SP)
5th - 803rd TD bn (SP)
26th - 778th tank bn, 818th TD bn (SP)
90th - 773rd TD bn (SP)
65th - 748th tank bn, 808th TD bn (SP)
71st - 761st tank bn, 635th TD bn (T)*
80th - 702nd tank bn, 811th TD bn (SP)
70th - none

Total: 630 tanks, 36 Sherman 105s, 348 tank destroyers, 57-60 M8 armored cars by TO&E

Attached to armored divs:
14th - none
9th - 656th TD bn (SP)
16th - 633rd TD bn (SP)
4th - 704th TD bn (SP)
11th - 705th TD bn (SP)
13th - "7th Armored Group**," 801st TD bn (SP)

Total: c. 222 tanks and assault guns, 180 tank destroyers, 36 M8 armored cars by TO&E

*(T) = towed tank destroyer battalion, consisted of 36 towed AT guns
** Armored group = corps level armored reserve, consisted of ~3 tank battalions

Combined with the armored divisions (1,315 tanks and assault guns, 270 armored cars), that's 2,731 tanks, TDs, and assault guns, and 364-366 armored cars by TO&E.

Using your analogy of L'vov-Sandomierz, Harpe's position was not very comparable to Patton's. Over a 353 km front Harpe had 370,000 to 400,000 men as opposed to Patton's 437,860 over ~ 280 kms. Compared with Patton's 2,700 tanks, TDs, and assault guns Harpe had just 420. The 1,000 aircraft flying support for the German troops probably would have struggled to match the performance of even XIX Tactical Air Command assigned to Third Army, let alone the rest of the Allied air forces in the theater. Patton's troops also weren't chewed up from months (years?) of combat on the Eastern Front and he didn't have to work with Hungarian puppet soldiers under his command. The Americans, of course, were also completely motorized, had a huge firepower superiority over the Germans, and were in a position to receive rapid reinforcements from both First Army and Sixth Army Group.

With this in mind, wiki states that during the L'vov-Sandomierz offensive the German XLII corps managed to withdraw under attack from the northern Soviet pincer relatively intact, while on the southern front the Germans held the Soviet breakthrough to a width of 3-4 kilometers after their initial attempt was repulsed by an infantry division-equivalent (Korpsabteilung "C"). While this took place, a counterattack by a single panzer division (likely badly understrength) and elements of an SS grenadier division ("Galizien") actually managed to gain ground on the Soviets, who - interestingly - stopped them with the help of tactical air support. Then after the Soviets threw in their reserves they began to resume the advance west, whereupon they were able to encircle the XIII Corps at Brody largely because the German commander refused to order a retreat. This took place 4-5 days after the initial attack, which is greater than the length of time it took LXVI corps to defeat the two regiments of the 106th Division in the battle for the Schnee Eifel.

Given the above, it seems very unlikely the Soviets would have been able to manhandle Patton the same way they did to the Germans.

The claim that the Soviets in northern Manchuria also made little progress is without much foundation: by the time the Kwangtung Army surrendered, the forces in northern Manchuria had already entered the central Manchurian plain largely ahead of schedule. The Japanese withdrawal was also on the verge of being undone by the advance of the Trans-Baikal Front's exploitation forces, which was reaching the very railways they had to rely on to withdraw, while the bulk of their forces were withdrawing in the wrong direction (northwestward, deeper into the forming pocket, rather then southwestward). The Japanese front was fragmented, not broad, particularly in the west where they were mostly reduced to disparate and immobilized hardpoints of mostly isolated battalion-sized units.

The 2nd Red Banner Army was not able to pierce the Lesser Khingan Range by the time of the Japanese surrender (maybe the 15th Army was able to advance in the Sungari area but Japanese forces on that front, the 134th and 135th Divisions, withdrew to positions around 100 miles NW of Harbin and to Yehho, respectively). Likely because of the mountainous terrain, the battle there was difficult and both sides suffered much: Major General Mozhayev's combat journal reported 645 killed and 74 missing while the Japanese 123rd Division and 135th Brigade incurred 1,107 battle deaths.

In the Trans-Baikal Front's sector the 6th Guards Tank Army was not in position to pre-empt the Third Area Army's withdrawal to Tunghua while on the eastern front the Japanese First Area Army retreated SW toward Tunhua (not to be confused with the former). General Shtemenko reported that "the main forces" of the First Area Army were falling back on Harbin, but in reality it was likely the IJA 5th Army retreating to Hengtaohotzu on instructions from First Area Army.

Spoiler

Map: First Area Army defense plan

Spoiler

On the 15th, the Japanese 5th Army received the following message:

"The invading Soviet Army has broken through the Manchurian border at various points. The Kwantung Army plans to organize a structure for protracted war of resistance with the Manchurian-Korean border zone running along Mount Paektu (Changpaishan) as the final defense line. The Fifth Army will try to hold the positions east of Mutanchiang River as long as possible and then retreat to the locality of Tunhua or Hengtaohotzu."​

--JM-154 p. 210​

Hengtaohotzu was chosen because of its geographic proximity to Mutanchiang and the military situation at the time. Although the Japanese forces were hit hard and in many cases badly disorganized, the Soviets were not able to conduct a "deep battle" behind their lines nor were they able to carry out any large-scale encirclements .

Map: 5th Army operations. Even though JM-154 stated earlier that it still possessed about 50 percent of its original effectiveness after the battle of Mutanchiang, the subsection dealing more specifically with that army states that its fighting capacity was "completely exhausted, and personnel [were] reduced to almost a rabble."

Spoiler

 

[duckie]

On a side node to all this talk about using German POW's, I just saw this video on Youtube.

It seems that the groundwork should already be formed at the POD.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

Beyond what I've already posted I don't have much more information to assess the strength of the German barrage. If they fired about the same on the Western and Eastern fronts (as the previously quoted study claimed) then expenditures in the west should have been comparatively more dense owing to the shorter length of the front. In the Bulge the only other specifics I have are that the barrage lasted approximately 30 minutes (0530-0600) during the most intense phases and that in general the results were disappointing for the Germans (lack of ammunition was a factor). The shortest time period I could find was at Hoefen on the northern shoulder (20 minutes). There the 3rd Battalion, 395th Infantry Regiment, 99th Division counted about 250 to 300 rounds falling in its sector during that time.

The cited study is for a 10 day period in November, which was a relatively quiet period on both fronts, and says nothing about expenditures on major offensives nor that overall German expenditures were higher in the west than in the east. The amount fired off during the opening bombardment for the Bulge were undoubtedly higher on average than during the earlier periods of the Western Front and probably the average during the Eastern Front. But I'm willing to bet they still pale in comparison to what they fired off during the more intense periods of combat on the Eastern Front in mid-1944.

If the US fired 1.2 million tonnes and the British c. 800,000 in Western Europe and Italy,that works out to just under 6,000 tonnes daily (if British expenditure in MTO was "only" the same as the US Fifth Army's despite the fact that their Eighth Army's effective strength was over 2.3 times higher it still would have been 5,200 tonnes/day).

Sorry, no. I’m not letting you arbitrarily change the numbers like that. You’ve already posted US expenditures in the ETO/MTO as I quoted:

The US Army fired about 900,000 to 1,000,000 tonnes of artillery ammunition in ETO/MTO alone from June '44 to VE day. In Western Europe the British/Commonwealth fired at least 330,000 tonnes and in the Mediterranean probably at another 200,000+ (similar to the US, and probably more since the British Eighth Army was over twice as large as the US Fifth).

Because of it's size, I didn't quote where you then went on to break that down at 777,000 tonnes in ETO, 200,000 tonnes in MTO from the US and 300,000 tonnes from the British in ETO. With the 200,000 estimate for British in MTO, that is 1.477 million tonnes over 336 days. 4.395 thousand tonnes daily. What's more, your subsequent breakdown makes clear that the above total includes tank, AT, and AA ammunition for the US (although not the British), whereas my figures for the Soviets are purely tube and mortar artillery so I'm actually being rather generous to the WAllies not including the corresponding Soviet figures.

My hypothesis as to why the Soviet Army fired more during the final months of the war is probably a combination of the sense that Germany's defeat was near and the more static combat in East Prussia demanded a greater expenditure of shells as opposed to pursuit operations in Byelorussia and Poland.

A possibility, but still fundamentally speculative. Regardless, the numbers certainly show the Soviets have the capacity to fire off shells on a scale quite comparable to the WAllies by 1945.

Often they had artillery support, but not always. The above 3rd Infantry Battalion at Hoefen met the German attack with only infantry weapons since the opening barrage disrupted communications with the artillery for about an hour, also the I&R platoon (southernmost 99th Division unit) famously held back the Germans at Lanzerath for almost an entire day.

The forces at Hoefen were heavily supported by field artillery, with heavy shelling from, among others, the 396th artillery unit breaking up the Volksgrenadiers as they tried to close into the assault. At Lazenrath, the I&R platoon only faced two platoons, although most accounts pull some classic shenanigans by counting the entire rest of those platoons parent battalion in the count, sometimes including Kampfgruppe Peiper despite the fact his unit only passed through the town the day after and never fired a shot at the I&R Platoon. A December 1944 Fallschirmjager platoon would constitute They were mostly poorly training and poorly motivated, as can be seen by the tactics they exercised during the fight: they blindly charged the American positions up a hill with no armored support and only a few mortars for indirect fire support. When a passing group of Volksgrenadiers had the good sense to flank the position through some woods to the south, the positions were swiftly overrun.

In other words, the American achievement at Lazenrath ridge was a case of decently-trained infantry up against a larger force of poorly-trained infantry exercising shit tactics, hardly some romantic David vs Goliath story. Suffice to say, your average 1945 Soviet rifle officer would not be so poorly-trained and inexperienced as to try a head-on assault without much more in the way of indirect fire support or a few tanks to provide cover and fire support as well as roll over obstacles. Most probably would have just done what the Volksgrenadiers did and flanked the Americans through the woods to start with, with any frontal assault merely being a distraction.

Reading the description of the German move into Lanzerath itself illustrates quite nicely how unaggressive they were compared to their Soviet counterparts: the Volksgrenaiders were still forming up on their own frontline positions while the bombardment was happening and only crossed it when it ended. For the Soviets, assuming a 90-minute bombardment, the rifle division would be expected to cross over their own frontline within the first 30 minutes of the bombardment and already be inside the enemies frontline positions by the time it ended. The Soviets also might undertake a false-lull in the bombardment at the aforementioned 30 minute mark to encourage the enemy to pop-out of their entrenchments and assume firing positions to try and fire on the advancing rifle troops before resuming after several minutes, but this wasn't always the case. This was something that, best I can tell, the Germans never practiced in their fireplans on the Western Front.

The reason for the comparison is that the battle between the 106th Division and LXVI corps is similar to what the Soviets arranged on a division to division and a half frontage during breakthrough operations (per Glantz). Obviously the German offensive also used more than one corps, and as I mentioned there were other divisions in the way of the German onslaught that didn't collapse. The circumstances that existed during the battle west of the Schnee Eifel were pretty unique on the Western Front, and although Soviet forces might have been able to achieve a higher force ratio in such and such location, those same combination of factors wouldn't have been present. Especially in terms of combat experience, out of all Patton's divisions every infantry division had seen heavy combat and only one armored division (the 16th) was relatively untested.

You need to reread Glantz. To begin with, your average 1944-45 combined arms army contained around double the manpower of LXVI corps (37,000 vs 60-80,000), around 4 times the armor (133 vs 400+), and 3 times the artillery. Even given this, the comparison is still inapt because the Soviets concentrated twice . Best I can tell, the LXVI corps was the only shock grouping in the entire Sixth Army. The Fifth Army seems to have concentrated formed its shock grouping on two corps (the LVIII Panzer and XLVII Panzer). This meant that the entire offensive was carried out with a mere two shock groups. None of the shock groups contained a second tactical echelon for to sustain the breakthrough and conduct immediate exploitation. There were no separate operational maneuver groups to carry out the mission of operational-strategic exploitation and sustain the operation into the enemies strategic depth. The shock groups were expected to fulfill the duty of breakthrough, immediate exploitation, and operational-strategic exploitation all at once. As it was, just the task of breaking through the tactical defenses completely exhausted them, rendered them unable to breakthrough the operational defenses, and consequently allowed them to be bottled up during immediate exploitation.

By comparison, the Belorussian Operation involved six separate shock groupings, all but one consisting of two combined-arms armies or a combined-arms army and a shock army. All shock groups constituted a combined-arms first echelon and a second echelon to take over once the tactical defenses had been broken and break the operational defenses. Three OMGs existed: a tank army and two mechanized-cavalry groups, along with some lesser front-level mobile groups, usually either a tank/mechanized corps or an ad-hoc grouping of several brigades with a rifle division that had been motorized using front truck assets.

And yes, the same combination of factors won't exist: after all, the Soviets are stronger, have all the fuel they need for tactical and operational maneuver rather than just a fraction of it, the terrain is much more favorable for the sort of maneuver they excel at, their artillery will actually be able to displace forward to support the advance beyond the first line of tactical advance, they'll be able to rely on their own air forces to engage the enemy rather then just hope the weather grounds them, and they habitually provided their infantry with organic armored support.

50,000 men over 2-3 days is not the same as 60,000 men and 11,000 vehicles in one day let alone 250,000 men with 50,000 vehicles in a week. Even though the distance is farther you're talking an average of 32,000 men and 8200 vehicles daily after the first group. According to rough calculations based on Dupuy's numbers Allied strength increased by about 312,000 men and 2,347 tanks, TDs, and assault guns within 8 days and by 476,000 men and 3,397 tanks, etc in 2 and a half weeks.

Interesting how you keep inflating the number: we’ve gone from 50,000 in one day to 60,000 in one day. Even leaving that aside, there’s an awful lack of clarity in that statement: how do we know it means that those men actually moved there all at once on that day from other parts of the Western Front rather than just getting ordered there on that day? Both the 82nd and 101st Airborne Division, for example, were ordered out on the 16th but neither reached their positions until the 19th. The 7th and 10th Armored Divisions were likewise ordered to move on the 16th, but the former didn't arrive on a defense line west of Saint Vith until late on the 17th and the latter didn't arrive in it's own positions Bastogne until the 18th. Based on these examples, we can see that the timeframe for the actual movement was in actuality more than one day and little different than the German response to the Belorussian Operation during it's 1st Phase.

Now during the second phase of operations (June 29th to July 4th) the Germans transferred in an additional thirteen divisions. I don't have any information on transfers made in the third period of operations (July 5th-July 17th), but during July 17-23 another eleven divisions were transferred to the Belorussian Sector (the Belorussian Operation as a whole would officially last until August 29th, although some parts of the operation would end as early as the start of August). Unfortunately, I can't translate these into any manpower or vehicle strength figures, as those are unavailable.

A division at battalion strength ceases to be a division. No such 'divisions' could have effectively taken part in any offensive.

Quite. Nonetheless, Hitler liked to have divisions kept as divisions even when they've been whittled away to battalion strength and would often order them to execute attacks on the basis they were divisions. Which is why simply stating the number of divisions the Germans say were officially involved is meaningless: a number of those divisions could very well have simply not been able to effectively take part in it despite being ordered too because they had been reduced to battalion strength. There’s a very good reason German offensives and counter-offensives made rather little impression on Allied forces in either the west or east throughout most of 1945.

Even if the Soviets succeeded in crossing at a number of places, what would happen then? Do you think that, once discovered, the Allies would permit them to expand their strength to a level that would permit a breakout, especially under air and artillery attack? Furthermore while this is going on First Canadian Army also likely would have had time to arrive at the front.

Depends on what strength the Soviets manage to cross, the speed with which they cross, and how quickly the WAllies manage to detect the bridgehead. “Detection” in this case. includes the time necessary for the information to travel up the chain of command, the commanders to recognize the significance of the information and issue the relevant orders that would dispatch enough forces to contain or destroy the bridgehead. If the Soviets move rapidly enough, in enough strength, and/or are just lucky enough (always a bit of a unknown variable), the WAllies may not detect the bridgehead until after masses of Soviet armor had already crossed and broken out. The Soviets by mid-‘45 had demonstrated the ability to leap multiple tank armies across multiple rivers in the span of a single day of operations.

Operationally too. We can look at the fighting in the Rhineland (Operation Veritable comes to mind) as well as Plunder - the 21st Army Group's crossing of the Rhine. In the Pacific theater Field Marshal Slim's "Operation Extended Capital" was a formidable example of military deception and maneuver against a capable enemy. The US even had an entire unit, the "Ghost Army," dedicated to battlefield deception.

I have seen no evidence of significant operational deception in Operation Veritable or the Rhine crossings overall. Attempts at deception of any sort on the Japanese generally were wasted effort: yes the British made attempts, but the evidence is that Japanese decision makers just ignored them in favor of their already existing analysis of enemy intentions and plans. This, ironically, often worked to the Allies advantage when those plans assumed Allied actions completely at odds to what they were actually doing. Don’t interrupt your enemy when making a mistake and all. The Ghost Armies contain only two examples that might count as operational-level deception that I can find, but otherwise seem to have been largely employed in the tactical and strategic deceptions as noted in my quote. In no case is there any evidence of systemic use of operational deception. Most cases of such were ad-hoc and accidental, with the WAllies not even particularly aware that operational-level deception was what they were undertaking (not having a concept of operational art and all).

You seem to be just throwing out names without undertaking any analysis that would demonstrate such deception was a mandatory feature of Allied operational planning, rather than the occasional side-on.

This wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for the Japanese (pp. 12-13), but the Americans quickly adjusted to their tactics and they were not successful. In any regard, infiltrators don't seem to have had a decisive impact on either front in terms of suppression of the opponent's artillery.

It would have been quite unusual for the Japanese: their infiltration tactics were designed to get a number of men close up to the enemies frontline positions to execute a charge. They were not designed to sneak a few men deep into their rear areas to conduct deep operational-strategic reconnaissance before exfiltrating them, aiming to avoid combat all the while. And the value in artillery suppression in the latter case is in the identification of gun positions for the fire plan.

I wouldn't exactly call it "air parity;" but Allied photo-reconnaissance was generally excellent. In the case of counter-reconnaissance, likely this capability was limited on the German side due to the unfavorable military situation that existed for them at that time.

I would certainly call it air parity: that's what it is when neither air force has air superiority. WAllied photo-reconnaissance showed no particular ability to peer through Soviet camouflage and deception practices, even after 50 years of technological development and far better air conditions. Serbian deception methods, which were extremely close to that of the Soviet playbook, did a fantastic job at hiding and securing their strength, disposition, and rear area against western air reconnaissance during the 90s. Ditto the North Koreans during the latter 2/3rds of the Korean War and the North Vietnamese throughout the Vietnam War.

German counter-reconnaissance practices were somewhat better developed than that of the WAllies (by necessity: they weren't the ones who could rely on air-superiority after all), but still nowhere near that of the Soviets. Several practices the Soviets routinely engaged in (such as use of slightly-submerged pontoon bridges impossible to spot from the air) were employed by the Germans, but never with the consistency and systemic manner that the Soviets did.

Yes, they did. This was proven time and again, and just follows common sense: more fighters in the 'battlespace' means more mutual protection and more attackers per enemy aircraft. The Allies had the numbers and resources to swarm the German airfields with 50-300 plane raids and were able to achieve success because of the massive suppressive effect this created. They didn't concentrate all their aircraft against a single target, but in each of those combats they almost always possessed a smothering advantage in numbers such that the Germans were simply overwhelmed.

I love your use of the word “common sense” since, like most actual common sense, just because tactically having more aircraft might seem like it might be an advantage, that is not what the actual history of air combat tells us. The actual history tells us that in air battle, where it is plane-vs-plane and pilot-vs-pilot, the reality is that if a fighter strikes with position and surprise enemy numbers don't matter so much. It also tells us that larger formations often sacrifice position and surprise, and since these are the most decisive advantages in tactical air combat that can make them counter-productive. If a small group can arrive undetected in a position of advantage it can pick its target, attack, and then dive out. And if the escorts all give chase, they would then be out of position when the next squadron dives in...

Even leaving aside that the evidence suggests that the WAllies posting fighters right above Luftwaffe airfields was a result of rather than a cause of the Luftwaffe’s decline and would not have been possible with the much narrower numerical advantage (roughly 1:1) in fighters they have against the Soviets, the WAllies did not swarm individual air fields with 50-300 fights all at once. Rather they spread their squadrons of fighters over multiple air fields ahead of the bomber fleets and dispatched more to fill in patrol spaces in between so that the Germans interceptors were having to constantly fight through roving air patrols just to get at the bombers. They were not suppressed by a huge swarm of aircraft appearing over their airfield, but by having to engage a couple of squadrons over their air field, then another couple 1/5th of the way to intercepting the raid, then another couple 2/5th of the way to the raid, and so-on and so-forth, bleeding fighters all the way. Continual waves of smaller forces were what bled the Luftwaffe, not massing up into one huge formation.

Looking at actual instances where the attacker did just try to tactically swamp their opposition with sheer numbers shows things working out extremely poorly for the attacker down at the tactical end... and often (but not always) the operational-strategic end too. A good part of Kieth Park's genius when commanding 11 Group during the Battle of Britain was in realizing that it was more important for him to strike early and often with continual waves of smaller forces. Sending up his squadrons one or two at a time against German formations of hundreds of planes let him emerged with a 2:1 kill ratio he needed despite all conventional expectations. Meanwhile, massing up into one huge formation as Leigh Mallory in 12 Group tried to do resulted in vastly poorer performances, and the subsequent attempts to do it offensively over France in 1941/42 were catastrophic failures as the Germans applied the bitter lessons Park taught them to score a 5:1 kill ratio. A similar story emerged over Australia when it was attempted against the Japanese. Later on, Vietnamese MiG-21s applied this principle in the Skies over North Vietnam and attacking American formations of dozens or scores of aircraft in small groups of two to four were able to score a 3:1 kill ratio until the Americans adjusted. The Israelis took the lessons from the past half-century of air combat and applied them to Mole Cricket, with all the additional enhancements of modern technology, and achieved a staggeringly lopsided result.

Or hell, let’s look at D-Day, where the Luftwaffe did quite well for itself tactically: all told, the Luftwaffe claimed 24 kills on 6 June - 18 for JG 2 and 6 for JG 26 - with JG 2 losing no aircraft in aerial combat, and JG 26 losing one in the air, with another destroyed on the ground by a P-47. JG 2 did lose another two planes in "operational accidents," which some historians think may be some fudging of combat damage, but that's still a good kill ratio. At least 11 of these kills can be matched with Allied records, with some more possibles. JG 2 ace Herbert Huppertz personally claimed five that day, four of which (two Typhoons, and two P-51) can be confirmed from Allied records.

But, and here is where we see the actual importance of my tactical vs operational/strategic dichotomy, while the Luftwaffe may have been very successful tactically in D-Day, operationally and strategically they were a total failure. The Luftwaffe flew 174 sorties on 6 June. The Allies flew 14,000. The actual operational-strategic impact of the above tactical success basically amounted too pissing into the tornado.

The numbers may mean nothing for the air battle. But they can mean a whole hell of a lot for the campaign. Problem is that the WAllies don’t have the sort of numerical advantage over the VVS in 1945 that they did over the Luftwaffe in 1944... or even that of 1942-43, for that matter. Not at the start, at least.

I don't deny that the Soviets had a much larger air force than the Germans did in 1944/45 and that the Allies wouldn't have been able to go about as if they weren't there, but we have the known historical record of Luftwaffe operations on the Eastern Front where the Soviets weren't strong enough (or didn't have the doctrine) to completely dominate them and they were able to continue air-to-air combat and ground support until very late in the war. The Allies - who wrested air superiority over the entire theater, rather than just over the breakthrough points - possessed a capability many times greater. If the Soviets, both ground and air forces, conducted their 'business as usual' without taking this into account, the consequences for them would have been very severe.

You’re continuing to miss the point: the WAllied air forces were able to wrest air superiority over the entire theater because they existed in a geo-strategic situation where there was no major ground campaign which could distract from the counter-air campaign until AFTER the enemy Air Force had already been broken. They were free to channel their energies into grinding down the Luftwaffe qualitatively from an equal in mid-‘42 to a state of collapse in early-1944 while increasing their quantitative lead. The counter-air campaign was functionally finished by the time of D-Day.

This was a luxury denied to the Soviets: they had no convenient seas and oceans separating them from the main armies of the enemy. The VVS could not concentrate on a counter-air campaign, because there was a massive ground war they had to support from day one. The diversion of resources needed to beat down the Eastern Luftwaffe would mean depriving the troops of desperately needed air support that was simply much more important given that the ground war was of life-and-death importance. The Luftwaffe encountered similar dynamics in ‘41-‘42: when it focused on ground support, the still-unbroken Red Air Force used the reprieve to recover and regroup. When it focused on the Red Air Force, the CAS squadrons began to scream about where their escorts had vanished off too, leaving them at the mercy of Soviet fighters that managed to slip past the CAPs, and the Heer began to scream about where it’s air support had gone.

There is no evidence the WAllied air forces would not be confronted with the same dilemma in a Unthinkable-scenario and some evidence that they would (namely, the noticeable, if extremely brief, drop in Allied air support to the ground troops during the time period they had to fight off Operation Bodenplatte). Here, the WAllies do not have the luxury of doing first one and then the other. They face the same issue as the VVS or Luftwaffe did: prioritize fighting the VVS or prioritize supporting the ground army. They never showed the ability to do both at once.

I think more context is needed for the Third Army and Soviet forces in Czechia. At the end of the war, Third Army was ordered to occupy the line Enns River - Budejovice - Pilsen - Karlsbad, or about 280 km on Google Maps using straight lines. It had four corps, 12 infantry divisions, (the 4th, 99th, 1st, 2nd, 97th, 5th, 26th, 90th, 65th, 71st, 80th, and 70th), 5 armored divisions (the 14th, 9th, 16th, 4th, 11th, and 13th), and the 474th Independent Infantry Regiment. According to the US Army official history, on that date there were also the following attached tank/TD units:

Attached to infantry divs:
4th - 70th tank bn, 610th TD bn (SP)
99th - 786th tank bn, 629th TD bn (SP)
1st - 745th tank bn (until 8 May), 634th TD bn (SP, -Co. C) (until 6 May)
2nd - 741st tank bn (until 8 May), 612th TD bn (SP)
97th - 782nd tank bn, 820th TD bn (SP)
5th - 803rd TD bn (SP)
26th - 778th tank bn, 818th TD bn (SP)
90th - 773rd TD bn (SP)
65th - 748th tank bn, 808th TD bn (SP)
71st - 761st tank bn, 635th TD bn (T)*
80th - 702nd tank bn, 811th TD bn (SP)
70th - none

Total: 630 tanks, 36 Sherman 105s, 348 tank destroyers, 57-60 M8 armored cars by TO&E

Attached to armored divs:
14th - none
9th - 656th TD bn (SP)
16th - 633rd TD bn (SP)
4th - 704th TD bn (SP)
11th - 705th TD bn (SP)
13th - "7th Armored Group**," 801st TD bn (SP)

Total: c. 222 tanks and assault guns, 180 tank destroyers, 36 M8 armored cars by TO&E

*(T) = towed tank destroyer battalion, consisted of 36 towed AT guns
** Armored group = corps level armored reserve, consisted of ~3 tank battalions

Combined with the armored divisions (1,315 tanks and assault guns, 270 armored cars), that's 2,731 tanks, TDs, and assault guns, and 364-366 armored cars by TO&E.

Great, except any tank or TD or assault gun in one of those units that is sitting in a divisional or corps repair shop would still be considered part of that unit. Any Soviet tank or TD or assault gun sitting in a corps, army, or front repair shop, on the other hand, would not be considered part of any formation and still be uncounted. Still, given that the Soviets did have the armor to fully staff their armored forces regardless, TO&E is probably a good way to do it in this case, so let's see...

1st Ukrainian Front's armored formations in May 1945 constituted 6 tank corps (3 in tank armies, one Polish), 4 mechanized corps (3 in the tank armies), and a guards cavalry corps (which had a organic armored complement of 83 medium tanks, 21 light tanks, and 21 Su-76s). The nearest number for non-corps armored units I could find is from January 1945, so it might be a little off, but they constituted 3 tank brigades, 11 independent regiments (8 medium, 3 heavy), 3 SAU brigades (all light), and 16 SAU-regiments.

6 Tank Corps is 1,170 medium tanks and 378 SPGs/TDs.
4 Mechanized Corps is 732 medium tanks and 252 SPGs/TDs.
3 Tank Brigades is 195 medium tanks.
8 medium tank regiments is 328 medium tanks.
3 heavy tank regiments is 63 heavy tanks.
3 Su-76 brigades is 180 SPGs/TDs.
16 SAU regiments is 336 SPGs/TD.

That plus the cavalry corps gives 1st Ukrainian 3,759 tanks, TDs, and assault guns. Unfortunately, information on 4th and 2nd Ukrainian Front is much harder to come by, although 2nd Ukrainian Front had the 6th Guards Tank Army with two mechanized corps and a tank corps until June whose TO&E would come out to 624 tanks, TDs, and assault guns, plus those from any non-corps support units. For 4th Ukrainian, a incomplete (60th Army's data is missing) OOB from January 1945 gives it 3 tank brigades, 2 heavy tank regiments, a 5 SPG regiments for a total of 342 tanks and TDs. This all brings the total amount of Soviet armor to 4,725 tanks, SPGs, and TDs. So even a incomplete TO&E analysis of the fronts in Czechoslovakia shows a pretty clear Soviet armored superiority over Patton at least 1.7:1 and probably more. There's also the Romanian Armies, who had been re-equipped with Soviet armaments by this point, although I don't have any figures for them. Using the Belorussian Operation as a guide (where the Soviets had about twice the operational superiority in armor and achieved tactical superiorities of 20:1), the Soviets should be able to achieve armored superiorities of 10:1 on the key sectors if they deploy and practice their deception practices successfully.

Using your analogy of L'vov-Sandomierz, Harpe's position was not very comparable to Patton's.

Quite right. Harpe's position was in some ways better than Patton's: he occupied much more well-established and deeply-developed defensive line than what Patton had and was actually expecting a Soviet attack on his axis, although he was caught off-guard by the precise direction and . Despite his otherwise undoubtable maneuver skills, Patton's well-known arrogance and dismissive attitude towards the Soviets is liable to render him particularly susceptible to Soviet deception practices, at least at first. Whether he'd learn some humility and gain some respect for the Red Army after the initial defeats, whether those defeats occur on the scale you envision or I do, is an interesting question.

Although the Japanese forces were hit hard and in many cases badly disorganized, the Soviets were not able to conduct a "deep battle" behind their lines nor were they able to carry out any large-scale encirclements.

An examination of the Soviet advance and Japanese positions at the time of surrender would show that this is because the formation of the large-scale encirclement was still ongoing at the time of surrender: the Trans-Baikal's 6th Guards Tank Army had just reached Changchun, with the 39th Army close on it's heels, and from the 2nd Far Eastern Front the 25th Army was motoring in the clear more than halfway to Lafa in a mostly cross-country movement, having advanced some 150 kilometers westward after August 15th on a axis roughly running Hunchun-Wangching-Tunhua. As a examination at the railway map below will tell you, the capture of these two cities effectively means the encirclement of the entire northern half of Manchuria, including Harbin region (ignore the redline, I drew it to make a separate point). The Japanese forces retreating towards Harbin would have to march cross-country to Kirin (assuming the Soviets don't just carry on and capture it too after securing Changchun or Lafa) before they could get on a train to Tunghua.

By comparison, the 1st Far Eastern's advance. Lafa doesn't appear on this map but Kirin, which is too Lafa's west on the map above, does. I've indicated Lafa's approximate location on the map with a black circle, for clarities sake.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

Before responding in detail I would like to point out the following:

- The artillery numbers were a brain fart on my part: I accidentally counted 1Mt as US expenditure in ETO only and re-added Italy on top of that. I don't have any data for the other Allies in Italy but it should be assumed they were at least as prolific as the Americans (c. 200k tonnes) considering US forces made up less than 40% of the Allied contingent there. If artillery use was proportionate to number of divisions it would have been 900-1M t for the US and more than 800k for the other Allies (300k in Europe and 500k in Italy).

- The Bulge: it was always 60k men and 11k vehicles diverted on the first day (see post #72). Approximately the overall ratios in ground force numbers (using Dupuy's data) can be seen in the wiki table, giving a sense of the Allied response capability.

- The British and American armies classed tanks as either 'operational or operational in less than 6 hours,' 'non-operational, but can be repaired in less than 24 hours,' or 'non-operational, not repairable in 24 hours.' I don't know if the US Army considered short term 'non-operationals' as part of TO&E strength, but I doubt it, otherwise the unit wouldn't have been at TO&E.

- Didn't 3rd Belorussian Front end the war in East Prussia and elements of 2nd Belorussian were on the north German coast? If that was the case then the situation on the Elbe was much more favorable then I thought and US First Army could have diverted almost all of its strength to the southeast against the northern flank of 1st Ukrainian. (Of course, in this timeline it's likely that both sides would have re-positioned prior to a Soviet declaration of war.)

- Manchuria: the Japanese weren't retreating toward Harbin. First Area Army was falling back to Tunhua/Antu while Third Area Army was retreating to Tunghua. The only major subordinate command of the Kwantung Army that didn't plan to fall back on the Korean border area was the Fourth Army in northern Manchuria, whose main concentrations were in the Lesser Khingan, Tsitsihar and Harbin areas:

Spoiler

BTW, JM-154, which covers the fighting on the East Manchurian Front from the Japanese side has two parts, Hyperwar has only one. Both can be downloaded for free from CARL here: https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll8/id/2437/rec/2

JM-155 (northern and western fronts; north Korea): https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4013coll8/id/2600/rec/1
"Naval Operations against Soviet Russia 1941-1945:" http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/Japan/Monos/pdfs/JM-106_NavalOpsAgainstUSSR/JM-106.pdf

These three cover basically all of the Manchurian campaign from the Japanese side, though there was another monograph about Sakhalin and the Kuriles that I can't seem to find available for download ("Homeland Operations Record, Volume IV Operations in Karafuto and China Area (9 August-22 August 1945)") and one titled "Air Operations Record Against Soviet Russia (June 1941-September 1945)"

Going off on a tangent, in addition to this there were a series of "Special studies on Manchuria," the list of which can be found here but only two ("operational planning against the USSR" and "Strategical and Tactical peculiarities of Soviet Russia and Soviet Far East Forces") are available in PDF form.

EDIT: was also able to find "Infantry Operations" (JSOM vol. V)

In addition to these, there is a three-part account of the Battle of Lake Khasan ("Book A"): https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a950018.pdf
The Battle of Khalkhin Gol part 1 ("Book B"): https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a950019.pdf
and Khalkhin Gol part 2 ("Book C"): https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a950020.pdf
that I think are worth the download. All told they're almost 600 pages.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

Before responding in detail I would like to point out the following:

- The artillery numbers were a brain fart on my part: I accidentally counted 1Mt as US expenditure in ETO only and re-added Italy on top of that. I don't have any data for the other Allies in Italy but it should be assumed they were at least as prolific as the Americans (c. 200k tonnes) considering US forces made up less than 40% of the Allied contingent there. If artillery use was proportionate to number of divisions it would have been 900-1M t for the US and more than 800k for the other Allies (300k in Europe and 500k in Italy).

I mean, even given that your non-US

The Bulge: it was always 60k men and 11k vehicles diverted on the first day (see post #72). Approximately the overall ratios in ground force numbers (using Dupuy's data) can be seen in the wiki table, giving a sense of the Allied response capability.

So diverted but not arrived? Then there isn’t anything special about them compared Bagration.

- The British and American armies classed tanks as either 'operational or operational in less than 6 hours,' 'non-operational, but can be repaired in less than 24 hours,' or 'non-operational, not repairable in 24 hours.' I don't know if the US Army considered short term 'non-operationals' as part of TO&E strength, but I doubt it, otherwise the unit wouldn't have been at TO&E.

That’s actually a fair bit more sensible than the Soviets “it’s either running and operational or in repair and non operational.” But generally the Soviets from 1943 onwards also strove to keep their armored units at full TO&E, in contrast to

-Didn't 3rd Belorussian Front end the war in East Prussia and elements of 2nd Belorussian were on the north German coast? If that was the case then the situation on the Elbe was much more favorable then I thought and US First Army could have diverted almost all of its strength to the southeast against the northern flank of 1st Ukrainian. (Of course, in this timeline it's likely that both sides would have re-positioned prior to a Soviet declaration of war.)

The bulk of 2nd Belorussian was on 1st Belorussian Fronts northern flank, having opened their westward offensive on April 20th and advancing alongside it. 3rd Belorussian was where you said it was, but 1st Army could not have done what you claim: the bulk of 1st Belorussian was facing 1st and 9th Army, save for the armies being sent against Berlin, which undoubtedly would be shifted to face the WAllies once the city fell.

Of course, as you said, if the Soviets intended to strike west then undoubtedly they’d have redeployed the 3rd Belorussian Front, and the two Baltic Fronts as well, to East Germany. The WAllies would reposition their forces as well... hmm... perhaps the positions at the end of May rather than the beginning would present a better picture of WAllied dispositions? Historical Soviet dispositions aren’t very useful, since they’d be radically different with them deploying for an offensive.

- Manchuria: the Japanese weren't retreating toward Harbin. First Area Army was falling back to Tunhua/Antu while Third Area Army was retreating to Tunghua. The only major subordinate command of the Kwantung Army that didn't plan to fall back on the Korean border area was the Fourth Army in northern Manchuria, whose main concentrations were in the Lesser Khingan, Tsitsihar and Harbin areas:

The Fifth Army of the First Area Army was definitely retreating towards Harbin: that’s the direction it’s retreat from Mutanchiang to the northwest takes it and the road/rail net does not contain any cross-roads that would let them them swing directly south. Undoubtedly the ultimate intent was to redeploy down to Tunhua/Antu from Harbin, but whether they’d make it with 25th Army already on the verge of taking Tunhua is open to question. The other army under First Area, the Third, was certainly more fortunate: it had retreated southwest to Yanji.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

So diverted but not arrived? Then there isn’t anything special about them compared Bagration.

I think the timetable was that these units were alerted on the 16th and arrived on the 17th (maybe not necessarily at their ultimate objectives, but were taking part in the battle - don't really have specifics at the moment). P. 137 of Merriam's "Dark December: The Full Account of the Battle of the Bulge" states:

"Meanwhile, the Allies successfully carried out some of the most herculean troop movements in the history of warfare. The First Army, in the first week of the attack alone, moved 248,000 troops and 48,711 vehicles; the peak day was December 17, when 60,000 men were shunted into the penetration in 11,000 vehicles. These movements, which spelled disaster for German plans, were far in excess of German estimates of our capabilities."​

On the same page, Merriam goes on to make an interesting claim:

"However, as a compensating factor, the Germans quickly caught onto the trick of monitoring our traffic control broadcasts to military police stations, Naturally, whenever vast troop movements were involved, elaborate preparations and reports were necessary. Although our security in many phases of the battle was good, we broke down in reporting traffic movements. The Germans were, consequently, able to determine our approximate strength (although not by division number) by monitoring these broadcasts, which were made in the clear with no code. By simply noting the length of time it took for a given unit to pass by a given point, the Germans, with logistics tables as accurate as ours, could easily compute the strength of the various units being moved into the Bulge. This, despite our security blackout, which withheld the news from home for forty-eight hours. Many a German general later joked with me about this enormous chink in our security armor; one "Sepp" Dietrich [Bob note: Cmdr 6th Panzer Army] said, "I hope you know better next time." "​

I'm not sure when (or if at all) this serious deficiency was ever corrected.

The bulk of 2nd Belorussian was on 1st Belorussian Fronts northern flank, having opened their westward offensive on April 20th and advancing alongside it. 3rd Belorussian was where you said it was, but 1st Army could not have done what you claim: the bulk of 1st Belorussian was facing 1st and 9th Army, save for the armies being sent against Berlin, which undoubtedly would be shifted to face the WAllies once the city fell.

Of course, as you said, if the Soviets intended to strike west then undoubtedly they’d have redeployed the 3rd Belorussian Front, and the two Baltic Fronts as well, to East Germany. The WAllies would reposition their forces as well... hmm... perhaps the positions at the end of May rather than the beginning would present a better picture of WAllied dispositions? Historical Soviet dispositions aren’t very useful, since they’d be radically different with them deploying for an offensive.

Yes, if both sides prepared their respective dispositions would have looked a lot different. There's probably a reason why the 'Unthinkable' planners chose Dresden as the main axis for their attack; it's roughly at the bottom of the North German plain (any further south and they would have dealt with the Czech highlands) and was approximately in the gap between the two main Soviet groups at the end of the war.

Northern Germany would have been more suited to armored combat than Bavaria, though again the Elbe would have been an obstacle to either side. I think that the Soviets would have wanted to avoid major river crossings as much as possible, while it wouldn't have been as great a limiting factor for the Allies (Operation Plunder).

The Fifth Army of the First Area Army was definitely retreating towards Harbin: that’s the direction it’s retreat from Mutanchiang to the northwest takes it and the road/rail net does not contain any cross-roads that would let them them swing directly south. Undoubtedly the ultimate intent was to redeploy down to Tunhua/Antu from Harbin, but whether they’d make it with 25th Army already on the verge of taking Tunhua is open to question. The other army under First Area, the Third, was certainly more fortunate: it had retreated southwest to Yanji.

Kind of. Two divisions of the Japanese 5th Army (the 126th and 135th) retreated to Hengtaohotzu (~31mi/50km NW of Mutanchiang) while part of the 124th was still fighting around Muleng. Their interim strategy was to hold out there as long as possible using existing defense positions before deciding what to do then. Probably they wouldn't have lasted much longer it the war continued since they lost most of their equipment in the battle of Mutanchiang.

Another map from JM-154 (between pages 202 and 203) depicts the final stages of the battle of Mutanchiang and the 5th Army's subsequent withdrawal: