Berlin or Bust - An Unthinkable Operation

[ObssesedNuker]

Yes, if both sides prepared their respective dispositions would have looked a lot different.

Well, that is a question fundamentally of warning. The Soviets are much better set-up to wrong-foot the WAllies on this than vice-versa, but it isn’t a sure thing.

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).

That’s a statement infused with no honest analysis of the two sides respective a at all. The Soviets are no less well-equipped than the WAllies to pull something like that off and they have considerably more experience when it comes to major river crossing operations than the WAllies, given the bevy of massive rivers they had to cross as they advanced across Eastern Europe. They’re not going to be shy about avoiding them at all, especially if doing so let’s them steel a march on the WAllies.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

Well, that is a question fundamentally of warning. The Soviets are much better set-up to wrong-foot the WAllies on this than vice-versa, but it isn’t a sure thing.



That’s a statement infused with no honest analysis of the two sides respective a at all. The Soviets are no less well-equipped than the WAllies to pull something like that off and they have considerably more experience when it comes to major river crossing operations than the WAllies, given the bevy of massive rivers they had to cross as they advanced across Eastern Europe. They’re not going to be shy about avoiding them at all, especially if doing so let’s them steel a march on the WAllies.

It's more a question of tactics than experience. If the Soviets were to attempt a direct crossing of the Elbe straight into the teeth of 21st Army Group it would mean throwing away their numerical advantage in ground personnel. The bridgeheads would have to be expanded piecemeal before a breakout could be attempted and this would take place under air attack. The Allies, unlike the Germans at Sandomierz and elsewhere, had large, fully-staffed ground forces that could have rapidly been thrown into the threatened sectors, including multiple armored divisions and brigades. In other words, the risk of failure would have been high. To an extent this would have applied to the Allies as well - Operation Plunder was the largest river crossing in history (1.3 million men, 5,500 guns), but it was undertaken in an environment where the Germans didn't have much chance to repel the landing at all.

Because of this, I still think the most vulnerable sector for the Allies would have been the corridor between Torgau and the Czech border. If the Soviets launched an offensive to the west in late spring 1945, IMO this is probably where their main effort would have been.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

The Allies, unlike the Germans at Sandomierz and elsewhere, had large, fully-staffed ground forces that could have rapidly been thrown into the threatened sectors, including multiple armored divisions and brigades.

The Germans did throw in multiple, fully-staffed armored divisions at the Soviet bridgeheads over the Vistula in August of '44, complete with Luftwaffe air support. These counter-attacks were repulsed, albeit at heavy losses to both sides. But this was against a already-dying Soviet offensive, rather than a fresh one.

Because of this, I still think the most vulnerable sector for the Allies would have been the corridor between Torgau and the Czech border. If the Soviets launched an offensive to the west in late spring 1945, IMO this is probably where their main effort would have been.

That actually does sound quite plausible. The terrain there is largely as favorable to armored maneuvers as further to the northwest (only slightly more wooded) and the Soviets are already across the Elbe in force around Dresden. But I wouldn't discount pinning or sequenced offensives further to the north and south. Looking at a map, a breakthrough against the British between the Elbe and Schwerin towards Hamburg offers some interesting possibilities, particularly if any of the OMG's assigned too it are able to bounce the northern Elbe crossings before the British can pull back to set-up a line of defense on them.

Stepping back and looking at the broad picture, I do believe we're largely in agreement about the broad course of events, even if we disagree on some of the details. Operating on the assumption the Soviets launch the war, then our largest source of disagreement is about the scale of the opening victory: you think that it's unlikely the Soviets manage to cut-off and destroy an army regardless of how well the respective sides play their role and/or how the fates of war break and think the Soviets can only manage to push the WAllies back over the Rhine on a broad front, in a similar manner to how they pushed the Germans over the D'niepr in 1943, after the Battle of Kursk. I view both outcomes as plausible, depending on how well the respective sides are able to set-up and execute their plans and how the fates of war break. This represents our most significant disagreement but given the strategic context, to me it represents six of one, a half-dozen of the other.

Where we are in broad agreement is that in neither case is this physically enough to debilitate the WAllies ability to wage war. The losses, though far more severe than anything experienced against the Germans, are well within their capacity to make good. The Soviets are also liable to have expended a ton of resources themselves and stretched out their logistics more pushing to the Rhine, regardless of which type of victory they manage. Unless this operational victory results in a collapse of political will among the Western Alliance, it will not translate into the strategic victory needed to win the war. And we are in agreement that with the Soviets kicking things off, such a political collapse is unlikely to manifest.

And beyond this opening campaign, Soviet prospects look dim. Continued westward offensives only offer the prospect of limited success. They may make some inroads into the northeastern Italy around Venice, but by and large that front is liable to be at a stalemate. They may overrun large sections of the Middle East, but this is fundamentally irrellevant to the outcome of the main fight. The Soviets do have some capacity to prepare for the eventual WAllied bombing campaign against their homeland: they have some 1,500 high-altitude fighters (mostly British late-model Spitfires, ironically enough) at the start of the war in reserve amongst PVO formations guarding the home land (they'd be under the non-operational category, since the German high-altitude threat had dwindled too nothing by 1945) and the capacity to ramp up production on the high-altitude variants of the YaK-9 and La-7, but this only kicks the can down the road a little. The advent of the atomic bomb will add a serious additional source of pain once the US manages to enhance their bombing bases in Europe and the MidEast with the atomic assembly and storage facilities, and over the long-term offers the prospect of ramping up to debilitating levels of destruction. The only real question over the long-war is whether the Western Alliance push for unconditional surrender or decides marching all the way over Central and Eastern Europe to Moscow is just too costly and wind-up cutting a peace that leaves the Soviet Union in place, but deprives it of most or all of it's Central/Eastern European gains.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

The Germans did throw in multiple, fully-staffed armored divisions at the Soviet bridgeheads over the Vistula in August of '44, complete with Luftwaffe air support. These counter-attacks were repulsed, albeit at heavy losses to both sides. But this was against a already-dying Soviet offensive, rather than a fresh one.



That actually does sound quite plausible. The terrain there is largely as favorable to armored maneuvers as further to the northwest (only slightly more wooded) and the Soviets are already across the Elbe in force around Dresden. But I wouldn't discount pinning or sequenced offensives further to the north and south. Looking at a map, a breakthrough against the British between the Elbe and Schwerin towards Hamburg offers some interesting possibilities, particularly if any of the OMG's assigned too it are able to bounce the northern Elbe crossings before the British can pull back to set-up a line of defense on them.

Stepping back and looking at the broad picture, I do believe we're largely in agreement about the broad course of events, even if we disagree on some of the details. Operating on the assumption the Soviets launch the war, then our largest source of disagreement is about the scale of the opening victory: you think that it's unlikely the Soviets manage to cut-off and destroy an army regardless of how well the respective sides play their role and/or how the fates of war break and think the Soviets can only manage to push the WAllies back over the Rhine on a broad front, in a similar manner to how they pushed the Germans over the D'niepr in 1943, after the Battle of Kursk. I view both outcomes as plausible, depending on how well the respective sides are able to set-up and execute their plans and how the fates of war break. This represents our most significant disagreement but given the strategic context, to me it represents six of one, a half-dozen of the other.

Where we are in broad agreement is that in neither case is this physically enough to debilitate the WAllies ability to wage war. The losses, though far more severe than anything experienced against the Germans, are well within their capacity to make good. The Soviets are also liable to have expended a ton of resources themselves and stretched out their logistics more pushing to the Rhine, regardless of which type of victory they manage. Unless this operational victory results in a collapse of political will among the Western Alliance, it will not translate into the strategic victory needed to win the war. And we are in agreement that with the Soviets kicking things off, such a political collapse is unlikely to manifest.

And beyond this opening campaign, Soviet prospects look dim. Continued westward offensives only offer the prospect of limited success. They may make some inroads into the northeastern Italy around Venice, but by and large that front is liable to be at a stalemate. They may overrun large sections of the Middle East, but this is fundamentally irrellevant to the outcome of the main fight. The Soviets do have some capacity to prepare for the eventual WAllied bombing campaign against their homeland: they have some 1,500 high-altitude fighters (mostly British late-model Spitfires, ironically enough) at the start of the war in reserve amongst PVO formations guarding the home land (they'd be under the non-operational category, since the German high-altitude threat had dwindled too nothing by 1945) and the capacity to ramp up production on the high-altitude variants of the YaK-9 and La-7, but this only kicks the can down the road a little. The advent of the atomic bomb will add a serious additional source of pain once the US manages to enhance their bombing bases in Europe and the MidEast with the atomic assembly and storage facilities, and over the long-term offers the prospect of ramping up to debilitating levels of destruction. The only real question over the long-war is whether the Western Alliance push for unconditional surrender or decides marching all the way over Central and Eastern Europe to Moscow is just too costly and wind-up cutting a peace that leaves the Soviet Union in place, but deprives it of most or all of it's Central/Eastern European gains.

I mean, if you want me to take a crack at it this is basically how I think the Soviets would have planned:

Generally:

1. The economic strength of the US and Britain was too much for the USSR to resist in a long war (communist kool-aid notwithstanding). Therefore any military action would be directed toward some diplomatic end that the Soviets would have sought to assert from a position of strength (or at least stronger than they were in May).

2. This, obviously, depends on what exactly the Soviet regime's immediate military and political goals were, that they would decide on open war so quickly. I assume that in the case of this TL (a massive, all-out offensive westward) Stalin and the Stavka have deluded themselves into believing the Allies were preparing a preventative attack.

3. The problem is, the Soviets would be at a loss in terms of long-term goals, because unless Allied popular morale collapsed they would be unable to end the war on their own terms. They had the very recent examples of western Europe in 1940 and the Pacific in 1941/42 to look at. They would be adopting a similar strategy as Hitler's against the UK and Japan's against the US. Maybe they would have demanded that the Soviet 'sphere of influence' be extended to the Rhine as a condition for a ceasefire; though, it's doubtful the Allies would have accepted this.

4. IMO the Soviets wouldn't have allied with Japan outright (at least at first). More likely they would have held back this threat as a political bargaining chip. Tying themselves to Japan by formal military alliance would only have further hardened the Allies' position against them, and a protracted total war would have almost certainly led to crushing defeat. Therefore, the Soviets likely would have wanted to put an end to the fighting within six months or at most before the end of 1945, especially given the battered state of their economy. This would become all the more urgent after the July 16 "Trinity" test signaled the horrifying prospect of a one-sided nuclear war on the horizon.

Operationally:

1. The Soviets, like the Germans, Japanese, and they themselves earlier on, would have wanted to achieve as decisive a battlefield result as possible in the shortest possible time. The chief obstacle to this would have been the sheer size of the Allied armies in Europe and Italy (about 4 million ground troops in the respective army groups, 2 million+ COMZ and Air Force personnel, and material capabilities that matched or exceeded those of the Red Army). Confronted with such forces, 'victory in one stroke' was not feasible. Even an advance to the east bank of the the Rhine (a distance of 280 to 340 miles, or 450-550 km) in a single offensive might have been unrealistic.

2. While the exact Allied dispositions in this scenario can't be given with certainty, the terrain and line of contact wouldn't have changed; likewise the geographic areas held by the respective Allied nations would have been similar. The Soviets probably would have designed their offensive to take advantage of the Allies' coalition command structure in an attempt to break them up politically, as Hitler sought to do with the Ardennes offensive. (Whether this would have succeeded is doubtful in my opinion.) This likely would have involved attempting to physically isolate the respective Allied armies from each other. The Soviets also probably would have attempted to get sympathizers in Western Europe (especially in France) to relay military information and start sabotaging Allied supply lines, though again I doubt much would have come from this.

3. As above, the main axis of attack westwards likely would have been approximately the line Torgau to Kadan in Czechia (~80 miles, or 130 km north to south). This would have allowed the Soviets to gather large armored forces into a compact area, with relatively flat terrain, all without having to worry about crossing a major river. With American forces in the vicinity of Chemnitz, it would have been difficult to conceal their preparations completely, especially if there were previous incidences of smaller-scale clashes.

Because the Sudentenland and Bavaria are both very mountainous and contain dense forests, it would not have made military sense for the Soviets to swing in that direction after launching their attack. Rather, they would have envisioned an advance to the northwest on the north German plain toward Hanover, which would have threatened the southern flank of 21st Army Group and any US forces holding the Elbe. If successful, it might also have allowed Soviet forces on the east bank to make a crossing over to the west, threatening the Allied position from two different directions.

4. In order to secure their southern flank against a counteroffensive by Third Army or by Sixth Army Group, the Soviets probably would have diverted strong forces for fixing attacks southwest from the Sudetenland, perhaps even sending troops up the Danube River Valley from the direction of Linz, Austria. These attacks would have been short, and would have lacked the massive armored punch of the main offensive to the north.

5. On the Elbe river front, the Soviets would expend most of their energies trying to force the British out of Schleswig-Holstein in an attempt to access Denmark, part of their strategy to close the Baltic to Allied shipping. Whether they could have succeeded is questionable, since the British were determined to occupy that area to prevent the Red Army from reaching Denmark. The Soviets would not have attempted to cross the Elbe at that time, but may have undertaken a deception campaign to give the Allies the impression they were about to try it.

6. Italy and the Alps would have been a subsidiary theater for both sides, as both the Allies and the Soviets would have needed most of their strength for the main battle in central Europe.

7. The Soviet air forces would have been devoted mostly to tactical support of ground units and contesting the skies over the main offensive corridor. The Soviets would not have attempted to disperse their efforts in far-flung attacks on the massive Allied airbases. A strategic flaw, but the Stavka likely would have concluded that as many planes as possible were needed for tactical support to prevent their ground forces from getting bogged down.

8. The final objectives for the first phase offensive would have been to force the Allies behind the river Weser, while the forces advancing southwest from Czechia would reach the headwaters of the river Main and the portion of the Danube running NW from Austria. The basic ground concept would have looked roughly as follows, similar to Zhukov's 15 May 1941 proposal against Germany:

Of course, if some guy on the internet could figure this out, it is highly likely that the professionals in the Allied army could too, especially given proper warning. Because of geographic factors I don't believe the Soviets could have fooled the Allies about the location of their main effort. Through deception they might have been able to keep the British and Americans guessing about an early Elbe crossing or maybe suggest that the objective of the central thrust was to cross the Weser and move toward Frankfurt, but this would only have gone so far.

You will additionally notice that in order to achieve the 'swing' northward the Soviets would have had to go through the middle of the 12th Army Group, which was the most powerful Allied ground formation in Europe with 1.3 million men. This alone would have hardly been a 'sure thing.'

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More realistically, I think the actual course of events would have proceeded along these lines:

1. In the immediate buildup to hostilities, the Allies would have ordered all their armies in Western Europe to assume a defensive stance along the line of contact (OTL this was already the case). The Allied armies in Europe would have 'rotated' counterclockwise - the Third Army more north of Karlovy Vary, the Seventh on the southern Czech border up to Pilsen, and most of the French First near the border of Austria. The First Canadian Army likely would have joined Second British Army on the Elbe; I think at minimum the major armored units in the Mediterranean theater (3 armored divisions) would also have already been on their way to Europe with standby orders in place for much, much larger transfers if necessary.

2. The main Soviet attack would have faced off against the combined might of two full US armies - the First and Third - with one corps from the Ninth Army and one corps from the Seventh Army detached to each, respectively. Despite this, these two armies would have been fighting for their existence as the Soviets threaten to overrun them. Patton's skill as a commander and the massive armored force at his disposal manage to avert an all-out disaster on several occasions.

3. The main forces of the Sixth Army Group are unable to assist the Third Army to its north - they are busy fending off the Soviet fixing attacks southwest from Czechoslovakia and westward from the Danube river valley. The Soviets don't advance very far on these fronts, but their objective is to tie down Allied manpower rather than take ground.

4. Soviet attacks in Schleswig-Holstein fail to destroy the British Second Army, but the latter retreats back across the Elbe in order to consolidate the front in a more defensible position; First Canadian Army begins to shift southward to free up troops from US Ninth Army to move southward to the central front.

5. The 12th Army Group begins to recover from the initial shock of the Soviet offensive and the frontline stabilizes east of the Weser with the Harz mountains as its anchor. In ten days the Soviets have managed to advance as far as 150 km into Allied lines, but their efforts have begun to falter: Ninth Army is now fully engaged on the northern shoulder of the Soviet penetration, while Fifth Army has begun unloading in the Rhone valley and is preparing to race into Central Germany. Although the Soviets have inflicted a colossal blow, they have failed to breakout into open space. In addition to this, the major part of the British Eighth Army has been reassigned to 21st Army Group as part of the Second Army (where they would be under Monty's command again). Like the Fifth Army, they would be brought in through the Rhone valley. The Allies, in desperation, also look at the possibility of re-arming some German units whose WWII combat records were the 'least atrocious.'

6. Despite the worsening situation, Soviet troops still do not cross the Elbe in force. Several small landings are quickly pushed back. Exasperated, the Red Army gives up on the prospect of a 'delayed pincer' attack against 21st Army Group across the Elbe and diverts much of its strength in that sector south to the central front.

7. The air campaign, which takes the Allies by surprise at the outset, is quickly turned around. Western planes, pilots, and methods are generally more effective than those of the Soviets across the board. The VVS takes heavy losses and its airbases come under constant attack; in particular, the Sturmovik and Pe-2 would not have fared well against Allied fighters. Long, vulnerable columns of motor vehicles are badly shot up, slowing the pace of the ground offensive. The Soviets are torn between launching attacks on Allied airbases and contesting the skies over their main land corridor; but they can't do both and are losing strength rapidly.

8. The reinforced British Second Army now assumes full responsibility for holding the Elbe between the North Sea and Stendal, a distance of 150 miles (240 km). First Canadian Army now moves into the line alongside the US Ninth, attacking southward from Magdeburg. Excluding any German holdovers, Allied forces on the central front now amount to five armies - the Fifth, Third, First, Ninth, and First Canadian - roughly 2.2 million men. In the south, Sixth Army Group has 750,000, while the British Second Army, now the largest in the world besides Slim's Fourteenth in Burma, holds the Elbe with 750,000 men - a grand total of 3.7 million ground troops in Western Europe. Besides this, there were about 1.1 million ground forces personnel in the communications zone and another million in the air force, not counting the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean.

Against this massive force, with hordes of armored vehicles and under withering air and artillery attack, the Soviets can hardly make any more strategic gains. During their initial offensive, they occupied approximately 50,000 square kilometers of additional territory, but at appalling cost. Both sides are now exhausted, and neither can make a large-scale offensive against the other for the time being. The Soviet gamble has failed: they launched the largest land battle in history, but without a decisive result. After getting word through both public and clandestine channels that the United States has developed a horrible new weapon - the atomic bomb - and is beginning to put it into production, certain elements of the Soviet regime - perhaps even led by Khrushchev and Zhukov - might have deposed Stalin and sued for peace. How the Allies would have responded, or if such a scenario was even plausible, is up for debate.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

The chief obstacle to this would have been the sheer size of the Allied armies in Europe and Italy (about 4 million ground troops in the respective army groups, 2 million+ COMZ and Air Force personnel, and material capabilities that matched or exceeded those of the Red Army).

A figure which is achieved by including millions of personnel that in the Red Army are either non-operational personnel or not even military personnel at all. Cutting things down to the actual equivalent to Soviet operational forces among the WAllies gives us a figure of around 3 million men. That gives the Soviets a similar strategic numerical advantage over the Western Allies to what they enjoyed over the Germans in 1944/45. And as our conversation over the last page have illustrated, in no category that really matters for large-scale operational ground warfare do the WAllies enjoy a notable advantage in material capabilities. At best, they only have a slight advantage. At worst, they have a notable disadvantage.

Operationally
:snip:

What a very positional view of operational warfare. Positional warfare looks primarily at the ground. Gain good ground, so as to gain the most tactical advantage. Suffice to say, this is not the sort of basis for planning a maneuver-oriented army like the Soviets would make and if the WAllies follow it, they are in for one of the nastiest shocks of their life. Operational maneuver warfare (which was the paradigm of WWII) does not do this. It instead looks at the enemy. Where is the enemy army most vulnerable to our attack independently of terrain?

Soviets tactical-operational objectives would be defined not by the ground, but by the location of WAllied forces. If the WAllies are particularly weak in a sector, that's where the Soviets will strike, regardless of the terrain. Difficult terrain is all well and good, but terrain doesn't stop armies. Just ask the French in 1940 or Army Group Center in 1944 how well the Ardennes or the Pripyet Marshes held up their enemies.

There's also some notable underestimation of Soviet deception techniques, blithe assumption the WAllies will perfectly detect and react to a Soviet deception plan which will be tailored against them without any reference as to how, totally ignoring any friction from their relatively disunited command structure, and the consequences of their tendency to not economize on resources in passive or unimportant sectors. It is stated that the WAllies fully deploy their armies defensively, which by WAllied book would mean lining up all of their armies linearly in a single operational echelon with a modest reserve of one-two armored divisions yet the subsequent map assumes no less than two armies deployed in reserve in a second operational echelon... if not an outright strategic reserve.

These are the most glaring flaws I can see in your thesis and while there are others, they mainly flow from the above. A good example is the assumption the Soviets won't mount a crossing of the Elbe. To which I reply: why not? If the WAllies are denuding their defenses along it in favor of beefing the defenses up north of Hamburg and around Leipzig based on an analysis of the tactical difficulties of crossing such terrain, then the perfect Soviet response is to mount a deception operation to convince the WAllies to keep concentrating on those two regions while instead allocating the engineer-bridging resources required to overcome the tactical difficulties posed by the Elbe to steal a operational march on the WAllies. Piercing a weakly defended Elbe river line would give the Soviets a straight shot at the lines of communication for all Western Allied forces north of the Alps.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

A figure which is achieved by including millions of personnel that in the Red Army are either non-operational personnel or not even military personnel at all. Cutting things down to the actual equivalent to Soviet operational forces among the WAllies gives us a figure of around 3 million men. That gives the Soviets a similar strategic numerical advantage over the Western Allies to what they enjoyed over the Germans in 1944/45. And as our conversation over the last page have illustrated, in no category that really matters for large-scale operational ground warfare do the WAllies enjoy a notable advantage in material capabilities. At best, they only have a slight advantage. At worst, they have a notable disadvantage.

For personnel, the Allies had approximately 1,000,000 in 21st Army Group, 1,300,000 in 12th Army Group, 800,000 in 6th Army Group, and 900,000 in 15th Army Group - total ~4 million, hence "about 4 million ground troops." In Western Europe there were a further 1 million personnel in the communications zone (Zaloga - overall Army strength was 4,084,300 on 30 April '45) plus another 1 million airmen (Zaloga - 993,480). In the Mediterranean 15th Army Group had, in addition to the 900,000 men in the Fifth (US) and Eighth (British/Commonwealth) Armies, another 430,000 men in the communications zone, which may not have included air force personnel. Therefore total Allied strength amounted to 4 million in their army groups, about 1.4 million ground personnel in the communications zone, and at least a million air force personnel (the USSBS page 1 lists the peak strength of the USAAF and RAF combat commands at 1.3 million). Therefore, up to 6.7 million overall.

Compared with the Soviets the Allies had more and better planes, a massive fleet of four engined bombers, and likely much more skilled pilots. They had by TO&E a similar number of tanks, TDs, and assault guns (still not sure about this one, and 20-25 percent of Soviet heavy armored forces were fixed casemate) and a more robust basis for maintaining those forces (more motor vehicles, probably better trained mechanics too). The two sides fired a similar amount of artillery ammunition, though Western tactical methods were better and the Red Army had basically no dedicated indirect fire SPGs.
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As for the correlation between German and Soviet personnel on the Eastern Front, I actually wasn't too sure about this. For the Soviets, their ration strength on 20 April 1945 was approximately 6,250,000 operational troops, 1.3 million in nonoperational fronts, and 2.6 million in the military districts - 10,150,000 in total. In addition to these, there were 1,244,269 personnel in military hospitals (431,000 in military districts and 764,000 in the operational army). If this was their whole army, what was the equivalent to western "communications zone" personnel? Were the military districts responsible for Soviet occupied territories in Poland and Eastern Europe? Or were they a subdivision of the "operational" force?

For the Germans too: out of a total military strength of 7,849,000 in April 1944, 3,878,000 were in Eastern Europe, 311,000 in Norway/Denmark, 1,873,000 in Western Europe, 961,000 in Italy, and 826,000 in the Balkans. You'll notice that all of these figures add up to the above 7,849,000, with no reserve in Germany or delineation between combat and noncombat troops. From this, it seems that the actual strength of the German field armies in the East was far lower than the above 3.9 million, and in fact Ziemke records the strength of the German army groups from about that time (April-May 1944) as follows:

North - 540,965
Center - 792,196
N. Ukraine - 400,542
S. Ukraine - 508,946
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Total - 2,242,649

Compared with the Germans at least, the Allied army groups in Europe and the Mediterranean in April 1945 stood at almost double the manpower of the German army groups on the Eastern Front the year before, and of course the difference in armored and air strength was immense (Harpe's AG N. Ukraine had only 420 "AFVs" and the support of 1,000 aircraft that he didn't control).

What a very positional view of operational warfare. Positional warfare looks primarily at the ground. Gain good ground, so as to gain the most tactical advantage. Suffice to say, this is not the sort of basis for planning a maneuver-oriented army like the Soviets would make and if the WAllies follow it, they are in for one of the nastiest shocks of their life. Operational maneuver warfare (which was the paradigm of WWII) does not do this. It instead looks at the enemy. Where is the enemy army most vulnerable to our attack independently of terrain?

Soviets tactical-operational objectives would be defined not by the ground, but by the location of WAllied forces. If the WAllies are particularly weak in a sector, that's where the Soviets will strike, regardless of the terrain. Difficult terrain is all well and good, but terrain doesn't stop armies. Just ask the French in 1940 or Army Group Center in 1944 how well the Ardennes or the Pripyet Marshes held up their enemies.

Terrain is absolutely a limiting factor. If it weren't, how would the British have dealt with Operation Sea Lion or the Greeks with Xerxes' invasion? For that matter, how would the Soviets have dealt with Hitler at the Volga or the Australians with the Japanese in New Guinea?

The Soviets couldn't "command push" their way across a major natural obstacle with over 1 million Allied troops and up to 9,248 tanks waiting on the other side (possibly more with reinforcement from Italy).

There's also some notable underestimation of Soviet deception techniques, blithe assumption the WAllies will perfectly detect and react to a Soviet deception plan which will be tailored against them without any reference as to how, totally ignoring any friction from their relatively disunited command structure, and the consequences of their tendency to not economize on resources in passive or unimportant sectors. It is stated that the WAllies fully deploy their armies defensively, which by WAllied book would mean lining up all of their armies linearly in a single operational echelon with a modest reserve of one-two armored divisions yet the subsequent map assumes no less than two armies deployed in reserve in a second operational echelon... if not an outright strategic reserve.

Not so much that the Allies would see through all Soviet deceptions with perfect clarity, but that certain critical pieces of information would likely have been available to them and they would have acted accordingly. I think this would have been much more realistic than the Allies being caught "asleep" and completely out of position.

(Also, as mentioned in my previous post the two blue blocks in the bottom left part of the second map represent the US Fifth Army and the major portion of the British Eighth Army, both having arrived up the Rhone valley from Italy.)

These are the most glaring flaws I can see in your thesis and while there are others, they mainly flow from the above. A good example is the assumption the Soviets won't mount a crossing of the Elbe. To which I reply: why not? If the WAllies are denuding their defenses along it in favor of beefing the defenses up north of Hamburg and around Leipzig based on an analysis of the tactical difficulties of crossing such terrain, then the perfect Soviet response is to mount a deception operation to convince the WAllies to keep concentrating on those two regions while instead allocating the engineer-bridging resources required to overcome the tactical difficulties posed by the Elbe to steal a operational march on the WAllies. Piercing a weakly defended Elbe river line would give the Soviets a straight shot at the lines of communication for all Western Allied forces north of the Alps.

Why not: because in this scenario the Elbe river line is held by two British/Commonwealth armies and the US Ninth Army. I speculated that under the Soviet plan this sector would be a 'magnet' to draw Allied forces north from the central front; Soviet forces may have presented the appearance of preparing for a river crossing, but this would not have happened unless their main offensive broke through the Allied defense to the south and threatened the southern flank of 21st Army Group. In the meantime they would likely have concentrated their actual efforts on pushing the British back to the west bank of the Elbe and moving into Denmark.

Obviously, if their hypothetical central attack failed the 'delayed pincer' against the 21st Army Group would have been useless and the main Soviet forces on this front would likely have been diverted to the south, as the map shows.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

For personnel, the Allies had approximately 1,000,000 in 21st Army Group, 1,300,000 in 12th Army Group, 800,000 in 6th Army Group, and 900,000 in 15th Army Group - total ~4 million, hence "about 4 million ground troops." In Western Europe there were a further 1 million personnel in the communications zone (Zaloga - overall Army strength was 4,084,300 on 30 April '45) plus another 1 million airmen (Zaloga - 993,480). In the Mediterranean 15th Army Group had, in addition to the 900,000 men in the Fifth (US) and Eighth (British/Commonwealth) Armies, another 430,000 men in the communications zone, which may not have included air force personnel. Therefore total Allied strength amounted to 4 million in their army groups, about 1.4 million ground personnel in the communications zone, and at least a million air force personnel (the USSBS page 1 lists the peak strength of the USAAF and RAF combat commands at 1.3 million). Therefore, up to 6.7 million overall.

Which again all includes personnel not found amidst the Soviet operational forces or even the Soviet military. As a good example, the Soviets had no equivalent to the Western Allies railway repair troops, instead relying on close-coordination with the civilian NKPS. This meant that not only did a significant proportion of Soviet logistical manpower not appear within the OOB of any Soviet fronts, they didn't appear within the tables of the Red Army at all!

But frankly, I know the 4.6 million is not active frontline personnel or their immediate support personnel and includes a lot of non-divisional chafe that the Soviets would consider non-operational. How do I know that? This post by you:

Therefore, in Western Europe the Allies had the equivalent of about 54 armored divisions, 70 infantry or mechanized divisions, and 5 airborne divisions. In the Mediterranean they had the equivalent of 7 armored divisions, 16 infantry divisions, and 1 mountain division. Combining the two, the Allied ground forces totalled approximately 153 division-equivalents (including 61 armored) at the close of hostilities in May 1945, without drawing on CONUS or the Pacific.

The sum total of all WAllied ground forces is the equivalent to 153 division-equivalents (well, not really, but it is useful in manpower terms). That's both divisional personnel and all personnel assigned to combat support units. Even assuming all 153 division-equivalents are of the manpower strength of the largest such formation (a British infantry division, with 18,347), that is 2,807,091. In reality, it's probably a fair bit less, given that an American infantry division had 3,000 fewer men and a US armored division has about 7,000 fewer. I just rounded up to 3,000,000 to be generous. More realistically it's probably around 2.5 million.

By comparison, the number of men in the 153 Soviet rifle corps in Europe alone is somewhere between 2 and 2.5 million (16,000 average times 153 is 2.448 million, but some rifle corps were below the average so...), never mind literally all the other Soviet formations and units we wound up computing.

Compared with the Soviets the Allies had more and better planes, a massive fleet of four engined bombers, and likely much more skilled pilots.

In raw numbers, yes the WAllies have overall more planes. However, when it comes to aircraft most relevant to the immediate tactical-operational battle (fighters, CAS aircraft, and tactical bombers), the Soviets are shown to have at worst only slightly below parity and at best an absolute superiority (the WAllies had no dedicated CAS aircraft). The claim that the WAllies planes are better is dubious: in the low-altitude air fights that dominated on the Eastern Front and is liable to dominate here, Soviet aircraft actually showed much better performance. Likewise, the claim their pilots are more skilled is not born out by historical evidence: Soviet pilots in Korea traded even with their WAllied counterparts and achieved similar late-war loss ratios against the Germans*.

*As I noted earlier, the exchange rate between American heavy bombers and Luftwaffe fighters was roughly 1:1, yet an American bomber being 3-4 times the industrial expense and 8-10 times the manpower expense (to the point the Luftwaffe actually did consider shooting down a four-engine heavy as being worth 3 fighter kills) means this is actually an extremely favorable kill ratio for the Luftwaffe and renders the overall loss ratio in the west quite comparable to that of the east.

They had by TO&E a similar number of tanks, TDs, and assault guns (still not sure about this one, and 20-25 percent of Soviet heavy armored forces were fixed casemate) and a more robust basis for maintaining those forces (more motor vehicles, probably better trained mechanics too). The two sides fired a similar amount of artillery ammunition, though Western tactical methods were better and the Red Army had basically no dedicated indirect fire SPGs.

I'm still trying to refine numbers on the independent tank units, btw. I'm getting some contradictory results on the number of tank brigades and regiments: CJ Dick gives 229 independent "brigades and regiments" across the Red Army but doesn't break them down. On the other hand, Glantz gives a figure of 115 independent regiments and 83 independent brigades which is a total of 198 units. Zaloga in Red Army Handbook backs up Glantz on the regiments figure but frustratingly refuses to provide a number for independent tank brigades (or even the total number of tank brigades). And finally, Dunn gives 177 total tank brigades, of which 95 were in corps, which comes out to 82 independent brigades but only 60 independent regiments for a total of 142 independent tank units? I think based on this review it'd be safe to say that the Soviets have "around 200" total independent tank units, with 80-85 being brigades and the rest regiments. Thankfully, the number of SAU regiments is consistent across sources. The Soviets have a pretty clear, if modest, advantage in ammunition. Soviet operational methods for both the grouping and concealment of artillery also is more than enough to offset tactical superiority. The claim that the Western basis for maintaining their armored forces was more robust is unsubstantiated.

As for the correlation between German and Soviet personnel on the Eastern Front, I actually wasn't too sure about this. For the Soviets, their ration strength on 20 April 1945 was approximately 6,250,000 operational troops, 1.3 million in nonoperational fronts, and 2.6 million in the military districts - 10,150,000 in total. In addition to these, there were 1,244,269 personnel in military hospitals (431,000 in military districts and 764,000 in the operational army). If this was their whole army, what was the equivalent to western "communications zone" personnel? Were the military districts responsible for Soviet occupied territories in Poland and Eastern Europe? Or were they a subdivision of the "operational" force?

It depends. Naturally a bunch of the non-operational forces would constitute the equivalent along with a minority but there'd also be a variety of civilian and paramilitary personnel. I mentioned up above the civilian NKPS, whose staffing numbered in the millions (although obviously not all of them), but another example you'd also have the 800,000 in the NKVDs military arm who were overwhelmingly devoted to rear-area security. There is the obvious problem of divorcing how many of these men were devoted operations within the Soviets vs outside and how many at any given moment were directly supporting the Red Army as opposed to internal activity. I don't frankly even know if it would be even possible to compute such.

Terrain is absolutely a limiting factor. If it weren't, how would the British have dealt with Operation Sea Lion or the Greeks with Xerxes' invasion? For that matter, how would the Soviets have dealt with Hitler at the Volga or the Australians with the Japanese in New Guinea?

No, forces is the limiting factor. The British would have dealt with Sea Lion with their army, air force, and navy and the Greeks dealt with Xerxes invasion with their army. In neither case did they rest their defense solely on terrain. Nor did the Soviets in dealing with Hitler at the Volga or the Australian fighting the Japanese in New Guinea.

The Soviets couldn't "command push" their way across a major natural obstacle with over 1 million Allied troops and up to 9,248 tanks waiting on the other side (possibly more with reinforcement from Italy).

They can if many of those forces are running up north or south to fight the Soviet threats there (or in the northern forces case, help ensure their fellows withdraw back across the Elbe intact), leaving large portions of the west bank Elbe defended by little more than screening forces.

Not so much that the Allies would see through all Soviet deceptions with perfect clarity, but that certain critical pieces of information would likely have been available to them and they would have acted accordingly. I think this would have been much more realistic than the Allies being caught "asleep" and completely out of position.

You think so, but with no real basis for thinking so. At the collection stage, the WAllies have no HUMINT on the Soviets, airborne IMINT has been done on a minimal basis and is subject to deception (camouflage, decoys, discrete movements, exploitation of sensor gaps, etc), and the late-war Red Army subjected their forces to rigorous COMSEC for both wireless and wired communications which greatly limits (if not nullifies outright) data provided by SIGINT. Given all this, their analysis will have little basis through which to pick-up, let alone tell, the genuine bits of information apart phony groupings, decoys, and misinformation.

It’s not impossible, certainly, but odds are against it.

Why not: because in this scenario the Elbe river line is held by two British/Commonwealth armies and the US Ninth Army.

No, a portion of the British/Commonwealth armies are already northeast of the Elbe and hence vulnerable to being cut-off if the Soviets breakthrough there. Even if they do scramble back over in time, it is entirely possible that the Soviets could capture or force crossings before they can get their defenses arranged. The 9th Army, in the meantime is being heavily diverted to back up 1st Army, which would leave it's forces along the Elbe .

I speculated that under the Soviet plan this sector would be a 'magnet' to draw Allied forces north from the central front; Soviet forces may have presented the appearance of preparing for a river crossing, but this would not have happened unless their main offensive broke through the Allied defense to the south and threatened the southern flank of 21st Army Group. In the meantime they would likely have concentrated their actual efforts on pushing the British back to the west bank of the Elbe and moving into Denmark.

If the WAllies are conducting the sort of positional based analysis you are, then it's liable to be the exact opposite: the Soviets are likely to use their forces against the British in the north and the Americans around Leipzig to convince the WAllies to leave little more than screening forces on the Elbe, which could be easily punched through with an assault-crossing.

Obviously, if their hypothetical central attack failed the 'delayed pincer' against the 21st Army Group would have been useless and the main Soviet forces on this front would likely have been diverted to the south, as the map shows.

Why would the Soviets efforts merely be to push the British back? A rapid breakthrough south of Wismar, where the terrain is wide enough to create a breakthrough corridor opens the possibility of inserting OMGs which can dash for Hamburg and the Northern Elbe river crossings before the British can pull back their spearheads. This would let the Soviets not only secure Denmark, but also cut-off the portion of 21st Army Group around Kiel-Lubeck and bounce the northern Elbe. The Soviets don't have to merely settle for pushing the WAllies back.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

Which again all includes personnel not found amidst the Soviet operational forces or even the Soviet military. As a good example, the Soviets had no equivalent to the Western Allies railway repair troops, instead relying on close-coordination with the civilian NKPS. This meant that not only did a significant proportion of Soviet logistical manpower not appear within the OOB of any Soviet fronts, they didn't appear within the tables of the Red Army at all!

But frankly, I know the 4.6 million is not active frontline personnel or their immediate support personnel and includes a lot of non-divisional chafe that the Soviets would consider non-operational. How do I know that? This post by you:



The sum total of all WAllied ground forces is the equivalent to 153 division-equivalents (well, not really, but it is useful in manpower terms). That's both divisional personnel and all personnel assigned to combat support units. Even assuming all 153 division-equivalents are of the manpower strength of the largest such formation (a British infantry division, with 18,347), that is 2,807,091. In reality, it's probably a fair bit less, given that an American infantry division had 3,000 fewer men and a US armored division has about 7,000 fewer. I just rounded up to 3,000,000 to be generous. More realistically it's probably around 2.5 million.

By comparison, the number of men in the 153 Soviet rifle corps in Europe alone is somewhere between 2 and 2.5 million (16,000 average times 153 is 2.448 million, but some rifle corps were below the average so...), never mind literally all the other Soviet formations and units we wound up computing.

So everyone who wasn't a dedicated trigger-puller wasn't "operational" in the Soviet Army? Seems unlikely. In US Army parlance, each division in the 12th Army Group had a "combat zone" slice of 26,500 by the end of April 1945, while each division in the 6th Army Group had a slice of 30,500. The overall COMZ slice was 8,919 on the continent and 10,700 in the theater as a whole [Logistical Support of the Armies, September 1944 - May 1945 p. 303]. This doesn't include the 15th Army Group in Italy (which had a strength of 1,333,856, during Operation Grapeshot in Spring 1945, of which 900,000 were part of the US Fifth and British Eighth Armies) not does it include Montgomery's 21st Army Group.

The breakdown for ETOUSA can be seen in this table (p.288): On 30 April 1945, there were 61 US divisions in ETO and a total manpower level of 3,059,942. Of these, 2,628,082 were actually on the continent and the rest were in the UK; this further breaks down to 1,612,734 "field forces," 259,223 air forces, 544,005 COMZ, 70,194 "non-operating" (mainly hospital patients), and 141,926 ground forces replacement stream.

This brings up another point: how were the Soviet air forces counted?

In raw numbers, yes the WAllies have overall more planes. However, when it comes to aircraft most relevant to the immediate tactical-operational battle (fighters, CAS aircraft, and tactical bombers), the Soviets are shown to have at worst only slightly below parity and at best an absolute superiority (the WAllies had no dedicated CAS aircraft).

It sounds like you're making a virtue of necessity: the P-47 could carry 2,500 pounds of bombs and after it dropped those it became a world-class fighter. The Il-2 could carry 1,300 pounds of bombs and after it dropped those it became. . . not a world-class fighter.

Almost every major Allied fighter except the Spitfire could also double as a capable fighter bomber:

The P-51 could carry up to 1,000 pounds of bombs
P-38 - up to 5,000 pounds
Typhoon - up to 2,000 pounds
Tempest - up to 2,000 pounds
Mosquito - up to 4,000 pounds (depending on the variant)

- As far as I know the Yak 9 and Yak 3 carried no bombs (though the Yak 9B had an internal bomb bay for up to 880 pounds), while the Lavochkins could carry about 440 to 485 pounds.

In other words, even if the Soviets had more dedicated CAS aircraft, their actual ability to provide CAS was lower.

The claim that the WAllies planes are better is dubious: in the low-altitude air fights that dominated on the Eastern Front and is liable to dominate here, Soviet aircraft actually showed much better performance. Likewise, the claim their pilots are more skilled is not born out by historical evidence: Soviet pilots in Korea traded even with their WAllied counterparts and achieved similar late-war loss ratios against the Germans*.

In Korean War fighter battles, a postwar review of 5th Air Force records revealed that 224 F-86 Sabres were lost to all causes, with 40 being lost to non-operational accidents, 61 to non-hostile causes, 18 to anti-aircraft fire, and 1 to a night attack by Po-2 bombers. The remaining 104 were lost to aerial combat, with 78 known for a fact to be directly brought down by MiG-15s, 14 lost to fuel starvation, and the remaining 12 unaccounted for.

Soviet records state that 335 MiG-15s were lost in Korea with 319 downed in combat. Of this number, 309 were destroyed by F-86s. The Chinese Air Force admits the loss of 399 aircraft (including 224 MiGs, all of which were destroyed by the F-86). North Korean losses are hard to determine, but owing to the estimate of a KPAF defector we have a picture of "at least 100," of which one-third were destroyed by the Sabre.

Accepting these figures as correct, over the course of the conflict approximately 566 MiG-15s were destroyed by F-86s for a loss of 78, a ratio of 7.26 : 1. It's uncertain how many F-86s were shot down by the Soviets, but even if the Red Air Force claimed every single Sabre shot down during the war they still would have been on the receiving end of a 4 to 1 ratio.

*As I noted earlier, the exchange rate between American heavy bombers and Luftwaffe fighters was roughly 1:1, yet an American bomber being 3-4 times the industrial expense and 8-10 times the manpower expense (to the point the Luftwaffe actually did consider shooting down a four-engine heavy as being worth 3 fighter kills) means this is actually an extremely favorable kill ratio for the Luftwaffe and renders the overall loss ratio in the west quite comparable to that of the east.

One plane is one plane; a bomber can't defend itself like a fighter can.

Calling it an 'extremely favorable' kill ratio also ignores the fact that by the end of the war the Luftwaffe barely had any planes or pilots left and the Allies were roving at will over German skies.

The Soviets have a pretty clear, if modest, advantage in ammunition.

Not necessarily (depending on British expenditures in MTO). At most they might have fired marginally more in Europe, but US production serviced more than just ETO and MTO.

(Also, in the ASF breakdown there's no separation between tank and anti-tank shells, so it was impossible to distinguish between them. That said, expenditures of that type of ammunition accounted for very little as a percentage of weight.)

Soviet operational methods for both the grouping and concealment of artillery also is more than enough to offset tactical superiority. The claim that the Western basis for maintaining their armored forces was more robust is unsubstantiated.

Were the Soviets really any better in 'grouping and concealment?' They also had a huge problem in that once their troops moved out of gun range they would have to rely on SUs and airplanes for artillery and didn't have TOT or Fort Sill fire direction techniques.

It depends. Naturally a bunch of the non-operational forces would constitute the equivalent along with a minority but there'd also be a variety of civilian and paramilitary personnel. I mentioned up above the civilian NKPS, whose staffing numbered in the millions (although obviously not all of them), but another example you'd also have the 800,000 in the NKVDs military arm who were overwhelmingly devoted to rear-area security. There is the obvious problem of divorcing how many of these men were devoted operations within the Soviets vs outside and how many at any given moment were directly supporting the Red Army as opposed to internal activity. I don't frankly even know if it would be even possible to compute such.

So the western military districts had troops in Poland maintaining lines of communication with the frontline armies? Additionally, the US Army Service Forces also used civilians, POWs, and Italian Service Units in the ETO COMZ. At the end of the war they totalled 540,000, or 48 percent of the 1,121,650 men in COMZ by VE day, though they apparently weren't counted in the 'official' breakdown above, which only listed 652,779 personnel in Britain and on the continent.

Besides that, the number of NKVD personnel outside the USSR numbered less than 100,000 per Art on Axis History Forum.

No, forces is the limiting factor. The British would have dealt with Sea Lion with their army, air force, and navy and the Greeks dealt with Xerxes invasion with their army. In neither case did they rest their defense solely on terrain. Nor did the Soviets in dealing with Hitler at the Volga or the Australian fighting the Japanese in New Guinea.

So the line of thinking is that anyone could visit the moon if only they could jump high enough?

This is the problem: you are arguing that with adequate forces crossing the Elbe would have been doable. The thing is, Soviet forces were inadequate because of the size of the Allied armies and their capabilities on the other side. In order to make a successful river crossing, the attacking force needs to (1) gather an overwhelming numerical advantage over the defenders in the area(s) of the crossing, (2) disrupt the opponent's air power long enough to allow sizable amounts of men and equipment to cross, and (3) be able to engage the opponent's reserves such that the bridgehead isn't immediately crushed in the event of a counterattack.

The Soviets might have been able to manage (1) and (2), but given the amount of armor and artillery support the Allies had I doubt they could have done (3). Furthermore, even after crossing a river the bridgeheads needed to be consolidated before any further moves could be made. If the Soviets made their main effort in northern Germany over the Elbe they would have thrown away any chances of rapidly advancing into Allied rear areas and at most would have drawn attention away from the central front, which, if this was their objective all along they could also have done this without actually crossing.

If the Soviet Union went to war with the Western Allies in the spring of 1945, their military strategy would have depended on winning as quick and decisive a victory on the battlefield as possible; a river crossing into northern Germany wouldn't have done that.

They can if many of those forces are running up north or south to fight the Soviet threats there (or in the northern forces case, help ensure their fellows withdraw back across the Elbe intact), leaving large portions of the west bank Elbe defended by little more than screening forces.

[...]

No, a portion of the British/Commonwealth armies are already northeast of the Elbe and hence vulnerable to being cut-off if the Soviets breakthrough there. Even if they do scramble back over in time, it is entirely possible that the Soviets could capture or force crossings before they can get their defenses arranged. The 9th Army, in the meantime is being heavily diverted to back up 1st Army, which would leave it's forces along the Elbe .

If the WAllies are conducting the sort of positional based analysis you are, then it's liable to be the exact opposite: the Soviets are likely to use their forces against the British in the north and the Americans around Leipzig to convince the WAllies to leave little more than screening forces on the Elbe, which could be easily punched through with an assault-crossing.

The scenario posits that the Elbe from the Elde tributary to Magdeburg (~90 miles or 150 km) is held by First Canadian Army and at least two corps of US Ninth Army; these would hardly have been "screening forces."

Meanwhile on the east bank of the Elbe the frontline was only about 60 miles/100 km north to south, and the entire British Second Army was gathered there. Because of the density of forces and the geographic constraints of the Elbe and Baltic it would have been extremely difficult for the Soviets to turn the flanks of the British or get behind them (let alone break through the middle). With overwhelming numbers (for instance, the troops of the 2nd and 3rd Belorussian Fronts) I can see Second Army being forced to retreat back over the Elbe, but actually being cut off and broken up is hard to imagine.

You think so, but with no real basis for thinking so. At the collection stage, the WAllies have no HUMINT on the Soviets, airborne IMINT has been done on a minimal basis and is subject to deception (camouflage, decoys, discrete movements, exploitation of sensor gaps, etc), and the late-war Red Army subjected their forces to rigorous COMSEC for both wireless and wired communications which greatly limits (if not nullifies outright) data provided by SIGINT. Given all this, their analysis will have little basis through which to pick-up, let alone tell, the genuine bits of information apart phony groupings, decoys, and misinformation.

It’s not impossible, certainly, but odds are against it.

The Allies had plenty of access to human intelligence including the defeated Germans and the Soviets themselves (not to mention clandestine channels in Poland and eastern Europe). Their order of battle wasn't unknown to them, and as I said earlier completely concealing millions of troops was not feasible.

This doesn't mean that the Allies would know everything about Soviet operational intentions or the timing and direction of their attacks, but they would likely have a ballpark estimate of the dispositions and orientation of the various Soviet fronts, as well as their composition. The last statement (composition) is the one I have the least confidence for though, as I could see the Allies misplacing tank armies or just not recognizing their presence at all. Conversely, I don't know how accurate the Soviets would have been in assessing Allied dispositions beyond the same criteria.

Why would the Soviets efforts merely be to push the British back? A rapid breakthrough south of Wismar, where the terrain is wide enough to create a breakthrough corridor opens the possibility of inserting OMGs which can dash for Hamburg and the Northern Elbe river crossings before the British can pull back their spearheads. This would let the Soviets not only secure Denmark, but also cut-off the portion of 21st Army Group around Kiel-Lubeck and bounce the northern Elbe. The Soviets don't have to merely settle for pushing the WAllies back.

As above, the density of forces was too high and the terrain too confining.

 

[ObssesedNuker]

So everyone who wasn't a dedicated trigger-puller wasn't "operational" in the Soviet Army?

No: the 18,000 figure would include divisional support personnel (and their equivalents for the support units which get grouped into divisions), although corps/army/army group support personnel. Overall, though, the WAllies had to devote considerably more personnel to support functions because the geography of their logistical tail (not being overseas) rendered it more complex, never mind the extra burden of supplying their forces with luxury goods ("service materials") that the Soviets eschewed and which made up over one-fifth of their logistical demand based on the daily requirements. The Soviets can simply get away with a lower tail:tooth ratio without sacrificing either combat power or their ability to sustain their forces.

The breakdown for ETOUSA can be seen in this table (p.288): On 30 April 1945, there were 61 US divisions in ETO and a total manpower level of 3,059,942. Of these, 2,628,082 were actually on the continent and the rest were in the UK; this further breaks down to 1,612,734 "field forces," 259,223 air forces, 544,005 COMZ, 70,194 "non-operating" (mainly hospital patients), and 141,926 ground forces replacement stream.

So no break down in the field forces between those serving up front in Germany and those pulling rear-area duties more akin to the COMZ personnel?

This brings up another point: how were the Soviet air forces counted?

Unsure. Hell, I'm still rooting around for total Soviet air force personnel. The only figure I've managed to find on that so far is 8.65% of total armed forces strength on January 1941. Applying that to 1945 gives me a figure of approximately 1.05 million personnel, which is similar to the total in the British RAF. This is almost the manpower size of the RAF on twice the amount of aircraft, but then the Soviets air force doesn't have to worry about overseas logistics nor does it have much in the way of extra-intensive strategic bomber units. Then again, support of the Red Air Force was inadequate in 1941 so by '45 the figure might be higher. Probably closer to 10%, which would place it around 1.1-1.2 million. Still lower on a man-to-aircraft basis than the RAF, but again the VVS/PVO doesn't have the logistical requirements of overseas deployments and heavy bombers that the RAF does. It's also higher on a man-to-aircraft basis then the USAAF (2.253 million across 63,715 aircraft, twice the number of men on three times the number of aircraft although admittedly many of the latter were stateside in reserve). The 1.1-1.2 million figure does also fit with the estimates I've seen on the total personnel in the Soviet ground forces, which is around 10-10.5 million out of a total RKKA strength of 11.7 million.

Does that percentage apply to Soviet operational forces? I don't have a clue.

It sounds like you're making a virtue of necessity: the P-47 could carry 2,500 pounds of bombs and after it dropped those it became a world-class fighter. The Il-2 could carry 1,300 pounds of bombs and after it dropped those it became. . . not a world-class fighter.

Great except to do that you are taking away fighters from the air superiority role and if the P-47 dumps it's bombs to engage in air-air combat, it has removed itself from the CAS role and the American ground forces it's supposed to support... don't get any support. Additionally, the statement "became a world-class fighter" needs to be qualified: the P-47 was mainly optimized for high-altitude combat. Down on the deck in the sort of air engagements that characterized those over the Eastern Front and is liable to be the norm in the first-stage of Unthinkable, it was considerably more sluggish.

In other words, even if the Soviets had more dedicated CAS aircraft, their actual ability to provide CAS was lower.

This misses the point: the Soviet ability to provide CAS results in no degradation to the number of fighters to run air superiority. Conversely, the WAllies will need to remove a considerable number of their fighters to provide CAS.

In Korean War fighter battles, a postwar review of 5th Air Force records revealed that 224 F-86 Sabres were lost to all causes, with 40 being lost to non-operational accidents, 61 to non-hostile causes, 18 to anti-aircraft fire, and 1 to a night attack by Po-2 bombers. The remaining 104 were lost to aerial combat, with 78 known for a fact to be directly brought down by MiG-15s, 14 lost to fuel starvation, and the remaining 12 unaccounted for.

Mostly accurate, save for the fact that data-matching that there were plenty of instances where the USAF attributed combat losses to "landing accidents" and "other causes". In the 1970s, the Air Force bumped the number of Sabres it admitted to losing to MiGs up to 92. Commonly accepted figure for the number of USAAF losses in academia to MiGs is around 100 aircraft.

Soviet records state that 335 MiG-15s were lost in Korea with 319 downed in combat. Of this number, 309 were destroyed by F-86s. The Chinese Air Force admits the loss of 399 aircraft (including 224 MiGs, all of which were destroyed by the F-86). North Korean losses are hard to determine, but owing to the estimate of a KPAF defector we have a picture of "at least 100," of which one-third were destroyed by the Sabre.

The Soviet number of MiG losses do not state that 309 were lost to F-86s, so that claim is fictional. Nevertheless, studies show that when the Americans were flying against Soviet WW2 pilots (as opposed to the fresh-faced trainees rotated in later, when the communists started treating the air war less as something to be won and more as a training opportunity), the ratio was near 1:1. I'm more inclined to take the painstaking research of post-Cold War scholars going through all the archival material rather than a guy on the internet who found the Soviet WW2 pilots matched their American counterparts:

Limiting the statistics to specific periods highlights more meaningful conclusions. Author and retired Air Force Colonel Doug Dildy observes that when Chinese, North Korean, and newly deployed Soviet pilots occupied the MiG-15 cockpit, statistics do in fact support a 9-to-1 Sabre-favoring kill ratio*. However, when claimed kills are restricted to a span encompassing 1951 combat, when Americans faced Soviet pilots who flew against the Luftwaffe during the Great Patriotic War, the kill ratio flattens out to a nearly dead-even 1.4 to 1, slightly favoring the Sabre.

*Technically 4-to-1, really, but whatever.

One plane is one plane; a bomber can't defend itself like a fighter can.

One plane is a varied level of investment in resource, depending on what plane it is. And no, a bomber can't defend itself like a fighter can, but it can defend itself: bomber gunners were rather unsuccessful at shooting down enemy fighters, but they did force the fighters into sub-optimal approaches. Additionally, heavy bombers were much more resilient then fighters and often limped away from damage in a repairable state from damage that would see a fighter written-off, if not outright shot down.

Calling it an 'extremely favorable' kill ratio also ignores the fact that by the end of the war the Luftwaffe barely had any planes or pilots left and the Allies were roving at will over German skies.

And that the Luftwaffe lost in the end does not mean the kill ratio was not highly in their favor. It just means they could not sustain even highly favorable kill ratios, while the Americans could. The Luftwaffe loses 6,000 of their single-engine fighters in a year, they go "oh, fuck me!". The Americans lose 6,000 heavy bombers in the same time, they shrug and carry on. I mean, if one wants to be pedantic, one can make a distinction between tactical and strategically ratios, where the former favors the Luftwaffe and the latter favoring the Americans. But this argument on pilot skill is invariably going to be based on the former.

There is a skill difference when it comes to the strategic replacement abilities, but it’s more in the skills to organize the system of replacement aircraft and pilots then the skills at the sharp end. The Soviets in ‘45 are a lot closer to the Americans in this then they are the Germans (although the Americans still do have several notable advantages which is why they ultimately win the air war in the long-run).

Not necessarily (depending on British expenditures in MTO). At most they might have fired marginally more in Europe, but US production serviced more than just ETO and MTO.

US Army expenditures in the Pacific are pretty irrelevant, since they'll still be there.

Were the Soviets really any better in 'grouping and concealment?'

Yes, they were. They repeatedly demonstrated this ability throughout 1944-45 while the WAllies...

I actually can’t think of any instance where the WAllies successfully concealing a major grouping from the Germans. There are instances when they managed to confuse or misdirect the Germans by presenting them with a decoy grouping on top of the real ones, but no instance when they managed to outright conceal the real grouping from detection.

As for the very act of concentrating an assault grouping on the operational level, again, yes the Soviets did tend to be better at it. CJ Dick does a direct comparison between Soviet and WAllied operational art in both the breakthrough and exploitation When it came to the breakthrough, Dick noted that the two sides followed many broadly similar trends: they assembled similarly sized artillery groupings in terms of pieces-per-kilometer, similar numbers of tanks and SPGs, multi-echeloning below the corps-level, and so-on. But Dick points out three important defects on the WAllied part (or three defects for the British, two for the Americans):

First, Soviet concentrations were mounted on an army-group or multi-army group scale whereas the WAllies only ever mounted them on an army-scale with only one or two corps.
Secondly, WAllied frontages were excessively narrow which resulted in problems of excessive congestions, crossfire from enemy positions on the shoulders, and the disruption to the enemy being too localized and limited.
Thirdly, Soviet doctrine was obsessed with tempo and provided for no tactical pauses in the attack. By contrast, the British (Dick notes that this was mainly a British failing and absent from American concentration-breakthrough operations, although they still possessed the above two issues) conducted their breakthrough attempts according to highly prescriptive orders in successive phases and were extremely reluctant to continue operations during the night. This meant that tactical pauses were de-facto built into the operation and gave the enemy the necessary breathing space to effect emergency redeployments and repair their defenses.

When it came to exploitation, however...

"This was the major area where Western and Red Army theory and practice parted company. The British and Americans had no concept of deep operations. In no operation in was any provision made for more than tactical exploitation. Both army groups invariably deployed in a single echelon. Armies also deployed mostly in a single echelon, with only a small reserve, while passive sectors were held in excessive strength, disproportionate to the enemy's capabilities. Assault corps mostly had a reserve, often consisting of one or even two mobile divisions (in Totalize and Cobra, three), but this was merely for tactical exploitation. Even this was often conducted with excessive caution, as evidenced by both Bluecoat and Totalize. No army-level mobile groups of two-three armored divisions waited in the wings to extend the penetration into the enemy's operational rear. The failure to do so was symptomatic of the Allied generals' frequent inability to think much beyond the tactical level and to identify and work toward decisive operational effect." -Page 257.

They also had a huge problem in that once their troops moved out of gun range they would have to rely on SUs and airplanes for artillery and didn't have TOT or Fort Sill fire direction techniques.

A bit more complicated: the mobile groups and tank armies generally left behind all non-organic artillery assets during exploitation and hence had to rely on their SAUs and aircraft, but the artillery was generally able to keep pace with their forces throughout the entirety of the breakthrough phase of a battle, and during exploitation had little difficult keeping pace with the combined-arms and shock armies. By 1945 the speed of these armies advances was such that there was never more than a one-day gap between them and the tank armies. So while the problem is there, it's not huge and compared to the Germans in the Bulge, the Soviets will be able to rely on their artillery to move forward and assist in both counter-battery fire and the reduction of bypassed WAllied strongpoints whereas the Germans basically left their arty behind in the first 6 hours and it never displaced forward in meaningful numbers, which was a key factor in stuff like those strongpoints holding out for so long, being unable to breakthrough Elsenborne Ridge, and WAllied artillery going basically unchallenged. WAllied certainly have tactical advantages in method (although the advantage over some Soviet artillery units is narrower than with others), but this is compensated for by the larger number of Soviet guns and their superior ability to operationally rapidly mass artillery where and when they are needed.

So the western military districts had troops in Poland maintaining lines of communication with the frontline armies?

In Poland? Maybe a few. But part of the complicating picture here is that - from a logistical perspective - the westernmost USSR is rather more comparable to what France is for the WAllies than Britain or the US Eastern Seaboard, so there is a very real argument to be made that the Soviet personnel there are rough equivalents to western COMMZ.

Additionally, the US Army Service Forces also used civilians, POWs, and Italian Service Units in the ETO COMZ.

The point is that the US Army Service Forces also included Railway Service Troops, who had no equivalent in the Red Army. By US Army reckoning, the Red Army had no military personnel assigned to railway service duty. And that was just one such example.

Besides that, the number of NKVD personnel outside the USSR numbered less than 100,000 per Art on Axis History Forum.

Eh, Art estimates 70,000 NKVD men outside the Soviet Union just before the Vistula-Oder Offensive in January 1945, excluding those in the Balkans (He specifically states that "Not listed in the order were NKVD troops in South-East Europe"). Given that the Balkans was the only part of Europe that the NKVD would be in significant numbers outside of the USSR amidst both the operational and non-operational forces that makes the figure both (A) an underestimate and (B) obsolete by May of 1945.

So the line of thinking is that anyone could visit the moon if only they could jump high enough?

Cute, but let's be real: if the Greeks had no army, then the Persian army's advance through Thermopylae and elsewhere would have been a pleasant stroll. Similarly, had the British lacked a navy, air force, or army, then Operation Sealion would have been less of a challenge for the Germans than their invasion of Norway.

The Soviets might have been able to manage (1) and (2), but given the amount of armor and artillery support the Allies had I doubt they could have done (3).

Never mind that the very point of Soviet mobile groups and OMGs was too do precisely that.

Furthermore, even after crossing a river the bridgeheads needed to be consolidated before any further moves could be made.

No, not necessarily. It's entirely possible for the Soviets to force the river with one or several tank army's supported by engineering detachments and have those armies immediately exploit into the enemies depth while leaving bridgehead consolidation to the combined-arms armies following in their wake. They did this several times against the Germans.

The Allies had plenty of access to human intelligence including the defeated Germans and the Soviets themselves (not to mention clandestine channels in Poland and eastern Europe). Their order of battle wasn't unknown to them, and as I said earlier completely concealing millions of troops was not feasible.

They did not. The WAllies had no agents in the Soviet government, no personnel with free access behind Soviet lines, and clandestine contacts in Eastern Europe had largely been severed by the Soviets. Their only real source of information was what the Soviet government would tell them and this was often deceitful, if not outright lies. This is not only the historical record, but the diplomatic one too: the both Churchill and Truman complained of it too the Soviets at Potsdam in 1945. Now, given time they're liable to reestablish contact with the resistance movements in Eastern Europe, but that's for the war in 1946 and later, not 1945.

Their order of battle wasn't unknown to them, and as I said earlier completely concealing millions of troops was not feasible.

That latter statement combined with the way our discussion about the air war in part uses reminds me of Goering declaring that it is impossible that an American fighter aircraft was shot down flying around east of Aachen in November 1943 after being told the Germans shot down American fighter aircraft flying around eat of Aachen.

By your logic, the Germans should have seen the August Jassy-Kishinev Offensive coming. After all, the Soviet order of battle wasn't unknown to the Germans, they had considerably more IMINT than the WAllies (although their HUMINT and SIGINT was roughly as poor), and it should have been "not feasible" to conceal the massive offensive groupings of a force of over 1.3 million men. Yet the very day before the offensive opened, the commander of Army Group South Ukraine was blissfully reporting to his superiors in OKH (who were no more wiser than he was) that Soviet forces dispositions were mostly defensive and he expected little more than harassing attacks...

Conversely, I don't know how accurate the Soviets would have been in assessing Allied dispositions beyond the same criteria.

The Soviets had military representatives stationed in SHAEF headquarters throughout 1945. They probably wouldn't be perfect, but they'll be a lot more accurate then the WAllies.

As above, the density of forces was too high and the terrain too confining.

In 2008, a Russian mechanized battalion using classic Soviet-style tactics straight out of the WW2 handbook outmaneuvered and routed a much larger, more heavily equipped Georgian brigade. It did so despite having to advance through a tunnel and down a single route in terrain that was the very definition of canalizing with a narrow mountain valley, towns and a river.

Given that example, you'll forgive me for expressing skepticism over the claim that the Soviets would be unable to find room to achieve potentially decisive maneuver in Northern Germany despite the terrain being far more open and the ratio of forces being in the Soviets favor.

 

[BobTheBarbarian]

Sorry for the long delay

No: the 18,000 figure would include divisional support personnel (and their equivalents for the support units which get grouped into divisions), although corps/army/army group support personnel. Overall, though, the WAllies had to devote considerably more personnel to support functions because the geography of their logistical tail (not being overseas) rendered it more complex, never mind the extra burden of supplying their forces with luxury goods ("service materials") that the Soviets eschewed and which made up over one-fifth of their logistical demand based on the daily requirements. The Soviets can simply get away with a lower tail:tooth ratio without sacrificing either combat power or their ability to sustain their forces.



So no break down in the field forces between those serving up front in Germany and those pulling rear-area duties more akin to the COMZ personnel?



Unsure. Hell, I'm still rooting around for total Soviet air force personnel. The only figure I've managed to find on that so far is 8.65% of total armed forces strength on January 1941. Applying that to 1945 gives me a figure of approximately 1.05 million personnel, which is similar to the total in the British RAF. This is almost the manpower size of the RAF on twice the amount of aircraft, but then the Soviets air force doesn't have to worry about overseas logistics nor does it have much in the way of extra-intensive strategic bomber units. Then again, support of the Red Air Force was inadequate in 1941 so by '45 the figure might be higher. Probably closer to 10%, which would place it around 1.1-1.2 million. Still lower on a man-to-aircraft basis than the RAF, but again the VVS/PVO doesn't have the logistical requirements of overseas deployments and heavy bombers that the RAF does. It's also higher on a man-to-aircraft basis then the USAAF (2.253 million across 63,715 aircraft, twice the number of men on three times the number of aircraft although admittedly many of the latter were stateside in reserve). The 1.1-1.2 million figure does also fit with the estimates I've seen on the total personnel in the Soviet ground forces, which is around 10-10.5 million out of a total RKKA strength of 11.7 million.

Does that percentage apply to Soviet operational forces? I don't have a clue.

So you're saying the Soviet Army didn't count medical, signals, engineers, transport, quartermaster, as "operational?" I mean, given that we have the 'general' breakdown of all troops in the Soviet Army at that time those personnel had to be categorized somehow.

How about, in order to avoid back and forth nitpicking we say that, based on the rough calculations in posts 50 and 63 that the Soviets had a roughly 2 to 1 advantage in numbers of front-line infantry and parity in armored units by TO&E. Though, about 20 to 25 percent of Soviet heavy armored units were fixed casemate and the Allied armies were better supplied and had a higher degree motorization thanks to their more robust logistical tail.

Great except to do that you are taking away fighters from the air superiority role and if the P-47 dumps it's bombs to engage in air-air combat, it has removed itself from the CAS role and the American ground forces it's supposed to support... don't get any support. Additionally, the statement "became a world-class fighter" needs to be qualified: the P-47 was mainly optimized for high-altitude combat. Down on the deck in the sort of air engagements that characterized those over the Eastern Front and is liable to be the norm in the first-stage of Unthinkable, it was considerably more sluggish.

This misses the point: the Soviet ability to provide CAS results in no degradation to the number of fighters to run air superiority. Conversely, the WAllies will need to remove a considerable number of their fighters to provide CAS.

The Allies had 14,000 fighters against at least 8,000 Soviet fighters and 5,000 ground-attack (Soviet figures for January '45, don't have figures for May). There were also that many bombers (14k - "The War in Western Europe" appendix 8 sheet 1) against 5,000 Soviet bombers. During the initial period it would have been impossible for either side to suppress the other, and the Allied air forces had much more firepower than the Soviets.

Also, the P-47's heavy construction meant that it was extremely fast in a dive while the P-51D and Spitfire Mk. XIV could climb as good or better than the Yak-3 and La-7.

Mostly accurate, save for the fact that data-matching that there were plenty of instances where the USAF attributed combat losses to "landing accidents" and "other causes". In the 1970s, the Air Force bumped the number of Sabres it admitted to losing to MiGs up to 92. Commonly accepted figure for the number of USAAF losses in academia to MiGs is around 100 aircraft.

The Soviet number of MiG losses do not state that 309 were lost to F-86s, so that claim is fictional. Nevertheless, studies show that when the Americans were flying against Soviet WW2 pilots (as opposed to the fresh-faced trainees rotated in later, when the communists started treating the air war less as something to be won and more as a training opportunity), the ratio was near 1:1. I'm more inclined to take the painstaking research of post-Cold War scholars going through all the archival material rather than a guy on the internet who found the Soviet WW2 pilots matched their American counterparts:

From Dildy and Thompson, "F-86 Sabre vs MiG-15: Korea 1950-53" p. 73:

'Soviet archival records state that 335 MiG-15s and 120 pilots were lost in Korea, with 319 of these aircraft and 110 pilots being shot down in combat. All but ten of the downed MiGs fell to F-86s. The PLAAF admits the loss of 399 aircraft in Korea, of which 224 MiG-15s were destroyed in combat - all exclusively to the Sabre - with the loss of 77 pilots. North Korean losses are not yet known with certainty, but in 1953 a defector estimated that KPAF losses numbered at least 100 jets, of which about one-third had been claimed by F-86s. Overall then, approximately 566 MiG-15s had been destroyed by Sabres. Of these, only 49 were flown by members of the two elite V-VS divisions that fought over the Yalu primarily during 1951.

[...]

Against the Soviet's best - the crack 303rd and 324th IADs - the ratio nears parity at 1.4 to 1. Interestingly, when the 324th IAD was flying the early model MiG, the "kill ratio" was 8 to 1 in favor of the F-86A. Once the MiG-15bis was used, it dropped to 1.2 to 1, indicating that the two variants, and the men flying them, were nearly equal in capabilities.'​

The Soviets' best were nearly able to inflict equal losses, but overall they lost more than they brought down.

US Army expenditures in the Pacific are pretty irrelevant, since they'll still be there.

At that time there was only the Okinawa campaign and mopping up in the Philippines. That was where the largest US ground campaign was in that theater, but Japanese resistance had largely been broken by VE day.

Yes, they were. They repeatedly demonstrated this ability throughout 1944-45 while the WAllies...

I actually can’t think of any instance where the WAllies successfully concealing a major grouping from the Germans. There are instances when they managed to confuse or misdirect the Germans by presenting them with a decoy grouping on top of the real ones, but no instance when they managed to outright conceal the real grouping from detection.

Did the Soviets ever do this? The closest I can think of is Operation Uranus, but I'm not sure as to the extent the Germans were unaware of what the Soviets had. To give one example from the Allied side, General Slim's IV Corps, under total radio silence and with dummy headquarters pumping out false information (Operation Cloak) was able to achieve complete surprise against General Kimura's Burma Area Army during Operation Extended Capital, the crossing of the Irawaddy River in 1944. Together with the XXXIII corps, the Fourteenth Army was able to confuse the Japanese about its intentions and the direction of its offensive, and was ultimately able to execute a pincer maneuver against the Japanese, evicting them from central Burma and taking the important objectives of Meiktila and Mandalay.

First, Soviet concentrations were mounted on an army-group or multi-army group scale whereas the WAllies only ever mounted them on an army-scale with only one or two corps.

Operation Overlord, Veritable-Grenade, Lumberjack, Undertone, Plunder, Grapeshot, and the Ruhr all involved multiple Allied armies; these weren't even the only examples.

Secondly, WAllied frontages were excessively narrow which resulted in problems of excessive congestions, crossfire from enemy positions on the shoulders, and the disruption to the enemy being too localized and limited.

Not always the case. Goodwood and Veritable especially suffered from narrow frontages, but there were other instances where it wasn't so.

Thirdly, Soviet doctrine was obsessed with tempo and provided for no tactical pauses in the attack. By contrast, the British (Dick notes that this was mainly a British failing and absent from American concentration-breakthrough operations, although they still possessed the above two issues) conducted their breakthrough attempts according to highly prescriptive orders in successive phases and were extremely reluctant to continue operations during the night. This meant that tactical pauses were de-facto built into the operation and gave the enemy the necessary breathing space to effect emergency redeployments and repair their defenses.

When it came to exploitation, however...

"This was the major area where Western and Red Army theory and practice parted company. The British and Americans had no concept of deep operations. In no operation in was any provision made for more than tactical exploitation. Both army groups invariably deployed in a single echelon. Armies also deployed mostly in a single echelon, with only a small reserve, while passive sectors were held in excessive strength, disproportionate to the enemy's capabilities. Assault corps mostly had a reserve, often consisting of one or even two mobile divisions (in Totalize and Cobra, three), but this was merely for tactical exploitation. Even this was often conducted with excessive caution, as evidenced by both Bluecoat and Totalize. No army-level mobile groups of two-three armored divisions waited in the wings to extend the penetration into the enemy's operational rear. The failure to do so was symptomatic of the Allied generals' frequent inability to think much beyond the tactical level and to identify and work toward decisive operational effect." -Page 257.

Maybe this was more an artifact of the leadership style of certain officers rather than any doctrinal limitations. We have the above example from Burma as a counterexample, while the Ruhr was envisioned as a "deep envelopment" of a German Army Group. In the Pacific the island hopping campaign was certainly carried out on more than a tactical basis.

In other words, even if the Allies never definitively expressed such terms on paper, I don't think we can conclude that they were ignorant of the concept.

A bit more complicated: the mobile groups and tank armies generally left behind all non-organic artillery assets during exploitation and hence had to rely on their SAUs and aircraft, but the artillery was generally able to keep pace with their forces throughout the entirety of the breakthrough phase of a battle, and during exploitation had little difficult keeping pace with the combined-arms and shock armies. By 1945 the speed of these armies advances was such that there was never more than a one-day gap between them and the tank armies. So while the problem is there, it's not huge and compared to the Germans in the Bulge, the Soviets will be able to rely on their artillery to move forward and assist in both counter-battery fire and the reduction of bypassed WAllied strongpoints whereas the Germans basically left their arty behind in the first 6 hours and it never displaced forward in meaningful numbers, which was a key factor in stuff like those strongpoints holding out for so long, being unable to breakthrough Elsenborne Ridge, and WAllied artillery going basically unchallenged. WAllied certainly have tactical advantages in method (although the advantage over some Soviet artillery units is narrower than with others), but this is compensated for by the larger number of Soviet guns and their superior ability to operationally rapidly mass artillery where and when they are needed.

German artillery in the Bulge did displace forward, but was not strong enough to counter the Allies (and at Elsenborn Ridge the distance to the initial starting points was probably too short for transport to have been much of an issue). I recognize that the Soviet army had a much greater capability compared to the Germans in this regard, but again, the situation was much different in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe where the defending side sometime had less than 2 guns per km of front (Glantz).

In Poland? Maybe a few. But part of the complicating picture here is that - from a logistical perspective - the westernmost USSR is rather more comparable to what France is for the WAllies than Britain or the US Eastern Seaboard, so there is a very real argument to be made that the Soviet personnel there are rough equivalents to western COMMZ.

Maybe the Soviet military personnel would have been more the strategic equivalent of Western personnel in the UK and CONUS; troops in France would have been more equivalent to Poland, Hungary, etc.

The point is that the US Army Service Forces also included Railway Service Troops, who had no equivalent in the Red Army. By US Army reckoning, the Red Army had no military personnel assigned to railway service duty. And that was just one such example.

According to "The War in Western Europe" there were only a bit over 31,000 military railway service personnel in April 1945. The complete COMZ breakdown (for the US at least) can be found on page 154 of the above link.

Cute, but let's be real: if the Greeks had no army, then the Persian army's advance through Thermopylae and elsewhere would have been a pleasant stroll. Similarly, had the British lacked a navy, air force, or army, then Operation Sealion would have been less of a challenge for the Germans than their invasion of Norway.

You could just as easily say that if Greece was flat or not a peninsula the 7,500 men they sent to Thermopylae could have easily been outflanked by Persian cavalry, or that if Doggerland was still above sea level in the 20th Century Panzergruppe Kleist could have pressed on to London after reaching Calais.

Never mind that the very point of Soviet mobile groups and OMGs was too do precisely that.

No, not necessarily. It's entirely possible for the Soviets to force the river with one or several tank army's supported by engineering detachments and have those armies immediately exploit into the enemies depth while leaving bridgehead consolidation to the combined-arms armies following in their wake. They did this several times against the Germans.

Were the Soviets capable of constructing bridges capable of inserting entire tank armies overnight across the Elbe (800-1,000 feet wide over most of the area in question)? All this would have had to happen within 8-12 hours, and you're talking multiple Allied armored divisions/brigades counterattacking on the first day - these possessing a lot more punch than Germany's 40-tank panzer divisions on the Eastern Front - plus artillery, aircraft, and so on.

They did not. The WAllies had no agents in the Soviet government, no personnel with free access behind Soviet lines, and clandestine contacts in Eastern Europe had largely been severed by the Soviets. Their only real source of information was what the Soviet government would tell them and this was often deceitful, if not outright lies. This is not only the historical record, but the diplomatic one too: the both Churchill and Truman complained of it too the Soviets at Potsdam in 1945. Now, given time they're liable to reestablish contact with the resistance movements in Eastern Europe, but that's for the war in 1946 and later, not 1945.

The Allies, especially the SOE, had considerable resources in Poland. The Germans couldn't catch them all and I doubt the Soviets could have either. In any regard the efforts of spies didn't have much impact on intelligence gathering at the tactical and operational levels in combat (then and now).

That latter statement combined with the way our discussion about the air war in part uses reminds me of Goering declaring that it is impossible that an American fighter aircraft was shot down flying around east of Aachen in November 1943 after being told the Germans shot down American fighter aircraft flying around eat of Aachen.

By your logic, the Germans should have seen the August Jassy-Kishinev Offensive coming. After all, the Soviet order of battle wasn't unknown to the Germans, they had considerably more IMINT than the WAllies (although their HUMINT and SIGINT was roughly as poor), and it should have been "not feasible" to conceal the massive offensive groupings of a force of over 1.3 million men. Yet the very day before the offensive opened, the commander of Army Group South Ukraine was blissfully reporting to his superiors in OKH (who were no more wiser than he was) that Soviet forces dispositions were mostly defensive and he expected little more than harassing attacks...

The Axis forces apparently did know about the Soviet offensive preparations. I don't have primary citations, but the Romanians called it basically to how it actually played out, and it was the Germans who dismissed them possibly for political reasons. (Best source on hand)

Also: US aerial and signals intelligence was extremely good - the Germans weren't on their level. Formerly secret documents declassified in 1988 showed that 'the US tactical and operational signal intelligence services operated on a par with ULTRA,' and that through superior cryptoanalysis systems were able to decipher 'large numbers of German tactical messages and relay them to Allied commanders, often within hours of the initial transmissions.' The analysis of German signal security found in these documents is, according to Dupuy, "almost disdainful."

The limitation of this capability is that while it could be used to construct an accurate order of battle for the German forces (thereby revealing the true nature of 'cover' designations such as "Twenty-Fifth Army," "Gruppe von Manteuffel," and "Feldkommando z. b. V. 16," in the Ardennes "it could not reveal the intentions of those units until operations began due to Hitler's orders prohibiting any radio signals dealing with planning for the attack. [Dupuy, "Hitler's Last Gamble" p. 39]

In 2008, a Russian mechanized battalion using classic Soviet-style tactics straight out of the WW2 handbook outmaneuvered and routed a much larger, more heavily equipped Georgian brigade. It did so despite having to advance through a tunnel and down a single route in terrain that was the very definition of canalizing with a narrow mountain valley, towns and a river.

Given that example, you'll forgive me for expressing skepticism over the claim that the Soviets would be unable to find room to achieve potentially decisive maneuver in Northern Germany despite the terrain being far more open and the ratio of forces being in the Soviets favor.

??

That's completely irrelevant to the hypothetical in question.