Guide to Logistics

[Riain]

Not quite - horses do have lower energy needs when they're not moving all day long, just like any other organism. Although yes, they do still consume some stuff when they're standing still, unlike say trucks.

Can you define 'some'?

A cow is not a horse, but I recall from my days in the dairy industry that a cow that is not pregnant and not lactating and thus not 'working' still requires 70% or so of the feed she does when pregnant or lactating at peak production. If a horse is in a similar ballpark then a non working horse requires a large portion of its working ration when not working. However IIUC on campaign horses lose condition so when they are resting they require a full ration to build up condition again. This will be on top of any 'maintenance' that a horse requires such a shoeing, worming and maintenance of the harness, saddle etc?

For a truck the ration is the fuel and the maintenance is exactly what it sounds like. When a truck isn't working it requires not fuel at all, only maintenance.

 

[Saphroneth]

Can you define 'some'?

A cow is not a horse, but I recall from my days in the dairy industry that a cow that is not pregnant and not lactating and thus not 'working' still requires 70% or so of the feed she does when pregnant or lactating at peak production. If a horse is in a similar ballpark then a non working horse requires a large portion of its working ration when not working. However IIUC on campaign horses lose condition so when they are resting they require a full ration to build up condition again. This will be on top of any 'maintenance' that a horse requires such a shoeing, worming and maintenance of the harness, saddle etc?

For a truck the ration is the fuel and the maintenance is exactly what it sounds like. When a truck isn't working it requires not fuel at all, only maintenance.

Perhaps some of that is that a stationary horse can graze - it's not required to be walking for hours a day, so it can be pastured for a bit.
There's also that maintenance is less without walking on hard roads for hours.

So yes, it's still a significant cost, but the grazing is a big help food-wise.

 

[Riain]

Perhaps some of that is that a stationary horse can graze - it's not required to be walking for hours a day, so it can be pastured for a bit.
There's also that maintenance is less without walking on hard roads for hours.

So yes, it's still a significant cost, but the grazing is a big help food-wise.

Hard working animals require more than just grass to keep in good condition, some grain will have to be included in the mix, but pasture can be used when a unit is on the move to slow the loss of condition of the animals. The campaign will wear out shoes etc and impact on the horses' health so when a unit stops that's the time to catch up on maintenance like shoeing and vet work.

 

[LHB]

Hard working animals require more than just grass to keep in good condition, some grain will have to be included in the mix, but pasture can be used when a unit is on the move to slow the loss of condition of the animals. The campaign will wear out shoes etc and impact on the horses' health so when a unit stops that's the time to catch up on maintenance like shoeing and vet work.

That's before taking into account that most cavalry forces in history brought remounts with them plus riding horses for heavy cavalry (to put less strain on chargers and warhorses during campaigns). The Mongols were famous for having the most but even the poorest European knight made sure to have a spare riding horse (even if it was a pony) along with their charger. Add in pack animals and you've got a LOT of hoof that needs feeding.

On the flip side in modern warfare tanks and airplanes are enormous logistical sinks. The amount of maintenance needed plus cost of spare parts makes them some of the hungriest animals in any modern military's proverbial stable.

 

[alfredtuomi]

one of the most interesting things (to me at least) during ww2 was that all the trucks in the US inventory,Canadian inventory,no doubt the reconstituted French inventory and about half the british inventory were made by ford and gm with some Studebakers thrown in .so basically just three different engines and running gear to stock parts for.how convenient.now how many different vehicle manufacturers supplied the german army??

 

[PatrickS]

This is great! This or maybe an official version should be sticky to the board for people making a timeline.

I have some questions though....

Why did the Nazis do so well in Russia though? It looks like everything was against them, yet SS troops could see the Kremlin.

Why did the Mongols stop? Could they have taken all of Europe? And move on to Africa and later the Americas?

Was there any way for the Germans to win in either Russia or Africa?

 

[marathag]

one of the most interesting things (to me at least) during ww2 was that all the trucks in the US inventory,Canadian inventory,no doubt the reconstituted French inventory and about half the british inventory were made by ford and gm with some Studebakers thrown in .so basically just three different engines and running gear to stock parts for.how convenient.

Not quite that easy.

Near all the Studebakers went to the USSR

Now look here German Ford V3000

US Ford, that are really close

But Ford of Canada.......

But that Ford V8 found its way into many vehicles, on both sides.

You don't hear about them, but Diamond T, IH, Mack and Autocar made a lot of the heavier US trucks

 

[alfredtuomi]

strangely enough the engines and a lot of the mechanicals were the same....even tho the bodies looked different.ford and gm of Canada built over 400,000 trucks from 1/2 to 3 ton using identical bodies,near identical frames and all of them had either a ford v8 or gm 6...they collaborated on the design .....only 2 different engines....and some 30,000 bren gun carriiers with ford engines(same one as the trucks).seems the gm(us)2.5 had the same engine as the Canadian built trucks.........oh....half the trucks in the british army were built in Canada.......

 

[wcv215]

Bring out your dead - disease


One of the biggest problems for any army in history was disease.
It's sometimes hard to remember that the germ theory of disease was only really being developed in the mid-nineteenth century, something as elemental as washing hands between treating patients dates back less than two centuries, and that Sulfonamide and Penicillin drugs were first developed in the 30s and 40s.
...
In sum - disease is one of the things which should not be ignored in any war, and some of the great historical generals could do what they did simply because they took simple sanitation procedures which cut down on their attrition to things like dysentry.

First of all, great thread.

Second, could you go into a little more detail on the above. I'd be especially interested in the procedures that could be undertaken by generals at various points. Or point me to a good reference book on the subject.

Thanks.

 

[Francisco Cojuanco]

Also, note that with trains, especially, usually most railway networks are set up to be used by mostly peacetime civilian traffic. In war, those are going to be used much more - which means that trains will break down, or rust, the rails will wear out, and then there's the greater fuel consumption. When, like the Germans in Poland, your military uses the trains so heavily that on any given stretch of railway, a train passes by once every two minutes, wear and tear can stymie a lot of supplies from reaching the front.

If you suddenly are at war, lot a lot of ISOTs are, that deals a great shock to the rail system or transport system generally to breaking point.

 

[Driftless]

Bring out your dead - disease


One of the biggest problems for any army in history was disease.
It's sometimes hard to remember that the germ theory of disease was only really being developed in the mid-nineteenth century, something as elemental as washing hands between treating patients dates back less than two centuries, and that Sulfonamide and Penicillin drugs were first developed in the 30s and 40s.

With that in mind, it should be understood that the cause of most casualties in most wars was disease - not bullets, not artillery, but disease.
Let's take one example first.

On their retreat through Poland in the 1810s, the Russians practiced a scorched-earth campaign. (This is itself tricky, but they did a fair bit of damage.) The result was that the area was disrupted and people were displaced from their homes - so sanitation broke down.
This resulted in a typhus epidemic - just as the Grande Armee passed through.
Now, the Grande Armee consisted of young men in hundreds of thousands, who would be dirty and sweaty (hot summer, marching tens of miles a day, and at war) and living in the same clothes for days.
Typhus is spread by lice.
The Grande Armee was essentially torn to shreds by Typhus. Within a month, he had suffered 16% casualties - 80,000 men were unfit for duty or dead, due to the disease alone.
One two week period slashed his combat effectives count from 160,000 to 103,000 - mostly from Typhus - and the total casualties caused by the disease are hard to determine but may have been well over half the entire Grande Armee's losses. (This may explain why Napoleon was down to 100,000 men from 500,000 by the time he reached Moscow - not General Winter, but the summer, reduced his numbers by hundreds of thousands of men. Ironically, the winter may have saved those who survived.)


More generally, armies are almost always great places for disease to build up. Unwashed, tired men in close proximity (to each other and dead bodies), without enough food, often sleeping in cold and damp conditions with weakened immune systems, possibly with minor injuries, sharing food, wading through mud or dirty rivers, and (if the army does not have excellent sanitation and self-control) with shit everywhere. Almost the ideal way to catch disease. (snip)

Arguably the most informative combination of map & graph ever, a modern rendering of Charles Joseph Minards classic strength map of Napoleon's Invasion of Russia. Combine disease with Russian winter = disaster

The tan bar shows relative dwindling fighting strength of the French during the advance to Moscow, and the black shows the dwindling strength during the retreat.

 

[Saphroneth]

This is great! This or maybe an official version should be sticky to the board for people making a timeline.

I have some questions though....

Why did the Nazis do so well in Russia though? It looks like everything was against them, yet SS troops could see the Kremlin.

Why did the Mongols stop? Could they have taken all of Europe? And move on to Africa and later the Americas?

Was there any way for the Germans to win in either Russia or Africa?

Basically, the Nazis did so well because of complete strategic and tactical surprise at first, coupled with bad luck and poor judgement on the part of the Russians.
The Germans did just about as well as they could possibly have done, in Russia - any better is hard to see being possible.

And the Mongols - basically, they pulled back because they needed to elect a new Kahn (Odegai had died) and they didn't care enough to finish the job with Europe. Over the decades, their military machine declined a bit, and also got overtaken by technology - though it took centuries to dismantle their holdings.

The Germans couldn't have won a purely military victory in Russia, not unless the Soviets kept doing stupid things for the sake of it for another few months - which is unrealistic, the USSR was undergoing a rather brutal selection process to end up with competent commanders all through the summer. By the time their logistics were somewhat rationalized, the Russians had firmed up their front.
They could possibly have won a political victory (USSR's will to resist collapses) though it's hard to judge how likely.


As for Africa - define "win" for a German army in Africa. Preferably looking at a non-Mercator projection. Africa is absolutely enormous, much bigger than Europe, and there weren't many German soldiers to go around.

 

[Look More Closely Later]

Western Allies in Europe, early autumn, 1944

In his WW2 memoirs (Volume 6, chapter VIII), Churchill puts a rough figure of 20,000 tons of 'supplies' needing to make it on a daily basis to the front-line in eastern France in early autumn of 1944, and all of it having to come in via the Normandy beaches and Cherbourg. He notes that '...relatively little ammunition was being used...' (the Germans were in retreat by that point back to the homeland) '...but food and above all petrol, governed every movement...'
And in addition to that more material had to be brought over for '...mending roads and bridges and building airfields...'.
Presumably it was a great relief once the Allies got 'Pluto' (the project to lay fuel cables across the Channel) up and starting to pump petrol.

 

[MattII]

Yes, the Pluto pipeline is an oft-overlooked yet absolutely essential project, not only for the course of the war, but also for the development of the oil industry afterwards.

 

[Saphroneth]

Case study - it's raining men

Air drops are, fundamentally, a crazy idea. Take a perfectly good unit of men (usually better than usual, ideal NCO material in other units) and throw them out of a plane.

They can work - they often do. But they present two unique logistical challenges.
The first one is - where do they get their weapons?

This isn't trivial, because full battle dress complete with weapons weighs a LOT. In fact, during the early part of WW2 if someone had jumped in full battle dress they'd have hit the ground hard enough to break a leg despite the parachute.

The German fallschirmjaegers in WW2 had an answer - they would have their weapons dropped separately, in canisters, except for their sidearms. Land, walk to the canister, pick up the weapon, you're ready.
Simple.
When you're not being shot at, and when you're doing this on an open field in peacetime on a sunny day.

In practice, this led to all kinds of f*ckups. For starters, the canisters could end up in the wrong field - when the dropping plane is moving at hundreds of miles an hour, then you can get the canister quite a long way off by dropping it a second too late. (And you can't steer to follow the canister down - your parachute isn't steerable at this point! One riser to the canopy.)
There might be people shooting at you on the way down - or as you run out to the canister to get your weapons.
The plane itself might be off course.
If landing at night, you might not even SEE the canister.
And, when you get there, someone else might have taken the weapon already. Go and find another canister.


The second problem is that you're basically being dropped out of the sky and have no idea where the commanding officer is. (Or for that matter your sergeant.) Airborne forces take a while to consolidate back into effective fighting forces, which eats away at their main advantage - surprise.
Because airborne don't have much staying power. The only things they jump with are very light - maybe an anti-tank weapon, but that's about it until post WW2.
But that's not a unique logistical challenge.

The unique logistical challenge is REsupply. Everything your airborne force gets has to be flown in - by glider, dropped by parachute, or unloaded at an airport.
And air supply is HARD.
You don't have any other option, though, so get to it.

Each supply aircraft can provide a couple of tons per flight, and you're going to need an airport to let them land and take off again. Or at least something like an airfield - the worse the quality, the more the landing accidents, and you'd better hope that there's no booby traps.
Another option is dropping gliders. They still need someone to steer them, so you're also dropping in qualified pilots from a not unlimited supply, and they do need reasonable fields to land in, but at least they don't have to take off again. (They're not reusable, though. Hope you built enough gliders.)
Or there's just dropping more supplies by parachute.
Oops, the wind's blowing the wrong way, your mortar resupply just drifted behind enemy lines and now they're arriving at you much faster than you were hoping!

The Germans added a whole new fillip to this simply by who flew their transports. (the Ju-52.) Rather than have a transport corps as a permanent organization, or stripping bomber crews (because bombers were needed for the high tempo of offensive operations), they instead used their multi-engined aircraft flight school teachers.
This is inventive, but it's also very, very risky. If they suffered casualties (and the slow and ungainly Ju-52 was very vulnerable) then they lost not merely their best multi-engined pilots but also their ability to train more.

(That's a perennial problem for the Axis as a whole - unlike the Allies, who rotated their best pilots to go train more pilots, the Axis kept sending their best into harms way where they racked up incredible scores and then died. Losing all their experience without passing it on.)



So, with all that, why do people use airborne forces?
Partly because it seems cool. Partly the real value of surprise - if you want to take a bridge intact, drop several hundred men on it and then RUN LIKE HELL with your main army to link up with them. Bring ammunition and tea, the paras will need it.
And partly because of misunderstandings.
The Allies were finally swayed on the need for large airborne forces by the spectacular capture of Crete, using airborne forces only.
The Germans, on the other hand, were shocked and appalled by the heavy casualties and how close they came to failure - so never launched a large scale paradrop again.
Indeed, none of the large Allied drops really worked according to plan. But the Normandy one does bring the final reason people use paratroopers to light.
Logistics. Not yours, those of the enemy!
Drop about ten thousand fit, well trained, well armed young men into the rear areas of an army and tell them to do something. It doesn't matter what, most of them will forget it - and they'll try to muddle through by killing whoever seems to be doing something important for the enemy.
This makes a logistical network go absolutely bananas.
You had that resupply scheduled for yesterday? Sorry, ten young enemy paratroopers shot the driver, set the truck on fire, and blew a bridge to smithereens with the explosives.
You need to march down that road? Sure, but there's paratroopers about, so you may be about to be shot.
You need four thousand more men on the front line? Sorry, they're all hunting paratroopers.

This concept is called LGOP - Little Groups Of Paratroopers - and is vaguely terrifying.

 

[MattII]

Did they land with their kit on their back? Seems to me having the parachute on your back, and most of the kit hanging off the parachute (a long enough line that the stuff hangs below your feet in the air would help) would reduce the risk of breaking bones when you land.

Have skirmishers (f.e. the LRDG) been mentioned yet? What about SOE and other spy types?

 

[Saphroneth]

Did they land with their kit on their back? Seems to me having the parachute on your back, and most of the kit hanging off the parachute (a long enough line that the stuff hangs below your feet in the air would help) would reduce the risk of breaking bones when you land.

It's one of the fields really in its infancy in WW2 - the idea of the big hole in the middle of a parachute to prevent sway wasn't around, for example. So I'm not sure. But it might have required a bigger parachute to have the kit on it.

 

[MattII]

But they landed with all their kit right (at least, the allies did)? Seems to me that if you can reduce the weight on the trooper on the way down, then there's less chance of really nasty injuries like broken bones.

 

[RLBH]

This concept is called LGOP - Little Groups Of Paratroopers - and is vaguely terrifying.

For extra fun, drop LGOPs places other than where you're about to attack. This requires a willingness to carry out suicide missions, or a plausible way of getting them out once they've reached the limit of their ability to wreak havoc - in the WW2 era, by boats, and you might like to get them in that way too. Then you can tie down the logistic net on a strategic, not just an operational, level. As well as requiring the enemy to put decent forces everywhere just in case a group of well armed men decide to show up one night, blow up everything expensive or useful, and leave again.

This, of course, is the basic principle of the British Commandos.

 

[Tanc49]

Feels like the threat of paratrooper can already be a big hassle.

You cannot commit everybody to the front line as you need more people behind, just in case somebody drops