How lang has the US to stay out of the war for Britain to collapse in WWII?

Angrybird

Banned
Russian Wikipedia also has an interesting article on LL:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25D0%259B%25D0%25B5%25D0%25BD%25D0%25B4-%25D0%25BB%25D0%25B8%25D0%25B7&prev=search
In terms of GDP the European Axis blockaded IOTL and under strategic bombardment had several times the Soviet GDP in 1942-43. Without strategic bombing and no blockade the Soviet GDP without LL from 1942 on will stagnate at very least and be swamped by Axis GDP.

In economics of WW2 Mark Harrison gives the following GDP for Germany and the USSR (1990s prices in billion dollars)

Germany/USSR:

1941: 412 - 359
1942: 417 - 274
1943: 426 - 305
1944: 437 - 362

One also has to keep in mind that Germany GDP was reduced by some 10% in 1943 and by some 20% in 1944 through bombing and that Soviet GDP would have remained at the level of 1942 - because without Western aid the Red Army would not have been able to reqonquer so much territory and population.
 

Deleted member 1487

In economics of WW2 Mark Harrison gives the following GDP for Germany and the USSR (1990s prices in billion dollars)

Germany/USSR:

1941: 412 - 359
1942: 417 - 274
1943: 426 - 305
1944: 437 - 362

One also has to keep in mind that Germany GDP was reduced by some 10% in 1943 and by some 20% in 1944 through bombing and that Soviet GDP would have remained at the level of 1942 - because without Western aid the Red Army would not have been able to reqonquer so much territory and population.
And that number does not include Austria either, nor occupied Europe, nor Italy and Axis minor allies. Though it should be noted that about 25% of German resources were forcibly imported from occupied Europe. Not sure how much the blockade reduced things either due to lack of imports or at least cost GDP that was diverted into synthetics that would have otherwise been used for armaments. Harrison said that 8 million tons of nearly IIRC 30 million tons of steel produced by Germany was used for armaments, which was a function of the expensive synthetics programs that would have been unnecessary without the blockade. Also the huge need to build trains and rail equipment was a huge demander of steel.

Also IIRC the value of LL was not included in the Soviet GDP, but the products of LL machinery and raw materials was.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Angrybird

Banned
And that number does not include Austria either, nor occupied Europe, nor Italy and Axis minor allies. Though it should be noted that about 25% of German resources were forcibly imported from occupied Europe. Not sure how much the blockade reduced things either due to lack of imports or at least cost GDP that was diverted into synthetics that would have otherwise been used for armaments. Harrison said that 8 million tons of nearly IIRC 30 million tons of steel produced by Germany was used for armaments, which was a function of the expensive synthetics programs that would have been unnecessary without the blockade. Also the huge need to build trains and rail equipment was a huge demander of steel.

Also IIRC the value of LL was not included in the Soviet GDP, but the products of LL machinery and raw materials was.

The Germans built over 11 000 locomotives from 42-44 and 1150 submarines during the war.

Without a war against the West they can reduce U-boat production by at least 1000 boats - and cut locomotive production in half.

Instead of some 5000 locomotives with each between 60 and 150 tons - they can build over 10 000 Panther and Tiger tanks.

According to the USSBS bombing cost Germany some 20 000 aircraft.
The Aluminium used to produce AA amunition would have been enough to produce an additonal 20 000 fighter aircraft - the V1 and V2 programm cost an additional 20 000 fighter aircraft as well.

In 1942/43 the Allies destroyed some 15 000 German aircraft in combat - the Soviets only 8000.

These additional resources would have made a great difference on the Eastern Front - and anyone who claims that they would not is IMO not objective.
 

Deleted member 1487

These additional resources would have made a great difference on the Eastern Front - and anyone who claims that they would not is IMO not objective.
Hence the ongoing debate with Nuker ;)
Without LL I think a Soviet economic collapse is ensured if Britain is out of the war and the US is neutral, if not sometime in 1943 then in 1944. Even with LL they couldn't defeat Germany without Britain and the US in. With just Britain in and LL they could still end in stalemate. The US was critical to the war in every aspect, Britain was pretty necessary for the USSR too in terms of LL, the blockade, and strategic bombing, plus forcing a peripheral theater and need to defend the coastline of Europe.
 

Deleted member 1487

Also looking at things like the night war over Germany massive electronic resources went into defenses from 1942-45; without that how would they be deployed in the East? I imagine a lot of point defense against the VVS, making AAA more accurate, perhaps guidance systems for night bombing on a large scale in the East or even just for night harassment bombing, maybe artillery radar for counter battery fire, or even a proximity fuse for artillery and light AAA? By 1944 the V-1 likely makes an appearance from Smolensk (probably held ITTL due to the disparity in resources) and areas around Leningrad against those cities. Smolensk is a bit far from Moscow for the early version, but the later wooden nose version would be able to reach. Plus the Soviets don't have a spy system to cause them to misaim and the Germans would still retain high altitude recon capabilities over Moscow that they lacked over Britain due to the Soviets not having a working turbosupercharger rated for that altitude; even the Mig-3 which had been designed to operate high up was dogging it at 20k feet with its engine, but that engine had been taken out of production in 1942 to make engines for the IL-2. So the Soviets would lack fighter interception for 25k feet recon over Moscow...which means come 1944 when the He177 is ready with the Fritz X they can operate freely over the Eastern Front, as they did historically when briefly used there at 20k feet; there was one low level carpet bombing attempt that ended in disaster though, but that was a situation that will not exist ITTL.

By 1944 without LL the Soviets are going to face far too much for them to economically handle. When Operation Eisenhammer comes off in 1944 after the VVS/PVO is ground down in 1943-44 without LL propping them up they will basically implode economically, especially if they can get the He277 with its long range over the Soviet steel works in the Urals. Several Fritz-X hits on that thing would be death to the tank factories given the huge steel shortage ITTL without LL and liberating the Don Basin/West Ukraine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitogorsk_Iron_and_Steel_Works
 

Deleted member 1487

Which we are not talking about.
Actually you originally said that the Turks would not allow any Axis shipping, not just military. They did in fact allow non-military and some secret military transfers. ITTL where the British are out of the war and the Soviets are on the ropes they may allow light defensive units to be transferred like Uboats and Destroyers because the Germans have a lot more leverage politically.

Which the Germans could not do.
If the don't advance as far they could because the problem IOTL was the lack of concentration due to being stretched out on the road to Grozny, while the Black Seas Fleet allowed for the transfer of supplies and reinforcements to whatever area was threatened along the coast plus of course fire support; with great concentration of force due to Maykop being the furthest advance AND the prescense of an anti-shipping air corps the Black Seas fleet is out of the picture, the attackers have a lot more airpower on their side, and they have more ground presence. The Soviets can be moved in that case.

Except they were unable to do that elsewhere against similar targets. Now somehow they are going to succeed.
What similar targets? They are operating from Crimea against the nearby port of Novorossiysk in air corps strength; there is no historical example that I'm aware of that meets that criteria other than Malta and that saw heavy British losses of ships and aircraft, plus suppression of the island until Rommel drew off the aircraft for his invasion of Egypt. Plus the British had a lot better radar, fighter defenses, and experienced pilots.

All of which is still present ITTL.
Depends on how deeply they advance. If the goal is to grab Maykop and move in the next year into Grozny once they've got their logistics along the coast in order to move more deeply and weaken the Soviets by shutting down the Volga in the meantime they won't have to worry about Soviet defenses. Plus as we found out by doing some research into LL the British were supplying the Soviets in the Caucasus via Iran, which will not be the case here, other than what the Soviets can buy and have shipped in via Iran's abysmal infrastructure without US/UK investment in upgrades. So the Soviets will lack about 40% of their tanks, not sure how much other supply.

Not really. After the Germans breached the Don river, the Soviets withdrew all the way to the Caucasus mountains. The Germans were mostly occupying land devoid of enemy forces until then. Remember about what I said when there is no enemy resistance?
If they were so strong why did they pull back without resistance? In that case the Axis occupy Maykop without a fight and have a lot of strength to then apply against the ports on the Black Sea coast when they set up a southern defensive perimeter to defend Maykop.

By that token, then neither were the 400,000 men facing them.
True.

So not a logistically sustainable advance.
Much more so than IOTL, especially if they open up Novorossiysk.


Except the footbound 6th Army included a substantial number of panzer divisions on it's own right and none of your sources give a 3-4 week acceleration from this different decision making.
They were still bound to the speed of the foot divisions, as they were just the spearhead of the army, not an independent maneuver element that was allowed to roam freely like the 4th Panzer army was. IIRC they had two panzer divisions and a motorized division that were all stripped out and sent to another army. But the 6th army is not the decisive element of maneuver ITTL the 4th Panzer army is.

And that order was compelled by a military attempt to encircle additional Soviet forces and not by any time pressures. Thus, it will still happen ITTL.
Not without the immediate need to move south of the Don to get at the oil. Without that the retreat of the Soviet armies means nothing, as the goal is the secure the Volga first and then move South once the panzers of AG-A are refitted.

Which is fantasy. 4th Panzer was running out of gas at the end of July where it was and there is not reason for Hitler not to make the same decisions to try and encircle more Soviet forces then he did IOTL.
Because they were sent into an area with compressed supply lines that competed with the 1st Panzer army; that is the entire point, they were sent a further distance away from where they would be if they went after Stalingrad and they wouldn't have to compete with the 1st Panzer army for roads and limited rail transport, because 1st Panzer would be using different routes and stop on the Don until the Volga flank was secured, meaning 4th Panzer got the lion's share of the logistics resources to sustain its advance, as it is the primary objective; once Stalingrad is secured then it sits still and logistic resources are shifted to the advance of the 1st Panzer army south of the Don.

I have not seen evidence that Ju52 fuel drops made a substantial difference in the advance though.
I have. The Ju52s brought in necessary fuel that kept dry gas tanks fueled up and kept them going before ground supply got there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Blue#Splitting_of_Army_Group_South
By 10 August, the Red Army had largely been cleared from the western bank of the Don River but Soviet resistance continued in some areas, further delaying Army Group B's eastward offensive. Furthermore, the Wehrmacht could not make appreciable headway towards Stalingrad because of heavy logistical problems caused by the poor state of Soviet roads, which created bottlenecks and shortages of both munitions and fuel. To ease the situation, the Luftwaffe sent an ad-hoc force of 300 Ju 52s, enabling the German Army to forge ahead. In some cases, bombers were diverted from combat operations to supply missions under the so-called Stalingrad Transport Region force.[65]
I fucked up in that post. I wanted to say that my impression was
Still need to fix this one.


Why are the Germans retreating across the Don? Was Hitler's initial response to the Soviet offensive of IOTL to retreat? Or are we giving Hitler perfect foresight now?
No, we are saying that he recognizes the threat of the collapse of the north Don when the Italians, Hungarians, and Romanian 3rd are overrun and flank attacks by the reserves of the German 6th and 2nd armies are not enough. ITTL the 5th Panzer army (instead of Panzerarmee Afrika) blunts the advance somewhat as a reserve for AG-B, but between that and Luftwaffe attacks the situation is far too dangerous and just like IOTL when Uranus and Saturn were launched Hitler ordered AG-A to pull back along with the survivors of AG-B. If the Soviets had the resources to launch an attack against the 4th Romanian/4th Panzer too, then its clear the position is too exposed and unsustainable and Stalingrad lacks the emotional significance of OTL to hold, while if they don't pull back then AG-South is trapped and wiped out. Even Hitler accepted that IOTL during Stalingrad, which is why he sacrificed the 6th army to save the rest of AG-South when it became clear that Uranus could not be undone.

So the plan would be as I detailed in a scenario I laid out before: 17th army pulls back to Taman as per OTL, 4th Panzer/4th Romanian pulls back to the Don Bend around Rostov, holding it as a spring board with Taman to advance again next year while absorbing the survivors of the 3rd Romanian, while the 6th army holds the Donets north of the Don bend, 1st Panzer moves north of the 6th army, 5th Panzer army pulls back to the north of them, and 2nd army pulls back to Starry Oskol and that river it lays on whatever that is called. The lines pulls back to concentrate forces and hold for the winter until they can attack again in 1943, but now the Romanians are weakened, the Hungarians effectively gone, and the Italians smashed, but reconstituting behind the lines (not withdrawn because of no Mediterranean disaster).



Eh, German air doctrine never incorporated a focused series of attacks. Generally they would launch a few strikes against a target and then move on.
Focused yes definitely, that was written into the 1935 doctrine, but sustained no. Still the Germans were learning as time went on, so while they wouldn't necessarily realize that in 1942 by 1943 and on they would learn the need to keep hitting targets as they get back into service, which they and the Wallies did learn IOTL. I have a book about Luftwaffe doctrine from the 1920s-1945:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Luftwaffes-Way-War-1911-1945/dp/187785347X
Its directly translated sections of Luftwaffe doctrine manuals and from the 1943-45 section they do explicitly mention the need for sustained action against rail targets in the East because of Soviet repair capabilities, which they highly respected. PP. 230-241 are all about Luftwaffe doctrine for interdicting rail lines on the Eastern Front. Very interesting reading.

Edit:The document cited is from August 1943 and recommends sustained attacks against targets as the only way to knock them out over a period of time and was a sophisticated doctrine that details all the elements of how to shut down a rail network and states that no one set of instructions applies to all areas of the front in all conditions at all times. They did end up carrying it would for a few months in 1944 IOTL, there only problem with that being that they targeted the wrong lines for interdiction. The thing is that if they stay in East Ukraine they can hit the few lines coming out of the Urals at the points they cross the Ural and Volga rivers to the south and to the north by Gorki with their existing bombers. Its just an issue of having enough concentrated in the East to interrupt those lines, as they are well known and undisguisable, plus having the supply. Without the Wallies in the war and greater production/less losses than IOTL those deep rail lines are getting hit with significant consequences to the Soviet war effort.

Given that you have not even attempted to support your claim that the Germans praised the Axis minors?
You haven't proven that they were poorly led in 1942, just provided one quote from an officer that was not commanding AG-South or having contact with them for at least a year after he made that statement. When Rundstedt commanded the Axis minors it was when they had no combat experience at all and performed badly in Ukraine in 1941, which as you noted in other discussions was because the Southwestern Front was the best prepared of all Soviet armies during Barbarossa.


Yet Romanian, Italian, and Hungarian AT guns survived the artillery and were able to get into action[ /quote]

In seriously reduced numbers.
Nevertheless having effective ones would have allowed them to do something, which IOTL they did virtually nothing; if you look at the scenario I laid out for the Big Saturn variant you proposed I said for the sake of argument they don't get any German AT guns and fall apart as per OTL, which triggers the rest of the scenario. Its on page 6 if you want to comment on that.

Not just Hitler. Even OKH's military intelligence chief was reporting that the Soviets strength was completely exhausted and they could expect a quiet winter.

The "Stalingrad encirclement was all Hitler's fault" myth has been thoroughly rejected by modern scholarship. The reality is that most of the German command shared his delusion that the Soviet Union had been beaten and would not rise again.
Care to provide some quotes are at least a source?

Except that is not in evidence. The Soviets stopped the largest German tank assault in the war cold and would have annihilated it had Hitler not called it off. From late-1942 onwards they repeatedly penetrated German defensive positions and broke into their operational depths. Every time they wanted air superiority in a sector they seized it regardless of how much resources the Luftwaffe committed. Tactically they were still sloppy, but in operational terms their performance was competent enough to see them through.
Kursk was a massive blooding for the Soviets, they lost 5 times the tanks the Germans did and were not actually stopping it cold, they were throwing in as many tanks as they could and watching them all get slaughtered until Hitler panicked about the Sicily invasion and demonstrations on the Mius river, calling off the offensive. Manstein was still grinding on. Its debateable what would have happened had he been allowed to continue, but you cannot say he was stopped cold, he was still advancing and inflicting vast damage. After that his section of the front wasn't attacked for several weeks and then he managed to inflict heavy damage on the defensive, despite being heavily assaulted by overwhelming numbers and have major parts of his strength siphoned off for Italy, not to mention losing airpower support for Italy. That's on top of the siphoning off of major airpower in 1942 and the huge losses in the Mediterranean of aircraft and tanks, not to mention high experienced combat personnel; ITTL the 6th army is not lost, the Panzerarmee Afrika is not lost, the entire LW is on the Eastern Front and not sustaining thousands of losses in the Mediterranean/Western Europe, the German economy is not getting bombed, nor is the war economy producing for air defense/naval operations against the West in 1943. The resources that went into Uboats and FLAK are instead going into Panzers and PAK. Germany is up at least 500k men and has several armies available for the East it did not IOTL and have several thousand more aircraft not lost/used against the Wallies in 1942-43 for the East.

Using OTL Kursk to compare to TTL is completely pointless because its a complete different situation. Plus with all the points we detailed about the loss of LL the Soviets are nowhere near as strong as IOTL due to the lack of food for one, especially as 1943 was the point that famine was kicking in and US LL was really coming in strong to sustain the weakened Soviet economy when it was at its nadir; US supplies of food, raw materials, explosives, aircraft, AFVs, industrial equipment, trucks, communications gear, copper wire and phones, trains, etc. came in in a major way in 1943 and enabled OTL Kursk and post-Kursk capabilities. Its easy to be effective on the advance when you're economy is build back up by the world's greatest economy so you don't have to demobilize men to grow food and make weapons, plus when your enemy has his strength worn down and siphoned off to fight on other fronts. ITTL the growing operational skills of the Red Army are meaningless due to the growing, not weakening strength of the Wehrmacht in the East, plus the enormous gaps left in the Soviet economy due to lack of US LL.

Except that is even more of an argument for Hitler making the same decisions. If he was perfectly willing to accept the delays these moves imposed IOTL when there was a time crunch, why would he not accept
He was so desperate for oil that he felt he had no choice; here with the British blockade over he can import all the oil he needs, so its not necessity, its a luxury he can wait for while he ensures his forces are properly conducting the planned offensive.

Your link there gives no citation for it's claims and does not fit with the scholarly established estimate of ~2 million irrecoverable losses. Indeed, it seems to be using to be counting total casualties as "deaths".
Which scholarly accepted claims?

The mounting evidence is that they will have Stalingrad. And given that said WAllied distraction and damage only became heavy after the Soviets had already turned the tide...
What mounting evidence? The damage started before Kursk and the resource sink that the Allies drained off started before Barbarossa. The blockade, strategic bombing drawing in resources for air defense, the Mediterranean campaign, aircraft losses and stationing in the west, occupation forces in the West to defend against Britain, and the naval war all sucked in major resources in 1942; without the Allies in the war in 1942 Case Blue would in fact have been a lot stronger with the Afrika Korps there, the Fw190 deployed in the East as fighter-bombers before Case Blue instead of the Baedekker raids, Luftflotte 2 in the East with its 1600 aircraft, Italian shipping via the Black Sea without a Libya campaign, no need to hold down major armored and infantry elements in France and the Lowlands to defend against Britain and the Dieppe raid, imports from abroad, not need for 1/3rd of Wehrmacht resources going into air defense all dramatically changes the resources for the East in 1942 before Case Blue.

As 1942 goes on into 1943 those resources keep increasing as all the investments into FLAK, air defenses, Uboats, V-weapons, the Atlantic Wall, air raids on Britain, the imports without a blockade, no need for massive investments in synthetics, the fight in the Mediterranean, etc. all go toward the East. That means more of every weapon category inflicting damage on the Soviets from 1942 onward. You're so wedded to the events of OTL you can't seem to see what an ATL would actually mean. Also you're totally forgetting the benefits gained from LL in 1942 and into 1943. The Soviets are not what they would have been IOTL in 1942-43, while the Axis is far stronger.

They don't need it to keep going. They only needed it to keep going in the manner which they did IOTL 1944-45.
Which they explicitly cannot do in 1942-45 because of lack LL and a far strong Axis.

Except they did not.
Did not what?

Then the Soviets build-up and do it again.
No, without LL they in fact cannot build up and do it again. I meant at very best for them if they do not implode due to the famine really setting in 1943 is that they cannot get past the Dniepr; that's if everything goes right for them ITTL.

Why are the Germans pulling back when Hitler has not been disabused of his notion that "hold at all costs" is unworkable?
Because he realized IOTL in 1942-43 what the risk was of not pulling back and losing most of AG-South when the Soviets attacked, hence the OTL pull back of the survivors of AG-B and -A after Uranus and Saturn. If the Big Saturn operation you propose is conducted then the Axis has to retreat to avoid being trapped by a Soviet advance to the Sea of Azov, like the Soviets tried to do IOTL with Operations Gallop and Star and the Axis retreated.

Read that post you are quoting again. I specifically state between the start of Operation Blau and Operation Uranus. In other words, between June 28th-November 19th.
Yes in that period the 1st SS Liebstandarte division was pulled out of the East.

I'm only seeing a single regiment of the Totenkopf being transferred, although it does strike me as odd that just a single regiment from the entire division would be sent away. In any case, the Totenkopf was never deployed in the south. It's location on the start of Blau is part of the II Corps in the Demyansk pocket... no wonder it was transferred out. The formation would be badly in need of R&R after that!
Totenkopf was with AG-North, not South. The entire 1st SS division Liebstandarte was removed and sent to France to form the SS Panzer Corps (3rd SS was pulled out too in October and sent to France).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_SS...tandarte_SS_Adolf_Hitler#Operation_Barbarossa
The LSSAH spent the winter fighting ferocious defensive battles in temperatures of down to −40 °C (−40 °F),[citation needed] with minimal winter clothing and only 150 grams of rations per man per day. Despite this, the division held. After the spring rasputitsa (seasonal mud) had cleared, the exhausted division joined in Fall Blau, participating in the fighting to retake Rostov-on-Don, which was recaptured in late July 1942. Severely understrength and completely exhausted, the LSSAH was pulled out of the line. The division was ordered to the Normandy region of occupied France to join the newly formed SS Panzer Corps and to be reformed as a Panzergrenadier division.[33]
So not away from the Eastern Front.
Into reserve, not fighting until the Winter.

I'm actually not seeing a net negative of withdrawals for 1942 until November. Certainly there were withdrawals, but for every group which is transferred out another one gets transferred in. But then German air sorties were declining well before that in the face of operational exhaustion and resurgent Soviet air power. The Luftwaffe never actually exhibited the ability to sustain operations as long as the Anglo-American or Soviet air forces did.
Maybe because they were fighting on several fronts and were unable to rest their units IOTL. If they have only one front by 1942 they can rotate, rest, rehab, and sustain units far more so than IOTL, like the Allies were able to do so; its the entire thesis of 'Strategy for Defeat' and several other books that the multiple fronts problem killed the Luftwaffe from 1941 on, because they were never able to catch their breath; even with the massive Eastern front, were that the only front the LW would have been able to sustain it effectively like the USAAF and RAF were able to do against Germany IOTL, especially as all LW resources would go into that one theater and with Axis allied airforces actually outproduced the Soviets IOTL; with imports and no losses in other theaters, plus their historical 3:1 or great kill rates against the VVS/PVO the Axis would shred them from 1941 non-stop rather than being shredded by the Wallies IOTL. Also without LL the Soviets could not make what they did IOTL from 1942 on in the air.

This is not in evidence looking at the given dispositions and issues of logistics. Grossdeutschland will be transferred north ITTL anyways. 1st Totenkopf will likely still get sent west for R&R. The 296th gets sent to Norway for whatever bizarre reason Hitler sent it there*.

*Seriously, what the hell Hitler?
But the Panzerarmee Afrika would be the 5th Panzer army there with OTL German forces committed to Africa/the Meditterranean/occupation duties in France/the Lowlands/Norway. Plus come 1943 the troops used in Sicily/Italy/Greece, those used to guard France, etc.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Deleted member 1487

What then happens to Europe ITTL if the war ends in 1944 via negotiation with the Axis pretty much controlling Brest-Litovsk level territory (eastern border on the Don/Donets) while the US is led by a progressive, isolationist, anti-communist like Thomas Dewey?

The USSR is in major famine even with major demobilization of horses and men, can't really directly threaten Axis-held Eastern Europe directly though it funnels weapons and trained guerrillas into occupied territory, but the communist regime is shaky with significant unrest over defeat and shortages. Let's say the Pacific war did not happen, though the US and Britain still have some level of embargo, while German dominated Netherlands sells oil and other supplies via the DEI to Japan to keep her from attacking (which Japan is able to actually pay for thanks to Dewey not slapping on the 1941 embargo that frozen Japanese accounts with the occupation of Indochina). So there is some Japanese-Axis European trade going on with Vichy France still technically controlling Indochina despite Japanese occupation. China is withering on the vine as a result of Japan cutting off all methods of supply via sea and the British/Americans not sending supplies via airlift, nor there being a Flying Tigers unit in China. Britain is recovering its finances and has rearmed, but India is agitating heavily for independence. The US is rearmed too and doesn't have a great relationship with Britain. The world is multi-polar, but everyone is pretty much focused on their backyard due to domestic issues (Germany-occupation, casualties, setting up a new European trade block, inflation and war costs; Britain-surviving a German dominated Europe, keeping the empire together, finances and domestic unrest; US-economy, defense, political/labor issues; Japan-digesting China; USSR-surviving the defeat in Europe and famine, major economic issues, unrest).

I imagine Britain will be working toward the Atomic Bomb as soon as possible, the USSR is too damaged to work on it, the Germans are way too off base, the US is not thinking in that direction necessarily, but might be getting it, Japan is behind but making progress, Italy is not advanced enough. Eventually the Germans will probably make progress on nuclear power and figure out their mistakes on the bomb, maybe getting it in the 1950s. In the meantime their lead on chemical weapons probably widens. Russia keeps working on her bio-weapons, as does Britain.

The US is probably going to keep trading with the Japanese and Europe as that trade is necessary for all economically, even though a lot of lower level trade is cut off between the trade blocs. Will the USSR survive if it is defeated and in major famine?
 

Deleted member 1487

Soviet Manpower

I found relevant info to this discussion:
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=132085&page=8
http://www.armchairgeneral.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2517717&postcount=111
According to Mikhalev, in late summer 1942 the total remaining unused Soviet manpower amounted to:

A) 2.8 million men reserved for employment in the economy
B) 1.3 million men in labor columns
C) 0.7 million recruits born in 1925
D) 0.6 million fit men in Central Asia
E) 0.5 million men with limited fitness
F) 0.5 million men in Siberia and the Caucasus (of which only 0.1 million were fully fit)
G) 0.2 million officers of reserve
I) 1.2 million men in the prison system

A grand total of 7.8 million men, out of which only 1.6 million were both fully fit and easily mobilized (C, D, 0.1m of F, G). To that should be added further age classes which aren't covered by the report, i.e. the class of 1926 (1.2 million), which would become available in 1943, and that of 1927 (0.9 million), which would arrive in 1944. Obviously, these last two classes would have yielded somewhat less recruits in the territory the USSR controlled in late 1942.

Thus, the next mobilisation decree (GKO no. 2640), dated 20 December 1942, conscripted all 0.7 million men of the 1925 age class, 0.2 million men from Central Asia, 30,000 from the penal system and 0.2 million reserved for the economy, for a grand total of about 1.1 million new recruits.

For comparison's sake, the Germans conscripted between June 1942 and the end of the war 7.4 million men.

Quote:
The Germans implemented quite brutal policies of forced evacuation (death marches) of local population in order it would not be drafted/employed by the Red Army, so the overall number of liberated and drafted people was much smaller than what the population figures would suggest. Also you should consider about 5.5 million Ost-Arbeiters which were first invited then forcibly driven to work in Germany, who were kept there until the end of the war.
Indeed. Still the Soviets mobilized millions of men from the liberated territories, or else they would quite simply have seen their strength collapse. We can even arrive at a rough estimate with the figures I provided previously: in late summer 1942 the Soviets had a total of 10 million potential recruits left (including new age cohorts up to 1927), of which about a million were mobilized before the end of the year. Between January 1943 and the end of the war 6.2 million Russians and 4.9 million non-Russians were conscripted. There were about 0.5 million potential recruits left in the non-Russian regions under Soviet control at the beginning of 1943, so the reconquered territories necessarily provided at least 4.5 million non-Russian recruits, as well as a relatively minor part of the 6.2 million Russians (North Caucasus, Don region, Smolensk region, etc.).

Thus, we can conclude that the recaptured territories provided around 5 million recruits.

So Soviet manpower would be a serious issue going forward especially without LL and the need for more men and horses for farming.

Also contrary to Nuker's claims recruits from liberated territories were pretty important in 1944:
http://translate.google.com/transla.../forum/0/archive/2433/2433758.htm&prev=search
Mobilization load RSFSR during WWII

In extreme edition Krivosheeva (Great Patriotic War without secrecy. The book losses. M., 2009. P. 37) data are available on mobilized in general and specifically on the territory of the Russian Federation:
Period Total in the USSR in the RSFSR RSFSR Share (%) 22.06.41-30.04.42 15 384 837 10 851 795 70.5 1.05-31.12.42 5 328 392 4 109 222 77.1 1943 5 901 436 4,046,803 68.5 1944 4 646 250 1,890,967 40.7 1.01-1.05.45 551 243 288 830 52.4 It is clearly seen in the 44th year sharply reduced the share mobilized from the territory of the Russian Federation. Most likely this is due to the fact that the major share mobilized in 1944 began to make residents vacated areas of the USSR. As an example, data entry personnel at the front of the spacecraft in the first quarter of 1944:
Fronts urged human Marching contingents completion Leningrad 121797102797 and Volkhovsky 2nd and 1st Baltic states., 311 476 95 684 West and Belarus. 1, 2, 3, 4 minutes, Ukrain. 766 334 60 401 fronts and Dep. Approx. A. Associations and conn. - 221 527 Stavka reserve Total directed in 1 199 607 479 891 Action. army Source - The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945. Campaigns and strategic operations in numbers. In two volumes. Volume II. M., 2010. P. 241.

A similar pattern of replenishment given in the penultimate official history of the war:
"In January-April 1944, four Ukrainian Front received a total of 56 900 people trained in the military districts marching replenishment, while one 1st Ukrainian Front was mobilized with the liberated territory of 126,300 people." (The Great Patriotic War. 1941-1945. Military-historical essays. Book Three. Exemption. M., 1999, pp 52).

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=136344
That is an interesting question to which I haven't seen a full answer. At least we know that the number of men liable for military service who reamined on the territories lost in the campaign of 1941 was estimated as 5,6 mlns:
viewtopic.php?f=79&t=129586&start=0&st=0&sk=t&sd=a
The campaign of 1942 definitely added something to this figure too, so without any doubt the number of interest was on a million scale.
Mikhalev ("Military strategy") says that 2,5 millions men were drafted from the previously occupied territories by units of active fronts. I have allready mentioned that the Stavka directive issued in the beginning of 1941 (on 9th February 1942 to be more precise) authorized conscription from liberated territories conducted by the Operational Army via its replacement units in addition to normal system of conscription via military commissariats controlled by military districts. The 2.5 millions figure pertains to the first part type of conscription, and it's only the part of the total figure.

Some examples of how it looked in practice:
From the report of the military council of the 48th Army to the member of military council of the 1st Belorussian Front
25th August 1944

Characteristic data on personnel.

In the course of the last combat actions the composition of units - first of all of rifle regiments significantly altered.
The main contingents are new replacements. The number of enlisted men who were on the front from 1942 not to speak about 1941 hardly amounts to several men.
During the period from 20.06. to 20.08.1944 the army lost 4 787 killed in action and 19 815 wounded in action. During the same period 26 614 men were conscripted and brought to ranks by conscription from the liberated territory.
Thus the main part of rifle companies’ personnel consists of soldiers conscripted from the regions of Western and Eastern Belorussia (percentage of Belorussians amounts to 63,3 %).
According to opinions of some officers and enlisted men new draftees are not seasoned enough.
Giving his opinion on replacement soldiers the commander of 2nd battalion 391st rifle regiment captain Samokhvalov says:
“We have to work and work on these soldiers. They are not seasoned, not accustomed to military discipline, never were in combat and have no real military spirit. A lot of them during all three years of the war were hiding from Germans, hanging around in various places. We have to work long and stubbornly on them, otherwise they can let us down in combat.”
Senior sergeant from 2nd mortar company of the same regiment Volikov says:
“We will never receive such replacement we had at the start of our Bobruisk offensive. We have to work on them very intensively, the main thing is to explain them the article “The art of attack””

The report of the General Staff representative to the Deputy Supreme Commander in Chief .
30th August 1944
To comrade Zharov [Zhukov’s pseudonym]

In the second half of August 5 488 men arrived for reinforcement of guards divisions of the 8th Guards Army from the Belorussian Military District, of them 5 102 from the Brest and Pinsk oblasts [regions]. All are without military training.
Apart from this during August the divisions received up to 2 000 former military men liberated from Lublin camps and prisons.
The arrival of such a large amount of unchecked and unexamined replacement without combat experience under conditions of small strength of divisions and low strength of rifle companies creates a ratio which makes the combat-weary core of guardsmen to be dissolved in newly arrived replacement.
Taking into account an expediency to use the 8th Guards Army as a shock offensive army I find it urgently necessary to deliver replacement from the [internal] regions of the country on the basis of bringing divisions to the strength of 6 000 – 6 500 and uniform distribution of newly arrived replacements.

Major general Revyakin.

Source: "Russkiy Arkhiv. Vol. 14" (The USSR and Poland), 1994, I added some comments in [square brackets].

Also interestingly the large share of German dead/captured happened at Stalingrad in 1943:
The loss ratio was heavily skewed in favor of the Axis until the summer of 1944, with the obvious blip of the Stalingrad disaster.

The overall combat casualties, broken down by year, amount to:

1941: 209,595 Germans killed/captured + 621,308 wounded VS 2,800,863 Soviets killed/captured + 1,256,421 wounded
1942: 278,272 + 840,063 VS 2,888,837 + 3,475,721
1943: 587,906 + 976,827 VS 1,936,514 + 4,613,848
1944: 948,393 + 1,081,681 VS 1,379,625 + 3,976,181

Axis losses (without Finland) come at:

1941-2: 32,719 + 87,932
1943: 300,094 + 91,635 (this includes Romanians captured end 1942)
1944: 6,430 + 18,397 (excludes massive Romanian and Bulgarian losses in the summer)

Even in 1944, when the Soviets inflict higher irrecoverable losses than they take, they're still suffering much larger total casualties because of all their soldiers that are wounded.

Glantz's German loss figures are obviously very wrong.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Deleted member 1487

To the claim that that best German pilots fought on the Eastern Front:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13518049408430160
The role of lend‐lease in Soviet military efforts, 1941–1945

The Journal of Slavic Military Studies

Volume 7, Issue 3, 1994

Boris V. Sokolovab
Translated by David Glantz


The main force of German aviation, especially fighters, operated against the British and US Air Forces, and, just in the struggle with the Western allies, the Luftwaffe suffered the principal part of their losses. The Soviet estimate of German aviation losses on the Soviet-German front: 62,000 machines out of the 101,000 aircraft making up the irrevocable combat losses of German aviation throughout the entire war,79 is far from reality, since it is arrived at by means of simple multiplication of the quantity of German aircraft in separate theaters of war for the time combat operations developed in a given theater, without consideration of the comparative intensity of combat actions (in aircraft sorties) in various theaters. Moreover, as a whole, the intensity of air combat in the West was higher than in the East, and the best German pilots fought there. Thus, in July and August 1943, when significant Luftwaffe forces were concentrated on the Eastern Front during the Battles of Kursk, Orel, and Khar'kov, out of 3,213 irrevocable combat aircraft losses, only 1,030, or 32.3 per cent, occurred on the Eastern Front.80 It is likely that during the war, the Luftwaffe suffered approximately the same proportion of all of its irrevocable losses on the Eastern Front.

Since the USSR could not have waged war against Germany without the cooperation of Britain and the USA, the assertion by Soviet propaganda about the economic victory of Socialism during the Great Patriotic War and about the USSR's capability of independently defeating Germany, remains nothing more than a myth. In contradistinction to Germany, the desire in the USSR, which appeared as long ago as the beginning of the 1930s, to create an self-sufficient [autarkic] economy, capable of providing the wartime Army with all that which was necessary for the conduct of war, was not crowned with success. Hitler and his advisers miscalculated not so much in their determination of the USSR's military-economic strength, as in the capacity of the Soviet economic and political systems to preserve the ability to function in conditions of severe military defeats, as well as in the capacity of the Soviet economy to use Western supplies effectively and rapidly enough, and the US and Great Britain's capacity for carrying out the necessary quantities of deliveries in timely fashion.
 
Time constraints prevent me from getting as comprehensive a reply as I would like, especially about lend-lease. So eh...

Actually you originally said that the Turks would not allow any Axis shipping, not just military.

Except no, I was saying that the Turks would not allow supply ships through since those are military ships.

If the don't advance as far they could because the problem IOTL was the lack of concentration due to being stretched out on the road to Grozny,

Which is unchanged from IOTL.

with great concentration of force due to Maykop being the furthest advance

Which is unchanged from IOTL.

the prescense of an anti-shipping air corps the Black Seas fleet is out of the picture,

Via magic, apparently. Axis anti-shipping against Soviet ships in harbor and shallow waters failed to put the

If they were so strong why did they pull back without resistance?

To get the Germans to string their logistics out and put themselves on a strong natural terrain barrier.

in that case the Axis occupy Maykop without a fight and have a lot of strength to then apply against the ports on the Black Sea coast when they set up a southern defensive perimeter to defend Maykop.

This is no different then IOTL. And the Germans failed to budge the Soviets.

I should note that not advancing towards Grozny still leaves the Germans with a giant exposed left flank. In fact, it's even more exposed then IOTL as the Soviets can freely use the railhead in that direction to advance into the left flank of Army Group A. The Germans will have to devote tons of forces to securing a defense line in the direction of the Kuma river.

Much more so than IOTL, especially if they open up Novorossiysk.

Which they can't do unless they have additional forces. But they can't supply those additional forces unless they open up Novorossiysk. But they can't open up Novorossiysk without those additional forces.

So far, you have not overcome this conundrum. You have just been wishing it away.

Not without the immediate need to move south of the Don to get at the oil.

Which makes it even more likely to still happen. In Hitler's mind, destroying those Soviet forces will make it easier to take the oil later down the road and if it creates delays in the finishing of the first plan... then so what? He still has time.

Depends on how deeply they advance.

According to you, they are advancing just as deeply as IOTL. In logistical terms, taking and holding Maikop is just as logistically unsustainable for the Germans as getting to Grozny. The inability of the Germans to extend their logistical base past Rostov compounds this to the point that it is simply never going to be possible.

I have. The Ju52s brought in necessary fuel that kept dry gas tanks fueled up and kept them going before ground supply got there.

I'm not seeing that those made a substantial difference in that quote...

Because they were sent into an area with compressed supply lines that competed with the 1st Panzer army;

No, I mean even before that order went down. The same "start-stop" phenomenon that had plagued the Germans in the summer 1941 had set in long before.

No, we are saying that he recognizes the threat of the collapse of the north Don when the Italians, Hungarians, and Romanian 3rd are overrun and flank attacks by the reserves of the German 6th and 2nd armies are not enough.

So magical foresight. Because IOTL he absolutely refused to recognize the threat until it was too late to salvage a line even on the Don river. And that was after the 6th Army was encircled at Stalingrad. Without the example of 6th Army's entrapment to act as an example of the threat, he is liable to never authorize a withdrawal. All of Army Group A and B are subsequently trapped in the Caucasus.

Care to provide some quotes are at least a source?

Antony Beevor goes into quite extensive details in his Stalingrad book. If you want details, then your going to have to get it yourself. I don't have time to track down the pages and transcribe.

The document cited is from August 1943

So far too late to matter.

Maybe because they were fighting on several fronts and were unable to rest their units IOTL.

Except the same phenomenon was observable throughout the entire war: in 1940, 1941, and 1942 the Luftwaffe was unable to sustain operations for months on end, regardless of how many fronts they were fighting on and how severe their commitments elsewhere were. Even the Polish Operation imposed severe exhaustion upon the force. This suggests the problem lies more in the organization, logistics, and other technical aspects of the Luftwaffe. The fact that Soviet air power was in resurgence also played a role.

What mounting evidence?

Your inability to prove why Hitler will take radically different decisions then he did IOTL.

Kursk was a massive blooding for the Soviets, they lost 5 times the tanks the Germans did and were not actually stopping it cold, they were throwing in as many tanks as they could and watching them all get slaughtered until Hitler panicked about the Sicily invasion and demonstrations on the Mius river, calling off the offensive

That does not at all support what actually happened. The front was absolutely static from July 12th-14th and the German flanks were crumbling from the fact their infantry didn't have enough manpower to hold the line. Not to mention, from a strategic perspective the German advance was absolutely pathetic by WW2 standards: 35 kilometers in a week is practically nothing, especially compared to the German advances of the past two years or the Soviet advances immediately afterwards.



To the claim that that best German pilots fought on the Eastern Front:

Except the evidence does not suggest that.

http://www.bergstrombooks.elknet.pl/bc-rs/text.html

The dominant assessment in the "Western World" of the air war on the Eastern Front during WW II in many ways still is rooted in myths and misconceptions. Of course this is due to the Cold War, the dominance in the West of German accounts from this war theater, and the previous Soviet reluctance of offering any insight into their archives.​

It is clear that the German fighter pilots were more successful on the Eastern Front than against the Western Allies, and that the war in the air on the Eastern Front cost more Soviet than German aircraft. But the reasons to this are manifolded. One key issue is the development of German fighter aces, and the extreme emphasis that the Luftwaffe placed on individual aerial victories. First of all, the Germans held a superiority regarding pilot training, the experience of their airmen, tactics, and technical outfit in 1941-1942. The tutoring into an aggressive victory hunt taht the German fighter pilots ("Jäger," "hunters," in German) received must be taken into account. The output from German fighter pilot training schools until 1943 can be described as highly trained, self confident, and highly motivated young aerial warriors, tutored to hunt aerial victories and nothing else. They had been brought up to believe that they were superior to anything else. They enjoyed the advantages of the best fighter plane at the time (Messerschmitt Bf 109), highly efficient tactics, and the accumulated result of the experience of other Luftwaffe veterans from the Spanish Civil War and the air war in the West in 1940.

When Hitler launched his attack against the Soviet Union, the surviving veterans of the Luftwaffe had been hardened by the tough lessons of the battles for France and England in 1940-41. Stalin's extensive purges of the Red Army in the late Thirties resulted in huge qualitative deficiencies. Many of the best commanders, down to unit level, were executed. The conservative Stalinist thinking dominated, and the Soviet airmen found themselves ill equipped, inadequately trained for a modern aerial warfare, and tied down by obsolete methods and tactics. In addition, the technical modernization program for the Soviet air forces had merely begun.

The Luftwaffe held about a two-year technical advantage compared to the Soviet air forces. For these reasons, the Soviets suffered heavy losses in airmen. This led to radically reduced pilot training courses. Which in turn increased Soviet losses--and, of course, the success rate among the German fighter pilots. The entire situation enabled a core of German airmen to survive and amass a huge combat experience.

From late 1942, when the quality of the Soviet Air Force was slowly resurging, a core of immensely experienced German fighter pilots - with experience from 500 or even more combat sorties, all flown in the same aircraft type - had emerged on the Eastern Front. It is a fact that never have there been more war-experienced fighter pilots in action than the core of German aces that developed on the Eastern Front in 1941-1943. This conclusion is based not mainly on the number of aerial victories attained by the "top aces", but as a combination of several factors. The most important factor here is the amount of experience - both the exoerience attained by the "aces", but also the experience amassed by their wingmen. Many very skillful Luftwaffe fighter aces were killed in the West because the other pilots in their formation lacked the experience necessary to cover their formation leader. This problem was not at all as present in the East, where the core of experienced wingmen were far better than the average Jagdwaffe wingman in the West from late 1943 and onward.

Without doubt, fighter pilots in general developed and refined their combat skills the more experience they gained. For instance, 132-victory ace Alfred Grislawski states that when he flew over the Normandie in the Summer of 1944 - with an accumulated experience from almost 800 combat missions (most of which had been flown on Bf 109s) - he was much more skillful as a fighter pilot than when he "only" had flown 200 combat missions. "By that time [Summer of 1944] I could master any situation, and when I entered air combat I could tell in advance whom I was going to shoot down."

Of course war-weariness ultimately affected some veterans negatively, but far from everyone. Since fighter pilots in general developed and refined their combat skills the more experience they gained, it is plausible to assume that the fighter pilot veterans who accumulated experience from over 500 - in a few cases even over a thousand - combat sorties, developed levels of air combat skills that were unparallelled in any other air force. The majority of those served with the Luftwaffe on the Eastern Front.
The situation was different on the "Western Front," where the modern equipped and trained RAF was an equal opponent already from the start of the war. The Luftwaffe's pilot losses against the Western Allies in 1941-1943 did not allow such a tremendously experienced core of fighter aces to develop as was the case in the East. But of course there were exceptions. During the month of September 1942, German fighter ace Hans-Joachim Marseille claimed 54 victories - including 17 in one day - in North Africa (most of them fighters); during the same month, the top scorer on the Eastern Front, German fighter ace Hermann Graf, claimed 62 Soviet aircraft shot down - 10 was his best result for a single day.

For several reasons, the German fighter pilots in general held a slight upper hand in air combat with the Western Allies air forces until 1943. This however changed with the appearance of large formations of US heavy bombers and long-range US escort fighters. From the Fall of 1943, the "hunters" of the German fighter force had turned into "hunted." While the German fighters had to be concentrated against US bombers, the escorting Thunderbolts, Mustangs, and Lightnings, operating in incraesingly superior numbers, could bounce German fighters and shoot them down in scores. Added to this was the severe losses as a result of the heavy bombers' defensive fire. Increasing losses in the air battles over Germany resulted in reduced pilot training courses, which in turn further increased German fighter losses. This mainly affected the units with the highest losses - namely the fighter units in the "West".

Another important difference between the "West" and the Eastern Front was that until June 1944, the USAAF and RAF fighter pilots had no frontline on the ground to cover (this regarding Western Europe), and thus could concentrate on hunting German planes in the air. This advantage was never enjoyed by the Soviet fighter pilots.

It is interesting to study the fates of some German aces who "changed fronts." Here I only deal with fighter-to-fighter combat, where skill may count (any top ace could get killed in the massive fire from hundreds of heavy machine-guns from a US heavy bomber formation, regardless of immense flying skills).

"Jochen" Müncheberg, Galland's protegé in JG 26, arrived to JG 51 on the Eastern Front in August 1942. He was shot down twice in four weeks. Siegfried Schnell, who achieved 87 victories against the RAF and the USAAF, arrived to JG 54 on the Eastern Front in February 1944; two weeks later he was killed in combat with Soviet fighters. "Assi" Hahn was shot down by a Soviet La-5, and ended up in captivity three months after he arrived to the Eastern Front; he had previously scored 68 victories against the French Air Force and the RAF. Oberstleutnant Hannes Trautloft, "Assi" Hahn's Geschwaderkommodore on the Eastern Front, recorded this statement by "Assi" Hahn regarding the quality of the Soviet opposition three months after Hahn's arrival to the Eastern Front:

"Hahn told me that the air combats are not easier, but instead harder than what he previously had experienced. He, who is used to merciless air combats against a skillful enemy over the English Channel, told us that he had to mobilize all his skills to fight enemies who proved to be at least as killful as the Englishmen."

"Those 'Kanaljäger' arrived to us and thought that it was an easy game on the Russian Front. Well, they soon learned that this was not the case," said Artur Gärtner of JG 54.

Of course there also were experienced German fighter pilots from the East who got shot down and killed shortly after they had arrived in the West. But no one has denied that the air war in the West was dangerous; it is the air war on the Eastern Front that - probably incorrectly - has been described as "easy", from a German perspective. To some extent, the losses of experienced German fighter aces in the West in 1943 - 1945 also can be explained by the fact that they often did not have the same protection - i.e. quality of their wingmen - as in the East.

One famous Eastern Front expert who "changed fronts" is Günther Rall, who after 273 victories and over 700 combat missions (almost all on the Eastern Front) in the Spring of 1944 was shifted to JG 11 in the Home Defense. Indeed, Rall was shot down and wounded by Thunderbolts from U.S. 56 FG on May 12, 1944. But this was not until he had shot down two of the Thunderbolts himself - and in an air battle where 470 German fighters were pinned against fifteen hundred American planes, including 814 heavy bombers and 735 fighters. This was the ninth time Rall got shot down - eight of which had occurred on the Eastern Front. Asked about his opinion on the American and Soviet fighter pilots, Rall said: "The Americans weren't better than the Russians. The Russians were aggressive and tough opponents."

At the same time, it is interesting to study some of the German top aces that had been educated on the Eastern Front, and their accomplishments against US and British fighters:

Ernst-Wilhelm Reinert had carried out around 500 combat sorties and achieved 103 victories on the Eastern Front in 1941-1942 when he was shifted to Tunisia. Between January 1943 and early May 1943, he was credited with fifty victories against the USAAF and the RAF - quite comparable to the success rate achieved by other top aces on the Eastern Front at that time, and also comparable to the rate of successes that he had achieved against inferior equipped Soviets. Heinz Bär arrived from the Eastern Front to North Africa in October 1942 and shot down twenty RAF and USAAF fighters in two months - about the same rate of successes that he had scored previously on the Eastern Front. Theodor Weissenberger arrived to the "Normandie Front" in June 1944, after almost three years of service on the Eastern Front; he claimed twenty-five US and British fighters in only twenty-six combat sorties in June and July 1944 - his previous twenty-two victories had been achieved on twenty-five combat sorties on the Eastern Front. And we all know how Hartmann dealt with the US Mustangs...

We have asked several Luftwaffe veterans of their impression of the qualities of their various opponents. Hugo Dahmer, who served on the Eastern Front only in 1941, has the impression that the Soviet airmen were inferior to those of the RAF. Alfred Grislawski, who served on the Eastern Front until 1943, and from then on in the Reichsverteidigung, holds that the Soviet airmen in 1943 were equal to those of the RAF. Grislawski explained that "the Russians had a different tactic; their main task often was to strafe our ground troops, and because of this we often managed to catch them in a position that was to their disadvantage."

One German fighter ace and Knight's Cross holder (he expressed the wish of remaining anonymous) expressed the impression that the Soviet airmen were better than the Americans (this was regarding the US airmen in North Africa in 1942). This is supported by Alfred Grislawski, who - speaking of the last Soviet pilots that he met (in the spring of 1943) compared to the American pilots that he met later in 1943 and in 1944 - said: "It is hard to compare because the Americans always came in large numbers against few of us. But when it comes to the individual pilot, I regard the Russians as better than the Americans. This is only natural, because the Americans had this tour system. How much did they fly - thirty or forty combat missions? - and then they were called back home again. They never accumulated that much experience."

"The advantage of the Americans was that they always appeared in large numbers," is a common statement from former Luftwaffe aces.
The Soviet fighter pilots mostly operated in relatively small formations. The normal German fighter tactic was a high-side gunnery run against lower flying enemy formations, whereafter they could use the superior climbing performance of the Bf 109 to withdraw. In this way, the German fighter pilots frequently were in a position where they could choose to engage the enemy only when the situation was to their advantage. Whereas the German fighter pilots operated in the loose two-plane Rotte-formation, and in the four-plane Schwarm-formation (two Rotten) - where the wingman's task was to cover the leader, who was supposed to shoot down the enemy-, the Soviets (in 1941 to mid-1942) mainly operated in three-plane V-formations, which reduced the flexibility of the fighters. One of the main advantages held by the Germans was that all of their aircraft were equipped with R/T transmitters and receivers, while most Soviet fighters only were equipped with receivers during the first years of the war. What also hampered the Soviet fighter pilots was the common tactic of deploying them to area protection, where it was prohibited to pursue the enemy outside of the assigned territory; the German fighter pilots were mainly dispatched on free hunting sorties with no other territorial boundaries than those set by the amount of fuel in the tanks of their aircraft.

In spite of these initial German advantages in air combat, the Soviet airmen performed very well. Without doubt, the Soviet fliers in general were the toughest and most determined opponents ever to be faced by German airmen. Any other air force probably would have disintegrated morally following the immense losses that were dealt the Soviets by the Luftwaffe on June 22, 1941 - at least this was what the Germans had anticipated would happen to the Soviet armed forces. In spite of this, Soviet bomber crews kept launching one mission after another against the advancing German ground troops during the first weeks of the war, and the Soviet fighter pilots never ceased challenging the Luftwaffe of air superiority.

Until Tomas Polak and Hans Dieter Seidl in the late 1990s came out with their books on the Soviet fighter aces in WW II ("Stalin's Falcons" and "Stalin's Eagles"), the achievements by the Soviet airmen in WW II were relatively unknown in the Western World.

It is a fact that the most experienced and most successful fighter aces on the Allied side in WW II were the Soviet top aces. It is interesting to note that the P-39 Airacobra was rejected by both RAF and USAAF pilots. Soviet ace Aleksandr Pokryshkin nevertheless achieved the bulk of his 59 personal (plus several "shared") victories while piloting an Airacobra, which by all means was vastly inferior to the Bf 109 G and the Fw 190 A - and to the Spitfire IX, the Mustangs, and the Thunderbolts that the British and US fighter pilots manned.

In 1941, Soviet ace Boris Safonov achieved his first sixteen victories (plus six "shared" victories) while piloting an I-16 Ishak. Although the performance of the I-16 has been belittled in several Western accounts (comparing test flights made by a New Zealand test pilot in recent years indicated that the I-16 was slightly superior to the British Hurricane), it is clear that the I-16 was vastly inferior to the Bf 109s with which it was opposed. It is easy to imagine which successes Safonov would have been able to achieve, had he been equipped with a Spitfire, and had he operated within the frameworks of a radar-supported fighter control system like RAF Fighter Command in 1940.

Taking the fact that the cream of the German fighter aces were deployed to the Eastern Front, the performance of these Soviet aces are even more impressive. It should also be noted that whereas several German fighter pilots flew with the main intention of achieving high individual scores (they had been brought up to this), the Soviet airmen waged a war with the intention of striking against the enemy wherever he could be found - on the ground or in the air. The main accomplishment by the Soviet air forces in WW II was their contribution to the destruction of the German Army. The German fighter pilots developed such an attitude toward strafing or fighter-bombing missions, that when they first were instructed to undertake such missions, they regarded it as an unjust punishment - which also was what Göring, who had issued the order, intended.

As mentioned, the dominant assessment in the "Western World" of the air war on the Eastern Front during WW II in many ways still is rooted in myths, misconceptions and bias. Of course this is due to the Cold War, the dominance in the West of German accounts from this war theater, and the previous Soviet reluctance of offering any insight into their archives. But the Cold War is over. What remains now is a handful of surviving veterans with their invaluable memories, and the huge amounts of aviation unit documents in the Russian archives.

We, the authors of "Black Cross/Red Star", have made an effort to find the truth behind the myths, misconceptions, prejudices and bias - on both sides! - by digging into those sources. Put together with the accounts of Russian and German pilot veterans that we have met, and Soviet and German air force documents, we have arrived at a picture that in many ways is opposed to some versions previously presented by both "the West" and "the East".
The only aim of our forthcoming six-volume book "Black Cross/Red Star: Air War Over the Eastern Front" is to find the actual picture of this hitherto little-known air war, the largest in history. The aim of this article is to bring about a better understanding of the environment during which the air war was fought on the Eastern Front, during which the German and Soviet fighter pilots attained their - often in the West doubted or belittled - large victory numbers. If this article has contributed to dismantle the impression that the achievements of the Soviet fighter pilots were below those of the British and American fighter pilots - which the author believes is a serious misconception - one important goal is achieved. At the same time, it is of course not the author's intention to belittle the achievements or standards of British and American fighter pilots.

I've probably missed stuff to reply too in the above. Apologies about that, but as I said I don't have time for as comprehensive of a post as I would like.
 

Deleted member 1487

Except the evidence does not suggest that.

http://www.bergstrombooks.elknet.pl/bc-rs/text.html
Just to this first, will get to the rest later.
All he presents is anecdotes and narrative, but no sourcing. Looking at the transfers to the West of units the majority of fighter units were in the East from 1941 until late 1942 then the shift West started and was pretty much complete by Kursk. The majority of fighter units were shifted West and fought there for the rest of the war while some were retained or rotated West later. By 1944 50% of the LW was just dedicated to air defense in Germany/Western Europe, which meant the vast majority of fighters. In the 1943 period the source I posted even states that though the majority of the LW was in the East during Kursk only about 1/3rd of LW casualties during that period were in the East.

Bergstrom is trying to make a point that doesn't hold up; he's right that a core of pilots that made their bones in the East were retained there and survived longer because the Soviets were easier to kill, but the majority of the LW and the best pilots were there by 1944 and probably by 1943; its not exactly like its a fair comparison to say that because the high kill totals in the East of fighter pilots means they were the best the LW had, they just had the highest scores because the Soviets were the easiest to kill starting in 1941 right through to 1945. That was because of the lack of training/skill early on or the fighting environments later on due to lack of Soviet fighters to space compared to Western Europe and critical need to combat Wallied aircraft no matter what while in the East they could run if needed and fight when it was more convenient/favorable.

So kill totals aren't the end all of discussing skill, plus the combat environment/situation also was highly different. To say the best pilots were kept in the East is highly disingenuous.
 

Deleted member 1487

Except no, I was saying that the Turks would not allow supply ships through since those are military ships.
They allowed merchant shipping with war materials, the only thing they would not let through are warships like destroyers on up.


Which is unchanged from IOTL.
I explicitly said they wouldn't go after Grozny ITTL because they are getting a later start and are focus on grabbing the ports after taking Maykop to sustain an advance into the Caucasus by getting supply lines from the coast, rather than Rostov.

Which is unchanged from IOTL.
Uh, no they advanced past Maykop and dragged the 17th army along with them IOTL.

Via magic, apparently. Axis anti-shipping against Soviet ships in harbor and shallow waters failed to put the
Axis air attacks against Kerch worked pretty well IOTL. They shifted airpower away from Crimea after they finished Bustard Hunt; with a dedicated anti-shipping unit operating from Crimea as they advanced along the Black Sea coast they'd catch the Black Sea ships operating along the coast by day. At night it would be a lot harder but not impossible given Taranto.

To get the Germans to string their logistics out and put themselves on a strong natural terrain barrier.
Which plays into German plans ITTL.

This is no different then IOTL. And the Germans failed to budge the Soviets.
No its quite different from OTL especially with an extra air fleet supporting them.


I should note that not advancing towards Grozny still leaves the Germans with a giant exposed left flank. In fact, it's even more exposed then IOTL as the Soviets can freely use the railhead in that direction to advance into the left flank of Army Group A. The Germans will have to devote tons of forces to securing a defense line in the direction of the Kuma river.
Not sure where you're talking about exactly, the Germans would cover the rail line heading north-south toward Grozny; 1st Panzer army wouldn't simply sit on Maykop they would occupy and defend it and hold the area along the Kuban river; there isn't enough logistics assets for the Soviets to deploy wide away from their rail line, plus they had only 600 tanks in the entire region if you include British LL ones. They were locked on the rail line for their advance, so would pretty much have to stick to it to attack and would be attacking a river line defensive position head on.


Which they can't do unless they have additional forces. But they can't supply those additional forces unless they open up Novorossiysk. But they can't open up Novorossiysk without those additional forces.
Not really, they had the necessary forces if they don't advance past setting up viable position to hold Maikop. Not sending mountain divisions to climb Mt. Elbrus and instead using them to attack Novorossiysk would result in its fall; it fell in September 1942 IOTL, but the heights to the South hadn't been taken yet and the emergency around Stalingrad precluded the effort to take them; having taken it earlier thanks to committing more reserves to the fight and with extra airpower supporting it, both by going after the Black Seas fleet and direct support would take them.


Which makes it even more likely to still happen. In Hitler's mind, destroying those Soviet forces will make it easier to take the oil later down the road and if it creates delays in the finishing of the first plan... then so what? He still has time.
Why rush when the screwed up logistics will cost you more in the meantime? Stick to the pre-battle plan and get it all anyway because the oil is the final goal, but only after the Soviet economy was damaged by interdicting the Volga, the first and more immediately important goal; the oil with be there no matter what, but the first step needs to be completed first if the oil isn't immediately imperative.


According to you, they are advancing just as deeply as IOTL. In logistical terms, taking and holding Maikop is just as logistically unsustainable for the Germans as getting to Grozny. The inability of the Germans to extend their logistical base past Rostov compounds this to the point that it is simply never going to be possible.
No, they are stopping short. Maykop was far more logistically sustainable than Grozny, especially once Novorossiysk falls.
OTL advance was twice as deep as Maykop.
http://tinypic.com/dmu3rn.jpg


I'm not seeing that those made a substantial difference in that quote...
That's your problem then, it says air supply fueled the panzers to keep going before ground supply caught up.

No, I mean even before that order went down. The same "start-stop" phenomenon that had plagued the Germans in the summer 1941 had set in long before.
Nowhere near that level; the advance from July 13th on was due to need to secure the flanks and the mash up of logistics caused by having 1st Panzer move too soon with AG-A on Rostov, when it was supposed to wait its turn once the Volga flank guard was established.

So magical foresight. Because IOTL he absolutely refused to recognize the threat until it was too late to salvage a line even on the Don river. And that was after the 6th Army was encircled at Stalingrad. Without the example of 6th Army's entrapment to act as an example of the threat, he is liable to never authorize a withdrawal. All of Army Group A and B are subsequently trapped in the Caucasus.
IOTL it was only the Romanians being attacked, not the entire line from the Hungarians at Voronezh to the Romanians near the Don Bend collapsing. 5th Panzer is committed to stem the tide, the 6th and 2nd armies attack and flanks, but its not enough and Soviet logistics and Axis counter attacks hamper the deep advance long enough for Hitler to understand that they cannot stop the Soviets if they don't retreat, just slow them down...especially if 4th Romania is also attacked. There is no way in hell he wouldn't recognize that threat; having the 6th army encircled is one thing because he thought he could save it, but when the counter attack failed to breach Soviet lines and Saturn blew out the Hungarians and Italians he authorized the retreat; ITTL its obvious far more quickly than the Soviets could reach the Donets that the line is not salvagable and they need to retreat or face the threat of losing most of AG-South; plus the Soviets couldn't advance after Uranus/Saturn quickly enough to cut off AG-A/B anyway and Hitler reacted once the Don line started collapsing beyond the Romanians.

Antony Beevor goes into quite extensive details in his Stalingrad book. If you want details, then your going to have to get it yourself. I don't have time to track down the pages and transcribe.
Can you at least provide the pages so I can find it at the library? What was this even in reference to, I can't find where you quoted me from.

So far too late to matter.
No, its the accumulated experience of what was going on and what was practice already, just not universally. Air Fleet 6 of the North Flank at Kursk was not practicing this while the 4th Air Fleet was leading up to Kursk...which might be why the North was stymied.


Except the same phenomenon was observable throughout the entire war: in 1940, 1941, and 1942 the Luftwaffe was unable to sustain operations for months on end, regardless of how many fronts they were fighting on and how severe their commitments elsewhere were. Even the Polish Operation imposed severe exhaustion upon the force. This suggests the problem lies more in the organization, logistics, and other technical aspects of the Luftwaffe. The fact that Soviet air power was in resurgence also played a role.
Because they were fighting on multiple fronts in 1941-45. In 1940 they had just suffered major losses in France, then fought the BoB, then immediately shifted to the Blitz with minor pause and continued operations from October 1940-May 1941 while invading the Balkans, helping the Italians in the Mediterranean/Libya and building up for Barbarossa which was the immediate next operation; after that they sustained major operations from June to December and even then into 1942 with some down time before getting into the Crimean Operation and fighting the 2nd Kharkov simultaneously while also conducting defensive operations over France/Germany and in the Mediterranean. After that it continued with Stalingrad/Tunisia/El Alamein, etc. The Luftwaffe fought nothing but sustained campaigns on multiple fronts throughout the war, which is why they were badly worn down and never given a chance to recover; with the East as the only active front they could have sustained operations far more easily than IOTL.


Your inability to prove why Hitler will take radically different decisions then he did IOTL.
I did in fact show why, he doesn't need oil. You've demonstrated nothing but stubbornness and refusal to accept that things would be different with different pressures.

That does not at all support what actually happened. The front was absolutely static from July 12th-14th and the German flanks were crumbling from the fact their infantry didn't have enough manpower to hold the line. Not to mention, from a strategic perspective the German advance was absolutely pathetic by WW2 standards: 35 kilometers in a week is practically nothing, especially compared to the German advances of the past two years or the Soviet advances immediately afterwards.
They were fighting a heavy battle at Prokhorovka and Hitler ordered the advance called off on account of Sicily and the Soviet counterattack to the North. Plus of course the advance was against the most heavily fortified and reinforced area in the world at the time, so its not like we should compare rapid advances in open Steppe as the same as a fortified trench system. That's like comparing the grinding Soviet advance at Smolensk to Bagration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Prokhorovka#Following_the_main_engagement

Of course all of that is meaningless considering that the situation would be radically different by 1943 ITTL.
 

Deleted member 1487

And a point about LW strength IOTL and where it was distributed:
DefeatGAF18.jpg


http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=117575&p=1033888
An even more intriguing change may be seen if we look at just the three months May-July 1943 and witness the changes that occurred then. Looking at just single-engine fighters we find that the distribution of strength (as of the first of the month)/losses (during the month) were:

Luftwaffe Strengths
May 1943
West 1,113/159
East 623/112

June 1943
West 1,361/173
East 533/58

July 1943
West 1,399/487
East 494/183

So over just a three-month period the fighter strength in the West increased by 20.4 percent, while that in the East decreased by 20.7 percent. At the same time losses in the West went from 14.29 percent of strength, to 12.71 percent, to 34.81 percent, while losses in the East went from 17.98 percent, to 10.88 percent, to 37.04 percent.

As of 1 June 1944 a rough breakdown of strength by type is (West/East):

1-engine fighter 1,400/560
2-engine fighter 220/137
nightfighter 834/101
ground attack 265/816
bombers 917/781
total 3,636/2,395
Most of the single engine fighters were not in the East during Kursk, in fact only almost exactly 1/4th of fighters. During the month of July about 1/4th of losses were there. With just the USSR in the war assuming no additions due to less losses in the west in 1942, the LW fighter arm would be 4x as large in the East, which changes the entire character of the fighting in the air battles that year in the East, not least of which because they would cause much higher losses for the Soviets compared to OTL, while suffering fewer themselves compared to OTL due to concentration of power in one place. That would make the Soviets less effective at all missions due to the presence of 4x as many SE fighters (more even with twin engine fighters being there), which would likely get them air dominance where they need it.

Edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jagdgeschwader_52#The_Kursk_offensive
From what I can tell IOTL at Kursk there were only 8 fighter gruppen, which would be around 240 fighters assuming all were operational and at full strength, about half of the fighter strength on the Eastern Front in 1943. Even if half of the fighters on all other fronts were sent to Kursk in July (1399 overall, say 700 is half) that would be a near tripling of the fighter strength at Kursk. That's just to make the point about how much the Wallies drew off German airpower and if the Soviets were the only power fighting Germany in 1943 any decisive battle in Ukraine would see at least 1000 fighters participating rather than the historical ~240. That changes the entire context of the air war in the East in 1943 without assuming any differences in production of loss rates in 1942-43 influencing 1943.

Assuming no West Front in 1942-43 in terms of losses:
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=49&t=117575&p=1033888
The distribution of the Luftwaffe shows an even more striking shift from East to West from 1942 to 1944. This may be partly illustrated by the loss patterns. In general, they were as follows

Luftwaffe Losses (WF/EF):

1942
1-engine fighter 536/707
2-engine fighter 61/178
nightfighter 83/0
ground attack 169/457
bombers 690/957
total 1,539/2,299

1943
1-engine fighter 2,359/1,135
2-engine fighter 182/132
nightfighter 274/23
ground attack 518/905
bombers 1,164/3,128
total 4,497/3,128

1944
1-engine fighter 6,818/972
2-engine fighter 275/185
nightfighter 1,063/94
ground attack 345/1,237
bombers 1,217/425
total 9,718/2,913
1942 losses in the West: 1539, 1943: 4497, and 1944: 9718 all that would have been available for the East otherwise.
Plus without Stalingrad being encircled:
Luftwaffe losses

Aircraft losses of the Luftwaffe for the supply of the 6th Army at Stalingrad, and the recovery of wounded from 24 November 1942 to 31 January 1943:
Losses Aircraft type 269 Junkers Ju 52 169 Heinkel He 111 42 Junkers Ju 86 9 Focke-Wulf Fw 200 5 Heinkel He 177 1 Junkers Ju 290
 
Last edited by a moderator:
As mentioned before Britain had 3 million pounds left in gold and dollar reserves by early 1941.

From 1941-1945 the US delivered nearly 5 million tons of food - which fed more than 10% of British population.

And we are not even talking about the other resources like petroleum and steel or war material like tanks and aircraft + that the Germans were sinking ships faster then the British can build them.

So how does all this make a British collapse " not likely"?

well any concieveable pod gets rid of the japanese empire, so presumeably at least some shipping, money and resources can be spared/saved from the non existent eastern theatre. In this situation the british would not give anything to the russians it would be on a cash basis, so material is saved or money gained there. similarly a cerrtain technological mission would not be giving anything to the USA it would be looking for cash sales, so there are at least some possibilities. There could be other asset sales of various kinds.
A collapse is not happening, unless as a last resort.
 

Deleted member 1487

More issues of Soviet finances:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_gold#Use_of_the_deposit
It turns out they spent all of the Spanish gold pre-1941, so wouldn't have had that to buy during the war; given how quickly they went through it, its likely they had spent most of their own reserves and would likely not have a whole lot considering first the exodus of money before and during the Russian Civil War, then the spending by Stalin to industrialize with Western help. Lacking international legitimacy for a while they would need to use tradeable commodities like gold to buy things like the factories from Ford to made GAZ or buy American expertise to help on the Caucasian oilfields. So the $2.5 Billion in gold mined during the 1920-41 period would likely largely have been spent during that period too. The 1930s saw the value of their commodity exports crash, so that would mean they had to have used a lot of hard currency to be able to buy anything on the open market because their trade was effectively gone.
This paper even mentions the hard currency issues the Soviets experienced during the Great Depression and resulting collapse of trade with the US:
http://www.ebha.org/ebha2011/files/Papers/shpotovebha2011.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_ruble#Fourth_.28Gold.29_Soviet_ruble.2C_March_7.2C_1924_-_1947
Silver apparently was also in short supply.

Edit:
http://www.hist.msu.ru/Labs/Ecohist/EZH/2002/osokina.htm
This paper is about the Soviets exporting art during the 1920s to raise hard currency to finance industrialization, indicating that they did not have a lot of hard currency for international trade pre- and during WW2.

The lack of commodities to trade during the war, plus lack of hard currency in general would pretty much mean that other than a limited stream of gold production during the war would at best generate some $200 million per year (that was peak pre-war production, not sure it could be maintained in wartime, certainly not exceeded due to the demand for it pre-war anyway), which would not be enough to even buy OTL LL amounts of food.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreig...opment_of_the_state_monopoly_on_foreign_trade
It would seem most foreign trade pre-war was for grain and minerals, things that were in short supply within Russia during the war and would be unexportable due to the war.

So without LL the Soviets would burn through their meager reserves quickly and then be seriously short of hard currency to buy even a fraction of what was needed not to collapse.

Another Edit:
http://www.o5m6.de/Routes.html
June-September 1941 bought them with $41 million 166k tons of supplies, mostly petroleum products; October 1941-June 1942 GAVE them 1.42 million tons of supplies, mostly food, metals, machine tools, vehicles, and fuel; July 1942-June 1943 gave them 3 million tons of supplies mostly food, metals, vehicles, chemicals, fuel, and machines; July 1943-June 1944 gave them 5.7 million tons of supplies, mostly food and metals, with some fuel, vehicles, machines and chemicals making up the rest; July 1944-May 1945 gave 5.5 million tons of supplies with the distribution being similar to the previous period; the final shipments were from June 1945-September 1945 and amounted to 1.5 million tons.

June 1941-June 1943, two years, gave them about as much as they got in one year from July 1943-June 1944 or July 1944-May 1945, which was not negligible at all. If they could only afford the first period from June to early October 1941 they are in big trouble, but I think they could afford purchases like the historical number from June 1941-June 1943, but then would be basically broke, which might influence earlier purchasing, might not. Regardless purchasing would only buy them survival until mid-1943 then they are basically on their own in terms of domestic production, which would be pretty devastating right at the critical moment. They cannot therefore launch a 1943 like offensive due to lack of LL and German increases in strength, especially in aircraft and anti-tank weaponry. Nor can the Soviets afford to mobilize reserves that they had IOTL due to the lack of sufficient food coming in via LL or purchasing, as they would otherwise risk major famine in their workforce or army.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Top