Though Obsessed Nuker and I have had this out in other threads, I'm still of the opinion that the Soviets would get their asses handed to them in comedic fashion.
Sure, because you, like History Learner up there, have an almost OKH-esque underestimation of the Soviets (up to the point of explicitly labelling the Russians dumb) not shared by the strategists, who rank among the greatest in history, that actually drafted Operation Unthinkable or the military historians who have bothered to study the subject.
While army groups might not disintegrate, their supply lines are precarious. And with the practice the Allies had at aerial interdiction, there's going to be a lot of poor dumb Russians starving and running low on ammunition, while lavishly supplied Allied columns roll through to the sea near Greifswald.
The Germans will be defeated by Christmas. The US can hold the Phillipines in 1941. The Chinese won't come south and if they did they will be slaughtered on the Yalu. Victory in Vietnam is imminent and has been since 1965. And the Iraqis will greet us as liberators.
While I'm certain Nuker will jump to point out the political implausibility, "couldn't happen, politics." is a very boring thread.
Well, I'm sorry that you don't understand a very fundamental aspect of warfare that is as important as the guns people are firing or the bullets that are being shot, but it's not my fault you didn't pass Clausewitz 101.
Last year, you personally told me the Soviets were never desperate enough to conscript teens; which way is it?
Men younger than 17 were definitely never conscripted. Men at 17 were conscripted for military training and service in auxiliary and non-operational fronts, freeing up older men for combat. Functionally speaking, that means conscription of 2-3 million 17 year olds is still the addition of 2-3 million men of 18 years of age.
Which is completely contrary to Soviet draft data presented to Stalin for 1942 and 1943 years,
I don't see how. That would require, to start with, the draft data you've cited to discuss men coming of age in 1943 or later. What you have cited simply does not do so.
and find it rather unlikely they suddenly had a jump from less than a million men liable for conscription to nearly two million suddenly.
Well, you see, there's this concept where people gets older as time goes on. It's called "aging". It means that people who were ineligible for conscription in the previous years would thus become eligible in the next.
Outside of the Soviet data, your claim is also unsupported by observations of Soviet manpower activities up to Bagration,
If we want to talk data, the relevant data is Soviet demographics and not the strengths of a specific type of division while ignoring the rest of the army (both individually and as a whole). As per
Vital Statistics in the Soviet Union in 1926, from 1924-1930, the Soviet crude birth rate hovered around 44 per thousand. This from a population of approximately 150 million (147 million specifically in 1926). Modifying the formula for crude birth rate based on available data, the formula for calculating number of births from population and births per thousand is (147,000,000 X 44)/1,000=6,480,000. Proportion of males in births is 51.9%, so that’s 3,363,120. Walter Dunn’s studies on manpower have indicated that 90+% men reaching of age were considered fit for service by Soviet standards, so that’s 3,026,808. 3 million men.
in that the rifle divisions were running at 2-5,000 men when TOE called for 9,600. If they had the manpower, why would they run their divisions so low? Don't tell me it's because they preferred it like that, because they wouldn't have made an attempt to increase the force size of divisions prior to Bagration if this was the case.
Yes, they preferred it that way. While the Soviets did increase manpower in the run up to Bagration, no attempt was made to increase it all the way up to their TO&E. Instead, they aimed for sizes of around 6,000 men... which were largely achieved. Furthermore, your hyper-focus on the rifle divisions rather ignores that the rifle divisions did not make up the entirety of the Red Army. During the course of 1943 and 1944, the Soviets also formed a whole bunch of new artillery, tank, and other support units and formations which absorbed the bulk of new manpower. Manpower personnel in non-divisional artillery and mortar battalions, regiments, brigades, and divisions rose from 400,000 in November 1942 to around a million men by 1945. Manpower in tank and mechanized regiments rose from 300,000 in November 1942 to 400,000 by mid-'44. All of this sucked up huge amounts of men which could only come at the expense of the infantry. But even within the rifle divisions, the artillery regiments average strength remained largely static despite the fall in the number of riflemen. The proportion of infantry may have declined, but in turn the proportion of heavy weapons operators and specialists increased. But overall Soviet army size first grew up until mid-'43, then remained static until 1945... which it shouldn't have if your claims had any basis.
Again, no. Massive daylight raids begin in early 1943 and by the following Spring the Luftwaffe is effectively destroyed; notable to this is that this development occurs within three months of long range fighters being fielded. For another example, after D-Day they begin targeting POL and have effectively collapsed said logistic chain within two months. You also saw this with the transportation network, in that the mediums and fighter bombers get French air bases after D-Day and collapse the German transportation network within six months
Again, yes. The Luftwaffe had already been engaged in unsustainable attrition over Med and the Eastern Front for a solid year by the time daylight raids began in early-'43, as well as opposing the British night bombing campaign over Germany and British fighter sweeps in France. While they were victorious in most instances, these victories were largely pyrrhic and the Luftwaffe couldn't sustain it's strength. 1943 saw this attrition increase yet further, despite the Luftwaffe’s technically defeating the 1943 bomber offensives, and that attrition set up for it's final destruction in 1944. Without that prior attrition, the destruction of the Luftwaffe would have been post-poned accordingly. And despite the battering it took, the German transport network was functioning right up until the end.
No, they did not. The indeed found the German economy could've been collapsed within a year had they targeted the electrical net and/or POL.
Yes, they did. I’m referring to not to the “might have beens”, but to the actual results and even those reports acknowledge that the destruction of the Luftwaffe was an effective precondition to effective POLs and electric campaigns. And since a large segments of Soviet electrical net and POL are beyond the range of Allied strategic air forces to begin with, that means nothing.
Feeding Mars: The Role of Logistics in the German Defeat in Normandy, 1944.
The long and short of it is that the Geman dumps were much too far behind the lines, too small, and too few trucks were allocated to transport what fuel there was forward. Allied air attacks certainly exacerbated this problem, but the root cause was the basic German logistic plan in France was woefully inadequate. Even had the Allies not flown a single fighter bomber sortie, the Germans would have been in trouble.
Maybe because there is a rather substantial difference between the logistical needs of a multi-million man army and a guerrilla warfare force in the hundreds of thousands with local support?
Korea, Vietnam, Serbia, and Iraq all saw conventional armies, with significant mechanized elements in the latter two cases, with conventional supply lines all of which operated for months and/or years under conditions of enemy air superiority and even supremacy without supply breaking down. What's more, the Vietnamese and Serbian campaigns were against Western Forces conducted with resources that would make WW2 air generals green with envy, yet the most effective techniques in the preservation of their forces and supply lines were the same as those developed by the Soviets during WW2 against the Luftwaffe. The Gulf War case is particularly damning, for despite total air dominance and an inability for the Iraqis to apply any sort of effective air defense measures, Iraqis logistics continued to deliver supplies to their formations all the way up until the Coalition ground attack. The subsequent collapse has been attributed to classically terrible Iraqis command and control rather then logistical severance via air power.
Moving to the immediate time period, despite the aforementioned mismanaged logistics, the extensive demolition of the French rail net, and total WAllied air superiority, the German army in Normandy remained in the field for two months and ultimately collapsed not by running out of ammunition or fuel, but by being worn down through a brutal attrition at a 1:1 manpower loss exchange rate with the WAllies that they simply did not have the men or equipment to replace. Similarly, German air superiority in 1941-42 was singularly unable to prevent the Soviets from supplying their forces once they had overcome their initial mismanagement. The frank fact of history is that the total isolation of a combat force from its lines of supply via air power has simply never happened in the entire history of air power even when the opposing side has totally controlled the skies. The claims that it will occur to the 1945 Red Army which will be operating under air conditions far more favorable then those found by the above armies is without any basis.
Luftwaffe was defeated in the space of the year, from the early 1943 North Africa campaign to the Air Battle of Berlin the following Spring. The Western Allies in 1945 have the further advantage of bases in Italy, France and elsewhere from which mediums and fighter bombers can wreck transportation nodes and allow for deep strikes.
The Luftwaffe was defeated over the course of two years as a function of multiple fronts and was operating from an inferior strategic position compared to the Soviets in 1945.
And now they can't replace said stocks, and railway gear wears out fast even without the Western Allies blowing it to hell in a handbasket.
I have not seen any indication that the WAllies would be more successful then the Luftwaffe was, probably less given that the prevailing air situation will favor the Soviets more then it did in 1941-42.
Maybe because there is a rather major distance differential from Berlin to the USSR heartland as compared to Kursk to Stalingrad?
That's still a massive amount of distance which had to be retracked. And that ignores that only 15% of railway equipment was delivered during the massive Soviet offensives, and concurrent rail repair, across Ukraine.
Up to that point, the Soviets had only managed to reclaim the Kuban then waited around six months to reclaim Left Bank Ukraine by which point Lend Lease rails began to pour in. Given that fact, it's rather clear they couldn't have made it to Berlin without them.
There is no indication that the Soviet pause from March to July 1943 was a result of lack of rail supplies, as opposed to the conscious decision to await the Soviet. And at 15% of 80%, the supplies delivered in 1943-44, third protocols would have been quite inadequate to sustain the subsequent Soviet offensives across Ukraine unless massively paired with domestic stocks.
It's also highly telling you failed to cite domestic production of such.
Because domestic production doesn’t seem to have mattered. The Soviets were able to adequately maintain and sustain their rail net entirely on pre-war stocks.
Citation for the source of the claim was given, as compared to your source which provided no citations to back up its claim.
And I'm seeing no numbers for which the mathematical percentage is derived from.
Uh, what? You stated Soviet production was sufficient to meet 60% of their needs while I've cited multiple sources that said it's 40%.
I stated Soviet production during the war was sufficient enough to meet 60% (or 40%) during the war… but that was before they acquired a huge mess of capacity via lend-lease and occupation of Eastern Europe. What matters in an Unthinkable scenario is the latter, not the former, but this seems to be a distinction you are either unable or unwilling to make.
From your own source:
Your own source spells out there is no basis to your assertions, and further notes it was four refineries, not six as you've repeatedly claimed.
What are you talking about? The very numbers are the mathematical basis with which I note that Soviets seem to have obtained 40% of their high quality avgas, combined with their consumption numbers provided elsewhere (something I have to note you are conspicuously failing to provide). While it talks about the Soviet production situation in 1941 and '42, it doesn't talk about '43 or beyond. That the Soviets were incapable of such production in 1941 and '42 means jack shit about their productive capacity in 1945, when more lend-lease came in and they now had controll of a huge mess of Axis petrochemical industries. We don’t even know when those LL refineries were shipped and when they came online, which could further skew things by loading up a great increase in annual production only in the last year or two of the war.
As to the four refineries… well, I’ll admit to having fucked up there. I recall seeing an article somewhere that said six but perhaps I misremembered. In any case, I have noticed in other items there is a discrepancy between what was shipped and what arrived so maybe the last two never got there for whatever reason. Or hadn’t been set up by the time the war ended. Regardless, even four refineries would represent substantial increase, particularly when paired with the acquisitions from Eastern Europe.
If by function you mean at only 9% of their March, 1944 capacity in September of that year, sure.
Which isn't relevant, seeing as that bombing ended when the plants were captured and hence there was plenty of time for repair, rework. As I already pointed out, the combined output of German synthetic industry that was shipped amounted to a million metric tons of aviation gasoline a year. I'm still trying to track on what the quality of that was and what the timeframe for reaching that capacity was, but if it's high quality avgas.... then that comfortably exceeds Soviet annual wartime consumption by 250,000 metric tons.
And I'll state again: just because you claim something is so, does not make it such. I've cited a source, to which your only response so far has been to claim it wrong; that's not how a debate works. You need to play the ball and actually cite something.
Your the one whose making the positive claim. If you want to show that Soviet aviation was the important thing in stopping those Germans, you need more then that correlation... you need a causation. In other words, you need to show how.
Given they only managed to restore 40% of the rail net in recovered areas in the USSR, amount of cargo transported on rails halved by 1943 and had yet to recover anywhere near Pre-War totals in 1945 and German/European track was an entirely different gauge, I'm a doubting it.
It's increasingly clear you don't know what your talking about. According to Volume 5 of
History of the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945, the Soviets by the end of 1944 had recovered to 91% of their pre-war rail capacity, which is very much near their pre-war totals. Given that the
The Influence of Railways on Military Operations in the Russo-German War 1941–1945 notes that the Soviets immediately before the war carried almost as much freight traffic as the United States, the claim that the restored Soviet railways could not withstand war time pressures is simply without basis. It seems we can blame the usual suspects for early-Cold War American underestimation of the Soviet rail net: the former German commanders who tried to cover up their humiliating failure of planning and organization for the railway war by blaming it upon supposed shoddiness of the Soviets.
The difference in German/European track apparently did not mean much to the Red Army, given the numbers of munitions, fuel, and other supplies shipped across it massively increased over the previous years. The Soviet supply situation during the drive on Berlin is the very opposite of overstretched and it was very much dependent on rail lines feeding across Eastern Europe.
Which wasn't claimed; the point was that the Red Army doesn't need as much ammo and fuel when it's not actually needing to shoot it or use it.
That's precisely what you claimed: I observed that the lack of machine tools is not supported by the expansion of Soviet civilian manufacturing capacity in 1945-1950. You reply that it's because they got 25% of their machine tools from lend-lease, which would be the years of 1941-45. I pointed that out to you and now you are replying by claiming "it doesn't matter", a rather clear case of goalpost shifting.
"Implementing the stolen plans still required immense technical skill and a deep understanding of atomic processes. In addition, though the information was, as Ioffe claimed, always precise, Soviet scientists could not assume that it was. An immense amount of checking had to be done, since it was always possible that the Americans had intentionally released carefully constructed disinformation. And, in order to protect the secret of the stolen secrets, only the most senior scientists were aware that the designs had been pilfered. Most scientists went to their graves believing that their bomb was distinctively Russian." -
The Bomb: A Life, Page 128.
"Fuchs himself did not believe that his contribution was crucial. In his interrogation, he remarked that he was 'extremely surprised that the Russian explosion had taken place so soon'. In common with other [Western] analysts, he had assumed that the information he had given 'could not have been applied so quickly and that the Russians would not have the engineering, design, and construction facilities that would be needed to build a production plant in such a short time.'" -
The Bomb: A Life, Page 147
And from
here:
“Contrary to popular belief, there was no concrete "secret" behind the atomic bomb. The discovery of fission in 1938 meant that a nuclear chain reaction was possible and that the energy produced from this process could be used to produce a weapon of unusual force. Physicists like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard knew that it was only a matter of time before other countries were able to develop their own atomic weapons. The only secret behind the bombs lay in their specifications, material composition, and inner workings. Any government with the determination and the resources to develop an atomic weapon could do so within a matter of time.
When Klaus Fuchs's espionage was discovered in 1950, many believed that his actions had been essential to the Soviet bomb. Fuchs did pass along important information about the bomb's design and technical specifications, and the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy concluded that "Fuchs alone has influenced the safety of more people and accomplished greater damage than any other spy not only in the history of the United States but in the history of nations." However, there has been much debate surrounding the role of espionage in the Soviet Union's atomic program. Scholarship suggests that Soviet spying probably allowed the USSR to develop an atomic bomb six months to two years faster than they would have had there been no espionage.”
Long story short, in order to reverse-engineer foreign technology, one needs the technical-industrial capacity to build that technology.
Only if you completely cut out the rest of the quote, which was that they had low resources and had to put them all into the military to even make it effective.
And yet their civilian economy expanded in the same time. Which indicates that the Soviets had more resources then the US estimated.
Sure, but look at the types delivered; mass production of I-15s and 16s vs P-63s. As well, Western Allied aluminum exports.
I-15 production terminated in 1937 and I-16 production was winding down by 1941, ending completely in 1942, and hence was tiny. The gross majority of production from 1941-45 were modern models that were manufactured in quantities far exceeding any aircraft type shipped to under lend-lease. For example: per Russian Aviation and Air Power in the Twentieth Century, combined YaK-9, YaK-3, YaK-7, La-5, and La-7 production was 36,432. Total P-39 deliveries were 4,000 aircraft. 10%. In any case, your claim was that lend-lease aircraft made up 30%, the actual numbers provided show this to be false. While WAllied aluminum exports were certainly important during the bulk of the war, they were merely replacements of lost Soviet production capability. In early-1941 Soviet capacity was 120,000 tons a year. But the losses of production plants and bauxite mines to Barbarossa severely impacted production, cutting it in half. Lend-lease had to fill the gap, supplying a total of 250,000 tons over four years, which works out to 62,500 tons a year, although the preponderance was likely delivered in 1942-44. However, by 1944 those sites had been recaptured and production was re-established during the course of that year and a an additional Ural site that had been under construction started coming online in April. As a result, Soviet aluminum production during 1945 slightly outstripping it's pre-war capacity of 125,000 tons a year. Hence we can safely say that even with the termination of lend-lease, the USSR would still be able to maintain it's prior supply of aluminum to the aircraft and other industries.
To claim this is to be detached from all military reality; if you're on the end of a lopside ratio, you're going to eventually run out. There's a reason WWII was a war of production.
No, it's rather the opposite of that. If lopsided ratios are the measure of who wins, then the Germans won the air battle over D-Day. In air to air combat, the Luftwaffe claimed 24 kills on 6 June - 18 for JG 2 and 6 for JG 26 - with JG 2 losing no aircraft in aerial combat, and JG 26 lost only one in the air. JG 2 did lose another two planes in "operational accidents," which some historians think may be some fudging of combat damage, but that's still a good kill ratio. At least 11 of these kills can be matched with Allied records, with some more possibles. JG 2 ace Herbert Huppertz personally claimed five that day, four of which (two Typhoons, and two P-51) can be confirmed from Allied records. But anyone who claimed the Germans won the air battle at D-Day based on their superior kill ratio would be rightly denounced as an idiot.
Of course, if we want to talk Soviet pilots vs American pilot kill ratios… well, the accidental clashes near the end of the war tended to go well for the Soviets as often as they went for the Americans, but those are rather small scale. On the other hand, the post Cold War opening of archives has shown that in Korea the exchange rate between WW2-experienced Russian and American pilots was very close to 1:1, with the Russians actually coming out on top of a number of large engagements that USAF history holds the Americans shot down more. This is hardly surprising. Everyone overclaims, with the US doing so the order of 10:1. Even the more rigorous Russian system resulted in overclaiming on the order of 5 or 4:1 from their pilots. Neither sides air force is in much hurry to change the official histories, so we've had to rely more on independent academics for this sort of stuff.
http://acepilots.com/korea_aces.html#top
http://acepilots.com/russian/rus_aces.html
No, they don't need to make said choices because they massively outnumber the Soviets in the air and the Soviets are lacking in fuel; they can handily do both.
The numbers are rather near-equal, if not favorable to the Soviets, and your claims about fuel availability are under increasingly shakey grounds the more I look into acquisition of capacity from Eastern Europe (the latter of which I can't fail to notice you haven't been able to address at all, although I did edit it in a few hours later so maybe you missed it?)
