Trado you meanYou also could try the Dutch approch. They had enough trucks for peace time and had stored Tardo units for the requisitioned civilian trucks.
the Tardo units changed a 4x2 truck in an 6x4 truck.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trado
Trado you meanYou also could try the Dutch approch. They had enough trucks for peace time and had stored Tardo units for the requisitioned civilian trucks.
the Tardo units changed a 4x2 truck in an 6x4 truck.
I've also seen/heard/read that model T's are exhausting to drive by our standards and were bastards to drive.
as is seen here in an amusing way.
This also drove the unit cost up. In terms of the T, yes it could move on crap roads - but only with a driver in it, not full of passengers or cargo
And again, no it wasn't. Motor transportation was more expensive and required a longer logistics train, all the way to Texas and Saudi Arabia in fact. The British could do so because they could afford to and because they had the access to the logistics, as could the United States and later the Soviet Union - on the backs of American supplied Lend Lease vehicles. Germany could not; they simply did not have the industrial capacity to manufacture enough trucks to fully motorise their army, nor did they have the petroleum to supply them with, nor could they have afforded to in any respect.
That is an idiotic argument to make. The British could afford to equip their army steadily, only a small section of it was actually fighting between 1940 and 1944; British and American manufacturing was able to produce the required vehicles, and Britain, despite Lend Lease, racked up a debt that took decades to pay off.
And again,
That is an idiotic argument to make. The British could afford to equip their army steadily, only a small section of it was actually fighting between 1940 and 1944; British and American manufacturing was able to produce the required vehicles, and Britain, despite Lend Lease, racked up a debt that took decades to pay off.
My father was a young soldier in the 1930s. His training to become a driver was being shown the controls, driving the lorry around a field once and coming to a halt. He was then signed off as a driver. Mind you this was a time before civilian driving tests.there were plenty of recruits who already knew how to drive a motor vehicle.
I'm not sure the usual 'over-engineered' claim really applied to German automobiles as they used a GM design with Opel (subsidiary of GM) that was able to use US Army spare parts and be repaired and operated by the US in France in 1944 because the designs were so similar. German designs like the Kubelwagen were extremely simple and rugged, and based off the 'Beetle' civilian version engineered to be easily maintained by the average person (it was supposed to be a German model T for the 1930s):I had read once that one of the main issues with European motorized divisions was the inability of the normal soldier to maintenance and repair breakdowns. I believe it was something like only 5% of the average soldiers (not in the maintenance area) had any idea how to work on engines or trucks in general. Plus German designs tended to be over engineered and difficult to work on by the average layman. Conversely in the American Army 65 to 75% of it's soldiers could do normal maintenance of the vehicles it was operating. Plus the engineering was typically simple and easily learned by the operator. It was one of the USA's greatest "hidden" weapons was when driving into battle the majority of the unit arrived ready to fight. As opposed to a German division that say had to move 50 miles into a battle you would see 15 to 25% of it's vehicles strung out waiting for a repair group.
(snip)
Based on the above I don't understand why it took so long to mechanise the field brigades. 13 out of 23 were still on a horsed basis in the 1936-37 Estimates and weren't mechanised until 1937-38. By contrast all the medium and heavy artillery brigades were mechanised by 1927-28.
I don't know, but I suspect that the "old school" had very little to do with it. Mechanisation was the great project of the interwar British Army. IRRC the British Army was able to move a whole infantry division with Mechanical Transport in about 1930 and IIRC it was the first army in the world to do so.How much might be the "old school" outlook of senior commanders and senior civilian administration?
Lower still was the equipment of the field forces. The Army did not occupy a place in the traditional concepts of British power as important as that of the Navy and did not figure as prominently in the plans of Imperial defence. Nor could it match the R.A.F. in its ability to impress the public and overawe the statesmen by its terrible and yet undisclosed potentialities for destruction. The field forces were therefore bound to be the main victims of the financial stringency. The annual allocation for the purchase and maintenance of army weapons and war-stores in the decade between 1923 and 1933 seldom exceeded £2.5 millions and averaged about £2 millions, or slightly less than nine percent of the small sums spent on armaments in an average year.
The effects of the stringency were all but crippling. The official doctrine of the War Office in the late twenties and the early thirties was that of a highly-equipped small and mobile professional army. Small it indeed was—its regular nucleus in the twenties was only four divisions strong. To some extent it was also becoming mobile, for under the current scheme of mechanisation its entire transport, cavalry and artillery, was due to be motorised. But highly equipped it certainly was not.
Mechanisation was the largest and the best-advertised of the Army's projects of modernisation, but in fact throughout the twenties and early thirties it was not carried beyond a merely experimental stage. The Royal Army Service Corps alone was completely mechanised by 1930. By 1929 some brigades of the Royal Artillery were equipped with tracked tractors, several Royal Engineer and Signal units were mechanised, and a few cavalry units had their first-line transport converted to lorries. Between 1930 and 1934 the artillery, the engineer and signal and R.A.S.C units of the Territorials were also supplied with lorries. It was not, however, until 1934 that the infantry began to be mechanised, and it was not until 1939 that the Regular Army obtained its peacetime complement of wheeled vehicles and as much as one-half of its complement of tracked vehicles, quite apart from tanks. Before 1934 the process appeared more impressive in lists of units than in terms of actual equipment ordered and supplied. The total number of all wheeled motor vehicles ordered in the ten years from 1923 to 1932 was little more than 5,000, or about 500 per annum. Of this six-wheeled lorries, the main element of mechanised equipment, formed somewhat less than half.
The biggest problem was probably finances. The Great Depression gutted British military funding through the 1930s and it was only after rearmament was prioritized around 1936-38 to various degrees did they finally have the funding to make it happen.How much might be the "old school" outlook of senior commanders and senior civilian administration?
I'm not sure the usual 'over-engineered' claim really applied to German automobiles as they used a GM design with Opel (subsidiary of GM) that was able to use US Army spare parts and be repaired and operated by the US in France in 1944 because the designs were so similar. German designs like the Kubelwagen were extremely simple and rugged, and based off the 'Beetle' civilian version engineered to be easily maintained by the average person (it was supposed to be a German model T for the 1930s):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_Kübelwagen
The Daimler L3000 used a simple V4 Diesel engine and proved even more rugged than the GM based Opel trucks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes-Benz_L3000
I think the 'over-engineered' idea comes from a few high end tank designs in WW2 (Tiger, Elefant, and Panther) and post-war German cars in the luxury class Mercedes and BMW designs. Its ironic though that no one mentions how similar English made cars had similar design/maintenance issues in the 1960s like Jaguar.
But yes German society had the least automotively experienced population of any 'western' society in the lead up to WW2 due to the economic situation in the 1920s-30s meaning that fewer people could afford automobiles, while the US had the most car ownership of any society on earth, so most people had some experience driving or doing simple maintenance. Still I think the German army did better than 5% of soldiers having automotive knowledge, as car ownership in Germany was significantly more than 5% of the population, but perhaps the most knowledgable soldiers were siphoned off for the technical branches and services like the navy and Luftwaffe.
Of course when you say the Germans had maybe up to a quarter of their vehicles broken down on the march you need to consider when and the situation, in 1938 there was virtually no time to prepare for an operation when orders came down to move on Austria, so there was a lot of vehicles that broke down due to little preparation for operations, while in France in 1940 I don't recall ever reading anything close to even 15% were broken down due to maintenance issues. Barbarossa probably ran into 25% or more due to the unique situation of the mixture of civilian and foreign booty automobiles used for the invasion, the conditions, and the lack of proper air filters for the dusty unpaved roads. In that situation even the US and UK would have massive breakdowns. AFAIK the 1942 campaign had much fewer breakdowns as a result of honing down to fewer models and more military/4x4 models, but then the huge advance in that year meant wear and tear was going to knock out any vehicle eventually. I do not think that any Allied advance even in 1944 traveled so far, yet the the US and USSR had trouble with their logistics after their big advances in France and Belarus in that year.
In monetary terms mechanical transport was cheaper than horse transport, at least for the Royal Artillery between the World Wars.
According to the 1925-26 Army Estimates a HT Field Brigade with 521 men cost £113,600 a year, compared to a £99,500 for MT Field Brigade with 417 men. Both types of brigade had 16 guns, that is four 4.5" howitzers and twelve 18pdr guns.
By 1937-38 a HT Field Brigade had 513 men and 261 horses to operate 16 artillery pieces at an annual cost of £95,100. Meanwhile a MT Field Brigade needed 398 men and 31 horses to operate 16 artillery pieces at an annual cost of £80,000.
The 1938 Anschluss occupation was one of the worst run operations in Germany military history to that point, so they learned a LOT of lessons that they applied to Poland in 1939 and France in 1940. They didn't make those same mistakes if they could avoid it.You are absolutely correct in that I pulled the breakdown number from the 1938 march into Austria. I (maybe incorrectly) assumed that situation would not have improved much from the standpoint of the fighting vehicles. You are also right in that the trucks were relatively simple so many Germans learned on the job and that side of it probably improved as the war went on.
On the American side weren't most of the engines used gasoline? I don't recall the US using many diesel engines, but I really don't know.
I was referring to when I said the US troops repaired and used German trucks, they were repairing the Opel Blitz's as they were gasoline based and effectively the same trucks the US was using (or at least those parts worked in the German trucks):