Operation Bagration in numerical equality

Definitivo

Banned
Suppose the USSR in previous war years had suffered greater demographic losses and by mid-1944 had much less manpower.

In this scenario, the USSR would launch Operation Bagration with a strategic equality in terms of manpower, what would have happened?
 
The USSR's pool of military age men somehow been reduced to parity with Germany.
O_O

If there still is a USSR at this point in the TL, then there won't be for long.

edit: like... if Stalin mounts an offencive it's going to be a sequel to the Kerensky Offensive.
 
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mial42

Gone Fishin'
The USSR wouldn't be launching Bagration or anything like it in a scenario where they get clobbered that badly. It'd take a miracle for them to even survive if they took losses on that scale.
 
What is the POD exactly? Considering lack of elaboration of what happened to make things this way, this belongs in ASB. Such huge demographic changes would greatly change the entire strategy, structure and nature of the armed forces that it's a stretch we'd see the exact same situation as in Bagration but with less men.
 
Suppose the USSR in previous war years had suffered greater demographic losses and by mid-1944 had much less manpower.

In this scenario, the USSR would launch Operation Bagration with a strategic equality in terms of manpower, what would have happened?

The USSR's pool of military age men somehow been reduced to parity with Germany.

Given your talking about dropping the soviet population to less than 50% of it's OTL figure to get this balance (and that's including giving Germany the entire German Reich as of 1939). So if I'm reading your post right you are suggesting that the USSR would have started Barbarossa at OTL numbers and then that loss of numbers would have occurred 1941- 44. So you are talking about over 100m* being killed in three years?! How did this happen, I think that if the Germans had the ability or opportunity to kill over 100m Russians than they already possess some capability beyond that of OTL, that is itself a winning change!

However to answer the question in it's narrowest context I can't see the USSR being able to fight or produce the tools to fight having lost over half its population in 3 years.


But again looking at the progression of the war on the eastern front if the Germans inflict this vastly large number of casualties it's unlikely the war in the east gets as far as 1944!




*FWIW I'm using 196m for the USSR and 87m for the German Reich, stats vary but not really by that much in these terms
 
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Bagration was planned that way because they had local superiority. In conditions of parity they would have had to plan a completely different operation.
Since the basis of offensive deep operations is to overwheelm the adversary in its entire depth, it's not easy to imagine something even close to Bagration being planned in those conditions.
it would be possible to plan something like desert storm if the soviets had a large qualitative advantage, but with parity in numbers and quality large scale offensives tend to become massive attritional WW1 style affairs, umless one side totally fucks up its planning (Like the allies did in France in 1940, in whic case you can argue that command is a part of quality and therefore the quality was not equal)
 
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Cuirassier

Banned
Without lopsided strengths in OTL there wouldn't have been an Operation Bagration. Germans had a marginal number of armoured forces to cover the entire front (especially once OVERLORD sucked armooured formations away).
 
Under this premise there would be no Bagration because the USSR would have fallen in 1941.

Anyway and trying to find a plausible excuse it occurs to me that a Japanese invasion could cause the Red Army to have to divide forces to send to the Far East, or else there is no loan and lease and the USSR would not have so many trucks or fuel for move your forces.
 
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