The Japanese army and the Soviet Siberian divisions

Deleted member 1487

The Siberian Rifle Divisions did not make a win/lose difference in the fall of 1941. They did perform better than the average Soviet Rifle Division from the West, yes, but that was not solely due to experience and the presence of competente cadres; they also came with much less reduced assets, and sometimes with assets attached in excess of their Shtat.
They did give the Germans a bloody nose when the time came, more in the Soviet winter counteroffensive than in stopping the Germans before that; even though I always like how the 32nd Rifle Division, a Siberian one, stopped the 40. Panzer Korps for several days at Borodino. Yeah, eventually the 10. Panzerdivision and SS Das Reich took the field - with the SS Das Reich, which had started the battle nearly at full strength and with a full head of steam, having to disband one of its three-battalion regiments to keep the other two in the field. At reduced strength. The Germans also lost some 100 tanks. Get it: a Soviet Rifle Division - at this time, seldom more than a speed bump for a team of two panzer+motorized infantry German ones - reduces the 40. Panzer Korps to combat-unworthyness. Naturally, as mentioned above, this one division had valuable attachments on top of its official Shtat, instead of being a skeleton of it.
Um....the SS division Reich fought several Soviet units at the Mozhiask defensive line that comprised the 5th Army and they were constrained by mud. Neither was it at full strength at the start of operation Typhoon, as it has received few reinforcements since the start of Barbarossa, while the 32nd Rifle division was at full strength in prepared defensive positions along with tank support, which the SS division lacked until days into the battle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_SS_Panzer_Division_Das_Reich#Operational_history
By the time Das Reich took part in the Battle of Moscow, it had lost 60 percent of its combat strength.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5th_Red_Banner_Army#Moscow
The 5th Army was re-raised for the second time in October 1941, under the command of Dmitri Lelyushenko, as part of the Soviet Western Front. Recent sources give the actual re-raising date as 11 October 1941.[9] It included two rifle divisions and three tank brigades.[10]

From Robert Forcyzk's "Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-42" pp.136-37
On the morning of 9 October, the SS-Regiment Deutschland fought its way into
Gzhatsk, only 175km west of Moscow, and secured the town by 1230 hours. Jubilant at
this victory, Hausser sent his Kradschützen-Abteilung, followed by the SS-Regiment Der
Führer to probe further down the highway toward Mozhaisk. Druzhinina had established a
blocking position 10km east of Gzhatsk, with his tank concealed in ambush near the
village of Budayevo.

120 At 1630 hours, Druzhinina’s tankers spotted the approaching
Waffen-SS vanguard, led by motorcycles and armoured cars. The Waffen-SS troops were
stunned when more than fifty Soviet tanks opened fire on them, some at point-blank
range. Lacking the ability to defeat T-34s, the Waffen-SS troops withdrew, after suffering
400 casualties. Hausser immediately requested that Stumme’s XXXX Armeekorps (mot.)
send him armoured support to counter the enemy tanks. Further south, Troitsky’s 17th
Tank Brigade counterattacked the lead elements of Kuntzen’s corps northeast of Yukhnov.
Major Nikolai Y. Klypin, who had won the HSU as a tanker in the Russo-Finnish War, led
a vicious counterattack with two companies of T-34 that ripped apart Oberst Horst von
Wolff’s Infanterie-Regiment 478. Wolf had been moving up to reinforce Jahn’s
3.Infanterie-Division (mot.), but his handful of 3.7cm Pak guns were completely useless
against Klypin’s T-34s. Oberst Wolff, one of the few German officers who had won both
the Pour le Mérite in the First World War and the Ritterkreuz in the Second World War,
was killed in action and his regiment routed. After days of disaster, Soviet tankers had
finally gained some measure of success.

The German pursuit had been halted and the Stavka tried to make good use of this time.
Polkovnik Sergey A. Kalihovich’s 19th Tank Brigade arrived by rail in Mozhaisk and was
sent to reinforce Druzhinina’s brigade. More important, the first elements of the 32nd
Rifle Division began unloading at Mozhaisk on 10 October; this was a well-trained, full-
strength unit from Siberia, with 15,000 troops and a full complement of artillery. Also on
this day Zhukov was finally put in overall command of the Western Front (with remnants
of the Reserve Front included), with Konev as his deputy. The Germans had nearly
crushed the Vyazma kessel by this point and the 10.Panzer-Division sent Kampfgruppe
von Hauenschild (Pz.Regt 7 and SR 86) to reinforce Hausser’s advance toward Mozhaisk.
Kuntzen directed the 19 and 20.Panzer-Divisionen to Yukhnov, but the vehicles of both
divisions were in such poor condition that they could only advance at a crawl along the
muddy roads. Command lethargy was also a factor developing among the German mid-
level leaders as illness and exhaustion robbed commanders of their normal aggressiveness.

German inactivity on this day was equivalent to another Soviet tactical victory.

The reality was that Soviet defenders outnumbered and outgunned the German forces attacking along the main highway to Moscow in the period you mention and the 32nd Rifle Division showed up at full strength to back up defenders already in place in defensive positions, while mud constricted the German attack to the roads in pre-sighted kill grounds, preventing any flanking efforts. Though the T-34 is mythologized, in many cases by the Germans to explain their failures in 1941, it did play a major role in defeating the advance on Moscow in October, as the Germans lacked sufficient weapons powerful enough to destroy or disable it, especially when used en masse and from defensive positions.

The role of the 32nd division was to give the defensive line critical reinforcement from a pre-war, full strength, fully trained division (an extreme rarity by October 1941...on both sides), just as the Germans were starting to bring sufficient forces to bear to actually be able to match the Soviet 5th army's defensive power.
 

Deleted member 1487

Yes guys, it's the Russian weather that defeated the Nazis, as we all know.
Funny how you ignored the entirety of my post except for 1 word, especially as I quoted an example of where the Soviets defeated the Germans in tactical combat.
 
It certainly helped. Weather does affect the battlefield, after all.

Sure! But the Soviets were also counterattacking the Germans in October 1941, and those counterattacks are described as defeated by the clever Germans, no mention of mud is made by a certain sort of people interested in this theater of war.
Then move forward to the following winter, when the Germans no longer could claim that they did not know what a winter in Russia would entail. The Soviets do their thing and surround Stalingrad, destroying Axis armies by the dozen as they go. The Germans also launch a winter offensive of their own, Wintergewitter, and - you'll find again the usual complaints about how cold the place was.

And so on. Yes, weather affects the battlefield - for both sides, but you'll often read about it being touted as an excuse for one side only.
 

Deleted member 1487

Sure! But the Soviets were also counterattacking the Germans in October 1941, and those counterattacks are described as defeated by the clever Germans, no mention of mud is made by a certain sort of people interested in this theater of war.
November 1941 and mud was a major factor:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Moscow#Wearing_down
Although 100,000 additional Soviet soldiers had reinforced Klin and Tula, where renewed German offensives were expected, Soviet defenses remained relatively thin. Nevertheless, Stalin ordered several preemptive counteroffensives against German lines. These were launched despite protests from Zhukov, who pointed out the complete lack of reserves.[51] The Wehrmacht repelled most of these counteroffensives, which squandered Soviet forces that could have been used for Moscow's defense.
Reading David Stahel's Battle of Moscow, mud is a massive factor in the fighting...for both sides. It was much harder on the attacker, as they had to move through the mud more to get to where they wanted to go, which heavily helped the Germans during the Soviet attacks in the muddy period. In April mud again shut down the Soviet winter offensives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1942
  • Action on the Eastern Front entered a lull as the terrain reverted to spring mud.[19]
Davidson, Edward; Manning, Dale (1999). Chronology of World War Two. London: Cassell & Co. p. 106. ISBN 0-304-35309-4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasputitsa
Wartime effects
Rasputitsa seasons of Russia are well known as a great defensive advantage in wartime.[2][3] Common nicknames in such context are General Mud or Marshal Mud. During the French invasion of Russia in 1812, Napoleon found the mud to be a great hindrance.[2][3] During the Second World War, the month-long muddy period slowed down the German advance during the Battle of Moscow, and may have helped save the Soviet capital.[4]
Bundesarchiv_Bild_101I-289-1091-26%2C_Russland%2C_Pferdegespann_im_Schlamm.jpg

Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1981-149-34A%2C_Russland%2C_Herausziehen_eines_Autos.jpg

Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-B15500%2C_Russland%2C_Dorf_vor_Moskau.jpg
 
The Soviets had 5:1 superiority at the point of attack, selected a weak Japanese divisions isolated from it's command/support/supply, was strung out, and applied their full force and had air superiority...and lost substantially more men than the Japanese. @BobTheBarbarian can talk about the details.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Khalkhin_Gol

The Japanese of 1941 were also vastly different than the Japanese of 1939 - their numbers in-theater had doubled and their equipment loadout more than tripled as the Kwantung Army was raised to a war readiness stance. Many of the logistical weaknesses encountered during that time were either mollified or circumvented thanks to the influx of trucks and horses as well as the adoption of an OPLAN focusing more on the region between the Manchurian border and the Pacific Ocean (where the rail network was well developed and the distances involved were with a few exceptions mostly in the 200 to 300 mile range) as opposed to the Trans-Baikal direction. Where that was concerned, the Japanese would have been content to only take a small amount of territory and then simply hold the far side of the Great Khingan range.

Had Japan pressed ahead with its war plan against the USSR in 1941, it is almost certain that the Soviets would have been defeated in that theater. Their position was simply too precarious: they had no strategic mobility, they were dependent on a single lifeline, promised reinforcements from the hinterland were essentially nil, and there were about 350,000 to 400,000 Red Army men and another 100,000 or so NKVD and Naval personnel- the heart of their defensive effort- just begging to be encircled in Primorye. Had this invasion taken place, it is uncertain whether or not the USSR itself would have survived: Alvin D Coox, Stuart Goldman, and Soviet General Kazakovtsev (Far East Front operations chief at the time) certainly thought not, but I personally have my doubts since the Soviets still possessed a considerable amount of industry around Moscow and the Urals, and still would have had a number of L-L channels available (Murmansk and Persia in particular come to mind).

On the other hand, if Japan embarked on an adventure in Siberia it would have little options for seizing the Southern Resource Area with the majority of its army tied down in China and Russia; its only options in that case would be to either bend to whatever demands the US placed on it or risk creating excessive strain on its military efforts in one of those two former places.
 
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