This is not evidenced in their relative performance. The German divisions mobilized in 1940/41 performed just as well when committed to combat as the divisions mobilized in 1934-1940 and only saw decline from 1942 onwards as the German training system couldn't handle a campaign of constant attrition. It is true that the German formations which were freshly mobilized after Barbarossa's start saw quality impacts, but this does not seem to have afflicted those mobilized between the fall of France and the start of Barbarossa. Soviet rifle divisions performed much better in '43-'45 then they had in '41 and '42, even if they never matched their mechanized counterparts, despite the hasty mobilization and heavy losses.
Can you provide a source on that? If anything it was the strategic situation and relative state of their opponents which drove field performance the way you're framing things. Soviet improved performance in 1943 is really not saying that much given performance quality in 1941-42.
The Germans operated on a wave system, so those mobilized in 1941 were occupation/security divisions that were not committed to front line combat and mostly used outside of the USSR:
https://www.axishistory.com/books/145-germany-heer/heer-unsorted/3422-the-german-mobilization-1941
Plus of those raised in 1940 most were the same, that is occupation/static/security units, with several others being formed from parts of existing divisions. I can only find a handful that were freshly raised in 1940:
https://www.axishistory.com/books/145-germany-heer/heer-unsorted/3421-the-german-mobilization-1940
Downsizing had already occurred during the latter part of 1941, but resulted in no significant improvement in combat performance. Soviet combat performance doesn't really pick up until well into 1942, long after any results from the downsizing should have become apparent. It also fails to explain the continued improvements in 1943/44.
Downsizing alone isn't going to fix everything wrong in 1941, but it was step in the right direction. Strategic situation matters quite a bit and the 'improved' performance seems more like a function of the strategic/operational situation, access to training, and what support was available. Improvements in 1943-44 is more a function of how many casualties they were suffering going down and more and more men surviving from month to month. Oh and LL kicking into high gear and the Wallies getting more into ground combat, plus the Luftwaffe moving mostly to the western fronts.
They have the machine tooling and are very much ready to put these things into production, as they shortly did. Improvements to the technology will come even faster with concrete battle performance and knowledge of what works and what doesn't on hand.
How could they have the machine tools when the T-34 didn't even exist as a prototype in 1939??? Or the aircraft for that matter. For instance the MiG-1 prototype didn't even enter flight testing until April 1940. Same for the LaGG-3. The YaK-1 prototype entered flight testing in January 1940. The IL-2 prototype had just entered flight testing in October 1939 and took until 1941 to enter production. Basically none of the modern types of weapon systems that were just showing up in 1941 were even starting testing, so there is no way the machine tooling for these could even exist in 1939 or even 1940. Rushing their testing will only result in a worse design/production quality problems than IOTL 1941, which saw half of Soviet aircraft on hand lost in accidents in 6 months.
The T-34 gave the Germans serious trouble in 1941, despite the Soviets poor crew training and organization hampering them, something the Soviets noticed and is the reason they focused on the design. Further combat allowed them to refine it and that would be the case IATL.
That is likely exaggerated to make up for German failures in 1941, as it didn't stop the Germans from fighting all the way to the gates of Moscow despite being outclassed in AFV quality. Plus they weren't really available as a majority of Soviet AFVs until the Moscow campaign. But that doesn't matter ITTL, as the T-34 didn't even exist in 1939 except on paper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34#Origins
The first prototype wasn't built until 1940 and as it was the army was demanding more existing models than a 'newfangled' design. IOTL it took until September 1940 to be the first production T-34, which was a pretty garbage version of the design, with major upgrades necessary to even get to the still rather flawed 1941 model. They could of course rush the flawed version into production, which is probably if anything a boon to the Germans rather than the Soviets. Of course IMHO the German military would probably try and coup Hitler before 1941 to get out of the two front war, as ITTL Hitler doesn't have the support he got from the success in France and through 1940 and is much more politically vulnerable from getting Germany into a two front war that was pretty unpopular in 1939 when the invasion of Poland was first declared.
Quibbling over when and how new Soviet equipment gets into production is effectively meaningless in the wider strategic sense given that Germany is screwed in a two front war without having defeated France first.
The modern aircraft will probably arrive in larger quantities come 1940/41 then they did OTL, with Soviet industry mobilized and rationalized to a much greater degree for war. The same mobilization and rationalization is also liable to inspire the same sort of improvements in Soviet aircraft technology, as it did OTL in 1941-45. More importantly though, the Soviets will sort out their organization and training that much more rapidly, which matters even more then what plane their flying. At the same time, without the loot from Western Europe, German production will be crashing during the latter part of 1940, so it's going to be going into 1941 without much of the modern gear it enjoyed OTL.
You mean not at all in 1940 and only a trickle in 1941? Are you aware of the accident rates in peace time and early war time for the Soviet aircraft? They lost nearly as many aircraft in combat as they did to accidents in the 6 months of Barbarossa IOTL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equipment_losses_in_World_War_II
Grigori F. Krivosheev states: "A high percentage of combat aircraft were lost in relation to the number available on 22 June 1941: 442% (total losses) or 216% (combat losses).
In the air force over a half of losses were non-combat losses."[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_...ion_Barbarossa#Training,_equipment_and_purges
Only 37
Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-1 and 201 MiG-3s were operational on 22 June, and only four pilots had been trained to fly them.
[85] The attempt to familiarise pilots with these types resulted in the loss of 141 pilots killed and 138 aircraft written off in accidents in the first quarter of 1941 alone.
[66]
Soviet training left much to be desired. Stalin's purges had deprived the VVS of its senior and best commanders. It heralded a debilitating decline in military effectiveness. In the event of the
Winter War and the German victory in the
French Campaign, the Soviet leadership panicked and Stalin ordered a hasty overhaul of the armed forces. Order 0362, 22 December 1940, of the People's Commissar Defence ordered the accelerated training program for pilots which meant the cutting of training time. The program had already been cut owing to an earlier defence order, 008, dated 14 March 1940. It put an end to the flight training for volunteers, and instituted mass drafts. In February 1941, pilot training was cut further leading to a disastrous drop in the quality of pilot training prior to
Barbarossa.
[51]
The officer corps was decimated in the
Great Purge and operational level effectiveness suffered. The 6,000 officers lost and then the subsequent massive expansion schemes, which increased the number of personnel from 1.5 million in 1938 to five million in 1941 flooded the VVS with inexperienced personnel and the infrastructure struggled to cope. It still left the VVS short of 60,000 qualified officers in 1941. Despite the expansion of flight schools from 12 to 83 from 1937 to June 1941, the schools lacked half their flight instructors and half of their allotted fuel supplies. Combined with these events, training was shortened a total of seven times in 1939-1940. The attrition and loss of experienced pilots in
Barbarossa encouraged a culture of rapid promotion to positions beyond some pilots' level of competence. It created severe operational difficulties for the VVS.
[83][84]
Which ignores that the Soviets managed to go for modernization OTL without production interruption despite something far more disruptive then any sort of production switch (namely, losing large portions of their industrial base to a German invasion). They focused on what worked. The T-34 and KV-series, for all their flaws, worked in a way their older (and some other modern ones, like the T-50, whose production was duly canned) designs did not. The Soviets observed this and focused their production on them. When the Soviets see that their current equipment isn't cutting it, their going to introduce their prototypes and when they see those do better, they'll focus on getting those out en-masse.
In peacetime. During wartime they tweeked existing designs mostly and were very careful about disrupting production. In 1941 they were luckily already producing the T-34 instead of T-26s, making all their latest aircraft and had phased out the old models, and had their latest small arms in production. In 1939 none of those new designs are even in production or even in prototype testing.
Incorrect. It showed the reforms hadn’t had time to take before they had to start from scratch again. There was no instantaneous switch that led to the Red Army to suddenly reach it's late-1942, it was a progressive thing that was halting and repeatedly interrupted, with each disaster setting it back as trained men and combat experience was lost en-masse and had to be replaced, forcing the next batch of forces to be rushed to the front before they could fully complete their training. Not until the Germans were finally halted in the Caucasus in late-summer 1942 were the Soviets able to enjoy a static front for long enough to fully finish training their forces. The Soviets will indeed suffer heavy losses in the opening month or two, but the inability of the Germans to exploit the disaster to the degree they did in Barbarossa would quickly see the front go static and leave the Soviets with much more resources and time to focus on fixing their issues rather then constantly be distracted by the struggle to simply survive.
'fully finish training' in 1942 is a very abbreviated training cycle by any measure, especially Soviet pre-war training. For any service even in 1944 training wasn't close to pre-war standards due to casualty rates. Things certainly improved, but the scale of losses simply meant it wasn't possible. Arguably the Soviets could do that much more easily ITTL without being invaded, but that is going to depend on the tempo of combat and equipment losses. In 1939-40 likely they are just going to mobilize reserves and throw them into combat per their reserve mobilization model and perhaps focus on training for larger segements of reserves to get them ready for combat...but I do wonder what the situation is going to be in the East with the Japanese given that the Khalkin Gol situation had just ended and the IJA is still looking for revenge and the Soviets have demonstrated that their agreements aren't worth the paper they're printed on, given they are violating the brand new Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact within weeks of signing it. The Soviets might find themselves in a two front war as of late 1939 and unable to spend time in training cycles or strip out the Far East for men and equipment to make good losses in the West. Plus Stalin might well order new offensives in the West to bring a rapid decision, including expanding the war into Romania so as to cut Germany off from oil, which will bring Italy into the war as well. The conflict has the potential to snowball and begin a rapid drain on Soviet resources very quickly far beyond just the situation in Poland.
Once again, you show no grasp of relative scale. The number of officers your own quote provides as being arrested in the 1941 is tiny compared to the arrests during the Great Purge. The trend of arrests was solidly downward and would terminate by the end of the year despite the war and all the associated catastrophes. The arrests stopped even before then. The only people arrested in connection with any disasters were those which occurred at the very beginning of the war. According to you, this should have been followed by a even larger onslaught of arrests and executions in response to the disasters at Smolensk-Kiev, then Typhoon, then Rzhev, then 2nd Kharkov, with Stalin only relenting when the Germans are at the gates of Stalingrad... but that didn't happen.
Sure, the 1941 Purges weren't as bad as the situation in the Great Purge, but it demonstrates Stalin's attitudes toward punishing failure even when in a desperate situation. The desperation of the situation in 1941-42 finally tapered the process off, but it was still ongoing and hitting the armaments industry and Soviet command structure rather viciously; combat was purging failed commanders more quickly though, so it is just as possible Stalin would have gone even harder, but since the Germans were doing the killing before the NKVD could Stalin didn't have the chance to purge as much as he might have. By the time the situation at Stalingrad happened Stalin didn't have any more options to purge, so had to suck it up and deal with what he had rather than continuing with the purges.
The '41 purges hardly show it, as I already pointed out above, nor does it disprove that rehabilitation of previous Soviet officers was already underway. You can only point to a few hundred purged, but Rokossovsky was one among thousands who were rehabilitated in 1940, as Glantz had detailed. Hell, Rokossovsky was rehabilitated in March of 1940. At that point, not only had the Soviet Union not gone to war yet, the Germans hadn't even knocked out France so Stalin wasn't even worried about the possibility of war with the Germans. And yet, already he was releasing people! And yes, while there will still be a gap, it would be made good in time as combat experience forces reform on the Soviets, as happened IOTL. Initial Soviet losses will probably be almost as heavy as in June/July 1941 OTL, but the inability of the Germans to exploit means they will quickly taper off to a much lesser level then that of August-December 1941. With the urgency of wartime mobilization, untouched industrial resources, and a static front providing a steady intake of experience without forcing continuous disruption of the training schedules, the reform of the Red Army will probably be accelerated such that the Red Army would be in fighting shape by the summer of 1940 (if starting in autumn 1939) or the winter of 1940/41 (if starting in spring 1940).
Rokossovsky was rehabilitated in March to help with the Winter War, because of the disaster that it had become. Can you quote Glantz about the people rehabbed in 1940?
In terms of the 1940-42 purges it hit the air force and armaments industry, as the army had largely be hit the hardest already in the Great Purge, so their further purging mostly hit after the war started. As to the loss rates for the Soviets in this war, a lot will depend on how Stalin conducts things; it is likely they invade Romania too to cut off German oil, which brings in Italy. Japan is another possibility too in this scenario, as they had just ended their border conflict, but now Germany is involved and Stalin just violated his agreement with them, which invalidates their agreement with the Japanese. So the Soviets might well find themselves fighting on multiple fronts by the end of 1939 and little breathing room to focus on expansion as they did IOTL in 1940-41. Given the problems with training and expanding the forces in 1940-41 despite a desperate rush to do so, the Soviets are probably not going to handle that particularly well initially; it's going to take time to fix a flawed system, as it did IOTL in 1941-42. Certainly the Soviets had a lot of advantages compared to OTL 1941-42 without being directly invaded, but they also have potentially multiple fronts and enemies to face, with no real allies to help supply them externally. The Allies aren't going to help the Soviets, just watch them and the Axis fight it out while they blockade the Germans and potentially work towards getting a coup against the Nazis going. Daladier and Chamberlain aren't what you'd call fans of Stalin. Likely by the time the Soviets get their act together some deal is worked out to end the conflict, as Stalin isn't really interested in a long draining war with Germany and potentially Italy and Japan as the Allies sit back and watch, while Hitler is likely not in a strong political position at home given the two front war and the entire blame for getting Germany into a no-win situation.