what if Germany could of repalced its horse drawn equpmet with trucks

I doubt they would be able to sustain a fully mechanized army with the resources they had, especially with the massive lack of oil available.

But what would have the benefits been if they where able to maintain a fully mechanized army? I imagine it would greatly improve the logistical situation on the Eastern front and provide more supplies etc. But I read that there was a massive amount of well bred horses in Eastern Europe that would be useful to the Wehrmacht, and they man where better trained to care for horses. Also they proved useful in extreme weather conditions encountered on the Eastern front which general trucks could not maneuver.
 
Horses are extremely fragile animals. They get sick; they get scared; they need as much care as a human (if not more); if they get shot they're toast. If a truck gets shot at, as long as it doesn't hit the driver or some vital part, it'll keep running. And even if a running part gets damaged, one can always swap it out. Try swapping out a damaged kidney on a horse.
Also, horses didn't really fare that much better than vehicles in crap conditions; they got bogged down just as easily in mud (easier than tanks, actually, due to the small contact area), and they skidded just as easily on icy roads.
I'm also curious as to why the Germans didn't opt for diesel instead of petrol. Much less volatile (less chance of ignition in case of fuel tank rupture), better economy. I remember reading some speculations about engines' weight and size making them unsuitable for the tanks first envisioned by the Germans (and the higher amount of noise compared to petrol ones), but nothing really clear.
 
Horses are extremely fragile animals. They get sick; they get scared; they need as much care as a human (if not more); if they get shot they're toast. If a truck gets shot at, as long as it doesn't hit the driver or some vital part, it'll keep running. And even if a running part gets damaged, one can always swap it out. Try swapping out a damaged kidney on a horse.
Also, horses didn't really fare that much better than vehicles in crap conditions; they got bogged down just as easily in mud (easier than tanks, actually, due to the small contact area), and they skidded just as easily on icy roads.
I'm also curious as to why the Germans didn't opt for diesel instead of petrol. Much less volatile (less chance of ignition in case of fuel tank rupture), better economy. I remember reading some speculations about engines' weight and size making them unsuitable for the tanks first envisioned by the Germans (and the higher amount of noise compared to petrol ones), but nothing really clear.


Trucks are not as realiable as horses. Especially in the muddy russia, or when the winter sets in.
 

Superdude

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Of course, the Russians were able to make those massive advances in 1944-1945 because of their increasingly mechanized armies. With a more mechanized army in June 1941, I would suspect that Germany would make even greater advances in Operation Barbarossa, making the Soviet war effort that much more difficult.
 
Trucks are not as realiable as horses. Especially in the muddy russia, or when the winter sets in.
Plus of Course, The BIG Reason Why Horse Transport can be More Useful ...

Regardless of Means you Will have your Losses ...

And Unlike with Horses, you can't Eat a Dead Truck!

:D
 
I read the horse vs truck tansport calculations years ago, I think it is spelled out in Len Dieghtons Blitzkrieg and Van Creveld's Supplying War. There is NO argument that trucks are about 3 times better than horses no matter what the circumstances. This is the basic reason why WW1 advances had a limit of 100 miles from their railhead/start lines and WW2 advances were 300 miles more or less. ___________ There is no question that the industrial and resource base of WW2 Germany could support the machanisation of 200+ divisions. But they did seriously underperform with truck production from day 1. In 1940-41 Britain produced 213,000 trucks. In the same period Germany, with at least 50% more industrial strength and a proportionally larger army, produced 168,000. Double Germany's truck production, and add what can be bought/looted from occupied territories and you could double the number of mot. inf. divs. able to accompany the pz. divs. on their deep encirclments, AND provide more trucks to regular inf. divs to speed their foot advance. It just puts more soldiers deeper into the SU faster, just what German strategy in Russia needed.
 
Well actually Horses may prove more reliable than trucks in the cold weather conditions of the Eastern front. For one the oil in the tanks would freeze and turn jelly like rendering the vehicle useless. I read the memoirs of a German soldier and apparently they army preferred to use horses in these cases.

Also during the Allied push toward Germany, the winter become so harsh that it severely slowed down the Allied advance because road and vehicles could not maneuver in these conditions, so General Patton had horses ordered from the USA but in the end they where never needed....
 
Horses freeze to death in cold winters, in fact horses are prone to die a lot of the time. Horses suck, that's why they were replaced in the private sector and the military by motorised transport. The fact that you can eat a horse, or that sometimes there is grass for it to eat locally is no consolation.
 
Horses freeze to death in cold winters, in fact horses are prone to die a lot of the time. Horses suck, that's why they were replaced in the private sector and the military by motorised transport. The fact that you can eat a horse, or that sometimes there is grass for it to eat locally is no consolation.


Depends on the horse.

Ayways, for what's it worth the Germans had really big problems with everything that was mechanized during the first winter in Russia. Pretty much everything broke down, from trains to tanks to trucks...
 
To provide a herd for a German army numbering in the millions horses were requisitioned from everywhere and were of wildly different quality, as befits an era when horses were on the way out. It is illustrative that the Soviets didn't rely on horses when it came time for them to advance.
 
To provide a herd for a German army numbering in the millions horses were requisitioned from everywhere and were of wildly different quality, as befits an era when horses were on the way out. It is illustrative that the Soviets didn't rely on horses when it came time for them to advance.
But then, the Soviets weren't providing their own transportation and fuel. The trucks, boots, trains, and high-quality fuels needed to sustain an offensive march were provided by the US, not Russia, as well as the food that allowed Russia to pull so many out of the farms. Germany might not have been able to conquer Russia regardless of US aid, but US aid is what allowed the Russian steamroller to proceed.
 
If horses were the answer to the SU's problems I'm sure they would have gotten around the problem somehow, it was a matter of survival for them after all. _____________ BTW what is behind this idea that horses are better than machines in industrialised total warfare? I have as much a romantic attachment to cavalry as the next bloke, but I've worked on dairy and beef cattle farms for many years and it's much, much easier to start up a motorbike to get the herd in for milking (for example) than it is to catch and saddle a horse to do the same job, and then take the saddle off and look after the horse when you are finished.
 
Of course trucks are better than horses, otherwise we would still be using them. That applies to Russian winters, too. In that case, the issue is not about a generic truck being better than a generic horse. One has to ask, what kind of truck and what kind of horse.
A truck built for the French road network and climate, with its parts seriously worn down by the summer's campaigning, and sporting lubricants for the French climate, is obviously worse – in Russian winter - than a Panje locally-grown pony-sized horse; just like a large-sized, more powerful and faster central-European horse will be better than a small, less powerful and slower Panje horse, save in the Russian winter.
But all of those will be bettered by a truck specifically built to work in the Russian winter, with suitable metals, fuels, lubricants and tires employed.
So the point is making do with what you have. If you have one of those French war-booty trucks, you are better off with a few locally commandeered Panje horses. But if you have a serious, brand new, all-weather truck, you are better off with that than with an old, fair-weather French truck, a central-European horse, or a local Panje horse. All of the time, including winter.

As to German logistics allowing the capture of Leningrad, Stalingrad and Moscow, trucks do supply armies fighting block by block in cities, but don't do the actual fighting. If both sides are in supply, it's not a given that the Germans win in that kind of street fighting.

As to the choice of gas engines over diesels. A diesel engine providing the same output in kWs as a gas engine in the 1930s was almost twice as much heavier and bulkier. Which is much of an issue if most of your tanks are on the light or medium-light end. You can have lighter, smaller diesel engines if you throw money at them (just like you can have, however, much, much lighter gas engines by the same means).
On the battlefield, diesels are less likely to catch fire. OTOH, they have longer start-up times (which, for a combat vehicle, can be deadly) and less acceleration.
Finally, yes, fueling diesels would be easier in a war lasting years. But Germany went to war on the assumption of a quick Polish campaign (right) which would not bring other combatants in (wrong), followed by a quick attack on the SU that would bring down the whole rotting hut (wrong wrong). No sweat...
 
After their 1940 campaign against France, the Wehrmacht examined the possibilities of fully motorizing the entire army. It found that it could motorize a total of approximately 70 divisions for a sustained operation and the High Command largely favoured this option.

Hitler rejected this because 70 divisions were not sufficient for his ambitions against Russia. Instead, the panzer arm was ‘doubled’ by doubling the number of divisions but equipping them with half the previous number of tanks and adding a few additional motorized infantry divisions.
 
After their 1940 campaign against France, the Wehrmacht examined the possibilities of fully motorizing the entire army. It found that it could motorize a total of approximately 70 divisions for a sustained operation and the High Command largely favoured this option.

Hitler rejected this because 70 divisions were not sufficient for his ambitions against Russia. Instead, the panzer arm was ‘doubled’ by doubling the number of divisions but equipping them with half the previous number of tanks and adding a few additional motorized infantry divisions.

That is generally true but as to the numbers it is not entirely accurate. A Panzerdivision had had 560 tanks in 1935, but only about 320 in 1939, and some 280 (or less) in 1940. This was reduced again in 1941, but the Panzerdivisionen actually committed in Barbarossa in June had 192 tanks on average, which is more than half of 320 or 280.

The other consideration is tank quality. On the one hand, a tank platoon of 5 PzIIIs was objectively better off than a platoon touting 7 PzIs. These were being phased off at that time, even though 3 PzDivs. started off Barbarossa with about 40 of them.
OTOH, then again one has to admit that many of the divisions which were above the average mentioned above had the Pz38(t) as their main tank.

 
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