For all this you need a POD prior to the 30 years war. Its not Germany in this reality's 20th century you are describing.
Any POD prior to the 30 years war of any significance would completely butterfly away the 20th century as we know it.
For all this you need a POD prior to the 30 years war. Its not Germany in this reality's 20th century you are describing.
For all this you need a POD prior to the 30 years war. Its not Germany in this reality's 20th century you are describing.
What Snake says is true.
Also
No minor fiddling with a few more trucks or train tracks will matter. In case you missed it the trains run through areas where Corps and Army sized Soviet forces were still fighting into August - with air support, artillery barrages and so on. Panzergenadiers were being moved into battle in confiscated French municipal buses. Germany does not have the industrial plant to sustain the level of motorisation they actually achieved in 1940 which is why they demotorised prior to Barbarossa to create the mobile forces they did have.
Mass murder of Ukrainians is, whatever the Nazis thought, also a specific Wehrmacht policy both as part of the economic programme to depopulate the Ukraine (foods for germans not Ukrainian city dwellers - 35 million or so of them) and casually as in order to relieve their immediate supply situation German Army Groups ordered their formations to 'wild loot' for foodstuffs from day 1.
For the avoidance of doubt this means taking the food from the peasants, taking the seeds for next year from the peasants and leaving them to starve to death - without the supervision of officers so there could be a little bit of rape and murder along the way.
Well the first 2 were happening anyway IIRC, and once you have some engines and wagons converted to Russian Gauge actually converting the rails is much less critical than it was. Besides which, most trains ran on coal, not oil, so you save that for shifting the stuff from the rail-heads to the front lines.No, as the issue was food or ammunition, and that issue is not going to be helped by trying to supply advances deep into the Soviet interior *and* repairing railways *and* getting logistics where it needs to be when it needs to be there.
Well the first 2 were happening anyway IIRC, and once you have some engines and wagons converted to Russian Gauge actually converting the rails is much less critical than it was. Besides which, most trains ran on coal, not oil, so you save that for shifting the stuff from the rail-heads to the front lines.
So what, running trains a couple hundred miles closer to the front does absolutely squat to get ammunition delivered to the forward units of the Heer?Except that the problem is less this than that the Germans didn't have the ability to project past a certain point, knew this, and chose to strike beyond it anyhow. There is no getting past Georg Thomas's analyses here, a man in the Wehrmacht presumably knew more of that force's capabilities than people 60 years later.
So what, running trains a couple hundred miles closer to the front does absolutely squat to get ammunition delivered to the forward units of the Heer?
The Germans tried converting Russian Gauge to Standard Gauge, a slow process under any circumstances. Having some Russian Gauge trains would have allowed them to move supplies further forward than OTL without the frantic work of actually having to convert the railways, just repair them and keep them repaired.
Firstly, how the f*** do you figure they get less food? Secondly, did you read the part where I suggested they convert some of their own trains?Then they get less food *and* less ammunition when they need as much of it as is possible for them to get, while having still to transfer goods from German gauge and railcar to Soviet, overtaxing the Soviet engines while leaving German ones useless.
You could still use German trains in Ukraine though I assume.Apparently German locos had problems in the Russian winter due to design differences. The Russians had less fedwater tanks along their routes so Russian