And then the Soviets managed to recover, despite still having those holes until into 1943.
Thanks to Lend-Lease
More people die. Duh. Prove that enough more people die.
What is enough to you? Especially when it comes to morale the tipping point could be 1 million more, especially including soldiers if order breaks down, or many millions more if they get ruthless about supplying the military and specific labor forces and can't keep food riots in line. We are probably looking at several million more malnutrition related deaths without LL food (not necessarily starvation, but illness and susceptibility to work/military accidents and what not due to a foggy mind) plus of course food riot/disorder related issues.
Prove it. Your the one making the assertion that these holes were the absolutely vital ones the Soviet economy could not function without, it falls upon you to provide the evidence that was the case.
The food issue is pretty much the vital one. I have already posted a book about that:
https://www.amazon.com/Hunger-War-Provisioning-Soviet-during/dp/0253017122
I have a digital copy of the book, but I cannot copy and past because it comes out as gibberish code; there are very instructive quotes in here about the direness of the food situation. In early 1943 a Soviet internal report cited that workers were dying in the Kirov factory in early 1943 due to malnutrition and was citing the factory not giving workers their allotted time off as part of the reason. That is as the great victory at Stalingrad was being won and hundreds of thousands of tons of LL high calorie foods had already been received. Industrial workers were one of the groups of people in the USSR in this period that had the best allotment of foods too, because of their vital war work. Sure it wasn't as good as the army, but they got more than the general public and yet they were still dropped dead on the job as late as 1943. The book also says in 1943-44, when LL food and medicine shipments were higher than ever before, the single largest cause of non-child civilian deaths was starvation and TB. There was not enough food to feed both the military and civilians EVEN with LL food shipments. Apparently in 1943 the worst deaths among males 30-59 happened due to prolonged ongoing malnutrition and disease and malnutrition caused mass deaths. That was even with LL food BTW. Starvation or malnutrition related deaths remained the single greatest cause of death among the civilian population even in 1944, effecting all age groups, despite a dramatic improvement in food stocks. People were being re-fed, but they were still dying in large numbers.
The book even says that estimating numbers is impossible because outside the large cities there was not really a reporting system for these sorts of things until the 1950s, while within the cities the reporting system was limited. What is really surprising to me is how many factory workers were dying of malnutrition related issues; you'd think they'd need a healthy workforce, but even as late as 1944 the workforce in the Urals was suffering quite badly. Again despite the dramatic improvements in LL food shipments AND increased domestic production. Apparently there was a poor harvest in 1943 in the unoccupied USSR, which forced ration cuts, which proved to be a really fatal issue in winter in areas with a poor agricultural base, like the Ural industrial regions. Some crop was lost to blight too and the book specifically mentions how LL prevented the USSR from collapsing into mass famine and death in this period too. It seems now that the critical periods were in late 1942-1943 and once again in Autumn 1943-44. Plus then once LL ended there was a famine in 1946-47. Starvation during the war apparently peaked in 1943 when adult men finally started to succumb to years of malnutrition. It really took until Summer 1944 for the food situation to really improve...until the post-war famine.
In the end the book states that while the food situation in places like Leningrad or German occupied Soviet territory (where over 4 million people died of malnutrition related issues, not sure if that counts the PoWs taken in 1941-42) was absolutely worse, IOTL the Soviets faced famine proportion starvation throughout their territory. Without Lend-Lease food that means 'famine proportion' becomes just straight up full famine with the mass deaths and social breakdown that entails. The labor force is going to die in droves much earlier and the army will have to take a food cut or many millions more civilians would die in factories, in fields, or in the mines.
Oblast =! industrial regions.
So what is an official industrial region then? What cities were lost for an extended period of time in the Moscow region and what industry did it have?
With their industrial facilities annihilated.
Proof? The Germans got into Tula, but it's factories were fine and continued to function throughout the fighting.
Correct. It was shelled, bombed, and fought in. All of which damaged the cities industry quite severely. That it still nevertheless managed to output some weapons is really a testament to how big the Tula arsenal works was, not an indication that it didn't suffer from destruction.
Do you have any estimates of how much industry was lost and how much industry was there to be damaged that was war related? You're asserting it was damaged to some degree, but I have not seen that stated anywhere despite the fighting in the area, just that it converted to making weapons that supplied the armies in the area.
Yes they did. They destroyed everything they could as they retreated in December so as to deny it to the Soviets. Just as the Soviets did in October. Scorched earth was common practice for both sides throughout the war.
I haven't seen that given how fast they had to retreat. If you have any info on that I'm all ears. Certainly in the more deliberate retreats later in the war they did scorched earth when possible, but often, as was also the case with Soviet retreats, sometimes retreating happened faster than things could be destroyed.
And you honestly think the Soviet tank factory was the only factory in the entirety of Kharkov?
I didn't say that, but haven't seen any claims that industry in Kharkov was captured, what it's nature was, or if or how it would be related to war production.
Can you provide numbers/sourcing supporting that?
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewto...p=1785948&hilit=kharkov+tank+factory#p1785948
A quote from "The Soviet economy and the Red Army, 1930-1945" by Walter S Dunn:
On June 24, 1941, the Council for Evacuation was appointed. On July 4, 1941, the Council ordered Voznesenskii, director of five-year planning, to organise the movement of industry and workers to the east. Local committees used the five-year plan structure with 3,000 agents controlling the movement. Evacuation of industrial plants began in August 1941 and continued until the end of the year. But evidence shows evacuation began much earlier, or at least the transfer of machine tools and skilled workers to "shadow factories" in the east. The US military attache reported significant transfers of machines and men from the Moscow area to the east in late 1940 and early 1941. The rapid growth in production in early 1942 suggested that the evacuation had started in 1940. The tempo increased in August 1941.
Evacuation began with a recommendation from a local agency to the commissariat of the appropriate industry. After investigation, the recommendation was approved by the Evacuation Council and placed on a schedule giving the date, method of transport, and relocation site. In addition, unapproved evacuations took place on the initiative of local authorities.
Evacuation was well under way in the first week of August 1941. Sacrificing immediate production, many factories closed in August, packed up, and moved to the Ural Mountains. But because their products were needed, some plants remained in production until too late to be moved. Only 17 of the 64 iron and steel plants in the Donbas were evacuated between October and December 1941. The Kharkov tank factory was being dismantled when the Germans arrived.
The railroad made evacuation possible. As the railroads moved 2.5 million men to the front in June, July and August, they moved industrial machinery on their return. For example, on 7 August 1941, 3,000 rail cars per day evacuated iron and steel manufacturing equipment from the Dnieper area - 1,000 cars per day for the electrical industry, 400 cars per day for the chemical industry, and others. From August 8 to August 15, 1941, 26,000 rail cars evacuated industries in the Ukraine. In Moscow, 80,000 cars transported 498 factories, including 75,000 lathes, leaving only 21,000. Production by many factories resumed by December.......The operation was not always orderly. Other indications that planning was not complete and that turnaround time was longer than average were anecdotes of equipment having been dumped beside the tracks to empty the cars for a return journey. Of the 700 plants evacuated in the first months, only 270 arrived at planned destinations fully equipped, and 110 arrived with only part of their equipment....At times, inadequate planning resulted in trains having been loaded with materials and despatched with no destination to prevent capture by the Germans. These orphan trains moved around the country for long periods because there were no plans to use the equipment and no one knew what to do with them.....The evacuation of the factories was an immense undertaking. In the last three months of 1941, GOSPLAN moved 1,360 factories: 455 to the Urals, 210 to Western Siberia, and 250 to Central Asia and Kazahkstan. By the end of 1941, 1,523 large factories were moved. A few went to the Far East. The total was only a small proportion of the 32,000 factories captured by the Germans, but arms-related factories, representing 12% of the industrial potential in the occupied zone, were evacuated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malyshev_Factory#Tank_production
Shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union the KhPZ started series production of the
T-34, the most-produced and arguably the best tank of
World War II. Series production began in June 1940 in Kharkiv, and later in the
Stalingrad Tractor Plant and
Krasnoye Sormovo Shipbuilding Plant. In 1941, due to German advances, the factory and design shops were evacuated to the
Ural mountains;
[1] the plant was merged with
Uralvagonzavod in
Nizhny Tagil into one enterprise called Ural Tank Plant No. 183.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Kharkov
In that time, however, most of Kharkov's industrial equipment had been evacuated or rendered useless by the Soviet authorities.
http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/weapons_t-34_production.html
First Factory No.183 - Charkovskiy Traktornyj Zawod (ChTZ), Kharkov
Production of the T-34 began at Factory No.183 at Kharkov, where the tank had been designed. On 5 June 1940 the Central Committee passed a resolution ordering the Kharkov plant to produce 600 tanks in 1940, with another 100 to be produced at Stalingrad. In fact only 183 T-34s were completed during 1940, all of them at Factory No.183. Production stepped up in the first half of 1940, when 553 tanks were produced at Kharkov, and reached a peak in the second half of the year, when despite the rapid approach of the Germans another 939 T-34s were completed. A total of 1,675 T-34s were produced at Kharkov.
By September 1941 it was clear that there was a real danger that Kkarkov would fall to the Germans. On 13 September 1941 the factory was ordered to evacuate to Nizhniy Tagil, east of the Urals. The first of 43 trains left on 17 September, the last on 19 October. Although much of the factory equipment reached the new site, only 10% of the work force and 20% of the engineers followed the machinery.
Production Summary
T-34-76: 1,675
Actually he gives no indication of that. Perhaps you confused it with the part where he noted that most of the industrial plants slated for evacuation specifically in the month of October managed to make it out. Even then, he qualifies by noting that "Others were probably still to be cleared for evacuation and not every factory was evacuated in full".
Now, probably the majority of defense industry in the entirety of the Soviet Union escaped destruction. I stated was the majority of defense industry in the areas occupied by the Germans in 1941 that were destroyed. Most stuff I've read stated this territory constituted 60% of Soviet defense industry, which obviously means that 40% of Soviet defense industry lay outside of that territory. Combine that with the percentage of industry successfully evacuated from the pre-war territory and you probably get a majority of the entire Soviet Unions defense industry.
I never said all of it was removed, but the vast majority of Soviet defense industry made it out. Perhaps it would be more helpful to discuss what was lost if we could find that out some how, but it seems losing the skilled workforce was an issue in the retreat. Again Lend-Lease to the rescue, replacing the parts of factories not evacuated and making the Soviets whole again with world class brand new high capacity machinery. The US made the most advanced machine tools in the world and the Soviets got them to enhance their production.
Soviet defense industry was recovering before the winter of 1941/42 even ended, before much of the lend-lease machinery for 1942 even arrived, much less the lend-lease machinery for the entire war. As I said, enough machinery was saved to ensure that the whole apparatus could continue to operate. It's just that "enough" isn't necessarily the same as "most".
It was reconstituting and mobilizing, but was well below capacity of what it would have done without invasion in the event of mobilization. So yes evacuated industry was able to get back into production relatively early on, but they started getting Lend-Lease machinery as early as late 1941.
http://www.historynet.com/did-russi...ase-helped-the-soviets-defeat-the-germans.htm
British and Commonwealth deliveries to the Soviet Union in late 1941 and early 1942 would not only assist in the Soviet defense of Moscow and subsequent counteroffensive, but also in increasing Soviet production for the next period of the war. Substantial quantities of machine tools and raw materials, such as aluminum and rubber, were supplied to help Soviet industry back on its feet: 312 metal-cutting machine tools were delivered by convoy PQ-12 alone, arriving in March 1942, along with a range of other items for Soviet factories such as machine presses and compressors.
Once again, raw figures do not tell the whole story. Although British shipments amounted to only a few percent of Soviet domestic production of machine tools, the Soviet Union could request specific items which it may not have been able to produce for itself. Additionally, many of the British tools arrived in early 1942, when Soviet tool production was still very low, resulting in a disproportionate impact. The handing over of forty imported machine tools to Aviation Factory No. 150 in July 1942, for example, was the critical factor in enabling the factory to reach projected capacity within two months.
http://www.o5m6.de/LL_Routes.html
According to this in the first protocol of LL some 30,000 tons of machinery was received from October 1st 1941-June 30th 1942. 16,000 tons were received with 'pre-LL' from June 1941-September 30th 1941. So in all roughly 46,000 tons of machinery was received from June 1941-June 1942. Lend-Lease/Western machinery was pretty important even in 1941-42, especially in the recovery period of industry being set up once again after evacuations.
Only specific thing with number I ever saw was in Keegan's book about the 2nd World War, where he states specifically that approximately 500 tractor factories of varying sizes which could have been used for AFV or motor-vehicle production were irrevocably lost to the Germans.
That's pretty vague and we have no idea what he was basing that on. I have no doubt that certainly some proportion of Soviet industry lost could have been turned to war work...but IOTL over 1 million tons of machine tools were sent to the USSR, including entire factories removed from the US, so it is more than safe to say what the Soviets got from Lend-Lease more than offset what the Soviets lost in 1941-42 given the much more advanced machinery the US had to offer the relatively backwards Soviet economy. I mean there was a reason that Stalin made huge deals for industrial equipment from Germany for raw materials in 1939-41. That said the loss of such industry and then no Lend-Lease would have been a HUGE problem for the Soviets.
Tractor factories, steel mills, chemical plants, aluminum processing, motor vehicle manufacturing, machine tool shops, and so-on and so forth.
Got a list of that stuff? We are just hypothesizing at this point. I mean yes of course the Stalino/Donbass and general Ukraine industrial area losses were quite heavy with all of that, we just don't know how much. In the end though that brings us back to how vital Lend-Lease was to making good Soviet economic losses...