"With 26.000 tanks, how the Soviet cannot Stop the...." Topic

…German Panzers in Barbarossa?

"Almost everyone who studied the history of armoured warfare would know about Operation Barbarossa, where only a few thousand German tanks swept away tens of thousands of Soviet tanks. I've seen these numbers used to back a number of claims, each more ridiculous than the last, but today, let's look at them in more detail. According to Order in Tank Forces: What happened to Stalin's tanks? by Dmitriy Shein, the Red Army had 25932 vehicles under its command. An impressive number, but the Soviet Union is a large country, so if you only count vehicles protecting the Western military regions, vehicles that were actually in the position to do something about the invading Germans, you get a somewhat different picture. Let's take a look…"
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Amicalement
Armand

No maintenance, no spare parts, lack of fuel and initially no or under trained crews. The the empty tanks are abandon on the road or in over run tank parks. And 20,000 are T26/BT series with 3 man-crews, not really built for the type of armor combat that was thrown at them in 1941.

Don't forget the Luftwaffe had a lot to do with it too…

Swept most Russian aircraft from the skies and bombed and strafed Russian troops and equipment.

Reading the introduction to the article, I felt very skeptical of what I would find in the content.

I'm not a big fan of the "Oh well you should only count the stuff in the Western Military Districts" line of reasoning. I mean really? The Soviets fed huge amounts of material (and manpower) into the combat zones from all across the country. To suggest the Germans didn't need to face the entire might of the Red Army during Barbarossa simply ignores the fact that Soviet casualties totaled almost 100% of the whole Red Army within the first 6 months of crossing the border. It was only the amazing (and often draconian) mobilization of reserves and conscription/formation of new units that saved the Soviet state.

So … I started reading, in a state of mind that anticipated resistance to the article.

That said, I think it contained a lot of good data about the sorry state of the Red Army in June of 1941, and overall was well written with some good analysis. Rebutting my own argument above is the questionable value of substantial reserves elsewhere in the country when much of the material is not in operable condition where it is, and you are desperately short of spare parts, fuel and ammunition, not to mention the motor transport needed to move what reserves, parts, ammunition and fuel you do have.

Fair enough. Can't hardly argue with that analysis.

Poor combat results were only a fraction of the failures of the Red Army in 1941. And what failures there were in combat result may well have been greatly amplified by logistical failures. Poor soldiers do NOT fight better when you don't give them ammunition or fuel!

To a great extent the problems in the whole structure, from quality of production to age of equipment to lack of training to inattention to logistics … it was an enormous organization that showed all the symptoms of over-centralized management and a top-down obsession with metrics. (If you want a current events comparison, read any recent business article about Sears stores in the U.S.)

All in all, an interesting read.

Thanks for pointing it out, my friend.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Let's be fair. A lot of the tanks the panzerwaffe had for Barbarossa were "not really built for the type of armor combat that was thrown at them in 1941" either. And it's not as though German logistics weren't stressed. ("First they want us to blow up the Polish rail network. Then they want us to supply troops over it.")

In fact, I think a study of military history suggests that wars are mostly things which do not occur when where and how they're expected to. The winners find a way to work with that.

Soviet armed forces also suffered from a professional senior leadership vacuum thanks to Stalin's wide scale purges in the immediate pre-war years.

B

Mark, the geographical distribution of the Red Army's units was critical, as was the non-mobilized state of most of those "reserves." By contrast, the Nazis and their allies started with almost all of their forces concentrated on the border. It's a lot easier to defeat the enemy in detail when they arrive on the battlefield over the course of 3 to 6 months …

Even the units in the WMD were deployed in considerable depth, and not in a good way. Having second-line units 25 to 50 miles back from the front-line units just means that the first line is bypassed, encircled, and crushed. The bypassing mobile divisions end up occupying the locations where the reinforcing units are supposed to go (or to pass through), completely disrupting the defender's plans.

(To go back to my earlier point, if Cat 3 divisions around Moscow need a month to mobilize, they aren't even going to start moving until then, when they're competing with desperately needed supplies for rail capacity--or they're marching toward the front …)

It's a lot easier to defeat the enemy in detail when they arrive on the battlefield over the course of 3 to 6 months …

Quite agree.

And I feel that this point is critical to understanding how Barbarossa succeeded. But that is not achieved by suggesting that to understand the German success in Barbarossa, you need to count only that fraction of the Red Army forces that were in the Western Military Districts.

Perhaps I did not adequately construct my strawman before I tore it down. ;)

My point is that we may well be able to understand the first wave of the border battles by looking at the forces in the Western Military Districts. But only the first wave. Within 3 to 4 weeks the Soviets were moving forces in to the western districts from the rest of the country. And these too were forces the Germans had to face, as part of Barbarossa.

Defense-in-depth is often a very successful military strategy. It was not, during Barbarossa. This warrants examination, not dismissal. WHY did the Soviet defense in depth fail so miserably? It was not because you shouldn't count the second and third echelons in a defense-in-depth, that much is clear.

I think the reasons are many, including some aspects of German operational art (which nation in 1939-1941 actually succeeded in stopping a German attack?), some related to Russian operational art (defense-in-depth works best when the follow-on echelons are in range to support the echelon that is in combat, but perhaps more importantly defense-in-depth as a concept is actually fairly meaningless when the troops are only trained to attack), some related to the Soviet obsession with metrics (men could be counted, but there was no metric for combat effectiveness), some related to equipment (less than half the armored vehicles had radios, and those they had were notoriously unreliable), some related to logistics (again, poorly trained soldiers do NOT fight better if you don't give them ammunition and fuel), etc. etc.

None of that is because the Germans didn't have to face the entire strength of the Red Army. They did. It's just that they did over time, not on the first day.

One might even make the case that it was fortunate for the Russians that they DID come to the battle in piecemeal fashion, as the many advantages that the Germans held may not have been overcome by larger Red Army numbers. You can only fit so many men on a given battlefield. The stunning losses the Red Army faced were not primarily from battlefield casualties, but from encirclements that trapped enormous numbers of men. If the Russians had put more men forward, more would have been encircled in less time.

The Germans managed three big waves of encirclements in Barbarossa. If the Russians had put substantially more forces forward, they might well have run out of men after the second (or even the first) wave of encirclements, as the Germans had expected. Then there would have been no Red Army left. As it was, the Red Army lost almost 100% of it's pre-war strength in 6 months, while the Russian mobilization more than doubled the size of the Red Army in about 8 months. There was about 1 or 2 months in late fall/ early winter when the Red Army was dangerously under strength. But by February of 1942 the Red Army was almost as big as it had been in June of 1941.

If you put more troops forward, resulting in more being encircled, that math gets worse for the Russians, not better. Running short of troops in September is a LOT worse than running short of troops in November.

Or so I've read.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

Much of the Red Army was just for show. Lots of tanks, guns and planes to wow the foreign press and the Russian masses. But no maintenance, training, or in some cases even ammunition, to make all that hardware combat effective.

I would quibble with the comment that German tanks "swept away" the Russian opposition, almost like swatting a fly. An interesting read is "The Initial Period of War on the Eastern Front 22 June-August 1941" by David Glantz. This is subtitled "Proceedings of the Fourth Art of War Symposium Garmisch, October 1987". I do caution that many of the anecdotes and lessons are from German officers taking part in the symposium and there is always a tendency to play up ones opponent after the fact to magnify ones own accomplishments. Nonetheless it is still instructive just how close some of those initial battles proved to be.

If the Russians had put more men forward, more would have been encircled in less time.

Roger that! That's one of the main reasons Barbarossa failed -- too much of the Red Army was NOT where the Germans could get at it on the first bounce.

Glad you enjoyed the article my friend. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

Another issue was the political factors at work. Many Russians, soldiers and peasants, believed the Germans couldn't actually be worse than the Russian authorities, so one wonders how hard they actually wanted to fight. At least until they found out the horrible truth.

The other side of that coin, Stalin didn't trust his own citizens to the point no effort was made to supply or help his own troops. They were all expendable.

funnily enough they didn't fight them all at once….

Barbarossa was a failure, so unclear what the point is here? The campaign was premised on defeating the Red Army in a 12 week period within 500km of the border. The second stage was what some referred to as a railway war, simply a matter of sending troops up the rail lines to accept surrender. Neither happened. As early as August '41 things were going off the rails. By September German losses were approaching 700,000, but only 400,000 replacements were forthcoming. By December the Red Army was larger than it was in June at the start of the campaign and nowhere near destruction. By October and November a few successful operations could not disguise the German problems of rapidly diminishing force, abject failure of intelligence having failed to comprehend the recuperative powers of the Red Army and compounded by a logistic system collapsing under the strain of the distances.

The Soviets launched numerous counter attacks throughout 1941, while most were defeated they inflicted considerable loss (700,000 casualties) and numerous delays (see the Yelnya salient as a good example, or the battle of Smolensk).

Needless to say, to claim a victory for Barbarossa requires the defeat of the Red Army before October/November 1941. As that didn't happen and the end result was the Red Army in Berlin four years later, then abject failure was the only result.