26 replies to this topic

[W. Clark]

The Axis and the Soviets used preregistration to get their artillery targets ready. On the move, after a breakthrough, the Soviets used direct fire until they got stopped. Then they set it all up again and hit repeat. The Germans did the same initially and supplemented that during the hay day of blitzkrieg with air strikes. That required radio nets that the Soviets never really had, and the Germans ceased to have later in the war. We gave the Soviets about 4 million radio tubes and somewhere near a million radios (far, far more than they produced themselves). That was still not enough to give them the kind of radio nets needed to pursue our arty tactics across the board. If you were to study how long, it took the various armies after out running their initial arty set up during an offensive and upon establishing a defense to reestablish their ability to use indirect fire (excepting organic mortars and the like).  You would find that the Brits and the US took the least amount of time (all things being equal) by quite a bit to do it. I'm talking hours at the very least and often longer. 

 

The Germans were aware of how to do it from at least 43 onwards but did not for various reasons. A large part of that failure was the fact that they were better (took less time to get set up) at it than the Russians (where some 70% of their army was engaged), but the real sticking point was lack of radio nets needed to put it into practice the way the UK and the US did.

 

I'd cite various authors if the wildfire in 2020 had not consumed my library. But there is an option. I'll consult with Jim O'Neil and see if he can cite the needed references so you can see for yourself what I'm talking about.

WMC

[healey36]

We're hoping to get them legitimately on the table when the Sealion series resumes later this year.

 

Sadly, the Sealion series has not been resumed...yet. We're still slogging around the French countryside building out scenarios for a future series. However, we did pick up a few Beaverettes recently, so there's hope 

[W. Clark]

My understanding of why the Germans did not upgrade their artillery usage more along the lines the US had adopted was because their then, current practices being so superior to the Russians, and they did not see the need until they ran into our arty. At that point, their ability to provide the needed radio net across the board was very limited due in part to the effects of the Allied bombing campaign. The Russians used the old way from WWI in that they set their arty park up and ran wire communications, then registered their emplaced arty. The whole process took days and telegraphed that a major effort was in the works. I concur that Russian arty in support of mobile operations that exceeded the range of the initial set up were direct fire applications. The Russians lacked the radios to do anything else. The one million radios and some 4 million radio tubes we provided them from Lend Lease far exceeded what they produced for themselves in quantity and quality.

 

Those radios and the 4 hundred thousand trucks we gave them sealed the fate of Eastern Europe and subjected it to Russian rule for 40 years. Otherwise, the Russians would have had to control and coordinate their armored columns with flags, hand signals and couriers while the infantry of their mobile units that could not fit on their tanks would have had to walk from Stalingrad to Berlin. Even Stalin once admitted directly to FDR that our trucks made all the difference. Funny, how that statement gets suppressed by those who write and say that the Russians won WWII on their own and that Allied efforts including Lend Lease were minor additions at best. Soviet propaganda lives on in our universities and higher education apparently. 

 

WMC

[Begemot_]

I saw a can of Spam in a former Soviet war museum devoted to the Great Patriotic War. Following Clark's analysis I guess without Spam the Red Army would have starved to death.

[W. Clark]

The food we shipped to them was very important in 42, though I'm not sure how important it was later.

 

My view of Lend Lease is based on its quantity versus what the Soviets produced is that we only increased what they built by about 10% as far as tanks, planes and guns go. And they derided the quality of the planes, tanks and guns we provided, but as usual when dealing with Socialists it is important to place emphasis on what they do rather than what they say or write (more on that later). When it comes to trucks, radios and radio tubes it is another story altogether. We gave the Russians about 400,000 trucks which numbers wise is about 4 times what they made themselves (and just about equal to the entirety of German war time production) and what they made was an obsolescent copy of a ford under license. They came to call trucks "Studebakers" as a slang term they applied to all trucks just as they came to call all small vehicles "Willeys". As far radios go, we provided the vast majority of what they had to the point that radios below the divisional level were almost always Lend Lease. Stalin's statement to FDR at Yalta about American trucks having made the difference was a rare instance of the truth coming out of his mouth.

 

Now for the quality issue. I've no argument with the Soviet assessment of the Grant or even the 75mm Sherman versus the T34 (especially the T34-85). But then you look at how they employed the Sherman 76 and their saying one thing and doing something else immediately comes back to the fore. In late 44 the Soviets began rearming T34-85 equipped Guards Tank and Mech Corps with the Sherman 76. Now if the Sherman 76 was as bad as they claimed in comparison to the T34-85 then I can only conclude that Stalin hated his Guards Tankers and was trying to kill them off in mass by giving them second class equipment. So, IMHO there is something fishy in the Soviet public assessment of the Sherman 76. This does not surprise me, given that we firebombed Dresden per a Soviet request so they could avoid another siege of a fortified city like Budapest (it worked by the way). Gobbels immediately called it war crime, and the Soviets adopted his viewpoint after the war while conveniently passing over the fact that we did it at their request. So, when you hear what Basterds we were at Dresden just remember that its Nazi propaganda warmed over by the Soviets that the Left is crying about in the name of humanity while saying that what Lenin and Stalin did was necessary.

 

In a world run on the Melian Dialogue, we may not be the good guys, but neither is anyone else.

 

WMC

[Begemot_]

Guess you can't take a hint. I believe that it is inappropriate to hijack a hobby thread for the purpose of propagating tendentious and dubious claims. I get that you are a Russophobe. Leave this sort of thing out of this site. Your kind of posting can be found elsewhere. Leave it there please and let the hobby sites be a refuge from the general ugliness that is too rampant in the general environment.

[healey36]

Probably best posted in the "Military History Discussion" segment of the Lounge, but interesting nonetheless. Historians' notions seem to range from "the Russians won the war walking away" to "if it wasn't for the Americans, the world would be speaking German now". Everyone else, especially the Brits, seem to get marginalized by most "experts".