Re: [GZG] Point Systems

["John Atkinson" <johnmatkinson@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/5/06, Eric Foley <stiltman@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> >  They also tended to
> > have better equipment in the most vital categories (tanks, assault
> > guns, individual weapons, close support aircraft).  Most (90%+) of the
> > German Army was fighting with equipment no better than their fathers
> > carried into Russia in 1914, other than the MG 34/42 family.
>
> The Germans got beat on a lot of fronts with logistics and equipment issues,
> yes.  The Germans didn't take the time to plan how they were going to fight
> in the Russian climate (especially but not limited to the winters).
> However, the tanks and aircraft the Soviets had in the early phases of the
> war were simply terrible and obsolete.  Something like 10% of the entire
> Soviet air force got destroyed on the ground in the first day,
> serviceability was awful, and so on.  The Soviets had about six times as
> many tanks as the Germans did at the beginning of the invasion and about the
> same ratio of aircraft, and still didn't establish air superiority until
> 1943 and didn't get an effective tank corps until about the same time.

Yeah, old Joe wasn't planning on fighting the Nazis for another couple
years.  BFD.  The fact of the matter is that in 18 months, after
relocating their entire industrial base hundreds of miles east, they
outproduced the Germans, and their entire production was quality
equipment, unlike the Germans who had at several points 5 or 6 models
of medium tank in production at the same time, practically none for a
production run of more than 2,000 or so.  There's no excuse to change
your tank models so quickly that you hit the 'M' model of a line in
less than 5 years.

For the vast majority of the war, the Soviets had better equipment.
You're quibbling about the edges.  Further, the majority of the German
fighter strength was in the West by 1943, and a significant number of
the better tanks also went West in 1944-45.  Baffling, but there it
is.

> The estimates I'm aware of, of German military deaths in the war on all
> fronts were about 5.5 million; Soviet military losses totaled between 8.7
> and 10 million, depending on who you asked.  Yes, most of the German
> military dead were on the eastern front, but even if you assume the Soviets
> were responsible for every single German military man killed that's still a
> kill ratio approaching two to one.  Pile on the 10-20 or so million civilian
> deaths and add up how many of those were in the line of fire because they
> got conscripted into "people's militias" or forced labor against the German
> offensive and it gets that much more disgusting.

If they were in people's militias or labor battalions, then they were
military deaths.  The 10-20 million civilians are those shot, tortured
to death, starved, or killed by exposure when those heros of the
German Volk in the Whermacht kicked them out into the winter.

> I'm not sure which part of those kill ratios is "fighting smart".  Yes, they
> did fight smarter on some level but they also did it by having absolutely no
> concern for how many bodies they piled up along the way, and the numbers
> pretty well back it up.

Given that those deaths were, after 1943, largely racked up conducting
deliberate attacks, that's a damn good death ratio.  Real Life is a
little more complicated than a nice, clean gaming table.

You also have to consider the 5 million Germans captured by the
Soviets, the 200K killed and 1 million captured from the forces the
Germans raised on Soviet soil from Soviet citizens, 81K Romanians
captured and 500K killed, 100,000 Hungarians KIA, 500,000 Hungarians
captured, 32,000 Italians killed, and 70,000 Italians captured.  It's
a little more complicated when you take that into account.

According to RÅdiger Overmans, Deutsche militÃrische Verluste im
Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000, the Germans suffered 3.1 million
KIA/MIA on the Eastern Front, plus 3.3 million troops captured by the
Soviets.

For those playing along at home, that's a total of 3,528,000 KIA/MIA
suffered by the Axis, and 5,450,000 captured by the Soviets.

Compared to Vadim Erlikman, Poteri narodonaseleniia v XX veke:
spravochnik. Moscow 2004 which says the Soviets took 7.6 million
military KIA/MIA and had 5,200,000 captured by the Nazis, of whom 2.6
million died.

Furthermore, since the Soviet won, they liberated the remaining 2.6
million POWs, rather than depending on the good will of their
conquerer to return them.

The whole "no concern" for casualties is a myth.  The Soviets were
extremely pragmatic about casualties, but no more so than US Marines
in the Pacific or Georgie Patton's Third Army.  Oddly enough, that
attitude produces far better results (and in the long run, lower
casualties) than a cautious, conservative, ineffective
Montgomery-style obsession with casualties.  What the Soviets did have
was fewer resources to deal with the casualties that did occour.  It's
one of the downsides of fighting a war of survival against a genocidal
monstrosity that had already overrun most of Europe and wished to not
only defeat, but depopulate Russia.

John
--
"Thousands of Sarmatians, Thousands of Franks, we've slain them again
and again.  We're looking for thousands of Persians."
--Vita Aureliani

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