85% of the Soviet armoured vehicle park on 1.1.1936 is missing from HoI4 (updated to NSB)

[qer]

you're arguing that Hitler's strategic decisions were actually wise, against the advice of most of the Wermacht's High command. Let that sink in

A) Not against all the Wermacht.
B) The high staff did make severe strategic blunders, like forgetting what logistics is (who do you think planned Barbarossa).
C) just because you are the worst piece of shit to ever live on the planet doesn't mean that sometimes you get something right, even if by pure chance. Hitler was fundamental in supporting Fall Gelb against a more conservative staff, and the gamble to not retreat in 1941 from the central sector turn out to be right. If you want to believe caricature history with people who are cartonishly (don't know if I write that rigth) inefficient fine by me, but the german High staff and Hitler were both as responsible of the early victories to the latter blunders.
D) I said operational, not strategic.
E) The OKW were also really bad people who where supportive of the NSDAP plans, being themselves detrimental to Germany situation.

 

[Koba133]

I am not "buying" into anything. I've read a lot of Glantz, but thanks for the recommendation. Stalin continued to mismanage the war well into 1945, but to a lesser extent gradually.

Bogging down to minute details, or focusing on simple quotes without context will give you a distorted picture, or to put it simply, you might miss the forest from the trees.
On the whole, between rasputsitsas in 1942, Soviets didn't try as much counteroffensives as they did in 1941. But my main point was that there was much fewer massive encirclements. Red Army didn't suddenly turn super competent within 6 months. That simple fact should illustrate that massive losses during 1941 could have been avoided with a different strategic approach, without the need to into details about troops positioning and orders, which is out of the scope of the thread.

Conquer in this case meant force surrender. I didn't mean they needed to occupy every sq cm of SU.

Lend lease requires a topic of its own, but suffice to say to grasp the big picture:

1) lend lease amounted to 4% total of Soviet ear time production

2) vast majority of it arrived after 1942.

Sure, there are a lot of nuances and caveats in it, but it is safe to say that LL only started arriving in significant quantities after Wehrmacht was already spent. It certainly helped shorten the war and save lives, but the outcome was decided before it started arriving

40 % of soviet armour during the moscow counter attack was british. (matilda's etc) they were running on fumes

 

[Koba133]

A) Not against all the Wermacht.
B) The high staff did make severe strategic blunders, like forgetting what logistics is (who do you think planned Barbarossa).
C) just because you are the worst piece of shit to ever live on the planet doesn't mean that sometimes you get something right, even if by pure chance. Hitler was fundamental in supporting Fall Gelb against a more conservative staff, and the gamble to not retreat in 1941 from the central sector turn out to be right. If you want to believe caricature history with people who are cartonishly (don't know if I write that rigth) inefficient fine by me, but the german High staff and Hitler were both as responsible of the early victories to the latter blunders.
D) I said operational, not strategic.
E) The OKW were also really bad people who where supportive of the NSDAP plans, being themselves detrimental to Germany situation.

Ok i'm not accusing you of being sympathetic with Hitler. I withdraw that statement because of course it's besides the point. I stand my case that if Halder, Bock and Guderian had their way Moscow would have fell before the end of 1941, likely triggering a soviet collapse.

 

[Fulmen]

But that would leave the army advance flanks over exposed as I said before. And funny that you mention the distance between Paris and the German front, because their logistic situation was far better and didn't need the advance- stop- advance nature of the attack that we see in Barbarossa due to logistics. Also in September and October you are also getting mud adding to the difficulty. The encirclement in Kiev wasn't a bad move based on previous german experiences, and honestly I think it falls under the myth popularize by post war german generals of saying that everything wrong was due to the mustache man and the SS, instead of accepting the fact that they were at fault too (or God forbid, that Hitler took some decisions that weren't bad on the operational level).

According to Nigel Askey Army Group South (AGS) had the capacity to finish off the Kiev pocket on its own, without help from AGC, which I thought was interesting. Had AGC been allowed to continue towards Moscow unhindered, the city would have fallen before winter, before Russia could raise all those forces from the region that historically threw the Germans back in the winter of 1941-42, before Russia could have built the fortifications that were historically built during the fall-winter of 1941, that then stopped the Germans almost at the gates of Moscow. The capture of Moscow in the fall of 1941 would have removed a substantial amount of Russian forces from the equation as well as a very substantial amount of the Russian industrial base. As I recall, up to 30% of the USSR's industry was still in the Moscow region in December 1941. And let's not forget, the fall of Moscow would have cut off the central point of the Russian railway network and likely meant the fall of Leningrad and major supply problems for the Red Army.

Would all this have resulted in an Axis victory in WW2? Perhaps not. The US would still have entered the war and lend-lease would have likely been even greater than it was historically (up to 25% of total Soviet production during 1941-1945, but lend-lease often contributed to many times the domestic production in many vital types of materiel and resources, such as transportation and high-octane fuel).

Since the impact of lend-lease was discussed, I suppose I could copy a few posts I made on the topic a couple of months back on Discord:

"Here's figures on American (no British, Canadian or others included) lend-lease that I've attempted to sum up based on newer, post-Soviet research. The percentage figures refer to the percentage of the total of that category wielded by the USSR during the GPW:

Aviation fuel: 2,586,000 tons, or 57.8%, of which 97% had an octane level of 99 or higher. By contrast, domestic production of high-octane fuel made up a tiny fraction of total production. On the eve of Barbarossa the USSR had enough of the 78 octane B-78 aviation fuel, the best they could produce, to meet only 4% of its requirements. From August 1941 to September 1945 lend-lease gasoline exceeded Soviet production proper by 1.4 times, although if taking into account octane levels it exceeds Soviet production many times.

Automobile fuel: 242,300 tons, or 2.8%, although again, this was high-octane fuel, so the real percentage is higher.

Motor vehicles: c. 510,284, of which at least 460,000 were trucks and light transports, of which 24,902 were light trucks and 351,715 medium trucks supplied by the US. US supplied trucks alone contributed 897,964 tons of lifting capacity, over 2.5 times the 354,780 ton lifting capacity of the 197,100 trucks the USSR produced during WW2, the latter which was comprised mostly of 1.5t commercial models. Altogether lend-lease trucks exceeded Soviet production more than twice over, and that's not including light transports. Included in the motor vehicles are also 32,300 motorcycles, which exceeded Soviet production by 1.2 times (27,816 motorcycles).

Railroad: 622,100 tons of rails, 56.6% of Soviet production. If excluding narrow gauge rails not supplied by lend-lease, American deliveries comprise 83.3% of the total volume of Soviet production. production. If excluding production during the second half of 1945, accepting it as being equal to at least half of yearly production (actually, considerably more than half the annual production of rails occurred in the second half of 1945 because of the curtailment of purely military production), then lend-lease in rails made up 92.7% of the overall volume of Soviet rail production.

Locomotives: Lend-lease delivered 1,900 locomotives and 66 diesel-electric locomotives. Soviet production of locomotives in 1941-45 was 798. Probably most of the 706 produced in 1941 were produced before the war and the 8 in 1945 after the war but let's be generous and presume half of those were produced during the war, thus the number is 441. The USSR produced 1 diesel-electric locomotive in 1941, don't know if before or during the war. Thus lend-lease exceeded Soviet production of regular and electric-diesel locomotives by over 4.3 times and 26 times respectively.

Railway wagons: Lend-lease delivered 11,075 railway wagons, whilst the USSR produced between 1942 and 1945 only 1,087 wagons. The USSR did produce 33,096 wagons in 1941, but judging by the sharp decline these were probably produced mostly pre-war. Likely we are looking at lend-lease providing some 8-10 times the volume of Soviet wartime production here.

Explosives and copper: 348,100 tons of explosive materials supplied by lend-lease, 53% of Soviet production (c. 600,000 tons). Soviet production of non-ferrous metals from 1941 to 1945 remain a secret (one can only wonder why), but it is estimated that 470,000 tons of copper were produced from mid-1941 to the end of the war in 1945. US lend-lease supplied the USSR with 359,600 short tons of copper ore and 52,100 short tons of electrolyctic and refined copper. These equivalate to about 387,600 tons of ore, or 82.5% of Soviet wartime production. Additionally 956,700 miles of field telephone cable, 2,100 miles of sea cable and 1,100 miles of underwater cable were delivered, which helped alleviate the Russian copper shortage. Moreover, lend-lease provided the USSR with 35,800 radio stations, 5,899 radio receivers and 348 radars, which satisfied the basic requirements of the Red Army.

There's still aluminium, aircraft, steel and armoured vehicles, artillery, tires and food, machine tools and non-lend-lease aid to cover, but I haven't summarised those.

The following figures are from Boris Sokolov's The Role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War: A Re-examination. They're un-summarised and I haven't corroborated the figures with other sources, but as far as I could tell the only mistakes possibly on the list is that the amount of lend-lease is actually erronously smaller than what it should be. E.g. Sokolov mentioned only 409,500 American motor vehicles lend-leased to the USSR, short by over 100,000 of the real number!"







And here's a few points from Nigel Askey:

 

[Sarmatian]

40 % of soviet armour during the moscow counter attack was british. (matilda's etc) they were running on fumes

So you picked an extremely narrow piece of the entire front and narrow time frame, and then produced a percentage. Why don't you share the actual number of tanks delivered at that time?

 

[qer]

Ok i'm not accusing you of being sympathetic with Hitler. I withdraw that statement because of course it's besides the point. I stand my case that if Halder, Bock and Guderian had their way Moscow would have fell before the end of 1941, likely triggering a soviet collapse.

Okay thanks for retracting on that point,maybe I overreacted a little. Still, I would like to know what is your base to say that the Soviets would collapse.

@Fulmen Excellent point on lend lease, but beyond disagreeing with Nigel, I think an encirclement of Moscow needed to surrender the city would be unviable due to logistical difficulties and unfavorable weather. Also an encirclement would still leave the army flanks over exposed, and Moscow itself would not by any mean be an easy city to take based on Leningrad or Stalingrad, where the soviets literally throw everything they had at hand. I don't think they could take the city before winter, and the Soviet counterattack would probably harm army group center even more than what it happen in real life.

 

[Meglok]

@Fulmen not willing to read thru 5 pages, so if this is redundant my bad.

The Interwar Soviets were very bad about keeping everything on the books. Working, broken down, lacking parts, cannibalize for parts, rusting hulk, it was all kept on the books. Because the great socialist state of the Soviet Union must have most of everything. Plus saying something was broken opened up possible claims of sabotage and a one way ticket to Lubyanka or a chance to count trees in Siberia.

You have to take a lot of inventory quantities with a grain of salt, especially the early designs of AFVs. You really can't apply on the book inventories to HOI inventories for Russia.

 

[Fulmen]

1) lend lease amounted to 4% total of Soviet ear time production

This is simply a falsehood, a Soviet-era propaganda figure that even modern mainstream Russian historians admit to. You claim you're not buying into Soviet historiography, yet this is another one of their propaganda myths that has been debunked for quite some time. Modern mainstream Russian historians admit to a figure of 8%, but the real figure is likely in the range of 15-25%. See my post above.

 

[Cain012]

This is a very interesting discussion which mainly seems to hinge on the fundamental limitation of historical game design in the face of player hindsight.

It may be interesting to note that a game with a totally opposing philosophy (War in the East 2) is frustrating a lot of players for the same reason: even though the game is utterly meticulous on the issues of modeling logistics, stockpiles, capabilities, combat delay, and moreover is turn based rather than “attack is movement” based, one cannot get around the feelings of being shoehorned and handicapped arbitrarily by hidden systems which are meant to take into account the player’s tendency to make ahistorical choices in an effort to not reproduce the disadvantages of history.

For instance, the Red Army player will pull the red army back instead of letting it get pocketed, or go for different objectives as the Germans to prevent “mistakes” like 2nd and 3rd Panzer Group’s diversions from the Moscow axis. And so systems are in place to make this difficult, on the supposition that what happened happened because it was what was possible with the resources available, and any alternative actions need to take that into account. In WitE2, for instance, there are special turn one rules which freeze an entire Soviet front in the south unless the Germans advance south and east of a particular hex, and logistics so punishing that the Germans cannot really use the luftwaffe for ground support for six or seven turns after the first turn due to the inability of moving up supplies to airbases as you repair the Soviet rail, and so on.

Ironically, these systems may actually *prevent* the player from achieving historical outcomes (it is extremely difficult in WitE2 to get AGS to Rostov by December for example), which ironically causes heaps of criticism to be leveled at those systems for their “inaccuracy.” This devolves into dispiriting peeks behind the curtain at stat formulas and metagaming which expose the reality that “accuracy” is all too often an arbitrary standard enforced by arbitrary rules for developers and players alike, and is not really attainable.

Personally I like the idea of attempting to accomplish ahistorical goals while having only the resources and conditions imposed by history, and I often wish Hoi4 had more of that. But WitE2 shows that hindsight is the main reason no game’s representation of those systems could be too accurate. Nobody wants to reproduce history with these games but nobody wants to be inhibited from accomplishing what was accomplished in history either. People want their ahistorical play to be “historically accurate.” It is a tough balance to strike even for one of the most famously grognard-type games on the market.

 

[Sarmatian]

This is simply a falsehood, a Soviet-era propaganda figure that even modern mainstream Russian historians admit to. You claim you're not buying into Soviet historiography, yet this is another one of their propaganda myths that has been debunked for quite some time. Modern mainstream Russian historians admit to a figure of 8%, but the real figure is likely in the range of 15-25%. See my post above.

LL is a highly complex subject and it would be extremely hard to evaluate actual impact of it even if you had access to every single piece of information.

The number of trucks is often cited as an example of how impactful LL was to Soviet war effort. Of course, as with everything, that's only half the picture. If you analyze Soviet truck production, you will notice that it gradually decreased as number of trucks received through lend lease increased. Truck production in 1941 was several orders of magnitude larger than in 1943, for example.

So, one could conclude that LL trucks simply replaced Soviet trucks. Sure, you could say that those factories now could produce something else. But what? Truck factories were hard to convert to tank production for example. It was almost impossible to produce medium and heavy tanks in such a factory. Vast majority of tens of thousands of T34's that were produced during WW2 were produced in just a few factories. Truck factories could have sometimes been converted to produce light tanks, but light tanks were becoming increasingly obsolete, and were often relegated to scouting purposes. In the last years of the war, they were considered risky even for those roles.

On the other hand, some stuff that would have made just tiny part of LL (in terms of tonnage, or value) like radios and telephones could have been much more important to Soviet war effort because they actually lacked to know how to produce such equipment in sufficient quantity and quality. Other things, like food, could have been crucial, depending on capabilities of SU to produce food at various times.

I would be very surprised if LL contributed anything close to 25% of Soviet war time production.

War on the eastern front has been a great interest of mine for quite a long time. 10-15 years ago, I would have been able to give exact names of factories and number of AFV's produced in them. Now I would have to consult books for even simpler data.

I think such discussion are outside the scope of the thread, anyway.

The fact remains that giving USSR actual number of equipment it historically had on the eve of Barbarossa would make for a very boring WW2 in the game. You would have to introduce much stronger limitation on the player to make it a fair fight. I remain convinced that current approach of devs (ie. heavily downsized amount of equipment and some penalties that gradually go away) is the right way to do it, instead of a massive, historical equipment pool and extremely harsh penalties.

 

[Gethsemani]

@Fulmen not willing to read thru 5 pages, so if this is redundant my bad.

The Interwar Soviets were very bad about keeping everything on the books. Working, broken down, lacking parts, cannibalize for parts, rusting hulk, it was all kept on the books. Because the great socialist state of the Soviet Union must have most of everything. Plus saying something was broken opened up possible claims of sabotage and a one way ticket to Lubyanka or a chance to count trees in Siberia.

You have to take a lot of inventory quantities with a grain of salt, especially the early designs of AFVs. You really can't apply on the book inventories to HOI inventories for Russia.

This is one of Merridale's big points in Ivan's War, namely that the interwar Red Army was a disorganized disaster all the way up until 1941. The purges in the Red Army didn't cause disorganization as much as it worsened them, but the basic systemic issues of the Red Army being, perversely, both the pride of the Soviet Union and the bastard stepchild that no one wanted to get close to because it was a leftover from Trotsky were already there. But corruption was widespread all throughout the 30's, with both quartermasters and higher officers cooking the books to make themselves look better (and to skim off the top, leather belts was an attractive item that was easy to embezzle for example). Hence when the purges came it was only expected that a lot of officers would go down, because most of them had perpetuated a corruption that reached from the lowest ranking conscripts all the way straight into high command. There was almost no oversight prior to the purges and the Red Army was showered with resources compared to most other parts of Soviet society, a situation that always leads to corruption.

A more realistic look at the Red Army's AFV inventory comes from doing like Zaloga and Glantz, by cross-referencing the number of Soviet vehicles the Axis claim to have destroyed or captured in the first months of Barbarossa against the Soviet claims. Because the Axis did capture thousands upon thousands of AFV's, but also noted that most of them were captured while still sitting in military storage and being so badly neglected that even the armor-starved Axis didn't see any point in trying to restore them for their own use. They also captured thousands more that had broken down before reaching the front, which suggests that no matter how they were graded by the Red Army they were definitely not fit for duty.

 

[Fulmen]

broken down before reaching the front, which suggests that no matter how they were graded by the Red Army they were definitely not fit for duty.

Because the Russians drove them over long distances. E.g. at Brody in June 1941, where the 8th Mechanised Corps marched for nearly 500 km to the battlefield and lost half its tank strength just to mechanical breakdowns in the process.

T-34s, KVs, Panthers and Tigers, to name a few, were also prone to mechanical breakdowns at such distances. Were they also not fit for duty?

Furthermore, is the equipment at fault if the crew has not been properly trained to perform even simple field repairs?

 

[Gethsemani]

Because the Russians drove them over long distances. E.g. at Brody in June 1941, where the 8th Mechanised Corps marched for nearly 500 km to the battlefield and lost half its tank strength just to mechanical breakdowns in the process.

T-34s, KVs, Panthers and Tigers, to name a few, were also prone to mechanical breakdowns at such distances. Were they also not fit for duty?

Furthermore, is the equipment at fault if the crew has not been properly trained to perform even simple field repairs?

Whether to lay the fault on the equipment or the crew is pointless semantics and obfuscation of the point being made: That, for whatever reasons, the Red Army inventory of tanks was largely a paper tiger, with most tanks being in various states of disrepair. Official records give a truly staggering number of tanks in the field, but the number of tanks that the Axis fought was much, much lower. Reports from both sides indicate that even tanks that USSR records claimed were in fighting condition actually weren't. This is totally consistent with the mismanagement and corruption that had plagued the Red Army ever since the early-30's and there's few reasons to assume that the books were less cooked in 1941 than they had been in the 30's.

So what if the crews couldn't maintain their tanks? Even if they could they would not have spare parts to do so and in many cases not even the tools necessary. This all ties back into the point about a staggeringly inept and corrupt organization (both militarily in the Red Army and more broadly politically in the USSR) more obsessed with presenting great statistics than the actual conditions on the field or factory floor. The purges only shifted the reason for covering up shortcomings from personal gain to fear of becoming yet another number in the long list of people that had been executed or sent to the gulags.

 

[Fulmen]

Whether to lay the fault on the equipment or the crew is pointless semantics and obfuscation of the point being made: That, for whatever reasons, the Red Army inventory of tanks was largely a paper tiger, with most tanks being in various states of disrepair. Official records give a truly staggering number of tanks in the field, but the number of tanks that the Axis fought was much, much lower. Reports from both sides indicate that even tanks that USSR records claimed were in fighting condition actually weren't. This is totally consistent with the mismanagement and corruption that had plagued the Red Army ever since the early-30's and there's few reasons to assume that the books were less cooked in 1941 than they had been in the 30's.

So what if the crews couldn't maintain their tanks? Even if they could they would not have spare parts to do so and in many cases not even the tools necessary. This all ties back into the point about a staggeringly inept and corrupt organization (both militarily in the Red Army and more broadly politically in the USSR) more obsessed with presenting great statistics than the actual conditions on the field or factory floor. The purges only shifted the reason for covering up shortcomings from personal gain to fear of becoming yet another number in the long list of people that had been executed or sent to the gulags.

The Red Army catalogued its inventory fairly often before the war. Do you have anything to back up this claim that these inventory lists were full of forgeries, that thousands of Red Army soldiers partaking in this frequent cataloguing of materiel were actively and consistently lying to their superiors for years at the risk of being shot and having their families sent to the gulag?

Inventory lists such as this one on aircraft that I posted in the OP:



So far I've seen no evidence to cast doubt on the validity of these lists, only conjecture. But I'm always open to new information.

 

[Sarmatian]

Ok, so even if we assume that everything on the books was in working order - what is the actual proposal? To actually give such amounts of equipment in game? How would that be balanced?

 

[Arilou]

Obvious question: Are in-game tanks supposed to represent 1-to-1 an actual tank? Or an abstracted number of a certain amount of tanks (including various other equipment)

 

[GenericType]

The mistake you make is to think the wermacht needed to "conquer the USSR". Of course it's impossible. But the losses of Leningrad and Moscow, possible in 1941, or alternatively the loss of the caucasus oil supply in 1942, would have crippled the soviet capabilities to push back the germans, or even provoked a collapse like in 1917.

And Uncle Joe himself said that without lend lease the USSR would have been toasted.

Why would the loss of Moscow or Leningrad decide the war for the Soviets? At the time for the Battle for Moscow, Soviet arms production is already picking up from the relocations behind the Urals, and enough men are being raised to completely replace the lost in the first phases of Barbarossa. At the end of 1941, the previously outnumbered Red Army is now almost at par, at the end of 1942, numerical superiority in terms of men and equipment per kilometer has been achieved. Moreover, at that time, the Nazis have already been reaching their maximum logistical extent, while logistically the Red Army is in much better shape owing to shorter supply lines.

An early semi or full capture of Moscow would have instead suspended Case Blue, since Moscow would need more men to be fed to the meatgrinder. It would mostly likely result in a much earlier planet-themed operations, and IMO a more devastating Nazi defeat.

All in all, the loss of Moscow is not in any way a sure-fire ceasefire material. Stalin would've just thrown everything to win or take back Moscow rather than surrender, well since his industrial and manpower base behind the Urals is intact, not to mention LL from the Allies.

 

[Secret Master]

Obvious question: Are in-game tanks supposed to represent 1-to-1 an actual tank? Or an abstracted number of a certain amount of tanks (including various other equipment)

It's always suspect to do a 1:1 equivalency between equipment in HOI4 and equipment in the real world. With ships it kind of works out, but with tanks and trucks it's a bit hazy.

In one sense, yes, it's 1:1. But there are no spare parts or ammunition considerations, so one tank sometimes represents spares, ammo, and other things.

Things like support equipment and infantry kits are right out. They are definitely not 1:1.

 

[Ketchup & friends]

@Arilou @Secret Master
even if isn't 1:1, there should be an internal consistency. The Soviets had a greater number of T-27 and T-37 than BT-5, but they have none in the game.

 

[Secret Master]

@Arilou @Secret Master
even if isn't 1:1, there should be an internal consistency. The Soviets had a greater number of T-27 and T-37 than BT-5, but they have none in the game.

I mean, yeah, consistency is important. But let's not pretend that the Soviets are the only victim here. The French don't have their old WW1 stockpiles of equipment. (Neither do the other victories of WW1 as far as I can tell.) In the case of France, there isn't a clearer demonstration of "We did this to balance gameplay" in the entire game. I suspect that it's the same thing here with the Soviets.

I seriously doubt the Devs just didn't know about the tanks. Most of the numbers of these AFVs can be found on Wikipedia. Hell, if I were an unpaid intern at Paradox, I could generate Soviet AFV types and numbers by using the links to various Soviet tanks in Wikipedia. It would take half an hour.

That being said, someone else already mentioned that this sort of issue is related to the whole "the war is won in the factories" aspect of HOI4. And more than once person has indicated that it would be great if the Soviets were nerfed in other ways to make up for the large stockpiles. But I'm not sure the game mechanics as they stand now "stretch" quite that far.

Again, I go back and look at how France is nerfed. If France had her actual starting stockpile of equipment, even if you nerfed their army with worse national spirits, she's probably be the most overpowered country in the early game or impossible to play if you set their ORG to a ridiculously low value. But if you do that, then when France capitulates, guess who benefits from all that extra equipment? That's right: Germany.

I wish I had a better answer for you, but I really don't. :shrug: