I really wouldn't call that a naive belief. On paper it would take a mad man to launch an offensive into the USSR. Hitler lucked out that both defensive lines were unarmed at once. He lucked out the supplies were placed forward.
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I really wouldn't call that a naive belief. On paper it would take a mad man to launch an offensive into the USSR. Hitler lucked out that both defensive lines were unarmed at once. He lucked out the supplies were placed forward.
To b e fair that luck turned around with one of the coldest winters in Russia for awhile.
Probably he was, yes. Not active planning but passive, of the sort that a strategically-encircled military superpower would be expected to undertake. I seriously doubt that such an offensive would've gone well, most certainly not in 1941 and still most probably not if it went ahead in 1942 or 1943. All those sweet weapons and tech that the Soviets ended up with had to be earned in blood, a terrible amount of blood. They needed to encounter the likes of the upgraded Panzer IV and Tiger I before they considered mounting 85mm cannons to the T-34, and while it's true that in turn the Wehrmacht had to encounter the T-34 and KV-series, the early variants of those tanks were notoriously unreliable. There's no reason to think Soviet all-arms offensive abilities would've somehow been better either, since that sort of experience also had to be earned in blood. They would've been better armed, better supplied and some units would've been better trained, but in this case I certainly favour the defensive abilities of the Germans to win out against repeated general Soviet offensives.
It had however the positive effect to cut down the rasputitsa time.
Barbarossa has failed before the winter so there cant be a dispute.
I was merely talking about that because most people have this false idea that the Germans froze to death in mass during the Winter and that's why they lost.
Most people don't realize that Germany had already "cannibalized" most of its logistics and support train to replace riflemen on the front line, leaving the army without most of the well-trained and experienced specialists that helped make it so effective up until that point. The push on Moscow was a "do or die" gamble, and failed. They then took a few more years to die, but that critical first nail was already in the coffin. Further losses to the cold and Soviet counter-attacks throughout the winter of '41-42 merely aggravated the problem.
Uh, of course they mounted the 85mm weapon as a response to the guns pf the Pz VI and V. Which in turn had been developed to counter the KV series and T-34s, as you well say. I doubt highly that without the incentive of the nasty shock that these Soviet tank models were, the Germans would have bothered much about improving their tanks. In a war concentrated against the Western Allies after the fall of France, they would've concentrated all their resources in the Luftwaffe and the Kriegsmarine, not in developing the Pz V and Pz VI behemoths, who were notoriously bad suited for the Bewegungskrieg that was axiomatic for the Prusso-German military tradition: they were slow, gas-guzzling and cumbersome vehicles badly suited to the sort of deep thrusts into the enemy rearguard that the Wehrmacht conducted in 1939-41.
On another side, both the Pz V and Pz VI had even worse teething problems than the Soviet T-34 had in 1941, and in some cases, they had serious issues with reliability and mobility that were left unsolved until the end of the war.
There's also the issue that the Soviets kept their heads cool when it came to develop new tanks and self-propelled guns, while the new German tanks were authentic financial extravaganzas. Building a Tiger needed more than 300,000 man-hours (a fact proudly broadcasted in German brochures, actually), and financially it cost more to build one Pz VI than a B-24 four-engined bomber. It was insanity, pure and simple.
I'd not be so sure about German defensive capabilities. These capabilities were (to borrow your expression) bought with blood in the East, but in 1941 the Germans had little experience in it. Actually, in 1941 both the Heer and the Red Army were obsessed with offensive warfare and totally neglected developing defensive doctrines. When the Germans attacked, the Soviets paid for it dearly. But had the roles been reversed, it's my opinion that the German army would have been also badly unprepared, with an officer corps whose only doctrine for waging war according to a three-centuries old tradition was Bewegungskrieg, and an offensive approach to operations was always favoured and encouraged, even when badly outnumbered by the enemy.
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I thought the Panzer 4 at least was a relatively efficient vehicle in terms of cost and fairly reliable.
You are correct...but what is your point? Mine was that the best Soviet weapons only appeared much later in the war, after years of combat demonstrated the need for them. If the Red Army embarks on a general offensive in 1941, 1942 or 1943, they would do so without the assistance of such machines as the IS-2, ISU-152 and T-34-85, the very things that allowed them to have an advantage over the Wehrmacht. The Wehrmacht would likewise most likely not have deployed either the Tiger or Panther, nor even the advanced versions of the Panzer IV, and on paper would seem undermatched against the Red Army. But alas, wars aren't fought on paper, and given what we know of the state of Soviet forces in 1941, a Soviet victory looks highly unlikely. If Stalin doesn't sue for peace after a failed strike, or if Hitler doesn't let him, the war would probably end up a stalemate.
They'd already demonstrated their defensive innovation in 1941, in North Africa where Rommel used his FlaK batteries to destroy British armored thrusts. Small arms-wise, the MG-34 (and its next evolution, the MG-42) was a reliable, lightweight, belt-fed weapon, perfect for generating maximum firepower with minimum manpower, whereas the DP MG was not. The K98k and Mosin-Nagant were both equally fine rifles, but the Germans also had the MP40 in service well before 1941, so they hold a clear advantage in defensive firepower. I consider it entirely unlikely, almost impossible really, that the Germans would've been unprepared for a Soviet strike. It was crystal clear that the only country who could hurt Germany on land was the Soviet Union, and their status as ideological enemies meant it would be suicidal not to have capable forces at or near the border, coupled with reconnaissance to boot.
Taking into account their doctrine of Bewegungskrieg, it's feasible that the Wehrmacht would've let their central Polish front collapse while holding the flanks, in order to draw in Soviet forces, then envelope them in a massive Cannae. Whether the Soviets would've seen such a thing and taken measures to prevent it is arguable, as indeed is the (un)likelihood of Hitler even permitting such a withdrawal. But what is not arguable is the massive gap in combined arms warfare development between the two armies, falling firmly in favour of the Germans; in a war of movement at this time, the Heer is going to come out on top.
You have the source for these claims?, if you can share please.
For the man-hour cost of the Tiger I, although 300,000 is a widespread number both in books and in the net, I'd have to look for more "serious" sources; but as I've said it's an often used number.
As for the Consolidated B-24 "Liberator" bomber, I have reliable information, from the book "Willow Run - Colossus of American Industry" (by Warren Benjamin Kidder, 1995). Building a B-24 in 1941, before it really entered mass production, required 201,826 man-hours. By March 1944, at Ford's Willow Run plant, thanks to the mass production procedures enacted by its manager Charles E.Sorensen, that amount had decreased to only 17,357 man-hours (at peak production, the plant was churning out 1 B-24 every hour, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).
As for the Consolidated B-24 "Liberator" bomber, I have reliable information, from the book "Willow Run - Colossus of American Industry" (by Warren Benjamin Kidder, 1995). Building a B-24 in 1941, before it really entered mass production, required 201,826 man-hours. By March 1944, at Ford's Willow Run plant, thanks to the mass production procedures enacted by its manager Charles E.Sorensen, that amount had decreased to only 17,357 man-hours (at peak production, the plant was churning out 1 B-24 every hour, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week).
The Tiger and Panther, perhaps not. The advanced versions of the Panzer IV, on the other hand, were already in the works due to the poor showing of the Panzer III against some of the better-armored French tanks. The Panzer III was only able to handle a modest amount of upgrading before its suspension and engine were incapable of dealing with the added weight, so the Panzer IV became the logical target for major improvements. By the time Germany declared war on the Soviets, longer-barreled 75mm guns (75L43, 75L48) and additional armor plate were already being installed into Panzer IV F2 and G models. The 75L48 was still in widespread German use on the StuG and Hetzer up until the end of the war, and effective at decent ranges against anything but some of the heavy late-war Soviet tanks. The interim 50mm medium-length gun on the Panzer III (replacing the 37mm gun used in Poland and France), on the other hand, might not have been increased to a long-barrel, and even the high velocity 50L60 was marginal against the mid-war Soviet tanks.
The Soviets, however, would not have gotten an early chance to work out the operational flaws with their own designs, and would have been facing the up-gunned Panzer IV, not the lethargic Panzer III (nearly half of them still armed with 37mm guns), as the main German tank.
In 1941, the only field in which the Germans had a clear technological advantadge over the Soviets in main weapons systems was in airplanes (and in ships, but that would be of little importance). The Soviets had already some good modern designs lined up in the drawing boards, but they'd still not entered mass production due to the lack of aluminium and the lack of sufficiently powerful engines (although the Klimov design bureau was working around the clock to get prototypes ready). In artillery, the Soviets had equal or better guns than the Germans in all areas except in anti-air weapons (ironically, most of the technical assistane to design them had come from Rheinmetall in the pre-Hitler years). The Red Army's field artillery in particular was considerably better than German models, especially the 122mm howitzer and the 152mm gun (better mobility, higher range and higher rate of fire than comparable German models), and the Germans lacked rocket artillery of any kind. The situation in tanks is well known. In small arms, in June 1941 the Red Army's infantry standard weapon was a semi-automatic rifle, the SVT-40, while the German landser still used a Mauser bolt rifle (the Soviets reintroduced the Moisin-Nagant rifle after Barbarossa because it was cheaper to produce in order to cover the horrific losses of the first months of the war).
The German advantadge lay in better coordination, a much higher level of professional efficiency in combat leadership and the advantadges of having a much more developed industry which allowed them to multiply the efficiency of their own weapons: radios, better optical sights, close coordination between artillery and infantry, and between land and air forces, etc.
They also had clear deficiencies that were left unresolved and utterly ignored until the bitter end: intelligence, logistics, optimization of armaments production, etc. In all these fields (which were key in WW2) the Allies were consistently better than the Germans.
Perhaps yes, perhaps not. We'll never know. But one thing is clear: the German army in 1941 was not as efficient as it would be later at defensive fighting, and it was clearly outgunned and outnumbered by the Soviets. Without Barbarossa, one to three years later things would be even more eschewed in the Soviets' favour. What the Soviets needed was time to sort out the mess in which the Red Army was into due to Stalin's purges, the constant changes of doctrine in the pre-war years and the frantic program of expansion of the army.
And the German doctrine of Bewegungskrieg did not always go as designed either; at Kursk they crashed headways into the Soviet defenses, during Fall Blau they overextended themselves, at Moscow they escaped narrowly a total disaster ... Not to speak of the way that after Kursk the Soviet commanders always managed to outmaneuver the Germans and confuse them about their real intentions. Even the rash, hyper-aggressive Guderian was a changed man after his 1941 experiences during Barbarossa, and in 1943 he advocated prudence and a defensive strategy instead of more of the same old Bewegungskrieg.
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In actual practice, much of Germany's early success came from defensive tactics (as a tool of an offensive strategy), NOT offensive. The Germans would advance rapidly, seize a strategic location before the opponents were ready to oppose the attack, set up machinegun and artillery "killing zones", and then defend it against the inevitable counter-attacks. In the mass confusion of the early war advances, it worked. Once things were allowed to stabilize and there were no easy advances into poorly defended positions, as well as less of an inclination to automatically launch human waves against German positions, things got bloody and expensive, and the German advances stalled. The land mine also had a profound impact on the success or failure of Blitzkrieg, and the Soviets utilized a staggering quantity of land mines to slow the German advance.
Intelligence went from a strong point in the early stages to a weak one, as the attrition rates ground down the scouts, and fresh recruits attempted to do the same tasks that had been allocated to experienced teams. Fuel restrictions limited aerial reconnaissance as well. As more and more of the details of the war were directed from the top, and local recon reports were "overlooked" if they didn't support the "plan", there had to be a sense of futility: "why bother". Possibly as a result, the Germans were too often totally ignorant of what the Soviets were doing, when even a cursory look from the air would have spotted things of major concern.
Intelligence went from a strong point in the early stages to a weak one, as the attrition rates ground down the scouts, and fresh recruits attempted to do the same tasks that had been allocated to experienced teams. Fuel restrictions limited aerial reconnaissance as well. As more and more of the details of the war were directed from the top, and local recon reports were "overlooked" if they didn't support the "plan", there had to be a sense of futility: "why bother". Possibly as a result, the Germans were too often totally ignorant of what the Soviets were doing, when even a cursory look from the air would have spotted things of major concern.
Ammo production. Wehrmacht regularly "out-shelled" Red Army for half the war and up until late 1942 AP shells were a severe deficiency, 34s and KVs had to use canister shot with fuse set to impact.
Both the Western Allies and the Germans shot more shells per gun than the Soviets, who used their guns in the old-fashioned WW1 way, as static barrages, and only in cases of major offensives or major defensive battles. And given the huge disparity in industrial capacity between Germany and the USSR, it's no wonder that the Soviets were outproduced somewhere. The real surprise is that they managed to outproduce the Germans in some cathegories.
From 1943 onwards they also made quite an ingenious use of their artillery, employing very sophisticated time tables for their artillery barrages before major offensives. By 1945, the only way the Germans had to avoid the devastating effect of massed Soviet artillery was to be alert, detect any Soviet buildup (not easy, as the Soviets became very skilled in deception) in advance and, if they had enough time available, build new defensive positions in the rear ... while manning the original defenses until the very last moment, or else the Soviet initial infiltrating infantry would detect the ruse.