Without the General Winter, would Russia have lost to Napoleon/Hitler?

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On this: how much is true from the cliché that Revolutionary/Imperial French armies required extensive foraging to keep their ability to fight? Was it only done to maintain the pace, or the logistical train was patchy and it was a calculated risk as the plan was to occupy the enemy land anyway?

Could the Grande Armée make a winter quartier in Poland without devastating the land and/or losing its effective fighting ability? Was the Grande Armée a sustainable stuff at all or the drive to Moscow was dictated by the necessity of now or never?

Since I've already been digging into these books just now, here are some quotes about Poland and Russian logistics:

A Soldier for Napoleon by Franz Hausmann

pg 120
"Once in Silesia, however, the friendliness ceased and provisions diminished. The situation
grew worse as the corps shifted into Poland itself, spending the bulk of April around Posen
in miserable quarters. Supplies were drawn from magazines as the impoverished countryside was
incapable of sustaining the vast army now making its home between the Oder and the Vistula."


"There was not even enough straw for the troops to sleep on; they had to lie on the dirty and bare
floors in the miserable huts. Oppressive heat and bad water compounded the general misery. As Franz
noted, therefore, no one was reluctant to leave Poland."


pg 121
"The logistical situation grew increasingly difficult, exacerbated by a 5 June order for each
unit to stock a 10 to 14 day supply of provisions. The Bavarians, like most of the army, were
already receiving reduced rations for man and horse, and they quickly exhausted the readily available
resources of the regions where they were quartered. This additional requirement could only be met by pitiless
exactions from the local populace. Poland and East Prussia were stripped bare. Under these conditions, the
Bavarians made their way to the borders of the Tsar's realm through "an unlovely, often completely
barren region that became even more impoverished toward the Neman"


Though they marched in good order, the rigours of campaigning in Russia were already becoming evident,
"Heaps of dead horses showed us the way that IV Corps had taken, for hunger and fatigue felled them by
the hundreds"


pg 122
"Immediately on the right [eastern] bank, we found dozens of overturned and plundered wagons; even the finest
baggage wagons of the Italian and French Guards lay in the field next to their piles of horses, so that one
felt one was following a fleeing rather than an advancing army."


For the French Army, the peaceful move from the Vistula to the Neman, through barren regions,
was characterised by exhaustion and privation. The soldiers comforted themselves with the thought
of rich compensations in enemy territory. Once there, however, they found far and wide only a wasted
countryside whose inhabitants had fled. Another Bavarian officer noted "A bread shortage was already evident,
even though we had hardly set foot on enemy soil"


Major Ludwig Count von Seyboltstorff, commander of the II/1st Infantry noted:
"How will the army be able to live even in the case the war takes a favorable course with the quick pursuit
of the enemy and a rapid advance. By 12 July, the men had already gone nine days without bread and St Cyr
calculated that the corps had already lost 200 artillery horses. Poor quarters, short rations, foul water and
desolation remained the norm for man and beast."


pg 123
On 14 July, the corps departed Vilna. The marches were even worse than in Poland and Franz recorded that
"we are very often twelve hours on the road but have only covered a march of four hours owing to a new evil, the
complete absence of shoes...the greater part of the corps goes about with bare feet or wrapped their suffering feet
in cow hides"


St Cyr's comment was simple "Every day, the corps leaves behind a battalion's worth of men"


pg 162
Letter #12 Kowalewo 9 June 1812
I mention that I have used up the coffee, sugar and chocolate that I
already had, since there has been need of it. I thank you very much for all this.
The ham and mustard will serve me especially well, I would only wish that I could keep
it for when I will need it...we are situated at the home of a pensioned Polish colonel,
but the men are no longer getting all the necessities. For example, the bad drinking
water is notorious. Brandy is now also lacking, and, as I said before, there has been
a dearth of straw for a considerable time, and most of the the buildings have been
stripped of their thatch


Recollections of an Officer in Napoleon's Army by Captain Blaze

pg 63
In the campaign of Russia, the soldiers passed in front of the
treasury vans, abandoned on the road, without touching an ecus,
because there was no baker in the neighborhood. The great thing
in this world is bread, it is the stomach whose periodical demands
must always be listened to.


pg 77
A country in which were both very comfortable and the extreme opposite,
was Poland: The villages are frightfully filthy, in every peasant's house
there is an immense bed which serves for the entire family. The father,
mother, daughter, son-in-law all sleep there together, on straw and very
much as a litter of pigs. Go out of this hovel wherein you have left nature
in its primitive state, go to the chateau, you will find there all the
refinements of civilisation: a choice library, an agreeable conversation,
all the comforts it is possible to have in Poland. A voyage in that country
is a perpetual succession of antitheses. The Polish nobles make a ruinous
display and seek to re-establish the equilibrium of their finances by making
the peasants work.


pg 79
At Warsaw, one half of the inhabitants is composed of foreigners, and
especially Germans. The Polish Jews exclusively do business there; they are
inn-keepers, merchants, tailors, shoemakers; the Germans are doctors, surgeons,
lawyers; the Poles themselves are either nobles or peasants, slaves or lords; in
that country no intermediate class exists."


pg 80
The Poles speak nothing but French even among themselves; it is very bad form in
Warsaw to speak Polish, unless one addresses servants. The Polish language is
banished from good society as the Provencal patois is in Marseilles. They are
quite right in learning the languages of other people for no one, to my mind,
will be tempted to learn theirs. I have tried to do so, but how can one succeed
in pronouncing words which have four or five consonants one after the other? Still these
peasants, dirty, indolent, became very fit and brave soldiers. From beasts they become men,
proud, fit, intelligent, and they are not one bit inferior to the soldiers of the most
civilized nations.


pg 81
The Polish horses are small, they feed on anything given them, even old straw which
has seen service on the roofs of houses. They have been able to resist all the privations
that are experienced in war, while our handsome Norman horses were like skeletons when they
had gone without oats for two weeks.


pg 82
In Poland, the roads are not paved; the trouble has been taken of tracing
them through the forests, that is all. During the winter, and when the French
army tracked over that country in all directions, we encountered oceans of mud
which it was impossible to cross. The mud of Pultusk has become unhappily
celebrated: mounted men have been drowned in it with their horses.


pg 277
"The Poles, as soon as the coming of a detachment was announced,
deserted the villages and devoted their whole energy in concealing their provisions.
But practise in marauding enabled the troopers sounding the ground with their ram-rods
to find, even in the depths of the woods the Poles' best hiding-places.
 
For guns and tanks and artillery? the influx is not substantial compared to what Russia was producing.

For canned meats, foodstuffs, machine tools, motorized vehicles, incredibly valuable. For radios and radio technologies, invaluable.
One may wonder though if Soviet tank and artillery production would have been hurt if they had to take care of their own foodstuffs and trucks.
Again, depending on how you define Barbarossa. In the initial sense of a "lightning" campaign, then no, it did not succeed even in destroying the Red Army in the western USSR. The Soviet Southwestern Front (by far the strongest Soviet front in the summer of 1941) was able to defend Ukraine successfully against Heeresgruppe Süd until September, when the arrival of Panzegruppe 2 from Heeresgruppe Mitte allowed for a joint enveloping operation with Panzergruppe 1. September 1941 was the lowest point of Soviet fortunes during 1941, because after the destruction of the Southwestern Front (more than 700,000 men) they were left with very few frontline troops, and especially with massive material losses that were difficult to replace in a short space of time.

It should be remembered that the Germans enjoyed numerical superiority on June 22 1941, then the Soviets were able to mobilize enough new units to gain a slight advance, but after Kiev they again lost the numerical advantage and the Germans retained it until the winter. By October the Soviets began sending new units to the fronts to patch the holes, especially the gigantic one that had opened up in central Ukraine after their defeat at Kiev, units that they had begun mobilizing immediately after the German attack but needed training. The units they had mobilized until then had been formed mostly by recent reservists or by marine personnel in active service and could be sent to the front with less training time, but as this manpool of younger trained men was exhausted the Soviets needed more time to train their new units.

The third and final wave of massive Soviet losses happened again against Heeresgruppe Mitte, when the latter launched Typhoon in October and easily enveloped the weakened Soviet Western and Bryansk Fronts, inflicting a further 500,000 losses upon the Red Army, and ripping another gigantic hole in the Soviet defences. But by early December, the Soviets again had been able to mass enough forces to stop the weakened German advance and counterattack.

The reason for the successes of Heeresgruppe Mitte is quite simple: it had two Panzergruppe at its disposal, while Heeresgruppen Nord and Süd only had one each. This means that Bock's forces could launch pincer attacks, but the Army Groups of Leeb and Rundstedt could only do so if Heeresgruppe Mitte lent one of their Armored Groups to them, or if they were able to catch a group of Soviet troops with their backs to the coast of the Black Sea or the Baltic.

If you account for all the Soviet losses in 1941, from June 22 to December 31 then yes, the Soviets had to rebuild a whole Red Army from scratch. And what is more impressive is that this was not done by transfering troops from the Far East of the Caucasus, but by new levies, meaning that they actually had to rebuild once and a half in less than sixth months the forces that the Red Army really had deployed in the western USSR before the German attack. It was a war of resilience and attrition from the start, and it just couldn't be won by fancy "Bewegungskrieg" of the sort German generals enjoyed.
I once read that by 1945 the USSR was actually starting to run out of manpower. It didn't mater as Germany was loosing hard and irrevocably by then, but I do wonder how the Russians would for example have fared alone against the Axis.
 
One may wonder though if Soviet tank and artillery production would have been hurt if they had to take care of their own foodstuffs and trucks.
They literally couldn't build trucks themselves until Ford built the Gaz plant and showed them how.
 
They literally couldn't build trucks themselves until Ford built the Gaz plant and showed them how.

Even if we accept your incredibly condescending and deserves-a-punch-from-a-veteran quip about the USSR not knowing how to build trucks, the Gaz plant, and its trucks, predate WWII by roughly a decade.

You can make a claim that it was Lend-Lease that kept the USSR in war, and I have made it myself, but it needs to be based on, you know, reality.
 
I once read that by 1945 the USSR was actually starting to run out of manpower. It didn't mater as Germany was loosing hard and irrevocably by then, but I do wonder how the Russians would for example have fared alone against the Axis.
The only in depth study I've read about this issue (a ratehr old work by Walther J. Dunn, dated to the early 1990s) which unfortunately I don't have around here right now, was quite adamant that it was not the case, although I'm quite prudent about that because I've not read other comparably detailed sources.

The USSR lived through a demographic explosion in the 1920s, and before 1914 the Russian Empire's population had also been increasing at a quick pace. Despite the fact that on paper the ration between populations of Germany in 1941 (including the teritories annexed to the Reich that provided recruits for the Wehrmacht, like Austria) and the USSR was not that skewed to the USSR's advantage as it might seem (epecially considering the role played by Gernany's allies), the USSR had a "hidden" advantage that Germany lacked: its population was much younger, and so a much larger part of it could be recruited for military service.

In fact, before 1939 a considerable part of each year's class of conscripts was exempted altogether from service in the Red Army, because simply there were too many conscripts available. But even these men received some basic military training in the "popular militia" set by the Soviet state, which gave them basic training with light arms, grenades and in some cases even basic flying lessons with old planes. It should also be noticed that while Germany only reintroduced compulsory conscription in 1934, the USSR had been enforcing in without interruption since 1918.

The phenomenal expansion of the Red Army after the Polish campaign ended this situation. And when the Soviets began creating new units immediately the start of the German attack, they could resort to a huge pool of trained veterans and semi-trained older (but still young and relatively fit) men for immediate armed service, which meant that not much time was needed to turn them into front troops. The real obstacle was the available equipment, because the huge German encirclements meant that massive amounts of weapons of all sorts were lost, and the evacuation of industry to the Urals disrupted production of most sorts of weapons for several months.

Still, a decree by Stalin in the spring of 1942 stated clearly that no soldier without previous experience (this was the case of the classes of conscripts that came of age in 1941 and 1942) could be sent to the front without at the very least three months training. The Soviets only broke this rule in 1941 to cover the huge gaps created first by the "Kesselschlacht" of Kiev and second by Typhoon. But even in this case, most of the troops that took part in the Moscow counteroffensive in December 1941 were "fresh" troops formed by conscripts of the 1941 class who had been under training until then in the rearguard.

The Soviets tended to use older men as "cannon fodder" because in general they were much less well educated. As the education infrastructure of the USSR improved steadily during the 1920s and 1930s, younger generations became markedly more literate and able to learn the basic skills of modern technological warfare. Older men tended to be riflemen, and younger men went to artillery, tanks, aviation, or were trained as NCOs, or were provided with automatic or anti-tank weapons.

As the war advanced and the Red Army became better equipped, the Soviets also started to send more reinforcements to these "technical branches" or to logistical services, and reduced constantly the number of frontline riflemen in their divisions and brigades. But actually, the total numnbers of the Red Army remained pretty stable from 1942 until 1945: around 6,400,000 men and women, distributed between the Far East, the Caucasus (the Soviets never fully trusted Turkey), some forces in Central Asia and the western USSR, where the amount of Soviet troops hovered around 3,500,000 - 4,500,000. In this respect, the numerical advantage of the Soviets was real and existed during most of the war, but it didn't become substantial (more than 2:1) until the very end. The Soviets were aware that they just couldn't sustain an army larger than that; the real genius lay in the way they were able to keep reinforcing it.

If we are to believe Dunn's numbers, by early 1945 the Soviets had even begun releasing men again into the civilian economy, as the "irretrievable losses" (in Soviet speech) suffered in combat each year after 1942 could be covered fully with each year's new class of conscripts. In this respexct, it should also be note that as the war advanced, the number of "irretrievable losses" suffered by the Red Army declined sharply. They lost far more men in the great defensive battles of 1941 and 1942 than in any other time. Later offensive operations were always lighter in such losses, and the ratio of losses decreased as the war advanced; in 1944, despite launching a general offensive from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, the Red Army suffered less losses than in 1941, 1942 and 1943.
 
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If we are to believe Dunn's numbers, by early 1945 the Soviets had even begun releasing men again into the civilian economy, as the "irretrievable losses" (in Soviet speech) suffered in combat each year after 1942 could be covered fully with each year's new class of conscripts. In this respexct, it should also be note that as the war advanced, the number of "irretrievable losses" suffered by the Red Army declined sharply. They lost far more men in the great defensive battles of 1941 and 1942 than in any other time. Later offensive operations were always lighter in such losses, and the ratio of losses decreased as the war advanced; in 1944, despite launching a general offensive from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, the Red Army suffered less losses than in 1941, 1942 and 1943.

While this is true in part, the Red Army was is a bad state manpower wise by 1944. Most of the front line divisions were down to less than half strength in their combat battalions and even 'fresh' divisions were often well below paper strength. This manpower shortage is due to a range of reasons, not simply due to a lack of fresh bodies to throw into combat.

Firstly, Soviet policy was moving to improved training, which slowed the pipeline of new recruits down. In addition, a greater proportion of graduates from military training were being held back for additional technical training, further reducing the flow to the front line. While in theory this would eventually resolve itself, in practice the Red Army was in massive deficit of technically trained soldiers throughout the war and any additionally trained solders would be snapped up for a variety of roles that did not involve direct front line combat.

Secondly, and related to the first point, the proportion of the divisional manpower that was used as front line soldiers (riflemen) dropped throughout the war. This gradually brought the Red Army more into line with other major powers. To give an idea, a British and Soviet infantry division had roughly the same number of riflemen, but a British division had a paper strength of around 18000 men to a Soviet division's 10000 men. This partly explains why Soviet divisions could sustain far higher casualties (proportionally) than an equivalent German one and remain combat effective. This also explains why the performance of Soviet divisions was often very poor - they simply lacked the support services needed to act a combat multipliers. However, it did result in a decline in front line strength of divisions throughout 1944-45

Thirdly, the Soviet logistical services simply could not move replacement drafts up to the front as fast as the formations were depleted. This drop off of combat power, similar to what happened to the Wehrmacht in 1941, plagued the Red Army up to the end of the war. After a sustained advance the formations would rapidly lose combat power, and the offensive could only be maintained by the injection of fresh forces. When the front level reserves were depleted the advance would grind to halt, even against quite limited opposition.

Finally, Soviet policy was to leave formations on the front line until they were combat ineffective, then pull them into reserve to be rebuilt. This meant that fresh drafts were directed to rebuilding shattered divisions rather than restoring the front line strength of partially depleted divisions. As the Soviets began to win more battles with lower casualties, this ironically resulted in partially degraded divisions remaining on the front line for far longer, creating a massive manpower shortage at the front, while far less of a shortage existed on paper.

One may wonder though if Soviet tank and artillery production would have been hurt if they had to take care of their own foodstuffs and trucks

The Soviet agricultural sector was almost unique in the government's ability to extract surplus from it. While in occupied Europe, most farmers could hide part of their crop from authorities, or simply resort to subsistence agriculture to avoid confiscations Soviet farmers on collective farms did not have this option. As a result the Soviet Union was the only major combatant to have greater levels of hunger in the countryside than the cities. This gave it the ability to use food to sustain output in critical sectors, even at the cost of less 'useful' people.

The imports of tinned meat from America via lend lease were of huge importance in enriching the diet of the Soviet people, which in turn helped to sustain effective per-capita productivity, particularly in high-caloric demand activities such as mining and heavy industry. Without them it is likely that productivity may have dropped noticeably, although probably not to an extent that would have jeopardized the overall war effort.

Domestic truck production was sufficient to mechanize a decent core of units, which would have allowed the Soviets to maintain mobile warfare in limited areas for limited durations. So they likely could have surrounded and destroyed German forces at Orsha and Bobruisk in Bagration, but likely not have managed the massive operational advances to the Vistula. As such, they could still have defeated the Germans, but it would have been a slower and significantly more costly affair.

Without American trucks the Soviets could not have afforded to divert truck factories into producing light tanks, which made up about 1/3rd or total Soviet tank production during the war and nearly 50% during the critical period of 1942-43. However, given the poor performance of the T-60 and T-70 tanks when used as front line forces it may have had far less impact that the raw number might suggest

I once read that by 1945 the USSR was actually starting to run out of manpower. It didn't mater as Germany was loosing hard and irrevocably by then, but I do wonder how the Russians would for example have fared alone against the Axis

The critical period of the war on the Eastern front was the years of 1941-1942 when the Western Allies' contribution was at its lowest. Even the forces used in Africa and to garrison western Europe would have been of limited value on the Eastern Front, where logistical constraints were the primary factor in limiting the gains of Germany in those years. Cramming in extra divisions would exacerbated those problems. On the flip side, the hardware devoted to creating and maintaining the Afrika Korps would have been a godsend to the depleted German panzer division.

Critically, if Army Group B had possessed those two Panzer divisions in reserve during operations Uranus and Little Saturn it is likely they could have limited Soviet advances and maybe even prevented the destruction of 6th Army at Stalingrad. In addition, without the massive fuel expenditure and constant drain on the Luftwaffe caused by the air war over Germany, the Soviets would have faced significantly more issues.

So overall, the Soviets had already prevented a German victory before the Western Allied contribution became significant, but the eventual Soviet victory was massively aided by the Western Allied contribution, to the extent that a total Soviet victory becomes far less likely and some sort of negotiated end caused by mutual exhaustion and economic collapse becomes fairly probable (although the likely-hood of one side breaking the treaty as soon as they have regained some strength is very high). In the event of a second round I believe a Soviet victory is by far the most likely outcome, as Germany would have lost most of its advantages.
 
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