Suvorov books, ww-2

I kept reading and re-reading what I wrote and, honestly, I cannot see where I "talked" about brigades, mountain troops, etc...

You speak about "taking mountain passes" as if they are doors or gates. Have you ever travelled through Oituz? Soveja? Bicaz? Vidra? Tihuta? I hiked a few times through Cheile Putnei. There are many kilometres of windy and sloping roads through narrow valleys and canyons, often so narrow that only two vehicles can pass at a time, sometimes flanked by vertical walls on either side. These are death traps. Even in the summer. Never mind the times when the whole place is immersed in thick fog that you cannot see the hand in front of your eyes. Want to talk about winter in the mountain passes?
But let us assume that indeed the brave Russian parachutists would assume complete control of these passes along the entire length of each pass (a thing they failed to do with modern equipment in Afghanistan) and that the Russian army would be able to travel freely through Carpatii Orientali on their way to Berlin. Then what? There are other passes on the way, in Carpatii Apuseni, Tatra, Alps. That is another battle, and another battle, and another battle, endlessly. What would you do? Send more parachutists or re-assign the guys from the earlier-fought passes and leave those passes exposed again. After some thinking, it becomes evident that it would take a lot of time, effort, material and personnel to take and keep these passes. Why bother going through such hard-fought mountainous terrain on the way to Berlin when just a few hundred kilometres to the north there is a long relatively flat land with roads (tarmac, dirt, whatever) all the way to Berlin. That is EXACTLY why the Russians went that way to Berlin.

As Andreas said, the only reason the Russians would come down South of the Carpathians would be to take the oil fields, but if they did that, they would do it over the plains to the South of the mountains rather than across the mountains. The Southern plain of Romania is a bottleneck. Getting out of there involves a veritable obstacle course, with Danube to the South and West, the sea to the East and Mountains to the North and West.

Radu

Since the discussion keeps degrading due to innability of PaulC to discuss in a civilized manner without resorting to insulting personal remarks, he was banned for one week.

I think PaulC make a confusion betwen my posts and Radub ones (regarding mountain troops).

About paratroopers, well, german ones at Eben Emael was just few (less then a company size i think) and landed by surprize using gliders. It was a local, pinpoint target benefiting of element of surprise, and the fort was captured when reinforcements arrived next days.

In Crete german paratroopers landed near airports areas (quite flat, yes) not in mountains. They suffered heavy casualties, especially because they didnt had heavy weaponry nor the necessary support and such large scale missions was not done anymore after that.

Soviets tried a single more important action
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Dnieper...borne_operation

<<STAVKA, sensing a critical juncture, ordered a hasty airborne corps assault to increase the size of the bridgehead before the Germans could counterattack. On the 21st, the Voronezh Front's 1st, 3rd and 5th Guards Airborne Brigades got the urgent call to secure, on the 23rd, a bridgehead perimeter 15 to 20 km wide and 30 km deep on the Dnieper loop between Kaniv and Rzhishchev, while Front elements forced the river.........................................................................................................Through the night, some pilots avoided starshell-lit drop points entirely, and 13 aircraft returned to airfields without having dropped at all. Intending a 10 by 14 km drop over largely undefended terrain, the Soviets instead achieved a 30 by 90 km drop over the fastest mobile elements of two German corps.....................................................................................................................Of 4,575 men dropped (seventy percent of the planned number, and just 1,525 from 5th Brigade), some 2,300 eventually assembled into 43 ad-hoc groups, missions abandoned as hopeless, and spent most of their time seeking supplies not yet destroyed by Germans. Others joined with the nine partisan groups operating in the area. About 230 made it over (or out of) the Dnieper to Front units (or were originally dropped there). Most of the rest were almost casually captured that first night or killed the next day (though, that first night, 3rd Co, 73rd Panzer Grenadier Regiment, suffered heavy losses while annihilating about 150 paratroopers near Grushevo, some 3 km west of Dubari)..................................................................................................................STAVKA deemed this second (and, ultimately, last) corps drop a complete failure; lessons they knew they’d already learned from their winter offensive corps drop at Viazma hadn’t stuck. They would never trust themselves to try it again.>>

Now this was done in a quite flat area, and even so they wasnt able to accomplish anything. They wasnt able to regroup to form any significant battle group, lacked supplies, heavy weapons and was quickly anihiliated as significant combat force.

Imagine them flying without much air superiority (so suffering important losses even before to launch their troops), and launched somewhere in mountain and forest areas, scatered all over there, without heavy guns and trying to regroup. And facing troops specialized in fighting in such enviroment, better equiped and better trained to fight there and knowing much better the terrain.
Sure, Stalin and his gang might thought that was easy (even if lessons learned in Finland might temperate their wet dreams) based mostly in numbers, as usual, but what usually happened when such actions was done (by any significant paratroop units) show the otherwise

It isnt any wonder why such big air drops wasnt done in such areas, by anyone, because is too hard to accomplish something, not to mention you dont do large scale launches without having total air superiority.

This post has been edited by udar on July 05, 2012 08:50 am

As for the combat airdrop experience of the Soviets, their largest operation involved dropping the 4th Airborne Corps at Vyazma, with only 2,100 parachutists dropped and the operation ending in total failure.

More about it here: http://books.google.ro/books?id=rz7smHCwhX...0vyazma&f=false

That's behind any other major protagonist that performed airborne operations in European theater: US, UK and Germany.

Perhaps it is as you say PaulC, but I can't resist asking the question: what did they gain from that? After all they win the war having more men, more machines, more powerful allies, indeed accumulating experience and use it at the the end of the war... but no major airborne operations, no blitzkrieg operations (thay never matched the success of the Wehrmacht from the summer-autumn of 1941!)...
what stopped them to use this high quality men thay had later, from 1943 onwards, they were on the offensive? They have none left or what?

I can not help myself not to comment ironically this picture that appears more cartoon-like not war... Back to the theme the 2nd Mech. Corps from around Chisinau would not be introduced in battle in Tulcea or Galati areas but in Iasi, in central Moldova, according the alleged operational plan "Burian" crossing trough continuous fighting the southern part of Moldova and north-eastern Muntenia to reach Bucuresti -Ploiesti line. A much shorter distance and apparently easier task was given to the 18th Mech Corps from southern Basarabia, which I will analyze a little:

The 18th Mechanized Corps (commander - Major General PV Volokh, Deputy. For political affairs - Regimental Commissar IA Gavrilov, Chief of Staff - Colonel AG Kravchenko) began to take shape in March 1941 on the basis of 23th and 49th light tank brigades and 12th motorized rifle brigades and units of the Odessa Military District. It consists of:
- The 44th Tank Division (87th and 88th Tank Regiments, 44th Motorized Rifle Regiment, 44th Artillery Regiment, I-362 PPP, 379 pg-I, and other units of the number of divisions);
- The 47th Tank Division (93rd and 94th Tank Regiments, 47th Motorized Rifle Regiment, 47th Artillery Regiment, I 357-PPP, 45th pg, other units of the number of divisions);
- 218 th Motorized Division (658th and 667th Motorized Rifle Regiment, 135th Tank Regiment, 663rd Artillery Regiment, 44th oiptadn, 231 th ozadn, 288th orb, 591th Em, 388 First Lieb , 216th AAA, 164th RMB, 687 th ab, 368 th SME 23rd pp, 466 First PCP, 747-PPP, I, 597 I-pg);
- 26th Motorcycle Regiment;
- 552nd First separate battalion;
- 68-th separate engineering battalion;
- 118th Aviation Squadron, a separate cabinet.
Staffing Corps personnel was 26,879 people (75% of staff positions). In service of its parts were [16]: 282 tanks (106 BT-5/-7, 150 T-26, 12 OT-26, 14 T-37/-38), 6 armored vehicles, 64 guns 76-152mm caliber, 30 guns AT, 32 anti-aircraft guns, 30 cars and 915 trucks*, 79* tractors, tanks 4*, 19* Workshop, 140 motorcycle [17], a small amount of tankettes T-27. The lack of cars and trucks offset by anticipated revenue from the economy in the declaration of mobilization.
The 44th Tank Division (commander - Colonel VP Krymov deputy. For political affairs - Regimental Commissar SS Zatsarinsky, Chief of Staff - Colonel P. Pankow), which consisted of 211 tanks (143 T-26, 42 BT-5, 12 OT-26, 14 T-37/-38), stationed in areas Tarutino and Berezino.
The 47th Tank Division (commander - Colonel GS Rodin, Deputy. For political affairs - Regimental Commissar AF Andreev, Chief of Staff - Colonel PPZadorozhnyj), armed with only 22 tanks (15 BT-7 and 7 T-26) and a few dozen tankettes T-27, stationed in the area of ​​Ackerman, Maysburga, Chabot and Shabolet. From the available in its 94th tank regiment 36 tankettes only 24 machines were functioning properly [18]. A small amount of military equipment forced the tank to train crews by "walking - in Tank."
218th I. Motorized Division (commander - Colonel AP Sharagin, Deputy. For political affairs - Regimental Commissar N. Kovalev), which had 45 tanks BT-7, was stationed in the area, and Sarat Gnadentalya.
Management and staff of the corps - Ackerman.
Source (translated partially): http://lib.rus.ec/b/367734/read
if you imagine that such a force can occupy Ploiesti and/or Bucharest in summer 1941, I recommend you a serious study of military aspects of WW2, in its basic elements!

With whom are are your arguing ? Where did I say the road to Berlin passed through the Carpathians ?

Oil being the no1 target is pretty obvious from my messages too. Again what is your point ? To deliver a deadly blow to the Wehrmacht, the Red Army had to cut the oil extraction and transport to Germany.

The mission for the Red Army mountain units and paratroopers was to stop the oil flow. And for that, the difficult crossing characteristics of the Carpathians become handy. On top of that, it turns the Carpathians into a wall for the Romanian and German forces in Moldova. If a Spetsnaz platoon with 25kg of TNT blows up rocks in mountain pass, axis units are trapped like rats in Moldova.

As for the Southern Plain being a bottleneck, that's absurd. Who turns it into a bottleneck ? It's not as geographic obstacles by themselves stop an army. You need another army to do that. Who exactly was turning the Southern Romania into a bottleneck ? The crushed Romanian army retreating into Bulgaria ? The Bulgarian Army ? I'd expect them to fraternize with the Soviets, not fight them. The serbs ? The same serbs that saw the Soviets as the bigger brother which will liberate them?

This post has been edited by PaulC on July 13, 2012 06:36 pm

Could it be the total lack of transport planes ? It's not like the TB3s survived in a German controlled airspace. At Vyazma not only was it badly planned, but they had so few planes that they couldn't achieve surprise at once, but had to do multiple drops over several nights.

To me, the 18th mechanized corp is any Wehrmacht officer's dream force to have : a huge, well equipped tank division ( I wanted to say motorised infantry since a soviet motorized infantry division has 275 tanks while a German Panzergrenadier division has 0 tanks. ).

No German tank division on the Eastern front had 282 tanks, 64 field guns, 26 000 men, 32 AT guns and a lefty amount of trucks and tractors.

For the Red Army, the 18th mech corp was pocket change. For the Wehrmacht they only wished they could have such a large unit.

But feel free to prove that the 18th mech corp was useless.

When you claim something, it's important not to forget that any claim has to be substantiated in relation to the context and not by itself in a vacuum.

To throw back a devastating simple rebuttal : what could stop it from doing just that, destroying the Ploiesti oilfields and/or take Bucharest ?

The 1st Romanian tank division that was undergoing elementary training ?

283 ofiteri, 433 subofiteri, 6.014 soldati, 5.367 pusti, 234 pusti-mitraliera, 39 mitraliere, 18 aruncatoare de mine, 36 piese de artilerie, 103 tancuri şi 725 vehicule.

vs.

26,879 people , 282 tanks , 6 armored vehicles, 64 guns 76-152mm caliber, 30 guns AT, 32 anti-aircraft guns, 30 cars and 915 trucks*, 79* tractors, tanks 4*, 19* Workshop, 140 motorcycle a small amount of tankettes T-27.

Men 4-1 advantage for the soviets
Tanks 2.8-1 advantage for the soviets
Artillery field guns 64 vs. 54 ( including mortars )
AT guns 32 vs. 0
AA guns 32 vs. 0? ( could we consider the 39 machineguns as AA ? )
Trucks 1211 ( including working T27 tankettes ) vs. 725 vehicles of all type. For the soviets this is before the mobilization of the civilian transport.

I repeat my question : what could stop the 18th mech corp ?

BTW, thanks for the link. It provides a wealth of information regarding the Red Army units of the Odessa district, those directed against Romania. Simply by navigating through the dozens of pages of units cannot leave one but a sense of the huge force threatening us.

I will conclude by pasting the last line in the analysis you linked :

By June 1941 the Red Army had considerable stocks and had everything needed for combat operations. Ammunition, fuel and food dispensed from the central and regional warehouses, should be enough troops for at least 6-7 months of hostilities

But, of course, we all know, the soviets were not prepared for war and the Germans reached Moscow and Rostov by their own efforts.

This post has been edited by PaulC on July 13, 2012 07:12 pm

Welcome back PaulC!
what could stop the 18th Mech Corps... first the Danube or the Pruth... second the vehicles who would be decimated by the road (not because it was so bed, but because they were in very bad shape)... third the romanian infantry and armoured divisions... fourth the romanian and german aircraft...

Until the fun ends..

Can you pinpoint please what forces would have stopped the soviets in making bridgeheads on our territory ? We have the map, we have the opposing forces.

The T26 and BT tanks had exceptional reliability. This was proven in Spain and in Mongolia and again in 1945 in Manchiuria.
The BTs used against the Japanese crossed the Gobi desert with 7% mechanical losses. 800 km in 3 days.

Which Romanian infantry ? The 4th army was being mobilized as of June 22. Even assuming it would have finished mobilization by July 6th, we're talking about a reservists army very poorly equipped.

Assuming somehow they've survived the initial mass attack. Of course, the VVS with a few thousand planes wouldn't have protected its mech corps.
How many ground attack planes did the Luftwaffe have in Romania ?

This post has been edited by PaulC on July 13, 2012 07:38 pm

Be welcome PaulC! You also linked me the Solonin book who is very interesting too!

Ok, I agree the BT tanks especially were not bad tanks, but maybe there (Spain, Mongolia) they were in a better technical condition... here in southern Basarabia we have this :
Although a considerable number of tanks required repairs (about 70% of all tanks of the Odessa MD were ready for action, the other 30% nedeed major repairs), but were in the ranks were a serious threat to the enemy, focusing on the Romanian territory, and who had a small amount of military equipment.
70% from 282 tanks is let's say 200 ready for action?

I am not arguing... It seems you are.
In my first post about the mountains on 3 July, I replied to Andreas explaining why the "Russian Spearhead" did not come through Tulcea-Galati and went North instead because the main aim of the "Russian Army" was Berlin. Andreas agreed partially. That should have been the end of that. Where was the need for an argument and all those pie-in-the-sky fantasies about paratroops taking whole mountain passes? I have no idea!
Radu

I am not arguing... It seems you are.
In my first post about the mountains on 3 July, I replied to Andreas explaining why the "Russian Spearhead" did not come through Tulcea-Galati and went North instead because the main aim of the "Russian Army" was Berlin. Andreas agreed partially. That should have been the end of that. Where was the need for an argument and all those pie-in-the-sky fantasies about paratroops taking whole mountain passes? I have no idea!
Radu

Well, the soviets planned to use paratroopers to block the Romanian mountain passes and cut the oil flow to Germany.

Secondly, I don't think Andreas for a moment was thinking of the soviet spearhead of the all Eastern Front, but he can clarify this. What I understood was related to the main drive of the south western front against us.

From a book devoted to the BT-2/-5 fast tanks I can quote that in April 1941 the 18th Mechanized Corps had only older types like BT-2 and BT-5 tanks and none BT-7... and in a bed technical condition compared to other mechanized corps...