German supply

[chuckfourth]

No Idea
The proposition that a truck is limited to 300kms is clearly wrong, if its a fuel tanker then you can just fill the fuel tank for the trucks motor from the transported fuel.

Red Lancer
Ok you have quoted me as saying "I don't believe". I never said that. It is probably good policy when you quote someone that something they actually said appears in the quotes.
Either the quote you supplied previously is wrong or your assumption that there were no other trucks available is wrong. If both are correct then the Germans are out of trucks by 38 days into Barbarossa. It is simple inescapable Logic.
I repeat my question to you, do you know how many trucks the Germans had at the beginning of Barbarossa?

[morvael]

The longer the distance the trucks have to cross, the longer the time required to do so. To keep the stream of supplies at the same level it would mean you need more trucks (as more would be on their way to the front or back at any given time). With constant (actually dwindling due to damage, lack of spare tyres and parts to repair) number of trucks, there is a distance at which they will be unable to keep required level of delivery. As number of trucks dwindles, so does effective resupply distance. I guess 300km is a generous assumption of how much each truck can travel per day in good WW2 conditions. Being 100km from railhead you can assume each truck will make three runs every two days. Being 300km from railhead you can assume each truck will make one run every two days. Obviously the capacity to resupply at 300km is reduced to 1/3 of what you could achieve at 100km, this can be too little, hence divisions will have to pause active operations, and withdraw if attacked due to lack of ammo. Also, at certain distances (I think somewhere between 1000km and 2000km for WW2 trucks) you reach the point where the truck reaches its limit - it will consume more supplies on the way than it can carry, meaning it's useless.

[morvael]

b. ROAD SUPPLY COLUMNS AND TRAINS. There are four types of road supply columns in the German Army: (1) Motorized columns (Kraftwagenkolonnen) are, in general, employed on good roads. They can cover up to 125 miles per day. They are organized into very large, large, and small motor transport columns with a capacity of 120 metric tons, 60 tons, and 30 tons respectively for the transportation of supplies other than fuel. In addition, mountain divisions may have a special 10-ton capacity column. Fuel generally is transported in motorized fuel columns of two types--heavy columns with a minimum load of 50 cubic meters of fuel, and light columns with a minimum of 25 cubic meters. Motor transport columns are designated with reference to their employment as Field Army, army, corps, or division motor truck columns.

Animal-drawn columns (Fahrkolonnen) normally have capacities of 30 or 17 metric tons, and mountain animal-drawn columns 15 metric tons. In general, they are equipped with one-team wagons; in cavalry units two-team wagons are used. According to German training instructions, well cared for and trained horses can cover 12 to 15 miles per day and under favorable conditions up to 20 miles, with a day of rest following. If oxen are employed, the rate of movement is slower.

from Handbook on German Military Forces from March 1945, chapter 6 - http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/Germany/HB/HB-6.html

Since supply needs of active units skyrocket (the source above says "infantry divisions required 80 tons a day when inactive and some 1,100 tons during a day of heavy fighting" in Russia in 1941), it's really a simple math to find out that even vastly larger fleet of trucks than the Germans had would be required to support offensive operations very far from railhead, and they would actually never fit on available roads.

[morvael]

The distance between truckheads does not exceed the length of a daily round trip for supply vehicles-from 40 to 50 miles.

from Handbook on USSR Military Forces, Chapter VII: Logistics - http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dodmilintel/28/

[chuckfourth]

Thank you for your contribution Morvael
But then how do you explain Rommel Supplying and doing HQBU 65 hexes away form Tripoli along a single road? 1255 km's long.
5 infantry and 5 mechanised divisions at the time of Operation crusader.

[morvael]

I think you can put about 40 metric tons on a semi-trailer truck which uses 40-50 L/100km (with about 800L tank capacity). WW2 trucks carried 1.5-3.5 tons, and spent about 50-60L/100km on Russian roads (with about 90L tank capacity). So you would need some 12 WW2 trucks to carry the same amount of cargo as a single modern semi-trailer truck. Those WW2 trucks would consume 14 times more fuel, and would require refueling 10 times as often (150km vs 1600km). With target more than 75km away from railhead you would have to carry extra fuel in special trucks, just to refuel your truck column. A fuel tanker version carried about 2100L, so you would need 2 more of these to refuel your column.

That gives us 14 trucks (12 cargo, 2 fuel) expending 5040L of fuel and 3 days (125 miles per day = 200km per day), to carry some 40 tons of supply to a target 300km from railhead and returning (assuming no breakdowns, no interdiction, no detours). And there would be some 14-28 men in the column.
Meanwhile, today, a single semi-trailer truck with one driver on a modern highway can carry the same amount of cargo in a day, expending just 300L of fuel. This is absolutely incomparable.

[chuckfourth]

OK they are interesting calculations I will look into them, but at the risk of being rude, How did Rommel do it?

[morvael]

ORIGINAL: chuckles

Thank you for your contribution Morvael
But then how do you explain Rommel Supplying and doing HQBU 65 hexes away form Tripoli along a single road? 1255 km's long.
5 infantry and 5 mechanised divisions at the time of Operation crusader.

Somewhere I have a badly scanned book sold by Amazon on logistics in Africa. I think the limit of 2000km comes from that book, but it can be calculated - from my example above. Even assuming the drivers need not to carry the food they will eat, 40L/100km and 300km per day on flat & empty desert roads, a column of 12 cargo trucks would require about 9 days to travel there and back again. You need about 1000L of fuel per such truck, so basically a single tanker truck is required for every cargo truck. That increases your truck column to 24 vehicles which expend 24000L of fuel to carry those 40 tons of cargo to the front. If you have no choice you must do it, but obviously you can't count on building up great dumps of supply and supporting a full fledged offensive. As for food, those roughly 50 men require 2kg of supplies per day, so they would consume some 900kg during their travel. That's 1/4 of a big WW2 truck, and so another 900kg of cargo carrying capacity is lost.

Remember there is a difference in consumption whether you are attacking, mopping up, defending, withdrawing or sitting idly. So it's possible to live hand to mouth doing the minimum possible with such a long supply line. In emergency you can expend carefully husbanded stocks, fly some much needed supplies by air etc. But it's all improvisation. Steady resupply to max strength is impossible or will take too much time if your supply columns have to travel too far.

[RedLancer]

Rommel: http://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/ ... logistics/

There were around 600,000 trucks of numerous types allocated to Barbarossa. It is difficult to compare this figure with the game as in game the trucks have a notional 1T capacity.

[morvael]

Even the Wikipedia article on Op Crusader lists some supply numbers, taken from van Creveldt.

A German motorised division needed 360 tonnes (350 long tons) per day and moving the supplies 480 kilometres (300 mi) took 1,170 2.0-tonne (2-long-ton) lorries. With seven Axis divisions, air and naval units, 71,000 tonnes (70,000 long tons) of supplies per month were needed. Lack of transport in Libya left German supplies in Tripoli and the Italians had only 7,000 lorries for deliveries to 225,000 men.

And those divisions seem smaller than their East Front cousins, 15th Panzer is shown to have just one infantry battalion, 21st two (instead of four) at the time of Crusader. Obviously supply needs differ vastly for different sized units. For example Soviet armored regiments were half the size of German battalions (20 vs 40). Therefore it's impossible to do supply calculations on just number of divisions which can vary between 4000 and 20000 men. Actual numbers are required in the first place.

[No idea]

ORIGINAL: chuckles

No Idea
The proposition that a truck is limited to 300kms is clearly wrong, if its a fuel tanker then you can just fill the fuel tank for the trucks motor from the transported fuel.

Red Lancer
Ok you have quoted me as saying "I don't believe". I never said that. It is probably good policy when you quote someone that something they actually said appears in the quotes.
Either the quote you supplied previously is wrong or your assumption that there were no other trucks available is wrong. If both are correct then the Germans are out of trucks by 38 days into Barbarossa. It is simple inescapable Logic.
I repeat my question to you, do you know how many trucks the Germans had at the beginning of Barbarossa?

Do you think the trucks that transported fuel were what we nowadays call fuel tankers? They were mostly normal trucks filled with fuel cans. The sentence means that, beyond 300kms, the truck would consume more fuel than the one it would deliver. Basically it would be a game of diminishing returns. The farther from your supply sources the less fuel you would receive, unless you used more trucks. But the farther you went, the more trucks would broke down.

[morvael]

ORIGINAL: Red Lancer

There were around 600,000 trucks of numerous types allocated to Barbarossa. It is difficult to compare this figure with the game as in game the trucks have a notional 1T capacity.

Most of these were used in combat unit themselves (divisional supply columns, towing guns, carrying troops supplies). Ferrying supplies from railhead to army depots was the responsibility of Grosstransportraum units, which had a lift of 60k tons at the start of Barbarossa (so about 20 000 trucks in these).

[No idea]

ORIGINAL: chuckles

Thank you for your contribution Morvael
But then how do you explain Rommel Supplying and doing HQBU 65 hexes away form Tripoli along a single road? 1255 km's long.
5 infantry and 5 mechanised divisions at the time of Operation crusader.

Do we know how much time did Rommel spent building stocks? Do we know for how long those stocks lasted? Do we know if they had more than enough for the planned operation or they had to do it with what they had at hand? Besides, are we sure all supplies came from Tripoli or some also came from Benghazi?(far nearer to Tobruk than Tripoli)

[chuckfourth]

To be quite honest and without meaning to be critical I do find your calculations strangely complex. I do however think your 50-60L/100kms a bit high, please see below.

Let me try working from first principles, or from the bottom up rather than the top down.

Opel blitz has a fuel capacity of 92L and internet gives it a fuel consumption of 30L/100km on a highway, lets say it is on part of the 64,375 kms of paved roads in Russia, thank you No Idea.
It is a 3 ton truck so it can carry 3 tons.
OK so it has a range of 300kms. So can go 150 km away, drop-off and get back home. No penalties.
Now what about if we put 9 20L jerry cans in the back? Well we can now travel 450 kms forward and get back home.
9 full jerry cans weighs about 198kg, cargo capacity has been reduced from 3000kgs to 2802kgs.
So you can put any number of Opel blitz's in the convoy delivering 450kms (27 hexes) from the rail head and you will only ever lose 7% or your cargo capacity.
On a good road you can drive 450kms in a day, easy.
If you increase fuel consumption by half again to 45L/100km modelling poor roads/bad weather then you still lose 7% of your cargo but can now only deliver out to 18 hexes.
Note no need for any extra fuel trucks.

So as far as I can see this example gives you the distance penalty to apply, If the trucks are working 450 kms from the railhead on a good road then they deliver 7% less than full supply. In game terms the convoy will deliver 7% less when 28 hexes from the Railhead. However in the game it currently loses more than 60% of its supply at 28 hexes away. For 45L/100km's then again we deliver 7% less supply at 18 hexes, but in the game now you currently lose over 40% at this distance. I think this example demonstrates how the game is too restrictive on supply delivery.

Ok there are breakdowns, lost trucks, accidents interdiction etc etc. I don't agree with other posters however that these factors should be included in these calculations as they are already factored in as truck attrition. which already affects supply delivery, factoring it in here as well is a double whammy, having your cake and eating it.

German trucks came in four classes, 1.5, 3, 4.5 and 6 tons. 1.5 class can be largely discounted as they mostly serviced the divisions, they were best at rough going and made a small target. But they might be used to run up to Corps. All the designs in each class had all been well bedded down and mass produced in the 30s and so were very reliable.

The Asphalt roads no doubt ran from major centre to major centre and/or along rail lines. So pushing from Major centre to major centre in Russia probably guarantees use of at least one asphalted road. This give some validity to using the 30L/100kms value when calculating an average. Also here we still have 1000s of kilometres of unsealed roads, The trucks drive just as fast on those as they do on asphalt.

The other part of the equation is how many trucks they actually had, hundreds of thousands Red Lancer tell us, thank you, so probably enough.

Just for interest
Lets run our Opels from Tripoli to Tobruk lets say 2500 kms round trip, the Via Balba is asphalt. 300kms is one tank of fuel. We need 9 full petrol tanks, or 8 extra fuel tanks. That is equivalent to 36 jerry cans that's about an extra 728 kilos. So we lose one quarter of our cargo. Still do-able, no tankers required. Convoy of any size.

I still stand my original proposition that up until the first heavy rains the roads were good enough, the Germans Organised enough and the trucks effective range high enough, that there were no really critical supply issues. Specifically if fuel was needed forward it got there, even if it had to be at the cost of other supplies.

[morvael]

I made different assumptions, that's why I got a bit different results.

First of all I assumed majority of the railhead - army depot - unit supply line would be traveled on unpaved roads and used cross-country fuel use (40/100). I also know from van Creveldt's book (Supplying War) that regulatory fuel consumption per 100km calculated on German roads was enough for just 70km on Soviet "roads" (dust damage, lack of lubricants), which gives fuel use of about 57/100. Hence the range 50-60/100 that I used in my calculations.

I assumed load of such track at 3.5 tons, so even slightly more than you.

All the time you overestimate the number of km such a WW2 truck convoy could travel per day, despite sources I have provided. They travel with a maximum speed of 30km in daylight and good weather (on average). 450km is 15 hours without a single pause and no time allowance for loading/unloading/refueling/repairs/interdiction/encountering stragglers or partisans/waiting at the brigdes and crossroads/detours/hunting moving target. I don't deny this could be done in emergency (physically is possible), but it is not possible on a regular basis, and I'm talking here about averages. You don't want to run down your men and vehicle park, this is reserved for emergencies only. When looking at the subject of resupplying three army groups over a period of several months only average values will show whether efficient resupply was possible or not, not special rare cases.

Believe me there were very little asphalted roads even from major city to major city in Russia in 1941. Official Soviet data about km of paved roads is not true, they were exaggerating as always, to hide their weakness and poverty. Usually you could count only on this:

[morvael]

Which turned to this after rain (even in the summer, not in the mud season):

[morvael]

Actually winter was not that bad for the trucks as it was for the locomotives. But summer was nearly as hard on trucks as autumn (either you had dust or mud, both were damaging).

[morvael]

Just look for the photos of Lena Highway ( example http://englishrussia.com/2014/12/02/154812/ or http://www.ssqq.com/archive/vinlin27c.htm ) on the internet. Despite being called "A360 Federal Highway", it is wholly paved only since 2014, and there is still no brigde to get you across Lena...
And roads of this class were all over Soviet Union in 1941, despite being reported on the maps as good roads. Just dirt roads which turn into mud hell with first drops of rain.

[morvael]

ORIGINAL: chuckles
I still stand my original proposition that up until the first heavy rains the roads were good enough, the Germans Organised enough and the trucks effective range high enough, that there were no really critical supply issues. Specifically if fuel was needed forward it got there, even if it had to be at the cost of other supplies.

In the early period there was a very big problem of tens of thousands of Soviet stragglers from units that were bypassed by motorized units and not yet mopped up by lagging infantry units. These caused high losses on the supply columns which had to go unescorted towards motorized troops on terrain that was swimming in Soviet soldiers from shattered units. Also, ammo had higher priority than fuel (from obvious reasons), and ammo use was really underestimated by German planners, so it soon turned out that ratios had to be reversed in favour of ammo and it took the majority of lift capacity. The only supply that could wait was food (troops could live from the land to a degree, although this was time consuming and partisan inducing), spare parts, and new equipment (and this meant German units were gradually worn out in the course of the campaign, which in turn reduced their supply needs and allowed for other items to start trickling back, obviously many opportunities for easy wins were lost).

[chuckfourth]

Ok so first, the road network, 64375kms of paved, You say this is exaggerated, maybe they doubled the real number. So lets work with half, only 32187kms of paved roads. Where were the paved roads they must be somewhere? Moscow to Brest Litovsk 1059 kms, Keiv to Lvov, 541 kms, Leningrad to Pskov 293 kms that's 1893 kms. Still 30294 kms of paved road to account for!
Ok i dont know how much paved roads there were or where they run but I think it doesn't really matter, because a properly constructed unpaved road is nearly as good, it is not a farm track it has a proper roadbase, culverts, roadside drains bridges instead of fords etc etc, and these certainly ran from major centre to major centre.

Id like to look at the numbers you provided,
You assume unpaved roads means cross country fuel consumption rates.
I cant agree with that, on unpaved roads there is no tall grass, rocks, ditches, steps, abrupt changes of slope etc, the fuel consumption on an unpaved road would be very similar if not identical to a paved road.
You say that Creveldt numbers equates to a fuel consumption of 57L/100kms I make it 43L/100kms, here's why

Creveldt says the ratio is 100kms in Germany to 70km in Russia. OK good, So for Opel Blitz this means the German rate of 30L/100kms becomes the Russian rate of 43/100kms.
What did I get wrong?
This site gives a cross country fuel consumption for Opel Blitz of 40L/100kms
http://www.autogallery.org.ru/blitz4x4.htm

I "overestimate" the number of kilometres travelled to establish a baseline which is 300Kms per tank of fuel. I do not intend for this to correspond to a days driving, I make no time constraint to achieve this mileage. Each turn is a week that's 7 days to travel say 450 kms.
I am currently just trying to determine the correct range and fuel consumption. Once that is established the time constraint can be considered more clearly. Step by step I am trying to progress.

All the other considerations you mention only slow the convoy down they don't decrease the range, so ignoring those time factors for the moment would you agree that 43L/100kms would be an accurate consumption rate to determine range on dry roads in Russia?
I would point out that to make sense of the Creveldt ratio we need to know over what time period this number was calculated, if the period included winter for instance then 43L/100kms would be much too high for the dry period before the first autumn rains.

At this point most Russian soldiers having being deserted by their leaders and without the partisan network having been created yet, were probably most keen on surrendering and getting some food. Hundreds of thousands did just that.
Also the job of the security divisions and probably construction teams was to protect as well as maintain the roads. The roads are probably the last place they would go unless they wanted to surrender. There was certainly a lot of dangerous stuff moving along the roads. I'm sure any attack would soon attract a call for an army liaison aircraft and they would be soon be hunted down.

I understand that you are working with averages, But I think that if there are already separate penalties for the weather then the average should not include winter or mud conditions, that is double dipping, they receive the winter adjustment and it is also factored into the average!

Lena Highway is in the middle of Siberia.

Can we please stop banging away about Mud. If there is a some summer rain and some road somewhere in the back blocks turns a ford to mud the overall effect is negligible in a weekly division based game. If a passing summer shower falls on a paved road or a properly constructed unpaved road the effect is zero. Can we please agree that before the widespread heavy autumn rains set in this rain effect is negligible.
Does anyone really believe that in the vast industrialised economy operating in European Russia with all the Heavy road traffic that that would entail that road traffic stopped every time it rained, that the Road between Smolensk and Moscow was made to only carry a few farm carts.