MagicMissile wrote: Tue Jan 17, 2023 3:11 pm
I know full well that the USSR was low on soldiers in 44 again in most games the problem is the Soviet run low on manpower in 42 not 44. Most games in 42 Soviet manpower in the 50-70 range whereas Germany sit snugly at 90-95% but that doesnt matter so much I was mostly interested on the very big hit on manpower when you lose Moscow.
About this, please read this interesting article:
https://www.globeatwar.com/article/stat ... -june-1942
The game is correctly showing the manpower situation of Soviets in 1942 with all the main manpower (green) cities on the west and captured by the German army. This is more German manpower that is too high. They were having problems in 1942.
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This is not to say that the Red Army did not try to make use of the manpower that could be found in the Caucuses and Central Asia - it just didn't work out. Language barriers represented a formidable obstacle to integrating non-Russian speaking populations into the Red Army. The Red Army raised twenty-six rifle or mountain divisions from the Caucuses, Central Asia, and Baltic states, but almost none of these were deployable against the Germans. Though four Armenian rifle divisions saw combat, as well as the majority of Georgian units, those cases proved the exception rather than the rule. For instance, only three of fifteen Uzbek units saw combat and the Chechen-Ingush cavalry divison never came close to a battlefield. The loss of population in Western Russia, Belorussia, and the Ukraine therefore had an outsized impact on Soviet military potential as a whole. Moreover, there is a strong argument that that had the Germans, even in failing to meet the goals of their 1941-1942 campaigns, merely been able to hold onto the Soviet population centers captured in 1941-1942 that the Red Army may have been in deep trouble. That's because as early as January of 1943 a key component in the Red Army's ability to rejuvenate its strength would be its ability to move west and recapture land and population lost to the Germans. For evidence as to that we need look no further than the Voronezh Front's experiences early in 1943 as it pursued German forces withdrawing from Southern Russia as the German pocket at Stalingrad was slowly being reduced.
From January 13th to March 3rd 1943 the Voronezh Front's pursuit operations further beat up the Axis armies in Southern Russia but at a cost of 100,00 casualties (this included 33,331 irrecoverable losses) from the front's total initial strength of 350,000 men. To help ameliorate these losses the front received nearly 50,000 replacements during January and February. However, less than 10,000 of these replacements represented trained manpower released from the Stavka reserves. The largest single category of replacements comprised 20,902 men press-ganged into service from recaptured territory as the front moved west. The remainder consisted of front reserve units, previously sick or wounded men released from hospitals, liberated prisoners of war, penal troops (men released from the gulag and prisons) and the like. This meant that forty percent of the Voronezh Front's replacement manpower only came about because the front was able to move west. Nor was this situation unique. At this point in the war the Red Army was running short in the trained reserves needed to replenish the massive losses still being incurred while it also built up a strategic reserve and created new units.
The manpower problems facing the Red Army proved a constant throughout the Second World War. Even December 1944 revisions to the shtat of rifle divisions (when the Red Army was otherwise knocking on Germany's door) saw the number of rear-area personnel assigned to a rifle division cut in half compared to where it had been in June of 1941 (1,852 to 3,359 such personnel). At the same time the Red Army had spent 1944 making strenuous efforts to locate and press into immediate service (i.e. without training) men as old as 45 from the recaptured territories in the Western Soviet Union. By 1945 the Red Army was even taking Soviet citizens and POW's found on the march into Germany. These people, who had previously been rounded up by the Germans for service in the Third Reich's factories, were being sent to flesh out front-line ranks even though most were hardly in the physical condition needed to perform adequately in combat. Going back to early in 1942 we find entire rifle divisions being manned by far from inexhuastible sources of manpower. For instance, in April of 1942 the 112th Rifle Division was manned by Siberian Russians and penal troops.
The simple truth for the Red Army was that not even one year into the war extra manpower still not only needed to be found, but would be even more badly in demand as the Germans continued to brutalize the Red Army and Soviet population alike. Before the 1942 German summer offensive even began the Red Army suffered another 3,404,313 casualties during the first six months of 1942 and lost another 3,048 tanks and 2,037 aircraft on top of the 20,500 tanks, 21,200 aircraft and 4,473,8200 casualties lost during 1941. By June of 1942 the Red Army was losing over four men for each German killed, injured, or captured.
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The Red Army is often portrayed as overwhelmingly powerful in 1942; for quantitative reasons as much as anything else. In reality it was numerically far weaker than it had been in June of 1941. For instance, in spite of concentrating production on key weapons systems like tanks, aircraft and artillery and mortars the Red Army's stocks hadn't come anywhere close to pre-war levels. In June of 1941 the Red Army had 22,600 tanks on its books. In May of 1942 this total had fallen to 9,325 such machines. Aircraft had dropped from 20,000 to 14,967. Artillery and mortar stocks were down from 112,800 to 107,795 on the eve of the 1942 German summer campaign. Moreover, the increased focus on tank, artillery, and aircraft production that had even enabled the Red Army to maintain such those numbers came at the expense of other very important items - not least of which being truck production.
In 1941 the Soviet economy produced 118,704 trucks; a number that hadn't come close to meeting the Red Army's needs. Then truck output collapsed in 1942, with only 32,409 such vehicles manufactured in the entire year. This meant the Red Army's long-standing problems in coordinating the disparate combat arms only worsened as the increased flow of tanks was not matched by motorized infantry and artillery. This lack of trucks thus greatly hindered the Red Army's ability to go on the offensive. Not only couldn't the prime mover starved artillery keep up with Soviet armor once the battlefield became mobile (at least the infantry could ride on tanks - though at dreadful cost as they entered the battlefield), but each mile removed from railheads meant needed fuel, munitions, and other such critical supplies failed to reach the front. Though the 1942 era Red Army would launch aggressive offensives and counteroffensives at a dizzying pace; few of them had the logistical legs to truly threaten to take away the German hold on the initiative.
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