Soviet Partisans

[Redleg]

Just a note to share what I thought was an extremely interesting bit of information.

December, 1941 German directive:
1. All rail lines required 1 sentry every 100 meters in "closed" (wooded) terrain.
2. Open terrain, rails required 1 sentry every 200 meters.
3. All bridges and culverts shorter than 15 meters required double sentries.
4. Bridges and structures longer than 15 meters required an NCO+6 men for guard duty.
5. 300 meter perimeters of rail yards were to be cleared.
6. All sentries were to remain in sight of one another.

Similar directives were in place for the few paved roads in rear-areas.

Given the huge occupied territory, the resources consumed for rear-area security must have been monumental. Army Group Center had a rear-area the size of Texas (300,000+ square miles).

Security was greatly complicated due to the acute shortage of trucks and vehicles. Some battalions only had 2-3 captured Soviet trucks. Some divisions had only 1 battalion of motorised troops to use in this monumental security task.

All of this at a time when German infantry divisions were at 50% and panzer divisions at 40%.

In SPWAW terms, some implications for scenario design.

Happy hunting.

[SoleSurvivor]

I recall some paper said that usually less than 60% of the German forces in Russia were available for front duties.

[Redleg]

The more I find out about this the more interesting it gets.

Partisan brigades behind the lines in control of airfields being supplied and cadred by Red Army units.... parachute units dropped in to work in concert with partisan operations. Partisan liaison officers at high levels in the Red Army.

Soviet doctrine changed to remove the term "partisan" and replace it with "Red Army Brigade Behind Enemy Lines".

Now investigating the use of "Centuries" by the Germans - these were Finnish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Russian, etc units attached to SS. The idea was to free up combat troops to face the Soviet counter-offensive in early 42.

[asgrrr]

My tagline has a special meaning: It is a slight reminder that this game we love so much is all about killing your fellow man, an intrinsically evil act. There is no special reason for my mentioning this now, except that the subject of this thread relates to an unusually sinister chapter in the history of WW2. The partisan theater in the soviet union was all about pillage, mass murder and all kinds of unspeakable acts, on both sides.
I think it is wholesome for us wargamers to keep those things in mind while we roam around the hexagonal battlefield.

[Tombstone]

Killing is not 'intrinsically' an evil act. It's just that there are a lot more evil reasons to kill someone than there are doing a lot of other things. It's the thought that counts.

Tomo

[Redleg]

Evil deeds, but very interesting to me. That's why I raised the topic.

[AmmoSgt]

There are some very interesting articles over on GunWriters from he partisan perspective on how to make partisan ammo ..possesion of which was cause for immediate execution ... it seems that if you pull the bullet from and dump the powder from a standard 7,62 x 54 russian cartridge and replace it with half the powder and the bullet from the 7,65 mauser pistol round , you get a subsonic ( read silenced without a silencer ) round when fired from the long barrel Mosin-nagant 91/30 rifle.. It seems that these partisan rounds fired from the deep woods along lines of communication made things rather hard on those sentries discussed above .... and yes the round still had more than enough energy to be very lethal ....