Further to the above.
These mobile units generally have approximately 50% supply and mostly well over 100% fuel. I think if the fuel roughly matched the supply it might be more accurate.
These extracts from
Stalin’s Folly the Tragic First Ten Days of WW2 on the Eastern Front. Constantine Pleshakov.
June 22nd
by the end of the day Riabyshev's men were to relocate to the woods west of Sambor. Sambor lay very close to the border, which meant that they would soon be in contact with German tanks. No evacuation of civilians had been ordered, so the officers were forced to leave their families in the compound, which was now blazing but only a few hours earlier had been a secure base and a comfortable home. The 50-mile march to Sambor proved stressful. The corps, with 30,000 men and an awkward assortment of 932 tanks, proceeded slowly. Only 169 of the eight kinds of tanks were the new KVs and T-34s. The older tanks couldn't go more than 300 miles without needing repairs, and 197 of them already had serious mechanical problems. Most of the tanks used gasoline — three different kinds of gasoline — but 171 had to have diesel fuel.
June 23rd.
The adversaries crawled toward each other, spitting fire. The Germans hadn't expected any resistance at all, so, surprised, they withdrew a few miles, unwilling to take unnecessary losses, and called in the air force. With a terrifying screech, the U-88 bombers dived at the Thirtieth almost vertically, delivered their load, and climbed back into the sky with a victorious roar. No Red air force fighters were there to stop them. Soon the battlefield was studded with the carcasses of Soviet tanks. Like torches, they flared up one after another. The Thirtieth didn't
stand a chance. After the Luftwaffe assault, Guderians tanks moved into position and smashed the division, kicking its remnants back to the east. The division lost 60 tanks out of 120. Another panzer division, the Twenty-second, had just 40 tanks left, and its commander, Major General Puganov, had been killed. Guderians progress had been checked for a few hours, but the Soviets had paid too heavy a price. Korobkov looked gloomy and exhausted. When he was told that by some miracle communications with Pavlov had been restored, he immediately contacted him. He asked Pavlov to send planes, fuel, and ammunition. Both knew that it was an unrealistic request, since the air force had been destroyed and the fuel and ammunition annihilated, but Korobkov felt obliged to ask, and Pavlov felt compelled to promise.
June 27-28th
The night before, Zhukov had cabled an order consisting of five points, each demanding immediate action. The first instructed Pavlov, five days after the start of hostilities, to get in touch with all the front's units. Second, he was to be sure not to abandon tanks and artillery pieces on the battlefield because they had run out of fuel; if necessary, he should airlift extra fuel to the troops.
The Tenth Army was silent in the pocket at Belostok, and the Third remained hopelessly dispersed and impossible to track. An airlift to send extra fuel to the front line was an absurd notion, since most of the Western Front air force had been destroyed in the first hours of war.
June 28th
It would be wrong to say that the directives had no impact at all; directives #2 and #3, ordering forceful counterstrikes, did eventually thrust hundreds of thousands into battle. However, the result was the opposite of what Stalin, Timoshenko, and Zhukov had hoped to achieve. The troops perished, yielding more territory and leaving the hinterland unprotected. It couldn't have been otherwise, as the basic cycle of war — battle report, high command decision, implementation of the decision — had been completely disrupted. Normally it took just a few hours for all the communications to go through; in principle, with radio and telephone, it was feasible to
squeeze the whole cycle into an hour or so. In reality the process often took days. Granted, Stalin expected too much from his troops, thinking that discipline and purge could substitute for ammunition and fuel.
