Text 4858, 57 rader
Skriven 2010-02-09 05:11:18 av Bob Ackley (1:300/3)
   Kommentar till text 4813 av Ward Dossche (2:292/854)
Ärende: Britain -- England -- UK
================================
Replying to a message of Ward Dossche to Roy Witt:

 W>>> WD> Please look at the size of Russia at that time ... you
 W>>> cannot WD> conquer that by conventional ways.

 RW>> All they needed to do was to take and hold the oil fields
 RW>> they started out to take. They didn't need to go to Moscow
 RW>> or Stalingrad to do that.

 WD> Aw c'mon Roy, you ought to be smarter than that.

 WD> The further the German army advanced, the longer the
 WD> military supply-lines became. From the eastern part of
 WD> Germany to e.g. Kiev is roughly 1,500km. With the road
 WD> situation of those days, the carrying capacity of the
 WD> trucks and the need for continuous security it was an
 WD> impossible task.

Most of the roads were not paved, and were impassable mudholes in the fall and
spring.  The railroads were a different gauge than the German/European
standard,
so everything shipped by rail had to be trans-shipped at some point near the
border.

Then there was that winter.  The Germans didn't bother to provide proper winter
clothing to their troops, and they didn't have the proper antifreezes, fuels
and
lubricants for their gasoline and diesel engines.  Also note that the Germans
still
used a lot of horse-drawn transport, and those horses had to be fed - which
took
up more transport space.

 WD> The Germans did not control the vast
 WD> Russian countryside, merely the roads. Eventually they were
 WD> as good as helpless against Russian resistance attacks and
 WD> Russian military which were free to roam the countryside
 WD> for which the Germans did not have anough troops to
 WD> control.

The Russians learned from that experience, the US did not...

 WD> When the Americans got stuck in Bastogne their supply line
 WD> was from somewhere northern France as access to the port of
 WD> Antwerp still was not secured. That wasn't even 500km over
 WD> absolutely 100% friendly territory and the columns
 WD> slowed-down.

 WD> Even with all the oil the Germans could get, the Nazis could
 WD> not win the war because of the impossible logistic
 WD> situation to run anything else than a Blitz limited in time
 WD> and distance.

Military amateurs think tactics, professionals think logistics.

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 * Origin: Bob's Boneyard, Emerson, Iowa (1:300/3)