Peltonx
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quote:
ORIGINAL: morvael
quote:
ORIGINAL: Michael T
But a known MP value means the Soviet can co-ordinate perfectly. How would you suggest modelling orders that never made it thru to an army or orders ignored?
Simple solution - available MPs should be hidden :)
The more you move the more you risk hitting the hidden limit, and ending up in an undesirable location.
The bigger issue was the horrible Russian Logistics system Zhukov set-up.
Basicly Russian logistic system was a disaster from June 22 1941 to August 1st and then it 2 months before it was working, still digging into how effective it was but seeing gas shortages for trucks as into late 1943.
Army General G. I. Zhukov to be chief of the Soviet General Staff in January 1941 and you can read the joke of a logistic system he set up and then after 6 weeks of war an the system not working ( and you can read why real joke) . On 27 July a thoroughly frustrated Khrulev prepared a written proposal for a centralized rear service establishment designed to impose a measure of order on this rapidly unraveling rear support situation.15 The proposal was passed to the Supreme Commander, I. V. Stalin, who approved Khrulev’s recommendations and immediately ordered that a draft State Defense Committee (SDC) decision on the Red Army rear service organization be prepared.16
Working with his staff, Khrulev quickly drew up the SDC draft decree and presented it to Stalin in the predawn hours of 28 July.17 Over Zhukov’s objections, the decree was approved - a move that was to establish by 1 August the essential organizations and responsibilities of the Soviet Armed Forces Rear Services as they continued to exist through the 1980s.18 It also institutionalized what appears to be a degree of creative tension between the national-level rear services and the General Staff.19
Prewar Preparation, Wartime Reorganization, and the Support of Strategic Operations, 1939–1945
Graham H. Turbiville, Jr.
When German forces began their rapid advance into the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 - the beginning of the Soviet-termed Great Patriotic War - the logistic support system of the Red Army and Navy was in virtually every respect unprepared for the demands that were to be placed upon it. Rear service responsibilities were largely decentralized; analogous rear service control and management entities often absent from key tactical, operational, and central command levels; existing rear service directorates understaffed; and logistic resources of all types badly deployed for dealing with the “difficult” support situations faced by Soviet military forces. Indeed, the whole concept of providing logistic support to armies and fronts - operational logistic support - proved badly flawed from both organizational and resource standpoints.
Prewar logistic planners anticipated these systemic and resource problems, though senior Soviet commanders (severely attrited by the 1930s purges) gave logistic matters only secondary attention. Thus, when a 47-year-old corps commissar named A. V. Khrulev was appointed supply chief of the Red Army in October 1939, he found himself in a job that was ill defined and possessed little real authority over those many agencies charged with logistic support.3 Khrulev, a decorated veteran of S. M. Budennyî’s First Cavalry Army in the civil war, set out with his staff to reconstruct a rear service establishment that even in peacetime seemed clearly unsuited to support large-scale combined-arms operations.
Almost from the beginning of his tenure, however, he became immersed in the numerous problems engendered by the 1939–1940 Winter War with Finland. Transportation and logistic management problems were particularly acute in the Winter War. Even from the earliest days, railway cars supplying front forces were backed up on a number of lines because of inadequate tracking and poor planning. An attempt to alleviate this problem by also supplying the Northwest Front by sea from Arkhangelsk through Murmansk instead created chaotic conditions at the Arkhangelsk port. Every Red Army branch of service (artillery, engineer, signal, etc.) operated on its own schedule with no overall coordination.
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Information sent from operational levels to central logistic planning bodies was irregular and sometimes inaccurate.4
As a consequence of these problems, and the inability of the logistic establishment to deal with them, Khrulev pushed for the creation of a central “Quartermaster Directorate” with expanded capabilities, a request met by People’s Commissar of Defense Marshal K. E. Voroshilov, in the summer of 1940. Khrulev (now a lieutenant general) was given increased authority and staff support. While this constituted a measure of progress at the central level, it was far from the sweeping restructuring envisioned as necessary at all levels by senior logisticians.
As Khrulev continued to push for greater control over rear services in the months preceding the Soviet Union’s entry into World War II, there was considerable discussion and disagreement within the Soviet military establishment over the subordination of rear service bodies and responsibilities for planning logistic support at every level. These disagreements became particularly acute with the assignment of Army General G. I. Zhukov to be chief of the Soviet General Staff in January 1941.
General Zhukov “supported those on the general staff who believed that a general outline sufficed as a basis for directing the supply of the army in the field.”5 Under this approach:
The General Staff would calculate needs and issue a directive; the quartermaster services subordinate to it would dispatch everything requested from them; and the commandant’s offices of the general staff ’s Military Transportation Service, to which motor vehicle, rail, water, and air transport were subordinate, would deliver to the troops all types of authorized supply.6
In short, Zhukov wanted the general staff to retain direct control of key rear service entities.
By the start of the war, in accord with Zhukov’s wishes, logistic responsibilities were divided among the several principals. As the recently retired chief of staff of the Soviet Armed Forces Rear Services, Col. Gen. I. M. Golushko, noted in a considerable understatement forty years later, “a definite separateness could be observed in the organization and, consequently, in the actions of the directorates and services related to the rear support sphere.”7 At the tactical and operational levels, the control of logistic planning within fronts, armies, and divisions rested principally with the commanders and combat staffs, not specialized rear service planning bodies. This allowed only the most superficial attention to be given to rear service support because of the other combat demands placed on the commanders and staffs.8
In addition to the organizational problems and resulting difficulties in the operation of the rear service system, those logistic resources intended to support Soviet operational formations in the initial period of war were badly deployed. Basically, there were depots for all classes
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of supply (weapons and equipment, ammunition, POL [petroleum, oil, and lubricants], repair parts, food, etc.) subordinate to the various central directorates of the Commissariat of Defense, and to military districts. These stockpiles were intended for the mobilizational deployment of operational formations. However, in addition to the lack of centralized rear service management (and likely because of it), there were dangerous anomalies in what supplies were found at which levels. For example, the General Staff ’s POL reserves were virtually all located at military district level or in facilities of the national economy, with almost no stocks under direct central control.9 Thus, the general staff was limited in how quickly it could influence the POL supply of field formations.
On the other hand, ammunition stockpiles, which were the responsibility of the Main Artillery Directorate’s (GAU) Artillery Supply Service at each level, were located in GAU central, military district, and field army depots. In wartime central depots were expected to supply forward army ammunition dumps directly, while army depots in turn would supply lower echelons.10 No provision was made for a front link, though fronts would be expected to plan for the expenditure and resupply of ammunition while army entities carried out the actual resupply operations.11 The problems and confusion resulting from this kind of arrangement were not difficult for Khrulev and his staff to imagine and indeed became quickly manifest once the war began.
It is clear that the rear service support establishment existing at the time of the German attack would have had substantial problems meeting large-scale support requirements even with adequate preparation time and favorable circumstances at the beginning of war. The German attack, however, totally disrupted prewar plans for rear service mobilization and support. Huge quantities of supplies were overrun or destroyed by German forces in the first days of the conflict. Those supplies surviving or located further in the interior were often “in the hands of various services that were not subordinated to combined-arms headquarters” and thus were not made available to combat units.12 Rear service elements had to simultaneously provide retreating units with supplies, undertake the mobilization deployment of rear service units, and evacuate supplies.13 In addition, because of the concurrent requirements to sustain Soviet units and operational formations in combat and evacuate over 1,300 industrial enterprises as well as agricultural and other resources, “two gigantic train flows were moving in opposite directions with incredible difficulty under constant air attack by the enemy.”14
It is not surprising, in light of the above, that the Soviet logistic support system failed in most respects to meet the enormous demands so suddenly placed upon it. By early July 1941, by Soviet assessment, Zhukov and the General Staff were so immersed in operational matters that they had neither a conception of the logistic situation at the fronts,
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