(Book Review, Partial) The Russo-German War by Albert Seaton

[MKSheppard]

From a post I did back in 2008 on HPCA, I never posted it over here.

This is only a partial review, mind you, as I only got a couple hundred or pages in.

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I'm about 170~ pages into it; it was written in the 1960s, using a lot of reliance on primary German sources; Russian sources at the time were very sketchy, and if they were available, they were propaganda-level stuff; so could be discredited.

But it's by no means a pro-German organ grinding piece.

It makes the point very clear that the German General Staff had absolutely no idea what it wanted to achieve with the campaign in the East. There was no real direction to the campaign other than "walk east towards an imaginary line along the Urals".

In the absence of any clear unity of purpose, the front commanders like Guderian pretty much did what they thought was needed, and so they were all working at opposite ends.

Chapter 12 is a very nice demolishment of the post-war German apologists claiming that "Hitler cost us the war in the east with that delay in August/September of 1941!"

Some interesting facts from that chapter (typed here verbatim in bullet points)

1.) When the Germans went to war in the East only 400,000 reinforcements were held by Fromm's Replacement Army, and fuel reserves were limited to two to three months supply. Of the twenty-eight divisions originally held as a reserve by the Army High Command, all but three had been committed to the fighting in the summer. Although only fractional of those suffered by the Red Army, German casualties had been far from light and in the ten weeks fighting up to 26 August totalled 440,000, of which 94,000 had been killed.

2.) By the end of August only 217,000 men had been allotted as reinforcements, but there was inevitably a time lag before these reached their units, since many of them had to make their own way forward of the railhead by march route.

3.) German tank strength had been reduced by casualties and breakdown to less than fifty per cent of establishment and there was difficulty in providing replacement vehicle assemblies to make good the heavy engine wear caused by dust, sand and long mileage. Motor vehicles, too, had been overtaxed and there was a shortage of about thirty per cent of establishment.

4.) At the end of August Guderian was complaining of the exhaustion of the panzer troops and their limited combat strength, giving the example of Munzel's 6 Panzer Regiment which, he said, was temporarily reduced on 14 September to a strength of ten battleworthy tanks out of an establishment of about one hundred and fifty. Tank crew losses had been light so far, but motorized infantry companies had been reduced to fifty men each and the lack of combat experience and toughness of the replacements had already been noted.

6.) At the beginning of September personnel deficiencies were as follows:

In fourteen divisions more than 4,000
In forty divisions more than 3,000
In thirty divisions more than 2,000
In fifty-eight divisions less than 2,000

1 Panzer Group's tank strenth as a percentage was 70% at the end of August, and 80% at the end of September.
2 Panzer Group's tank strenth as a percentage was 25% at the end of August, and 50% at the end of September.
3 Panzer Group's tank strenth as a percentage was 41% at the end of August, and 70-80% at the end of September.
4 Panzer Group's tank strenth as a percentage was 70% at the end of August, and 100% at the end of September.

7.) In the 22nd Infantry Division, Rifle companies had only thirty to forty of the original men left and from 31 July to 10 August a single infantry regiment lost thirty-seven officers and 1,200 men. The division was 3,800 men under strength on 27 September when the first reinforcements arrived, and of these one battalion received thirty-seven men and reported the replacement as a drop in the ocean. A Coburg artillery battery received sixteen men and drily noted 'apparently no more men left in Coburg'.

8.) The reconnaissance battalion of the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler received on 17 September six officers and ninety-five men as reinforcements. During the whole of the autumn twenty-six officers, forty-two non-commissioned officers and 450 men became casualties and the replacement figure totalled eleven officers and 186 men of which only one was a non-commissioned officer.

9.) Experience at Kiev had shown that a German division was needed for every 20,000 Soviet prisoners for guard, sorting and transporting duties.

You can see how by August 1941, the German Army, was hurting badly and was in bad need of replacements and repair; and that month spent doing "nothing" was in fact an invaluable boon to the Wehrmacht, in which casualties got replaced (albeit a little), and the panzer units were regenerated.