Optimise the Red Army for World War 2

[Crueldwarf]

But as long as the old gear is being used by front line troops, you should have spares, period.

You can't fight with broken gear, even if new gear is promised 'soon'

You need to be able to fight _now_ even if it's with T-26 Tanks and I-16 Fighters that are getting replaced in the near future.
Low serviceability rates means you are combat ineffective.

Yeah, so? This need will not magically create spare track links for T-26 out of thin air because factories simply do not make them anymore. Industry was outright refusing to restart the production after military demanded more spares for the older tanks. Because:
a) They were busy making new stuff.
b) Government was paying more for the new stuff than for the old.

Production capacity is finite. Resources planned to maintain that production are finite. Workforce is finite. It is what happens when you try to rearm at the breakneck pace. And it is why stuff like 'we need T-34 sooner' (or T-34M especially) or 'we need 57 mm guns in mass production' require literal ASB intervention to achieve.

 

[CaptainCalvert]

The time when all this stuff that was dug down in the archives in the past decade or two would trick down to historical enthusiast communities in the anglosphere cannot came soon enough really. Because repeating refutations to all of that becomes exhausting and old really fast.

For example - 'not mobilizing early' issue. There was a thing going on during spring and summer of 1941 in the Soviet Union - Big Training Exercises - that involved calling upon reservists and mobilizing some elements within the formations in staggered pattern throughout the entire year. By the time of the German attack a few hundred thousand people went through these exercises and slightly less than a million was supposed to went through by the end of the year. Some unsavory characters even used these BTE as a "ironclad proof" that Soviets were mobilizing for the pre-emptive strike and shit.

So what was important about BTE and how they are relevant to the 'Soviets need to mobilize early' talk. Well, this whole exercise was already putting Soviet economy under quite a serious strain. Industry and agriculture administrators were up in arms about it because it denied them valuable workforce and equipment which had compounding effect on their ability to maintain their production plans. So whole BTE was riddled with demands to exempt certain people and categories of people from the draft because military envisioned the exercises as a way to update the reservists on new doctrinal changes and modern equipment and therefore wanted to get most qualified personnel for it. But most of that qualified personnel was already doing important economic work including production of the very same modern equipment that Military wanted as many as possible and preferably yesterday. So it was quite a conundrum for everyone.

And here you guys ask for not exercises that were removing specialists from the economy for one or two months at a time, but a wholesale mobilization that would remove them from the workforce pool for a year at the least. There was a reason why Soviet leadership was very reluctant to push 'mobilize' button IRL.

So what about ammunition and spare parts?

Well, Soviet industry for the most part stopped producing spares and components for the older generation of tanks and aircraft by late 1940. And by summer 1941 it created a certain shortages of spares for these categories of equipment as it was suffering the most from wear and tear from Winter war and ongoing training and maneuvers throughout the 1940-41 period. This stuff was already old and therefore it was used as expendable. Mobilization will not solve the issue with spares in any way because the industry is busy producing new generation stuff and they already struggle with meeting the demands of the military. There was no free industrial capacity.

The same is kinda true for the ammunition. Because Soviet chemical industry was already working in overdrive mode for a few years and a bottleneck was explosive production and not economical mobilization. And there was also stuff like new 76,2 mm armor piercing shells for L-11 and F-34 guns that were simply not produced in enough numbers because industry didn't manage to work out all the kinks and issues with them. Putting even more pressure on them would probably result in something similar like 45 mm AP debacle when a significant part of 1938-90 production was entirely defective and Soviets had a significant amount of armor piercing shells spread around that were shattering against 30 mm armor plate instead of going straight through it.

Again, it is what people here need to understand about Soviet Union of 1941. If you think that you have devised a reasonably simple and easy solution to any perceived Soviet issue you are also most likely wrong and this solution will not be easy or simple or will just not work.

It's nice to see a different perspective for a change.
The soviet army was suffering from having had some of the best tanks of the mid 1930s, as they had thousands that were worn out and obsolescent. I can see why they'd try to avoid maintaining stocks if the alternative was to try to replace them with new and better models.
More tanks with so-so armour and poor or no radios probably wouldn't have made a big difference early in Barbarossa against the aggressive high speed work of the German forces, just as better tanks wouldn't have made a lot of difference in France.
However, being short a few hundred or thousand T34 because the factories were still supporting T26 and BT5 and BT7 would have more than compensated for any extra early losses the Germans took from a few hundred extra T26.

I get Marathag's point about keeping what you have in working order, but the OTL decision was probably the correct one, even though it resulted in a lot of harm.

 

[Belisarius II]

But as long as the old gear is being used by front line troops, you should have spares, period.

You can't fight with broken gear, even if new gear is promised 'soon'

You need to be able to fight _now_ even if it's with T-26 Tanks and I-16 Fighters that are getting replaced in the near future.
Low serviceability rates means you are combat ineffective.

Your right, but the Soviets were caught in a period of transition. No one has unlimited industrial capacity, so converting to producing new gear will leave old gear short of spares. That's why the British were slow in replacing the 2 pounder with the 6 pounder. They were afraid of being short of anti-tank guns, and ammo, so they decided to stick with the old 2 pounder much longer than they wanted to. If they went with the superior 6 pounder after Dunkirk, they might've had a serious shortage of anti-tank capability if the Germans invaded England, or in the critical early phases of their battles with the Africa Korps. Sometimes you just have to make imperfect choices in an imperfect world.

 

[Capt Thunderbolt]

Only that their kit they had was good enough if used properly in the Summer of 41 (same with France a year earlier) - and my whole point was that the Purges took away the ability to do that as well as throttling development in 1941 and into 1942.

Good enough,,,,,
Include spares, training and logistics?

Grabin designed most of weapons, and did so under the table. Before and after the war.

 

[Capt Thunderbolt]

While the most made Soviet aircraft, was also the most shot down.
A large number of flaws. Like being a liquid cooled ground attack aircraft, than an aircooled radial, no rear gunner at first, and then when the GiB is added, he didn't get any armor
table from wiki

Type	Average number of missions flown before loss
Su-2	80
Pe-2	54
IL-2 (two seat)	26
A-20	19
IL-2 (single seat)	13

this says to me, the Su-2 should have been developed more to the Su-4 version with the derived twin row version of the Wright R-1820, the Shvetsov ASh-82 of 41L displacemnt and 1900hp rated take off.

What is the same statistic for other air arms?

 

[Crueldwarf]

Grabin designed most of weapons, and did so under the table. Before and after the war.

This is again a product of using rather self-serving Grabin memoirs as a baseline. Yeah, ZiS-3 76.2 mm cannon development was not endorsed my the military or the industry pre-war. And yes, Grabin was kinda doing that on the side. What is rarely mentioned for some reason is the question why. And this reason had nothing to do with Purge or anything.

Military wanted to transition divisional artillery from rather unsatisfactory "universal" 76,2 mm caliber and the whole debacle with F-22 (a cursed index apparently) to a more solid 95 mm guns. And Grabin was involved neck deep into that project pre-war. He just do not like to remind anyone about it because his 95 mm prototypes were demonstrating rather unique properties during testing. Like sending their shells into the targets downrange sideways or simply never hitting them at all.

So this project went nowhere and when Germans invaded Soviets got stuck with their stock of 76,2 mm artillery as adoption of entirely new caliber was now definitely not an option. And then Grabin indeed produced new simplified F-22 design and called it ZiS-3. And it was a very much needed success. But it had nothing to do with "under the table development", it was a side project put forward after Grabin failed his primary one. He never liked to be reminded about that and as he became rather big name during and after the war, the whole story was mostly buried in the archives and his memoirs became a main source on Soviet artillery development for decades.

 

[marathag]

What is the same statistic for other air arms?

At one time i had the US equivalent, but unable to locate now

 

[tomo pauk]

Military wanted to transition divisional artillery from rather unsatisfactory "universal" 76,2 mm caliber and the whole debacle with F-22 (a cursed index apparently) to a more solid 95 mm guns. And Grabin was involved neck deep into that project pre-war. He just do not like to remind anyone about it because his 95 mm prototypes were demonstrating rather unique properties during testing. Like sending their shells into the targets downrange sideways or simply never hitting them at all.

This is very interesting. Do you have some source wrt. Grabin's 95mm failures?

 

[Capt Thunderbolt]

At one time i had the US equivalent, but unable to locate now

Ok,
The American A-20 ironically has the highest loss rate in that table. 19

 

[Capt Thunderbolt]

This is again a product of using rather self-serving Grabin memoirs as a baseline. Yeah, ZiS-3 76.2 mm cannon development was not endorsed my the military or the industry pre-war. And yes, Grabin was kinda doing that on the side. What is rarely mentioned for some reason is the question why. And this reason had nothing to do with Purge or anything.

Is there any memoirs of generals, admirals and politicians, anything but self-serving and plenty of plastered over history?

Military wanted to transition divisional artillery from rather unsatisfactory "universal" 76,2 mm caliber and the whole debacle with F-22 (a cursed index apparently) to a more solid 95 mm guns. And Grabin was involved neck deep into that project pre-war. He just do not like to remind anyone about it because his 95 mm prototypes were demonstrating rather unique properties during testing. Like sending their shells into the targets downrange sideways or simply never hitting them at all.

Is yawing of shells, the product of poor shell quality / driving band or poor barrel /rifling or both?

Considering there is no history of 95mm in Russia /Soviet, this not surprising?

And then Grabin indeed produced new simplified F-22 design and called it ZiS-3. And it was a very much needed success. But it had nothing to do with "under the table development", it was a side project put forward after Grabin failed his primary one.

Did Grabin win the 95mm competition??

"In late 1937 the Red Army’s Artillery Directorate decided to upgrade divisional artillery with a new 95mm piece. The project began early the next year, with renowned designer V.G. Grabin of Plan No. 92 producing the winning entry. His 95mm F28 field gun used the same carriage as the newly-adopted 122mm F25 howitzer. It passed its trials, with good range, explosive power and anti-tank performance. A tank-mounted version, the F29, never made it off the drawing board but was considered for upgraded versions of the T28 medium and T35 heavy tanks."

The Book of Armaments:
Soviet 107mm Field Guns
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
May 2021