Germans doomed to failure

Bits & Pieces: Russian highway system

This is the state of Russian highways today! Even the presence of just a few bulldozers, towed road graders, road rollers, along with some dump trucks and gravel would go a long way to stabilizing such highways. The presence of a bulldozer would also be invaluable in pulling stuck equipment out of the mud and muck in short order.

For railway construction the majority of the heavy transport can be done with specialist trains fitted for the purpose. As far as I can tell the Germans did not develop these either. Having a train that essentially constructs or reconstructs the rail line as it moves forward would be a big bonus. The US did something like this. They had a train that would come up to the construction point loaded with pre-assembled sections of rail line. A crawler crane would simply lift these off the rail cars and then into place on a prepared road bed. Another train would haul the ballast forward in side dump cars to pile it where a loader or bucket crane could load dump trucks with it to move it into place.
This is again, something the Germans could have managed. It requires few vehicles and dump trailers that are horse drawn could be substituted for the trucks if necessary. But, a few trains assigned to a rail construction battalion along with pre-fabrication of materials would make a huge difference in speed of repair or construction.

 

I was thinking of German army that deployed 1 or perhaps 2 more Panzer Groups/Armies in the initial invasion. With a reduction of perhaps 20 to 25 standard Infantry divisions overall. If there were 1 more Panzer Group/Army in AGC, it could effect the detachment and encirclements needed by AGN/AGS while allowing AGC to continue its primary axis of advance without halting for the redeployments it historicly did. Two PzrGrps would be ideal, one each for AGN/AGS there by allowing each Army group to effect encirclements on their own without waiting for aid from AGC. The added speed of action/attack could compensate at least in part for numbers and add a greater level of command confusion for the Soviets.

The next question is where do they come from. My understanding of a typical PzrGrp of 1941 consisted of 2 Pzr, 2 to 3 Motorized and 1 to 2 standard Infantry divisions, with an overall group/army size of 5 to 7 divisions. As I recall 2 Pzr Divisions deployed as reinforcements after June 22nd. Further Black6 opined that captured French/British AFV's might have been employed. Factor a more efficient pre-war and early war production of German AFV's, then 1 or 2 more PzrGrp's might be feasable.

Certainly a better rail supply net would have aided Germany overall, and I am not implying that a truck based system was prefferable as a long term solution. However my understanding of Germany's plan was to win a very quick victory, far sooner than it would take to repair all the rail links to Moscow/Leningrad. Once the Soviet government had collapsed there would be all the time in the world to repair rail/road infrastucture.

 

I agree with TA that the possibility of "quick wins", mening some relatively easy to implement solution that would yeld big benefits existed. But that would require a radically different set of priorities by the Germans, once again a matter or will/mindset, rather than raw theoretical capability. They didn't expect the capaign to last and by the time they realized it would they had already committed to an approach that deprived the logistics branch of the high initiative leadership required for them.

 

Well reasoned!

 

were the bulldozers-caterpillar already used in Europe before WWII?

 

Hanomag, Krupp and, several other manufacturers of heavy equipment in Germany prior to WW 2 all produced crawler tractors along with wheeled ones. These generally were produced in only small numbers and once the war started production quickly tapered off so that by about 1942 it had completely ended. Such equipment could have been produced and used by the Wehrmacht but wasn't.

 

the reason for my demanding questions is that my eye was fallen(not litterally) on P 95 of "Va Banque",which page is given a summary of the German losses for "not armoured cars-automobiles" from june 1941-to january 1942,and the different types were
kraeder :motor-bicycles
PKW:cars
LKW :trucks
Zugkraftwagen:half-tracks,tractors,prime movers
Kraftomnibusse:motorbus
Schlepper :tractors
Anhaenger:trailer
Sonderkraftfehrzeuge :special ones
Krankenkraftwagen:ambulances
I was a bit confused:if the Germans had,tractors,half-tracks,prime movers ,why did they have not bulldozers ?Was the technology that different ?
Of course,that's only a question from a layman,who knowsonly that a tractor is used by the farmers,and a bulldozer in the construction of roads and houses ?

 

I thought I had seen some photos of such in the pre-war time frame, but cannot say how widespread they were.

 

Finding pictures of pre-war German tractors is really difficult. There just are not that many out there it seems.

 

Was Germany's pre-war Autobahn hand built or did they use heavy equipment. Clearly they knew how to build roads.

 

The video does seem to show that they did as much manual labor as possible, which makes sence as it is a 'Works Project"

 

It is not certain who invented the first bulldozer, since the "bulldozer-type" blade was in use before the invention of any traction engine, steam, gasoline, diesel, wheeled or tracked. It consisted of a frame with a blade at the front into which were harnessed two mules. The mules would push the blade into a heap of dirt dumped by a cart and spread the dirt or push it over a bank to fill a hole or gully. It was "named" in honor of the policy of a bull to push his adversary during the mating ritual by brute strength, and without regard for his own well-being.

In the moving of earth by brute strength the fun part came when you wanted the mules to back up for the next push. That said, in the mid-twenties two Americans named James Cummins and J.E. McLeod took the "bulldozer-type" blade and attached it to the front of a steel-wheeled farm tractor so they could win the contract for back filling the pipelines that were being laid at the time.

The trenches themselves were machine cut, but filling the trench in after the line was laid was still being done by hand. These two guys are probably the originators of the machine powered "bulldozer".

Goto:

bulldoze

Attaching the "blade" to a crawler-type traction engine likely happened at the instigation of Robert Gilmour Le Tourneau in the thirties. I’m just guessing there, since there are claims by other companies in this instance, but since Le Tourneau built and supplied about 70% of the heavy earth moving equipment for the allies in WW2 I wouldn’t count him out.

Now, as to the Germans using machinery in this field it should be remembered (as mentioned by Lou), that the Autobahn was used as a public works project, and was NOT done with extensive mechanization for much of its earthmoving. I don’t doubt the Germans were familiar with and possibly did build crawler-type "bulldozers" for their own use. However at the time they were coming into use in America and other nations; the Nazis weren’t concentrating on this type of unit. Their manufacturing focus wasn’t on construction machines, but destruction machines.

 

Great post Clint, thank you.

 

Most of the commentary I have read on German military construction techniques during WW 2 state that with a few common exceptions the work was done by hand. Cranes and gantrys are commonly used when necessary as are cement mixers. One and two man chain saws are frequently seen also. But, there is no mention of the use of much else besides that. I know that Opel did build a dump truck version of the Blitz truck pre-war but how many I don't know.

Photo-wise I have seen a few of steam (real steam) rollers, a couple of tracked pre-war tractors, and the occasional "road" tractor running on tires. I also once found a drawing of a horse drawn road grader. But, for the most part it appears German construction at the time was virtually unmechanized.

 

This is a legitimate question, if you haven’t ever had the opportunity to use either one or the other machinery types. While they appear similar on the exterior, the two are quite different. A continuous tracked power traction design for agriculture is very different from one designed for construction, as it is for military purposes.

A tracked unit for construction can easily be used in agriculture, but not the reverse. And a tracked drive unit designed for military use is inapplicable to either. At least in the time-frame of WW2, clear through the 1960s when I was using both construction and agriculture designs.

An old "construction" designed "crawler" has the unique ability to have a single lever throw between forward and reverse, using all the gears of the main transmission in either direction. An agricultural designed traction engine has X number of forward gears, and a single reverse gear which has to be engaged at full stop, and has only one speed.

A construction crawler can go from forward to backward, in the same gear speed with the simple throw of a single lever. Now, in the "old days" this required a full stop as well, but only a single move of a single lever. Today, the ability to go forward and back doesn’t even require full stop since the connections aren’t really "mechanical", i.e. gear to gear.

There is also a great deal of difference in design between pulling a load; "agriculture" for the most part, and pushing a load; "bulldozing" in earth moving. The frames of the units are stressed differently, as are the final drives. Once again a design for construction can do both agriculture and military work where neither of the others translate well into construction. The designs (military or agriculture) can be used for short terms in the area of construction, but they will fail sooner rather than later. While designs for construction can and will do at least the agricultural without fail.

 

as I can not add to your reputation ((could any one ? :salute) :thank you very much for this great post

 

Great post but I'm not 100% in agreement with the closng, the "guns or butter" issue was a limiting factor in German war output and some factories didn't convert to 100% war production until mid or late war. One question, a mecanical snow plough looks very similar to a buldozer, today I think earth moving machinery rather than special design is often used for that role, did the Germans have those? I seem to recall some wartime pictures.

 

" In the end it was not Hitler but Keitel who intervened. At a series of meetings between 14 and 16 August 1941, he attempted to force the three branches of the Wehrmacht to tailor their armaments programmes to fit the constraints imposed by the coal shortage. Instead of monthly steel production of 2 million tons Germany would have to make do with only 1.65 million tons. Combined with the obvious limitations of German metalworking capacity,this meant that the Wehrmacht´s overall allocation would have to be sharply curtailed to prevent any further acceleration of the already severe "steel inflation".
Within weeks of the gigantic Goering programme, the Luftwaffe was forced by Keitel to settle for the extraordinarily modest objective of simply replacing the aircraft destroyed on the Eastern Front over the last two months.In the foreseeable future there was neither the steel nor the labour to complete the huge synthetic fuel and rubber plants that would be necessary to supply the gigantic air fleet envisioned a few months earlier.And whereas the Luftwaffe was merely frustrated in its sprogramme of expansion, the army faced truly devastating cuts. On 25 October 1941 the army´s steel ration was set at a miserly 173,000 monthly tons, a level not seen since before the May crisis in 1938.This drastic shift was fully in line with the German armaments strategy since the autumn of 1940- shifting resources to the Luftwaffe and navy as soon as the battle in the east was won. Facing with drastic cuts to its steel ration, the army procurement office panicked. Without extra steel, it saw no possibility of resupplying the Ostheer to continue the war in 1942..."

From "The wages of destruction" by Tooze

 

Great post but

is an after the fact effect upon Barbarossa, to mean that the supplies and personnel replacements that would decide the campaign were already "in the pipeline" so to speak and were uneffected by the outcome of the meeting. This has more to do with the reasoning behind the strategic planning of 1942's Case Blue IMHO.

In regard to Wehrmacht engineering I also have to disagree in large part. The scale of operations on the central axis of AGC alone would require a staggering amount of construction equipment to attempt to upgrade the roadnet (which was in heavy use). AGC had only two major road arteries (by doctrine it required seven, one per corps), how exactly does one improve a road under such heavy use? There are also a few other specific considerations to address here:
1) The road from Brest to Minsk is vital in June/July which is well before the rains, the same can be said with Minsk to Smolensk in July and hypothetically for Smolensk to Vyazma in Sept. To try and improve a road that will be superceded by rail before the Rasputista while it is in heavy use and critical to ongoing operations seems to a bit of a reach to me.
2) The main issue with the roads causing attrition to the truck/vehicle fleet in June-Sept is the operational tempo (which cannot be changed) and dust, not mud, lack off road capabilities, snow, ice, etc. So upgrading roads during this time is pointless unless you can pave them (a remote idea...no?).

The only area that could benefit greatly from increased construction assets would be the railroad crews in the area of bridge reconstruction, water towers, switches, etc. on the double tracked trunk line from Brest to Smolensk. If the Germans had planned for major operations extending beyond Smolensk to instead Vyazma before a pause, they could have provided these assets to the rail construction crews.
The margin of change for AGC to continue to advance in Aug/Sept. as opposed to stopping at Smolensk is not as large as one might think. Historically AGC was able to sustain two Infantry armies in heavy static combat, send one full Panzer group with extra Infantry support hundreds of km's south and part of another Panzer group north. If the Germans had planned to push to Vyazma with all of AGC by Sept. in their initial planning they would perhaps need an additional 50% added to their Grosstranportatraum (with requisite fuel needs met for the whole of AGC, a big what if) and much more emphasis on rail conversion than was done historically.
The reward for this is to catch the Red Army still forming its 13 reserve armies in July and 14 in August while they are barely even manned, let alone equipped or led. This would be wholesale slaughter (worse than Vyazma and Briansk were historically) and would leave the Red Army with only 3 new armies raised in Sept and 5 in Oct. to halt a reasonably well supplied AGC in November (only 100 or so miles from Moscow). If AGC takes Moscow in November it would displace the nerve center, logistical and communication hub and main impetus of Soviet force generation.
Success for Barbarossa was a conceptual race between Wehrmacht force projection and Red Army force generation. Germany was perfectly capable of winning that race, hypothetically the assets were available. The key ingredient that was missing for the Wehrmacht was the accurate information needed to plan accordingly.