New thread for "Siberians"

vypuero · Post by **vypuero** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 3:28 pm

I think that you clearly jumped to conclusions based on little evidence. Possum is not the designer.

Post by **IainMcNeil** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:18 pm

Lets calm it all down guys - I dont want to have to lock the thread

Redpossum · Post by **Redpossum** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 4:43 pm

vypuero wrote:I think that you clearly jumped to conclusions based on little evidence. Possum is not the designer.

ROFL, gods no! I'm just a customer, loud-mouth forum weenie, and sometime wannabe beta-tester

vypuero · Post by **vypuero** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 7:36 pm

I am jealous that you are a princepe, though.

stalins_organ · Post by **stalins_organ** » Tue Jul 17, 2007 9:54 pm

Yes I read it, but it wasn't footnoted and written by Glantz so I'm surprised you think an unsubstantiated remark like that should carry any weight at all.

I've done a search for Siberians in the beta forum - there is no such discussion that I can see - I do hold that opinion, but I think Possum is mistaken.

Plainian · Post by **Plainian** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 8:23 pm

For what its worth on this Siberian thing Dave my sources suggests -

Central Asian MD
2 of the 4 Rifle Divs moved - 194 (Mtn) Sep 41 and 238 Oct 41

Trans Baikal MD
3 of the 4 Rifle Divs moved - 65 Oct 41 93 Nov 41 114 Oct 41

Far Eastern MD
5 of the 16 Rifle Divs moved (21,26,32,92,78) although 92 did not go to Moscow but Leningrad.
12th Rifle must be a typo? It was destroyed at Brest in June 41?
I have the 101st Mtn as 101st Motorised which was also sent west in Oct 41.
69th Motorised might have been an ordinary Rifle Div but whatever it was it was sent west and destroyed in Oct 41.
So make that 7 units.

12 in total I suppose. Would have to check the Tank and Cavalry later.

Info from "The Red Army Order of Battle in the Great Patrotic War" - Pairier and Conner.

vypuero · Post by **vypuero** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 8:29 pm

...12 out of 100's of divisions is not much at this scale. Even at full strength, Russian divisions were always much smaller than German (or western) divisions until late in the war. I basically assigned 1 unit per Army to the Russians in the later scenarios at this scale.

stalins_organ · Post by **stalins_organ** » Wed Jul 18, 2007 9:31 pm

Thanks for that Ian - I hadn't seen that work referenced before so I'll look it up.

That's the sort of distribution I had read about - troops arrived any time from august onwards, including some units sent to Leningrad but no specifics.

Edit - I see it's a 1985 publication from Progress Publishers in Moscow. I'll be interested to see how close it is to modern western sources that have used Soviet era archives too.

stalins_organ · Post by **stalins_organ** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:07 am

I went to the bother of looking for the discussion that Possum & I had about siberians a while back - it's at viewtopic.php?t=1247&start=30 - ie on this forum, so anyone could have found it had they bothered to search.

It is in no great depth.

Redpossum · Post by **Redpossum** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 3:14 am

The weird part is, bro I did search, but didn't find it...

Plainian · Post by **Plainian** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 7:22 pm

If anyone is really interested in which soviets units were moved from easterm MD's (including the Siberian MD which you didn't mention Dave) then possibly the Europa boardgame series by GRD is the place to go. These games covered practically all of WWII at the Divisional and sub Divisional level.

Yes it sounds a bit silly to use a boardgame but the research for these games I'd say was very high so I'd its OOB's were pretty good. These people have spent years if not decades researching and analysing OOB's. Every so often they refine the OOB adding or changing things.

There was a magazine which supported the boardgame series called Europa. Pretty sure that in one of these I noticed a listing of which units arrived from off board eastern MD's after June 41. Number of units is a lot higher than 12 but I suspect that some of these units were raised in the far eastern MD's after June 41. (those in 300 and 400 series most likely)

If anyone is interested I can look out the pages which shows which units moved. It doesn't show where they went historically. In the game you deploy them as and where you see fit.

Perrier and Conners book ISBN 0-89141-237-9 would probably suggest which western front it went to. This book was written 1985 by the way. There must be a more modern and comprehesive book on Soviet OOB's by now I'd think. Nafziger?

Redpossum · Post by **Redpossum** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 7:28 pm

I hate to be the cynic here, and risk getting you all pissed off at me, but...

How certain are we that soviet-era records are accurate enough to be relied upon?

vypuero · Post by **vypuero** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 7:39 pm

They are not perfect, and they have to be seen also in context of the nature of how under-strength they were at the beginning of the war. In any case, I use this as my general OOB for 1941 as well as Ellis' WW II a Statistical Digest:

http://www.orbat.com/site/ww2/drleo/012 ... stavka.htm

stalins_organ · Post by **stalins_organ** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:37 pm

Possum the Soviets were a bureaucratic society much given to record keeping.

The records now available are unit returns from the lowest levels of the military - they may have been massaged and altered at higher levels to report favourable pictures (but I have no evidence of that), but it seems unlikely that company and battalion commanders would do so.

stalins_organ · Post by **stalins_organ** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 9:42 pm

ian wrote:Perrier and Conners book ISBN 0-89141-237-9 would probably suggest which western front it went to. This book was written 1985 by the way. There must be a more modern and comprehesive book on Soviet OOB's by now I'd think. Nafziger?

Nafziger publishes soviet OOB's from a couple of authors - there's one series by Charles Sharp (IIRC) which deals with teh raising of every unit of brigade level or higher - it's 12 volumes, with provocotive titles like "Red Storm" and similar, but each volume deals with a specific section of hte army - Inf Brigades or divisions, tank brigades, artillery, militia, NKVD, etc. IIRC Infantry divisions rate 2 or 3 volumes covering different periods of teh war.

He also ahs another OOB by someone else that deals with army level info.

I've got some of them winging their way to me as I write....

Plainian · Post by **Plainian** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 10:29 pm

Charles C Sharp and a person called Luis Rotundo wrote many historical articles for Europa on Soviet OOB and units. Its where I first learnt that the Soviets in 41 had Motorised Divisions and Motor Rifle Divisions and that they were different. Pretty sure that Galantz has also commented on this.

By the way I have Clarks Barbarossa book. Impressive book considering it was written in the mid 60's. Immersive summary of the main campaigns. Problem is that like many books written after the war it relies on German sources. eg page 206 (paperback ed) he mentions that Guderians intelligence noted 3 more units from the far east one of which is the 299th Rifle Div. According to Conners and Perier this was raised in the Orel MD?

Since you have books en route I'll stop posting. Not sure how this helps make CEAW a better game.

stalins_organ · Post by **stalins_organ** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 11:15 pm

Yes I've seen many reviews of Clark's Barbarossa and various other works from teh 60's and 70's expressing the sentiment that they did well, but with the limitation that they didn't have access to Soviet material.

IMO anything that furthers the accuracy of OOB's in WW2 and understanding of how the war progressed has the possibility of helping het developers get the model correct......hence it's all good!

ungers_pride · Post by **ungers_pride** » Fri Jul 20, 2007 1:14 am

stalins_organ wrote:Yes I read it, but it wasn't footnoted and written by Glantz so I'm surprised you think an unsubstantiated remark like that should carry any weight at all.

I've done a search for Siberians in the beta forum - there is no such discussion that I can see - I do hold that opinion, but I think Possum is mistaken.

hehe

Sorry guys, please accept my sincere apology. From that comment of possum's I just assumed that some of the beta testers had enough influence to have the Siberians removed from the game.

Sorry. My bad.

I should have posed it as a question.

I did not mean anything by it.

Clearly, it was just a design decision.

ungers_pride · Post by **ungers_pride** » Fri Jul 20, 2007 1:20 am

I also think the discussion of the Siberians started off on the wrong foot.

It assumed an adversarial type of discussion, which I think was based, again, on certain assumptions.

Hence, I would prefer the discussion to be more cooperative in nature. Clearly, in my reading I have found a great deal of the information is scattered throughout many books.

I think it would be interesting if a historian like Glantz could tackle this subject in a paper, and perhaps settle the issue in a meaningful way, especially with his access to all that Soviet data.

ungers_pride · Post by **ungers_pride** » Fri Jul 20, 2007 1:50 am

In my readings, there were far more than 12 divisions that were transfered from the east. Easily, more than double that number.

To help the discussion, let's break down the units and trace their activities.

So let's start with the first two units that were transferred to the west.

These two units are the Siberian 16th Army and 24th Army.

It appears that both armies combined had about 20-22 Rifle Divisions between the two of them, and this total does not include armour, arty, etc on June 22, 1941.

Both were transferred to the west relatively early.

16th Army was heavily engaged in fighting early and was reformed THREE times due to heavy losses before Dec/41.

In John Erickson's book The Road to Stalingrad, in the Sources and References section of his book (p. 534), he uses Soviet author D.Z. Muriev to show the deployment of West Front Soviet reserves on 5/6 December, 1941 under Zhukov's command.

Muriev lists the 16th Army with 7 Rifle/Cavalry Divs, 643 Guns/mortars, and with 125 tanks. And this Army was placed on the line near Moscow.

Glantz, in "Stumbling Colossus" , on page 16, shows the Siberian 24th Army in reserve just to the east of Moscow in December, 1941.

He lists the 24th Army as being comprised of FIVE Rifle Corps (the 52nd, 53rd, 20th, 45th, 67th) and ONE mechanized Corps [p. 18] which would give the 24th Army 15 Rifle Divisions (such as the 91, 119, 166, 107, 133, 178) as of June 22, 1941.

The 24th Army was involved in heavy fighting in the Yelnya Offensive on September 3, 1941 (This was the most substantial reverse that the Wehrmacht had suffered up to that date and the first successful planned Soviet offensive operation in the Soviet-German war). It was eventually moved to the east of Moscow as the Germans advanced into Russia. It was placed into reserve behind Moscow and was involved in the counteroffensive of December, 1941. At this time it still had a large number of Rifle Divisions, not including tanks and arty.

So here we have between the 16th and 24th Siberian Armies quite a bit of firepower, and these were transferred to the west sometime in May or June, 1941.

And this is before taking into account any Far Eastern transfers of troops in Oct/Nov, 1941.

Does anyone have anymore info on the 16th and 24th Armies?