Germans doomed to failure

Black 5.


Sorry, but they DID shift the factories! Not sure about the roof and walls, but the machines and the workers went together to the Urals, and I have seen movies of Leningrad siege with the workers and machines running with the roof blown off. They WOULD have kept going as they did.

The roof and walls could come later i am sure. Even the USA had an outdoor aircraft production line in California! Though the weather was a bit kinder than in western Siberia.

The raw materials come from wherever, and could be re-routed to Perm etc on that intact railway line.


And if push came to shove, they could have shifted the lot to Krasnoyarsk! (and added another 2000Kms to the german supply lines.)

 

Factory shifting in the face of Barbarossa was something that only a totalitarian regime could have accomplished.

In most cases that I've read, the principle machinery from these said factories were loaded onto the same trains as the workers themselves. These trains would roll to there appointed place, where their cargo was unloaded literally by the side of the track itself, or very close to it. The workers had to build the factory around these machines, often living in fields close by their place of work.

Such disruption would only have been tolerated in the Soviet Union. One cannot picture Western workers putting up with the same conditions, national emergency or not. Westerners would have demanded accomodation FIRST before anything else was done.

There are so many aspects of the GPW that are astounding to behold. The self-sacrificing Russian people are the real story in almost every case. We should thank providence that they were successful in their undertakings.

 

VB,

The Russians also had a ready made workforce only too happy to work themselves to death in the snow. Most were called Hans or Fritz or Helmut. A stop work meeting would have invited a bullet in the head, or a one way trip to a far east Siberian 'Gulag'.

As you say, what the Russians did in the War was almost beyond belief.

 

about the factories going east:in the west explained as :all was going east,repaied and this was crucial :without this,no Soviet victory.
some points :
1) not all was going east :a lot was destroyed
2)a lot of what was going east,arrived in the east in a bad state
3) most important :was the increase of the Russian war production due to the reconstructed 'western' industries,or,was it ,by the increasing production of the existant industries in the non occupied parts of the SU ?
to give one exemple :coal
in 1940 ,the Soviet coal production was :146.8 million of tons,of which 85.5 million for the Don Basin.(55.8 %)
in 1945:the coal production was :156.2 million ,of which 36.9 million for the Don Basin (25.7 %°
the explanation is that the loss of the Don Basin was replaced by an increase of the Moscow region,the Urals ....
While not denying that the transfer of a lot of industries to the east was important,I think that it is much exagerate to say that this transport saved the SU .

 

-
- Amateurs compared to the Kempatai and Korean camp soldiers.
Even the Waffen SS were goggled eyed at the Japanese...

 

"While not denying that the transfer of a lot of industries to the east was important,I think that it is much exagerate to say that this transport saved the SU ."


I don't think anyone has actually said that. An important factor though, yes.

 

CAC,


It is hard to get a valid comparison between the tender mercies of the various 'specialists' in the gentle art of barbarism. What the germans etc endured in the 'gulags' is hard to beat.



PS,


When the Russians got their hands on an SS soldier they sent them to Wrangell Island, far north of the North Siberian coast. NONE came home.

 

- I see your point, and its valid, who wants to argue this anyway?? I can tell you when a marine squad came into one camp, the LT looked around...speechless...pointed to five Japanese Officers, took them to the nearby road and shot all five in the head, not uttering a word...such was his utter disgust at what he saw.

 

Lets keep the prisoner condition comparisons out of this thread gentlemen...

PS
What the Germans endured in the Gulags is not hard to beat

 

That needed to be said.

 

If memory serves, the Russians had Gorky set up as a back-up capital and it was operational. Party functionaries and even the archives had been relocated to Gorky during Typhoon. I do not see how the fall of that city could damage the Soviet war effort meaningfully. By the 1930s, the Soviets already built gargantuan industrial complexes in Siberia, such as the famous Magnitogorsk, so the infrastructure was already in place and the Soviets were well-adapted in planning production in Siberian conditions. According to Glantz, production figures in the end of 1941 in weapons of all types exceeded that of Germany's. Again, no evidence to suggest Moscow was in anyway critical.

A thought experiment that a NATO colonel in another forum suggested participants in a discussion very much like this to do is to imagine the Soviet December Counteroffensive taking place in Siberian weather. Would Germans be better off? If Russia came crashing into Manchuria for resources, could the Japanese stop them?

 

Post 242 was very close to it .

 

about the transfer of industries to the non occupied parts of the SU,I am surprised that no one was thinking that it would be unwise to transfer industries to the east,and to rebuild them,somewhere in the middle of nowhere,where there was no electricity,etc..as already has been referred to .

 

What makes you think they could do it in this case if they didn't historically?

Repeating an opinion especially without any additional support doesn't make it any more valid.

I read somewhere recently that some of the Ural factories didn't have roofs for a significant period of time after they went into operation.

That seems a rather shaky position to take to me. Certainly haven't seen anything to support it asside from the fact that the only regime subjected to it ws totalitarian.
[/quote]Such disruption would only have been tolerated in the Soviet Union.

 

I base my assumption on the manner in which it totally disrupts the lives of those involved.

Westerners had, and still have, a much lower tolerance for this sort of government policy. The Soviet Union undertook social measures that Western governments might not have had the courage to put into action. Stalinism held a very firm grip on the people, one which could ask much more of it's citizens. Witness the other totalitarian regime, (Germany), whose leader felt unable to shift domestic production away from consumer goods, such as cosmetics, for a full three years of the conflict! Additionally, factory relocation was achieved with the aid of slave labour to man these facilities. It's difficult to imagine German workers putting up with conditions that existed in some of these facilities, like the underground "Dora" plant in the Harz mountains for producing the V-1.

Does this answer your question?...not such shakey ground after all!

Can you imagine the howls of protest from workers manning the facilities for the purpose built "Manhattan Project" being asked to not only relocate to the middle of nowhere, but to live in tents whilst they built the factory FIRST? Not on your life! Furthermore, I don't believe such a protest would have resulted in such draconian punishment from the security forces of the United States.

In fact, show me one Western country, including the U.S., that could have matched the performance of the Russians. I feel sure that if the armed forces of the United States lost as many service people in their first year of the conflict as the Soviets did this would have forced a change of government and possibly a peaceful settlement of the conflict as a whole! The French certainly did not wish to get in any deeper, exiting after a very short period of actual fighting. I ask again, could any other country have withstood a 'Barbarossa' and bounced back as the Russians did?

I don't think so. Those amazing Russians were unique, even if their war effort was in front of a gun barrel from the enemy and their own security services. The Russians themselves often said that "Mother Russia has sons enough!". Such sentiments came from no other people in WW2. Even the Japanese couldn't match it, as demonstrated quite clearly by their understandable reluctance to embroil themselves in a conflict with the Soviets. Having fought them twice already in the twentieth century, they had already learned the folly of it. Instead, they went for the 'soft' Allies, and that was as doomed an endevour as the Confederate effort in the American Civil War, (with apologies to Southerners. The odds for a Confederate victory on any level were fairly long, to say the least).

The Russian people put up with a lot of orders from on high during WW2 that would have provoked rioting in the West. But, to be sure, internal security always was the primary platform of the Bolshevik regime, and the subject of much paranoia from it's leader, Mr Stalin.

 

Very well put. By any objective measurement Russia in 1942 should have collapsed politically, morally and economically. To put it another way, could any other country have matched the extraordinary scale and speed of Russia's recovery after the disasters of 1941? - I rather doubt it.

No one can dispute that part of the reason for this remarkable human effort by ordinary people was that Stalinist Russia applied the kind of heavy-handed coercion which the western democracies led by Roosevelt and Churchill could not begin to contemplate - not even in a time of war.

Even so there is not a shadow of doubt that Stalin's appeals to the patriot instincts of the Russian people was a very potent tool in the fight against Germany, and I believe it remains a factor to which many people still attach too little weight.

 

Your treat this assumption like it was a fact. I don't think it can be supported. Look for instance at the CCC. One would need to spend a bit more effort convincing them it was necessary rather than just ordering it but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

That's one way of putting it. The reverse is also true of course. Not sure it's relevant to moving industry though.

Did he feel "unable" to or did he think it was unnecessary?

But now you are talking about another totalitarian regime being unable to do what you just said took a totalitarian regime. Weren't there German workers at some of the underground factories as well?

It's an answer but does little to improve the case for your opinion being correct and indeed makes it in some ways even shakier.

Or not. In any case why force people to be uncomfortable if you don't have to. As for living in tents I think I mentioned the CCC above.

Totally irrelevant to the topic as far as I can see. Even if it is relevnat name a country that matched the performance of the US (or Britain, or Germany, or ...).

You may feel that way but I don't see much support for it. As a bit of counter logic look at Union losses in the ACW. Now if the losses had kept up like those of the Soviets there would indeed have been ramification but then there should be.

Rather an impossible question to answer isn't it? Who else was in a goegraphical position to sustain it? You mentioned the French but a big factor there was they simply ran out of room. If they had been as big as the Soviet Union they likely would have kept fighting as well. Look at their losses in WWI for instance.

That's highly debateable.

That's one interpretation but not a particularly well supported one. Hint there's a big difference between being willing to die or expend troops defending your country and doing it to conquer a relativly poor chunk of turf.

Your characterization of the allies is rather off. Although the Japanese plan rather assumed such. In any case the Japanese didn't attack the US, Britian, and the Dutch because they thought they were soft they attacked them because they held vital resources.

And this is relevant how?

Indeed but is that a good thing? and how is it relevant?

 

Why would they want to even contemplate it. They didn't need to there are better ways to motivate people.

 

Volga Boatman,

I think if the US was invaded by the likes of Hitler's Germany you may have seen something like what the SU was able to do in Barbarossa. The only remotely similar event for the US was the CSA in the ACW. IMHO if the Union had been like Nazi Germany & Lincoln like Hitler well Lincoln & the Union would have been in deep dodo.

However I don't want to hijack this thread.

 

Yes, but the powers of motivation available to western democracies like the US and Britain could not have coerced their workforces into producing the effort and sacrifice to match Russia's after 1941.
For instance, the western democracies such as the US and Britain, who never experienced the meaning of invasion, could still enjoy the relative luxury in wartime of guaranteeing their workers' rights to strike. To take Britain as an example, during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, there were continual strikes - even in industries absolutely central to national survival such as aircraft and shipbuilding.
So even in Britain's most critical hour there were clear limitations on the government's capacity to motivate or coerce its citizens. Stalin's Russia of course faced no such constraints.