The Influence of Railways on Military Operations in the Russo-German War 1941–45 | Hacker News Reader

The Influence of Railways on Military Operations in the Russo-German War 1941–45

hgwdavie.com

85 pointsVigier57 comments

There is a very interesting theory that claims one of the major factors leading to the start of WWI (not II) was that Germans could not change their mobilization plans to anything softer than outright invasion of Belgium because there was no easy way to modify the railway schedules on which mobilization plans rely: http://www.ae.metu.edu.tr/~evren/history/texts/taylor1.htm

So once they were forced into some kind of escalation, they had to escalate all the way. Other countries did not realize that (obviously) so they kept putting pressure on Germany with escalations on their end.

For people who enjoy podcasts, the History of the Twentieth Century is currently on WW1, and explains both the background that led to war, the pre-war plans and the actual events.

https://historyofthetwentiethcentury.com/

More about the Western Front, but Hardcore History does a fantastic job there.

The timetable thesis doesn't hold up that well. The Russians had no plans for a partial mobilization, and the tsar still ordered a partial mobilization (although the military did succeed in pressuring him to return to general mobilization within a few days). Germany not invading Belgium wouldn't have changed the course of the war all that much--Britain likely would have found another excuse to involve itself in the war had Belgian neutrality not been violated.

If you subscribe to the belief that the grand strategy of war should be left to the politicians and not the military, then the timetable excuse is gross dereliction of duty on the part of the military: the military is failing to provide plans for perfectly reasonable options that the government could wish to enact (i.e., limited war instead of total war).

There is some good sense to the argument though. Being entirely surrounded, Germany couldn’t afford to mobilise slower than it’s neighbours. I appreciate this isn’t exactly what you are arguing against but it a pretty complicated situation.

> and the tsar still ordered a partial mobilization (although the military did succeed in pressuring him to return to general mobilization within a few days)

That's not even remotely what happened. What actually happened was the Tsar ordered a full mobilization while lying to the world that their mobilization was only partial, to possibly delay the mobilization of other powers. From the start, not a single thing was done differently from a full mobilization.

What I found most interesting from the article was that the effectiveness of Soviet scorched earth tactics was due to expert Soviet planning and the German military engineers' naivete about railroad operations.

The Soviet decision of precisely what to scorch was made by railroad logistics experts. They tore up some tracks here and there, but paid especial attention to wrecking all locomotive depots before retreating, and taking all operational locomotives back with the retreating forces, leaving no equipment for the enemy.

The German military engineers spent their efforts on repairing and regauging the tracks, but didn't pay as much attention to the condition of the depots, failing to realize that without a fully operational depot per every 80 km of track, the line's overall capacity was severely degraded. This left front units starved of supplies as soon as the length of captured and "repaired" railroad lines got long enough.

> failing to realize that without a fully operational depot per every 80 km of track, the line's overall capacity was severely degraded

I am failing to realize this too. To be fair I'm not a logistician or train guy.

Why are the depots necessary, and why at 80km intervals?

(From the article) Trains need sand, water, coolant, and other materials for normal operation. These need to be regularly resupplied (at depots). Hence, a typical system would be to dedicate each locomotive engine to a stretch of track (the length of which was constrained by how long the train could go without a resupply) between two depots. The train would stop at the depot, move the cars to another engine, send the new engine along, resupply the old engine, and have the old engine take new cars from yet another train along the track in the opposite direction (to the depot it originally came from).

Steam locomotives could only travel a fixed distance (limited by locomotive design at the time, which in turn was limited by physical constraints of the track) before running out of water and coal and needing to be turned around. The train would then be detached from one locomotive and passed on to the next one - very much like changing horses in a preindustrial mail dispatch relay.

Refueling, refilling water, turning around, and performing needed regular maintenance to keep the locomotive in running order was very difficult without a specially prepared site - the depot. Without depots, you could get a train 80 km down the line, but then you were stuck without the ability to immediately hand the train off to the next locomotive.

Amusing collection of military quotes on the importance of logistics: https://www.military-quotes.com/forum/logistics-quotes-t511....

I'm surprised there aren't any quotes from U. S. Grant there since logistics expertise was what he built his career on and the changing nature of ground transport in the 1860s made it particularly important in his time.

"My logisticians are a humorless lot ... they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay." - Alexander

I ready a very interesting book about Alexander's logistics during his campaigns that calculated he could never have had more than 4 days supplies. Imagine spending years pressing further and further into dessert and jungle not knowing where to get food for 40000 people after a few days

Not many comments yet on the article itself, which I thougt was techically interesting. Some TL;DR points are:

The Russian network was techically primitive but had higher traffic capacity (e.g. because manual signalling and slow trains meant collisions were unlikely

Russian central logistics planning meant that there was less non-essential traffic.

The Russian net was run according to rules developed by railway specialists. In contrast, the Wehrmacht had multiple competing managers, including some military officers who made decisions (e.g. commandeering trains) that degraded overall network efficiency

It was easier for the Russians to repair their own damaged railways than for the Germans to bring captured networks to their own higher standards

I haven't read the article yet, but one of the things that does stand out is that Germany (and Europe) used 1435mm track, whereas Russia used 1520mm track. This would have caused a major break of gauge in Poland, which would have been one of the causes of supplies desperately needed for front-line troops (such as winter coats) getting stuck in Poland.

The German military in WWII did not distinguish itself with good command of logistics.

Germany modified most of tracks in Poland from 1520 mm to 1435 mm in 1915 for military purposes.

Poland continued to modify the remaining tracks slowly after it regained independence in 1918 till 1939.

The other intersting comment in the article related to the possible loading of Russian trains. The less confined operating areas meant loads could be wider.

Both wider and taller! The most common Russian T loading gauge is 3.75 meters wide, 5.3 meters high.

Compare to Germany's traditional G2 gauge: only 3.15 meters wide by 4.65 meters high, and that height is with a sloping roof profile. (And the German gauge is quite generous compared to some other Western European countries; for much of the British network, the loading gauge is much smaller.)

Calling it the Russo-German War is (probably deliberately) ignoring the sacrifices and sufferings of millions of Ukrainians and Belorussians and other nationalities in the USSR.

I also found it bizarre to use this term. It's called World War for a reason, on both sides there were multiple countries and nationalities involved. "German" side was also full of soldiers of Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, etc origin.

I believe the designation in Russian is "The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945".

Then things get simplified for English-speaking audience titles ...

There are terms that are both simple and not actively misleading (as much of that war happened in non-Russian USSR) - what's wrong with "Eastern front of WW2" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II) ?

Well, depends how far East you go… But generally yeah that makes sense. Or talk about the two governments: "Nazi-Soviet war"

Saying "Russia" rather than "USSR" in this context is not really simplifying, it is more like distorting history. Like saying Prussia instead of Germany. "The Prussian-French war of 1940-1945"

How about the "Austria-Serbia war of 1914-1918"?

The weirdest part of it is that it seems to be an academic article. A lot of people are lumping all USSR and even exUSSR nationalities into "Russians" after the Cold War era dehumanization, but this doesn't seem to be ignorance.

Not sure why the "Otechestvennaya" part in "Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna" is usually translated as Patriotic while it actually means Fatherland.

Patriotic etymologically has the same meaning, and bears much more sense in the context.

Soviet states were Russian the same way that Oregonians are American or Taiwanese are Chinese. My qualm with this title is that the use of "German" is a subtle form of Nazi erasure that white nationalists cling onto.

Not at all. The Soviet Union was a self-proclaimed multi-ethnic state that was only Russian in the sense that the Russian soviets were the largest and dominated political life.

Soviet Union was called "Russian" because it was built on remnants of Russian empire. Russians were not the largest group until Holodomor in 1932-1934, and political life was dominated by Jews.

Please stop using HN for political and national battle. We ban accounts that do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you are really want to for HN to be better place, maybe it's better to fix HN instead of trying to fix HN users.

First, fix problem with down-votes — down-votes are used here to hide alternative views on a problem, from politics to quantum theory.

Second, fix problem with off-topics — create possibility to separate off-topic branches from main branch, so users can discuss their problems without disturbing others.

Third, text contains no emotions or political battles. It's just text. Minor correction of text between two historians can be major insult to you.

Perhaps it's a weird term, but please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar territory. The last thing we need is bitter disputes about who suffered more.

Also, please edit swipes like "probably deliberately" out of your comments here. With that you broke at least two guidelines: the one against flamebait and the one that asks you to assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry, can't edit anymore. That said, I believe the title itself is flamebait - you don't need to be an expert in WWII to see that. It is not a question of who suffers most, just historical facts about where the war took place and who fought in it.

Just look at the summary and maps here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II) and tell me again that I am the one nationalism baiting by pushing back against the term "Russo-German war".

But you are correct that I cant assume bad faith by the original authors. There might be other reasons.

You have a point, but the art of commenting well here involves resisting the effects of provocation. If you react to provocation with more provocation, others do the same and we get flamewars. I know it's not easy to avoid (for me either) but we all need to work on this in order to have a shared space that's a bit better than internet default.

Is it appropriate to pretend that the title of a scholarly article, rather than, say, a blog post, is something other than what it actually is? I understand the point of badpun (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17489430 )'s helpful suggestion, but this is a scholarly work—viz.,

> This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in JOURNAL OF SLAVIC MILITARY STUDIES Volume 30 Issue 2 on 27th April 2017

—where one can expect that the choice of language is careful and significant, and it's called "The Influence of Railways on Military Operations in the Russo-German War 1941–1945", not what the current headline says it's called (Influence of Railways on Military Operations in the Soviet-German War 1941-45).

(With that said, let me be the first top-level thread to comment on something other than the title. I haven't read the article yet, but it's a fascinating topic and I look forward to doing so!)

Russi-German war huh, as if the Uzbeks and Khazaks were not affected and effective in repelling Nazis, Germans, Italians, Romanians and Croatians among more, as if this was a national war and not ideological?

A suggestion from your side instead of a rant would be helpful. Maybe Russo-Khazaks-Uzbeks-German-Italian-Romanians-Croatians war?!

I think "Eastern Front in WWII" is the editor-friendly name, even if it's pointless navel gazing.

Thanks for me teaching me “navel gazing”, had to look that up :)

About your suggestion: I’d associate the Asian theatre with that...

Where of course "Asian theatre" is entirely unambiguous ;)

Why - I'm pretty sure the Eastern Front was entirely in Europe?

No, that is the Pacific Theatre. Eastern Front in WWII unambiguously refers to the European theatre of the Axis-Soviet conflict in Western post-war study. The problem with that term is of course that from the Soviet/Russian perspective, the enemy was coming from the West, so they refer to the European theatre as the Great Patriotic War - a rather loaded and mostly unheard of term in the West.

So academia has had to come up with new rather obscure neutral terminology like the German-Soviet Conflict or Russo-German War.

"Eastern Front" is pretty widely understood I would think, perhaps because there wasn't so much of a single "front" in the pacific theatre? (except for the second Sino-Japanese war)

But wouldn't the eastern front in WWII not be in East Asia?

In WWI it makes sense to use the Eastern front when talking about the German/Austro-Hungarian - Russian front, but in WWII that's quite euro-centric.

WWI also had fighting in East Asia, e.g. Japan taking Qingdao and various Pacific islands from Germany.

Unless I'm mistaken that's not really a front that was active for long, unlike the front between Germany/A-H and Russia.

"Soviet" instead of "Russian".

I can't read an article that starts with a such bizarre title. If author can't state the name of the war properly the rest is definitely not worth to read.

You mean it should say Second World War? That's quite broad, then you'd need to add more qualifiers. This name is more exact and is not wrong.

I grew up in USSR. History textbooks talked only about Great Patriotic War. 1941-06-22 to 1945-05-09, USSR vs. Germany, nothing elze.

I'm a Finn myself and we also have special names for the two wars Finland fought during the WWII; The Winter War (1939-40) and the Continuation War (1941-44). It would be interesting to know what number of different specific names for the parts of that war are being used.

It's not the first time it's been called this. A whole book on the topic, written over two decades ago, had this as its title:

https://www.amazon.com/Russo-German-War-1941-45/dp/089141491...

To all of the pseudo-pedants who think there is only one acceptable name for World War Two, I humbly submit a man far greater and learned than myself and many others: Victor D. Hanson

https://youtu.be/tQq-ORA4fHw

I honestly think those pseudo-pedants didn't actually read or understand the article they just want to sound like they are intelligent so they found some detail to nitpick.

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