Why doesn't the USSR have any naval or land scientists? Should they be added in the near future? I can understand naval scientists, but land scientists not so much.
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This is already starting to make me angry, to be honest. Yes, there were episodes with arrests, the same Korolev was arrested for embezzlement. But not all people and scientists were in the GULAGs. Enough of this ridiculous nonsense. As I already quoted Stalin in my ironic comment above: Stalin quote: We are 50-100 years behind the advanced countries. We must cover this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we will be crushed. And the USSR was not crushed, it is impossible when the population is in prison, neither scientists nor others.
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Thanks for the link to the thread, I hope the developers add at least one scientist and totally agree about the railway artillery.
Is there much difference between start scientist and the low level guy you recruit for 100pp? At low level they level up pretty quickly anyway. However, each level up only makes minor increases in ability.
I mean 2% research speed only knocks a day or two off research times. Balance this with the problem that worse ability, gives longer special project times, thus gives you MORE chances to have iterations, and extra research bonii.
By the time you have built a land research facility that you need, you should have saved 100pp anyway.
I mean 2% research speed only knocks a day or two off research times. Balance this with the problem that worse ability, gives longer special project times, thus gives you MORE chances to have iterations, and extra research bonii.
By the time you have built a land research facility that you need, you should have saved 100pp anyway.
As usual, any defeat gives birth to myths on what caused it.
Ahmm... Petain commanded the French army in the 1922 Rif War. And used tanks and aircraft there quite extensively.
He specifically did mess up big-time in the Spanish Civil War, when he refused to draw conclusions on airpower. That was his personal failure.
On the other hand, Petain was older than Joe Biden when WW2 started.
Context is important.
Sorry, that was plain unreasonable for a multitude of reasons:
1. France just got out of the "War to End all wars", and was not expecting another European war in the nearest future in 1920. Tanks are a very expensive tool that became viable only because of the whole "Static Warfare" situation, while in "Colonial conflicts" they were simply inefficient: too expensive for the tasks.
What would you expect this "tank branch" to do, all of the 1920-s and 1930s?
2. You have a bunch of career officers that want to establish a "separate branch" where they could become "4-star generals" and be on equal footing with Infantry & Cavalry when asking for funding from parliament.
Ideally, even become in command of their counterparts in other branches "because we're the most important guys".
Why would someone want to support that? Even the Panzertruppen had that issue in the 1930s.
3. The whole concept of "let's create a huge armored force and huge airforce" is plain unreasonable both for 1920 and 1930.
Ok, you create those two, then what?
What happened to those 2500 Renault FT-17s left from WW1 in France by 1940?
They simply rotted away.
What happened to the 1920s British Medium Mk. IIs? Kind of the same story.
What happened to the 3000 Soviet T-27 tankettes by 1941?
They simply became obsolete.
Who is this whole armada going to be used against? Weimar Germany with 7 divisions?
4. Politics. WW1 ended and there was of course the fear of the military refusing to surrender their wartime power to civilian authority.
In these circumstances, serious advocacy for expanding the military in any way is kind of "in the wrong place, in the wrong time".
Honestly he was right here as WW2 showed.
There was not a single time that purely mechanized combat units operated completely separately of other forces. Tanks and mechanized units are always just one part of the army, not the be-it, end all.
You couldn't make your entire army tank-based, so you needed infantry. Even in Kursk in 1943, Germans had to support their tanks with infantry units.
What exactly is incorrect here? I underlined key points.
In the 1920s there was the "great idea" by folks like J.F.C Fuller who proposed that tanks could outright replace infantry and cavalry, and that tanks don't need infantry.
The French in that regard were extremely reasonable: instead of saying "we know have an armored magic wand" they sought to incorporate it into conventional warfare. Tanks are useless without infantry, they are a support weapon. Germans agreed with that too.
A tank is always part of a team. When tanks tried working on their own, it usually went poorly.
The thing is, there was an explicit reason why they said this.
In the 1920s you had the wonderful idea of General Douhet that "The airforce is sufficient to win all wars of the future". Or "let's just bomb the enemy and he will surrender". Which was pure fantasy.
The French were quite reasonable that they didn't fall for this idea.
Instead they said quite right that the airforce's job is to support ground troops, not have its own war.
After all, the American & British strategic bombing did not bring Germany to surrender, it was the conquests on the ground that did.
Well, actually...
Specifications (Amiot 143, introduction date 1935, medium bomber)
- Crew: Five (pilot, navigator/bombardier, radio operator, nose and dorsal gunners)
Germany produced 102 Pz. IVs and 38 Pz. IIIs in 1938. That's around 10 tanks per month.
147 Pz. IVs and 206 Pz. IIIs in 1939. That's about 30 tanks per month. French were building 10+ B1s and 10+ S-35s.
In 1940, the French were building 30+ B1s alone per month and another 20 S-35s.
Also the above doesn't count the 37mm armed H-35/39s and R-35/40.
Given that the French were undoubtedly industrially weaker than the Germans and were of course "behind on mobilizing" given they didn't start the war, that's actually way better than one could expect.
That's an interesting take that I have a hard time believing. Can you provide the source?
I have a split for the 1936 Defense Budget:
2.4 billion FRF for infantry
2 billion FRF for artillery
1.3 billion for artillery ammunition
4.5 for other areas (industrial mobilization, veterinary care for horses are examples)
Kind of adds up from what I know.
Guderian, Fuller and Estienne were very different individuals.
As I mentioned, there is the idea that politicians liked the concept of spending on "defensive fortifications", as it on one end did not politically empower the army (De Gaulle's idea of "let's make a 100,000 professional army" was appalling explicitly as it created a bedrock for a military coup in the unstable French republic), on the other it gave jobs in the Great Depression environment, on the third it actually did protect the most vital resource areas France had.
Alsace and Lorraine were extremely important because of their coal and iron.
Well that's an opinion. What's the basis for that opinion?
Again an opinion which doesn't have a base.
I couldn't dig up his biography btw, so I don't even know what his career was, where he served, what he achieved. Except that he was De Tassigny's chief of staff in 1943.
The problem is, that doesn't correspond to what the French were actually doing.
For example, the French converted their cavalry into mechanized units as early as 1936, with their "Division Legere Mecanisee" (which was very close to what the German tank units were) .
They developed the so called "Division d'Infanterie Motorisee" concept, which didn't really have a WW1 analogue.
They developed "long-range tanks" like the S-35, AMC 35, that really had no analogue in WW1.
They developed half-tracks that later served as starting points for the German Sd Kfzs (Citroen P.106).
They developed AT guns.
They formed paratrooper units.
If we compare the French army of 1918 and the French army of 1940, they were very different beasts.
You can't really argue that they "sat back and did nothing since WW1". Because they didn't fight with Renault FT.17s and WW1 infantry.
De Gaulle in that regard is someone who succeeded them after the defeat, and needed to paint his predecessors in dark colors.
Well do we know why they were parked there?
Answers:
1. Some planes were parked at factories because they lacked engine or propellers.
Common problem for the French and Soviets, where it looked like they were ready, but lacking something.
2. The French airforce was not provided with adequate fuel in the interwar years to do training (which again is an issue with poltiicians, moreso than with the head of the airforce) which left them with few fighter pilots.
You can have aircraft, but may not have the pilots to operate them, so what, you ship them to the frontline? Great idea.
RAF had the same issue in the Battle for Britain btw, the only thing that saved them was German Bf.109s didn't have the range to fight over the isles. So they could afford sending barely trained pilots into the fight.
Soviet Airforce had the same problem and tried doing exactly opposite of what the French did, with hopes that "pilots will get trained at the frontline", as a result crippling their logistics (supplying fuel in the rear is a lot easier than on the frontline) and diluting their airforce with insufficiently trained pilots that were easy targets for the Germans.
3. You need ground crews to operate these fighters: something the French also lacked severely in the prewar days, thanks to politics. I believe it was normal for the French to have 67% of their aircraft operational of the total, not sure what German numbers were to compare.
4. How many of these aircraft were single-engine trainers that looked like fighters?
After all, the Luftwaffe had about 25% of their overall production devoted to trainers in 1940.
Of the 800 active pilots the Armee de l'Air had, 200 were killed, 188 were wounded and 31 captured: 52% casualty rate. Kind of speaks for itself.
Well let's see.
The British assigned 40% of their defense budget towards the RAF.
1939, the war begins. Of 31 Fighter command squadrons, the British send 4 Hurricane squadrons into France. Or roughly 8% (64 aircraft of the 850) modern fighters (550 Hurricanes and 300 Spitfires) available at the time.
The French have 439 single-engine fighters that are operational.
Later the British had their fighter force increase to 45 squadrons so they sent 2 more squadrons to France, operating Gloster Gladiator biplanes.
AKA, 85%+ of British fighters were parked anywhere but where the war was on.
When the German offensive began, the British sent another 4 Hurricane squadrons. So now the British had 160 fighters in France, all Hurricanes(they rearmed the two Gloster Gladiator squadrons) , not a single Spitfire.
The French had 369 fighters against the Luftwaffe and 140 in Southern France in May 1940. Later they transferred everyone they could up North, leaving 10 fighters in the South.
The Germans in comparison, had 1191 aircraft in the Benelux alone.
Overall it can be summed as the conversation between Petain and Churchill in June 1940:
Churchill: "Remember! We had difficult times in 1918, but we overcame them. We will overcome these in the same way!"
Petain: "In 1918, I gave you 40 French divisions to save the British army. Where are the forty English divisions we would need to save us today?"
Well it's basically what I'm saying above.
Notice: many of these new aircraft were at air schools, not just "lost somewhere".
That's true to an extent. The French made mistakes, like everyone else.
But at the end of the day, I'm not sure if Vuillemin could do something about what was going on. It seems since 1938 he was well aware of his issues, and doing the best he can. Would love to see something more detailed explaining why they didn't train up the pilots (as the 400-man fighter corps they had in 1940 seems an awful lot similar to what they had in 1936, and given WW1 experience, you would expect they knew it needed to be replenished when war will start).
Were the British putting up what they could in French skies?
Kind of hard to argue that. And more importantly, they refused to do it at all times.
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I have quoted the French principals involved in their own words. I'm not interested in engaging with later attempts to whitewash French failures. Officers on the ground at the time extensively documented these problems, and I'm not going to engage with speculation like "well maybe they were trainers that just looked like fighters, and no one could tell the difference." If you'd like to argue with postwar France's own government and the conclusions it reached, you are of course more than welcome to do so, though it would be nice if you would cite sources on your production figures, which flatly contradict France's own surviving archives.
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I'm not trying to whitewash anything. But I'd be against simplifying everything to "French lost, so they were wrong everywhere".
These are mid-level officers that were not aware of the full context of what was going on. And that wanted to put the blame on someone for "Why they lost".
Did they provide a justified explanation of "Why these aircraft were in the rear?" No.
Not only that, I am aware of a similar mistake made by Soviet military observers in 1940: when they visited German factories and learned "Germany is producing 10,000+ aircraft per year" which was true.
From that, they projected that "the Luftwaffe will field 10,000+ combat aircraft while we have only a fraction of that" failing to recognize that most of that aircraft were trainers.
It's easy to say "These folks were incompetent" as an explanation to everything. But come on, that's just lazy.
I clearly see that all French aircraft TOEs for some reason don't separate out training aircraft, and knowing how many trainers were needed from USA, German and British examples, I am forced to wonder how the French organized the process.
R.Forczyk, "Case Red: The Collapse of France" is a good source
Which is not what I have said. The French had several advantages, including tank design and artillery production. Doctrinally, however, they were wrong about nearly everything, from the role of tanks in modern battle (yes, tanks must be supported by infantry. To put in HoI terms, German doctrine and Estienne's proposals were for divisions with nine medium tanks and six mechanized battalions, and what the French under Georges and Gamelin settled on was 9 infantry 1 medium tank) to the role of aircraft (the French famously did not put radios in their bombers) to the importance of communication (French government and military communications went through civilian switchboards and competed with normal civilian traffic). And when the battle was engaged, French senior commanders lacked the competence, courage, energy and attention necessary to make war at the level required of a conflict against a major industrial power.
Gamelin, Weygand and Georges were the three most senior officers in France. La Chambre was Air Minister. de la Vigerie commanded all air forces over the Benelux countries and northeast France. Vuillemin was Chief of the Air Force and d'Harcourt was Chief of Fighter Command. Their testimonies were given to Parliament, under oath. Cosse-Brissac was chief of the Army Historical Section, reviewing documents from government archives. The German estimate comes from Jacobsen, Cosse-Brissac's interviews with Luftwaffe officers in 1947, and Kesselring's review of the official Luftwaffe figures from their archives. British estimates come from Maj. Ellis's official history of the RAF's involvement in France, and the quantities of French aircraft in North Africa come from the Italians after France's surrender.
de Marancour's explanation is that they weren't armed, but that the armaments were readily available, had anyone wished to use the planes:
He assembled thirty fighters at a second airfield, armed and ready to go, and they sat on the field until June as no one would issue orders to move them. That seems typical of the ossified state of French high command in 1940. And, as we have seen, Gamelin was not aware that they existed until after the war (or at least he says he wasn't).
It's part of Forczyk's own case -- French high command was terrible. He pushes back against the narrative that French soldiers were cowardly and performed poorly, but that's not what I've said. In individual engagements, French soldiers mostly performed about as well as you'd expect given the conditions. Their leaders -- Gamelin, Weygand, Georges, Huntziger, Vuillemin, and many more -- did not. To quote from Lt Col Jesse McIntyre's review of Case Red in the US Army Press:
Or, to quote Gamelin again, on Georges, speaking to Parliament's Investigating Committee in 1947:
Competitive self-exculpation aside, and it is hard to lay aside in Gamelin's case, he's clearly correct about the primary thrust of his case: Georges did not take firm charge of his theater. Of course, Georges contends that that's Gamelin's fault. On trial in Riom, he said
Emphasis in original. And before Parliament, speaking of the situation on the 19th of May, he said
He also said that he received 140 general orders from Gamelin between September 1939 and May 10 1940, but did not receive another until May 19 -- the aforementioned Secret and Personal Instruction Number 12. Concluding his testimony, Georges said:
And history's judgement has been that they were both awful and should have been put out to pasture a decade or more before. Weygand was no better, and Petain was worse.
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Perhaps we should open a separate thread on the Collapse of France in 1940, so that we can have a fruitful discussion about Soviet Scientists there?
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I have already found a solution to this thread so anyone who wants to offer their options or promote a suggestion for the developers to see it then follow the link. But if you want to continue discussing scientists you certainly can.