A USSaaR

[ComTrav]

I'm wondering why you're building the armor brigades as fully mobilized. If you're mainly interested in building up practical, it seems like building them as reserves is a better option. (Especially since you still have volunteer army.) On the other hand, having your tanks ready to fight on day one of any war has advantages, too.

Great updates btw-let's hope your far east machinations pay off.

 

[loki100]

VILenin - The leadership crunch is definitely involves making some tough decisions. I axed diplomacy too, which is too bad since I would've like to have been more active with it. I'm still on the fence with intelligence, though I think using spies in you own country can be quite helpful.

Aye, I seem to spend ages fussing over this and its going to get worse in 1938. I'm avoiding research 'ahead of time' so have started to pick up a few theory techs to keep some things ticking over. But in '38 there is so much to do - 2 new tank models, getting SPA started, a new Inf Div equipment, lots of industrial stuff that the temptation will be to binge on research, but I'm going to try to be disciplined and spread that batch over 38-40 and hope that accumulation of practical and steady research brings the costs down.

I've decided, really as an experiment, to push the subversion part of the Intelligence system to see if that is a sensible route. So far, no real pay off but realistically it shouldn't just pay back overnight.

I've got my officer ratio up to 110% - enough for 40 divs but I'm going to have to put back in some of the command structure I pulled out so this will prob only fund 25-30 divs in reality. So need to keep that going.

Mind you every time I feel a bit sorry for myself in this respect, I just read Renssler's Portugal AAR ....

I'm wondering why you're building the armor brigades as fully mobilized. If you're mainly interested in building up practical, it seems like building them as reserves is a better option. (Especially since you still have volunteer army.) On the other hand, having your tanks ready to fight on day one of any war has advantages, too.

Some of this is scattiness - too easy to forget to click the 'reserve' option and some is deliberate. The garrison divisions going into the Caucasus and Central Asia are all at reserve strength, those in key ports are at full strength. Elsewhere, I'm using a concept from Soviet post-war planning of Category A and Category B divisions. I don't intend to fully mobilise in the Winter War (I'd then have potentially quite a while with a fully mobilised army in peace time), but don't want just reserve divisions when Adolph comes visiting. So key formations are being developed as full strength, even if it does take longer, and most of my vanilla Inf Divs are reserves - except enough to equip 2 new armies that I'm going to deploy to Leningrad and Karelian sectors -- they want to build up on my borders, I'll build up on theirs!

At this moment, I've got IC to spare, this won't last, but want to take advantage of it whilst I can. Thats one reason why I've developed my current rocket fetish - so I can build some testing facilities at a time when my IC isn't desparately pressed on keeping an army functioning in wartime.

 

[loki100]

This post is partly a test, I think I have sorted out uploading so will redo earlier screenshots but also shows the sort of small scale mistake you can make.

I opted to develop the engineering brigade before finishing off the 1936 inf tech. If I'd done the other way around, I could have got the arctic warfare tech out of the way at this stage, as it is that'll end up cluttering up my 1938 research programme which'll be busy enough in any case.



Instead one of my 'Inf' research teams is off on more aircrew training for TAC bombers.

 

[Juan_de_Marco]

It seems to me, solely from reading AARs, that espionage and diplomacy are only useful in conjunction with each other. Not surprising, as most of the time these two activities fall under one foreign ministry..

 

[loki100]

It seems to me, solely from reading AARs, that espionage and diplomacy are only useful in conjunction with each other. Not surprising, as most of the time these two activities fall under one foreign ministry

I think you are probably right, but with the SU you have a real leadership problem. It doesn't sound it when compared to say Portugal but ideally you want decent air, both defensive and offensive, inf, armour, specialist artilley, do things to sort out your supply problems etc etc. So its hard to put any effort into diplomacy - which is why I'm keeping my new current set to hand and not using them.

I suspect my spy offensive will work if I can hit a weak country (ie NU below 55-60), which is a democracy and I end up creating a strong national communist party. The other thing I want to see is if doing subversion re revolts feeds into (a) more revolts and (b) if it does - are the partisans 'mine'?

 

[loki100]

Speech by General Koniev

We are pleased to be able to offer 2 recent speeches by upcoming Generals to our officer recruits. They start to set out an overall appreciation of Soviet military strategy and some ideas as to future developments.

The following is an extract of Comrade Koniev’s speech to officer cadets.

Comrade officers, you are about to graduate to the new, fast expanding Red Army. You have no doubt heard news reports and seen pictures of the new Tank Formations even now being deployed near Moscow on the ground named after the famous General Suvorov.


This seems to have been defaced by the NKVD in an attempt to claim at least one non-domestic success!

My goal today is to give you an appreciation of the wider structure of the Red Army and show you how the apparently trivial has a key part in our overall military strategy. As you can see we currently have 16 ‘Garrison’ Brigades and another 2 are in production. They appear to be scattered at random around the USSR and many are not even integrated into our conventional military structure.






So why are these so important? Despite the growth of our armed forces we remain surrounded by enemies. Britain has always been a mortal enemy of the Russian people, France has invaded us before and Germany re-arms. Japan is a growing threat, even if its opportunistic invasion of China is going badly.




Why do I praise ‘garrisons’? Is it Socialist Solidarity? No they play a vital role. Those seemingly random places are key ports or protect major resources and growing industrial centres, without which our industrial capacity would collapse. They allow us to release other units for service where we most fear attack – Finland, Poland, the Far East. We have to be aware of the flexibility of our enemies – an attack could come across any border or from any sea. Those units will delay such an attack until regular units can deploy and deal with the aggressors. So the Soviet build up is not just about armoured divisions, consider it as an integrated plan.

 

[loki100]

Zhukov gets the rocket

Later in the day, a follow up speech was given by Comrade General Zhukov. This offered insights into the current very long term thinking of the General Staff.

Gaining Strategic Reach.

At the moment our military build up is in its infancy. Despite the worsening international situation, the party leadership has decided to keep the Second Five Year Plan focussed on Industry. We have just constructed the first of a new type of armoured division and that had to be partially done by taking brigades from an existing motorised division.

However, my purpose here is not to talk about what we could call our operational reach, I wish to talk about how we might deal with enemies who are located outside the European and Asian continental land masses. As you know, the Soviet Navy (VNF) is antiquated and almost no resources can be spared for modernisation or training. The airforce (VVS) has been tasked with defending Soviet airspace and support for RKKA operations. Other countries are already developing long range 4 engine bombers – that, at the moment, is not for us.

So how can we gain such a long range reach? Rockets comrades, Rockets. We intend, as resources allow, to slowly develop our rocket technologies. These will appear in many guises – such as specialist artillery formations, but more important we believe such weapons will ultimately give us the ability to attack regions currently beyond our grasp. Managing this, with the other demands we face will be a long term project, however, by the time of the 4th Five Year Plan (1943) do not be surprised if they are playing a role in our military planning.

 

[ComTrav]

Screen shots all look great.

Using spies is very thematic for a USSR AAR, I hope it pays off. If someone can get the German-American Bund to be the largest party in the US by using "Support Our Party", I'm sure the potential is there.

 

[loki100]

Using spies is very thematic for a USSR AAR, I hope it pays off. If someone can get the German-American Bund to be the largest party in the US by using "Support Our Party", I'm sure the potential is there

also I feel rather committed to this gambit - so will stick with it, despite temptation to the contrary.

My Far East policy appears to be working, in general Japanese and Chinese are now in a stalemate. Soviet military planners are quite interested in the emergence of Beijing as a 'Hero City', its been cut off since August and is holding out - dunno what is actually going on though



NKVD denies any responsibility for the assasination attempt reported by the French

 

[loki100]

Planning for 3rd Five Year Plan

1938 seems to be quite important in terms of options. Partly as I've been avoiding 'ahead of time' research (locks up teams for too long), all of sudden there is a mass of new stuff to research and its a bit like being in the sweetie shop if you aren't careful. So update, focussed on research later on - when I actually think about what I'm up to.

I'll also do an update on Soviet OOB and organisation - but that, obv, will take time.

So 2 quick musings about options. First is the organisation and options for the Soviet airforce (VVS). I actually think this is pretty simple. I want more than I'll be able to have, nothing except air superiority and army support. Good thing is now that FTR and INT share techs, its a bit easier to have both.

I started with: 4 TAC, 8 INT. Have since added 1 more INT, 1*CAS and a further INT and Trans are in production.

In general, as with armour, will build early – upgrades are not too costly, so easiest to absorb the building costs when I still have a feeling of having spare IC.

Organisation will be into units of 3 aircraft so if 2 end up in same sector not too bad for stacking penalty. CAS will be in formations of 2*CAS, 1*FTR, TAC, I’m not sure if 3*TAC or 2*TAC, 1*FTR is the way to go. Aim by late 1940 to have 16 INT – spread something like 1 in Far East, 3 guarding Moscow, 3 at Leningrad, 3 at Minsk/Baltic region, 3 at Kiev/Poland, 3 at Odessa. Plus 2-3 squadrons of mixed CAS/FTR and, if it can be squeezed in, at least 2 more TAC. That means that each main sector of the Western Front will have 2 ground attack/interdiction aircraft to support key operations.

I think I need to keep clusters of 3 as do not have very many air commanders and a lot of them are not so good.

 

[loki100]

Soviet armoured formations

Current OOB and ideas.

What I've inherited is a bit of an odd mix. I've not so far done any re-organising at the Brigade level so there are effectively 3 'armoured' formations rattling around. My new Tank Division (which I'll annotate as TD), and then the old Light Armour units are mostly in structures of 1 LArm and 2 Mot Brigades (these I'll annotate as MD) but some (4?) are in a structure of 2 LArm and 1 Mot) - these I'll call AD (armoured divs). I'm not convinced the vastness of the Red Army is the place for subtle distinctions so I need to think about if I keep to this or package the component brigades in a different way.

All the existing Cav Divs come with an AC brigade - so quite good as long as they stay out the way of Medium armour.

1 Tank Army – STAVKA RESERVE – will soon have 3 TDs (2 MA, 1Mot), 2 MDs (1LA, 2Mot);
1 Mech Army – Leningrad Sector – 2 MD (1 LA, 2 Mot); may then build up to Tank Army status;
2 Mech Army – Latvian Front – 1 AD (2LA, 1Mot), 3 MD (1LA, 2Mot);
3 Mech Army – Polish Front – 1 AD (2LA, 1Mot), 3 MD (1LA, 2Mot), 1 Cav (2Cav, 1AC);
4 Mech Army – Uman Front – 1 AD (2LA, 1Mot), 2 MD (1LA, 2Mot), 2 Cav (2Cav, 1AC)

To put this into context, that means the last 2 are in the area immediately South of the Pripyet marshes where I'd expect to see the bulk of any German armour. If 1 Tank is then brought out of reserve, and esp if I've built another Tank army, should be quite a clash of armour. After Winter War, will move 1 Mech to the Baltic/N Polish areas and I'm pretty sure it'll get the next batch of proper Tank Divisions - and then become named as Tank Army.

Outside Armoured formations:

1 AD (2LA, 1Mot) – Murmansk, 1 Cav Div at Baku, 1 MD (1LA, 1Mot) and 1 Mot (3Mot) in Far East.

Options – break up AD to MD, (ie build more motorised and spread armour out – still get CA bonus and have more, but less powerful, formations), or combine MD to AD and release Mot as sep formations? If I do the latter, I'll then reinforce the new pure motorised divisions with AC brigades.

Need to think of best additional brigades – SPA (easy), HARM (if I research), more AC? – def add AC to pure Mot Divs. If I research Mech, start to replace Mot Divs in Tank Armies with Mech, or use Mech to improve combat power of existing LArm divs?

 

[Stuyvesant]

Interesting read. I look forward to comparing your results to VILenin's.

Can't offer any advice on the division layout, since I'm fairly clueless there. I tend to stick with the templates for now. o

Anyway, looking forward to more developments.

 

[Myth]

You're certainly organizing your armies with a thought to future operations. It'll be interesting to see how well your preparations stack up to the real challenge of fighting.

 

[loki100]

Interesting read. I look forward to comparing your results to VILenin's.

I find it interesting there are 4 Soviet AARs on the go - I sort of suspect that the vastness of HOI3 makes it seem so much more alluring - but what will be interesting is to see how it pans out. My real hope is that Soviet strategies in HOI3 remain much more varied than the relatively standardised HOI2 waltz to war.

You're certainly organizing your armies with a thought to future operations. It'll be interesting to see how well your preparations stack up to the real challenge of fighting.

that is indeed the big gamble, due to the way 1.1c worked, the most fighting I did with a Soviet set up was with the Finns, where, no matter what happens 'might ends up making right'. But I did a France 1938 start, and some of the organisational ideas I picked up in doing that game are being repeated on a larger scale here. Adding AC to Inf Divs was an accidental success there - the formations became incredibly tough.

Stalin has warned all members of the politburo that he wants no repeat of the drunken antics of the last 2 new years eves - in fact to keep them busy he has demanded a full session of the Politburo convene at 10.00 on 1/1/38 - and he expects major analyses and forward plans - which will of course dovetail with those of their colleagues.

In the meantime he sent himself to sleep with but a solitary glass of vodka whilst he gazed at OOB informaton for the Red Army

 

[loki100]

The Soviet OOB

This post and the one that follows will give some detail on the Soviet OOB. I won't cover the Central Asia or Far Eastern Theatres as not much has been done there except adding Garrison divisions to key sites.

This post will look at the Archangelsk, STAVKA and Stalingrad Theatres (the latter really just the Transcaucasus at the moment). The next post will break down some key sectors on the Western borders to give a bit more detail.

Just to reiterate, in part to get my own head clear, I renamed all the surviving command formations. So in what follows, a 'corps' is an Army, an 'army' has become a 'front', where I kept the old fronts, they are now Military Districts. The bulk below shows the OOB down to my 'front' level.

The Arctic.

Here I scrapped the level between Theatre and Front, so there are only 3 levels of command. Equally there is only 1 Front but I didn't really want the individual armies reporting straight to the Theatre.

Each army has 4-5 conventional rifle divisions (some fully mobilised), the Front has command of the divisions at Murmansk (arm, garrison and inf divs) as well as the 3 armies. If Winter War approaches I'll reinforce the 3 Army sector with 1 Shock from STAVKA reserve. I've added most of my new rifle divs so far to here or Leningrad but will stop the build up in this Theatre for now.



STAVKA

This is the most complex (apols for my drawing skills) and I'll break it out a bit in the next post.

There are 4 Front line military districts - Leningrad, Gdov, Minsk and Odessa and a 'Reserve' district that controls the forces grouped at Kiev and the 1 Tank Army and 1 Shock Army in the Moscow sector (kept here to reduce supply losses as much as anything else). As you can see from the organisation chart on the right, the Leningrad MD has 1 Front, Gdov 2, Minsk 5 and Odessa 2. The one I am still not sure about is whether to keep the Leningrad MD or just have a Front in that sector and link it to the Gdov MD (which in turn will move into the Baltic states at a suitable time).



Finally, to complete the European Russia OOB here's the Caucasus. Its a single 'Front' with 2 armies. Both armies are a mix of MTN and Gar Divs. Unlike on the Finnish border I don't really expect an early war with Turkey but if that was likely, these formations could be reinforced by drawing off the reserves in the Kiev Front.

 

[loki100]

Soviet OOB - Minsk and Leningrad Sectors

The first shot shows the relatively small Leningrad MD. The structure is MD with 1 Mech Army attached, Viipuuri Front, which has 2 Armies - 2nd Shock (which is the formations that start in this sector, I've been adding artillery brigades and other goodies) and 28A (which is one of the few I've added recently). The formations are intermingled but the basic idea is that 28A guards the border and Leningrad, the 2 offensive armies are set back from the border. Post winter war, 2SA and 1Mech will go elsewhere and be backfilled by more standard rifle divisions.



The second picture tries to break out the large Minsk MD somewhat. At the moment, almost all the 'armies' are 3 rifle divisions so scope to add some more reinforcements (this sector will get most of the next batch of INF) before I need more commands. There are 3 Fronts - Vityebysk up on the border with Latvia, Minsk, with 3 armies scattered around the area over and to the north of the Pripyet marshes and the Polish Front covering the southern border with Poland. Although 3 Mech sort of belongs to the Polish Front its actually deployed behind both Polish and Minsk sectors. The Vityebysk formations for the most part came out of the old SW Front that I broke up right at the start. The rest are the units that start around here.

To the east is the Kiev Front of the STAVKA reserve and to the South is 4 Mech (notionally part of the Odessa Front).

I think this is a rubbish formation for combat, even if there are no breakthroughs it'll be all over the place. But it'll make sense once E Poland and the Baltic States are in place and it chops and changes bits and pieces with the 2 neighbouring MDs. My goal by early 1940 is to have the 4 western fronts aligned in some sort of depth along a clear axis.

 

[loki100]

Still on the theme of military structure

The Red Army is huge, and I think AI control (at least at my army level) is an essential unless you want to fight the Great Patriotic War in real time. So what I'm trying to do is to make it simple and visually easy. So if I see an Inf Army, I know it should be 4-5 rifle divs, Shock Army will be a template and so on.

What I did right at the start was to wind up the 'Orel' and 'South West' fronts. In the main I've not shifted much around as the starting positions are good enough, but it does need a cleaner organisation. The 2 Inf Corps that start in the Orel front initially went to the Moscow Front as a central reserve. One of those corps then went to Karelia and is now 2A, the other was the basis of the 1st Shock Army - ie I added extra goodies to the existing rifle divs.

SW Front got split up 3 ways - one batch of an 'army+2 corps' was sent off to the Polish/Latvian border - that area starts quite weak. The bulk of the Inf was more or less left in place and is now Kiev Front linked to the STAVKA reserve. Finally the Arm and Cav was split up between what is now the 3+4 Mech armies.

I then went through the command structure and abolished the Cav Corps, about half the Mech Corps - you have masses of these with just 1 attached division, and a fair few general inf corps and armies. Tried to ensure that nothing was left with less than 3 attached divs (& no 'army' HQs with less than 2, pref 3 'corps'). So left a bit of leeway for future expansion without having to immediately add in new HQs.

My instinct is that my (using my terms not the game) Front structure will now do up to the start of generalised war. I'll add more armies as I need to control new builds. I'm still fussing about my 'Military District' organisation and numbers.

 

[loki100]

extract from Stalin's personal diaries

1 January 1938

Woke without headache, and after the Kremlin was unusually busy (& sober) all night.

No shocking world news this morning.

Carried on thinking about changes to Politburo. Being a dictator is difficult when you can't demote people just on a whim - I'm stuck with a head of the navy who wants to build aircraft carriers - Zhukov may get his rockets but I just don't see us doing aircraft carriers.

However, decide to appoint Orlov as new head of NKVD - he'll help with the domestic propaganda effort to convince people we need to plan for war. Pleased to see that our neutrality is now down to 66. Good to see that disruption of Finland continues, their NU is now at 65.9. NKVD operations in Spain and Germany remain a disaster but we are doing a good job of making the French out to be the ogres of Europe.

Less pleased with this morning's Trud. The army has been moaning that Molotov has moved from selling spare kit to actually raiding their ammunition dumps for his 'trades' (ie my supplies are going down by a net 41 a day, due to 137 outflow - my cash balance is healthy though!). Trud has a story that Molotov met his Italian contact, code named 'Silvio' apparently on a boat in Corfu in August when we'd told the world I was doing some 'community service' on a new canal near Tashkent - they've called it the Stalin Canal which I think is rather nice.

What they miss is that apart from Republican Spain, Italy is the only country in Europe that seems to like us (+75) ... wonder if they want a new alliance if they get bored with the Germans?

Need to stick with Molotov for the moment - no feasible alternative .... but one meets other foreign ministers who seem to do something positive (other than make money we cannot spend).

Off to Politburo to see if they have any plans before I tell them what to do in any case.

 

[loki100]

Minutes of the Politburo 5 January 1938

(it was a long meeting!)

Foreign Affairs - Essentially the 2 active wars seem to have stalemated, although recently the Republicans have lost Barcelona and the Basque provinces. On the other hand they have captured some more ground in the South and are holding the Nationalists away from Madrid. The army remains interested in the developments at Beijing as we too will face urban combat when we advance beyond our current borders.

At the moment, the overall assessment remains as before. We do not believe there will be a general war in the immediate future, we remain concerned at Finland's agressive military deployment but they are not mobilising so are unlikely to be able to attack.

NKVD. Domestically the main goal is to reduce our neutrality so we can introduce new conscription laws and further militarise our IC usage. The main obstacle remains permanently high levels of foreign subversion - especially aimed at our research effort. Internationally, we have maintained a high level in Finland and France. However, due to efficient counter-espionage work we are finding it impossible to build up in Germany and Spain. We now intend to close down all other programmes except that in Nationalist Spain, where we will seek to damage their war effort. If the Republic wins this network will become the basis of a new spy network in their territory. Equally if the Republic wins we will start to use our limited diplomatic resources on 'influencing' - an ally at the west end of the Mediterranean would be most welcome.

Research. For the moment we will keep to 13 teams (2.08 is going to Spies, 2.11 to officers). We have many research options in both military and industrial areas so need some rough allocation of effort over the next 2 years. Our plan is:

We need to work on 5 Inf Techs (ie only 'defensiveness' for Garrisons) so will use just 1 team;
We need at least 11 Arm Techs (2 complete tank models, SPA, 2 AC components), so will allocate 2 teams;
We need just one air eng tech, this will be done by 1 team and that will then be re-allocated;
Art (incl fixed AA), 4 techs, 1 team after it has finished the air tech;
Land doctrines - 3 teams - 1 each on Mobile, Infantry and Large Front doctrines. 1 of these teams may be re-allocated to armour developments later on;
Air doctrines - 3 teams - 1 each on FTR, TAC and CAS doctrines;
Industry is complex. There are 6 techs we would like based on mechanical engineering and some of these (more IC etc) are priorities; there are also 6 techs based on combat experience (educ, hospitals, logistics) and 3 techs based on electronic eng (radar, spying). We will cover these with 1 team in each area. The electronic engineering teams might delay their start to help out with other industrial areas but we would like to develop Radar in 1939 and this would be eased by some recent experience in the field. For the moment, we will not seek to improve our oil production but this does remain rather low - a problem being masked by our ability to convert coal to oil due to overall industrial strength.

Teams will move to their new allocations as they complete their current research and some have started. More capacity will become available once the current research in education is completed but, as usual we have other demands. Even the recent modest increase in Red Army strength and HQ structures reduced our 'officer ratio' from 110% to 107%.

Production - We want another 3 Tank Divs at least in production this year, more aircraft, possibly including some more tactical bombers and about 5-7 new industrial units. Rifle divisions can be fitted in as needed and we will keep up to date with upgrades. If we feel that the danger of war is increasing, we may accelerate the production of new rifle divisions and hold back other developments (ie Zhukov's rocket sites)

Hopefully a combination of increasing capacity, new technology and further re-allocation away from the civil economy will help us to meet our overall needs. Once we have the 'Advanced Construction Engineering' technology we may want to divert some IC to improved railroads in critical sectors around Moscow and additional fortifications. Given our high levels of practical experience in construction, this will be relatively cheap.

 

[unmerged(163187)]

One is to create 5 Inf Div 'Shock Armies' - my current model will be 3 normal Inf Divs boosted by an Art brigade, 1 Inf Div boosted by an Eng brigade and I may make the 5th formation a bit 'hard' by slotting in an AC brigade (my France '38 game gave me quite a lot of respect for AC in HOI3).

Interesting, please expand on the benefits of AC!