Mystics & Statistics

Tank Losses on 12/13 July 1943

I do have a nice simple graphic in my books that compares the tank losses on the 12th (and 13th) of July 1943 for both sides. It is on page 953 of my Kursk book and page 344 of my Prokhorovka book. It is shown above.

As can be seen by my count based upon the unit records, the LSSAH Panzer Grenadier Division lost 19 tanks on the 12th. The XVIII Tank Corps lost 81 tanks while the XXIX Tank Corps lost 159 tanks. This is 19 compared to 240. Now, Ben Wheatley from his photo analysis concludes it was 5 Panzer IVs lost versus over 200 Soviet tanks.

But…..this is not the whole story. To start with, the Soviet XVIII Tank Corps was partly engaged with the Totenkopf SS Panzer Grenadier Division. As I note on page 931 of my Kursk book (page 318 of my Prokhorovka book): Rotmistrov reported that at 1330 (Moscow time), the first echelon brigades were fired on by 13 Tigers tanks from the area of height 226.6, which were moving in the direction of the northwestern outskirts of Mikhailovka. The Totenkopf Division had around 11 Tigers operational on the evening of the 11th (and had 10 damaged/broken down on the 12th and 13th). Also, the XXIX Tank Corps was partly engaged with the Das Reich SS Panzer Grenadier Division. So….

(more to come)

Ten Million in Ten Days?

Hard to ignore the news when the President of the United States is talking about how he could kill ten million people. And here I was planning on spending this week blogging about Prokhorovka. Anyhow, an article with a video of his comments is here: https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-boasts-afghanistan-would-be-easy-to-fix-i-just-dont-want-to-kill-10-million-people-190412501.html

His two main comments were:

We’re like policemen. We’re not fighting a war. If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in the week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.

I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth. It would be gone, it would be over literally in 10 days.

Well, to start with it is pretty hard to kill 10 million people.  We won’t discuss the six or so cases where people actually succeeded in doing this, they are pretty well known. None of them were done in 10 days. It would appear that the only way you could cause such havoc in 10 days would be through a massive nuclear attack. It would have to be fairly extensive attack to kill 10 million of the 35 million people in Afghanistan, especially as they are somewhat dispersed.

Is someone actually discussing this possibility inside the White House or Pentagon? I seriously doubt it.

Now, I have never been involved in estimating losses from a nuclear attack. It can be done. Each bomb or missile has a lethal radius, a less-than-lethal radius, and of course, there is radiation poisoning, nuclear fallout, and a rather extended long-term series of illnesses, as the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could recount in painful detail. It would certainly require dozens of nuclear bombs. The U.S. has around 1,800 deployed nuclear warheads.

He also said:

If we wanted to, we could win that war. I have a plan that would win that war in the very short period of time.

I do find that hard to believe, as large insurgencies have been particularly intractable. See page 47 of my book America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.

 

Kursk Aerial Photos

Tank Fields of Prokhorovka, 16 July 1943 (page 599)

I did include in my Kursk book 32 aerial photos taken by the Germans in June and July 1943 (pages 569-600), in what was called the “Photo Reconnaissance Section.” I considered them useful for examining the terrain and a nice supplement to the 1:5000 scale maps I included in the book. I also included 12 such photos in my Prokhorovka book, pages 189-202. It is a nice, large and untapped collection at the National Archives. You can tell when archives files have been heavily used. These looked untouched. I was directed to these files by John Sloan about 10 years ago.

Apparently a British historian by the name of Ben Wheatley tapped into the pictures of the battlefield taken on 14-16 July. He was able to see in some of them the destroyed tanks on the battlefield. It resulted in this article in BBC (it is nice that they pay attention to history): https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48963295

That article was posted in a message to this blog by David Carr. Ben Wheatley paper is here:                                                                          .  https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16161262.2019.1606545

The real story at Prokhorovka has been known for a while, so surprised that this has been getting such attention. The BBC article states that the Germans lost 5 Pz IVs at Prokhorovka while the Soviets lost more than 200.

This is probably a little more certainty about the figures than I have in my books. So over the next couple of posts, I will be exploring what those figures may be. The first problem is the definition of the battlefield and who is on it. The next problem is what tanks were lost on what days. There is also an issue with defining what a loss is.

Lethality in War by Numbers

Seeing how the word “Lethality” has developed a life of its own….I decided to take a look at what was discussed on lethality in my book War by Numbers. Just to clarify, I have never considered how “lethality” should be defined or what its definition should consist of, but simply used the word as commonly used in American English.

I ended up discussing lethality in two chapters of my book: Chapter 13: The Effects of Dispersion on Combat, and Chapter 15: Casualties.

In Chapter 13: The Effects of Dispersion on Combat, I discuss it only the most general way. For example: “The effectiveness and lethality of weapons have continued to increase over the past four hundred years, yet the loss rates among forces in combat have declined.” (page 161) and “He postulated that forces continued to disperse over time to compensate for the increased lethality of weapons.” (also page 161). This chapter, pages 161-173, should probably be read by anyone looking to discuss “lethality.”

In Chapter 15: Casualties, I discuss lethality as related to wounded-to-killed ratio and specific weapons that wound and/or kill. There is an entire section in the book called “Lethality of Weapons” (page 183). This looks at the percent of people killed among those wounded by weapon. So there are multiple tables showing the “Lethality of Weapon,” some drawn from the Textbook of Military Medicine. This is a fairly extended discussion that addresses the lethality of weapons over multiple weapons over multiple wars. It then morphs into a discussion of wounded-to-killed ratios (pages 181-205). Lethality in this case refers to people killed or died of wounds.

Again, I am not comfortable by what recent writers mean by their use of the word “lethality.”

Our Previous Blog Posts related to Lethality

Dr. Shawn Woodford did write up a response to Olivia Gerard’s The Strategy Bridge article in November 2018, shortly after it appeared last November:

What Does Lethality Mean In Warfare?

Here are other posts we have done that reference lethality.

What Is The Relationship Between Rate of Fire and Military Effectiveness?

Trevor Dupuy and Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality

TDI Friday Read: Lethality, Dispersion, And Mass On Future Battlefields

Dupuy’s Verities: The Effects of Firepower in Combat

Trevor Dupuy’s Definitions of Lethality

Two U.S. Marines with a M1919A4 machine gun on Roi-Namur Island in the Marshall Islands during World War II. [Wikimedia]

It appears that discussion of the meaning of lethality, as related to the use of the term in the 2018 U.S. National Defense Strategy document, has sparked up again. It was kicked off by an interesting piece by Olivia Gerard in The Strategy Bridge last autumn, “Lethality: An Inquiry.”

Gerard credited Trevor Dupuy and his colleagues at the Historical Evaluation Research Organization (HERO) with codifying “the military appropriation of the concept” of lethality, which was defined as: “the inherent capability of a given weapon to kill personnel or make materiel ineffective in a given period, where capability includes the factors of weapon range, rate of fire, accuracy, radius of effects, and battlefield mobility.”

It is gratifying for Gerard to attribute this to Dupuy and HERO, but some clarification is needed. The definition she quoted was, in fact, one provided to HERO for the purposes of a study sponsored by the Advanced Tactics Project (AVTAC) of the U.S. Army Combat Developments Command. The 1964 study report, Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality, provided the starting point for Dupuy’s subsequent theorizing about combat.

In his own works, Dupuy used a simpler definition of lethality:

He also used the terms lethality and firepower interchangeably in his writings. The wording of the original 1964 AVTAC definition tracks closely with the lethality scoring methodology Dupuy and his HERO colleagues developed for the study, known as the Theoretical Lethality Index/Operational Lethality Index (TLI/OLI). The original purpose of this construct was to permit some measurement of lethality by which weapons could be compared to each other (TLI), and to each other through history (OLI). It worked well enough that he incorporated it into his combat models, the Quantified Judgement Model (QJM) and Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model (TNDM).

Some Background on Lethality

There have recently been some articles and talk about lethality. This is hardly a new subject, although apparently there is some renewed interest in the subject. More to the point, the word is now being used extensively in discussions, even though I do not fully understand what they mean by it. This article in late 2018 from The Strategy Bridge provides a little background on the subject: https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2018/11/1/lethality-an-inquiry

As the article states (bolding is mine):

 Left undefined, lethality risks the fate of many insufficiently elucidated but well-meaning concepts. It is imperative the concept is properly understood, otherwise the word will saturate PowerPoint slides bereft of insight.

And then there is the sentence further on that catches my attention:

Trevor Dupuy’s 1964 “Final Report on Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality” codified the military appropriation of the concept. 

OK, so we are (were) at the cutting edge (in 1964). Nice to know. This was news to me. I had been ignoring all this discussion on lethality until more than one person brought it to my attention this last week. Trevor Dupuy later used this report for his book Evolution of Weapons and Warfare.

Anyhow, I guess we should start blogging about lethality a little more, even though I am not sure what all is encompassed by other people’s use of the word.

Today – Speaking at Historicon in Lancaster, PA., Friday 12 July

I will be speaking at Historicon in Lancaster, PA., Friday 12 July, at 6 PM. Historicon is one of the three major annual wargaming conventions run by the Historical Miniatures Gaming Society (HMGS). It will be run from 10 July-14 July, 2019. Their website is here: https://www.hmgs.org/general/custom.asp?page=HconHome

As part of this large convention, they have organized a “War College.” This is an impressive effort that includes 18 lectures on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. I have the last lecture on Friday, from 6 – 7 PM. The speakers for this series include published authors Paul Westermeyer, Pete Panzeri, Steve R. Waddell and John Prados, among others. Lecture descriptions are here:                                                                               . https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.hmgs.org/resource/resmgr/historicon/hcon_19/pels/19_war_college_pel_6-19-2019.pdf

I will be doing a presentation similar to the one I did at the New York Military Affairs Symposium (NYMAS). It is based upon part of my book War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat.

Book Pictures

I was wandering through a Barnes & Nobles last week and spotted my Prokhorovka book on the shelf. It was kind of easy to spot, being bigger than everything else on the shelf and with a light-colored dust jacket. Always nice to stand out on the book shelf. Of course, this is my smaller book on the subject. My original Kursk book was never sold in stores.

On facebook, a friend of mine posted the following picture, apparently from a library in Denmark:

There have been a number of pictures on this book posted on the internet. Apparently the shear size of the book has grabbed people’s fancy, although I gather a few people have actually read the entire book:

http://www.ratspatrol.com/christmas/
https://elgrancapitan.org/foro/viewtopic.php?t=23259&start=0

Anyhow, if size matters….then this book did the trick.

Aces at Kursk – Summation

Yak-9 at war memorial, northwest of Yakovlevo, Belrorod-Oboyan road (1995)

I do have a completed manuscript that I am marketing. I have done a number of posts recently related to my work on this. Let me list them below:

145 or 10?

So did Kozhedub shoot down 62, 64 or 66 planes?

5th Guards Fighter Regiment, 7 July 1943

The 728th Fighter Regiment on 16 July 1943

Soviet versus German kill claims at Kursk

So What Was Driving the Soviet Kill Claims?

Aces at Kursk – Chapters