Mystics & Statistics

And elements of the XXIX Tank Corps….

In addition to elements of the XVIII Tank Corps being engaged with Totenkopf SS Division, also, elements of the XXIX Tank Corps were engaged with the Das Reich SS Division.

As I report on page 329 of my Prokhorovka book (or page 940 of my Kursk book — This account was slightly revised for my newer book with one sentence added and two sentences adjusted in the third paragraph):

On the other side of the railroad track, the 25th Tank Brigade, with two batteries of the 1446th Self-Propelled Artillery Regiment made more progress. They attacked through Stalinskoye Otdeleniye Sovkhoz and by 1400 (Moscow time) they had taken Storozhevoye and overcome the German fire resistance from Ivanovskii Vyiselok and the groves 1.5 kilometers northeast of Yasnaya Polyana. They also are reported to have taken significant casualties from air and artillery fire (this is Rotmistrov’s claim) but no mention is made of the losses from tank fire. Their attack then stalled somewhere around Storozhevoye, tangled up with the Das Reich SS Division.

The Das Reich reported in the morning an attack against the small forest east of Ivanovskii Vyiselok with 18 to 20 tanks and against its defenses west of Storozhevoye with infantry and tanks. It reported at 1140 Soviet attacks with tanks and infantry against the II Battalion, Deutschland SS Regiment. After this attack was defeated, at 1255 the battalion attacked Storozhevoye. It reported nine Soviet tanks were destroyed. At 1340, the II Battalion then took the south part of Storozhevoye as well as the little woods south of there. At 1505, the battalion was in the north part of Storozhevoye attacking to the east.

The 53rd Motorized Rifle Brigade, with the 271st Mortar Regiment, meanwhile had advanced into the woods north of Storozhevoye and were able to reach the “glade.” Elements of the brigade along with at least 15 T-34s from the first tank battalion of the 32nd Tank Brigade had already penetrated to Komsomolets Sovkhoz in the original attack. Even though two attacking Soviet tank brigades were stalled in front of the German positions around height 252.2, elements of the tank corps had been able to bypass this point and take Komsomolets Sovkhoz. The railroad and the woods north of Storozhevoye probably served to cover the brigade’s right flank as it continued forward. After “fierce fighting,” by 1400 (Moscow time), they were able to take Komsomolets Sovkhoz. Still, as none of the other armor of the XXIX Tank Corps had been able to come forward with this brigade, they were left in an untenable position and the Das Reich SS Division was attacking Storozhevoye, behind them.

There is more, but you get the picture. It is clear that significant elements of the XXIX Tank Corps were primarily engaged with Das Reich SS Division.

Therefore, we have parts of the XVIII Tank Corps engaging the Totenkopf SS Division and parts of the XXIX Tank Corps engaging the Das Reich SS Division. This is a little more complicated picture than just the two corps attacking the LSSAH Division. It is not as simple as a 5-to-200+ or even a 19-to-240 exchange. Here are the figures we used in the engagement sheets created from the Kursk Data Base (from pages 954-956 in the Kursk book, and pages 345-347 in the Prokhorovka book):

Totenkopf SS:

…..134 tanks (0 light) versus 70 Soviet tanks (33 light)

…..28 German tanks lost versus 33 Soviet tanks lost

LSSAH:

…..99 tanks (6 light) versus 260 Soviet tanks (83 light)

…..19 German tanks lost versus 155 Soviet tanks lost (!!!)

DR SS:

…..108 tanks (0 light) versus 251 Soviet tanks (103 light) *

…..1 German tanks lost versus 121 Soviet tanks lost

 

This is a little fuzzier picture. Because of the poor quality of record keeping on this day (which does happen when people get busy), there is some confusion as to what some people were doing during parts of the battle. Lining up exactly who was facing who for each division fight requires a little guess work.

 

* This engagement sheet also covers the attacks by the II Guards Tank Corps and the afternoon attack by the II Tank Corps.

What About Totenkopf’s Losses?

If one looks at the losses in the above graphics, one sees the Totenkopf SS Panzer Grenadier Division loosing 28 tanks on the 12th and 29 tanks on the 13th. This is merely a straight line estimate of the losses over two days, as we do not know what they lost on the 12th. We know what they report ready for action on the 11th and we know what they report ready for action on the 13th.

Totenkopf had as of the evening of 11July the following tanks (source: TDI’s Kursk Data Base):

Pz III Long: 54

Pz III Observation: 5

Pz III Command: 7

Pz IV short: 4

Pz IV long: 26

Pz VI: 10 *

Pz VI Command: 1

StuG III: 21

Marder II: 11

On the 13th we have them with:

Pz III long: 32

Pz III Observation: 5

Pz Command: 5

Pz IV short: 3

Pz IV long: 14

Pz VI: 0

Pz VI Command: 1

StuG III: 20

Marder II: 2

This is decline of 57 tanks.

There was a status report for Totenkopf on the 12th but it indicates no losses for the 12th of July (and includes one additional Tiger). Considering its operations that day (read pages 924-927 of my Kursk book or 307-312 of my Prokhorovka book), that is hard to believe. For in addition to being engaged with the gutted 52nd Guards Rifle Division and the fresh 95th Guards Rifle Division of the Fifth Guards Army, they were also engaged with the 11th Motorized Rifle Brigade (X Guards Tank Corps), the 99th Tank Brigade (II Tank Corps) and to some extent with the 181st Tank Brigade (XVIII Tank Corps). Furthermore, they conducted offensive operations: at 0715 (Berlin time) taking the barracks (at Kluchi?) with their panzer battalion, and then their armored group at 0930 (Berlin time) jumped off from hill 226.6 to the northeast. The Fifth Guards Army confirms that the Germans launched this attack claiming at 1215 (Moscow time) the Germans attacked with 100 tanks in the direction of height 226.6. This attack was successful and pushed on to the eastern outskirts of Veselyii and height 236.7.

The Soviets throughout the day launched multiple attacks against the division also. Totenkopf reports attacks on the barracks northwest of Klyuchi at 0330 and 0730. The second attack had tank support (we think from the 99th Tank Brigade, II Tank Corps). There were also many other Soviet attacks during the day.

And then, at 1115 (Berlin time) Totenkopf diverted its drive to the northeast to turn its armor south to cross the Psel at Mikhailovka and move in behind the Soviets south of the Psel. Part of Totenkopf’s armor did cross to the south of the Psel this day and got into a heavy exchange with the XVIII Tank Corps.

It is hard to say what was where at this time, but Totenkopf continued to also advance north of the Psel to the northeast. At 1500 (Berlin time) the Totenkopf armored group was two kilometers northwest of Polezhayev. At 1630 (Moscow time), the Soviets reported that the German offensive had been halted, but fighting clearly continued, for at 1835 (Berlin time), the SS Panzer Corps reported that the armored group from Totenkopf were engaged in heavy tank battles around one kilometer northwest of Polezhayev. Worth looking at a map for this, but Polozhayev is north of Prokhorovka.

There is also the claim in Soviet records that at 1600 (Moscow time) 36 German tanks from hill 226.6 descended into the depression north of that hill and moved through the ravine west of Polezhayev, and headed towards hill 236.7 (some four kilometers away). Reaching the hill, the tanks spent an hour driving back and forth on it, and then departed into the depression west of hill 236.7 (see Prokhorovka, page 309).

Hard to believe that the Totenkopf SS Division suffered no armor losses on the 12th, not even a tank or two broken down. Hard to move armor around without a few breakdowns. Yet, Totenkopf has a tank status report for the 12th that shows no losses. We do not believe that this report reflects the actual situation as of the end of the day on the 12th.

So, we were left with assuming that there were no armor losses on the 12th and 57 tanks lost on the 13th…..or we could split them evenly between the two days. We did the latter, as that appeared more rational. Considering the offensive operations conducted by the Totenkopf SS Division on the 13th and that they were then driven back (!), one could certainly make the argument that more losses should have been assigned on the 13th than the 12th (see pages 965-969 of my Kursk book or 359-363 of my Prokhorovka book). Still, hard to believe there were no losses on the 12th.

It also opens up the question of how many of the XVIII Tank Corps losses were due to the actions of the Totenkopf SS Division and how many tanks did Totenkopf loose engaging the XVIII Tank Corps. The record is not clear here.

 

* They had either 9 Pz VIs this day or 10, depending on which report you choose to accept (see page 926-927 or 311-312)

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.