Thursday 10 December 2015

Red Army Exercises, 1941

CAMD RF 28-1167-367

Here's an interesting little table, vehicles planned for use during Red Army exercises in 1941. The rows list the various exercises, as follows:

Kiev Special Military District: June 1941
Western Special Military District: October 1941
Baltic Special Military District: July 1941
Transbaikal Military District: August 1941
Far East Military District: August 1941
Siberian Military District: September 1941
Arkhangelsk Military District: August 1941

These are all boring, since if you look at the columns to the right, they don't use any tanks at all, only light cars, GAZ-AA trucks, and ZiS-5 trucks. The next two are a little more interesting:

Auto transport exercises in Kiev Special Military District: June 1941
Auto transport exercises in the Western Special Military District: July 1941

These exercises involve a lot more trucks and also 50 special vehicles of some kind. But we don't get the good stuff until:

Combined arms exercises in Kiev Special Military District: September 1941
Combined arms exercises in the Western Special Military District: September 1941

Now we're talking! Lots and lots of vehicle! The middle section is tanks, and it's fairly self explanatory (the last column is armoured cars), the section to the right is tractors (Comintern, Komsomolets, S-65, STZ-5). After that is another pair of interesting columns, "length of work per vehicle per day" (presumably in hours, with the hours for combat vehicles in the numerator and light vehicles in the denominator) and "average daily distance travelled per vehicle" (light cars in the numerator and trucks in the denominator).

It's interesting to note that despite a large number of old model tanks, only 50 T-34s are issued for exercises and only 60 KVs, showing how protective the Red Army was of its shiny new toys, even for such limited exercises. Sadly, the war cut these plans short, and the T-34 had to earn its combined arms experience in battle.

1 comment:

  1. Was under the impression the main reason for the absence of the new stuff would be that they were barely yet coming out of factories in sufficient numbers for issue to troops - and given the downright crippling shortages of nigh everything relevant logistics-related (like spare parts, ammunition, supply vehicles...) in the formations equipped with them still when Barbarossa started, one doubts if they would have been able to meaningfully participate anyway.

    ReplyDelete