Comments by "David Himmelsbach" (@davidhimmelsbach557) on "Why the German Army couldn't overcome their bad logistics" video.

@agentorange6085 It's more complicated -- but of course. Warsaw was a BIG sticking point. It turned out that the British wanted to pump up Poland's strategic position -- WITHOUT Britain doing the pumping up. For example, Warsaw pitched that the RAF should send Spitfires to augment the pitiful Polish air force. Whitehall said: "No dice." The RAF objected on the ground that sending three-to five squadrons to Poland was no different than throwing them away -- and that even their deployment could and would be used by Hitler as a casus belli. Further, there would be no chance of keeping such squadrons supplied -- and aircraft chomp through supplies. Likewise, Polish proposals to station a token force of RN ships went no-where. The diplomatic status of Danzig was just to weird. ( The "Free City of Danzig" ) Warsaw was trying to establish a trip-wire that would crystalize in the mind of Berlin (Adolf) that to invade Poland// seize Danzig was to initiate a general Great War. Very Secret discussions with Stalin to bring the USSR into alliance with Poland, Britain and France terminated because Stalin wanted a FREE CORRIDOR forty-to eighty miles wide straight through Poland on to Germany. In this, he'd be re-creating the logistics of WWI in the East. His armies wouldn't have any dependencies upon the Poles to speak of. For some crazy reason, Warsaw didn't trust Stalin. Imagine! However, it's BECAUSE of these negotiations that Staline came to fully understand TOO MUCH about what was up with Poland, France and Britain. It was with this knowledge that he CONTRACTED FOR WAR WITH ADOLF HITLER. Yeltsin exposed the Soviet-Nazi Pact (for War) to the world's press. The paperwork was shocking to all assembled. For the first time it was realized that STALIN, not Hitler, started WWII in Europe. Hitler ALWAYS wanted his war, but without Stalin, he couldn't dance. He had hyper-critical shortages in rubber, nickel, tungsten/wolfram, oil and food. Stalin eliminated the corset that the West had Adolf in a bind. Stalin's oil conquered France. It put the Bf-109s into the sky. BTW, the Nazis were on fumes when Poland fell. They'd used up their strategic reserve. Their show of sufficiency faked out France and was the primary reason that France stopped invading from the West. By going so low into the barrel, Hitler had impeached the intelligence estimates of Paris so badly that they'd lost credibility.
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Critically, and for decades keep secret in all memoirs -- the ENTIRE Ju-52 fleet was grounded when Hitler arrived at the front to direct Guderian SOUTH. Yes, the Luftwaffe had been bailing out the Heer -- and especially itself -- by fling critical repair parts and even petrol all the way to the front. The Red Air Force was 'missing' at this point of the war, so the Luftwaffe got away with murder. The Luftwaffe would no longer be able to bail out the panzer spearheads -- and Hoth and Guderian wanted to know why. Like the IJN's deceits to Tojo, the Luftwaffe air-cargo command was hiding just how many Ju-52s were grounded because they landed on Russian farmland -- with NO PREPARATIONS to speak of. The contrast with the USAAF, USMC, et. al is striking. On a total panic basis, Junkers came out with a repair-kit solution that was then cranked out by every manufacturer in sight... including its rivals. ( I was a simple kit. ) All of this was done on oral orders. Don't look for surviving documents unless you're Mr. Lucky. Point #2 -- The Russian rail grid was NEVER BALLASTED in the daze of the Tsar. You know, the fella that laid a straight-edge on a map and directed the builders of HIS railroad to follow that line -- skipping all of the peasants between Saint Petersberg and Moscow. The Tsar was never going to ride the rails during the mud-seasons -- so think of all the money he saved by not hauling ballast all across Mother Russia. Further, unlike Western Nations, in the west of Russia there were virtually no hard-rock quarries to speak of. They would have to be built -- on a panic basis -- if you wanted quality ballast. Common rocks just don't suffice. We're talking about, ultimately, millions of tons of ballast -- that had to be hauled a vast distance before it could be laid under the sleepers/railroad ties. The ONLY double-track run in the USSR ran from Karkov to Moscow. It was so built because Stalin constructed a VAST, VAST rank of food warehouses to hold all of the grain the KGB stole from the growers. They were NOT burned down -- but captured during 1941 -- because burning Moscow's food supply was too daunting without a written Stalin order. ( I'm sure you all remember the mega-warehouse that held Leningrad's food for the winter. It was so huge that the Germans blew it up first -- with Ju-87s. Same thing here.) This Moscow-Karkov connection explains why so many mega-battles were fought nearby. Stalin never failed to shunt reinforcements there. From Autumn 41 to Summer of 43, count how many battles were a two-day drive from Karkov. Because the ENTIRE system ( exception noted ) was unballasted ( a surprise for the Germans ) it basically shut down during the mud months. By shut down I mean that the main-line locomotives would fall off the rails into the mud. Thousands of Soviet engineers entered the GULAG with that blot on their record! The change of rail gauge is wildly over-emphasized. The KILLERS were a total lack of ballast -- everywhere you turned -- and destroyed sleepers -- by the million. Green lumber makes for rotten -- and rotting sleepers. Even pulling cross-ties out of France -- and rails, too -- could not rescue the Germans. BTW, the CSA -- circa 1863 -- -showed how a single locomotive can destroy thousands of sleepers in a day by using a custom sleeper-plow. That lesson was not forgotten by the Reds. Finally, when the Red Army needed to link Stalingrad to Astrakhan -- they built 15 KM a day -- by not laying ballast under their sleepers -- and skipping two out of three as they moved ahead. In this they were entirely replicating the American approach, for that was how the first track was laid to craft the Continental Railroad. The missing cross-ties were inserted after-the-fact by 'repair' crews. It was important that the money was in the bank, first. When this tempo of track lay-down was photographed by the Luftwaffe, the Heer was stunned. The Nazis were defeated by the Soviet rail net. The Nazi Power of the Will did not pencil out.
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His steel versus bridging talent is off the mark, too. The Krauts totally screwed up by not anticipating that they'd HAVE to loot the Western rail systems of every manner of stuff -- starting with the TALENT. By the time the Krauts got around to confiscating the French rail way assets, it was too late. The hang-up at the fortress of Brest-Litovsk was much more pivotal than most historians realize. Only with Putin's 2011 video history has anyone brought it to the fore. It's plain that the Nazis figured that with their new super-mobile grand-tactics that looting the French nation of its trucks would suffice. Obviously, such was not so. Here and there, you'll run across admissions that the Soviet rail net was not working for days at a time. IT'S THE MUD. Because the rails were not ballasted, the Soviet network ALWAYS had to shut down -- typically for weeks. The Stalinist technique was to send out repair crews to lift the sleepers// cross-ties out of the mud towards the end of each mud-season. It's AMAZING that the Krauts were totally oblivious to this practice -- even though their boys had witnessed some of this decades before Barbarossa. This is compounded by the fact that the Krauts had to be aware of the missing ballast the second they rolled over the border. ALL railroad engineers knew what problems come from unballasted track. { The first to witness this: the British. The very first railways in Britain were just stubs from here to there. It took British rain to convince them that they had to lift their sleepers up out of the mud. Dry sleepers last so much longer. Ballasting sleepers allows for track-crews to keep the rails level and true a lot cheaper than playing in the dirt. Today's railroads have trick machines (they are huge -- and on youtube ) to lay down fresh ballast and to re-fresh existing ballast, too. } The fact is that the Krauts should've been hopping all over the ballast issue and the need to replace all of the destroyed sleepers no later than July, 1941. There is one thing that they could've taken advantage of: such straight runs of track meant that in Russia, the Krauts could've laid triple length rails -- and saved on a ton of fish-plates.
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TIK, you missed it WRT the 29th Motorized. It had already been decided to maintain an elite mobile formation as a quasi-strategic reserve for 6th Army. The 29th was actually being, de facto, converted into another panzer division -- in the field. Requests for the real thing, a reinforcing panzer division, went no-where. If you look at the panzer corps committed, you notice that they are more than a tad light in panzer divisions. The 16th, in particular, is entirely pinned down at the land bridge. Repeated attempts to pull it entirely out of the line keep being frustrated by STAVKA. Stalin does not want that trouble maker going anywhere. By over-reinforcing the 29th the boys figured that they could fool both Berlin and Moscow. And it was the spoofing of the 29th that sealed the doom of 6th Army. EVERY single German account harps on this point. STAVKA gave the 29th a Fuhrer directive! They did so while Adolf was on his train racing from Bavaria back to his fighting HQ. It didn't take too long for the Krauts to realize that they'd been spoofed -- the timestamps told the story. Naval Enigmas were flown in by Manstein's request -- PDQ. It was then that he reverse-spoofed the Soviets during his counter-offensive. That's why it was so successful.
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