soc.history.war.world-war-ii

On Mar 5, 11:52 am, "Michael Kuettner" wrote:
> No, I mean you and Lou have some divergence at numbers of vehicles.
> Bear with me for a moment :
> Division GD consists of 3 regiments.
> So there would be daily divisional reports of tanks ( & cie) on a regimental
> level and daily reports on a divisional level.
> If one adds the numbers from the regiments, he gets number for vehicles
> in the division.
> But : The divisional level also includes the staff and supply units - eg., the
> workshop for fixing the vehicles.
> So, let's say GD overruns some Russian formations and comes into possession
> of spme Russian tanks, those would go directly to the worshop for fixing /
> seeing if they are fit for use and wouldn't be attached to any of the regiments
> of GD until they come out of the workshop again.
> So the divisional count of vehicles would be higher than the sum of the vehicles
> in the regiments.
> Might that explain some divergences of your numbers ?

Hi Michael,

Unfortunately that is likely not the case. The reports that are
available for Kursk are fairly representative of what you find
available. Many of the records are divisional reports, filed as part
of the GD KTB, either mentioned in the written narrative, but more
usually attached as appendices (Anlagen). Typically German units made
three reports in the day, morning (Morgenmeldung), middle of the day
(Zwischenmeldung), and evening (Tagesmeldung), strength reports were
usually made in Morgenmeldung, especially for AFV, before the start of
the days operations.

But the records are not available every day for every division, but
luckily, those reports were frequently duplicated at the corps or army
level, a Panzerkorps would usually report the status of the divisons
under its command, so as to gauge the combat readiness of the division
and corps. So often a missing days report may be found that way, or in
an army file, or even an army group file.

But the problem is that sometimes there are transcription errors. For
example, in Italy operations were ongoing in the fall of 1943 when the
letter codes used to designate different vehciles were changed, partly
because of the near disapperance of some vehicles, like the Pz-III (k)
with the short-barrel 5 cm gun. But some units confused what the new
code meant, the result is for a while it is a puzzle as to whether
they intended to report Pz-III (k), Pz-III (l), Pz-III (75) or
Flammpanzer-III. Or the simpler and more frequent transcription error,
where numbers are transposed "15" is turned into "51". With luck
though if you have the previous and next report those can be obvious.
Another good one is confusion of written numbers, "3" becomes "5", or
"1" becomes "9", and so forth.

Another problem is that some reports only included combat vehicles as
a matter of course, so the Beobachtungspanzer and Befehlspanzer often
get missed. Yet another is that units occassionaly only reported
operational vehicles, but sometimes reported short-term and long-term
repair as well. Or an on hand total, without reporting what was
operational. And every other combination imaginable.

So there are often discrepencies that need to be corrected and gaps
that need to be filled in. The advantage we had was that we were
tracking every unit, for every day, in a consistant manner, and so
were able to fill in most gaps fairly easily. That doesn't
neccessarily mean our figures are 100 percent correct, but they are at
least 100 percent consistant with the record.

Hope that answers your question?

Rich