I’ve been reading several books about Barbarossa and one thing keeps going unanswered: Did Germany attempt to use any of the massive amounts of Russian equipment captured? Tanks and guns can usually be repaired unless totally destroyed so I’m wondering if Germany attempted to start using this equipment, possibly by modifying it to German calibers. Seems that even with the creation of static defensive positions those guns and tanks would have worked wonders to relieve pressure on German industry. If they didn’t want to use it, giving it to their allies such as the Italians or Romanians would probably have been a better idea than letting it rust in place.
I don’t know whether they re-used captured equipment on a large scale, but I can tell you that modifying a gun or artillery piece to use a difference caliber is not a trivial undertaking. Doing it on a large scale efficiently would require specialized production lines, and it would probably be easier to just make more of your own in your existing factories.
How about modifying existing lines or creating new ones to produce ammunition for the captured guns and tanks? The resources needed to create the ammunition would have to be much less than the resources needed to ramp up your tank and/or gun production by 1,000. Say you’re worried about spare parts. Transport the tanks to France and bury them up to the turret making them damn hard to destroy targets requiring little support beyond ammunition. Probably death traps but with Allied air superiority, most tanks would have been.
OK, this post doesn’t follow my OP but it would strike me as odd if nothing was done with that equipment. I know Germany used Czechoslovakian tank factories(making the Panzer 38(t) and variants) so I’m wondering if the trend continued to captured equipment.
Yes, the Germans like anyone else used whatever came to hand. T34s and AT guns for certain, as they were better in some ways than their own. There was no need to modify calibres as they also captured huge amounts of ammunition.
But the Russians made sure as little as possible fell into their hands, most notably train lines, engines, motorised transport, and specifically factories of any sort. The Germans had to convert every kilometre of track they wanted to use from Russian gauge to European, so little rolling stock did they capture intact.
Generally, SOP is when your position is being overran and you have to abandon your equipment, you destroy it so the enemy can’t reuse it. I don’t know the details of the Eastern Front Campaign, but I would think that much of the gear the Germans would have come across would have been rendered useless (or booby trapped). Additionally, it’s not a good idea to pick up the other guy’s gear in a combat situation. There’s an account of a US platoon that scooped up some Nazi weapons (because they were superior to the ones they’d been issued) and were having a “grand old time” using them to kill the enemy, when another US platoon heard the sound of the guns, recognizing them as German weapons, they promptly shelled the first platoon, killing a good number of them.
The only time you’d want to use the other guy’s stuff is when you’re trying to slip behind enemy lines undetected for covertops type stuff.
The Germans made extensive use of captured PPSh-41 SMGs, rechambering them to 9mm Parabellum. They were officially adopted by the Wermacht, designated the MP-717®, and saw extensive service at Stalingrad.
The Germans were also very fond of handguns, but hated the “Ivan Revolver”, the Nagant M1895. (I’m not entirely sure why, as the Nagant is an infinitely better handgun for the Russian climate the P08 Luger could ever hope to be- although the Nagant isn’t as powerful and is almost impossible to reload in a hurry.)
The Moisin-Nagant M91/30 was seen as inferior to the German’s own Mauser K98k, but towards the end of Barbarossa, when the supply lines got stretched, the Germans simply armed themselves with anything they could get. (The M91/30 is just as good as the Lee-Enfield, Mauser, or Springfield bolt-action rifles, IMO)
The Germans also took over Arsenals in occupied countries to make their own guns- the Browning Hi-Power was made and used by both sides in WWII (Many of the engineers at Fabrique Nationale escaped to Canada in 1940 with the plans for the Browning Hi-Power, and started production at the Inglis factory, whilst the Germans kept making them at the captured FN arsenal in Liege. It was the only small arm manufactured AND issued by both sides during the war, IIRC).
Anthony Beevor’s book Stalingrad is a must-read if you have even a passing interest in Operation Barbarossa, too!
Here’s a cool link which shows the Nazi’s “rebadging” T-34s. I understand they would, however, have preferred riding dinosaurs.
I’ll second the comment on Beevor’s Stalingrad - not only a great book on Barbarossa, but a great book, period. It’s a pity his Berlin or Spanish Civil War were nowhere near as good…
mm
On a slightly related note, Stalin used scorched earth tactics, ordering fleeing refugees to destroy anything (food, shelter, transportation) that could be used by the enemy.
During the second world war, and probably most other wars, armies did not hesitate to use abandoned or captured equipment, especially armored vehicles or other expensive machinery. The German soldiers was particularly fond of Jeeps If I remember correctly.
I also heartily recommend Beevor’s Stalingrad.
IIRC the Germans used modest numbers of T-34’s and other captured vehicles. They used a fair number of captured 76.2 mm AT guns as is or modified for German ammo calibers. And they fell in love with the 120 mm mortar - producing it on their own as well as using captured elements.
The last couple of years of the war the Germans also fielded a number of artillery battallions using largely captured equipment. Don’t know how much was Russian.
The Germans probably used captured equipment, from all the nations they fought, more extensively than any other nation in World War II. The T-34 link provided by mamboman shows just how extensively they pursued it – beyond mere “rebadging”, the Germans devoted an entire factory in occupied Riga to refurbishing T-34s to their own standards --including radios, lights, and commanders’ cupolas (the German model not only having superior vision, but a graduated ring that remained oriented to the front of the tank as the turret turned, allowing the commander to readily call out target coordinates to the gunner) – as well as cannibalizing them to manufacture hybrid vehicles.
The Soviet 76.2mm artillery piece was even more extensively used by the Germans, such that I believe they began producing their own ammunition for it, as well as reboring many guns to fire their own 75mm ammo. At the beginning of Barbarossa, the standard German AT gun was 50mm, and inadequate when facing T-34s and KV-1s. 88mm Flak guns in the AT role were one answer, but these had other jobs to do, and were extremely bulky and slow to deploy. Captured Soviet 76mm guns were much more practical and effective, and continued to be used even after the Germans had developed a 75mm AT gun of their own. Soviet 76’s also equipped many German"Marder" tank destroyers.
You might even count POWs – The Germans extensively recruited or press-ganged Soviet prisoners into “Ost Battalions”, which they used extensively to man the defenses of the “Atlantic Wall”.
It wasn’t just Soviet equipment – The Germans used captured British Universal Carrier chassis for their “Maultier” halftracks. Captured French tanks were used extensively for anti-partisan fighting, and French chassis were used in the most common German self-propelled artillery pieces. The reconstituted 21st Panzer Division in fact, during the Normandy campaign, was largely equipped with support artillery that it built itself in field workshops out of captured French equipment. Moreover, much of the motor transport of the German army was made up of civilian vehicles rounded up from all over Europe.
While packrat-ism and field ingenuity are traditionally associated with the US Army, they were probably more important overall to the more poorly supplied Germans in World War II, and were essential to their holding out as long as they did.
Another related question: the Germans seemed to lack some sophistication in the design of their tanks-I understand that the MK-IV tank had a manual gun training system-the gunner had to manually spin wheels to swing and raise the gun barrel. Even the US sherman tanks had servo-controlled hydraulic gunlaying equipment. O f course, the germans had a vast variety of captured stuff, which they used as their own factories shut down. One question i’ve always had: the germans had pretty good radar-but they never thought of having a central command point for their fighter operations (as the RAF) had-did nobody think of this?
I recently watched a documentary on strategic bombing in World War II that said that the Germans developed a sophisticated and integrated air defense system.
Ah, no…?
Hundreds of kilometers of Russian rail track fell into advancing Nazi hands. The capture of Russian rail lines was a necessary part of Barbarossa as lines of supply across the great expanse of land. German trains would carry supplies to a certain point, where Euro gauge met Russian gauge, the supplies would then be reloaded onto a new train and continued to the front using Russian gauge. I’ve had never read, and find it impossible to believe, that Germany laid any extensive rail track across their lines of advance - the distance being far, far to great.
As for the OP, Russian supplies were used. However, the German army was already an assorted collection of weaponry. Entire Panzer units were made-up of armor taken from captured Czech forces. The difficulty with employing “captured” weapons is in supplying them. It is one thing to pick up a weapon and shoot it until it’s empty; it is quite another thing to have a factory producing the necessary armory and spare parts in Germany, integrating that factory into supply lines transporting to the front, having expertise across the front to repair breakdowns in weapons… etc. The logistics required prohibits using enemy weapons until their entire infrastructure can be employed to further your war effort.
Obligatory link.
Sorry.
Pretty cool! It’s pretty well known that most of the Germans in the cast were Jewish, but I hadn’t realized that he’d been a refugee, and a “subversive” actor.
I think you guys would find this book interesting: Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941-1945 [2005; Luba Vinogradova and Antony Beevor, trans. & ed.], which is both a history of Grossman’s life and career and a compendium of his (nonfictional) war writing, reprinting much of his wartime journalism and some private letters – and it’s Grossman’s war journalism that makes up the bulk of this book.
Grossman, a journalist and fiction writer before the war, became a leading war correspondent for various Soviet press organs, particularly the Red Army paper. In the course of his work, he was briefly attached to a tremendous variety of Soviet units on the front lines, interviewing everyone from commanding officers to grunts, civilians, and even refugees. He was in the thick of things from the calamitous retreat westward in '41-'42, at Stalingrad, through the retaking of the Ukraine and the advance to Berlin, the liberation of Nazi death camps (Grossman’s lengthy essay on Treblinka is justly famous), and the fall of Berlin. His writing style, both in his wartime correspondence and his social-realist war novels, was profoundly humanist in its sympathy and interest in the full spectrum of humanity, with more interest and sympathy reserved for ordinary people than their high-level military officers, the Party per se, or its commissars and leaders. His much-lauded “fictional” writings on the war were largely drawn from his journalistic accounts from that time and landed Grossman in hot water after the war: a much-lauded novel he wrote about Stalingrad enraged Stalin and CP hacks because it refused to glorify Stalin or attribute the victory to him personally and to the Party – and was condemned by Party censors to be withheld from publication for 200 years! (Fortunately, a copy was smuggled to the West and was widely published.)
Grossman was, as noted above, something of a political anomaly: a (secular) Jewish Soviet journalist and novelist, who, despite his refusal to join the Communist Party and his role as a key co-founder of the Jewish Writers’ Anti-Fascist Committee during the war (and co-author of “The Black Book,” detailing and labelling as specifically anti-semitic many Nazi war crimes in the Soviet Union), nevertheless survived the purges of '37-'38, the war (where he narrowly escaped being killed or captured by the Germans on many occasions and was able to do his work with unfettered access and relatively little censorship), the lesser (but increasingly anti-semitic) terror of '47-‘48, and the rabidly anti-semitic era that followed – during which thirteen of his fellow founders of the Jewish Writers’ Anti-Fascist Committee (which was only barely tolerated during the war and afterwards condemned for its “cosmopolitanism” and ties to westerners) were executed following their kangaroo-court trials.
I recently read Barbarossa by Alan White and * Ivan’s War* by Catherine Merridale. Barbarossa was fine but I felt it missed a good bit of focus on the personal level of the war and concentrated far too much on Hitler’s squabbles with his generals. Ivan’s War just had too much details about several things while totally ignoring other subjects.
oops, sorry about the tag issues.
I didn’t say they laid new track, I said they had to convert it - the implication relevant to the OP being they captured very little Russian gauge rolling stock or engines.