Quantcast
Channel: Tank Archives
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1891

On German Losses

$
0
0
"There is confusion regarding the alleged precision... I'm not going to speak for the Western Allies, that's not my topic, but I had to work with German losses. And believe me, the mess with their counting of losses is much greater than ours. We had a very specific Form #8, "Report on Losses", everyone had to fill it out, if it had to be revised then another form would be submitted. The Germans had nothing like this. As for the German data, you can take a look at just one period, with static positions, let's say Sevastopol. Here's a report by the army Senior Quartermaster. Compare it to the list of names of killed officers. They counted officers separately and NCOs and soldiers separately. The difference in numbers can be as high as 50%, one and a half times higher when you count them by name.
...
Overall, if you take 1944 and count the losses in Bagration, it's a horrible mess. Reports on losses get delayed until the fall. That same 17th Army in Crimea that was defeated on the peninsula only reports its losses several weeks later. They were only counted several weeks later. If we take the 10-day report of the medical service for the army, the number of losses in Crimea are almost an order of magnitude less than the losses that were actually taken and reported on later. This precision is greatly exaggerated. It's the opposite: the Germans were more interested in what they had now, and the losses they sustained, well, the numbers were often counted very poorly. Paulus' army doctor at Stalingrad writes reports, compare it with the 10-day reports, the difference is huge, 20%. Where it comes from, it's hard to say, but it's there a lot. The lower the level, the deeper you have to dig to discover precise numbers."

Aleksei Isayev, Battle for Moscow

Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 1891

Trending Articles



<script src="https://jsc.adskeeper.com/r/s/rssing.com.1596347.js" async> </script>