French AirForce sortie rate May/June 40

buffnut453 said:

True enough but we're not talking about civilians. We're talking about the military and most field armies were highly mechanized. As noted above, your logistics has to keep pace with your front-line forces, and that goes both for advance and retreat. It was extremely naiive of the German Army to think it could subsist to such a degree on horse-drawn logistics chains.

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What I meant was that cars and trucks were not mass transport. Until they became mass transport you do not have hard top roads. We are all familiar with pictures of the German Army stranded in mud, but the British army was in the same position in 1914/18 and they built railways to supply the trenches. Tracked Vehicles cannot drive to Moscow from Germany and 1930s trucks get stuck in mud. The design brief of the 1934 Citroen 2CV car included being able to be driven on unmade roads and ploughed fields.

pbehn said:

What I meant was that cars and trucks were not mass transport. Until they became mass transport you do not have hard top roads. We are all familiar with pictures of the German Army stranded in mud, but the British army was in the same position in 1914/18 and they built railways to supply the trenches. Tracked Vehicles cannot drive to Moscow from Germany and 1930s trucks get stuck in mud. The design brief of the 1934 Citroen 2CV car included being able to be driven on unmade roads and ploughed fields.

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True enough but horse-drawn vehicles get bogged down in mud just as easily as cars and trucks.

The only reason the British could build tracks to the trenches is because the front line wasn't moving much. In manoeuvre warfare, you don't have the time to build tracks and horses can't keep up.

I'm not saying that trains weren't used in WW2 (that would be fatuously incorrect). I'm simply observing that relying on horses for the last tactical mile is not a good idea in mechanized warfare.

Of course, we're all wonderfully off-topic so maybe we should get back to discussing French sortie rates.

buffnut453 said:

Of course, we're all wonderfully off-topic so maybe we should get back to discussing French sortie rates.

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If I could find the book with the source I would but I cant lol. I remember reading that French forces were ordered to do only non combat missions while the RAF were still fighting....but I cant remember which book it was and without a source it is controversial gossip.

The vast majority of the German Army traveled on foot.
Germany was pretty much at the "height" of it's motorization in the Spring of 1940. Numbers of motor vehicles to number of troops actually tasked with moving. Russian invasion had more vehicles but more units were moving faster and further.

Wiki (better source welcome) says 141 German Divisions in the west in May 1940. Only ten are panzer divisions and there are very few (if any?) "motor" rifle divisions or mechanized divisions. 4 of the panzer divisions were "light" divisions in Poland and only upgraded with issue of Czech tanks.

Only the British army in France was fully "motorized" which basically meant no horses. The infantry troops still walked. Motorized does not mean everybody had a ride.

Nobody had mostly "mechanized" armies in WW II, even the Americans in 1945. Mechanized generally means "tracked" as opposed to motorized which generally means wheeled.

Western Europe was the most favorable area in Europe for the use of trains. Not saying it was ideal but any other place was worse. Poland and east? North Africa? The Balkans and Greece?

Use of trains also means you need control of the air as trains are easy to spot and not hard to stop. By 1945 and the Battle of the Bulge the Germans were short of trains ( and tracks had many interruptions) and with the allies dominating the air trains could only move at night or in bad weather. And had to be in a "safe" place come daylight. Bulge was also an armored thrust and not an infantry thrust.

The German army in 1940 was an odd mixture of old and new, motorised and unmotorised. Its mobile elements were more motorised than mechanised, with only 1 battalion our of 9 receiving half tracks. The artillery suffered the worst, some was fully motorised and others were horse drawn.

The motorisation pools were used mostly for "strategic lifts", with the halftracks used close to the front and mostly for rough terrain work.

The infantry was also another anomaly. The 30 odd wave 1 divs were for all intents and purposes motorised formations. They are often quoted as having just 700 or so vehicles assigned to each division but in reality each of these front line divsiions included or had assigned to them around 2000 vehicles per div.

Moreover the level of horse drawn transport was very generous. These front line divs had in excess of 6500 DAs attached.

There were bottom feeder units that existed at the other end of the spectrum. Some of the hastily formed 500 series divisions had no MT and perhaps 1000 horses attached. Frequently they did not even possess radios for communication, or even engineers to lay field telephones. These formations were even less combat ready than the "B" series French reserve units.

There were 4 fully motorised divs in the heer in 1940, in addition to the Panzer units. Panzer Div 6 through to 10 were the Leicht div conversions and were equipped for the most part with a disheartening array of captured and ex-czech equipment mostly, including truck parks of distinctly questionable reliability. There were the equivalent of two SS motorised divs and 2 or 3 independent panzer Bdes. There were further several independent Infantry support groups equipped with some distinctly dubious experimental types. There were several SIG tracked vehicles, which I think were independent units attached 9as opposed to assigned), to larger tracked formations. Finally there were a number of TD units, essentially pz mk I chassis with a captured Polish 47mm ATG bolted onto the chassis

The heer went to war with basically 650000 vehicles in May 1940

For an excellent overview of german military production issues I would recommend:

Germany and the Second World War (Vol V), edited by Germany. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt

You can get a bit of a peak at this publication via this link:

Germany and the Second World War

Thank you for the more detailed look. I would note that when looking at some of these numbers that a division with 700 or more "motor vehicles" can include several hundred motorcycles.

Even with side cars that doesn't do a lot for moving supplies/cargo.