How to plan and execute the largest military campaign in history? Find it out in 1-3.5 player, 90 minutes logistic take on Barbarossa.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Lots of good news (German and Italian Editions!)
over 4 years ago
– Sun, Dec 01, 2019 at 04:01:27 PM
Hello Everyone,
We are happy to announce that due to great support from the German community, 1941. Race to Moscow will be published in German ! Hoorah! If you are a German gamer, still on the fence about supporting this campaign, check out this preview in German:
What’s more, our friends from Pendragon Game Studio will publish the Italian edition of the game if this campaign gathers at last 150 backers from Italy (for now we have 33, you can check this in the Community section of the campaign page). We know that you have been asking for this, so now it is all in your hands! Please promote this site among your Italian friends and let’s publish the Italian edition of Race to Moscow together!
And there is more good news for today. You have crossed the £65.000 funding level, so the first campaign stretch goal is yours - 16 bunker miniatures will be added to every game for free! Congratulations!
So now it is time to choose the next stretch goal. Here is the poll:
It is an enlarged version of the board (by 50% - from 84 x 56 cm to 126 x 84 cm), so all areas are bigger, leaving more space for game miniatures and counters placed on the map.
It is made of eco leather, a 2mm thick material with leather texture that is anti-allergic, and water, UV, and scratch proof.
And here is a photo of a prototype mat:
To add the Giant Playing Mat to your pledge, just increase your pledge amount by £40 by clicking on the “Manage Your Pledge” button. This add-on is language independent. The estimated shipping cost is an extra £10-£15 per mat, and this will be paid in the Pledge Manager after the campaign ends.
And now let’s continue Eric’s G. L. Pinzelli lecture about the Soviet army of 1941.
You need to know your enemy!
SOVIET ARMOR IN 1941
Following the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg victories of 1939-1940, the Soviets scrambled to put together large armored formations of comparable or superior power to counter the German threat. By 1941, there were 27 Mechanized Corps next to the Western Front. On paper, each Mechanized Corps had two large Tank Divisions plus a Motorized Rifle Division with a strength of 37,000 men, 1,031 tanks, 268 armored cars, 358 guns and mortars, and over 7,000 other assorted motor vehicles.
In effect, the Soviets had a large tank force, consisting of 25,000 armored fighting vehicles before it entered the war. However, when Operation Barbarossa began, most of these tanks were inferior to German armor. The Germans were expecting little from their opponents’ tank forces, which were mostly composed of light, old T-26 light tanks, and more recent BTs class of cruiser tanks. In 1941, the BT-7, which had entered service in 1935, was the main cavalry tank of the Soviet army. These had good mobility, but their armor was not thick enough against the German PzKpfw IIIs and IVs. The Red Army had planned to replace the BT tank series with the T-34 and had just begun doing so when Operation Barbarossa began.
The most effective tanks that the Soviets had were the KV-1 -KV-2 heavy tanks and the T-34 medium tanks. However, the Soviets only had a small number of these: about 1,000 T-34 and 500 KV tanks, concentrated in five mechanized corps. The existence of the T-34 and KV tanks, encountered for the first time at the Battle of Raseiniai on June 23, came as a shock to German soldiers, who had expected to face an inferior enemy. The T-34, which had entered production in September 1940, was superior to any tank the Germans had in service at the time, with thick sloped armor, a Christie suspension, wide tracks, and a larger 75mm gun. All existing German tanks were immediately rendered obsolete. However, the German tanks had better optics and radios, enabling coordinated team combat. Only the T-34s of the company commander (one out of ten) were fitted with radio, while the rest still had to use flags for signaling!
The KV, which entered production in 1939, had excellent firepower and extremely thick armor. The only way the Germans could stop a KV was by destroying its tracks or attacking it from the rear at very close range. At the Battle of Rasseiniai, a single KV-1 successfully blocked any advance of some elements of the 6th Panzer Division for 24 hours before running out of ammunition. It was hit by dozens of different calibers, but it remained unscathed. When the Luftwaffe was unavailable for bomber support, 88mm anti-aircraft guns and sticky bombs placed on the tracks of the tanks were all that managed to take the Russian beasts down. Still, the best the Soviets were able to achieve during the war was 300 km without a mechanical failure. Soviet tanks of the time were rudimentary, suffering from poor manufacturing quality. It was not uncommon for Soviet crews to destroy their own tanks because they could not be repaired in time or they lacked fuel. The training of the Soviet troops was also lacking, and the discipline was brutal. Due to poor leadership and tactics, the Soviets wasted their armor and crews in vast numbers. The Red Army lost a total of 20,500 tanks in 1941 (including 2,300 T-34s and over 900 heavy tanks, mostly KVs).
SOVIET INFANTRY IN 1941
The infantry was one of the ground arms of the Red Army, together with the armored and mechanized forces, the artillery, the cavalry, and the technical services. It was by far the largest branch organized in Rifle regiments, Mechanized battalions, Motorized rifle regiments, Machine gun battalions, and Mountain rifle regiments. In the spring of 1941, many Soviet conscripts had only begun their basic military instruction, having been called up in the fall of 1940. The summer camps, field exercises, and maneuvers of 1941 were supposed to provide advanced infantry training and begin troop exposure to combined arms tactics, but this never happened.
Field armies comprised three rifle corps, which were the highest tactical organization of a military district. A 26,000-man strong rifle corps consisted of the headquarters, with a span of control of three rifle divisions, one or two regiments of corps artillery, an antiaircraft artillery group, a signal battalion, a chemical warfare battalion, an air reconnaissance squadron, and various service units. There were 62 rifle corps headquarters in June 1941, but after Stavka's Circular 01 of July 15, 1941, by November only one corps remained active. In effect, because of a shortage of experienced officers at the outset of the war, rifle army headquarters were directly supervising the rifle divisions in combined operations, except in the Far East Front. This echelon would eventually be rebuilt from late 1942 forward as the wartime structure of the Soviet forces matured.
In the spring of 1941, a rifle division, the real backbone of the Soviet army, consisted of headquarters, three rifle regiments, two artillery regiments (a mixed field artillery and a howitzer regiment), a reconnaissance, a light tank, an antitank, an engineer, a signal, and a medical battalion, an antiaircraft machine gun company, a field hospital, and services. At the time, according to their TO&E (Shtat Prescription 04/400 of April 5, 1941), Soviet rifle divisions were supposed to contain 14,483 men, 294 guns and mortars, 16 tanks, 13 armored cars, 558 autos and trucks, 99 tractors, and 3,000 horses. Although rifle divisions were often forced to operate at far below their authorized strength, and most of their transport was still horse drawn!
A rifle division was expected to occupy a position covering a front of 8-12 km, with a depth of 4-6 km. Most of the 571 divisions in existence in 1941 were wiped out, disbanded, and reformed. The Soviet High Command considered divisions to be an expendable unit and a week’s hard fighting on the Eastern Front could reduce its establishment strength by half! From June 23rd to December 31st 1941, the Stavka mobilized and deployed 41 new Army headquarters with 182 rifle divisions and 43 militia rifle divisions. Furthermore, 19 Mountain Rifle divisions were assembled, recruited mostly from the Transcaucasian Military District. None of these distinguished themselves in battle. Two mountain armies were concentrated in the eastern Carpathians in the early summer of 1941, but they had to withdraw to the plain to avoid encirclement and were easily destroyed by the 1st Tank Group of the Wehrmacht.
Soviet infantry weapons had a reputation for being somewhat crude yet reliable. Some of these small arms were so reliable that the German soldiers often preferred captured weapons over their own issued weapons. This was especially true of the PPSh-41 submachine gun, which was cheap, reliable and mass produced (six million PPSh-41s were constructed during the war). The Germans converted the weapon to their standard submachine 9×19mm Parabellum cartridge. The PPSh-41 was also a favorite among partisans. At the beginning of the war, the Mosin–Nagant 91/30 was the standard issue weapon of Soviet troops, and about 20 million of these rifles were produced and used in World War II. Soviet snipers used Mosin Nagant 91/30 equipped with a 3.5 power PU Scope. The Mosin Nagant was replaced as the main infantry rifle by the semi-automatic SKS carbine, which would be replaced by the AK-47 in the early 1950s.
THE ELITE SOVIET NAVAL INFANTRY IN 1941
The Soviet Navy was considered one of the most elite branches of Soviet Armed Forces before the war, with higher conscription requirements. Thanks to Admiral Nikolai Kuznetsov, the Soviet Navy was the only branch of the military in the highest state of combat readiness at the start of Operation Barbarossa. On June 26, a task force of the Soviet Navy attacked the Romanian port of Constanța since Romania had been a member of the Tripartite Pact from November 1940 and the Romanian Air Force had bombed Soviet airfields on June 22. As an outcome of the action, while retaining naval superiority in Black Sea, the Soviet Navy's surface ships focused more on amphibious operations and ground support during the Siege of Odessa (August 8 – October 16, 1941) by the Romanian 4th Army and elements of the German 11th army. The Soviet Navy was then restricted to a purely defensive strategy: protecting the Army's flanks, insuring the Soviet Union’s sea communications, defending key cities, and supporting besieged ports.
Soviet experience during the Winter War against Finland suggests that the reason for activating the First Naval Infantry Brigade in 1940 was attributed to the dismal performance of amphibious landings by the ground force. After the massive losses suffered by the Red Army during the summer of 1941, the Stavka desperately needed new sources of manpower to help stop the invasion, therefore new naval infantry brigades (called “Morskaia Pekhota”) were created from surplus ship crews or shore duty sailors. Students from the coastal artillery schools were also converted into marines. “The Odessa Naval base designated its Red Fleet regiments simply as the First and Second Naval Regiments. But these units were in fact, Marines, probably some of the very first of the war.” - Admiral Nikolai I. Krylov.
The earlier ad hoc units soon gave way to organized units such as "Naval Infantry Brigades" and "Independent Naval Infantry Battalions." Up to 25 brigades of 3,000 men each were activated in World War II. Naval Infantry Brigades were subordinated to a fleet and consisted of a Brigade Headquarters, and usually between three and seven Naval Infantry Battalions. The 7th and 9th brigades of the Black Sea Fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Filipp Oktyabrsky supplied and helped to defend Odessa which was entrusted to Rear Admiral Gavriil V. Zhukov. The marines later fought at Sevastopol (October 30 1941- July 4, 1942), and Kerch (December 1941-May 1942). Most of the sailors fought using their black Navy uniforms, and the Germans gave them the nicknames “Black Devils” and “Black Commissars” because of how they fought and the color of their uniforms. Their units had better equipment (including SVT-40s) and usually higher motivation than their Army counterparts. They gained a reputation for toughness, flexibility, and resourcefulness in combat operations.
At Odessa, once the situation became critical, a valiant counterattack on September 22 in which the 3rd Marines regiment led by Cap. Koren took part (an amphibious landing at Grigorevka), managed to gain valuable time for the city. Eventually, after a 73-day siege, at a time when German forces had advanced far to the east and were approaching the critical naval base of Sevastopol, the Black Sea Fleet evacuated the remaining Soviet forces from Odessa to continue the fight in Crimea. It is estimated that as many as 100,000 soldiers, 150,000 civilians, and 200,000 tons of material were evacuated over the period of the siege, an incredible achievement in the face of Axis air superiority and the loss of several ships to air attack.
There were at least 114 amphibious operations during WWII against the Germans and the Japanese, over one-fourth of which were accomplished under the command of Counter Admiral Sergey Gorshkov. Soviet marines were used in support of the Red Army to protect its flanks and to make amphibious landings at the enemy's rear, relieving pressure on the army. It was also employed with the Red Army in inland battles and in river crossing operations on the Dnieper, Don, Donau, and, later, the Amur. Amphibious operations were conducted in the following phases: preparation, overseas movement, beachhead assault, landing execution of the mission ashore, mopping up, and in the event of defeat, withdrawal.
The Naval infantry’s fame was further enhanced when sailors of the Pacific Fleet and the Amur Flotilla were recalled to Moscow and organized into Naval Infantry brigades where they joined with Red Army units in the defense of the capital. In recognition of its gallantry and versatility, the decision to increase the Naval Infantry to form 25 separate "marine" brigades was announced in October of 1941. An estimated 330,000 men were landed during WW2 in soviet coastal sectors. The Soviet Navy had made an invaluable contribution to the war effort, and the Naval Infantry had earned its place in Soviet naval history by its courage and tenacity in battle and its strong fighting spirit.
Written by Dr. Eric G. L. Pinzelli
Happy gaming!
Michał & PHALANX Team
Ста́вка (and the third poll!)
over 4 years ago
– Sun, Dec 01, 2019 at 04:01:09 PM
Hello Everyone,
Just after bringing the bunkers to the game, you have unlocked the next stretch goal: the Stavka Game Variant! Congratulations!
This upgrade will allow the Soviet player to control what types of fighting units he is deploying against the enemy. Now he will be able to throw his best units against the predicted directions of German attack. Will he outguess his opponents? Or maybe the German players will change their attack routes to move around the flanks of the deadly Soviet armoured corps?
The bunker miniatures have cost you 150 interactions, and the Stavka Game Variant cost an additional 25 (from 323 that you have accrued so far), so here is a set of new posts to let you gather some more!
Please like, share, and comment on the above posts and let’s promote the game together!
And to keep today’s topic consistent, we now present to you...
Top Soviet Commanders of the Initial Days of Operation Barbarossa
DMITRY PAVLOV, THE GENERAL WHO TOOK THE BLAME FOR THE RED ARMY’S FAILURES.
Dmitry Grigoryevich Pavlov was born in Vonyuky of the Kostroma Oblast on 23rd October, 1897. During WW1, he served in the Russian Army on the Eastern Front and was captured by the Germans. He later joined the Bolsheviks and the Red Army, fighting during the Russian Civil War. Pavlov was chosen for officer training and graduated from the famous Frunze Military Academy in 1928 and the Military-Technical Academy in 1931. He was later in command of some of the Red Army’s first mechanized units, the 6th mechanized regiment, and from 1934, the 4th mechanized brigade. In 1936, Brigade Commander Pavlov was awarded the Order of Lenin for exemplary service.
In 1937, Pavlov was sent to Spain as a military advisor for the Republicans, leading a brigade of T-26 tanks under the pseudonym “Pablo”. For his service during the Spanish Civil War, he was awarded the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union”. In June of the same year, Mikhail Tukhachevsky and other top Red Army commanders were executed. Pavlov escaped the purge, and on his return to the Soviet Union he was made the Head of the Directorate of Tank and Armoured Car Troops. As a result of his experience in Spain, Pavlov concluded that there was no future for large armor formations which at the time led to the disbandment of the Soviet mechanized corps. He judged that the Red Army’s tanks should supplement rifle divisions in battalion strength. In the summer of 1939, Pavlov participated in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol as a military adviser on the use of armored forces. He also participated in the Soviet-Finnish War as an inspector of the armored troops.
On 22nd February 1941, he was one of the first Soviet generals to receive the new rank of General of the Army, inferior only to the rank of Marshal of the Soviet Union, and placed in charge of Minsk. He received command of the Western Front on June 6, just prior to the German invasion. Facing the German Army Group Center, Pavlov positioned three of his armies well forward and kept only one in reserve. Pavlov, who had not increased the alertness of his Western Front forces, was committed to a virtually static defense of the Bialystok salient. Much of Pavlov's armor was still stationed in its peacetime garrisons and ill prepared to transition immediately to mobile wartime operations. He was forced to retreat, and within six days the Wehrmacht had captured Minsk, which outraged the Soviet dictator.
Pavlov and his chief of staff, Major General V. E. Klimovskikh, were recalled to Moscow with several other commanders. Pavlov was made the scapegoat for Soviet military failures and accused of collaboration with the Germans. He was the only commander of any Soviet front arrested during the entire Operation Barbarossa. After a meeting with Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, they were charged on 4th July with being involved in an "anti-Soviet military conspiracy" that had "betrayed the interests of the Motherland, violated the oath of office, and damaged the combat power of the Red Army, all of which are crimes under Articles 58-1b, 58-11 RSFSR Criminal Code." When Stalin was informed that Pavlov and his chief of staff had been charged, he told Major-General Alexander Poskrebyshev: "I approve the sentence, but tell Ulrikh to get rid of all that rubbish about conspiratorial activity. The case shouldn't drag out. No appeal. And inform the fronts so that they know that defeatists will be punished without mercy!" Thus, Pavlov and his deputies were convicted under the article “failure to fulfill their official duties”, and not “treason to the Motherland”.
Pavlov’s properties were confiscated, he was deprived of military rank, and executed by the NKVD on 22nd July, 1941. By a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR of March 21, 1947, he was also deprived of the title of Hero of the Soviet Union. After Stalin’s death in 1956, Pavlov was exonerated of all previous accusations due to “lack of evidence”.
MIKHAIL KIRPONOS, THE GENERAL WHO SHOT HIMSELF TO AVOID BEING CAPTURED.
Mikhail Petrovich Kirponos was born on January 12, 1892 in the town of Vertievka (Chernigov province), in a poor peasant family. In September 1915, he was drafted into the Russian Imperial Army. After completing instructor courses at the Oranienbaum Officer Rifle School, he served in the 216th reserve infantry regiment in the city of Kozlov (Tambov Region). After demobilization, in August 1918, Kirponos joined the Red Army. During the Russian Civil War, he became chief of staff, assistant commander, and later commander of the 22nd Ukrainian Rifle Regiment of the 44th Rifle Division. The regiment successfully fought against the White Guards at Zhytomyr, Berdichev and Kiev.
After graduating from the Frunze Military Academy in 1927, he was appointed commander of the 130th Bogun Rifle regiment and in January 1931 chief of staff of the 51st Perekop Rifle Division. In March 1934, he became the head and military commissar of the Tatar-Bashkir Joint Military School which was soon renamed the Kazan Infantry School. He took part in the Soviet-Finnish War. In December 1939, he was appointed commander of the 70th Infantry Division (7th Army). In early March 1940, the division knocked the Finns out of the fortifications on the northern shore of the Vyborg Gulf, cutting off the Vyborg-Helsinki road. For his outstanding service during the Winter War, his “heroism displayed in battle,” on March 21, 1940, Kirponos was awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, with the Order of Lenin and the Golden Star medal.
In April 1940, he was appointed commander of the 49th Rifle Corps, and in June of the same year, to the post of commander of the troops of the Leningrad Military District. On January 14, 1941, he was appointed commander of the Kiev Special Military District. With the outbreak of WWII, the Kiev Special Military District was transformed into the Southwestern Front, and Colonel General Kirponos was appointed to the post of commander of the front. German Army Group South, led by Gerd von Rundstedt, was supposed to seize the economically-vital region of Ukraine and push all the way to the Volga River. However, it faced 907,000 men, the largest concentration of Soviet forces on the Eastern Front, which was the Southwestern Front under General Kirponos, that offered more effective resistance than the Soviet forces further north.
On the second day of the invasion, Army Group South met with a massive Soviet armored counterattack that contained units from six Mechanized Corps (4th, 8th, 9th, 15th, 19th, and 22nd) with a total force of over 3,500 tanks. This attempted counterattack became the Battle of Brody. Kirponos only managed to slow the German advance, and at a very high price: By the end of the battle on June 30th, the Russian armored forces were completely wiped out. Every single one of the six Mechanized Corps had lost more than 80% of their initial tank strength, with some losing up to 95% of all their armor. In mid-July, the Germans were not far from Kiev, but Kirponos' units had managed to avoid major encirclements. However in August, the first cauldron in Ukraine was created by the Germans near Uman, where more than 100,000 Soviet soldiers were captured.
At the end of August, the German 2nd Panzer Group was directed south from the Army Group Center. It entered Ukraine from the north and the ensuing operation in which it linked up with the 1st Panzer Group, driving up from the south, resulted in the largest encirclement thus far on the Eastern Front. More than 600,000 prisoners were taken. By September 14, the 5th, 21st, 26th and 37th Soviet armies were surrounded. In the late night of September 18, the troops and front headquarters attempted to withdraw to avoid encirclement. On September 20, to avoid capture, a wounded Kirponos resolved to shoot himself. He was buried in haste in a nearby grove of Dryukovschina’s farm, southwest of Lokhvitsy. In December 1943, his remains were re-buried with full military honors at Kiev’s A.V. Fomin Botanical Garden. In 1958, his ashes were buried again, this time in the Park of Eternal Glory.
MARSHAL SEMYON BUDYONNY: THE RED CAVALRY COMMANDER
Semyon Mikhaylovich Budyonny was born April 25, 1883, at Kozyurin, in the Don Cossack region, in Southern Russia. Coming from a poor peasant family, he worked as farm-boy and blacksmith’s apprentice before being drafted in the Imperial army to fight in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) in the 26th Don Cossack Regiment. As the best rider of the regiment, in 1907 he was sent to St. Petersburg to the Officer Cavalry School from which he graduated in 1908. He participated in the Great War as a senior non-commissioned officer of the 18th Dragoon Seversky Regiment of the Caucasian Cavalry Division on the German, Austrian, and Caucasian fronts and was awarded the St. George Cross for bravery four times.
Later, he took part in the Russian Revolution that overthrew the imperial government, became chairman of the divisional soviet of soldiers in the Caucasus, and formed a cavalry unit to fight the Whites in the northern Caucasus (February 1918). In 1919 he joined the Communist Party and, having become commander of the 1st Cavalry Army (1919–24), played a crucial role in defeating the White generals Anton Denikin and Pyotr Wrangel and in fighting the Poles, although his army was routed twice in January 1920 near Rostov. In 1922, he became commander of all the troops in the north Caucasian military district. At the time, Budyonny himself became the subject of several popular patriotic songs. Budyonny later served as inspector of the Red Army’s cavalry (1924–37) and commander of the Moscow military district (1937–40), and was promoted to the rank of marshal of the Soviet Union in November of 1935.
One of Stalin’s loyal supporters, in June 1937, he was a member of the Special Military Tribunal that sentenced Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky and seven other generals to be executed. He himself narrowly escaped arrest by appealing directly to Stalin, although a few days later his second wife was sent to the Gulag, where she would spend 19 years. Budyonny became a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (1938), a full member of the party’s Central Committee (1939), and first deputy commissar for defense (1940). While advocating the technical re-equipment of the army, he initiated the formation of horse-mechanized formations.
At the outset of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Budyonny was placed in command of the Southwestern Front. His troops suffered appalling losses (more than 1.5 million men were either killed, captured, or missing) during the Battle of Uman and the Battle of Kiev (August – September 1941) and he was replaced by Marshal Semyon Timoshenko in September. Stalin named him commander of the Stavka’s Reserve Front that was charged with the defense of the approaches to Moscow along with the Briansk Front and the Western Front. However, Operation Typhoon overran the reserves within a few days and once again, hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were surrounded. Budyonny himself managed to escape, but this proved to be Budyonny’s last field command. Instead, he was made inspector of the cavalry of the Red Army.
After the war, between 1947 and 1953, he was also deputy minister of agriculture for horse breeding. In 1953 he resumed his post of inspector of the cavalry. He was made Hero of the Soviet Union in February 1958. Semyon Budyonny passed away at Moscow from a brain hemorrhage on October 26, 1973, aged 91. He was buried with full military honors on the Red Square near the Kremlin wall.
Written by Dr. Eric G. L. Pinzelli
During the upcoming weekend we won’t post updates and will be less responsive, to get some rest. But we will be back on Monday, with new campaign and historical content. Have a great weekend!
Michał & PHALANX Team
The Bunkers
over 4 years ago
– Sun, Dec 01, 2019 at 02:58:05 PM
Hello Everyone,
With 264 votes you have chosen the first campaign stretch goal: 16 bunker miniatures to mark Soviet fortifications on the game board (here is the link to the poll). This is a really good upgrade, as it will make these positions easy to find on the game board and will let you to throw them off the board after destroying them - which is always nice! :) So, it is no wonder that bunkers won, but other upgrades were really close, so there will be a fierce fight during the next poll…
So, what are the next steps?
The first stretch goal was chosen, so now we need to fund it! The price of this upgrade is £15.000 and 168 interactions (20% of the number of backers on 20th Nov - when we have reached the first campaign goal of £50.000). You can check the number of backers for a specific day on the Kicktraq page here: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/phalanxgames/1941-race-to-moscow/#chart-daily
And what is your budget? Since reaching the £50.000 goal we have collected £10,606 and 180 interactions. So, the bunkers will be yours after we collect the extra £4.394 (you have enough interactions to get them!). Really close!
To help you with collecting both funds and interactions we have created a new set of banners that you can like, share, and comment on social media in order to bring some new backers here and grab the interactions for the next stretch goals!
In the meantime you have asked some questions about these stretch goals and their prices. Soon we will post you more info about the additional game content that they provide. And about the price - the MSRP of the game is £80, so £60 is a discounted price for KS backers. Similarly with the Axis Aircraft expansion - £20 is the MSRP, and this item is free for KS backers. The expansion will be available in retail, but only in a limited printrun, similar to our add-ons from other campaigns. So the campaign price is £60 for all the items, which is a competitive price compared to other wargames currently on the market. We really care about the quality - i.e. the miniatures will be made of hard ABS plastic to keep them sharp and straight (which costs more than soft PVC plastic). Unfortunately plastic production is expensive for short production runs, but we really want to provide you the product on par with our new editions of Hannibal & Hamilcar and Nanty Narking. Wargames deserve to be attractive! :)
But let’s get back to the battlefield. Were Soviet fortifications effective in 1941? Let’s ask the expert!
SOVIET FORTIFICATIONS IN JUNE 1941 AND THE DEFENSE OF THE BREST FORTRESS
The concept of “fortified districts” (ukreplyonny raion or “UR”) originated from the Russian Civil War, and were to be used not only for defense, but were also to act as staging points for offensive operations. Each fortifcation was designated by a number. Their function was “securing important economic political and strategic points of district, securing space for deployment and maneuver, covering the flanks of formations operation along the line of the main blow.” Starting in 1928, the Civil War defenses were extended, creating a front that stretched from the Karelian Isthmus in the Baltic to the Black Sea. The total construction consisted of 23 Districts along 3,200 km of the border.
Fixed fortifications and defense belts formed a part of the defense plan which evolved under chief of general staff Marshal Tukhachevsky. Soviet defenses were planned in-depth, in line with the theoretical development. In 1932 a series of fortified positions were set up in the north, and what was to be labeled the “Stalin Line” by foreign observers was begun not long afterwards, the construction work being directed by Pivovarov. It wasn’t a real line, but rather a network incorporating deep defensive zones set on the same longitude, with forward obstacles and tank-traps, as well as mine-fields and gun-emplacements. The depth of the defense was designed to eliminate the enemy armor’s effectiveness, establish anti-tank zones, and use mobile anti-tank reserves.
After the signing of the Non Aggression Pact in 1939 and the partition of Poland, new fortifications were started (dubbed the “Molotov Line”) on the revised western border with the German Reich now stretching over 4,500 km. In the Baltic States, work began on frontier fortifications in August 1940. The harsh winter that followed hampered the work, which ultimately had to be suspended until the spring of 1941. By June 1941 the work had been finished in the frontier area, but the fortifications were not manned enough and were only partially armed. Only 25% of the planned work along the Molotov Line had been completed. Out of 2,500 bunkers, just around 1,000 were equipped with guns, and around 1,500 with machine guns. The Molotov Line failed to provide adequate defense for the Soviet Union’s borders. Operation Barbarossa, the initial German offensive of the war on June 22, 1941, took the builders and numerous crews by surprise. Soviet troops were caught in their camps and barracks. The field fortifications were quickly overran by German troops. Only the four southernmost fortified regions, which were only partly completed, were able to delay the advance of the Wehrmacht for a few days (with some exceptions!).
According to the official Soviet historiography, the defenders of the Brest fortress resisted the invasion for 32 days. However, combat lasted effectively from June 22 to 29, even if some isolated defenders kept hiding in the fortress for weeks. Although largely obsolete by contemporary standards, the fortress occupied a strategic position at the convergence of the Muchawiec and Bug Rivers. The fortress town of Brest had been captured from the Poles by General Heinz Guderian in September 1939 and handed over to the Soviets, who kept it for less than two years. In June 1941, The Wehrmacht had planned to seize Brest and its fortress, which lay in the path of Generalfeldmarschall Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center and controlled the crossings over the Bug river as well as the rail and road lines linking Warsaw and Moscow, during the first hours of Operation Barbarossa. The Germans deployed heavy artillery, rocket-launchers, and flamethrowers in support of their infantry but the isolated stronghold held out. The garrison, trapped and without hope of relief, put up a tenacious resistance against the Austrian 45th Infantry division as the Soviet front collapsed all around them. In 1957, Pyotr Gavrilov, the Soviet commander in charge of the fortress, was awarded the title of “Hero of the Soviet Union,” and in 1971 a huge memorial, with “the Courage Monument” and the “Bayonet Obelisk,” was inaugurated on the site.
Written by Dr. Eric G. L. Pinzelli
Thank you for your support! 1.000 forms a nice regiment! :)
Michał & PHALANX Team
The Second Poll & Add-ons
over 4 years ago
– Sun, Dec 01, 2019 at 02:52:26 PM
Responding to your feedback, we have decided to make things simpler by putting a fixed number of interactions under every possible stretch goal. We have also decreased the numbers a bit. Have fun on voting! :)
Please note that you can still earn new interactions by liking, sharing, and commenting on these posts:
We are approaching to the midpoint of our campaign, so it is a good moment to introduce some add-ons. As always, we offer you some games from our catalogue, plus the special 1941. Race to Moscow dedicated add-ons. This time we offer you a superb quality giant playing mat and a set of larger locomotives, for collectors who would like to have all their game pieces in the same scale (1:300). Such large locomotives won’t fit on a standard board, so this add-on is recommended for those who would like to play on the giant playing mat.
To include add-ons in your pledge, please click on the Manage Your Pledge button. To include any items you would like to receive, simply increase your total pledge for the amount of the add-ons. You will be able to let us know in the Pledge Manager (after the campaign ends) which items you have added to your order.
The estimated shipping cost of the Giant Playing Mat is +£10-15 per item, Successors and Hannibal & Hamilcar are +£8 per item; Germania Magna and HUNGER are +£5 per game.
You need to purchase at least one copy of 1941. Race to Moscow to be able to include any add-ons in your pledge. Please note that add-ons bought during the campaign increase the overall funding level, that helps you to unlock the stretch goals! :)
You already know the general outcome of the Barbarossa campaign, so now we can move to the details. In the previous update we wrote about Soviet fortifications, so now let’s discuss…
THE SOVIET ARMY IN THE SUMMER OF 1941
After the Winter War against Finland that cost the Soviets 200,000 men, 1,600 tanks, and 700 aircraft, Stalin steadily increased the size of the Red Army. Since 1937, the army had been greatly weakened by the purges, with half of the officers removed, often executed, including 64% of the general officers. The Soviet-Finnish War convinced the German high command that the Wehrmacht would easily defeat the Red Army while Stalin himself came to the conclusion that the Red Army was not yet able to fight a major war. The Soviet Union needed time to rebuild its defensive capacities and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was seen as a temporary but necessary expedient.
By 1940, the Soviet Union was spending 15% of its national income on defense and military armament. The entire country was divided into 18 military districts. At the beginning of 1941, the army had grown to 300 divisions (3 million men). The Soviet Union had a larger population than Germany at the time (about twice as large), but Axis troops occupied about a third of Soviet territory (where 45 percent of its population lived) by the end of 1941. It is estimated that 110 to 120 million people remained in the unoccupied areas of the Soviet Union from which the Stavka would mobilize more troops.
The Stavka's Main Command, which comprised the most senior military and political officers, was reorganized into the Stavka of the Supreme Command on 10 July 1941. Early in the war, Semyon Timoshenko was appointed its chairman, before Stalin himself replaced him as Defense Commissar and head of the high command. The basic strategic formation was the army, sixty of which were in existence in 1941. Most of the troops served in non-mechanized rifle divisions. During the course of WW2, the Red Army would raise over 450 numbered rifle divisions. The infantry was still supported by horse-drawn artillery and the cavalry. Excluding the air force, the Red Army was divided in eight groups: the combat arms (infantry, cavalry, artillery, armoured regiments, technical corps, and chemical troops), the services, and the so-called “specialist officers” (commissars, political officers).
The Red Army Military Air Force itself was not an independent service, and was controlled by the Red Army. By 1941 the Red Air Force possessed a total of 18,000 aircraft and employed 20,000 pilots and a further 180,000 personnel. The Soviet Air Force was just starting its rearmament, the airplane park was switching generation. During the first six months of the war, it lost nearly 70 percent of its combat aircraft, mostly destroyed on the ground. The Soviet Air Force had started the war with a large, but seriously outdated park of aircraft with outdated operational and tactical doctrine, a deficit officers, pilots, and spare parts.
On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the best Soviet forces (103 divisions) were concentrated on the Western Front in an apparent offensive posture along the 1800 km border with the German Reich, leaving them exposed to the Wehrmacht's attack and encirclement. Although German sources claimed that the Red Army outnumbered the Wehrmacht by ten to one or even twenty to one, this assertion has been proven a myth. At the time, the ratio Axis troops vs Red Army was in favor of the invading armies with 3,700,000 Germans and allies vs 2,600,000 Soviets.
Written by Dr. Eric G. L. Pinzelli
Thank you for your continuous support!
Michal & PHALANX Team
The First Poll
over 4 years ago
– Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 06:21:21 AM
Hello Everyone,
Yesterday we have announced our Quartermaster’s Game for the campaign (please visit the previous campaign update for details) and today the fun starts!
Please click here and visit the Boardgamegeek.com forum to vote for your next preferred campaign upgrade.
The poll is open until midnight on Sunday. On Monday we will announce which upgrade received the most support and that would become our first stretch goal. Every upgrade has its price both in Pounds and Interactions. The money is added to the upgrade budet with each new pledge. To earn Interactions please like, share and retweet these posts at your social media channels:
In retrospect, it’s easy to assume that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union was doomed before it even started, given the size of the country and the severity of its winters, but until the fall of 1941 Operation Barbarossa didn’t seem to be a military mistake at all. However, the huge logistics challenge involved in a campaign against the gigantic Soviet Union made this operation daunting from the outset.
Furthermore, the objective was not clear: was it to destroy the Red Army, or to capture the Soviet main cities, including the capital? These objectives also kept changing. If Moscow had been attacked immediately, following the fall of Smolensk, instead of sending Panzergruppe Guderian south to assist in the encirclement of the Kiev pocket, had the panzergruppe taken Tula and then driven towards Moscow, the Russian front might indeed have collapsed before the end of the year.
An earlier opening of hostilities would have meant that the Germans would have reached Moscow in force by the end of the summer, which doesn’t mean that the city would not have been bitterly defended. The Soviets would have to play defensively after the center of Soviet factories and the main railway and transit hub of the European part of the country had been captured. Would that be the final straw? The prolonged sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad showed what would have also happened in the capital: a bitter urban battle that would turn into a costly operation. In any case, it was just too wet to launch Operation Barbarossa earlier.
The fundamental problem facing the occupying Ostheer was that everything it needed, apart from food and fodder, had to come from Germany, and it simply lacked the railway transport in order to carry this. With huge distances, incompatible rail gauges, unpaved Russian roads, and heavy reliance on horse-drawn transport, the further east the Wehrmacht advanced, the weaker it became. The distance from the border of East Prussia to the front-line divisions was about 1400 km. The success of the military operations in general depended particularly on the railroads and everything depended on the existing rail net. The Wehrmacht had no previous experience of long-range operations using railways and refused to seek professional help of the Reichsbahn.
The inability to complete rail lines on schedule and their failure to fill requirements caused repeated interruptions in the offensive and finally culminated in the crisis at the gates of Moscow. There were only few roads in Russia which were capable of handling heavy traffic. With a supply situation becoming critical, the initial surge was almost ground to a halt about 2/3 of the way to Moscow in August, even while Soviet resistance north of the Pripyat Marshes had basically been broken in the first two weeks. The OKH had planned for a victory by October, before the muddy autumn, not expecting an early winter that slowed down the entire war machine, then froze the troops, also preventing the use of air power. The Soviets, being fully aware of the importance of the railroad for German operations, employed partisans in order to disrupt German rail traffic.
On the political side, historian David Reynolds mentioned how Stalin had expected a coup or to be removed from power after failing to prepare properly against the German invasion. The Germans had planned on that, with Bolshevism "collapsing like a house of cards". But the leaders left after the purges were "ducklings in politics", as Stalin used to say. The people he left alive, like Mikoyan and Zhukov, were good at their jobs, but kept their heads down. Stalin, who was in firm control of Soviet Union at the time, had the benefit of 20 years of state propaganda working on his behalf, portraying him as the indispensable leader. It seems that nobody in the Soviet Union in 1941, even after the military disasters, seriously considered replacing him.
At the onset of Operation Barbarossa, many people greeted and regarded the invaders as liberators from Stalin’s rule, especially the Ukrainians who had suffered millions of deaths during the Holodomor (1932-33). Nationalists in the west of Ukraine were among the most enthusiastic, hoping that their efforts would enable them to reestablish an independent state later on. The new German administration preferred to play Slavic nations out one against the other. By the autumn of 1941, serious food shortages were being reported in Kiev and Lviv, but nothing was done to alleviate them: the provision of food to the army and the German population was seen as the overriding priority. If Adolf Hitler and the German leaders had decided to treat the Ukrainians and other occupied peoples better, create puppet states, the Soviet Union could have been destabilized.
In early 1942, the successful defense of Moscow left Stalin over-confident. Against the advice Georgii Zhukov, he ordered counteroffensives all along the front. These assaults exhausted the troops and exposed them to the Wehrmacht's new campaign, this time aimed at the Caucasus and its oil fields.
Written by Dr. Eric G. L. Pinzelli
During the next two days we won’t post updates and will be less responsive, as it is a time to get some rest. Please spend this time with your families... playing board games! Thank you for your continuous support and have a great weekend!
