While the supply discipline of the United States Army is regulated by the pressure to give troops all the comforts the middle-class American has learned to expect, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation), the Russian Army, composed of men who have lived hard in their civilian environment, can operate in war on a minimum subsistence level without making its people feel abused:
As the Quartermaster General M. F. Kerner has pointed out, this means that the Communists have a relatively simple logistical problem,_ despite that we commonly think of the tran::portation of supply as being the weak link in the Soviet military system.
Many of Kerner’s revelations about how they improvise in the supply and technical field are highly significant. He continues:
“In my own experience I almost never saw a Russian military truck driver with the equipment to repair his tires. Hundreds of times I have watched these drivers patch up their punctures with the help of an empty oil can, a piece of crude rubber and the help of a heavy stone from the roadside. Piercing the upper part of the can, they filled the bottom with gasoline. Then they cleaned the tire tube, laid the crude rubber patch over the hole, and placed the stone on top. By setting fire to the gasoline, the patch was vulcanized to the tube in ten minutes.
“Fuel for the tanks was usually stored in huge cast-iron drums on trailers attached to the tanks and kept rolling along behind.
“When a tank was out of order, the troops improvised a repair shop in the forest by felling three trees, trimming their branches, and arranging them crosswise to make a lever for lifting the motor or any heavy part of the tank. Bridges were made entirely of timber. If the region was wooded, horses and oxen from local farms were commandeered to transport the trees; if there were no woods, the nearest wooden structure, whether a private home or a public building, was demolished and used for lumber.
“Russian engineers were trained in time of peace to construct wooden bridges, even massive bridges as high as 30 feet, such as those over the Don and Rivers. In the exigency of war, these engineers could put up a bridge with no other tools than axes, hammers and clamps.
“Every army has a system of priorities for supplying its fighting troops. But Soviet transportation, controlled entirely from a central office in Moscow, had a system of such sharp penalties inflicted for minor negligence that a small delay in loading and unloading operations was treated as a serious transgression. The personnel of all forms of transportation came under the jurisdiction of military tribunals which performed their duties right at the front, often trying and sentencing the offender within 24 hours of his dereliction.
“Staff training consists, as far as possible, in practice rather than in theory. During the war, military trainees had to study the current battles, analyze the mistakes made, and even visit the front to accustom themselves to actual combat. All branches of the army, including medical personnel and quartermaster corps underwent this same training.
“Little mail was transported to the front. A dilapidated three-to-four ton truck, no longer useful for priority materiel, sufficed to take care of the mail for a whole division. It was generally accepted as a mere weakness for the soldier at the front to want news of home, and the men were discouraged from writing. As in all other matters concerning the individual, the Russian soldier’s feelings were of no consequence.
“Their success with logistics, in sum, is due not to extraordinary skill and efficiency, hut rather to an endless ability to forage for themselves, to withstand the onslaught of the elements and to make do with whatever comes to hand.”
[…]
This is what [a German general] said: “The Russian will not be held back by terrain normally considered impassable. That was where we made some of our early mistakes. Gradually we learned that it was in just such places that his appearance, and probably his attack, was to be expected. The Russian infantryman could not only overcome terrain difficulties but was able to do so very quickly. Miles of corduroy road were laid through swamp within a few days. Beaten tracks appeared through forest covered in deep snow. Ten men abreast with arms joined, in ranks 100 deep, prepared these routes in 15-minute reliefs of 1,000 men each. Following this human snowplow, guns and other heavy weapons were dragged to wherever they were needed by other teams of infantrymen. During winter, snow caves which could be heated were built to provide overnight shelter for men and horses. Motorization was reduced to an absolute minimum, only the lightest vehicles being used. The horses were tough and required little care. The uniforms were suitable but the men were never over-clad. Mobility came of the mass of men which moved all loads, doing the work of machines when machines would no longer work.”
Anyone who grew up in the mean streets of NYC before the 80s or poor white in rural America to this day recognizes this and a thousand other hacks they’ve used are brought to mind.
A fair share of our military are poor white rural kids who can’t believe how incredibly well the army food is having grown up on roadkill and sunny delite
There was often a certain… asceticism in logistics. But the feats like Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation required much more than that.
And adaptation: intervention in Spain, early troubles in the Winter War, etc, experience led to refinement of relevant structures and hardware, failure meant overhaul ASAP.
This went almost from the start to the end.