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Thread: Are the numbers of troops available at the Barbarossa campaign historically accurate ?

  1. #1
    Boba93's Avatar Libertus
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    Default Are the numbers of troops available at the Barbarossa campaign historically accurate ?

    Hello, I have been playing HOI3 for a few days now so I am completely a newbie in this game. But one thing drew my attention and it seems to frustrate me more than it should do, that thing is the historical accuracy of the number of troops that we can actually control in the game.
    I have noticed that when you start the game as Germany in June 1941 playing the Barbarossa campaign, Germany starts with about 1.1 million soldiers on the eastern front while according to many sources on the internet, Germany actually began operation Barbarossa with about 3.2 million soldiers on the eastern front, so the difference is just too big to be neglected.

    I've tried to find some justifications for this, I actually had an idea that this 1.1 million might be the ACTUAL fighting personnel and the other 2.1 million were support and service units that never actually joined the fight, but I don't think this is true as I remember I read that those 3 million soldiers were actually counted as "frontline strength" and were part of the main assault, and the casualties confirm that too.
    The same goes for the Soviets as well, because in 1943 in the tides has turned campaign, the soviets have only ~2 million troops on the eastern front fighting Germany, which is similarly much less than the actual ~6 million troops stationed there at that time.

    So is there a reason for this that I don't know ? Or the game is just not meant to be historically accurate in this matter ?

  2. #2
    Poach's Avatar Civitate
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    Default Re: Are the numbers of troops available at the Barbarossa campaign historically accurate ?

    'Frontline Strength' doesn't mean 'Combat Arms', and HoI3 could be off for three reasons:

    1. Troops engaged in rear-area and supply activities aren't counted by HoI3 despite making up a large number of total forces. Each Division would be supported by a logistics train that HoI3 doesn't represent as unit counters, only in abstract in the Supply mapmode.

    2. HoI3 doesn't represent rotations. It could be that 3.2 million Combat Arms soldiers were there on day 1, until day X, but they weren't permanent. Much like the United States today has briefly 'surged' troop numbers in the Iraq and Afghan wars, Germany may have done the same for Barbarossa. They may have temporarily put overwhelming force into the field and withdrew troops to non-frontline postings after a short period to give them rest before their proper deployment on the Eastern Front.

    Consider that (I'm using the country I know) the UK had 10,000 men in Afghanistan at the height of the war, despite having an Armed Forces of somewhere in the region of 200,000-250,000 people. In real life, you need lots of people on rest or training to maintain a deployment: 10,000 in the field, 10,000 preparing to go into the field, and deployments were usually 6 months of every 3 year cycle. You can quickly see that you need far more than the people on the ground shooting the guns to maintain a war effort.

    Since HoI3 has no way to represent rotations, surges or logistics, the actual number of 'troops' (as far as HoI3 is concerned) will never reach the numbers you see on Wikipedia. The only thing HoI3 could reasonably do is start Germany with 3.2 million men and then despawn two thirds of them after a short while, if Wikipedia does actually mean Germany had 3.2 million Combat Arms troops crossing the Russian border that day.

    3. HoI3 is a game, games need balancing and need to be fun. It's not a 100% realistic military sim, and it can't be because real militaries have entire Staffs to run them, not one amateur on a computer. A ton of stuff was simplified and changed to make it a playable game that somewhat represented a real military campaign looked at from an arcade-mode point of view.

  3. #3

    Default Re: Are the numbers of troops available at the Barbarossa campaign historically accurate ?

    Also the 3.2 million, is total axis forces. So that number incudes, Romania, Hungary, Italy etc.

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