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Description and Objectives of the Work
Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis
On
22nd June 1941 the Wehrmacht launched the largest invasion in recorded
history, under the code name Operation Barbarossa. Barbarossa needs no
introduction to students of the Second World War, as it is unrivalled
in military history for size, speed of operations, and the magnitude of
its geographic objectives. The Wehrmacht’s objective was no less than
the complete defeat of the USSR, a country possessing by far the
largest army and air force in the world at that time. This study
focuses on the period from 22nd June 1941 to 31st December 1941, the
period when the Soviet Union came closest to defeat, and arguably the
only period when Germany could still win WWII outright. Since the end
of WWII, debate has raged about the key operational and strategic
decisions made by the German and Soviet high commands, especially
during the critical period from July to September 1941.
The objective
of Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical
Analysis is ambitious: to create the most historically accurate,
advanced and comprehensive quantitative model, of the first six months
of the largest and costliest military campaign in history. The work
includes a full statistical analysis of the belligerents’ military,
economic and logistical capabilities, as related to their war effort on
the East Front in 1941. Furthermore, the work presents what amounts to
a large ‘data warehouse’ of historical data, and in the final
(separable and optional) part uses it to construct, what I believe to
be, the most comprehensive operational-strategic military simulation of
Operation Barbarossa yet.
The work’s pedagogy
is best described as a combination of: military history, military
organisations and command structures, operational research, applied
physics and mathematics, statistical analysis, and analytical
methodology as related to modern military simulations.
The key rationales behind this work are:
- To
bring together an immense amount of information from disparate sources,
and present it in the form of a large database in a single body of
work. The professional researcher or amateur scholar of WWII is
provided with a comprehensive data source, containing the details of
all the armed forces involved on the East Front from 22nd June to 31st
December 1941. Currently there is no single source detailing the actual
land, air and naval forces involved in Operation Barbarossa.
- To
fully analyse each of the belligerents’ military, economic and
logistical capabilities, as related to the East Front during 1941 and
in the strategic context of their overall war effort.
- To
bring an in-depth quantitative analysis to bear on probable outcomes
resulting from different operational and strategic decisions by the
German and Soviet high commands in 1941. For the first time, a single
work presents the advanced student of this campaign with a mechanism
for quantitative analysis of the actual forces, logistics and economies
involved. Even more significantly, the work enables an examination of
the probable outcome of various ‘what if’ scenarios. In so doing, many
of the historically accepted ‘myths’ surrounding Operation Barbarossa
are questioned, while other less appreciated historical factors are
shown to have been far more significant than commonly perceived.
- The
application of quantitative analysis to military history, and to
demonstrate the potential power of modern military simulations in the
study of military history. The purpose here is to demonstrate why
sophisticated operational-strategic military simulations provide one of
the most powerful methods of studying military history available today.
In so doing, the reader is provided with a generic methodology for
researching, cataloguing and building the elements needed to create a
realistic simulation of a historical military event.
Operation
Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis does
not assume the reader has detailed knowledge of the history of WWII, or
extensive knowledge of the various disciplines mentioned. The approach
includes an analytical methodology for analysing a country’s armed
forces and its overall war effort. The methodologies defined in this
work are designed to be generic, in that they can be employed to
analyse a military campaign other than Barbarossa. In this sense
Operation Barbarossa: the Complete Organisational and Statistical
Analysis is also a guide to designing and building a quantitative
analysis of a military campaign to the level needed to create a
realistic military simulation. One of the distinguishing features of
this work is that it is one of the first to formalise and document such
a methodology.
The large bulk of the work then applies these
methodologies (although the methodology itself is transparent to the
reader in these parts) to the various belligerents involved in
Operation Barbarossa in 1941. By selecting such a massive military
operation as the historical case study, it is able to demonstrate the
power of quantitative analysis as well as military simulations in
studying military history. In so doing, Operation Barbarossa: the
Complete Organisational and Statistical Analysis produces a new and
unique perspective on a very famous, immensely important and tragic
historical event.
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Last updated, 14th May 2011.