Quote:
blitzkreig said:
Its worth remembering as a German player that there were very few Armoured infantry units availbable during the early war years to. In 1939 there were apparently only 68 251 Apcs actually in service!
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Ian,
You're right, the number of APCs available was very low, and most Panzergrenadier units had 1 battalion on APCs at most, but never all 3, not even Waffen-SS units. I'm not the picky type of person, just curious: 68
thousand APCs sounds in German service in '39 sounds like really way too high to me! This may be some total war production number, I might be able to find those, but even then it sounds very high! Do you have a source for this? And do we talk about the same thing - namely only SdKfz 251+250 half-track APCs?
I got a book on German weapons production with a lot of statistics and data, I meantioned it in the thread on motorcycle scouts - the numbers it provides are very detailed for most vehicles and weapons, I could tell you the numbers of various weapons that the Wehrmacht had in its inventory at several key dates during the war, the losses during every year and campaign, etc --- unfortunately in this case there is no separate number for APCs, but it says that (abbreviated) at the start of the war the german army had 3.7 million men in total, and active/in reserve 115000/9000 trucks, 2700/600 tanks, and
1300/200 light armored vehicles - this would include the 4-wheel, 6-wheel and 8-wheel recon vehicles - the book says it is difficult to find production numbers for the SdKfz250/251 series, as production numbers often include those of unarmored 1-ton and 3-ton half-track towing tractors, which are based on the same vehicle, but to give you an idea: the books I got agree that total production of the light -250 was around 7500 vehicles and over 16.000 for the medium -251. Also, AFAIK production of both versions only started in '39 or '38 and therefore the numers available on 09/1/39 must have been rather low.