Hey Hanny1, I was just thinking about this thread, and here you gave it a bump. I'd suggest a little reading material on the subject that I happened upon. (Seems to be in draft form, but the specifics are pretty solid...plus lots of annexes). It expands in detail as to what I presented.
Except this link contradicts your first source, to a degree that is staggering, and yes you do need to read your link.
I pointed you to perhapas the world leading author/educator on logistics, to counter a book that is clearly incorect, you now post a link to website that directly contadicts your first book. Example this link contains a wagon load to be 4 animals with 2800lbs 0r 6 with 3000 against your first books 6 with 2000. The first book list 1600 wagons as being the requirement while the second has double to treble that number of wagons as the requirement, all at 50% greater capacity.
As for your points. I agree that in theory, the country could provide forage in great quantity, but to live off the land that stuff has to be collected and transported. That means dispersing men and horses to forage, which takes them away from more military tasks like marching, tending the picket line etc. An army on the move is moving all day, it doesn't have time to halt and forage. Your example with Bragg loosing his guns because his animals were away foraging is a perfect example of the dangers of trying to live off the land in the presence of the enemy. To be fully combat effective and capable of mobile operations, an army can't be dispersed foraging.
Not theory, its how the WBTS was fought in practice, a portion of it ( a force (detached extra duty)at every level as detailed in your link, ANV had a forage Bttn at Div level whose only job was to provide fodder) was detailed to forage and provide the means to exist ona daily basis. Every Reg/Div/Corpshad uints dedicated to forage, and force protection, ( as detailed in your link, you did read it right?, if so why contadict it?} who did that and nothing else, its how Armies operated, and a perfect example of you unfamilirity with the subject matter. Foraging occurs while the army is in motion, it occurs when it is not, its how the Army stays alive because otherwise it dies, there was not in this century a supply from base to end user in operation in the USA for ffod/fodder. Had you read any book on logistics you would know that. Supply from base only become required when munitions tonnage excedded food/fodder requirement making supply from source mandatory, and thats a century away, in the WBTS the only time supply from base came close to being required was for extended sieges, and that was becauase the amount of local resources was unable to sustain the increase in numbers consuming it over time.
Grant orders to Hunter were to lay the Shenadoah valley to wate,moving to Staunton then to Charlotsville, then to Lynchburg living of the land fo rthe entire Journey, thats all 18,000 of Hunters command for 6 weeks to live of the land.
AoP in G-Burg requistioned around 2 millions worth of it as it marched to get there and back, more than the dollar value it carried with it. Lee took 2.5 million from PA in the same timeframe.
Concerning the 14 day limit, the number of troops is irrelevant.
Only irlevent if your not interested in logistics, or unable to count. Otherwise its a critical value that if gotten wrong means a failure of epic proportion in real life or at otal failure to understand whats happening in history, and its impossible to know when the capaicity will be used up without that value. Its also the value of the timeframe in game so as to understand if the model fits with reality.
The calculation is just based on the space needed in one wagon for its 6 mule team. 6 mules eating 25lbs of feed eat 150lbs per day. The wagon holds 2,000lbs. Divide 2,000 by 150 and you get 13.3 days. As in a supply wagon has only enough space to hold 14 days worth of food for the 6 mules pulling it. (And remember we are marching all day during that time, eating from our stores, in order not to be forced to waste time foraging).
Your fist book and second link both used different number values. Book one is 6 mules and 2000 load, the second is 4 with 2800 and 6 with 3000. Your second link tells us that wagons use short rations when moving, Wagons on the march only issue 9lbs of extra grain instead of any fodder. Your prior post was full of factuall errors in regard to the innefiecent wagon supply usage, logiticans term the "critical distance" as the distance forces using any given vehicle can support itself, before it requires resupply a wagons critical distance is 144 lbs per day to maintain itsel, 25 miles in 10 hours, 2000lbs load, gives its critical distance of 375 miles. No Army in the WBTS every got close to using that potential capacity, nor did it do so anywhere else in the world. 22% of the potential, 120 miles was competent commanders the world over achieved with it. 12% more than has been achied with motorised transport in the next century.
So your link now has 6*23/2800=20.2 days and no eating any fodder and therfore being able to move all day.
The general ratio of fodder/forage wagons was 2 out of 6 with each 1000 men. generally speaking a third of all wagons carried fodder/rations.
There were only two times that Civil War armies cast themselves off from a base of supply.
Except that this is not factually correct at all. Forces did it from choice quite often, and the oposistion put them in that posistion quite often at both the startegic and tactical level .
Example ANV on 14 June had 80,000 foot, 20,000 horse, 47,000 mules with 7500 wagons.Requiring 60 miles of road space, each Corps ( never more than 30k men ona raoad net), the same is in Europe had a principle road asigned to as this was the max number that can use the road space. They recieved no resupply except ammo from then till 14 July when they returned to VA.
80.000*3*28=6.7 million lbs required
20,000*24*28=13.5 million lbs.
47,000*24*28=31.5 million lbs.
50 million lbs required in round numbers.
7500 wagons holds 15 million lbs, and that excludes everything other than food/fodder, ie no munition, tents etc. For a month ANV could meet a third of its daily requirements from stocks, the rest it aquired localy, but that is using every wagon for fodder forage when in reality its forage fodder is a third of all wagons so it actauuly confiscated even more, the 22,000 cattle it sent back fed it till winter 64, in addition to everything else. The huge shortfall was gathered locally, not supplied from base.
Sherman's March to the Sea, which faced no opposition, and was conducted in an extremely dispersed way in order to maximize destruction,
Sherman 57,000 foot 5000 mounted 2500 wagons campaign lasted 28 days, took him 220 miles.His total forward lift capacity was 5 million lbs, and required 18 million to be consumed, so his supply carried was enough for around a third of what was required. He seperated becausae of ease of movement by having a Corps on different roads and foraging over 100 miles in frontage.
Shermans Army was supplied at Atlanta by a single RR stretching back 473 miles, Sherman estimated that this single rail line did the work of 36,800 wagons and 220,800 mules.
And Grant's Vicksburg campaign. The key to Grant's success was speed. From when he departed the supply steamers at Grand Gulf to when he got in contact with supply steamers north of the City was around 16 days (May 3-4 to May 19).
Except that he never was out of supply..
http://www.civilwar.org/battlefields/vicksburg/vicksburg-history-articles/vicksburgsupplyhillpg.htmlGrant's Vicksburg Supply Line
Myth or Fact?
Ill providea another such example.
F Steel planned a 14 day, 210 mile campaign from Little Rock to Shreveport, to met up with Banks Red River campaign, 23 March to 3 May was the reality, a 41 day campaign of 350 miles, crossing 4 major river and fighting 5 battles, lossing 650 of his 1050 wagons, along with the mules.
He began with10,000 foot 5000 Mtd, 1050 wagons, *14 days =2,600,000lbs required at full supply, which was enough to get them there for resupply by Banks using the USN supply lift, ie he went with enough to get there and no more, but had a spare week in time to reach there, he planned to move at 15mpd but had spare time, and was not supplied from base. This was highly common ( living of the land for a period) in the WBTS as entire Armies often deliberatly set out without an umbilical supply chain, as that did not exist in the century and only come into exixtence in the next. Lee abandoned his base of supply during G-Burg for instance, Staunton being the most advanced rail head, oncre he was 90 miles past it on 14 June he was adrift from his base of supply for munitions. Armies and Corps would often set out tacticaly abondoning the supply net. His actual 41 day campaign required 5 million more lbs than he had in stock, which he found locally, which is in part why LA lost 40% of all its livestock by the end of the war.
Banks was defeated and Steel with a 2:1 numbers advantage, on hearing turned back after the CS haveing already chopped 300 wagons in his rear with mounted attacks by Marmadukes 3000 cav, on his rear as they were too few to stop him frontaly.Having stopped Banks they now would be able to concentrated on Steel and Taylor was comming on fast after stopping Banks
April 17 Telegram to Halleck from Steel, expaining the logistical reason why he was turning back.
"Our supplie are nearly exhusted,We are obliged to forage 5 to 15 miles to either side of the road to keep our stock alive."
Thats an area of 270 sq miles every day that had its acumalted stocks taken to make up the shortfall, 14 person per sq miles, so every day the foragers found 2,041,200 lbs and took 120,000 lbs of it. reducing the acumalted stocks of the civilian population by 6%, ie 6 peope in every hundred now faced starvation. Because there was a total shortfall in stocks required of 5,000,000 lbs, 120,000lbs a day more was required than existed and had to be confiscated localy. This was done with crualty ( QM repoert "198 Wagons loaded with bacon,corn, bed quilts, womens and childrens cloths,hogs, geese,and all the plunder were lost") resulting in no mercy shown by CS forces to Steels men during the campaign, one Reg losing 117 dead from 182 total losses defending one foraging expidition from Walkers CS forces, who got amongst them ( from above QM after action acount) who executed all the wounded.
There was a good reason that the armies stayed as close to steam transportation as possible, steam could carry so much more than horse.
To quote from the document I linked to:
McClellan wanted enough rolling stock to supply an army of 130,000 men and 20,000 horses on full rations. Using Van Vliet?s estimates, the men required 390,000 pounds of food each day and the animals consumed 520,000 pounds of forage daily. Boxcars had a capacity of 20,000 pounds [ten times that of a supply wagon], or 1,285 cubic feet. A minimum of 19.5 boxcar loads of subsistence and 26 boxcar loads of forage, 45.5 boxcar loads per day in total, had to be delivered to the army from the depot. These numbers may be slightly high, at least for the soldier?s rations. Tables in Annex B of this book show that between 8,000 and 10,000 complete rations could be loaded onto a boxcar by exceeding the car?s weight capacity. The transportation requirement for subsistence could have been reduced to between 13 and 16¼ boxcars per day if they were loaded as specified in the tables. Annex A of this paper gives the forage ration for 1,000 horses as 26,000 pounds and 1,739.5 cubic feet. Twenty thousand horses required 26 boxcars per day by weight or 27 boxcars per day when measured by volume. Figured either way, between 39 and 43 boxcars per day should have fulfilled McClellan?s requirement. D.C.McCallum, a superintendent of the U.S. Military Railroad (U.S.M.R.R.) reported that six locomotives and eighty rail cars were destroyed when the railway was abandoned on June 28, 1862.” As for the management of supply wagons (and indeed we are talking about a gargantuan number of wagons here):
Except Mc asked for the above for a army unable to forage because he had the sea to his back and major rivers on both flanks And Richmond before him And a finite amount of land area for local forage that he had already exhusted. His 3500 wagons on hand, 980 would be required to maintain that number of men/horses, over the same 40 miles of RR laid to replace them, less thyan the number the regs give to do that job, so Mc had the capacity to maintain himself as this 980 is less a third of the number on hand and dedicated to supplying food and fodder. So a more effiecent RR supply nice but not actaully required to maintain the Army.
General U. S. Grant One of the main reasons Grant kept going around Lee's right was so that he could keep shifting supply bases along river landings so that he could minimize the time needed to wagon supplies from the depot to the front line
Grant had 140,000 men and 56,000 horses and mules, 5000 wagons Grants forward lift was therefore 10,000,000 lbs, the river landings were to his rear and he moved away from them, changing resuupy from them from 1 day to days.( to which was added 5 dyays rations carried by mule train and on the men themselves giving AoP a 10 day suppy when it set oyut) with a a daily requirement of 1,764,000, he could go anywhere for 5.5 days/140 miles, and still have the same amount for the next week. For the 40 days his base of supply changed, or rather he ignored it and lived of the land untill a base close to where he was became established, he went left not least because in doing so he wenovver ground neither Army had yet to draw upon for any supplies. ( from your link:His Qm expaling what happened
From the outset General Grant has cut boldly loose from his line of supplies – the Orange and Alexandria Railroad – and trusted to luck and hard blows to find another. Loading up his wagons, he turned his army, though more numerous than ever before, into a moveable column, fighting as it marched, and resolved to depend for supplies on a base equally moveable. His first change of base was from Culpepper to Fredericksburg, or rather Belle Plain next to Port Royal, next to the White House, and then to City Point, or at least it is still here at this writing. All of these changes involved gigantic work on the part of the Quartermaster?s Department, which was all the more onerous and harassing because no one could say how long it would prove available.)
, all wounded went back on empty wagons and returned with munitions and fodder. which provided all of the AoP resupply whever it went." I have sent all my wagons back to Belle Plain for a fresh supply of provisions, and propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer" Grant. So again, no that not why he went where he went.
Culpeper was a round trip of under 24 hours, the average dailly WIA sent back to hospsitals for the month was 2300, or 322,000 lbs of WIA going back to Culpeper and returing with that same amount of supply every day. Every day 845 wagons became empty of supply and went back and returned with 1,770,00 lbs totaly daily resupply excedded daily consumption till he was 10 days into the month.By the end of the month this change of base ment a 4 day round trip instead. So your post is factually wrong at every level as he lengthened the resupply chain by moving 80 miles further south away from the nearest supply sources to his rear, putting major rivers in the way and having to dismantle existing pontoons to create new passable points on rivers as he moved away from existing crossing points.
(And as for the west, I didn't mean to imply that infantry carried everything on their backs, rather that infantry could campaign longer in the field with a given set of supply wagons than a cavalry unit because their food requirements were so much less. Check out the Horsemeat March for a sense of how bad it could be.)
Not at all the posistion you started out claiming.
And thats also not how it works in practice, it works almost exactly the oposite way.
From your linked article, which you must get around to reading.
9. The supply trains shall be as follows: To each 1,000 men, for cavalry and infantry, for quartermaster?s stores, subsistence, &c., 7 wagons; to each cavalry division, for carrying forage for cavalry horses, 30 wagons additional
1000 Infantry require 3000lbs a day 1824 for mules a total of 4824, and have 7 wagons at 2000=14000 capacity, this unit can move for 2.9 days before resuply, it has a 72 mile operational bound.
1000 Cavalry requires 3000lbs for riders, 29328 for mounts/mules, 33,000 lbs total, and 37 wagons with a capicity of 74,000 lbs, this unit can move for 2.24 days, it has an operational bound of 168 miles.
1000 cavalry requires 3000lbs for riders, 28106 for mounts on short ration ( no fodder but replaced with 9lbs extra grain) and 37 wagons with a capacity of 74,000 lbs, this unit can move for 2.37 days, it has an operational bound of 178 miles.
Or to put it another way, mounted get there quicker and go further than do unmounted, its roughly twice as effiecent as a manouver element as it covers twice the milage in around two thirds the time frame, and Infantry take longer to achive less, so your still wrong.
[quote]
In game terms, a unit can carry two turns worth of general supply, or 30 days, where as in reality, the best that was achieved was around 14 days, or one game turn. That's why i tinkered around with a base(/quote]
You have an incorrect opinion on how forces sustained themselves in the field, or moved for that matter, reality was that Grant Sherman and Lee existed for a month without any problem, in fact two had both gained logisticly from doing so.
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