East Africa 1930: An ORBAT Quest

[4WheelSword]

Reewiin, Japanese East African Protectorate with other foreign influences
Population: ~4,500,000 - Employable population: ~2,700,000
Fit, military-age male population: ~120,000

Key Locations:

• Bur Gaabo, the capital city and trade port.
• Kismayo, second city and trade port.
• Lake Turkana, marking the west-most border.
• Mount Marsabit, a silent volcano that's home to a wealth of animals.

Resource Exploitation -

• Sumitomo Mining (Western Division) - Iron, Gypsum, Zinc

Industrial Developments -

• Kaguya Heavy Industries - Iron smelting
• Lloyd Triestina sub-office - Shipping and Freight

 

[4WheelSword]

Please note this includes some minor retcons compared to our previous text ORBAT but this one takes precedence.
Questions are welcome.

 

[4WheelSword]

The summer of 1930 saw a number of shakeups to the paper disposition of the Reewiin forces to prepare for future doctrinal changes.

 

[FrangibleCover]

Since there's been more discussion about it, a fairly ugly map of the current borders of Reewiin. Note that all of the thin border areas next to Kenya are approximate, these areas are sparsely populated and governmental control from either Reewiin or Britain is not strong.

 

[FrangibleCover]

April 1933

Army

Total headcount is around 6000 personnel and 2000 horses, donkeys and mules.

Key equipment:

• 8000+ Arisaka Type 38
• 32 Fiat-Revelli 1914 MMG
• 6 Type 3 MMG (all with the Guards Regiment)
• 12 Krupp 75mm Pack Howitzer (Brigade level)
• 10 Type 92 70mm Pack Howitzer (Battalion level)
• 24 Hotchkiss 13.2mm DP HMG

Carabinieri

Total headcount is around 10000 personnel, although not all are necessarily active.

Key equipment:

• Around 10000 Arisaka Type 38/Type 30
• 12 Perino 1908 MMG
• 6 Vickers MMG
• 4 Maxim MMG
• Over ten thousand assorted firearms

Maritime Carabinieri Force

Key equipment:

• Protected Cruiser Kutulo
• 12 lake patrol craft
• Assorted auxiliaries

 

[FrangibleCover]

The Environments of Reewiin

Further to some discussion in the discord channel on Wordsmiths (join us there for Charlie_Zulu and his horrifying grenades), it might be useful to have a general picture of the environments of Reewiin. This is all information that you would know just from living in the country.

The Cities

Unsurprisingly, much of the population is concentrated in the urban areas of Buur Gaabo and Kismayo. These are old cities, filled with higgedly-piggedly old buildings and without the grand boulevards of Europe and America. Architecture trends towards long and low-slung buildings, the tallest structure in Kismayo is a windpump. Many buildings have small windows and crenellated roofs, making them useful fortifications.

This is actually Mogadishu, 1930s, but Kismayo looks similar.

The Close Rural

Around the two major cities and along the Juba river are the farmlands of Reewiin, recently expanded by the establishment of strategic horse and donkey stocks. These areas are generally filled with many smallholdings, scattered trees and animals. Lines of sight look reasonably long, but various streambeds and wadis will allow small forces to close with each other easily, as was common in the bad old days of inter-Somali raiding before the establishment of the Republic of Reewiin.

An Ogaden Tribesman, somewhere in Jubaland around the turn of the century.

The Bushlands

In common with much of Africa, Reewiin's interior is filled with sparse, low forest and bush. Most of the trees are species of hard-scrabbling Acacia or thorny Myrrh, with thick underbrush of grasses and smaller plants. The region is dotted with villages and also contains nomadic Somali and Oromo groups. This is an extremely difficult environment to operate in, with movement taking a long time and very short average lines of sight, in the order of a hundred meters, in most areas. European forces are likely to be unfamiliar with this sort of terrain.

Some sort of pointy thing, but look around and behind it at the terrain.

Bush Forests

Mount Marsabit itself, and a few other areas on the coastal Kenyan border, have dense enough vegetation to form actual forests more similar to those found in Kenya. These areas are haunted by wild animals such as elephant and zebra, and are more or less similar ecologically to the aforementioned bush except even denser and with less ground coverage. Settled population is basically zero, except for the mining settlements around Marsabit.

Ahmed, King of Marsabit, He could only climb hills backwards. Jomo Kenyatta gave him a personal protective detail. After he died of old age they weighed his tusks and determined that they weighed about 150lb each. Attempt to ignore him and look at the foliage again.

Turkana

The shores of Lake Turkana are, perhaps counterintuitively, some of the driest areas in Reewiin. Communities have been clustered against the lake itself since time immemorial, where they make use of the plentiful fishing for most of their dietary needs. The areas behind the lake are desertified grasslands and desert, with sparse vegetation and cut with deep ravines produced by infrequent rainfalls.

Overlooking Lake Turkana from somewhere near Mt. Sibiloi.

 

[C_Z]

So, decided to go down a rabbit hole on logistics, and specifically, what kind of transport we need. This, in turn, depends a lot on three key factors:

1. How long is a company expected to maneuver/fight without getting resupplied? At one end, they could be fighting on top of a railhead, and on the other end, we could be asking companies to fight weeks at a time in between getting resupplied.
2. How does the company transport supplies not carried by the soldiers? Worst case scenario, they're using human porters, which will eat through the food they can carry very quickly. Pack mules are a bit better; wagons and oxcarts better than that. Motor vehicles are, of course, the best, but a luxury we do not currently possess.
3. Can the army forage? If we're unable to let our animals graze, their food demands skyrocket, and by extension, the amount of useful cargo they can carry not dedicated to feeding themselves drops. This is even worse if there isn't plentiful water; I'm not even going to bother calculating logistics for if we need to carry our water with us and don't have motor vehicles.

Spoiler: Here's a long justification for the numbers I'm pulling

To start with, let's say each person in our unit eats 1.6 kg/day of food. That's somewhere between WWII US and Japanese rations in weight, which I think is reasonable for a country not as prosperous as the US but also not believing its soldiers can eat grass if they have a strong enough fighting spirit. I'd like to insist that this not be forage, at least under peacetime circumstances, because it tends to result in animosity - my grandmother bore a grudge against the Germans her entire life, in no small part due to remembering trying to hide the family's chickens from soldiers during the war. There are also arguments to be had about how taking food from civilians with the threat of violence can result in a fucked up army culture.

As for draught animals (and people), we can start with pack mules; those can carry about 130 kg; in turn, they require 4.5 kg/day of hay or straw to graze on and an additional 2.25 kg/day of barley. Porters can carry about 50 kg and require the same food as any other person. As for horses, small ponies can live off of grass, but larger horses require about half their diet to be special feed; a horse will eat 2% its bodyweight in food each day, and can pull a wagon weighing up to 1.5 times its bodyweight. Using Japanese WWII carts as a basis of cargo/total weight, this results in a horse being able to pull about 350 kg of cargo atop a wagon and eating 4.5 kg/day of foraged hay and 4.5 kg/day of barley or other high quality feed. Oxen can get by with proportionately more grazing (Boran cattle, which are what the Oromo raise, are apparently notable for their tolerance for low quality feed and ability to graze on the trot), but still need a similar 2%. Oxen can also pull about 2.5-3x their bodyweight; this results in a Boran ox being able to pull about 850 kg of cargo atop a wagon and eating 13 kg of foraged grass or hay a day. A truck, obviously, requires no forage, and only around a few gallons of gas per day for several tons of cargo if moving at the sedate pace of walking infantry.

Aside from food, there are other necessary supplies. The US in the Pacific had this as:

3.11 pounds (1.41 kg) of clothing, replacement vehicles, and other general supplies (Class II), 10.67 pounds (4.84 kg) of fuel and lubricants (Class III), 15.46 pounds (7.0 kg) of medical, motor maintenance, quartermaster, construction, and other miscellaneous supplies (Class IV), and 9.58 pounds (4.35 kg) of ammunition (Class V).

Click to shrink...

The British were much less, at 8 kg per soldier being delivered at the corps level. At the company level, I think we can say most of that isn't going to be actively consumed; instead, I'd just add 1.4 kg to our previous 1.6 kg for 3 kg/day per person, plus ammunition.

As for ammunition, thankfully, there's info on how many rounds of ammunition the Japanese expected a fighting unit to consume over an average four-month period per weapon, with 2/3rds of that time being spent in active combat (Kaisenbun). Each rifle was expected to need 300 rounds, and each light machine gun, 8000 rounds. For contrast, the US unit of fire (roughly 1 heavy day's fighting) was around 100-150 rounds for a rifle, 1,500-2,000 rounds for a LMG, 3,000 rounds for a MMG, 1 grenade per enlisted man, and 100 60 mm mortar bombs. The ratio of rifle:LMG ammo seems to suggest that the US expects the rifleman to be shooting a fair bit more often than the Japanese do; I'm going to split the difference by giving each rifle 450 rounds. If we divide this by the 80 days of combat that Japanse Kaisenbun represents, this gives us something like:

• 5.625 rounds/rifle/day
• 100 rounds/LMG/day
• 200 rounds/MMG/day
• 0.025 grenades/rifleman/day
• 2.5 mortar bombs/mortar/day

Per a person on discord who has some 6.5 Carcano clips and a scale (which are presumably not too different from 6.5 Arisaka clips in overall mass), they're negligibly heavy; we're probably looking at about 23 g per round. An ammunition box for rifle rounds seems to add around 15% to the weight. Machine gun strips and the ammo box, meanwhile, seems to add about 80%. I'm going to assume grenades are about 0.6 kg; mortar bombs for the Type 89 were about 1 kg. For a company with 207 rifles, 9 LMGs, and 2 MMGs, this is 33.9 kg of rifle ammo (and grenades) per day, 37.3 kg of LMG ammo per day, and 16.6 kg of MMG ammo per day; overall, this is around 90 kg per day of consumables. Ofc, we're only fighting 2/3ds of the time, so let's say it's 60 kg.

I am NOT going to get into water usage. I am assuming we have water supplies, because if we don't, then it is infeasible to use anything but motor transport and I will leave it at that.

Anyways, add this 60 kg to the 200*3 kg we have from the non-transportpersonnel, and we need 660 kg/day of consumables to keep a company in the field ignoring the logistics burden of the logistics apparatus itself. Assuming a 1:1 ratio of animals to handlers (which seems to roughly be the historical practice, give or take a few), we can then calculate the food requirements for the animals and their handlers, add that to the transport requirements of the rest of the company, and solve for how many we need (i.e., 0=[# of days autonomy]*660 kg/day+[# of animals]*[# of days]*[animal+handler supply consumption in kg/day]-[# of animals]*[carrying capacity of animals in kg]).

The results are presented in the graph below.

So, what does this look like?

This plots how many "units" of each transport option we'd need for a given period of autonomy on top of what our soldiers carry with them. Interestingly, there isn't a big difference between the dry season (i.e., no foraging) and rainy season values at the levels of autonomy we're looking at. Ox+handler is clearly the best per animal, with horse+handler being about half as effective; pack mules are not very good in terms of carrying capacity, and human porters would limit us to day trips only (it's 14 porters to just take a day trip, and 30 for a weekend).

I'm telling you guys. 🐂

Edit: Hosted graph more permanently, since this is now threadmarked.

As a conclusion, in my opinion this suggests we should save the horses for cavalry/recon units since they're limited in number, and go with a mix of mules and oxen for our companies. A Japanese soldier's base kit was enough for around 10-15 days autonomy, so if we add another 10 days onto that for 3 weeks total before needing extensive resupply, we'd be looking at around 8 oxen and 3 mules, which is appealing to me, since it'd be one mule per platoon.