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It seems more appropriate to me to say that the Germans didn't plan on the battle going into winter (despite needing to occupy that area indefinitely) so they just didn't pack anything for it.  Which is I guess pretty much the same thing. 

Yeah, they didn't pack winter gear but they didn't pack a lot of things that they needed even for a relatively short war.  Modern mechanized armies can't possibly pack everything they need for anything longer than a few days of operations.  After that they need resupply.  Barbarossa, even if it went as planned would have taken months so resupply was an inevitable need.  

Winter clothing was a problem for the Germans only in that it was yet another supply need that their already severely overtaxed logistical capacity simply couldn't provide.  @Cincydawg pointed out that cold weather caused a need for more fuel to keep vehicles running and that tank treads and tank engines wore out.  All of these things were additional needs on top of needing ammunition and food for ~3.8 Million hungry young men.  

The winter clothing issue wasn't the only problem but it exacerbated an already disastrous situation for the German Army . . . just as Paulus said pre-war would happen.  Their logistical capacity simply wasn't capable of fighting that deep in Russia.  

Hitler famously told his generals at the onset that "You have but to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."  From that we can see that he simply didn't think the Germans would have to do any actual fighting that deep in Russia because he thought that by the time the Germans got that deep, Russia would have collapsed so they'd only be dealing with occupation duty and neutralizing the occasional Partisan not actual front line fighting with an organized army.  

I'm okay with that, because Celsius 232.778 would have made an awful book title.

[img width=500 height=312.997]https://i.imgur.com/VMR7LS8.png[/img]

I think it was President Ford who made this mistake, maybe Carter.  

Anyway, when I was a kid in the 1970's they said we were going to "gradually" switch to metric.  That just inherently doesn't work.  Nobody "gradually" switches from thinking "It is 110 miles to Ohio Stadium, that takes about two hours with traffic" to "It is 175 Kilometers to Ohio Stadium, that takes about two hours with traffic."  

At this point in my life (I'll be 50 in about a week), I'm never going to feel "native" in metric.  I'm too old to make that switch.  Even if the US switched tomorrow, I think that for the rest of my life I'd still "think" in traditional English measurements and "translate" in my head.  

They should have just ripped the band-aid off back in the 1970's.  In that case I'd have learned metric growing up and traditional English would have been something I only used for working on old stuff.  

The thing I'd like to know is how did they handle it with housing/lumber when the switched elsewhere?  

2x4's are 1-1/2" by 3-1/2" which means that stud cavities are exactly 3-1/2" by 14-1/2" by (usually) 96".  Switching that would take forever because all existing homes would be the old standard for literally centuries in some cases.  

We’re (nearly)  the same age Medina. I do remember when it seemed like the switch to metric started. 2 liter cokes, engines in liters, a few other things here and there. They taught us metric in school. It made so much sense. Then it just died out. Big cokes are 1 or 2 liter. Little cokes are 12 or 20 oz. It’s just strange how some things got accepted and some didn’t.