[kolya1]

I don't know, how long do you thing a division needs to be fully combat ready again ?

From a material point of view, I'd agree with you, but the men also need rest, and as there were no tours of operations in the VVS, pilots flew until the end of the war or until they died or were unfit for flying...

The only time during wich they could rest were these "pauses", AFAIK in the RAF or USAAF, individuals were rotated and their units remained while in the VVS, whole units were rotated.

That being said, the VVS, having suffered a lot early in the war when the combat power of some units was uselessly wasted and became unavailable when necessary (e.g. : in the Crimea in early 1942), had the habit of creating huge reserves during the second part of the war (either for breakthrough ops or "just in case")...


I don't think there were other particular reasons about the reserve systems, except perhaps a pathological habit Stalin had, even before the war, to make reserves of everything (I read this once or twice), or his personnal paranoïa (although, in the second part of the war, the military was mostly in charge of the conduct of the war, and was spared the level of intervention imposed by Stalin in the beginning)...