Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History Visualized"
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Italys warproduction also failed because Germany took most of the Axis valuable resources (such as Romanian oil) for their own consumption, and thus leaving little over for Italian consumption. One could say that Germany was a bit parasitical on Italian warproduction, rather than co-operating. More than 2 million italians worked as guest workers in German industry 1944-45. And when Italy gained some German resources, it was never gifts, but rather exchange under harsh terms from the Germans. Germany never gave italy any StuGs or so, because they prioritized their own needs first.
Italys warproduction was like you say a failure even from the start of the war, and lack of resources was their largest handicap. And not only that, Italian industry was non-existent in World War I, and Mussolini took the lesson and tried to build up an industry, but progress was slow and Italy was not really an industrialized country making ships, planes and automobiles, but instead it was a poor country with a textile industry.
Anyhow, the needs of war forced Italy to pool her resources into building her own industry as best as she could for the sake of victory. She lost the war, but she won the peace, because those investments made Italy come out of the war with a stronger industry than she had at the outbreak of the war. Many Italians had became trained into skilled industrial workers, and the loss of human lives in the war was light, especially in comparison with her losses in World War 1.
Most of the war damages was suffered in southern Italy, while most of the industry was in northern Italy, and Germany kept control over these areas and tried to expand warproduction there as best as they could.
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@MehrumesDagon
The American "bodycount doctrine was stupid and it didn't bring America close to victory. On the contrary, it incentivised false statistics, and massacres on civilians to get the body count number up.... because if the enemy lost more men than they could replace then the war soon be won the US Military promised.
However, this promise turned out to be false. Truth is that the US Military had no idea how many Vietcongs and North Vietnamease army men were out there. So while the US Military promised a soon victory in 1967, those dreams were soon scattered with the tet-offensive in 1968. And the tet-offensive was far from this outstanding American victory like the mainstream narrative goes, because even despite the Vietcong leadership got totally wiped out in the cities and the vietcong took heavy losses, the war still progressed as before with equally high losses for the Americans as previous years. And while the Americans won the battle for the cities, they also at the same time lose all the control of the countryside as units were moving from the countryside into the cities to take them back.
So the war continued. And American solidiers got tired of this stupid bodycount doctrine, because the military leadership just saw them as expandable materia that could be replaced with new recruits if someone died when a careerist officer wanted his medals and promotions.
The stupid and costly fighting to take Hamburger hill is a typical example of this doctrine. In other wars Armies fight to gain control over vital areas - the Normandy beachhead, the Caucausus oilfields and so on.... But in Vietnam the Americans just attacked the worthless Hamburger Hill to kill Vietcongs, and then they just abandoned this hill soon after, even if many men had fought and died to get it, and within a few months would the Vietcong be back in control over it.
So all this crap made the morale in the American Army to fall apart, and fragging became common from 1969 and onwards, and the unreported numbers are surely higher than even the official statistics. And the reason was simple, the solidiers were throwing handgrenades at their own officers because they didn't wanna die in some pointless offensive.
And the search-and-avoid operations became common as well as more fraudgelent reporting of bodycounts, so that the leadership would be happy with the numbers and not try to play more aggressive and the send the men out on dangerous missions to get the bodycount number up.
All in all did the morale fall apart and a continuation of the war was no longer possible for Americas part, as the men refused to obey their own officers. So who is the blame for the defeat? The US Military and its stupid doctrine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFvcuuS5eUI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpr1HYZDzHY
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Operation Barbarossa could have ended in disasters the first weeks if the German Airforce wasn't so lucky that they could win total control of the airspace on day 1.
The German inferiority in numbers were great regardless if we talk about manpower, tanks or planes. But worst of all was the lack of artillery, which was small compared to other nations, and the Germans started the war outnumbred in artillery 12:1 and 20:1 later in the war.
So the only reason why Germany could press forward was the intensive bombings by the Luftwaffe, that destroyed lots of Russian tanks while they were sitting on the railway. Luftwaffe made many sorties per day, and had so many potential targets to bomb that they had to abandon many of them as they soon ran out of bombs to drop, because of the underestimation of the numbers of the red army.
Germany wasn't ready for this war, and even if they did know that Russian railways had wider tracks, they had forgot to plan for building a new railway network, since German trains were smaller than Russian trains and needed water and refueling stations in a shorter distance from one-another.
And the some books claim that Germany lost 2000 men per day in operation Barbarossa, but I think the numbers are higher. Anyways, only in the battle of Moscow alone did Germany lose 130.000 men - thats even more than the 100.000 men Germany lost in the wars 1939-40 against France, UK, Luxemburg, Denmark, Holland, Poland and Norway combined. And furthermore, the men lost were to a high degree NCOs, and men out of German elite Divisions such as Totenkopf and Großdeutschland.
And when Stalins winter offensive came, Germany would also lose enormous amounts of their heavy equipment. And only the over-extention and bad coordination of these attacks, as well as the failure at Kharkov in may 1942 made it possible for Germany to dominate the eastern front in 1942 as they did.
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The United States could never have won that war. Not with their stupid body counts doctrine. And the only chance for South to survive would had been a landreform, which is a political action and not a military.
There are instances when entire units had been wiped out, so I guess the definition of "battle" is a bit arbritrary. Anyways, Vietminh had control over the situation and started 90% of the firefights. And that casulity ratio have been inflated... both by politicians who wanted the public to believe that the war was progressing, and the numbers was also inflated by commanders in order to get promotions and not getting fired from their job so they can't support their family and send their kid to collage. And each unit also had a quota of enemies to kill, and had to risk their lives to fullfill it. So soliders often lied, they didn't want to die in a pointless battle like Hamburger Hill, so one of their higher ups could have his medals and rewards, while people with the ass in the grass dies for nothing. They said dead civilians was dead VC's. They said that they had a kill, but the artillery bombardment of the area had made that no body was left.
The statistics was bullshit, and America never got halfway to that magic casulity number when the enenmy losses men in higher number each month than they could find replacements. Not even with their own manipulated fakestats.
Furthermore don't I understand why casualty ratios would be important, since the Russians could defeat Germany despite taking higher losses.
And America never managed to control the countryside. In fact they completly misunderstood the entire conflict to begin with. The narrowminded brains of the American political and military leadership just saw the world as either communist or capitalist and ignored all nuance.
Ho Chi-Minh was more of a nationalist (and initially also a democrat), than he was a communist. He recieved foreign aid by America when he fought the Japanease occupation, and he was person much liked by America, and Ho Chi Minh admired America and wanted to shape Vietnam after the founding fathers of America. He was an intellectual man who had studied in Europe. But when he suggested a Vietnam with a high degree of self-governence and still being a colony under France, his moderate suggestions got rejected. America didn't want to piss off the french just to make some poor vietnamease happy.
So Vietminh had to fight the french, and they had no support from America so they had to turn the communist block to get arms for their national liberation. And after Dien Bien Phu Vietnam won their independence, and it was agreed upon that South would have a democratic election about a reunification of the country in 1956, but that promise became ignored because it was believed that Ho Chi Minh easily could have won that election.
So the war didn't have much to do with a communist invasion or the domino theory. This was a seperate event. And the conflict was about many things. It was firstly and foremost a peasant revolt against opressive landlords, it was a war against a corrupth and unjust government, it was a protest against the unpopular strategic hamlet program that forced people from their homes to go into camps where people starved and had their freedom of movement taken away, it was a war about national liberation, it was protest against Diems Catholic governments rule over a Buddist population, it was a war about revenge over the many civilian casulties inflicted by the Americans in free fire zones.
In short, it was more than just a war about imposing communism over another country.
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why wouldnt they wait to build up and get a decent military?
Military spending made up 20% of GDP before ww2, and 40% in 1941. Compare that to other countries like Germany and UK who put 70-80% into their war effort. Its simply easier to mobilize your economy for war when you have a high income per head in your country. * Italy did suceed in squeezing private consumption and transfering the recources to the government, but too much of the government spending was not devoted to war and much money had to be invested in building up the industrial capacity, with plants and machines.
why couldnt they get industrial output up to speed?
Firstly, resource constraints. Especially liquid fuels,which showed a decline in avaiblity already in 1940.
And Italy had too few firms, and too small. They had too many lines of production, fragmentation into other lines, and the plans to enlarge scale of production were too hastly made, too many types of weapon prototypes were built, and none adequatly testested and none produced in suffiecent numbers.
And the most scarce resource of all was organization.
* UK and USA had the highest incomes per head among the major powers in WW2, and they could therefore afford expensive tractors to replace human workers so they could be sent to they therefore could be sent to the army or to the factories. And they could also afford to use machines in mines and factories to increase output, and replace workers so even more men could be sent to the front.
As you see, when you got a rich country you can use machines to free up men for the fight, and therefore mobilize your economy for war more effiecently.
When you have a country like Russia with a low productivity, you need to use more men in order to produce the same amounts of stuff as a one guy with a machine. So you therefore need more men in agriculture, mining and industry just to produce the same amounts, and you got less men to spare to fight at the front. But Russia did suceed in mobilizing their economy despite these handicaps thanks to using female workers to replace the men, and by good central planning, and large pre-war stockpiles of resources vital for war production.
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Often the best men were selected for those units. And unlike normal army units did they have very much firepower at the lowest levels in the organization and stormtroopers were equiped everything from body armour, to submachine guns (which was a raririty back in those days) and they could carry flamethrowers and all kinds of modified weapons.
And they had tactics which was basicly the opposite of the common wisdom of the day - which was bombarding an area for days or even weeks and then making large assault on the enemy positions. The stormtroopers did the opposite. They tried to use surprise attacks instead of alerting their enemy ahead of time that an attack were about to come. And stormtroopers were not shy to night fighting. But they could also fighting during the day. And before an attack they tried to make a short but very intensive and powerful bombardment which surprised and chocked the enemy, and shortly afterwards would the stormtroopers attack while the enemy was trying to recover from the confusion after the artillery bombardment.
Decisions were also made by the NCOs (lower officers) who were fighting togheter with their men at the frontline - unlike ther enemies which followed orders from their Generals.
And that was a huge problem when no radio existed, so it would on average take an order 8hours to get from the Generals headquarters to reach the frontline. And then it took 8 hours for the information from the frontline to reach the General.
So it is needless to say that orders often became completly outdated once they reached the troops. The enemy could for example have brought forward reinforcements, prepared defensive positions and weather could have become bad so an order of an attack that was earlier sensible could later on become foolish and impossible to follow.
But if you are having good commanders at the front who knows the situation, then they can decide and determine the situation instead. And that was what the Germans did. Normally they would follow orders from their Generals, but the NCOs were also free to use their common sense and make changes to their plans if they deemed them necessary. And that helped the Germans to react faster than their enemies and always be one step ahead.
So I think one could say that they were a bit better than the regular infantry. But I don't think they were Rambo like elite troops. And I think their kind of warfare was a little bit revolutionary.
I don't think that there is a coincidence that Germany would invent this tactic, since the Prussians had a tradidion of mission type tactics. And another reason why they discovered this new concept was that Germany realized that the odds were stacked against her. The Allies had more resources, so Germany was not likely to win a long war. Therefore it became more important for Germany to fast find new ways of quickly winning this war. So they tried posion gas, flamethrowers, uboats, zeppelin bombraids and new better tactics of course - and stromtrooper tactics became one those new superweapons.
Neverhteless I do still think it is amazing that the ideas never gained more popularity after all the gigantic stipidity Hötzendorf, Haig, Cadorna, Enver Pasha, Nivelle, Falkenhayn and others had commited. It was incompetence beyond just incompetene, their behaviour was criminal in how wasteful they were with their solidiers lives and kept on repeating the same stupid mistakes that had lead to failure, over and over again........until the 287th battle of the Isonzo river.
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I think that conscription armies are a bit different.
Lets say you fight a war with blackwater troops, Gurkhas and the french foreign legion... then the civilian population wouldn't protest as much about having to fight an illegal war on foreign soil in order to steal natural resources. But if you have spend your own peoples blood abroad just for the sake of a rich scumbag wanting more money in his pockets, then people would be furious.
On the other hand I think that national conscription army would be superior in fighting moral to a mercenary army when it is fighting a just war, that say a war of defence... or maybe a war to stop a genocide.
Then you talk about the economic aspects of war. In the past was an imperial power punished for being militaristic and having an aggressive foreign policy, since the cost of war would mean higher taxes for the population in that country. That in turn would make the products that that country produces more expensive and less competative on the world market, and foreign competitors would grab more shares of the world trade.. while the warlike country sinks to the bottom, and the empire declines.
But today America have new system: The petrodollar. All countries around the world needs dollars, since its the only acceptable payment for oil.
And that in turn keeps up the demand for dollars around the world, and America can print more money and other countries happily grabs more dollars to increase their foreign currency reserves. And America can pay for things by just printing money. America doesn't have to pay for wars and a huge miliary like empires in the past, she can't dump over that cost on Europe and Asia.
So why don't Europe and Asia then just stop taking dollars? Because if the demands for dollars go down, then the value of the dollar goes down. That would hurt America, but a cheap dollar would also help their industry to take marketshares from European and Asian producers. So its simply a dilemma for Europe and Asia.
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"Stronger and and better concealed the French front. "
No it wasn't. Stop making up lies about history. Finland was a massive failure and humiliation for the Red Army. If a weak poor shitty country with nothing in plenty besides swamps and mosquitos could defeat a military/industrial gigiant, then an attack on Germany would have been suicidal.
"BT tanks which was designed to fight in Europe not Russia..... Amphibious tanks and the largest airborne force I think some of the high numbers was 5 million but probably close 500,000 cant use that for offense you also missed a critical analysis."
When you copy a good imported American tank design, its not strange that the tanks you produce are more suitable to Europe than to a poor 2nd world country.
And having a massive army isn't the same thing as having aggressive intentions, and likewise doesn't military experimentations in offensive weapons mean you are going to use those weapons.
Countries develop new weapons and tactics all the time, because things that worked well in the last war, doesn't necessarily work well in the future wars. Mounted knights became unfashionable when gunpower came, and battleships dissapeared when planes and uboats came.
And building amphibious tanks isn't anymore strange than Kaiser Wilhelm II deciding to build the largest fleet of battleships in the world, despite the geography says Germany isn't a real naval power.
"Why would an defensive nation eat 3 nations, eat half of poland, take parts of Romania, and Finland and destroy a Japanese army."
Russia wanted to retake land lost in world war 1 (just like Germany). Stalin was bully who only cowardly attacked small countries. Attacking Germany + the Axis powers + occupied Europe, when the army have failed terribly at Finland, when the defensive lines are unfinished, when officer corps have been slaughtered, when dissent in the country is widespread, when tanks and airplanes need repairations and spare parts, when the international community always have been hostile towards USSR... all just seem foolish and suicidal.
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The problem was that Germany was producing luxury cars before world war 1, and the car manufacturers was happy with producing small numbers of cars to rich customers instead of massproducing things for the masses. And the German ministry of war was also of the opinion that it wanted to get its trucks from many companies instead of being dependent upon on just a few... and all this made the German automotive industry very ineffective during world war 1, because the lack of standardization when every company built their own vehicles and types of trucks.
So the allies could easily outproduce Germany in tanks and trucks... when their industries was used to Fordism, taylorism and massproduction.
And the German industry never solved this ineffectivity problem. Economic crisis can be painful, but they can also be necessary in order to create a strong economy in the long term. Structural rationalization means that demand for products falls in a market, and competition among companies gets harder about the smaller number of customers that are left. And some companies doesn't survive this struggle of life and death.... so some companies go bankrupth and their workers lose their jobs and they have to sell all their machines and tools to pay off their debts, or they get bought up by a competitor at a low price.
So when the economic crisis have killed off all companies with uneffective, uncompetiative ways of production... then only the strong companies with good leadership, management are left.
And when then garden has been cleansed of all weed, then there is plenty of room for expansion. And companies could grow stronger when many competitors are gone, and they can increase sales and hire more workers.
Germany was hard hit by the hyperinflation and the Great depression, but it got out of very quickly when Hitler turned the economy around with his defence spending. People got their jobs back and companies produced stuff for the military at full capacity of what their factories could bear. Germany never had as a painful structural rationalization as USA and many other countries, so she never had mass unemployment like USA had during the 1930s, but on the other hand did the German car producers remain ineffective and old fashioned... while American car producers increased their effectivity.
The Great Depression had helped the nazis. Without it people would have been angry on Hitler for increased taxes to pay for his military spending, but now people could not see how much the military took from their pockets... since the standard of living had fallen so much in Germany during the economic crisis that people had forgotten what was normal... so when Hitler gave people jobs it felt like a great improvement of standard of living that people atleast could support themselves with their own job and have something to eat.
And the quick mobilization for war that America did after 1941 would also not have been possible without the great Depression that started in 1929 and lasted to 1941. Millions of unemployed Americans was hungry and queing at the soup kitchens and large factories was closed, and with the war those millions either got to wear a military uniform, or going to a factory making the uniforms.
And since millions were unemployed and factories was unused, the American government didn't have to force people to move to a job in the defence industry and neighter did they have to steal any factories that was used for civilian production when there was so many closed down factories that could be used.
So massmobilization was going through very smoothly, and people didn't mind taxes and war rationing as much when they were used to starvation during the economic crash, and people wasn't so unhappy about paying more taxes, instead they were happy to just get a job.
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The Russians wasn't so interested in building tanks that could take out other tanks from long ranges, so they rather massproduced tanks with less quality and less precision of the guns and having gun sights that leaked in dust.
85mm and 122mm guns became standard, because the russians had made tests firing all their guns on a captured Tiger tank and concluded that only the 85mm Anti-aircraft gun and the 122mm field gun could penetrate it.
And russians designers also liked the idea of making tanks compact and small so armour thickness in millimeters increased without adding extra weight, and the tanks would also be harder to detect and a smaller target to hit, but the disadvantage with low cost compact tanks is that when it gets a penetrating hit, it will become very hard for the crew to abandon the crampy tank.
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Germans was a people of perfection, so they were building tanks complex high quality tanks that could take out the enemy from long ranges so they didn't have to risk their few expensive machines. The Germans had problems dealing with KV1 and t-34 on the Russian front, so they decided to put a longer gun barrel on the PanzerIV tank.
So the replaced the old 75mm L24 gun with the longer 75mm L48 gun, with gave the tank better ability to deal with tanks, because a long gun barrel gives more muzzle velocity - and when the bullet flies faster it can go through more millimeters of armour. And another advantage with long gun barrels is that they have better precision.
So when the Panther tank came, it had a very long 75mm L70 gun with amazing capabities and it could penetrate any allied tank on the battlefield. The gun was extremely accurate and the gun sights was also best of any tank in the war.
But the disadvantage of having a long thin gun instead of a short fat, is that the shot you fire doesn't contain much explosives, so they aren't as effective when firing on soft targets such as footsolidiers, trucks and buildings.
And the 88mm guns had been in use the entire war, since the 88mm anti-aircraft guns had proven themselves as excellent as dealing with enemy aricrafts, but also good at taking about enemy tanks from long ranges, and sometimes the guns was also used as artillery support.
And in 1941 the Germans meet superior russian tanks that was hard to knock out for all German weapons - but the 88mm anti-aircraft gun. So it was decided that new German tanks would be constructed with this gun.
And 2 variants of this gun was under development, and one was longer than the other.
The Tiger tank got the shorter 88mmL56 gun, which was an excellent gun, since anti-aircraft guns are designed to reload fast and the velocity of the shots is very high because you need lots of speed to throw up a bullet thousands of meters up into heaven - but that good velocity also means that anti-aircraft guns are excellent in penetration armour.
The Nashorn got the other gun (88mmL71) which was even longer and more powerful. The Nashorn could snipe and kill tanks at distances almost comparable to modern tanks. The gun was rapid firing, accurate, had extremly good penetration, and eventhough the caliber was smaller than some Russian guns, so was it still a monster in 1942-43 when the best allied tanks only had a 75mm caliber.
And later on would the Jagdpanther and the King Tiger also be given the same gun, while the JagdpanzerIV was given the same gun as Tiger I (88mL56), or the same gun as the panther (75mmL70).
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Germany started to massproduce things from 1943 onwards. And Germany couldn't do any "American style massproduction" before then, simply because it lacked factories for massproduction and enough skilled workers.
The Americans could on the other hand start massproducing tanks almost right away, since they already had huge factories for massproducing cars that could be converted into producing tanks and there was lots of skilled workers. And America and Britain was also richer countries than Germany, so those countries could afford more tools and machines which made their workers more productive.
So I would say that Germany couldn't have done much about their low military production prior to 1943. Maybe they could have increased workhours, removed weekends and used women in the war effort earlier.
But I think that Germany was at an disadvantage from the start, since they lacked oil and had to waste industrial capacity to get oil by other means (converting coal into oil), and Germany was also under allied bombing while Germany could do nothing against America, and Germany had been suffering under the Versaille treaty and their automotive industry was not used to massproduction.
The only trumpcard the Axis had was their superb, experienced military and skilled leadership.
And all this was thrown away in 1942, with the defeats at Midway, Guadacanal, El Alamein and Stalingrad.
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The Russias military is developing many weapons that are superior to anything the west have. The Armata tank is the most modern tank in the world. The PAK-FA is the best fighter jet in the world - by far. And Russia also got other weapons that are if not the best, so among the best in the world - such as the Ka52 attack helicopter, the S-400 surface-to-air missile, the Kornet anti-tank missile, the T-80 tank, and the SU35 fighter is atleast on paper superior to any western fighter jet, and the MIG35 and even the old MIG31 is comparing well to the most modern European fighter jets.
So considering Russias small size of the economy, one should not mock them for achieving so impressive technological achievments but rather applaud them. I am not a Russian fanboy, and much less a fan of Putin. But I can respect Russia for doing some things well, unlike retarded Russia-haters who say bad things about the country regardless if they deserves it or not.
And yes, Russia is poor compared to Europe and USA. But Russias industrialization also started much later, and the country had its economy destroyed in a world war and a large chunk of its economy destroyed by the Germans and a large part of its population murdered by Hitler.
And then in the 1990s Russia implemented neoliberal economic reforms under Yeltsin that crashed the economy, bankrupted 80% of the farms in Russia, and made the Russian GDP go down by 2/3rds.
More Russians got killed Yeltsins corrupth economic reforms than the amount of Russians killed by Hitler. And HIV, drug-use and prostitution started to spread where it was previsously unknown. The hyperinflation ruined ordinary Russians while corrupth oligarchs and the Maffia made big money.
So western powers share some of the blame for Russia's economic development after the world war and the economic policies pushed by the Washington consensus in the 1990s.
The Soviet union also made disasterous economic decisions as we all know with its over-spending on the military and its creation of mass-starvation in Ukraine.
But its economic development was none the less impressive in many aspects. And if one does not call the Soviet economic development a success, then I don't know what country one could then possibly call an economic success.
Soviet started as a poor feudal country of farmers that became one of the largest industrial countries in the world and entered the atomic age. The average life-span for the population more than doubled. The country managed to win the space race against the richest country on the planet. It managed to defeat the mightyiest invasion army in history. It managed to industrialize the country in record short time, not only once, but twice after the Germans had wrecked most of the industrial centers in the country. The peasant country became a superpower.
I think the development by the Soviets can be impressive in many aspects. But I don't think starving a million Ukrainians and censoring and killing political dissidents was a price worth paying. Nevertheless, did Stalins brutal industrialization financed by all stolen Ukrainian food save the world from nazi world domination. For without all those factories and machines that was built, Russia could never have defeated Germany.
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Of course would it be more difficult to train 4x more tank crews if Germany built StuGs and PanzerIVs instead of Tigers.
But on the other hand would Germany not have to bother with making special military bridges, special trains, recovery vehicles, and storing more types of spareparts and such.
Germanys biggest problem was after all the lack of numbers of tanks. So the few they had would they have to drive around much to counter allied attacks on one front, and then they had to move to another front to fight back an allied attack there... and so it went on.
If Germany had more tanks deployed along the frontline then it wouldn't have to move around as much. And having tanks in defensive positions would not consume much fuel anyways.
Another benifit of lighter tanks would be that they would be easier to pull away from the battlefield so they could be repaired. Because controlling the battlefield after a battle is almost as important as to win the battle. If you control the battlefield afterwards, then you can repair your own tanks and perhaps also repair and steal some enemy tanks as well.
But if you don't can control the battlefield after a battle, then you have to fast pull away your heavy tiger to a repair shop before the Russians take over the area. And if that is not possible, then you have to blow up your own tank so that the Russians don't steal your tank and use it against you.
And recovering a 20tonnes tank is much easier than a Tiger I tank. A Tiger tank was so heavy that only another Tiger had enough power to move it. Or otherwise you would have to use 3 big Famo trucks to move your tank away from the battlefield - which is a complicated thing.
Your trucks are rare and in short supply in the German army. And even if you got 3 trucks, then you don't wanna use drive those weakly protected machines on a battlefield where the enemy is firing around you just so that you can use hours to drive away a Tiger tank to a safe place where you can do repairs and maintance.
Germany was losing the war after the start of 1943, so having heavy tanks that were too precious to lose and too difficult to evacuate from a battlefield was not optimal.
Earlier in the war could Germany use hundreds of captured T-34 tanks. But Germany would not use any later T-34/85 models in their army because they rarely controlled the battlefield after the battle and could therefore rarely ever capture any such tanks.
And Germany had to start using overkill tactics, and after they knocked out a tank they kept on firing on it until it catched fire - and only then would it be counted as a kill.
And the reason for this was that the Germans did rarely control the battlefield after a battle, and they had to therefore make sure that the allied tank was completly destroyed and could not be repaired and used again another day.
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Fact remains that the US had the strongest economy in world war II by far, even if they started to demobilize their economy before the war was over. It doubled its GDP during the war years, it created more planes than the rest of the world combined in 1943, it not only expanded its agricultural output and industrial production at the same time but it did also let the military grow from less than 200.000 men to 12 million.
And yet, so did America not even mobilize more than a fraction than what they potentionally actully could have.
The Soviet economy was more mobilized for war than the American - which is an impressive feat, since poor countries usally lacks the tools and effectivness in production in order to spare manpower from civilian agriculture so they could be put into the industry to make military equipment, or so that the farmers can provide the army with enough food.
Russia had large stacks of supplies before the war and thanks to skilled centralplanning it could even for a short while use 80% of its GDP to fight the war. Which is normally something that only the richest countries in the world are able to pull off.
Russia survived and won the war, but the price for victory was enormous. Millions of workers/taxpayers/consumers were dead. Factories, bridges, homes and roads had been destroyed all over western Russia - where 60-70% of Russia's GDP had laid in German hands. More than 13.000 villages and hundreds of towns had been under German occupation.
One could also compare GDP between the Axis powers and the Allied countries here:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.590.924&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Of course does GDP not tell everything. But it can oftentimes help to get the bigger picture of things. And in this case it can clearly demonstrate the American superiority. But I would go even further, and say that it understates Americas strenght, since it doesn't say anything about technological superiority, fighting morale, or the armount of resources at hand. And oil is the lifeblood of any economy, now as then.
And since America was the largest oil producer inte world and had plenty of cheap oil, I would say that that gave them a huge advantage to the rest of the world. They could replace human labour with cheap energy. And they didn't have to waste money and having to research facilities that could transform coal into oil.
Instead they could just focus all of their industrial capacity towards winning the war.
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The main problem was not what Germany did at the frontline, but rather what it did behind it. Killing civilians at the frontline sometimes happens, but rounding up millions of people and have them standing next to a ditch and have them shot is another doctrine.
At the frontline did the German army behave well. But behind the front did Germany create crimes of epic proportions. Most of the blame goes to the SS, SD, and Gestapo of course. They deserve 97% of all the blame for what happened. And without them would the German army, the reichbahn, and the German chemical industry never had became helpers of genocide either.
The genocide was unique in that sense that it s co-ordinated effort of all departments of the state-machinery of a modern government. The industry provided expertise in cremation ovens, poison gas, gas tight rooms, computers for data storage, and gas vans. The reichbahn provided railway transports. The intelligence agency tracked down people.
The military provided land mines, barbed wire, machine guns and much else. Doctors gave lethal injections and selected which people who would die and which were strong enough for slave labor.
Everything was systematic. Murder methods were systematically improved.
The cost of killing a person were kept at a minimum. And a tiny guard force of only a hundred men could easily kill half a million people. Only 2 people managed to flee and survive from Belzec while a quarter of a million died. And at Chelmno did also only 2 people survive out of half a million. Victims were systematically mislead by being given soap, and seeing shower room signs, and seeing sprinkles in the roof. Thousands of people could be killed in just an hour.
And the guards did not have to look their victims in their face as they died.
And all information about their crimes was supposed to be hidden, bodies were burned to ashes to hide their crimes.
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America send large amounts of help. So I am not questioning that.
All I am saying is that about 80% of that help came between late 1943 to 1945... when the German army already had been severly beaten in Stalingrad and the axis forces was on the retreat. And Germany was unable to recover the huge losses of men it suffered from the winters and the many epic meatgrinder battles. After Stalingrad many axis countries tried to withdraw from the war. And the battle of Kursk was the beginning of the end of German air superiority over the Russian skies. German tank production had increased greatly, but none the less did tank losses keep phase with tank production.
Maybe Hitler could won the war on the East if he had gotten a peace treaty with the western powers. And attacked Russia in 1943, and grabbed the oilfields, the industries and farms from southern Russia so the Russian economy had gotten severly mutilated while the German resource shortages would have been permanently reliefed.
But besides from that, I think it is unlikely that Germany would ever win a war with Russia.
The Great victories won in 1941 wasn't just caused by German mastery of the art of war and Russian incompetence. But a huge deal of it was also caused by pure luck.
Had the Russians not so foolishly lined up the air force on the runways so they became simple targets and sitting ducks for the Luftwaffe, so they could totally destroy the worlds largest airforce in just two weeks... then the war could have ended very differently. Had Stalin been wiser and allowed retreats and concentrated all his supertanks into large units, he would certainly had caused much trouble for the Germans. And had he not overextended his winter counteroffensive, then it would have ended up as a huge success instead of a failure. And if Hitler had listened to his Generals instead of order "not one step back", then the Russian counteroffensive probably had destroyed the Wehrmacht, and the war would have been over in 1942.
So many things could have gone wrong, that it is strange that the Germans could become as succesful as they were before Stalingrad happened.
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"Why didn't people in ww2 just have infantry with diffrent support weapons in response to wathever threat they might face?"
Because of failed doctrine. Before world war 2 there was a belief in a breaktrough doctrine of modern weapon systems. Douhet spoke of huge airfleets of bombers who would breakthrough any air defences and transform every enemy city into rubble, and Liddle Hart instead spoke of huge fleets of tanks that would breaktrough any defences and force enemy to surrender.
Both of those doctrines failed in World War2. German warproduction rose the entire war despite the bombings, and at the end of the war production started to decline because Lorraine's steel and Romanias oil fell into Allied hands.
And Germanys early victories had nothing to do with massconcentration of all tanks at one place, but people later on started to believe it.
The list of failures of this tank doctrine can be made endless... allies in Normandy and Pattons failed breakout, and Montgomerys failed attacks at Caen, followed by Hitlers failure to learn from his enemies mistakes that attacking with tanks in bocage terrain with narrow roads is a terrible idea, launced his Arracourt offensive. Then they all decided to repeat their mistakes, with Patton at Metz, Monty at Operation Market Garden, and Hitler with the Ardennes offensive.
Tanks aren't invinceble machines, not even Tigers and Panthers. They can't move and fight in all kinds of terrain, such as forrests and towns. And even if they got good cross-country abilty, their supply trucks can't get there, and those wheeled vehicles are also vulnerble to enemy fire, and if the supply lines to the tanks are cut off, even the best tanks become worthless.
So the tanks can only move as fast as the supply tracks can supply them. And the supply trucks needs protection by friendly troops (usally the footsoliders), so the movement becomes limited. And that explains why the German troop movements in World War2 was no faster than in World War 1, since they were both determined by the phase of the foot-soliders.
The German army was famous for its rapid speed, but that has to do with auftragstactic and their extremly skilled NCOs. In fact, the German army was less motorized than the British, French and American armies, and still relied much on horses for transports.
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Its still a relevant comparison. America like most countries suffered from the great depression during the 1930s, which meant that ineffiecent car firms got knocked out while the most effiecent firms could grow their share of the car market. And that is the point in having what's called a "structural rationalization". It is this increase in effiecency and productivity that enables larger economic grow when economic crashes are over.
And this is also a reason why countries like America would do so well during world war 2, and the horrible structural rationalization Sweden suffered before all others in the early 1920 also helped Sweden to gain an economic leadership position in the world post world war2 since it had eliminated all outdated ineffecient production methods and was able to produce more stuff at a lower cost than all other countries during the 1950s and 1960s before others had catched up.
Anyways.. back to the topic.
Germany never undergone any real structural rationalization in its automotive industry during the 1930s, since Hitler had made the economic wheels of Germany go in high spin with his re-arment policies.
So the German industry never switched to American style massproduction methods with high levels of productivity. Speer also compared the productivity of nazi-slave labor with a rifle production plant in Springfield and concluded in his memoirs that Germany lacked productivity levels anyware near the United States.
And the German production of military trucks continued to be split up among many producers - which in turn created logistical problems with servicing the vechiles and pilling up spare parts for trucks of all kinds... Opel, MAN, Phänomen, Mercedes, Borgward, Hansa-lloyd Goliath, Hanomag, Henchel, Krupp, Magirus, Büssing-NAG, Ford, Daimler, Steyr, FAUN, Vomag, Adler, Framo, Nacke, Tempo
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The thing is that most of the lend-lease help came after 1943 when the war on the eastern front already had been lost for the Germans. So it was never any kickstart thanks to lend-lease to begin with. Russia could build its own tanks without American help.
My guess is that Russia would have won the war even without the lend-lease help. They would probably had cut back their production of guns and tanks, and instead increased their production efforts in make trucks and locomotives and food production if the lend lease help never happened. Russia would probably have played safer with her scarce manpower because the military, the agriculture, the mining industry, and the military industry would be competing harshly about all manpower they could get. And much more so than in richer countries such as Britain and USA, where tractors and machines were more plentiful and reduced the need for workers.
Lend lease was probably unimportant, since it probably didn't change the outcome of the war. When lend-lease started to arrive for real the second half of 1943, the axis had already lost the battle over the Atlantic, Japan had been beaten at Midway, the Africa Korps had been beaten at El-Alamein and kicked out from Africa, Germany had bleed much blood in the winter 1941-42 and in the winter 1942-43 had the Sixth Army been destroyed at Stalingrad.
It was too late for the Axis to turn things around.
Germany was beaten even before any real quantaties of lend-lease help had arrived. And the small amounts that arrived before 1943 barely made any difference.
After 1943 help started to arrive, which helped Russia greatly, and that in combination with the reconquest of Ukraine helped to relief the Soviet economy from shortages of food and manpower. And when food and trucks came from America, the Russians didn't need as much men to work to work as farmers or workers in an automotive factory, but could instead put more men in uniform to fight the Germans instead.
If the Germans had somehow kept Southern Russia under control and lend-lease never happened, then perhaps the Russian economy would have been under serious problems like it was in 1917. But that's another topic for discussion.
I am baseing much of my argumentation on the book - the Economics of World War II, by Mark Harrison
https://books.google.se/books?id=ZgFu2p5uogwC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=the+economics+of+world+war+ii+mark+harrison&source=bl&ots=5FivRGqGxO&sig=GpvSPtwGQvMAywRJfgMqx4jSjUo&hl=sv&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjNzfTVwaDUAhVHjiwKHTkJCV44ChDoAQgnMAE#v=onepage&q=the%20economics%20of%20world%20war%20ii%20mark%20harrison&f=false
German war production was never started for real until 1943, and didn't exceed Russias until 1944 (if I remember correctly. But by then the war had already been lost for Germany. And Germany couldn't have done much to increase their war production before 1943 either, since you cannot start large scale mass-production unless you first got a trained workforce and built factories for that purpose.
And Germany had to spend the first half of the second World War to train German men and women to become industrial workers and to build those factories (and military construction works such as the atlantic wall that consumed about a quarter of all concrete, steel and manpower in Germany).
So there was no way for Germany to outproduce the USSR, unless Germany had decided to wait with invading Russia until 1943.
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America never won the war in any sense, and there was no way they could. They were backing up a corrupt regime that put the foreign aid into their own pockets instead of the people, and it even sold weapons it was given to the enemy. And their solidiers lacked
will to fight. Vietnam was more than just a communist invasion, it was also a war of national unification, a war where people joined VietCong because they were feed up with terrorbombings and strategic hamlets, and most importantly of all - it was a class war of farmers who hated their oppressive landlords that often took 60-80% of their incomes in tax when they had to work for them because they owned all land and no land was left for the poor farmers. South Vietnam was controled by the landlords who used their Army to defend their own interests.
So the easiest way, and perhaps the only way to win the Vietnam war was to do a landreform and give the poor farmers a bit of land so they could feed themselves and their families.
But that would never have happened if USA didn't pressure South Vietnam. And if they pressured South Vietnam, they would have gotten accused of USA-imperialism by meddling in the affairs of independent countries.
The US Army had no idea how to fight the war so they could never have won the war militarily. Over half a million men, and a large chunk of their aircrafts wasn't enough. They used faked statistics that was supposed to show that the war was almost won by 1967 since the enemy lost more men than they could recruit. But with the tet-offensive in 1968 people lost faith in that talking point.
The US army had no idea how to fight, so instead they relied on this stupid idea of body counts and the absurd thinking that the war was a mathematics game.
So soliders were sent to places like Hamburger Hill to kill a bounch of enemies at a high price of their own, and when the hill was won they just left it and let it be taken by the enemy a time later.
Things like that made soliders furius. Their lives was worth nothing, they were just seen as a replaceable commodity in a production system, based on the same ideas as profit and loss in a company. And if a worker died, no big deal, America had plenty of men.
The soliders were tired of risking their lives by being told by their commanders to walk into enemy ambushes just so the warmanagers could produce high enemy body counts by rain artillery and air support over them when the enemy was found.
The soliders were just used as a bait, and sometimes their missions were almost suicidal. But the high level commanders didn't care, they just cared about high body counts so they could get a promotion, a bounch of medals and economic rewards.
So the soliders started a revolt against their commanders and started to refuse orders, and fragging became commonplace and the fragging incidents went up dramtically, but most of them was never reported.
So the commanders was then unable to push their soliders too hard. And in the end, the losses that got inflicted upon the communists were never anyware close to being impossible to replace by North Vietnam.
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Stalingrad meant the loss of the momentum of the German army...1942 was the year when Germany was supposed to have given such a hard punch on the allies that they wouldn't recover and Germany could then direct her forces to deal with the Americans when they finally was ready for war. As we all know did Germany fail completly with that and lost the battle of the Atlantic, they tought the capture of Tobruk had been so devestating that they never bothered to attack Malta and then they lost the battle of El-Alamein, and then Germany lost all her accomplishments in 1942 with the disaster at Stalingrad.
Germany fought on, but the Kursk offensive failed. It wasnt the catastrophy for the German tank arm as documentaries says, but it was a severe diplomatic backlash and Hitlers allies began negotiating and end to the war, and Spain withdrew from the war if I remember correctly.
And Germany began losing air superiority in the east by now, and the consequences hit them hard as their army had a relativly little artillery compared to other armies and now couldn't use air support like they did in the earlier war years.
The losses of experienced troops was replaced young boys with less experience.
Meanwhile did the allies become better at fighting the war. The Russians had learned from past mistakes, their air force have copied tactics from the Germans, their massed attacks with infantry now had become more effective when morale didn't collapse ase easily when they had much tank support when Russian factories finally had began producing tanks at a higher rate than they were lost. Lend lease help had also began making the Russian army more mobile with trucks.
So the quality of the German Army constantly sank, and the power in their attacks gradually declined and became less and less effective. So with the lack of oil, air superiority and much else did the front finally break and collapse
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Tanks in real life doesn't act like in World of Tanks. If the enemy shots off your track, you will need half and hour to repair it, you cannot do it instantly and you can absolutly not doing when the tank is still moving lol. Furthermore, if your tank gets penetrated by a shell its game over, its not like in games where you can take 4-5 hits before your tank gets wrecked. And if your tank takes serious damages, it can take many hours to fix.
And unlike WOT can't you turn your tank gun trough walls and destroyed tanks, like your tank was a ghost. And you cannot drive full speed into a mountain wall and backflip with your tank without serious damages.
And your tanks will also have to refuel in real life. And your tanks will be organized under a commander, instead all 15 tanks acting independently. And in real life will also vision be limited in tank combat, and often does the driver have the best view of the outside world. And tanks will have to take mines, infantry, planes, Anti-tank guns into consideration, and not just other tanks.
So its a tank game without much realism. Its for entertainment and not real life battle simulation like the game creators says. A realistic tank game would probably be pretty boring, as the game would be over as soon your tracks been blown off. And a single hit could take your tank out, so people would hide like cowards.
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PanzerIV was a tank that entered service in 1935 so of course the tank would become outdated as the war progressed. And with out outdated I mean that it would become clearly inferior to the best versions of the M4 tank and hoplessly inferior to the IS-2 tank on the eastern front.
And the 76mm on the Sherman didn't have any problems dealing with most German tanks, including the PanzerIV that you claim to be so superior.
"While the 76 mm had less High Explosive (HE) and smoke performance than the 75 mm, the higher-velocity 76 mm gave better anti-tank performance, with firepower similar to many of the armored fighting vehicles it encountered, particularly the Panzer IV tank and StuG assault gun vehicles. Using the M62 APC round, the 76 mm gun penetrated 109 mm (4.3 in) of armor at 0° obliquity and 1,000 m (3,300 ft), with a muzzle velocity of 792 m/s (2,600 ft/s). The HVAP round was able to penetrate 178 mm (7.0 in) at 1,000 m (3,300 ft), with a muzzle velocity of 1,036 m/s (3,400 ft/s)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/76_mm_gun_M1
The PanzerIV variant had 80millimeters of armour at its best protected area of the tank, and the Sherman 76mm gun could go through 109mm of armour. So PanzerIV was no match for a m4.
That doesn't say that armour is completly useless, since it can give protection against some guns, and from long distances and certain angles it can also protect against some of the bigger guns. But this armour protection that Panzer IV H had came at a price, since all extra armour doubled the weight of the tank and made life difficult for the engine, which in turn slowed the tank down and possibly increased the risk of an engine failure.
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I do not see the point in puttinger Panther and Tiger I into service when countries are developing newer tanks that are better.
Retraining crews takes time. And USA, Britain, Germany and Russia all used different sizes for their ammunition. The germans used 150mm howitzers, while the Americans used 155mm and Russia 152mm.
Germany used 88mm guns while the American used 90mm guns and the russians used 85mm guns.
So getting a tank for which you do not produce any ammunition creates problems. And a tank without ammunition is worthless. Just look at the Ukraine war today and you see that Ukraines biggest problem they have is the lack of ammunition.
The german tanks were also built for German doctrine, while the American tanks were tailor made for American needs and logistical apparatus to be carried on ships, being transported on american railroads and being able to use american military bridges. Those things were not solved as well by the germans as their panther tanks were typically too heavy even for their own military bridges.
So the option would therefore be to borrow the best ideas from various countries and from the germans in particular to make a new tank. A tank a bit like Centurion with a powerful gun, good mobility and armor, and maybe the suspension from the panther, IR gun sights and good optics.
Personally do I think that Panzer IV was hopelessly obsolete in the 1970s. Indeed this vehicle was clearly inferior to the new allied tanks such as M4A3E8, Comet, Centurion and T-34/85. And even more so compared to T-55 and M60 Patton. Its short 75mm gun already had much problems fighting the most powerful allied tanks in 1944 so it would not be a tank I would want for an European army in the 1950s and 1960s.
It would only be a tank to consider if you couldn't get your hands on anything better. Finland used StuGIII after the war at that was truely a capable machine excellent for defensive warfare during the 1940s and 1950s but then it came too weak to fight allied tanks. However Switzerlands long use of Hetzer is in my opinion a bad budget choice. Hetzer was a good tank if you needed a cheap vehicle that could be produced fast. But in the cold war there was no longer any need for that which is why turretless vehicles as a class soon died out. Firepower, mobility and a turret was more important.
Swedens S-tank was a succesfull improvement of the StuGIII idea. But it when gun stabilizers came and chobham armor did this vehicle become obsolete. Swedens use of world war 2 tanks was not that impressive either. After the war it wanted to buy surplus M4 Shermans from the demobilizing USA, but USA offered older variant, and batches of small numbers of this or that model instead of allowing Sweden to buy large numbers of one modern variant to make logistics easier.
Britain refused to sell any tanks, but then the country got into economic problems and decided to sell some Centurions to Sweden to get some cash. But this was in the early 1960s so Centurions was clearly no longer the best tanks in the world so to say. Sweden made some upgrades to them. And they were okayish as 2nd line tanks I guess. But not so fun to use against T-72 or T-80 I guess.
Sweden did however do upgrade its own old WW2 tanks quite succesfully, Stridsvagn 74 did become something like Swedens M41 Walker Bulldog that was built on a M24 Chaffee chassi.
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@erikakurosaka3734 Your ignorance is mind-blowing. Sweden have made world class weapon system in area after area: submarines, AA guns, tanks, IFVs, SPGs, fighter jets, motorcycles, anti tank weapons, combat boats... you name it.
But how come that Sweden have not had an export success in proportion to the quality of their products?
-The answer is that Sweden is not a Nato member.
Nato countries prefer to buy products from other Nato countries. There do you have the reason why F16 have been sold to so many countries in Europe, despite that plane was not superior to non-Nato aircraft's like Viggen or French Mirage F1E (France was not a Nato member back then). Belgium would have preferred to buy the Mirage because of its cultural ties to France and because it was a better plane than F16, and they also preferred Viggen over F16. Denmark's favorite choice was to buy the Viggen, but they ended up buying F-16 instead. So countries prefer to buy inferior products to support other Nato members arms industries.
USA have also actively worked to sabotage arms sales for other countries with unfair play. Like for example when India was interested in buying Viggen from Sweden, and the Americans responded with forbidding the sale of components for the engine in order to block this arms deal from taking place.
For producing weapons in such a small number (and thereby with high unit costs, since there are no export market that can help reduce the cost of production) I would say that Sweden's arms industry is the most impressive in the world. It have punched above its own weight in area after area.
Gripen, Gotlands class submarines, archer artillery, Combat vehicle 90 are all playing in the top of the list of the league of the best weapons systems in the world.
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The army was under-sized for a country like Germany to begin with, and it was also always secretly planned that the army would expand one day - which it did. Germany had large amounts of men in paramilitary formations before the army began its expansion in 1935.
But the fast expansion was not easy, not even in peace time. The industry could not deliver all tanks the führer wanted so many of the new divisions lacked equipment. The theft of Czech weapons did help a little bit, but much problems remained.
And while the leadership and doctrine of the new army was excellent, so was there still much to wish for in other aspects. A large part of the German army's soldiers had no more than 2 months training when the war on Poland began.
This fast growth of an army would normally be unsustainable. Hitler wanted to grow his army and he was prepared to throw the German economy under the bus to do so. The costs were rising at unsustainable rates. All foreign currency reserves was being used up as Hitler used all dollars, pounds, krona, zlotys and what have you to pay for importing rare raw materials from other countries.... and when he would run out of money he would be unable to import anything.. not even oil to fuel tractors and machines, so of course was economists very worried.
And the industry wanted to increase exports to other countries, but Hitler said no to that, because he wanted all steel to be made for German tanks and battleships instead. So German trade balance was put on an unsustainable course.
Hitlers rapid expansion of the army created resource shortages everywhere, which caused prices to go up, so inflation became more and more of a problem. And meanwhile did Germany produce less things of economic value - so more money chased fewer goods - which is the definition of inflation.
But Hitler managed to conquer Europe before his country got high inflation and went bankrupt.
And he could steal oil supplies from other countries.
Hitler was also in an unique position when he got into power that allowed him to do his crazy military expansionism without pissing off the public opinion with his wasteful military spending.
When he took power in 1933, had Germany suffered hard from the hyperinflation in 1924 and the economic crash of the Great Depression 1930. So unemployment was high and people were starving and standard of living was low.
So there was large amounts of people that were unemployed and now could become soldiers or industrial workers for the industry. The German government did have it easy. If the German government would try to make the same huge expansion of its army today, then people would protest.
People would not want to leave their well paid jobs in the private sector to work for the military, and if you would want people to do so voluntarily, then you have to increase wages. And that means higher costs for the government and higher taxes - which would be unpopular.
The German population in 1933 did not have any jobs, so they were happy for every kind of job they could get, so they did instead become very happy when the army grew and needed manpower.
And the starving German people became happy that Hitler gave them a job with a wage that could allow them to feed themselves and their family, even if it wasn't the best well paid job in the world - People did not have high standards after all economic crashes.
But if Germany in year 2021 would try to expand its army and raise taxes, cut standards of living to allow an expansion of the army then it would make many persons very unhappy instead. And rationing would not be met with the same understanding by a people who is used to living a life in plenty.
So without the Great depression would Hitlers expansion of the army had been impossible. And without Hitlers conquests he would not have been able to expand his army so fast and keep it as large as he did.
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"The Wehrmacht was made up of some of the best equipped, trained fighthing men in the world."
The German army was not the best equiped. The British, American and French Armies had much more trucks, while the Heer had to use horses. And many weapons experts would say that the Americans had the best rifle of the war while the German 98k had multiple flaws. And overall did the French have better tanks than Germany in 1940, which had tanks with weak armour, sluggish underpowered engines, and tiny guns.
So no, the person who says that the German Army was better equiped just doesn't know what he is talking about.
And not was the German army the best trained army in the world when the war began either.
The overwhelming majority of the German troops only had undergone a pair of months military training when the war begun. So the German army was hardly consisting of any supersolidiers with superweapons.
It was rather the contrary.
It was an army which relied on horses and conscripts and weapons from the 1930s. That might dissapoint some wehraboos, but personaly that only makes me more impressed by the German achievements since it shows the superiority of the German doctrine and tactics - of auftragstaktik, of close co-operation and coordination with the air force, of the kampfgruppe tactics, of the deep defence tactics, of the idea of the kesselschlacht... plus all the superb education videos that can be found on youtube on various topics from sniping, to how to make counterattacks, or how infantry can knock out tanks.
The German army was the best in world war1, and it improved throughout that war and past on much of its knowledge to the Wehrmacht.
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Stalingrad was the last nail in the coffin for the Axis hope to win the war.
Midway, Guadacanal, El-Alamein, USAs entry into the war, the Allied victories at sea in the western theather, the bombing of German cities... and then came Stalingrad.
All that was won in 1942 had been lost. Germany had lost her best Army. The reputation of the invincible German military was from now on shattered. The Axis had lost momentum, and now the allies rolled forward in Asia, in Africa, over the skies, and on the Eastern front where the south was about to fall apart.
Everyone, including Hitler, now realized that the war on the eastern front was impossible to win rapidly.
And things didn't look good. The Axis was fighting against the largest country on earth (UK), and the country with the largest Army in the world (USSR) and at the same time they were also fighting against the largest economy on the planet (USA).
And on top of that had the Axis now had loss after loss.
The invincible Afrika Korps had been rolled back. The japanease had been stopped and lost unreplaceable amounts of skilled pilots, and the Navy had lost so many ships that Japan would never again have an upper hand in the pacific. And Germany had compensated lack of military and economic strenght, with having superior tactics and better troops. But much of that advantage had been lost when the 6th Army was destroyed. And the Russian airforce simply copied the German tactics and used it against them, and bit by bit did the Russians get better and better, while Germany lost more and more of their battlehardened troops.
It was no coincidence that Hitlers friends were starting to lose hope about the war after Stalingrad. His Axis partners started negotiations with the Allies to disengage from the war. And Spain started to take home their troops from the eastern front in 1943.
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The western allies had 50% larger forces and 4 times larger industrial production and they were generally more technologically advanced. The superior allied Air force would probably have bombed the Russian railroad network into ruins - and the only way to fix this problem for the Russians would have been to import locomotives from America.
And without supplies and reinforcements the Russian forces would have been an easy prey for allied troops.
America also had nearly 900 atomic bombs in stockpile in 1949, and their bombers could reach basicly every city in the Soviet empire and turn into ruins.
During the late war was the Soviets very much relying upon American imports. Of trucks, of tanks, of planes, of locomotives, on uniforms, machinery, explosives, food rations and so on. And without this help the Soviets would have been forced into a dilemma - should they decrase the army to increase the production of the economy? or should they increase the army with the economic output falling as a consequence?
America was the richest country on the planet and never had such a problem during the war. It put 16 million men in uniform, and expanded both the industrial and agricultural production during the war. And its war economy wasn't even running at 100% of its full potential. Already in late 1943 decisions were made to cut back war production.
Meanwhile Russia was fighting for her life in a life and death struggle, and she never had the privilegie to have an ocean protecting her land - so 13.000 villages and hundreds of towns fell into German hands and much of the industry got destroyed during the war and millions were killed.
Russia would never have a postwar economic boom like Italy, Germany, UK and USA because her industrial base was weaker than before the war - unlike the other countries mentioned.
Russia would probably also soon run out of explosives in a war with the west. Not because she didn't make any of it herself during the war. But most of it was done with US made machinery made by US blueprints, and the chemicals in the production process was imported from America. And in addition so was much explosives imported from America direcly.
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"One could argue that, if Germany had developed a fully functioning wartime economy they would have a lot more to work with in the field in '41 and '42."
Germany was not a peacetime economy in 1939-42, it was in the greyzone between a wartime economy and a peacetime economy in that period. And it was only in late 1940 that Hitler choose not to use the full industrial capacity of the military industry when he decided to cut back on ammunitions production after the fall of France.
So a total war in 1941 would just have a marginal effect because Germany didn't have the extra factories to produce the extra tanks that you dream about. It was only in the late war years Germany was able to catch up with the Americans in massproduction thanks to the new larger factories and a higly trained labourforce that gained skill throughout the war.
So would the path of history have changed with a German wartime economy in 1939? No. My impression by reading "The Economics of World War. II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison" is that Germany couldn't get their war economy started for real until 1942-43. Maybe Germany could have waited to attack USSR 2 years, but then things would be very different on the other hand...USSR would recover a bit from the purges and the army would probably be better equiped, while Japan probably would have stayed out of a the war against America.
"With regards to Hitler as a military commander I am baffled why you would defend him."
I would flip the question, and saying why should we blindly believe in self-serving biographies of military commanders? (Especially when they are blaming a dead person who can't defend himself).
It was true that Germany had geniuses such as Manstein, Kesselring, Halder and Guderian. But not all German generals were that great, and Hitler didn't always make bad decisions. It was he who gave Guderian and Manstein a chance to make a career, while the old school retards in the Army did not want anything of it. It was Hitler who saved the Ostheer in 1941, and it was he who made the decision to go for the oil.
He wasn't perfect, but neighter was his Generals. Manstein never admitted that he never understood the economic importance of Ukrain, and Rommel constantly exhausted his supplies and wasted his forces and then demanded reinforcements, while Germany was needing every man they could spare on other more important fronts.
Wehrmacht wasn't all super competent through and through, as Von Paulus is a good example of, and neighter was the Waffen-SS only led by complete idiots, as Paul Hausser is recognized by many as a very talented leader.
Things aren't black and white, competence and incompetence. And Germanys resources was very limited, and her allies industry were weak.
"With regards to Dunkirk...Hitler could have easily overturned the decision of one of his generals."
So now of a sudden you blame him for not micromanage things after you said (to pharaphrase) that his micromanagement costed Germany the victory?
It was Hitler military who convinced him to support the decision that Küchler made, and the battlereports over the losses confirmed his decision. People who blame Hitler makes it very easy for themselves.
This thing of blaming Hitler for the loss in WW2 and the popular opinion and politicians for the loss in Vietnam is just history repeating itself with stab-in-the-back myths.
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Wars are basicly the same as in the past. An encircled army is doomed unless it breaks out, and this is as true today as thousand of years ago, because an army still needs food and supplies to survive regardless of how many super-tanks it got. And the principle of concentration of force and "getrennt marschieren vereint schlagen" is as true today as in the past. And attacks on the flanks is as big of a threat today as in the past.
And deception may have taken new forms today with stealth aircrafts and dummy tanks, but it still plays just the same important role as in the past, since it can confuse an enemy to misalocate its forces and abondon their strong defences and getting lured into ambushes and getting entire armies destroyed.
On a general level one can say that all the good commanders in history have applied the same recipies behind their successes. They have first of all commited themselves to achieving a clearcut goal - instead of acting confused in trying to achieve a multiple number of changing goals.
Most of them have been skilled in the art of the element of surprise, and constantly taken the advantage over their confused enemies, and acting with such speed and aggressivness that the enemy does not have any time to make any well organized counter-measures.
They have been good at playing the game of taking calculated risks. And they have been good at concentrating their own forces so they can fight the enemy with a superior force.
They have been masters of co-ordinating armies so they close enough to support each other if the enemy starts an attack, but still they move independently enough to not clog up the roads with long supply trains so troop movements gets slowed down. And when a good oppurtunity of fighting the enemy appears, then multiple armies can attack him simultanuously and inflict huge losses on the enemy - something that was as true in Cannae 216 BC as in Königgrätz in 1866 two-thousand years later.
I don't consider military history a waste of time, because I think there are lot to learn from the past. And even if some things do change over time, I still think there are lots of things that can be learned from recent wars. Tomorrows wars will not be much different from the wars of today, and the wars of today will have much in common with wars recently fought yesterday.
Studying Vietnam, the Balkan wars, Chechenya, Iraq, Afghanistan can tell us a lot about the effectiveness of different modern weaponsystems - from tanks, to planes, and helicopters.
Just as the armies in World war 1 that learned from the history lessons of the past wars (Manchuria, the Boer war, the American civil war etc) did better than those armies who didn't. The Brits and Germans understood the importance of digging trenches and using uniforms with colours that blended in with the enviroment - while the French didn't, and they therefore suffered enormous losses thanks to their colourful red-blue uniforms and their lack of training to use a spade, and their proportionaly low amount of engineer troops compared to the German army.
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A good example of an organizational reform, was the germans decision to hand over more decision making from the high level to the NCOs. That improved decision making by taking the burden of analyzing information for the high level, and people on the lower level got more freedom to act upon first hand information.
Chiefs at the higher level would simply be unable to have a good overview upon EVERYTHING happening on the battlefield... The fighting morale of his men, the combat strenght of the enemy, having knowledge of if a logistics transport have been halted by a mine... all those small details that make up a greater whole of a military operation.
By this model information can be faster interpreted, and transformed into action.
Having a centralized organization can work in a factory, but in far you have a time factor for your decision making, and not everything works as anticipated. And your enemy makes everything he can to mislead you, and whenever he can he will also surprise you.. and sometimes he will also probably succed. And other factors aren't known as well, you don't know how well your untested weaponsystems will perform. You don't know how fighting morale will be affected by the unique circumstances at the moment.
So therefore you can't plan everything into the smallest detail, so some flexibility and improvisation is needed. But of course you also need to set up a larger strategic goal in your war, but there must be some flexibility to act upon the circumstances to fullfill your plan.
This flexibility gave the germans a great advantage in both the world wars. And the NCOs felt a greater personal repsonsability when he was not just a cog a in a machinery, but a man with responsability for his own unit.. to make sure that his assault is succesful and that objective is captured, that the logistics runs smoothly, and that coordination functions properly.
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T-34 was a great tank. But as Blah said, it did have many flaws as well and it wasn't designed for long lasting peacetime or a comfertable space for the crew. Not only were they crampy, and the gun had a hard recoil that the crewmen had to avoid, it was also the loudest tank in world war 2. For good and bad of course, not so good for surprise attacks but better for psychological warfare.
T-34 was a tank that was built to be powerful in combat. It was built for being each to produce for unskilled labor, and at low cost, and at short period of time.
An average life expectancy for a Soviet tank in the hard fights on the easternfront was just 6 months, so russian engineers considered it waste to use expensive and time consuming components if they lasted much longer than 6 months. It was more important for the russians to replace the huge losses in tanks in 1941, and to outproduce the germans with numerical superiority. And for training tank crewmen with tanks that did needed to last longer and didn't have to see combat, the soviets used allied tanks such as the valentine.
And the tank was indeed excellent in combat. It had no problems with crossing terrain that most german tanks without wide tracks couldn't. Its protection was excellent compared to most tanks in its days. And in 1941 it also had the most powerful gun of any medium tank of its day. And it was mobile as well. And it was reliable in that sense that the crews could fix the tracks and most other stuff in the field. But of course, when it took a penetrating hit it was game over. I think that about 80% of the russian tank men died in the war, and there was a 80% chance of dying in the tank if it took a hit compared to a 80% chance of not dying if the same happened to a german or west-allied tank.
In my opinion was it without doubt the best tank in world war 2. A poor country had outproduced a mighty industrial nation with occupied Europe's industrial capacity at its disposal. They have built a tank that outclassed most of the tanks that Germany had. It was the tank that more than any other allied tank won the war.
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The thing is that time was not on Japans side so a deleying war could never be won. We all know the enormous industrial superiority America had over Japan with all carriers and planes it produced. But there was also a large technological advatage it had over Japan.
Japan only had a good Navy in 1941-42 while the A6M Zero still was the best fighter plane in the world and its pilots was were battle hardened veterans. And all this was lost, all the carriers, all the skilled pilots and planes just a few months after the war had started with the battles of Midway and Guadacanal.
But I don't think that Japan could have won a long war even if it had won at Midway and Guadacanal. Simply because it never had the ability to replace its losses of pilots and the aircraft production was so small that the Zeros could never be replaced with something better to combat the best American planes such as Corsair and P51H. Japan could simply not produce anything compareable in the numbers needed.
Winning early victories in the pacific against an oponent with outdated planes (such as the Buffalo) and which had prioritzed the best resources to fight the nazis instead does not say much of Japans combat capabilities.
The real test would come once America had started to gear up for war for real.
Japans industry was not up to western standards once the war began. It could conquer much lands, but it lacked the transport ships needed to move all plundered resources (oil, sugar, coal, copper, rice, cotton etc) to Japan.
The empire was overstretched and it didn't have the transport ships needed to supply all garrisons it had put out everyware. The war in China was also meatgrinder without any victory at near sight, or at sight at all.
And fighting China, USSR, USA and Britain was not something Japan win in the long run.
It build tanks in extremely small numbers, and the few they made were shitty and getting outdated more and more for each year - just like its fighter planes which were getting outclassed by western planes so much that kamikaze attacks finally became the most effiecent way of using their old junk.
Had Japan been more victorious, then America would not have started to demobilize its economy by 1944. The Montana class battleship would not be canceled for example, and in a real national crisis America could still mobilize its economy for war much more than it actully did. It was in fact the only major allied power that never full-heartedly commited everything it had to this conflict.
And Americas most battlehardened best equiped troops from Europe would be transfered to this less prioritized front. And if that wouldn't end Japan, then some nukes would.
Japan was overstreched in 1942, and it didn't have any tranport ships for a large land invasion of the USA. And grabbing India was also very unrealistic. So where could Japan deliever a knockout punch?
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Food matters. Not only did the Germans eat more food than they produced and therefore they were forced to prioritize the conquest of the Russian South that was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Food still matters today in modern warfare. The modern food industry was actully born out of the Vietnam war. The problem was that Solidiers didn't eat all their rations because they didn't like the taste of the food, so they got too few calories into their bodies and didn't therefore have the energy needed to do hard work such as digging, marching and fighting. So the military asked the private sector for help. And it made some research and invented new methods to make solidiers eat more so they could do more work. And the new discoveries also enabled the food industry to sell more food to consumers than they otherwise would and thereby increasing the profits. And so was the problem of overeating and obesity born in the western world.
The food scientist Howard Moskowitz (and the father of almost all the grocery store foods we eat) was asked for help by the US Military.
* “So I started asking soldiers how frequently they would like to eat this or that, trying to figure out which products they would find boring,” Moskowitz said. The answers he got were inconsistent. “They liked flavorful foods like turkey tetrazzini, but only at first; they quickly grew tired of them. On the other hand, mundane foods like white bread would never get them too excited, but they could eat lots and lots of it without feeling they’d had enough.”*
This contradiction is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” In lay terms, it is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more. Sensory-specific satiety also became a guiding principle for the processed-food industry. The biggest hits — be they Coca-Cola or Doritos — owe their success to complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don’t have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html
But also other concepts was discovered, such as the concept of the "blisspoint" which is perhaps the most important discovery of all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWh1PSQfdK0
And it have led to the massive use of sugar, fat and salt to increase the allure of foods... since the human brain is developed by evolution to find pleasure in energy rich foods containing much sweat and fat.
And then did Moskowitz all discover the idea of making food that suits one consumer group, instead to try to make a product that suits all. The pasta sauce company was near bankruptcy as it desperatly called Moskowitz for help. And he analyzed their products and said that instead of making one pasta sauce, they should instead make many - one type that suits consumers who like their sauce spicy, another sauce for those who like it chunky, and a third sauce for those who liked it plain.
And Prego tried his idea, and turned losses into record profits in just a year.
https://youtu.be/iIiAAhUeR6Y
The food industry now also uses other new methods to increase its profits by overeating. It uses different kinds of sugars that more easily melts in the mouth and faster reaches the pleasure reflexes in the brain so we immiedtly starts eating more, and therefore pull more food down our bodies before we feel tired of eating.
So far has the easiest way for a food manufacturer to make profits not been to increase sales, but to instead cut costs - by for example replacing expensive ingridients with cheaper ones - such as salt and sugar which are both dirt cheap.
But now things are getting different, for example, have the profits from selling frozen pizza risen dramatically when producers discovered that they can increase the sales by a lot if they make their product more alluring to the consumer by adding extra cheese (because fat is an ingridient that humans are hardwired by evolution to like).
So thank or blame Capitalism for the food we have today. Its cheaper and more well tasting than ever, thanks to guys like Howard Moskowitz. But it is also food that have led to massive health problems around the world for humans as well as pets
It is however interesting that once again the military have provided much of the innovation for this. And the military is a field where food are put under a much harder test than in grocery stores. When grocery store producers cry about falling profits when food becomes uneatable after a few months, military food producers laugh because they have to make food that atleast could be stored for 3-4 years. And it should be made so well tasting that the solidiers are willing to eat their rations.
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What about the Japanese though ? Could they have achieved any semblence of parity with the allies?
Nope. The average income per head was much lower in Japan than in Britan or USA, which meant that Japan could afford fewer tools and machines and tractors, which in turn meant that the amount of stuff a normal worker could produce was much less.
So Japan needed more farmers to feed their people when they had less tractors, and they needed more men in industry just to produce the same amount of tanks as their enemies since their production was much less effiecient. And the lower effectivity in turn meant that it was harder for Japan to both increase the army and production at the same time. Meanwhile did the worlds richest country - USA - not have any problems of massproducing weapons, increasing food production an buildng an enormous military all at the same time. And all this was simply possible because of Americas effective production methods and her ability to rely more of machines and tractors and mechanized agriculture than doing all work by hand.
Also, let's presume here if the Americans do not get involved in the war, how would it have panned out then?
Japan did not have the resources to win against China either, and much less so to take on USSR and GB at the same time. And the US sanctions on Japan would have doomed the country and its war effort in China. Japan needed to attack the western powers in Asia in order to get all resources it needed - oil. rubber, rice, sugar, cotton, copper, aluminium etc.
How was british industrial capability in the homeland and the colonies compared with the axis capabilities?
Britain could easily have crushed Italy and Japan. And it was also slightly richer country than Germany in average income per head. And the empire also had great natural resources.
Germany could have outproduced UK, but Japan would never ever even be close at doing that.
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I agree Anthony. Japans problem in the pre-war period was that her industry wasn't large enough for large scale military production. So Japan had to import tools and machines from western countries in order to become a real industrial nation and a military great power.
But in order to get those machines, Japan first had to export stuff to the west (things like cheap textiles) so that she could get her hands on foreign currency that she could use to buy those American machines. But in order to get any clothes to export, then Japan first had to import cotton and such which put a strain on the currency reserves. And things didn't become easier by having to fight a war in China at the same time as the country is trying to increase the exports so it can buy more imports so the country can indsutrialize.
So Japans Soviet inspired 5 year plan to industrialize a country in just 5 years failed and got deleyd because she didn't really get the cash needed to buy all machines, and buying all coal and steel needed to build a huge modern military.
So Japans limitation was cash in period before the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941. And after the attack things started to change pretty suddenly, and Japan made some blitzkriegs in the pacifc and took control over the most resource rich areas in the world in record time.
And Japan now had more warbooty than her industry could consume. Cash was no longer a problem. Japan had all the resources she needed, but her problem was more about shipping them to Japan from Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, the Phillipines and other places.
Japans merchant navy was large, but it wasn't large enough for this huge task, and the occupied countries economies declined when they couldn't export or import as much as before, when the Japanease merchant navy was unable to fill the ship transport gap that the old colonial masters had left when they surrendered their islands.
Prices on export commodities in the occupied lands started to fall, and the lack of imports made prices to go up and cause inflation in the occupied territories.
And things gradually got worse and worse, when the Japanease military wanted ships for troop transports and supplying the troops. And when the war started to go bad, and merchant ships was getting slaugthered by US submarines things became even more desperete. And only the most valuable commodies became shipped to Japan. But in the end of the war didn't even that come to Japan in suffient amounts, and the colonies economies got starved and wrecked and inflation was high.
And even if the Japanease war economy got impressivly mobilized for a not very industrialized or rich country (80% of the GDP was spent on the war effort), the war production was still not even near close enough to beat America. America for example produced more warplanes in a single year, than all planes Japan made throughout the entire war!
And when the war ended it was clear that Japans mobilization for total war was unsubstainable. 80% of the merchant navy had been sunk in the war. 80% of the infrastructure in Japan had been destroyed. Many towns laid in ruins. Many young men had been wasted.
And yet, was Japan never even close of defeating the allies.
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Its not just the output that is interesting. Its also interesting know how high the GDP per capita (income per head is). Because that determines how much a country can mobilize its economy for war (most poor countries can't use 80% of their GDP for a war effort like Germany in World war 2).
And it also determines how much manpower the industry can spare. If two countries are equal in everything, but one country got higher productivity and every worker can produce twice as much goods per workhour as the worker in the other country, then the country with more effective productive methods can send half of its workers in industry to the frontline instead, since the country can produce the same output as the other country with less amount of workers.
This means that poor countries have it much harder to get both enough men to fight at the front, and men to produce weapons in the factories at the same time, because they need more workers to build a tank than a rich country does.
The size of the country is also important for the industry, since a large country usally have more natural resources and therefore have a much more self-suffiecent economy. Large territories also give the option of sacrifice some terrain to the enemy without heavy economic costs for the decision, and a large landmass gives the ability to manouver.
Another factor is of course how suited the industrial policies are to the needs of the military. The Russians handled world war II pretty nice. Tank engines was only built to last 8 months or so, and any effort in making the engine more durable by wasting more money, materials and workhours was forbidden because the Russian leadership correctly saw it as an unecessary useless sacrifice of Russias limited resources to build a good tank engine that could last for many years, when most t-34 tanks was destroyed by the Germans within 8 months.
So a poor 2nd world country could outproduce the Germans with their smart industrial policy.
Russian industry was smart in other ways as well. The moving of factories from the west to Siberia, plus all transports of civilians, and all troop transports and logistics made the railroad network overloaded in 1941 and 1942. So it became an highly prioritzed issue to take the burden off the railway system so it wouldn't collapse in midst of all the critical battles for the survival of the country.
So Russia created new industrial cities, around mining areas. So iron could go directly to the steel works and then becoming a tank without having raw materials moved around back and fourth as much on the railway lines.
So with the war Russias military production became heavily concentrated around a few cities, and decline with the civilian sector during the war and the expansion of the military complex would change the face of Soviet economy forever. It was an excellent system for the war, but not for the peace.
Germanys industrial production was a bit of the opposite. Their tank designs war overly complex, and therefore expensive to build and demanding much workers and the monthly production output was low. The German Army put too high demands on minor unimportant details, that became costly and wasteful - I mean why build a component that can last for decades when German tank losses happens at the same phase as new tanks are being built??
And with all those complex designs, the German tanks often broke down because there was always some of the piece of the many components that wanted to mess things up. So impressive as the Panther tanks were, they were rarely on the battlefield but spent half of the time in repairshops. While Shermans and T-34 tanks were active for service for more than 80% of the time.
Germany also choosed to build a twin engined jet fighter instead of a single engined.. which is just another example of bad priorities - especiall for a counrt lacking rare earth metals for building durable engines.
The bad decisions are endless, and some of Speer's criticizm of Göring and SS was justified. The wasteful V-2 project should have been scrapped immiedtly for example, when Germanys needs were defensive weapons - like the surface to air missles project schmettelrng - and not militarily ineffective and uneconomic offensive weapons.
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Is it possible for the Japanese to defeat the allied Pacific?
No. The Americans were pissed off, and racist attitudes fueled the anger even further. And one just have to look at the production numbers to see how many much more carriers and other types of warships America built under the war, and then one should also remember that America also canceled many construction projects at the end of the war when victory seemed certain.. like for example the Montana Class battleship that have been mentioned.
America also built more warplanes in just one year than Japan did under the entire war.
And on top of all this was Japan involved in a meatgrinder in China, and at war with USSR, UK, Netherland, and Australia as well. The only advantages japan had was shinto and a little battle experince.
But America had the industrial and technological advantage, and soon also superior quality of the weaponsystems.
Japan managed to conquer the most resource rich area in the world with anything a large industry could ask for, but Japan didn't have any transport capacity to move all resources back to Japan. Their large merchant navy was too small for the task, and when the Army needed to get transported and supplied the strain on the transport capacity increased even further. And as ships got sunked by allied submarines and planes, the situation got unbearable. Japan could only transport the absolutly most important resources for their industry, and she was forced to abandon her imperialist-mercantilist trade policies designed to plunder her conquered provinces and outcompete their industries. Instead was Japan now forced to allow her colonies more independence, and open their own industries since the homeland could no longer supply them by sea, and they had to do their own foodproduction as well since nothing could be imported. And the inflation rose and causing harm.
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It depends on what type of Division (mountain troops, tanks, mechanized, infantry, motorized). And then it also depends on what year you talk about, since the German Army decided to make their Divisions smaller throughout the war. And also, Germany usally lost so many men between 1941 and the end of the war that most Divisions didn't have all manpower they were supposed to have.
Anyways, in 1939 did a German Division have 16.800 men. And in the later war years 12-14000 something I think.
So the size of a Division is often varied. In the late 1960s could an American Divison have more than 18.000 men while a Soviet had 13.000. Usally the number of men is between 10.000 and 20.000. And the firepower can be different between Divisions as well. An italian world war 2 divisons did not have much big guns and automatic weapons at all, while a German could be pretty powerful, and a french Division was something inbetween.
And to further confuse you more, so was not all men in a unit a man with a rifle in his hand.
For example, only 3000 out of the more than 10.000 men serving in the 173rd American Brigade in Vietnam was ready for combat, while the rest of the division was working in steakhouses and pizza huts, clubs headquarters, The Generals mess, artillery, engineers,
And when you also exclude people not directly assigned to combat roles such as guys who toted with radios, men who stayed back and typed, those who worked with the supplies of a company, or daily helicopter supply lifts... then you could only field about 800 men if you put all your five Battalions out to fight. So only about 6% of the men in Vietnam were combat personnel.
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Not at all. The corruption in Vietnam was immense, and Vietcong had no problems of buying all kinds of American weapons from the corrupt South Vietnamease ruling class, including M16 rifles, grenades, food rations, clothes, trucks, jeeps and even tanks and helicopters.
But even if huge amounts of M16 rifles was stockpiled, the Vietnamease prefered to not use them. Partially because they wanted as few ammo types as possible to carry along the Ho-Chi Minh trail for logistical reasons, and partially also because the M16 sucked compared to the AK47.
When your M16 starts to jam in the middle of a fire fight you don't wanna to have to take it apart and clean it, simply because you often don't have the time to. Shell casing overexpanded when fired and did not eject to clear the chamber for the next round. Marine Tim Holmes said: "One of our dudes got hurt. His rifle fired a round and then it didn't eject it. The shell expanded and then it pushed another one right in there and it blew up. He was all bloody; that was our first casualty. You see, M16's jam a lot. You're firing maybe two magazines real fast so it's hot as hell."
Some soliders wrote their congressmen and senators " ´We left with 250 men in our company and came back with 107. Practically every one of our dead was found with a rifle torn down next to him."
A marine wrote to Senator Gaylord Nelson " The weapon has failed us at crucial moments when we needed fire power most. In each case, it left Marines naked against their enemy. Often, and this is no exaggeration, we take counts after each fight, as many as 50% of the rifles fail to work. I know atleast two Marines who died within 10 feet of the enemy with jammed rifles."
Conclution: M16 was a weapon for the benifit of the weapons manufacturer Colt, and the Army officers who lobbied to approve it. They didn't have to deal with this malfunctioning weapon in combat unlike, hundreds or even thousands of American and South Vietnamease troops who lost their lives because of it. It was a weapon for the economic interests not the soliders.
Congressman Richard Ichord's committee discovered that the army knowingly let Colt Firearms test the weapons and pass army design criteria using ammo specified by designer George Stoner rather than ammo the army procured in Vietnam.
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how effective are military helicopters in general
Everything is relative I guess. In a military budget I would give them a pretty low priority on my wish list compared to other weapon systems, I don't think they are the most bang for the buch even if I think ambulance helicopters could be valuble.
The problems with helicopters in Vietnam were many. They couldn't carry a heavy load, and because of that their armour protection was crap and a single rifle bullet in the hydralics system could make this expensive machine go down along with men inside, they wasn't too suited to Vietnams weather and terrain, and when they landed their winds blow up wood and rocks and that shortened the lifespan if the propeller significantly.
And even if the idea of putting a force behind the enemy and smash him in an encirclement sounds great in theory, it seems like not much was done in Vietnam. And helicopters aren't much flexible as one might think either, they can't just put down men and supplies everyware but they need landing zones. And then you often want it to be close enough to your own artillery.
And when you found a spot, it could be dangerous to get there. Because the enemy aren't idiots, they know that there is only a very limited number of places where you are likely to land your helicopters. And as I said, it doesn't take much to shot down a helicopter. So therefore the Americans started using attack helicopters and prop planes to protect the landing and helicopters. But the Vietcong also learn the standardized procedures used by America in the video above.
And when you finally put down some troops, its likely that it is a limited operation since the carrying capacity of the helicopters are limited.
So what do I think about helicopters nowadys? I guess daisycutters have helped creating landing zones easier, I guess new technologies doesn't limit operations to daylight and good weather as much as before, and that helicopters are a bit stronger now so they could carry more. And instead of huey gunships, there are real attack helicopters nowadays. So helicopters have certainly improved.
But on the other hand, fact remains that they are expensive and weak and could be easily shot down by cheap weapons. And the ability to carry heavy equipment is severly limited. So I don't think they are a war winning weapon.
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Japan had 0% chance of win a war against USA. And Germany had their odds stacked against them. Maybe theres a slim chance that they could have won if they had taken Caucausus so Russia would have lost both 90% of their oil production as well as their black sea fleet and industrial capacity, while the Germans would have gained oil, self-suffiency in food production, plus secure a safe traderoute for their Turkish chrome, and gained other resources as well such as coal and timber and political prestige.
Not only would such a blow be devestating to the Russian economy at the moment in its most critical moment. It would also open up strategic possibilites. Germany could then attack Persia, or launch stratigic bombing against Russian industry in the Ural mountains, or use the Russian weakness to push deeper into Russia, or use the time to push back the western allies so they later could get free hands to deal with the Russians.
The problem with all "what if's" is that you get no line to draw when the scenario becomes too unrealistic. I don't fully believe the situation of a German Stalingrad victory would be fully as optimistic as I written above, but all things said is still possible, and the situation after a German victory would nonetheless be very problematic for the allies.
Furthermore, all "what ifs" are endless and when you add them up you can always get the conclution you want; what if the Germans not only invented SAM-systems, what if Germany had access to more resources so their steel quality didn't turn into shit? what if Germany didn't had wasted men in the battle of Moscow, Rhzev, and evacuated the Afrika Korps, and never launched the Arracourt offensive or the armour offensives at Budapest and the Ardennes, and made an organized retreat in Belorussia instead of having army group Mittle destroyed? Would the Germans been better off if they had taken Malta? What if Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain and Finland had contributed more into the war effort?
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"why logistics would be different of industry?"
Well for me logistics is different for the military and the private sector since they got many different goals and act differently to certain situations. Soliders isn't robots, but human beings that can't be massproduced in a month, and stored on shelf for months without maintance.
And while a car manufacturer wanna have as small inventory as possible to avoid unnessary production costs and avoid waste, a General rather wants as big inventory for a campaign.. just in case things doesn't go as planned. Running out of ammo at the start of a battle would just be the worst imaginable nightmare possible.
And having a slimmed organization might be the optimal for a car factory, in order to produce a car with the fewest number of workers possible.
But having a slimmed organization with the bare minimum of men for supplying and army would be a very bad idea, since even the tinyest problem could throw all timetables overboard for the entire organization since there are no extra manpower to fullfill the tasks that needs to be done in time.
And meanwhile you are losing time, the enemy gets more time to make counter-moves. Dig himself down and laying mines if he is defending... or perhaps he gets some extra time to escape being catched in a pocket, or perhaps he gets a chance to encircle your entire army thanks to all logistical caos.
Lean production/New public Management is a shitty way of organizing things in areas demanding well supplied inventories, a plenty of personel, and a good access to your supplies.
Effectivisations such as "minimal waste" and getting rid of "unecessary workers", would just be counterproductive for the effectiveness of an Army.
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The Germans fought hard in 1945 despite everything was lost. In world war 2 documentaries there are many allied solidiers saying fightning got much harder when the allies started to penetrate German land, and the German solidiers fought much harder when there was no more step back to take, because now the fighting was about protecting the holy German soil - and many solidiers even made suicidal attacks if that could benifit the German cause.
And according to my limited knowledge so was it the same case for Japan. Okinawa was considered holy Japanease land by the defending troops, and the battle became one of the bloodiest for the Americans during the entire war.
The military leadership would probably be ruthless in mobilizing everything for the war. But they would have many disadvantages on their side, since the Americans controlled the sky and sea, and Japan had lost all her imports from once mighty empire, most of her fleet laid at the bottom of the see, and skilled pilots had been lost.
80% of the infrastructure and 80% of the transport ships had been lost. Cities laid in rubble after bombraids even before the atomic bombs, and the firebombing raids killed even more people than the nukes.
China, USSR, Britain and USA stood against a broken Japan. And this was a war that never could have been won anyways, even if Japan had sunk every US ship at the battle of Midway without any own losses.
I usally think people exaggerate the importance of industrial might and numbers in wars - but this war is one exception because the American advantage was so crushingly strong from the start.
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Germany needed food, oil, steel and aluminium for a pro-longed war, and just sitting and doing nothing would give allies the upper hand as they outproduce Germany.
And falling back and making the front shorter would have saved up German troops for other uses, but on the other hand would the enemy be able to do the same, so no real advantages would have been gained by falling back.
During the first months alone of Operation Barbarossa did the German army crush over 150 Russian Divisions, and yet had intellligence observed that the Russians did possess atleast 150 more Divisions. So the decision to take Southern Russia instead of Moscow did make sense, since crushing the industrial war potential of an enemy could have brought the Russians to their knees just as in World War 1.
It would also provide Germany with raw materials, industrial capacity, food, territory to launch bombers on the Ural mountains, crushing the Black Sea Fleet and thereby securing the Black Sea chrome trade with Turkey... as well as bringing in Political Presitige and threatening the middle east with German troops, air attacks and support for rebel groups.
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German automotive sector was too small in world war I... I have a vague memory that they only built 40k trucks under that war, while the allies made half a million, but I can be wrong. When Germany industrialized under the Kaiserreich, they did so by having cartels and a heavily involved state, and this continued in the Weimar period where some ineffiecent companies were kept alive, and the regime didn't make full use of the structural rationalization in 1920s like in other countries.
And the problem persisted as well with the first years with the nazis in power, because the aim of the nazi regime was job creation and not introduction of laboursaving effiecent production technics... mainly because Germany had 6 million openly unemployed when Hitler took power, and the regime had to get rid of massunemplyement quick if the nazi regime would have any chance to survive even in the short run.
So Germany lagged behind America in productioneffiecency. And the victories in the west in 1940 gave Germany so many dutch and french trucks plus the entire british expeditionary forces park of vehicles that Germany felt no pressing need to fix their low production output.
So besides all foreign trucks the German Army used that they would get problems with finding spare parts to, they would also have the problems with standardization of parts that the trucks german military truck manufacturers used (such as Opel, MAN, Hansa-Llyod Goliath, Phänomen, Henchel, Borgward, Büssing Nag, Ford, Krupp, Daimler).
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Things that annoys me:
-Ridiculus political assumptions in a game... like in Hearts of Iron when you control the entire UK plus a million provinces and the country still refuses to surrender because you havn't taken some bullshit province in far east Asia where the new capital is located.
And the Soviet Union sooner or later always attacks Germany... which I think is stupid. Since I think a Russian attack was unlikely in real life.
-Too many sci-fic units. When a game like panzer corps adds in some exprimental units to spice up the game it can be fun, but at some time its stop being a real world war 2 game, when most units are Maus, tortoise and IS3 tanks, and amerika bombers are dominating the skies.
- The stupid AIs in hearts of Iron that puts 100 divisions into Washington DC, and then you can wipe them all out with an atom bomb.
- The total lack of logistics which takes away any realism in any game. You cannot form a kettle to starve out an army, or having it suffer attrition by a long march through lands without resources.
- The inability of a game like Hearts of Iron to just make you able to temporarily demobilize your panzer divisions so they don't suck up supplies. It feels pretty dumb and unfair to having to delete your divisions completly and then rebuild them again and train the manpower.
In a realistic world I would just send the men home for a while until they are needed and the unit would be activated again. OR I would just transfer my veteran troops to the infantry so it could keep full combat strenght.
- Another system is production of units, which in itself needs technology, money, production capacity, manhours of work, inputs of resources... and an endless number of other factors.
But I can be satisfied with a simple system of purchasing price only, but when the price system is unbalanced the game play can get messed up. For example, in Panzer General II a german tank on average costed about 400 prestige... while a russian t-34 tank literarly costed 0 credits to buy. So even if you inflicted 10 times higher losses on the enemy, he could still throw endless numbers of tanks against you.
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73tons is food for lots of people when each person only eat 100g per day.
Paulus surrendered his army on the promise that his men would be feed if they surrendered - and the Russians agreed to those terms, but never cared to fullfill their promise so most of the 6th Army died.
So had the German planes delievered food instead of letters, then the German soliders probably would have been better off. Atleast they would enjoy a last meal before their end in Russian hands.
My priority would have been food first, ammo second and letters 3rd, winter cloth 4th, medical supplies and spareparts 5th, fuel 6th, and useless junk (old newspapers, barbed wire, pepper, pocketbooks, false collars, shoe laces) on 7th place on my priority list.
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1939 - Crushing Poland so fast that France stop them.
1940 - Secure Swedish Iron shipments by capturing the Ice free harbour at Narvik where the Iron gets shipped to Germany.
- May 1940, capture the Benelux countries and push into France without crossing the Maginot line.
1941 -Put Balkans under Axis control, and then securing Crete in order to deny allied bombers the ability to bomb Romanian oil fields.
Troops are sent to North Africa to save the Italian Army there from collapsing.
-June 1941, The largest military operation in history begin, when Hitler attack Soviet Russia. The objective is to destroy the Russian army as fast as possible, and no army in history have suffered so heavy losses as the Russians did in 1941. But the losses for the Germans were also enormous, even if they were nowhere near as bad as the Russians.
-October 1941, Since Germany now controls huge areas of land and inflicted heavy losses on their enemy, it is decided to end the war in Russia with the capture of Moscow, and the Germans push forward under heavy losses but fail to capture their goals.
1942 Russia have gathered large numbers of men from all over Russia, and decides to throw in everything they got in a winteroffensive all along the Russian front. And the German army was exhausted by the losses from the previous year, many had also frozen to death by the winter, and much of their tanks, guns and planes couldn't be used in the cold... so when the Russians attacked, the German army wasn't strong enough to hold them back so they were pushed back 100km before the Russians could be stopped. The Russian troops had moved forward so hastenly that they didn't know where to go, and the units where spread out and couldn't support each other and couldn't get enough fuel, ammo and food forward to them when they had moved so deep into enemy lands so fast.
So the Germans simply encircled and destroyed each russian unit one by one.
And Stalins winteroffensive ended up as a worse disaster for the Russians than for the Germans. But the German retreat during the winter had also meant that troops had to abandon much of their heavy equipment so they could retreat fast enough without getting caugt by the Russians. So Germany had lost huge number of guns, tanks, trucks and transport planes.
-may 1942, Hitler changes his plans. Moscow is no longer a target.. its too well defended and can't guarantee an end to the war.
Hitler understands that this war will probably last for years and to win he needs recources. So he decides to take Southern Russia instead. And if he succedes he could solve Germanys problems of consuming more food and oil than they produce.
And losing Southern Russia would also mean a heavy blow to Russia, even losing those resources in the shortrun would be devestating.
So Hitler starts Operation Blue, with the best Divisions of his army and support them with his best air units.
The heavy losses Germany had simply didn't allow for any attack into Russia on all fronts like in 1941.
And Hitler captures Kiev, he takes Crimea, Kharkov and Rostov.. and he almost takes Stalingrad..........................
But then Russia makes a huge counterattack on the entire eastern front like in 1941. Outside Moscow a huge German army is under threat of getting encircled and crushed, and is fighting for their lives in the battle of Rzhev.
And at the same time is an equally epic battle going on in Stalingrad, where the Russians succesfully have encirled the German 6th Army.. which is now fighting for their lives to get out of the ring the Russians have formed around them. But the Russian forces is too strong, and the German troops is starving, and lacking medicines, ammunition and fuel to fight effectivly. And finally gets forced to surrender.
Which is a disaster for Germany, who needed that 6th Army more than ever to fight a war that has grown even larger when USA joined it. And the loss of it, created a big open hole in the German frontline at the south.
And 1942 was not a good year for the navy either. And the war went to shit for japan as well after unrepairable losses at Midway and Guadacanal.
The battle in Europe and North Africa in 1942 was supposed to be the year when the Axis powers should have used the time to deal a big punch to the Allies so they couldn't recover until the war in Russia was over.
It was important to punch hard in 1942, because America wasn't still ready for war. Their industry hadn't geared up yet, and millions of new troops had to be equiped, trained and then sent to Europe.... and that would take a year before they could get strong enough to become a real threat to Germany.
So what did Germany do on the western front in 1942?
Nothing.
They thought about capturing Malta with paratroopers, to stop allied planes and ships from harassing supply ships. But the operation was canceled at the last moment, because it was wrongly considered that the operation was unnessary when Rommels Afrika Korps had inflicted a devestating defeat on the allies with the capture of Tobruk.
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Originally it was against USSR, but when America boycoted Germany in 1936 and started to give lend-lease to Hitlers enemies he tought that America could go to hell. But Hitler himself lacked a large Navy to take on the Americans, so he was happy to get Japan on his side. And some historians say that the push against Moscow in 1941 was a desperate attempt to make it seem like the war in Russia would be over soon, so Japan would feel comfy to start a war with America.
From a Japanease perspective was the Attack on America only foolish and totally lacking rationality since Japan had 0% chance of winning a war against the American gigiant. The reasons were only feelings. Japan had free trade forced upon them in 1853 by western powers. They felt inferior back then to the westerners with superior weapns innovations and industry, and firstly bought into the racist rethoric that only the white man could have a modern state, and that made the Japanease depressed. But they were determined to try to get a modern army, so imported technologies and tried to finance all expenditures by industrialization. So they became one industrial power, not the greatest one in the global league, but the greatest one in the Asian league. So then they started to imitate western powers in other ways and started to colonize their neighbours such as Korea and they got involved in a conflict with China. But despite all great achievements and western admiration of Japans progress, the Asian race was still looked down upon, and America had restricted their immigration, and western countries refused to treat them like an equal as with western countries.
So all this frustration, in combination with shinto warrior ideals and crazy imperalistic nationalism, plus militarism and Americas trade boycot of Japan triggered a Japanease reaction that became the attack on Pearl Harbour.
The hope was to destroy the American navy completly, and then go south and take Indoneasia and grab some of the most resource rich areas in the world. And instead currency reserves for buying raw material imports being the limiting factor for the industrial production, the only limiting factor would become the amount of plundered resources the transport ships could carry.
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Panzer III was a shitty tank in 1939, with only a 37mm gun.
When Panzer III entered service in 1935 it was intended to be the main tank of the German army, and it was planned that this machine - which was considered as powerful tank back then - should one day replace all weak pz1 and pzII tanks in service with the army. But the World War began before that dream could come true.
And in 1939 only a few of these tanks had been produced. So the German army had to use old PzI and PzII tanks to crush the Poles instead. And in 1940 in the Battle of France, the same story was still true, since German tank production was still unimpressive. And the few panzer III tanks that fought, showed the German army that this tank was shit compared to French tanks, it had crappier firepower, armour and horsepower per tonne ratio. So the German army decided to give the tank a better 50mm gun and give it some extra armour so it would be able to better against a future enemy than what it had done against French tanks.
And in Russia in 1941, the Panzer III was finally deployed in large numbers. But because of the lazyness of the German industry, which had choosen to not listen to Hitlers orders, most of the panzer III tanks still carried the old 37mm gun. And that gun was okay when fighting most Russian tanks such as T-26 and BT7.
But against the best Russian tanks (KV-1 and T-34) with thick armour it was completly useless. And some historians even claim this to be the reason why Hitler lost the battle of Moscow in 1941.
Panzer III got upgraded and did an okayish performance in 1942. But by 1943 it started to getting a bit outdated, and not being able to fight against allied tanks (ie M4 sherman and T34/76) on equal terms. But it wasn't enough panzer IV and Panther tanks available to the German army to take this old crappy machine out of service.
So it had to continue it service within the German army, but now as a reconnaissance tank. And since the gun was useless against armour, it was instead given a 75mm gun to fire High-Explosives on soft targets. And this PanzerIIIN variant was also given some extra thick armour and was used for infantry support.
So by 1943 the roles had changed. Panzer III had earlier been intentended to fight tanks, while Panzer IV should be attacking the infantry and bunkers with its short fat gun. But now the roles was the opposite. Panzer III had to fight the enemy foot solidiers while Panzer IV dealt with the enemy tanks.
And in 1943 production of Panzer III had stopped, since the tank was outdated. Instead Germany used all panzer III chassis to build the Sturmgeshütze III. Because Stug had both better armour and firepower than panzer III (since it didn't have a turret), and it also had some of the best optics of any German tank. And it was also much cheaper to produce and days needed for production was also cut down, since Stug didn't need a turret like other tanks.
All in all, Panzer III looks impressive on paper with its big gun and high numbers of tanks produced. But it was only after 1942 that the tank really got some substantial improvements. And it was not until 1941 that the tank was availale in large numbers.
So I would call this tank a little bit of a failure. But its excellent traverse speed enabled the tank chassi to become the most succesful tank destroyer in history.
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World war 2 was an industrial war done on scale never seen before in history. The mobilization never seen in another war. But the organized murder of civilians also took forms of extreme efficiency and industrial scale.
The entire state machinery was brought into this... the railroads, technicians to build ovens, gas chambers, gas vans and ventilation, and electric fences, the secret police tracked up people, the military provided machine guns for the guard towers and land mines outside the camps.
And the efficiency was brutal. Gas did cost nearly nothing to produce. The camps did not need much personnel.
Millions of people died in just a year. Evidence was hidden by burning the bodies to ashes, and then using the ashes to grow trees. The killers did not have to see their victims, since the dirty work of taking care of dead bodies was done by slaves. And nearly no one successfully able to flee from those horrible places. The chance of survival was literary less than one in 250.000 in one of those. And even less if you were a child, elderly, a mother or disabled and unfit to work - because then you were killed right away. And almost all among those few who were lucky to flee were men who were working outside in the forest as a slave and cutting trees. Otherwise was there nearly no chance at all of surviving, except an armed uprising.
To me the lesson of all this is how powerless the individual is against an evil government.
If the Germans were able to do this with such a brutal efficiency in 1942, then imagine what a modern government would be able to do today...
Back then it was almost impossible to flee from a factory of death. You had to worry about guards with machine guns, electric fences, barbed wire, land mines,
And even if you manage to get out of the camp, then you would have to flee out in the woods starved and with a striped pyjamas and no food or cover against the cold. And meanwhile would trucks with guards and barking dogs come out and looking after you. And people would feel sympaties with you and give you food and a blanket if you were lucky. But they would be too afraid to hide you, because then their entire family could be killed if your enemy would found out.
And today I imagine that chance of surviving a genocide is not 1 in 250.000.... but rather it is 0%.
Today governments can track fleeing prisoners with drones flying around or satellites. Heat seeking sensors can see the heat of a human body hiding in a forest. Microphones, surveillance cameras and sensors can easily track people down. With RFID tags can you track down the movement of cattle on a radar. With coal cameras can you see through walls if someone is hiding on the other side.
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@qk-tb2df "as the worlds oil reserves go down (if they actually do)"
First you discover oil. Then you start building oil rigs, and 12-15 years later will the oil field be ready to be used. And then you pump oil. The oil field usally never run out of oil. The problem is rather that when you have pumped out half of the oil of the field, then it will become harder and harder to get oil out from the ground. The oil will be mixed with sand and will be thick and sticky and hard to get out from the ground, and you will need more and more energy to pump the oil from the ground.
And then you need more and more energy to clean your impure oil from sand and other stuff before you can turn your oil into petrol, plastics, asphalt, and other petroleum products.
So the oil will become too expensive and too energy consuming to pump up from the ground at some point. And then the oil field gets closed down even if there are oil left in the ground.
I mean why use 100 barrels of oil to drive a diesel pump if you only pump up 50 barrels of oil from the ground? That would only be idiotic and unsubstainable.
The problem is that we do not discover much new oil fields nowadays. And the few oil fields we find are tiny in size. And the quality of the oil we find is also crappy (ie Canadian tar sands) or it is oil which is not easy and cheap to get - like drilling for oil thousands of meters underneath the water outside the Brazilian coast.
"the supply/demand of electric and other sources will become more and more appealing to markets"
That might be true. But the laws of physics crush the laws of economics.
Unless you of course believe in magic.
"also keep in mind that the world population will eventually start to flatten out as more education is involved"
I guess that is too little too late. We have already depleted much of the freshwater reserves. We have depleted fishstocks. We are using up oil reserves and phosphor mines that provides our agriculture with inputs that allows a highly productive agriculture.
And the population are declining in places with smart people (ie Iran), while the population is increasing in places with dumbass retards (ie Pakistan).
We are seeing a world with more religious fundamentalists and dumbass analphabets in Africa, while civilized westerners and east asians are getting fewer.
The global population is already too large to be substained. And having a few billion more people in the near time will only overstretch the planet even more. Land will turn into deserts as we use up water and cut down trees and use up the top soil with our unsubstainable agriculture. Extinct animals are not coming back. Rainforrests will not come back even if we wait another 1000 years for it to heal. The fresh water reserves under arabia took a thousand years to fill and now most of it has been used up. The aral sea and dead sea will soon be nothing but desert.
Global population will stabilize as you say. But it doesn't seem like it will be through the rational way of stupid people abstaining from having kids they cannot take care of.
Rather the job has to be done by mass starvation.
At this point are countries like India so fucking overpopulated that the next monstous disease, like the bubonic plague 2.0 would not be able to fix the problem even if it manage to kill an astonishing number like 500 million people.
Even if that would happen there would still be a billion people left just in India alone.
I wish that you were right however. I wish that everyone - even the idiots - would have a great standard of living. But that is never going to happen with a planet with 7 billion people. There are simply not enough resources on this planet to go around for everyone, so that we all can live the life of middle class Americans and have
a family with 2 cars, one house, multiple computers, a tv, a fridge, a mixer, a lawn mover, a stereo, a washing machine and so on. And then afford to take a vacation to Spain, Florida, Hawaii or Thailand.
"stop listening to retarded doomsayers and use your brain"
Many doomsayers are wrong. But some of them make good arguments for not believing in a bright future. All I do is to simply just look at the facts. And if someone presents a convincing argument - then I am prepared to change my opinion.
In this case do I really wish that I was wrong, because I don't like the idea that the world is running out of oil, that we are depleting resources and that millions of people will die because of it. And that human civilization has reached its peak, and that every future generation will become poorer than us when energy becomes scarce.
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Building 50 and 70 tonnes tanks demand more specialist vehicles and strain the logistical system to an unnecessarily large degree. It would take 3 Famo-trucks just to be able to pull a single Tiger to a repairshop after it had broken down - and all this timestaking work had to be done in wartime condions where the Wehrmacht didn't have many transport trucks to spare to begin with, and even if some would be available it would still not be an easy job to slowly pull away a heavy tank while the enemy is firing in your direction. Furthermore will you need new military bridges, since neighter the standard 20 tonnes or 40 tonnes bridges would be able to carry those machines.
Those heavy tanks will furthermore be more tactically inflexible since they cannot cross normal bridges or most military bridges... and they are also too slow to keep up with the fast changes of the frontline due to their slow speed.
And when you produce something in larger numbers, then it makes more sense to start using specialized tools that makes massproduction easier. And massproduction in turn makes unit-cost to fall, so that a tank would take less and less manhours to build. A Tiger took 200.000 manhours to build while a new Sherman came out of Detroit every 45 minutes.
Producing things in small numbers simply makes it uneconomical and not very practical to switch over to more division of labour and more effiecent production methods.
Building heavy tanks also demands heavy cranes to carry all extra heavy machinery so I guess a car plant would need much modifications before production could be switched towards wartime production of tanks.
The Germans overengineered their tanks, and this is a lesson we can learn from the Russians. The Russians never overengineered their tanks. If the average lifespan of a tank was just 6 months, then it would pointless to build it with components that last much more longer than that. So the Russians could save both expensive and rare building material as well as manhours by not wasting any extra efforts in building a tank that probably just would be destroyed within a certain point of time. But the Germans never did that. They built their tanks with quality that could make them last for decades in peacetime, despite they would likely be destroyed within some month or year. So the Germans simply wasted time and resources, and also got less tanks produced.
And when it comes to the fighting I say that quantatity has a quality of its own. Germany could have relied more upon the StuGIII and a light weight version of the Panther and probably been doing better than what they did with their over-engineered tanks that either killed themselves in engine fires or got blown up by their own crews because they were too heavy to drag to a repairshop.
And those special scenarios with super tigers rarely happen. Firstly because only 1.300 were built compared to 100.000 Shermans and T-34's.. and secondly because only a few of them was in service, and half of the German tankforce was undergoing maintance because they were over-engineered. And thirdly, the allies were not stupid enough to try to make long distance fire duel at 2000 metres most of the time, but rather tried to let air power and battleship guns kill the German tanks, or make close range flanking attacks where they could make masskillings of the German cats - as they did at Arracourt and Korsun.
And here we come to the final point. The German cats was too expensable to afford to lose one of them.
But a Sherman, a T-34, or a StuG could be lost and it wouldn't be much of a big deal.
A weapon system that is "too-big-to-fail" is not every useful when it comes to war, if a carrier just sits in the harbour all the time that a war lasts because it would be too disastrous to risk losing it, then what use does it have? And if a Tiger tank is too dear to being risked of losing, then how useful is it?
To me it seems like Germany should have tried building a good 30 tonnes medium tank instead. It wouldn't have won the war, but it would perhaps allowed the evil empire to last a few more months.
And the German heavy tanks would have been outclassed by new allied medium tanks pretty soon anways, as the Centurion and T-44 was entering into production. And then the Tiger and Panther would have been as outdated as the old panzerIV was. So new tanks would be needed to be developed anyways if Germany should have kept its upper hand in the technological race.
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Other countries preserves their traditions despite their anti-democratic roots. "Royal" airforce does not really sound democraticly and nice as the name "people's liberation army" of the democratic people's republic of China.
But I guess that superficial attributes are more important than what things really are.
Sweden continues the tradition of parading regiments in front of the Royal palace - a tradition with roots from 1523, when the Swedish King wanted protection from his life guard regiments of his life and to protect his undemocratic royalistic rule.
Personally, I think that a country should honour its past. Atleast when it comes to the symbols of the state - such as coins, military traditions and such. And I also think it is more honest to name a government department "the ministroy of war" instead of naming into som lying Orwellian bullshit like warmongering neoliberal politicians do today when they call it the "ministry of defence" while they go to war against country after country... Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria... I don't care about superficial garbage like politically correct idiots.
I only care if things are opressive in the real world - which Iron crosses, palace guards, royal names on regiments, old royalist military flags are not.
And things that sound nice, doesn't have to be nice things - as DPRK and DDR shows.
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I guess it is a common flaw to appoint people on other grounds than competence. Hitler wanted loyal people in his administration - such as early party members who joined the nazi party before it became popular, and the earlier someone joined the party the more trust did he have for them.
Ingvar Kampfrad (the founder of IKEA) appointed chiefs not according to skill or qualifications, but instead he hired people who were just like himself - white males from the countryside in the little province named Småland - because he felt most trust in those kinds of persons, despite they were lacking in competence and English skills to run such a huge company.
And Napoleon trusted his family members - which he made rulers over the countries he conquered. And everyone kissed his ass, but after 1812 with the defeat in Russia everyone just betrayed him and stabbed him in his back.
Even his own family that he have helped so much.
His empire fell apart. But his legacy is enormous. The metric system, the system of adresses with even and uneven numbers on each side of the street was all thanks to him. He radically modernized the law system across Europe for the better. He helped to destroy serfdom, and thereby laid the foundation for the democratic system in Europe.
He did of course do bad things to like brining back slavery in the west indies (not so much freedom, equality and brotherhood there), but overall did he radically modernize Europe.
And he also ended the Holy Roman empire among other things. He built roads with oaks on the sides, he made a census in Egypt and promoted science.
So despite all bad sides, I still think that this man made more good to humanity than bad.
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The First world war proved that Germany had the best army in the world. The Austro-Hungrian army lost all their core units in 3 lost battles against the Russians the first months of the war, and the Ottomans wasted much of their offensive power with the stupid Armenia winteroffensive.
And after that Germany had to fight the war mostly by herself, since her allies had exhausted almost all their offensive capabilities. But even so, Germany almost got close at winning the war entirely by herself. She knocked out Serbia from the war, and then Russia and Romania, and then Italy, and then also almost Belgium, France and Britain - which were only saved by the arrival by American troops in 1918.
So I would say that the Army of the Kaiser was a much more impressive creation than the Wehrmacht. But in the end it would lose the war anyways because it didn't enough resources to keep on fighting, and the leadership also had some useless full retards in command as in all other armies at that time.
Falkenhayn and his waste of a million men at Verdun is probably the best example. I think that Hitlers anti-monarchist anti-traditionalist attitudes made him an enemy of the old guard within the German army, which led him to fire all the old retards and put new fresh minds in the positions of power.
And without Hitler, there would never had been any great career for Guderian, Manstein, von Paulus and others.
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1. Japan could not get the resources it needed for its own industry. So it needed to steal them from other Asian countries, and Japan did not have enough transport ships to transport all plunder to Japan.
2. Japan was technologically inferior to America and the early victories was won much thanks to outdated equipment the Americans had. But soon things changed and America would get superior aircrafts, and American tanks would outclass all armour the Japanese had. And the Americans had access to the Japanese codes.
Winning in the Philippines against America might be easy when you have the element of surprise and fight a lightly equiped enemy. But fighting without the element of surprise against an enemy with superior tanks is much harder.
3. The Japanese army was involved in wars on multiple fronts against Vietminh, China, Russia, Australia, Britain and the USA. And troops were spread out on so many islands that there was not enough transport ships to supply them - especially not when the industry also wanted the same transport ships so that oil, aluminium, coal, copper, rubber, cotton, sugar, rice and other things could be shipped to Japan.
4. America produced more aircrafts in 1943 than Japan did during the entire war (including the years of war they fought in China). And the American planes were also much better than the old outdated junk the japanese had. And America had plenty of oil and trained pilots, while japan did not.
5. Even if Midway had ended in a total victory for Japan, it would hardly change anything. Japan would never been able to take Australia, India or California in 1942 anyways. Japan was already overextended and could at best only spend their time to consolidate their earlier gains.
But meanwhile would America build up a new fleet in the pacific. And British and American ships would be transfered from the Atlantic and the mediterranean in the meanwhile to stabilize the situation.
6. America realized that the war was won in 1943 so they stepped down military production even before the war ended. Had the Japanese won at Midway, then America would probably have increased military production instead of decreasing it.
And we could have seen Montana class battleships become reality - instead of being disbanded before they could enter service, as what really happened.
7. The co-operation between Japan and the Axis powers were nearly non-existant. While the allies had superior co-operation and huge land masses of resources. Japan might have 5 million men in China. But so what?
Those men were poorly equiped 3rd world infantry. And good fighting morale only go so far when you have to fight against Russian troops with IS2 and ISU152 tank support. Or American troops with superior amounts of artillery and tank support and excellent radios. American troops were better fed, they had more ammo to waste, they had better firearms. And Americas population was much larger than Japans. USA had 12 million men in uniform and they could easily call upon even more millions of manpower if needed to defeat a crappy japanese army.
But I doubt America would even bother. They would just use artillery, airpower and armour instead of wasting their own blood in fighting the japanese. Or give China or Russia some surplus weapons to deal with the japs.
Even junk like M3 Lee and Stuart tanks would outclass most of the armour Japan had in 1944 and 1945. Indeed, Japan did barely have any tank support at all.
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@michaelritzen8138
They would atleast not have fared any worse by not declaring war. I think Hitler made a big mistake even if we would assume that USA would join the war at a later point.
Hitler had units tied up in France which he could have used on the eastern front. And a 20 extra divisions could have been enough to prevent the Stalingrad disaster from happening.
And maybe he then would have been able to win the 1942 campaign then and basicly knocking USSR out of the war.
I also think that Roosevelt would have been very limited in the aid he could have given the USSR. Had USA not been at war with Germany it could have been politically difficult to give away as much aid as they did irl.
So the lend lease help would then have been small and not very significant - just as it was in 1941 and 1942.
It is possible that USSR still would have been able to defeat the Axis, but on the other hand would it also be very possible for Hitler to have defeated Russia.
Losing southern Russia would have been devastating to the Russian war effort, and the economy could have fallen apart like it did in 1917,
And the manpower shortages would become more of a problem for Russia. Germany could to some extent compensate their lost men by better weapons and more firepower. And a high GDP per capita of rich countries allows them to replace male workers with machines and tractors to a larger extent than a poor country like Russia. The Russian economy worked impressingly and surprisingly well during the war, and 80% of the country's GDP was directed towards the war effort - which is an extremely high number which normally only rich countries are able to achieve. Russia managed to achieve this by careful planning before the war, and the country had stored up vital resources before the war so a crash like 1917 due to resource shortages and price inflation would not happen. But this way of doing things could not work forever... and by late 1942 were Russia starting to running low on many vital resources. And if the resourced had runned out, then the industrial output would have fallen down like a rock. And Russia would have been forced into a dilemma - should they put more men in agriculture or mining? or should they put them in industry instead? or should they be put into the military instead?
All 3 branches desperatly needed more manpower at this very important time period during the war. And more men in the economy would have meant less men for the military. And more men in the military would have meant less men in the economy, and weapons lost in battle would become more difficult to replace.
So by 1942 I think it seems like Russia was in a more dire situation than Germany, despite Germany had not even started full rationing and mobilized its women for industrial work.
Without gigantic amounts of lend-lease and the resources from southern Russia it seems like Russia would have been forced to fight a terrible up-hill battle for the rest of the war. And Britain would not have been able to do much to liberate continental Europe on its own.
Russia had lost its entire airforce in 1941 and the army had lost millions of men, and large amounts of manpower reserves and industrial centers had also been lost to the Germans. So the war had already started bad for the Russians. They had lost 80% of their alumnium production to the Germans at the start of the war, and that was a hard blow to Russias ability to make aircrafts.
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They would probably have a hard time. Industrial countries does have an advantage - like the North had in the American Civil War. And in world war 1 Russia was suffering from a cronic shortage of rifles, guns - and most of all: Ammunition.
Building up an industry is something that takes time. At best it would normally take 15-30 years for a country to industrialize. Not only do you need a factory, you also need to import tools and machinery and modern production technologies in order to be able to build modern tanks, planes, cruise missiles and submarines.... You will also have to solve the problem, that a country that does not do any manufacturing will not get any foreign currency to pay for all imports.
And even if you somehow get some imports and manage to steal a perfect blueprint of the latest fighter jet from the pentagon, you will not be able to copy it unless you got skilled workers and years of technological know-how within the aircraft producers in your country.
Allow me to quote economic proffessor Ha Joon Chang:
"When Germany became as poor as Peru and Mexico right after the Second World War, no one suggested that it should be reclassified as a developing country, because people knew that it still had command over technological, organizational and institutional knowledge that had made it one of the most formidable industrial powers before the war."
So as you see, building up technological know-how, organizatinal skills, and well-functioning institutions takes a long time. And neighter Peru or Mexico have catched and are as rich as Germany today despite their GDP was roughly the same size in 1945.
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"Now do a video explaining why Vietnam had NO chance in the Vietnam war"
While I agree that economic power in itself cannot determine the outcome of a war, I do however think that it can say a lot about the likelyhood of a certain outcome.
Usally does an industrial country defeat an unindustrial economy - as with for example the American civil war.
In the case of Japan vs USA I would say that USA had such a crushing superior industrial strenght that it more likely to win on the lottery than seeing Japan winning a war against USA while simultanously fighting wars against China, Russia and the British empire.
The reason why the Vietnam war ended in a failure for America was because they failed to create any realistic war goals. The thought that body counts was a goal in itself to win the war - but that is just a stupid idea of economifying warfare.
War is not about killing enemies in a faster rate than they can be replaced. Only idiots think that.
Both the American military and political leadership lacked basic understanding what war is. And they also thought that winning wars by economic means would be enough - because WWII was much won that way, as they saw it.
But Vietnam was not some stupid economic game, and nor could the enemy be understood by game theory. Ho Chi-Minh was not a typical Communist, even if the CIA and the political leadership of America thought so.
Ho Chi-Minh was most of all a nationalist. And after that he was a democrat. And after that he was a leftwinger. Indeed, he even got support from the CIA when Vietminh fought a guerilla war against Japan and was seen as a close friend to America.
But when the war with Japan ended things changed, because France wanted their colony back while Ho Chi Minh wanted independence for Vietnam. And USA had to pick side, and choosed to support France over some unimportant unknown farmer in Vietnam. So when America refused to sell him arms, he had to turn to the Chinease communists instead to get weapons - and after that he was begun to be seen as a Communist by America, despite all what he really wanted was a unified independent Vietnam with democratic rule. And only after the west had turned against him did he go into the Communist camp.
The next big mistake by America was to back the unpopular, despotic and corrupt regime in South Vietnam after the French indo-China war had ended.
This South-Vietnamese regime was hated by almost everyone for many different reasons. But once again did America have this ignorant view that it was simply a battle between Communism and liberal-democratic capitalism.
So America had no understanding for their enemy and how they could win over the people to their side.
The people in Vietnam fought for many other reasons than to promote communism. Poor farmers hated rich landlords that stole 80% of their incomes and treated them like medieval serfs. Some people hated the corruption and the power abuse of the rich landlord class that ruled South Vietnam. Some people hate the south Vietnamease regime because it was ruled by a catholic leadership (Ngo Dinh Diem). And some people were just nationalists that wanted to unify both Vietnams into a single country. And some minority people had been mistreated by the South Vietnamase government and therefore took up arms against it.
So the perhaps easiest way for America to win the Vietnam war would have been to throw the corrupt South-Vietnamease government under the bus and force the ruling class in Vietnam to agree to a landreform so all poor Vietnamese farmers could get their own piece of land to farm so they wouldn't have to be treated as slaves by some landowner.
But America could not agree to this. If they twisted the arms of their allies they could become accused of US-imperialism, and that would look very bad to the world. America needed allies in the Cold war, so they rather kept the impopular South Vietnamease regime in place and fought a long war to try to keep it in power.
But America lacked any ideas how to win this war. They thought that "body counts" would be the way to go. But the American solidiers didn't fail to see the insanity of this stupid doctrine that the military leadership promoted.
Hamburger hill was captured from Vietnamease troops after heavy casualties, but as soon as the hill was captured the Americans abandoned this hill - because the body count job had been done. And only after a few months did the Vietnamease retake the hill again.
So all the losses of lives had been for nothing. American solidiers had died for nothing while while high ranking personnel got their medals for wasting their own mens lives.
The solidiers made something akin to a working class revolt against their superiors. And fragging and threats became commonplace, so that American unit leaders would know that they will have a hadgrenade thrown at them and be killed by their own troops if they ever tried to waste their solidiers lives in pointless attacks.
So by 1970 had the fighting morale of US Army fallen apart and the leadership had lost control, and no American solidier wanted to be the last man to die in this pointless war. Corruption was rampant in South Vietnam where South Vietnamese generals sold military equpiment on the black market that America had given them. Mortars, grenades, rifles and even tanks could be bought by anyone.. and American troops started to find lots of American weapons in the hands of Vietcong. And drug sales were also a part of this rotten economy.
America had won the battles in the tet-offensive and regained control over the cities. But on the other hand had the large vietnamease countryside all been lost to the enemy. And people had lost trust in all the fake statistics produced by the military about everything from body counts to sorties flown - as a measurement of progress and effictiveness.
People lied about everything either to get promotions or to get home so they could survive the war. And even the accounting metodology idea in itself was flawed. If a dead vietnamese body was found after a battle, then both the infantry, the artillery and airpower would want to claim it as their kill - so there would be no complaints about their unit not fullfilling their monthly quota of kills, and that they therefore next month would be sent out to much more dangerous missions so the monthly kill quota could be boosted.
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The late 1800s was an age when nationalism was taken to the extreme, not just by Germany but by all countries. And Germany was a young country that only came into being very lately (1871), so Germany had to try to from a unifying thing... all the small different German Kingdoms felt like one people rather than as feeling as Bavarians, Prussians, Wurtembergers, Saxons, and Hessians in the first hand. So nationalism was drived into high gear, and the military was a way to achive this. With one military parade after another, all flag waving, all talk abour Germanys long and proud military traditions, and all beautiful patriotic songs and military marches were played non-stop such as Preußens Gloria, Die wacht Am Rhein and Oh Deutschland hoch in ehren.
The founding father of Germany - Otto von Bismarck, also tried to unify the German people by bring it togheter against a common enemy. And the Germans was taught to fear the French and Russians in order unifying the country against a common threat, and appealing to the feelings of all Germans to protect their loved fatherland.
But the side affect from this fear was that Germany went a little bit paranoid, and they thought they needed to maintain a strong military to protect against all outer threats.
And later on would the retarded Kaiser Wilhelm II take power, and he never understood how to play this game of diplomacy and didn't understand politics. He was a clumby arrogant idiot, and he went into collision course with France, Russia and England. He decided to build a huge navy for his country after reading a book that said that the country that dominates the seas would control the world. And his hunger for national prestige also contributed to this, as well as the fear the German military had about having too many socialist urban recruits in the Army, so defence spending was rather put into the navy instead.
But that just made Britain feeling threatened by Germany, and created a naval power arms race between Germany and Britain.
But the German army was great as well in 1914. And much money had been thrown into the military for prestigious reasons, like in all other countries. And the industrial revolution had also allowed massproduced weapons and uniforms.. so massarmies was also possible for the first time. And the German army had started to use their grey uniforms for all German states in 1912 as another step to unifying the country.
And the first world war was a German national trauma, that helped to bring togheter the country. But in other ways it also created division.. many became tired of the German Kaiser and demanded that he should abdicate in order to save his country from further pains in 1918. At first he refused, but soon he was kind of forced to accept it.
Many Germans then dreamt back to the days of the monarchy. And other Germans felt like their military was about to win the war - but the civilian protesters let the victorious army down (much like many Americans look upon their war in Vietnam).
The Versaille treaty forbade Germany to have a strong military and territory was lost and economic compensation would be paid to Germanys enemies. So it was a hard peace. And then Hitler came some decades later, and fixed the economy took back lost land and gave germans pride and jobs. And the military power was being restored with great public support.
And the old tradition of unifying the country by cermonies, parades, patriotic music and culture and creating fear of a foreign enemy was brought up again. Hindenburgs funeral became televised as a great ceremony over a national hero. And likewise was the veterans day and the nazi party rallys made into great military spectacles. To impress foreign allies and frighten the allies from invading Germany. And to create an image to the German people and the world that people supported Hitler whole heartedly, and it created a cult of personality. Even today his propaganda movies are intoxicating. But I guess they give the wrong impression about his regime... changeing your countrys national anthem to contain the word Hitler seems a bit to egotiscial. And likewise the idea of making a party flag into a national flag, and even incorparate it into military standards. And having the soliders swear an oath directly to Hitler. And name a youth organization after himself....... all this after just some years in power. And on propaganda movies, this all seem so natural, but I wonder what the average German felt about all this new things.
Sorry for a long post.
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The German solidier wasn't any better. I would say that their training and tactics was the thing that made them superb opponent until the last days of the war in 1945.
The German army was well equiped and well organized in 1914. For decades the Germans had planned the Schlieffen Plan in to the tinyiest detail and made time tables for all trains carrying troops and supplies.
And even when millions of men and supplies should be supplied on Belgiums tiny roads and bridges they never got any traffic jams, becasue everything had been carefully planned and the Prussian burecracy was the most effiecent of all bureucratic machinerys. Germany had also studied the the Russo-japanease war and the Boer war and well learned the lessons, so German troops had their grey uniforms that blended in with terrain superbly while the french had their red-blue uniforms and suffered enormous losses, before they realized their mistake.
The German army also had the largest proportion of engineers, and every solider was equiped with a spade and much digging was included in their military education of their troops.
While the french had no digging at all in their military education. The British army had learned their lesson about the value of camouflage and digging in, so they performed better than any of the allied Armies. Even the Russians that should have learned more from their was with Japan.
The German army also had other strenghts, which would later on also become valueable in world war II. They developed new weapons and tactics, because Germany had no chance of winning a long war of attrition, so they had to try to come up with new ways of defeating their enemy so they could win fast. They tried planes, uboats, flamethrowers, submachine guns, poison gas, terrorbombings with zeppelins.. you name it. But they also turned all ideas on their heads, and instead of bombarding the same area for a week with a million shells and lead hundred of thousands of men forward by orders from the Highest Commander in chief, the Germans did the opposite. They made a short intensive bombardment to soften up their enemy and then launched a surprise attack with a small group of men that was armed with special weapons, body armour, handgrenades, flamethrowers and submachine guns. And those men could make their own decisions at the frontline instead of constantly awaiting orders from Headquarters.
And the best men was picked for this fighting teams called "Stosstruppen" and gived extra training in infiltration tactics.
And they proved very succesful in defeating their enemies, the first tank offensive the allied launched managed to win lots of ground from the Germans, so they decided to make a counterattack with their Stosstruppen and they managed to not only to win back all lost ground but also push back the allies beyond the original frontline the battle had started from.
This idea of lower commanders taking own iniatives was not entirely new since even the Prussian Army had encouraged their lower commanders to think for themselves and improvise instead of blindly following orders from the top. And this was an important reason why the germans could do so well, when the lack of radio communication made it to take 8 hours on average for an order to reach the frontline from the General Headquarters. And when this order finally came to the frontline, it was often times outdated... the weather had changed, the enemy had escaped while you waited for order to press on, or worse he could have recovered from the iniatal surprise from the attack and brought forward reinforcements and digged in.
The German army was simply superior in 1914, and almost managed to defeat all the allies on its own hand, but Americas involvement finally became the straw the crushed the camels neck.
In World War 2 Germany would use their stosstruppen tactics (aka auftragstaktik) with great success. Their skilled commanders and their rapid decision making caught their enemies by surprise time and time again. And their superb military training made them formidable opponents even in defence. They were also early fans of the radio, which enabled tank commanders to coordinate their attacks and take out superior Russian tanks. And the radio also enabled them to coordinate support from the airforce to a degree the allies couldn't.
And once again they researched superweapons as a way to neutralize the allied superiority in manpower.
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David, your statement is ignorant. France not only had more tanks and better and more modern tanks than Germany. They also had 12 armoured Divisions compared to 10 Germans, and on top of that they also had lots of tanks deployed among the infantry - a luxury Germany couldn't afford simply because they didn't have enough tanks.
Furthermore, defensive lines wasn't just a French thing, even the Germans and Erich von Manstein himself was a great proponent of them. And the German forts at the Siegfried line was were similiar to the french design, and they proved their value when France tried many failed attacks on Germany to come to the resuce of Poland.
And many in the french military leadership predicted where the German attack would come. And they won some important tank battles over the Germans in the first days of operation Gelb. Then the political leadership of the allies paniced, and the new british government decided to call back their expeditionary force, which in turn left the flank open for the Belgian army, so they had to retreat as well. And they eventully got cut off by the German push forward and was then forced to evacuate at Dunkirk.
So basicly was it the british side that fucked everything up, while France stood alone, with their frontline in caos, and with a weak political leadership, was then forced to give up and surrender.
The french army did nothing wrong.
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Russia had a large badly equiped and badly supplied army in world war1, and every russian artillery piece could just fire a fraction of the number of shells that other major powers guns did each month... and if you think that France, UK and Germany had problems with ammunition, then their problems were tiny in comparison.
The allies tried to open a way to transport weapons to russia, but it failed at Galliopoli. So Russia had to industrialize in the middle of the war, and as men moved from farming into uniforms or into the industries making the uniforms food production fell, and wages for industry workers rose as the factories desperately tried to get enough workers.... and the result became inflation and foodshortages. And hunger, economic problems and military defeats caused the Russian revolution.
In theory Russia would have been the strongest of all powers in 1914, when they besides of having the largest army also had the largest reserves with 26million men desposable, while the second largest power: Germany, only had 6 million men in reserves.
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Regarding your model, the "industry/resource" component is well adapted to total wars like WWI&II but in asymmetrical wars and ancient (limited) wars, weapons are often bought on the market (and even soldiers as mercenaries). In this case, the focus is on finding money through any means (taxation/ransoms/foreign support/...) not in building industries, technological innovations and strategic destruction.
Interesting theory. Maybe industrialization have become more important as the cost of killing an enemy has risen.
During the time of Caesar It did cost about 75 cents to kill a man, under Napoleon the cost had risen to $3,000, and in World War 1 the cost had run up to $21,000 per dead solidier. In World War 2 the cost had risen to $55,000 and then it rose to $170,000 in Vietnam.
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Germany had fought against almost the entire world alone for 4 years. Its really nothing strange with them running out of manpower and exhausting every other resource.
The Austrians sucked, and the Ottomans sucked as well. So Germany had to carry the team to victory alone, and it might actully have succeded with their great army, if they had not been stupid enough to getting USA involved.. and when America sent hundreds of thousands of troops each month the war got lost.
Germany had no tanks, almost no trucks, no men, their traitorous allies was about leaving Germany... so the situation was bad despite all victories and having knocked out Serbia, Romania, Italy and Russia alone, and having signed a harsh peace treaty and getting promised food deliveries from conquered land in the east.
If America didn't had joined the war things could have ended very differently. The British army wasn't feeling to happy either after Somme and all else, but it was still a force to be reckon with. But the Belgian army was almost knocked out in 1914. While the French army had suffered terribly in 1914 as the entire German army pushed on them in early 1914... and making mass charges with bayonettes in old colourful uniforms costed enormous amounts of french lives.
The germans tried to crush France again later in the battle of Verdun which ended in a costly draw for both sides. And the battle might perhaps been the most awful battle in human history, and 80% of the french army fought there.. and collected traumas and terrible memories.
And in 1917 was the Nivelle offensive launched... and the french once again lost huge numbers of men, and the soliders started a strike and refused to obey their officers when they wanted to make stupid attacks, but they promised to fight bravely to defend their country. However, the Germans strangely enough never heard about the strike... and if they had, it might very well have ended the war, as the Germans would just had launched an attack against the french and crushed everything that was left of France's will to fight.
And in 1918, Germany might very well had crushed the French army as well.
In 1918 the odds were even between the allies and the centralpowers. But Americas entry into the war tipped the balance so hard in favour for the allies that Germany was doomed to fail.
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Germany invaded France the same day as Churchill became prime minister and he was new and unexperienced when he got this caos on his hands, and he got a phone call by the french prime minister who was paniced and thought the game was lost and that the sky was falling down (but in reality it wasn't, and french had already won a few minor battles). So Churchill took the french prime ministers word and started a retreat towards the coast. That left the flank open on the Belgian army so they had to retreat as well. So for 10 days they just moved backwards... and the germans could make steady progress.
Their advance was spread out on three army groups for Holland, Belgium and France. And that left the allied Headquarters in confusion when attacks occured at many places at the same time. Where was the main blow? Was the other attacks just to trick the allied defenders into the wrong direction? Anyways, the fighting kept on.
And the Germans quickly took control over the skies, because the germans had positioned their airfields close to the front so they could fly many missions per day, unlike the allies who had their airfields long behind the frontline.
Allied bombers also tried to attack all germans moving on the roads, but the germans had skillfully incorporated airforce personnel with anti-aircraft guns in the army so the allied losses of bombers grew at an unsubstainable rate, that they had to abolish their bombings after a few days if they wanted to have an airforce left of the month.
And the germans harden their grip over the control of the skies, and bombed allied troops on the ground and knocked out trains with french tanks loaded upon them before they could even reach the front.
And the British army got cut off and surrounded and had to flee back to England, and succesfully done so in the battle of Dunqurk. And the germans captured large amounts of trucks and other equipment. And the british army had lost all their heavy equipment when they had fled. And the germans could now push on into France without having to going across the Maginot line. Paris was taken. And without England and Belgium in the game, France saw it as pointless to keep on fighting alone. The odds was not in their favour, and they knew how terrible the previous world war had been. And unlike 1914 when people was cheering on the streets when the world broke out, people was already tired of wars when it started in 1939.
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The germans were right about the assumption that landings would happen somewhere within range of allied airpower. But they couldn't pinpoint exactly where, so there easiest guess would be that it would happen in the most narrow part of the English channel. The allies, then tried to reinforce that belief by doubling up the airstrikes at the Calais area, while normandy didn't get as much attention by the bombers.
So then the landings happened, and years of preperations.. with planning for what men to put where, getting the right equipment and then all logistical tasks of transporting fuel, ammo, food 1,5 million men. And it all that went smoothly, and deserves credits as one of the most succesfully planned operations in history in that sense. But what was not impressive was the failure of the allied intelligence to pick up information about the terrain around the beachhead. So while the allied were succesful in their landings, their breakout couldn't be done for 2 months.. despite the germans were heavily outnumbered (just 200.000 men) and didn't have the luxury of supplies as allied units and they also got hammered by naval and airforces.
The Germans didn't even commit half of their forces away from the Calais area even 2 months after the fighting in Normandy had begun, because they though it just was a small operation to divert attention away to an even larger landing.
The gemans had skilled hardened veterans leading their men, and they undestood how to fully take advantage of all trees and bushes in Normandy for making ambushes, and dug themselves in to protect themselves from allied bombardement. The Americans under Patton tried to make a push in the west but got stuck, and Montgomery tired to make a push in the east but failed. The allied intelligence simply had forgot taking this terrain into consideration when they planned the Normandy landings.. despite all access to air reconnaissance planes, local partisans, people who had lived, worked and in the area or been there for tourism.
The sturdy buildings, the stone walls, the thick hedgerows, the tightly clustered houses in many villages, the narrow roads which often were sunken or having stone embarkments on either sides, lots of sturdy buildings enables every competend commander to recreate a great defensive position like the german lines in world war 1.
The allied tried multiple times to breakout but failed every time.. and it seemed like the Germans could have contained them in Normandy for the entire rest of the year. And things didn't look happier for the allies when the british army was starting to run out of infantry after all the fighting.
So an allied a push towards Cherbourg was needed so the troops in Normandy could get a harbour, so the job of supplying this huge force could be done easier. And the American push to the west was succesful, but the main German defensive line around Normandy remained intact, and the allies were still contained by this tiny German force.
But the loss of Cherbourg made Hitler furious, and he demanded a counter-attack.
So the German army repeated the mistakes the allies had done the 2 months, and now they themselves attacked with tanks in terrain totally unsuitable for them. And the Germans suffered so heavy losses that their offensive at Avranches that they had to cancel the operation. And now the German army in Normandy had been weakened so much that it no longer could hold the defensive line intact, as the allies made their next breakout attempt. So at the end of the month the German defense had collapsed, and Hitler had helped to create one of the most fateful military defeats the German army suffered from in World War 2.
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But if you use killratio as a measurement of success, then you will end up with very strange conclutions. First of all, I don't know how you numbers are calculated. Many russian tanks was lost in 1941 thanks to airpower attacking the railway transports and only about half the tanks was operational when the Germans invaded due the lack of maintance and repairs. So if half the tanks in a unit is away on repairs, then its much harder to fight effectivly.
Furthermore, the german forces had more experienced crewmen, while the russians used untrained farmboys. The Germans had refined their combat tactics after the wars in the west, while the russians had purged their army. The germans also had air superiority til the battle of Kursk, so they didn't have to the same constraints. The early t-34 tanks did also lack radio which decreased the level of co-ordination of a unit. And in the early war was the russian tank arm scattered in small units, so when the russians managed to do a succesful attack the effects became very limited.
In all, the tank was great in combat, but bad tactics, bad tank crews and other factors limited its performance. And that is hardly the fault of the tank in itself.
With the reasoning that killratios = success, one could argue that the Elephant was the best tank in world war 2, since it had the highest killratio of any tank.
If the numbers are inflated, and to what extent the role of crewskill, leadership, noobiness of the enemy and circumstances played in, I don't know.
However, that tank was considered unreliable, too heavy, too slow, too inflexible when it its so slow and can't use most bridges, and it did cost way too much to produce, it lacked a mobile turret.
So the germans only produced a few of them and took them out of production in less than a year. If killratios was everything, then I guess that the germans would have kept them in production never replaced them with Tiger I and other tank destroyers.
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"Understanding all these misconceptions and learning about how it actually was I can´t stop to wonder how the Axis actually did achieve so much during the war."
Germany had luck and the element of surprise. They had a superb co-operation between airforce and army. Their airforce tactics was superior, and they could use their planes more often than the allies since they positioned their airfields 20 minutes flight behind the frontline (instead like hours as the allies), which enabled them to fly more bombing missions with each plane on a single day.
The German army also had a long prussian tradition of good leadership and buraucracy. Encirclement battles, kampfgruppen- tactics, stormtrooper infiltration tactics, auftrags taktik was also important components of their successes.
The German army was the best in the world in World War1, but many in the high command were retards. But after the Versaille peace the army was deprived of its heavy weapons and forced to shrink from 3 million to 100.000.
All that meant that Germany only could keep its very best most talented men for the army, which it did. So the Worlds best army got rid of all but the best.
And reichwehr became an excellent little army, but it lacked heavy weapons and numbers. But that changed when Hitler transformed the army in 1935 and reintroduced conscription and created an airforce and armour divisions and artillery.
Germany then got both numbers and heavy equipment to their excellent leadership. But even so, so was Germany much less prepared for a war in 1939, than it was in 1914. But 1939 was a new age with the radio, which enabled coordination of supporting fire, reinforcements, troop coordination and mobility that now crushed the advantage the defending side had in 1914.
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West got 3 weaknesses:
1. They look at war as just mathematic game, without realizing that not everything could be measured.
2. The wars in the middle east have been colonial wars, and real existential threats. But now the line has become blurry after hostile muslim populations have settled in large numbers in Europe.
3. The low birthrates have meant that fewer men can be send away from the economy to serve in the military, and not everyone is keen on sacrificing their only son in a war when they only got one or two childs.
So with less lazy military doctrinal thinking, huge concription armies and modern weaponary, and with good motivation for a just war, then I think the western Armies would be superior in a world war against China, middle-east, Africa and Russia.
Saddam had basicly the same crappy equipment as China, but the Iraqi army was slightly better upgraded, and their soliders were battle experienced after the war with Iran. And the numbers was also quite impressive.
But the USA led coalition would anyways easily crushed Saddams army like a bug under boot during the 1991 war.
So I don't put much faith in the corrupt Chinease army consisting of poorly equiped beggars.
The Russian military is impressive, but the country is hardly a superpower. Its GDP is smaller than Spains and its population is not large enough to play around and taking massive losses like in the past days of glory.
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It is true that Germany didn't begin the war with a big army and industry like in 1914. The re-arment and competent leadership could compensate for some of the shortages, and later on would plunder help too. But it wasn't until 1943 Germany was able to make large scale assembly line production like the allies. Before then Germany simply didn't have any large scale factories and equipment for such.
One another thing worth mentioning is that an economic crisis can be positive for re-arment, since you don't have to take the unpopular decision of stealing workers from the private sector to feed your army with manpower. With the massunemployment, people rather happily went from unemployed to become a man in uniform, or going to a factory to make that uniform.
Americas quick total mobilization for a war economy in 1942 wouldn't have been possible to make as smoothly without the massunemployment, and all empty factories that laid idle and could be converted into factories for tank production and building guns. The low standard of living under the great depression also made people more tolerant of war rationing, since they were used to meager standard of living.
Had the economy been rolling along well before the war, people might have been protesting the higher taxes and lower standard of living and the limitations put on concumer choice.
But things wasn't like that, so the reaction in USA to the war became quite different. People remember it as a time when the American people became one. Everyone, rich and poor, black and white, women and men had to make sacrifices for the final victory. Unemployed was no longer seen as worthless, but as military service men worthy of respect and deserving of veterans benifits for risking their lives for the country. Other unemployed got jobs in the war industry with well paid wages, and since foodproduction actully did grow under the war, America could afford both guns and butter, and people could get a much better diet than other wartorn nations.
People got jobs, income, and unemployment in US went down to 0%! some factories owners even had to go out on the streets and start searching for workers themselves to fill the labour shortages.
And the high inflation during the war had wiped away the large national debt. The economy was rolling. New innovations was ready to become the next generation of consumer products. And the people which was broken and starving, was now in good shape and had their pockets filled saved money, since the wartime rationing system had made it impossible to waste the money on consumer goods.
And veterans was guaranteed housing benifits and could also contribute to the great demand for consumer goods that would create the economic boom after World War 2.
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I guess there are many differences now. Especially logisticswise with all combustion engines, railways, massproduced arms, and food that can last for years on a shelf. But media and demographics is also different.
And the cost of war have increased according to some:
"Lowell Limpus says that it cost Caesar about 75 cents to kill an enemy in his day. Napoleon almost bankrupted France because it cost a fraction under $3,000 to kill an enemy in his day. The World War ran the cost up to $1,000 per dead solider, and it is estimated that before the present conflicts ends it will have risen to $50,000."
And also ammunition consumption has risen dramatically.
On average it took 400 rounds to hit an enemy under Napoleons days, and
"In Would War II, the United States and its allies expended 25,000 rounds of ammunition to kill a single enemy soldier. In the Korean War, the ammunition expenditure had increased four-fold to 100,000 rounds per soldier; in the Vietnam War, that figure had doubled to 200,000 rounds of ammunition for the death of a single enemy soldier."
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Many reasons....
1. The Germans took the Russians by surprise and could encircle huge groups of men on the first days, and when encircled units were trapped without food, ammo, fuel and water their fighting effectivness was much lower.
Furthermore, did the unexpected attack on Russia cause lots of confusion so the Russians couldn't co-ordinate all their men to make effective counter-measures to the German invasion.
2. The Russian army lacked good leadership since Stalin had killed lots of Generals, Field marshals, Colonels and so on... and then he took incompetent, but politically loyal men to replace all his murdered Generals as leaders over their each own army with hundreds of thousands of men.
And those stupid incompetent leaders would make many mistakes... attacking on the wrong time, getting lured into traps, and so fourth.
3. Russia wasn't prepared for the war, so their airplanes were nicely positioned as a straight lines on their airfields. So when Russias former friend (Germany) decided to betray her, it was quite easy for Russias enemies to destroy thousands of Russian planes the first days of the war.
Thousands of planes was destroyed even before the Russians had any chance to make counter-measures.
4. The Germans would have the total advantage of control over the skies and could therefore use planes to spot Russians troop movements on the ground, while the Russians couldn't see were the Germans were going with their ground troops. So the Germans could make better plans than the Russians.
Another advatage the Germans had with air superiority was that they could bomb Russian troops on the ground and attack trains transporting Russian tanks to the frontline and easily knock them out even before those tanks had a chance to get unloaded off the trains.
And when German ground troops were in danger of getting destroyed they could always call their airforce for help, and German planes would rain bombs upon Russian troops and destroy their attack. But the Russians ground troops never had the same luxury in 1941 because their entire air force had been destroyed the first days of the war.
5. Russian tanks didn't have any radio, while the Germans had. So the Russian unit leader had to order his troops movments by using signal flags in the middle of all enemy fire. And the view range was also limited.
So if you roll forward and attack an enemy there is not much of a problem. But if the enemy on the other hand just suddenly appears on the sides and the tanks got no way of telling their commander, so he could order a swing to the left or right, well then you got a problem...
And Russian tanks would therefore often get outflanked and outsmarted by the experienced German tank arm.
6. The Russian army was in a bad shape when the war begun. On paper it was extremely impressive, but about half of the tanks in a normal tank regiment was in need of repairs before they could be put to use against the Germans.
And Russian infantry regiments often didn't have the manpower they were supposed to have in times of war.
7. The German surprise attack caused panic in Stalin and made him make stupid decisions out of desperation. He forbade retreats and ordered ill-crafted offensives that costed lots of men. And things didn't get better by him ordering the execution of people who disobeyed his insane orders.
And hundreds of thousands Russian solidiers would get killed by the Russians themselves during the war - a waste of lives and solidiers no other army in history have been able to afford.
And the Russians also used unarmed men in punishment battallions to attack German positions in order to clear minefields. And the Russians also lacked rifles for all of their troops, so a regiment could therefore attack the Germans like in the "Enemies at the gates" movie about Stalingrad, so not every man had something to shot with, unless he could pick up a rifle from a dead comrade to use... so the losses was of course heavy for the Russians.
8. Germany had the best army in the world in 1941. In fact, the army of 1941 was even much better than the German army of 1940 that had conquered Western Europe.
The confidence and pride of the German army was record high in 1941. The solidiers was trained and battle experienced. The superior German tactics from World War 1 combined with a great airforce, a skilled leadership, the invention of the radio, and the newly used kampfgruppe tactics had helped the Germans crush the armies of Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, France, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Yugoslavia, Greece and giving the British a bloody nose.
But as I said earlier, the German army had even become much better in 1941 than what it was in 1940. Since the Germans had learned lessons from the wars in Europe and seen what worked well, and what didn't work well.
So training and tactics was improved to deal with all the shortcomings.... the oversized panzer divisions had their number of tanks reduced by half, so more panzer divisions could be created.
The great StuGIII had proven itself to be a great weapon in France and was therefore ordered into massproduction. It was decided that German tanks should get more powerful guns, because they had lacked much to ask for in the fight against French tanks.
So Germany was in the best fighting shape, while the Russian army was in a shitty condition. Stalin had just killed his military leadership. His regime was extremely unpopular - especially in Ukraine where millions had been starved to death under his reign.
Much of his tanks was in need for repairs. And the self-confidence of the Red army wasn't that great after Stalins embarrasing failure in Finland - the poorest country in Europe - where the Russians suffered heavy losses against a small and badly equiped army.... while the Russians had plenty of tanks, planes and guns to spare, but failed to gain any results.
9. Another reason worth mentioning is that the Axis had numerical superiority at the frontline in the first months of the war, because half of the huge Russian army was positioned in the Russian interior, and not all Armies was sitting along the border with Germany.
So it would take time for the Russians to move all men to the front. And meanwhile did the Germans have the upper hand in the fighting the first months of the war.
The Germans had prepared for this war, and the Russians had not.
And the Russian road and railroad network got overloaded, which caused deleys and lower effectiveness for the Russian war effort. Wounded men had to be moved back. Tanks had to go to repairshops. Factories had to be evacuated and equipment moved.
And meanwhile did more men and equipment have to reach the frontline. And millions of men had to be supplied with ammo and fuel. And all this had to be done, while German airplanes was wrecking railroad stations, bridges, and attacked trains and supply trucks.
So things was quite caotic for the Russians in 1941 and 1942.
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Russia was fighting a life and death struggle. Hitler wanted to exterminate half of the population of Russia and enslave the other half. So unlike western countries did Russia not have the option of just surrendering, because of the unacceptably high price of such a thing. And the huge scale of the conflict and large territories that had to be conquered makes a fast victory seem unlikely to me.
Germany had many strenghts, but they also had many weaknesses. Preparations had been insuffiecent. German intelligence expected opposition from 150 Divisions, but after just a few months after Barbarossa had begun they had counted opposition from atleast 300, and despite they had already destroyed 150 by then so were they nowhere even close to victory. And many German Divisions were running low on ammo just 2 weeks after the war had begun.
Luftwaffe was bombing targets with steaming intensity, and its role in the first months was large, and Barbarossa could easily had ended very bad for the Germans if they hadn't been able to take control over the skies as fast as they did. The German army did had very little artillery compared to the Russians, and instead relied more upon air support to soften up enemy opposition. So when Germany lost air superiority in 1943, did the Army also lose much of its fire support for its ground troops. So if Germany had not won the battle over the skies the first days in 1941 and bombed Russian tanks to pieces before they even had a chance to reach the front by railroad, then things could have gotten very tough for the Germans.
Germanys preparations for the Eastern front conflict was insuffient. German trains was smaller than Soviet trains, and therefore needed to be refueled with coal more often and couldn't travel the same huge distances between coaling towers and water stops as Russian trains without running out of fuel. And strangly enough had no German planners thought about this.. so the Germans had no other choice than to start building an entire new railroad network in Russia with new stations and narrower space between the tracks for German trains. Which was a task that sucked resources.
German tanks got exhausted by all wear and tear the long distances it had to travel. And less than half of the German tanks were operational by October if I remember correctly. And the Russians also had many better tank designs than the Germans - but they had simply not started to build those tanks in large numbers yet and given them radios and learned how to use them move effectivly... but it was just a matter of time that the Russians would learn their lesson.
Germany had also started the war with insuffiecent warproduction. The lack of standardization made Germany unable to massproduce things like the Russians and Americans. And instead Hitler thought that he could win this war by using army trucks stolen by the countries he had conquered. But that just added up to even more difficulties to the German logistical organization. And that combined with Spanish, Italian, Hungrian, and Romanian made stuff just made the logistics hopeless when millions of spareparts had to be stored and transported
And I have heard that the average lifespan of a German military truck was just two months because of all wear and tear.
And Luftwaffe was running out of bombs because of all intense bombing. And pilots was getting exhausted by making multiple dive bombing raids day in and day out. And the logistical capacity to transport bombs and fuels to forward airfields was getting harder and harder. So the Luftwaffe had to prioritize between ground support and strikes against communications and industrial facilities... because there was simply not enough planes and bombs to attack all targets that the Germans wanted destroyed at the moment.
And in the long run did Russia have many advantages. Its huge landmass enabled it to sacrifice land to an enemy in a way other countries could not afford to. Its large landmass also provided Russia with lots of resources, such as oil, while the Germans had to set aside large resources to produce much more expensive oil in amounts that were also much smaller. Germany did also consume more food than it produced, and importing food was not an option because of the royal navy blockade... so it was not in a favourable position in a long war.
Russia was also slowly learning from its mistakes. And the confusion the first weeks of the war did not last forever. The Soviet air force was copying Luftwaffes tactics. Soviet tanks was supporting the infantry in their attacks so their attacks didn't just collapse in 1943 like they did in 1942 and 1941. Weapons got improved, and tanks were made easier to massproduce. And the Russians never over-engineered weapons like the Germans too often did.
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Barbarossa was a bad plan on a too large scale with too little planning. The German airforce ran out of bombs to drop. Army units were running low on ammo within the first weeks. More than half of all tanks were no longer operational by October thanks to heavy losses by combat and wear and tear. The Germans had also not planned anything at all on how to refuel their small trains with coal on the Russian railway lines that was built for supplying larger Russian trains that didn't need refueling as often as German trains.... so the Russian water and coaling stations were standing too far apart from each other to be used by the German trains, so new ones had to be built.
Furthermore was the idea of occupying everything west of the Ural mountains completly unrealistic. Militarily as well as logistically. And starting a genocide on East Europeans didn't make things easier.
So I am not surprised at all that Germany couldn't win the war in 1941 or 1942. I am rather surprised that things didn't turn into a disaster for them in 1941 instead of 1944... after all was it just pure luck that the Luftwaffe could destroy the red airforce - the world largest airforce by far - on the first days of the war... and therefore was able to unhindred bomb Russian ground troops and destroy their attacks and soften up their defences.
And if Stalin just had a few IQ-points above 60, he should have not overextended his winter-offensive that almost destroyed the entire German army on the Eastern front. And if the Russians had used their superior tanks (KV2, KV1, T-34, BT7) to fight togheter instead of being spread out destoyed piecemeal by the German tankers, then the Russians could have avoided many unnessary losses and inflicted heavy casualties on the Germans.
My adivice to Hitler would be to fix supplies and tanks for a long war before attacking, and meanwhile let the German army fix a victory in North Africa. And when a war on Russia should be unleashed, then grabbing Caucausus/Ukraine and Southern Russia should be the limited initial goal - since it is a place that can provide Germany with black soil, lots of oil, lots of factories and provide Germany with a strong strategic position with control over the black sea trade, and airbases for strikes into Persia and deep into Russia. And losing Southern Russia would be heavy blow for the Russians - that would be denied many key resources that could be very helpful for a long war.
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I think that the nazi leadership wanted anyone who could do the job of killing innocent civilians with a smile on his face was perfect for the SS camp duty. Killing women and children is hard to do for most people, so many Einsatzgruppen men hated their job and fell victim to alcoholism or mental illness after all deeds they had done.
So to motivate people of taking the job as a death camp guard, they offered higher wages and a life without the dangers of dying at the Russian front. And the men in the Einsatzgruppen got lots of alcohol to make their job of shooting civilians easier. And criminals and thieves were preferred for this job. They lack of morals made it easier for them to kill people, and their lust for plunder could work as a motivation for doing this shitty job so they could steal clothes and jewelry from murdered victims. Criminals did also often get the job of dropping the buckets with poison gas into the gas chambers.
The problem of course was that criminals had a problem with discipline and many of them became mad after all painful memories of killing innocent people they had piled up. So they could no longer do their job. So the nazi leadership did send them to the front - where they hopefully would die. Their death would solve many problems for the nazi leadership - eye witnesses who had seen and knew too much about the holocaust would die and take all their secrets with them into their graves. So the punishment of suicidal front line duty for the guard crew that failed to stop the Sobibor prisoner uprising/escape, was basically just another example of killing two birds with one stone.
Eye witnesses were killed, while punishment also acted as an deterrent example for other death camp commanders for what would happen if they too failed to stop prisoners from fleeing.
The system of killing people did become more efficient as time passed. Gas was cheaper than bullets, and letting slaves empty the gas chambers and burn the bodies into ashes almost entirely dump all the workload on the prisoners, so that the nazi guards did rarely ever have to do any dirty work themselves.
So while the first nazi camps were guarded by fanatical nazis in the early years of Hitlers regime, would they later on become more guarded by teenagers and elderly men that often lacked fanatical political beliefs. The elderly grey haired guards gassed people too, but they were often kinder to the prisoners than nazi guards of the old kind. And the teenagers had a varied temperament, a few were kind, while others could be extremely cruel and they felt like it was cool to wear a military uniform so they tried to make a militaristic posture and trying to impress on their superiors by mistreating the jews.
Another thing that comes to mind about the holocaust is that much of it was done by men in their 30s. Reinhard Heydrich was only 38 when he died. Odilo Globocnik was also born the same year, and he organized "operation Reinhard" that killed of 98% of Poland's jewish population. Adolf Eichmann was only 35 years when he planned all railway transports that would transport millions of people to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Amon Göth (the monster in "Schindlers list")
was only 35 years old when he became commandant of a concentration camp.
To me this seems like those men were too old to be fighting at the front, and therefore took this job of committing crimes behind the front lines instead. Useless men who wished to be soldiers, but stayed behind the front line instead.
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I would say that both France and Britain had better tanks than Germany in 1939-1940, and I say this more as an objective fact than a subjective opinion. Germany began the war with tanks with shitty armour, underpowered engines (compared to the allied tanks which had a better horsepower per ton ratio), and some french tanks had so thick frontal armour that it was immune to frontal hits from any German panzer.
Furthermore was the German tankers also heavily outnumbered, and their tank fleet was mostly consisting of pzII light tanks since their production of medium tanks was so low that they wasn't able to replace their weaker machines to any significant extent.
Germany was also pretty much in love with the idea of building boxshaped tanks, while the french on the other hand was early into that. The only minor advantage German tanks had, was having a two-man turret (which was hardly close enough to compensate for all the advantages french tanks had overall). But the Germans was good at realizing the importance of the radio early on, so they could oftentimes deal with enemies with better tanks thanks to better tactics - such as when they faced KV1 and T-34 tanks in Russia who lacked radios.
The only time in the war Germany actully had better tanks was in 1942-44 I would say. Because then they had the PZIVH and the Panther. And in 1945 the allies got their Centurion, T-44, ISU152, and Pershing... which were just as powerful machines as the German ones.
And overall did Britain actully build quite good tanks. Panzer IV and StuGIII was usally the best thing Germany had, and the Sherman, the Cromwell and Comet could easily take those tanks on quite well. Indeed, they were even slightly superior to those machines, and junk like Panzer III and Marder that Germany used is simply a sign of desperation since those things were hopelessly outdated.
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Germany was better at the tactical level, but they lacked supplies, they lacked experienced manpower, they didn't have air superiority, and they also made many severe blunders at the strategic level (much thanks to Hitler) - D-day, Arracourt, Bagration, Ardennes - which certainly speeded up the defeat of the reich with a year or two. Had Normandy and Operation Bagration not ended up as allied victories, then history would definatly had another course. Germany would still lose the war, but it would have taken a much different path to get there.
So was the German defeats in 1944-45 caused by bad equipment? No. An army can suffer terrible losses even it got excellent equipment - which the Soviet union proved in 1941 when it had the worlds best tanks, KV1, T-34 and Bt7.. and had very good artillery and yet suffered millions in losses.
Another thing we also need to remember when we talk about killratios and such is what kind of opposition our forces are meeting. Having a killratio of 30:1 would be impressive if a plane from the 1950s manage to shot down some MIG15s with skilled pilots, but having a killratio 30:1 is not that impressive if our pilot got a 5th generation fighter from 2017, those MIG15s are driven crappy pilots.
So a high killratio of a tank doesn't tell much, if we don't look at the circumstances on the battlefield, the training of the men and quality of the equipment and such.
And in 1945 things were dire for the Germans, their lack of rare metals had made the steel quality in their tanks really shitty, they lacked paint to camouflage their tanks, they didn't have much fuel. And having great tanks doesn't mean much if the support organization has fallen apart.
Without AA guns tanks were vulnerable to airpower, without proper recon they could easily fall into ambushes, without artillery to soften up the enemy attacks could turn into costly failures and so on.
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The allies had both better tanks and larger numbers of them than the Germans.
Somua 35 had sloped armour and was immune to all tank guns the shitty German tanks had in 1940. And the french 47mm anti-tank gun had the best muzzle velocity and armour penetration of any anti-tank gun in the world at that time. Its true that the allies used many old machines, but so did the Germans too. In fact, 90% of the German tankforce was outdated garbage (panzer I, Panzer II, Panzer 35t, Panzer 38t). While PanzerIII and PanzerIV only existed in small numbers, and their guns, engine and armour was inferior to the best allied tanks and those huge disadvantages could hardly be compensated for by any radio or extra crewman in the turret. Panzer IVD (of 1940) had only 30mm frontal armour, compared to Char B1's 60mm and Matilda II's 78mm.
Char 1b, S-35 and MatildaII were clearly more powerful than any German tank.
Here is what Mosier writes:
By May 1940 the French, as we have seen, had twelve armored divisions, comprising literally thousands of tanks, together with twenty-eight independent battalions of R.35 and H35 tanks." By that same point the British had managed to assemble one armored division, the First, comprising 156 Cruiser tanks and 174 Mark 6 vehicles, 100 Matilda tanks in two independent tank regiments, and another 200 or so Mark 6 tanks distributed among the "cavalry" regiments.
Like the Germans and the French, the British were still thinking about how to deploy armor, so in addition to separate cavalry regiments equipped with light tanks, there were two independent tank regiments equipped with "infantry" tanks, which in 1940 meant a vehicle known as the Matilda, owing to its ungainly waddling movement. The Matilda 2 was a massive vehicle weighing about 27,000 kilograms and armed with a two pounder gun. It was decently armored, and certainly the best tank the British had. The problem was that production was late starting (in September 1939 there were only two of them) and plagued by mechanical problems. In France the BEF had far too few of them to make much of a difference on the battlefield, although the combination of thick armor and a hard-hitting gun gave the Germans some nasty shocks in late May.
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There is much truth to that story.
Germany surprised attacked other countries, and their auftragstaktik always made them able to make decisions before their could respond to the changing circumstances on the battlefield. And on the strategic level was large troop concentrations encircled by the enemy and cut off from supplies and forced to surrender.
In Russia however it turned out that the enemy had enough resources to survive one gigantic encirlement disaster after another with hundreds of thousands of men being taken prisoner each time. And the iniatial benifit of surprise attacking a country dissapeared as time progressed.
And the superior speed of the German army could not have the same effect as in western Europe because of the long distances, the poor infrastucture and the wear and tear on the German army's vehicles.
The German army did still however remain the fastest army in World war2 throughout the war thanks to its ability to make fast decisions on the battlefield with its auftragstaktik and kampfgruppen.
But on the other hand did the German military still suffer heavy losses. The Russian army compensated its lack of skill and finesse by having Russian troops dig in and creating strong defences that were costly to take. And superiority in artillery, air power and amounts of tanks to support the infantry could help unconfident Russian solidiers to put up a fight against the German veterans.
And as the war progressed did the Russians learn to copy many of the smart tactics that the Germans used, and then use the same tactics against their enemy. The Russian airforce tactics became a copy of the Luftwaffe.
In the end however was it perhaps the large blunders the German leadership made on the macro level which caused the German defeat more than all the other factors already mentioned above.
Germany should have massed an extra army in Southern Russia to capture southern Russia in 1942. The German army should not have overstreched itself by launching its Moscow offensive in october 1941. They should not have invested so much in keeping Rzhev. They should have scrapped overly complex weapon designs, mobilized the women earlier and endorsed the He162 jet fighter project earlier and built surface to air missiles instead of V-bombs.
They should have locked the allies into the Normandy beachhead and turn it into a siege and a disaster for the allies. Hitler should have allowed retreats and allowed a more flexible defence, and then the disaster of operation Bagration would never have happened. And using German armour in forrests and swamps was a bad idea and many tanks were wasted at Arracourt, Ardennes, Budapest and other places
And giving the best weapons to badly trained men was a bad idea. And the German army after Stalingrad would have been better off getting reinforcements to existing formations instead of creating new units only because of political reasons.
The list is very long of the mistakes of the german generals, Hitler and his industrial policies.
Hitlers decisions was perhaps not worse than any other leader. But on the other hand did Germany's enemies have more resources to play with.
The loss of the Afrika Korps, the 6th army at Stalingrad, 400.000 men during Bagration, and the twenty divisions lost at Normandy, and the large losses during the winter 1941-42 with the offensive towards Moscow and Stalins counter-offensive also caused 200.000 - 800.000 losses to the German army.
All in all was those losses too much for the German army to take. And the war more and more seemed like lost.
One could of course wonder what would have happened if Hitler had spared his men and evacuated the Afrika korps and his other troops instead of throwing them away in this wasteful way.
But all of this is of course observations done by a person who have the benifit of hindsight.
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First of all, the greatest change in warfare was the use of barbed wire which was totally impossible to get through without endless bombardment of high explosive shells, and even with huge bombardment it could be a dangerous project to attack across no mans land. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hQ-otfHZx8
Secondly, the machine gun had dramatically increased the firepower of the infantry so a few machine guns could produce the same wall of bullets flying around in the air as an entire regiment of line infantry.
And artillery now had new types of shells and they could hit targets beyond visable range - eventhough that was rarily practical since there was no radio that could be used to direct the fire onto the target. So even if you somehow manage to punch a big hole into the enemy land and take much terrain you would not be able defend yourself that well against an enemy counter-attack.
Your artillery don't know where to shoot because they cannot see the enemy. And dragging machine guns into position would take time. And if the enemy act swiftly you will not have the time to dig in and form an organized defence, but the men would rather being scattered just after the breakthrough and vulnerable to a counter-attack.
And the lack of communication would be problematic for the men at the front who don't know what to do. And the commander who is sitting miles behind the frontline didn't know what is going on at the front - since there was no radio communication and it took about 8 hours on average for an order from the General headquarters to reach the troops at the frontline, and it took an equal amount of time to get information back to the HQ. So the Commander could not exploit his succeful attack or sending in reinforcements to defend the taken terrain from an enemy counterattack.
So with other words, Technology were greatly biased in favour of the defenders.
And what retarded Generals did was to attack and attack again over and over, and thinking that just a little more men and guns would make the next attack likely to succed. And all this lack of imagination costed millions of lives for nothing.
Cadornas 12 Isonzo offensives are the most clear example of this failure to learn from past mistakes. And accusing the General of incompetence is simply a too mild accusation. They are really more guilty of a criminal waste of their own solidiers lives. And Haig, Hötzendorf, Cadorna and Falkenhayn all deserves to have their names thrown into the mud. I can excuse some gigantic failures on their part because of the huge changes technology and tactics, but at some point those idiots should have learned.
And their stupid shit never did anything to bring their own country to victory. The solution then came with the tank that could drive through the barbed wire, the radio that allowed the attackers to call in artillery support and reinforcements, and to get fresh orders that wasn't totally outdated.
And the German stormtrooper tactics also gave the solidiers at the frontline much more freedom to make their own decisions instead of following outdated orders that no longer made sense in the actual period of time. So the Germans could act with much more flexibility than their enemies, and the stormtroops also had much more firepower at their disposal in the weapons they carried, so they were much more flexible than the ordinary troops that had to make the trouble of coordinating things with the artillery and wasting time.
So the German army had turned everything upside down. Instead of bombarding an area for weeks and alerting the enemy, the Germans instead made a short bombardment and used the element of surprise. And instead of leading men from behind the frontline by a dumbass General who knew nothing about the war, they gave experienced NCOs who knew the war and knew their troops the task of deciding on how the war should be fought.
So the Germans could act much faster and their enemies, and the allied orders became more and more outdated as the German rolled up their defensive lines. And they were always a step ahead.
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Things depends on the combat distances. When you fire at targets far away you do want a rifle. While a SMG are better at close ranges.
The M1 Garand was a great rifle for its time (in WWII) when combat distances were large. But modern wars have seen a tendency towards much more close combat distances and then have the rifle become more and more unpractical.
You rarely got the time to aim for a "one-shot, one kill" in Vietnam, even if you were lucky enough to even actually see the enemy. Now you spray bullets into one direction and hope one of those bullets find its target. And even if you are not able to hit anyone, are you probably at least able to suppress your enemy and force him to take cover in a ditch while your firing is going on.
If the modern assault gun is an M16, then could say that M1 garand is the the old WWII rifle.
You say that the modern assault rifle, is a combination between a SMG and the "battle rifle". But personally I do not completely agree with that statement. M14 which the Americans used in Vietnam do however fit very well into the description of "a combination between a SMG and a battle rifle".
The problem with M14 however was that it unlike the M16 still used old heavy rifle ammunition, because the Americans still liked their old M1 rifle and had a hard time of let go of the old ideas of a one-shot kill.
The powerful ammunition of M14 is great when you want send away a shot long distances and kill targets far away.
But the problem is that the recoil also becomes greater with rifle ammunition than it does with small cartridges of pistols and SMGs. So if you wanna fire a rapid burst, then will the recoil become so great that you shake so much that you cannot aim properly or hit your target.
So the solution for the Americans then became to drop this concept of the M14 completely, and go over to the M16 instead. M16 fired smaller rounds which gave less recoil and therefore also better precision with automatic firing. The bullets smaller size also saved weight. And the plastic material did not swell like wood do after it gets wet.
So the old rifle does not have a place on the modern battlefield. The old long range fighting from world war 1 belongs to the past. Now it is instead more important to put as much lead up into the air as possible.
But some modern battlefield theorists do however argue that the sniper rifle now have a much larger role to play than ever, and that groups of one or two dozen snipers can paralyze an entire city.
So there seem to be some contradictory trends going on, with more snipers on one hand, and in the other hand do you see an insane increase of ammunition consumption per killed soldier, with something like 600.000 shots fired for every enemy soldier killed in Vietnam compared to 400 shots per kill in the Napoleonic wars, 20.000 around WW1, and 200.000 in WWII.
I think this video does excellent explain why M1 and M14 does not have any place on a modern battlefield.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mby4hOq-DpI
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The Russian tree is based on earlier practical experience with tank designs that worked in the past:
T34→T44→T55→T62→T64→t72→T80→T90
The Nato countries are not so similiar. But because of standardization within Nato have almost all Nato tanks used the British L7 105mm gun (Centurion, AMX30, Leopard1, M60, M1 Ambrams etc) and later on have the 120mm rheinmetall gun become standard (used on for example Leopard2, M1 Abrams) and also other tanks use120mm guns such as Leclerc, Challanger 2, Merkava, C1 Ariete.
Priorities have been different for the many armies. British Chieftain was a slow tank with good armor and firepower. French AMX30 and German Leopard had bad armor protection, but their speed and firepower was excellent.
And M50 Ontos, Merkava and Stridsvagn-103 could be seen as very odd birds, with very innovative designs.
The last generation of MBTs are however much similar in many ways Merkava, M1 Abrams, Leopard2, Leclerk, Ariete, Challanger 2 do look much similar and all have 120mm guns. But there are of course also many differences.
Abrams is a heavy tank while Challanger2 is much more lighter. Abrams use uranium ammunition, while German Leopard 2 doesn't and therefore have to get a new gun to be able to kill the newest Russian tanks without using uranium ammunition.
Also Merkava could be upgraded and get a bigger gun. But today that is not so important. Using a 15cm gun to kill and old T-72 tank of Israels neighbors would be overkill. Why use a big an expensive shot to kill a cheap garbage tank if you can easily kill it with small shots instead? So it is better to stick with the old 120mm ammunition that is easier and faster to reload, and you can also carry more rounds of ammunition.
When Israels neigbours get better tanks, then it can become time to reconsider doing an expensive upgrade of the gun and armor for Merkava. But today that is not so urgent.
And Leclerk is a tank that will not be upgunned, because it can't be. Its turret ring is too small to carry a bigger gun, and that means that Leclerk will be unable to penetrate the armor of Russia's new Armata tank.
Challanger 2 is a tank with much potential left. But the British government does not want to spend more money on that tank, and have even thought about buying Leopard2 tanks instead. And the Italians have much upgrades to do before their C1 Ariete can play in the same league as the other MBTs. That will of course cost money for the country with economic problems. As it is today however do this tank need better frontal armor, since even a world war 2 T34/85 tank would be able to penetrate the lower front plate. And the precision of the gun is under-performing.
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@Kieselmeister
"becoming carbon neutral"
As if "carbon neutral" matters when nuclear reactors contributes massively to global warming through other ways - only the tiny amount of Swedish nuclear plants creates over 200 Terawatts of waste heat, which is more than the amount of energy we spent to heat every home in cold Sweden for 1 year. So when you release all that waste heat into the ocean you contribute massively to global warming. And this heat also stimulates the growth of algae - and all algae growth sucks up all oxygen from the water so that all fish dies from lack of oxygen.
"No other reactor design before or since has ever been as dangerous"
According to IAEA are Swedish nuclear reactors even more unreliable than those 4 nuclear plants of Chernobyl type that are stationed outside St. Petersburg. On an average year are our old plants closed down more days for repairs than theirs.
And there have also been incidents that were close to becoming nuclear disasters, but were stopped in the last moment. So therefore are they not much talked about in the news.
"the only reason fukushima happened"
Fukushima reactors are not safe in my opinion. Almost all (if not all) nuclear reactors in the world use an old analog technology instead of digital ones. In my opinion is that retarded. I have done some PLC programming myself, and I do not agree with the idea that analog is superior to digital. I would say it is the other way around.
"The technology to make reactors which fail "safe" instead of failing "deadly" has existed for over 40 years"
Nuclear energy have existed for so long, and still people market it as something "new" and "high tech" when it in fact is an old technology invented by a Swedish guy a hundred years ago. Meanwhile have seen disaster after disaster happen Sellafield, Harrisburg, Chernobyl, Tokaimura, Fukushima.
And every time nuclear fanboys says its only "a one time event" "so unlikely that it would never happen". And yet they keep on happening. And people blame earth quakes, Communism, greedy Japanese companies and all kinds of things... except nuclear power itself. A dangerous energy source we have not yet learned to master, and yet we put the survival of the entire planet in danger. No one in the nuclear lobby gives an answer how we can safely store nuclear fuel safely for hundreds of thousands of years.
Instead I usually only get a bullsh*t answer: "technology will solve this".
But what if technology doesn't solve every problem in the world? What is plan B?
If I was optimistic about technology solving every human problem, then I would rather drive my car on
lingonberry juice than nuclear energy.
"and are still operating dangerous 50 year old reactors instead of replacing them"
And still there is no plan what to do with all the toxic radioactive plutonium, uranium, cesium. 75 years have passed since Hiroshima was bombed, and this problem have not been solved yet. Well I have lost my patience with the nuclear lobby.
This problem should be fixed before more money is spent on nuclear power.
There was enough nuclear waste located at Chernobyl to kill all life in Europe - and there was a high chance that a second nuclear explosion nearly did just that.
In Fukushima there was even more spent fuel stored - and fuel which were even more dangerous than the one stored at Chernobyl. And if that fuel leaks out into the environment, it is enough to kill all life on this planet.
We are with other words playing Russian roulette with all life on this planet.
What happens the next time a disaster happen? Maybe we aren't that lucky. And once all nuclear waste leaks out there is no way you could get the genie back into the bottle. It is GAME OVER for the planet.
And it doesn't matter if it happens because the Japanese were foolish to build nuclear plants in a land prone to earthquakes, or it happened because of an ISIS terrorist attack, or a meteorite falling down from the sky and blowing a hole into the metal container at Fukushima containing all spent fuel. We will all die.
"But the USA's schizophrenic environmental lobby has demanded that all spent nuclear fuel be buried in the desert, while also refusing to allow the waste to be transported TO that desert because it would have to go past their houses, so it just sits forever in cans in swimming pools at the reactor sites."
I think the world should come together and solve this problem once and for all. We should pump in money into USA so we can finish this storage facility in Arizona. And the "not in my backyard" club and their hypocritical governor should be thrown under the bus.
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Russia economy is badly battered and ammunition production is likely to fall off a cliff next year. Already today is Ukraine firing more artillery shells than russia. And with ATACMS arriving and the last years horrible russian losses in artillery and MLRS will make the future even worse for russia. And North Korean artillery shells sent to russia is like putting a plaster on a guy who just had his entire leg chopped off. Its low quality junk in too small numbers to make any difference.
The next year is likely getting horrible for russia. Its economy is going down, its artillery is disapearing, its missiles are going away, its helicopters are held far away by ATACMS, its black sea fleet cannot stay in Crimea, the country is running out of tanks.
And now it is using 90 year old military trucks (GAZ AA), 70 year old tanks (T-55), 130 year old rifles (Mosin Nagant), and 70 year old armored personnel carriers (BTR-50).
And I don't think russia would be using such old equipment and needlessly put their own soldiers lives at risk if better more modern equipment was available. And to me this is a sign that russia have suffered extremely heavy unsubstainable losses.
And if russias professional army equipped with T-90 tanks couldn't defeat ukrainians back when russia had enormous superior in tanks and artillery that could fire 63.000 shots per day - then I don't think russia can win this war when it have fewer tanks than ukraine and firing less shots per day than Ukraine, and having artillery that is of a lower quality.
And russias professional army is also dead. Its counter-battery radars are gone. And now are only badly equipped, poorly trained, and badly motivated troops all that russia is having left.
So I likely think russia is heading towards a loss. And I think that even a Trump election win would be too little too late to save Putin from a loss. He have already lost too much men and equipment by then to turn the tables and win the war. And even without american artillery shells would the rest of the free world be able to provide enough shells for Ukraine to keep it fighting and making the final push needed to drive home victory against a totally exhausted enemy that have no tanks or artillery left, and only got lots of useless meat - men that gets blown up by ukrainian artillery before they get the chance to even fire upon any ukrainian infantry.
And without artillery and tanks you cannot make any succesful offensive tanks. And russia lacks both, and its infantry lacks both training and weapons - so its combat value sucks, and especially so in offensive operations.
This Avdiika offensive might be the last major offensive russia could pull off in this war. And it should be noted that this offensive is done with with BTR-50 and the last modern tanks russia got. And even unit in the russian army - VDV looklike complete rookies unsure how to act on a battlefield. So things do not look good for russia.
The Ukrainian army might not be well trained professional soldiers according to western standards. Indeed they are far from it, and especially after all losses they have suffered. But Ukraine do on the other hand have lots of good kit, and artillery superiority both in quality and quantity and that is worth a lot.
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Firstly, Germany did not have enough ships for sea lion. Secondly I don't think the German air force would be able to destroy the royal air force, and then the royal navy, and then being able to pull off support for a land invasion of Britain in the short span of just a few months.
And even if Britain have had a weaker government that signed a peace treaty with the Germans, I still don't think it would dramatically change the situation on the Eastern Front.
Sure, Germany could have won in the east even if Hitler was with the western powers. His killratio was exhausting the Russians faster than the Germans until 1944, and Hitlers Southern offensive in 1942 could have been devestating for Russia.
But nevertheless, so was the odds against Germany. And 3 German Divisions in North Africa, the Italian army, and some German Garrison troops in the west was still not enough men to secure a victory on the Eastern front.
Odds would still be against Germany.
And even if 1940 had been a period of peace after the fall of France, that would have made food imports from South America possible for Germany. But Germany would still probably be dependent on oil from Russia. Unless it could import from oil from Persia and Indonesia.
But the war on Russia was not just a resource matter. Hitler wanted the land for his people, and he wanted to exterminate the slavs. Nothing would probably have stopped Hitler from attacking Russia, even if it clearly was against the best interest of his own country.
Germany would lose a friendship. It would lose a great trade partner. And its armies would suffer horrific losses that would weaken Germany immensly.
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You confuse skill with luck. The Germans were just lucky that they could destroy the largest air force in the world the first day of Barbarossa with a surprse attack on Russian airfields. And without air support the German army would have suffered huge losses in 1941, because the German artillery was 12 times weaker than the Russian artillery in 1941, and 20 times weaker in 1944.
Furthermore did the Russians posses tanks in better quality and quantatity than any military in the world in 1941. And no other country even came close to match them. So had Stalin not forbidden retreats and incentivised stupid decisionmaking, then the Germans would not have won the great victories they had in 1941.
And the German Army lost 3000 men per day during Barbarossa. So no one could fool me into believing 3 Afrika Korps divisions of 45.000 men would have made any difference on the Eastern Front. 45.000 men would just had been eaten up in only 15 days.
Only the battle for Moscow alone killed more German solidiers than the losses it took during all the invasions of western Europe combined (Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Netherlands, France).
The German military was exhausted by october and should have taken a rest instead of pushing onwards. Its logistics was strained. More than half of the tanks were no longer operational because of all wear and tear and fighting, huge manpower losses needed to be replaced, Stuka pilots were being by all the bombing missions and the Luftwaffe didn't have enough bombs or planes to deal with even half of all the targets that were on the list to bomb.
So an attack on Moscow in 1941 was simply overly ambitious, and a stupid waste of resources. And even if they had sacrificed all and gotten into the city, its doubtful that they could have taken it. Probably it would just have been lots of bloody streetfighting.
And neighter woul the conquest of Moscow have ended the war. The Swedes took Moscow in 1612, and that didn't mean the conquest of Russia, and neighter did Napoleons conquest of the city 200 years later end differently.
Probably would the Germans just be too weak to both hold the city and protect their own flanks, so the option was to retreat and leave the city or getting encirled and trapped as they were in Stalingrad.
And Germany was once again lucky that they didn't lose the war already in the winter 1941-42 when Stalin launched his massive counteroffensive that pushed the Germans back 300km and nearly crushed the German defensive line in the central Russia.
Hitler refused to listen to his Generals, and his policy of forbidding retreats had saved the German Wehrmacht from total destruction. And Stalins massive offensive turned into a costly disaster for the Russians since they were easily cut off and destroyed when they had pushed forward so fast that supplies couldn't keep up..
The winter offensive was a disaster for the Red Army. And without this disaster it would have been impossible for Hitler to start an offensive in Russia in 1942. Furthermore had Germany also lost enormous amounts of planes, heavy artillery and machines during their winter retreat. And manpower losses to cold and fighting was huge despite they won a victory.
----------------
So would I say that Germany would be the likely victor in war against Russia? No.
They had a small chance. But odds were not in their favour.
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First of all did the loss of the 6th Army and 4th panzer corps cause a huge gap in the southern part of the Russian front, and the Germans were lucky that they didn't lose the other half of the Army Group. But if that would have happened the South would have collapsed, and Germany would be forced to try to plug the hole with what they had - and they didn't have anything suffiecent to compensate such a huge loss. And moving troops from Army Group North and Middle, would just strech those army groups thin as well.... and then the Russians could just smash those army groups as well, and the entire Eastern front would be left unprotected for the steamrolling red army.
And not trying to plug the southern hole was not an option either. Germany needed rare earth metals, it needed the Ukrainian coal mines, and losing the airbases on Crimea would threaten the Turkish shipments of chrome to Germany........And worst of all, having a million men on the southern flank of Army group mittel would be a disaster for the Germans. And of top of all those things - I guess a political crisis would be ensured. Stalingrad was bad enough, and many countries were starting to make diplomatical moves towards peace and leaving the Axis. And had the Southern front totally collapsed and Ukraine quickly fallen to the Russians, and Romania and Hungary had become next to fall.... then I guess that the Axis-alliance would fall to pieces pretty fast.
And the only thing stopping the red army then, would be bad weather and logistical constraints rather than fierce enemy opposition.
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@user-stanis777
Det här kriget går inte bra för ryssland. Ni har inte längre någon chans att vinna det. Vore jag en ryss skulle jag vilja ha fred så snart som möjligt för att spara så många ryska soldaters liv som möjligt, och för att hindra att ryska tanks och kanoner sprängs i bitar till ingen nytta alls.
Kriget är också en tragedi för Ukraina med all sin förödelse.
Det kommer att ta tid för Ryssland för att återhämta sig. Relationerna till andra länder har skadats allvarligt. Pengar som kunnat användas till att bygga nya broar, köpa in bättre apparater till sjukhus och stödja ryska företag har slösats bort i detta krig.
Rysslands rykte som militär stormakt har skadats av detta dåligt skötta krig, och länder i arabien och indien lär vara tveksamma i framtiden till att köpa ryska vapen.
Rysslands folkmängd kommer att fortsätta att sjunka som en sten i vattnet. Det var ett stort problem innan kriget. Nu kommer problemet bli ännu värre med alla unga män som dör och skadas och tillbringar år i den ukrainska leran istället för att stanna hemma och dela kärlek med en vacker kvinna.
Ryssland har förstört sitt rykte för årtionden framöver. Eran aggressiva hotfulla utrikespolitik har förstört allt hopp om ett mäktigt ryssland ni hoppats bygga.
Finland, Ukraina, Georgien, Polen, Litauen, Estland, Lettland, Tjeckien, Slovakien, Rumänien... folk i alla dessa länder hatar er.
Vi svenskar ogillar också ryssar, men i dessa länder så känner man ett starkt hat.
Det beror förstås på allt förtryck, krigande, mördande och hård ockupation Sovjetunionen och Ryssland gjort i dessa länder.
Det är därför folk i dessa länder känner så stark sympati med Ukraina. De vet vilket lidande Ukraina står inför. Och de hjälper Ukraina med hela sitt hjärta, på samma vis som de hoppas att andra länder och Ukraina ska hjälpa dom i fall dom blev invaderade av Ryssland.
Vill ni vara den stora ledande stormakten i östeuropa, då föreslår jag att ni prövar att bygga vänskapsband med era grannar istället för att hota dom.
Små länder skulle då vända sig till er för att få stöd istället. Så eran makt och inflytande skulle vara mycket större. Små länder skulle se det som ett välkommet alternativ till USA, EU, och Tyskland.
Men allt sånt hopp har blåst bort med den idiotiska ryska utrikespolitiken de senaste 30 åren 🙄
Naturligtvis lär du ge fan i allt vad jag har att säga. Jag är trots allt en oviktig person som bor i sveriges ödemark.
Men lägg gärna mina ord på minnet. Skulle du i framtiden känna ånger så kan du tipsa din barn och framtida generationer av ryssar om de råd jag har gett.
Kom ihåg att barn, fyllon och fiender är ärliga. Jag är brutalt ärlig med dig om hur jag ser på ryssland. Det är en jobbig sanning du antagligen inte vill höra.
Men saker går inte bra för ryssland.
Ni kan göra en omvändning som jag föreslår.
Men ni kan förstås fortsätta på den inslagna vägen. Men sen tar det stopp. Ni får slut på vapen, pengar och soldater.
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@qk-tb2df "the REAL thing to worry about would be the economic collapse if there isn't a good enough of a transition period for oil"
First we humans used timber as source of energy, then we switched over whale oil, then we used coal, and today we oil and fossile fuels.
During all those steps we went from one energy source over to another energy source that was more powerful. But with oil its different. We have nothing more powerful to replace it with.
It costs energy to produce energy. When drive a drill into the ground you use up energy. When you pump up oil from the ground you use up energy.
And likewise does it also cost energy to produce ethanol fuel for cars. You waste energy when you pump water to grow wheat. You waste energy when make fertilizer. You waste energy when you drive a tractor. You waste energy when you fly a plane to spray pesticides. You waste energy when you use radiators to dry your harvest and so on.
And the most interesting thing about energy is the ratio we get - Energy produced vs. energy consumed. If you can pump 30 barrels of oil up from the ground for every barrel of oil you spend to get that oil, then you get an EROEI value of 30 (EROEI = Energy returned on energy invested).
A good energy source should give you a high EROEI. Oil in the 1800s could give you an EROEI of 100, since oil was everyware and you didn't even have to go down deep to get it. You only had to stick a hole into the ground and a black fontain came up.
But today have the average EROEI value of oil began to sink worldwide, because we have used up all the oil that was easy to get, and now we have to pump up dirty oil from the ground with much sand in it that costs more energy to extract and turn pure.
And even if oil today only have an EROEI of say 30, it is still a superior form of energy compared EROEI from solar, wind, nuclear, and biofuels.
Brazilian ethanol fuel only have an EROEI of 15. Swedish timber have an EROEI of 5. Ethanol from maize and grain even have an EROEI of 0.5 - which means that you even lose energy by using oil to produce ethanol!
So as you see. There is nothing we can replace oil with. The EROEI of other forms of energy is too low to replace oil. And would it even be possible to maintain an industrial society if EROEI falls down to such a low number as 5?
And that is just the beginning of all the problems. Where should you grow all biofuels to produce the large amounts you will need? I mean we humans also needs somewhere to live and we also need something to eat ourselves and not just our cars. And same goes for solar and windfarms. Nuclear power also have a shitty EROEI of about 5 (if I remember correctly what Nicole Foss said). And if we would to replace all oil, coal and natural gas with nuclear then we would need to build enormous amounts of new nuclear plants. And we would get a new problem - How would we be able to find enough fuel for so many new nuclear plants? There is only a limited amount of uranium on this planet. And if we would use it all to replace oil, then the global uranium reserves would be used up in only a few years.
So no, replacing oil cannot be done. Even the nazi scientists couldn't solve Germany's oil dependency problem. Nor could the Brazilian military dictatorship which during the 1970s oil shocks started to run so huge trade deficits when oil became expensive that they felt forced to get off their oil dependency by fueling cars with ethanol from sugarcane. But even 40 yers later are Brazil still consuming enormous amounts of oil.
So many American presidents have promised to get off oil dependency that this statement have just become a joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNfZeh6oK-c
Our world have been dependent on fossile fuels for 200 years now since the start of the industrial revolution. And it would take decades if not even a century to transform society away from that.
Even if we would tomorrow get the space aliens to hand us over a blueprint of the perfect engine for renewable energy it would still take time to change society. We must produce lots of things before we can replace our old machines that relies on a combustion engine - cars, trucks, ships, aircrafts, chain saws, lawn movers, motorcycles, snowmobiles, leafblowers, diesel locomotives, jetskies, helicopters, air compressors and what have you?
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@qk-tb2df Sure you can power all kinds of tools with electric power. But do you have the resources?
As I said there are many types of machines. And there are millions of them. And there is not even enough Litium and other rare materials on the planet to make enough electric car batteries to replace 1% of the cars used worldwide.
And the next problem down the line is how you should expand the energy grid. And then you need to somehow get enough power to all those machines. Building 10.000 nuclear plants would take decades before they are finished, and would only work until you run out of uranium after some years.
Nuclear power does also do nothing to help us solve the problems we have here and now.
How would it help us get the oil the resources we need to build all the electric machines you talk about?
Today we need enormous amounts of oil for everything we make. Your computer probably consumed oil about 10x its own weight during its manufacturing process.
A car consume tonnes of oil to make, since half of all a car consumes during its life time happens during the production process. Only making a single tire takes 26 litres of oil.
And then we need to find ways of replacing oil for all kinds of things: plastics, toothpaste, medicines, colours, pesticides, asphalt, food coloring and food flavourings, cosmetics, synthetic fabrics, rubber and the list is endless.
Only such a thing as kerosene would be hopeless to find a replacement for, because it is a kind of fuel with unique and extreme requirements:
Energy content per unit volume, energy content per unit weight, freezing point, boiling point, flash point, etc. And not the least must the fuel be possible to produce in sufficient quantities.
Todays aviation fuel is ideal since it works even when it is 55 degrees cold at 11.000 metres.
Todays biofuels for airliners would have to expand unrealisticly much to replace aviation fuel from fossile fuels. Ross Walker, who works as a developer of alternative fuels for Airbus says you would need to grow sunflowers on an area the size of France to provide the French airline industry with all the biofuel it needs. And growing algae on a plot of land of the size of Belgium would be able to provide enough fuel for the entire worlds aviation industry.
This sounds like an unreasonable solution to me. Especially considering that we also need land for other uses. We would need 2 million square kilometers of forrest only to provide fuel for all cars and trucks on EUs roads. We would timber fuel to heat our homes. We would need land to grow food and feed cattle. We need land for roads, shopping malls and mining.
My own country Sweden is blessed with having lots of forrests and not lots of people which needs to be supported unlike more densly populated countries. But Sweden would still not be able to replace all its oil imports with biomass. We import 118 barrels of oil each year, while 96 million square metres of forrest grows each year - which is rougly equal to the energy of 81 million barrels of oil. So even if we burn down all our forrest growth for an entire year would we be able to replace our oil imports.
But of course cannot even countries like Russia, Canada or Sweden burn down all their trees. We need forrests to provide us with paper, and timber for furniture and buildings and things to export.
And trees needs 20-30 years to grow so you cannot just cut down all trees at once. So cutting down 3-5% of the trees each year would be a more realistic goal. And that means that not much biomass can be used to replace fossile fuels can be replaced by fossile fuels.
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1. Good question. I guess that the intent was to give the tank a limited ability to defend itself against other tanks. A short fat gun is good for dealing with soft targets of flesh and blood, while a long gun barrel is good for dealing with enemy tanks. This is because a fat gun fires large grenades that contains large amounts of explosives and therefore kill lots of men where the shot lands. And a long gun barrel gives a higher muzzle velocity, so a gun shot will hit an enemy tank with much more power and speed - and that will make it more likely that the shot will pierce the armour of an enemy tank and kill the men inside.
In the 1930s tanks were still a new thing and people were unsure about its role of the future battlefield. And the tankdesign was not that developed, so engines were weak, the suspension was not that sophisticated, the tracks was not that wide and thus unable to deal with the heavy weight of a tank that well.
And tanks were not broad and could not therefore have a huge gun turret, and the tanks were too weak to carry a heavy gun that was both long and fat and thus capable of both killing tanks and infantry.
2. Germany was forbidden to have any tanks after world war 1, so when Hitler decided do ignore this restriction he had to build whatever tanks Germany could get their hands on. So he started building Panzer1 and Panzer2 tanks....and he hoped that he one day would be able to replace them with better panzerIII and PanzerIV tanks that were better able to fight both enemy infantry and tanks since they atleast had some real guns.
And in 1942 it was decided that the Panther tank that would be able to do all jobs would replace all earlier tanks. It took it barely a year to get the tank from the drawingboard to the battlefield, so of course did the tank have many design flaws that had to be corrected at the beginning.
There was of course other firms that was designing other tanks that competed with the Panther for the contracts, when in 1942 it was realized that the PanzerIII was inferior to the KV1 and even the upgraded panzerIV would perhaps soon become inferior to the next generation of allied tanks.
And some E-series projects were alternatives to the Panther. While other monster tanks, were heavy "supertanks" thought of as "breaktrough tanks" that was able to smash any heavy enemy resisitance.
And the Tiger and the King Tiger was such machines. And they were never intented for massproduction or playing multiple roles on the battlefield. But irony meant that Germany could never use the Tiger for the offensive war it planned for. Instead it fought without air support and had to fight defensive actions instead.
3. I think that all countries had good and bad commanders. But German NCOs had more freedom to do what they wanted without having to ask for permission from their high ranked officers. Indeed, panzer commanders were even encouraged to take their own iniatives on the battlefield and act the way they seemed fit.
A General sitting long behind the front could not know all the circumstances at every place at the battlefield and give rational detailed orders to everyone what to do. So instead the Germans decided that their NCOs should get an order or goal from above, and then they themselves should decide the best way to fullfill that goal.
And usally this tactic worked well. The Germans could use tactical opportunities on the battlefield that a slower clumbsier organization couldn't. And they were masters of speedy improvised warfare.
Their auftragstaktik and their kampfgruppen combined with their good skill level gave them superiority on the battlefield. They could take all men and machines that was available in an area and form an improvised battlegroup to solve a problem that had shown up on the battlefield.
This tactic gave the Germans, and the Israelis the upper hand in their wars. But sometimes it also resulted in disproportionally high losses of NCOs in the fighting.
So the tactic was good. But the higher leadership in Germany was just as incompetent as the worst allied leaders - which shown itself in the great offensives Germany made in terrain totally unsuitable for German tanks such as the ardennes, the marshes in Hungary, the offensive in Normandy.... and the allies also thought that breaktroughs could easily be done in unsuitable terrain, which resulted in the costly failures at Normandy, Caen, Metz and Market Garden.
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@romankovalev7894
Russia have lost so many vehicles that they cannot be replaced. If Russia had lots of modern vehicles - as you pretend they do, then I bet that they would use them in Ukraine by the thousands to more effectivly destroy Ukrainian resistence and to save their own soldiers lives.
But instead have Russia began to use more and more junk weapons. T62 tanks that are easy prey even relativly old and weak anti-tank weapons. And as a result have Russian losses in human lives gone up each month.
And it is not just tanks... but also more and more old and crappy military trucks have been pushed into service. Garbage from the 1960s such as scooby doo vans are now used, along with WW2 helmets and WW2 rifles.
Much of those garbage weapons will be slaughtered by Ukraine even before they get within firing range to their enemy. HIMARS, and BONUS, excalibur and such artillery rounds are slaughtering the enemies from distance.
And even if Russia have more tanks and vehicles it doesn't matter. Ukraine have so many anti-tank missiles that Russian tanks are safe nowhere. There are Stugna, Panzerfaust-3, NLAWs, Javelins, AT4, RPG7, Carl-Gustaf, Matador, MILAN, TOW, Pansarvärnspjäs 1110 and much more hiding everywhere in Ukraine.
So it is no wonder why Russian armor losses have been gigantic despite Ukraines armor forces are lower in numbers than their foe.
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Discussing machineguns feels irrelevant. Partly because it is debatable if it was the best weapon of its role (just ask Lindybeige). But even more so because we are talking about how well equiped the Armies was overall. And the Americans and the British there had an enormous advantage.
Their solidiers were well fed. They had lots of trucks and fire support. While the Germans didn't.
On average did an US Army Division consume 800 tonnes of supplies per day, while a German Division only consumed 400 tonnes.
Germany was badly equiped overall. With little oil, ammo, food spare parts. Their truck cabins was made out of wood to save metal. Their jet engines only lasted for a week due to shortages of rare materials. The steel quality in their tanks deteriorated when they ran out of rare materials for the production process of high quality steel. Germany also ran out of chemicals to cammo paint their tanks at the late war.
So Germany couldn't provide for its troops.
They lacked everything. And instead of building real tanks they had to resort to using old czech tank chassis and using captured Russian guns to build tank destroyers such as Marder. Only because they didn't have enough real tanks. So shit equipment like marder was what Germany usally had to use in combat because real tanks was so rare and could almost never be seen.
And the first half of world war 2 when Germany conquered Europe, it did so without any big Tiger tanks or Panthers. In fact, Germany had worse tanks than their enemies. And France also had twice as many tanks as the Germans in 1940.
And to make matters worse, so was tankproduction painfully slow in 1940. So almost all of Germanys tanks were older tanks, while just a tiny tiny portion was the more modern panzer III and Panzer IV.
And when Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Germany still used mostly old bad Panzer II and pz38t tanks. While Russia had tanks of equal quality such as T-26 and and BT-7, and tanks of clearly superior quality such as t-34 and KV-1. So Germany didn't have the best tanks in the world.
In 1940 it was the french, and in 1941 it was the Russians. And it is debatable if Germany even had best tanks in 1944-45 since the Russians also had monsters such as IS2, ISU152, SU152, SU100 etc.
So I cannot see any clear evidence that Germany was best equiped overall.
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The resources you have at your disposal do determine what kind of objectives you should have in a war, and what way you should go to reach your goals.
Germany should have taken a strategy of a fast victory due to their limited resources. And they should have tried to knock one country out of the war before attacking the next. Because Germanys resources were limited, and winning a 5 front war (in the atlantic, in the air, in Africa/italy, Russia and the west) was hopeless.
And the allies knew that they had more resources at their hand and planned their war effort accordingly, unlike Germany who made a missmatch between their strategy and resources.
The Allies could also have tried to build over-engineered weapons like the Germans and not mobilized their women for their industries. But they choosed another path.
And they choosed to force Hitler to fight a war on multiple fronts so their resources would be thinned out. And the japanease had their supply routes cut off, so the japanease island garrisons didn't have be fought down, but could instead just be starved to death as no supply ships provided them with food.
And in Russia, did the Soviets launch offensives on a broad front simultaniously. And Germany was always facing a dilemma where it would put its resources to stop to stop the Russian forward thrusts - North, Center or South?. Germany simply didn't have enough manpower to fight everyware at the sametime. So they were facing attrition and was losing the iniative on the Eastern front.
So the Allies played their game right, while the Axis played foolishly and opened up multiple fronts and didn't make sure that the war got short.
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if the so called better grand strategy of the allies is a product of the military genius or the inherent strategical situation?
They used common sense in military matters. While Japan and Germany made foolish strategic decisions.
Japan never had the resources to defeat USA. Nor the SU. And not even China.
And Germany as I sees it only had one way of winning the war. And that would be to postpone Operation Barbarossa to 1942 or 1943. And meanwhile should Germany take control over North Africa and mediterranean, and build up their industrial capacity, train new regiments, stockpile supplies such as small arms ammunition and artillery shells, and then luftwaffe should get resources to replace losses from the battle of Britain.
So when Germany invades Russia they can go in with full force before Russia gets time to mobilize all their resources and before lend-lease could effectivly supply them.
And instead of fighting a costly battle for Moscow should Germany instead target Southern Russia directly, which would be a terrible loss to Russia even in the short run.
And with Southern Russias resources in German hands Germany would get stronger by the day while Russia is starving to death. And USA would of course not be provoced into war until Russia has fallen and the conquest has been consolidated.
if the allies hadnt had the industrial capacity of the SU or the USA, the allied strategy would have been therefore fundamentally flawed.
I don't think you can separate strategy from economics since they are linked. And if the allies did not have the industrial capacity they had, then I think that they also would have had another type of strategy of war.
Building liberty ships faster than they could be sunked would for example probably be replaced by another naval strategy.
The allies had during the entire war an strategical freedom the axis could only dream of, even the best axis strategy would be by default be bad considering the odds simply because the strategical situation dictated it.
I don't think Germany played foreign policy rational. No one forced them to attack USA, and no one forced to attack the Soviet union when they did. And they had a choice what their factories should have produced - strategic bombers, tanks, uboats, tactical bombers, offensive weapons, defensive weapons. They could have taken Malta, but they didn't. They could have supported Arabian uprisings in the middle east. They could tried not to make themselves enemies of the slavs. If the Kriegsmarine had joined forces with the Italian navy and the Vichy fleet, then the battles at sea could have become interesting.
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One cannot just assemble a million men at the German border and punch through it within a week. But atleast France did a try, and had they been succesful they would probably have expanded their offensive into Germany while most of the German army was fighting in Poland.
But the French got stuck and didn't seem to have much faith in the ability to break trough well prepared defenses. And all this was contradicting all the military wisdom that existed back then which said that a huge tank force could always punch through any defences. Just like the bombers would always breaktrough into enemy territory and terrorbomb a country into submission. And the Allies also did several bomb raids on Germany in 1939, and to their own surprise did they not have any effect at all on their enemy.
So what one can conclude is that Fuller's "breaktrough doctrine" was just as faulty as the fashionable Dohuets theory about bombers as a war winning weapon.
Fact is that tanks usally don't do well against a well prepared enemy or in unsuitable terrain. Tanks and airplanes are not wonder weapons. Just as fortifications is not just some medieval nonsense. Great military thinkers like Erich von Manstein was one of the proponents of building fortifactions in pre-war Germany, even if those projects competed with funds and steel with other defensive strategies.
And the Westwall was an improved copy of French Maginot line, but it had somewhat shittier guns than the french version. Nonetheless was it a formidable defensive position.
And defensive lines came to play an important role in the war, such as the Gustav line which the allies couldn't breakthrough for 6 months despite their superior numbers. And even old shitty defensive lines could prove to be hard nuts to crack. The Mannerheim line was not as well equiped as the continental defensive lines, since Finland was the poorest country in Europe and its population was tiny, but still their defences proved difficult for the Russians, who got utterly humiliated by the finns both in the winter war and in the continuation war.
And then we have the case of Metz, with old forts from the 1870s guarded by a dozen understrength Divisions mosly consisting of troops dubious quality - militia and such . But nevertheless could it hold back some of the best units in the American army, when they held back the well equiped Pattons 3rd Army for over 3 months.
So no, I certainly do not consider fortifications to be a joke like you do. And I think tanks are more suited to flanking operations and attacks on open ground than attacking fortifications. And considering the hell of the first world war, I would say that attacking a well entrenched enemy with barbed wire and minefields ahead of him is indeed a very costly operation.
The Siegfried line was no joke, and it existed for real. And it would have been a tough nut to crack.
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You don't need that expensive weapons to shot down a helicopter. A gunshot or a RPG are usally enough.
Helicopters during the Vietnam era only needed a bullet into their hydralic system for them to crash. Furthermore did they lack any warning systems that told them that they were taking hits from enemy fire and needed to take cover, so it was often only after other helicopters in the unit saw gunfire that anyone could react.
Todays helicopters are much better in so far that the pilots are more likely to survive a crash.
However, the limitations are still much the same. They can only carry a limited amount of weight, and therefore they cannot carry much armour. They cost much money and they got limitations on range, how much weight they can carry, and they cannot take much damage, and most helicopters in Vietnam couldn't take survive long in the harsh climate since the rotorblades got destroyed by wood and rocks it threw up, and Iraq 2003 British Helicopters also suffered from a short lifespan to all sandydust it threw up.
And helicopters in Vietnam was also limited in their capabilities to operate at night and in bad weather.
So helicopter warfare got its limitations. With a limited number of positions on the map suitable for helicopter transports of men, it was easy for the Vietcong to make ambushes on American helicopters.
So protect the transport helicopters, some helicopters was starting to carry rockets and machine guns. And those huey gunships would later lead to the UH-1 Cobra, the worlds first attack helcopter.
So do I think attack helicopters are obsolete? Not yet. They got much firepower and can take out enemy tanks. And they can provide protection for other helicopters. But on the other hand are they weak, and would probably get replaced by drones in the future.
Few armies got the luxury to move large numbers of troops by helicopter, so I think the transport helicopter will mostly be valuable as an ambulance.
And the Air Cavalry Division in Vietnam had limited firepower since everything had to be transportable by helicopter. And the troops were vulnerable to ambushes when they landed or lifted. And also resupplying the troops by helicopter could be dangerous under enemy fire. And just one single bullet could be enough to down an expensive helicopter with all onboard. Later on would troops be dropped by rope by helicopter so they could clear a landing zone with chainsaws. Or Planes could drop mega bombs in the middle of the djungle, so helicopters could land in the crater.
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I think Germany had some scientific advantage over their opponents, but it could not in itself help bring Germany to victory.
Those who (unlike me) love to speculate about "what if" scenarios could of course argue if Germany maybe could have a realistic chance to win the war if Germany somehow had killed the Normandy landing, avoided the Bagration disaster, and been able to use all panzers lost at Falaise, the Ardennes, Arracourt and other places in the west and thrown them into the east instead to retake the Romanian oil fields, and to inflict heavy manpower losses on the heavily exhausted red army.
Germany had a good education system ever since Frederick the Great and his system was later on copied by countries all over the world. And the heavy investments done by the German Kaiser helped to create many high tech industries in electricity, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Germany had the best educated people in the world. And Hitler would later on inherit this
fantastic science base.
And the rest of the world could not even catch up with Germany, even after the Versaille treaty had forced the country to share its secrets in the chemical industry with the Americans.
It is no surprise that Germany invested so heavily into creating new super weapons that would change the outcome of the war.
In both World wars were Germany fighting a war against enemies with much larger resources, and Germany could simply not win a war of atrittion. Germany needed a fast victory so it tried all kinds of methods to get a speedy victory even if it sometimes
meant using methods that would upset the global world opinion.
During WW1 did the Germans try to break the stalemate with poison gas, flame throwers, and unrestricted submarine warfare.
And in world war 2 was Germany also forced to gamble on new technologies since it did not have manpower or industrial production capacity to compete with the allies on equal terms.
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Truth has been sacrificed for the sake of simplicity and in the cause of healing some wounds. In war movies are there often stereotypical caracters like the good German (Thomas Kretschmann, von Stauffenberg etc) and the bad German (ie Hauptmann Haller).
Not all Germans were bad was the message, and clean Wehrmacht myth and the myth of the South only wanting "a little more freedom and the fight had nothing to with slavery"... are maybe a bit of an attempts to heal the wounds and hatred between USA and Germany, and the North and the South.
But reality was however more complicated. The Wehrmacht was mostly clean, but there was also elements who committed crimes against humanity. And even if the SS, the police and gestapo deserve 95% of all the blame for the genocide, would I still say that it is bad enough if only 3% could be blamed on the German army for their cooperation and assistance with bullets and trucks to kill people. Looking the other way and say nothing when millions of innocents die is incredibly weak by an organization that managed to conquer Europe.
I do however not think that the German army otherwise did much I can complain about. A few war crimes happened like in any other army, captured American paratroops in Italy got tied to trees and then got a bucket of gasoline on them and being set on fire, but as one paratrooper said did the Americans do equally horrible things in the fighting there. Overall was the war in North Africa seen as civilized and both sides even had secret radio contact to help each other to save men who had been lost in the middle of the desert. And soldiers who had raped a woman in France got severely punished.
When it comes to the South and the lost cause is this story incredibly silly. The South was the bad guys, and the purpose of the war was the preservation of slavery... and all other factors for the war were of little importance by comparison. CSA also committed treason so there is really no need to romanticize the South.
If I would present the South in a good light I would not do so by lying, but rather by saying that abolitionist activist caused dangerous riots in the south - which was both an undemocratic method of doing things, and a thing very provocative towards the south... and it radicalized the issue of slavery and made it difficult to compromise a stepwise solution towards abolition. The war was a tragedy that could have been avoided, and it did end up costing more lives than any other more in US history.
The war was unnecessary and it created bad blood between the North and the South for decades to come... indeed some even see conflicts between GOP and the democrats to follow this line of conflict. The protectionist policies that made imports of British machinery more expensive for southern farmers were also an unfair provocation to the south. Northern cities benefited by southerners being forced to buy their overpriced products and helping them to industrialize, but the South did not get any compensation for this.
And the burning of cities in the South did put salt into the wounds in the relation between north and south.
"Nazi iconography is banned in Germany, many hate groups over there have taken to using the Confederate battle flag in its stead."
The best thing would be to forcing them to wear ugly Picasso painting logos instead of good looking symbols :P
Jokes aside.. I do think that hate groups will use whatever that is available to them. So banning the nazi flag is pointless. The neo-nazis in Germany then only use the old black-white-red Bismarck tricolour with an iron cross
instead - which have in turn made a historical German non-nazi symbol associated with far right extremism.
Which I do think is idiotic.
To a foreigner it is a bit strange that the stars and bars are still used as much as it is in state flags, given its historical use in the racist oppressive Confederate states.
But on the other hand could you see this flag being used also here in Europe by groups with no ties to KKK... such as rockabilly fans, motorcycle drivers and people who drives American cars fromt the 1950s and 1960s. So it have become a strange cultural icon.
"Winners do not always write history- only those dedicated to writing history write history."
True. So if one person repeat a lie. Then will I repeat the truth over and over and over again until it sticks.
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On the other hand would better planes result in more military victories which in turn would result in more resources.
Maybe jet fighters and SAMs would be able to prevent some american bombers from destroying factories so more planes could be built. And with more jet fighters it would be possible to protect mines, and prevent railways transports from being bombed - which would lead to more resources to Germany.
And maybe a few jets could make a difference to cling on to important strategic locations a little longer so Germany could get rare earths from Norway and Ukraine, metal from France and oil from Romania.
The problem for Germany would rather be to produce victories in the long run. USA had hundreds of thousands of planes and airmen ready to fight. While Germany didn't have huge amounts of aluminium and high quality oil like USA.
The technological development was speedy during this time period. Only 13 years after the war ended did F4 Phantom and F105 Thunderchief enter service. F4 is a plane capable of flying mach 2, and landing on aircraft carriers, and with upgrades this plane could still be a worthy opponent in air combats of today.
And F105 was almost a stealth bomber built in 1958, and despite it only had a single engine it could fly twice the speed of sound and carry a bombload twice as big as of a B17.
And in 1955, only 10 years after world war 2 did Sweden also develop Draken which was a fighter which also was capable of flying mach2 and it would remain in service with several nordic air forces until the late 1990s, and Austria kept their last Drakens in service until 2005.
All of those three planes would be able to outclass any early war allied or axis aircraft. And not only that. Every plane in service in 1945 would be slaughtered in an air combat against F4, F105 or Draken.
Compare that to today, when upgraded versions of old planes (like F16 Viper, Gripen NG, Eurofighter) still are deadly opponents to even the most advanced fighter jets in service - like F22 which is usally considered the best plane in the world. We are talking about planes which are 40 years old.
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World war II was a bit special, America had its great depression and lots of unemployed, and women were outside the labourmarket, so it was possible to smoothly move workers into new jobs.
In a future war I do think the west still got much to give in a war effort. The post-industrial society is largely a myth. Fewer people work in the industry today and more people work in the service sector for two main reasons. Firstly because there is a trend that companies wanna specialize in their core activities, and back in the old days a car manufacturer, for example Volvo, could hire people to work as cleaners and having people handling all the bills. But now those same cleaners and finance experts could do the exactly same jobs as before for Volvo, but now they work for a separate cleaning or finance company that works for Volvo.
Nothing has changed in the real world, but in statistics things seems to have changed because the cleaner and banker no longer works in an industry company but are now instead classed as service sector workers.
Another reason why less people are working on the factory floor is because industrial robots and machinery can do the job more effective oftentimes. You don't have any worker strikes, no paid vacations, no maturnity leave, no sick workers staying home, and no gossip.
And robots can also work in enviroments too dangerous for human labour, they can work in noisy dirty enviroments, and they can lift things that weight many tonnes, and they can make things with greater precision than a human surgeon.
So I wouldn't say that the industry lacks capacity, in fact I think the contrary is true. And in terms of money that are going into the government by taxes, we still see that the industry still plays a huge role in most western economies.
And if a world war with China starts, then I think people would consume less and money would instead be used for investments in more industrial robots and new production plants.
And labour-intensive production methods would be replaced with capital intensive production methods, since we got lots of money and techological know how, and little manpower.
And China would do the opposite since they got much people that can become workers, but they can not afford many machines.
So the west would be able to send a larger proportion of its male population to war since fewer people are needed to produce a tank than what China would need due to its lack of robots.
We still have high unemployment today today, and most people do work with bullshit jobs - marketing/advertisement, tourism, selling financial products of no use to society, genderstudies proffessors, making goldplated toilets and luxury yachts for billionaires, salesmen of anal bleaching, public relations executives and management consultants....... yep there are lots of people one can pick and either dressup in a military uniform or put to work in a factory to make that uniform.
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USA is still the largest economy in the world and most of the highly productive Fortune 500 companies are stationed there, and the country holds a technological leadership. And Britain is still one of the largest economies in the world despite their shrinking importance of their manufacturing industry, the country still produces a lot of things, but if we divde up the industrial production with the number of citizens, then country produces very little nowadays and needs to reindustrialize.
And Germany, Japan, Scandinavia are still making things.
I would not go so far as to say its decline has been a statistical illusion
To some extent it is. And it can explain atleast some of the decline. People always say that we live in a post-industrial society, but I would say that manufacturing is still the most important sector in an economy.
Neighter farming or the service sector can make the same productivity increases.
We are 400 times more productive in making cotton clothes than we were in the early 1800s, and while a skilled worker could make 2000 cigares per day in the early in 1800s, there are now machines that can make 5000 cigarettes per minute.
So could a farmer do the same and increase his harvest 400 times bigger than his ancestors? nope.
Can a service sector person make two hundred more haircuts per hour than a barber in Rome? no.
Can a chef serve a hundred more meals? no.
Only manufacturing can also bring in foreign currency into the country to pay for all the imports. So I would say that manufacturing still plays a key roll in the modern economy. Unfortunatly it has often been neglected by modern intellectuals who say that a service based economy and banking is the future.
The US will be fine, lots of cash protected by two oceans, the worlds biggest navy to keep supply lines open and an abundance of most resources. Europeans, Japan, Russia ect. I might be alot harder for them.
Germany and Japan could build a huge military, but they have just choosen not to do so. And if they were to spend more on their own military - as America wants - then they would get some substantial military forces, as West-Germany had during the cold war.
And Britain and France still got some of the most powerful armies in the world. And the German, South Korean and Japanease airforces are still quite large, and relativly strong compared to the Chinease airforce which still uses ancient garbage like MIG-17 fighter jets.
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Even with this definition of victory Japans way of acting still remains increadibly retarded. I can understand japans feelings of frustration and anger over unfair treatment from the west. But that doesn't change the fact that Japans decision to start a war with USA was stupid and suicidal.
Yamamoto knew that this would never end well. But the rest of Japans leadership was naive and thought that all what was needed was a hard punch to knock out the American fleet and the war would be over, because America would just be okay with a sneaky suprise attack from a country of an inferior human race.
As I said. This was just wishful thinking. America would never accept such dirty tactics, and especially not in a time period when racism was mainstream. There would also be too much national pride and prestige loss to surrender to a developing country in Asia.
Pearl Harbor would never be forgotten or forgiven.
And this idea the japanese had that combat experience against shitty armies in Asia, and fanatical combat morale could fully compensate for Americas industrial superiority is also naive.
The japanese racist stereotype of Americans as materialistic and afraid of death were also far from true. Just like Hitler and the nazis did the japanese leadership know nothing about America and its industrial might. And the consequences of that would become equally devastating.
The war Japan started was just a mess of miscalculations on so many levels. And the lack of a Plan-B seems typical for the caotic japanese regime. They just started wars everyware and landed troops on islands everyware even if they didn't have any logistical capabilities to support small garrisons on every goddamn island in the pacific.
They were nowhere near victory in China, and yet they started new wars with France, the Netherlands, Britain, Australia, USA and New Zeeland. As if the problems with China and Russia was not enough. And they also managed to piss off the local population in every land they occupied, and they lacked any economic plan on how rule their many stolen colonies so the local economies took severe damages and suffered from shortages of everything, higher prices and massive inflation.
The war could never have ended well in the long run - as you said. But the war didn't even run well in the short run. The turning point of the war came only half a year after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor.
And the battle of Coral Sea was an indecisive small loss for Japan. And the battle of
Pearl harbor never became any knockout punch, but instead could many ships be repaired and brought back to service within a few months.
And if Japan could not do better the first months of the war, then what says that they would do better the next coming months and years when America would get more modern planes to combat the Zero fighters with?
The next big disaster for Japan came only months after Midway, when the battle of Guadacanal costed Japan hundreds of aircrafts and enormous amounts of transport ships that it would never be able to replace.
And after that did Japan lose the iniative in the pacific theather over to the Americans.
And the massive sea battle at the Philliphines in 1944 could at best only have won Japan a little time before defeat. Japan was at that point starving and the merchant navy laid at the bottom of the ocean. And the industrial production was stopped by the lack of raw materials.
And even if the resources had been there so would the japanese production been too little to save the country. America was producing more aircrafts in 1943 than Japan did during the entire war. And Japans aircraft designs were comparably outdated and the pilots was badly trained.
And with the end of the war in Europe would any prospects of peace on good terms be over with as Britain, USSR, USA and China would gang up on Japan. America had never even used their industrial muscles 100% during the war - and yet were they able utterly outproduce rest of the world.
And one can only imagine what would happen if America full hearted attempt if Japan somehow managed to win some battles in the pacific. The US Navy even canceled the orders of new battleships after the victory at Midway in 1942. So had the battle of Midway ended differently then the Montana monster-sized super-battleships could still would have been under construction.
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I guess that one can use any kind of sensor as a trigger. Only human imagination is the limit. A mine that explodes when someone press on it (like when you press a key on your mouse), or a sensor that makes the mine explode when it hear loud noises, or mines that explode from heat, or a mine that explodes from a smell of certain chemicals, from certain color, from heat, from magnetism, mines that explodes from a tripwire, mines that can explode when you crush the glass of a window, you can make mines that sends out a a laser beam towards a sensor and when someone moves between the two and interrupts this laser beam and blocks it - then the mine explodes. You can make mines that reacts to electricity, magnetism, air pressure, the speed of particles moving around in the air.
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The ukrainian frontline is shorter. Wehrmacht had to mine the entire atlantic coast and the eastern front so of course was there large spots on the map not covered by land mines or other obstacles like barbed wire, dragoons teeths, punji sticks or whatever.
I think this video is useful as it puts yourself in shoes of the bad guys (Nazi-Germany and Ṋạƶì-Ŗǜṣṣḯâ ) and their challanges with their land mines. Their lack of mines that made it impossible to cover all areas with mines. The terrain challanges of putting land mines in certain areas.
Too often do we think of the challanges how to overcome the landmines from our perspective as the good guys. However by seeing the weaknesses in our enemy can we understand the weakpoints in our enemys defensive strategy that is based around mines.
Going through minefields is easy of the enemy does not defend that area, so having artillery and air superiority would be an option.
Another option would be to use amphibous landings to circumvent minefields - like the russians did when they invaded Finland in 1713 when they just landed troops behind every newly established defensive line of the Swedes.
And exploiting an area not covered by mines - where they enemy could not cover the area because of cows or lack of mines - is also an option.
There are some similiarities to old siege warfare in all this, where a fortress is a place where a small troop can hold up a much larger enemy force and inflict disproportionally heavy losses on them when they are forced to fight under unbenefitial circumstances.
Of course you can get cannons and siegecraft to batter a hole in the wall, dig tunnels under the wall, offer bribes, make threats, siege the place, use ships to cut off food supplies to the town.
But the best way to take a place is probably through a surprising coup. A few men can sneak in to the town through a trojan horse and open the gates so that a big army quickly can cross the water and storm into the city.
However with airdropped mines and artillery deployed mines do I think that warfare has become more complex than ever. Now are the minefields no longer just in front of you. But now can the enemy even also quickly deploy minefields behind you to prevent you from retreating and fleeing and catch you a death trap.
And with advanced sensors and drones flying everywhere like CCTV cameras, plus AI bot FPV drones in the future will it be hard to hide on a future battlefield. And electronic warfare and cyber warfare will become very important.
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PanzerIII was intended to be main tank of the German army - and it was the best tank they had in the beginning of the war, so this was the tank they wanted to use against other tanks.
And PanzerIV was a bigger machine that was just thought of as something to support other tanks or helping the infantry. Its gun was short because it was used to kill enemy bunkers and enemy footsolidiers.
And that was the German idea on how the war should be fought. But those dreams got crushed in 1940, because Germany didn't have enough panzerIII tanks to fight against France since the production of the German industry was so small. So Germany had to attack France with all that they had - which was mostly weak light tanks such as Panzer I, Panzer 35t, Panzer 38t and the most numerous of all German tanks was the Panzer II.
And Germany only had a very small number of somewhat good tanks as Panzer IV, Panzer III and StuG B.
But Germany won over France anyways.
And after the battle of France the Germans realized how good the StuG B was so the started to build them in large numbers, and they also realized that they had to replace their weak light tanks with more powerful Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks, and give the PanzerIII tank a new better 50mm gun so it would have any chance of winning a fight in a modern tank battle.
Then when Germany invaded Russia they had a much more powerful tankforce with much more StuGs and medium tanks - but even in 1941 so was the weak Panzer II still the most used tank in the German army.
And in Russia the Germans got many nasty surprises - they meet monster tanks like t-34 and kv1 which was the most powerful tanks in the world in 1941... just as the Panther and Tiger was the most powerful tanks in the world in 1943.
And the only way of taking out those tanks was to fire at them with the powerful 88mm anti-aircraft guns. And the shots from German tanks just bounced off the Russian armor of those beasts. The German solidier felt powerless against those Russian tanks, and the Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunners didn't like their new job as tank killers, since this was nothing they was trained for, and driving this high siluette unarmoured thing close to the enemy lines was nothing they liked.
So Germany realized that they needed better tools that was able to kill those tanks before the Russians could start building them in large numbers.
So Germany started the Panther project in 1942, and they continued their development of the Tiger tank since the German army deseratly needed anything that could take on the Russian monsters. And to solve the most urgent crisis the Germans put some Russian 76mm guns they had conquered and putted them on Czech panzer 38t tanks and used them as the Marder38t tank destroyers.
And the old PanzerIII and PanzerIV got better guns so they would be better able to kill enemy tanks. Panzer IV got a long 75 gun and thereby became the best tank in the world in 1942, but the little panzer III was too small to carry such a big gun so it only got a 50mm gun that was good enough to kill most tanks, but it could not destroy the frontal armour of a KV1... so the German infantryman now always felt safer standing next to Panzer IV.
Panzer IV had become tha main tank of the German army because it had a better gun against enemy tanks, while Panzer III became more of a support tank because it too weak to fight the best enemy tanks.
But panzer III would live on for the rest of the war, because it was a reliable good tank that could turn fast. Its big problem was its weak gun, so the Germans took away the turret from the tank and built it like a box with a large 75mm gun on it. And without a turret, a tank becomes cheaper and easier to produce.
The turret also weights a lot, so by taking the turret off, the Germans could instead put a larger gun on the tank and give it extra thick armour. So the StuG became the most produced German tank of world war II, and also one of the most succeful. It was cheap to produce and it killed 3 tanks for every StuG that was lost.
In August 1942, the Tiger tank entered service, just about the same time when Germany was trying to conquer southern Russia and push forward into Egypt. And it was not a tank Germany planned to build in large numbers since it was too expensive and too difficult and time consuming to produce.
This heavy tank was intended to be a huge sledgehammer that would turn even the most well defended enemy position into pieces. And it would be a weapon superior to anything the enemy have, and it would be a great morale booster to the German troops and make the enemy solidiers piss their pants when they saw one these monsters show up.
And it was a good tank, but not good enough to justify all trouble that went into producing these machines. And they had their drawbacks - they were too heavy to use most bridges, and also most German military bridges.. and they needed 3 trucks to draw them to a repairshop because they were so heavy, and doint that thing is not a funny job at a battlefield where fire is raining down everyware.
And by 1943 the war had changed and Germany was now no longer the attacker, but now needed to defend her territory. And then the Tiger was forced to fight a type of war it was never build for.
And in 1943 Germany was getting the Panther which was starting to replace the old Panzer IV as the main medium tank of the German army. It was fast, had a good gun with excellent precision, penetration, range and reload time, and it had good frontal armour....and it could travel over snow and mud better than all other tanks - even those half its own weight, and its optics was superior to any tank during the war, and it was a pioneer in IR-sights (something Nato only began using in the 1960s).
But the tank also had serious drawbacks. It was expensive to produce and consumed many workhours to make one tank. It was too heavy to use on most military bridges. Its sidearmour was no better than other tanks despite this tank was so expensive to make. And the tank was an overly complex design so it often suffered from all kinds of problems from engine fires, electrical failures that prevented the gun from firing to all kinds of things. It needed so much repairs that it every year spent half its time in a repairshop, and therefore only could help the troops on the battlefield half the time. While Sherman and T-34 could be at the battlefield 80-90% of the time because they were tanks with less design problems.
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If Hitler thought that Russia was about to fall, then there would be no need to get Japan involved to share the booty. The Japanease Navy was an impressive addition to the Axis, but I think Hitler made a huge misjudgement when one compares the benifits of having Japan as an ally compared to having the USA as an enemy.
But as I said earlier, Hitler and Japan had to make a quick decision. Because Japan was quickly running out of resources, and without those resources the war in China would be doomed to fail. And Japan was furious on USA for their blockade, but on the other hand did they fear a war with this mighty power. And Hitler made the decision that he wanted to have Japan as his brother in arms, so he tried to impress them and make them believe that the war in Russia was almost over so Japan would be convinced to join the Axis and fight America togheter with Germany.
Personally I think that Hitler had reason for some optimism in 1941 and 1942. The Russian military disasters of 1941 was simply happening at an unsubstainable rate. He had misjudged the opposition and it was guessed that he would face opposition from 150 Russian Divisions, but a few months into Barbarossa it was estimated by his own military that he had been facing 300 Division equalents, and by late October over 150 Russian Divisions had been destroyed.
The German losses had also been heavy of course, but not as severe as the Russian losses. And as 1942 started Germany began the war with a decimated force, and so did the Russians. But in terms of firepower Germany was better off. Her tank losses had mostly been among the outdated garbage with shitty armour and guns, while all newly produced tanks were powerful machines - such as the excellent PzIVF,G and H models.
While Russia had lost of her good equipment in 41 and her industry was in great trouble with all movement to the Ural. Germany also had total control over the skies.
And after the catastrophic Soviet winter offensive and the disasterous Kharkov offensive in 1942, I would say that the Axis had its finest hour and Victory was almost at sight. The road to Southern Russia laid open for Germany to take and Japan was still having the upper hand in the sea battles of the pacific.
But just a few weeks later things would change forever with the battle at Midway. And Japan would lose her naval dominance. And later that year the Afrika korps would get defeated, and the battle for the Atlantic would turn bad for the Germanz, and the year would end with the disaster at Stalingrad. And the war would be lost.
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