Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History Visualized"
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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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