Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Comparison German Infantry, Motorized \u0026 Panzer Divisions 1939 - Visualization" video.

  1. Horses can starve to death unlike trucks, but they can go across difficult terrain. Germany started the war with trucks from a large number of manufactureres and no standardization which made the logistics messy... then they conquered France and the most motorized army in the world (the british) decided that it was a good idea to leave all their trucks in Belgium to the Germans before they went home to Britain... so the Germans ended up with a large number of trucks and felt that trucks-transportations-logistics wasn't much of a pressing issue in their preparations for the invasion of Russia. And that decision would later on bite them in the ass for the rest of the war, with their logistical nightmare of trying to find spare parts not only for trucks from 1-2 dozens of German companies, but also british, dutch and french trucks. But relying on horses wasn't always a disadvantage. Ironically did the germans have better mobility in the battle of Normandy than the allies, because their horses wasn't so reliant upon good infrastructure as the allies. So when allied bombers turned all infrastructure in the entire northern France into ruins, then the mobility of the motorized british and American army got severly restricted. The great speed of the german army relied more upon their skillful NCOs and their decentralized decisionmaking (auftragstaktik). This tactics became even more successful than in World war 1 thanks to the co-ordination by radio. In world war 1 it could take 8 hours for troops at the front to send information up the ranks to the reach the headquarters behind the front.. and then it took the equal amount of time for orders to come from the headquarters to reach the front. But by then the situation had often changed so much that the orders were completly outdated. So the germans solved this problem by letting their commanders of lower ranks to get more freedom to do as they seemed fit at the time and spot, instead of having to get instructions from above for everything. That made the German army so flexible, fast and effiecent.
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  2. General Motors is best general. He have never lost a war.
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  3. Sweden used horses til the 1960s and we also used lots of tractors to draw the infantry.
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  4. A weak German military could make their neighbours more relaxed so they could use money on other things than on the military. I for my part think that all European countries should have their own strong army since I don't believe in EU, freetrade and globalism, and I alsot think that a strong army doesn't have to cost much (look at Finland). Sweden did also have a pretty strong military at a low cost, perhaps even the strongest in Europe in 1994. 800.000 men + a modern JAS-39 airforce with as many planes as the french airforce, hundreds of Leopard tanks plus lots of good 2nd rate materials in reserve (centurion tanks, the S-tank, Viggen, Draken etc)... not bad for a country with only 9 million people.
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  5. Nah The mongols, the Kaiser Heer and the Assyrians was better horsedrawn armies.
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  6. Assyrians was the fastest army measured in average marched miles per day. The mongols started from nothing into conquering a large chunk of the entire world. And the Kaisers army wasn't exactly a cavlry army, but it was horse drawn like the Wehrmacht...and that army was effiecent and could take lots of losses and still be fit for fight like the roman Armies. It almost knocked out France and UK in 1914 and then again in 1917 (when France will to fight nearly collapsed with the Nivelle offensive) and the Brits also nearly gave up in 1918...... Anyhow. Despite Germanys allies basicly got knocked out at the start of the war... (Austria the first 3-4 months of the war and the Ottomans with the failed Caucasus offensive the winter 1914-15).....and yet Germany almost won the war on their own. They crushed Serbia, and then they knocked out Romania, and then Russia, and then Italy, and then they almost knocked out Beligum, France and the British Commonwealth. But the American intervention did in the last moment save the Alliies from losing the war by sending in endless numbers of fresh troops when the German Army had suffered exhaustion.
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  7. What about mechanized divisions?? Didn't they have most tanks and firepower of all divisions in 1939?
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  8. Atleast the existed in theory, I read it in a book (Kraftfahrzeuge und Panzer der Reichswehr, Wehrmacht und Bundeswehr) that takes up the number of men and composition of the manpower within all types of German divisions each year from 1939 to 1945. Maybe they didn't exist for real in 1939 (I doubt they did, since Germany didn't even have enough tanks for their panzer Divisions, and putting them in an even more Overpowered mechanized Divison seem like a terrible idea). However, their composition and strenght seemed so very different from a motorized division... a mechanized division on paper did even have more tanks than a panzer division, and a panzer division was much more powerful than a motorized division. So a mechanized Division was pretty powerful compared to a motorized.
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  9. Number of men is important, but so is also organization, equipment and training. The German army was at its peak in 1941. Their numbers were strong. The men were battlehardened and experienced. Their confidence inthemselves, in their officers, their comrades and the Army was record high after all the victories in Europe. Their tactics and training had been improved by the great amounts of experience they gained by all the countries they had invaded. Germany also tried to produce more of the equipment that had been proven unexpectedly successful and phase out the more dissapointing stuffs. The Army also recieved lots of captured trucks from the french army and the British expeditionary force.
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  10. What was the point of multiplying Panzer Divisions if the number of tanks was reduced in half? The experiences during the battle of France showed that the panzer Divisions was way too overpowered when it came to tanks, while their infantry support was a little bit weak. So the solution to this problem was to spread out the tanks in more units, and letting each panzer division gain a larger proportion of infantry support.
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  11. War of independence?
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