Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Wehrmacht: Incompetent yet Successful?" video.
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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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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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