Comments by "Nattygsbord" (@nattygsbord) on "Military History not Visualized"
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Airwar:
Strategic bombing - attacking factories, cities, railway hubs, bridges
Tactical bombing - Supporting your own ground troops by attacking tanks, infantry, bunkers and such.
Land war:
Tactical level - Units of a minor size (less than say 5.000 men) fighting battles of very limited importance to the outcome of the war. And the study of tactics involves much around co-ordination between tanks, air support, artillery and infantry... and what tanks attack formation should look like, and how trenches, machine guns and land mines are best put to use, and how helicopters best can cooperate during a helicopter landing so that losses can be kept low by careful planning and cooperation between attack helicopters, recon helicopters, transports and attack aircraft.
Strategic level - Are about seeing the war from a bigger picture and ignore the minor details (such as what type of tanks and machine guns that being used by each side). A Strategic General is much more interested in the logistic situation since supplying and feeding big armies of 200.000 men are much more of challange than to someone who is just leading a battallion of 750 men.
Getting supplies forward to your own troops and cutting off the supplies for the armies of your enemies are much more important than worrying about how many men who died in a small battle with 50 men of each side.
For a strategist terrain does matter, mountains, trenches and minefields are excellent defensive positions. While bridges, railway hubs, oil fields, industrial centres, powerplants and such are valuable key areas to take. And encirleing enemy armies can destroy them more cheaply and effectivly than winning a 100 small tactical battles.
Then there are of course not always so easy to put things into the right box. Its not always black and white. There are sometimes greyzones between tactical and strategic level combat.
Fighting about a single building in a town is usally just an unimportant tactical level operation - but in Stalingrad did thousands of men die over the control over builds such as Pavlovs house. And it was not uncommon that small German and Finlandic units could fight off entire soviet armies during world war 2, So should battles with 2 Finnish regiments fighting against multiple Russian divisions
be classed as tactical or a strategic battle? I think it is often hard to tell.
Small battles can sometimes impact the larger strategic situation.
And while losing 50 tanks might not be a big deal for the allies, but losing 50 panthers in the battle at Korsun can have much negative consequences also for the eastern front as a whole.
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France had a larger population than England, and while America was friendly to England during the world war, it was not so friendly during the Napoleonic wars. And the British dominance at sea was total in World war II. Germany was forced to dismantle her entire Navy with the peace treaty at Versaille, and after that she was prohibited from building a new one. And building a new powerful navy would have taken decades even under a militaristic dictator like Hitler, so Hitler never started the war with a Navy powerful enough to challange the British home fleet, and much less so when it was combined with the enormous fleets Britain also had in Asia and mediterranean.
And the loss of Graf Spee and the costly Norway invasion left Hitlers navy in even less shape to invade England, and nor was there any suffiecent amount of transport ships for an invasion. And plundering food and living off the lands could work for an army of the 1300s, 1500s, 1600s, 1700 and even early 1800s.... but a modern army doesn't work that way - it need tonnes of petroleum, and tonnes of ammunition. The 6th Army at Stalingrad consumed 13 railway cars of small arms ammo each day. And then we havn't even included artillery that consumes even more ammo than that.
So I would Guess that Napoleon had a better chance. France had a naval tradition as well as her allied countries, while Germany never really been a naval power. England didn't have much timber of her own to build ships, and her population needed food imports.
German uboats was quite close to starving England, but they were never any threat to Englands dominance at sea, and Germany would never outnumber England at sea as Spain and France did at Trafalgar.
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I think the German assumptions on where the allied D-day landings would go were reasonable - after all it would be dumb to make a landing outside air cover, and having long distances for ship to transport, and not taking a harbour so that the invasion force can get supplies and reinforcements.
Making an attack directly into Prussia would give the Germans all the advantages of having short supply lines, knowing the terrain, having men more determined than ever to defend their homeland (instead of just a outpost in France). And meanwhile would it the allied ability to use their massive air power be very limited as no planes had the range and no paratroops could capture bridges and protect the flanks of the amphibious landing.
So a landing in Germany looks foolish to me. And same goes for an invasion of Denmark since the land is close to Germany and far away from Britain, and Germany could easily gather troops in Germany and by land just walk into the country. And German air fields would be perfectly in range of reaching any invasion force, while the allied planes would not be able to reach the area.
Norway is a country with excellent defensive positions. The country is basicly just mountains and forrests, and it was not this rich oil nation back then as it is today, so the bad infrastructure would probably also become a huge allied invasion force.
And the climate is not so friendly either. So it is a country which is suitable for defensive warfare. And the allied advantage of air power and large numbers of tanks would not come to its right in this terrain. It would simply be more wise to use them elseware.
The Balkans were a more credible threat to the Germans. It could potentially outflank the German eastern front in the south, and its proximity to the Romanian oil fields were probably also worrysome. Even having allied bombers in airfields in Greece that close would be problematic enough.
But on the other hand did the balkans and Greece have many mountains that offered good defensive terrain - as Mussoline learnt the hard way. And Germany could use airpower and send reinforcements to the area by land. So an allied landing here could very easily just have ended in one deadlock after another just like the campaign in Italy.
Taking Greece could probably be done since most of the country laid in good range for naval bombardment, and bombers in North Africa and Italy could reach it. But then breaking out further from there would be hard and would require so much troops to get through the bad terrain that one could once again start to wonder if it would be worth it?
France and the Benelux countries offered bigger rewards, and they allowed the allies to use air power and not overstretching their maritime supply lines unnecessarily much.
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