pamak_1970

I agree with what you said except the above quote. I don't think Germans had a material superiority in France 1940 or Africa 1941. In fact part of the credit they got as a military machine was their ability to fight and win impressive victories during these years against stronger opponents in material terms. On the other hand i understand that you can't congratulate yourself for the big encirclements and casualties inflicted on Soviets during the first stages of their campaign in 1941 and at the same time blaim lack of fuel or lack of spare parts or aerial superiority for their defeats in France in 1944. Soviets had also similar problems in 1941

I don't understand how you come to this conclusion. What is the yardstick you use for the appropriate level of casualties a superior in quality force can inflict on another under the conditions in ETO 1944? I don't say that Germans were superior. I just try to understand how you came to this conclusion. I do understand that defense gives a serious advantage to them at the tactical level. On the other hand, most of casualties come because of operational reasons, not tactical. It is operational breakthroughs and exploitations which create hundreds of thousands of prisoners and captured material, even minor damaged ones which under different circumstances (stable front) could be repaired and return to the battlefield. So although it is true that Germans were favored by the terrain and their posture at the tactical level, it is also true that Allies being on the offensive operationally and managing to win, registered hundreds of thousands of German prisoners and hundreds of German tanks in their books as a result of it. But the question remains. Someone may argue that this operational victory came because of numbers and that Germans were actually better in quality and someone else may argue that there was parity or American supremacy in both quantity and quality. Here is an interesting example. Germans in Alamein are behind a fortified line with secured flanks and lose suffering huge casualties, dozens of thousands as prisoners (most of them are captured during the retreat) and hundreds of tanks which they couldn't evacuate and repair during the retreat. They had never experienced such a high level of casualties although they had been on the offensive before and even staged failed attacks like during the first battle of Alamein. If they suffered an alarming high rate of personnel losses when they were on the offensive, they simply had the freedom to stop the action and when their tank force had experienced comparable loss of equipment before, it was a matter of a short time to repair the vast majority and put them back to action but they simply didn't have this freedom when they lost the defensive battle in El Alamein. Many argue that British won this operational victory in the last battle of Alamein, not because of their superior quality but because of their superior numbers and although DAK had a big tactical advantage because of its posture it didn't change the fact that Germans lost many people and equipment (more that the attacking British) as a result of their operational defeat and not as a result of their inferior quality. So did Germans there suffer huge losses because of the superior quality of British soldier, or was it a matter of brute force? The above case is not some type of anomaly. British had a similar experience earlier in Gazala where they were on the defensive and were forced to retreat suffering huge losses too.

My 2 cents I will talk only about a certain thing I see emerging often in this thread. People often try to “quantify” quality by examining casualty rates. “X inflicted more casualties on his opponent than Y did, therefore X demonstrated higher quality”. I have dozens of objections regarding this type of logic. I will mention just two of them First, one obvious question is the appropriate yardstick we should use. Should we talk simply about the casualty ratio or should we talk about “casualties inflicted per fighter”? I am not familiar with the official historical numbers so I will use hypothetical ones. Say 100,000 Germans in Normandy inflicted 10,000 casualties on Allies and 200,000 Allies inflicted 20,000 casualties on Germans. If somebody tallies the total number and uses the ratio of Allied to German casualties, he will conclude that German casualties were double compared to Allied ones. But does this imply any quality advantage on behalf of the Allies? Someone else may use another yardstick implying different results. Say we examine “casualties inflicted on enemy per friendly fighter”. In the above example 100,000 German fighters were responsible for the 10,000 Allied casualties and 200,000 Allied fighters were responsible for the 20,000 German casualties. In other words, the number of casualties inflicted on the other side per fighter is equal for both sides implying equal “quality”. My second objection is more complex to describe so I will use an analogy to make my point.Let’s use another type of “fight” say a war game like combat mission. We all know that a digital army commanded by an experienced human player has more “quality” compared to the one controlled by the PC. Here is one case you might want to consider. Let’s assume that statistics show that when you play a certain scenario against computer, you manage to get a victory by annihilating your opponent after suffering X casualties on average. Say that you want to gather similar statistics for a slightly modified version of the same scenario. Everything will be the same, except that you start the game with double the amount of forces you had originally. Isn’t it a reasonable expectation to see better results in the form of suffering fewer casualties on average till the end of the game? Does this mean that somehow your quality as a player improved or that the AI became worse? by the way my screen name is pamak1970 but for some reason the system didn't let me in. Perhaps because it was an old account? I haven't posted here for quite sometime. So i created a new one