The Brits?

[AttorneyAtWar]

41 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

I

Or take the story of the Tirpitz, which I was just reading about yesterday. They build this huge battleship, then for some reason decide to park it up a fjord in Norway. Then they just let it sit there while it gets bombed repeatedly. They try to call the Luftwaffe to protect it but apparently nobody got the memo, then they try to use some new AA shells but apparently forgot they don't have the necessary range to hit anything, and eventually the whole thing is bombed to the bottom. One of the most powerful and costly assets, taken out at a loss of what, 10 Allied aircraft and a couple of miniature submarines?

 

You obviously didn't read to deeply into that story because there's a very good reason Tirpitz was forced into that Fjord. (No malice intended, I know that first part may sound a bit snippy)

What were they going to do with it when the RN and the RAF were hunting it down mercilessly, they never accomplished anything because the brits were on top of all of Germany's surface raiders rather quickly.

Edited August 5, 2016 by Raptorx7

[Bulletpoint]

5 minutes ago, TrailApe said:

So you as a German Infantry Battalion commander have laid out your defences immaculately, overlapping fields of fire, kill zones, the terrain has been used to force the enemy into corridors and even if things go badly you have an appreciable reserve to counter attack immediately. You are just waiting for the first Yank/Tommy to stick his head out and by god he’s toast!

 

Then the RAF/USAAF strategic heavy bombers unload on your defenses.

 

Then you are hit by 16” naval guns

 

Then an Army Group of Artillery open up on you,

 

Then your armoured reserve is attacked by jabos.

Sounds like you actually agree with those German generals after all

7 minutes ago, TrailApe said:

2) Eisenhower does Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein

 

Just not going to happen is it?

 

The Allies didn’t have to gamble with a **** or bust throw of the dice, they were winning.

It was a hypothetical question about whether the Germans lost because their generals were not good enough (but tried to blame other stuff for their personal failure), or because, as they claimed, they lost due to the Allies having far more resources, tnks, soliers, artillery, fighter bombers, the whole list that you mentioned. If we imagine that everything stays the same, apart from swapping the commanders so that the Allied generals fight for the Germans, and vice versa, would it have made any difference?

It seems from your post that it wouldn't have mattered at all. The German generals were in fact right to "whine" that they had no chance in hell of winning with the resources the Allied could throw at them.

 

[Michael Emrys]

38 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

Or take the story of the Tirpitz, which I was just reading about yesterday. They build this huge battleship, then for some reason decide to park it up a fjord in Norway. Then they just let it sit there while it gets bombed repeatedly.

Ah, the Navy is a whole 'nother chapter on the road to disaster. Hitler promised the Navy that there would be no general war before 1944. The Navy took him at his word (big mistake) and scheduled construction accordingly. Bismarck and Tirpitz were big ticket prestige items to announce to the world, "See what we can do? Now don't mess with us." Because so much labor and material had been devoted to capital ship construction—and for other reasons—Germany had maybe 200 fewer submarines than it needed when war came (oops!) five years early. Like I said, bad strategy and grand strategy. Hitler had badly underestimated his major opponents and would continue to do so until the day he blew his brains out.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

10 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

It was a hypothetical question about whether the Germans lost because their generals were not good enough (but tried to blame other stuff for their personal failure), or because, as they claimed, they lost due to the Allies having far more resources, tnks, soliers, artillery, fighter bombers, the whole list that you mentioned. If we imagine that everything stays the same, apart from swapping the commanders so that the Allied generals fight for the Germans, and vice versa, would it have made any difference?

There would have been differences aplenty, but I don't think they would have changed the outcome of the war. You need to understand that it wasn't just the generals, but the entire institutions of the various national armies. Even within the Allies, the different armies did not fight the same. Generals have to fight with the armies they are given. Sometimes they can change or adapt something here or there, but the vast institution of an army also has vast inertia and changes, especially profound changes, come slowly.

10 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

It seems from your post that it wouldn't have mattered at all. The German generals were in fact right to "whine" that they had no chance in hell of winning with the resources the Allied could throw at them.

No, they were completely wrong to whine, if that is what they did. They chose to roll the dice, and have no complaint that they came up snake eyes. They might have arrested Hitler and all his thugs and saved their nation a terrible disaster. But they didn't.

Michael

[Bulletpoint]

1 minute ago, Michael Emrys said:

No, they were completely wrong to whine, if that is what they did.

My point was that I don't think they were whining. I think they were giving a quite rational explanation of the reason they lost the war.

Maybe they were at the same time trying to escape any blame for their own presonal mistakes, but all in all I think they were right in their analysis.

Please note that I am in no way trying to defend Nazi Germany.

Anyway, sorry for derailing the thread, which was actually about the British, not the Germans.

[TrailApe]

In my opinion it was not who had the better generals, better equipment or whatever but it was who waged the war most effectively.

The German War Machine seems to have been ideally suited to a limited war for a limited period, however once the conflict spread beyond France and with the USSR and the USA becoming involved it was no longer enough. In some ways the 1939 Wehrmacht reminds me of the 'Old Contemptibles' of 1914. Superbly trained, but once the war dragged on their skill was diluted by casualties.

The Wehrmacht was not enough to win the war because it was a tactical force with a limited reach. they were never a fully motorized army and lacked an amphibious capability. They did have an Airborne element but that was totally gutted in one operation. With the army lacking in projection power the Germans neglected to develop a strategic airforce and although the U Boats did cause concern in the Battle of the Atlantic, by 1943 the technology and numbers had shifted the momentum to the Allies. As an American phrase puts it - they brought a knife to a gunfight.

Instead of patting the defeated German generals on the back and telling them they put up a blinking good show against the hordes of the East and the Industrial might of the US and the British Empire you should really ask them what the phek were they thinking of - invade the USSR - really? Decalare war on the USA?  - absolutely bonkers.

 

Of course then they blame Hitler - 'we were forced to do it'.

 

Ha!

 

 

 

[Bulletpoint]

3 minutes ago, TrailApe said:

Instead of patting the defeated German generals on the back and telling them they put up a blinking good show against the hordes of the East and the Industrial might of the US and the British Empire you should really ask them what the phek were they thinking of - invade the USSR - really? Decalare war on the USA?  - absolutely bonkers.

 

Of course then they blame Hitler - 'we were forced to do it'.

 

Ha!

I'm a bit confused now, you're saying it wasn't Hitler who was in charge and ordered the attack on the USSR and declared war on the USA?

[Michael Emrys]

5 minutes ago, TrailApe said:

The German War Machine seems to have been ideally suited to a limited war for a limited period, however once the conflict spread beyond France and with the USSR and the USA becoming involved it was no longer enough.

That's exactly right. The Wehrmacht was not well set up to fight more than 300 kilometers beyond the border. Inside that range they were hell on wheels, but beyond that their offensive power begins to fade. So yes, they were what today we would call a regional power, but not one that was capable of carrying on a global conflict.

Michael

[Warts 'n' all]

Paddy takes a sip on his pint of black, turns to Monty, and says.. "Field Marshal, for the love of Jesus. Mary, Joseph and all the saints, will yerz go back down to Earth, and tell them feckers, that I'm not a Brit."

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

On topic:  

From my understanding CMFB is supposed to evolve into the "end of the war in the west" game, so a British module seems a shoe-in as does a post Bulge US one.

On the Off Topic:

There's some really annoying misconceptions about the nature of the various armies in World War Two. Here's a few of the ones that are more relevant to the offtopic that drive me nuts:

1. German Soldier Supreme: Literally anytime you leave someone unattended from actual historical materials, the perception of the German army is that it's all superior panzer aces and ubersoldats.  Please ignore the poor showings, disintegrating units, failed counter-offensives, and lets just talk about Villers-Bocage and Monte Cassino over and over again because those are the only battles that happened.

2. American soldiers are all fresh draftees just arrived from the states.  Outside of Fury, virtually every bit of public portrayal is of the US Army green as green gets from 1942-1945.  It ignores that on more than a few occasions, it was actually battle hardened American forces cutting through poorly trained green German troops (see Arracourt for a good example of this dynamic).  By 1945 many divisions were crusty as crusty gets, some having fought all the way from Africa.

3. German Panzer supreme!  Again, looking at the performance of German armor on a whole, it's not especially awe inspiring, and the lopsided popular conception isn't supported by actual losses.

4. JABOS!!!!!  Virtually no battle damage assessment supports aviation as a major killer of armor in any theater of World War Two.  Did they disrupt stuff?  Yeah.  But I think they have become an easy way to blame someone else for the fact German tanks went into France in 1944, and did not emerge again.

There's more, but there's a lot of historical fiction that gets simply taken as reality that really needs killing.  

[JonS]

11 hours ago, TrailApe said:

Carlo D’Estes ‘Deciscion in Normandy’ devotes a whole chapter  - The Price of Caution’ to British tendency to evade close quarter fighting where possible and rely heavily on indirect firepower.

That entire chapter is tendentious, and dangerously close to incompetent.

[JonS]

12 hours ago, Michael Emrys said:

they (the Germans) staked out huge areas of very valuable land early on from which they had to be pried out very painfully. Once they had lost possession of those lands, the ultimate collapse proceeded rather quickly.

Interestingly, the period of German expansion reaches it's apogee at almost exactly half way through WWII (the European version of WWII, not the US version). So, the Allies took just as long as the Germans to overrun Europe, except the Allies overran Germany as well.

[Duckman]

15 hours ago, TrailApe said:

The German War Machine seems to have been ideally suited to a limited war for a limited period, however once the conflict spread beyond France and with the USSR and the USA becoming involved it was no longer enough. In some ways the 1939 Wehrmacht reminds me of the 'Old Contemptibles' of 1914. Superbly trained, but once the war dragged on their skill was diluted by casualties.

While the comparison is tempting I don't think it quite holds up. The 1914 BEF was a small, veteran police force. The midwar Reichswehr was a cadre force intended to become the nucleus of much bigger army once the restrictions of Versailles were lifted. Each man was trained to assume a position two ranks higher than his actual one to facilitate this.

So once Hitler came to power and conscription (which had deep cultural and political roots in Germany and France, unlike in the US and UK) was reintroduced expansion was easier than it seemed thanks to the previous work of von Seeckt and others. The US and UK, on the other hand, introduced conscription much later and had to start from very small prewar army nucleuses (next to microscopic in the US's case) which meant there were major bottlenecks. The French and Soviets had huge peacetime armies of course, but those were mostly destroyed in 1940-41 leaving the Germans with by far the biggest trained force which gave them much-needed depth in the years to come.

As for other factors, the Germans themselves coined the term Materialschlacht already in WWI and it certainly holds for WWII as well. Germany's chance for victory in both wars was a quick knockout punch, something recognized by German military planners already in the 1800s, and once that chance passed with the failure of Barbarossa (or the Schlieffen plan in 1914) they were more or less out of options. It should be said however that there weren't a lot of other attractive strategic options once they chose war, and they did come close to winning with the fall of France, If a few political chips had fallen the other way in 1940 or 1941 they might have pulled it off.

[Duckman]

For a systematic comparison of the US and German armies see Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Performance, 1939-1945 by Martin Van Creveld. It's been a while since I read it, but the basic conclusions are that there were major problems with US training and replacement policies which hampered effectiveness and contributed to things like combat fatigue. The Germans on the other hand managed to keep a very good, experience-based peacetime training program running for most of the war even of cracks started showing eventually. German replacement policies were also much better thought out. 

Towards the end of the war the US had fixed a lot of the problems (even if some of them reappeared in Vietnam) while the Germans were, understandably, cracking under the strain and also from increased political and bureacratic meddling. For most of the war however the German system ran remarkably smoothly and contributed significantly to the much-vaunted German small unit effectiveness. 

[Michael Emrys]

On August 5, 2016 at 1:06 PM, Warts 'n' all said:

Paddy takes a sip on his pint of black, turns to Monty, and says.. "Field Marshal, for the love of Jesus. Mary, Joseph and all the saints, will yerz go back down to Earth, and tell them feckers, that I'm not a Brit."

That was actually pretty funny.

Michael

[Warts 'n' all]

1 hour ago, Michael Emrys said:

That was actually pretty funny.

Michael

I should imagine that Monty's response would have been. "Oh, I see, Sgt. Fitzsimons. So my father the Lord Bishop obviously backed the wrong horse, up here in Heaven it is you Catholics who give the orders."

[Sailor Malan2]

On 8/5/2016 at 3:57 PM, TrailApe said:

[quote]

Carlo D’Estes ‘Deciscion in Normandy’ devotes a whole chapter  - The Price of Caution’ to British tendency to evade close quarter fighting where possible and rely heavily on indirect firepower.

 

It always amuses me when the... erhem ... more keen 3rd Reich followers quote Germans as saying things like the above, or (my particular favourite) British combat tactics were predictable, as if that is a bad thing. The British army was thorough and systematic, and yet this is used as a criticism. Or put another way, the Germans kept losing from 1942 on, even thought they knew what was going to happen with fighting the British. What does that say? 

 

I always wondered why anyone woult turn up to a knife fight in a telephone box... i find automatic weapons tend to remove the need! Fight like you want to, not like the other guy wants to!

[John Kettler]

For the CW grogs,

Did the British change their TO&E between Normandy and the Bulge? I ask this because the veteran British 43rd Wessex ID was involved in the Battle of Geilenkirchen along with the green but very well trained and high morale US 84th ID. The US force had Funnies attached. Speaking of Geilenkirchen, Ken Ford's Assault on Germany: The Battle for Geilenkirchen is really good. The only issue I have is there are no elevation contours or hachure marks on the maps to help understand the ground.

Regards,

John Kettler