A couple of statistics

[General Bolt]

Napolean reached Moscow in 83 days (13.6 KM per day).

The Wermacht reach Moscow in 167 days (7.4 km/day) and they actually never got there.

In WWII:

Allies moblized 40.4 million troops

Germany moblized 12.5 million troops

Allies casualties 23 million (mostly Russian)

Germans had 10.1 million casualties.

Each German caused a average of 1.42 wounds

one in four Allied soldiers caused a wound.

[securityguard]

75% of all statistics aren't real

[JonS]

Originally posted by General Colt:

Napolean reached Moscow in 83 days (13.6 KM per day).

The Wermacht reach Moscow in 167 days (7.4 km/day) and they actually never got there.

In WWII:

Allies moblized 40.4 million troops

Germany moblized 12.5 million troops

Allies casualties 23 million (mostly Russian)

Germans had 10.1 million casualties.

Each German caused a average of 1.42 wounds

one in four Allied soldiers caused a wound.

hehe - cool selective use of stats. Let's see, using the same logic, NZ mobilised about 200,000 men and had about 50k cas. Therefore:

Each NZ soldier caused an average 50.2 German cas.

One in 250 German soldiers wounded a Kiwi.

Talk about your uber-soldiers!

[Mace]

The one that matters,

Allies: 1

Axis : 0

Mace

[JonS]

Originally posted by Mace:

The one that matters,

Allies: 1

Axis : 0

Mace

Germany: 0

Britain, US, and France: 2

[Pzman]

No, no France 0... Britian US, Canada, Aussies, etc... 2.

[melb_will]

Lies, damned lies and statistics

[Andreas]

Bah humbug.

Everybody else: -3

Finland: 257

[Brent Pollock]

281 if you add in the Winter Olympics...

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Originally posted by Pzman:

No, no France 0... Britian US, Canada, Aussies, etc... 2.

How did you figure that one? France wasn't beaten in WW1

[undead reindeer cavalry]

i read about some extensive Swedish study about 5-10 years ago in some Finnish military mag. it stated something like that German soldiers were 7-12 times more effective than Western Allied ones.

does anyone know the study i read about? references?

[undead reindeer cavalry]

didn't find anything with google. IIRC the Swedish study had modelled in CAS, artillery etc, which most likely covers the high 1:7 ratio. the use of CAS, artillery etc of course by no means means lesser efficiency. a bit like the classic misused "US soldiers needed 100 000 bullets to kill each single NVA soldier".

found this though. somewhat interesting read. quotes studies that state Germans were only 20% more effective than British & US forces.

2.2 WWII armies

Modern militaries, as we’ll see, are most successful when they can recreate many of the elements of the egalitarian tribal ethos notwithstanding the reality of highly formalized hierarchical command and control. The trick is to minimize the psychological difference between desperate drama of modern combat and the similarly desperate acts of offense and defense that were probably common in the intertribal anarchy before 10,000 years ago. (Those taught to believe that tribal life before the origin of states was peaceful must read Keeley, 1996.)

Military traditions in different countries have very different attitudes toward the leadership and formation of bodies of the bodies of troops that actually fight together. Their performance in WWII also differed significantly. Dupuy (1984, 1987) has conducted a quantitative historical analysis of relative combat effectiveness of soldiers that have faced one another in battle in WWII. Controlling for equipment, surprise, and many other factors as well as possible, Dupuy found large differences in the effectiveness of soldiers. In WWII, German per capita effectiveness was highest, followed by Americans and British with about a 20% handicap relative to Germans (all else equal, it would take 120 Americans or British troops to accomplish the same objective as 100 Germans). The German advantage relative to Russians was approximately 2 fold. This difference persisted until the very end of the war despite a steady diet of defeat after 1942 for German units, very heavy casualties, and a poor supply situation. Many indices of German soldier’s military effectiveness accord with Dupuy’s analysis. For example, comparatively few Germans from ordinary divisions surrendered when defeated, most soldiers making their way rearward, even in chaotic defeats that reduced the soldiers of other armies to helpless passivity. Similar factors apply to the relative advantage of Israeli troops over their Arab enemies in 1967 and 1973.

More ethnographic analyses of the performance of the German Army relative to the Western Allies were conducted by Shils and Janowitz (1948), van Creveld (1982) and Fritz (1995). Cockburn’s (1983) account of the Cold War Soviet Army is similarly detailed. Shalit (1988) gives an interesting account of the psychology of combat based on his studies as a member of the Israeli Defense Force. All observers, van Creveld and Fritz most explicitly, agree with Dupuy’s evaluation of the relative superiority of the German Army against all its enemies, and with the relative inefficiency of the Soviet Army. It cannot be objected, these analysts hold, that the German loss of the war is ultimately the test of the combat effectiveness of their army. Lose Germany did, owing to the greater numbers of their enemies, especially the Soviets, and their superiority in material, especially due to American production. Controlling for such factors, German troops were more effective fighters than the Allies. Four aspects of modern armies seem to explain most of the German advantage in soldier’s fighting power, modes of recruitment, training, leadership, and treatment of individuals.

German doctrine placed great emphasis on developing a sense of cohesion and solidarity among the members of small units (squads, platoons, and companies). To begin with, troops were recruited on a territorial basis, so the men served with fellows from the same towns and villages of their birth. Recruits were trained by elements of the same regiment in which they would serve in combat, and sent as a body to the front to make up losses from their regiment. A German soldier always served in the company of comrades, whose bonds of loyalty and fellowship were deliberately designed to cumulatively increase from the day of induction onwards. At the opposite extreme, the American system gave recruits basic training in temporary groups, and sent them on to advanced schools, and eventually to combat, as individuals. Socially isolated neophyte soldiers suffered considerable psychological turmoil during their long, lonely journeys to the front, and were disproportionately likely to become casualties in their first weeks of fighting. Not until actually incorporated into their final destination units could recruits begin to develop a sense of cohesion with any of the comrades with whom they would fight.

German basic training, conducted at the hands of non-commissioned officer drill sergeants, was extremely rigorous physically and mentally. However, this training was explicitly legitimated as preparation for battle, and instructors were typically fair as well as hard. After the beginning of the war, most instructors were veterans with whom the trainees would return to the front. Most drill instructors earned grudging admiration or better from recruits. Training of commissioned officers as well as NCOs emphasized the responsibility of officers for the welfare of their troops, and very often enlisted troops responded warmly to the paternalistic concerns of their field grade officers. At every level, soldiers were trained to seize opportunities and act on individual initiative, rather than await orders.

It is interesting read advice manuals for junior officers in modern Western armies (e.g. Malone, 1983), where leadership by remote command through a chain of command to troops, backed up by extreme coercion for disobedience, ought to be most manifest. Malone advises leaders of small units to display such traits as humility, justice, tact, and selflessness as well as more conventional military virtues as courage decisiveness, dependability, and loyalty. Under several different headings he encourages leaders to conspicuously recognize the contributions of subordinates, downplay their own roles, and defend their subordinates against unfair treatment from outside and from up the chain of command. Ideally at least, modern armies seem to expect leaders to behave much the same way an influential man might in an egalitarian society. More formal studies of bureaucratic leadership, of which military leadership is only a special case, emphasize similar points (Van Fleet and Yukl, 1986; Taylor and Rosenbach, 1992). According to Fritz and van Creveld, the German emphasis on the prosocial traits of NCO and field officer leaders along the lines Malone suggests was a good deal stronger than in the American Army of WWII. No doubt, the chain of command exists, and no doubt it is widely resented. Nothing is more familiar to all of us than complaining about superiors. Without dedicated small-unit leaders that can inspire common action by the same deft force of personality the informal leaders of simple societies use, it is doubtful that soldiers could be inspired to their customary desperate deeds.

American and British training and leadership practices were less meticulous versions of the German system, but Soviet practice was very different according to Cockburn. Recruitment and training were haphazard. In the Soviet Army, the NCO system was very rudimentary; lacking the long-service career NCO cadre that is one of the key components of German, British, and American armies. Commissioned officers were socially remote from recruits, who were informally ranked in terms of length of service (recruits serve 2 or 3 years). The effective face-to-face leaders of Soviet soldiers were typically young, inexperienced draftee junior officers. As a consequence Soviet units not only lacked effective small unit leadership, but the recruit experience engendered divisions between older and younger soldiers within units rather than the strongly felt solidarity of Western European, especially German, small units. Blind obedience to orders coming down from a remote high command was the rule, and local initiative was discouraged. German practice was at the opposite extreme in this regard. German orders to subordinates were drafted to emphasize the mission to be accomplished, with the subordinate expected to devise the means to accomplish the mission, right down to the level of squad and section leaders and individual enlisted men.

According to van Crevelt, the German command system was constructed to seem fair and just to individual soldiers by catering to their psychological needs for strong fellowship and sensitive, if tough, leadership. The German system went to considerable extremes to move the best officers to the front lines, at the expense of leaving rear areas under- and poorly staffed. German procedure greatly simplified reporting by field commanders in the interest of reducing the paperwork burden on fighters. The Americans had a much more manage-by-numbers approach, which tended to keep talent men in rear-area jobs, and which imposed a much larger paperwork burden on front line commanders. The German system for awarding medals was more prompt in its recognition of merit, and more strongly restricted to actual combat accomplishment, than the American system. The development of a very efficient field postal system kept soldiers in touch with their families, and hardship leave (e.g. when the family home was bombed) was common. The Wehrmacht thus went to considerable extremes to demonstrate an interest in a soldier’s personal well-being, minimizing conflicts between soldierly duty and personal interest. Significantly, Fritz describes, a German soldier was very unlikely to face extreme discipline from his normal superiors. In the catastrophic, anarchic retreats of the 1943-5 period, German Field Police units dealt summarily and extremely harshly with stragglers for relative misdemeanors, and the element of raw coercion in the system became very plain. In such circumstances, a soldier’s best option was to rejoin his unit as quickly as possible. Intact German units, even when very badly mauled, continued to be well led and well behaved and didn’t attracted attention from these dreaded detachments. German soldiers felt well cared for despite the fact that service in combat led to the death or maiming of most of them. Russian soldiers, contrariwise, were subject to extreme discipline by their own officers, with attendant lack of intense feelings of fellowship between superiors and subordinates.

There is debate over the role of Nazi ideology in explaining the effectiveness of WWII German soldiers. Shils and Janowitz substantially discount its impact relative to the details of training and leadership. Fritz argues that Nazi ideology underpinned soldier’s attitudes in several respects. First, the Nazi ideology of national solidarity was explicitly built on an analogy with the deeply felt front-line solidarity of small units in the face of a dangerous foreign enemy, a topic on which front-line WWI veteran Hitler could expound with genuine personal familiarity. Army service was endowed with an idealistic demonstration mission for the whole German Volk to a greater degree than in other armies. Fritz elaborates considerably on Hitler’s charismatic appeal to at least some considerable minority of soldiers. Second, the anti-aristocratic element in Nazi ideology served to reinforce attempts to bring officers socially closer to the men they commanded. At the end of WWI, dispirited German soldiers mutinied in large numbers, hastening the end of the war. The deep division between a largely aristocratic officer corps and working class enlisted ranks contributed to the mutinous behavior. No such mutinies occurred even in the last, desperate days of WWII. Van Creveld attributes this difference to a dramatic democratization of the German officer corps, including, much promotion from the NCO ranks, after 1933. Since the American and Soviet societies had ready access to egalitarian ideologies that could have served to reduce the social distance between officers and their troops, perhaps the most plausible explanation is that Hitler’s enlisted man’s experience in WWI gave him an intuitive sympathy for and appeal to ordinary soldiers’ motivations for fighting. In Hitler’s concept of soldierly solidarity, an ideological linchpin of his regime’s claim to legitimacy, happened to work rather well when applied to small units, and his glorification of it sustained soldier’s idealism remarkably well. And, he had the dictatorial power to enforce his ideals of leadership upon the traditional officer class. This power was exercised with sufficient vigor to result in von Stauffenberg’s 1944 attempt on his life, organized by aristocratic officers. In any case, average German performance was better than all but the best units of the American and British armies, whose organization, training, and leadership norms resembled that of the German Army in many respects. It does seem plausible that these differences in training and leadership could give rise to the large differences in per capita effectiveness measured by Dupuy.

It is highly ironic, as van Crevelt, an Israeli not likely to romanticize matters, notes, that a criminal, totalitarian nazi regime managed to find the most successful formula of the period for meeting the conflicting demands of command and control at the nation-state level with the need to provide feelings of egalitarian solidarity and just, prosocial leadership at the psychologically most salient level to ordinary soldiers.

Complex Societies: The Evolutionary Dynamics of a Crude Superorganism

[Stan Hope Park]

.

[ March 06, 2005, 08:32 AM: Message edited by: 1327 ]

[Kingfish]

Number of allied planes downed over Wisconsin as a direct result of enemy action - 0

Number of Bolivian warships sunk by U-boats during the period Sept '39 / May '45 - 0

Total number of axis bombs dropped on Victoria Island, Canada - 0

[roqf77]

but weren't the WW II British hamstrung by lack of egalitarianism?

.

what do you mean?????????????

another contentious statisticin the normandy campaign were according to wikipedia.com

37,000 dead, 172,000 wounded/missing allies

Germans

Approximately 200,000 killed/wounded, 200,000 captured.

so its allies about 200k out germans 400k out

[Andreas]

Yeah, I am sure those tankers in their Cromwells thought every day - "Mark my words, I says. I don't mind no Tigers, but if it wussn't for this lack of egalitarianism, we'd be in Burlin already, I tell you."

Or sumfink.

[Guest Mike]

93.6% of statistics are made up on the spot.

An old "Strategy and Tactics" mag compared the rates of advance of hte Germans towards Paris in WW1, WW2, and the Israeli advance across the Sinia in 1967 - the WW1 Germans were the fasest IIRC.

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Mike:

An old "Strategy and Tactics" mag compared the rates of advance of hte Germans towards Paris in WW1, WW2, and the Israeli advance across the Sinia in 1967 - the WW1 Germans were the fasest IIRC.

I think the WW I figure concerned their advance across Russia and Ukraine. But this was after the Russian collapse and was accomplished by loading soldiers on trains and chugging across the country against little or no opposition.

Michael

[Kingfish]

I remember reading somewhere that said the Brit 7th armored held the record for the fastest advance by a mechanized force for a given distance, when it cut across the Benghazi arc to trap the Italians at Beda Fomm.

[DrD]

Originally posted by undead reindeer cavalry:

didn't find anything with google. IIRC the Swedish study had modelled in CAS, artillery etc, which most likely covers the high 1:7 ratio. the use of CAS, artillery etc of course by no means means lesser efficiency. a bit like the classic misused "US soldiers needed 100 000 bullets to kill each single NVA soldier".

found this though. somewhat interesting read. quotes studies that state Germans were only 20% more effective than British & US forces.

Interesting, but did this take into account supply differences, or was it based on manpower alone? If the latter, then 20% doesn't tell the whole story, as US and British divisions IIRC had about 3 times the supplies (in tons) of a German division.

They generally enjoyed better rations, shelter, more ammo, artillery, and of course air support. So if the German despite this were 20% better than the Anglos, I'd say they were twice as good man for man.

[Andrew H.]

Originally posted by Michael Emrys:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Mike:

An old "Strategy and Tactics" mag compared the rates of advance of hte Germans towards Paris in WW1, WW2, and the Israeli advance across the Sinia in 1967 - the WW1 Germans were the fasest IIRC.

I think the WW I figure concerned their advance across Russia and Ukraine. But this was after the Russian collapse and was accomplished by loading soldiers on trains and chugging across the country against little or no opposition.

Michael </font>

[dieseltaylor]

Surely we are all agreed that the attack generally takes more casualties than the defence. This of course is providing that both sides are without uber weapons.

[special point added to negate line of argument : )]

Therefore the country who defended the longest would record higher kill ratios until such time as its defences crumbled. The efectiveness of the defence being a function of militay resources available to attacker and defender against/ and the terrain it was spread over.

I would therefore submit that analysis by losses alone is bogus. I think Dupuy probably knew what he was talking about : )

[Tero]

Originally posted by dieseltaylor:

Therefore the country who defended the longest would record higher kill ratios until such time as its defences crumbled. The efectiveness of the defence being a function of militay resources available to attacker and defender against/ and the terrain it was spread over.

I would therefore submit that analysis by losses alone is bogus. I think Dupuy probably knew what he was talking about : )

This disregards the political aspects of the conflicts. There are plenty of examples where inflicting casualties on the attacker has affected the political outcome of the conflict more than casualties inflicted on the defender, no matter what kind of assets and strategical supply resources have been in play.

And in these cases the outcome has been mostly in favour of the defender (relatively speaking).

[Dave H]

Originally posted by General Colt:

In WWII:

Allies moblized 40.4 million troops

Germany moblized 12.5 million troops

Allies casualties 23 million (mostly Russian)

Germans had 10.1 million casualties.

Each German caused a average of 1.42 wounds

one in four Allied soldiers caused a wound.

Crew of Enola Gay - 10 men

Casualties in Hiroshima - The British Official History of World War II in its final volume of the War Against Japan states that the casualties at Hiroshima were: 78,150 killed and 51,048 injured.

According to your statistic, these 10 airmen caused no wounds.

The British ex-Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics" (popularized by Mark Twain in the U.S.).

[General Bolt]

No, the numbers I quoted didn't take it to account the nukes.

My source was Numbers, Prediction, and War - T.N.Dupuy. Its a damn complex book. I need to take a refresher course in calculus just to get the drift of what he's saying.

Here's another stat. In WWI, the US Army imported more fodder than munitions.