So are German forces "better" on average?

[Michael Emrys]

The US had manpower pool in their nation; but for some reason (I think enconomy) they set themselves a limit of how many divisions they'd mobilise and pretty much stuck to it if I recall right. So it could be said the US way of war had a different emphasis by choice; which lead to a firepower emphasis.

The deal there was that somebody noticed that if they went ahead and raised 200 divisions (or whatever the original goal was), they would be draining prime manpower away from the defense and supporting industries. That would in turn mean lower production and abandoning the "Arsenal of Democracy" role. So basically it was a balancing act.

All the major belligerent nations faced the same problem, more or less, but the applied solutions were different. For instance, Germany continued to draft prime—and increasingly sub-prime—manpower into uniform, and tried to make up the labor shortfall by relying on foreign labor including vast amounts of slave labor. That didn't work out so well, but by that time they had run out of alternatives.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

One thing is pretty sure, though. You take an average urbanite and an average rural soldier, give them equal training, and drop them into a rural combat environment... my money is on the rural guy having a better chance of survival. Instead, stick the same two guys into an urban battle for their first fight and my money is on the urban guy.

This seems to have been the experience in Viet Nam. The farmers' sons were better adapted to woods and fields, but the city guys were more hip to alleys and roofs.

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

The realism factor of having soldiers react to the overall state of the battlefield implies they know the overall state of the battlefield.

This is a problem. I suppose you could limit their awareness to only those fellow units they are in visual contact with. But there is also the question of hearing firing going on in a part of the battlefield one cannot see and trying to guess what it means. This gets complicated really fast.

Michael

[Praetori]

I take it you haven't played CMSF? Because that is in already, if only by being out of C2 alone.

I've never seen a unit break or being unable to do Anything because a lack of C2. And I do play red side quite often.

[Praetori]

This is a problem. I suppose you could limit their awareness to only those fellow units they are in visual contact with. But there is also the question of hearing firing going on in a part of the battlefield one cannot see and trying to guess what it means. This gets complicated really fast.

Michael

Well as a platoon commander I wouldn't be quite so sure of my orders to advance if I knew that my neighboring platoon had just been rolled over by mechanized infantry or tanks. This though, as you say would require pretty good C2 or LOS calculations.

I would love to see some harder difficulty settings which affected the ability to issue complex orders when higher command units are pinned, dead or missing/out of C2. Then again this would have to be tied to experience and the ability for other units HQs to take command.

[stikkypixie]

I've never seen a unit break or being unable to do Anything because a lack of C2. And I do play red side quite often.

They don't break, but go to nervous.

[Battlefront.com]

The deal there was that somebody noticed that if they went ahead and raised 200 divisions (or whatever the original goal was), they would be draining prime manpower away from the defense and supporting industries.

The primary reason they didn't raise the number of planned divisions is they found they didn't need them. The war was winding down, casualties were below expectations, and they literally had more forces in Europe than they could use. The Pacific was never a ground forces hungry campaign so it was under control with the resources it had. The higher ups decided it was far better to make sure the existing formations were adequately supplied with replacements. The Germans did the opposite and post-war analysis has concluded that was one of their strategic mistakes.

I've never seen a unit break or being unable to do Anything because a lack of C2. And I do play red side quite often.

When you see a unit that is Nervous, Panicked, Broken, or Routed there is no way to tell what the factors were that lead to that state. But units out of C2 are more likely to go in that direction, so if a unit is Broken and out of C2 it is probable that being out of C2 was a contributing factor.

Steve

[DLaurier]

Early war Germans were better educated.

They were products of the old German educational system, before the nazis dumbed it down.

Late war Germans had their nazi education, which was crap.

Weimar Germany inherited the Imperial education system with it's emphasis on logic and thought... as well as exceptionaly high standards of academia. The Weimar system also expanded upon this by introducing more philosophy, and a wider range of ideas.

The ability to think more effectively, gave early war Germans a massive advantage.

[Battlefront.com]

Propaganda based education does tend to leave something to be desired, doesn't it?

This is the #1 reason, I think, for German veterans (during and post war) blaming much of their TACTICAL defeats on superior enemy numbers of men, weapons, and material. If you're raised to think of yourself as the best of the best, and you come out second best in a fight, well... either you question your internal value system or you look for excuses. Human beings, not just Germans in this case, most often pick external excuses rather than internal reflection. It's just the way us beasties are wired

Steve

[JasonC]

On Vincere's question on force structure and planning and the number of divisions, it wasn't quite the "low losses, unneeded" answer Steve gave, nor the production one that Michael offered. The main constraint on total divisions sent to the theater was shipping space, and the secondary consideration was the difficulty of forecasting what the various bottlenecks would be and sizing all the components of the force mix for the conditions actually encountered in the ETO.

Initially the force was planned much larger than it turned out, and it also included huge numbers of specialist non divisional formations, way more than wound up being needed. 200 AAA battalions for example, and a comparable number of planned TD battalions. These plans stemmed from the era right after the fall of France when the Germans seemed to be relying on air ground coordination and armored forces in a revolutionary way, as press reports and "blitzkrieg" descriptions of the war so far had it. Basically the initial force structure assumed an unbeaten Luftwaffe and a monster panzer arm.

In the real event, the former was smashed in the air campaign early in 1944, before the invasion. The latter had been largely beaten by the Russians. The western allies did face meaningful quantities of armor in Normany and again in the bulge fight, but otherwise the tank and plane enemies the initial force structure had envisioned failed to show up. That part certainly fits the "easier than expected" description Steve gave.

As a result, scores of independent battalions formed and training back in the states were dismantled and the personnel released to the replacement pool. Others were already in Europe - notably AAA - and wound up with a secondary job shooting at V-1s flying into Antwerp or toward London. The force also had more light armor than it needed, and an abundance of artillery formations etc.

It turned out the two main bottlenecks actually encountered were rifle replacements and 105mm ammunition. Both of them WW I era items for attrition fighting, rather than the specialist formations of supposedly more modern war. Losses were simply far more concentrated on riflemen in both the infantry and armored infantry formations than early planners had assumed. On artillery ammunition, the excellent gun park could throw it as rapidly as it could be moved to theater. The front moved farther and more rapidly at times that anticipated, and stalled in position fighting more than anticipated otherwise. This led to flurries when only gas was wanted and others in which artillery ammo was the most important thing, etc. The planned steady rate of advance across the continent didn't happen; the line jerked and stalled instead.

The other factor to understand is that the force structure was largely planned in 1942 and training up in 1943, but the U-boat war was not yet won at those points in time. The amount of transatlantic lift they'd have to work with thus seemed way tighter, through about mid 1943, than it actually turned out to be in 1944 and 1945. Because the loss rate to the U-boats rose strongly until about March of 1943, leveled there, then fell very steeply in the rest of 1943. While replacement shipping roared along, only keeping pace with those losses until the sinkings fell off, then expanding rapidly.

The result was a very tight global shipping situation, that suddenly got looser than anticipated starting in late 1943. There was no limit on either absolute manpower or specialized equipment for ground forces, but there was a definite limit on what could be sent to Europe and supplied there.

If you plan a sustainment thruput of so many tons per day per division under one estimate of total thruput and then that thruput jumps 50%, you can't just up the number of deployed divisions 50%. The mix of equipment is different for a new formation than for sustaining an existing one in combat, the men needed are a different mix (more rifle replacements to keep an existing division punching full strength longer, more specialists for all of the lower casualty-rate roles for a new formation), they have to be trained well ahead of time, etc.

I wouldn't say the US got all of these trade offs just right. It over invested in specialist arms early, and properly disbanded many for replacements but could have disbanded even more, or wasted less training time on roles not needed. It underanticipated combat losses and thus undersupplied ordinary replacements. It didn't put a high enough priority on the highly flexible artillery ammunition category, a great use of logistic thruput for combat power "on tap" - though US artillery was still awesome, anyway, it could have been even more dominating if that strong suit had been backed to the hilt. Arguably an excessive portion of the whole war effort went to the most expensive air war (it took at least a quarter of all war output, and a huge portion of munitions production went to bombs, arguably a much less efficient use of that available power than artillery ammunition), though at least that air war was won convincingly as a result.

FWIW...

[MikeyD]

If you're raised to think of yourself as the best of the best

I wonder if American egalitarian populist notions of the 1940s help to perpetuate the German 'superman' myth. Americans saw themselves as the scrappy little everyman knocking the chip off the German's übermenchen's shoulder. Their myth of Ayran natural superiority dovetailed with our own quite different myth of natural superiority. We needed to have a black hatted villain to take down a peg.

[Melchior]

I'd argue the British did more than any of the other Allies to perpetuate the German super men myth. I mean, between 1936 to 1939 Britain and France totally failed to protect Czechslovakia, or Poland from falling into Axis hands and couldn't even keep Germany from uniting with Austria and the Rhineland.

To add to an already steaming cake of **** 1940 saw the fall of France and continental Europe, the invasion of Egypt by Italy, the losses of HMS Royal Oak and Hood in the Atlantic and the initial shock of the Luftwaffe bombing Britain.

The British got off to a very rough start in the war and strongly felt they had to rationalize it. What better way than to perpetuate myths like the German super soldiers crap or Hitler being some kind of diabolical evil genius.

[Blackcat]

I'd argue the British did more than any of the other Allies to perpetuate the German super men myth. I mean, between 1936 to 1939 Britain and France totally failed to protect Czechslovakia, or Poland from falling into Axis hands and couldn't even keep Germany from uniting with Austria and the Rhineland.

To add to an already steaming cake of **** 1940 saw the fall of France and continental Europe, the invasion of Egypt by Italy, the losses of HMS Royal Oak and Hood in the Atlantic and the initial shock of the Luftwaffe bombing Britain.

The British got off to a very rough start in the war and strongly felt they had to rationalize it. What better way than to perpetuate myths like the German super soldiers crap or Hitler being some kind of diabolical evil genius.

Total and utter tosh!

[Melchior]

Don't get me wrong. The Americans did the same thing against the Japanese. The Allies treated the war like an epic life or death struggle because who are we kidding, it was. It's just that a lot of hyperbolic drama that emerged post war, clogging today's media and history, came from this propaganda. I mean most Americans still think that losing the Battle of Midway would have meant losing the war.

[Peregrine]

There was one army prepared to fight WWII when it started and everyone else was playing catch-up.

How it played tactically horrifying, how it played out operationally fascinating.

But in the end the simply truth is the allies buckled down and simply made more equipment with better logistical support. The Germans were still reliant on horses for most (all?) of the war. The Germans needed to do more with their economy and didn't therefore less equipment.

This leads to every nearly every German account talking about preponderance of machines, HE etc which can leave an impression that "hey us Germans were better soldiers, we only lost because it wasn't a balanced fight."

Not a significant point particularly when it came to Normandy but I gather there was a certain prestige factor to the German army, lesser in Britain, lesser in the US and not present at all in the Soviet forces that may lead to a higher calibre of volunteer in the German army initially. Attrition and many other factors would have nullified this point by Normandy anyway.

[Peregrine]

or Hitler being some kind of diabolical evil genius.

Hilter was a diabolical evil genius in some aspects, as a supreme commander of the army he was not. Gomer Pile would have done a better job. I think Gomer would at least have only had one idea at a time and not having his armies spread out chasing multiple objectives at once may have worked in the East in the early years.

[Wiggum]

Sometimes i think the nazi propaganda had a greater impact on americans then on germans...

(Isent there some fascination in this myth ?)

Believe me, nearly all german soldiers did not believe the aryan superman thing.

They did not think that they are better soldiers, at least not more then any army does (esprit de corps).

Sure, in 1940 there was a euphoria in germany after all those victorys, but in 1944 this had changed and most soldiers know for some part that the war was lost.

Dont blame them for complaining about enemy superiority in material and manpower.

Imagine how it they felt in those late war years, fighting against such scary firepower.

I never met a german veteran who would say that they were "better" soldiers and even if they would do, everyone who was in the military knows that kind of feeling...they are all the "best" (esprit de corps again).

Or look at the war against Poland in 1939.

They just had no real change but still put up a great fight...

There are many small battles where they were able to get a tactical victory and some very stubborn defensive actions.

They also said that they lost because of enemy superiority in material and manpower (superiority in the Air).

Such behavior is not only a "german thing".

Its not the question if the german soldiers think they only lost because enemy superiority in material and manpower, the question is if you can win a large scal industrial war if you are not superior in material and manpower...

[Secondbrooks]

This seems to have been the experience in Viet Nam. The farmers' sons were better adapted to woods and fields, but the city guys were more hip to alleys and roofs.

Michael

One factor which is quite important is that does culture support privately owned firearms and their use? If this is true then it's usually rural areas where firearms are being owned and used.

Quite often it seems that shooting/marksmanship training is one of worst lacks which infantry soldiers tends to have, and that is what they seems to usually whine about. And good shooting skills takes years to build and bullet to shoot so it's challenging skills to improve even in long run. Not to speak about times of war when resources and time to spent in marksmanship training can be close to nothing.

And another is that rural areas tends to produce more fit (endurance) person than urban areas. Which is even more important thing than marksmanship when it comes to overall capacity of soldier. I've heard sentence that battle is like running two marathons in row.

[Peregrine]

One factor which is quite important is that does culture support privately owned firearms and their use? If this is true then it's usually rural areas where firearms are being owned and used.

Quite often it seems that shooting/marksmanship training is one of worst lacks which infantry soldiers tends to have, and that is what they seems to usually whine about. And good shooting skills takes years to build and bullet to shoot so it's challenging skills to improve even in long run. Not to speak about times of war when resources and time to spent in marksmanship training can be close to nothing.

And another is that rural areas tends to produce more fit (endurance) person than urban areas. Which is even more important thing than marksmanship when it comes to overall capacity of soldier. I've heard sentence that battle is like running two marathons in row.

You couldn't not train soldiers to use their weapons but having lots of firepower and not panicking is what stands units in good stead. A lot of soldiers don't technically use their weapons in combat correctly even after training simply because they are more interested in staying alive. I have no idea where I read them but the actual volume of ammunition that needed to be expended to kill anything is pretty staggering.

Any length of training should dispense with the gap of having some experience with a gun or not.

[Michael Emrys]

The primary reason they didn't raise the number of planned divisions is they found they didn't need them. The war was winding down, casualties were below expectations, and they literally had more forces in Europe than they could use.

Oh? My understanding was that the reduction in planned forces occurred in three stages, but all of them were before we even had any troops on the continent of Europe. I think the first stage (and maybe the second too?) was before we were even at war.

Michael

[Magpie_Oz]

Where a soldier comes from has little tangible impact on his performance on the battlefield neither does his previous experience with firearms.

It is a myth that country people are fitter than their city dwelling contemporaries, or that people who live in cities are somehow better suited to urban combat.

Without doubt the single biggest factor for a soldier is how well they have been trained and how well their own psyche stands up to being utterly terrified it effects everyone differently regardless of background.

As Perigrine said the training one receives puts everyone on a level footing to start with but the fear of combat makes marksmanship very difficult and most bullets fired miss !

[Blackcat]

"the question is if you can win a large scale industrial war if you are not superior in material and manpower..."

Well how many large scale industrial wars have there been?

ACW, Prussia - v - France 1870 (maybe, just scrapes in the the definition), WWI, WWII. Every time it was the guys with the biggest industrial production capacity that won out. You could arguably extent it to the Cold War, the Sovs packed it in becuase they simply could not compete with the US economy. Makes you kind of wonder what is going to happen with China, don't it?

[Vark]

Believe me, nearly all german soldiers did not believe the aryan superman thing.

They did not think that they are better soldiers, at least not more then any army does (esprit de corps).

...

Really? I thought this orthodoxy had been seriously challenged by German archivists looking closely at unit histories. Certainly 6th Armies record in Russian suggests they had bought into the unter/ubermensch propaganda quite convincingly. Anecdotally (i.e. nearly worthless, yet interesting) my German relatives have many a tale about how their families saw the war and it is not pretty.

[SKELLEN]

I haven't read all of this thread and so this may or may not have been mentioned, but let's not forget the general fear the average German soldier had also. No, not for the Americans, British etc, but for the Red Army. This factor alone may greatly contributed to the Germans determined and desperate attempt in the Normandy campaign to see off the western allies (so to speak) and then go all out against the impending Russian juggernaut in defense of the Fatherland.

I just feel a lot of talk is on the western allies, let's not forget Russia who really enabled the Normandy campaign in my mind. However I'm no grog and don't claim to be, this is just my opinion.

Some fun quotes:-

"They are not so hot yet, but they are learning and they'll make a first class army before long."

-Stalin

"The reason the American Army does so well in wartime is because war is chaos, and the American Army practices it on a daily basis."

-unknown German General

"We shall show no mercy, but we shall not ask for it."

-Winston Churchill

"Don't fight a battle if you don't gain anything from winning."

-Erwin Rommel

"Make love not war."

-John Lennon;)

[Secondbrooks]

Where a soldier comes from has little tangible impact on his performance on the battlefield neither does his previous experience with firearms.

It is a myth that country people are fitter than their city dwelling contemporaries, or that people who live in cities are somehow better suited to urban combat.

Without doubt the single biggest factor for a soldier is how well they have been trained and how well their own psyche stands up to being utterly terrified it effects everyone differently regardless of background.

As Perigrine said the training one receives puts everyone on a level footing to start with but the fear of combat makes marksmanship very difficult and most bullets fired miss !

Your first sentence could be said like this

Where a soldier comes from has little tangible impact on his performance on the battlefield neither does his existence in the first place matter much.

Ultimately just as marksmanship is useless so is individual soldier pretty useless... Unless he happens to be hero material. At that time both soldier and marksmanship counts very much.

What you speak is true for long time trained soldiers with lots of resources to put into their training. But for guys with at most couple months of training things aren't like that even more so if unit cohesion is poor, they simply don't have enough time to improve alot with their fitness and marksmanship. They probably can't establish automation for most of basic soldiering skills like squad weaponry, formations, movement etc. This is reason why our conscript/reservist based system tries to filter suitable men for suitable slots. If persons hobbies will support his training/duty it usually counts. I can understand that for professional military which seemingly has years to put into individual soldiers it seems odd, but when soldier is being trained from 6 to 12 months things has to be sorted out bit differently, for reservists refreshment training can mean just weeks and in here hobbies and occupation really counts when selecting who gets slotted where. Heck, it easily can be so that former military training doesn't count at all if guy himself isn't up to task anymore, poor physical fitness and some overweight.

I don't agree about training being ONLY important factor as far too many long line instructorstaff and ww2 veterans have said what i've said eariler on. City boys are simply worse than country boys, it piles down to artificial urban enviroment which give different things for yougsters to do than rural areas. I'm mostly talking about days of ww2 or days before urbanization of (whatever) nation. Later on things have changed atleast with fitness levels when cars and motorbikes have become common, hunting and firearms are much more related to culture.

Back to cityboys. Typical examples are that city boys don't handle simplest tolls such as axes, making of fire, how to ski etc. etc. etc. Urbanization for most parts has been almost curse word for military. 50 years ago they didn't need to train use of axe, crowbar, shovel, how to keep knife sharp. How to wear suitable clothing!!! Nowdays they do and that wastes precious training time from more important matters, such as actual combat skills... Back then there were handicapped people too but they were in very marginal role.

Surely mostly problem is urbanization and it has reached it's currupting touch from cities to rural areas as well. So today it presumably isn't as clear as it has been some ~50-60 years ago.

An example of pre military experience put into use: WW1 and snipers should display this, Germany with it's strong "northern European hunting culture" seemed to get much more out from it's snipers than Brits or French. For these two it seemed to take years before they reached Germany's level in "ways of snipership".

Then again US reached level of Germany much faster. I wonder does similar hunting culture have something to do with it? By some experts: Yes it does. Because forexample Germany could easily find guys with good fieldcraft and shooting skills. Brits tried to put sport shooters against them but they didn't match German snipers. Later on Brits understood to gather their own hunters as snipers and voila their success started to improve against Germans.

Watch the mighty aufttraghtigntaktik (or something like that) put into use!

Ps. I'm firm believer for this what i've writen here conserning rural and urban boys. I mostly look this thru Finnish colored classes so i must admit that in some other nations things can be different, mainly in US which was totally different nation than some pesky undeveloped little swamp-land in Northern Europe in which most people still lived from farming and woodcutting. But i have discussed and listened quite a deal with people who have seen the change in our society and competence of young men over the decades. Almost everyone underlines same facts.

I will not write no more about this.