German Economic Shortcomings

Out of the Foxholes Questions
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Are you kidding me? Really? The Germans had no trouble fielding forces this far south in the last war, they’ll have no trouble in this one. Most of the forces of Middle Eastern Command are in Egypt, the AFVs are second rate, and German military logistics in this theater were always historically constrained by trying to ignore or isolate Malta. Overland the Germans always did much much better. And even historically the British were getting the crap knocked out of them by TWO German divisions without a single railhead from Tripoli, not until they had a completely unflankable position at El-Alemen AND the Americans invaded Africa on the other coast, threatening to roll up the Axis position like a Parchment in the Library of Alexandria, which they did.

The Royal Navy proved very decisively they could not and would not fuck with the strongpoint at Gallipoli (despite Churchill BEGGING them while the Aussies died in huge numbers), which means the Germans can and will transfer troops and supplies overland with imunity both their and the Bospohourous, with a double-wide train track all the way down along with a few older rail lines they’ve already used to great effect elsewhere, with air force covering them that’s already proven that it flies wherever it wants and shit on whatever it pleases like a fleet of incontinent pigeons.

The African War this is not, the Greek slaughter, this is, except no sea evacuation. That is the difference. In the historical Iraq uprising, Germans were far away. Here, Germans very very close, Halitosis close. And…if you want to get technical…if they can’t get the oil from Iraq, and believe me, they would be getting quite a bit very soon given their toehold experience in the Caucuses right as Stalingrad kicked off, they would be getting plenty from Iran.

It’s wishful thinking to think the British would perform anything other than dismally given their track record at any point previously in the war. They would FIGHT very well at the tactical level, but the British Army is simply the short end of the three branches. The money went into the Navy, the Air Force, and the Army in that order pre-war because the French were supposed to be doing the ground-pounding in a tussle with Germany. For the same reason, the German navy was always destined to suck. It’s simple triage: unless you are the US and you have more money than God and Crassus owes YOU outstanding loans.

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That’s the Wehraboo interpretation.

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Nothing Heer or Luftwaffe is a Wherboo interpretation pre-Barbarossa. Once the US comes in with 40% of the world’s industrial capacity and the German strategic oil supply starts to run dry then you get to cry Wehrboo, not before.

Because before then, the historical record firmly says otherwise. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the British army got its ass handed to it every single time it faced the Germans or the Japanese except Arras, El_Alemein, supported or flanked by the American army or led by Slim. Possible minor exceptions aside this is the flow of the war.

Give me some credit I’m WAY too critical of the technically proficient pinhead German officer corps to be a Wehrboo, but I can’t roll over and pretend the British made a single correct doctrinal or design decision outside of fighter command single 1918 (when it was pretty amazing), nor that the British weren’t completely on the ropes from Dunkirk to Torch. To deny this is to be a …TeaBoo, and frankly invest that energy in the Peninsular Army, Wellington might actually deserve it.

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More like the bearer of false news. Speaking as a Canadian, your comments are insulting.

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Well, sense you feel that way, I have to a basic truth:

Feelings have no place in analysis, NONE. This really pissed me off in some of the bombing threads six months back. Doesn’t matter if grandpa lost his house and leg to German blitzing, violence is a fucking TOOL, not a pastime, not a means of Catharsis either. The only grounds for bombing back is if those bombs are actually the most cost-effective means of spending war material when morale, retaliation, post-war rebuilding, and material losses delivering the thing are put into account.

But since we are all human, allow me to offer a counterpoint, an American counterpoint, a mea culpa that sticks in my crawl, our big screw in Afghanistan. Now I need to make clear in both cases, it’s not the soldiers who screwed up, small unit tacts were fine and I don’t think there was a German who is a small-arms fight respected anyone more than the British soldier and his commanding officers (they feared the Americans more because they would throw a fuckton of artillery at them move up a bit and throw a fuckton of artillery at them again).

So why did we lose, and we absolutely lost a 20-year war in God’s open-air opium pit, so why? Because we lost Doctrinally, because we didn’t learn the lessons of when we actually won, cause we didn’t quite realize how we actually won at least won the peace. And there’s a book on this

Theives of State by Sarah Chayes

Now in the case of the British military in World War II, you have a state that is borderline insolvent, in danger of breaking up and by the time the French sign the armistice, it’s too late to make substantial changes to interwar doctrine and design practices. Just watching Chieftain’s channel on Youtube, tank designs are a five-year process from scratch to production, and most weapon systems are also years in the making. Doctrines are the same. In the time span of any theoretical invasion of Tukey and into the middle east, were talking 18 months at most from first contact from seeing how badly antiquated and wrongly built the army was in May of 1940 to when the pressure would be taken off it.

That’s not enough time to correct for any army. That not insulting, that’s the truism you go to war with the army you have.

The American case with Afghanistan and also Vietnam is actually far worse because we had AMPLE time to get our heads out of our asses and we largely refused to. Now ours were political doctrines rather than operational ones, but both are painful lessons in having your thinking done by fools.

And believe me, the lessons of both wars insult both sides in America.
The left says: These wars are imperialist and immoral!
And the Right says: “You dishonor the dead by running! We’re also fighting really bad people who will kill and enslave without mercy if we leave!”

Both are emotional, and thus bullshit, in that they don’t address the problems, nor do they point towards solutions. Values are meaningless, only solutions matter.

Now even I had had an emotional investment in these which being a misanthrope was:
We can’t leave: it’s safer to bleed in front of a shark than show weakness in front of a human! And given the age of terrorism that followed VIetnme in the West but not the east, I think I have a point. But that doesn’t solve the endlesss money and lives I guess being sent down the sinkhole.

In the American case, our jackass State Department is so eager to work with established governments or easy to control puppets from within the American establishment (Syngman Rhee, Karsai, and this last president of Afghanistan were ALL American university professors before becoming presidents of American client states), that we don’t pay attention to their often black hole like levels of corruption which causes the people to not support the other side which often scares them to death but they hate our guy so bad they sit on their hands in spite or dispair and hope, somehow both will die and they will be left the hell alone/ That was certainly the Sarah Chaeys experience with Afghans after being shaken down often multiple times a day by the Karsai police.

This is illustrative of how a bad basic doctrine, in this case, security comes first then good governance spirals into catastrophe in practice. Now I’m not familiar with any stories how exactly bad doctrine sapped the fighting ability of the British army in detail, but I can tell the overview that throughout the way until the very end, we’re talking late 44, and certainly, in 1940, 1941, the Britsh Army had very low initiative, bad reconnaissance (General Freyberg’s reaction to the paratroopers landing on Crete being a comical exaggeration but not by much, and he was considered a very good officer until that point) and coordination with the RAF was from what I understand borderline piss poor.

I have to be honest, you’ve pulled the Wehrboo card, the pulled the insult card, you’ve pulled the ‘they can’t pul the logistics card’, and at every turn, I’ve given fairly detailed reasons why these are not the case.

I submit you suffer from a rather severe case of lack of imagination. You can only think about what did happen, but not what could have given the materials at hand.

See, given your responses, I don’t think if the Japanese hadn’t taken Singapore the way they did, I think you’d be arguing with me right now the Japanese could never, EVER have ridden 200 miles down the Malay jungle on motley collection ob BICYCLES, riding them until they were grating on the rims to outflank the British at every turn, that would be ABSURD!

And that’s EXACTLY what happened.

Conventional wisdom is a dangerous thing, so is national pride. Both are paper fortresses. And I say this as someone who’s been licking my wounds since August.

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Yes, you are being a Wehraboo. The chronic deficiencies of US tactics could be its own thread cough Admiral King cough Anzio**cough

“Now I’m not familiar with any stories how exactly bad doctrine sapped the fighting ability of the British army in detail, but I can tell the overview that throughout the way until the very end, we’re talking late 44, and certainly, in 1940, 1941, the Britsh Army had very low initiative, bad reconnaissance (General Freyberg’s reaction to the paratroopers landing on Crete being a comical exaggeration but not by much, and he was considered a very good officer until that point) and coordination with the RAF was from what I understand borderline piss poor.”

That’s highly ignorant. It has been explained many times on this channel just how poor German logistics and sustainment were from the start.

Secondly your brazen dismissal of the British and Commonwealth Armies is at odds with the record where the British sand Commonwealth forces stood on their own records in Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe. We can start with El-Alamein, continue through Sicily and the Italian mainland and pass on to D-Day.

Your comment on British Armour are also misguided. The Matilda was one of the finest early-war tanks and inadvertently touched off a tank arms race. The British Army was the only fully motorized army in Europe in 1940 and it remained highly motorized throughout the war.

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Yeah, British troops fought very well and the and the Matilda literally tanked everything short of an 88 shell…

ON THE TACTICAL LEVEL

Here we are talking past each other, in fact in a lot of ways we are talking past each other. On the tactical level doesn’t matter when you lose on the operational and strategic which the British did until Torch. The Germans lost in North Africa because they were world-class Dumb Dumbs, and you are right about the logistics system…for North Africa. For Europe on the European gauge rail system the German logistics system isn’t that bad, it’s significantly degraded from what it was in World War I and that is ALL Hitler’s fault, but it’s pretty decent. In Russia, dear Lord…

Hitler needed to autodictat himself the tonnage capacity of putting shit on boats.

All the squeezy squeezy the British could do to Rommel through Malta, Tito couldn’t hope to do a tenth of that to the supplies running through Yugoslavian rail lines. Rommel got to Lybia and the local command told him in Morpheus voice “Welcome to the Desert of total lack of Italian Infrastructure” he couldn’t even really use Benghazi are a port. Turkey was really backward in the early 1940s in terms of infrastructure but not nearly that backward.

Turkey eliminates the three bottles necks Rommel had historically
Malta
Lybia itself
And the limits of an Italian merchant fleet scattered internationally in June 1940

And see the Berlin Baghdad railway is a European gauge railway, and the Germans have the cars and the engineers and everything to handle this brand spanking new railway like they would anything in France, which they did with aplomb.

As to the America, I will not defend Anzio as landing in front of a cliff is generally not a smart move and generally the kind of thing Mark Clark would come up with. But you kind of missed the point. Napoleon remarked that artillery is the king of the battlefield, the Americans came with way more than anyone else, even before air support, which again they had more of than anyone else, and if you’re ever played an operational level strat game, enough artillery covers a MULTITUDE of sins.

Another thing to consider is not simply cooperation with the RAF, which was not good in 1941, 42, but also pre-Barbarosa, the bulk of the Luftwaffe was free to reign down on Middle east Command if they could get there. And they almost did it with VIchy Syria which is the British invaded. The main problem with your contention is the vast bulk of MEC is deployed by necessity to Egpyt and really can’t be moved to northern Iraq. The British have motor pool more limited than Germany and even more commitments because they are rightfully expecting a Japanese attack in the Far East soon. The Germans can concentrate and that is it’s own logistics advantage.

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The Nazi’s still very much thought of themselves as a political party; keeping the civilians back home happy was important to them. That meant producing military ‘goods’ as important as producing civilian goods. And let’s remember, that right up until about December 1941, the Germans had been able to do a pretty good job conquering countries that were attached to Europe.

Also, all them extra tanks and aircraft would have cost a ton of money, and would have required massive increases in production (of iron, for instance), fuel, supply, tankers, tank-repair shops, and so on. It would have required the Nazi’s to be something they weren’t (see below.)

Pz-IV’s with the long-barrel 75 didn’t start being produced until mid-1942, and even the 50mm-armed Pz-III was in the minority in June 1941. (Want to go up against a T-34 with a 37mm popgun? Not me, either.)

The Nazis talked a good game about “total war” (declared by Goebbels - but not until February 1943), but they didn’t do it very well - because it was really just sloganeering. Consumer goods were still produced; food and goods were stolen from other countries (mostly France) to keep the civilians happy. The civilian ‘mood’ was carefully monitored by the SS, and when rationing required things to be less good for the folks at home, the Nazi’s got really nervous. (Goering, for instance, threatened Reich Commissioners in August 1942 with unspecified retribution if they didn’t get better at stealing from conquered countries.)

The Nazis announced they were going to comb through the bureaucracies to get surplus manpower. All the bureacracies declared that everyone was ‘indispensable’, and the Nazi’s didn’t push. They didn’t mobilize female workers in any real way. The Nazi’s still thought of women as baby-factories, and nothing could be done to ‘threaten’ the next generation of good little aryan cannon-fodder.

The Nazi’s never really did come up with a complete plan for military production; as the war got into 1943 and on, Hitler began announcing that one thing or another would have “absolute priority”… until the next thing (the bomber/fighter silliness over the Me-262 is an example.) Weapons manufacturers were not carefully watched, and so would tend to keep right on developing a specific aircraft when told not to. For 1943, Hitler insisted on Panthers and Tigers be built, when Guderian kept advising long-barrel Pz-IV’s – more could be built faster, and would be better in most situations. But Hitler wanted his Panthers-that-still-threw-tracks, Tigers-whose-engines-kept-failing, and Elefants-with-no-machine-guns.

Speer tried to ‘rationalize’ production, but largely failed, because the companies that made up the German war economy were just independent enough to make it impossible.

So, if the Germans had realized that the Soviets were going to be a long-term, tough opponent (which they didn’t, or didn’t want to, in June 1941) – maybe. But they’d still have to move supplies for all them vehicles.

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So following Napoleon’s strategy.
Would a thrust at Moscow have been able to move faster? Concentrating more panzer divisions may have made faster progress, but they would just have left their supporting foot infantry even further behind.
How difficult would it have been to protect a long narrow thrust against flank attacks.
How much would Soviet war production outside of Moscow been enhanced by not having to relocate east?

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