Best Army of WWII?

[Miner]

quote: Originally posted by Harlan on 09-03-2000 07:50 PM Its scary to think what the Germans could have done if someone managed to direct and control their scientists...

And I believe this to be the morale of the story for all Civers, especially those Fundie junkies.

[jeibel]

This is such an interesting topic that it drives me out of lurking...
Who do you guys, all well knowledged in ww2, consider to have been the best tactician/general ?
I refer the "History of world war two" encyclopedia by Sir Basil Liddel Hart, good but somewhat old info, and the bottom line here seem to be in favor of Zhukov, for his flexibility to adapt to the changing situation and the use of 'improvised' (is that a word?) war material, i.e. mobilitating the populace to build fortification in the non threathened zone as the german army changed direction and so on...
Also, i have a remark to the 'soviet won by number' line: although that is certainly true for the majority of the war the won important battle by tactics alone: AFAIK at Stalingrad the proportion between the two army was 1:1, with the Soviets being slightly inferior.
Also one of the factor to take in account, although that may seem obvious, is the dreaded Propaganda. The Nazis were so deeply convinced of their racial superiority (as it was necessary in such a regime)that they considered russian to be less than human and thus unworthy of being targeted by prop (as if they hadn't an intellect to comprehend it). The Soviet on the other hand made an extensive use of it, and also thank to the impressive work of the Red Orchestra, it was terribly effective: there are reports of german division being 'bombarded' with leaflets depicting their army plan... Kinda scaring knowing the enemy knows every one of your move.
To everyone who object the nazi (NOT german!) way of thought during the war (arrogance and superiority), as a student of totalitarianism i say: it was needed. It is the only way in which such a regime can be run: all deeply rooted in the ideal of the Volkgemeinschaft, the racial (folk) community of nordic/arian populace... Totalitarian regime make an ideology which is totaly uncaring of factual reality their driving force... But if you want to know more about that read 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' by Hannah Arendt, a very enlightening text (I made a student term paper on it! ).
To VietMinh: make that 3 fascist states...
Farewell

[jeibel]

Farewell
[This message has been edited by jeibel (edited September 04, 2000).]

[Harlan]

Nemo,
I'm glad you liked that insight, but it wasn't mine, it was from that book. Read it, and truly understand WW2 . Also, your other comment is very true: Hitler's search for a wonder weapons certainly was involved. The German scientists were already having the problems mentioned earlier, but when Hitler wanted his wonder weapons he goaded them on, reinforcing their worst habits, and gave them big budgets to waste to boot. When I say waste I don't mean that some of those weapons couldn't have been useful had the war gone on, cos they could have, but "bang for the buck" calculations were not considered at all. Doubly shocking in Germany's cash strapped economy. What the Germans might have afforded to do if they didn't waste so much money on their rocket program alone gives one pause for thought. That used one fourth of their military budget for several years and in the end killed about as many people as one big conventional air raid by the Allies over Germany.

And while the Axis could have done better, made the war go on much longer and had millions more killed, I think in the end they would have lost. Why? Cos in both countries their population was relatively small- less than 100 million each. Thanks to their racial beliefs, the more territory they conquered, the harder it was to maintain their empire. Russia they got virtually nothing out of, cos there was no one skilled (or the capital) left to manage and exploit it. Those people were already busy exploiting other conquests. And the guerilla warfare problem against them would have grown and grown. Plus, add up all of Germany and Japan's would be conquests, and it still doesn't add up to the economic might of the US alone at that time.

The best they could have hoped for was to make reconquest of their conquests by the Allies so costly that they would sue for peace instead, but they could have never conquered America. What very well might have ensued was a world looking just like Orwell's 1984. Not a lot of people know this, but he wrote that book based on what might have happened if WW2 ended in a stalemate. America eventually because Fascist cos they can't afford their freedoms in trying to beat the other Fascist nations, and then three equally powerful nations endlessly battle over the earth. It never ends, cos if one gets two powerful, the other two team up, and war keeps their own population under heel. Scary.

Best general? Hard to say, but Zhukov is certainly up there, not the least for managing to not get killed by Stalin!

[Captain Nemo]

Jeibel:
I would still say that numbers played a critical role in the Stalingrad victory. The stalemate in the ruins of the city was achieved with approx. equal numbers but the massive envelopment move was done with superior numbers and led to the isolation and destruction of the 6th Army mostly by supply starvation.
The battle of Kursk has always facinated me, because the view and even the facts vary so widely from account to account. Widely regarded as the first Soviet summer victory, one of my sources says it was actually a disaster for the Soviet Army? It states that the massive tank engagement cost the Soviets 600 tanks versus less than 100 German tanks being knocked out? Does anyone have actual facts that are uncontested?
In any case it is still pretty sure that the Soviets lost at least as many soldiers and equipment as the Germans from 1942-1945 so their massive ressources turned a potential STALEMATE into a complete Victory.

Best strategist:
Although I agree with Zhukov as the best Soviet general/marshal I would say that the American strategy in Europe seemed more effective, achieving better results with less losses. But whose strategy was it? I could not say that any specific American general set the strategy... Maybe the "average" US field commander?
I am reluctant to mention Patton because he really worked in a smaller scale, however he was quite successful. Omar Bradley was a better commander than many give him credit for.
On the German side Rommel, Von Rundstedt and Guderian come to mind.

[SixArmedMan]

Von Rundstedt?? Why would you say him? Wasn't he more of an old fashioned general than say... Manstein or Guderian? And wasn't he in favour of holding Guderian back during the invasion of France, thus allowing the British more time to evacuate at Dunkirk???

(Edited for misspelling)
[This message has been edited by SixArmedMan (edited September 06, 2000).]

[BeBMan]

Nemo, I only found an article in the net about Kursk that says that during the direct tank confrontation near Prokhorovka (-sp?) the German losses were only between 100 and 200 tanks, but the Soviet tank losses were much higher (around the number you said).

According to this article, most of these Soviet losses were reparable tanks that were abandoned. This seems a bit strange to me, and the author gives no reason for this. But generally the author considered Kursk still as a major victory for the Soviet Union.

The source for this article was the online edition of a German newspaper from the right political spectrum, so it´s also possible that the author see the Germans in a better light than they were in reality...
Has someone more serious info about this, from better sources (I´m also interested in this )

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Civ2000

[Sten Sture]

Have you guys seen this site?
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/avenue/vy75/

It appears to use good sources for its data. Prokorovka: Armor at Kursk was the first cardboard strategy game I ever played and I would love to replace my lost copy of it or see a civ version.

Very interesting discussion gentlemen. Thanks for the good read.

[The ANZAC]

I think I can put together everything collected on Kursk and the whole eastern front for WWII into a general idea. To me, it seems as though the Soviet Union won a "Pyhric Victory" against the Germans. So they won a victory and not defeat at Kursk, but with a high cost.

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"We sought to throw a raging lion ashore; what we got was a stranded whale!" -Winston Curchill on the Battle of Anzio

"Quis custodes ipsos custodiet?" -Juvenal

"I can walk!!" -Dr. Strangelove

[Shadowstrike]

quote: Originally posted by The ANZAC on 09-06-2000 06:25 PM I think I can put together everything collected on Kursk and the whole eastern front for WWII into a general idea. To me, it seems as though the Soviet Union won a "Pyhric Victory" against the Germans. So they won a victory and not defeat at Kursk, but with a high cost.

I suppose that this was the general idea of Red Front. You as the player would lose a lot of units, a lot more then the enemy, and any victory would be a hollow one paid for by hundreds of thousands of lives.

[jeibel]

Excuse me if i go a bit OFF-Topic but this is sort of my speciality field

WARNING: Many of the things i am going to say may looks very cruel and inhuman. I am fortunate enough to not know totalitarian terror first-hand, nor any of my relatives has been a victim (i am from a country that was once Fascist). I am of course not trying to justify the oppression and cruelity of a totalitarian regime. HOwever it is a deep and involved subject, with many exisistential implication (wich i am not going to touch) and i feel compelled to exspose my thought.

I know '1984' very well... In fact i prepared my final exam paper as an inter-disciplinary confrontation between Hannah Arendt's real world theories and Orwell's fictional. Orwell started conceveing the book after the Tehran conference in 1943. As you will well know at the time the possibilietis of an allied victory was very high, if not certain; thus the Allies started making plan about the division of the world in zone of influence. The prospective orrified Orwell. However at the time the role of the Soviet Union was less regarded, since they hadn't had any major success besides Stalingrad... IIRC (i know this not by study of history but of literature ) Western europe was to be included in a sort of commonwealth under british leadership (the 'other' major power). So stalemate is not entirely accurate, as the premise for the Revoultions of the '50s was the fall of fascism (in 1984 the ruling party of the three states claim to be the heir of Socialist/Communist ideology...).
And there is another very important point to clarify that also allow me to perhaps answer the ANZAC: what was the true realization of those totalitarian states? And what had the Soviet Union truly gained from the war? Well it is not accurate to say that in 1984 the states keeps the population under heel to win the war (although, thanks to double-think, they do believe so...). Rather they have realized that by keeping the war in a stalemate, they would be able to mantain a fully mobilized society, by definition transitionary, permanently. (the kind of soc. whose enormous possibilities became evident in ww1), one where all the populace's efforts are directed towards a single goal... The sense of comradeship that arises makes the populace compact and utterly loyal to a leader. This, combined with police espionage and administrative slaughter of the populace would make an elite able to keep the power stably.
They reduce the people directly involved in the war to a minority (as it was done from antiquity to modernity), but mantain all other populace involved in the war effort.

Result: War is Peace

So, to come back to ANZAC post, what has the U.S.S.R. truly gained from the war? I think that it is the perfection of its totalitarian regime. Although the era of the Great Purges range between 1927 and 1936 it is during the war that the true cohesion in the nation is achieved. in an abused, but true, expression the war had galvanized the people. Stalin had realized a way to keep a population under control without significant risk of being overthrown. Even after the war, purge followed purge, and the society was constantly striving to achieve new goals (the five years plan, the 'foundation of a new society', the reconstruction, the space race...). Th situation of the Cold War was, in fact, ideal: a stalemate situation in which the populace can be kept under terror, and thus, control. In fact some historian consider Stalin's death the end of the Cold War, as it marked the end of post-war totalitarianism and the beginning of the 'normalization' process.
A side note. It is a little known fact that a few months before his death in 1953, Stalin was planning what could have been the greatest purge in USSR.

The purge of Jews.

Thank you for reading so far and excuse me for my ranting.
Farewell
[This message has been edited by jeibel (edited September 06, 2000).]

[jeibel]

To came a little back in topic.
Another little example of the lack of true cohesion between the Axis countries: during Italy's colonial war in Ethiopia the Nazi supplied high-grade military ammunition to the ethiopians.
Farewell

[Captain Nemo]

I had about the same kind of report in an American Magazine specializing in WWII... But I must say there is a mysticism in America about the Germans in WWII and Americans have an unfortunate tendency toward history revisionism.
The main battle was when the 1st, 2nd and 3rd SS-Panzerdivisions ran into about 1000 Soviet tanks (Mostly T-34s) from the reserve 6th(?) Guard division...
The casualties in the article were derived from strengths reports of the units on both sides before and after the battle. The author was decidedly "pro-German" so I am suspicious of his data.
I also had separate data about the Germans losing 3/4 of the new Panther tanks engaged as well as almost all the 80 "Elephant" panzerjagers that were used which points to much higher losses. Also, the pictures I have of the battlefield are littered with destroyed German Pzkw III and IV tanks and many of the Elephant PzJg's, which really seems to point in the direction of huge German losses. Unfortunately, both sides had a strong tendency to "alter" the truth...

[a_bates]

I'm no expert on the subject but I would just say to Nemo, don't trust pictures, they tend to be taken by the winner.

[Harlan]

Its true that many of the "wonder weapons" looked good only on paper, but many of them were actually quite advanced and could have worked had the war gone on a few more years. Normally there is a strongly conservative streak in militaries that shoot down any thing new and significantly different. Because German scientists were given carte blanche during the war and even goaded into wierder and wierder designs in the pursuit of some magical solution, these conservative nay-sayers could be ignored.

An example would be forward sweeping wings on an airplane. Pretty common on advanced aircraft today. A German plane late in the war had this design, and being a totalitarian state they forced someone to test fly it. Even after this success, it took decades for the winning powers to build such a thiing, and when they did, no one was willing to fly it. People would say: that's not how planes are supposed to look, it will never fly. The Germans even came up with a "single wing" plane that looks remarkably like modern stealth fighters. That idea turned out to be 40 years ahead of its time.