How were they effective? They lucked into beating the French. Then they wasted a huge amount of air power attacking Britain when they had no real hope of actually invading the islands, let alone conquering them. Then they launched an insanely baby brained genocide/invasion campaign that that zero chance of success. I fail to see how they were “effective.” Like were the German armies individually good at combat? Yeah sure, but that was largely because they had a massive number of veteran NCO’s and Commissioned officers with legacy training from the ww1 German Empire, that never demobilized from the first world war combined with the religiously psychotic drive of fascism.
People like to shit on the French for folding so fast to the Germans, but it must be remembered that it really was a surprise to everyone including the Germans themselves. Like I dont want to base everything on hypotheticals, but if the German breakthrough hadn’t of happened, the Maginot line was a serious set of fortifications that would probably have let to another long and grinding war on that front that the Germans would have had no chance of winning. I dont want to totally discount the strategic development of rapid advance tank spearheads, but it is always important to ground an analysis in reality and not mythologize the Germans as this invincible juggernaut that was bound to win. The reality is that they had developed an new and effective operational strategy and they also got super fucking lucky. The value of defenses against armored spearheads would be proven again and again, especially at Kursk where the layers of Soviet defenses managed to ablative halt German offensives and then surround and destroy them.
when Hitler launched Barbarossa he thought it would be over before Christmas
“kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down”
EDIT: for more clarity, that was June 22 1941. almost two years later (Feb 3 1943) the Sixth Army would surrender at Stalingrad
Even the Japanese, famous for stupid military projects too, took one look at Hitlers plan and were like “Nope!” Germany just didnt remotely have the logistical capabilities to defeat the soviet union if they managed to put up half a fight, and they put up WAY more than half a fight.
Something fucking hilarious that is glossed over about the pacific war was that japans entire strategy to “defeating” America was capturing Hawaii and holding it for ransom in order to get americas colony islands on the pacific.
They literally knew they couldn’t compete with the U.S. but basically thought they would just roll over
German armies individually good at combat
They built anti-tank guns that were very good at destroying tanks but at the expense of manufacturing less anti-tank rounds than their enemies had tanks. This was not the only case of them making a mistake along these lines and it was largely for ideological reasons
Yeah I agree. It has to do with they German Capital model* which is highly risk adverse and iterative, and you still see today; to be fair it is not just the Germans who do this but they are the most famous for it. Basically you keep iterating on the same basic design improving it each time. This can work very well, but it also tends to lead to over complexity, as you require more and more fancy work arounds to deal with problems in the previous iterations. This is why advanced German tanks late in the war tended to be extremely good tanks… when they worked. Especially overcomplicated bits like transmissions and suspensions in the later Panzers and Tigers were notorious for malfunctioning.
This is compared to the Soviet and american model(though I would argue that as capital has become more risk adverse the US philosophy as moved toward the German one in a lot of ways) where, when necessary, you completely scrap a design and start from scratch thereby doing away with all those legacy errors at the cost of a more expensive retooling.
*Note this isn’t me wielding calipers and measuring the German risk lobe. It’s just an artifact of how German capital developed in the post unification period and is culturally embedded in the governance of all the major corporations that sprang up at the beginning of German capitalism. Companies which all are still with us today, which is why when you go to any German Companies “about us” web page there is a big gap in the timeline from the mid 30’s to 1945.
The Soviets and Americans were also far better at mass producing equipment. Some German tank models never even had a thousand made
Huh, I thought it was the other way around. Germans preferred big flashy upgrades that would require re-tooling and mean that two different Panzer IVs would have barely any commonality in parts, whereas the Soviets tended to do small upgrades and spread them in a unified way that would mean that tank production didn’t shut down and also having a lot of commonality in parts.
Late war German tanks took this to the extreme, whereas the Soviets snowed them under with iteratively upgraded T34-85s (and the much rarer IS series). Not that this is a total analysis of the war, there were a lot of reasons the nazis lost.
Many French soldiers were still fighting as and after the French government surrendered as the government betrayed them when the capitalists in parliament realized that they were actually pretty chill with fascism France very well could have ended the German advance with the help from Britain if it wasn’t for there own government
how? the whole BEF was disarmed. the best units of the french army were destroyed/surrounded
certainly they could’ve taken more krauts down with them but stalemate and eventual victory is a pipedream
They lucked into beating the French.
I disagree.
People like to shit on the French for folding so fast to the Germans, but it must be remembered that it really was a surprise to everyone including the Germans themselves.
To the German high command perhaps, but not to the people who knew it could be done.
The more one looks into the Third Republic, the more one finds just how despicable the French really were. At the top, they were all rotten. They cared for nothing but their own maneuvering for power. When the British offered a political union to stave off defeat, the French contemptuously rejected it as an attempt to seize French colonies.
the Maginot line was a serious set of fortifications
The Germans breached the Maginot Line with a regular attack. It’s forgotten today, but it happened.
"…my own part in this campaign was limited to the fighting in Lorraine, where I served as chief of staff (Ia) of the 197th Infantry Division. It formed part of the First German Army which on 14 June attacked the famous Maginot Line at Puttlingen, south of Saarbrucken. I had a good opportunity of seeing the battle at first hand, although in our division only the artillery and an engineer battalion were engaged in the actual breakthrough.
The Maginot Line was widely believed to be impregnable, and for all I know there may still be those who think that the fortifications could have resisted any attack. It may be of interest to point out that the Maginot defenses were breached in a few hours by a normal infantry attack, without any tank support whatever. The German infantry advanced under cover of a heavy air and artillery bombardment in which lavish use was made of smoke shell. They soon found that many of the French strong points were not proof against shells or bombs, and moreover, a large number of positions had not been sited for all around defense and were easy to attack from the blind side with grenades and flamethrowers. The Maginot Line lacked depth, and taken as a whole the position was far inferior to many defensive systems developed later in the war. In modern war it is in any case unsound to rely on static defense, but as far as the Maginot Line was concerned the fortifications had only a moderate local value."
– Major General F.W. von Mellinthin, Panzer Battles: A Study of the Employment of Armor in the Second World War
They really weren’t though! See: eastern front
The Nazis being brutally effective is just one of those myths that refuses to die
Whoa so you tell me that if a Nation of 70 Million people and some 300 Divions decieds to Invade … fucking Norway … succesfull This is a clear sign on how effectiv this army is…
They were certainly effective at rolling over the nations of western Europe.
And even more effective at recruiting soldiers from the SS from these same nations. Never let them forget this. Bring it up all the time. Every single nation in Europe had their own SS formations except Portugal.
aT lEaSt ThE tRaInS rAn On TiMe
When you sucker punch people struggling to rebuild after the first fucking war that killed millions of people, you aren’t really playing on a level playing field
Eh, the French should have knocked out Germany in October 1939.
See, they declared war on Germany to defend Poland. An attack on Germany would have presented the Nazis with a two front war, crippling them. A drive on Berlin would likely have worked. The entire Wehrmacht was in Poland, only a few troops were along the border with France. Punching through them, there would have been little between the French army and Berlin but open countryside. There would have been a coup and regime change, and the new government would have sued for peace.
But no, turns out the entire alliance with Poland was a lie. A bluff. Sure, France launched an “offensive” - which they quickly abandoned. The French were paid back in their own coin when this betrayal came back to bite them, hard. After ridiculing Poland for surrendering in five weeks, France surrendered in six.
I heard a fairly convincing, if not well backed, theory once that the conservative French military command purposely threw the war against the Germans because the French government was increasingly moving leftwards and they’d rather be puppets under Germany for a bit than let capital be threatened in any way. If the French had stalemated the Germans during the initial blitz for just a few weeks Germany’s economy and war machine would’ve collapsed from cannibalizing itself.
this and related ‘french didnt want to win’ theories are bullshit
talking about a government that rounded up commies and put them in concentration camps at the onset of war, being unacceptably left-wing. and the price arch-conservative french generals would pay for being rid of such a government is extreme national humiliation, the loss of alsace-lorraine & military occupation.
people don’t seem to understand is that like the Germans & the Soviets, the Germans & the French (and Czechoslovaks & Poles) had irreconcilable disputes that overshadowed any but the most short-term cooperation. Conservatives can agree on a lot but they are not internationalists, they want their territory, they want their ‘face’ and ‘honor’, they want revenge for historical grievances.
The German army was so efficient during WWII that Germany went from being one of the largest military powers in the world to being the fifth-largest military power in Berlin.
