JJKettunen
Posts: 3530
Joined: 3/12/2002
From: Finland
Status: offline
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My cheesy comment came out of the fact, that the German `landsers´ were the best all around fighters in the world. The point of the view here is tactical, and somewhat operational. Nobody brought the grand strategical point of view until you did. During both World Wars Germans had the strange admicture of tactical brilliance and strategical stupidity.
Here are couple of interesting quotes. The first one is from Niklas Zetterling´s (Swedish historian) book "Normandy 1944: German Military Organization, Combat Power and Organizational Effectiveness", and the other is from review of that book by Bill Stone.
1. It seems that the Allied numerical superiority in Normandy has not been clear to all authors. Indeed some have not even observed it at all. Stephen E. Ambrose has even written:
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin relied on overwhelming numbers, and to some extent American-supplied equipment, to fight the Wehrmacht. The British and Americans were going to have to rely on their soldiers outfighting Nazi soldiers, because the numbers of troops on the opposing sides were roughly equal.
This is entirely wrong. When Operation Cobra was launched, the Germans had brought to Normandy about 410,000 men in divisions and non-divisional combat units. If this is multiplied by 1.19 [service and support manpower outside German divisions and non-div units] we arrive at approximately 490,000 soldiers. However, until 23 July, casualties amounted to 116,863, while only 10,078 replacements had arrived. This means that no more than 380,000 soldiers remained in Normandy or supported the fighting in Normandy.
On 25 July there were 812,000 US soldiers and 640,000 British in Normandy. This means that the Allies had a 3.8:1 superiority in manpower. This was better than the superiority enjoyed by the Red Army on the Eastern Front. On 1 June 1944 the Soviets pitted 7.25 million men against 2.62 million Germans.
2. There are far too many books blindly praising the superiority of German arms, worshiping every SS commander as though a god of war incarnate, and sometimes linking combat performance to Nazi racial and political ideology. In an environment where that kind of unhealthy fetishism is distressingly popular, it's no wonder that a cadre of writers such as Ambrose and Mansoor and Doubler and Brown might go a bit overboard in attempting to demonstrate the superiority of American combat performance in Europe, and some have even gone so far as to say not only were the Yanks the best in the business, but only a democratic society could produce soldiers of that quality. (That latter assertion, of course, is not far removed from the belief held in some other quarters that only the Soviet system could have produced armies capable of defeating Hitler.) Such polarization can make it difficult to examine the historical foundations and lessons of the campaign with any impartiality. In this contentious arena, however, Niklas Zetterling is a breath of fresh air. With an array of facts and figures, and analysis as relentlessly apolitical as a spreadsheet, he provides a tremendous amount of invaluable information and draws some rational conclusions.
Given this database of units and manpower and tanks and guns and casualties, one point shines through. German soldiers certainly were not supermen, and they were never invincible, but in Normandy they absolutely managed to do more with considerably less than most historians have previously conceded.
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