Launched from where? If the Soviet government had collapsed following the fall of Moscow in winter '41, it’s highly unlikely that the UK would still be in the war in summer '45. If the bulk of German forces were freed from the Eastern front, Operation Sealion II becomes a real possibility. And even if Britain wasn’t invaded the threat of invasion might have been enough to force a truce.
Remember also that the atomic bombing of Japan occurred when the U.S. had complete air superiority. Flying similar missions straight into the teeth of a full-strength Luftwaffe with no forces tied down in the east would be a very different proposition.
I’m not saying that the atom bomb wouldn’t have defeated the Nazis even if the Soviets had been eliminated early in the war. But until the ICBM was developed in the late 50’s, the delivery of atomic weapons to their targets depended very much on conventional air combat. It would by no means have been a sure thing.
Hitler frequently told his military leaders and the general German public that Americans were weak and ill-prepared for war, so he’s on record disdaining Americans. Freedom per se is a different issue, but I don’t think we can call ol’ Adolf an admirer of human rights and freedoms. The whole concept of Führerprinzip indicates otherwise:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The Führerprinzip, German for “leader principle”, prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the governmental structures of the Third Reich. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer’s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political Fascism.
[/QUOTE]
Does that sound like it emphasizes individual freedom to you?
Victor Davis Hanson, although I do not agree with other things he has said, has made a case for the idea that citizen-soldiers of democracies are uniquely more effective than those of totalitarian regimes, most pointedly in his book The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny. There aren’t many such armies in the broad sweep of history, but they do have a pretty good record.
Indeed. Most historians I’ve read seem to agree Hitler did not want Germany-the-state, nor individual Germans, to survive him. The German people had “failed” him and deserved to go down with him Götterdämmerung.
At the risk of a hijack, I contend that Germany would have lost air superiority in any event once she engaged the United States. It might have been a while before it was “safe” to run B-29s in to Berlin, but it would have happened.
Let’s not forget the enormous amount of supplies the US sent the Soviets (and the comparably enormous effort to deliver them). A collapsed Soviet Union would have freed up all that materiel and supporting infrastructure to increase the weight of the US blow against Germany at the same time it would have freed up the Luftwaffe units from the Eastern Front.
In response to the OP: the old 1977 Avalon Hill wargame, Squad Leader, took an interesting view of the question.
It was put together by “grognards,” serious-minded amateur armchair generals and wargame aficionados. Whether that makes it less – or more – reliable an interpretation of reality is up to the reader.
In the game rules, mind you:
American infantry in WWII has a lower chance to pass a “morale check” when under fire, but is not subject to a penalty (which applies to everyone else) to recover morale quickly. If I am remembering rightly, this stemmed from the designers’ impression that US units did not stand up to punishing casualties with the grim determination their enemies showed, but after getting out of the immediate killing zone, much more readily returned to the line to fight again, even without charismatic leadership to rally them.
I don’t know how realistic this was, but it sounded plausible to this teenager back in the day.
The issue with that scenario would actually be in the logistics. Yes without the Eastern Front the resources would be freed up to head westwards, but the materials would still be an issue. Much of the transportation infrastructure was totally wiped out, so you would have the issue of getting the raw materials and crude oil back to Germany and into the manufacturing infrastructure. One of the huge issues towards the middle and end for the Germans was the lack of petroleum and other crucial war effort materials. Even if they regained access to the eastern oil fields, with no trains to easily move the crude, with the distilling facilities bombed out you still have issues transporting the fuel. If you try to truck the fuel 1000 miles back westward, you quickly start burning up the fuel the war effort needs for the planes and tanks [and assorted transports.]
We DID have significant guerilla units, but they did not win battles. The British were not ignorant of guerilla fighting. They had their own units that fought in “skirmish” formation as they called it.
Further, if guerilla units won battles, why did the US forces try to hard to emulate the European mode of fighting? The entire point of hiring Von Steuben to train soldiers at Valley Forge was that they could not win on the battlefield without mastering the British way of warfare.
The thread title carries with it an implicit criticism, but you can’t fault the American soldier. They were brave, highly motivated and adaptable. The problem was that during the interwar years, the American military completely forgot how to make war. It was up to a handful of old-school soldiers to mobilize and train millions of citizens with no institution or infrastructure to support them.
Perhaps if this were true in real life it may explain the effectiveness of soldiers from democracies. They are not as imbued with stories about how absolutely cowardly it is to run in battle, and are not as likely to get in trouble if they do run. So when the sensible thing to do is run, they run. Then they regroup rather than get slaughtered on the spot.
I believe it is in Stephan Ambrose’s Citizen Soldier that discusses American soldiers in Aachen, which was their first battle that took place on German soil. The Germans would no longer retreat and were preparing for house-to-house fighting like Stalingrad. An American commander, when he saw how deadly the fighting could be, ordered his howitzers to blow holes through the row houses so his soldiers could advance under cover instead of in the street. A captured German officer later called this “unfair”.
Americans fought a “soft”, rich war because they could. As you said, this makes perfect sense.
I don’t think physicality is as much a factor as things like equipment and training. Morale too, of course, but I doubt the morale of Americans fighting to defeat the Nazis was any lower than Germans fighting for the Fuhrer.
FWIW, I would bet that the individual German soldier was superior, one on one, to the individual American. More experience in fighting, for one thing, given their early victories over France, etc.
But the Allies didn’t win the war because the individual American soldier was better. They won because America was the greatest industrial power on earth. And once the US geared up to a war time economy, and developed weapons that were, so to speak, WWII era instead of WWI, it was a foregone conclusion that the Tausand Jahre Reich was toast.
The US could not only fight a war in the Pacific. They could also fight (to a lesser extent) in Europe and supply their own army as well as the British and Soviets with tanks and planes and bullets and shells and food and trucks and medical supplies and everything else that was needed.
Amateur soldiers talk tactics. Professionals talk logistics. A major point of battle planning is not to fight a fair battle, where the sides are evenly matched and you find out which army is better one on one. That’s why Napolean talked about the concentration of forces at the critical point - so that when it actually comes to the sharp edge, those guys are overmatched, not only in soldiers but in what soldiers use to kill each other.
Maybe Fritz is a 30% better shot than Billy. If Billy has twice the ammunition, the law of averages says he is going to win a shoot out. Especially if Billy has a belly full of nice hot food, waterproof boots, and Fritz has been strafed for the last twenty four hours.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
That’s why Napolean talked about the concentration of forces at the critical point - so that when it actually comes to the sharp edge, those guys are overmatched, not only in soldiers but in what soldiers use to kill each other.
[/QUOTE]
Huh…I thought that was Clauswitz (the schwernpunkt IIRC, though gods know how it’s spelled). But I think your post is spot on…it’s not about the individual fighting ability of your soldiers, but the effectiveness of your military. The US military wasn’t trying to win fairly or prove we had the best soldier or best tank…we just wanted to win so we could go home and have some fun.
I remember seeing a show on the History Channel where they were talking to a German tanker. He was bragging that his Tiger was just dominating some section of road. It had killed 5 US Sherman tanks, which he was total in contempt of. He went on to say that his platoon was eventually wiped out (including his own tank) when the US basically cheated and called in tactical air and artillery to pound the shit out of their tanks while a flood of additional Sherman tanks managed to flank them, get behind them and shoot them in the ass. You could tell he didn’t think much of this, that it wasn’t sporting or right, and that he knew that his tank and his fellows were the better men because they had the best tanks…which did them no good in the end, since the US could afford to lose those 5 tanks to take out a single Tiger, and that such a ratio was actually ridiculously in our favor (though hard on the tank crews…one of my pet peeves is how badly the US prepared for war in the past and the crap we sent our troops into combat with, the bad training and little preparation we gave our troops, and the fact that we relied our our guys to learn by a trial of fire every time we went into battle up to fairly recent times).
Maybe he did. I heard it first in connection with Napolean (cite). But it is a key tactical concept, so no doubt Clausewitz talked about it as well, as well as every other general of the last few hundred years.
Reminiscent of what my sensei used to say about the two best things for your assailant to say after a fight. Best thing is “hey, what happened?”
Second best is “No fair!”
Hear, hear.
Which is why I was heartened by what I saw in the first Gulf War, which was a twenty first century army vs. a Viet Nam era army. For once, our generals (especially the late lamented Schwarzkopf) were not preparing to fight the last war, but the one in front of them.
I always enjoy reading what you have to say about military history and tactics.
Yeah, it’s a pretty common concept. I just remember it from On War, so that’s where I associate it from.
[QUOTE=Shodan]
Reminiscent of what my sensei used to say about the two best things for your assailant to say after a fight. Best thing is “hey, what happened?”
Second best is "No fair!
[/QUOTE]
We must have had the same sensei. There is no such thing as a fair fight, either individually or in war. It always amuses me when people talk about the US military being unfair with their use of drones and reliance on tactical air, precision artillery and long range strikes.
I read a book (title and author long forgotten, I’m afraid) maybe 30 years ago that attempted to analyse the combatants’ performance in WWII, at several levels. This was using statistical analysis and normalising situations to extract performance out of the randomness of combat situations.
His conclusion was that the German soldier was 50% better, as an individual, than any of his counterparts in the war. That is that 2 Wehrmacht were equal in combat outcomes to any 3 other soldiers.
As you quite correctly say, this was eventually fairly irrelevant to the outcome of the war. But there is no real other explanation for the performance of the German Army from 1939-1941 than they were simply better man-for-man. Being 50% better doesn’t help much when you’re fighting 5-1 odds all the time.
Even from an objective standpoint, the worse kind of battle is a “fair” one. That just means the sides are evenly matched, which guarantees a lot of people on both sides are going to die. A battle where one side has an “unfair” advantage will be over quicker and produce fewer casualties.
As Little Nemo said, presumably the author was Trevor Dupuy, he wrote a number of books on this issue such as *Numbers, Predictions and War *and A Genius for War - the German Army and General Staff, 1807-1945 and incorporated his Quantified Judgement Model and Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model in many of his other works. To nitpick he found the Combat Effectiveness Value of German formations to be on average 20% higher than those of the Western Allies and the casualty rate they inflicted to be 50% higher. From here, warning pdf file:
Not so nitpicky though, his conclusion was not that the German soldier was 50% better as an individual; it was that in organized combat formations the Germans were 20% more effective. Though in this case he is comparing Arab and Israeli performance, the same applies to his analysis of the Germans in WW2; from Elusive Victory: The Arab-Israeli Wars, 1947-1974
Kidding aside, I haven’t seen any interesting study in comparing units from squad- to company-size in WW2. It was only the US army that introduced increased firepower at the squad level. This was with the introduction of semi-auto rifles and an automatic rifle designed for small unit use (the BAR.) The Britons had a similar make-up but not as pronounced as the Americans. The Germans, on the other hand, focused on the machine gun as the primary small arm in actions involving platoons or bigger.
There was one account of American soldiers encountering elite German paras (starts with an ‘f’, I could never remember the spelling.) I can’t quote the supposed report of the American commander since I can’t find that article. Clue: he implied the US shouldn’t be fighting the Germans.
There is no such thing as a fair fight, either individually or in war. It always amuses me when people talk about the US military being unfair with their use of drones and reliance on tactical air, precision artillery and long range strikes.