Not “fanaticism” or “ideology” (neither of which I mentioned), but allocation of resources. The Western Allies spent the time after WW1 trying to figure out how to shrink their militaries. The Nazis, in contrast, elevated militarism to the highest of national ideals, and spent their time figuring out how to circumvent the limits placed on theor military - and to expand it beyond anything that the Allies had or wanted. This was a Nazi choice (though of course the German Army was all for it) based on the Nazi notion that a string military was the highest of national goals.
If you look at the cold hard figures, you will see what I mean. Before WW2, for example, the US military was pitifully small - it had to expand great rates: it went from some 300K in 1939 to something like 12 Millinon in 1945.
Moreover, because of the militarism of German society, the troops are likely to have had much longer periods of quasi-military training and indoctrination.
It is no wonder, given these national priorities, that the German soldiers were better at it.
Dude, you are more intelligent that that surely. The Nazi’s did not create the German military machine. The Germans had a military tradition and a very successful one, when the Nazi’s were just a bunch of Bavarian Beer Bullys. It was not “fanaticism” or “ideology” which won them so much success, it was that tradition, married with one of the worlds most advanced scientific and technological bases.
To expand a bit further, the Germans had considerably better officer and NCO training; to be qualified to become an officer in the Wehrmacht you had to have something like a year’s worth of experience as a NCO of some sort to go to officer school, or if not in the military yet, have the equivalent of 2 years of college and then do a year as an enlisted man, and then go to officer school.
In addition to the training differences, there were huge doctrinal differences. The German doctrine emphasized flexibility, initiative and independent action- the concept of aufgragstaktik (“mission type tactics” in English) was VERY different than the way Western and Russian armies did things. Rather than issue detailed direct orders to subordinates of how they should do things, mission-type tactics detail a final goal, what are needed/provided to accomplish that goal, and a time frame for achieving the goal. The subordinate is left to fill in the gaps of how to actually achieve the goal.
For enlisted men many if not most, came in with some degree of paramilitary experience from the Hitler Youth and/or the Arbeitsdienst, and could spend more time learning soldiering skills, rather than basic military behavior.
Combine all that with a revolutionary strategic doctrine (blitzkrieg) and a fairly technologically advanced military, and you have the recipe for very effective troops.
I believe it was a British historian named Max Hastings who did a study of German infantry actions against Allied forces and found that regardless of who the opposition was, the Germans routinely inflicted 2.5 times the casualties as they got. The study did not include battles involving artillery or airstrikes, just infantry on infantry battles.
There were some exceptions. For instance, the Germans didn’t do that well against elite troops like the American Airborne or British Commandos.
The UK was pushing 50% of GDP, the US was nearing 40%. I’m going to assume that 40-50% is the max a civilization can maintain while still functioning since you still need some civilian infrastructure and because both nations stopped at about the 40-50% mark.
By comparison it is rare for a modern nation to spend more than 10%, and North Korea (which has the highest military to GDP ratio of any nation on earth) spends about 15-25% based on which stats you look at.
So I’m going to guess that Japan, like the UK, maxed out at about 50%. So if you assume that applies to the rest of the world, then the industrialized world was spending 40-50% of GDP on military spending vs Germany and Japan spending 40-50%.
On another note, reading up on it apparently Canada’s great contribution to the war effort was industrial, not military. They made something like 800,000 military vehicles, and produced large amount of minerals to support the war effort. So again, you have nations like Canada dumping almost a million trucks, artillery, planes, etc. into the battlefield as well as putting large amounts of minerals into production while being thousands of miles away from bombing vs. Japan & Germany whose industrial base were being bombed daily.
These are more or less similar to what I was saying.
To put it another way: an Allied army (such as the US army) that expanded by a factor of 50 in response to the war, and in a society where the powers that be did not emphaisize universal militarism as the highest virtue and so create paramilitary ‘youth’ programs on a mass scale (and so these recruits lacked paramilitary experience), could not reasonably be expected to uphold these standards for soldiers.
Don’t forget that Canada also had the BCATP, which produced a lot of pilots and enabled the Allies to achieve control of the skies in a lot less time than f they had to have been trained in GB or at home. The Axis powers would likely have held out longer if not for this.
Circular reasoning. You don’t think that Japan had a higher percentage than the US or UK because you think that the US and UK maxed out the percentage, and you think that the percentage the US and UK was the max because they didn’t go any higher than that. Maybe Japan was doing 60% or 70%, which would mean that 60% or 70% (or higher) would be the true maximum.
First of all, how much were they spending BEFORE the war?
The German buildup prior to the war was vastly larger than the U.S. or British buildup, and goes a long way to account for their head start. In 1936, German GNP was 10% devoted to military buildup, an astounding number for a country that is not at war.
I’m going to assume there is no reason to think that there’s a ceiling at 40-50% if a totalitarian country is fighting a world war. The Nazi economy was dedicated to war to an extent not even the slightest bit comparable to the American or British systems, and involved a degree of control and government interference that really makes it hard to call it a normal economy. Germany also freely looted the countries it conquered, an economic input without any parallel to the Western Allies.
The max could be higher than 50%, but I’m not sure what the true ceiling is. The reason I figured that was the ceiling was both the US and UK spiked to that level rapidly, then stayed there. They didn’t go to 40%, then 70%, then 90%. They went to 40-50% rapidly and stayed there. Then again those were democratic governments, and the people wouldn’t have tolerated as much civilian shortages as a totalitarian government could get away with.
That site says Germany was spending 61% in 1943. They also claim the UK was spending 63%, but that stat doesn’t match the other ones I’ve found for the UK showing closer to 50%. So I don’t know which stat to trust. Since I’ve seen more than one site claim the UK spent closer to 40-50%, I’m inclined to trust that stat more.
Assume the max is 70%, that doesn’t negate what I said. Japan spending 70% of GDP on military is less than the UK spending 50% or the US spending 40% because the Allies had larger economies. North Korea spending 25% of GDP on military is less spending than South Korea spending 3%.
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Assume the max is 70%, that doesn’t negate what I said. Japan spending 70% of GDP on military is less than the UK spending 50% or the US spending 40% because the Allies had larger economies. North Korea spending 25% of GDP on military is less spending than South Korea spending 3%.
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But you still seem to be missing the point a bunch of people are trying to make. The Japanese were spending a lot in a focused manner BEFORE the war. The fact that the US and others outspent them later on is why they lost, once the initial shock was over and the large initial gains were first slowed, then halted then rolled back. The reason they did better initially is the same reason Germany and Italy did, because they were preparing for war before the war (both mentally AND physically), and they were focused on preparing to attack, while most of the allies were either not preparing or doing so based on the play book of the previous war. Or they were crippling themselves for political reasons, like the Russians, who WERE building up but who also had spent several years before the war gutting their officer corps (which, in the Russian model was the backbone of their military, since they didn’t use NCOs like the US or other western powers did or do). The Germans and Japanese especially were thinking through and planning both their strategy and tactics and weapons and doctrine on the war they thought they could fight, while most of the allies, especially the ones who were in the fight early were trying to figure out how not to fight a war at all, and were pretty much desultorily preparing just in case (on very limited budgets and, again, based on a play book that was from the previous war).
You can argue that the Americans, the British, the French, the Russians, and the Chinese all had been militaristic when they had conquered their empires. But they weren’t looking for conquests in the thirties. The Axis powers were the militaristic powers in the thirties that were looking for conquest.
Dont you think its just a bit ironic that the axis powers were conquering territory that the axis powers had conquered…and the French and the British were using Colonials to fight on their side.
Do you mean conquering territories that the allied powers had conquered? If so, then sure. And the axis powers made that argument at the time. They all said that they were just doing what other countries had done in the past - and there was certainly some truth to what they were saying.
But that’s irrelevant to the topic of this thread. We’re not debating the morality of the Axis powers. We’re talking about the balance of power in WWII. The military forces that the allied powers had used to conquer their empires had been used decades in the past so they weren’t a factor in the war.
As others have noted, this was history by the 1930s. The Western Allies at least had no intention of making further conquests, particularly of First World neighbours - the resulst of WW1 had scared them too profoundly.
The way I see it is as follows:
After WW1, the Western Allies were uninterested in conquest. They attempted in various ways to limit spending and controll aggression (such as through the Naval Treaty and the League of Nations).
Some powers did not buy into this - the Axis powers, and also the Soviets.
The Nazis in particular created a whole world-view in which conquest and domination of others was the important criterion of national ‘worth’.
In pursuit of that, and building on their already-excellent military traditions, they prepared their whole society for war - with indoctrination, sure, but also with paramilitary prep for the kiddies, and with lots of investment and prep in tech and training.
The Western Allies did not want to pay to keep up with this - particularly as they were clawing their way out of the Depression. Moreover, their ideological mind-set was now all about how aggressive warfare was a bad idea.
The Nazis and Japanese both built up formidable forces and started using them - the Japanese earlier, in carving an empire in China/Manchuria.
The Soviets too created a substantial force - but the purges and show-trials crippled its effectiveness. The Soviets, just like the Nazis and Japanese, had no compunctions against using this force to steal from others - only, in its crippled state, it wasn’t very effective: even tiny Finland was able to defy them (for a time).
The Western Allies belatedly begain to rearm, but this is not so easily done in societies which have not been indoctrinated with the notion that warfare is a positive ideal. The Nazis and Japanese had created militarized societies which inculcated solderly discipline and training almost from childhood, which the Western Allies in particular found hard to beat, soldier for soldier. Moreover, in some cases, they had actual experience - for example, the Japanese army had already been fighting in China for years, and so some soldiers, officers and NCOs had actual wartime experience.
However, the Western Allies had a huge preponderence of power - particularly after the US was joined. Moreover, the initial superiority of Axis soldiers was a depreciating advantage to them - most noticable when the war started.
I’m not an expert, but I can highly recommend Ken Burns’ “The War” if you want to get a good idea of what the defensive positioning did for the Axis in Europe.
My point was that it was better/longer officer training and doctrinal differences, not cultural militarism that made the difference.
I mean, we had millions of farm boys who’d grown up shooting. That had to be some kind of advantage on our side, but it didn’t seem to pan out that way.
The German military, on a tactical level, was much more flexible and better-led than the Allied troops they faced, UNLESS they were facing similarly well-led troops such as US Airborne and British Commandos/Airborne. But facing some garden-variety US infantry division composed of draftees and 90-day wonders(junior officers trained in 90 days), the Germans handed them their asses.
See answer above.
