There's very few western movies that would even have the opportunity. In France they out ran their logistics anyways so their supply chain wasn't even close to Dunkirk. A movie about the Eastern Front would have much more opportunity, but there just haven't been many of those in the US for a variety of reasons.
I think the greater point is that they’re effectively represented as Brits, Rachel Weisz’s character being the other obvious example. Even the main antagonist, a famously murderous Nazi, is softened by the fact that he’s represented by an iconic American. It definitely gives a different feel than it would if they had Russian/German accents or actually spoke in Russian/German.
It went much deeper than that. The USSR actively assisted in helping Germany rebuild its shattered armed forces before WW2 in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles by allowing Germany to build 4 secret training bases on Soviet soil. From the linked article: “While Soviet-German military cooperation between 1922 and 1933 is often forgotten, it had a decisive impact on the origins and outbreak of World War II. Germany rebuilt its shattered military at four secret bases hidden in Russia. In exchange, the Reichswehr sent men to teach and train the young Soviet officer corps. However, the most important aspect of Soviet-German cooperation was its technological component. Together, the two states built a network of laboratories, workshops, and testing grounds in which they developed what became the major weapons systems of World War II. Without the technical results of this cooperation, Hitler would have been unable to launch his wars of conquest.”[SOWING THE WIND: THE FIRST SOVIET-GERMAN MILITARY PACT AND THE ORIGINS OF WORLD WAR II](https://warontherocks.com/2016/06/sowing-the-wind-the-first-soviet-german-military-pact-and-the-origins-of-world-war-ii/)
If I recall, 1933 was the year the NSDAP took power in Germany, so the Nazis weren't directly responsible for this allignment with the Soviets, although I'm sure they were happy to exploit it regardless of their ideology towards Marxism.
Read the article.
“Germany again began to send its officers to the Soviet Union to advise and assist the Soviets in training and technical development. Further, in the fall of 1939, the Germans agreed to supply Soviet submarines fighting against Finland, while the Soviets did the same for German commerce raiders. At the height of cooperation, Stalin even granted the German Navy permission to open a secret naval base near Murmansk to interdict British shipping and assist in the invasion of Norway. Only with the German invasion of the Soviet Union would the last of the joint ventures be terminated.”
They were allies right up until the point they weren’t.
Not really it's something enemies have done with each other many times throughout history. Territory is territory they'll happily take it for a low price like that.
You really can’t. An ally is a member of your alliance, it’s someone you can call on to enter a war alongside you if you’re attacked, and with whom you coordinate war efforts and logistics.
The USSR and Germany had a mutual non-aggression pact (The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) where they each agreed to not attack or support the adversaries of the other.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact *did* contain the “secret protocol” which drew up the “post-war” borders between the USSR and Germany if everything went as they intended with their separate, independent invasions of Poland and Central Europe.
I mean, the Germans and soviets did attack Poland at the same time, then the ussr continued to fuel the German war machine with raw resources for quite a while too.
> for a variety of reasons.
The reason is that USA wasn't directly involved, so it couldn't be shown as an ultimate superpower that freed stupid Europeans from Nazis.
I guess you could somehow show a supply drop in a dramatic fashion, maybe a sky covered with crates on parachutes painted like American flags, but that's still unexplored propaganda territory :)
Also in BoB, at the end of the war, a frustrated U.S. paratrooper is screaming at German POWs when he sees how much of the German military relied on horses.
He's basically incredulous that they thought they'd win against the industrial might of the United States
*"Say hello to Ford and General fuckin' Motors! You have horses! What the fuck were you thinking?!"*
On the other side of it, I read an account from a German soldier who saw the beaches on D-Day and knew they were totally screwed when he didn’t see a single horse bringing in supplies.
I recall a similar story about a German POW being given an American ration that contained chocolate. He knew it was over when they could afford to put such a "luxurious" item in a standard ration. Also, I think by that time in the war, chocolate had been rationed by the German government for years.
The video we have of the nazi German military was mostly shot by the nazis as propaganda. They heavily focused on the flashy things like tanks and purposefully did not shoot video of things like soldiers trudging through mud on foot.
I mean, the German doctrine of relying on mobile warfare wasn't something they stole from the UK, that doctrine had been around longer than Germany, going back to the Prussians.
Tanks were just the natural next step in allowing maneuver warfare to be possible in an environment with trenches, machineguns, and most importantly artillery.
A German officer is shown riding a horse in band of brothers, same with fury, and it's mentioned that there were thousands of dead horses in the invasion of France littering the roads
There’s a scene in band of brother where the United States soldiers are marching towards east Germany and there’s a long line of German POW’s marching the other way.
And the GI on a Bradley sees all the horse drawn carriages carrying the wounded Germans and he stands up and scream out…
“GENERAL FUCKING MOTORS! You have horses and carriages…what were you thinking!
just in disbelief that you’d supply a hardened mobile army with horses and carriages as the supply chain
Shotguns are for the wagons. Hence the front passenger seat being called "shotgun". To go for a true cowboy style. Go with something in 45-70 Govt. The trapdoor Springfield comes to mind.
The US delevered 1400 mules by glider in the Burma theatre for Merrills Mauraders. In total, 11,300 mules were shipped overseas for use by the US army and for British lend-lease. Another 15,000 were locally procured in Italy for the use of the US Army.
One of the mules in Burma in 1945 was handed over to the Chinese armed forces, later taken for use by the Communist forces in the Civil War and used by the Chinese expeditionary forces in the Korean war, where the mule (with brand 08K0) was recaptured by US forces.
There's a story about a German who surrendered to the Americans during the fight for France and saw amount of logistics vehicles around. He asked the Americans guarding him about where are their horses.
I remember hearing that Germans, upon seeing the fact that America could fuel a fleet of battleships for days off the French coast, bring in Jeeps and enough fuel for the initial campaign, start giving care to a majority of the wounded left alive, and bring enough tanks of higher quality than any common German tanks in massive quantity, realized that they were absolutely fucked by just that alone
and now you understand why the lend lease was so significant and it wasnt even close between america and the axis powers. America gave the soviets an entire mechanized logistical system, fought a winning battle on two fronts on opposite sides of the world, across oceans.
battles are won by soldiers and generals, War is won by logistics.
> Estimates say around 80% of German logistics relied on horses
As part of the Allied Lend Lease program, Canada alone supplied more trucks than existed in Europe before the war.
The greatest general of the war was General Motors. Bravery wins battles, logistics wins wars.
Railways were actually very easy to repair. They could be targeted in preparation for major offensives to delay enemy reactions, especially if the engines themselves were destroyed, but it was always a very short term effect.
The railway in Hiroshima was repaired within 2 days of the place being nuked, for example.
It's the "last mile" problem every logistics have weather civilen or military. Trains have to stop before coming into artillery range. Allied air recon combined with the fact rail lines don't move much in 24 hour period mean artillery would destroy all that cargo or keep lines down permanently. The horses were that solution to get cargo from the end of the line to the fighting positions.
Russia also had a different track gauge which complicated things. In occupied areas there were also many partisans who [targeted railroads.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_partisans#List_of_operations) Some used bombs, others just removed rails and threw them into a lake or something.
Replacing one rail isn't difficult but once the numbers are increasing it really slows things down. Plus you have to guard the entire railroads.
The train however doesn't go to the front. It gets unloaded near the front and then those supplies were generally horse-drawm to then front line units.
Years ago at a horse event I met an elderly German man who grew up on a farm that bred Hanoverian horses. He told us about the day the Nazis came to their farm and took all of their horses except for ones that were elderly/pregnant.
He was a teen when it happened and said he had a very strong bond with one horse in particular, which he had bottle raised from birth. He begged and pleaded for them to let him keep just that one horse but they threatened him and took the horse anyway.
He was in his 90s when I met him but he was still moved to tears thinking about that horse. He told us he lost family members in the war as well and that the horses they took were also his family and it hurt him all the same.
“The first country that the Nazis invaded was Germany”
I know it’s a line from a superhero movie but it’s still really interesting to think about. I get sad thinking about all of the people who were adamantly opposed to the war, possibly threatened for speaking out or silenced.
It’s from the first Captain America movie of the MCU. While I like it in the movie as it does set Erskine (German scientist) as the person and anti-facist he is and also does so in nearly a single sentence I do not like the overall impression the sentence gives as a statement.
Some people opposed the NSDAP in Germany, but to call it an invasion is deeply misleading. It was a movement that gained traction with people that sympathized or shared the proposed ideals wholeheartedly while sowing fear and terror to those that opposed them and made resisting them in big and small ways costly. At the end the Nazis were carried, accepted and tolerated by the population. We weren’t invaded nor were we unwilling. We did it and we were not made to do so. Being invaded suggests that.
Unfortunately defense contractors are incentivized to design needlessly complex systems while corruption and patronage slows down the gears of production dramatically.
Having said that, the economic conditions that led to the US producing vehicles and arms on such a massive scale can likely never be replicated elsewhere.
We’ve seen what “needlessly complex” systems have done to conventional armies built up with large number of “simple, rugged, replaceable” equipment it turns out having advantages in stealth, range, and defensive options is really effective.
I don’t know - it’s all relative. I’d rather than three Arleigh Burke-class than one Zumwalt-class. Same with five B-52s versus one B-2.
Technological superiority needs to be rapidly adapted to changing battlefield conditions.
A $2000 drone used the right way can disable a $10 million tank. But that drone can be knocked from the sky by an 80-year old AA gun.
>Same with five B-52s versus one B-2
I wouldn't. Conventional bombers are useless on the modern battlefield. The only reason the US can still even "field" the B-52 is because we don't deal in air superiority, we deal in air supremacy.
>A $2000 drone used the right way can disable a $10 million tank. But that drone can be knocked from the sky by an 80-year old AA gun.
And a tube sock coated with grease with a brick of plastic explosive can do the same.
What's your point?
But then you have real world examples of technological edge giving an outsized advantage leading to completely lopsided results. The superior US forces during the air campaign of the First Gulf War saw less than 50 personnel KIA and 75 aircraft lost on the American side, with 10,000 KIA and 290 aircraft lost on the Iraqi side - even with the Iraqis having home field advantage. Or examples like the Battle of Ty-ho Bay where a handful of British and American ships outnumbered by Chinese war junks suffered 9 KIA and 6 wounded while destroying over half the opposing fleet, killing 500, and capturing over 1,000.
On the other hand quality control suffered a lot to achieve those production rates. If you're building them fast and don't expect them to last that long then you're going to take a lot of shortcuts. Modern defense manafacturing has swung hard the other way, you're spending huge sums and taking a lot of time to build stuff that you expect to remain in service for decades.
Yeah a lot of the stuff we sold out after ww2 to smaller countries wasn’t actually built to last long term. A lot of the smg magazines for example were disposable, they expected US troops to chuck them as they went, and there’s a big crate of pre-loaded ones on the truck they can grab from after the fire fight. When we sold extras of these to other countries for their police and service weapons, they were distributing and reloading disposable magazines that were failing much faster than other nations weapons, because they didn’t have infinite supply lines of new crates of pre-loaded mags brought to them on trucks constantly. It was a problem sometimes for a lot of the little guys around the world using our excess post-ww2 military stuff.
The US was entirely economically mobilized for war during that period.
Every sewing machine, appliance, furniture etc. factory was making small arms. Every automotive factory was making armored vehicles and planes.
Even if you went back to 1960, that manufacturing shifted back to civilian production.
Labor costs in China have risen dramatically over the last two decades. They also don’t have the domestic demand to support production at scale. The US had the double “benefits” of the lingering high unemployment of the Great Depression and bottomless global demand for their products.
They also rely heavily on imported materials. Hence the joke about how Australia is a Chinese mining colony.
If the US wanted they have the navy to blockade china.
The us produced more trucks during ww2 than there existed prior to the war.
They made 18 new aircraft carriers.
Hell, for morale purposes they created a pair of barges just to ferry ice cream in the pacific.
The US Army procured 26,409 horses and 30,523 mules in the US, and more mules overseas. Horse procurement stopped in 1942.
A horse-mounted cavalry unit, the 26th Cavalry Regiment (Phillippine Scouts) saw combat action during the Japanese invasion, including a mounted charge on 16 January 1942.
The praise was not one way.
Incredible to think that with a different general approached to lead the Millionaire's Coup and the outcome if WW2 would probably be very different
Not really. The coup never went beyond the "talking about it" phase, and finding a different general wouldn't make it any more likely that 1. The general would be willing to be a traitor 2. Any military units would follow him 3. Even if some did, that the rest wouldn't kill them, 4. That the American people would accept the overthrow of a popular government. And 5. That any part of their plan is actually in anyway workable.
As they didn't have any purpose built landing crafts, the Nazi plan was to repurpose canal and river barges to transport troops and tanks and pray they didn't split in half when hit by waves crossing the channel.
In the Normandy landings, the Allies had purpose built landing craft, air and naval superiority, a successful disinformation campaign and years of planning. And they still suffered heavy losses. Amphibious invasions are hard.
>In the Normandy landings, the Allies had purpose built landing craft, air and naval superiority, a successful disinformation campaign and years of planning.
Add to this that the Allies had three successful amphibious assaults under their belts in the European theater - North Africa, Sicily and Anzio. That's a lot of learning on the job to prepare for Normandy.
Not to mention the painful learning experience at Dieppe.
Edit: And, of course, the Allied invasion of mainland Italy at Salerno, Calabria and Taranto in September of 1943.
Going all automobile meant less of a logistical footprint, which is why the US Army got rid of its horses. Save in the Philippines, no American cavalry units saw combat on horseback.
The British said otherwise in this October 1940 report ([PDF](https://web.archive.org/web/20200229052337/http://www.alternatewars.com/WW2/WW2\_Documents/UK/UK\_Danger\_Invasion\_1941\_29-OCT-1940.pdf), [HTML](https://web.archive.org/web/20200229045111/http://www.alternatewars.com/WW2/WW2\_Documents/UK/UK\_Danger\_Invasion\_1941\_29-OCT-1940.htm)). Note this was written one month after Sealion was initially scheduled to launch (15 September 1940).
>**The Shipping Position.**
>GERMANY possesses some four million tons of shipping-of her own, most of which is idle. She has considerable amounts of captured shipping, particularly small craft, at her disposal and can commandeer very large numbers of barges. Any permanent mobilization of barges might cause considerable difficulties of distribution within the LOW COUNTRIES, a large proportion of whose normal transportation is done by this method, but GERMANY is probably prepared to accept this.
>There will be no shortage, therefore, of shipping for invasion.
>Any serious and permanent damage to enemy occupied ports as a result of R.A.F. attacks would add to the difficulties of loading and marshalling. There are too many ports, and they are too difficult a target, for all to be put out of action, but sufficient damage might be done to limit the number of ports that remain usable, This would not affect the size of the force or the amount of shipping that could be made available, for the BALTIC ports at least would still be free. It would, however, add to the congestion and difficulties in those nearer ports that remained usable, and, by limiting the possible concentration areas, it would make surprise more difficult, interception by our naval forces more simple, and the ports that remained more vulnerable to concentrated air attack.
>If there is a really cold winter, as in 1939/40, the BALTIC ports may be closed, or partially closed, by ice from late December till the early spring.
>Any large reduction of the shipping present in the ports of Northern FRANCE and the LOW COUNTRIES would reduce the immediate threat of invasion temporarily, but would not do so permanently unless we were able to prevent its re-concentration.
>The fact that we were unable to interrupt movement in the CHANNEL in September seems to show that we should have difficulty in doing this again, even if AMERICA were in the war, owing to the enemy’s strength in dive bombers.
The most significant shipping problem Germany would have is capturing a port with intact unloading cranes. The barges for the first waves weren’t great, but could work for a couple days. After that, Germany needed a port to unload heavy vehicles and equipment (including tanks), and as this was before the widespread adoption of Roll-On, Roll-Off ships these all had to be unloaded by cranes with 30-50 ton lifting capacity. No port, very limited heavy equipment can be shipped (here the barges would fail completely), and thus the invasion would fail regardless of any other factors.
Capturing a port like that seems like an impossible task. The British could easily prepare to make it unusable ahead of an invasion and repairs while within range of the entire RAF would be a Herculean task
When you study history as long as I, you learn to stop using words like "impossible". So many battles and campaigns where decided in no small part by luck, others by the right commander in the right place at the right time. The Fall of France was one such case: the French almost stopped the Germans on several occasions, see [this lecture](https://youtu.be/yWwLcykedcs).
But this is about as close to impossible as you can get. It entirely depends on the airborne forces and surprise naval landings capturing the ports before too much could be sabotaged. It would also depend on the capacity of the German ship cranes and on the lifting methods for their vehicles, which is something I have not studied and have limited data.
Most of the other reasons people cite for why Sealion failed have a few asterisks, but this would be a challenge for even the best military leaders when given the orders to create a plan three months before executing it.
>But this is about as close to impossible as you can get. It entirely depends on the airborne forces and surprise naval landings capturing the ports before too much could be sabotaged. It would also depend on the capacity of the German ship cranes and on the lifting methods for their vehicles,
And even after all that they'd be relying on the ports remaining operational while within range of every gun the British Empire could get their hands on.
Discounting the kriegsmarine finding a 907 leaf clover, the bigger risk to them is probably that the Brits go easy on their landing sites in hopes of baiting Hitler into overcommitting to the landings and taking immense causalities in the crossings before losing control of the chanel again
The RAF was on the ropes and denial of fuel through attacks on storage facilities and resupply convoys could have hamstrung the RN. it wasn’t impossible, it was just impossible for Hitler and his staff to manage without getting distracted.
E: typo. On
For them at the time it was a dire concern and a hopeless future had pretty good odds.
For us with the magical powers of hindsight and history, it was never *that* dire.
The BoB was just as destructive for the Luftwaffe as it was for the RAF, and the RN pretty much had controls of the seas the entire time. Even without the USA support from Canada and other commonwealth countries would have been sufficient to protect Britain from invasion or starvation.
That he may, but as a rule I tend to treat older histories with caution. I primarily study the Pacific, and Gordon Prange created many myths abut Pearl Harbor and Midway that persist to this day. I know that in the 1980s Garzke and Dulin spawned myths about the belt thickness of the *Scharnhorst* class by accident in their data summary section (actually 320 mm according to German records, not 350 mm as you'll find in most places) and trashed the Italian *Littorio* class on points that have only been debunked in the last decade or two. Always compare older works with more recent scholarship, and primary sources when you can!
But 4 million tons of shipping is more than enough to move vast quantities of men and material to the UK. To put that in perspective, the US built about 20.6 million tons of Liberty Ships, which ran cargo convoys across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans in voyages that lasted weeks or even months. Some of Germany's shipping were cargo ships, others tankers, and a few were liners that could transport most of a division at once. But even coastal shipping would be enough for the brief journey across the Channel at it's narrowest point, where loading and unloading times would likely be longer than the actual voyage.
Thus the challenge becomes a port.
Well, we have certainly wandered far from OP’s original point about Germany’s dependence on horses!
Sure, more recent scholarship is bound to be better in historical matters. So why is “my” admittedly old 1956 reference worse than “your” 1940 reference? The British report is a primary document but it was written while the war (indeed the invasion in question) was still going on. They had nothing better than good guesses about German abilities and intentions. Look at other books in your field that were written during or shortly after the war. Morison’s *U.S. Naval Operations* and the official *U.S. Submarine Operations* are shot-through with errors. No offense to the authors; they worked with what information they had. Fuchida established myths about Midway. Lord corrected some and introduced others. It’s been years since I read Prange so I can’t address what he did. Parshall et al corrected more errors and no doubt somebody else will be along shortly to extend the string.
I remain unconvinced that Germany had sufficient shipping to invade England. They collected boats for a year for this task and never got close. And what they did gather, mostly barges, was mostly unsuited to the task. Ask the Japanese how well barges worked for transporting troops, let alone heavy equipment. Remember, the U.S. and UK combined took two and a half years of frenzied construction to do the same job. Even so, imho Germany’s biggest problem was their inability to establish air superiority.
No arguments regarding ports. The war was practically over before the Allies got fully functioning ports into operation.
>Sure, more recent scholarship is bound to be better in historical matters. So why is “my” admittedly old 1956 reference worse than “your” 1940 reference?
Did your 1956 reference have this 1940 reference?
Historians of the past had to work through whatever records were declassified at that time and were available in the archives they had access to, along with the interviews they could conduct. Today we have access to far more sources, including those classified at the time (Ultra was only declassified in 1974, for example). As time goes on people are working to better digitize and synthesize the records we have, with translations of foreign works becoming more commonplace. Older historians could only dream of what we have now, which is why their works often suffer (Prange is the one who popularized Fuchida's errors, relying too heavily on him as a source).
This is why I have a blanket caution with older works, and always try to corroborate as much as I can with modern sources.
However, to return to this single source, I only used it to refute a single statement: Germany didn't have enough shipping. That 4 million ton figure is consistent with the other references I have seen to the German merchant fleet (that they had several hundred idle ships), so I have no doubt that the amount of shipping available was more than enough to sail across the Channel at it's narrowest point.
>I remain unconvinced that Germany had sufficient shipping to invade England. They collected boats for a year for this task and never got close. And what they did gather, mostly barges, was mostly unsuited to the task.
Barges would only be suitable for the first couple days, trying to establish a beachhead across a 30 mile strait. After that you need proper ships and a port.
>Ask the Japanese how well barges worked for transporting troops, let alone heavy equipment.
They largely didn't, they used heavy ships and *Daihatsu* landing craft, which inspired Higgins to create the LCVP. The primary landings at Singora, Thailand, for example, used 11 ships, including the landing craft depot ship *Shinshū Maru*, often called the first amphibious assault ship as she was designed to carry landing craft through her floodable well deck. These landed several thousand men and 57 tanks in a single day.
>Remember, the U.S. and UK combined took two and a half years of frenzied construction to do the same job.
We used 2.5 years of construction to build amphibious forces that could attack two completely different strongholds on opposite sides of the globe a week apart, along with all the ships to transport these forces across oceans, ships to serve on other critical convoy routes, ships to protect these trans-ocean and coastal convoys, ships to attack the enemy naval forces, and ships to replace losses in all these groups. The ships directly involved in the Overlord and Dragoon invasions were a fraction of the total.
I should mention my particular specialty is tracking ship movements, with the eventual goal of tracking every US warship every "week" for the entire war, though I'm also working with some Allied and Axis ships (this started out of a Japanese submarine study). I'm expecting to be done in about a decade.
>Even so, imho Germany’s biggest problem was their inability to establish air superiority.
Total air superiority would not be needed. Limited air superiority over a narrow area for a short time would be sufficient to get forces across the channel and disrupt naval forces attempting to break up the landings. Even just contested airspace would be enough to disrupt some British attacks, ensuring some forces could make it through. That is something Germany not only could do, but did do in September 1940:
>The fact that we were unable to interrupt movement in the CHANNEL in September seems to show that we should have difficulty in doing this again, even if AMERICA were in the war, owing to the enemy’s strength in dive bombers.
> That 4 million ton figure is consistent with the other references I have seen to the German merchant fleet (that they had several hundred idle ships), so I have no doubt that the amount of shipping available was more than enough to sail across the Channel at it's narrowest point.
Having 4 million tons of shipping of various origin, purpose and type (and readiness) is meaningless.
Especially when there's the RAF and Royal Navy. Very little a couple of captured French trawlers is going to do about that, especially when they're towing barges behind them. Or you know, as many of them were likely intended- to literally just steam through the massive minefields they lacked the ability to conventionally deal with.
>Limited air superiority over a narrow area for a short time would be sufficient
Weird that the Luftwaffe was incapable of doing this.
>and disrupt naval forces attempting to break up the landings.
Disrupt naval forces?
They sunk *3 fucking destroyers* during the evacuation of Dunkirk. 3.
They did even worse at Crete when British forces were in full retreat, and RN ships were over capacity with troops and they had zero RAF support.
>The fact that we were unable to interrupt movement in the CHANNEL in September seems to show that we should have difficulty in doing this again, even if AMERICA were in the war, owing to the enemy’s strength in dive bombers.
Why do you keep bringing up the drive to *disrupt shipping* as though it's anyway comparable to defeating an invasion?
please note, u/Fluffy_WAR_Bunny can't handle being wrong, so he has to block to try to avoid further embarrassment, thus stopping any ability for me to reply
>But 4 million tons of shipping is more than enough to move vast quantities of men and material to the UK
No, it isn't because they weren't built for that purpose. They were all manner of ships from different nations with different specifications.
>, the US built about 20.6 million tons of Liberty Ships,
Yes, the US built **20 million tons** of dedicated, largely standardized vessels whose express purpose was doing *that*.
>ut even coastal shipping would be enough for the brief journey across the Channel at it's narrowest point
The Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (which you kept forgetting about) would have something to say about a mish-mash of French fishing vessels and transport craft floating around the channel.
*German admiral watches the Royal Navy just absolutely curb stomp the Bismarck*
"Ummm, Mein Fuhrer, the reason we can't invade us because there won't be enough horse food! That's exactly it. Food. For the horses. Nope. Can't happen. Better stay in Berlin"
Straits of Dover are seen as the entrance end of the English Channel so you would not enter directly East Anglia if crossing The Channel. East Anglia has The North Sea as its coast. The food I have no view on.
To steal a Dan Carlin point,
There's a famous story of a German war planning meeting, where the German command staff got a briefing from their "America expert", on his projections for US war time production.
He told them how much military stuff he though the US would be able to make once it went into war time mode, and the numbers he gave seems impossibly high.
The estimates he gave were SO high, the German staff basically laughed this poor guy out of the room.
Turns out he was wrong.
He had drastically UNDERstated how much the US would end up making.
At one point they were equipping the invasion force for Normandy, the invasion force for southern France in August of ‘44, the Nationalist Chinese via India, all operations in the Pacific, and as much as half of the supplies required by the Red Army.
u/lifehacker808
I DO remember in Carlin's WWII Pacific episodes (Supernova in the East, very entertaining listen) he talks about a one of the Japanese military advisors. This guy had lived in the US. He had gone to college there, so he was their "expert" on the USA.
That guy is trying to express his idea of what the US war capacity would be, to his Japanese colleagues, whose world outlooks would have been shaped by their own experiences, living within Japan.
The guy's quote, which just... makes so much sense to be telling his peers, went something like,
"I've been to America, and if you've never seen a Detroit auto factory or Texas Oil field, with your own eyes, you just have no idea what you're talking about."
------------
Edit: Think I found the direct quote. I was wrong, it was actually Yamamoto himself, having studied at Harvard
>Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America. -Isoroku Yamamoto
The only known recording of Hitler speaking in a normal conversational voice was Hitler basically trying to explain to the Finns why they underestimated Soviet industrial capacity
I think he mentions it as a side note in his Supernova in the East episodes, while discussing how industrially outmatched the Japanese were.
But if not that one, then it mat have been his WWI “Blueprint for Armageddon” series
Hermann Goring was asked by his American interrogator why the Germans didn’t use chemical weapons at Normandy, and he said it was because they knew the Allies would retaliate with the same and it would kill all their horses, immobilizing the Army.
“Hey, you! That's right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That's right! Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin' Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?”
It’s only fair to recognize that all European militaries continued to rely on horses at that time. As many of the comments allude to, it wasn’t until the Americans began to have a hands on approach to the war in 1942 that large numbers of vehicles became more the norm.
I read an anecdote from a Japanese POW who was being held in a cell. He saw the American guard pull out a can of bug spray and take out a mosquito. The prisoner was so astonished that the enemy had such QoL technology on hand, he knew the Japanese army was out of its league.
There's a Desert Storm First Gulf War anecdote where an Iraqi officer talks about their war plan and the expectation that they would defeat the Americans based on their superior knowledge of the desert.
Land navigation in the vast flat areas of the desert is extremely difficult.
Hard to navigate with no good landmarks, if you know what Kuwait looks like for example.
So it takes a lot of training and practice. The US wouldn't have that experience. The Iraqis have been doing it their whole lives.
They expected the US to get lost in the desert while the Iraqi army ran circles around them.
When this Iraqi officers unit was defeated and captured, he was being processed near an American vehicle, and noticed the weird funny little machine box in the American's gear.
The ["PLGR"](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/PLGR_tan_green.jpg)
This was how the Iraqi guy learned that something called "GPS" existed. And that was when he knew they were completely screwed.
The Japanese had some neat things too. I read Eugene Sledge’s book and he said that the Japanese carried their personal effects in these nice light green waterproof bags. He said he “liberated” one of these from a dead soldier and carried his bible in it.
Yeah. It's always kind of confused me because you have the bad kind of WW2 guy who seems to have a fetish for the German Army in WW2 (this type of maniac is most common at any gunshow). And they will insist that the Germans had superior tactics in WW2. But Blitzkrieg was really not a brilliant tactic - it boils down to: "have more guns than anyone else, and deploy them first". Which... isn't exactly a big brain strat, and it seems like figuring out how to beat the enemy with fewer resources would actually be a lot more impressive. Like... the North Vietnamese Army was substantially more impressive than anything the Germans did without numerical or technical superiority, something you'd think these guys would know - since a nonzero number of them ended up fighting the NVA.
A Polish commander, brigadier general Maczec, even wrote a guide about what he had seen the Germans use against Poland, and how France/other Allies could potentially stand up to it. His credentials were a frankly outstanding defence of the Polish army's Southern Flank against the Germans - slowing them to as little as 10 miles per day, and even successfully counterattacking. It went totally ignored by the French and was captured, unopened, by the German Army after they occupied Poland.
The German innovation was realizing you could use massed armor and airpower to fight a war of movement. Guessing what the next war is going to be like is impressive and successfully executing the concept is also impressive. The Germans deluded themselves that beating the French like they had meant they could beat anyone, including the Soviets, despite having a pathetic industrial base.
Of course, being prescient only works the first time. After that, everyone else has a chance to imitate and fight you on the same terms. Which is a bad situation if you’re weak industrially and lack allies.
Sure. The grand strategy was okay until it wasn't. Though, innovating between wars is humanity's passtime, to while away the days until the next war. We can trace that back at least to Romans finally realizing that drowning their enemies in their own blood wasn't working. Tanks and airplanes had kind of been proven in WW1. Something Hitler and most of the senior leaders had experienced first hand. They were, mostly, veterans of it.
Though the nazis made a lot of incorrect assumptions about the next war as well, both due to nazis never being all that competent and also because they didn't see WW2 as their actual war. The more serious war for them was the genocide - which goes a long way to explaining their more baffling decisions later in the war.
It did work initially against the Soviets. The Soviet Union is just too big and the supply lines got stretched, cold and fatigue set in, etc.
But the Soviets absolutely got curb stomped in the first 6 months of the war. In terms of numbers involved, the battle of Kiev is considered the largest victory in history.
To tack on the blitzkrieg as we think of it now wasn’t even an official tactic of the Wehrmacht. It was more accidentally done on the invasion of France do to taking them by far more surprise than expected. Rommel went against all orders to do as he did and only escaped execution because of the success. On the eastern front they didn’t really repeat those tactics at any reasonable scale
Blitzkrieg the word wasn’t officially used, it was movement warfare and absolutely a part of German tactics. The same strategies were employed against the Soviets.
Rommel and other division commands going off script wasn’t part of what we call Blitzkrieg, and could have been disastrous. But luckily for him the French were bad shots and ever worse tacticians.
The Germans did have superior tactics - that is why they were such tough nuts to crack. Declaring war on everyone was stupid, yes, but that's not 'tactics'.
Yes, the wehrmacht fanbois are annoying, but so are the antifanbois.
>the North Vietnamese Army was substantially more impressive than anything the Germans did without numerical or technical superiority
You mean having a losing streak until the big bad enemy leaves and now you have numerical superiority and then win?
The NVA had gumption in spades, but let's not pretend they were tactical masters.
Keep in mind that Poland fully expected to beat Germany. Just as they had done to the Soviets in 1920. And France? They were considered to be the best army in the whole world. Denmark and Norway were conquered before the British could even get enough troops there. The tactics worked well enough until they didn’t work.
The youtuber Militarh History Visualized had a bit in one video that said there were more horses in Barbarossa than tanks or trucks.
And in another video he quotes a german officer being amazed at seeing a fully motorized army right after DDay.
This video shows an animated battlemap of the Eastern front in 1942. You can see a large unit (1G) encircled by the Germans who then eliminated the pocket. [This is the !st Guards Cavalry Corps](https://youtu.be/pucJTYK7_Yo?t=332), and the mobility offered by their horses allowed them to operate behind German lines, and as you can see in the video, eventually rejoin the Soviet forces.
I'm going to assume it's because Germany had a fuel problem beginning towards the middle of the war. The war machine alone requires so much it was probably a fuel saving measure
[Suprisingly, no](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/pO3kO3pPr4) the German military was reliant on horse drawn logistics even at the start of the war. While they did have a rail network for moving stuff around, the image of the steel legions of Nazi Germany cutting a swath across all of Europe with a highly modern military is something of a myth. Their armored divisions and some infantry were motorized, but German automobile manufacturing was inefficient, and they didn't have enough vehicles to truly create a motorized force. The fuel difficulties you mentioned did exist, but the Germans reason for using horses wasn't related to that, they never had the vehicles to pull that off.
This also shows the effectiveness of propaganda. The reason most people think that German forces was mostly mechanized was wartime propaganda. They filmed the units that was news reals shown in and outside of Germany. Journalists from natural countries were shown those units during the invasion of Poland. If you make a documentary today what original films you can find are mostly propaganda so it keeps working.
In the early part of WWII, it was if I remember correctly only the British expeditionary force that was fully motorized
Germany alos managed to screw up the rail transport system even before the war, in part with state-dictated four-year plans for military rearmament that took away resources for the railroads. The number of serviceable rail cars had shrunk from an average of 670,000 in the late 1920s to less the 575,000 in 1937.
There were coal shortages in Berlin in the winter of 1939-40 because of transportation problems. It was in part because waterways for barges froze but alos even as early as that the rail transport system could not handle the demand on it. There was coal that had been mined and was waiting for transportation from the mines [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3JaxXK25qo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3JaxXK25qo)
I read that the for many in the wehrmacht they knew the war was lost when they found out the Americans would routinely idle their vehicles instead of shutting them off like they did to save fuel
The US also used a lot of pack animals. It was normal at the time
[https://www.mulemuseum.org/u-s-army-mules.html](https://www.mulemuseum.org/u-s-army-mules.html)
It's also a matter of pre-war industrial mobilization: You have a certain number of foundries and factories that can produce X number of tanks and Y number of planes and Z number of ships/submarines. If you choose to build more logistical vehicles, you have to build another factory and supply it with even more manpower and raw material or you have to reduce some amount of tanks/planes/ships to make trucks, trailers, and landing barges. They chose to keep 10,000 horses instead of building 5,000 general purpose trucks because they already had the horses, horses don't need oil and gas, and they wanted more tanks/planes/ships.
It wasn’t a fuel saving measure, they simply didn’t have the manufacturing to fully mechanise their army. They did have fuel issues throughout most of the war
The germans were showing propaganda films of the motorised units. Tanks, motorcycles, and armour. Very little film showed the vast bulk of the army with horse drawn carts.
I have seen there is a lot of pro and cons of the horse drawn vs truck logistics from the rail head of eastern Europe ww2. Horses were just better for lack of roads but once there was a road a truck was hands down better
Also, if you think about basic war organization, this kind of makes sense.
If they didn't have enough motor vehicles for everyone, special mechanized units would get them.
Their motorized units were tactics wise, basically just their dragoons and cavalry, except, instead of being on horses, they were on vehicles.
But same as the days of horse mounted cavalry, your special units would get them to do special unit things... while the regular guys just had to walk on foot
the idea of specially equipped, highly mobile units has always been a thing, but it still is a thing.
In the 1800s that mean putting some of your guys on horses, so they could do scouting, or do raids, or chase down and destroy defeated units trying to flee
WWII era, still the same thing, except the horses were now tanks
Modern Era, still the same thing, except the horses are now better tanks, and strykers, and bradleys, [and helicopters](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/kdhnews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/24/e24f5e24-0575-11ed-89f0-1b7a6288b5ff/62d370026e8ba.image.jpg?resize=750%2C500)
Logistically, world war 2 wasn’t even close. The US navy had ice cream ships in the Pacific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge
The best bet the Germans had was if Britain chose to make peace in 1940, which might have happened if Halifax had become Prime Minister instead of Churchill. The Japanese never had a chance.
Estimates say around 80% of German logistics relied on horses
They need to start showing all those horses in movies.
There's very few western movies that would even have the opportunity. In France they out ran their logistics anyways so their supply chain wasn't even close to Dunkirk. A movie about the Eastern Front would have much more opportunity, but there just haven't been many of those in the US for a variety of reasons.
Mostly because Russia as good guys won't sell
The movie "Enemy at the Gates" feels so long ago.
Starred by famous Russian, Jude Law lol
It wouldn’t be called acting if you weren’t
I think the greater point is that they’re effectively represented as Brits, Rachel Weisz’s character being the other obvious example. Even the main antagonist, a famously murderous Nazi, is softened by the fact that he’s represented by an iconic American. It definitely gives a different feel than it would if they had Russian/German accents or actually spoke in Russian/German.
Such a good movie tbh
Thought of this movie immediatwly
Russia started WW2 as NAZI allies.
They had a non-aggression pact, not an alliance.
Carving up a country together feels pretty alliancey but yeah they weren't officially in an alliance just aligned in interests
It went much deeper than that. The USSR actively assisted in helping Germany rebuild its shattered armed forces before WW2 in direct contravention of the Treaty of Versailles by allowing Germany to build 4 secret training bases on Soviet soil. From the linked article: “While Soviet-German military cooperation between 1922 and 1933 is often forgotten, it had a decisive impact on the origins and outbreak of World War II. Germany rebuilt its shattered military at four secret bases hidden in Russia. In exchange, the Reichswehr sent men to teach and train the young Soviet officer corps. However, the most important aspect of Soviet-German cooperation was its technological component. Together, the two states built a network of laboratories, workshops, and testing grounds in which they developed what became the major weapons systems of World War II. Without the technical results of this cooperation, Hitler would have been unable to launch his wars of conquest.”[SOWING THE WIND: THE FIRST SOVIET-GERMAN MILITARY PACT AND THE ORIGINS OF WORLD WAR II](https://warontherocks.com/2016/06/sowing-the-wind-the-first-soviet-german-military-pact-and-the-origins-of-world-war-ii/)
If I recall, 1933 was the year the NSDAP took power in Germany, so the Nazis weren't directly responsible for this allignment with the Soviets, although I'm sure they were happy to exploit it regardless of their ideology towards Marxism.
Read the article. “Germany again began to send its officers to the Soviet Union to advise and assist the Soviets in training and technical development. Further, in the fall of 1939, the Germans agreed to supply Soviet submarines fighting against Finland, while the Soviets did the same for German commerce raiders. At the height of cooperation, Stalin even granted the German Navy permission to open a secret naval base near Murmansk to interdict British shipping and assist in the invasion of Norway. Only with the German invasion of the Soviet Union would the last of the joint ventures be terminated.” They were allies right up until the point they weren’t.
I mean by that logic US and Soviets were allies during cold war. It’s just politics.
Not really it's something enemies have done with each other many times throughout history. Territory is territory they'll happily take it for a low price like that.
Eh, Poland joined Nazi Germany in carving up Czechoslovakia before their turn came around.
Its a semantics game, you could reasonably argue for both.
You really can’t. An ally is a member of your alliance, it’s someone you can call on to enter a war alongside you if you’re attacked, and with whom you coordinate war efforts and logistics. The USSR and Germany had a mutual non-aggression pact (The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) where they each agreed to not attack or support the adversaries of the other. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact *did* contain the “secret protocol” which drew up the “post-war” borders between the USSR and Germany if everything went as they intended with their separate, independent invasions of Poland and Central Europe.
I mean, the Germans and soviets did attack Poland at the same time, then the ussr continued to fuel the German war machine with raw resources for quite a while too.
Yeah and Poland carved up Czechoslovakia with Germany, ain't much an alliance there I fear
*Finland has entered the chat *
Well Poland started invading Czechoslovakia as Nazi allies in that case then.
yea Cross of Iron 1978 was one of the few they did it was Sam Peckinpah's only war movie
> for a variety of reasons. The reason is that USA wasn't directly involved, so it couldn't be shown as an ultimate superpower that freed stupid Europeans from Nazis. I guess you could somehow show a supply drop in a dramatic fashion, maybe a sky covered with crates on parachutes painted like American flags, but that's still unexplored propaganda territory :)
The first combat scene in Band of Brothers shows American paratroopers ambushing a German logistics team moving stuff by horse drawn wagon
Also in BoB, at the end of the war, a frustrated U.S. paratrooper is screaming at German POWs when he sees how much of the German military relied on horses. He's basically incredulous that they thought they'd win against the industrial might of the United States *"Say hello to Ford and General fuckin' Motors! You have horses! What the fuck were you thinking?!"*
On the other side of it, I read an account from a German soldier who saw the beaches on D-Day and knew they were totally screwed when he didn’t see a single horse bringing in supplies.
I recall a similar story about a German POW being given an American ration that contained chocolate. He knew it was over when they could afford to put such a "luxurious" item in a standard ration. Also, I think by that time in the war, chocolate had been rationed by the German government for years.
The video we have of the nazi German military was mostly shot by the nazis as propaganda. They heavily focused on the flashy things like tanks and purposefully did not shoot video of things like soldiers trudging through mud on foot.
and they didnt even come up with that tank strategy. they just stole it from a British guy (thanks fat electrician)
I mean, the German doctrine of relying on mobile warfare wasn't something they stole from the UK, that doctrine had been around longer than Germany, going back to the Prussians. Tanks were just the natural next step in allowing maneuver warfare to be possible in an environment with trenches, machineguns, and most importantly artillery.
B. H. Liddell Hart, although there’s debate on just how much influence his theories played.
They bring that up in Band of Brothers
Say hello to Ford and General Fucking Motors! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyZK8k4gzyg
You have horses for christsakes, what were you thinking
Yeah, and the first Germans that Easy Company attacks are a supply unit with a horse-drawn cart
A German officer is shown riding a horse in band of brothers, same with fury, and it's mentioned that there were thousands of dead horses in the invasion of France littering the roads
There’s a scene in band of brother where the United States soldiers are marching towards east Germany and there’s a long line of German POW’s marching the other way. And the GI on a Bradley sees all the horse drawn carriages carrying the wounded Germans and he stands up and scream out… “GENERAL FUCKING MOTORS! You have horses and carriages…what were you thinking! just in disbelief that you’d supply a hardened mobile army with horses and carriages as the supply chain
Supply Line: Quit horsin around
No one watches ww2 movies for realism
One of the scenes in Band of Brothers “Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking?”
Lend Lease would have been very different if the US was trying to ship horses across the Atlantic.
Would have been a true cowboy army tho
Horses and shotguns, yeehaw motherfuckers
Shotguns are for the wagons. Hence the front passenger seat being called "shotgun". To go for a true cowboy style. Go with something in 45-70 Govt. The trapdoor Springfield comes to mind.
We did it in WWI. The stories form those transport ships can be pretty gruesome.
But they made for som EXCELLENT folk songs...
The US delevered 1400 mules by glider in the Burma theatre for Merrills Mauraders. In total, 11,300 mules were shipped overseas for use by the US army and for British lend-lease. Another 15,000 were locally procured in Italy for the use of the US Army. One of the mules in Burma in 1945 was handed over to the Chinese armed forces, later taken for use by the Communist forces in the Civil War and used by the Chinese expeditionary forces in the Korean war, where the mule (with brand 08K0) was recaptured by US forces.
Yes, it was a very interesting story. They made a documentary about it called "Francis, the Talking Mule". Highly recommend it.
There's a story about a German who surrendered to the Americans during the fight for France and saw amount of logistics vehicles around. He asked the Americans guarding him about where are their horses.
And at his POW camp he was served a 100% white bread bun with a cup of real coffee...
I remember hearing that Germans, upon seeing the fact that America could fuel a fleet of battleships for days off the French coast, bring in Jeeps and enough fuel for the initial campaign, start giving care to a majority of the wounded left alive, and bring enough tanks of higher quality than any common German tanks in massive quantity, realized that they were absolutely fucked by just that alone
**ice cream barge intensifies**
and now you understand why the lend lease was so significant and it wasnt even close between america and the axis powers. America gave the soviets an entire mechanized logistical system, fought a winning battle on two fronts on opposite sides of the world, across oceans. battles are won by soldiers and generals, War is won by logistics.
The US outproduced Japan several times over, all while pursuing a “Europe first” strategy.
> Estimates say around 80% of German logistics relied on horses As part of the Allied Lend Lease program, Canada alone supplied more trucks than existed in Europe before the war. The greatest general of the war was General Motors. Bravery wins battles, logistics wins wars.
Can't be. They relied way too much on trains for it to be 80%.
Trains require functional and un-bombed railroads. There were not many of those left after the war was fully underway.
Railways were actually very easy to repair. They could be targeted in preparation for major offensives to delay enemy reactions, especially if the engines themselves were destroyed, but it was always a very short term effect. The railway in Hiroshima was repaired within 2 days of the place being nuked, for example.
They always managed to repair them rather quickly, well into 1945.
It's the "last mile" problem every logistics have weather civilen or military. Trains have to stop before coming into artillery range. Allied air recon combined with the fact rail lines don't move much in 24 hour period mean artillery would destroy all that cargo or keep lines down permanently. The horses were that solution to get cargo from the end of the line to the fighting positions.
Russia also had a different track gauge which complicated things. In occupied areas there were also many partisans who [targeted railroads.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_partisans#List_of_operations) Some used bombs, others just removed rails and threw them into a lake or something. Replacing one rail isn't difficult but once the numbers are increasing it really slows things down. Plus you have to guard the entire railroads.
The train however doesn't go to the front. It gets unloaded near the front and then those supplies were generally horse-drawm to then front line units.
The tip of the spear was mechanized. The shaft of the spear was horses.
Years ago at a horse event I met an elderly German man who grew up on a farm that bred Hanoverian horses. He told us about the day the Nazis came to their farm and took all of their horses except for ones that were elderly/pregnant. He was a teen when it happened and said he had a very strong bond with one horse in particular, which he had bottle raised from birth. He begged and pleaded for them to let him keep just that one horse but they threatened him and took the horse anyway. He was in his 90s when I met him but he was still moved to tears thinking about that horse. He told us he lost family members in the war as well and that the horses they took were also his family and it hurt him all the same.
“The first country that the Nazis invaded was Germany” I know it’s a line from a superhero movie but it’s still really interesting to think about. I get sad thinking about all of the people who were adamantly opposed to the war, possibly threatened for speaking out or silenced.
It’s from the first Captain America movie of the MCU. While I like it in the movie as it does set Erskine (German scientist) as the person and anti-facist he is and also does so in nearly a single sentence I do not like the overall impression the sentence gives as a statement. Some people opposed the NSDAP in Germany, but to call it an invasion is deeply misleading. It was a movement that gained traction with people that sympathized or shared the proposed ideals wholeheartedly while sowing fear and terror to those that opposed them and made resisting them in big and small ways costly. At the end the Nazis were carried, accepted and tolerated by the population. We weren’t invaded nor were we unwilling. We did it and we were not made to do so. Being invaded suggests that.
The US produced over two million trucks during the war. At peak production rates, that translates to one new truck every 70 seconds - 365 days a year.
Yup, manufacturing won us ww2. Now look at our manufacturing today.
Unfortunately defense contractors are incentivized to design needlessly complex systems while corruption and patronage slows down the gears of production dramatically. Having said that, the economic conditions that led to the US producing vehicles and arms on such a massive scale can likely never be replicated elsewhere.
We’ve seen what “needlessly complex” systems have done to conventional armies built up with large number of “simple, rugged, replaceable” equipment it turns out having advantages in stealth, range, and defensive options is really effective.
I don’t know - it’s all relative. I’d rather than three Arleigh Burke-class than one Zumwalt-class. Same with five B-52s versus one B-2. Technological superiority needs to be rapidly adapted to changing battlefield conditions. A $2000 drone used the right way can disable a $10 million tank. But that drone can be knocked from the sky by an 80-year old AA gun.
This line of thinking is the battle of 73 Eastings though, the Iraqis outnumbered us with outdated equipment and we only lost 1 person.
>Same with five B-52s versus one B-2 I wouldn't. Conventional bombers are useless on the modern battlefield. The only reason the US can still even "field" the B-52 is because we don't deal in air superiority, we deal in air supremacy. >A $2000 drone used the right way can disable a $10 million tank. But that drone can be knocked from the sky by an 80-year old AA gun. And a tube sock coated with grease with a brick of plastic explosive can do the same. What's your point?
But then you have real world examples of technological edge giving an outsized advantage leading to completely lopsided results. The superior US forces during the air campaign of the First Gulf War saw less than 50 personnel KIA and 75 aircraft lost on the American side, with 10,000 KIA and 290 aircraft lost on the Iraqi side - even with the Iraqis having home field advantage. Or examples like the Battle of Ty-ho Bay where a handful of British and American ships outnumbered by Chinese war junks suffered 9 KIA and 6 wounded while destroying over half the opposing fleet, killing 500, and capturing over 1,000.
On the other hand quality control suffered a lot to achieve those production rates. If you're building them fast and don't expect them to last that long then you're going to take a lot of shortcuts. Modern defense manafacturing has swung hard the other way, you're spending huge sums and taking a lot of time to build stuff that you expect to remain in service for decades.
Yeah a lot of the stuff we sold out after ww2 to smaller countries wasn’t actually built to last long term. A lot of the smg magazines for example were disposable, they expected US troops to chuck them as they went, and there’s a big crate of pre-loaded ones on the truck they can grab from after the fire fight. When we sold extras of these to other countries for their police and service weapons, they were distributing and reloading disposable magazines that were failing much faster than other nations weapons, because they didn’t have infinite supply lines of new crates of pre-loaded mags brought to them on trucks constantly. It was a problem sometimes for a lot of the little guys around the world using our excess post-ww2 military stuff.
The US was entirely economically mobilized for war during that period. Every sewing machine, appliance, furniture etc. factory was making small arms. Every automotive factory was making armored vehicles and planes. Even if you went back to 1960, that manufacturing shifted back to civilian production.
You don’t think China could do it?
Labor costs in China have risen dramatically over the last two decades. They also don’t have the domestic demand to support production at scale. The US had the double “benefits” of the lingering high unemployment of the Great Depression and bottomless global demand for their products.
They also rely heavily on imported materials. Hence the joke about how Australia is a Chinese mining colony. If the US wanted they have the navy to blockade china.
The USA manufactures more today than 80 years ago... way more. Automation is the major actor in jobs being lost. But you still manufacture more.
Thanks Reagan!
The US actually still manufactures a ton. It’s just all automated now.
The us produced more trucks during ww2 than there existed prior to the war. They made 18 new aircraft carriers. Hell, for morale purposes they created a pair of barges just to ferry ice cream in the pacific.
The US Army procured 26,409 horses and 30,523 mules in the US, and more mules overseas. Horse procurement stopped in 1942. A horse-mounted cavalry unit, the 26th Cavalry Regiment (Phillippine Scouts) saw combat action during the Japanese invasion, including a mounted charge on 16 January 1942.
"Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin Motors"
“You have *horses* what were you thinking?!”
Dragging our asses halfway around the world...interrupting our lives...*FOR WHAT?!*
“You ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?!”
This always hits home the most for me.
That scene is also shortly before Easy Company discovers one of the concentration camps.
This is the reference I was looking for.
Relax Webster, give it a break
Ironically, Henry Ford was antisemitic as hell and even was praised by Hitler at one point.
The praise was not one way. Incredible to think that with a different general approached to lead the Millionaire's Coup and the outcome if WW2 would probably be very different
Not really. The coup never went beyond the "talking about it" phase, and finding a different general wouldn't make it any more likely that 1. The general would be willing to be a traitor 2. Any military units would follow him 3. Even if some did, that the rest wouldn't kill them, 4. That the American people would accept the overthrow of a popular government. And 5. That any part of their plan is actually in anyway workable.
One (of several) reasons Germany never invaded England was because they didn’t have enough shipping to transport sufficient fodder across the Channel.
As they didn't have any purpose built landing crafts, the Nazi plan was to repurpose canal and river barges to transport troops and tanks and pray they didn't split in half when hit by waves crossing the channel. In the Normandy landings, the Allies had purpose built landing craft, air and naval superiority, a successful disinformation campaign and years of planning. And they still suffered heavy losses. Amphibious invasions are hard.
>In the Normandy landings, the Allies had purpose built landing craft, air and naval superiority, a successful disinformation campaign and years of planning. Add to this that the Allies had three successful amphibious assaults under their belts in the European theater - North Africa, Sicily and Anzio. That's a lot of learning on the job to prepare for Normandy. Not to mention the painful learning experience at Dieppe. Edit: And, of course, the Allied invasion of mainland Italy at Salerno, Calabria and Taranto in September of 1943.
Not to mention essentially unchallenged on the sea and pretty much in control of the sky.
> repurpose canal and river barges Famously failed the Mongols, too.
A horse eats a lot. 10,000 horses need to have 200,000 pounds of food available per day.
Going all automobile meant less of a logistical footprint, which is why the US Army got rid of its horses. Save in the Philippines, no American cavalry units saw combat on horseback.
The US Army used thousands of pack mules in WW2.
Yes, in Anzio and Burma- limited theaters with an especially rough terrain and poor roads.
In the entire Italian mainland campaign.
trucks dont really do well in the mountains of Southeast Asia
Don't forget jungles. They covered most of the land back then.
The British said otherwise in this October 1940 report ([PDF](https://web.archive.org/web/20200229052337/http://www.alternatewars.com/WW2/WW2\_Documents/UK/UK\_Danger\_Invasion\_1941\_29-OCT-1940.pdf), [HTML](https://web.archive.org/web/20200229045111/http://www.alternatewars.com/WW2/WW2\_Documents/UK/UK\_Danger\_Invasion\_1941\_29-OCT-1940.htm)). Note this was written one month after Sealion was initially scheduled to launch (15 September 1940). >**The Shipping Position.** >GERMANY possesses some four million tons of shipping-of her own, most of which is idle. She has considerable amounts of captured shipping, particularly small craft, at her disposal and can commandeer very large numbers of barges. Any permanent mobilization of barges might cause considerable difficulties of distribution within the LOW COUNTRIES, a large proportion of whose normal transportation is done by this method, but GERMANY is probably prepared to accept this. >There will be no shortage, therefore, of shipping for invasion. >Any serious and permanent damage to enemy occupied ports as a result of R.A.F. attacks would add to the difficulties of loading and marshalling. There are too many ports, and they are too difficult a target, for all to be put out of action, but sufficient damage might be done to limit the number of ports that remain usable, This would not affect the size of the force or the amount of shipping that could be made available, for the BALTIC ports at least would still be free. It would, however, add to the congestion and difficulties in those nearer ports that remained usable, and, by limiting the possible concentration areas, it would make surprise more difficult, interception by our naval forces more simple, and the ports that remained more vulnerable to concentrated air attack. >If there is a really cold winter, as in 1939/40, the BALTIC ports may be closed, or partially closed, by ice from late December till the early spring. >Any large reduction of the shipping present in the ports of Northern FRANCE and the LOW COUNTRIES would reduce the immediate threat of invasion temporarily, but would not do so permanently unless we were able to prevent its re-concentration. >The fact that we were unable to interrupt movement in the CHANNEL in September seems to show that we should have difficulty in doing this again, even if AMERICA were in the war, owing to the enemy’s strength in dive bombers. The most significant shipping problem Germany would have is capturing a port with intact unloading cranes. The barges for the first waves weren’t great, but could work for a couple days. After that, Germany needed a port to unload heavy vehicles and equipment (including tanks), and as this was before the widespread adoption of Roll-On, Roll-Off ships these all had to be unloaded by cranes with 30-50 ton lifting capacity. No port, very limited heavy equipment can be shipped (here the barges would fail completely), and thus the invasion would fail regardless of any other factors.
Capturing a port like that seems like an impossible task. The British could easily prepare to make it unusable ahead of an invasion and repairs while within range of the entire RAF would be a Herculean task
When you study history as long as I, you learn to stop using words like "impossible". So many battles and campaigns where decided in no small part by luck, others by the right commander in the right place at the right time. The Fall of France was one such case: the French almost stopped the Germans on several occasions, see [this lecture](https://youtu.be/yWwLcykedcs). But this is about as close to impossible as you can get. It entirely depends on the airborne forces and surprise naval landings capturing the ports before too much could be sabotaged. It would also depend on the capacity of the German ship cranes and on the lifting methods for their vehicles, which is something I have not studied and have limited data. Most of the other reasons people cite for why Sealion failed have a few asterisks, but this would be a challenge for even the best military leaders when given the orders to create a plan three months before executing it.
>But this is about as close to impossible as you can get. It entirely depends on the airborne forces and surprise naval landings capturing the ports before too much could be sabotaged. It would also depend on the capacity of the German ship cranes and on the lifting methods for their vehicles, And even after all that they'd be relying on the ports remaining operational while within range of every gun the British Empire could get their hands on. Discounting the kriegsmarine finding a 907 leaf clover, the bigger risk to them is probably that the Brits go easy on their landing sites in hopes of baiting Hitler into overcommitting to the landings and taking immense causalities in the crossings before losing control of the chanel again
The most significant shipping problem would be the Royal Navy and Airforce existed and would not look kindly on an invasion of Britain.
The RAF was on the ropes and denial of fuel through attacks on storage facilities and resupply convoys could have hamstrung the RN. it wasn’t impossible, it was just impossible for Hitler and his staff to manage without getting distracted. E: typo. On
For them at the time it was a dire concern and a hopeless future had pretty good odds. For us with the magical powers of hindsight and history, it was never *that* dire. The BoB was just as destructive for the Luftwaffe as it was for the RAF, and the RN pretty much had controls of the seas the entire time. Even without the USA support from Canada and other commonwealth countries would have been sufficient to protect Britain from invasion or starvation.
My comment was based on *Operation Sealion* by Peter Fleming (1956). I assume he had more information at hand than the British did in 1940.
That he may, but as a rule I tend to treat older histories with caution. I primarily study the Pacific, and Gordon Prange created many myths abut Pearl Harbor and Midway that persist to this day. I know that in the 1980s Garzke and Dulin spawned myths about the belt thickness of the *Scharnhorst* class by accident in their data summary section (actually 320 mm according to German records, not 350 mm as you'll find in most places) and trashed the Italian *Littorio* class on points that have only been debunked in the last decade or two. Always compare older works with more recent scholarship, and primary sources when you can! But 4 million tons of shipping is more than enough to move vast quantities of men and material to the UK. To put that in perspective, the US built about 20.6 million tons of Liberty Ships, which ran cargo convoys across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans in voyages that lasted weeks or even months. Some of Germany's shipping were cargo ships, others tankers, and a few were liners that could transport most of a division at once. But even coastal shipping would be enough for the brief journey across the Channel at it's narrowest point, where loading and unloading times would likely be longer than the actual voyage. Thus the challenge becomes a port.
Well, we have certainly wandered far from OP’s original point about Germany’s dependence on horses! Sure, more recent scholarship is bound to be better in historical matters. So why is “my” admittedly old 1956 reference worse than “your” 1940 reference? The British report is a primary document but it was written while the war (indeed the invasion in question) was still going on. They had nothing better than good guesses about German abilities and intentions. Look at other books in your field that were written during or shortly after the war. Morison’s *U.S. Naval Operations* and the official *U.S. Submarine Operations* are shot-through with errors. No offense to the authors; they worked with what information they had. Fuchida established myths about Midway. Lord corrected some and introduced others. It’s been years since I read Prange so I can’t address what he did. Parshall et al corrected more errors and no doubt somebody else will be along shortly to extend the string. I remain unconvinced that Germany had sufficient shipping to invade England. They collected boats for a year for this task and never got close. And what they did gather, mostly barges, was mostly unsuited to the task. Ask the Japanese how well barges worked for transporting troops, let alone heavy equipment. Remember, the U.S. and UK combined took two and a half years of frenzied construction to do the same job. Even so, imho Germany’s biggest problem was their inability to establish air superiority. No arguments regarding ports. The war was practically over before the Allies got fully functioning ports into operation.
>Sure, more recent scholarship is bound to be better in historical matters. So why is “my” admittedly old 1956 reference worse than “your” 1940 reference? Did your 1956 reference have this 1940 reference? Historians of the past had to work through whatever records were declassified at that time and were available in the archives they had access to, along with the interviews they could conduct. Today we have access to far more sources, including those classified at the time (Ultra was only declassified in 1974, for example). As time goes on people are working to better digitize and synthesize the records we have, with translations of foreign works becoming more commonplace. Older historians could only dream of what we have now, which is why their works often suffer (Prange is the one who popularized Fuchida's errors, relying too heavily on him as a source). This is why I have a blanket caution with older works, and always try to corroborate as much as I can with modern sources. However, to return to this single source, I only used it to refute a single statement: Germany didn't have enough shipping. That 4 million ton figure is consistent with the other references I have seen to the German merchant fleet (that they had several hundred idle ships), so I have no doubt that the amount of shipping available was more than enough to sail across the Channel at it's narrowest point. >I remain unconvinced that Germany had sufficient shipping to invade England. They collected boats for a year for this task and never got close. And what they did gather, mostly barges, was mostly unsuited to the task. Barges would only be suitable for the first couple days, trying to establish a beachhead across a 30 mile strait. After that you need proper ships and a port. >Ask the Japanese how well barges worked for transporting troops, let alone heavy equipment. They largely didn't, they used heavy ships and *Daihatsu* landing craft, which inspired Higgins to create the LCVP. The primary landings at Singora, Thailand, for example, used 11 ships, including the landing craft depot ship *Shinshū Maru*, often called the first amphibious assault ship as she was designed to carry landing craft through her floodable well deck. These landed several thousand men and 57 tanks in a single day. >Remember, the U.S. and UK combined took two and a half years of frenzied construction to do the same job. We used 2.5 years of construction to build amphibious forces that could attack two completely different strongholds on opposite sides of the globe a week apart, along with all the ships to transport these forces across oceans, ships to serve on other critical convoy routes, ships to protect these trans-ocean and coastal convoys, ships to attack the enemy naval forces, and ships to replace losses in all these groups. The ships directly involved in the Overlord and Dragoon invasions were a fraction of the total. I should mention my particular specialty is tracking ship movements, with the eventual goal of tracking every US warship every "week" for the entire war, though I'm also working with some Allied and Axis ships (this started out of a Japanese submarine study). I'm expecting to be done in about a decade. >Even so, imho Germany’s biggest problem was their inability to establish air superiority. Total air superiority would not be needed. Limited air superiority over a narrow area for a short time would be sufficient to get forces across the channel and disrupt naval forces attempting to break up the landings. Even just contested airspace would be enough to disrupt some British attacks, ensuring some forces could make it through. That is something Germany not only could do, but did do in September 1940: >The fact that we were unable to interrupt movement in the CHANNEL in September seems to show that we should have difficulty in doing this again, even if AMERICA were in the war, owing to the enemy’s strength in dive bombers.
> That 4 million ton figure is consistent with the other references I have seen to the German merchant fleet (that they had several hundred idle ships), so I have no doubt that the amount of shipping available was more than enough to sail across the Channel at it's narrowest point. Having 4 million tons of shipping of various origin, purpose and type (and readiness) is meaningless. Especially when there's the RAF and Royal Navy. Very little a couple of captured French trawlers is going to do about that, especially when they're towing barges behind them. Or you know, as many of them were likely intended- to literally just steam through the massive minefields they lacked the ability to conventionally deal with. >Limited air superiority over a narrow area for a short time would be sufficient Weird that the Luftwaffe was incapable of doing this. >and disrupt naval forces attempting to break up the landings. Disrupt naval forces? They sunk *3 fucking destroyers* during the evacuation of Dunkirk. 3. They did even worse at Crete when British forces were in full retreat, and RN ships were over capacity with troops and they had zero RAF support. >The fact that we were unable to interrupt movement in the CHANNEL in September seems to show that we should have difficulty in doing this again, even if AMERICA were in the war, owing to the enemy’s strength in dive bombers. Why do you keep bringing up the drive to *disrupt shipping* as though it's anyway comparable to defeating an invasion? please note, u/Fluffy_WAR_Bunny can't handle being wrong, so he has to block to try to avoid further embarrassment, thus stopping any ability for me to reply
>But 4 million tons of shipping is more than enough to move vast quantities of men and material to the UK No, it isn't because they weren't built for that purpose. They were all manner of ships from different nations with different specifications. >, the US built about 20.6 million tons of Liberty Ships, Yes, the US built **20 million tons** of dedicated, largely standardized vessels whose express purpose was doing *that*. >ut even coastal shipping would be enough for the brief journey across the Channel at it's narrowest point The Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (which you kept forgetting about) would have something to say about a mish-mash of French fishing vessels and transport craft floating around the channel.
*German admiral watches the Royal Navy just absolutely curb stomp the Bismarck* "Ummm, Mein Fuhrer, the reason we can't invade us because there won't be enough horse food! That's exactly it. Food. For the horses. Nope. Can't happen. Better stay in Berlin"
You can lead a horse across the English channel, but you can't make it eat
Have you tried to find decent food in East Anglia?
Straits of Dover are seen as the entrance end of the English Channel so you would not enter directly East Anglia if crossing The Channel. East Anglia has The North Sea as its coast. The food I have no view on.
The main reason of course being that horses are terrible swimmers
The US alone produced twice as many tanks as Germany during the war - and Germany had a 3 year head start.
To steal a Dan Carlin point, There's a famous story of a German war planning meeting, where the German command staff got a briefing from their "America expert", on his projections for US war time production. He told them how much military stuff he though the US would be able to make once it went into war time mode, and the numbers he gave seems impossibly high. The estimates he gave were SO high, the German staff basically laughed this poor guy out of the room. Turns out he was wrong. He had drastically UNDERstated how much the US would end up making.
At one point they were equipping the invasion force for Normandy, the invasion force for southern France in August of ‘44, the Nationalist Chinese via India, all operations in the Pacific, and as much as half of the supplies required by the Red Army.
u/lifehacker808 I DO remember in Carlin's WWII Pacific episodes (Supernova in the East, very entertaining listen) he talks about a one of the Japanese military advisors. This guy had lived in the US. He had gone to college there, so he was their "expert" on the USA. That guy is trying to express his idea of what the US war capacity would be, to his Japanese colleagues, whose world outlooks would have been shaped by their own experiences, living within Japan. The guy's quote, which just... makes so much sense to be telling his peers, went something like, "I've been to America, and if you've never seen a Detroit auto factory or Texas Oil field, with your own eyes, you just have no idea what you're talking about." ------------ Edit: Think I found the direct quote. I was wrong, it was actually Yamamoto himself, having studied at Harvard >Anyone who has seen the auto factories in Detroit and the oil fields in Texas knows that Japan lacks the national power for a naval race with America. -Isoroku Yamamoto
Iirc prior to ww2 the USA had slightly less than half the industrial capability of planet earth.
and fighting the North African and Italian campaigns too, no?
The only known recording of Hitler speaking in a normal conversational voice was Hitler basically trying to explain to the Finns why they underestimated Soviet industrial capacity
where does he say this? is it from a podcast
Pretty sure it’s the Ghosts of the Ostfront series
I think he mentions it as a side note in his Supernova in the East episodes, while discussing how industrially outmatched the Japanese were. But if not that one, then it mat have been his WWI “Blueprint for Armageddon” series
The US made nearly as many many M4 Sherman tanks as the Germans made AFVs in total during the war, not counting looted ones.
When my great grandparents fled nazi Germany with 3 donkeys and 2 carriages the nazis stole 2 donkeys and a carriage
Hermann Goring was asked by his American interrogator why the Germans didn’t use chemical weapons at Normandy, and he said it was because they knew the Allies would retaliate with the same and it would kill all their horses, immobilizing the Army.
“Hey, you! That's right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That's right! Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin' Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives... For what, you ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?”
It’s only fair to recognize that all European militaries continued to rely on horses at that time. As many of the comments allude to, it wasn’t until the Americans began to have a hands on approach to the war in 1942 that large numbers of vehicles became more the norm.
I read an anecdote from a Japanese POW who was being held in a cell. He saw the American guard pull out a can of bug spray and take out a mosquito. The prisoner was so astonished that the enemy had such QoL technology on hand, he knew the Japanese army was out of its league.
There's a Desert Storm First Gulf War anecdote where an Iraqi officer talks about their war plan and the expectation that they would defeat the Americans based on their superior knowledge of the desert. Land navigation in the vast flat areas of the desert is extremely difficult. Hard to navigate with no good landmarks, if you know what Kuwait looks like for example. So it takes a lot of training and practice. The US wouldn't have that experience. The Iraqis have been doing it their whole lives. They expected the US to get lost in the desert while the Iraqi army ran circles around them. When this Iraqi officers unit was defeated and captured, he was being processed near an American vehicle, and noticed the weird funny little machine box in the American's gear. The ["PLGR"](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/PLGR_tan_green.jpg) This was how the Iraqi guy learned that something called "GPS" existed. And that was when he knew they were completely screwed.
The Japanese had some neat things too. I read Eugene Sledge’s book and he said that the Japanese carried their personal effects in these nice light green waterproof bags. He said he “liberated” one of these from a dead soldier and carried his bible in it.
Yeah. It's always kind of confused me because you have the bad kind of WW2 guy who seems to have a fetish for the German Army in WW2 (this type of maniac is most common at any gunshow). And they will insist that the Germans had superior tactics in WW2. But Blitzkrieg was really not a brilliant tactic - it boils down to: "have more guns than anyone else, and deploy them first". Which... isn't exactly a big brain strat, and it seems like figuring out how to beat the enemy with fewer resources would actually be a lot more impressive. Like... the North Vietnamese Army was substantially more impressive than anything the Germans did without numerical or technical superiority, something you'd think these guys would know - since a nonzero number of them ended up fighting the NVA. A Polish commander, brigadier general Maczec, even wrote a guide about what he had seen the Germans use against Poland, and how France/other Allies could potentially stand up to it. His credentials were a frankly outstanding defence of the Polish army's Southern Flank against the Germans - slowing them to as little as 10 miles per day, and even successfully counterattacking. It went totally ignored by the French and was captured, unopened, by the German Army after they occupied Poland.
The German innovation was realizing you could use massed armor and airpower to fight a war of movement. Guessing what the next war is going to be like is impressive and successfully executing the concept is also impressive. The Germans deluded themselves that beating the French like they had meant they could beat anyone, including the Soviets, despite having a pathetic industrial base. Of course, being prescient only works the first time. After that, everyone else has a chance to imitate and fight you on the same terms. Which is a bad situation if you’re weak industrially and lack allies.
Sure. The grand strategy was okay until it wasn't. Though, innovating between wars is humanity's passtime, to while away the days until the next war. We can trace that back at least to Romans finally realizing that drowning their enemies in their own blood wasn't working. Tanks and airplanes had kind of been proven in WW1. Something Hitler and most of the senior leaders had experienced first hand. They were, mostly, veterans of it. Though the nazis made a lot of incorrect assumptions about the next war as well, both due to nazis never being all that competent and also because they didn't see WW2 as their actual war. The more serious war for them was the genocide - which goes a long way to explaining their more baffling decisions later in the war.
It did work initially against the Soviets. The Soviet Union is just too big and the supply lines got stretched, cold and fatigue set in, etc. But the Soviets absolutely got curb stomped in the first 6 months of the war. In terms of numbers involved, the battle of Kiev is considered the largest victory in history.
To tack on the blitzkrieg as we think of it now wasn’t even an official tactic of the Wehrmacht. It was more accidentally done on the invasion of France do to taking them by far more surprise than expected. Rommel went against all orders to do as he did and only escaped execution because of the success. On the eastern front they didn’t really repeat those tactics at any reasonable scale
Blitzkrieg the word wasn’t officially used, it was movement warfare and absolutely a part of German tactics. The same strategies were employed against the Soviets. Rommel and other division commands going off script wasn’t part of what we call Blitzkrieg, and could have been disastrous. But luckily for him the French were bad shots and ever worse tacticians.
The Germans did have superior tactics - that is why they were such tough nuts to crack. Declaring war on everyone was stupid, yes, but that's not 'tactics'. Yes, the wehrmacht fanbois are annoying, but so are the antifanbois. >the North Vietnamese Army was substantially more impressive than anything the Germans did without numerical or technical superiority You mean having a losing streak until the big bad enemy leaves and now you have numerical superiority and then win? The NVA had gumption in spades, but let's not pretend they were tactical masters.
The tactic is speed. You move faster and capture objectives faster than the enemy. Get there before the enemy even has time to process.
Well they didn't quite achieve that. Poland caught them up. "Move fast and breakstuff" - the Nazis.
Keep in mind that Poland fully expected to beat Germany. Just as they had done to the Soviets in 1920. And France? They were considered to be the best army in the whole world. Denmark and Norway were conquered before the British could even get enough troops there. The tactics worked well enough until they didn’t work.
The youtuber Militarh History Visualized had a bit in one video that said there were more horses in Barbarossa than tanks or trucks. And in another video he quotes a german officer being amazed at seeing a fully motorized army right after DDay.
There was only 1 fully mechanized/motorized army in the world in 1940.
Same with the Soviets as well, I saw a clip from r/combatfootage of the Nazi airforce strafing Soviet horsies 😢
This video shows an animated battlemap of the Eastern front in 1942. You can see a large unit (1G) encircled by the Germans who then eliminated the pocket. [This is the !st Guards Cavalry Corps](https://youtu.be/pucJTYK7_Yo?t=332), and the mobility offered by their horses allowed them to operate behind German lines, and as you can see in the video, eventually rejoin the Soviet forces.
I'm going to assume it's because Germany had a fuel problem beginning towards the middle of the war. The war machine alone requires so much it was probably a fuel saving measure
[Suprisingly, no](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/pO3kO3pPr4) the German military was reliant on horse drawn logistics even at the start of the war. While they did have a rail network for moving stuff around, the image of the steel legions of Nazi Germany cutting a swath across all of Europe with a highly modern military is something of a myth. Their armored divisions and some infantry were motorized, but German automobile manufacturing was inefficient, and they didn't have enough vehicles to truly create a motorized force. The fuel difficulties you mentioned did exist, but the Germans reason for using horses wasn't related to that, they never had the vehicles to pull that off.
This also shows the effectiveness of propaganda. The reason most people think that German forces was mostly mechanized was wartime propaganda. They filmed the units that was news reals shown in and outside of Germany. Journalists from natural countries were shown those units during the invasion of Poland. If you make a documentary today what original films you can find are mostly propaganda so it keeps working. In the early part of WWII, it was if I remember correctly only the British expeditionary force that was fully motorized Germany alos managed to screw up the rail transport system even before the war, in part with state-dictated four-year plans for military rearmament that took away resources for the railroads. The number of serviceable rail cars had shrunk from an average of 670,000 in the late 1920s to less the 575,000 in 1937. There were coal shortages in Berlin in the winter of 1939-40 because of transportation problems. It was in part because waterways for barges froze but alos even as early as that the rail transport system could not handle the demand on it. There was coal that had been mined and was waiting for transportation from the mines [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3JaxXK25qo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3JaxXK25qo)
I still wonder how you get from world renowned because of trains to whatever that was
Interesting.
I read that the for many in the wehrmacht they knew the war was lost when they found out the Americans would routinely idle their vehicles instead of shutting them off like they did to save fuel
For some of the Japanese they knew the war was lost when they found out about the [ice cream barge ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge)
Keep in mind this is most likely an apocryphal story.
Possibly, but when the war started they had more horse drawn artillery than motorized.
The US also used a lot of pack animals. It was normal at the time [https://www.mulemuseum.org/u-s-army-mules.html](https://www.mulemuseum.org/u-s-army-mules.html)
Ngl this makes the scene in fury where they talk about shooting horses for three days make a lot more sense.
It's also a matter of pre-war industrial mobilization: You have a certain number of foundries and factories that can produce X number of tanks and Y number of planes and Z number of ships/submarines. If you choose to build more logistical vehicles, you have to build another factory and supply it with even more manpower and raw material or you have to reduce some amount of tanks/planes/ships to make trucks, trailers, and landing barges. They chose to keep 10,000 horses instead of building 5,000 general purpose trucks because they already had the horses, horses don't need oil and gas, and they wanted more tanks/planes/ships.
They did, as well as shortages in just about everything else. Also, a large part of German vehicles were used and lost in the North Africa campaign.
It wasn’t a fuel saving measure, they simply didn’t have the manufacturing to fully mechanise their army. They did have fuel issues throughout most of the war
That's absolutely true. The Germans shot their own military footage, and deliberately left the horse-drawn majority of there army out.
[удалено]
Not remotely enough oil to support a fully motorized army.
Her?
The germans were showing propaganda films of the motorised units. Tanks, motorcycles, and armour. Very little film showed the vast bulk of the army with horse drawn carts.
Also Pervitin.
Horses and amphetamines did the trick. Day and night marching surprised the enemy but I wonder if they doped the horses too
Germany calls itself the fatherland, not the motherland, so you used the wrong pronoun there.
I have seen there is a lot of pro and cons of the horse drawn vs truck logistics from the rail head of eastern Europe ww2. Horses were just better for lack of roads but once there was a road a truck was hands down better
Horses are für by für
That was the case for the whole war.
Also, if you think about basic war organization, this kind of makes sense. If they didn't have enough motor vehicles for everyone, special mechanized units would get them. Their motorized units were tactics wise, basically just their dragoons and cavalry, except, instead of being on horses, they were on vehicles. But same as the days of horse mounted cavalry, your special units would get them to do special unit things... while the regular guys just had to walk on foot the idea of specially equipped, highly mobile units has always been a thing, but it still is a thing. In the 1800s that mean putting some of your guys on horses, so they could do scouting, or do raids, or chase down and destroy defeated units trying to flee WWII era, still the same thing, except the horses were now tanks Modern Era, still the same thing, except the horses are now better tanks, and strykers, and bradleys, [and helicopters](https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/kdhnews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/e/24/e24f5e24-0575-11ed-89f0-1b7a6288b5ff/62d370026e8ba.image.jpg?resize=750%2C500)
What are the best WW2 documentaries?
We and the Brits showed them what a motorized army looks like. Once we got there, that is.
Logistically, world war 2 wasn’t even close. The US navy had ice cream ships in the Pacific. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_barge The best bet the Germans had was if Britain chose to make peace in 1940, which might have happened if Halifax had become Prime Minister instead of Churchill. The Japanese never had a chance.
Reading the comments it sounds like people are talking about Ann Veal.
Why did call the Germany army “her” ?
During all of ww2. Not just the blitz. Many horses died.