Parsifal said,
Yeah, they lost the war, but methods, procedures, tactics?
Absolutely.Particularly on the eastern front..at the beginning the limited resources avaliable to the germans dictated that they adopt narrow points of breakthrough....schwerepunkts, followed by deep penetrations. Tanks would then be forced to sit there and wait whilst the slow moving infantry formations completed the encirclements and cleaned up. generally worked, but it was innefficient, and many Soviets that should have been captured got away.
german logistics was terrible, and pretty much cost them the war. The idea that they could tack on a few mobile units to an unmotorized main body was busted, particualalry as the motorized elements of the infantry (what little they had) fell out of the floor, and then even the horsedrawn elements also lost mobility
And the list goes on and on....this is just one example
Their weapons were pretty good, procedures are just procedures, and almost everyone used similar tactics in simnilar situations at SOME time.
Dont agree, sorry.Some weapons were excelent, some were technically excellent, but the wrong tool for the job, others were downright awful. Examples of excellent include the Nebelwerfer, MP38, MG42, Stug III Me 109 ju88, type VII. Examples of technically excellent but the wrong tool for the job include Tigers, Panthers, most of theiir truck MT in Russia, their artillery in winter(it wouldnt work), their battleships and short range cruisers. examples of terrible equipment...type II,Narvik DDs, F-boote, early war torpedoes, Me 110, Me 210. The problem for the germans though isnt that their weapons were not good, in the main they were excellent, in the field. the problem was that there were never enough of them. okay, so they were behind the 8 from the start, but their production decisions certainly did not help them. The 262 is very much in this category. It wasnt really ready for squadron service in 1944, or even 1945, yet it was eating into their production at a time when they needed everything they could get their hands on. it was criminal how the germans tended to waste their production.
procedeures make all the difference. if procedures didnt matter,why did the french lose in 1940, why did the british get nowhere for 3 years (in NA),why did the germans clobber the russians 41-2. but the germns did not adapt as fast or as well as the allies, and allied/soviet methods were not the sameas german methods. German armoured warfare was fundamentally different to the allies. They focused on the tank, and centred their firepower around it, whereas by 1944, the allies, with their far greater levels of mobility wre able to implement integrated assault teams to a much greater extent than the germans. Dont get me wrong, the germans had some of that, but their formations and techniques of 1940were nothing like allied techniques of 1944, they werent like german techniques of 1944 either, and allied and German techniques remained fundamentally differtnt in 1944.
Russians adapted and produced a unique style of warfare that was all their own. They began the war with essentially western TOE and thinking....but it failed them badly. they simply did not have the technical skills to do what was the norm in the western armies. in the west, a division was more or less the main combat unit,with high levels of integration and a variety of weapins that its commandrs had to co-ordinate. But this required high levels of technical proficiency to produce a fully integrated team.The russians did not have the leadership skills, the technical skill, the mobility to dod any of that. sothey simplified the command problem...rifle divisions weredevoid of nearly everything except the basic weapons...almost quite literally a rifle division was a division with just rifles. what little artillery there was, was mostly for los shooting. The russians formed fuge artillery armies that were magnificant assault TOEs, but hopeless in defence. They found their tank formations hopeless as well, far too complicated for them to be workable, so they formed smaller, simipler Tank and mech brigades, with a few SMG armed men and afew mortars in support, so that such formations were within the level of complexity that their commanders could handle.
because of that lack of C&C, even later in the war the russians adapted. their formations were never as flexible as their German counterparts, So that meant complicated narrow front assaults wouldnt work. Instead the Russians adopted broad front tactics, and something the russians nicknamed a "Zhukov symphany" or "Zhikov orchestra". basically one offensive after another in rapid succession to keep the germans reeling and off balance. Eisenhower used the same approach in france in 1944. germans never used those sorts of tactics.
