parsifal
Colonel
But that is not what the original question asked. It asked what made the Germany army successful at the Beginning of the war. Training, education, communications, transport and a number of other factors made the difference, not ideology or politics. Ideology and politics helped an awful lot with the down fall of the 3rd Reich
I know, but the basic premise...."wht was the German army so successful?" is a wrong premise. A better wording for the question would be "How did the Germans manage to snatch defeat out of certain victory?" The answer does not lie with their tactical handling. It lies in their strategic miscalculations and repeated bungling even during the salad years of victory.
Jim Dunnigan some years ago did a study on motivation. Why is it that the german Army, was so successful when armies like the Italians, which had a very similar military sytem for mobilzation and training , was so unsuccessful. Nationalism, and propaganda has very little to do with it. Those issues get people into the army, it doesnt make them good soldiers. At the end of the day, the important manpower issues psychologically are the desire to survive, and trust you have in your leaders. In the Italian army there was this enormous gulf between the men and their officers. Trust was zero. The soldiers were trained okay, but they just didnt believe the army would save them. the result is that they tend3ed to throw their arms up in surrender a lot. The heer did not suffer from this. Their soldiers were better educated, which in itself made them more effective, but there was not a huge gap between officers and their men. The men believed in their officers, and the ratio of officers (including NCOs) to enlisted ranks was fairly high. This meant the unit retained cohesion even when under stress, and the men kept fighting even when taking casualties.
These werent the problems that defeated the wehrmacht. Where they failed was in the strategic area. For example, they never quite got the concept of a front commander controlling all the assets in a TO, and fighting a battle for a strategic objective. Commanders tended to fight battles in isolation, with control over only some of the resources and with little knowledge or care as to what was happening around them. There was never a unified command, in the sense of a SoPac or a SHAEF. And certainly anything quite likie the JCS which pooled resources of many nations. Compare the relationship of the JCS to the German-Italian relationship, or the relationship of hitler to his military commanders, comp0ared to the much more constrained ability of people like Churchilol over their military . there is no comparison actually
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