Performance of British and American armies

I agree with you Jaeger. I think that the German Army's 1944-1945 standards were low and just a wretched shadow of their condition in 1941.

As for those "fearsome" encounters in 1944-1945, the ones I've read mostly involved Panther and Tiger tanks/ 88 gun batteries naturally inflicted a big toll, lol. Besides the big tanks, the Germans pretty much had nothing significantly superior on the ground after June 1944. On rare occasion they might bag an entire Allied battalion in a counterattack, but that was about it.

 

I consider the deployment of 2nd Panzer, Panzer Lehr, 12. SS, 2.SS, and 3rd FG in Normandy the final time the Germans fielded decently prepared and equipped motorized formations in the West. After that, standards were just low.

 

TA Gardner all of what you say above is true. The Germans couldnt and didnt stand up to the combined might of allied and russian armies on two fronts. The point is that the germans were so successful ,for so long, with so little! From 1939 until about 1942 the Germans were invincible, in Poland, Norway, and western europe. When they attacked France in 1940 they were outnumbered in men, tanks and aircraft yet they rang rings around the allies and crushed them in less than two months. The arrival of rommel in North Africa in 1941 and his masterful use of his meager supplies and equipment (Hitler considered it a side show and refused to allocate more resources) routed the British and almost brought the Germans all the way to the middle east oil fields.

But of course after Stalingrad it was basically all over for the German war machine, and in spite of a few more minor victories (the 3rd battle of Kharkov in 1943 was called the "last German victory) the Germans were as you state, basically on the defensive everywhere.

Even on the defensive the German army did not collapse as in 1918, Hitler's draconian leadership prevented that. Despite being outnumbered 5, 10, or 20 to one on almost every front and losing air superiority completely, severe shortages of fuel and ammo and even food, the Germans managed to stave off defeat and collapse for years, until literally over-run. Contrast that for example with Operation Iraqi freedom in 2003 - where US forces won in a matter of weeks by doing a few feint attacks, then a massive Thunder run to bagdad, there to simply declare victory!

 

True and my very first line I certainly didnt claim that quality issues could be fully compensated for with indirect fire, but it certainly could increase the defensive power of a low quality formation manning a portion of the front. There are a number of other factors that certainly helped the Germans in this battle makeup for the lack of high quality divisions (defensive terrain, concentration of troops in a small area etc) but ultimately the outcome was decisively against the Germans and while the allies did get contained for a certain period of time in Normandy, it was at the cost of two german armies getting mauled and the lack of a force capable of stoping the allies from liberating the rest of france in 2 weeks, taking the largest port in europe (antwerp) in another week, and being on the boarder of Germany by november.

Sorry I will keep that in mind in the future.

 

Posted by Jaeger: "There was nothing superiour about the germans. Nothing."

Sorry, I'm not convinced that comment is accurate.

And they did pull off, even in 1944, some interesting feats, even if they were feats of improvisation or desperation.

- The pairing of cadres who escaped the Falaise Pocket with a rush of more or less raw recruits furnished by the Replacement Army may not have produced a war winning horde, but it certainly sufficed to halt the Allies at the Westwall;

- The undetected assembly of 26 divisions for a major counter-offensive, given the Allied Ultra advantage, is either evidence of an impressive German feat or of piss-poor Allied intelligence gathering and reconnaissance operations;

- Which seizure of initiative forced the Allies, who had underestimated how many divisions they would need to win in Europe, to shift an entire field army north out of Lorraine and spread the deployment of another field army in northern Alsace enough to render it vulnerable to a smaller, follow-up offensive. Not a bad "1-2" move for a power that had suffered defeats of incredible magnitude the previous summer.

- One should, in all honesty, note that on occasion in 1944-45, even if rare occasion, the Germans did kick the Allies in the hind ends, for example, the way in which the U.S. 12th Armored Division was shattered at Herrlisheim north of Strasbourg or the effective mobilization of odds and ends in Holland that caused the British 1st Airborne Division very heavy casualties at Arnhem. Underestimation of the Germans was not a smart thing to do even if Allied intelligence tended to prattle on about boy soldiers, old men, etc. To paraphrase a GI who fought in the Hürtgen Forest, "even a one-armed syphillitic old pric* armed with a machine gun and behind three feet of reinforced concrete became a formidable opponent".

My take is that for all of their material deficiencies, the Germans had two things going for them. One, their belief in Hitler and his cause bordered on being a faith (with all that implies for discounting heavy odds against oneself), and two, their society places a high premium on knowing one's place in the team and accepting the orders of authority without excessive rancor. Even when they were on their way down, these intangibles resulted in them being without a doubt a profoundly dangerous enemy.

Cheers

BW

 

The lack of supplies due to Ikes genious broadfront strategy did more than anything to halt allied advance.

"with nothing heavier than a Bren" suggests that there was more than hapshazard forces oposing the Paras.

 

In claiming the British and American armies performed poorly, I feel Hastings may have forgotten the difficulties facing the British and American armies. The bocage in Normandy was very difficult terrain to operate in. A large proportion of the British and American forces had no previous combat experience.

As stated in my opening thread the British and Americans were attacking and the germans defending. It is important to consider the position of attackers and defenders. Defenders are usually located in trenches with only the head sticking out which makes it difficult to hit them with small arms fire. In addition, trenches provide some protection from mortar and artillery fire. Hastings pointed out in his book Overlord that even very accurate artillery fire was an uncertain method of inflicting casualties on troops who were well dug in. The attackers on the other hand are exposed and out in the open. The terrain of the bocage made it easy for the germans to conceal themselves. Hastings never mentioned this in his overlord book.

I read a book about artillery in the second and in the last years of the war British and American artillery tactics and tactical air support had become very sophisticated.

I feel the British and American armies have not been given the credit they desrve.

 

Jaeger,

I am not sure that Eisenhower's broad-front strategy was all that invalid. Eisenhower objected because he must immoblize the Third Army in Lorraine to power Monty's big thrust, rendering Patton vulnerable right when the Germans could lash back at him. In the event, the Fifth Panzer Army fufilled that anticipation by attacking the Third with the heaviest doze of armor in the West and I very much doubt how well Patton could have protected himself without mobility.

There were things that the Germans did right. The morale of their troops sent on suicide missions to hold out against Allied schwerepunkt efforts is quite amazing. Ordinarily, one does not expect to see new US divisions holding its line against massed armor with no artillery and minimum armor backup.

And the Allies were constantly sending more green divisions on the line--heck, during the Bulge, 1st SS, Panzer Lehr and Fuhrer Begleit knocked three US divisions (two of them green) out of commission for days in their last gasp attack. The Americans won that engagement, but still, the German showing was not poor. The 17 SS Panzer Grenadiers nearly decimated the 12th Armored Division in Nordwind, too.

4th Wiltz,

In offensive operations, 120 tank losses to 80 kills is a good score. Besides, without a tally for antitank guns destroyed this kill ratio is meaningless. In formal assaults against Allied hedgehogs German Panzer Divisions suffered just as badly. German tank losses in Mortain, Lorraine and Ardennes had all been very heavy when they attacked "hard targets", that is infantry or armored units alerted and ready.

 

Hi Jaeger, thank you for the comments!

I agree the Allied logistical crisis was the primary driver in stopping the Allied forces at Germany's border. My point about the German Army in this situation is that despite the massive thrashing they had taken at Falaise, they were still able to stand up a new force on short notice and make it effective enough to buy themselves some time. Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe that in similar circumstances, many armies would have simply collapsed and fallen into a disastrous and permanent rout.

Arnhem: There were remnants/Kampfgrüppe of two SS Panzer divisions that assaulted the Paras -- a bad match as the Paras did not particularly have many or heavy antitank weapons. The overall context of MARKET-GARDEN, though, is different. Practically all of the major units the Germans used to eventually contain the Nijmegen Salient were stitched together from retreating remnants, new blood provided by the Replacement Army, and a real hodge-podge of training and garrison units in the Netherlands. There is a particularly good order of battle of these units to be found in the work "It never snows in September". In my view, this was an impressive feat of improvisation and force cohesion.

Overall, I agree with the comments in this thread that state the majority of the cards were held by the Allies in terms of training and equipment. I am less sure that certain aspects of Allied organisation and deployment could not have been better, and like you, I have my doubts about Allied senior leadership. For all that, though, I am unwilling to dismiss the Germans and state that they were inferior in all respects.

Cheers

BW

 

IMO the Allied war machine as a whole was vasltly superior but this was not necessarily true at a lower level.
Take away the Allied logistics superiority and the Germans troops are on a par if not slightly superior due to better average experience.
Still you can't really argue with that sort of success, the final issue was never in doubt.
Logistics and morale are most important element for victory in the modern battlefield, artillery (read ammo) is the main killer and better mobility (read POL and spare parts) will make the difference between a fighting retreat and a rout or a limited advance and an encirclement, better morale will ensure your troops will go on fighting after their opponents quit trying and German morale often compensated for allied superiority, there was a perfectly understandable "we are going to win anyway so why should I be the last casualty in the war" attitude in a lot of allied troops that didn't encourage aggressiveness, more than once the Allies came close to delivering a knockout blow but ultimately didn't.
Both armies had some elite units and a mass of less good ones, the difference being that the allied ones were poor because they were green so can be expected to improve while the German ones were scatched together formations of unpredictable performance. Some, like during Market Garden performed pretty well others, like the panzer brigades, were a waste of men and equipment.

 

From what I have read I have formed a similar impression. In particular it seems that allied forces often were rather inflexible when it came to inter-unit cooperation, and would require a period of training and working up together before they could be an affective formation. The germans appear to have been better at rapidly bolting together disparate units in a short time and getting them up to combat effectiveness. Perhaps that's just a reflection of different needs - the Allies were usually resourced to carefully assemble a massive hammer and then swing it when they wanted, whereas the Germans had to be good at improvising.

I did read one comment (in a discussion about the North Africa theatre) that the British Army didn't even have a common set of SOP's, with every regiment and brigade having it's own (often incompatible) SOPs that needed to be aligned if units were to work together. If that is correct it would certainly explain why things sometimes took a long time to set up.

 

Greetings to the community as a whole.

I haven't read the Max Hasting's books but from the preview of the first post of ths thread i understand
that German army performed far better than Allied armies and he regards the Germany army of the second world war as a superb fighting instrument. I tend to see this as 'Discovery/History Channel style' history; perhaps i'm wrong but i can see now on every major ww2 forum countless questions about 'elite' german formations with little or no attention given to allied units or even to other regular german formations.

Much was said, written and showed about Michael Wittmann's action on Villers-Bocage but i found little about, for example, Lieutenant Bilotte: on 16th May 1940 in Stonne during the battle of France, a single B1bis tank (the B1bis "Eure" commanded by Lieutenant Bilotte) pushed in the town itself into the German defences and went back. He attacked a German column of Pz.Rgt.8 (later this regiment went to 15th Panzer Division in North-Africa) and destroyed 2 PzIV, 11 PzIII and 2 Pak36 guns. The first shots destroyed simultaneously the first (with the 47mm gun) and the last tank (with the 75mm gun) of the column. The first German tanks were at less then 50m range. The armor of the B1bis was scattered with 140 impacts, no one penetrated or really damaged the armor. One can see here a kind of small 'Villers Bocage' action and after that Bilotte was nicknamed 'the butcher of Stonne' by his comrades. As a side note, in the same TV documentaries, it is considered that the idea of multi-tureted tanks was a failure but this action could illustrate a different perspective.
Or about Lieutenant Zinoviy Kolobanov and his combat performance at Krasnogvardeysk on August 14, 1941: on that day the vanguard of the German 8th Panzer Division approached Krasnogvardeysk (Gatchina) near Leningrad (St Petersburg) and was engaged from hull down position by 5 KV-1 tanks commanded by Kolobanov; on the previous day he had carefully studied the situation and readied his detachment: each KV-1 tank carried twice the normal amount of ammunition, two-thirds being armour-piercing rounds and also ordered his other commanders to hold their fire and await orders. He did not want to reveal the total force, so only one exposed tank at a time would engage the enemy. On August 14, the German 8th Panzer Division's vanguard ventured directly into the well-prepared Soviet ambush, with Kolobanov's tank knocking out the lead German tank with its first shot. The Germans falsely assumed that their lead tank had hit an anti-tank mine, and failed to realize that they had been ambushed. The German column stopped, giving Kolobanov the opportunity to destroy the second tank. Only then did the Germans realize they were under attack, but they failed to find the source of the shots. While the German tanks were firing blindly, Kolobanov knocked out the trailing German tank, thus boxing in the entire column. In the subsequent battle a total of 43 German tanks were destroyed by just five Soviet KV-1s (two more remained in reserve). Once again one can see here a Wittmann style action.

During the first six month of 1944 the german army was at it's peak with many excelent formations on both western and eastern front but at the end of August 1944 the near-total annihilation of Army Group Centre which cost the Germans 2,000 tanks and 57,000 other vehicles, 300,000 dead, 250,000 wounded, and about 120,000 captured (overall casualties at 670,000) and between 288,000 men and 450,000 men lost with aditional 2200 armored vehicles destroyed on western front left Germany, on longer term, wihout any capable force to stop the allied forces.

I apologize for possible errors regarding grammar or spelling, however English is not my native language; best regards

 

The Battledrill movement started in the UK when they were forced to raise a large field army.

The old guards were very careful about giving SOP's but rather vague guidelines. The old guard saw it as a national trait that britons were good at improvisation and had plenty of initiative. And since no situation is the same there will be a different soloutin to the problem. If the British officers and NCOs were forced to use battledrill, it would drain initiative and limit their creativity.

It seems incredible that anyone should think this was correct, but there it is. The younger officers such as Alexander, Brooke and Monty was for the battledrills, but they were not in a position to do anything about it.

Not until 1940 did the battledrill movement start. This started to pay dividends quickly. However Infantry/Armour cooperation would linger for three more years before perfection. There was no lessons learned from 1940 France. Mainly because it would be a crippling blow to learn that they were outfought en masse. It was not until the British tanks started to impale themselves on german AT screens that the ridiculus Balaclava charges were dealt with. Two main schools developed, and the decision on how to tackle the problem once and for all fell in 1944 with B.L.M As CinC 21st Army Group.

 

triple c,
thats thee point i was trying to make in my post.

 

Posted by sample>"Much was said, written and showed about Michael Wittmann's action on Villers-Bocage but i found little about, for example, Lieutenant Bilotte . . ."

I think your comment is perceptive. I would have to say that it applies to the France 1940 campaign in a broad sense as well. The historical lessons that leap out of the standard (English language) histories tend to revolve around the Allied failure to appreciate that the Ardennes could be traversed by a large armoured force, and, what that large armoured force did after it emerged from the Ardennes, capped by the actions at Dunkirk. I have found it difficult, for example, to ascertain where most of the army corps were at any given point in the campaign without resort to expensive resources like Les Grandes Unités Françaises or books that present the OKW campaign maps for that period. As well, there are not really many works that detail the various battles that happened all along the front; most are content to mention Sedan and Dunkirk, along with a general description of the breaking of the Somme Line. Considering that recently far more detailed works in English have appeared about events on the Eastern Front, it seems surprising that the purely military events of the France 1940 campaign don't seem to have received the same attention to detail.

Cheers

BW

 

The Germans myth of the superior German fighting man was built up in the early years of the war when they started a war that they had planned for ie the invasion of France they had there plans down and there tactics worked out where as the allies were not prepared.

The New Zealand and Australian armies and to be built up from scratch as did the American and also Canadians had a lot of work to do and the Russian army was in poor shape and needed a lot of work.

The allies also had a lot of work to do in learning how to fight with combined arms which they didn,t have a clue about in the desert war infantry were split up into brigade sized groups with no tank support the tanks were seen as a seperate unit and the end result was infantry over run after they had taken there objectives because they didn,t have any tank support and this happened time after time.

Once the allies got experience and learned how to fight our guys were good enough.

It should be noted that in Normandy an estimated 70% of casulties were caused my german mortar fire and at Cassino the New Zealand soldiers said the 8cm mortar was the biggest problem,indirect fire not the individual german soldier trading shots.

 

Gentelmen:

What Mr. Hastings does no say it the caliber of leadership in the US and British armies was unevenly distributed. The OKW was noted for giving strong leadership to weak units. US and British Elite units had superb leadership. Look how many of the Junior leader in the 82nd and 101st became general officers in later times. In my regiment most of thr junior officers graded very high in IQ test and were in the of their OCS classes in physical preformance. General Patton realized this and after the Bulge he propost General Smith that the Officers and NCO s of the 82nd and 101st be assigned to the Infantry Units in the Third Army at increased rank. He Assured General Smith that this would increase the preformance greatly.

I am delighted that General Eisenhower turned him down. The composition of the current US Army shows how valuable these units are today. You did not get posted top these units unless you were an outstanding leader.

As Ever,

Walter L. Marlowe

( Airborne all the Way)

 

- The undetected assembly of 26 divisions for a major counter-offensive, given the Allied Ultra advantage, is either evidence of an impressive German feat or of piss-poor Allied intelligence gathering and reconnaissance operations;

BW[/QUOTE]

that was due to .....

bad weather which prevented air recon

german use of domestic telephone network as they were on their own territory . no need for enigma machines when you have telephones !!!