Quote Originally Posted by Husar
Interesting topic indeed and while my knowledge is quite limited I'd like to throw in some thoughts and questions, hoping that someone can enlighten me.

Few days ago I looked up some tanks on wikipedia and while the japanese tanks were apparently pretty bad indeed
Bad is not the right word, they were terrible - weak armour (especially with much resilent steel they were using), bad doctrine and bad armament.
Japanese Type 89B might be the worst medium tank of the war...

Still they achived wonder with that equipment initially, were mad/stubborn enough to somehow carry them to inaccessible places noone expected any heavier equipment.

Besides - which I find especially funny considering all this nonsense about Polish cavalry charging tanks - their tanks were in fact charged by American cavalry during the Phillippines campaign.






I found it funny that when I checked some of the later german designs, many of them came close to 10:1 kill ratios and it was also often said that most of them were destroyed and abandoned by their own crews due to lack of support or fuel, one wonders what they could have achieved with more ressources behind them but of course lack of ressources and manpower were unsurprisingly the main failures of the german army while I find some of the technologies quite fascinating even though not all of them were perfect yet.
Several reasons with superior design as most likely a less important one.

Regardless of that the Germans made mistakes designing and producing too many types of tanks and armoured vehicles in too many versions.
So were a pure waste of resources, time and fuel - e.g. Konigtiger or Jagdtiger, not to mention Maus or the insane Ratte - 100+ t WTF were they thinking ?




And then there is of course this (myth?) that the german commander said if there had been more of these devils they could have defeated the german forces. Well, in this case their playground was limited to one city and their equipment sounds rather limited(not like I had expected the dutch to successfully defend against a german invasion anyway) but they sound like quite a capable and determined small force to me.
Virtually every army has such elite formations and surely in combat most of them fought exceptionally well compared to 'average' units.
Urban environment is exceptionally useful for that purpose.


BTW I found something really ironic.

Westerplatte - the slightly fortified Polish outpost in Danzig which was defended for a week against 10 times larger German forces with a loss of 16 men only in 1945 German units occupied that area and fought for... a week too.

There is a story coming from Soviet sources that they surrendered learning that a Polish brigade will be sent to fight them (which just finished fighting in Gdynia few miles to the north).
That would really be something - a complete change of places like this doesn't happen too often.


Oh and since someone said the soviet army was a very good force since it defeated the german army, well, when one army outnumbers the other 20:1 then even a 10:1 kill ration on the side of the outnumbered army isn't going to help a lot and one has to keep in mind that geographically the soviet union outnumbered germany quite a bit from the start,
There is more than one situation when the Soviets caused much more losses than they suffered, especially in the later part of the war - the offensives in Moldavia and in western Poland-eastern Germany for example.

Germans tended to win tactical victories, but had problems with actually winning something which really mattered.


I don't like Italy being on place 2 as they were probably one of the biggest failures in the war or can anyone tell me where they achieved anything without daddy germany coming to help them out? *waits for Tribesman to come and crush his fantasies about italy being bad*
Italians were unlucky to enter the war with so outdated equipment, weak industy and too much ambition.

Their defeats in Northern Africa are a bit overrated since in such environment numrical superiority doesn't translate into something tangible.
Slower moving Italians were simply cut off by motorized enemies and forced to surrender.
The loss of the infantry was also quite important factor to Rommel's demise.

On the other hand their mobile and elite formations performed quite well, especially with their terrible tanks similar to 2 year earlier designes used by other top 6 armoured forces ( Soviet Union, Germany, France, Japan, Poland) for example tankettes were still all too numerous in late 1940.

Another misfortune - the Greek campaign was initially due to a total disregard of the basic combat rules - they attacked with roughly 8 divisions which was supposed to win the war and later got stuck in the mountains where lower level tactical experience or determination mattered more.

Finally the Soviet campaign - armed with obsolete weapons and facing the full strenght of the 'Little Saturn' - a recipe for a disaster...

Italy was the weakest major power for sure and they fought in some worst places in the war, just like the French they are really underrated when it comes to some exceptionally well fought battles and skirmishes.


Personally the more I learn about this war I am more convinced that hardly anyone could be seen as a superior fighting force - there were always factors which make such claims not exactly justified.