Fighting Power

[CBR]

I also lulz at the attempnt to deconstruct the German war model as if it's any different from the French, British, or American one,

All are heavily influenced from Northern European post reformation thought.

Eisenhower is not surname that comes out of the contential 48 LOL

The German army did things differently and generally more efficiently, at least in the early part of the war. I don't see how "post reformation thought" automatically produces the same military thought at the same time for everyone. The fact is that in 1940 the French and British were excellent armies to fight a 1919 campaign but utterly sucked at handling the next generation of warfare.

An army can obviously be better on several levels. 1940 was primarily an operational victory as the Germans attacked the only place they had a chance of breaking through. It was an allied fiasco as the ones who had warned about the potential danger from the Ardennes sector simply were not listened to by fossilized leaders who hardly had moved on from WW1.

The German army also had a leadership culture of local initiative that was several generations old. They had learned to deal with and accept the chaos of war, whereas the Allied idea was more an attempt to use preparation and planning to take out the chaos element. It meant the Allied response was generally too slow. The German thrust could have been stopped if it hadn't been for counter attacks that just took one or two days too long to prepare, only to be cancelled because time had run out.

But that is 1940 and not the US army. AFAIK Dupuy did not make a detailed analysis of Normandy and beyond, and for Normandy there is even some confusion about German casualties with missing and POW's so it is not easy to say how much better the Germans were, if they were better. But one thing that stands out is the horrible US replacement system, sometimes soldiers were thrown directly into the front line hardly knowing what unit they were in.

If the Germans had any advantages in France, it was that even newly raised divisions had still been built up from a hardcore group of veteran officers and NCO's who knew how to train and lead their men.
The Panzer divisions were generally better at the combined arms thingie while Allied units were still learning.

If we then remember that anywhere between 70 to 80% of all casualties happened in the rifle companies/battalions then we should appreciate the effect of training, experience and teamwork. I'm not sure how much Dupuy is factoring in difference in weapons at the lower tactical level, but modern Western armies are not using the next generation BAR or Bren gun but rather the next generation MG42 in the form of belt fed LMG's. As German battalions had a slight advantage in numbers of medium and heavy mortars then perhaps it is not entirely far-fetched to think that they overall had a firepower advantage.

But it does not change the fact that USA managed to build up an army from scratch within a few years and that army did an OK job, with their biggest mistake being the replacement system IMO.