Fury (Film)

[stormymonday_2011]

...a key reason why Germany got screwed was not lunacy as such but arguably because the Nazi government was a collection of competiting, inefficient fiefdoms, not a monolithic state. This was an intrinsic part of the Nazi way of doing things, more or less from the begining.

The lunacy card, whilst not always invalid, is played too often and too soon when creating caricatures of opponents impo. Hitler and Co. probably did lose it by war's end but arguably only after they realised they were screwed.

Compared with Britain Germany was surprisingly slow at moving to a command and control economy in World War 2. It did not really get around to directing labour into war production until after 1942. In fact one of the surprises of both the 20th centuries World Wars is how quickly the UK with help from the US went onto a total war footing. In the Great War Lloyd George created a British arms indusry from almost nothing within the space of a year. In both conflicts despite possessing superior forces at the start Germany soon lost the material war ( i.e the ability to outproduce its opponents). Early military and tactical successes hid that weakness but once the German armies were checked in both 1914 and 1942 they increasingly found themselves on a losing wicket.

[DeepLurker]

If Hitler hadn't interfered with the 262 development could the war have turned out differently?

A factoid that sticks in my mind is that the Me262's engines were good for 15 hours flight time; after which, they had to be completely rebuilt.

Considering that jet engines were very, very, expensive, then even if Germany had managed to produce large numbers of 262s, I wonder if economically it would have stacked up - or if the effort would simply have bankrupted them.

It's similar to a point that other posters have made about the Tiger tank: on paper, it's amazing, but in the field it was a pig to keep running.

[Marshmellow]

Agree about the UFOs, the stuff designed by the Horten brothers is the first that comes to mind...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horten_Ho_229

Even today seeing something like that flying in the air would be unnerving, so god knows what people must have thought in the 40s if they saw one of these flying around. Its the areas like this where the real fantasies/myths/exaggerations about Nazi technology emerge.

[stormymonday_2011]

It was quite a good post until the last part

As the war drew to close I am fairly sure a lot of the German forces were fighting without air cover, and Hitler and co had become total lunatics after 1942. The reason Germany lost the war was basically because of him.

The technological 'myth' is both exaggerated and also fact (in some areas). Nazi Germany DID have technology that was beyond any of the other forces.

They had the first ever ballistic missile (which ended up being the first man-made object in space), they had the first ever homing missile, they had the first ever jet engine aircraft, they even had a 'stealth' fighter ffs. Probably, if Hitler hadn't become such a lunatic and banned research on nuclear weapons because it was run by jewish scientists, they might have even invented the Atom bomb first, a lot of the scientists working in area emigrated to America.

You only have to read about Werner von Braun to see how the entire concept of Nazi Germany and the culture towards technology can become wildly fantasized about. The super weapons concept also is a bit exaggerated due to propaganda from the lunatics because everyone in the Germany military knew the war was over by 1943.

I am not sure how mentioning allied firebombing of cities helps your argument. About 30-40k people were killed on the first night the bombs were dropped on Japan. That's also what the Allies were killing in one night when they decided to firebomb a German city.

I agree that German engineers and scientists were ground breaking

The Nazis had the first ballistic missile, the first cruise missile, the first effective automatic assault rifle, the first functioning jet fighter etc

It does not change the fact they still lost the war comprehensively. No amount of post event arguments about what might have occurred if this or that happened differently alter that situation (nb - one might as well speculate what would have occurred if the Nazis had obtained a death ray from the planet Thaarg or London had been hit by a large meteorite during the Blitz). The Germans for all their technical genius could not counter the reality that they were simply outnumbered and outproduced military where it counted. The fact they resisted tenaciously for so long was as much down to the quality of their fighting troops and especially the reamrkable resourcefulness of their NCOs as it was to the weapons they possessed.

As for mass area bombing the only essential difference between the allies and Nazi Germany was not tactics but the weight of bombs dropped. People who like to beat up the western allies for the number of civilian casualties they inflicted on Gemany compared to say those suffered by Britain tend to conveniently forget all the non combatants killed by the Luftwaffe in Holland, France, Poland and in particular Russia. Again the final imbalance was simply down to the Reich losing the material war

[Big Orange]

The victors of WWII seemed to get defeated by their own arrogance and hubris comparable to the Nazis' in the following decades anyway (with bigger economies, demographics, and territory delaying their slow defeats). The Soviets have long gone, replaced by a pretentious Putin, Britain and France are crashing hard, and the American domination is proving unsustainable.

[happy_renting]

The victors of WWII seemed to get defeated by their own arrogance and hubris comparable to the Nazis' in the following decades anyway (with bigger economies, demographics, and territory delaying their slow defeats). The Soviets have long gone, replaced by a pretentious Putin, Britain and France are crashing hard, and the American domination is proving unsustainable.

Perhaps Andorra's Time has Finally Come.

[interestrateripoff]

In Albert Speer's book he documents some of the technology available later in the war

From the way he writes I think that it was possible for German to successfully defend its airspace throughout 1944, if it wasnøt for the lunatics in charge. I think he might even state that at one point but I haven't read it. This is assuming its not all ********.

In fact in 1944, despite being bombed to oblivion for much of it they still managed almost double the production of any year previously so I think there is some truth in it.

He writes that the prisoners used to produce the homing missile would urinate in the electronics and cause them to malfunction, and he claims some impressive statistics of allied planes shot down on the few flights of the 3x1000 bomber (I think its the Nazi 'stealth' bomber) that could fly higher, faster and for longer.

I think Galbraith states the same that German production throughout the war increased and peaked just towards the end of 1944 when naturally the invading forces would compromised production.

One staggering fact is that prior to WWII the Germans had around 1.5m servants at the end of the war this figure was 1.3m ish. All that labour wasted on pouring drinks etc.... and not building equipment.

The UK economy was very quick to switch to war production.

[Big Orange]

The recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq failed because, despite the cushion of superior technology and firepower in general, the hubristic Pentagon and MoD were (and still not) not really on a real war footing and working with relatively low manpower (with nation building and various other vague, shifting objectives becoming an exercise of building a tower to the Moon).

[Riedquat]

The recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq failed because, despite the cushion of superior technology and firepower in general, the hubristic Pentagon and MoD were (and still not) not really on a real war footing and working with relatively low manpower (with nation building and various other vague, shifting objectives becoming an exercise of building a tower to the Moon).

The impression I've got is that you need manpower to hold and technology to attack. Whilst individual low tech attacks against high tech armies have been seen to work from a purely military perspective they can't achieve that much (that's not the same as "no success" but do they really put a significant dent in military capability?)

[Big Orange]

The impression I've got is that you need manpower to hold and technology to attack. Whilst individual low tech attacks against high tech armies have been seen to work from a purely military perspective they can't achieve that much (that's not the same as "no success" but do they really put a significant dent in military capability?)

Yes, I'd say the Taliban and ISIS are seriously overblown. While the MoD bit off more than it could chew to this day, will not properly mobilised and mismanaged the supply of certain vital hardware initially, I think the image of the badly equipped squaddie is a somewhat overblown meme like the lions led by donkeys and Nazi super weapons.

The British seem to get written off too easily, like Russians (when many contemporary military powers went through the same snarls in Afghanistan alongside them) and Afghanistan has always been a black hole since the Mongolian invasions (like Iraq).

[Nuggets Mahoney]

The impression I've got is that you need manpower to hold and technology to attack. Whilst individual low tech attacks against high tech armies have been seen to work from a purely military perspective they can't achieve that much (that's not the same as "no success" but do they really put a significant dent in military capability?)

The Russians tried pacifying Afghanistan in the 1980s, and if I read the mainstream depictions of the Ruskies correctly they were beholden to none of the namby pamby limp-wristed restrictions which military commanders who've f**ked up so frequently blame for failure.

Rule #1 for statist organisations, military or otherwise, when they f**k up they invariably complain they didn't have enough resources and that they weren't allowed to do things the way they wanted to.

There's only one consistantly proven way to permanently pacify an indigenous, martial population that doesn't want you to be there, or to live the way you want them to live. The Romans would give populations one chance before they implemented that solution. The Mongols didn't bother with that and went straight to the genocide.

And I could stick this comment in two or three other threads, but this meme about to only way to deal with ISIS is 'boots on the ground' but the political will is lacking flies against the fact that US/UK soldiers had their boots most firmly on the ground in that region only recently, incurred something like 2-3 trillion dollars in expense and still left the place a chaotic shambles in waiting.

'Boots on the ground' aren't the certain solution they're being pitched as and, politics aside, there's a very strong possibility that senior figures in the military don't fancy another helping of demoralising quagmire.

[Riedquat]

"Boots on the ground" is not all that's needed but it's simply not possible at all without them. They had people there, did they have enough to have them everywhere? That's still no guarentee of success but not having enough everywhere is a guarentee of failure.

[Big Orange]

Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq are far, far too broken and relatively crude fundamentally on a cultural, social, and economic level to expect anything but squabbling fiefdoms, bandits, and tribal hatred (the local hard men the West remove directly or indirectly or unintentionally proving to be the duct tape).

[Riedquat]

And the only way you're going to change that is to forcibly integrate into every aspect of society, which needs lots of people, and keep it up until you're rid of the generations that have grown up before then (I'm not saying that anyone should do that, just that that's the only way it could be done with an army).

[StuG III]

Sorry, been away for a bit....

I find it interesting that after all these years and numerous books on World War 2 that people are only now starting to question some of the myths about the German military. The fact that writer such as Max Hastings are so dismissive of British, Commonwealth and US war efforts in 1944 has long been a source of irritation to me particularly as it is quite obvious that in a mere 6 months after D Day they managed to get all the way from the beaches of Normandy to the German border something that no First World War 1 army managed to do. Of course, this has caused a some rather irrational reactions from people who can really only be described as post war Nazi sympathisers who cant bear the thought that German tanks and their beloved Waffen SS might have been a bit crap on more than the odd occasion.

I like your post but remember that in WWI, the war in the east was a war of movement. Armies advanced and retreated over vast distances. Didnt reduce the casualty rate though. All I'm trying to say is we should be careful of attributing some intrinsic value to movement in warfare. Movement is only of use when ground of strategic value can be conquered and held. The German spring offensive in 1918 is lauded as some kind of a break-through in tactics, but in truth, it was simply the application of overwhelming numbers against weakly defended ground of little value.

As the war drew to close I am fairly sure a lot of the German forces were fighting without air cover, and Hitler and co had become total lunatics after 1942. The reason Germany lost the war was basically because of him.

Sorry, but the "we lost because of Hitler" thing is a myth put out by the Nazi generals after the war to absolve themselves of blame. Same with the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth where the generals tried to pin all the atrocities on the SS, while the ordinary landser was just a normal bloke doing his duty for his country.

In truth the generals were as much at fault as Hitler for their poor intelligence and strategy, and the ordinary lander took to mass-murder with enthusiasm.

[longtomsilver]

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