This reminds me of this historian's theory that WWII generals were unusually successful because of the dynamic way they were assigned and potentially reassigned within weeks: (US Berkeley Events 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxZWxxZ2JGE
Hitler did start to replace/subvert his highest ranking military staff, and it's a big reason why he lost the war. Early on he did not micromanage the various theaters, which is partly why the Wermacht did so well early on. As the war went on, several of Hitler's best commanders were removed for railing against his out of touch orders.
Perhaps the best example of a promotion which detracted from the war effort was putting Hermann Goring in charge of the Luftwaffe.
You are right though that at the lower levels, the Wermacht could think flexibly.
> Germany sent their best generals to the east and they knew they had no hope but to delay the inevitable, and no alternative but to listen to Hitler. They continued to fight because to deny Hitler's madness often meant less than favorable outcomes for these commanders
That's not entirely true, though. Modern WW2 historiography acknowledges that this vision of WW2, that "Hitler was mad and his generals were afraid to contradict him", is mostly the version the surviving German generals gave in their self-serving memories, as a way to save face and paint themselves as more useful to the West during the Cold War.
More recent assessments contradict this version and show many German generals were enthusiastic about war with the Soviet Union, they fully expected to win, and in many cases goaded Hitler into making fatal mistakes he himself wasn't as sure about (an example: Operation Citadel, the battle of Kursk). The ones who knew the enterprise was doomed? The logistics guys, who did the calculations and predicted when the Wehrmacht would overextend itself and run out of supplies -- not the generals!
Professor Jonathan House, an American military historian specializing on WW2's Eastern Front, has a whole lecture about this, available on YouTube.
At the beginning of the war, American flag officers were humiliated by their much more experienced and skillful Wehrmacht counterparts. Lt. Gen Lloyd Fredendall and other fools just had to go or the war would end before it started. It was a natural evolution.
The only subpar American general who thrived in WWII was Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He came out of every mess he created with a hero's reputation. He could fix everything with a bombastic speech and infinite self-confidence.
And, counterintuitively, lack of coordination. Blitzkrieg units were uniquely autonomous and trusted to meet higher level objectives how they saw fit rather than following a recipe book written weeks before and miles away from the action.
As a german history student, I think this is the pretty commonly held view. I think the best German example was Ludendorff. Early in the war, as a fairly junior officer, he bluffed the citadel at Liege into surrendering all by his lonesome. It set him up for the eastern command with Hindenberg and then later as the proto-Hitlerian dictator of Germany at the end of World War I.
That said - the word on initiative and discipline is right. Prussian military tradition gave German officers very wide latitude to make their own decisions, until it interfered with the political state or their superiors commands.
That said, even great officers can't win against overwhelming odds and opponents with dramatic material superiority.
>WWII generals, who weren't as obsessed with Cannae as Schlieffen, but were well aware the "Schlieffen Plan" was a failure, took the same route with better mobility and logistics and succeeded.
They pulled a switcheroo on the allies in WWII and attacked through the Ardennes. The French & English forces rushing to counter Schlieffen II instead found themselves cut off in Belgium.
It did not worked. And big names were not just following orders anyway. But it was not just covardly way out. The prewar German culture really thought that way. It was heavily militarized state and following orders was valued. In that culture, if you followed orders you should be fine and not following then was something very bad.
(German intelligence found it literally incredible that Patton was relieved for slapping a couple of GIs for "malingering.")
The Germans learned mechanized warfare from an English book, the Americans learned stealth from a Russian paper, and the Stuka was copied from an American airplane.
The USA was blessed with some of the greatest military leaders of all time in WW2, natural-born killer OG's. The only incompetents I know of were Lieutenant General Mark Clark in Italy who killed over 10,000 GIs with 3 bungled amphibious landings, and the Mark 14 torpedo mgmt. (a decade of refusal to test.)
It also helps if you've got superior firepower and human resources compared to your adversaries, because otherwise Operation Barbarossa was quite the violent plan executed at just the right time (there are many reports saying that the Soviets were also preparing to attack first) but which failed miserably in the end. Nobody quotes generals Model or Guderian, who were just as competent if not more compared to Patton. Survivor bias at its best.
If Hitler had of been content to allow his generals to control the plans for the war, the outcome would likely have been drastically different. I believe one of the reasons he did not was because he saw that as one of the failures of WWI on the side of the Germans. Kaiser Wilhelm in WWI allowed his military to lead and Hitler did not want to sit on the sidelines as the Kaiser had once the war started.
Germany had some of the most talented military leadership of the time[1][2][3] and were thinking on the bleeding edge of military theory/doctrine. It was basically von Manstein's plan (that Hitler took credit for) that pushed through the Ardennes and into France. However, following the campaign in France, Hitler assumed he knew what he was doing and generally ignored the advice and plans of his generals.
Speaking of Germany's invasion of Russia, Germany would have been in a much better position to defend against the USSR if Hitler had not been pulling the strings. Paulus[4] could have broken out at Stalingrad and avoided encirclement if a competent leader (instead of Hitler) had been pulling the strings.
Hitler also stonewalled many of the bleeding edge technology programs of Germany at the time because he thought he knew better than his military. One example was the Me-262 jet fighter[5]. It was scheduled for service in 1943, but was delayed until 1944, because Hitler felt it would be better suited as a fighter-bomber. Thankfully, Hitler was incredibly vain as well as insane and thought too much of his military leadership skills.
We had many great military leaders on the side of the Allies (Patton, Bradley, Zhukov, etc) as well as overall manpower (and generally competent leadership[6] that delegated control), but the incompetence of Hitler's leadership allowed us to turn the war back to our favor after initial German Victories. In many ways, Stalin was also very much like Hitler, except much more paranoid[7] (and proved it by killing his shrink that told him he was paranoid)--a megalomaniac despot that mass murdered his people (though not as logically and coldly calculated as Germany) and thought more of his abilities than he should have. However, Stalin was smart/sane enough to know when he should let his generals do their jobs.
TL;DR: "Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics." - General Bradley.
Quote from article: Overall, by 1944 the Axis could deploy only a small fraction of their potential military capacity into combat—it was being destroyed in a multi-layered campaign long before it could be used against their enemies. This was the true battlefield of WWII, a massive air-sea super battlefield that stretched for thousands of miles not only of traditional front but of depth and height
> A curious point developed. German morale in the higher grades was worse than in the lower. ...
This unusual situation arose from the fact that the National Socialist propaganda machinery was still working on the masses of the troops. The political officers still made speeches. The troops were given pep talks, ...
In contrast with common troops, the officers had the professional skill to understand the advantages possessed by the Allied armies. The officers knew enough about global and continental strategy, about the immediate strategy of the Western front, about economic factors and so on, to see that the situation was genuinely bad. Furthermore, the officer class had been less indoctrinated in the first place...
A common Landser, tough and ready in a whole division full of well fed, well armed men, could not be expected to undergo despair because freight-car loadings hundreds of miles away had dropped to zero. He might see that the Luftwaffe was less in evidence; he might grumble about mail, or about having to use horse transport, but as long as he could see that his own unit was getting on all right, it was hard to persuade him that defeat was around the corner. In World War I, the German troops at the time of surrender were much better off than most of them thought they were; in World War II, they thought they were better off than they actually were. The Germans may not have been in perfect shape, but they were incomparably better off than the starving scarecrows with whom Generalissimo Chiang was trying to hold back the Japanese in West Hunan or the Americans who had fought despair, fever and Japanese—all three at once—on Bataan.
I have read that strategic bombing was ineffective, done mainly for propaganda purposes. Having seen the OR tools that came out of that war, or were published a decade later, I would not be surprised to learn that they had in fact been doing (at least rudimentary) min-cut analyses for target selection, and that alleged ineffectiveness (of the mathematics or of the kilotons) is itself propaganda.
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