Which army was the most qualitatively superior between the Allies and Nazi Germany?

Deleted member 1487

CAS, even today, has fairly long response time and before advent of precision munitions is not as precise as indirect fire in providing support. A well drilled mortar or artillery unit can be put to firing position in matter of minutes after command and deliver, even without charts and WW II technology, accurate fires within ballistic qualities of shells in minutes. Moreover, with leaping batteries etc. (ie. one battery out of battalion in position, two others on march etc.) procedures indirect fires are always on call.

CAS is not a replacement of indirect fires. It's great for some purposes and but it was not and probably even not even now is a perfect replacement for indirect fires.
IOTL from 1939-42 it was a larger factor in fire support than artillery, which had a hard time keeping up with the advance. That's not to say tube artillery didn't play A role prior to mounting it on old tank chassis, but it was not supporting the cutting edge of the advance unless it bogged down, because it largely lagged to the rear, as it couldn't set up fast enough and generally air support was trying to fly on standbye or ahead of spearheads to blast opposition on demand or in anticipation of demand. As fire support procedures improved, as did mobility of artillery, then it could do much more in support of mobile units on the attack than it had previous been able to do. Tanks generally were relying on maneuver and their own direct fire to attack surprised defenders or targets of opportunity.

That's because German and especially Soviet use of artillery was quite primitive and not flexible at all.
Actually German artillery was just as flexible as the US methodology, the problem was the lack of ammo, motor transport/fuel, supply issues, etc. later in the war when they went up against US and British artillery in France and Italy. They consistently were more flexible than the Soviet model, but couldn't compete with the number of tubes and ammo, nor later on the supply ability to move up ammo. In their defense a primary reason for Soviet mass casualties was German artillery, mortars, and infantry guns. But that is attritional stuff that doesn't win the war.
 
I would disagree with the Japanese in terms of amphibious warfare. Their successes in the early part of the Pacific War were mostly due to most of their landings being made against minimal resistance. The one instance where they faced a relatively strong defense was Wake, where an incomplete defense infrastructure and a relatively small garrison defeated the first attempt and did very well against a second assault until sheer numbers for the Japanese and isolation did in the defenders. Their doctrines for naval gunfire support and air support were no way as developed as USN/USMC doctrine in 1941, and logistic support plans were, as with almost all Japanese efforts, not good.

As far as the UK and amphibious warfare, while the LST was a derivative of a UK design, the reality is that during the 1930s the UK had a very small effort in the development of amphibious doctrine and equipment. Not none but very small and very underfunded. During the war the first UK amphibious assault was TORCH (the landings in Norway were transports/administrative landings not assaults). The grid showing the UK as a leader in this field early on in the war is really not supportable.

As far as the US goes, the doctrine for amphibious warfare was created primarily during the 1930s led by the USMC with participation of the USN. In 1938/39 the US Army began training in this area, initially using USMC instructors and taking the USMC/USN manual as the basis for its manual - mostly a direct copy with translation in to Army terms, with some additions and modifications.

There is copious documentation for this, not only published works but archival original documents (references available including where to fins the documents in the archives).
 
No, it tended to be extraordinarily effective. At it's peak, it was able to break German defenses pretty much by itself. The biggest problem was there tended to be quite a difference in the quality of the non-divisional and divisional artillery, in that the former received all the key gizmos and personnel for flexible fires while the latter didn't.

I did not meant to belittle the achievements of Soviet artillery, but rather the fact, that it was not qualitatively effectively due to large wastage of resources due to poor location ability and tendency to rather spend shells rather to norm than group them for maximum effectiveness. Also, the lack of flexibility on all levels was true. When making an attack against reconnoitred defense position the Soviet artillery was an unstoppable beast working in high, although not in perfect, efficiency.

IOTL from 1939-42 it was a larger factor in fire support than artillery, which had a hard time keeping up with the advance. That's not to say tube artillery didn't play A role prior to mounting it on old tank chassis, but it was not supporting the cutting edge of the advance unless it bogged down, because it largely lagged to the rear, as it couldn't set up fast enough and generally air support was trying to fly on standbye or ahead of spearheads to blast opposition on demand or in anticipation of demand. As fire support procedures improved, as did mobility of artillery, then it could do much more in support of mobile units on the attack than it had previous been able to do. Tanks generally were relying on maneuver and their own direct fire to attack surprised defenders or targets of opportunity.

Partially we're comparing apples and oranges, I think While well trained CAS units of WW II, such as Stuka units in 1940, were immensely powerful they had to be briefed and prepared if used en masse and could be used only against clearly distinguishable geographic targets, such as was the case in crossing the Meuse. Artillery was more of a precision instrument which could be deployed faster, if doctrine was developed enough. But of course bringing the amount of artillery power against clear target such as in case of crossing the Meuse in time would have been impossible.

Actually German artillery was just as flexible as the US methodology, the problem was the lack of ammo, motor transport/fuel, supply issues, etc. later in the war when they went up against US and British artillery in France and Italy. They consistently were more flexible than the Soviet model, but couldn't compete with the number of tubes and ammo, nor later on the supply ability to move up ammo. In their defense a primary reason for Soviet mass casualties was German artillery, mortars, and infantry guns. But that is attritional stuff that doesn't win the war.

Compared to Soviet yes, but to US, I doubt. In France since Napoleon and in Russia since god knows when the artillery has been said to be god of the battlefield.In German tradition it was infantry and later armor. Germany did not achieve the tactical flexibility of Western or Finnish armies in practice. Historically, for example from Finnish viewpoint Finnish officers had huge praise of various German military skills, such as armor and artillery use outside Finnish special circumstance, air force, intelligence etc. the artillery was constantly evaluated as bad and no doctrine was imported, while on numerous other arms, such as armor, infantry etc. various procedures were.

(When building Finnish army in 1920's and 1930's due to personalities Finland got it's infantry tradition from Germany and artillery traditions from Russia. It was a good occurrence, other way around it would have been a disaster.)
 
I don't know if this counts, but one thing the US did in WWII way better than any other power was logistics. Nobody was able to move men and material to the places that they needed to go and have them arrive at a timely manner than the US.
 
I would disagree with the Japanese in terms of amphibious warfare. Their successes in the early part of the Pacific War were mostly due to most of their landings being made against minimal resistance. The one instance where they faced a relatively strong defense was Wake, where an incomplete defense infrastructure and a relatively small garrison defeated the first attempt and did very well against a second assault until sheer numbers for the Japanese and isolation did in the defenders. Their doctrines for naval gunfire support and air support were no way as developed as USN/USMC doctrine in 1941, and logistic support plans were, as with almost all Japanese efforts, not good.

Landings are not just opposed landings. IJN had specialized landing craft, tanks etc. which would signify a rather high efficiency. The first opposed USMC landing on Tarawa wasn't that stellar either if you compare the correlation of forces, one has to remember.
 
One area I haven't seen discussed is which army had the superior medical system - that is, which army was able to most effectively reduce the number of irreplaceable losses. Put another way, in which army did the average combat soldier have the best chance of surviving a battlefield wound or illness?

I suspect it would be either the US or UK, but I don't know. To me, this metric would be at least as important as anything else discussed.
 
One area I haven't seen discussed is which army had the superior medical system - that is, which army was able to most effectively reduce the number of irreplaceable losses. Put another way, in which army did the average combat soldier have the best chance of surviving a battlefield wound or illness?

I suspect it would be either the US or UK, but I don't know. To me, this metric would be at least as important as anything else discussed.

I would guess that the US with best logistical resources would be the winner here. AFAIK too, US treatment of shirkers was different from other combatants where they were treated as traitors or lazy, am I wrong that the US appproach was more treatment-orientated thus bringing the deserters back to the front line.
 
I actually don't think the WW2 era US Army dealt with psychological casualties very well. True, there were very few executions for cowardice, but I don't know that this was an area of strength for us at that time.
 
I actually don't think the WW2 era US Army dealt with psychological casualties very well. True, there were very few executions for cowardice, but I don't know that this was an area of strength for us at that time.

But compared to many other countries where the basic treatment was execution at worst or confinement to mental institution at best I have the picture that US was better than that. As for rest of medical casualties, US resources were very good, medical personnel well trained and lines of communication to safe treatment were good.
 
Very true.

It seems to me that the ability to evacuate battlefield casualties not only retains manpower, but more importantly, experience. If this was indeed a US advantage, then I think this is at least as significant as battlefield tactics.
 

Deleted member 1487

No, it tended to be extraordinarily effective. At it's peak, it was able to break German defenses pretty much by itself. The biggest problem was there tended to be quite a difference in the quality of the non-divisional and divisional artillery, in that the former received all the key gizmos and personnel for flexible fires while the latter didn't.
At it's peak the German army was pretty much broken and unable to counter battery fire due to the lack of ammo as a result of the strategic air campaign. By then the Soviets had such a preponderance of tubes relative to their enemy that they could build up and bang away at will in a way they'd never risk pre-1944.

No, the actual maneuver part as well.
Even leaving aside that direct fire artillery is still artillery, the motorized guns were actually essential in providing indirect artillery fire to the panzers. Air power could not completely replace them, as it was much more limited in a number of ways (staying power, timeliness, more weather-dependent, etc).
That's the problem right there, difference in terms. I'm not counting direct fire weapons as part of artillery, meaning indirect fire artillery. If we count direct fire support weapons, then aren't tank guns artillery? They are cannons and even AT guns can and were used for direct fire support.
Indirect fire support from towed guns generally did not participate in the major mobile advances; having read enough accounts of the 'classic' campaigns of 1939-42 towed artillery didn't really weigh in except during breakthrough fighting, in defensive fighting, and in fighting that had bogged down long enough for artillery to deploy and range in. During rapid advances it was left up to the arms at the cutting edge to do their job with perhaps some SP infantry guns helping, of which there were not many. Things change in 1943 with the introduction of the SP indirect artillery, which was a major change in the ability of panzer divisions to use their artillery offensively and rapidly. Air units couldn't really replace artillery, but they did as best they could in combination with direct fire tank cannons, which was usually enough to get the job done, with exceptions of course.

If nothing else, suppression of enemy artillery. In the aforementioned "tanks and infantry only vs artillery and infantry only" match-up I mentioned, if the former tried to thrust at the latter with their armor, then the latter would first pin the former's supporting forces, then hack the unsupported armor apart with infantry armed with AT weapons while it sat impotently on whatever ground it had taken waiting for fuel and ammunition supply that would never arrive because it was being interdicted by yet more artillery fire. Tanks need to be concentrated to work, but artillery can fight dispersed and concentrate fire using their range. And while tanks must still be cautious around infantry, if there's no artillery to worry own then artillery can operate largely unmolested. This isn't idle speculation either: there have been repeated military exercises where one side was denied it's use of artillery and the other it's use of armor. What happened was that the side with artillery formed up their batteries with small groups of infantry and had them run around the battlefield totally wrecking shit until the exercise refs would finally consent to lift the restriction on the other sides arty.
Depends on the situation and if artillery has had time to deploy. Usually for mobile units in WW2 warfare prior to the advent of SP artillery air support did the work of suppressing enemy artillery. It was unusual for motorized artillery to be in a situation during the maneuver phase of an operation to be able to have the time to deploy and range in against enemy artillery on the offensive. What you describe above is a textbook idea of how combined arms is supposed to function, but prior to SP artillery being available artillery getting into action to support and offensive move by tank or motorized infantry during maneuver was relatively rare and relied more on air support, which could more frequently get into action more quickly. In 1943 on when artillery was able to keep up thanks to self propulsion, then what you describe above was much more common in reality.
 

Deleted member 1487

I don't know if this counts, but one thing the US did in WWII way better than any other power was logistics. Nobody was able to move men and material to the places that they needed to go and have them arrive at a timely manner than the US.
How many countries had US industrial resources and only 100 divisions? If the USSR and Germany had only 100 US sized divisions they could have supported their army units in the field just as well within the European theater.

Partially we're comparing apples and oranges, I think While well trained CAS units of WW II, such as Stuka units in 1940, were immensely powerful they had to be briefed and prepared if used en masse and could be used only against clearly distinguishable geographic targets, such as was the case in crossing the Meuse. Artillery was more of a precision instrument which could be deployed faster, if doctrine was developed enough. But of course bringing the amount of artillery power against clear target such as in case of crossing the Meuse in time would have been impossible.
It seems you're not really understanding how Luftwaffe CAS worked; generally it was not used against previously known targets, it hit targets of opportunity as they appeared as picked out by airborne or ground forward observers. The Meuse as a pre-planned strike target was an exception for CAS actually.
http://www.simhq.com/_air9/air_276c.html
http://www.simhq.com/_air9/air_276d.html


Compared to Soviet yes, but to US, I doubt. In France since Napoleon and in Russia since god knows when the artillery has been said to be god of the battlefield.In German tradition it was infantry and later armor. Germany did not achieve the tactical flexibility of Western or Finnish armies in practice. Historically, for example from Finnish viewpoint Finnish officers had huge praise of various German military skills, such as armor and artillery use outside Finnish special circumstance, air force, intelligence etc. the artillery was constantly evaluated as bad and no doctrine was imported, while on numerous other arms, such as armor, infantry etc. various procedures were.

(When building Finnish army in 1920's and 1930's due to personalities Finland got it's infantry tradition from Germany and artillery traditions from Russia. It was a good occurrence, other way around it would have been a disaster.)
I don't think you really understand WW2 if you think the Germans were behind the West and Finns in terms of tactical flexibility. Finnish experience with German units was extremely limited and to sorts of units that were fighting in their sector were mostly light infantry without a strong artillery arm or focus on such. It should be noted too that the Soviets basically copied German WW1 artillery doctrine and elaborated on it, cribbing Bruchmüller's artillery concepts from his books that were published post-war.
 
But compared to many other countries where the basic treatment was execution at worst or confinement to mental institution at best I have the picture that US was better than that. As for rest of medical casualties, US resources were very good, medical personnel well trained and lines of communication to safe treatment were good.

I know that our experience in WWII is what taught us that the best treatment for "shell shock" was a couple of days of rest and then returning the soldier to his unit (and thus his buddies), but I don't know how well it was implemented at the time.

I remember hearing of a comment- almost certainly apocryphal- made by a German commander regarding who was hardest to fight against among the Western Allies. It ended with "But how can you fight the damned Americans when even they don't know what they are going to do?" If true, that would seem to imply a degree of flexibility on the Americans' part. But I can't find it anywhere, now, so it's probably just yet another legend.
 
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Deleted member 1487

I remember hearing of a comment- almost certainly apocryphal- made by a German commander regarding who was hardest to fight against among the Western Allies. It ended with "But how can you fight the damned Americans when even they don't know what they are going to do?" If true, that would seem to imply a degree of flexibility on the Americans' part. But I can't find it anywhere, now, so it's probably just yet another legend.
American 'historians' tend to lie a LOT about what the Germans said about them. For example Patton was the most feared general, Marines were called "Teufelhunde", the Germans called the P-38 the "fork tailed devil", etc.
 
Germans were qualitatively the best, if you put a fully equipped German division be it infantry, panzer or panzer grenadier against any of it's contemporaries in an equal battle, the Germans would win.
And then the US division gets on its radios and calls in air attacks. An army is not a division, its the sum of the whole.
 
And then the US division gets on its radios and calls in air attacks. An army is not a division, its the sum of the whole.

So the Germans can call in the Luftwaffe and shoot down the American fighters. The Americans depended on their quantitative and strategic advantages.
 
So the Germans can call in the Luftwaffe and shoot down the American fighters. The Americans depended on their quantitative and strategic advantages.

The Americans actually have an Air Force that can respond. And of course quantity has a quality all its own.

You can't disregard numbers because the militaries are built to fight in those manners. If you remove the massive Allied Airpower advantage then you have to strip the Germans of something equally massive, like say their tanks.
 
They had the small-unit infantry tactics that allowed them to thrive a couple of years later.


I wasn't quite sure, but I figured having Tommy Guns would help a lot vs bolt-action rifles, so, rather than leave that space blank...

Don't think the miltary bought any Tommy guns until 1939. In any case, there's a lot more to urban warfare than SMGs, which the Germans had good numbers of. Prior to Stalingrad, all the big urban battles were in China. Shanghai has been described as Stalingrad of the east. There was the three battles for Changsha, Vasily Chuikov himself was an advisor at the Battle of Wuhan, no doubt invaluable experience for when he commanded Soviet forces in Stalingrad.

So I would say in the late 30, US had the most experience in the jungle and Japan was far more experienced than any Western army in urban warfare.
 
The Americans actually have an Air Force that can respond. And of course quantity has a quality all its own.

You can't disregard numbers because the militaries are built to fight in those manners. If you remove the massive Allied Airpower advantage then you have to strip the Germans of something equally massive, like say their tanks.

We're discussing the quality of each military, which means we are using equal numbers and resources to ascertain who was individually superior. This thread is talking about the army, not the airforce. You keep trying to change the circumstances of the comparison because we both know that in an equal fair fight, the Americans lose every time.
 
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