WI: WWII Germans more willing to use suicidal tactics

When the Kwantung Army officially surrendered on August 20th, the Soviets had already occupied and forced the surrender of most the Kwantung Army.

Huh, no. The order of surrender had been issued on August 16th. And guess what, the official surrender is dated August 20th because many Japanese units either did not receive the order or ignored it and continued fighting. And no, the Soviets had not "forced the surrender" of most of the Army; they had simply bypassed, in many instances, strongholds that had refused to surrender. That made those pockets ineffective and doomed, but not "surrendered".


The conduct of many individual American soldiers was not exactly fringe knowledge - it was criticized by FDR himself.

Yeah. This is not relevant, since I never claimed that it was "fringe knowledge".
 
Huh, no. The order of surrender had been issued on August 16th. And guess what, the official surrender is dated August 20th because many Japanese units either did not receive the order or ignored it and continued fighting. And no, the Soviets had not "forced the surrender" of most of the Army; they had simply bypassed, in many instances, strongholds that had refused to surrender. That made those pockets ineffective and doomed, but not "surrendered". ...

Indeed, The Red Army combat operations started very late on the 8th August & the main attacks came later early morning of the 9th. The actual decision for surrender came after midnight 10th August, after a series of cabinet meetings starting the previous day. The emperors intervention brought the debate to a end and the news of the decision began spreading after the Cabinet meeting ended around 02:00 am. Cabinet members were issuing preparatory instructions and had their staffs working on details during the 10th. Although the decision was to remain officially secret rumors were spreading through the upper ranks across Japans empire and the Kwantung Army before the end of the 10th.

The disintegration of the Kwantung Army from the 9th August had to do with the complete surprise on its command. Like the Germans in Normandy 14 months earlier many senior commanders were at or enroute to a conference and war-game. A second severe problem was the weak communications system from top to bottom within the region. The Red Army was well aware of both factors and took advantage using commandos and electronic attacks to further weaken communications. Most units were 'in their barracks' when the attack started with the actual defenses undermanned. Communications breakdowns caused slow reaction & some large units were caught on the road deploying rather than in their battle positions. Local commanders lacking any useful information or orders circled the wagons, ordering their units into whatever improvised local defense position that was at hand. Hence the large encircled garrisons of key cities. In contrast the Island battles had little surprise and the defenders were mentally prepared when the assaults came. One campaign that was closer to the Manchurian was on Luzon. The Japanese army there had a large region to defend and tried to fight a battle of maneuver. lacking good intelligence and faced with a above average opponent the defense was outmaneuvered on several occasions and the local units retreated vs fighting to the last man in place. When the campaign ended inAugust 1945 the bulk of the defenders were encircled in a couple large defendable enclaves.
 
The Germans realized that by and large suicide tactics were by and large wasteful. If a pilot is going to get to can't miss distance to ram an enemy bomber it was more productive to just have them empty their guns into a bomber at point blank, go back to base and do it again. Essentially nearly suicidal tactics were far more effective than actual suicide attacks. As for massing aircraft to conduct a large scale strike the record of the one suicide unit the Germans did form, the Leonidas Squadron, does not inspire any optimism about their chances against the Allies on D-Day.
 
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So, what if earlier in the war, the Germans decided to adopt the Japanese concept of death before dishonour and encouraged their soldiers, sailors and airmen to participate in suicidal tactics (human wave attacks by the Wehrmacht, kamikaze attacks by the Luftwaffe, manned torpedoes by the Kriegsmarine, etc)? What impact would this have on the war?

I've done a few comparisons between the assaults on OMAHA Beach and Betio Island, or Tarawa as its mistakenly referred to. The Japanese look better in terms of losses inflicted on the assault forces, but they suffered some 5,000 dead vs some 1100 killed, wounded and captured among the defenders of OMAHA Beach. Of course the Germans had and took the option to retreat. In the case of the Germans it took the assault companies about two hours to infiltrate to the top of the bluffs. by 08:30 the German regimental commander reported his defense was failing & the enemy would have the area secured in a few hours. On Betio it took two and a half days to break the defense, and another to mop up organized resistance. On OMAHA the last resistance nests were secured in the early afternoon. Conversely at sea the Japanese efforts were not better than the Germans in Normandy. In both cases surface naval forces were notable by their absence. Some torpedo boats made some barely noticed attacks on the Allied flotillas off Normandy. Near Betio a Japanese submarine torpedoed the Liscombe Bay causing 600+ dead. The German air attacks in daylight only got a few dozen pilots killed. The later night attacks killed some Allied soldiers & thats about it. The key problem being the Germans could not get close. They air battle being started at a ratio of 15-1 & reaching a ratio of only 8-1 four to five weeks later in July. Losses in daylight were at massacre levels & at night were still at heavy losses. @ Betio the Japanese managed one night bomber raid which actually hit the correct island, and hit both Japanese and US solders in equal measure.

Just these simple comparisons & some scratch paper calculations suggest a fanatical defense did not gain much in the larger picture. Most of the US losses at Betio were inflicted during the first 30 hours. the Japanese could have surrendered en mass on the second evening & the battle would have looked similar. On OMAHA Beach the Germans could have posted SS fanatics and not retreated at all. In the end it would just mean that Landser Seveloh would have died at his MG after running out of ammo, instead of as he said: "Ran like a rabbit".
 
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These guys didn't have a high survival rate:
images
Germany: Yo Italy we have our own manned torpedos now.

Italy: *blinks in disbelief* OH MY GOD YOU'RE DOING EVERYTHING WRONG!
 
Again:A) The planes were not there in time to matter; the D-Day deceptions had thrown off the Germans, and most of the German air power operational strength was either tossed against the Soviets, or defending the Vaterland. Hell, nobody even believed June 6th would be an invasion because it had horrible weather the week prior and was expected to continue. While that would have crippled Allied air, it would have also been dangerous to German planes too. The Allies literally had boats in the water waiting for the break; the moment it happened, they rushed in like mad.

It's not important to attack the first wave, but the resupply effort coming afterwards with LST's and freighters being the prime target. LCT's downwards are too small targets anyway.

B) Those 2000 pilots would be better used against soviet forces (numbering millions strong with tens of thousands of tank and artillery, not to mention their own rapidly growing and improving air power) and the continuing bombardments of the RAF and USAAF against German industry and infrastructure. There was even a German joke at the time:
"How can you tell the planes? By their color: British planes are blue, American planes are silver, and our planes are invisible."
The RAF used camouflage, the Americans just rolled them off the assembly lines with minimum paint, and the Germans had absolutely nothing to fight them off with. The Luftwaffe had 5,000 planes and they had 35000 planes produced in 1944, sure, but the Allies, including US, British, and Soviets, outnumbered them at 5:1:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_aircraft_production
https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/300000-airplanes-17122703/
The USA alone had it at more than 3:1, even if it was fighting a war against Japan at the same time. Meanwhile, the British and Soviets were equal in numbers to the Germans, and were largely focused in Europe. Quite simply, those 2,000 planes would not survive long enough to do any notable damage to the snowballing Allied effort.
C) The Luftwaffe was the private fief of Hermann Goering. He would never, under any circumstances, allow his precious pilots to be treated as disposable. The man was extremely arrogant and overprotective of his stuff.

2000 ill-trained pilots (enough for Kamikaze tasks) and planes would not and could not stop the Soviets or the Allied air raids, historically they did not as the Allies had ovewhelming superiority. But if applied against Overlord they might have a significant effect - or at least more than historically wasting them in air-to-air tasks.

As for getting through, the initial effort against V-1's which were slightly faster, but not deployed en masse but drips and could not do any avoidance tactics, was not encouraging. In the Pacific where the odds against Japanese were even more stacked from physical structure of the planes and speed differences onwards, Kamikazes got through.

As for losses, Germans at this stage were losing a 1000 planes a month (combat losses, 2000 total) anyway, with no significant effect.

As for Göring, this is a what-if, after all.
 
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It's not important to attack the first wave, but the resupply effort coming afterwards with LST's and freighters being the prime target. LCT's downwards are too small targets anyway.

2000 ill-trained pilots (enough for Kamikaze tasks) and planes would not and could not stop the Soviets or the Allied air raids, historically they did not as the Allies had ovewhelming superiority. But if applied against Overlord they might have a significant effect - or at least more than historically wasting them in air-to-air tasks.

As for getting through, the initial effort against V-1's which were slightly faster, but not deployed en masse but drips and could not do any avoidance tactics, was not encouraging. In the Pacific where the odds against Japanese were even more stacked from physical structure of the planes and speed differences onwards, Kamikazes got through.

As for losses, Germans at this stage were losing a 1000 planes a month (combat losses, 2000 total) anyway, with no significant effect.

As for Göring, this is a what-if, after all.
Fair enough. We're discussing how to make the Germans more willing to use suicide attacks and how they'd do it. They wouldn't be very effective, mind.

Thing is, Germany would have to be a lot more desperate to consider suicide attacks on the scale of the Japanese. Suicide with honor is universal, but held less in veneration among European nations than the Japanese for cultural and historic reasons. It would take even more dire circumstances for the Germans to consider last-gasp suicide attacks like the ones the Japanese carried out, and if we're going to use the pilots as manned guidance systems for kamikazes, we're going to have to dismantle the Luftwaffe command almost entirely. Goering and his officers were snobs, and did all they could to keep the Luftwaffe its own entity and with its own system; using trained (or untrained) pilots as guided missile pilots would damage their reputation and influence, something they'd fight tooth and nail against. The Japanese didn't have to worry about that because the air power was divided between the Navy and the Army (each had their own air wing), and both the IJN and the IJA treated all their men as disposable. Even experienced admirals and captains willingly went down with their ships.
 
they had some interesting armored gliders to be towed to altitude, proposed to fire their R4M rockets and possibly strike part of the Allied bombers then glide to landing.

that might have been something close to suicide mission that could have been endorsed?
 
There's the detail that Germany is not being defeated by a fleet at this point.

Yes, tho the thread has drifted off to Normandy, which touches on a German doctrine that attacking the invasion fleet was the best use of airpower in that situation. They tried the same thing during the Sicillian campaign, at Salerno, & later at Anzio. It failed in all those cases, which does not completely invalidate the doctrine, but does when the invaders have a 6-1 or 8-1 air superiority. Even if its just a academic exercise the question of using 'guided missiles' against the invasion fleet vs conventional bombers is worth a quick look. We do have the examples from the invasion of the Phillipines, and later Okinawa to compare with.
 
It's a fraught subject, but here's an account I've seen doing the rounds online that debunks the idea that the Waffen SS were inherently skilled in battle:

UNKNOWN: I will just tell you about one scene which I myself witnessed with my own eyes — otherwise I shouldn’t speak about it. That was during the winter fighting, when four Russian divisions, a Guards cavalry division, two Guards infantry divisions and one other division, broke through the neighbouring division on my left wing. I now formed a defensive flank projected like this, it formed an acute angle — ridiculous. I was right in the centre at a distance of 4 km. with my battle headquarters, at a distance of 2 km. from both fronts.

In order to form the defensive flank, I got a second unit an S.S. battalion, that is, it wasn’t much more than a glorified company. The company consisted of about a hundred and seventy-five men, a few heavy machine guns and two mortars. There was one Hauptsturmfuehrer von Benden, a grand fellow who had also been in the World War. These fellows had been acting as a protective division in the rear and had engaged guerrillas. They were then withdrawn and sent up to the front. I gave them orders to take the village of Volchanka (?).

As they hadn’t any heavy weapons, I gave them two light machine guns and three anti-tank guns, which I also immediately withdrew. The attack was begun. I couldn’t believe my eyes, how quickly the attack proceeded, it developed splendidly, we advanced against the village and met with fire. Suddenly Benden stood up in his car and drove up to the head of his battalion and the battalion fell in and marched on in step against the village.

Buelowius: … complete madness.

UNKNOWN: They had nine officers. Out of these nine, seven were killed or wounded. Out of a hundred and seventy infantry-men, about eighty were lost. They took (?) the village … Afterwards they held the village with eighty men for a whole week, or rather they had to leave it once and got back again. In the end they had twenty-five men left.

Yes, it was an absolute scandal. I gave him a troop of quick-firing (?) guns, he didn’t fire a round. (I said), ‘You must fire, von Benden.’ — ‘Nonsense, we can take it this way too.’ Utter madness.

(This is supposedly from allied intel eavesdropping on heer officer POWs.)

The Waffen SS being about as tactically-stupid-yet-ferocious as the Imperial Japanese prior to those final Pacific campaigns, that plays into the theme of OP.

(I guess this is similar territory to that thread here where discussion turned to how Nazi Germany might have performed in land campaigns if the SA had replaced the professional army in the '30s.)
 
It's a fraught subject, but here's an account I've seen doing the rounds online that debunks the idea that the Waffen SS were inherently skilled in battle:

...

yup. Tactical skill was confined to a handful of SS divisions. Veteran commanders were the key here. Some learned the lessons and paid attention to training and tactics. Others... During the Polish campaign a by passed Polish unit made a night attack on the German columns on a adjacent road. The regular army battalions had a portion of their men standing to through the night, MG deployed, outpost, sentries, ect... The SS unit posted a few sentries & was pretty much overrun, suffering far worse casualties than the adjacent army. Then theres the infamous 30th SS Division which mutinied while in France in the summer of 1944.
 
they had some interesting armored gliders to be towed to altitude, proposed to fire their R4M rockets and possibly strike part of the Allied bombers then glide to landing.

that might have been something close to suicide mission that could have been endorsed?

some of the aircraft mentioned were basically prototypes rushed into production, not actually intended as suicide tactics? (albeit that was the result)

still think towing gliders aloft, with intention that they make a strafing run against Allied bombers, would be near suicidal? (and possibly scary effective? in the manner of panzerfaust in hands of teens)
 
Why is that detail important? I don't believe there is anything wrong to speculate how manned antiship missiles could fare in the early years of the war.

Well, in the early years of the war, sure. But by selecting stuff that flew in late 1944 or 1945 only, that's excluding the early war years.
Alternately, one would need to find a way to move to earlier in the TL desperate last-ditch measures like the Volksjäger and the Komet.
 
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