Sheldrake wrote:
Many German officers interviewed all blamed allied air and sea power for the German defeat - an easy way deflect criticism from the conduct of the land battle. (As do some of the Wehrmacht fan club on historic forums!
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Its now wrong to acknowledge where the majority of the problem lay? Revisionist histories of the conflict have gotten to the point where they cannot even talk about these issues in context and have to blame the German military incompetence in all issues, while ignoring to vast constraints they operated under. Its become a cartoonish characterization of what actually happened when you can't point out that the Allies dominated the air in a way no military in history has up to that point or since until the Gulf War.
Sheldrake wrote:
Does your data support or disprove Staudiger? Where were the stocks of 17 cm and 21cm ammunition? How many rockets for the werfer brigades were held in 7th Army's depots?
Again there were vast logistics issues like strategic, operational, and tactical bombing that made accumulating them pretty difficult.
Sheldrake wrote:
Re 2. Sorry, but the idea that the Germans did the best they could and couldn't have done any better is straight from the Wehrmacht apologist playbook. Here are some of the propositions put forwards by German - and British observers:-
No one is arguing the Germans did perfectly given constraints, they were human after all, just that the bigger issue than their mistakes within those constraints was the constraints themselves that severely limited their ability to operate and badly screwed up their planning to the point that their mistakes somewhat stemmed from the uncertainty around their situation.
Sheldrake wrote:
1. The Germans themselves acknowledged that their horse drawn transport was inadequate for supply purposes - yet continued to generate a teeth arm heavy shop window of formations that could not be supplied adequately. This was a central failing of the German high command. The Germans also failed to reallocate vehicles from the disbanded Italian army rationally. Thus the artillery of the 71st infantry division in the Italian sideshow was fully motorised, while the artillery in Normandy was short of ammunition.
What alternative to horse drawn transport was there when there wasn't enough fuel, trucks, or experienced men to fully motorize? Even if they were entirely robotic in their organization and did everything perfectly in the extremely chaotic logistics environment of the Allies wrecking logsitics on every front and bombing Germany's factories and infrastructure they didn't have enough supplies and means to actually use all the trucks at their disposal, assuming they could even get there to where they were needed. Generating a tooth bigger than the tail was pretty much necessary when there isn't enough supplies coming in to justify having idle supply troops sitting around, especially when there aren't replacements coming in to make good combat losses. You see there were these things called strategic constraints that Germany faced in 1944 that doomed their war effort. How could they move Italian vehicles to France when Operation Strangle and the Transport plan, as well as the Combined Bomber Offensive was wrecking rail infrastructure, there wasn't enough fuel to go around, and probably not any ability to get spare parts to France from Italy as well as no experience among the French based German divisions on Italian equipment. It's silly suggestions like that that are entirely rooted in a fantasy ideal world where all that needed to be done was allocate resources and problems would be solved without any understanding of the reality of the situation on the ground that made it impossible to really organize.
Sheldrake wrote:
2. Germans admitted that the could have made better used of the motor vehicles that there were in France. Stauidiger said that they lost a lot of vehicles from driving over ill maintained under supervised roads. Eberbach claimed that there were plenty of under used vehicles supporting the Luftwaffe and Kreigsmarine. There were also vehicles supporting construction work on the Atlantic Wall in Northern France during June and July 1944. Eberbach also used the HQ of 16 LW Division to organise the supply lines for Panzer Gruppe West. There was no German equivalent to the logisitc support form the "Via Sacra" at Verdun or the red ball express. (There could have been. There were lots of construction troops and labour)
Who was going to maintain the roads? The Germans didn't have enough people, the French resistance was reaching new heights of danger in rural areas, the French public was increasingly uninterested in working for or with the Germans due to at very least the payback the Resistance would dish out, and the Germans didn't have enough guards to force them. Plus they were desperately putting their maintenance/repair resources into trying to fix the repaired rail roads the Allies kept bombing, while building up the Atlantic Wall. There were finite resources available and they were allocated to things that were more immediately necessary. Underused vehicles may have been the case, but did Stauidiger know the fuel situation or really what the other services were doing with said vehicles? Any chance he might be blaming the other services for his own failures? I'd say the vehicles helping build up defenses were pretty much occupied doing what was necessary, given that there were risks of the Allies landing elsewhere and turning the German flank while they were preoccouped in Normandy.
And yes the Germans did not have the resources to organize a 'Voie Sacree' in France in 1944 because of Allied air attacks, something the French did not have to deal with at Verdun or the US with the Red Ball Express and unlimited trucks, manpower, and fuel. Saying the Germans should have done the same thing despite constraints that prevented them from doing that lapses into the absurd. You are arguing from a fantasy position. How can you really argue that there was a ton of idle resources sitting around doing nothing? The labour resources were mostly forced local labor that would run off the second they could, while Allied air attacks would wreck any of their efforts, as they did historically. Plus the Germans were concerned with landings in other sectors, so kept troops locked down defending against that; the Allies had the resources to do more landings and ultimately did in Southern France. German construction resources were a joke in France and the Lowlands by July 1944 and wouldn't have been able to do much if anything more than was done to keep the fight in Normandy better supplied. They were trying to repair rail as fast as they could and couldn't keep up with it, what do you think they would have done driving from the border of Germany where there wasn't wrecked rail supply to Normandy?