Comments like the above make me rather skeptical that either you've actually read Wages of Destruction in its entirety, or that if you did that you actually understood Tooze's premise and it didn't go sailing right over your head.Guaporense wrote:By the way, while it's pretty much agreed that the USSR took out Germany's army while the Western Allies defeated their airforce and navy, one should understand that the vast majority of Germany's military expenditures were with the ground forces, average monthly expenditures in aircraft and ships were 825 million RM in the 3rd quarter of 1943 (Tooze(2005), No Room for Miracles page 460), compared to average monthly total government expenditures of ca. 10.4 billion RM in the year 09.42-08.43 that's only 8%.
For the German war effort, the navy and the airforce were only supplementary to the army. For contrast in the US, a naval power rather than a land power, expenditures on ships and aircraft in 1943 was 25 billion dollars (at 1945 prices) out of total government expenditures of ca. 85 billion dollars.
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There's nothing about the Luftwaffe or Kriegsmarine being "supplementary" to the Heer. In fact, quite the contrary Tooze infers that that Nazi Germany blundered into war unprepared believing that was alright since the Allies were too unprepared and it was "destiny" based on Hitler's rather faulty conspiratorial-based manias. Overall Wehrmacht planning was that there would be no war until the middle-1940's when both the Luftwaffe would have a strategic air arm and the navy would have achieved some sort of parity with the Royal Navy and US Navy when in unison with other Axis partners. I question your intellectual competence and think you are just cherry-picking to build a sophistic, prosecutorial case based on a predetermined "panzer-fanboi" world view rather than any factual, historical basis.
The reason why the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were subsumed was the lack of German industrial capacity and the fact that they were an agrarian society pre-war and simply did not have the work force nor the industrial base to fully implement rearmament in a meaningful way to guarantee any sort of strategic victory in a "long war". It wasn't out of any sense of primacy for the ground forces but pragmatism to the reality of the situation...
There was to be nothing secondary about the efforts of the Luftwaffe. They simply could not produce a proper strategic force of four engined bombers because they lacked the industrial base to make them. So they were stuck with the twin engined bombers that would be effective enough against the French, but would begin to haunt them in the Battle of Britain and in the blundering incompetence and arrogance they showed in the planning of Operation Barbarossa...
Maybe you can look up the "Cliff Notes" version?