histan wrote:German strategic planning was uncoordinated and incoherent throughout the war but particularly so from 1941 onward.
I disagree. German strategic planning was actually intelligent up to Stalingrad. Their problem was that nobody managed to expect that the USSR's military would pull out a miracle of surviving the loss of 600,000 men per month and actually gain the strategic innitiative while "burning" their labor force at such a rate.
I am probably not the only person who experiences some form of "cognitive dissonance" when asked to believe that the Germans were "better" than the Western Allies in the Normandy Campaign.
The facts on the ground are clear - in early June 1944 the allies were in England, by early September the allies had crossed the channel, passed through France and were at the German border. Equally, in early June 1944 the Germans were on the channel coast in France and in early September they had retreated through France, were rushing troops to defend the German border, and expressing concern that way into Germany was wide open.
Yet at the same time I am expected to believe that the Germans were "better" (either as soldiers or in warfighting) than the allies.
So the concepts of numerical odds and strategic situation eludes you.
If you win, taking 3 months, with 3-1 numerical superiority and complete aerial supremacy while suffering 240,000 casualties because you engaged a small garrison force of 37 poorly manned, trained and equipped divisions that were resting in France after being badly mauled in the Eastern front that was a very poor performance indeed.
Also, the strategic situtation in June 1944 was the following: The Soviet Union already had defeated the Wehrmacht in the critical decisive battles of Moscow, Kursk, Stalingrad, etc and so had already won the Second World War and was advacing in an irresistible fashion into Berlin and they arrived there 11 months later (even though it was only 1200 km away from the Eastern frontlines in June 1944). Nothing that happened in the western fronts in 1944 and 1945 had any decisive influence on the war so even if we assume that those 37 German divisions were able to stop the Western Allies in Normandy, they would still lose in Normandy because if they had contained the WAllies in Normandy then they would relocate those divisions to the Eastern front to help the armies there, and they would continously transfer divisions to the Eastern front which means that that bubble in Normandy would burst sonner or later: at the time of operation Cobra there were only 25 German divisions there compared to over 175 divisions in the Eastern and South-Eastern fronts. In other words, the WAllies did not defeat the German army in France: that army was already defeated, they were only doing the mopping up job and the German soldiers were glad to surrender to the WAllies to escape the Soviet POW camps (and the WAllies were losing many hundreds of thousands of soldiers in this mopping up process).
So, if Germany had already lost my mid 1944 why they were still fighting? Simple, because the Nazis knew that if they surrendered they would be executed by the Allies so they choose to use many hundreds of thousands of lives of the German people as a meat shield to (in a crude selfish manner) prolong their lives. Actually, though, I think that if they surrendered they would have lived longer because the Nuremberg trials took years to judge everybody. Although I doubt Hitler and co. would have admitted humiliation of being held as POWs.
When Germany invaded Poland, against a Polish force substantially larger and more well rested than the force Germany had in France (although with inferior equipment), they defeated Poland in 1 month while suffering 1/5 of the casualties the Western Allies suffered in France. While the German invasions of Greece and Yugoslavia involved a 6,000 casualties and they took several times the number of prisioners that the WAllies took in France in 1944.
Or for a better example, in 1940 the WAllies had 151 divisions in top notch condition (compared to the German troops in 1944) which numerically equivalent to about 230 German divisions of 1944, or a force about 7 times larger than the force the Germans had in 1944 in France along the border with Germany. This force about 7 times larger than the German force in France in 1944, was defeated in 1.5 months while the Germans suffered 150,000 causalties, that is half the time and 60% of the casualties the WAllies suffered to defeat a force 7 times larger and
the Germans DID not enjoy numerical superiority while in 1944 the WAllies had a 3-1 numerical superiority.
To me its beyond obvious that the German army was far superior on a operational and tactical level than the WAllies' armies. The Soviet army was also vastly superior to the armies of the WAllies on an operational level (they managed to encircle the German army in Bagration) although they suffered enormous casualties (well it's not like Stalin cared about casualties as long as they were able to replace them).
"In tactics, as in strategy, superiority in numbers is the most common element of victory." - Carl von Clausewitz