5,000 Portuguese. Why you feel like you need to diminish the portuguese?antwony wrote:How many of those 860,000 were Portuguese or guys that surrended?Guaporense wrote:Read Genius for War. The German army was consistently more effective than any other in both world wars.
And yes, even in 1918 they were the best in the world. For example. In the spring offensive, despite massive economic and manpower superiority the Allies lost 860,000 men to the Germans losses of 688,000 men, and the Germans were on the offensive, which means the Allies should have inflicted way more casualties given that they had massive superiority in every respect: manpower, economic, natural resources and defensive posture, yet they suffered 30% more losses.
Therefore, we can conclude that the German army was indeed superior. Niall Ferguson even estimated that in WW1 it cost 14,500 dollars for the Entente army to kill a German soldier but it cost 5,600 dollars for the German army to kill an Entente soldier.
They were certainly superior to the entente in a military sense.Almost all of those German casualties would have been from the designated "Assault" divisions, and many would have been stormtroopers, which/ who had been removed from the rest of the army and trained and equipped to a higher standard than the divisions that took over the line and "reaped the whirlwind" when the final German assault failed.
Germany had decided to go with a two-tier army (or not even two when consider they eventually deployed Landswehr divisions to the Western Front) and, in retrospect, we can say it didn't work out the best for them.
No it's not.Your point about offensive's is wrong vis-a-vis WW1.
Not remotely:Despite the enormous British losses on day one, casualties during the Battle of Somme were (probably) similiar on both sides.
British+France losses - 620,000
German losses ---------460,000
And total losses in the Western Front 1918 were:
German ------------------------- 1,498,138
French+British+American ----- 1,908,996
Even counting the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers who surrendered at the end.
And they outnumbered the Germans by a large margin.
Dupuy estimated German army to be on average 50% more effective than the British and the French on a per capita basis.
No, the difference is that they could import food while Germany couldn't.Artillery, nor machine guns, was the biggest killer of that war and the Entente hadn't destroyed their national economies to enable them to equip their armies i.e. they could make lots and lots and lots of shells and still feed their citizens
Also shell production per GDP was similar among the coalitions.
No, it's objective, based on performance.While best is a rather abstract term
This is moronic.surely they were, at best, the fourth best? France, British Commonwealth, USA, in which ever order you prefer. Athough, on November 11, 1918, the Italian Army was still in the field and was going forward. They'd, actually, proved to be the fourth best. So, yeah, if we are making a league table, and Guaporense likes his tables, Germany would be the fifth best. Have chosen to disregard White Finland and the Soviet Union, both of which were in existance on the Nov 12 1918. The Belgium's deserve fourth place actually
Very mature indeed.2-0