German attitude to inter unit competition

[Sheldrake]

Somewhere I read that, unlike the British and US armies the Germans discouraged inter sub unit competition as it encouraged animosity and discouraged co-opedration.

Is this true? Does anyone have a source?

[Sheldrake]

My source was an ebook edited by Bruce McCoy called German Army Training building German Army Combat Skill. dated 2006 and form the now defunct quickmaneuvers.com

The claim is that
"every effort is made to discourage rivalry between components of a team. For example, though march songs are highly regarded and developmed, there are no songs about the superiority of infantry to engineers (or artillery etc.) There are no inter company or inter battery athletics to develop useless competitive emotions."

Can anyone comment on accuracy of this observation this or know the source?

[Jan-Hendrik]

Never heard that....not one time during 25 years of research!

Jan-Hendrik

[T. A. Gardner]

There were certainly inter-service issues in the German army just as there were in the Allied armies. That is, the Heer, Luftwaffe, and SS all had separate chains of command and supply that often duplicated and even disrupted each other's at the operational level. But within a service I've never heard that there was rivalry between components and branches of service. There were issues between these services however. An SS or Luftwaffe officer might not take orders from a Heer officer citing their separate chains of command.

The British had some of that between territorial and regular units, and there were certainly regimental rivalries, although these rarely led to open animosity or failure to cooperate. The US had, and has, some of this going on too. Again, it didn't interfere with the conduct of operations as far as I know.

[Sean Oliver]

This sounds like a remark or sentence fabricated by a historian long ago and presented as 'truth' simply to make him appear more knowledgeable. All without the slightest bit of evidence. You all know the drill.....
Historians are some of the worst liars! Almost as much as politicians. They invent 'truths' like this, mix them with genuine facts, and then publish all of them together. Their statements are then accepted, repeated, and even exaggerated by following generations of "trustworthy scholars" as 100% true.

Germans troops were trained to regard the other branches and arms as their helpers and team-mates, and to regard them with respect, and cooperation. It seems like a rather obvious approach to warfare, but some didn't seem to practice it. The British Army often seemed to regard other units as hated enemies as much as the Germans.