Were the Nazis more advanced than the British and French?

And...?

 

No, however I mostly learned english by myself. I don't know how you would formulate that.

 

As you probably know, the 88mm gun was also the main gun on the Tiger1 & Tiger2:

"Nazi Germany's King Tiger Tank : Super Weapon or Super Myth?"
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/nazi-germanys-king-tiger-tank-super-weapon-or-super-myth-17332

EXCERPTS "Enter the Tiger II, or Konigstiger (King Tiger). At seventy-five tons, it was bigger than its predecessor. Its longer-barreled (and thus higher velocity) KwK 43 88-millimeter cannon could penetrate five inches of armor at a range of two kilometers (1.2 miles). With Sherman and T-34 crews having about two inches of frontal armor between them and eternity, no wonder a supersized Tiger must have seemed the devil on treads.
However, the most telling statistic is that while the Soviet Union produced nearly 3,900 IS-2s, Germany built just 492 Tiger IIs. The Soviets built more than 108,000 tanks, and the Americans eighty-eight thousand, because World War II was a contest of production that devoured material at an appalling rate. Less than 500 King Tigers, no matter how powerful, were not going to change the outcome."CONTINUED

 

Rather than invading Britain, I think that Hitler had not unrealistically hoped to make peace with Britain via Rudolph Hess's peace mission in 1941 (1). As you know there was some support for the Nazi / German cause in Britain (i.e. the Cliveden Set, King Edward Vlll etc).
The document as I understand it was a proposal for Germany to withdraw from all recently conquered territories in the North, West & South in order for Germany to fight just a 1 Front War against the Soviets who, according to former KGB Officer & historian Victor Suvorov, were preparing to invade Germany.(2), (3).
Regrettably, Churchill & Roosevelt were equally hungry for war as British Intelligence Agents successfully duped Americans into believing that Hitler wanted to invade South, Central & eventually, North America(4).





(1)"Document Suggests Hitler Knew of Hess' British Flight Plans"
http://www.spiegel.de/international...ew-of-hess-british-flight-plans-a-765607.html

EXCERPT "But now a previously unpublished document is casting Hess's notorious one-way trip in a new light: A 28-page, handwritten report that historian Matthias Uhl of the German Historical Institute Moscow discovered in the State Archive of the Russian Federation.
But his air mission was a failure from the start. When he heard about the unexpected visitor from Germany, then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who at the time was giving a dinner party at his weekend house near Oxford, was not even willing to postpone a planned film screening, saying: "Well, Hess or no Hess, I'm going to see the Marx Brothers." Why make peace with an aggressor who was determined to subjugate Europe? Hess was taken into custody."CONTINUED


(2) "Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler in 1941? The Historiographical Controversy Surrounding the Origins of the Nazi-Soviet War"
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/art...urrounding-the-origins-of-the-nazi-soviet-war


(3) "Exposing Stalin’s Plan to Conquer Europe:…"
https://www.counter-currents.com/201...onquer-europe/


(4) "The conquest of the United States by Britain"
http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/mahl.htm

EXCERPT "The principal tactic of British propaganda, Mahl points out, was to excite American fears of a direct German threat to the United States. That involved two basic themes:

- that Germany was poised to take over Latin America and that American non-interventionists were pro-Nazi fifth columnists. (It should be noted here that there was virtually no mention of German persecution of Jews, which today has become the ultimate justification for the "good war.")

The theme that non-interventionists were really Nazi agents had perhaps the greatest long-term impact. That lethal smear destroyed the careers of many non-interventionists, eliminating opposition not only to involvement in World War II but also to postwar American globalism in general.

Further, numerous works have shown that American intervention was not even essential for England's salvation. As John Charmley and others have maintained, England could have saved herself by agreeing to a separate peace with Germany.CONTINUED

 

First you call me a liar then confirm my comments. And you chide a 79 year old man who has lived among CA citizens most of his life yet has served in the Army and was once at Ft. Benning where the prejudice was palpable. But from blacks. They assumed for instance that were we to drive his car, a convertible I had put gasoline into, down town we would get beat up. I was told this by blacks sitting in the man's car. He was from Michigan. I know a lot about the racism in the north including laws declainr blacks could not live there as citizens, this in the north. When I was at Ft. Benning, I never heard of any report that Army blacks who ventured into Columbus, GA got beat up. But this fool made the assertion and refused to drive us into town.

Democrats were the power in the South. When I was in GA, it was well known the power was Democrats. Frankly it was more in Germany than in the South I saw how it works. I saw racist talk from a guy from TX and one from W. VA. They taunted blacks. They took a chance too. My base ended up posting added guards to protect white troops from the blacks. I loaned money to troops for profit and had a black soldier want me to hire him so he could beat up soldiers. Few of my loans went to blacks, perhaps none. I can't recall any of them asking to borrow. But I can't rule out some of them could have. Depending on the trooper, I would not stop loaning him money over being black.

I got to know some blacks in Germany. When the rubber hit the road, just one of them was a true friend. But the rest used some contrivance to show me they were black and by golly I am white so that means I am lousy.

Most whites do not report how blacks treat us as were we lousy human beings even when we do nothing wrong to blacks. They assume we are lousy.

Growing up in CA, the era I speak of we were conservative in politics. I think one reason Reagan changed parties was to give him a chance to be the governor.

Jim Crow was Democrat. Man, some who think today the Democrats fight with dirty politics ought to have been in GA in 1962 when I saw how dirty they are slugging it out. I reported to my parents in CA that in CA democrats did not get dirty to that extent.

Why do you know of Jim Crow and agree with me and then claim Democrats were not racist. I believe very much they still are.
Why so? They make certain race is built into their campaigns. They lie about republicans. Were they not racists, they would not need to bring up race all the time.

 

By 1941 it was clear to Brits that Nazi's had subpar genecode.
High technology comes from within.

 

Right well as you can see that is the 36L not the 37L and was not effective against the Matilda 2 armour, whereas the British 2 pounder was quite capable of penetrating the german armour. I call that outgunning your oppenant.

 

You seem to have missed the point of my post. You still appear to be hung up on a 'tank v tank' comparison, which is the exact opposite of the point of my post. I'll try again.

Germany fought the wrong war given its aims. Those aims, in case you are unsure, were to dominate the European continent ans especially to secure for itself European Russia. That territory was to be significantly depopulated and the remainder reduced to servants for the new German settlers who would colonize it. Understanding this is important, because total defeat of Russia was ultimately the war Germany had to win. Germany didn't get 'suckered' into moving deep into Russia, it went to war with the express aim of doing just that.

This is where the problem arises. Germany fought a war designed around short, victorious campaigns. German industry was geared to this type of war. It was geared toward making smaller quantities of higher quality gear. Stuff that took time to design & build and was produced in batches rather than the long, continuous production lines used by the US & Russia in particular. When Germany faced nations that were small, weak or could not trade space for the time required to match German skill this worked. France & Britain expected to be able to hold the initial German attack until they could increase production & bring the resources of their empires to bear. They failed.

However, at the end of its campaigns in 1939 & 1940 the German military needed time to rest & refit. It also needed to use huge amounts of equipment from conquered nations to fill gaps in its own capacity. This created problems with logistics. There is a saying among military professionals that amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics. The reason for that is that modern wars are so often won by the side that wins the logistics war - starting with production. This is most true of wars of mass & maneuver like WW2. When Germany invaded Russia in 1941 it assumed that it could win with one big campaign. In fact, no provision was made for any alternative outcome. Industry was not put on a war footing. Equipment was not designed to be mass produced cheaply & in large numbers. The huge range of equipment types & designs in that invasion force made logistics a total nightmare. That was a key reason Germany didn't take Moscow - it hadn't planned well enough (taking Moscow might not have won the war, which was another problem....but that is for another day). Germany failed to prepare for the war it was most determined to fight. The war it had been intending to fight for years. That was an entirely avoidable failure.

Germany needed more tanks that were cheaper and easier to produce, that were more reliable, that were easier to supply and maintain. Germany needed those tanks in 1941 when the war was still winnable. There is zero reason Germany couldn't have achieved this. It had the resources & industrial capacity. It even had a tank that could be adapted to the task - the Pz.IV. Modified versions of this were able to compete with the T-34, but not enough were made. The Tiger was a waste of resources for all the reasons I have listed - too slow & expensive to produce, too heavy, too prone to breakdowns. There is no point having a tank the T-34 can't easily kill if you only have a handful of them and most of those are broken down or being fixed. it was only a decent weapon for a nation retreating, so it was never going to win a war. Producing more Pz.IVs with 75mm guns would have been a much better investment.

The Panther is a great example of why the 'better tank/better technology' idea is such a foolish one to get excited about. In 1941 Germany could have just made a slightly better copy of the T-34. Something a bit bigger - similar armor layout, similar size gun, bigger turret, simple but reliable engine & components. Also something easy to produce in large numbers and something that would be available sooner in larger numbers than the panther was. A tank like that would have made it easier to compete with the Red Army and perhaps fight to a stalemate...perhaps. Germany did none of these things. It produced something 20 tons heavier, slow to produce and for the first few years very unreliable - not least because it was too heavy. So what if it was a lot better in some respects? There weren't enough of them at the front line to make a difference.

This is the point I'm trying to make. In WW2 the definition of what was 'good' equipment' or technology is not measured by how impressive its statistics were or how advanced the technology was. The definition of 'good' was much more about getting as much of that equipment into combat at the same time as you possibly could. As I said 'good enough' in large quantities was the war winner.

Get it yet?

 

Indeed. As many as 3 behind a tug boat. Some of them were going to be at sea for 3 days!! (and more importantly nights). Then they were going to be beached by the tug charging at the shore, cutting the cable and pulling away. Somehow these were supposed to land in some order, be pulled off the beach & towed back to get the second wave. Oh, and did I mention that they were going to be carrying thousands of horses?

The more you read about it the more comically bad the whole operation appears. I actually wish they had tried it. Losing 50,000 front line troops, the remainder of the Kriegsmarine and paratroops and hundreds of aircraft & pilots would have made the invasion of Russia even less successful than it was and possibly doomed North Africa to a quicker Allied victory. Could have shortened the war.

 

100,000 troops might be a formidable force considering that England at this time was stripping field guns from Museums, having just lost most of their ordance at Dunkirk. Couldn't the Germans have enlisted the aid of the Italian Navy?

 

Meh. Nazi technology tends to get overplayed. For instance, much gets said about their tanks, yet they were wildly overrated. Nazi radar was ahead at the beginning, but that fell away. Their nuclear program was a complete failure. And on and on.

Both sides had successes, both had failures. There is nothing special in the German water that turned them into technical geniuses.

 

Actually, while Americans were smugly reassuring one another that the Russians relied on German rocket scientists for their space program, the Russian program was being run by
Sergei Korolev, while, ours was being run by a former avowed Nazi.

Moreover, Kirolev's rockets turned out to be better than ours.

 

The Italians had no more amphibious landing ability than the Germans. Plus how do they get past Gibraltar and the British Med Fleet?

100,000 troops are just POWs waiting to happen if they are totally logistically cut off. Those troops couldn’t beat what Britain had in England in less than 48 hours, especially considering they’d have almost no artillery support and absolutely no vehicle support.

 

Sorry. Habit.
37L is the designation for most 37mm tank guns in ASL (see my avatar), including the German KWK/PaK.FlaK 37mm guns.
The 37mm German gun and the 2pdr were effectively identical in AP performance; the 37 could fire HE while the 2pdr could not.

 

Actually quite a bit has been written about it, some of it somewhat technical. However, since it is a rather fascinating subject, here are a couple of things that are simple and should give you an overview to get you started:

Link
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/01/s...-of-nazi-drive-for-a-bomb.html?pagewanted=all

And

Link
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13518370-300-heisenbergs-principles-kept-bomb-from-nazis/

 

I was looking at some material provided by another member of the forum. It turns out tanks like the German Panther were superior to the T34. It is said that the T34 was relatively blind compared to the Panther in that its provisions for operators to view the field of battle were severely restricted. No wonder the Russians had to produce so many of them. Its said that over 57000 were made but 45000 were destroyed. WOW!!!! Amazing!

Lucky the Russians got so much help from the US to produce their weapons. They likely would have been doomed without such enormous assistance.

You don't know anything about WW2 if you don't know that cold weather was a major factor in the Nazi defeat in their invasion of Russia. They poured 3 million men into that endeavor and had to retreat in defeat. One account says that some Nazi soldiers returned to Germany with no eyelids because the cold Russian weather had frozen them off! WOW!!!

 

Thanks! That was very informative!

 

What do you think of former KGB Offices & historian, Victor Suvorov's contention that Hitler's attack on Russia was pre emptive?


"Did Stalin Plan to Attack Hitler in 1941? The Historiographical Controversy Surrounding the Origins of the Nazi-Soviet War"
http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/art...urrounding-the-origins-of-the-nazi-soviet-war

EXCERPT " He [Victor Suvorov] cites a lack of defensive preparations, such as the construction of fortified lines and anti-tank ditches, and notes their deployment in hidden areas (such as woods) as evidence of the intention of the soviet leadership to conceal an imminent offensive operation.

…Stalin’s desire to attack Nazi Germany in 1941 with an analysis of soviet foreign policy during the 1930s. They contend that Stalin believed in the concept of world revolution, and that the Second World War provided Stalin an opportunity to extend soviet influence throughout Europe. Mel'tiukhov, for instance, asserts that, “the USSR’s principal aim was to expand the “front of socialism” across as much territory as possible.”CONTINUED

 

Given the woeful state of the Soviet Army in June 1941 and Germany's success against them, a Soviet invasion of Germany in 1941 might have brought the Germans closer to victory.

 

WOW! I'm impressed that you are able to do so well. They say that English is very difficult to learn because there are so many irregularities. I have been speaking it all my life and its pretty much all I know.

That said, I know how to say "My name is Precision" in French! I think I can count to ten too.

 

Although I really like your post, I am going to make a couple of observations.

1. To say that Germany got suckered into going deep into Russia does not mean that they had no intention of doing it, but were tricked into doing so. Suckered in this case means that started their campaign too late without properly grasping the enormity of the task and the time it COULD POTENTIALLY take. Part of the reason they started late was because they got tied up down in Greece. So essentially they were suckered by their own self deception into believing that the strategy they chose would be accomplished more easily and quickly than it actually took. I would argue that IF they had waited until the early spring, they likely would have been successful, and therefore your point about tank production numbers would be moot.

2. With regards to Moscow, its possible if Hitler had listened to his generals that they could have won by taking Moscow early on. However I will note that when they did get around to attacking Moscow, they were met with a larger than expected resistance. Who knows? Since the cold winter was approaching, if the effort had dragged on for quite a while, they still might have had problems. Waiting until spring to start the campaign, after they started late because of being tied up in the Mediterranean, would have been the best move. IF indeed they felt it necessary to attack Russia in a relatively short time frame.

Just my two cents. You probably know more about modern warfare than I do, so I would be interested in hearing your opinion about what I put forward.

 

That may be true. However both Russia and the US borrowed heavily from the knowledge of the Nazi rocket scientists.

 

RE:

I lived, studied & worked in Germany in the mid 1970s where I had the opportunity to know many German WW2 veterans, War widows, Camp survivors & those who managed to survive the starvation, anarchy & post WW1 Allied abuses.

One job I had was assisting a German stone mason who was one of the youngest Waffen SS officers on the Eastern Front. I learned through his friends that he also wrestled in the 1936 Olympics & played violin with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra. Because it was summertime & we were in Germany, we drank beer from lunchtime on & as a fellow Veteran, developed an excellent rapport.

He, however, did return with his eyelids but after his Russian captors found out that he played violin, they broke all of his fingers.
He didn't return home (Freiburg i. Br.) until 1947 & his whole family had been killed from Allied bombing that destroyed the sturdy, massive & almost bomb-proof home that he built that took a direct hit. The neighbors were unable to rescue his family because the timbers & stones that he used were so massive. All that was left was a large cherry tree from which he gave me a large sack of cherries on my last day on the job.

Unfortunately, most people envision German soldiers as inhuman & robotic blockheads through the bias lens of Hollywood movie makers & are incapable of realizing how badly Germans suffered especially after the war.

 

That's a very sad story. Any rate, that why war should be a last resort. I don't know why people seem so eager these days to solve problems by the use of military force. I just don't get it.

 

I find it very unlikely if your friend ever played for the Berlin Philharmonic as its members were granted exclusion from all military service, before and throughout the war. Hitler and Goebbels, who were fans of classical music, saw the Berlin Philharmonic as a useful tool in the promotion Nazi ideology. The music of Jewish composers, Mendelssohn, Mahler etc were banned in the 1930s. The Berlin Philharmonic was and still is one of the worlds finest orchestras, you have to be pretty special to play with them.