Were the Nazis more advanced than the British and French?

You have no idea how many times I have heard that story.

They got lucky. The Russians captured them. The suffering they experienced is dwarfed by the suffering they caused.

 

Even though I was fluent in German at the time, it is very likely that I misunderstood what I was told over 40 years ago by a friend of the SS Veteran with whom I worked as he ( the SS Veteran) never told me that he played in the Berlin Philharmonic. He talked very little about himself and like many combat Veterans, didn't talk much about his wartime experiences & post War time as a POW of the Soviets.
Thanks for your input. I think you're right & will be mindful of your correction when recounting that memory in the future.

 

With respect, we've all heard that one ourselves.
Really.

I'd take it with a pinch of salt if I were you.

 

If you leave home & travel around the world, maybe when you get older you'll have stories of your own.

RE:

Firstly, you've watched too many Hollywood WW2 movies & don't know that to be a fact.

 

I think it is extremely poor history that carefully cherry picks its 'proof' while completely ignoring facts that seriously undermine it or more likely explanations. The Red Army was in no shape to attack Germany in 1941. Not even close. It hadn't completed its post-Finland reorganization and many of its frontline divisions were in a poor state. Short of vehicles, ammo, spares etc. Suvorov has been picked apart by actual historians.

Stalin may have been planning an attack for a later time - maybe 12 or 14 months later - or maybe he would have decided Germany was too big to tackle and just put more effort into the fortifications he was having built in 1941 and invaded Manchuria instead. What is beyond dispute is that Hitler had long intended to invade & occupy European Russia. He was very clear on that point and Barbarossa was the fulfillment of that plan. Trying to paint it as the act of a nation defending itself means completely ignoring all of that.

 

After the Winter of 41, Germany produced sufficient winter gear for their troops and their weather related attrition wasn't any worse than any other Army's. Note, 1945 when they were actually defeated, is FOUR YEARS after that point. Clearly, "the cold" did not play that significant of a role in their defeat.

 

OK, I get the point you are making, but you are still working from some questionable assumptions.

The first is that the invasion of Greece was the reason Barbarossa was delayed. It wasn't. The problem was the spring rasputitsa, a twice yearly period in Russia when snow melt and/or rain causes rivers to flood & roads to become impassable. This hits Poland, Belarus and western Russia. Some years this starts in early March & is over in May, some years it continues into June. That was the case in 1941, so the Germans weren't able to start before they did. Greece didn't make a difference.

The second is that it was the fault of Hitler that Moscow was not taken, and even that if it had been the war would have been won. The reason the attack on Moscow slowed was partly because troops had to be diverted and partly because German logistics couldn't keep the army moving fast enough. Germany underestimated how hard Russia would fight. In the centre & south Russian units put up more resistance than expected. These large forces couldn't just be left on Germany's exposed flanks. They had to be removed. Even with that delay allowing theoretically resupply & refitting of some divisions, the forces attacking Moscow were still struggling for equipment & supplies before they launched their final attack. With renewed Russian resistance German forces were not only slowed further, but also continued to lose equipment to breakdowns & general fatigue. That is a problem that would have happened no matter when Germany attacked.

There is also no guarantee that taking Moscow would have led to a surrender. Russia still had vast resources & a huge population.

Personally I'm not convinced that there is a way for Germany to win. Germany over-achieved given the resources it had. It managed to defeat France at a much lower cost than could have been reasonably expected. It hit Russia at a point then the Red Army was in the middle of a reorganization and was below its potential fighting capability. For me the question isn't 'what could Germany have done that might have won it the war?', but 'how did Germany manage to do so much better than it had any right to expect it would?'. Perhaps if Germany had shifted to a full war economy in 1939 it might have been in better shape to win in 1941, but it is a big 'perhaps'. We don't know what other effects this might have had and what else might have changed.

 

Trump's Nazis will respond to this argument, never fear. But yes, Germany was more advanced back then. Better Army and small
arms tactics, which our Army still emulates. Too bad for them they only produced 1,200 ME-262 jets, and only 800 delivered.
Their Jumo engines were only good for 10 hours before replacement. They later said if they'd had Rolls Royce engines, they'd
have been truly great. Four 30 millimeter cannon and rocket pods? Really? Not enough to stop the Russian army, whom 80 percent
of German soldiers fought against.

 

This is painfully inaccurate.

A few examples of superior Nazi tech stick out, the Me262, V1 and 2 rockets, the first assault rifle in the stg 44. However, the Nazis owed a lot of their early success to superior employment of inferior weapons.

I think you might need to read up on a number of things. In a very few, focused areas (rocket propulsion, jet engine design) the nazis were superior. However, their defeat of france had less to do with superior tech and more to do with superior tactics. Combine those superior tactics with a completely bungled defense on part of the allies and you have your victory. The stuka was old tech, their tanks were less armored and had smaller guns, and a hundred other examples of them simply doing more with less.

In a number of areas they never held a tech advantage. The kreigsmarine was reduced to a raiding/submarine force and was never a serious threat to anyone early in the war. The few blue water capital ships they poured resources into were destroyed with ease. They never caught up on radar/sonor and were never were able to keep pace in any technical area of submarine avoidance/detection. The never managed to build one single aircraft carrier and lacked the plane to utilize if they had. The submarine force, once again owed it's effectiveness early in the war to superior tactics and not tech. Once the germans fell so far behind, the submarine force was marginalized by early 1943. The biggest contribution to the ineffective nature of the kreigsmarine had to do with superior british technical expertise in codebreaking/cipher (information security just another area in where the nazi's lagged in tech), and manipulation of information.

On the ground, Germany was almost always behind on tech in tank production, being outclassed as early as 41 by armor of soviet manufacture. Even the vaunted Tiger tank was initially produced without a coaxial machine gun, had no sloped armor, and was a breakdown machine. Even the use of the 88 as an anti armor platform was discovered not out of superior tech, but battlefield desperation because German guns were of such poor quality early in the war. Pz3's and even 4's were ineffective against Russian KV and T34 tanks. Even up to the end, the Wermacht was mostly a horse drawn army lacking a competent motorized transport (opel trucks were garbage).

I'm only scratching the surface here, but the German War machine has had the treatment of revisionist history.

 

The end of the war that saw the Nazi armies mostly powered by horses. That one? Read a book, please. It's not like their isn't a fountain of information on the subject.

 

The Germans had better generals and tactics, and made the most of that.
Finally overwhelmed by numbers and allied equipment. The somewhat
crappy but fast Sherman tank—we produced more than 49,000. Made by
car companies...

 

The V2, buzz bombs and jet aircraft. Does Chicago have any libraries?

 

Until 1944 the Panther was a very unreliable tank, so 'better' is a questionable assertion. It is only better if it is available when you need it. Russia didn't 'have' to produce the T-34. It chose to. It could have spent more time & resources making a smaller number of tanks of similar quality to the Panther. However, this wasn't how it was going to win the war.

That figure of '45,000 destroyed' is misleading. Most of those tanks were either able to be put back into service in some capacity, or were used by the Russians for spare parts. They weren't a complete loss and they helped the war effort even if they weren't able to function fully.

Really? How much help did they get to produce weapons? When did that help arrive and how did it prevent 'doom'? There has been a tendency among Russians to underplay the importance of Lend Lease & a tendency among Westerners to overplay it.

Britain & the US both supplied equipment to Russia during the war. In 1941, when 'doom' was very much a possibility, there was very little foreign equipment. It helped, but there is no reason to believe Russia would have fallen without it. From 1942 onward the weapons supplied were again, helpful in defeating Germany but not crucial to preventing Germany defeating Russia. The most important US contributions were trucks, trains & electronics. These allowed Russia to focus production on weapons and in the case of trucks move forces more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case. If Russia had to produce these things alone pushing Germany completely out of Russia would have been harder and taken longer. It might even have proved impossible, though the cost to Germany would have been huge.

Without LL Russia would not have been 'doomed', but it would have struggled to win as quickly as it did.

I would argue that you don't know anything if you think it was. The German offensive had ground to a halt by the time winter began for its own reasons. Further, the weather in Russia is well known, so Germany had years to prepare for it. If they did not that is yet another German failure rather than some uncontrollable outside force.

 

Russian tanks were better as early as 41. The french had a superior tank to the pv3/4 in the char b1 and the s35 in 1940. The only time German tanks has a qualitative edge was against the American Sherman.

 

V2 was a pointless use of resources and never had any effect outside of terror. The jet aircraft were ineffective, too few in number due to technical limitations in maufacture. They were also poorly designed, needed long runways that were perfect targets for allied bombing, and engines that were wholly unreliable. Not to mention the british invented the jet. Oops.

They have any history books by your trailer park? Anything else you'd like me to school you on, let me know.

 

Read the book on Michael Whittman, Germany's Tiger ace and winner of the Knight's Cross.
I forget his total of tanks destroyed, but it was phenomenal. Sometimes he burned entire
columns of enemy tanks in Russia and France. He commanded Tiger #007.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Wittmann

 

What? Germany didn't even move production to a full war economy until 1942. They were wholly unprepared for the war they would fight in 1939. They had weak tanks, outdated aircraft, a minimal navy and were economically weak.

I just can't believe how much ignorance is in this thread on a topic with so much information available.

 

We also didn't have Nazi sympathizers like we do today in our republican party.

 

They attacked Russia in 1941 with the help of what, all or parts of 15 countries? Something like that. It was still a tall order. I talked to an old tank commander from Hungary, he said they only had two divisions, and after the Germans arrived they were soon pointed towards Minsk. He commanded a Mark-IV Panzer but ended up walking home.

 

Ploesti never was enough to meet the demands of Germany. They had to waste a ton of resources in synthetic fuel production.

 

A comprehensive answer to this would take a lot of time.

In short, the maginot line was a giant waste of resources. Allied tank deployment favored splitting tanks among infantry units instead of concentrating them like the germans did. So even though the allies had more tanks overall, the germans were able to mass them at critical points and overwhelm defenses. The biggest strategic failure has to be the decision of the allies to wheel their armies into belgium, whilst ignoring the possibility of a concerted armored movement through the ardennes forest.

 

I suppose the point is that the defeat of the invasion of 1941 was primarily due to the cold weather. I think that was the biggest invasion in history and involved 3 million men over a 2000 mile front. That's if I am not mistaken. When it ended up getting bogged down, the cold weather was a decisive factor in the Russians being able to repel the Nazi assault on Moscow. It was a crucial turning point because the aura of Nazi invincibility had been crushed. The psychological effect was devastating. If instead, the invasion had started earlier, and the cold weather had not played such a huge role, the results likely would have been quite different, and the Nazis would have defeated Russia.

 

Mossie was the most versatile aircraft of the war, wouldn't you say?

 

The syrians and egyptians both destroyed a lot of centurion tanks in both 67 and 72. Israel handily won both of those wars, but the centurion was far from invulnerable.

 

And it wasn't really better technology, they just made the tanks heavier.