Tanking It

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Note: No podcast this week. The day job has consumed almost all of my time, so I was unable to put anything together. I’ll be back next week.

While burning the midnight oil on a project, I put on a documentary about the evolution of the battle tank in World War II. It was free on Amazon and it looks like it was done by the Brits, as all of the experts were British. Most of it was archival footage, so maybe it was made by an American company. Most of these things are just bits from prior shows cobbled together with a new narrator. As documentaries go, it was mediocre, but it made noise and it was free, so it was good company while I was working on other things.

One interesting thing about tank evolution that never gets mentioned in America is just how good the Soviets were at making tanks. The Germans are always assumed to have been the great tank builders, followed by the Americans, but it was the Russians who dominated the field in the tank game. Russian tanks were fast, powerful and easy to operate by their crews. Most important, they were reliable in all weather. The Russians assumed they would be fighting in horrible conditions and built a tank for it.

The Germans, in contrast, made one error after another when it came to tank design and tank building. They were obsessed with coming up with the biggest, most powerful tank, rather than making lots of good enough tanks. The result was lots of innovative designs, but most were failures and there was never enough of them. The Panzer IV was a very good tank with a platform that was flexible, but the Germans kept trying to come up with a super tank, rather than make lots of these. That was a costly error.

The American tank, which was used by the British, was not a great tank, but they were cheap and reliable, which meant there were loads of them. It was also a flexible platform for all sorts of other uses. The Sherman tank was about using the two advantages the Americans had over the Germans. One was more industry and the other was more soldiers. The plan was to beat the Germans with volume. While it would take five Sherman tanks to take out a German tank, that was math that worked in favor of the Americans.

This conflict between the perfect and the good enough showed up in many places during the war. The Germans seemed to look at the whole thing as an engineering project. The first step was to accept the restraints and then solve for the variables. The Russian and American view was always to limit the constraints and thereby increase the number of possible right answers. The Germans had much better human capital, but their opponents always had many more choices. They also had numbers, which counts for a lot.

When you apply this conflict between the perfect and the good enough to modern warfare, the American military looks a lot like the Germans. The quest for the perfect fighter jet has led to the F-35 boondoggle. Instead of pouring billions into these white elephants, the money could be used to build swarms of cheap drones, but no one is getting rich from making cheap and useful military gear. The same thing is true with sea power. American warships are technical masterpieces, but probably useless in a real war.

This comparison raises the question that perhaps there is a parallel between the state of human capital in the American elite and the German elite during the war. The German soldiers were the best in the world, but the people further up the line were not the best tacticians. At the upper reaches, the strategist were terrible in all sorts of ways, starting with Hitler, who was laughably inept at running a war. Winning was never an option, but the Germans could have avoided total obliteration if they had better leaders.

The blame for this is always put on Hitler and that’s a good place to start, but the Germans had a brain power problem throughout the planning layer. This is obvious in how they went about making tanks. Instead of going for a tank that was cheap and easy to produce by a civilian workforce, they tried to build tanks that were complex and required specialists to produce. The effects of allied bombing raids were amplified by this strategic blunder in production planning. This is a very basic error in planning and execution.

One possible cause of this was that the middle-aged men who would have been sorting these production and design problems had died during the Great War. The German army tended to “use up” their units, rather than cycle them in and out of lines. That meant that a lot of experience with supply and logistics was lost in the trenches. The British and the Americans rotated units in an out of the lines, thus they came out of the war with a vast number of people with experience in the nuts and bolts of war fighting.

The current ruling class needs the Germans to be seen as the ultimate in super villains, but the truth is the Germans were dumb about a lot of important things. The Russians came up with slopped armor, for example, and the Germans never bothered to steal the idea, even after Kursk. The Germans got their hands on the Churchill tank, but never bothered to learn anything from it. They never learned from the Americans how to use communications to coordinate their artillery and their armor.

In many respects, the story of the tank in the war is a great proxy for the story of human capital and cultural intelligence. The Germans had the best trained military on earth, but they lacked human capital in the strategy and tactics layer. Either the culture was unable to produce it or there was simply not enough smart people to create the necessary smart fraction. That was ultimately why the Germany was wiped from the map. It’s probably why no new culture has arisen from that place on the map either.

218 thoughts on “Tanking It”

  1. I looked at the first episode of that tank series and, yeah, I’ve seen other material from that source before on Youtube. “Military” cable channel, I think. The rotating tank wireframe images (on the one of the M3, the barrel of the 75mm looks awfully long, btw) is diagnostic, as is the laughable disconnect between the narration (which is of dubious accuracy) and the film images. I mean they talk about the excessive height of the Sherman…. and show an image of a Grant. Or its tendency to catch on fire… and show an image of two burning German eight-wheeled armored cars. Or the problems the Allies had penetrating German armor… and you get an image of German tanks in open country with an easily penetrated PzKw I in the foreground. Three hundred Shermans arrive just in time for 2nd Alamein and you get Grants shown on railroad cars. They talk about Shernan assembly lines… but show a locomotive being transported overhead in a plant. Or they talk about Shermans but show tank destroyers. Or talk anout exterior water storage to suppress fires (news to me) and they show a completely unrelated (except in that it relates to water) dual-drive Sherman with its canvas flotation gear accordioned down. Etc, etc, etc.

    The German fascination with superweapons was unhelpful, but their most produced armored vehicle was the Stug III, and when one of the main factories for those was bombed they diverted Pzkw IV chassis production to carry a slightly modified Stug III superstructure as the Stug IV. So they weren’t entirely immune to noticing the importance of quantity. If, though, they had produced 40,000 Pzkw IVs where would they have gotten the oil to run them?

    Also, no, the Russians did not invent sloped (“slopped”(sic)) armor, and the Germans DID adopt it, well before Kursk.

  2. This is a great piece, especially the line “The Germans seemed to look at the whole thing as an engineering project.” I work in consumer electronics in Silicon Valley and we face exactly what Z Man is trying to explain here: over-engineering leads to failure beause you don’t have unlimited time. Good enough is often entirely good enough. Field it and learn from the performance. Iterate the design.

    Of course, as with all websites like this, there are instead 150+ comments debating the genius of various tank models, their inventors, color, etc. by the “I know military stuff!”-crowd. It’s so discouraging; I don’t know how Z Man even puts up with the incessant “look at me!” noise.

  3. USAF may have a clue at last — they are requesting funding for production of the F15’X’. Its a 40yo design that still has life.

  4. I remember squatting in S. Vietnam (one of the “domino” countries – you remember those don’t you?) and looking at a cartoon in Stars and Strips. It was after the Six Day War (six fricking days) and the cartoon showed our President offering to trade with the leader of Israel (an American female Jew) the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff for one Moshe Ryan (I think that’s right, the leader of Israel’s military). So true then and so sad now. You can go back and forth on your “dislike” of folks of the Jewish persuasion all you like. After seventeen years of pointless wars I say “Where is Moshe?” . After all, I believe nineteen of the Muslims that attacked the former USA were from one Middle Eastern country – and not one we punished in any way shape or form. So bluster on. I hope you have blood in the current mess.

  5. I’ve worked with some Germans over the years. They’re technically smart and industrious but you can’t tell them anything.

  6. Fun topic. For starters, I agree that the US military today is a lot like the German military back then technically (not morally). They want the uber-pricey super weapons.

    But you also see the Russian principle in everyday life. I even call it the ‘T-34 principle’ after the Russian tank. The T-34 was all about ‘good enough and cheap, so you can get as many as possible.’ Where is this relevant today? Well, if you’re a prepper, it is relevant in ammo or even arrows. I took up archery about 6 yrs ago just for fun. Then I realized that $10 is ‘cheap’ for a good arrow. So I started making my own and even made a heap of very cheap ‘fire and forget’ ‘war arrows’. B/c, if Im gonna spend an irreplacable post SHTF arrow on you, you d better be one of a real mean SOB or a really juicy deer lol

    And I believe it is cultural btw. Look at German cars today. A Mercedes might not look like a tiger tank but they are built along the same philosophy. Whereas Russian stuff like the AK-47 is all about functionality and working in Siberian mud.

  7. This is the kind of conversation girls never gave a crap about. But now they want to bitch about being underrepresented in tank talk and shit.

    • This is why there are numerous books and movies about the men who served in tank battalions in wartime and only one farcical movie called “TankGirl”. There is no place for a girl in a tank.
      There is a very interesting article in the Chicago Tribune dated Dec. 16,1991, intitled “Weekend Warriors prove their mettle”. This is about a Marine reserve squadron that was called to active duty during Desert Storm, sent to Twentynine Palms for a month of training in the Abram’s tank, then shipped to Kuwait to take part in the last major tank battle that the U. S. Has been involved in. I know that most of not all is true, because these guys used to get drunk in my saloon and tell me war stories.
      What isn’t mentioned in the story is the Russian T55 [I think] that somehow got drug back home with them and now sits in front of the Reserve center in my home town. Those wascally wabbits.

    • Frip and Z….great and informative column! Just let go of any female bitching. This is the difference on display between the male and female brain. Pretend you’re in the Bellona Club on Veterans Day 1923 talking with other men on the history of war.

      Your brain can work with great volume and depth re mechanical and technical. Plus the immense amount of bravery to fight war and make civilizational history.

      I’ll admit…..this is P**** Envy on my part. I had zipzeronada interest in tanks and war until I passed 50. Years ago at a PTA meeting, I got bored and devilish, dropped and doggedly chewed on a couple facts about Bradley tanks, and cleared out my corner of the room. Now that I’m past 50 and my estrogen has calmed down, my brain is dramatically more interested in history. Swear to God the hardwiring is all rearranged. All I read is non-fiction. Who would have thought. My brain is not wired to dive into the depths of the attached threads except to get generalities and inspiration. So be it. Z has inspired me to, on my own speed, research into tanks, brush up on war strategy, can now remember a B-24 has 4 props and a B-25 has 2, and glad as hell am not operating a tank anywhere. The best I could do was watch Midway last night and tomorrow will watch The Desert Rat partly because it stars Richard Burton and I’m a gal, and lots of tanks! Thanks Z and thank you Gentlemen for all your knowledge.

      • Range;
        My apologies if my remarks were construed as “female bitching”
        Let me assure you that if it wasn’t for my little wife of almost 50 years I realize that I wouldn’t have amounted to much. I’ve been following your posts on the Z blog for the last 6 months and appreciate your intelligence and acumen.

        • PawPaw…..Good Grief man! No need for an apology! I wasn’t looking for female bitching on either side of the great male/female divide. No worries. Was responding to Frip to let him know that some of us gals DO get tired of overly sensitive women always jumping on each other and men at the drop of a hat. Glad men can find a space to themselves. I greatly appreciated the military tank column, am happy and comfortable with the way men think, just plain like men, such an intriguing difference. If I came through otherwise, then I need to practice clarity. That’s what happens when I write late at night. So please rip up that apology and go on about your good day! Take care.
          PS: Thank you for your kind comment!

  8. History repeats itself and the Germans are not the only ones guilty of building over complicated machinery. The M1 A-1 Abrams had its own teething pains.

    The introduction of turbo power is awesome unless you put the intake on the back deck right behind the treads kicking up all the dirt and dust.

    Of course back then we were bailing out Chrysler giving them the contract. Perhaps the design flaw was automotive engineers building tanks ?

    Another area where the Germans were superior but fell short was their submarine fleet. Military leaders wanted to build 300 subs to dominate the shipping lanes however Hitler instead took less than half of that and did initially rule the sea.

    Of course the capture of the Enigma machine and the endless supply of ships being built doomed that campaign as well.

    Sadly killing off a generation of white men has left their homelands vulnerable to invasion by the brown hordes. The same people that sent our grandfathers / great-grandfathers off to war are now finishing off the job by importing third world savages.

    When will we ever learn ?

    P,S. Miss the podcast. Remus has taking the week off as well from the woodpile report. This week’s internet entertainment has become sparse 🙂

    • German sub fleet effort failed because of too few built? Perhaps the Kriegsmarine was not allowed to build as many as requested, but the uboat effort failed due to improved technique by the allies wrt covoy’s, underwater detection, and attack—both at sea and home bases. Indeed, in 1943, just about every uboat built—more than a 100–was lost. In 1944 all uboats were recalled to base and operations—except for a few special cases—ceased. Building more uboats would have been a waste, they were simply obsolete given current technology of the time.

  9. it’s worth remembering that tanks were originally conceived as infantry support machines, rather than machines fighting each other. Kursk showed that major tank battles were possible, and ideas changed. However air control enabled the allies to attack German armour from the air in ’44which was decisive, and also the allies had developed the process of getting damaged tanks back for repair. I am not sure the Wehrmacht saw recovery and repair as the way forward.

  10. The Panzer IV was arguably the best medium tank of WW2, late model variants proved more than a match for the Sherman. The problem for the Germans was they couldn’t make enough of anything to make a difference against the huge numbers fielded by the Allies.
    Same with any conflict, quantity has a quality all of its own. If you want your white nationalism you’re going to have to figure out how to get more white babies on a large scale. A lot more… and so far all I can see is it going the other way.

  11. Operation Paperclip. That’s why the American MIC and secret intelligence services are German. On the bright side it got the American flag planted on the moon.

  12. Z: “The day job has consumed almost all of my time…” I can’t be the only one who wonders about what Z’s day job is.

    My guess is that he is a manager at a large company and has overseen software integration projects, given his use of software integration as a metaphor.

    (I don’t want to dox Z, I’m just curious and will avoid all specifics.)

    • My guess is he works in the electronics department at Walmart. Spends most of his days trying to upsell old black women HDMI cables. “See those connectors? That’s not gold plated, that’s REAL GOLD.”

      • Oh here comes Jrod with the Jrod up his butt laying down the curt reprimand. If you listen to the podcast, Z has implied plenty of times, what the other commenter wondered. Anyway, what’s fascinating is how Z hasn’t been doxxed. He’s been to enemy National Review get-togethers. So they know what he looks and sounds like. He’s been to friendly Dissident conferences, which surely contain enemy spies. So that’s more people that have seen him. Both friend and foe. Secrets are rarely held. People talk. His voice is unmistakable. I can’t believe someone hasn’t followed him out to the parking lot after one of these meet-ups. Or followed him home. There’s no doubt in my mind that federales with all their high tech must know exactly who he is. But they let him carry on as is. Here, and on YouTube no less. Z must live the life of a true secret agent man. It’s got to be difficult. It’s not like he’s a shut-in. He’s out there in person and on the “airwaves”. If this comment needs to be deleted that’s ok.

    • I work for myself. Small business has a lot of benefits, but sometimes you become a servant to events.

  13. As an engineer who works in the aerospace industry and who has worked on the F-35 program previously, I can tell you the problem isn’t on our end designing and building the aircraft. It’s always the customer.

    The U.S. military is infamous for writing incomprehensible, all-singing, all-dancing requests and then changing their mind multiple times in the middle of the process.

    The F-35 is compromised by the need for the STOVL B variant, no doubt about it. Providing space for the lift fan (which is dead weight after the aircraft transitions to normal flight) guaranteed that the aircraft would struggle to meet weight requirements.

    Trying to replace a whole generation of disparate tactical types while adding stealth and increased range to the mix makes the JSF program such an engineering nightmare.

    The key factor that makes the F-35 so amazing is the synergy between its sensors. Before, a pilot had to look at his radar display, check the radar warning receiver, look at his FLIR on another multifunction display, etc.

    The F-35’s computers fuse all of that data into a tactical picture that the pilot doesn’t have to waste precious time getting full situational awareness.

    This means that the amount of code required for this aircraft is unbelievable. Humans make mental errors and a lot of times, despite accurate computer models, unforeseen events can crop up from time to time. Developing any military aircraft is difficult and it’s little wonder why this aircraft seems so troubled to those who don’t understand how this process works.

    I talk to a lot of pilots who will have to fly it in battle and they’re all united in their praise for this airframe. It’s not a dog like critics say it is and it’s a beast in a turning fight that no one wants to see at the merge.

    The great thing is its stealth means most of its combat will be BVR rather than WVR.

    Most of the planes the F-35 knocks out of the sky won’t even know it’s there until their RWRs go off as they detect the terminal radar signal of an AIM-120.

    It’s expensive, but the taxpayers are going to get world-beating capability for their dollars.

    As for UAVs, they have their place, but they’re not the end-all, be-all. The problem is that if they’re not autonomous, what’s to stop an adversary from jamming them or even taking over control and using them against our own forces?

    Even if they’re autonomous, you’re going to want a human being with judgement in the kill chain making the ultimate decision. They also have a very high attrition rate because computers are programmed by humans and we make lots of mental errors.

    UAVs are great for reconnaissance, defense suppression, refueling, communications relay and in a loyal wingman role as basically flying extra missile magazines under the control of a manned fighter. They’re also a great way to extend the sensor range of not only manned aircraft, but ships as well.

    They are not a replacement, at least not yet, for manned aircraft at this point. Directed energy weapons are about to change air combat to the point where maneuverability as a primary virtue (exemplified by Sukhoi aircraft such as the Su-35) will be obsolete.

    A lot of people thought before Vietnam that air to air missiles would end dogfighting and the opposite proved to be the case.

    History won’t be repeating itself. You can’t jink a weapon that can burn you to a crisp as death travels at the speed of light.

    The aircraft that will survive the future fight will have long legs, stealth, sensor fusion and supercruise. Those without one or more of those features will be littering the ground below with twisted, burnt metal.

    As for the tanks of World War II, the T-34 and Sherman were easily the best. Both were easy to mass produce, easy for ill-trained conscripts to operate and reliable as hell. I’d much rather have 10 decent tanks that run all of the time and the troops under my command can wield effectively than the same number of over-engineered, yet problem-prone Tiger or King Tiger tanks.

    I wish we could apply the same logic to air combat, but when you’re asking your airplanes to be both a great bomber like the late, great F-111 Aardvark and a spectacular air superiority machine like an F-22, you’re going to get a more complex machine.

    I wish we would’ve come up with a common strike fighter to replace the mud-movers with limited air to air capability and built a kick-ass air superiority fighter that would be cheaper to build and maintain than the F-22. Trying to build a multirole aircraft is by nature an exercise in sometime unsatisfactory compromise.

  14. Here is an example of German overengineering at its finest. Before posting this link I had to watch the video again and I still can’t believe it. The particular car model is the VW Touareg:

    “How to Change a Tire with a VW Jack (The Widowmaker)”:

    https://youtu.be/SHyVIcjkL3k

    • I’m amused by the fact the guy is wearing driving gloves to change a tire. Presumably, he would wear them when driving his mid-price suburban people hauler.

  15. I would say this post shows a sure-fire way to provoke comments…state a few opinions on WW2, esp. the Nazis, and watch the fur fly.

    • WW2 Nazis and the War of Northron Aggression always make for a fun Friday, you betcha!

      We sons of WWll vets love to play with our army men, just like the sportsball kids.

      (No I mean it. I was outraged when I found my eager-beaver brother had thrown away my favorite mismatched little plastic gang.
      You know, the red Apache with the tomahawk, the blue Union officer with the sword, the green GI’s crouching with rifles…)

  16. I’m a fan of the ZMan blog, and I think the main point–2 industrial wars permanently damaged in the gross Germany’s human capital, i.e., “smart fraction”–is solid, but some of the supporting evidence needs a reconsideration.
    –The Russians invented nothing substantive; rather they were skilled at adapting Western military innovations to their own circumstances (e.g.,the T-34 suspension & sloped armor were derivatives of WJ Christie’s T-3). The Russians knew what they needed, knew what was possible, and adjusted industrial effort effectively to meet their needs, to include borrowing and building on western tech That’s not nothing–but they were not great armor theorists or designers. Early T-34s carried a two-man turret, and many didn’t have radios. That’s why they weren’t nearly so effective as they might have been, 1941-42.

    –The 5-1 Sherman/Panther ratio I’m fairly certain is not true. The tank which sees the enemy first, and fires first, usually won, that’s what the ETO records show. This favored the Germans, as they were on defensive in 1944 in the ETO. The long-range kill and the massed formations of tanks battling each other were negligible features of the ETO. The long-range kill was an Eastern Front speciality…in which Panzer Vi Tiger I units often had 20, 30-1 kill ratios. The lower tech Panzer IV, even with the long barrel 7.5cm gun, was no so effective.

    –German tank production actually increased in 1944 over previous years–it just came at the expense of spare parts production, and the shortage of key raw materials and the employment of slave labor in tank factories, further crippled the quality of tanks produced, even though there were more of them.

    –Most Sherman ammo fired in 1944 was HE, not AP…there was no call for the AP-firing long-barrel Sherman gun until the Ardennes Offensive, in which Germany’s armor force was irremediably reduced to a nullity in the ETO.

    –incredibly, the German logistical system still managed to function right up through April, 1945…ammo, tanks, and the German RPG (panzerfaust) were still being delivered to front-line units in April, 1945.

    –I’d recast the issue in this way: the USA specialized in the industrial elements of war fighting, to include logistics. The creation of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the 1920s reflects and was partly responsible for that. The Germans excelled at the operational and tactical levels of war, the key driver of which was their general staff system. In fact, to disagree with ZMan, there was no shortage of highly capable German generals. The Russians learned from both, and from their own experiences….their most prominent contribution to military arts/sciences during ww 2 was denial and deception…..

  17. Hitler’s downfall was not caused by poor military leadership, but an ideological assumption that led to a massive strategic blunder.

    In the NatSoc worldview, Soviet power consisted of a thin strata of parasitical Jews dominating Slav subhumans.

    German war and occupation plans were based on the idea that this power would disintegrate upon contact with the Blitzkrieg.

    This did not happen, Stalin became a Russian Nationalist overnight, and the rest is history.

    • That points out a flaw in my own tiresome thinking.

      Was he at war with the “central bankers” in most capitols?

      Did he think that we peasants yearned to be free of the Money Power, of the financial engines that created modern imperial commerce?

  18. Overall a great read (as always) but I will pick at this nit:
    “The Russians came up with slopped armor, for example, and the Germans never bothered to steal the idea, even after Kursk.”

    What on God’s Green Earth are you talking about?!? The Panther was conceived fairly quickly after the rude shock of meeting the T-34 during Barbarossa. Indeed the entire Kursk offensive was delayed significantly in order to be able to deploy the early production run of Panthers to the battle. And the Tiger II, Jagdpanther, Jagdpanzer III & IV, Hetzer and a few others all featured sloped armor. Your sentence is simply flat wrong.

    Going beyond this, the more complicated German tanks, even when inferior to their Soviet counterparts, often did well precisely because of the complexity – for example, better radios allowed much better coordination than the crudely furnished T-34’s (which either had no radios at all, or inferior AM sets), and better optics allowed long range kills that would otherwise be impossible (Tigers, for example, IIRC had something like an 80% hit rate at very long ranges)

    This isn’t to diminish the very real mistakes made in their tank design: for example, the Panther was really too big and overarmed to be a good medium tank – they should have stuck with the smaller and lighter main gun used on the later Mk IV’s, which was adequate to the task of killing T-34s. This would have allowed a smaller turret and hull, which would have translated into weight savings and the ability to beef up the side armor, which was a real weakness of the type. What historically was the Panther should have been beefed up a little bit in the side armor, given an 88mm/L56 like the Tiger, and become the replacement to the Tiger I, with a weight comparable to the Tiger (rather than the bloated Tiger II). And so on.

  19. The Germans….like the Russians had no qualms about murdering their best and brightest military minds…..if Erwin Rommel hadn’t chosen suicide he would have faced a fiing squad. Stalin murdered countless capable officers. Both Hitler and Stalin valued blind
    compliant loyalty over competence. Here in the US we don’t execute generals….we blackmail them into retiring and disappearing from the public eye. Obama ran literally DOZENS of capable officers out of the military because they refused to embrace socialism. We are paying a steep price for that now.

    • I thought Rommel chose suicide because he was involved in that plot to kill Hitler. Of course if you try to overthrow the government and fail you will be treated as a traitor, no matter how bright you are.

      The Germans failed because they let themselves get roped into a conflict bigger than they could handle. They tried taking on most of the world’s great powers all at once. It was doomed from the start. No amount of brilliance would have saved them.

  21. The German culture itself is responsible for these tank defects. It’s a culture where Herr Mueller sits behind a frosted glass door with the word “Direktor” on it, and no one challenges Herr Mueller’s plans, as it’s the Director’s responsibility, within the system, to come up with those plans. The Japanese have this culture on steroids, but they reinvented their economy to mass produce the day after the war was over, so mass production became their goal. Germans never fully adopted the mass production culture, even to this day. If you drive an Audi, or something like that, they’re technical wonders but they always need that on-the-mark servicing to be kept in tip top shape. How many Americans do this? I do, I write down my precise mileage and roll into the mechanic within 20 mies of that mark. But I’m abnormal and a control freak. I really do think it’s genetic in some way. I have to complete the circuit.

    Americans are sloppy people who go an extra 5,000 miles without servicing their vehicles. The Japanese know this and design their cars that way, saying “how would a pig over there ruin this?” The Germans were the last to put cupholders in their cars, because per German culture, you don’t eat and drink in vehicles. Only a swine would do that. They were dragged kicking and screaming into putting cupholders in their cars, for fat diabetic Americans and their Big Gulps. Germans have a problem with dumbing it down for the masses. The Japanese expect the masses outside of Japan to be inferior.

    That being said, I tend to spend extra bucks on German items because they’re just better. An electric motor for a water feature in my backyard will last a few years longer than its cheaper Chinese competitor.

  22. In 1925 Billy Mitchell was busted from Brigadier General to Colonel for insubordination, then later that year court-martialed after accusing Army and Navy leaders of an “almost treasonable administration of the national defense” for investing in battleships instead of aircraft carriers. He resigned from the service shortly afterward. Ironically, Carriers are now the sacred cows battleships once were. Worse, considering that the brass approved a photo shoot of military men wearing high heeled shoes in support of women in the military, it is impossible to judge how pozzed leadership has become.

  23. Au contraire Z. Germany could have ripped the head off the soviets and shat down their necks. If the Battle Of Britain had gone on for another week the Brits would have folded. The reason they held on as long as they did was the Spitfire – an aeronautical masterpiece of its time with Rolls Royce engines and a build time of 300 000 man hours. The P51 was a masterpiece too. The F35 IS the Soviet T35 tank of modern airplanes. VTOL technology is going to be critical in the next war. If you want to talk about masterpieces and white elephants the F22 MIGHT make your point. Preliminary estimates I have seen has pegged that bird with a survivability of around 5:1. It may well have a tactical niche in the arsenal.

    It is my conviction that tactics and morale trump technology and equipment if the gap between the opponents is not that great. Yes, our carriers are obsolete… but so are everyone else’s. Germany made some horrific tactical blunders and that is why they lost.

    My fear is that America is losing valuable lessons it learned in both world wars where it was dragged into conflict terribly unprepared. If America loses the next war it will be because leftists and vibrants undermine it. Such people make lousy troops and worse commanders. America’s military has a people problem not a hardware one.

    • The Battle of Britain was helped enormously by the number of Polish, French and other nationalities who came to the UK in 1940, and the fact that the fighting was over southern England. We got our pilots back if they bailed out; German survivors were prisoners of war.

      I believe the Luftwaffe decided against the continual bombing of airfields in Kent and the rest of the south-east and went for the big cities, which while spectacular did not help their war aims in the short term.

  24. “Why make something simple, when you can make it complicated?”, is the standard German engineering mantra followed by “We take pride in the fact we can find a problem for every solution.”

    While there’s no debate that German engineers are highly skilled and well educated, creativity and risk are not German traits. Which doesn’t translate very well in a combat situation where soldiers are under a very hierarchical command structure and everything is about following orders. Americans, on the other hand, made things up as they went, adjusting to the situation and not depending on higher command for leadership or instructions.

    I actually applaud the American approach to problem solving. Very pragmatic. They’ll try anything and everything a hundred times until they find something that works. Edison is my favorite example. He claimed to have found hundreds of materials that were totally unsuitable for a light bulb filament.

    But please give credit where it’s due. While we may not have been the best in tank design, we did mange to put the first operational jet fighter (Me-262) and tactical missiles (V1 and V2) into the air despite the best efforts of the 8th Air Force and British Bomber Command.

    • My last BMW (as in last ever) used to break down for absurd reasons. The motor mount literally broke off because a German engine decided to save an ounce by using aluminum bolts. Other times car parts I have never heard of malfunctioned.

    • I’ve had several high end BMWs and Mercedes. Marvelous cars with few maintenance issues.

    • Karl;
      Having studied the matter, I must differ about whose armies had the most hierarchal structure, rigidity of thinking and followed orders regardless of situation in WWII. Without a doubt the palm goes to England, followed by the USSR and then France. The Singapore Campaign in 1941 is a good case in point. The Brit propaganda about this was pure projection and possibly made to excuse their own practices by saying that the Krauts were worse.

      In the case of the USSR, the rule was, if you followed orders and failed you *might* not get shot by the NKVD. You surely would be if you deviated and failed, assuming you survived the battle. The individual Russian, then and now, can be highly innovative and creative, however.

      The French had planned a re-run of WWI with corresponding rigidity in method. They never had a chance to find out if they could adapt because they ran out of time in under a month. Apparently the Free French army with American equipment performed credibly after Normandy but not much is in English about this aspect of the war.

      I’d say that the German and US armies were about equal in adaptation. Without doubt the German individual soldier discipline was highly rigid, but at the tactical and operational levels they were pretty adaptive. For the US forces, individual discipline was always a problem but they had the luxury of not caring as much due to a logistical abundance that the German’s never had.

    • Karl;
      Having studied the matter in some depth, I must disagree with you which participant in WWII had the most rigid command structure and only followed orders. There is no doubt that the Germans had the most rigid individual soldier discipline. However their command structure encourage junior leader initiative at the tactical unit level at least as well as did the American.

      The palm for command rigidity in thinking goes to the Brits, closely followed by the USSR. A look The Singapore Campaign of 1941 is a good example of British rigidity in thinking and operations. British propaganda portraying ‘the Jerries’ as automations is pure projection, possibly being used to excuse their own methods.

      In the USSR, the NKVD *might* not shoot you if you meticulously followed orders and failed. But they surely would if you deviated and failed. Interestingly, the individual Russian, then and now, can be highly creative and innovative.

      • For anyone making a trip to Europe this year who has an interest in WWII and would like to see various tanks, planes, etc., I can recommend a couple of places well worth a visit.

        If you fly into Frankfurt, head south to Heidelberg, then continue east to the Technick Museum Sinsheim –
        https://sinsheim.technik-museum.de

        If you’re in Munich, be sure to visit to the Deutsches Museum. Give yourself a full day here –
        https://www.deutsches-museum.de/en

        If you’re in the UK, my favorite is the RAF Museum in Wolverhampton, situated between Birmingham and Shrewsbury.

        https://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/cosford/

        And of course if you’re in Belgium, there are several excellent museums on the Battle of the Bulge. I’ve been to several of them and as they are a bit smaller, they have more information and displays of equipment e.g. rifles, knives, uniforms and light vehicles. But well worth the time –

        https://www.bulge1944.com/battle-of-the-bulge-museums/

        And if you’re in the area, be sure to visit the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial where Gen. G. S. Patton is buried.

  25. At a macro level, the German’s biggest blunder was simply not realizing that they were in a war of economies, not armies. Until Speer came on the scene, the German economy was not on full war mobilization status. The US, Russians and British were from the start. Years ago in college read a book called “Behind the Urals” that detailed the movement of almost all Russian industry behind the mountain redoubt. But the other thing the Allies did was effectively allocate production based on comparative advantages. We only sent the Russians things like aluminum that they were poor at producing. The Axis, being little more than mob families at national scale, never coordinated a thing–production, strategy, tactics. This was fatal in the end. On a side note, one great uncle commanded a platoon of Shermans from D+6 to the end of the war and made the great armored sweep through southern Germany. How he survived, even having the up gunned version of the Sherman is still a mystery.

    • US Armor crew losses in Europe were pretty low compared to being in the infantry. The problem of the Sherman catching fire immediately after being hit was fixed early on in the war. The tank repair guy who wrote the book about how Shermans burned was wrong. He was just on the battlefield far after the fact. The fire retardant systems wouldn’t necessarily stop a fire. They would though delay the fire long enough for the crew to escape. So he saw all of these burned out tanks thinking they went up like a torch.

  26. “One possible cause of this was that the middle-aged men who would have been sorting these production and design problems had died during the Great War.” Killing Walter Rathenau was an own goal in that respect.

    Maybe a lot of smart guys died in WWI, but the Axis powers made pretty stupid use of the ones who survived., Persecuting and killing your smartest people is a dumb strategy if you want to win a war. Step one to designing effective war planes is to not force Theodore von Kármán out of your territory to work for the enemy. How dumb do politicians have to be to chase the likes of Albert Einstein out of their country when preparing to conquer the world? They got rid of Einstein, John von Neumann, Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller just as it became apparent that atomic bombs were possible.

    That had nothing to do with WWI and everything to do with godforsaken imbecility.

  27. The three main reasons Germany lost were these:

    1) Oil
    2) Fuel
    3) Gasoline.

    The Germans lost six weeks into the war. At the beginning of Barbarossa, the OKW estimated that they had six weeks worth of fuel for full-scale, offensive military operations. In that time, the Soviet Union had to surrender, so they could get access to the Caucasus oil fields.

    Only by de-motorizing both the military and industrial sectors, were they able to go on as long as they did, and by the end of the war, they were basically thrown back to WWI tactics.

    So it wouldn’t matter if they’d had more or better tanks, because they didn’t have the fuel to run them. In fact, by late 1944, they had a surplus of tanks and started using the turrets on stationary bunkers.

    • The main reason Germany lost was the problem that leaders were idiots. When you do not have oil then you must figure out how to win the war without oil. This is called Art of War.. Germany had only one way to win and this was to destroy the only thing, what Soviet Union, USA and British Empire could not produce in their industries. The soldiers. All Germany efforts should have gone to destroy the enemy’s infantry. Caucasus was irrelevant. Except oil you also need the manpower to operate machines and when everybody have so much oil when they want, then it comes down to question, who have more people to operate tanks aircraft and so on. People matter, not stuff.

      • There’s a lot of reasons Germany lost, but the point that I was trying to make, was that they’re all irrelevant if you run out of fuel.

        It’s like with nukes: no matter what Germany had done, they’d still lose because the United States got the atomic bomb first.

  28. The Asness Chair of Applied Liberty is moving on from Neocon Review and starting yet another anti-Trump online-only publication. He is of course staying on as a “fellow” at the Neocon Review Institute – which is where the real money (and no work) seem to be.
    So he has been pushed out of the visible part of Neocon Review (no one, especially Asness Chair, would volunteer for a clearly doomed startup) while still staying glued to the invisible money-teet at the “Institute.” Everyone’s a winner!

  29. To start an engine in very cold conditions requires a means of reducing the viscosity of the lubricating oil. In most WWII battle tanks this was achieved by returning oil to a small tank inside the larger one. Oil in the small tank can then be readily preheated or diluted. German tanks invading the Soviet Union lacked this feature, so in the very cold Russian winter, they had to leave their engines running or they wouldn’t be able to re-start them. The Soviets knew this and let the Germans keep advancing until they were low on fuel at which point they got picked off. This story was told to our class by one of my engineering professors, Dr. Ackerman, who had been an officer in the Soviet tank force.

  30. The useful analogy is with the current Deep State program to secure it’s dominance via expelling Trump and then gradually implement a global tyranny via technology-aided indoctrination of the masses plus importation of drone worker-parasites. They possess enormous resources/strengths, but a key weakness is ossified leadership that leans heavily on ruthlessness/overwhelming brutality as it’s first-line defense. They are not well prepared for countless simple cheap counterattacks arising out of the ether.

  31. Their early victories and the easy with which they held them gave the Germans a false sense of security and a bloated sense of their capabilities. This delusion evaporated after Stalingrad and Kursk. By then it was too late. Trying to retool and reengineer in the middle of a two front was not going to happen successfully. It’s both a logistical problem and a personnel problem.

  32. Technical excellence and “good enough” with large numbers each has its own merits. It seems to me a combination of both is ideal, because the enemy knows how to counter one or the other, but countering both is much more difficult. But I am a civilian, what do I know?

  33. Whether Germany’s done or not, they’ve got a strong case for “most influential culture of the past millennium.” Certainly in recent history: Modern life is equal parts Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Throw in Luther, Kant, and Mozart and you’ve got “Western Culture, 1500-present.” They made their mistakes, no doubt, but what a run!

    • What you’ve pointed out is what makes Germany’s potential societal disintegrantion so tragic. They have much to still contribute as a society, but mentally they no longer seem to have the will to survive. Come to think of it, we currently also live in such society. Different root causes, same effect. 🙁

    • sure, we have Herr Maxwell, Herr Kelvin, Herr Darwin, Herr Fleming, Herr Rutherford, Herr Dirac, Herr Poincare, Herr Carnot,…

    • There is a good case to be make that, with the exception of the Attics, Greeks were a product of migrating German tribes. The Etruscans had German origins, and were then replaced by other Germans, who became known as Romans. German blood in white America is, by percentage, greater than that of the British Isles.
      Where the Germans originated is another story.

  34. It’s the same principle used against the south, like pawns in a game of chess. The South was decisively winning the war early on but was limited in men and resources.

    The northern factories could keep them better stocked and with a ready supply of poor European immigrants to throw at them the south eventually ran out of resources.

    In WWII the US also had a large force of poor to throw at the conflict. I had always thought it was patriotism and propaganda that got that generation to enlist. I found out over the past few years my grandfather enlisted as a job and my wife’s grandfather enlisted to get out of school early. I’m sure they weren’t the exception.

    • That and 70% of the whites who served in the war were drafted. For blacks the figure was 90%. Most of what we have been taught about that war and the aftermath is wrong, it seems.

      • That’s a criminally under-examined aspect of industrial war: The ability of its survivors to propagandize on its behalf. Union veterans, for instance, as old men poured limitless resources into making sure only the “correct” (that’s the word they used) history of the war was taught. That “Greatest Generation” horseshit would never have gotten off the ground without the “Greatest Gen” themselves making a bunch of movies about it, back when they were berating their good-for-nothing kids about not being able to finish the job in Southeast Asia. It’s going to be hilarious here in the next 20 years, watching the “no war for oil! / Bush lied people died!” crowd start lionizing themselves about their selfless crusade to bring the light of civilization to the poor benighted Iraqis.

      • Yeah, well, did the books you read ever tell you about the fact that the Confederate Home Guards existed to make sure that deserters and draftees couldn’t run away from the Confederate armies?

        The CSA began drafting its poor whites before the USA did!

          • William C. Davis has something somewhere on this, among others. I *really* don’t want to re-litigate the Unpleasantness of 1861-5, but the Confederate Conscription Act of 1862 predated the Union’s first conscription measure (the Militia Act) by a few months. (The CSA actually gave something like “war socialism” the old college try — by 1865, the CSA was much more centralized on paper — please note, on paper — than the USA).

      • WW2 has been probably one of the most successful upsell jobs in the history of propaganda.

        It’s one of the reasons I like Pat Buchanan so much – he’s done a good job at blowing away some of the preconceptions of what that war was all about.

        “The aftermath” is one of the crucial pieces of the puzzle that go right down the memory hole. I’m old enough to remember what the 70’s and 80’s were like – with a lot of press about the troubles of the Vietnam vets. These days – I notice that Vietnam is starting to get the WW2 treatment. It’s glossed over a lot more than it used to be.

        People forget – the Hell’s Angels bike club started as WW2 vets. Go watch the series “Band of Brothers” – the Blythe character is typical of the type of guy that ended up in a VA hospital after the war – and the probably passed away 5 or 10 years later. Even just a decade or two after the war is over – everybody conveniently forgets the human debris left around after the war is over. Then the sanitized version of the war can get put into the high school history books and made into TV shows. Go read David Hackworth’s first book: About Face. He was a criminal after getting out of the military shortly after the end of WW2. I’m sure this was a common story.

        How much ink gets spilled talking about what happened in Europe AFTER the end of the war?

      • Honestly, do you people actually read history books or do you read comments on Southern troll blogs?

        Have you ever heard of the battle of Brawner Farm? I reckon you probably haven’t. At Brawner Farm, a few Wisconsin regiments held off an entire Confederate DIVISION, including the famous Virginia Stonewall Brigade.

        Or we could discuss the Hornet’s Nest at Shiloh, where Midwestern Yankees held for hours against one of the largest and most determined Confederate attacks of the war.

        We could discuss the Battle of Gettysburg, where even rebel survivors admitted the Yankees had fought harder than any tiger.

        Or we could talk about the Battle of Allatoona Pass, where a preposterously outnumbered Union force held off a fierce and large rebel attack.

        The best rebel soldiers, man for man, probably came from Texas – I rate Hood’s Texas Brigade as the best shock infantry in the Confederate Army. The best Union soldiers, man for man, probably came from Wisconsin. And they were mostly WASPs, not poor European immigrants.

        Seriously, if any of you people actually take the time to read history of the period before, during, and after the war, you might learn three things:

        I used to be something of a Confederate sympathizer until I learned that elite politicians from states like Louisiana and Mississippi had dreamed of re-opening the African slave trade. Our Founding generation worked to end that trade because they didn’t want more blacks here! Yet somehow you people have convinced yourselves that a war started for slavery – and fought against independent Northern farmers and townsmen – was some kind of last hurrah for the white man in America. What a joke!

        Maybe I’m lucky to be from a part of Pennsylvania that is still rural, with some tradition, so people here remember that our soldiers were independent Jacksonian farmers (my county went for Jackson 3 times), not the poor starving Irishmen of this intolerable and idiotic Confederate historiography.

        • The Westerners in the Union armies are never given their due. My gg grandfathers regiment stood at Peachtree Creek, enfiladed on both sides of their line and fighting hand to hand for nearly four hours to prevent a rout of Sherman’s crossing. By wars end they fought in 16 major battles and less than 260 men were left from an initial enlisted roster fo 1,155 in July 1861. I’d say the “whipped” ratio was in their favor.

        • What books would you recommend on the Civil War? The last one I read was Battle Cry of Freedom by James MacPherson.

          • T.L.S.;
            It’s hard to find an account with the Goldilocks level of detail: Enough to understand the basics but not so much that you get caught up in the minutiae. IMHO:
            – If you want to understand the Grand Strategy of the War and The Western Theater of War’s campaigns, I’d recommend MG JFC Fuller’s The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant.
            – If you want to understand the basic unit tactics, it’s hard to go wrong with Paddy Griffith’s Battle Tactics of the Civil War.
            – If you wan to understand the Eastern Theater of War’s campaigns and both sides battle management (or lack thereof) it’s hard to go wrong with Bevin Alexander’s How the South Could have Won the Civil War.

        • The Civil War was as much economic as anything. Its not like the Union was believing in fair pay for honest work. They just substituted immigrants for slaves. Its a small moral improvement used as a pretext for controlling the Southern economy.

          Cheap labor either as slavery or through mass immigration has always been America’s addiction. Its harder to quit for our elite than heroin is for a junky living on the streets

          In the end the endless chiseling on wages will doom the US anyway. It didn’t take Lincoln or the Confederates but people who allowed slavery and had the mindset that “we must have cheap labor”

          Its also nearly impossible for us as a society to discuss or suggest new ways of doing things and it took essential President for Life Roosevelt operating with reckless abandon to our Constitution to fix anything.

          This kind of rigid thinking will almost certainly end the Union. How many Americans will go off to die for their corporate masters is up in the air. Mercs of all sorts will but hopefully people will have enough sense to understand the Corporation, the State and the Left are all bad and don’t give a fig about you and your family. Of the three I actually think the Multinationals might be worse in some respects because at least the Reds and the State claim to have some concern for the greater good.

          We need a Right Wing Authoritarian Populist with FRDR level powers or more but whether we can get such a thing is beyond me

          As far as Wisconsin, that state has a reputation as a terrible place to be an employee and that workers while not quite Deep South bad , basically see employees as shoe scrapings. You do have Illinois which makes y’all look better but Wisconsin still has a terrible rep.

    • This is almost all wrong

      “The South was decisively winning the war early on but was limited in men and resources.”

      Hey Dirtperson Steve, have you ever heard of the West Virginia campaign of 1861, where Robert E. Lee was forced to retreat out of the Mountain State? Probably not. Have you ever heard of Mill Springs, Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, Shiloh, Corinth, or a host of other battles in the west? Your assertion is based on the typical ignorance of the fact that there was – believe it or not – a war west of Virginia! And, with a few exceptions, the Yankees dominated that war! They won the whole Civil War because the rebels couldn’t strike a sufficiently decisive blow in the East – and their biggest efforts got pushed back at Antietam and Gettysburg. Meanwhile, they couldn’t defend their territory in the West!

      A lot of people’s “knowledge” of the Civil War is like those folks who talk about like WW2 as though the Germans didn’t fight an entire other war against the Russians in the East! It’s absurd!

      “The northern factories could keep them better stocked and with a ready supply of poor European immigrants to throw at them the south eventually ran out of resources.”

      There are two parts to this sentence. The first is true, but the Confederates have only themselves to blame for attempting to fight a war against a mightier industrial enemy. The second part is unequivocally false: the vast majority of Northern soldiers were NOT poor European immigrants. The majority of Northern soldiers were of long-term white Protestant stock, and most of them had come from families which had been in America since before the Revolution. Recent immigrants from Europe generally came from Ireland or Germany, and while they made up a significant part of the Union Army, they were by no means even close to the majority. But I understand that pro-Confederate historiography has deluded people into believing that somehow a part of the country – the South – which had people who wanted to bring MORE blacks into America was somehow fighting for a dream of a white and free America. What a crock of crap, with absolutely zero history to back it.

      • Lee was not in command of the forces in WV. (He would not become an actual field commander until he took over from wounded General Joe Johnston on May 31, 1862.) Lee was sent to WV as an observer by Davis because word got back to Confederate HQ of problems there. Lee made excellent suggestions, but the two field commanders were incompetent and hated each other. For some reason, Lee is blamed for the failure of a campaign in which he had little or no authority. That changed after he took charge of the Army of Northern Virginia. Within a month of taking charge from Johnston, Lee cleared all Federal troops from Virginia. He beat off a whole series of invasions that year and would have ended the war at Antietam had his battle plan not fallen into the hands of the enemy. It was that close.

      • At Antietam, Lee’s battle strategy utterly contradicted anything he had done before or since, until Gettysburg. He stood and fought against superior forces, taking massive casualties, believing if he withdrew from that field losing the war became inevitable due to considerations of morale and politics. So yes, success was always a dicey proposition for the South. Without their greatest allay, McClellan, and the back stabbers at the Union general staff in Washington, the war would have been over in 1862. With Grant, Sherman, or even Meade in charge Antietam is a Union victory and the Confederates go on their heels.
        A question that might be asked now is, was McClellan an insufferable dandy, or a secret patriot to the old Republic?

        • You saw what I wrote above and ignored it. Even with Lee’s plans in his pocket, McClellan could not defeat Lee. Had those plans not fallen into his hands, the war would have been over and Washington would have fallen to Lee. Had Grant been the commander in 1862, Lee would have sent him reeling back into Maryland just like the others. By the time Grant came east, the war was virtually over and Lee could only hope to grind down the Federals while waiting for a miracle…which never came. But grind Lee did…Grant lost over 65,000 casualties in a sixty day campaign that ended in stalemate. With manpower advantages of four to one and unlimited resources, Grant’s only recourse was one of attrition. He knew he could wait it out, and did. A nine month trench warfare siege. No commander in modern history managed to do so much with so little as Lee. When Lee was asked by the victorious Union officers how many soldiers he had to oppose them on a one hundred mile long front for the last six months, Lee told them 30,000 men. They were dumbfounded and refused to believe it.

          • I read what you wrote. Maybe you didn’t read what i wrote. McClellan, with every advantage including Lee’s plans in his pocket, did not defeat Lee because he did not want to defeat Lee, or anyone else. I’m not rooting for the home team because I don’t have one.

    • What tends to get ignored in Civil War histories is that the war was won in the West, using armies that were very different from those in the East. Study Sherman’s campaign and you’ll it was a masterpiece of maneuver, tactics and economical logistics that allowed for the destruction of the South’s economic capability. Similarly earlier in the war the same was done with the closing of the Mississippi. Battles like Shiloh were the exception than the rule. The experience of my gg grandfathers regiment at Peachtree Creek where they took 40% casualties repelling Hood’s counterattack were considered very much the exception.

      • Sam;
        Agreed. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign was also a masterpiece of maneuver warfare enabling a win over superior overall numbers, badly used.

  35. Perhaps Germany learned too much from 19th century warfare in Europe and her colonies which was one repeated example after another of a smaller technically superior force annihilating a much large inferior force.

    The US first hand experience in the Civil war and the pacification of the plains was largely the opposit – the triumph of logistics and materially overwhelming the enemy.

  36. The sherman was a great tank. It was well made, fast, decently protected, had a three man turret with radio communications, smooth suspension and superior fire control. And it could be mass produced in huge numbers.

    But you are right..we wouldnt make Shermans anymore. We’d overengineer it. Its the same problem in the entire American military. Or the west for that matter. We cant just keep it simple.

    • I was in an armor battalion and wouldn’t want that kind of death-trap. So no, we wouldn’t build it again. I saw what happened to “simple” tanks like the T-62 in ’91. It was like clubbing baby-seals. Even infantry weapons like the Dragon were getting 1-shot kills.

      • It`s the user, not the tank. Those poor 80 point IQ half illiterate Iraqis would have been killed in the complicated machines probably even more and sooner. T 62 was built for Europe and not for open desert where only distance matters. T 62 is twice lighter than Abrams , very little electronic trace, crew serviceable and very long operational range. They should have go long around and hit logistics from behind, not wait for their death in front of Abrams long cannon and superb detection and sight system.

        • It has a glass-jaw. The turret is pathetically thin single-layer steel and they have live ammo stored in the turret itself – so as soon as hot metal burns through, ammo starts detonating inside the crew cabin. If the tank is sealed, the crew ends up shot out the entry hole is a hot mist.

          No thanks.

          • Yes but this is cheap. For example against tactics described in your next comment Soviets would use T 62 manned with fast breeding Central Asia Muslims. Cannon fodder is very important part of war and using Abrams with white crew in town full of mines and ambushes is very expensive. This is fundamental difference with West and East mindset. In the US nobody thinks about cheap tank with black ghetto crew.who`s only function is blew up mines for of white crew Abrams…:D

          • Ahhhhh. I just love to hear that tanker-talk. AViators could get a bit conceited and repetitive …. 😉

          • Talking about the M1 Abrams? The rounds are stored in the turret with the crew but in a sub-compartment sealed by an hydraulically actuated door. Likewise the top potion of this compartment is intended blow away through the top of the turret if the store ignites and goes up.

          • Right – the M1 can blow it’s ammo without killing the crew. The Russian tanks T-72 and earlier will absolutely kill the crew if a round goes off inside.

        • My buddies and I used to debate whether on not we could have won if we traded equipment and positions with the Iraqis. A yes answer assumed we would put the heavy equipment in the cities and conduct ambushes.

  37. Did the incentives of the Wehrmacht’s interior political system play a role in the dysfunction?

    The U.S. military has had nearly two decades’ worth of lessons in the Middle East to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but they still come up with ideas like ACUs and the F-35 (while trying to EOL the godlike A-10). Not to mention women in the combat arms…

    The bad ideas currently being generated are coming from officers who were somewhere between the platoon and battalion level when the war started, so inexperience is no excuse.

    The promotion system depends on making a mark, without regard to net impact, so any change is positive from the perspective of the decision maker.

    We’re still using AP 5.56 ffs.

    • Politics always plays a role.

      The endless quest to kill the A-10 is a perfect example for a piece of excellent US equipment that has more than proven it’s worth.

      A good example of this same sort of thing for the Germans is the Stg 43. Which Hitler didn’t think was useful in the war effort. If the Germans were able to kill so many Russians with bolt-action rifles – imagine what the Wehrmacht could have done with a magazine fed “assault” rifle.

  38. There’s a very good series of podcasts featuring Nicolas Moran, who goes by the name of “the Chieftain;” He’s in the Army reserves, I believe and served in an armored unit, but he performs research for the on-line game “World of Tanks.” The podcasts are known as “the Chieftain’s Hatch,” and are very interesting because he is able to gain access to museum versions of tanks and actually get in them and see how easy they were for the crew to operate. His opinions, even if one disagrees with them, are highly informative, because they are based on not only his experience in tanks, but also extensive research and access to the real equipment. His opinions are unconventional. For example, he rates the M4 Sherman as the best medium tank of World War II, especially in the version that carried the 76.2mm gun (the British Firefly version carried a 17-pounder gun, which may have been even more powerful). He says armor protection and mechanical reliability were reasonably good and it was very easy for the crew to operate and to escape from if the tank were damaged. He says he believes the “prone to burning and exploding” reputation of the Sherman was due to survivor bias; crews who escaped from the Sherman to describe it catching fire would not have escaped from a T-34, Panther, or Mark IV. He also rates the Panzer III the best tank at the beginning of the war, due largely to the spacious interior, which made for crew efficiency and a “barely adequate but good enough” long barrelled 5cm main gun. Insofar as the T-34 is concerned, he admires the producibility and armor protection, but found it very cramped inside and almost impossible to get out of in a hurry. The T-34/76 had a two-man turret, which meant the tank commander also had to aim and fire the gun. Only about one in five T-34s had radios at the beginning of the war, which impeded effective tactics. The T-34/85 had a three-man turret, which improved efficiency, although it remained cramped inside. He was also critical of the ergonomics of German designs, although their main guns and armor protection were quite good. While the Germans might have produced more Mark IV’s, that chassis was already taking the largest turret-gun combination of which it was capable. A more interesting option for the Germans would have been to concentrate on turretless tank destroyers–much less expensive to produce and almost as capable as turreted designs in the defense.

    One could go on and on about the Second World War. Like Z-Man, I rather suspect that the U.S. military-industrial complex has grown enamored of large, complex platforms that may prove vulnerable to cheaper, more numerousadversary weapons. Another weakness about which I wonder are the very extended lines of communication along which American forces operate. An adversary might render the large platforms relatively useless by attacking the logistical tail that supports them, which simply cannot be as well defended as the platform itself.

    • His videos are great. His talk about the Sherman really has some excellent points. It wasn’t just a matter of designing a tank. It was a matter of designing a tank that you could get across an ocean and support logistically. Plus, with the typically close engagement ranges in Western Europe, being able to penetrate 2 inches of armor at two miles didn’t matter.

  39. The F-35 in testing last week flat out smoked it. The cost of the F-35 comes from pentagon/congressional purchasing, personnel requirements and the decrease in orders relative to development cost. Lockheed is, hands down, the best defense company in the world. When the screaming about the F-35 started, I suspended my judgement because it’s Lockheed. Your point is still valid because the pilot is, and has been for forty years, the limiting factor. Aircraft have to be buffered, sometimes significantly, simply because the pilot wouldn’t survive. Even leaving the buffering out, think about how much weight could be removed by removing the pilot and everything that comes with the pilot. Weight = fuel/range and ordinance capacity. Aircraft are transportation and artillery. The cruise missile is simply a rocket powered drone. Drones are coming, but the fly boys will have to be out of power before it happens. Turning the Air Force back over to the Army would be a step in the right direction. Read up on the fights between the Air Force and the Army over who should be flying drones and where.

    The U.S. Navy is the submarine force. In my, nobody asked, opinion the carrier force took a significant step back in importance with in flight refueling. Carriers are a jobs program.

    Germany damn near killed every damn Russian in existence. I believe the phrase is, “they damn near bled the Soviets out”.

    • Agree with all. AND the start-from-scratch one-size-fits-all requirement was stupid. They could have just kept making much better variants of F-22’s for the Air Force while the Navy designed a new carrier-based aircraft.

      The Marines could have purchased, designed or modified something into a VTOL or just gone with drones. They are good at getting stuff done on the cheap.

    • Bleeding the enemy dry is a calculation that seems difficult to compute. Damn near, is just not good enough. Even at 4-5 to one, the German army failed. The Americans in Vietnam were at what, 10-20 to one? We still lost.

      • We bled and bombed them dry enough to negotiate a peace accord. Could have done it again in 75-76 but the commies were running Congress by then.

        • We did not negotiate a peace accord, we negotiated a face saving surrender (and subsequent withdrawal). The oriental mind understood this and complied. The war never stopped for a moment, no cesation of hostilities—none (except on our side).

          Nixon and Kissinger surrendered in Paris. It was exactly as (I believe) Goldwater used to quip, “…declare victory and go home…”. South Vietnam was left to fend for itself and that bought us time to get the hell out without too many more casualties and of course a Nixon re-election (which is all scummy pol’s care about).

          Compare our withdrawal and the peace that we negotiated to any other modern conflict of the 20th century—say Korea. Where were our peace keeping bases and defensive positions manned by American troops? Not in Vietnam, that’s for sure. When the last American combat unit left the theater the war was effectively lost for us and won for North Vietnam. The rest was just details.

          • Vietnam was lost with Watergate. PAVN was scared shitless of US air power and didn’t wiggle their pinky toe until they were absolutely sure the US wouldn’t provide the air cover they agreed to. The only reason Nixon didn’t veto Case Church is because Congress passed it with a veto proof margin.

      • The German Army was doomed to failure from the start. Hitler knew he would have fight the Soviets sooner or later, and he chose sooner. That the Germans damn near pulled it off is impressive.

        • Hitler believed he would have to fight the Soviets sooner or later, but he believed lots of things. There were many effective avenues to weaken the Soviets without ever firing a German artillery piece.

      • Less “lost” and more got bored and went home. When you don’t have the will to have WW2 rules for fighting guerillas (all fighters without portfolio will be shot), you’re at a major disadvantage. Even the much vaunted “graveyard of empires” in Afghanistan didn’t really beat the Soviets, the Soviet Union was falling at home. We’ve got this weird myth that guerilla wars are unwinnable when armies have been winning them for all time.

      • Lost? The only thing we lost was our minds allowing lefty politics to wage the Vietnam war.

    • Chateau Heartiste had a post up the other day that had a map of Europe showing the male to female sex ratios after WW2 was over. If I recollect correctly – Russia was at 62 to 100

      It’s true that Russia had more and probably better tanks than the Germans. But another very significant factor is that the US sent massive amounts of Lend Lease aid.

      Here’s the crucial info:
      In total, the U.S. deliveries through Lend-Lease amounted to $11 billion in materials: over 400,000 jeeps and trucks; 12,000 armored vehicles (including 7,000 tanks, about 1,386[43] of which were M3 Lees and 4,102 M4 Shermans);[44] 11,400 aircraft (4,719 of which were Bell P-39 Airacobras)[45] and 1.75 million tons of food.[46]

      Because the US sent the commies a shitload of trucks – they were able to concentrate on building more tanks.

      Could the Soviets have won the war without US trucks? I think that’s a debatable point. Trucks are at least as important if not more so than tanks on a modern battlefield. Without trucks an army is not mobile.

      And the American 6×6 was an excellent truck.

      From Wiki:

      The United States delivered to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel,[26] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic production.[26] One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company’s River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.[49]

      Inflation calculator:
      $11,000,000,000 in 1947 → $120,911,210,762.33 in 2017

      Could the USSR have won against Germany without US help? That’s the real question.

      Maybe without all that US help the Germans could have decimated the Russian population of males to the point where we be having to put up with all this commie shit in the here and now.

    • “…think about how much weight could be removed by removing the pilot and everything that comes with the pilot.”

      The USAF already ran the numbers on this. Any weight savings by removing the pilot as associated life support would be offset by the required SATCOM and other communications gear now needed to operate the plane remotely.

      • The SATCOM would be able to take more G’s.

        And experts hired by pilots will reach the conclusions that those pilots want them to. Do you really believe that comm gear has to be that weighty?

  40. Very good overview. Those German super weapons were in fact expensive useless toys and the brilliant German generals were idiots who did not understood the basics of the art of war.
    The problem was aristocracy. Despite grabbing power, all other life spheres in Germany remained under control of rich Elite who had isolated themselves from real life by generations and lost any capability to think. Actually entire West has this problem. In the Eastern Europe, much of common sense is caused by…..communists who wiped the degenerate Elite away. Goebbels in his diary openly admits that Stalin with his purges made the right thing and that was the real reason why Stalin won and Hitler lost.

    • In the US the degenerate academic elite is running the show in cahoots with politicians and media.

      • Amen. Take a gander at Roger Kimball’s article in The New Criterion (March 2019):

        Decline & Fall: classics edition
        On identity politics in classical education.

        Have a large glass of good bourbon at hand …..

    • The Finns had a field day with a Soviet Army stripped of all of its experienced officers during the Purges.

      • No, they were idiots, not officers. Finland was very lucky and very brave to survive officers attack. Without Stalin purges, Finland probably succeed to defend Mannerheim Line and saved their entire territory. Stalin entire success was based on fact that all countries around Soviet Union were prepared to fight with idiots like Tukhachevsky. and The Purge came as horrific surprise. Can you imagine, you build your Army to fight with commanders like David Hogg and suddenly Chesty Puller jumps out from nowhere.

    • The stalanistic purges were probably only good to a certain degree. At some point, not too far off, you kill initiative and risk taking from your support staff as well as lose a ton of experienced human capital.

  41. Hubris is the problem, which apparently goes hand-in-glove with technological superiority.

    If I had to choose a preferred adversary it would be the nation/culture that thinks they’re superior and “indispensable.” If I could choose the enemy to avoid it would be the hardened peasant with a cheap rifle and plentiful ammo.

    I was part of many discussions on our future navy, where senior leaders were creaming themselves over the next multi-billion dollar tech marvel. I asked the question, “How many places can it be at once?” Thinking I’m the idiot, they scowl “Well just one at a time of course.” Knowing them to be the idiots I say “Well what of our naval strategy that requires us to confront simultaneous crises … what if there’s a crisis in the Gulf and another in the Straits of Formosa? Wouldn’t it be better to have 3 good ships than 1 perfect ship?” Crickets.

    • “hardened peasant with a cheap rifle and plentiful ammo” hmm….sounds like an Afghani.

      • …or Vietcong. My understand of these “peasant” fighting forces is that they are tenacious and stretch their limited capabilities to amazing degrees AND win battles… but at gigantic costs. Pyrrhic victories most of them.

    • Arthur C. Clarke wrote a good Sci Fi short story on this theme of technological overkill:
      httpp://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

  42. The Germans could have won a war, just not the one Hitler bumbled into. He wasted men and treasure on pointless campaigns like North Africa, without securing Gibraltar – so they were sure to lose.

    And Civil Affairs! They were so stupid. It was insanity to invade Russia without invading or settling with the Brits first. But if you are going to invade, at least be evil geniuses about it and act like liberators – get the locals to fight on your side instead of oppressing them until you have to waste regiments fighting civilians. Be nice to them at least until the war is over!

    • from the wisdom of Field Marshal Montgomery:
      Rule 1, on page I of the book of war, is: “Do not march on Moscow”. Various people have tried it, Napoleon and Hitler, and it is no good. That is the first rule. I do not know whether your Lordships will know Rule 2 of war. It is: “Do not go fighting with your land armies in China”. It is a vast country, with no clearly defined objectives…

      • Hitler didn’t just break the rule, he had his armies simultaneously march on Moscow, Leningrad, and Stalingrad to ensure failure.

        • I’ve wondered why idiot uncle Dolphie struck out in all directions; such absurd overreach doomed his nation.

          As the Zman said, the smart ones died in WW1, and he was getting often deliberately bad info, as we see happening with Trump today.
          Almost as if someone else under him would benefit were he to lose.

          • Uncle Joe may have had the same ultimate objective as Adolf; destruction. Were I the Sovietskis I probably would have withdrawn my forces slowly and forced the Germans to continue to stretch their supply lines while simultaneously contenting with one of the coldest winters on record yet the Russians just poured men into Stalingrad to halt them probably more for symbolic reasons than anything tactical. Brave, noble, maybe, maybe not.

          • What makes you think that “withdraw[ing your] forces slowly” is an achievable goal? Withdrawals don’t turn into routs because the withdrawing side plans that to be the result.

            Stalingrad was indisputably a victory for the Russians. They didn’t need a secret objective to justify trying for that result.

    • Hitler had the war won in 1938. Germany was long out of the Great Depression. The same could not be said for Britain, France, and the US. Russia was in a permanent self-imposed depression. Eastern Europe depended on Germany for their economic development. But Adolf had gotten up on his old enemies without getting even. Unsatisfying.

    • Incredible considering he knew how vulnerable Russia was to losing the Ukraine and Belorussia. He could have crippled the Soviet Union by dragging Moscow’s troops away from the Crimea and into the Ukraine. Then an unsettling of the Middle East through the Black Sea could have finished off the USSR without a 40 year cold war.

  43. I thought the Germans did apply sloped armor to their Panther tanks, at least in the front?

    I think at the tactical level the Germans did fairly well, they just didn’t have the ability to see the bigger picture, so no matter how well the fought they were doomed to lose. The May 1940 invasion of France was pretty bold and clever, yet they didn’t finish off the Allied army in Dunkirk when they could have.

    I’ve been watching “The Greatest Story Never Told” and one thing the doc claims is that Hitler believed that with the Molotov Ribbentrop pact the Brits would not declare war on him when he invaded Poland. Because if they declared war on the Germans for invading Poland they logically would also have to declare war on Russia when they invaded too. I always wondered why the British only declared war on the Germans but not the Russians.

    I guess another mistake the Germans made was assuming their enemy would hold to their principles.

  45. Interesting, and probably true, but I wonder to what degree there has been an active repression of German culture and ideas in the post war period? In addition to the fact that east Germany was behind the iron curtain for much of the post war twentieth century. I know that German poets have complained that they are left out of anthologies and books, presumably because of lingering anger about the nazi period. Germany is still the powerhouse of Europe economically, so to me this argues that there remains a formidable smart set there.

    • There’s no question that the West went on a de-Germanification program after the war. All those Frankfurt School guys wound up in the post-war occupation of Germany. Paul Gottfied has written a lot about this. I forget the names, but a few Frankfurt types re-designed the German primary school system to take the German out of it.

  47. If you have time, this is an interesting lecture on the design, production, and doctrinal choices made which resulted in the Sherman–US AFV Development in WW2, or, “Why the Sherman was what it was”:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwIlrAosYiM&t=5113s

    Two more about the Sherman:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udnEpV160zU&list=PLEAEU2gs2Nz9w0BfANdoClKtK6jTM1gIN

    and the T-34-85:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCSh8aS1_D0&list=PLEAEU2gs2Nz9Sb-MmrP09kKsCW387X6Ea

  48. The reason: they destroyed the very people who could have seen the flaws. The great German thinkers were Jews.

      • Don’t understand the question? If you mean the US has turned the public schools into lefty propaganda dispensers, then I agree.

        • That, and what is described in Mearsheimer and Walt’s book on the Israeli lobby. As c matt says, they are definitely cunning thinkers; now, if I could only believe that we were all on the same team.

          • If your reply is to me, I was questioning the use of the word, cunning, in the previous comment. Hence the use of the ? .

            I don’t have Jews on the brain, but I would like to have an explanation of the reasoning that says in print in a public forum that people who’ve been forced out of their homes and countries and been slaughtered since biblical times to the present are seen by people with access to the internet as “cunning”?

      • German Jews got us atomic bombs to end the war and eventually the Apollo program. I’d say that worked out pretty well.

        Flame away.

    • I tend to agree. When it comes to war planning, strategy, etc. there are few tribes more adept than the Jews. Definitely cunning thinkers.

    • Funny how post war Germany didn’t need “great thinkers” to become a world class economy and exporter.

      • No? They lucked out when Germany was split in two and we poured gazillions into West Germany, rebuilt the country and provided military protection from the Soviets.

        • So how come we pour gazillions into the other 95% of the globe and get zero ROI?

          The Germans have their worth in some areas.

          • @Jim P The Germans are extremely worthy in most areas, but choosing who to chase out of their country and who to let in is not their strong point.

          • “The Germans are extremely worthy in most areas, but choosing who to chase out of their country and who to let in is not their strong point.”

            That’s a money quote lol

          • They would have done fine without the list of undesirables inside of Germany, especially without a total war to wreck the economy. You don’t need Jews to make jewelry or have a “sophisticated” economy, just like you don’t need Gypsies to get your pockets picked, or celebrated homosexuals to make films. The presence of “The Other” reduces trust in society, and low-trust societies suuuuuuck. Normal Germans can do all of these things AND preserve their society with overly-perfected machines (BMW M5 & MBZ OM-617a in a 300D). The Germans were going to fix France, make peace with the UK, then go home. You can’t get good beer or food outside of the Reich, so conquest is not that great. The Great War and WWII were banksters wars, just follow the money to see for yourself.
            “Let’s have you and him fight” is the bankster motto.

          • “The Germans were going to fix France, make peace with the UK, then go home.”

            That’s not what Hitler said in Mein Kampf, never mind the inferiority of the indigenous bratwurst in the areas he intended should become lebensraum.

          • High-IQ mechanical engineers, who are also somewhat borderline autistic geniuses who can focus on the task very well. You can’t just go buy that in China.

          • Why not? I thought Chinese have the highest IQ’s in the world. I mistrust those tests for lots of reasons, mostly lots of chicanery among the low IQ geniuses in academe.

    • There is a book, “Hitler’s Jews” (IIRC) that outlines the number of Jews given “dispensation” in order to fight for Germany in the war—many in front line combat units. Not specific to the JQ as we discuss it, but an interesting read. At least I found it interesting in that so many Jews could ignore the obvious threat they faced and still promote the interests of such a hostile society they lived in.

      • Beyond the 35000 juden in the military and 1500 in the officer class, I suspect the propagandists, financiers, secret police, business council, and other top-level decision makers were also overrepresented by “great minds”.

        Looking at the pictures of the propagandists, Heydrich, Himmler, Goebbels or Goering (I get em mixed up, so piss off)- they have the genetic tell, the low, slungback ears. Can’t be camoflagued, as shabbos/crypto Mengele was trying to do. (He remained free and unprosecuted until his death in 1992, yes, the boogeyman himself.)

        Oddly, after the war, who controlled Germany? The patriotic, nationalist Sephardi had been shipped off to tents in Israel or de-Nazified, banned from politics.

    • This is patently bullshit.

      The Germans kept innovating right up until the end of WW2. The Jews had long since been removed from the population and sent off to the camps.

      There’s a good series about the development of tanks starting in WW1 on Netflix right now. I believe it’s a French series.

      One of the key things they point out about German vs. Russian tanks – was that the German tanks were over-engineered vs the Russian tanks. The Russians RELENTLESSLY streamlined the production and design of the T-34 – to the point where they evaluated whether it was worth even grinding off the casting flash from the turret and painting the thing. They found that the average combat life of a tank and crew was something like 1 week. Why bother making the tank all fancy if it’s just going to be blown up a week later ?

      Same with the crew.

      Why train them extensively if they’re dead in a week?

      The Germans over-engineered and overbuilt things – you can see it right up into the present day with German built cars.

      It’s a societal / cultural thing – not Jew thing.

      Werner Von Braun wasn’t a Jew. Neither was Ferdinand Porsche.

        • Not having Jews didn’t help them get the Bomb, which is the only way they weren’t going to lose the war.

      • This is on par with the great myth of Soviet military strength that collapsed as soon as Reagan called their bluff.

        Things will be very different when Trump calls the bluff of the one worlders.

        • If. Not when. I love Trump, but he doesn’t seem to share my idea of who the enemy is.

          • What do you think he’s doing right now. He doesn’t need to send in the marines, although everyone knows they’re available at his nod.

      • One detail that gets overlooked, was critical, Calsdad, is the German tanks were padded, they burnt quickly if hit, the Russians were not, the crew wore padded hats.

        • Russian tanks burned just fine. When tanks burn it’s not “padding” that’s burning. And, no, German tanks weren’t anyway particularly “padded”. Look at the inside-the-tank explorations on The_Chieftain’s YouTube channel.

      • If you’re familiar at all with German cars, you can see the parallels. BMW and VW have clever engineering, but they’re overcomplicated at the expense of price, durability/serviceability.

        • Chrysler Corporation products suffered from German mechanical complexification during the overseas ownership. Cool looks, but what about the Slant-6/318/440 six-pack? Fiat understands resurrected zombie-cool muscle cars and brought back the Rapid Transit System of 1970.

      • Regards your comment about Russian manufacturing processes. I’ve worked on Russian equipment military equipment built as late as the mid nineties. They do not waste time machining surfaces that do not require plane surfaces. Casting flash and sand mould stipling on surfaces is left if not required to be removed for operation. Panels are all match drilled so vehicles generally can not have panels swapped between them during maintenance. Lots of little stuff like that but all just good enough.

    • I don’t know about “great thinkers, but Germany, Italy and the central European countries that Hitler conquered produced the scientists who fathered the atomic, and later Hydrogen bombs. He chased them out but kept the tank engineers, thus choosing poorly.

  49. I want to say it was a Hastings book (Retribution maybe) that discussed how Japan never changed either. They had good troops and Bushido and all that but never updated their tech, At the beginning of the war with the US, it was Zeros versus a P40 Warhawk maybe. At the end it was Zeros (what was left of them) versus Corsairs and Hellcats. They both believed the superiority of their tribe would win the day I guess.

    • I read a book on the training of Japanese fighter pilots. The selection and training process was as stringent as any I’ve ever read about. Pilots had to have vision strong enough to point out stars and planets in the daytime sky. This produced small numbers of truly exceptional pilots. The U.S. on the other hand aimed at a process that produced a lot of pretty good pilots. The Japanese dominated early on, but the Americans kept replacing the pilots it lost. Japan would not lower its standards and so could not.

      • The Americans also rotated out their best combat trained pilots back to the US to train more pilots. The Japanese did not do this. So when the Americans started killing off the highly trained and highly experienced Japanese pilots (they had been fighting long before the Americans entered the war) – the Japanese had no reserve of knowledge and experience to fall back upon to train new pilots.

    • Granddad was an engineer for Douglass during the war and the story I was told by the old man was that they had a captured Zero they were inspecting and granddad was scared to walk under it for fear that it would fall apart on top of him. True/not true? Doesn’t matter, it makes a good story.

      • Mitsubishi Zero were very-light (stripped of protection for the pilot, lacking redundant systems), giving them excellent climbing and good fuel economy. Not good at taking hits like heavy-slow US aircraft. No free lunch.
        Did the Imperial Army choose this strategy, or were they forced into it by iron/steel shortages? The Germans had shortages of everything, and developed ersatz for almost everything, even orange soda “Fanta”.

        • Well, the Imperial ARMY had nothing to do with the development of the Mitsubishi NAVY Type 0 fighter. And the “strategy” was dictated by the need for range in the Pacific.

    • One reason for the similarities might be the “Wehrmacht Worship” so common in the US Military right now. Not admiration for Nazism, far, far from it, but the idea that the German Army of WWII was the ne plus ultra of military machines, and that the only reason that they lost was that they were outnumbered. You can see this obsession with the Wehrmacht in everything from our tactical doctrine to the composition of divisions to the shape of our helmets to our obsession with superweapons. This in spite of the fact that Hitler himself thought that the German Army of WWII was inferior to that of WWI, and that many German war veterans stated that many American, British, and Soviet units outclassed their own, especially in the areas of artillery (American), radar (British) and tanks (Soviet). We will pay for this down the line…

      • Toddy;
        You must understand that the so-called ‘Wehrmacht worship’ is a polemic device in ongoing factional fighting within the US Ground Forces. ‘The Maneuver Warfare Faction’, largely composed of tankers, is the one forwarding it. They admire the Wehrmacht’s demonstrated tactical flexibility at the small unit level and their development of junior officers to be able to conduct wide-ranging mobile operations. It could be highly effective, as the Wehrmacht demonstrated, against a large peer competitor land army opponent.

        The Counter-Insurgency Faction, largely composed by special forces and infantry folk do not participate in such worship. In fact, while they agree about training junior leaders, they insist that it is a wast of money and likely to lead to defeat against indigenous foes.

        It should be obvious that there should be a place for both, depending on who the enemy is. The problem is that it’s hard to be ready for both sorts of combat at the same time. To some extent it’s about the rice bowls and who gets to be senior generals.

      • Fascinating history: Stormtroop Tactics – Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918; Gudmundsson; 1989. Supports the notion of the (evolved) superiority of the WWI German army. Also shows that the word “stormtrooper” has been sorely abused in allied culture.

    • My uncle designed the production lines for the Mustang fighter, specifically the cockpit. To help, the USAF even sent a captured Messerschmitt for examination to the plant. I can’t comment on tanks, but it seems the German Luftwaffe was the epitome of thrift wrt their fighters. Basically, an oil pressure gauge, altimeter, fuel and airspeed gauge. Even the seat was bare metal with a sheep skin tied to it.

      The spec’s for the Mustage were an order of magnitude greater and my uncle judged that it took dozens of man hours more to produce the Mustage cockpit on the line than the Messerschmitt. Of course, we had an abundance of workers, time, and infrastructure to produce such.

      As far as pilots go, there was a PBS documentary many years ago on pilot training in the USAF in WWII. Fairly long and seemed to follow the recollections of a single pilot IIRC. What amazed me is that he joined and was selected in early 1942, and trained (and trained) in the states until shipped overseas in 1944 (!) for the D-day landing. Two years of no use and he only spent about 6 months in combat in France before rotating back home.

  50. It’s not like the Germans never thought of sloped armour, rather than decide the boxy model was superior: yes, it was easier to penetrate, but the stability of the chassis was increased.

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