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WW2 British army - as good as the Wehrmacht?

• Message 1. 

  Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Tuesday, 22nd November 2011

  I'm not doubting the British serviceman's bravery or fighting skill in that war, but each time I read about WW2 or watch a documentary, with or without veteran testimony, I find myself thinking that the British soldiers simply didn't match the German or Japanese troops' strength in fighting organisation, leadership and/or ability?
  
  Was it all down to Axis indoctrination and fanaticism or did they simply have more seasoned professionals proportionately in the early war years to our peacetime occupation lads and new war conscripts?
  Even as the war dragged on, our Paras (Arnhem) and even LRDG/SAS ops behind enemy lines in Africa and Belgium respectively seemed to go belly up against the enemy?
  
  The military contexts and the conditions of war vastly differ from theatre-to-theatre, but many times the Axis proved far stronger on plenty of occasions and we oddly enjoy celebrating 'successes' out of brilliant but desperate failures- Stalag Luft III (Great Escape - only 3 escaped out of 76, none were British), Colditz, The Dambusters, Arnhem, Singapore, Dunkirk/France, St.Nazaire, Crete, initially N.Africa, Monte Cassino?
  
  Of course, heroic and fanatical British (and allied) fighting successfully resisted/defeated the Germans or Japanese at The Battle of Britain, El Alamein and Kohima!
  
  It often seems that we were either 'outclassed' or at least made repetitive successes out of losses, failures, retreats, escapes or surrenders?

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 22nd November 2011

  Hereward
  
  Both German and Japanese societies were militaristic with very strong traditions of self-sacrificing military- to the extent of the veneration of the fight to the death in defeat.
  
  Boys were indoctrinated and trained in this from an early age with Germany having a tradition of national conscription going back in the German principalities to before the creation of Germany. Moreover both countries had traditions in which government was dominated by the military, its needs and ambitions.
  
  Before the outbreak of the First World War , it has been asserted , the real control of German foreign relations was already assumed by the German High Command and removed from the Kaiser.
  
  In Japan the rule of the Emperor had been effectively taken over by the Shogun- the military chief for over two hundred years before the Meiji Revolution in the 1860's and the economic crisis that started in 1929 brought the military back in effective charge of Japanese foreign policy.
  
  In addition to all of this- and as a natural consequence (a) there had been a huge investment into military resources in both Japan and Germany in the ten years before 1939, and (b) both the Japanese forces in general and units of the German forces were had already been waging war for several years before the outbreak of the Second World War.
  
  Great Britain was different in almost all these respects and you have only to read Field Marshall Montgomery's Memoirs to see this carreer professional soldier's awareness of the huge job of catching up with the Axis Powers in the aftermath of Dunkirk.
  
  But personally I take some comfort from the fact that England seems to usually start a war all unprepared and has to suddenly develop the competences needed to defeat those who believe in wars as instruments of policy. The English people always resisted any ambitions of the Crown to have a permanent standing army, and its introduction by Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth, and the complications that it caused. was one of the factors in the Restoration of Charles II.
  
  But this tradition of facing up to war only when it is unavoidable means, I believe, that the English/British can have a deeper understanding of just what they are fighting for.. The "professional soldier" fights because he is told to and accepts to "just follow orders" even unto death. The soldier who understands why militarism and aggression must not prevail has a greater motive to find the road to victory.
  
  Cass

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  Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  I think that in Europe, different models of training, inspired by different models of military philosophy, accounted for a lot.
  
  The German military doctrine established during the Weimar republic, which remained the foundation of the Wehrmacht despite being challenged by the Nazis, combined strict discipline with a need for personal initiative. The notion prevailed that a good soldier did not necessarily need orders because his thorough training and indoctrination ensured that he would automatically do the right thing. Within a strict hierarchy, the social distance between soldiers and officers was intentionally kept small, symbolised by the ritual insistence that they should eat the same food. Even Hitler insisted that, within his elaborately fortified headquarters, he would live in austerely furnished rooms and eat simple food, because that was the image that a commander-in-chief should project. (On the other hand, when during the siege of Stalingrad the Army's chief of staff put himself on the same diet as the besieged 6th Army, an annoyed Hitler ordered him to stop.)
  
  British military doctrine, as far as I understand it, tended to rely a lot more on well-drilled soldiers automatically obeying orders. A larger distance was maintained between officers and enlisted men, usually bridged by a strong cadre of NCOs. The result was regarded by the Germans as a force that was stubborn and often heroic in the defensive, but too inflexible and too lacking in initiative to excel in the offensive. British staffs, operating from the principle that the men should not need to improvise too much, often resorted to elaborate, complex and detailed management of planned operations. This was "not done" in the view of traditional German commanders, who felt that a general should design the broad strokes of an operation and leave the details to his subordinates. This delegation of responsibility for the details ("Auftragstaktik") made it much easier for German commanders to implement a quick change of plans.
  
  However, it has to be said that towards the end, this operational flexibility of the German army badly eroded. It relied a lot on a cadre of highly trained NCOs and junior officers, but wartime losses in these groups were heavy, and their replacements were increasingly hastily trained. Hitler's insistence that his orders be exactly obeyed also went against the doctrine of the officer corps, which resisted for a long time, but final had to accept that the Fuhrer's orders were the last word.
  
  As for the Japanese, that is a different story entirely. Some Japanese operations were very well led, but at other times Japanese military leadership performed abysmally. In general Japanese soldiers were highly disciplined, tenacious, and able to survive and fight with absurdly low supplies. This permitted the Japanese Army to embark on operations that no other army could have contemplated, but they often crossed the line into planning operations that were logistically impossible, and killed huge numbers of their own men by starvation, disease, and neglect. Another unusual characteristic of the Japanese army was the way in which strict discipline was combined with frequent insubordination by junior officers, and often fierce quarrels at command level between officers with proud and abrasive personalities. This did not do much for operational coherence.
  
  In 1941-1942 the crucial factor probably was that the British army had never expected to fight an enemy like this, which broke most traditional rules. When they grasped how to deal with this, the balance shifted.

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  Mutatis
  
  I do not know just how typical Montgomery was- but in his description of the way that he approached his first command in the Southern Army after Dunkirk, he placed a great emphasis on the pursuit of fitness- physical, mental and moral.. The mental fitness seems to have involved the kind of exercises that promoted IQ and the ability to think.. Montie himself gives an example of the need to improvise. During the First World War as a young officer he had led a charge right across No Man's Land. Arriving in the German trenches and confronted by an armed German soldier he suddenly realised that all he had as a weapon was his ceremonial sword. So he kicked the German in the groin.
  
  Perhaps further to my previous post one should also note that really the German and Japanese armies- in terms of their importance in the national pysche and even military capability - should really be compared to the Royal Navy- the England/Britain's "Senior Service"..
  
  Cass

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• Message 5

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  Posted by colonelblimp (U1705702) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  Hereword,
  
  I would suggest that the German army was far more professional than the British, at every level, while the Japanese gained their edge through fanaticism. As you make clear, that's no reflection on the bravery of British soldiers but their leadership (by the regular officer corps) was often dire. The long catalogue of defeats between 1940 and 1942 has often been blamed on material inferiority but that certainly wasn't the case in, say, the Malaya campaign or the battle of Gazala.
  
  As the war continued, the British army became increasingly professional. However, by 1944, it was in the grip of a manpower crisis and divisions were having to be disbanded. Its contribution to the war would only have diminished the longer it went on.

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• Message 6

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  Posted by sinbadnick (U14506866) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  Just a short reply to your message about the bravery of our seervicemen
  in WW2 , did'nt Hitler himself say - With our brains and your guts we will
  rule the world. nuff said.

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• Message 7

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  Posted by Herewordless (U14549396) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  But British brains even exceeded German - Turing, Wallis, Whittle- and the Radar boffins (an RAF-coined phrase)?

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• Message 8

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  Hereward
  
  Of course Hitler and the Nazis one-way or another deprived themselves of some of the best German brains.. Part of the whole anti-Jewish resentment came from the fact that Jews were made up a disproportionate % of the German intellectual and professional classes..
  
  And perhaps you did not have to be Jewish to decide to leave?
  
  Jacob Bronowski writes most passionately about his friend Leo Slizard who he credits with being the scientist who worked out how an A Bomb could be made, and describes how he decided to opt out of the research team that he was involved in once he found himself working for the Nazis.
  
  Also some of the "success stories" like Von Braun were played down by the victorious allies- perhaps because it made them more useful as assets for the Future.
  
  Cass

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• Message 9

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  Posted by Sambista (U4068266) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  Cass - I think you mean Szilard?
  
  For an object lesson in over-complex plans with little or no resilience to deal with the unexpected, the Japanese Navy (the Leyte Gulf battles are a fine example) take some beating.

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• Message 10

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 23rd November 2011

  Ur-Lugal
  
  Thanks for another correction.
  
  I think that the interesting thing about the Royal Navy is that at base it depended upon a real competence "for all seasons"..
  
  Hence in part the old "Navigation Acts" were intended to ensure that England/Britain continued to produce the expert seamen that the Navy would need in time of war..In line with what I wrote earlier about these countries where young men were brought up pre-militarised and army-ready, there was a view that young Englishmen should take to the sea like ducks to water.. William Cobbett tried to join the Navy as soon as he saw the sea with the Fleet riding at anchor.
  
  By all accounts Captain Cook was such a brilliant sailor because he had been a real working sailor for so long and "had seen it all".
  
  Cass

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• Message 11

  , in reply to message 5.

  Posted by Raph33inUK (U14994758) on Thursday, 8th December 2011

  Very true.
  
  The main reason why the British army was outmatched up until 1942 is the same reason as for all allied armies being outmatched by the German army in the frist half of the war, roughly speaking.
  Equipment was not always up to the job, particularly on the British side apart from air power perhaps, but the core problem comes from tactics and doctrine.
  
  The first engagements of the Americans against the Afrika Korps in 1943 were a painful reminder of reality, to say the least.
  The truth is that during the first 2 or 3 years of the war, nobody was "good" enough to stand up to the German war machine.
  The Russians had the advantage of territory size and demography to act as a "buffer" against the striking beginnings fo Barbarossa, before pulling themselves together and getting better equipped.
  I think the allied armies needed to learn, often the hard way, how to handle the Whermarcht tactics.
  The only army which had good equipment at the beginning of the war was the French army, but their doctrine was so abysmally inappropriate that they were unable to get the best from it.
  

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• Message 12

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  Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Thursday, 8th December 2011

  Raph
  
  I have been quoting again recently John Steinbeck who wrote in the late fifties in an introduction to a book of his war reports- which 15 years later had an air of "once upon a time"- that the Greeks used to say that a war was necessary every 20 years or so in order that the lessons of war were not lost and forgotten.
  
  But perhaps France suffered from the success of the Dutch and the English in managing to establish "Natural Frontiers".. From Vaubon under Louis XIV to the Maginot Line there is a direct line of thinking.. Prussia on the great North German Plain evolved from a very different history and spread its model to the whole of Germany.
  
  Cass

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• Message 13

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  Posted by suvorovetz (U12273591) on Thursday, 8th December 2011

  The Russians had the advantage of territory size and demography to act as a "buffer" against the striking beginnings fo Barbarossa, before pulling themselves together  Yes. and getting better equipped.  Ur...not really:
  
  
  

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