janh
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quote:
ORIGINAL: turtlefang
They Germans logistic situation was a nightmare across the board - in many ways, much worse than in WWI on the East front. The mix of weapons and vehicles was simply unbelievable. And the Germans never devoted or developed as great an understanding of logistics as the Allies did. It was regarded as a backwater in the German military.
Guess this one of the undisputed lessons of this war. Just as the focus on the (wrong) high-tech weapons is another. Easy to say so in retrospect, though. If you compare early German tanks, I and II, to what their neighbors owned at that point, you start to realize how that happened, though. Or look at the navies, air forces etc. One has to keep in mind that the Germans were basically complete stood down until 1933, and formed all forces and re-developed the necessary technology and industry in only 5-6 years by the time the war began. Needless to say, early German tanks were not great. Some ships had their benefits (pocket BB and fast BC with range, but poor combat stats), and the Bf-109 and Ju-87 excelled for a (short) while). But to really pick up with Allied developments, continued focus was needed (Pz. IV series, FW-190, real BBs of BM class etc, though all were sort of late). Finally, the Germans exaggerated technical detail when they should have moved towards mass production. Yet whether the latter was truly an option for the German war industry, or the concentration on building few but technically superior platforms was a mere necessity due to external limitations as some historians claimed -- maybe, maybe not? Anyway, having had to build an Army from scratch, it may not be that surprising that some areas received less attention than others.
Another factor that probably contributed on the German promoting the importance of logistics might be found inherently in the past experiences that the "Prussian-German" officers corps shared (and hence the thinking): For a good 150 years, German wars were fought in Europe. The logistic infrastructure is well developed, the weather is mild, and distances were never that far as for WW2 standards, even if you substitute trucks for horse cards. Maybe they should have gained some perpendicular experiences from the colony wars in South Africa, but perhaps that seemed irrelevant to their 1933-39 war planning. Small wonder their logistics was meant to fight the nearest neighbors, and proved just sufficient for that, but never for such different environments as the wide and sparsely populated, poorly developed spaces of Russia, or the African dessert.
If G&G ever get to the "War in Europe", and put it on equal footing with AE (i.e. have at least an Axis production system in place), then most like we will see the same thing as successful players in AE do: Limit R&D and productions where possible to a small number of platforms (in WiE also tanks, apcs etc) with best performance/(cost+maintainance) ratio. Likely that will be late Pz IV and perhaps even Pz V, but a lot of high-tech toys with little impact would be rationalized away. Hindsight will probably be most important and impactful for the Axis side, as it seems just in WitE.
< Message edited by janh -- 12/1/2012 10:00:41 AM >
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RE: Germany vs Russia a 1 front War. - 
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