My wife and I and two friends are going to tour the Normandy battlefields so I have been reading up on the Normandy campaign. One book I have been reading is by British military historian Max Hastings of whom I am an admirer. In this and another book I read by him he has some incisive and highly critical comments on leadership and equipment in the war in the West:

* The Germans and Russians had multiple generals who were capable of high (i.e., theater) command. The U.S. had a few. The Brits had none – specifically including Montgomery.

* As soldiers, Germans and Russians were generally superior to American and British soldiers in all ranks. The Germans divided their army into: (a) static units (older men) vs. active units; and (b) mediocre vs. elite. The U.S. Army rejected such division bu had it in effect w/ the paratroopers being the elite. Elite American units were comparable to, or somewhat superior to mediocre or static German troops but probably inferior to German elite units. Ordinary American units were no better than German mediocre or static units and distinctly inferior to elite German units. Multiple reasons could be adduced for this:

1) The U.S. had deliberately culled out its best people for service in specialties like the Army Air Corps. This was a double whammy: One the one hand it meant that ordinary American infantry units tended to be very ordinary indeed; on the other hand assigning the best people to the Air Corps was a waste because its brass were fanatically dedicated to the concept of "strategic bombing" which was virtually worthless in WWII and resistant to direct troop support, and strafing and bombing enemy transport and equipment. These were the really invaluable things we could do w/ our air resources but were always neglected and downplayed (as "flying artillery") by the fanatic and ego-mad Air Corps brass. (Note that neither the Germans nor the Russians assigned much importance to strategic bombing after the opening years of the war when it proved itself useless.

2) German soldiers resisting in Normandy and Italy, like Russian soldiers resisting the Germans, saw themselves as desperately defending the motherland. In contrast neither the U.S. nor Britain were perceived by their soldiers as facing imminent attack. German soldiers, who were contemptuous of the American soldiers they had engaged, cited examples from the Eastern Front of Russian soldiers resisting German tank attacks by picking up mines and throwing themselves under the tanks.

2A) Concomitantly American and British soldiers were trained to do a job – the job they had been ordered to do. In contrast, German troops were trained, and expected, to do more than they had been asked to do. So at the weary end of a battle, especially a triumph. American and British troops lay down to rest. Weary German troops often mustered the energy to go on attacking, or to counter-attack and win back ground and positions they had lost.

2B) The Allied "unconditional surrender" objective inspired German troops to fanatic resistance in the belief that the peace that would be imposed on them would be more terrible than the war. At the same time the German soldiers deluded themselves into thinking that if the war were sufficiently prolonged the British and Americans would come to their senses enough to realize they needed Germany as a buttress against the barbaric Russians. (Could anyone but Germans have conducted a war w/ such barbarity and yet expected that others would deem them less barbaric than Russians?)

3) Also, of course, the way in which both the Germans and Russians waged war inspired each other with frantic, fanatic intensity. Insofar as Americans felt that way it was with hatred toward Japan not Germany. American soldiers in the ETO saw themselves as doing a dangerous job rather than embarked on a crusade.

4) For the Brits it seems to have been similar. In the early days of Normandy Monty kept his N. African veterans in reserve on the theory that he would commit them only when things got really tough. While they apparently liked Monty and were grateful for not being committed at first, they were highly resentful of being committed at all. Having performed well in N. Africa they felt they should have been sent home; let the new recruits do it all.

5) British troops especially were subject to the "its-not-on" syndrome. That is to say, their intensity and energy, and their confidence in their higher command, were so lackluster that if they judged that an attack was likely to be very dangerous and unsuccessful, their NCOs and junior officers would shut it down after carrying it out only to the point when they could claim they had put in a reasonable effort. In general the British theorized that most of their best potential NCOs and officers had perished in WWI and their WWII army was just left w/ the dregs.

6) Unit spirit and cohesion was a vital element of American fighting spirit. American infantry who became separated from their units in battle would temporarily join up w/ other units to enhance their security and chance of survival. But they were far less effective fighting w/o their friends w/ whom they had bonded and trained. In contrast, over and over and over again German units at Normandy and elsewhere were shattered and the disparate survivors joined together w/ other units and fought just as splendidly as they had w/ their original units.

7) Some of this may be due to the fact that many German soldiers in France had been wounded on the Eastern Front and transferred for recovery to France where there was no war until D-Day after which the war was still less terrible than the Eastern Front had been. Whatever the reason, German units were constantly being brutally fragmented by our attacks – after which the Germans who were left would be reassembled into new units, or resuscitated old ones, and fought very efficiently in contrast to American units which were unable or only poorly able even to efficiently integrate replacements into infantry units that had been decimated [that does not mean destroyed! It means suffered losses amounting to c. 10% of the whole] in combat. As a result we suffered staggering losses among replacements.

8) The Germans were adept in combined arms (infantry supported by tanks and air), though by the time of D-Day they had scant air power left. Americans and Brits were clumsy and inept at combined arms operations though the Americans got better as the war in West continued. Toward the end our fighter aircraft were more and more used in ground support and were much better coordinated to it. But all too much American air support was still wasted in strategic bombing.

9) Max Hastings’ opinion is that, given the inferiority of our tactics, operations, equipment and troops, our victory in Europe was only possible because of our almost total dominance of the air. Stephen Ambrose remarked that upon hearing aircraft coming American infantrymen routinely smiled while Germans desperately sought the nearest cover. In fact German troops joked about acquiring "the German look," i.e. throwing themselves to the ground from where they looked aloft in terror at the sound of aircraft.

10) The Germans were adept at infiltration tactics and could often get behind our lines with devastating results in night attack. Such tactics were not taught to American or British units and were only learned at all through experience.

* EQUIPMENT: American soldiers were told that their equipment was equivalent to or better than the Germans’ equipment. That was not untrue, but there was a disastrous caveat: Generally where our equipment was as good or better than theirs was, that equipment was tangential rather than vital to success. For instance:

1) The American .45 ACP pistol was clearly superior to the Walther P-38, much less the obsolete Luger. But handguns don’t win wars.

2) Tanks do win wars. Our Sherman was more reliable and faster than their Tiger or even their Panther. Which was useful because the only sensible thing to do when a Sherman saw one of their tanks was depart ASAP in some other direction. The Sherman also had a faster traverse which was supposed to be a big advantage when encountering a slower traversing tank like the Tiger. But this did not matter because almost never when a Sherman scored a direct hit on the front of a Tiger did the shell penetrate rather than just bounce off. In contrast when a Tiger’s or Panther’s 88 hit a Sherman it penetrated the frontal armor. Much of the time the Sherman (aka the "Ronson") burst into flame incinerating the crews. But if they were lucky the shell just passed all the way through the Sherman so that the crew died of concussion rather than burning to death.

2) Two caveats to the foregoing: a) We gave the Brits Shermans which were apparently superior to their own tanks. They equipped some of those (called Fireflies) w/ a high velocity sabot gun. While the Fireflies were often able to penetrate a Tiger’s frontal armor they were not able to do that as reliably as a Tiger could despatch them. b) Lend Lease also gave some Shermans to the Russians which treated them w/ the contempt they deserved. (The Russians had in great profusion the overall best tank of the war, the T-34 and their heavy (Josef Stalin) tank was also quite acceptable.) The Russians used Shermans only when engaged in assaulting infantry formations that were not accompanied by armor.

3) The American M1 carbine was a brilliantly innovated piece of shit which demonstrated over and over again its lack of stopping power. Basically it is a marginal weapon for taking small deer – using hunting ammunition. Using the FMJ rounds to which international law limits soldiers, the M1 carbine is best suited for taking rabbits, squirrels and other small game, not fighting wars.

4) In contrast the Garand rifle was a superb weapon, and much superior to the Germans’ fine, but obsolete Mauser ‘92 bolt action rifles. Both Garand and Mauser were much over-powered for combat weapons and needlessly heavy. The upside of that was that they were accurate at ranges far beyond those at which ordinary soldiers shot or could hit anything. The downside is that their ammo was much heavier and unwieldy both for soldiers to carry in large amounts and for the respective armies to transport to their soldiers.(Toward the end of the war both Germany and Russia began experimenting w/ smaller, lighter, less powerful "assault rifles" but they came too late to make any important difference.)

5) If the Germans had all been armed w/ Mauser ‘98s as American soldiers were generally armed w/ Garands, the Americans would have had a great firepower advantage. But by 1944 the Germans had had 2.5 years of combat experience against Russians whose standard infantry weapon was the submachine gun. So, while the bolt action Mauser theoretically remained the standard German infantry rifle, the actual armament of German units was high on the excellent Schmeisser submachine gun which was superior to our comparable guns and much superior to the Brits’ Sten guns. Moreover German units were much more plentifully armed w/ their M1942 light machine gun than American units were w/ their far inferior BAR and Brits were w/ their far inferior Bren Gun.