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Wait, a discussion in off-topic is pointless?

STOP THE PRESSES!

But seriously, America's military force in modern times is capable of armored or infantry assaults, rapid reactions/preemptive strikes, artillery bombardments, air strikes, and the like at a level in which no other country is capable of.

I think it played a significant role in German success in France, where officers acted on their own initiative to continue to exploit the collapsing French and English position, but a significant role in the failure of Barbarossa, where it prevented sufficient

Where is the rest of this sentence?

sebster wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:And its name was Zhukov...

Additionally, I want to point out that Joey's arguments about the "Germans would have crushed the Soviets had it not been for the Allied bombing campaign against German industry" thats actually contrary to the facts. Post war the US Army Air Forces and later the US Air Force conducted studies which pretty much concluded that strategic bombing of German industry had no noticeable, lasting, or long-term impact on production. In fact, the Reich's own production figures and Albert Speer's testimony confirmed that production actually INCREASED despite the bombing campaign (largely because the German economy did not even begin to mobilize for proper wartime production until 1943, so it had an industrial reserve that it slowly continued to increasingly exploit during the course of the war).

Interesting. I knew that strategic bombing had been broadly ineffecitice, but I didn't know that specific facts to back it up. Thanks.

ChaosOmega here is actually incorrect I'm afraid. The concept of the strategic bombing offensive being ineffective is a myth.

What you actually find is that Germany built up stocks of war materials prior to the invasion of Poland and France in the years immediately preceding their aggresion, giving them a solid foundation to draw upon, resulting in no need for a full war footing in the economy until later on in the war. The amount of ordnance dropped between the years 1939-1941 was minimal, and the expanding war economy rendered it fairly moot.

However, what we find come 1943, is that American aircraft building up in the offensive for D-Day, and the increase in the amount of munitions dropped, combined with the exhaustion of those resources gathered pre-war resulted in the impact of the allied air offensive increasing up until the end of the war. The German war economy was expanding, its true, but the bombing offensive destroyed transportation networks as well as the actual material producing plants. This resulted in abundances of certain resources in certain places, that couldn't get anywhere, and raw resources being unable to be shifted to the factories where it was needed, in order to produce material and munitions.

Speers testimony was actually along the lines of Allied Bombing having had a rather deleterious effect upon the German warmaking capacity. He believed that at one stage, it was accounting for the retardation of the German economy by 30-40% (if memory serves, I may be a little off on the precise figures). I read the transcripts of his interviews personally whilst compiling research on the subject some time back. He also commented that one or two more raids on the level of Dresden would probably have forced surrender upon Germany, interestingly enough.

Mannahnin wrote:Where is the rest of this sentence?

Added now.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Ketara wrote:ChaosOmega here is actually incorrect I'm afraid. The concept of the strategic bombing offensive being ineffective is a myth.

Okay, sounds like this is a discussion that's actually worth having then.

What you actually find is that Germany built up stocks of war materials prior to the invasion of Poland and France in the years immediately preceding their aggresion, giving them a solid foundation to draw upon, resulting in no need for a full war footing in the economy until later on in the war. The amount of ordnance dropped between the years 1939-1941 was minimal, and the expanding war economy rendered it fairly moot.

This seems to conflict with comments I've heard about the Germans gaining a massive boost from captured French military industry.


Anyhow, I know the greater issue is much more complex, because within the allied bombing there's the switch from targeted industrial bombing to greater strategic bombing, and it's the second that people criticise. So exactly what the overall effect is I might go an make an effort to read about. Then maybe we can have a new thread on the issue?

sebster wrote:

Disagreed strongly. I dont know where you got the idea that the Heer had a culture of giving their junior officers free reign in their actions... that is anything but the truth. Hell, friggin' senior officers didn't even have free reign in their actions, arguably the reason why Operation Overlord succeeded was because Rommel was away from the front and was unreachable by telephone, etc. His subordinates either didn't have the authority to mobilize the armored reserves (which may or may not have been positioned too far away to really be of effect when they were needed), or they feared acting without permission from their superior officers or Hitler himself.

I'm thinking of mission type tactics, where officers are given significant reign in how they go about achieving their prescribed objectives. I think it played a significant role in German success in France, where officers acted on their own initiative to continue to exploit the collapsing French and English position, but a significant role in the failure of Barbarossa, where it prevented sufficient



I do agree that the German military became increasingly hidebound as the war went on, largely a result of well trained, independantly capable officers being killed in the Eastern Front meatgrinder.

I still don't know if I would say it was an encouraged behavior. I recall that Rommel (not Junior at this point but still rather low in the grand scheme of things as a Division Commander) was rather much disliked by many of his fellow officers both above and below for his tendency to ignore orders and act as a maverick during the invasion of France and the Low Countries. I think your assessment of it becoming more restricted as time wore on is a good one, as it certainly seems by the end of the war (especially from certain memoirs I have read about the last days before Germany's capitulation and certainly during the Battle of Berlin) the expectations of what an officer was to do with his given orders were rather rigid it seems, though this may in part come from the fact that junior officers became increasingly more important as the military was ground down to a smaller and smaller size, and thus had more direct interaction with Hitler and/or higher command. It also seems that the culture at this point promoted it, as an officer that took the initiative and suffered losses (which were unaffordable) would be removed from command for failing in his duty or acting against orders and in some instances tried as a political criminal, while officers who took an initiative and succeeded would be awarded the knights cross for their actions. The officers would be far less likely to act of their own accord if one of the two possible outcomes (and indeed the more likely one) would put their future and possibly even their life, in jeopardy.

And Ketara, I disagree. Its certainly no myth that Strategic Bombing failed to live up to the expectations of the Airpower theorists of the interwar years, and, once again, the USAAF and the USAF themselves had determined that it was an ineffective campaign (in the European theater, the Pacific theater gets interesting due to the differences in weapons and strategies/tactics employed, as well as the differences between european and japanese architecture and urban planning).

Likewise, the claim that Germany built up a surplus of war material runs contrary to what I have read and what I have studied. In fact, it runs contrary to a lot of the facts I've been presented during my studies (having studied both the strategic bombing campaign in depth for my military related studies, as well as wartime production for my industrial engineering degree) which stated that German production was stalling prior to the start of the war due to the expanding military's insatiable demand for war materiel, as well as the necessity to produce and/or provide consumer goods to a civilian population that was being lifted out of the depression and once again had money to spend on luxury goods and of course the desire to do so.

The reoccupation of the Rhineland and especially Sudetenland (and later the occupation of the rest of the Czechoslovakia) certainly helped alleviate the stress and may have allowed some stockpiling to occur, but much like Sebster, from what I have seen, German production was not operating at a surplus level until after French industry was secured, Norway was occupied (thus essentially monopolizing the flow of Swedish iron ore), and Romania joined the Axis powers in 1940. The stockpiling of significant resources prior to the war would have been virtually impossible given the demands placed by the military on German industry, and certainly one of the key factors influencing the invasion of Norway was that the Germans were in desperate need for Swedish ore, since it was of a higher quality than that which Germany was able to produce domestically or source from elsewhere given the various trade embargoes and blockades it had imposed on it.

I dont deny that the air campaign made things difficult, certainly the constant repairs to infrastructure and the delays caused by severed rail links were a drain, but the impact was certainly minimal. By the USAAF's own BDA, only 20% of ordnance dropped fell within 1000ft of the target area... and that was supposed to be "precision" bombing (in fact, thats largely because in the last say 6-8 months of the bombing campaign they finally figured out how to do things right, i recall reading that in late 1944, the figure was less than 10% "accuracy"). The well known operations, such as the Ploesti oilfield raid and the Schweinfurt-Regensburg bombing really had little impact. Ploesti for example, had largely the same output before the raid as it did immediately after (because the refineries were not operating at full capacity and when several were lost, they simply increased production at the others to compensate, this 'tactic' is actually horrifyingly true of a lot of the major raids and is certainly telling of how inefficient german production was), and after repairs were affected was operating at an even higher capacity than previously capable about a month later. Schweinfurt-Regensburg temporarily disrupted production, but by that point in the war Germany did have a surplus available and thus the production shortfall wasn't even an issue to overall war materiel production. The real benefit that the allies derived from the strategic bombing campaign was the massive investment of resources into air defense, which largely drained resources that were desperately needed elsewhere (the amount of AAA produced by the Germans was actually rather ridiculous). Which, if my memory serves, is what Ketara refers to here:

Speers testimony was actually along the lines of Allied Bombing having had a rather deleterious effect upon the German warmaking capacity. He believed that at one stage, it was accounting for the retardation of the German economy by 30-40% (if memory serves, I may be a little off on the precise figures). I read the transcripts of his interviews personally whilst compiling research on the subject some time back.

See Also: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, it provides a pretty good analysis on what worked and what didn't, and for the most part, it points to the conclusion that strategic bombing was ineffective.

In any case, just throwing it out there, if the German high command (and no doubt Hitler) had taken a more realistic view of the situation at this stage in the war, they would have realized that they were fighting a defensive war, and thus their insistence in producing mechanized units (self-propelled artillery, anti-aircraft weapons, assault guns, etc.) was a drain on the economy, and they would have been better served producing more static equipment with which they could "hold the line" and perhaps in some areas turn the tide, while they slowly built up a reserve of mechanized units and armor with which they could counter-attack (and depending on the time period you're looking at, possibly turned the tide of the war.

chaos0xomega wrote:I still don't know if I would say it was an encouraged behavior. I recall that Rommel (not Junior at this point but still rather low in the grand scheme of things as a Division Commander) was rather much disliked by many of his fellow officers both above and below for his tendency to ignore orders and act as a maverick during the invasion of France and the Low Countries. I think your assessment of it becoming more restricted as time wore on is a good one, as it certainly seems by the end of the war (especially from certain memoirs I have read about the last days before Germany's capitulation and certainly during the Battle of Berlin) the expectations of what an officer was to do with his given orders were rather rigid it seems, though this may in part come from the fact that junior officers became increasingly more important as the military was ground down to a smaller and smaller size, and thus had more direct interaction with Hitler and/or higher command.

I admit I've never exactly gotten my head around mission type tactics, and the exact extent of where that begins and ends.

sebster wrote:
Interesting. I knew that strategic bombing had been broadly ineffecitice, but I didn't know that specific facts to back it up. Thanks.

However it was greatly effective in three ways (in Europe).
1. The destruction of the refineries and other attacks on the oil industry had a marked effect on reduce fuel supplies, which is a major killer.
2. Destruction of "marshalling yards" and other rail intermodal points played havoc with the movment of troops and material.
3. It effectively destroyed the German Luftwaffe, such that German attacks on DDay were materially insignificant.

Once can argue in the Pacific theater it had a much greater impact.

I've started a new thread for the merits of this one here chaps:- http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/436484.page

Melissia wrote:

But seriously, America's military force in modern times is capable of armored or infantry assaults, rapid reactions/preemptive strikes, artillery bombardments, air strikes, and the like at a level in which no other country is capable of.

I don't know about that me. Americas budget is massive cos you pay your lads fairly, but I reckon the Chinese could probably launch 50 million men into an infantry assault that would put the USA to shame.

your right,but they do not have enough weapons for them.Heck let us see them put in boats and see them invade us.That one would be a big joke.us Americans are all armed pretty good.i think some of us wishsome foriegn country would attack us,so we would have target practice!

I'm amazed that people can not differentiate between ARMY and MILITARY.

chaos0xomega wrote:I still don't know if I would say it was an encouraged behavior. I recall that Rommel (not Junior at this point but still rather low in the grand scheme of things as a Division Commander) was rather much disliked by many of his fellow officers both above and below for his tendency to ignore orders and act as a maverick during the invasion of France and the Low Countries.

Um, not really. Most division commanders in the German army tended to behave that way. Rommel was dislike for how he became a division commander (afaik). He asked Hitler, as he was in charge of his personal guard before the war, and Hitler asked him what kind of command he wanted and Rommel said he wanted a Panzer division. Being an infantry officer, this upset a lot of men such as Guderian, who had worked and develped the German armor doctrine for years. At that point most men hated him, especially Jodl who despite being an avid Hitler fan, to some degree still adhered to Prussian military traditions that held politics and the military should be separate entities.

I'm amazed that people can not differentiate between ARMY and MILITARY.

That's a hard distinction to make because for the majority of US military history the leaders of the military were Army. The Army planned the Civil War, WWI, and the majority of WWII (outside the Pacific) EDIT: And all those little wars for the most part. You can't really talk about US operational planning without talking about the Army planners who were the driving force behind it hence the lack of differentiation at least on my part.

Amaya wrote:I'm amazed that people can not differentiate between ARMY and MILITARY.

I'm amazed how hostile you post every time.

Frazzled wrote:

Amaya wrote:I'm amazed that people can not differentiate between ARMY and MILITARY.

I'm amazed how hostile you post every time.

Consistency is important.

Amaya wrote:I'm amazed that people can not differentiate between ARMY and MILITARY.

Well, yeah, they get the most government funding and have the most influence over the other branches of military. The Army is the backbone of sustained American combat

Its also the senior service, and given that american military operations are largely a joint affair and assets are integrated across the spectrum, its hard to talk Army without also incorporating the other branches into the discussion.

Squidmanlolz wrote:The Army is the backbone of sustained American combat

Sorry I have the Secretary of the Navy on the line. He and the Marine Corps Commandant would like to have a discussion with you, just behind the building to your left...

Frazzled wrote:

Squidmanlolz wrote:The Army is the backbone of sustained American combat

Sorry I have the Secretary of the Navy on the line. He and the Marine Corps Commandant would like to have a discussion with you, just behind the building to your left...

Tell that to the guy writing out the mil's budget.

Squidmanlolz wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

Squidmanlolz wrote:The Army is the backbone of sustained American combat

Sorry I have the Secretary of the Navy on the line. He and the Marine Corps Commandant would like to have a discussion with you, just behind the building to your left...

Tell that to the guy writing out the mil's budget.

Tell that to page 9 of this document:

http://www.defense.gov/pdf/SUMMARY_OF_THE_DOD_FISCAL_2012_BUDGET_PROPOSAL_(3).pdf

What percentage of the Navy's funding goes to the Marines?

Amaya wrote:I'm amazed that people can not differentiate between ARMY and MILITARY.

I'm amazed you still post in this thread.

Squidmanlolz wrote:Well, yeah, they get the most government funding and have the most influence over the other branches of military. The Army is the backbone of sustained American combat

Last time I checked, which was maybe a month ago the Navy received the most money. For the benefit of the doubt I will go check. The sustained combat bit is absolutely true though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oops I see Jake beat me to it.

mattyrm wrote:

Melissia wrote:

But seriously, America's military force in modern times is capable of armored or infantry assaults, rapid reactions/preemptive strikes, artillery bombardments, air strikes, and the like at a level in which no other country is capable of.

I don't know about that me. Americas budget is massive cos you pay your lads fairly, but I reckon the Chinese could probably launch 50 million men into an infantry assault that would put the USA to shame.

They'd be lucky to get even a tenth of that across the ocean given that the US has moved most of its naval assets to our west coast.

And even that assumes they'd have the naval capability to move that many people in the first place.

Which they don't.





The reason we don't differentiate between the Army and the Armed Forces is because the US military is smart enough to realize that combined arms is the best way to win. The army doesn't go to war without the Air Force and Navy backing it.

Melissia wrote:

The reason we don't differentiate between the Army and the Armed Forces is because the US military is smart enough to realize that combined arms is the best way to win. The army doesn't go to war without the Air Force and Navy backing it.

It almost burns my skin to agree with you: but when you are right you are right.

This post is all over the place, but I like it. Nazi Germany, US marines, secretary of the navy, latin quotes... all mentioned in the same thread. Only on dakka.

Slighty OT. A few months ago I asked for recommendations for American history books/films. My thanks to Auston for recommending Gods and Generals. damn good film. Got it on DVD the other day. Should have watched it years ago.

And finally, it has never been explained to me why the US Marines are deployed in a landlocked country. Iraq yes (tiny coastline) Afghanistan no

And finally, finally, who would win out of a fight between the US marines and the Swiss guard Like I said, the thread is all over the shop.

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:
And finally, it has never been explained to me why the US Marines are deployed in a landlocked country. Iraq yes (tiny coastline) Afghanistan no

An interesting question. It may be because we're seeing the Marines less as a waterborne police/jump-off-the-ship-and-attack force that they've been historically and more as an overall 'shock-attack' force.

The role of the US Marines has gone from the traditional role of marines to that of a first strike force for a variety of reasons. I'm pretty sure the USMC is larger and and has superior armor and artillery than the majority of actual 'armies'.

Do_I_Not_Like_That wrote:This post is all over the place, but I like it. Nazi Germany, US marines, secretary of the navy, latin quotes... all mentioned in the same thread. Only on dakka.

Slighty OT. A few months ago I asked for recommendations for American history books/films. My thanks to Auston for recommending Gods and Generals. damn good film. Got it on DVD the other day. Should have watched it years ago.

And finally, it has never been explained to me why the US Marines are deployed in a landlocked country. Iraq yes (tiny coastline) Afghanistan no

And finally, finally, who would win out of a fight between the US marines and the Swiss guard Like I said, the thread is all over the shop.

I'm immensely pleased you enjoyed it, and fun fact you can glimpse Ted Turner during the flag song and dance bit.

The USMC is not the only Marine Corps deployed to Afgan, the RM and I'm sure other similar forces are also there. The answer you are looking for is much more complex but the short answer is that the modern Marines are a land force, with the Army and its reserves at full extension the Marines fill a manpower gap in needed land forces. Additionally the Marines are using the current war as a place to blood a new generation of NCOs and Officers and to test equipment in what is unarguably one of the most difficult infantry environments in the world. There's certainly more to it...but for the most part that provides a solid base.

In equal numbers probably the USMC, they simply have the experience that the Swiss Guard haven't gotten in what...centuries? The SG are well trained, but today they are mostly a excellently trained paramilitary police force. Where the USMC remains America's bulldog assault force that hasn't been at peace for more than what 10-15 years at a time in the previous century. It also doesn't hurt that the USMC is a small combined arms force with armor and air support and on the field the SG is a solely infantry force.

CptJake wrote:

Squidmanlolz wrote:

Frazzled wrote:

Squidmanlolz wrote:The Army is the backbone of sustained American combat

Sorry I have the Secretary of the Navy on the line. He and the Marine Corps Commandant would like to have a discussion with you, just behind the building to your left...

Tell that to the guy writing out the mil's budget.

Tell that to page 9 of this document:

http://www.defense.gov/pdf/SUMMARY_OF_THE_DOD_FISCAL_2012_BUDGET_PROPOSAL_(3).pdf

My apologies, they do receive more funding than America's ground-based fighting forces, which are smaller in comparison though. But the Marine Corps budget is still only around 12% of the Army's.

Did the development of the tanks and trucks and helicopters and planes, and radios the Marines use come from their budget, or did they piggy back on other services? Do they get to take advantage of the total purchase of any platform lowering the price for the quantity they field?

(hint: In general, Uncle Sam's Misguided Children get some darned good deals when it comes to paying for DoD acquisition programs. There are VERY few USMC unique platforms out there.)

They also prototype virtually everything the Army eventually adopts, so not only do they pay lower costs they get the toys first...and the Army pays for them.