pretty simple really, Logistics decide the winner of any drawn out war, WW2 german logistics was poor due to issues such as Russian partisans causing damage, a lack of proper winter equiptment streched out supply lines in Africa and the lack of an industrial base to have enough quantity to allow for quality to be guaranteed whislt fulfilling demand for equiptment (most tanks and armoured equiptment for example) all doomed Germany in ww2.
by A_engietwo
37 Comments
As the saying the goes, “tactics win battles, logistics win wars.”
“It ToOk 3 ShErMaNs To BeAt A tIgEr!!!”
Even if that were true, it doesn’t matter if they can make 25 Sherman for every Tiger
I’d say morale as well, but that’s a topic for another time lol
“SAY HELLO TO FORD AND GENERAL MOTORS! YOU HAVE HORSES! WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!”
This line never fails to crack Me up. Sums up the vast differences between US and Aillied Logistics against Germany and Japan.
also speed, reliability, ease of repair and production capacity are critical to evaluating what is a “good tank” rather than just “gun plus armor”
The Sherman was the best tank of the war, fight me
Good tanks? You mean the “no bridge can hold its weight” Tiger? Or the “transmission broke before it reached battlefield” Tiger? Or maybe “stuck in maintance for a day” Tiger?
The transmission on like, every claimed “good” german tank would like a word.
claim to be superior race
lose two world wars
this template should be banned
What do you mean meth can’t replace logistics?
Good tanks? German? Lmao
Wehrabooism will be a clinical diagnosis in the DSM VII
Tanks are really niche when you think about it
It also doesn’t help when “good” tanks screw over the already-strained logistics.
Bullets don’t fly without supply.
“A mass-produced tank is eventually good, an over designed tank is forever bad.”
-Shigeru Miyomoto, on tank design philosophy
Shermans and T-34s are the better tank if the German alternative is there’s no tank. The tank that shows up is the best tank.
Obligatory; the US military is a logistics operation in camouflage.
Amateurs are talking about weaponry, professionals about logistics…
Battle of the Bulge proved that
Also the tanks were either on par with or worse than the allies tanks and in the handful of cases where the tanks were better it was not by a significant margin
I dont get this point…..
Per the Wechmacht OKW armament office Germany was in constant shortage of everything from start of the war. Also everybody knew Germany needed a shorter war. This wasnt new as per allot of plans Germany needed to do and did extremly risky plans to get ahead of their shortcomings. They lacked the basic resources nor time to do “good logistics”. They couldnt do good frontline stockpiles bcs those were needed elsewhere.
Even then Germans did try to improve the situation. They ended up out producing locomotives (for different rail systems) and railcarts than their consumption. Built quite allot of new rail in USSR.
You only need to compare USA to UK. USA had abundance in resouces and production so they could afford to put good amount of production into logisticks.
comiboos dont now logistic as well
A good tank is a thing that can fight. Tiger I cant even reach the fight itself without necessarily breaking down.
At least you have a replacement right? Well its Germans, gonna wait for another 6 months compared to what the US and Soviets can produce.
German tanks weren’t that good either. Too complicated, and most of them were too heavy for their firepower, because of the poor quality steel (poor ore).
I‘d argue that was one of the Soviet tanks strengths was ironically enough it was cheap and spotty, but you could produce them so fast that you win just by throwing garbage at the enemy
If you look at WW2 as a quality vs quantity thing you can clearly see that quantity won in the end
Albeit that’s simplifying it and I wouldn’t actually call German tanks quality, needlessly over-engineered excuses of quality would be more accurate
It probably could have helped Germany if they had motorized logistics instead of mostly horse reliant logistics too
Which those horses are another one of the many reasons why WW2 had no gas warfare, horse gas masks are expensive to make and you need a lot of them plus most horses would mistake them for feed bags and destroy them as seen in WW1
“On paper, the tank has good firepower. Too bad it could only stay on paper”
Think Battle of the Bulge. Germans needed to break through to capture fuel
This really applies to everyone, especially lazer pig fans
A tiger is only a better tank in a video game where things like firepower and armor are the only things thay matter and you only fight other tanks. As an instrument of war though, tigers were awful and outclassed by the sherman in every conceivable way
Was this meme made by Roboute Guilliman?
People like to speculate that “if this had happened, the Nazis would’ve won, if that had happened, the Nazis would’ve won,” but the more you look into them, the more you realize that it took absurd amounts of luck for them just to get as far as they did.
I hate logistics
I save this as a fantasy writer and sci-fi enjoyer
“We did it, Hans. We made it to the other end of the factory floor!”
*transmission proceeds to explode*
“A panzer could beat a sherman one on one every time!”
“When is there ever one sherman?”
Or
“Hkw many horses did the americans bring?”
“None”
I find this r/HistoryMemes armchair general understanding of warfare really defective. The Germans, knowing they literally could not ever win the production game, chose to instead focus on quality and operational art, hoping to defeat their more numerous enemies through crafty schemes. How stupid! Except, it isn’t, that is literally the only good course of action they had.
What ought to be criticized is the Germans choosing to start such a lopsided war in the first place, but there’s little to criticize in how they waged it, they were in fact by far the best of all of the powers involved at the tactical and operational levels of war. I think people have gone a bit too far to the other side in an attempt to debunk the myth of the hypercompetent Germans.
The Germans conducted themselves brilliantly in a situation that they stupidly got themselves into.
Also the intelligence! People fail to mention how often German intelligence failed miserably.
They took to Russia, believing the roads on the maps where actual roads or even highways only to find muddy trails time and time gain. The Nazis were, in many ways, pretty unprepared, often due to hubris.
I wonder how all would have turned out if Stalin hadn’t ignored his actually very capable spy ring and mobilization had taken place before the Germans invaded.