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One of the greatest myth of WW2 is that Germany was defeated only by the overwhelming strength of the Allies. Simply put, the Allies had greater manpower and material resources, with which they made more weapons. It was numbers alone that defeated the German military.
There was just one problem with this myth: it is not true.
Even a cursory glance at the history of WW2 would immediately show the flaw in the argument.
In Jun 40, Germany faced only one enemy - Britain, which had only two army divisions left fully equipped to repel an invasion. Its Luftwaffe (3,609 aircraft) was by far larger than the RAF (1,911 aircraft). Germany had the economic resources of the entire Western Europe to call on. Yet, Germany lost the Battle of Britain.
In Nov 1941, Germany was at the gates of Moscow, and had Leningrad besieged. At this stage, the majority of the Soviet Union's agriculture, industrial, manpower and raw material resources were under German occupation west of the Leningrad-Moscow axis. The Soviet forces had been decimated and its military factories either occupied, destroyed or disrupted. At this point, the Third Reich represented the greatest industrial power in the world, with the probable exception of the United States, which was not at war. It did not win even then.
In May 1942, Germany had proceeded to conquer even more Soviet territory, occupying vast tracts of Soviet land. In North Africa, it had thrown back the British, and the US was still not in the European war in strength as yet. By then, Germany's economic edge had started to erode as the US started to gear up its war production, but at this point, what was to be a flood was only a trickle.
If winning wars are determined by the economic strengths of the combatants alone, then Germany should have won in Jun 40. Or Nov 41. Or May 42. Yet, it failed. Clearly economic strength does not translate directly and inevitably into military victory.
Strange Lag in Production
The strangest thing about the story was the disparity between Germany's economic resources and its production numbers of important weapons.
For example, the British economy, which was much smaller, consistently out produced the Germans even during the desperate years between 1940 and 1942. The desperate British produced 15,049 aircraft in 1940 and 20,672 aircraft in 1941. Germany, despite having the resources of the entire continent to call on, produced only 10,247 in 1940 and 11,776 in 1941.
It was only in tanks that Germany outproduced Britain. Germany, with the French steel stocks and industry at its disposal, as well as the excellent armament factories of Belgium, Czechkoslavakia, and German proper to called on, produced 2,200 tanks in 1940 and 5,200 in 1941. Yet, the British, with far smaller steel and coal resources to call upon, produced 1,399 in 1940 and 4,841 in 1941!
So, Germany with far larger resources had actually produced less or not much more than the British. The same situation would apply for Russia, except that the disparity was even more amazing and the explanation of Russian strength even more heroic. I will touch on this topic in a seperate thread. It is sufficient to say now that Germany failed to turn its economic strength into production numbers.
It is even more strange that from 1943 onwards, when the situation of Germany became desperate, when Allied strategic bombing campaigns had started, and a revived Soviet Red Army began to throw it off its conquered lands with its resources, Germany actually produced more from ever shrinking resources. It produced 24,807 aircraft in 1943 and 39,807 aircraft in 1944. It produced 17,300 tanks in 1943 and 22,100 tanks in 1944.
(It is interesting to note that by comparison, the US produced 17,565 tanks in 1944, actually lesser than the Germans did.)
If the Germans could produce so much when conditions were becoming increasingly unfavourable, why didn't they produce more between 1940 to 1942, and win the war?
Complacency
I've previously touched on this issue in my examination of the strange lethagy that went into the design and production of the Me-262. It bears repeating again.
Between 1940 and 1942, Germany experienced a strange - and eventually fatal - lethagy. Unlike all of its enemies that began to push their economies to produce more and more, production increased only slowly in German factories.
New weapons were introduced at a leisurely rate. Between 1940 and 1943, the Luftwaffe received one new fighter type in the Fw-190, and no new bomber types. Large amount of resources were poured into developing second generation weapons such as the Me-209 which were then abandoned. It is telling that the next new fighter type to be introduced was the Me-262 in 1944, when it was too little and much too late.
The same went for the development of armour. Between 1940 and 1941, there was not much done to design new tanks to produce existing German ones in time for Barbarossa. Existing designs such as the PkW III and PkW IV were not even produced in sufficient numbers. Instead, existing tanks were scrouged together from existing stockpile. It took the shock of the T34 to rouse the Germans out of their lethagy to produce two new weapon types - the Panther and the Tiger. Even then, it took almost two years before these new types were introduced - prematurely as it turned out - into combat.
The most likely explanation was that the easy victories of 1939 and 1940 taught the Germans the wrong lessons. They believed that they were really so superior to their enemies that they did not had much to worry about. They could fight huge numbers and still defeat them.
The Blitzkrieg battles of 1939 and 1940 were so lop-sided that the Germans thought that they had found the magical formula to warfare where they could defeat larger enemies through speed, daring and flexibility. They believed that the enemy would always be inferior to them in combat.
Operation Barbarossa only reinforced this deadly myth. The heavy losses of the Red Army was amazing even to the Germans. Even the French collapse in 1940 had not produced such huge numbers of prisoners and equipment destroyed. Again, the Germans congratulated themselves on being militarily superior to their enemies, and neglected to push design and production aggressively. After all, why produce more when the enemy would always lose?
The reversals of Dec 41 failed to rouse the Germans from their lethagy. It was seen as a one-off event. They were simply caught unprepared. The early success of Operation Bleu seemed to confirm this, as vast amount of land were captured again.
By the time the Germans realised the deadly strategic trap that they had led themselves into, it was almost too late. The crushing defeats at Stalingrad and later in Tunis made the Germans realised - too late - that they were caught behind the design and production curve. It was only then that German attention was focused on producing more, led by the very competent Albert Speer.
The Obsession with Technological Superiority
But even the efforts of Albert Speer was not enough. Even he had to fight against many conflicting interests, such as the owners of the plants, the managers, and even the soldiers who were to use the weapons.
In this, the German obsession with technological superiority played a big part. I've already discussed how the Me-262 and the Panther and Tiger tanks were exactly the wrong type of weapons to produce for a war of attrition. Instead of simple easy to produced designs, the Germans were obsessed with building weapons of marked technological superiority, using premature technology or exaggerating technical aspects of the designs. All this made it difficult to produce such designs in large numbers.
But the problem extended even further than that. It was not well known that in Dec 41, Hitler had issued a Fuhrer Decree on the Simplification and Increased Efficiency in Armamanets Production. He had berated the German military for constantly burdening industry with unnecessary technical demands, and demanded more primitive and robust constructions. He ordered that mass-production be introduced into armament production.
What had happened was that the German military was so obsessed with getting the highest quality weapons possible that they constantly asked for improvements to be made to existing designs, disrupting production.
It is amazing to note, for example, that during the war, no less than 425 aircraft models and variants were intorduced. A casual glance at a book on the Me-109 would illustrate the same points. To the constantly changing number of models (E, F, G etc) were added numerous minor variants (-01,-02, -03 etc). This was true for all German aircraft designs.
On top of this constant disruption to mass-production must be added the demand for new weapon designs. While the Soviets and Americans wisely put their bets on adequate tanks such as the T34 and Shermans, the Germans were constantly searching for that mythical tank that would be so far superior to Allied tanks that the war would be won. They introduced one design after the other, each more imbalanced than the last until they ended with the monstrosity of Tiger II and Maus. This constant search for that ultimate weapon disrupted production of perfectly adequate designs, reducing the numbers that could have been produced.
Nothing illustrated the insanity and wastage of trying to find the ultimate weapon than the Vengeance weapons. Huge amount of resources were poured into the research and production of weapons such as the V1 and V2. Both would be precursors to weapons in the 1950's, but in WW2, their development drained precious resources away from actual war work. By some estimate, the amount of manpower, time and material put into the entire V2 programme could have been used to produce another 24,000 aircraft. What could this additional 24,000 aircraft have done?
Sheer Inefficiency
The German economy would become the ultimate examplar of productive efficiency in the 1950's and 1960's. But during WW2, it represented a puzzling model of inefficiency.
Throughout the war, barely 50% of Germany's car industry was put to work, unlike the examples of all its Allied enemies, which were pushed to produce huge numbers of equipment.
For example, at the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg, where machine tools for the production of 200,000 cars had been installed in 1939, barely 4,000 vehicles were produced throughout the war. Only a fifth of its capacity was ever utilised. Opel, which produced good trucks, was scarcely pushed to produce as much as it could. Despite having laid down production lines for army trucks, no orders for war work arrived until 1942 - three years after the war began.
Instead of rationalising production designs and concentrating resources, the German approach was entirely haphazard. They would simply use existing stockpiles or pools, instead of organsing all factories under their control to produce standard designs. By 1943, the Germans were using more than 151 different makes of trucks, and another 150 different motor-cycle designs. The logistical nightmare this produced must have been stupendous.
How Much was Enough?
This is a difficult question to answer, but I suspect that the answer was "Less than you think".WW2 was a war of attrition. But the Germans did not necessarily have to lose such a war. After its easy victories of the early years, it was primarily on the defensive. This made its problem simpler than the Allies'. It simply had to build sufficent weapons of sufficient performance to inflict unacceptable losses on the Allies. The Allies, on the other hand, must produce more of good quality weapons to defeat an enemy fighting from defensive positions.
This is illustrated best in the Battle of the Atlantic. This represented the best chance for Germany to win the war. If Britain was knocked out of the war, then there would be no base for the bombing of Germany, no base to launch a second front, and no diversion of resources to the Mediterranian.
To do this, Germany did not need to outproduce Britain or the US in any category of weapons. It merely had to have enough submarines to sink enough merchant shipping. At the crisis point in the Atlantic, the Germans had no more than 150 U-boats.
This is the same in the air. The Germans did not need to have an over-whelming superiority in numbers to win. The Allies needed to in order to win air superiority, but not the Germans. They simply had to have sufficient number of planes to inflict unacceptable losses on the bomber fleets - just as the British had done during the Battle of Britain when it too was outnumbered. In this, the Luftwaffe came very close, such as defeating the British Bomber Command during the Battle of Berlin, and the near defeat of the USAAF in 1943. Another 24,000 aircraft would have been handy in doing this.
On the ground, the same might be argued but perhaps not as easily. But surely, even here, complex and expensive designs such as the Panther and the Tiger was not what Germany needed. They needed cheaper tanks that could be produced in large numbers. They needed defensive designs such as the Hetzer that could lay in ambush to destroy large numbers of enemy tanks. They need cheap weapons to put in the hands of their infantrymen, such as the MP 3008, not the much more expensive StG 44 with its different ammunition.
In all of these, Germany could have made different choices. They could have produced more. They could have produced cruder designs. They could have pushed out better weapons faster. They might still have lost eventually. They might have won. We don't know, but surely it would have made things much more costly for the Allies.
It would not be difficult to imagine such a scenario. If Germany had only pushed itself between 1940 to 1942, it might have produced more U-Boats that would strangle Britain when it was still overstretched and weak. It might have produced enough tanks, trucks and heavy guns to help it defend the flanks of the Stalingrad front. It could have produced enough fighters such that US and British bombers would be shot down at an unacceptable rate in 1943.
This was not to be. The opposite happened. The German failure between 1940 to 1942 created an opportunity for the Allies to break in. By the time Albert Speer got things going, it was already too late. The strategic bombing campaign had already started, and the Soviet Red Army had already starting rolling back the Germans. From here on, it would always be too little too late.
Thus, ultimately, it was not that the Allies had larger numbers that inevitably must win. Rather, it was that Germany failed to produce as much as she could have when times were good. This is another story of German failure during the WW2.
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Originally Posted by Count Lippe
