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Notes -
Taffy 3 and the 101st airborne have entered the chat.
If this is the case, why were the axis consistently unable to prevail against the western allied forces post '43 even in situations where they had a siginifigant local superiority in terms of men and equipment?
The Battle of Hürtgen Forest?
The Ardennes Offensive, aka the Battle of the Bulge.
Approx. 52,000 german troops against approx. 20,000 Americans who where cut off and surrounded. On paper it should've been an easy win for the Germans, why wasn't it?
Maybe it was because the Americans knew they had total air superiority, columns of tanks (with fuel!) and broad numerical superiority. They could wait for the weather to improve. They could expect relief.
And the goal of the offensive was not 'encircle and destroy a few cut off Americans' but 'reach Antwerp and cut off the entire American army'.
How about the first three attacks on Monte Cassino? Or Operation Market Garden?
So what?
If the US was indeed "vastly inferior at warfighting" the gemans should have been able to roll them up with minimal effort given that they had a 2 to 1 numerical advantage and that western air-power had been grounded by the weather.
Maybe consider something, anything, a little more broad and wide-ranging than one battle? It's not like this is a new idea:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/05/05/their-wehrmacht-was-better-than-our-army/0b2cfe73-68f4-4bc3-a62d-7626f6382dbd/
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Because, and like the last time the Americans went to war against Germany (you say "allies" and "axis", but let's be real here) and won single-handedly, the Germans were completely exhausted while the Americans were mostly fresh. It turns out that a campaign of island hopping doesn't really require a massive army to wage, and highly mechanized forces like navies and air forces don't exhaust a population's will or ability to fight in the same way.
Remember that Germany, America, and Japan were three of the four newest nations on the planet at the time, and with youth brings vigor and innovation.
(They all began three generations- 70 years- before going to war with each other: Germans would defeat France and transition from a confederacy to a federation in 1871, America would conclusively defeat its confederacy faction in 1865, and Japan would unify its confederate states in 1868. The Soviet Union is the other one, formed in 1917, where House Romanov was defeated by House Stalin. It's not so much the age of the country so much as it is the age of that country's elite- when a large amount of it is defeated it creates living space for newer special interests- and while that won't protect you from going to war and losing, which the French [a 70 year old country themselves at the time] did in 1871, it does put you in a position to be reasonably able to contest with weaker, more sclerotic countries for dominance.)
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Do you have any specific examples?
Probably the most egregious: at the beginning of Wacht Am Rhein, the Germans had designated 1 SS Panzer Corps as the key breakthrough unit on the northern flank of the Ardennes offensive. It was the most fabulously and extravagantly equipped formation in the Wehrmacht at the time by far: 2 SS panzer divisions, 2 Volksgrenadier divisions, a parachute division, as well as two additional armoured battlegroups. It had been the chief beneficiary of Germany's last great spurt of industrial production (contrary to intuition, German war production peaked in 1944). It was the force meant to spearhead the charge through Allied lines and seize Antwerp. Facing it was only a single American infantry division that was brand new to the ETO and only had five of its 9 infantry battalions. It had been placed in this part of the line because it was thought to be safe from attack.
The German attack failed. The Volksgrenadier divisions didn't get anywhere on the first day, so on the second the panzer divisions (which were being held for the breakthrough) were added in, but they didn't make any progress either. And then by that time reinforcements were flowing in and the next week of fighting ended in stalemate. It's kind of amusing to me that some people try to play the "what if?" game with the Battle of the Bulge because never had a German attack had such a local superiority in force and failed so spectacularly, and right at the start of the offensive too.
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Taffy 3 off the coast of Samar, and the 101st at Bastogne to start.
I'm no wehraboo but for Bastogne, the Allies had already gained air superiority in France. Bastogne was playing defense (and I won't downplay the courage of the 101st, it was a damn difficult defense) for 6 days until the weather cleared and air support could relieve them.
Meanwhile on the Eastern Front virtually all major Soviet victories (Stalingrad, Kursk, Bagration, Berlin) still had the Soviets taking far more casualties than the Germans.
I think some of the late-war soviet losses vs. German losses are a bit overstated simply due to the Soviets generally being on the offensive - which is typically going to take more casualties than the defense
This doesn't really get at the heart of Soviet casualties - it might be true that in attacking a certain specific fortified position the attacker will take more casualties than the defender, but in a modern war where armies have great strategic mobility and the combat power of a given corps/army/army group etc. is sourced from vulnerable rear areas, an attacker that has the initiative has the potential to achieve lopsided victories. This is what the Germans did to the Soviets in 1941, and likewise what the Soviets returned to the Germans in later 1944-45. A third of the German war dead (1.5 million) came in the final four months of the war when the Soviets were able to fully turn the tables and inflict disproportionate losses on them.
The purges had left the Red Army in a state completely unfit for fighting a modern war, and so the Red Army was essentially almost wholly destroyed twice: first in June-July and then again in September-October 1941. From that point on it was such a desperate struggle for survival that the Soviet Union essentially had little time to try to rebuild or improve its institutional knowledge with respect to fighting a modern war. Every element of Soviet warfighting was massively deficient, essentially up until the operational pauses in early 1944 where after they had recovered enough territory (and suffered such horrendous casualties in the process) that they were able/forced to devote serious time and attention to overhauling their approaches to all elements of the war.
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