Why did Germany produce so many renowned generals compared to the relatively fewer from the U.S. and Britain? Was this due to superior military leadership or other factors?

 

IS.L.A. Marshall researched on this topic during and after WWII. Man-for-man, German soldiers were 4 times as well-trained and effective in combat as American troops. Moving up the chain of command, their officer corps outclassed ours in almost every category. The primary reason was the German Staff System, which was superb at training officers. (A good reference for this is the book “A Genius for War”) Despite losses in combat the Germans never lowered their officer standards during the War, preferring to fight with fewer rather than lower-quality officers.

We didn’t outfight the Germans in WWII, we out-produced them. Our resource base, industrial capacity and manpower pool won the War for us, not our generals. And 9 out of 10 Germans killed in combat in WWII were killed by the Russians, not by the Western Allies.

Hitler was the greatest hindrance to the German General Staff. Left to their own devices, they could probably have won the War early on. He kept interfering and moving the goal posts. An infantry corporal should not be in charge of overall national war strategy.

Additionally, German technology was years ahead of ours except in the nuclear area. (We had more money, resources and scientists to throw at the problem.) Their weapons designers and naval and aeronautical engineers were better than ours. But again, we outproduced them. Example: Their Tiger and Panther tanks were much better armored and armed than our Shermans, but the Germans couldn’t build enough of them, and had little fuel for them. In one case in the Ardennes in January 1945 one Tiger V in a road cut on a single road through mountainous, forested terrain destroyed almost an entire battalion of U.S. Sherman tanks…but we HAD a battalion of Shermans we could spare, and they had no more Tigers. The crew ran out of both main gun ammunition and diesel fuel, and just walked away.

As in our Civil War, the Union won, but Lee’s campaigns, and those of his subordinate Confederate generals, are the ones studied in every national military academy in the world. Ditto WWII and the German generals.

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