German Armed Forces

Society for History Education

Germany's Armed Forces in the Second World War: Manpower, Armaments, and SupplyAuthor(s): Larry T. BalsamoSource: The History Teacher, Vol. 24, No. 3 (May, 1991), pp. 263-277Published by: Society for History EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/494616Accessed: 04/12/2010 02:15

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Germany's Armed Forces in the Second World War: Manpower, Armaments, and Supply

Larry T. Balsamo Western Illinois University

THERE IS A GREAT DEAL OF INTEREST among students at all levels in the Second World War, an interest re-enforced by popular pub- lications and many programs on television. This article will summarize some of the most interesting information which teachers may find useful and interesting about the German war effort when dealing with this topic in their classes. The information is drawn from the best sources in English and any instructor wishing to elaborate on the points made in the article need only resort to the footnotes to find sources for further information.

The German armed forces in September of 1939 were certainly not prepared for a general war of any significant duration and were only partially ready to fight a short, limited war. This should hardly be surprising since until Adolf Hitler took power in 1933 the German armed forces had chafed under the significant limits placed on them by the Treaty of Versailles for nearly fifteen years. German rearmament took place in a little more than six years.

The army expanded from the treaty limit of 100,000 carefully selected men of all ranks which had been forbidden to possess tanks or heavy artillery to an armed force of over 3,600,000 men in the fall of 1939.1 This was an increase of three and one-half thousand percent and this German

The History Teacher Volume 24 Number 3 May 1991

264 Larry T. Balsamo

army of autumn 1939 was more than 1,500,000 larger than the army mobilized by Germany in summer 1914.2

An even more dramatic increase took place in the air force. Versailles had not permitted Germany any military aircraft at all. In 1933 Chancellor Adolf Hitler established an air ministry in his government headed by Nazi Party strongman Hermann Goering. Two years later Germany proclaimed the official existence of its new air force, the Luftwaffe, also headed by Goering. The expansion of the Luftwaffe mostly under the supervision of State Secretary Erhard Milch was meteoric. At the time the Polish campaign got under way the German air force possessed a manpower strength of just over 385,000 of all ranks and more than 4,100 aircraft.3 The Luftwaffe caused a rapid expansion of the nation's aircraft industry as well. By the close of 1938, for instance, some 204,000 workers were employed in the production of aircraft engines, air frames, and airplanes.4

Versailles left the navy small, too. No submarines were permitted and the numbers, types, and weights of capital ships (e.g., the so-called "pocket battleships") were severely restricted. By 1939, however, the navy threw off all restrictions and had grown from its 1933 authorization of 15,000 men to over 78,000.1 The "new" navy was indeed small in comparison to the British surface fleet, but it was made up largely of modem vessels. Ambitious plans were underway which could have made the German navy a much more formidable force if war with Great Britain had been delayed into the early 1940s.

Rapid military expansion was bound to put a strain on Germany's natural resources. Germany was not self-sufficient in key natural resources and the Third Reich was to rebuild its armed forces and fight a long war with a chronically fragile supply of iron, aluminum, ferroalloys, and petroleum.6 Especially in the 1933-1939 period, shortages in resources and skilled labor coupled with lack of clear priorities set and enforced by the National Socialist leadership among the army, air force, and navy were to have both short range and long range consequences.

The German army, for example, grew from ten divisions in 1933 to 102 divisions at the beginning of the war. Eighty-six of these were standard infantry divisions mobilized for the Polish campaign with its troopers mostly armed with the bolt-action K98 rifle which had been in use since 1898. It was not until the spring of 1940 that the majority of infantrymen were to receive the much more modem Gewehr 98/40 rifle. The 1939 soldier was armed with some five different types of machine pistols and this remained the case until 1942 when the Schmeisser, MP40 was received in quantity by frontline troops. The excellent MG34 light machine gun was not issued in significant numbers until 1941. Heavy

Germany's Armed Forces in the Second World War 265

mortars, except for smoke mortars, were not available at the start of the war and the standard issue 37MM anti-tank gun was to prove soon enough to be ineffective against modem tanks. At least fifty infantry divisions, mostly those assigned to reserve duty or a quiet sector in the west, possessed no machine pistols, no light or medium mortars, no light anti- aircraft guns, and no heavy infantry support cannon. The army's expected goal of possessing a supply of ammunition to last for four months of combat was seventy percent short of that mark when the war began.7

The Luftwaffe's 4,100 aircraft made it the world's largest modem air force in September, 1939, but it had on hand only enough spare engines and parts to replenish or repair some five percent of its force strength. The air force technical staff had hoped to have replacement parts and spares for at least thirty percent.8 The main force medium bombers, the Heinkel III and the Domier 17, were recognized by Luftwaffe leadership as virtually obsolescent at the beginning of the war, but no other medium bomber type was available as the long-awaited Junkers 88 had undergone so many design changes and modifications that it would not begin to enter production until mid-1940.9

The navy was least prepared for war. Two aircraft carriers were in the planning stage, but none would ever be launched. The giant battleships Tirpitz and Bismarck were not yet ready, and only about half of the fifty- seven submarines in commission were fit for combat action. ' As Grand Admiral Erich Raeder lamented on September 2, 1939:

As far as the navy is concerned, it is not nearly sufficiently armed in autumn 1939 for the great conflict with Britain ... the surface naval forces are still so far behind the British fleet in terms of numbers and strength that even at full attack - they could only demonstrate their readiness to die honorably and thus pave the way for a new fleet."

In general, of course, military commanders since the beginning of warfare have seldom believed that their forces were completely prepared for war and it is true that the armed forces of National Socialist Germany were in large measure better prepared for action than their Polish, French, British, or Russian adversaries, for at least the early years of the war. The performance of the Wehrmacht, in all of its branches, was both impressive and victorious through the autumn of 1941. And yet, the armed forces of the Reich during this period were not quite the juggernaut they must have seemed to their bedazzled opponents or as powerful or superior as the casual student of World War II often continues to assume even today.

The army which swept to the startling victories over Poland, the western allies in France and Belgium, and which struck deep into the Soviet Union in 1941 with rapidly moving columns of massed tanks was


very heavily dependent on horse-drawn vehicles for its service, support, and supply. In 1939 the typical first wave infantry division had an authorized establishment of nearly 1,200 horse-drawn vehicles and more than 4,800 horses along with just over a thousand motorized vehicles. Second and third wave divisions had less than six hundred motorized units and an official establishment of some 6,000 horses. In general, the only motorized components of the typical infantry division were the organic infantry support artillery, signals, anti-tank, headquarters, and some pioneer units. This remained the case for the duration of the war.'2 Even though each infantry division was supposed to possess a motorized trucking battalion these were usually below established strength and often more than twenty percent were under repair at any given time. Divisions depended heavily on their horse columns for sustenance and support and the field artillery regiments were entirely reliant on animal power to draw cannons, caissons, and ammunition wagons.'3 Even as late as 1944 a typical field artillery regiment contained 441 horse-drawn vehicles and all infantry divisions still included a veterinary company to feed and care for the division's complement of horses.14 The German army at the time of the speedy conquest of Poland contained at least 445,000 horses and the much larger army which struck into Russia in summer 1941 relied on 650,000 horses and about the same number of motorized units.'" The heart of the German land forces throughout the war consisted of more than three hundred infantry divisions all highly dependent on animal power. During World War I the German army used 1,400,000 horses. In World War II at least 2,700,000 horses saw service in the German army.'6

In contrast, Germany's British and American opponents both put into the field large land armies which almost without exception had completely motorized combat, support and supply components. The armed forces of the Soviet Union did at first rely very heavily on horse-drawn vehicles, but as the war progressed the Russian army, at least in part owing to Lend- Lease assistance, became more motorized. During the course of the war Russia received almost 700,000 trucks from her western allies alone. This was a figure slightly larger than the number of motorized vehicles possessed by the German army at the time it began the campaign against the Soviet Union.'7

Reliance on horses was a matter of both policy and limitations of resources. The German army had been preoccupied during the 1930s, largely in reaction to Hitler's foreign policy, with the likely possibility of war with easily reached neighbors such as France, Poland, and Czechoslo- vakia. In general the distances were not great, reasonably good roads existed, and an excellent rail net was in place. German planners estimated that it took at least 1,600 trucks to equal the carrying capacity of a double-


track railroad for ajoumey of two hundred miles.'8 In a short war railroads, supplemented by horse-drawn supply wagons and a limited number of motorized vehicles, were likely to be sufficient. In addition, trucks were expensive to produce and such production put additional strain on available resources of rubber, steel, and petroleum. Even with the limited number of motorized units required by the infantry divisions, the German economy was hard put to meet demand. Army forces in the western campaign of May-June 1940 were at least 5,000 vehicles short of establishment and army units attacking the Soviet Union a year later were at least 6,000 vehicles short.19 At least forty of the some two hundred divisions arrayed against Russia in June 1941 possessed only captured British and French motorized vehicles and the Wehrmacht had to scramble to find spare parts and to repair the more than 2,000 different types and models of trucks and automobiles possessed by combat and supply troops in 1941.20

Historian Martin Van Creveld, in his insightful study Supplying War, argues persuasively that a major factor in the loss of German offensive initiative in Russia during late autumn of 1941 was the failure of the Wehrmacht supply system. Not enough of the captured Russian railway net could be adapted to the standard European track width in good time to supply fast-moving assault columns, and there were not enough motorized supply and support vehicles in working order to bridge the gap.2' In North Africa German and Italian forces generally could get enough basic supplies to ports such as Tripoli and Benghazi, but with the almost complete lack of railroad lines, road-bound supply columns faced great difficulties in keeping assault columns sustained with such items as fuel and ammunition.22

Only the armored (Panzer) divisions and their companion motorized infantry divisions were completely free of reliance on horse-drawn supply vehicles. There were ten of the "fast" divisions when the war began and two years later the number had grown to thirty-one. These divisions were the elite of the land forces and they provided the slashing and rapid armored assaults which largely accounted for the success of the Blitzkrieg offensives of 1939-1942. The Panzer divisions, however, went to war with woefully inadequate machines in 1939. At least 2,000 of the German army's 2,900 tanks employed against Poland in 1939 were obsolete. These consisted of the Mark I in production since 1931. It weighed only six tons, had a two-man crew, and was lightly armed with two machine guns. The Mark II version was but little better. It weighed eleven tons and possessed only a 20mm cannon in its turret.23 Both of these types were best used as training tanks, but were available in large numbers and simply had to do until better versions could be produced in quantity. It was the


intention of army leaders to supplant these inadequate models with the much more modem Mark III and Mark IV tanks. Very few of these were on hand for use against Poland, but that was of little importance as the Polish forces possessed few armored vehicles of any type and even fewer anti-tank guns. Only about six hundred Mark III and Mark IV armored vehicles were available for use in the western campaign of 1940. Thus, the main battle tank in 1940 still consisted of obsolete types now joined by appropriated Czech made models which were little better. In fact, French heavy tanks and a number of frontline British tanks had heavier guns and thicker armor than the majority of fighting vehicles in the Panzer units.24 When German armored forces encountered the high quality T34 tank during the early stages of the Russian campaign the surprise was both costly and nasty. Even though more Mark III and Mark IV versions were available for campaigning in Russia neither were then a good match for the T34 and its potent 76.2mm gun.25

German victories in Poland, France, and in western Russia were certainly not the result of superior armored vehicles. Rather, these victories came about primarily because the Wehrmacht in every case enjoyed the element of surprise as Germany attacked at times and places of its own choosing, superior German training of tank crews in the concept of massed armored assaults, first-rate optical and ancillary equipment for the use of tank crews, and Luftwaffe tactical dominance over the battlefields.26 By 1943 Germany had put into successful mass production the splendid Mark V (Panther) and the formidable Mark VI (Tiger). By this time, however, the palmy days of easy Blitzkrieg success were in the past, the Luftwaffe could not be counted on to control battlefield airspace, and the Wehrmacht had been forced on to the defensive.27

The Luftwaffe performed its best service during the war in direct tactical support of Wehrmacht ground forces especially during 1939-1942 and in defending the airspace of the Reich from the allied heavy bombing campaigns during 1942-1945. Neither of these duties was necessarily the intended main function of the Luftwaffe. German airpower theorists and adherents were as influenced by the works of pioneers such as the Italian Douhet as were the strategic airpower advocates in the United States and Great Britain.28 A variety of circumstances served to alter the Luftwaffe's intended functions during the war. For example, the air force of the Reich fought all of World War II without an adequate long-range strategic bomber.

Germany had two long-range bombers developed in prototype by late 1936, the Domier 19 and the Junkers 89. Both were cancelled in 1937. A number of factors came together which caused these cancellations. Ac- cording to historian David Irving, Goering cancelled these bombers while


his able and energetic State Secretary Erhard Milch, who was chiefly responsible for aircraft production, was on leave. The Reichsmarschall made this decision in an attempt to economize in the use of scarce aluminum resources and also as an expression of his personal pique against Milch whom he saw as a competitor for both power and influence.29 Other authorities note that these long-range bombers were cancelled because in both cases their engines lacked adequate thrust and power to provide required speed and cruising range. Production of reliable and powerful aircraft engines was a chronic problem of Reich industry during this period.30 The combat experiences of the German Condor Legion in Spain by 1937 seemed to indicate also that dive bombing was more effective and accurate than level bombing and from 1937 until his suicide in late 1941 the Luftwaffe's head of technical staff and director of air armament and research was General Ernst Udet. He was a much decorated World War I aviator and an enthusiastic advocate of dive bombing.3" Much hope for the future was also placed on the Heinkel 177 which was to begin development in 1937. In order to cut wind drag and stress on the wings the developers hit upon the unique idea of placing two engines in each nacelle. Thus this four-engined bomber had the look of a twin-engined aircraft. This factor and the requirement that this plane be capable also of dive bombing meant that the promising Heinkel 177, which at first seemed capable of both high speed and long range, had endless technical problems, was never successfully produced in large number and played almost no role in air combat during the war.32

Lack of a reliable strategic bomber was to be a major factor in Germany's eventual defeat in the Battle of Britain and the Luftwaffe's inability to seriously interfere with Russian industrial production in the Urals and elsewhere. Failure to develop and produce a suitable long-range bomber was a major factor in the Luftwaffe's failure and Germany's defeat in World War II. However, the ultimate defeat of the German air force came as a result of its battle against the Anglo-American strategic bombing offensive. It is certainly true that the German air defenders exacted a very heavy price from the victors. The Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force lost a combined 16,562 bombers and suffered more than 137,000 crew casualties in their bomber offensives. Total casualties of the U.S.A.A.F. over Europe alone were virtually the same, just over 73,000, as U.S. Marine Casualties for the entire Pacific war.33 In addition to the human and material costs, the allied bombing offensives did not bring to a halt German production of weapons of war. In the face of unprecedented and unrelenting strategic bombing the German industrial economy managed to treble production of such crucial items as tanks and combat aircraft between 1941 and autumn of 1944.34


In September 1944, for instance, Germany produced more than 3,300 fighter planes, the highest monthly total of the war.35

Still, it can accurately be claimed that allied strategic bombing led directly to Luftwaffe and German defeat. The air offensives against Germany took the form of a steadily increasing crescendo of bomb tonnage delivered. More than seventy percent of the bombs dropped on German targets fell after July 1, 1944.36 Tanks and planes continued to roll off the production lines, but it was more and more difficult for them to reach combat units, and finding enough fuel for these machines to be operational became an increasingly serious problem. For example, in June 1944 the Luftwaffe alone consumed more than 180,000 metric tons of aviation fuel. The German economy, mostly because of the loss of Romanian oil fields and allied air attacks on Reich synthetic fuel plants, could only provide the air force with a total of 197,000 metric tons for the period July 1944 to April 1945.37 The increasing necessity to protect Reich industrial and civilian centers required after mid-1943 that at least sixty- five percent of the German air force be used to defend Germany's air space. This meant that Wehrmacht ground forces in Russia, Italy, and eventually France as well, often fought with only the most minimal kind of tactical air cover.38 Waging successful land warfare under such circumstances was a real challenge. Wehrmacht forces feverishly preparing to defend the coast of western Europe from the expected allied second front during the spring of 1944 were very heavily dependent upon the French railroad net for supplies and reinforcements. Between March and June of 1944 allied bombing put that vital rail system nearly out of commission. By June virtually all of the main crossing points on the Seine River west of Paris were destroyed. In March two hundred trains a day were reaching northwestern France from the east. By the time allied forces landed in Normandy on D Day only thirty trains were arriving daily and more than seventy-five percent of the available locomotives were not in operating order.39

Luftwaffe fighter forces contesting British and American bombing attacks suffered very heavy casualties, especially among pilots. In January of 1944 the German air force had about 2,300 fighter pilots available for duty to defend the Reich. The casualty rate for these pilots by April of the same year was an astounding ninety-nine percent.40 The need to produce large numbers of fighter pilots coupled with an increasingly precarious fuel supply meant curtailment in training. By early 1944 the typical Luft- waffe fighter pilot had only sixty to eighty hours of flying time in operational aircraft before being forwarded to air combat units. By contrast, in 1944 the British and American fighter pilots averaged at least 250 hours in operational aircraft before being assigned to combat.41


Germany fought and lost the decisive air battles of 1944-1945 with a handful of very proficient and experienced Geschwader and Gruppen commanders and a large number of green pilots who had a very short life expectancy.

The role of Adolf Hitler as warlord is of continual fascination to those interested in World War II. The Fuehrer was not without ability and knowledge in military matters. Alone among the heads of state of the major powers involved in the war he had actual combat experience as an enlisted man in the previous world war and had been awarded decorations for valor.42 He had a phenomenal, though selective, memory for details of weaponry and ordnance. Hitler was often impatient with traditional military procedures and bureaucracy and more than once he intervened in organizational decisions and strategic planning in a positive way.43 Adolf Hitler threw his influence behind the concept of creating Panzer divisions in 1935. He gave critical support to General Erich von Manstein' s plan to assault the vulnerable hinge of the French defenses in the Ardennes in the spring of 1940 and the western allies met defeat in only a few weeks. The Fuehrer's cynical and decisive actions helped to establish a strong, though costly, German military presence in Italy when that country pulled out of the Axis coalition during the summer of 1943.44 Adolf Hitler was totally ruthless and to his political and military adversaries he must have appeared to be unpredictable. As an example, the Germans' Ardennes offensive in December 1944 caught the allies by surprise and gave Eisenhower and the allied high command many anxious days.45

On balance, however, Hitler's shortcomings outweighed his strengths. That Germany rearmed in the 1930s without a coherent or comprehensive plan was a direct result of Hitler's leadership. His impatience with orderly procedure, routine, and chain-of-command, along with his apparent fascination with numbers, encouraged the three armed services compris- ing the Wehrmacht to each go their own separate way. The German armed forces in 1939 can accurately be described as having been armed in breadth rather than depth.46

Especially during the early years of the war the National Socialist economy operated at far less than optimum efficiency and allowed surprisingly robust production of frivolous items. As the United States Strategic Bombing Survey noted in 1945 of the period 1939-1942:

The bulk of the economy was permitted to operate in a leisurely . . fashion under the supervision of Funk's Economic Ministry .... Production of surplus civilian goods continued and scarce materials were allotted to non- essential programs.47

Hitler continued to believe that the war was to be a short one and he did


not name the able Albert Speer as head of armaments production until February 1942 and did not order Germany to gird itself for total war until a year later.48 Even in 1944 with massive increases in weapons production well underway Speer still had not been able to get a controlling handle on the often directionless German economy. As he noted in a speech to Nazi Party officials in 1944:

. . we still produce in a year 120,000 typewriters, 73,000 duplicating machines, 50,000 address machines, 30,000 calculating machines, 200,000 wireless receivers, 150,000 electrical bedwarmers, 3,600 electrical refrig- erators, 300,000 electricity meters.49

One can only wonder what the course of the war would have been if the Germans under Hitler had put the same energetic efforts at armament production into the early years of the war before the United States entry that they mustered in the 1942-1945 period. Even in the later stages of the war when the German economy was on a more total war footing Nazi ideology, of which Adolf Hitler was the chief architect and arbiter, refused to encourage the wholesale mobilization of German women into the industrial workforce. In sharp contrast to all of its competitors the number of German women in industrial jobs did not significantly increase between 1939-1945 and the number of German women listed as "domestic workers" actually increased slightly during the same period. Nazi ideology, on the other hand, positively encouraged the counter-productive and deliber- ately cruel misuse of "volunteer" foreign workers and Russian prisoners of war in industrial work.51

Hitler's influence on tactical military operations also had a decisively negative impact. The Fuehrer placed great emphasis on the role played by willpower in military affairs. Soldiers and officers, he believed, with proper exercise of will and belief in final German victory, could take any offensive objective and hold any defensive position.5' Time and again, especially from 1942 on, Hitler ordered his forces to do the impossible and the unwise. He refused to order or to allow the Sixth Army to attempt breakout from the Stalingrad pocket and it was lost. He adamantly refused to allow Rommel's badly outgunned and outnumbered Panzer Armee Afrika to withdraw from its El Alamein position in Egypt during late 1942 as he sent this admonition to the Axis commander:

In your present situation nothing else can be thought of but to hold on, not to yield a step, and to throw every weapon and every fighting man who can still be freed into battle.... Despite his superiority the enemy must also have exhausted his strength. It will not be the first time in history that the stronger will has triumphed over the enemy's stronger battalions. You can show your troops no other road than to victory or death.52


In Russia, in North Africa, in Normandy, Adolf Hitler refused to sanction or to order prompt and timely withdrawals and as a result German formations were often pounded to pieces by opponents who usually enjoyed significant advantages in manpower and superior material resources. Hard to replace equipment was lost and literally irreplaceable combat troops squandered.53 By January of 1945 the Fuehrer ordered that at the divisional level no troop dispositions were to be changed, no attacks carried out and no local retreats permitted without his express prior approval.54

The German armed forces, it must be admitted, fought exceedingly well in World War II. This was especially so of the German land forces. Combat efficiency is difficult to define and to assess, but Colonel T. N. Dupuy in his study A Genius for War credits the German army with a decisive advantage in kill ratio against the British, American, and Russian armies. This was the case whether the Germans were attacking or defending and whether or not they had tactical Luftwaffe support. Accord- ing to Dupuy, German superiority over the soldiers of the western allies was generally about fifty percent and the man-for-man German superiority over Soviet soldiers was even more marked.55 Dupuy's findings and conclusions are based on statistical analyses of a selection of battles and may be somewhat overstated. Nonetheless, it seems clear that the German soldier was in many cases and circumstances more than a match for his British, American, or Russian counterpart.

In part the excellent performance of the German army came from the qualitative superiority of its weapons. With the exception of the Soviet 76.2mm anti-tank gun German infantry weapons were better than those used by Russian ground forces. Soviet tanks were generally of excellent quality, but by early 1943 the Panther and Tiger were their equals and German vehicles had superior radios and optical equipment.56

Great Britain and the United States established general technological dominance in the air and at sea, but this was not the case in regard to land warfare. The German Mark V (Panther) and Mark VI (Tiger) were each clearly better, except in cross-country speed, than any United States or British tank in use. The American M4 Sherman which was also widely used by British units was too lightly gunned and thinly armored. Even in up-gunned versions it had a chance to defeat a Mark VI only at a range closer than three hundred yards. The Mark VI cannon penetrated the frontal armor of the Sherman at around four thousand yards. British tanks, Cromwells and Churchills, had similar disadvantages. German semi- automatic weapons and machine guns had a higher rate of fire than those of the western allies. For example, the German MG34 and MG42 machine guns had a rate of fire two times greater than the British Bren gun or the


American thirty caliber machine gun. The typical German infantry company had sixteen of these weapons and United States and British compa- nies were armed with eleven and nine machine guns respectively.57 On the fairly constricted battlefields of central Italy and western France rate of fire was a major factor.

Weapons alone do not a good soldier make, however, and the German army had other advantages. According to John Keegan:

The fighting spirit of the German army derived ultimately from its character. Unlike the American army, or even the British ... the German army had always taken the greatest care to see that its units were formed of men from the same province or city, that replacements for casualties also came from the same place and that returned wounded went back to the unit into which they had started. Thus, even though the army diminished rapidly in size during the first months of 1945, its essential nature was not changed.58

The German army retained its distinctive cohesion almost to the last and as another recent study contends, training for enlisted men, non-commissioned ranks, and commissioned officers was longer in length of time than training in the land forces of her opponents. To be a commissioned officer usually required at least fourteen months of training with some of it always in the parent combat unit. In the army of the United States new officers received on the average training for only nine months and then unit assignments were made from an officer pool. New enlisted recruits in the German army received basic training in the reserve battalion attached to each combat division and marched to the front sector in a cohesive group. Replacements and new recruits in the United States army generally arrived at their assigned units individually and piecemeal.59 Unit cohesion stood the German forces in good stead even in defeat.

In conclusion we should note that while Germany lost the battle for production against its combined adversaries, Germany did not lose because it lacked weapons with which to fight. In many cases modem weapons were in surprisingly short supply in the early stages of the war, but German opponents were caught by surprise and victories came quickly and easily. By the time of total war German weapons were good enough in general in both quantity and quality.

Defeat was mainly the result of human attrition which was accelerated by Hitler's operational leadership. We already noted pilot losses by mid- 1944 had seriously impaired the Luftwaffe. After mid-1941, Germany's only significant naval warfare was carried out by her submarine fleet. Between 1939 and 1945 of the 40,000 officers and men who served in the U-Boats, 28,000 lost their lives and another 6,000 were captured."6 In 1944 alone the German army lost as a result of heavy fighting in Italy and in


Russia and defeat in France total casualties in killed, wounded, and missing of nearly two million men. This nearly equaled total army casualties from September 1939 through February 1943 including Stalin- grad.61 Approximately twenty percent of the German male population of military age were casualties and seventeen percent of total casualties for all nations in World War II were German.62 No nation and no armed force can sustain that kind of attrition indefinitely. Germany and the Wehrmacht were no exceptions.

Notes

1. Mathew Cooper, The German Army, 1933 -45: Its Political and Military Failure (London, 1978), pp. 162-164.

2. Wilhelm Diest, The Wehrmacht and German Rearmament (Toronto, 1981), pp. 44-45.

3. Williamson Murray, Luftwaffe (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 9-10; David Irving, The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe: The Life of Field Marshal Erhard Milch (Boston, 1977), pp. 50-52; Telford Taylor, Sword and Swastika: Generals and Nazis in the Third Reich (Chicago, 1952), pp. 247-250.

4. Diest, Wehrmacht, pp. 59-60. 5. Ibid., p. 81. 6. Burton H. Klein, Germany's Economic Preparation for War (Cambridge, MA,

1959), pp. 110-135; Alan S. Milward, The German Economy at War (London, 1965), pp. 117-122.

7. Albert Seaton, The German Army (New York, 1982), pp. 164-5. 8. Murray, Luftwaffe, p. 14; Irving, Milch, pp. 73-4. 9. Ibid., pp. 75-6; Diest, Wehrmacht, p. 67. 10. Ibid., p. 82; Taylor, Swastika, pp. 252-3. 11. Diest, Wehrmacht, p. 64. 12. Cooper, German Army, pp. 162-4. 13. Martin van Creveld, Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton

(London, 1977), pp. 144, 145-7. 14. United States Army Technical Manual, Handbook on German Miliary Forces

(Washington, DC, 1945), Vol. 2, pp. 66, 99-100. 15. Albert Seaton, The Russo-German War, 194145 (New York, 1970), pp. 61-2,

252; Cooper, German Army, pp. 275-9; van Creveld, Supplying War, pp. 148-51. 16. Cooper, German Army, p. 164. 17. John Erickson, The Road to Berlin: Continuing the History of Stalin's War with

Germany (Boulder, CO, 1983), pp. 81-2. 18. van Creveld, Supplying War, p. 143. 19. Ibid., p. 145; Cooper, German Army, p. 277. 20. van Creveld, Supplying War, pp. 148-9; Seaton, German Army, pp. 172-175. 21. van Creveld, Supplying War, pp. 163-9. 22. Ibid., pp. 199-201; Cooper, German Army, pp. 361-2.


23. Seaton, German Army, pp. 67-9; Heinz Guderian, Panzer Leader (New York, 1957), pp. 17-18.

24. Ibid., p. 72; Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories (Chicago, 1958), p. 132. 25. Guderian, Panzer Leader, p. 143; Seaton, Russo-German War, p. 93. 26. Seaton, German Army, p. 69; Murray, Luftwaffe, pp. 40-1, 84-5. 27. Alan Clark, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-1945 (New York,

1965), pp.s 313-5; Guderian, Panzer Leader, pp. 216-8; Murray, Luftwaffe, pp. 157-60. 28. Ibid., pp. 8, 251. 29. Irving, Milch, pp. 54-5. 30. Murray, Luftwaffe, pp. 10, 12. 31. Ibid., pp. 16-8. 32. Irving, Milch, pp. 170-2. 33. Kenneth P. Werrell, "The Strategic Bombing of Germany in World War 11," The

Journal of American History, 73: 3 (December, 1986), 708-9. 34. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Overall Report European Theater

(Washington, DC, 1945), p. 11; Irving, Milch, pp. 272-3; Albert Speer, Inside the Thrid Reich: Memoirs (New York, 1970), pp. 210-235.

35. Milward, German Economy, p. 146. 36. Werrell, "Strategic Bombing," p. 707. 37. Murray, Luftwaffe, p. 260. 38. Werrell, "Strategic Bombing," p. 710; Murray, Luftwaffe, p. 175. 39. Chester Wilmot, The Struggle for Europe (New York, 1952), pp. 209-12;

Murray, Luftwaffe, pp. 253-5. 40. Ibid., p. 262. 41. Ibid., p. 263. 42. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (New York, 1976), pp. 61-73. 43. David Irving, Hitler's War (New York, 1977), pp. 80, 110; Percy E. Schramm,

Hitler: The Man and Military Leader (Stuttgart and Miami, 1986), pp. 103-4. 44. von Manstein, Lost Victories, pp. 110-13; Walter Warlimont, Inside Hitler's

Headquarters, 1939-1945 (New York, 1964), pp. 332-41, 373-7; Schramm, Hitler, p. 107. 45. Charles MacDonald, A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the

Bulge (New York, 1985), pp. 10-11, 12-4, 600-3; Schramm, Hitler, pp. 184-91. 46. Diest, Wehrmacht, pp. 90-100. 47. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Economic Report (Washington, DC,

1945), p. 24. 48. Speer, Third Reich, pp. 195, 197-9, 398-9. 49. Milward, German Economy, p. 106. 50. Ibid., pp. 35, 46; Klein, Economic Preparation, pp. 137-141; Speer, ThridRelch,

pp. 220-1, 540. 51. Schramm, Hitler, pp. 110-20, 147-50. 52. Earl Ziemke, Stalingrad to Berlin: The German Defeat in the East (Washington,

DC, 1968), pp. 58-9, 62-3; von Manstein, Lost Victories, pp. 337, 352; Cooper, German Army, p. 382.

53. Schramm, Hitler, pp. 150-58,159-60; Felix Gilbert, HitlerDirectsHis War (New York, 1950), pp. 1-27, 83-98.

54. H. R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Blitzkreig to Defeat: Hitler's War Directives, 1939- 1945 (New York, 1964), pp. 203-4.

55. Trevor N. Dupuy, A Geniusfor War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807- 1945 (London, 1977), pp. 253-5.

56. Ziemke, Stalingrad, pp. 20-1; Erickson, Road to Berlin, pp. 79-80.


57. Max Hastings, Overlord: D Day and theBattlefor Normandy (New York, 1984), pp. 186-94; George Forty, United States Army Handbook, 1939-1945 (New York, 1979), pp. 96-9, W. J. K. Davies, GermanArmy Handbook, 1939-1945 (New York, 1973), p. 144.

58. John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From D Day to the Liberation of Paris (New York, 1982) p. 320.

59. Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and U.S. Army Contributions to Military History, Number 32 (Westpoint, NY, 1982), pp. 43, 45, 46-7, 72-7, 139-40.

60. Lothar Gunther Buchheim, UBoat War (New York, 1978) pp. 331-2; Martin K. Sorge, The Other Price of Hitler's War: German Military and Civilian Losses Resulting from World War H (New York, 1986), p. 34.

61. Seaton, German Army, p. 238. 62. Sorge, Other Price, pp. 67, 152.

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