That pretty much sums it up. The more I learn about the Reich’s internal operations, the more apt the old claim “gangster government” seems. It was a cross between the old-style Chicago patronage system and old-style Chicago Mob structure… not that those were all that different.

Without a Frederick or a Bismark to do the strategy, the German armed forces were excellence without purpose. What’s sad is that so much of what they did was wasted in service of a despicable cause, and that that cause discredited all too much of the advances they made in the military arts and sciences.

One wonders what history would look like, had the German war machine been headed by someone with a grasp on strategy and the actual potentials of the German nation, and a decent set of morals. We would undoubtedly be living in a far better world than the one we live in.

Of course, that’s like the usual “If only…” sort of thinking about the Nazis in general. “If only they hadn’t…” or “If only they did…” boils down to one thing and one thing only: If only they weren’t Nazis. To make significant changes to what they did, they’d have had to be warped out of recognition from what they actually were.

Speer lamented that the anti-aircraft guns deployed around German cities would have been far more effective had they been sent to the Eastern front. Well before the time of the “aluminum overcast” the Americans were sending more new bombers than were shot down.

“Their tanks were better than ours in most respects.”

True. The US and Britain had a hard time getting a grip on the “tank” thing. But we not only had more tanks, they were at the apex of a global supply chain of ammunition, spare parts, and fuel.

Churchill knew logistics backward and forward. His massive 6-volume history of WWII is mostly logistics. But even he had a hard time coming to grips with the sheer volume of stuff America was able to throw into combat; he complained about the amount of space “wasted” on trucks in the D-Day invasion, and only belately realizing the mobility they provided. Rommel had faced something similar in Africa, but his subordinates got caught with their pants down time after time, their tactics coming apart when the Allied forces moved far faster than they were prepared for.

The War Production Board laid out its main plan early in 1942, establishing requirements for “enough of what will do the job” and turning a deaf ear to the entreaties of the scientists and engineers who kept coming up with the Next New Great Thing.

The B-24 was obsolete before the first one rolled off Ford’s Willow Run production line, but every hour after that a shiny new B-24 lined up on the runway, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The Germans simply didn’t have the resources to match that, plus their materials planning and production, due to the way the Reich was run, depended on who last had the ear of Todt, Speer, Goering, or Hitler. The Germans had excellent armor and artillery because most of it came from Krupp, which basically operated as a feifdom directly under Hitler, who mostly let them run without interference. Anything else… often, by the time a factory managed to tool up and go into production on some critical item, their resources, employees, and factories were then broken up and reassigned to some other critical project, depending on who held political power at the time.

On the Japanese front… alas, Yamamoto’s plan was similar to that of the Confederacy’s in 1861 or the Kaiser’s in 1914. They expected to bitch-slap their opponents, who would then fold rather than dig in and fight, so while they entered the war with some very advanced equipment, they didn’t have the production capacity to build enough more once they ran into determined opposition. And while their decision not to upgrade made sense, the rate of progress during the war put them at a disadvantage later in the war.

He said a good word about Rommel.

Comment bombardment imminent.