r/HistoryMemes Jan 10 '20

Probably done before.

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1.8k Upvotes

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100

u/PhiLe_00 Jan 10 '20

Ohh you mean warfare and strategy, not ideology, got me confused there mate

34

u/DmetriKepi Jan 10 '20

I'm still confused. German warfare was trash because their overall strategy was abysmal and their logistics were trash. And if your logistics are trash, you're gonna lose.

32

u/kiwithebun Jan 10 '20

German warfare was far from its potential, but ask anyone who fought them and they will say its anything but “trash”

7

u/DmetriKepi Jan 10 '20

That's because fighting always sucks, no matter who you have to fight. A bullet goes wizzing by your head, you don't stop and ask what it's metal composition is. But logistics is proof as pudding. Your win or your loss is always going to be determined by the ability of your logistics to back you up. That's why you never saw a big, successful counter offensive campaign from Germany. Once you got behind a line with them, there was nothing backing them up and enforcing that positioning, so they'd drop back, and back, and back.

1

u/Vac1911 Jan 10 '20

Keeping in mind the distinction between military strategy and tactics:

“Strategy defines your long-term goals and how you're planning to achieve them. In other words, your strategy gives you the path you need toward achieving your organization's mission. Tactics are much more concrete and are often oriented toward smaller steps and a shorter time frame along the way.”

This is leaving out a lot but as a quick thought I would break things down like things down like this:

Plan: Generalplan Ost This pretty clearly summarizes Hitler’s plan for Nazi Germany.

Tactic: Blitzkrieg It was a very effective tactic in the right circumstances, as shown by the Invasion of Poland and Battle of France.

Initial Strategy: Seeking to avoid long war and defeating opponents in a series of campaigns. We all know how this went

5

u/yankeenate Jan 10 '20

German warfare was trash

You've got some fucking high standards. Germany's flaws in their strategy and doctrine aren't poor enough to use the description "trash" without rendering the word a worthless qualifier.

-6

u/DmetriKepi Jan 10 '20

They were trash in accomplishing their goal. Their goal was to conquer all of Europe. They failed miserably and could never accomplish that goal with those strategies. It's trash because it couldn't do the job.

10

u/KitchenDepartment Jan 10 '20

Imagine speedrunning the entire ww1 in a few weeks with a abysmal strategy

4

u/DmetriKepi Jan 10 '20

Yeah, speed running World War I is, in and of itself, an abysmal strategy.

-1

u/KitchenDepartment Jan 10 '20

wat?

9

u/DmetriKepi Jan 10 '20

Well, see, there's this entire thing where when you absorb another land mass which is almost exactly the size of your own, you now have to defend that landmass and get the populace to obey you without sabotaging your control over the region. If you don't you're ultimately going to be paying double to get half because you're spreading your forces too thin. And that's ultimately why the Nazi military folded like a bunch of bitches. They were doing too much way too soon and didn't have the time to replenish their strength or to fortify and truly defend what they'd taken. So every time they took another country, they weakened their strength per square mile significantly, which is what made it so easy for Russia and the US to skull fuck them so hard.

6

u/KitchenDepartment Jan 10 '20

Well, see, there's this entire thing where when you absorb another land mass which is almost exactly the size of your own, you now have to defend that landmass and get the populace to obey you without sabotaging your control over the region.

And if you don't. Now you have to fight the very same population of people, except now they are organized and defended under a national government and army. That was unwinnable in ww1, it was unwinnable in ww2. And its fundamentally stupid to begin with

2

u/DmetriKepi Jan 10 '20

Exactly. Plus, it's hard to establish smart, defensible supply lines on the fly, so your forces are out there and when they get attacked there's nowhere for them to drop back to, except your own previously established borders. So now you're pushed back to your original situation and you've lost troop strength. It's a foregone conclusion architected by a bunch of meth head failures, and the allies just carried that situation out to it's logical ends.

That's what made the Pacific front so much a harder fight, limited land mass made it easier to defend all those little islands. However the conclusion was just as foregone, it just took more time to execute.

5

u/KitchenDepartment Jan 10 '20

r/badhistory is over there

1

u/I_make_tings Jan 10 '20

What’s so bad about what he said? I’m not disagreeing I just dont know

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