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Oh grasshopper, how little you know. Just to pick one point, the allied forces in WWII were led by men who had fought in WWI, just a generation earlier. WWI wa
by beat 8y ago
Oh grasshopper, how little you know.
Just to pick one point, the allied forces in WWII were led by men who had fought in WWI, just a generation earlier. WWI was a technological arms race that moved along just as fast as technology moves today. For example, warships built less than a decade before WWI were obsolete, unable to compete range-wise with ship artillery built just a few years later. Technologies like tanks got introduced midway through the war, and the most important technology was arguably barbed wire.
Why use horse-drawn artillery in WWII? Because it was there. Because they still had it, and they weren't fully recovered from WWI yet. Because cars and trucks and tracked vehicles were unreliable and dependent on imported fuel - fuel that everyone remembered would be very hard to get once war blockades started. Because they needed every gun they could get.
The blitzkrieg was the result of very modern technology, and new strategic and tactical thinking to go with the technology. A couple of years later, it was obsolete...
- thrower123 8y agoIt's a little funny how we have this picture of the Wehrmacht as blitzkrieg and super-nazis in Panther tanks, crushing everything in lighting advances. Most of the german army slogged along on foot, with the same Mauser 98k bolt-action rifles that their fathers carried, with horse-drawn artillery and supplies. Motorized equipment was concentrated in the elite Panzer and Panzergrenadiere formations, of which there were never many.
- beat 8y agoRight. Elite units did "blitzkrieg" and quickly broke holes in defensive lines, and then the regular army poured through those holes. Fundamentally, it wasn't that different from how armies used mounted cavalry units centuries earlier. Awesome name, tho.
- aurizon 8y agoThey had the same problem in WW1, the name tank was a code word for a mobile steel bunker, and it broke the trench stalemate. After WW1, the old boys ruled. Hitler broke this mold and pioneered new mobile armored warfare. We are lucky that most of the German army was the old style