Slouching Towards Utopia by J. Bradford DeLong;

Author:J. Bradford DeLong; [BRADFORD DELONG, J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

European Jews: 6 million (70 percent) (one-third of them Poles)

Poland: 6 million (16 percent) (one-third of them Jews)

Soviet Union: 26 million (13 percent)

Germany: 8 million (10 percent)

Japan: 2.7 million (4 percent)

China: 10 million (2 percent)

France: 600,000 (1 percent)

Italy: 500,000 (1 percent)

Britain: 400,000 (1 percent)

United States: 400,000 (0.3 percent)

To help explain the course of the war, we can first look at it tactically and operationally. Consider the first three major campaigns—the Polish campaign of September 1939, the French campaign of May and June 1940, and the first six months of the Russian campaign, from June 22 to the end of 1941.

In the 1939 Polish campaign, the Nazis lost 40,000 soldiers killed and wounded. The Poles lost 200,000 killed and wounded. The Poles also lost about 1 million taken prisoner. In the 1940 French campaign, the Nazis lost 160,000 soldiers killed and wounded. The Allies lost 360,000 soldiers killed and wounded. And the Allies also lost 2 million soldiers taken prisoner. In the first six months of the 1941 Russian campaign, the Nazis lost 1 million soldiers killed and wounded. The Russians lost 4 million soldiers killed and wounded. And the Russians lost 4 million soldiers taken prisoner.

The Nazis were simply better, tactically, at the business of war than any of their enemies. They understood dive bombers, they understood tank columns, and they understood surprise and flank attacks and digging in. The interwar German army on which the Nazis had built had had only 100,000 soldiers. But those 100,000 soldiers had learned and developed their business to a terrifying degree of tactical superiority. That is the first lesson of World War II: fight the Nazis and expect to be tactically outclassed. Expect to lose between two and five times as many soldiers on the battlefield as the Nazi armies do. That was true for everyone at the start of the war, and it was still true remarkably late into the war—even though the Allies did learn.

Moreover, the Nazis’ opponents were operationally outclassed. Hence the second lesson of World War II: fight the Nazis and expect periodically to find large groups of your soldiers overwhelmed, surrounded, cut off, out of supplies, fleeing in panic, and forced to surrender in large numbers. The last such episode took place in December 1944, less than five months before the collapse of the Nazi regime, when the Nazi Fifth Panzer Army surrounded nearly the entire 106th Infantry Division of the US Army in the Snowy Mountains of the Ardennes Forest on the Belgian-German border, forcing it to surrender.

Simply put, tactical and operational superiority matters immensely.

Consider again the French campaign of 1940. The French were expecting the Nazis to attack through Belgium north of the Ardennes Forest. Instead, the Nazis made their main attack through the Ardennes Forest itself, against the weak French Ninth Army—weak because the French command thought that the forest, the poor road network, and the Meuse River would be sufficient additional defenses.

Three days into the 1940 battle it was clear that a major Nazi attack was coming through the Ardennes, and the French began to respond.

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