PART I

I think his paradigm for assessing the German army is flawed; every army has its advantages, and every army makes countless mistakes over the course of an operation. What counts is being able to use your advantages to the best effect, and seize on your enemy's mistakes before they can take advantage of your own. This is why the Germans racked up an astonishing run of successes leading up to the catastrophe at Stalingrad, not because of superior equipment or enemies that bungled themselves into their hands.

People have called the German army to 1942 'the greatest army the world has ever seen.' I consider that a high exaggeration; considering all the praise that gets foisted on them for their early war performance, I think they are a bit overrated, but I'm inclined to disregard uncritical, uninformed praise.

When they commenced combat operations in Poland, everyone was so impressed by their performance, except the Germans themselves. While the interwar Reichsheer had been preparing for the rebirth of the army ever since the imposition of arms limitations in the treaty of Versailles, the crash rearmament of Germany was still not complete when Britain and France declared war. The Germans had begun the practice of conscripting each class of men coming of age, keeping them on active duty for two years, then shifting them to the reserve. This produced large numbers of men with prior military training that they could draw on for emergencies, without having to provide for all of them all the time. The Treaty of Versailles limited the German army to 100,000 men, of whom 4,000 could be officers, with all enlisted men serving a minimum of 12 years. This army was 1/50th the size it was in WWI.

Hans von Seekt was key in forming the institutional culture of this army, as de facto head of the General Staff; doctrine in the Reichsheer was that each man should be able to do the job of the man two levels above him. A private should be able to lead the squad even after the sergeant and corporal have been killed, and a sergeant should know how to lead a company.

Still, even with this adaptation to circumstances, the pool of men the Wehrmacht could use as the core of reformed armies was very limited; there were the interwar Reichsheer soldiers, and WWI veterans, the youngest of whom were already about forty when the war broke out. As a result, the vast majority of the Wehrmacht was under arms for the first time in their lives, and in Poland, it showed; one of the big complaints from veteran officers was that their infantry just wasn't as good as the Kaiser's infantry. There was a persistent issue where troops hesitated to open fire on the enemy, for fear they would fire back. During the invasion of France, they found that a large proportion of their equipment was just not up to snuff; their standard AT gun made little impression of French and British heavy tanks, while the Allies' AT guns (of about the same weight class) made short work of most of their tanks. While the Germans are the posterboy for mechanized warfare, only about 10% of their army for the Invasion of France was internal combustion engine driven. The rest moved 'at the speed of soldiers' boots, just like the Roman legions' -the Germans needed about 700,000 horses to pull their artillery and supply wagons for the invasion of Russia, and that was after they'd stolen everything on rubber wheels in France, a country with five times the rate of car ownership as Germany.

Nevertheless, they did have some key advantages in the early phases of the war. The Prussian-German army had a strong intellectual tradition, and free thought was generally encouraged for officers. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Germans set up dozens of committees with hundreds of officers between them to investigate what had happened, how they responded to it, what happened that they did not expect, and what were the overall lessons of the conflict. There were limitations to their ability to act on these lessons, and not all of them were strictly correct, but the ideas were flowing for the day when the German army would be reborn.

To 1940, France was the greatest military power on the continent, and the coming war between France and Germany would determine the course of the next five years; this was the crucial juncture, the trial by fire for the reborn Wehrmacht. French doctrine (which heavily influenced British doctrine) incorporated the lessons of the First World War as drawn up by a single committee of thirteen officers (compared to hundreds of Germans). While the Germans were quite open to innovative technology, since they were almost starting from scratch, the British and French tended to let the doctrinal tail wag the industrial-technological dog. One thing they took away from WWI: firepower kills. France mobilized about 20% of its population to resist the German invasion, eight million men. Of them, 1.7 million were killed, with millions more wounded, largely at the hands of German artillery. They knew they could never do that again. France's population was already smaller than that of Germany, and because of the horrifying four year slaughter, millions of men were never born, so a future French army would have to get the most out of the men it did have. That meant keeping them protected from enemy artillery, while maximizing their own firepower to kill at a favorable rate. Modern warfare was profoundly attritional; they had to lose men and materiel at the lowest possible rate relative to their ability to produce them, and destroy their opposite number at the greatest possible rate. Most of France's industrial capacity is situated in a great triangle, with Paris, Dunkirk, and Strasbourg as the three points; about half this area was occupied by the Germans during WWI. The French determined that the next war with the Germans would not be fought inside France; the border would be impermeable, forcing the Germans to come through Belgium again, where they would meet a solid wall of earthworks and firepower extending from the North Sea to the Alps. With the Maginot fortress line shielding the French interior in the south and the Ardennes forest crippling enemy offensive capabilities in the center, the battle would be fought on the plains of Belgium and the Netherlands, where the French, British, Belgians, and Dutch could establish an impenetrable line, from which they could make heavy, short range, methodical set piece attacks to grind down the German army, just like in 1918.

To the French, it was all a matter of methodically applying firepower and advancing infantry; the doctrine became known as Methodical Battle, and it had been very effective against the Germans when they were locked into a continuous, static front. Instead of piling forces onto one sector of the front and trying to push as far as possible, the French and British would make a heavy 'set piece' attack in one sector to cause maximum damage to the Germans, but keep it shallow to minimize their own losses. When the Germans shifted reserves to counter them, they would initiate a set piece attack in a sector the Germans had weakened, and so on down the line. Timing was precise and preparations advanced; there was little need for innovation, long range mobility, and lower level initiative in execution. Tanks were largely a weapon to multiply the short range attacking power of the infantry, rather than a large scale element of maneuver. With doctrine focused on the heavy, short range attack, the longest range weapon of all, the aircraft, had relatively little role as well; prominent officers believed so many aircraft would be lost in the first weeks of war that the arm would cease to be important. With objectives limited and the situation stable, there was also relatively little need for rapid and mobile communications within this doctrinal framework, so commanders were generally a few degrees removed from the battlefield, in places with wire bound communications.

This was a reasonable thought process and course of action, but the problem came with the hardening of doctrine into dogma. The French army tried to approach its preparations for war scientifically; they calculated how many guns they'd need to defend an area, and how many artillery shells it would take to knock out their positions. Advocating deviation from this doctrine could call into question one's political reliability; Charles de Gaulle advocated for a smaller, more professional army, but the left accused him of plotting to make the army more reactionary and fascist. There was the belief in the French army that, with much of the army being unprofessional reservists, debate over doctrine would undermine morale. Military staffs in the French tradition were assistants for the commander; debate and protest were not part of their institutional culture. The men in charge of the French army had little understanding in modern technology; it didn't fit within the framework of experience that informed their doctrine.

On the one hand, the French army had too rigid a doctrine; on the other, the French air force had almost no doctrine. French military and aviation experts couldn't work out exactly how France was going to use that whole third dimension air power provides, so the French air force was low priority during the period of intense political roiling between the wars. As such, the French suffered from a shortage of modern aircraft when the war began; while the allies had far more and better tanks and artillery compared to the Germans, the Germans had more and better aircraft, and had figured out how to use them.