Did any of the great powers of WW2 lose a disproportionately high number of officers, and why?

by MaxRavenclaw

Obviously, bar the Soviet purge, did the Soviets, British, Germans, US, etc. suffer a disproportionate loss of officers during the war, as compared to the others?

P__Squared

According to this US Army document the Germans lost 136 division, corps and army commanders during WW2. Of that number 110 were division commanders. I believe the whole US Army and Marine Corps lost 2 division commanders in all of WW2. At least at the higher ranks the Germans were certainly taking disproportionate losses.

Some reasons for this include:

-Being on the losing side of a war is significantly more dangerous than being on the winning side.

-The German army was big on officers, even relatively senior ones, leading from the front.

-Germany had a large number of relatively small divisions. At the beginning of 1945 they had approximately 250 combat divisions while the US Army never had more than around 90. Many German divisions were no more than glorified regiments or even battalions pieced together from whatever was available (for more detail on this you can check out the US Army Green Books that cover the push into Germany in early 1945.) Leading a small unit is inherently more dangerous than leading a large one.