Is it fair to in broad strokes characterize the Allied (mostly, US and Soviet) forces as experts at Strategic/Operational levels but poor at the tactical level, and characterize Germans as experts at the tactical level and poor if not outright incompetent at higher levels?

by [deleted]
Doroleux

It's a little unfair.

It was more that the Allies- particularly as American supplies poured in and Soviet industry reasserted itself- had the resources to engage in large, elaborate strategic maneuvers. The Allies didn't have tactically incompetent leadership- nine times out of ten what you see isn't so much incompetence as a simple lack of resources. France, for example, was a deeply troubled country when the Germans invaded. Half the leadership wanted to fight like it was still WW1, half the leadership was behind De Gaulle and his ideas for the actual implications of motorized warfare. The results were some fat, fat cash cows like the Char B1, which consumed something to the tune of half the French army's budget, was strategically worthless, and obsolete by the time it rolled off the assembly line.

The end result was that no commanding officer had the ability to properly fight the Germans. All the best tactical awareness in the world can't help an officer who doesn't have the gas to make the motorized vehicles he doesn't have run. And that's saying nothing of the ranks of the French army that were swollen not with experienced, trained soldiers but instead something akin to conscripts who fundamentally did not want to be there. Not to suggest the French had no truly professional army- far from it- but that even the best soldiers can't fight a war when deployed poorly.

Similarly, Germany's success in the early years of the war was owed heavily almost as much to German talent- to be clear, Germany had talented generals; Guderian, Manstein, Rundstedt, Model- as it was to the simple fact that they were clubbing neighboring countries over the head with neither the industry, economy, nor means to sufficiently resist them. Poland (betrayed by both sides!), the Czechs, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands, France, none of these countries really possessed the means to resist the German advance, not directly at any rate, and what's more, most of them lacked the physical geography to even do it. It could be argued that France represented the physical limits of what the Germans could do- Germany had to allow the British to escape at Dunkirk because their motorized divisions were all pushed to their limits and logistical elements needed to catch up- but Germany never truly faced the short comings of their own logistical lacking until they poked the Angry Communist Bear and discovered that the Soviets would not simply capitulate in the face of overwhelming force. That was the war where they had to pick between basic supplies and winter clothing. That was the war where they learned the hard way that while they were able to project power like they hadn't ever been able to before, they were still heavily reliant on horse drawn carts to supply troops.

Once the Soviets were fully committed to the war, the Germans had a fundamental crisis in the sense that it'd be nigh impossible to win the war and that, at best, all they could do is sue for peace.

But the Allies were not lacking for tactical leadership. Patton might not have had a mind for strategic level operations- just like Rommel- and he had zero patience for politics, but he could lead his troops like none other. Charles de Gaulle may have had few opportunities to demonstrate it but he also had a forward thinking mind with what the implications of motorized warfare would mean. To name a few.

PantsTime

I'd say fair, but an oversimplification (which is necessarily likely with any such generalisation).

In the early war, the Germans had the communications and all-arms co-operation to take tactical risks the other allies could not. They had drawn the correct lessons from the open warfare of 1918 and the Spanish Civil War, and had a 'no expenses spared' approach to their military build up. Versailles had shrunk their army and allowed to to rebuild in a practical and modern way, unlike the British which was still cavalry-dominated, and the French who fell into a defensive mindset and were anyway wrung out by World War One. The British also had the problem of being mainly involved in 'empire policing'. The US Army was simply tiny, and riven by inter-service rivalries. The Red Army perhaps went closest to matching the Wehrmacht, but the purges, an obsession with not losing or damaging equipment, and facing the Wehrmacht at its peak of experience and confidence meant it had little chance in 1941.

It was Germany's obsession with tactics that was a major cause of failure (reflecting her own experience in 1918). Although able to command any battlefield for much of the war, Nazism saw war as an end in itself so there was little attempt to conceive how battlefield victory could secure an overall victory in the war (as opposed to merely securing the resources to continue the war). Weapons tended to be less suitable for mass production because production engineers were less important in design than soldiers and weapon makers.

By late 1942, Germany's enemies were more or less as good at tactical battle as was the Wehrmacht, although the shadow of Germany's early superiority was a long one. By 1944 it was pretty much a myth, the Allies in Europe being able to tactically out-fight the Germans in many cases, despite their inferior unit weapons. This made Germany's operational plans moot, as they couldn't even hold or take hills and villages.