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Related to the post I started about whether criticizing Great Britain's conduct in World War I was disrespectful to the Canadians who died in that war, several of the responders talked about the incompetence shown by many of the nations' commanders.

That made me think of something I've observed in general when comparing the World Wars-overall, so much of World War II was executed so much more competently than it was in World War I.

Take Canada as an example. In World War I, our soldiers were badly led and badly equipped, with jamming Ross rifles and boots that fell apart, with Militia Minister Sam Hughes liberally dispensing contracts to his friends and reserving command of military units for his cronies. On the political side, Robert Borden's incompetence nearly caused the country to self-destruct on the issue of conscription, not just among Quebecers but also among Prairie farmers who were pissed off that their sons' exemptions were cancelled. Canada ended up discontented, disorganized and disunited after the war ended.

Fast forward to World War II, and "Minister of Everything" C.D. Howe brilliantly organized Canada's war effort and got the economy firing on all cylinders, even as Mackenzie King skilfully managed the conscription issue and avoided any major pitfalls on the issue. By the time the troops came home, Canada was powerful, prosperous and much more united than it had been 25 years ago.

Russia is another example. The Imperial Russian troops were badly equipped and even more badly led in World War I, but in World War II the Soviets began kicking ass all over the place once Zhukov took command. Stalin, for all that he was one of history's greatest monsters, also skilfully managed to transport a lot of Russian industry out of the Nazis' reach, and use that industry to equip the Red Army with the weapons they needed to win.

Has anyone else noticed this, or is it just me? Am I right, or not?

   

Well ask yourself, In the Great War was there really another strategy other then artillery bombing and suicidal charges?

   

Even then, it seems like the logistics of World War I were so much more screwed up compared to World War II for a lot of countries.

   

In my opinion everything changed for the better in WWI when the four Canadian divisions were finally united in the battle for Vimy Ridge on 9 April 1917, for the first time they were led by a Canadian, Sir Arthur William Currie, the first Canadian-appointed commander of the Canadian Corps.

   

QUOTED! FOR!! TRUTH!!!

   

I think one thing many fail to realize is that in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, many Russian soldiers surrendered at the first opportunity they had. This wasn't cowardice, they truly believed that Hitler was the good guy coming to liberate them from communism, so they even volunteered to join the Wehrmacht. No that many were accepted and of the few that were, very few of them served on the Eastern Front.
When the conscripted soldiers of a nation don't buy into the ideology, they tend not to fight very hard for it, if at all.
But Hitler's war wasn't just about ideologies, it was about race. Hitler hated Slavs and considered them to be sub-human too. The pogroms going on behind the lines with entire villages being deliberately burned along with the crops and stores, while the animals were butchered and the people murdered went a LONG way to strengthening the resolve of the Russian soldier. NOW, he was fighting for his land, his home, his people, his family.

Stalin was an asshole and many in Russia knew it. All of Stalin's strategizing would likely have been for naught if Hitler hadn't simply out-assholed him.
But, with all the horrendous mistakes Hitler made in the Russian campaign, it was more him losing than Russia winning.

   

Aye, combined with radical new ideas like getting lots of extra artillery,
using it properly, and training the troops in all aspects of the operation,
down to platoon level.

Smart guy, that one.

   

I swear this post just reeks of political nuances.

You're a lefty, aren't you ?

   

I was not terribly enamored of the Soviet performance in WW2. Starting with the purges of the Red Army by a psychopathically paranoid Stalin and then the rejection of innovation as 'counter-revolutionary' the USSR was needlessly hamstrung at the outset of the war. Absent aid from the US the Soviets would not have fared so well.

Don't get me wrong about the aid, it's not like the US won the war for them, but the Soviets saw the superior US equipment and copied it. The most important thing they copied was the US Army standard 'deuce and a half' truck that was so critical to logistics.

Yes, Hitler lost the war for hearts and minds but then he wasn't interested anyway.

The US did better during WW2 for the simple reason that our commanders didn't answer to UK commanders. The UK commanders in WW2 were risk averse having bled England white in WW1 while the US commanders were determined not to allow the battle lines to ever become static as they did in WW1. Thus the notion in the US was to attack and then follow up on attacks with the noted exception in the winter of '44 when Patton wanted to press into Germany from Metz and too many others wanted to enjoy Christmas...which allowed the Germans an opportunity to rally for their last offensive. That mistake was learned and not repeated in Iraq in 2003.

Canada did better in WW2 because the Canadians were also operating with more independence from the Brits and once ashore in Normandy the Canadians were a force to be reckoned with.

Going back to the UK, the biggest mistakes made by the UK were before the war when Chamberlain was trying to appease Hitler. Better yet, had there been an equitable peace at the end of WW1 no one today would even know the name of Adolf Hitler. Even so, had Chamberlain confronted Hitler early on the whole war could have been avoided as the best wars are the wars we never have to fight in the first place.

   

In my opinion WW2 was won because of Soviet and American production. Germany just couldn't match it.

   

Nope, they couldn't.

With the USA the Germans didn't understand that our consumer manufacturing base could rapidly retool to produce other things.

In his book, "The Last Train from Berlin"* Howard K. Smith (a famous US news anchor) wrote of how the Germans made fun of how American car companies retooled every year at great expense to make new models of cars instead of just making the same car for five or ten years as the Germans did. American manufacturers of all sorts put out new products every year and, consequently, were eminently skilled at rapid retooling.

A German firm would be down for up to a year to retool while an American firm could retool in a few weeks or less.

Thus the Germans thought the US was only good at making toys but in the weeks after the war got going there were many stunning examples of retooling taking place in the USA.

Singer Sewing Machine Co. took four weeks to go from making sewing machines to making a Model 1911 .45 for the US Army.

Maytag took six weeks to transition from washing machines to making gun turrets for B-17 and B-24 bombers.

Dodge famously went just six weeks between producing their last 1941 Dodge passenger car to producing their first B-24 bomber at their massive plant in Chicago.

And then the Germans and the Japanese dreadfully understimated how rapidly the US could expand production to where by 1944 US production alone was nearly twice that of the three Axis powers and their allies combined.

Another little side note was that US vehicle makers were able to crank out trucks in such abundance that our armies rarely faced logistical problems given the excess number of trucks available. The Axis, OTOH, had fewer trucks than they needed to supply their forces.

What concerns me now is that the USA lacks that kind of manufacturing capacity anymore and in a pinch I'm not sure what we'd do aside from having to resort to nuclear weapons in a serious war.

* http://www.amazon.com/Last-Train-From-B ... 1842122142

   

No, I'm a centrist. If I were a lefty, I wouldn't be applauding Harper's putting money back into the military, his support for Arctic sovereignty, his toughening of the justice system, his making the Canadian Wheat Board voluntary, or his killing the long gun registry while keeping the handgun registry in place. I have beefs with some of Harper's other policies, but these are the ones I like.

I apologize if my post came out seeming like it was politically biased-that wasn't my intention at all. I found out about our logistical problems in World War I from reading Canada and the Two World Wars by J.L. Granatstein, a historian not known for his lefty credentials, and I chose the examples of Canada because this is a Canadian forum and Russia because, as flawed as the USSR's war effort was, it doesn't even come close in terms of idiocy to the Russian Empire's war effort. The Imperial Russian armies were so poorly equipped that, if I recall correctly, they had to ration their bullets and artillery shells. Not to mention that the Soviet armies were eventually led by Zhukov, while the Imperial Russian forces were led by...Nicholas II. Yeah.

   

Sorry, this forum can get very political, and I apologize if I jumped a bit.

Yes there were lots of problems in WW1, it was the first time we did anything
like that.Lots of lessons that were learned for the second time around.
Including conscription.

Sam Hughes was a loud mouth and a boor.... and one of our better Patriots.
He did arrange Valcartier fast enough for us to send a division over
inside 2 months; it took 4 in WW2.
He also fought very hard to keep Canadian units together, as opposed to just
throwing them in with British divisions as the British wanted... and using Canadian
officers.
Canadian units with Canadian kit, including the Ross.
It's the 3rd or 4th time I have seen you slag off the Ross rifle.
Yes, it was junk for the trenches, but you neglect to mention that a lot
of Ross rifles were kept by snipers, because it was better.
In WW2 the situation was much easier, we just used British kit.
Yay for us.

There may not have been a Canadian Corps without Sam Hughes.


My point being there are usually two sides to every coin, and sometimes
3 or 4.


I'll save the Russian / USSR bit for next time, suffice to say it's
easier to win when you are prepared to sacrifice 10-20 million of your own souls.

   

One of the big failures on WWI commanders was their failure to adapt from old doctrine of the "chivalrous" charge and shit like that. Christ, when you have cavalry riding forward into machine guns on horesback with fucking swords and lances, and being anihalated, well you just may want to rethink your SOP's. It is a shame their closed minded arrogance caused millions of deaths.

Cases where officers refused the use of machine guns as it was not gentlemanly early in the war.

As for whether there was any other way to fight, I have often wondered why the allied forces in WWI never landed a force into Belgium or Netherlansd BEHIND the Germans and marched a contingent from the north to break up the stalemate.
The senior commanders probably thought it was not "sporting"

   

I remember reading somewhere that at the start of WWI the Brits employed 2 machine guns per DIVISION, while the Germans employed 50!

   

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