Why Btonze Age?

[Gawdzilla]

It's not as simple as knowing whether there are roads.   It takes one good quality road to support just a single Corp on the offensive.  A major land offensive would involve hundreds of thousands of vehicles.  Tracked vehicles like tanks quickly tear up most roads.  So requirement for supporting an mechanized offensive is even higher.  The French didn't believe the number and quality of roads in the Ardennes were sufficient to support more than a couple of division.

German veterans went on record calling it the biggest traffic jam in history.

The German success was not so much a German victory but a French failure. Since this was yet another instance where the troops were extremely vulnerable to airstrikes that didn't happen.

Bottom line is that they did it. The forests were permeable.

[Anomalocaris]

German veterans went on record calling it the biggest traffic jam in history.

The German success was not so much a German victory but a French failure. Since this was yet another instance where the troops were extremely vulnerable to airstrikes that didn't happen.

Bottom line is that they did it. The forests were permeable.

Militaries that do not enjoy overwhelming numerical superiority always have to gamble and thin out forces where the enemy is judged less likely to successfully attack, in order to provide adequate margins of superiority at the critical sector of the front where a decision is judged likely to be obtained.

An army that defends everything defends nothing.  So the fact that the French gambled that Germans can't successfully attack through the Ardennes was unfortunate, but that they lost the gamble is not in itself indictment of the fundamental quality of the french army.

The German army made many such gambles on the eastern front, and were more often wrong than right.

On both occasions when getting this right was critical to the entire outcome of the war in the east, the Germans gambled wrong, and left large, critical important sectors poorly defended against powerful Soviet penetrating attacks, and suffered calamitous defeats and losses of men, material and strategic position as a result.  The second time was definitely a larger defeat than the French suffered in terms of territory, men, equipment, and initiative. Only the fact that distance was so much greater on the eastern front than between Belgium and Paris saved Germany from being taken out by one single strategic thrust through an poorly defended sector during late summer 1944.

But No one seem to argue that the German army was therefore an incompetent force.

[Minimalist]

The best army isn't of much use if it lacks in leadership.

[abaris]

But No one seem to argue that the German army was therefore an incompetent force.

Hitler made it an incompetent army later on. At the start of the war, it was led by brilliant strategists having learned their lessons from WWI. As opposed to their opponents, who won the first war and didn't see much reason to work on new strategies.

Hitler's hand is first shown in not allowing to move for Dunkirk, thereby allowing the allies to evacuate some 350.000 troops. It's largely down to him that the ensuing campaigns went badly. Apart from the fact that there was no chance in hell that an army of give or take ten millions could ever hope to hold and supply a frontline of 32.000 kilometers against a coalition which included the major industrial powers of this world.

[Pat Mustard]

Big one I can think of off hand was rifled barrels. Made a huge difference in small arms. Artillery massively improved as well, not alone with rifling but with all other technical improvements. In fact it was the Crimean campaign which showed how outdated the Napoleonic era cannon had become, and the response to that failing lead to the Armstrong gun which is considered the first truly modern artillery.

Rifles were used in the American Revolution. Their main drawback was they were slower loading than the smooth-bores. Higher accuracy, slower rate of fire. For comparison, the last command before "Fire" for the smooth-bore firing line was "Level!", not "Aim". Nobody knew where the slug was going anyway, so why bother.

Rifles were used by individuals in the revolution, not mass produced for whole units or even armies. Rifling had been experimented with since the 1500's but it only came into use as a matter of course between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Franco-Prussian war (even in the Civil War rifled guns were uncommon).

[Anomalocaris]

But No one seem to argue that the German army was therefore an incompetent force.

Hitler made it an incompetent army later on. At the start of the war, it was led by brilliant strategists having learned their lessons from WWI. As opposed to their opponents, who won the first war and didn't see much reason to work on new strategies.

Hitler's hand is first shown in not allowing to move for Dunkirk, thereby allowing the allies to evacuate some 350.000 troops. It's largely down to him that the ensuing campaigns went badly. Apart from the fact that there was no chance in hell that an army of give or take ten millions could ever hope to hold and supply a frontline of 32.000 kilometers against a coalition which included the major industrial powers of this world.

I think the notion that the German army was led by brilliant strategists at the beginning of the war is taking the point much too far.   The officers of the German army arguably never had any significant opportunity to exercise real Independent strategic judgement between the first day of the war and the last.  Hitler was always the first and last word in German strategy.

The Germans did have brilliant practitioners at a level one step below strategy, in the arena of operational arts.  Guderian and Manstein comes to mind.  And I agree that as the war progressed, hitler become more and more inclined to interfere in operational decisions of the German army.  So Germans were increasingly easily outmaneuvered by the soviets on the operational level.

However, both before Stalingrad and before operation bagration, while hitler certainly made very bad judgement calls, it should be remembered those calls were not made in the context of thin air.  They were made possible by colossal failures of German military intelligence in assessing Soviet dispositions and intentions.

In one case directly analogous to the roads through the Ardennes, the German army had retreated some distance behind major rivers, and believed the rivers presented an impenetrable barrier to the soviets because the Germans had blown all the bridges. However, the soviets, working at night, built new bridges whose road surface were submerged 1-2 feet below water level. The Germans could not see these new bridges in aerial photos, and were confident the rivers remain impermeable to Soviet armor. As a result, when the Soviet attacked across the rivers, the Germans were taken completely by surprised. So how is that a smaller failure than the French with the Ardennes?

[Minimalist]

Rifles were used in the American Revolution. Their main drawback was they were slower loading than the smooth-bores. Higher accuracy, slower rate of fire. For comparison, the last command before "Fire" for the smooth-bore firing line was "Level!", not "Aim". Nobody knew where the slug was going anyway, so why bother.

Rifles were used by individuals in the revolution, not mass produced for whole units or even armies. Rifling had been experimented with since the 1500's but it only came into use as a matter of course between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the Franco-Prussian war (even in the Civil War rifled guns were uncommon).

The biggest problem with a rifle for military use was that they could not be fitted with a bayonet.  Since the way for infantry to resist cavalry was to form square and stand there with massed bayonets this was a decided disadvantage.  Individual sharpshooters could shelter within a square - as did artillery crews when the horses were coming - but an entire unit would have been overrrun.

[abaris]

I think the notion that the German army was led by brilliant strategists at the beginning of the war is taking the point much too far.   The officers of the German army arguably never had any significant opportunity to exercise real Independent strategic judgement between the first day of the war and the last.  Hitler was always the first and last word in German strategy.

You seem to forget that the Germans had reason to evaluate their strategies. They lost WWI and some of them, even before Hitler came to power, went to great lengths analysing why they lost. So they came up with new strategies. And the one that stuck was close cooperation between ground and air forces. They also, although they had tanks of their own, saw the importance of using them as independent units instead of just infantery support.

There was the so called black Reichswehr. Officers not officialy in service, to circumvent the terms of the Versailles treaty, but still very active in planning for the future. It's a little know fact, that under Hans von Seekt, the Reichwehr trained a future airforce in Soviet Russia. In close colaboration with them.

Fact is, they were tactically superior to other armies at the start of the war. The allies adapted pretty quickly, within two years. But at first, they were indeed on top of their game.

[Gawdzilla]

But No one seem to argue that the German army was therefore an incompetent force.

Hitler made it an incompetent army later on. 

The Germans fought as well as they could given idiots at the top.

[abaris]

The Germans fought as well as they could given idiots at the top.

There was one idiot calling the shots and an idiot in a supporting role. Keitel, who sucked up the spittle flying from Hitler's mouth. I always kept thinking he shouldn't have been hanged at Nuremberg. He was just a yes man wihtout any kind of power. Even Jodel gave Hitler contra, but couldn't change anything going against Htler and Keitel.

The generals on the other hand knew very well what went wrong. They just hadn't the guts to stand up when their own hide was on the line.