How was Germany able to do so well at the beginning of the world wars considering it was up against huge enemies?
In: 154
For WWI, Germany itself was massive, a recent country combined with Prussia. Their armies were top notch. Russia had the numbers but was a disaster when it and to military planning. France could only hold on for so long before the British came. But once they did hold on, everyone dug in and it stalled out. Lastly, France and England had huge #s of peoples from colonies that they could send into battle. Germany only had Germans.
In short they’d spent years preparing for war and others hadn’t. Once everyone else got their war face on Germany got stomped.
in ww1 Germany had a pretty good industry and organization
in ww2 Germany was prepared while the allies weren’t
basically Britain, France and Russia were looking for fights in other places while Germany was focusing all it’s efforts in Europe
One of the major factors was they were all jacked up on meth so they routed the exhausted enemy troops on the second shift so to speak.
Because no one with the power to do anything gave enough of a shit to stop the Nazis, basically. When it became apparent they posed a threat to more than just a few powerless countries, then shit turned around
All of this is instructive for how we need to deal with Nazi shitbags and their equivalents. Watching American conservatives, I fear we haven’t really learned that lesson though
Germany even now, after losing its territory in both wars is one of the most populous countries in Europe. Second only to Russia.
Also, despite they were banned from it they started preparing for invasion by orienting the economy into arming itself.
Well for starters they had the advantage of being the ones to start the war, meaning they were preparing for it before anyone else knew, or at least truly believed the possibility of a war breaking out. They started the wars with new technology and novel ideas about strategy and warfare, and basically the element of surprise was on their side and they made quick initial gains. Russia made quick gains too in the current war in Ukraine but they were not able to hold them.
But ultimately Germany lost both times for the same reason. You can’t fight a war on all fronts and continuously expand. More and more armies rose to oppose them and ultimately they buckled. At the start of the wars they only had to contend with a few unprepared armies.
Lot of wwii answers. I’ll chime in for WWI. Germany and France were in state of wars for centuries. They fought for each other since Prussia was still a thing. In the formation of the modern German state, a new empire was born. At this time, the world was already divided between Britain and France and other colonial powers. After the formation ofGermany, Bismarck was working tirelessly to form new alliance and weakened other powers. The alliance network put Britain France and Russia on one side and Germany and Austria on the other. This means that in time of hostility, Garmany would fight a two front wars. So in late 19th century, German strategists realized that they would have to be the first to strike in order to avoid a two fronts war. Thus they developed the Schfielen plan. So Garmany was planing logistics time tables and attack vectors since at least 1890s
Before hostility began, Russia was involved in the disastrous Russo Japanese war. This gave Germany an extra boost to be more confident.
When hostility commenced, Germany already had a mobilization and attack script to play. However this was also their weakness because they had to achieve their objectives or their train logistics would suffer. Russia actually reformed their army after the Russo Japanese defeat. So Russian quick mobilization took Germany off balance.
The axis was doing well at first because they had been planning for decades. But Austria-Hungragey was a week state that wasn’t able to assist Germany midway through the war.
Japan only rolled the dice on Pearl Harbor *because* they were having so much trouble keeping things afloat in China. They made the costly mistake of invading Indochina, prompting the US to instate an oil embargo on Japan and basically forcing their hand, to go all in on invading the Indies and other pacific territories for the resources they needed to fuel the war in China.
The Blitzkrieg tactic of war combined with the other European countries policy of appeasement trying to avoid another World War. Whoops…
Latest Answers