What was the competence level of the American military for

*in 1914 and 1918 Spring offensive

Crack aint good for you. Just letting you know.

>l (people always underestimate just how close Germans came to breaking the lines in 1914 Spring offensive)

But the spring offensive was nowhere near breaking the French. It wasn't even near to reaching its own objectives, nevermind that said objectives probably wouldn't have resulted in the defeat the Germans were gambling desperately on.

> and were finally defeating by the economic strangulation and deprivation of resources by a Anglo blockade.

First off, I suggest you go look up the "Turnip winter". They were quite literally starving.

Secondly, they had lost the war in the west by that point, and were facing a 1:2 inferiority on the main front, and losing ground badly, and every day the strategic situation was getting worse.

>What was the competence level of the American military for
>>WWI
Shit. Their advantage was manpower, and equipment. Tactical know how was provided by the Brits and they were basically subordinated to the French.
>WWII
Top tier. Logistically, they were the dominant military by the end of the war, with extensive experience in all theatres and all forms of combat. Further, they took way less casualties than the Soviets, leaving them better off. The naval dominance held by the Americans continues to this day and is the reason why global trade is a thing.
>Do you have a good military power rankings for the countries involved?
I'm pretty sure Germany was number 1 in both wars.

>Germany
>#1 military
They got stopped by the fucking British at the Marne, who didn't even have a large land army.

>they produced the only fully mechanized Army in the world
Canadian army was fully mechanized.

Not him, but source? I actually don't know that much about Canada in ww2.

>and is the reason why global trade is a thing.

Great meme user!

Command of the sea friendo. Lrn2Mahan

>military power rankings
>were they among the top armies involved
>competence level

Are you underage or do you really think 'military power rankings' means absolutely fucking anything in a historical context?

Or are you baiting all these retards for easy (You)s because 'power rankings' is something that draws them out of hiding? If this is the case, go to /pol/ or /b/ or somewhere and bait there.

>CMTC

The CMTC camps are pretty interesting. They were a compromise made by Congress in lieu of conscription and weren't around very long. Basically boot camp and military training but with no obligation to join the military. If you went to 4 camps you'd be given a officers commission in the reserves, but again no obligation of service.

I can't imagine conscription going over well in the US in the 1920's.

There is a quote from a German general (I forget the name) that said "1 panzer tank was worth 4 Sherman tanks. The problem was that the Americans always had 5." The implications are obvious. America was only superior in its production capacity, which happened to be the only thing that mattered

>America was only superior in its production capacity,
Its logistical capacity was also superior.

Then there is actual military scholarship, which shows that American armor tended to trash German armor when they bumped into each other.

amazon.com/Data-World-War-Tank-Engagements/dp/1470079062

Daily reminder that the big killers of American tanks were fixed anti-tank guns and mines, and that German tanks got stomped when they tried to fight other tanks.

Courtesy of the US lol

>WWI
Not great, not bad. We kicked the shit out of the Germans during the Meuse-Argonne which was the most heavily fortified part of the line and shocked the shit out of everyone. On the other hand, we took a fair amount of casualties doing it.

>WWII
Extremely well. People are going to meme about how the U.S. was fighting kids and the elderly on the Western Front, but even when we faced SS Panzer divisions we cleaned house. Even the Soviets were impressed at how quickly we liberated France and Stalin quipped that they couldn't have done it in twice the amount of time. The Pacific was hard fought, both against the Japs and the nature of the Pacific, but we did extremely well there too outside of Iwo Jima. You can pretty well describe our involvement as "America Kicked Ass: The War." The best part about it is that we were arming everyone else as well as ourselves.

>inb4 some retard says that the Japs were nobodies and the U.S. military was shit in WWII

Were they? I don't know much about the Canadian order of battle but assumed the commonwealth forces were supplied at least partially with the British, which is where they used most of their horses/mules. I do know Canada outproduced almost everyone in Europe and were major suppliers of LL to the UK.

That kinda highlights why you can't just rank Armies along some linear line just because they fought in the same war. Just look how much German armor was lost in the push from Normandy to the Falaise Pocket, mostly abandoned because the speed of the mechanized allies prevented them from regrouping before they were being overrun again.

>We kicked the shit out of the Germans during the Meuse-Argonne which was the most heavily fortified part of the line and shocked the shit out of everyone
Did people think we would lose?

The whole reason we were assigned the Meuse-Argonne was because the Entente wanted to give us a trial by fire while they pushed into Belgium. They didn't expect to push the line forward, let alone break it. Then again, no one expected us to be the first to break into Beijing during the Boxer War either. The U.S. had always been seen as an upstart on the world stage of military affairs until after WWI.

Fuck yeah

Have a quote from Hindenburg about the deadliest battle in American history: "So I must really say that the British food blockade and the American blow in the Argonne decided the war for the allies." and that "... without the American troops and despite a food blockade... the war could have ended in a sort of stalemate"

Is it really true? I don't think so, but to say that even the Germans were impressed was an understatement.

I wonder what the world would look like if we hadn't intervened. I think that without fresh American men and materiel, the Spring Offensive probably would have taken Paris.

>I think that without fresh American men and materiel, the Spring Offensive probably would have taken Paris
Nah. Our direct influence on the Spring Offensive was pretty minimal. What we did instead was provide a significant morale boost to the Entente which may have collapsed instead, but I can't say that for certain. The Hundred Days Offensive would have been near impossible though.

>beating the shit out of Germans with shotguns in trenches

Is this what birthed that stupid meme about shotguns being against the Geneva convention?

You're probably right. Still, if the Germans had redirected all their troops from Russia to another front like Italy, the Balkans, or the Ottoman Empire, they could have prolonged the war.

Eh, I doubt it. While the Spring Offensive was brought on by the desperation of the U.S. entering the war, in all likelihood they would have instead taken their time to poise for an offensive rather than rushing it like they did. They still can't afford to turtle since they're on the brink of starvation, but they can be a little more flexible on the Western Front.

>the Germans were impressed was an understatement.

Not sure if this relevant but the US military prepared a somewhat comprehensive study of German opinion re: American soldiers in WWI;

fas.org/irp/agency/army/wwi-soldiers.pdf

Interesting reading at least.

Thanks m8
Didn't all the Russian land they seized have fucktons of grain?

WWII: 9/10 outstanding, probably the best armed forces overall. Easily the best navy, and a superb air force, but their ground forces were second to the Red Army.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Arracourt

> “I fought in campaigns against the Russian Army, the Serbian Army, the Roumanian Army, the British Army, the French Army, and the American Army. All told in this war I have participated in more than 80 battles. I have found your American Army the most honorable of all our enemies. You have also been the bravest of our enemies and in fact the only ones who have attacked us seriously in this year’s battles. I therefore honor you, and, now that the war is over, I stand ready, for my part, to accept you as a friend.”
>—Chief of Staff for General v. Einem, commander of the Third German Army
Based af

>I fought in campaigns against the Russian Army, the Serbian Army, the Romanian Army, the British Army, the French Army and the American Army. All told in this war I have participated in more than 80 battles. I have found your American Army the most honorable (ehrlich) of all our enemies. You have also been the bravest of our enemies and in fact the only ones who have attacked us seriously in this year's battles. I therefore honor you, and, now that this war is over, I stand ready, for my part, to accept you as a friend.
Savage.

Not as much as the Germans had hoped

He probably was still very butthurt at France, which is why he made that quote to downplay their effort by praising countries that did less

Napoleon did the same after he lost, he claimed Spain rather than Russia was the reason France lost

Probably not. You have to realize that the U.S. were the ones that broke the Hindenburg line. Not the French, not the British, but the AEF.

>Not as much as the Germans had hoped
Unrealistic optimism was the same problem in 1918 as 1914.

You are going to need citations for that one.

Yeah. The Germans got really messed up about it because they viewed them as hunting weapons and felt it was literally inhumane.
They sent a message to the US saying it was uncool and that they would execute any US soldier captured with one, to which the US replied that they'd do the same with Germans equipped with flamethrowers. As far as I know, neither side ever made good on those threats.

However, the shotgun was very effective, the spread of the shot and the slamfire mechanism worked wonders in tight spaces and it was referred to as the trench broom or trench sweeper. Supposedly many of the cases of PTSD in German vets came in the form of terror at anything that sounded like a shotgun racking.

Can you imagine just how many soldiers were so experienced with shotguns back home that using it in combat was second nature?

The BEF was literally the best fighting force on the planet at the time though

PTSD was associated with artillery more than anything else, and it pays to remember the americans only fought for the last 6 months of the war

The U.S. broke through at Somme-Py on the 26th of September with a full breakthrough across the Meuse-Argonne on October 17th. The British Offensive started on the 29th of September and broke through on October 8th. It took them 9 days. It took us one on the most difficult part of the line.

the US offensive started on the hindenburg line, the british offensive had to retake the ground lost in spring to get to the line.

the british offensive, gained more ground over a wider front with a significantly better exchange rate than the american offensive.

nor despite the losses the americans took was the meuse argonne by any means 'the most difficult part of the line' it was actually less strongly held than the more northern parts having been essentially a side show for years, as indeed it was when the american offensive began

>were they among the top armies involved?

>WWI
Not much. The USA didn't even have a standing army at the time, usually just meme volunteer armies that get disbanded after the war is over. While their navy was able to roll with that of their powers, their army was rather primitive. Look to the various US retardations of the Spanish-American/Philippiner Wars for this.

To this end, the USAians actually arrived in Europe in 1917 but was considered unfit for the front and had to be fucking trained almost the whole year.

Not really
The German army was better, and the French army was considered the best on the allied side (and kept that reputation during the interwar period, which is why the shock was so big when they got raped in 1940)

Mind you, 90% of that, as well as the damage to the destroyer, was due to a mine left behind by the Japs... So "not present in the area" isn't exactly the case.

The rest was friendly fire from the Cunnucks, who didn't follow procedure and mention they were coming up from the other side of the island.

in 1914 the british army was the best army in the world man for man, it was also the smallest of the major powers armies, but the retreat from mons demonstrated that the british army was superior to both the french and german armies in qualitative terms, being better able to resist the german forces than a french formation of equal size, and bloodying the germans sharply at every encounter, had the french army matched the british in terms of quality and skill of individual soldiers and tactical experience there is little doubt that the germans would have been stopped cold long before they reached the marne

>drakeposting

kys any time

In WW1 we implemented the newer technology fairly well, but most of our strength was from overwhelming numbers. In WW2, we incorporated British technology (such as radar equipment like the cavity magnetron) and we had a ridiculous amount of oil production and manufacturing capabilities. WW1-we had a fuckload of troops because we had a fuckload of people, WW2-we were skilled fighters that could produce a fuckload of skilled fighters. Pic related, it's a magnetron

Nice piece of British delusion here
Trying to compare how the Brits fared in one particular battle against a qualitatively and numberically inferior German force than the French faced at the same moment is a very dumb standard to judge quality
Had the Brits been so good, the war would've been over way before 1918

>in 1914, the only professional army was better than conscript armies
You don't say.

They paid a hell of a price.

" By the end of 1914—after the battles of Mons, Le Cateau, the Aisne and Ypres—the old Regular Army had been wiped out, although it managed to help stop the German advance."

There were only 100000 of them

"Both sides had success at the Battle of Mons: the British had been outnumbered by about 3:1 but managed to withstand the German First Army for 48 hours, inflict more casualties on the Germans and then retire in good order. The BEF achieved its main strategic objective, which was to prevent the French Fifth Army from being outflanked.The battle was an important moral victory for the British; as their first battle on the continent since the Crimean War, it was a matter of great uncertainty as to how they would perform. In the event, the British soldiers came away from the battle with a clear sense that they had got the upper hand during the fighting at Mons. The Germans appeared to recognise that they had been dealt a sharp blow by an army they had considered inconsequential."

The German novelist and infantry officer wrote,

"The men all chilled to the bone, almost too exhausted to move and with the depressing consciousness of defeat weighing heavily upon them. A bad defeat, there can be no gainsaying it... we had been badly beaten, and by the English – by the English we had so laughed at a few hours before."—Captain Walter Bloem

delete this

You're overlooking terrain which even in peacetime is quite a bitch to get around in. And the Argonne was a "sideshow" because once the Germans systematically pushed the French out of their positions there earlier in the war there was nothing much the French could do about it.

>ignores everything in thread
>b-but we took 3000 casualties in one isolated incident s-so the US military obviously cant be p-powerful

You're still basing your judgment on a lone battle, cretin
Fluke can happen

Red Army was better desu

1914 perhaps, but 1918 was nowhere near Germans winning.

>>WWI
Rather poor, sadly. Americans failed to heed the lessons of tactical development the other combatants had experienced in the four years prior. Which saw some of the probably greatest military doctrine advances in the history of warfare, but then again I'm a WW1boo.

A lot of blame for this goes in my opinion to Pershing and someone whose name I forgot wrote a book specifically about this, that it was chiefly his stubbornness which led to a bit of a "we know better" spirit on the part of the American command -- except they actually and demonstrably didn't know better. Hence high-ish American casualties. Also see the struggles on how to deploy US forces.

Now all that might sound rather negative and, well, it was, but ignoring four years of development is easily forgiven because ultimately in a war of attrition you can excuse a lot of things if you present the sheer amount of potential power (manpower, rather) the US could and did.

The war would have been won without them, Germany was starved for virtually everything from men to metals to food and in the strategic scope the allies did have the upper hand and it was only a question of time at that point. But then America committed fully and from a question of "when" it became "how soon".

The French and the British still were by far the bulk of the force that sent the Germans running, but that they could have gone and done just that so quickly was by the surety provided by the US reserves. And that's not going into the economic potential which had already helped the allies throughout the war and now was firmly in their camp.

I think it was a lesson that gets overlooked a lot (especially on Veeky Forums eh!), fancy training is nice, shiny equipment is neat, cool tactics are cool, but ultimately modern wars are won by entire nations, not "just" soldiers, if that makes any sense.

US in WW2
first fight is a disaster
2 years later they crush the german badly

US in WW1
Allies didn't trust US abilities so the US soldiers were first sent in "calm" sectors of the front in Lorraine. German offensive in Amiens in mars 1918 changed the situation. US troops were redirected there and had to face heavy losses. In August 1918 General Pershing created the First US Army who became the main part of the Allies final offensive against Germany

>First they fight like shit then they become the Best
>America is Karate Kid