What were the biggest differences between the American, German, and Soviet militaries in WW2?

In very broad, reductionist terms:

>German military.

German military doctrine was focused around a concept called Schwerpunkt, which means something like focus point. Unlike most other militaries of their time, the Germans made little effort to ensure uniformity of their line units; whereas most, say, British or French infantry divisions tried to train and arm to the same standard (and might not have succeeded, but at least they tried), the Germans tried to identify their best people, put them all together in the same units, give them the best equipment, and then rely on these concentrated elite formations to get the job done while the rest of the army's job was to not lose fast enough for the elite formations to make a breakthrough somewhere. Then turn and envelop and eliminate the enemy. They featured enormously close co-operation between different arms of service, which is responsible for most of their success; it tended to compensate for inferior equipment overall, but due to their schwerpunkt organization, they tended to get the best stuff where it was needed, at least when it was on offense. They started at the bottom level of tactics and tended to try to work their way up from there.

>Soviet Military.

The Soviets inherited a deeply dysfunctional military. People will talk about the purges eliminating most of their officer corps, but it goes deeper than that; they didn't show particularly good performance before the purges in things like the Polish-Soviet war, and even more crippling than the loss of experienced personnel was the loss of initiative and the new climate of political control: Soviet officers lost their confidence in being able to make decisions wihtout a commissar executing them post hoc if things went wrong, which led to a military culture of buck-passing.

Some of this was ironed away as the big war went on, but they never completely got rid of it, in part because STAVKA didn't want everyone in all happy brotherhood; Stalin viewed a unified, competent military a threat to his power, and wouldn't be having that. Their performance suffered as a result. Ironically, most of the power was given to the operational level officers, supply guys and intelligence guys. They attempted to use their operational expertise to compensate for inferior tactics, and by the time they were getting the upper hand, they were actually doing it.

usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/connor.pdf (skip to page 71 or so).

Consider the ratio of force in Operation Bagration compared to the Eastern Front overall at that point: Overall Soviet frontline forces were about 5.6 million to the Germans 3.3 million, a bit less than 2:1. You had an even worse ratio of tanks+assault guns, of about 9,200 to 5,500. The only thing where the Soviets really, really had the Germans outnumbered (again, over the course of the entire front) was aircraft, where they had about a 6:1 advantage.

2/4?

But at Bagration itself, they managed a roughly 4:1 advantage in men, 10:1 advantage in armor, 13:1 advantage in artillery, and another 13:1 advantage in aircraft, all massively outpacing their overall numerical advantages. (Although, please note, this was at the initial assaults, the Germans did rush reinforcements to the area which brought down those ratios, although it was too little, too late for Army Group Center)

They managed to get away with this by having very good intelligence, and doing very good deception operations, a well as being able to rapidly move their men along lateral axes, thus shuttling troops to the confrontation point faster than the Germans could. Then they break through, consolidate, and push the line up a few hundred km.

>American military.

The American military was an oddball, in large part because of its industrial and geographic situation. In 1939, America had a smaller army (just talking land forces here) than Portugal, a country they had roughly 17 times the population and I don't know how much more industry than the Portuguese had. Most countries of the time had a pre-war core of officers and some senior non-coms, that was supposed to be the leadership element for the drastically inflated military should things go balls to the wall. The Americans didn't even have that, and essentially had to create an officer corps from scratch. This led to severe deficiencies in things like leadership and initiative, which the Americans generally recognized and tried to work around more than solve.

3/4

Because of their wealth and industry, they were, by far, the most well equipped military in the war. They were the only major power with a fully motorized logistical system. They churned out planes like nobody's business. They had about twice as much artillery as anyone else per division. They spat out so many tanks that they could split them up everywhere, and at the same time, the 1st infantry division that landed at Omaha had more tanks in its table of organization than any German armored division at that time.

American combat doctrine was centered around the idea of "holy shit, we have way, way more fire support than anyone else" They didn't need to embark on risky, gutsy, daring assaults. They were in a position where hang back and let the artillery pound it into paste was a viable option pretty much every time. And recognizing this, the artillery officers were given the lion's share of the prioritization, especially in training. The Americans developed a table-base which was essentially a small folder full of all the variables that could affect where the shell landed; distance, windage, angle of guns, reverse sloping, etc; and battery commanders (even individual gun commanders quite frequently) were all vigorously trained in how to use them. As a result, while battlefield communications were often spotty, once they got told where their target was, they could realign the guns and fire more quickly and more accurately than just about anyone, and given the high level of motorization and even self-propulsion of their artillery, meant they could advance extremely rapidly doing this. (Artillery is generally the slow and steady option in warfare, or at least it was up until that point).

4/fin.

memeposting

American's had invulnerable homefront, Germans were on the offensive and Russians were fighting for the very survival of their nation.

>Bagration
literally the BTFOiest of all BTFO moments in the entire war

>whenmomaskswhathappenedtoAGC.jpg

You hit the nail directly on the head.

I dont know. I just dont know. It's too big a topic. You could talk for hours about logistics, tactics, strategy, technology whatever. The question everyone should ponder is how the germans managed to hold out so long given that they were always undersupplied because of total allied air and naval superiority. The answer is simply that the germans (not necessarily the soldiers, but the commanders) were experienced veterans and could make do with what little they had despite overwhelming allied superiority. German soldiers > allied soldiers

this is "hitler wanted to kill everyone without blonde hair and blue eyes" tier

Good posts, thank you user