How did Afrika Korp get to Africa?

Believe it or not, but the USSR had sometimes better stuff then the Nato.
Don’t underestimate the russians.
And they still have.

What the Wehrmcht needed was a tank wich was able and fitted for:

Most terrains - wide tracks
Cheap to build - outproducing the enemy
A solid and one caliber only gun - a 7.5cm would have done the job
Running on a strong engine - Maybach 12 pistons engine 700 HP
Better transmission - helical teeth instead of vertical ones

You prob. get the idea…
But this would only solve one of many problems.

The Nato was created to prevent Russia from having and using a harbour anywhere near the Atlantic.
That was the only purpose, same as the Berlin wall.

The Warsaw pact was the opposite.
At that time manpower and tanks were useless because every big nation needed to make new plans for an upcoming 3rd World War and the way it would be fought; because the knew it would be fought way different then WW I and II combined.

Back to topic!

I once believed in the Conventional superiority of NATO, but its conceptual strategies (including multinational forces, aluminum AFVs, no easy tack on kit based reactive armor, quality over quantity, tactical use of armor, using armor at all to stop a massed armor invasion, trying to ship 30-40 divisions across the atlantic during a war…) are all failures.

The Euromissiles crisis was my undergrad thesis, the basic outline of this is that by 1977 or so the bright guys in the US govt. all realized that nukes were not a fallback plan, but THE plan, because trying to stop 10000 tanks riding over tank country without having 10000 active tanks and helicopters of your own isn’t workable (unless you tac nuke them), and in that era, the USA didn’t keep more than a modest proportion of its active, ready units in Germany (et al), but in the DMZ, Japan, and especially, the US, where they are normally marshaled and organized!)

There is a tremendous myth of Western Allied military strength, because it has never been tested against a true adversary (like Germany, or the Soviets)    We defeated the remnants of Nazi Germany, but the USSR defeated it, period.

USSR learned the schwerpunkt (blitz) method from it being used to slaughter them for 3 years
USSR under pressure generated a finer engineering/production regime than could possibly have been expected from the Tsarist era’s myth of Russian incompetence and graft.
USSR had political unity until it ran to failure whereas NATO as a confederacy was a train wreck from 1965 on.

USA came to rely more and more upon technologies that have limited applications in limited war (nukes) and limited application (attack helicopters vs MANPADS, expensive stealth aircraft that cannot be mass produced)  in unlimited (total) wars.

Ok, back to topic—where is the Wehrmacht issued Sun Screen?? SpF what?

@taamvan:

I once believed in the Conventional superiority of NATO, but its conceptual strategies (including multinational forces, aluminum AFVs, no easy tack on kit based reactive armor, quality over quantity, tactical use of armor, using armor at all to stop a massed armor invasion, trying to ship 30-40 divisions across the atlantic during a war…) are all failures.

I’ve also read that NATO’s strategy for dealing with a Warsaw Pact armoured invasion of Western Europe (launched from then-East Germany into then-West Germany) was partially dictated by political considerations which undermined its military effectiveness.  Conventional wisdom holds that the correct non-nuclear strategy for dealing with a massive armoured invasion is a defense in depth which gradually wears down the invading forces.  The problem with such a defense is that, if it were applied to the scenario just mentioned, much of West Germany would be overrun before NATO could halt the Warsaw Pact advance.  This prospect was understandably unacceptable to the West German government, so NATO relied instead on a concept of “forward defense”, with much of NATO’s forces concentrated close to the border with East Germany.  This doctrine, however, had two major problems.  First, this kind of piecrust defense wouldn’t have worked: if the Warsaw Pact had concentrated the bulk of its forces at one or two key points of the piecrust and had used all of that concentrated weight to effect a breakthrough, there would have been nothing behind the front line to stop them once they had punched their way through it.  Second, from the Soviet perspective, this “forward defense” concept looked nothing like a defensive stance; instead, it looked like a set-up for a NATO invasion of Eastern Europe, so it contributed to raising tensions between the two sides.

@CWO:

@taamvan:

I once believed in the Conventional superiority of NATO, but its conceptual strategies (including multinational forces, aluminum AFVs, no easy tack on kit based reactive armor, quality over quantity, tactical use of armor, using armor at all to stop a massed armor invasion, trying to ship 30-40 divisions across the atlantic during a war…) are all failures.

I’ve also read that NATO’s strategy for dealing with a Warsaw Pact armoured invasion of Western Europe (launched from then-East Germany into then-West Germany) was partially dictated by political considerations which undermined its military effectiveness.  Conventional wisdom holds that the correct non-nuclear strategy for dealing with a massive armoured invasion is a defense in depth which gradually wears down the invading forces.  The problem with such a defense is that, if it were applied to the scenario just mentioned, much of West Germany would be overrun before NATO could halt the Warsaw Pact advance.  This prospect was understandably unacceptable to the West German government, so NATO relied instead on a concept of “forward defense”, with much of NATO’s forces concentrated close to the border with East Germany.  This doctrine, however, had two major problems.  First, this kind of piecrust defense wouldn’t have worked: if the Warsaw Pact had concentrated the bulk of its forces at one or two key points of the piecrust and had used all of that concentrated weight to effect a breakthrough, there would have been nothing behind the front line to stop them once they had punched their way through it.  Second, from the Soviet perspective, this “forward defense” concept looked nothing like a defensive stance; instead, it looked like a set-up for a NATO invasion of Eastern Europe, so it contributed to raising tensions between the two sides.

This is what I love about strategy; and why in my opinion political considerations can trump tactical requirements - and rightly so.

By positioning forces in a “forward” stance - maybe the soviets would then readjust their own forces into a depth defense; and their own depth defense requirements become a speedbump in the event of their invasion of the rest of Europe.  MAYBE that was the plan all along? and maybe it worked!

Further, it can be strongly argued that NATO was better served by the pie-crust in the big picture. The invasion didn’t come, and the political ramifications of pissing everyone off in west germany, or making them feeling so alienated by the allies who wouldn’t really be defending them, but rather, using them as a human shield to stop the Russians before France were paramount.

I could see it both ways.

Imagine if NATO did the depth defense, only for the west germans to hear 40+years of soviet propaganda that they were just a puppet; maybe the people there would start to align with the soviets? (unlikely but not impossible!)

Quite the A&A gamble to judge and make!

One reason is that the OKW didn’t care much and left the shipping totally up to the Italians, therefore it is/was not well documented.
Everything the Geemans did was documented three times.
So the shipping papers could be from the italians were as the papers from the Reichsbahn would be german.
Therefore no records at all but maybe a few papers that state that tanks were downloaded.
The DAK was just a sideshow. They scattered everything together they could grab.
Working under worst conditions.
Compare what the SS got during the same time period to the stuff DAK got. :-o :-o

At times during the campaign, JU-52s brought men and fuel to Africa.

The other thing is, most of the time Germans used the vehicles and tanks from the enemy.
“Das Fliegertuch” aviator cloth and very good goggles were sometimes the best weapons they had in the Africa campagne.
They may have had less material to work with but used everything to deal with.

These weapons were handed out to Hungarians, Romanians, Italians, Fremde Heere Ost and so on, WW I weapons wich were short of Ammo.  :|

@Caesar:

Yeah I know, they gave it to the other Axis nations or Axis friendly. Germany usually kept the good tanks for themselves.

Which was very sensible of Germany.  Operating a large-scale haphazard collection of captured foreign vehicles and weapon systems is more trouble than it’s worth and creates all sorts of headaches.  It multiplies the number of machines that your troops have to be trained to operate (even assuming that you have access to things like the original operating manuals); it creates a force whose components have uneven performance levels (with the lesser-performing units thereby dragging the better ones down to their level, if you try to operate your forces as a group); it greatly complicates the problems of maintenance and spare parts; and it potentially introduces caliber incompatibilities to the issue of ammunition supply.  Even something as basic as tools and nuts and bolts can become a problem: when the French battleship Richelieu joined the Allied side in the middle of the war, and was sent to New York for a refit, the American shipyard workers had all sorts of trouble working on the ship due to the fact that the ship had been built using the metric system rather than using the imperial-derived system of US customary units.

Russian T34/57 under German control.
Maybe late '42.