re: Hardcore History Youtube Video - "Which Had the Superior Military: 1st or 2nd WW Germany?"

He wasn't comparing them as if they had to fight each other. If so, wwii would have won due to technological advances. He was pretty much grading them on a curve compared to who they were fighting at the time.

quote:

---

He also says that WWI Germany was so far better than the contemporaries that it is the best army ever. Where as the WWII Germans were better, but not by as much as WWI

---

I finished Wrath of the Khans yesterday, and I think he'd say that they were the best army ever even over WWI Germany. If I personally were to rank the Top 10 armies of all time, it would be the following relative to their time period:

1) The Mongols
2) US Modern Military
3) The Roman Empire
4) Alexander's Army
5) Napoleon's Army
6) WW1 Germany
7) Nazi Germany
8) The Red Army
9) The British Empire
10) The Huns

The Top 5 I think are nearly indisputable. The bottom 5 though are up for debate.

quote:

---

Thanks for posting the link.

---

No doubt that the world would have been a better place had Germany won a quick victory in 1914.

LIstened to it. It was ok. This thread had a better discussion and better information. It was pretty much the Nazis were stupid and incompetent and corrupted the military with their bad strategy, incompetence, and adherence to the Nazi ideology. Didn't really get into the militaries themselves.

quote:

---

British Empire ranked below Napoleon?

I dunno man, hands down they're navy was the Navy for a few hundred years.

But the British were resourceful for not being a continental power and their small armies inflicted many and much disportionate pain throughout the centuries.

---

The reason I put them below Napoleon is the fact that they've never been that much of land fighters. Also Germany would have possibly curb stomped them if it weren't for the US, or Hitler stupidly declaring war on us.

You have a great username

The blitzkrieg concept was actually stolen from the British, who came up with it in the interwar period but did not implement it. And the British, in turn, based it off of the German operational doctrine which was employed in 1918 to finally break the stalemate: the use of elite, specially trained and equipped units (stosstruppen in that case) to bypass enemy strongpoints and penetrate far to the rear, isolating those strongpoints and allowing them to be easily mopped up by standard infantry coming up behind. And the Germans, in their turn, based their 1918 doctrine on Russian concepts developed by Alexei Brusilov and employed by him in his 1916 offensive to almost completely shatter the Austro-Hungarian army, nearly knocking that empire out of the war.

To return to the German armies of WWI vs WWII when measured against their competition, consider this: in WWI, the German army was able to fight the French and British to a stalemate for four years before finally running out of gas, and they were able to defeat the Russians in three. In WW2, the Germans decisively, completely defeated the French and British on land in two weeks, and in six months penetrated more deeply into Russia than they ever did in WW1. The only reason they did not defeat Russia again was because the Soviet Union had a much firmer control of the Russian populace than the Tsar did.

To me it is no contest. Measured against their competition, the Wehrmacht blows the Imperial German Army away.