INCORRECT TECHNOLOGICAL DECISIONS:

THE DECISIONS THAT AFFECTED THE FATE OF THE THIRD REICH

Burak ÇINAR*

 INTRODUCTION:

The Second World War was the greatest war in history.  People who witnessed this war were introduced to bloody battles, cruel bombings, wise tactics, fatal weapons and so on.  As the greatest war, fights occurred not only in the fields, but also on all fronts.  The most effective decisions were made in the high offices and reflected to the fields.  These decisions did not consist of tactical concepts.  There were many areas that affected the vital strategic developments on all fronts.  Production capability, status of minorities, economic issues, morale conditions and many other events related to the strategic development of a country were the primary factors that affected the course of the war.

One of those factors was the scientific innovation in many areas; perhaps it was the most important in the Second World War.  Especially in the military arena, there was a scientific revolution dominated by the German scientists.  Although German technology was more advanced than that of the Allied side, incorrect technological decisions made by mostly Adolf Hitler and the OKW paved the way to the Allied victory.

Wrong decisions and behaviors in German research stopped the development of decisive new weapons, the Me-262 jet fighter, Walter Type XXI U-boat, heavy tanks and heavy bombers, in the early stages of the war.  In addition, some unnecessary productions previously purchased brought wasted time, materials and energy, such as the V-1, V-2, and super heavy tank projects, so that those created postponement of the Axis powers reaching their strategic and tactical objectives, which were the key steps to defeat the Allied forces.

EFFECTS OF FRICTION IN GERMAN DECISION-MAKING

During the Second World War civilian-military distribution was clearly observed in the German state-structure. Adolf Hitler, the Führer, who held absolute power in Germany, had been empowered by the titles of President, Chancellor, Minister of War and Leader of NSDAP. He was not only the leader of two civilian organs, the state and party[i], but also the military, having the title of the C-in-C of the Wehrmacht[ii]. Despite the Wehrmacht’s autonomous position, Hitler secretly controlled the military institutions.

Until the end of the First World War, political and military administrators in the West followed Carl Von Clausewitz’s concept of strategy.  Yet his ideas had the most influence on the German military, which made his principles of war sacred.  According to Clausewitz's concept of strategy, war was a political instrument and civilians had superiority over the military as decision-makers.  Such ideas greatly influenced first Otto Von Bismarck’s and later Adolf Hitler’s expansionist philosophy.  This shows the continuation of the German school of strategic thinkers. After the First World War, by the development of the idealist perspective, American statesmen tried to outlaw war as a political instrument, but this created an ideological clash between realists and idealists during the inter-war period.  However, political superiority over strategic decision-making was accepted on both sides, distributing the strategy and military strategy.

The Third Reich had a military structure, but ideologically, Nazi sympathizers always had a superior position in decision-making at all levels, disallowing the military voice to be heard.  After the creation of Waffen SS, the Armed Forces began to lose initiative and half-political and half-military units began to penetrate into all areas in the German state structure. This new institutionalizing process brought Hitler quickly gained power over the Wehrmacht, gradually spreading to all branches of the state.

Between 1938 and 1941, the OKW was under Hitler, as the high commander of the Armed Forces, over the OKM, OKL and OKH.  Advised and informed by OKW, Hitler had a direct control over all the branches of the Armed Forces.  Until the autumn 1941, Hitler attended to OKW and OKH mostly.  When things began to go wrong in the Operation Barbarossa, OKW began to lose its importance in Hitler’s eyes.  This greatly contributed to his making fateful decisions.  After the first defeat in front of Moscow in late 1941 and the retirement of Field-Marshall Heinrich Von Brauchitsch as the C-in-C of the OKH, Hitler took on direct command of OKH.[iii]

Meanwhile, as chancellor, Hitler was the head of the Council of Ministers. One important ministry was the Ministry of Armament and Munitions under Fritz Todt.  In the very beginning of 1942, after the accidental death of Todt, Hitler appointed architect Albert Speer to increase the production of war machines and materials.  This produced very positive results in the following years in terms of producing war machines and materials.  Speer began his duty by reorganizing the ministry to raise output and by centralizing the economics, armaments and research services of military branches in the Wehrmacht.  Periviously, the Ministry of Armaments was in charge of the defense and armament services of the OKW and OKM.  By 1944, Speer had managed armament service of the OKL.  This provided him an opportunity to dominate the Central Planning Commission, which made all the important decisions, and the Planning Service[iv].  Speer’s genius and personality helped armament become close to a perfect level through a centralist and authoritarian management.  In parallel with armament, R&D facilities for new weapons also gained speed.

Theoretically, technological-military innovation processes have two establishments: “military and relevant industrial-scientific, both of which operate within the political and economical climate of a country."[v]  Although Speer had no experience in the military discipline, he was in agreement with military personalities, such as Karl Dönitz, Heinz Guderian and Adolf Galland in terms of military strategies.  Speer had close contact with these and other military people, but he was primarily responsible to Hitler, who would make the last decision.  Since the decisions directed to R&D were part of the strategic level, Hitler was always the ultimate decision-maker.  Ignoring certain military realities, Hitler made various strategically important wrong decisions.  Thus, these decisions of R&D hampered advanced technology to reflect in production, as military personnel wished, which resulted in Germany losing the war in this area.

DECISIONS AND WEAPONS

1) ME-262: The Decision That Has Not Been Understood Yet

German scientists successfully tested the first jet-engine fighter of the world He-178 in 1939.  In the course of the war years, these scientists developed many other prototypes for military aviation.  Senior officers of Luftwaffe prepared their plans for the early victory.  Before the Summer Offensive in the Eastern Front in 1942, the Chief of the General Staff of Luftwaffe, Generaloberst Hans Jeschonnek, had pointed out that if Germany did not win the war by December of 1942, this would be the end of all their plans.[vi]  Indeed that is what happened in the end.  Luftwaffe suffered the following years, confirming the generals early assumptions regarding the fate of the war.  During the Battle of Stalingrad, Luftwaffe suffered much in the Eastern Front.  In the meantime, joined Allied air forces deployed in Britain hit the German main land through a crucial air campaign.  Luftwaffe was not able to oppose the massive allied air attacks for a long time.  The air war of attrition gained speed in the summer of 1943.  Although the output of the piston-engine fighters increased sharply, German fighter strength remained steady due to increasing loses.  This situation forced Luftwaffe to find an urgent solution in a few months to protect the Reich.

The solution was ready.  The first jet that could be used in the service was Me-262.  It was an important achievement, which could easily clean the skies of the Allied air forces.  Me-262 had a speed of 870 kph (Me-262 A-1a Schwalbe) and there was no other aircraft that could reach its performance.  Its climbing speed and range were also superior to the other main aircraft types (all variants of Bf-109 & Fw-190) of Luftwaffe.  However, its maneuverability was lower than the USAAF’s P-51 and P-47 and RAF’s Spitfire and Hurricane variants.  This was a disadvantage for disengaging from combat, but its superior speed was enough to cause damage because there were not any aircraft that could catch the Me-262 in the level run. According to the famous German fighter ace Generalleutnant Adolf Galland, Inspector General of Fighters from this period, to stop massive bomber formations the German forces needed four times the number of piston-engine fighters to respond to the bombers[vii].  Yet, the production of the piston-engine fighters never reached this quantity.  However, the Me-262 could balance the power in the skies.  Beside its superior performance, it had a more improved weapon system. There were four 30 mm. main guns put into the fuselage.  Fw-190 and Bf-109 variants in 1943, had not got the firepower of the Me-262.  Therefore, the Me-262 was the only aircraft to respond to the allied bombers.

The project of Me-262 was started in 1938.  In July 1943, the fifth type of the Me-262 succeeded in the test flight.  The next step was mass production for urgent deliveries to the military service.  This could maintain the air defense in Europe.  The air defense of Europe could prevent air superiority, which was preparing the conditions of Operation Overlord.  Hitler’s "illogical" directions postponed Me-262’s first deliveries to the air service until April 1944.  By March, the first outputs actually appeared, but training of the pilots began in April.  Until the end of July the production exceeded 100 aircraft.  In this last year, Allied forces marched on Rome; on another front, they prepared the aerial conditions for the landings on the Normandy coasts in France.  Suddenly, Hitler ordered the Me-262 fighter to be converted to a bomber.

Why did Hitler order the conversion of the Me-262?  He was a defendant of the idea that the prior demand of the Luftwaffe was the fast bomber.[viii]  When he saw the demonstration of the Me-262 first, he told Professor Willy Messerschmitt, “This is the blitz bomber that I have been requesting for years.”[ix]  As understood in this sentence, Hitler was living in the victory period of Germany.  He refused the need for defensive warfare for Germany.  His thoughts were based on the offense.  The experience of the war brought Germany into a worse circumstance, the ideas of the senior officers and the demands of the German army had changed, but Hitler closed his eyes to these developments.  So, his greedy and impatient soul made many crucial decisions and this was one of those vital mistakes.

Luftwaffe experts warned Hitler that fitting of external bomb racks would change the configuration and cause a reduction of the Me-262’s performance.[x]  This made the Me-262 lose its advantage.  Not only its speed, but also its balance was badly affected.  Galland persuaded the Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer, who understood the necessity of producing defensive weapons.  Speer, was very close to Hitler, had accepted the idea of using Me-262s as potential fighters to destroy the USAAF bomber formations.  He wrote about Me-262s in his book Inside the Third Reich, “The fact that these planes could fly higher than the American escort-fighters and could attack the relatively clumsy American bomber squadrons at will because of their immensely superior speed made no impression on Hitler.”[xi]  No one was able to prevent Hitler’s order.  Only after Speer managed to secretly give Galland a few fighter type Me-262s, in September 1944, did Hitler allow Me-262s to be built as fighters, because the Ar-234 light jet bomber was now under production[xii].

If early production of the Me-262 had been realized the Allies might have lost the war.  The production of the Me-262 was planned to be 1,250 aircraft per month by April 1945.[xiii]  The postponement of the Me-262s caused ineffective use of them at the end of 1944.  Until the end of the war, 1,433 Me-262s were produced.[xiv]  According to Galland’s memoirs there were only about 50 Me-262s allowed to be used as interceptors and never more than 25 were operational.[xv]  Speer indicated that only 220 of them were deployed.[xvi]  By 1944, Allied bomber units targeted German oil facilities that increased the fuel shortage that affected Luftwaffe units in 1945.  Especially after Germans lost vital petrol basins in Romania (September 1944) and Hungary (March 1945) to the Russian forces, usage of the aircraft in large numbers became more difficult.  In March 1945, Luftwaffe had 30,000 tons of petrol, so it could not receive further supplies until autumn.[xvii]  Oil reduction due to allied bombing strategy was the most important factor of all in reducing the German war potential.  In 1943, there was not a fuel shortage that could affect jet activity.  Assuming the Me-262s had been in action in 1943 when the Allied bomber casualty was so high, we see that the Germans could have won the air war over Europe.  The Allies could neither defend their forces in Italy nor attempt to land on the Normandy coasts without air support.  In contrast, Germans could protect most of their potential productions of war.  However, Allied air power became the greatest reason for the German defeat.

Me-262s improved their abilities during their service.  After his first flight with a Me-262 on 22 May 1943, Galland described the perfection of this jet, saying, “it felt as though angels were pushing.”[xviii]  To him, the invention of the Me-262 was “not a step forward but a leap.”[xix]  He was one of the first defendants of Me-262 fighters and stated that he would rather have one Me-262 than five Bf-109s[xx], which was the bulk of the fighter production for Luftwaffe.  The superiority of the Me-262 forced Americans to create new tactics.  Against the Me-262 the pilot was to dive down upon it from high above gaining speed, and then open fire before the Me-262’s pilot could react.  US fighters would try to knock out one of Me-262’s jet engines reducing its speed.  This was possible but had a low probability.  Americans mostly shot down Me-262s during takeoffs and landings.  Major Walter Nowotny, one of the German top aces, was shot down by an American P-51s while landing.[xxi]  Adolf Galland also shared the same fate[xxii].

There were also some technical and training problems because Hitler’s order caused expected difficulties to the German experts.  His order led to a quick use of this aircraft and this caught the pilots and the ground personnel unprepared.  For example, Kommando Nowotny (the Me-262 squadron under Nowotny), with a group of 30 Me-262s shot down 22 Allied aircraft, with only 3 Me-262s surviving, in October 1944.[xxiii]  Most of them were downed due to the mistakes of the ground personnel.  However these problems did not overshadow the superiority of the Me-262.  During February 1945, JG–7, under the command of Johannes Steinhoff, scored 45 bombers and 15 fighters with his 40 Me-262s, with no significant losses.[xxiv] Twenty-five B-17s along with five P-51s were shot down by Me-262s of JG-7 over Berlin on 18 March.  In this engagement, Professor Messerschmidt’s jets achieved an attack on 1,200 bombers who were being escorted by eighteen fighter squadrons.[xxv]  The development of the Me-262 variants (fighter, bomber, and night-fighter) slightly increased allied casualty.  Galland said that if they had three hundred operational Me-262 interceptors in 1944, they could stop the American daytime bombing offensive.[xxvi]

Me-262 was not the only jet interceptor project of the Third Reich; there were also some other types for which serial production was to be started, like the He-162 Volksjäger and Me-163 Komet.  He-162, which was prepared for last-hope attacks on bomber formations (perhaps suicidal attacks), was not delivered into service.  Me-163, which reached 960 kph by its rocket engine, first seen in action in summer 1944,[xxvii] but it was used in limited numbers during the last two months of the war.  There was also an excessive number of prototypes of many types of jets that were being tested or planned.  But all of these developments could only show how German science advanced.  The domination of Me-262 could have satisfied Germans if Hitler knew how to use it to its optimum.

2) Walter Type-XXI U-boat: The Weapon That Was Never Given Priority

German U-boats were the most effective weapons against the Western Allies in the early years of the Second World War.  The Commander of the U-boats, Grand-Admiral Karl Dönitz, saw that if the Allied shipping that carried the main supplies from the United States to Britain was broken, Allied troops could no longer resist Axis pressure in Europe, the Mediterranean or African arenas.  Time made Dönitz right.  In 1944, Germans captured some documents from a shot down B-24 and they were shocked.  According to these documents, “when a U-boat sank a 6.000t merchant ship and a 3.000t tanker, it inflicted losses of 42 tanks, 8 152mm Howitzers, 88 78.6mm AT guns, 40 40mm AA guns, 24 Armored Cars, 50 HMG, 5.210t of ammunition, 600 rifles, 428t of equipment for tanks, 2.000t of food, and 1.000 barrels of fuel.”  Additionally, it was stated as equal to 3.000 sorties of air offensive.[xxviii]  Allied leaders comprehended the importance of U-boats and directed their primary air raids to the U-boat construction yards in 1943.[xxix]  All of Dönitz’s efforts went to persuade Hitler to give naval priority to developing the German U-boat.  He was right in his claims.  In 1943, the fate of submarine warfare changed.  In the first half of the war, U-boats gave an opportunity for the German defeat of the Allies, because American support to the British was nearly cut.  In December 1942, Britain had only 300.000 tons of fuel-stock and its monthly spending was 130.000 tons.[xxx] Diminishing support in the Atlantic led to the Allied casualties rising over production.  If the conditions of 1942 had continued during the next year, Allied forces could not have replaced their units so easily.  This means that German victory would be possible first in North Africa and then in all the Mediterranean, which would lead to a total German victory in all fronts.  The victory was not far to Germany, but an Allied innovation, the decimetric radar, caused the unexpected losses of the U-boats.  The Kriegsmarine began to lose its domination in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.  This situation gave way to the decisive Allied landings in Sicily, Salerno, Normandy and Anvil on the Italian and French coasts.

What was the main reason that ended the horror of the German U-boats?  I am sure that Hitler’s attitude to the Kriegsmarine gives the main evidence in the German failure in the high seas.  Hitler was introduced to ground warfare in the First World War, and he always gave priority to the land forces.  However, ground warfare is not the only way to reach strategic objectives in modern warfare.  If you cut the supply you make it easy for your ground forces to destroy the enemy land units.  There is a proverb that explains a military reality: “Amateurs always talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics.”  Hitler was of the idea that the logistics were more important than the fights in the front in modern war.  His thought prevented Dönitz’s demands to give priority to the development and production of new U-boats.  Dönitz demanded new U-boats in the early years of the war.  He had pushed for the development of Walter projects (Type XXI and Type XXIII) to the Naval High Command in early 1942.[xxxi]  On 24 June 1942, he critically announced that, in his opinion, the quick development, testing and construction of the Walter U-boats was a fatal matter and the future of the war would be determined according to this.[xxxii]  He was farsighted, but Hitler was so busy with the battles in North Africa and Eastern Front that he could not show interest in the seas.  Hitler saw the Battle of the Atlantic as being only for attrition.  Therefore, there was conflict between Hitler and Dönitz’s ideas.  Dönitz was not the head of Kriegsmarine yet.  He was only leading the U-boat operations.  He was a feverish defendant of the U-boats, so he claimed that if they gave priority to the submarines on behalf of the high seas fleet this could collapse the Allied navy.  However, the Commander of the Kriegsmarine, Grand-Admiral Erich Raeder, who had a classical mind, believed that the high seas fleet is the most important factor that could determine the fate of the war in the seas.  Thus Dönitz managed to persuade a transfer of U-boat construction from the traditional naval control to the Armaments Ministry, under Speer, in spring 1943.[xxxiii]  Hitler supported Raeder’s work to gain power in the seas and gave an insufficient quota for the production of Dönitz’s U-boats, until the German high seas fleet failed.  After Hitler’s attack in a session about the failure of the Kriegsmarine, Admiral Raeder resigned and was replaced with Dönitz.[xxxiv]  Now, Hitler began to share Dönitz’s ideas.  However, this was too late because U-boats began to suffer from the Allied ASW attacks.  Nevertheless he could replace the old U-boats with the more developed one.  Production of a superb submarine was necessary to turn the course of the battles in the Atlantic, which now became a dangerous zone after the Allied powers developed the decimetric radar.  Despite all negative events in the Eastern Front (Battle of Stalingrad and Battle of Kursk) if the Allied forces were eliminated in the ocean, Germany had enough power to finish the war as the victor.

In 1943, Professor Helmuth Walter began to test his new U-boat Type-XXI. This submarine had all the characteristics that Dönitz demanded.  While going with the speed of 15.5 knots on the surface, its maximum submerging speed was 17.5 knots.  It could endure its maximum speed for two hours.  When submerged, the boat could move at 6 knots for 2.5 days and at its slowest speed for 11 days.  The operating range at economical speed was 24,000 miles.  In addition, Type-XXI was well equipped with the latest tools and weapon systems.  It could fire its torpedoes while fully submerged by the acoustic bearings of the targets.  It was able to blind-fire to the target from 50 meters (165 feet) deep.  It had 6 torpedo tubes with 23 torpedoes.  Because it was designed for cruising under the sea it was not forced to fill its batteries on the surface.[xxxv]  This provided total invisibility to the Type-XXI.  These specifications made Type-XXI the best and most superior submarine in the navies of the world.

After planning the Type-XXI in two months, its plans were submitted to Dönitz on 19 June 1943.[xxxvi]  He saw the advantages of Type-XXI, and ordered it to be built instead of the former Type IX.  Hitler approved only a monthly quota of 22 Type-XXIs.[xxxvii]  On 31 May 1943, after he explained the reasons of increased losses of the U-boats, he gave Hitler two alternatives: to increase the production of the older types of U-boats or to accelerate the works on the Walter U-boat.  Hitler agreed to give him more steel and ordered him to see Speer to plan further U-boat production[xxxviii].

Delivery of the Walter was scheduled as spring 1944, but Allied bombings caused a one-year postponement.[xxxix]  The first Type-XXI U-boat was launched on 20 April 1944 (on Hitler’s birthday) and 44 others followed by the end of October.[xl]  In December 1944 based on the amount of steel supplied to the industry, the German navy aimed at production of 336 Type XXI boats.[xli]  In April 1945, the Type-XXI left Norway for its first voyage.[xlii]  Another 12 Type-XXI U-boats were introduced into service in May 1945.[xliii]  There were also 91 Type-XXIs training for their further cruises,[xliv] but their activities in the high seas were limited with the resistance of the shattered ground forces.

This following anecdote shows what the Type-XXI could do in the war:

After the training of its crew U-2511, under the command of Adalbert Schnee (one of Germany's top U-boat aces), the first armed Walter Type-XXI U-boat for battle sailed to the Atlantic on 4 May 1945.  Its first engagement proved its power.  It was the first time that a U-boat had succeeded in evading a group of destroyers easily.  During its escape, the boat was submerging 16 miles per hour that it was equal to the speed of frigates and corvettes.  While U-2511 was going on the course, the radioman received the surrender message and Schnee decided to obey the order and the boat began to sail back to Bergen in Norway.  While the boat was going on its new course, it engaged with four destroyers escorting a cruiser.  With a hunting instinct, the U-boat headed towards and approached within 500 meters of the cruiser, imperceptible.  Schnee ordered the crew to arm the first and third torpedo tubes.  After the board of the Cruiser was targeted he waited to yell to fire.  He had got a fire position so easily, an opportunity that none of the U-boats had had before, but he shouted only “damn.”[xlv]

What was Me-262 in the air was to Type-XXI in the sea. As in the decision on the Me-262, Hitler and the staff of the Kriegsmarine was lack of seeing brilliant ideas of Dönitz who was a modernist.  If Hitler had accepted Dönitz’s proposal of Type-XXI before he was forced to accept that a new type of U-boat was necessary, the mass production of this superior boat would have begun in 1943 and it could have seen action before D-Day.  On the other side, Churchill saw the danger of the U-boat campaign in the Atlantic and he also saw Walter boats as revolutionary and very dangerous for the Allies.[xlvi]

Assuming the defeat of most of the Allied Forces in the sea would lead to the dissolution of the landing forces, this would have given way to an Axis victory in the defense of the Festung Europa.  Because the Allies could not risk the Soviet Troops reaching Western Europe, they could have sued for peace.  Therefore, the Germans missed the opportunity of victory by technological means for the second time.

3) The Hardest Targets That Could Bring the Victory: Heavy Tank Projects

Floating armor was the main factor in the early German victories.  Neither the French nor the British could have stopped the German Panzer Divisions, because they had failed to develop modern tactics based on armored units.  The Germans had achieved the creation of “Blitzkrieg” and planned their strategies based on their panzers. General Heinz Guderian, nicknamed “Fast Heinz,” led to the reorganization of the German Panzer Units as the main units of the armed forces before the breakout of the Second World War, and prepared all conditions for the further victories.

The Blitzkrieg tactics proved fruitful during the campaigns in Poland and France.  Poland was not able to resist the German Armor more than a month, while France, which had the greatest army in numbers, made it for only six weeks.  These successes gave way to the German major offensive, Operation Barbarossa, in Russia by 22 June 22 1941.  Barbarossa was planned in three stages.  In the first two stages German forces succeeded in the capitulation of the objective cities like Minsk, Kiev and Smolensk.  Now, the Germans could have started the last phase of their offensive to capture the cities of Leningrad and Moscow to the decisive defeat of the Red Army.  Suddenly, however, German armies began to slow while approaching Moscow.  In December the Germans had failed to celebrate the Noel with a total victory because the Russian counterattack drove the Germans back.

Why were German armies exhausted in the last step to the victory? There were many tactical and strategic faults by Hitler that caused the Germans to lose time over a period of two weeks during which Moscow could have been captured, before the Russian winter strike.  That is true, but the OKW had forgotten the main source of their incredible power: the panzer forces. Hitler gave priority to the light tank in the production of the panzers.  His ignorance of the production of medium tanks led to the Russian keeping armor and gun superiority during the winter of 1941 and also his postponement of heavy tank projects caused the Russians to take it during 1942.  By the end of July, Germans began to engage with powerful T-34 tanks.  Because of the lack of production of German medium tanks Pz-IVs with an insufficient penetration rate of their guns,[xlvii] Russian mass-produced medium tank T-34s and heavy tank KV-1s[xlviii] slowed the German advance, so German troops were left to face the Russian winter. On 23 June, General Reinhardt’s 6th Panzer Division experienced a KV-I that could not be knocked out by 50-mm AT guns; only 88mm AT guns could hit them from 900m.  This is why[xlix] German panzers could not advance after they reached within 20 miles of the Kremlin.

In 1937, Guderian estimated the real strength of Russian tanks in service as 10,000 in his book “Panzer Leader.”  But, according to the German Intelligence this number was 17,000.[l]  During the campaign in Poland, Guderian warned Hitler of the need not only for the production of more medium tanks (Pz-III & Pz-IV), but also for the development of their abilities.  In France the 349 Pz-III with 37mm gun, 39 Pz-III command tanks and 208 Pz-IVs were all medium tank types of a total 2574 tank strength.  40 new Pz-IIIs with 50mm guns saw action after May.[li] Although these tanks had not got the majority among the panzer types, they had accomplished the Invasion of France.  As General Thoma mentioned, the number of the medium tanks were increased and reached two-thirds of the total 2434 tanks on the eve of Operation Barbarossa.[lii] However, this was not enough to annihilate the Soviet power.  In August 1941, Guderian talked to Hitler about the insufficiencies of their tanks and Hitler now was regretful.[liii]  Although Germans had knocked out or captured 18,000 tanks[liv] and other armored vehicles by September, they engaged powerful Soviet tank units.  This shows the result of another wrong technological decision of the German leaders.

After Germans halted Operation Typhoon, they began to defend their positions to prepare a second attempt.  The German Pz-IIIs and Pz-IVs were upgraded with the more powerful guns and armor that Guderian had wished for before Operation Barbarossa.[lv]  But these developments did not satisfy the panzer generals.  Their second attempt also crashed into the ruins of Stalingrad, during the winter of 1942-43.

Germans suffered from the absence of the heavy tank in their service until 1943.  The first German heavy tank, Tiger-I E, was tested in action on 29 August 1942, at Mga, near Leningrad, but failed.[lvi]  Their second test was on 13 January 1943, and now they really succeeded in inflicting heavy casualty to the Russian armor column despite their small numbers.  1/sPzAbt 502 with only four Tigers and 8 Pz-III M/Ns destroyed half of the 24 T-34s and T-60s.  On 11 February, 6 Tigers accounted for the destruction of 32 of 46 tanks on the Leningrad sector.  Between 19 and 21 March the 1/sPzAbt 502 was credited with 163 kills including T-26s, T-34s, T-60s and KVs.  On 17 January Tigers gave their first loss to a Russian AT gun, which penetrated the thinner armour of its engine compartment.  Marshal Zhukov visited the Volkhov front and ordered the capture of its wreck at all costs.[lvii]  German heavy tank projects were just concluded with the mass production and they gained armor superiority in quality, but now they could not have had long superiority against the enormous production of Soviet tanks in numbers.  This forced Speer to decide to give overriding priority to the tank program, on 22 January 1943.[lviii]  By the Battle of Kursk, Germans illogically lost most of their new superior tanks and this helped further Soviet offensives towards the west.

Germans went on to the production and development of new superior tanks and they observed their tanks were able to defeat the enemy armor, if only they could maintain high numbers in production.  A short story from General Manteuffel’s memoirs, the Battle of Turgu Fromos, shows how German armor was more superior to the Russians’.  In early May, Russians employing over 500 tanks, (including JS-Is, which were their best, newest and the heaviest tanks at that time), attempted to break the German lines to reach the Ploesti petrol basin in Romania.  They jumped onto the Grossdeutschland Panzergrenadiere Division, which had deployed one Tiger, two Panther and one Pz-IV tank units with 160 tanks.  In the beginning, Germans were confused that 88 mm guns of the Tiger tanks were being compelled to penetrate the front armor of the JS-1s from 3,000 m, but after the battle 300 knocked-out Russian tanks were laying in the battlefield whereas the Germans suffered only 10 panzers[lix].

German King Tiger, which had an incredible armor, was first delivered into service in late 1944.  There were not any King Tigers lost in a tank battle until the end of the war.

It was too late.  By 1943, the skies were covered by the Allied aircraft, which were the greatest enemy of the tanks.  If the OKW had predicted the evolution of the panzers before Barbarossa, or they had heard the voices of their battlefield generals, like Guderian, they could have produced heavy tanks (e.g. Tiger) at least one and a half years before their deliverance into service.  Thus they could have defeated the Soviet armor outside of Moscow.

4) Never-ending Debate: Production of the Heavy Bombers

Like in the production of the tanks, there was a debate on the production of bombers.  In the pre-war period, an old German ace, now Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, successfully established the Luftwaffe from zero.  While the phoenix was rising, naturally some problems occurred.  The most important problem was the debate that Luftwaffe seniors were to select either to continue the production of the dive-bombers, which had a destructive impact on enemy ground units, or to begin the development and production of heavy bombers to catch the future.

Germans ignored the heavy bomber projects and produced them in limited numbers in the first two years of the war.  This decision gave priority to the use of dive-bombing tactics rather than level bombing.  So, the Germans were more concerned with tactical targets than strategic ones.  They went on to produce more of the Ju-87 Stuka dive-bombers, which had proved itself during the Spanish Civil War, but now the German seniors ignored the importance of the level-bombers, which became fashionable to exhaust the enemy resources.  Stuka was also slow and powerless, so this should have been changed.  The abilities of Stuka were enough to engage with Polish, Norwegian and French air forces, but they were vulnerable to the British aircraft.  After France had surrendered, Germany began to be interested in the British mainland and this brought many difficulties to the Germans.  Stukas could not be sent without escorts, but Luftwaffe did not have long-range single-seat fighters to protect them during their raids over targets in Britain.  The Battle of Britain was the first defeat of the Germans, which was the result of their faulty decision in the production of bombers.

After the end of the Battle of Britain, Germany started to remember their heavy bomber projects.  Nevertheless, their medium bombers covered the largest percentage of their bomber production.  Because they had not given importance to the heavy bombers at the time, their research and development of the heavy bombers had been postponed.

General Walter Wever, the head of the staff of the Luftwaffe, supported the heavy bomber projects.  They had been concerned with three projects: Ju-89, Do-19 and He-177.[lx]  In 1936, Wever’s death was the turning point in the research and development of the heavy bombers.  The Do-19 and Ju-89 projects were canceled in 1939 and only Greif, which was Germany’s biggest bomber project, survived[lxi].

Due to an irrational 1938 requirement German scientists had started to work on the Greif to convert it into a dive-bomber.  Its conversion into a dive-bomber brought similar troubles to what the decision on the Me-262 caused.  This postponed its first delivery into service until March 1942.  The He-177 production was limited to 1,000 pieces during the war, and only 200 of them had intermittent operational use and the Luftwaffe began using them mainly in 1944[lxii].

What happened then? The answer is very easy: The Americans did what the Germans did not, and heavily bombed the German cities with their four-engine B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers.  In one raid they destroyed three-fourths of Dresden with approximately 135,000 people.[lxiii]  German industries were destroyed step by step by the Allied heavy bombers.  If the German logic worked well in the eve of the war, they could have succeeded in the destruction of the British industry and airfields that could have given production superiority to the Germans, but they closed their eyes to the future.

5) Unnecessary Weights: V-1, V-2 & A-9/A-10 missiles, Maus & E-100 Tanks

During the Second World War, Germans launched many secret projects.  Most of them were advanced conventional weapons for further battles.  However, there were also strategic weapons found, produced and used.  According to Hitler, who exaggerated the abilities of those secret weapons, the ballistic missiles were especially valuable for research and development. V-1 and V-2 missiles were the best-known missile projects that opened the rocketry age and caused a revolution in ballistics warfare.  Another missile, A-9/A-10, the first ICBM, was in the pre-project phase.  Germans also had heavy conventional weapon projects, like super heavy tanks Maus and E-100.  These projects seemed Hitler’s last hopes and hindered the German weapon production.  These weapons caused extravagance and the Germans wasted their chance to optimize mass production.  In short, these projects brought wasted time, material and energy, the trinity of the Third Reich.  If we compare the wasted materials with the a priori necessities of the Third Reich, we can claim that the super heavy projects were one of the main obstacles to winning.

V-1 and V-2 were the first two types of surface-to-surface missiles in the world.  German scientists had developed them in less than a decade.  Hitler was very affected by this development because he supposed that an unknown weapon would cause the Allies to ask for peace.  He gave priority to the V-1s and the V-2s to terrorize British homeland.  These weapons diminished the British morale, but this was a way of gaining a strategic victory.  In his memoirs, Speer described how impressed Hitler was when he was shown a film of a howling, flame-spitting V-2, and how he decided to develop it at the expense of the unspectacular, but cheaper V-1.[lxiv]

V-1 was a mid-wing monoplane driven by a pulsating flow duct motor and carrying 150 gallons (683 l), having a 390-410 mph (624-656 km/h) speed at an average ceiling of 760 m, and throwing a 1870 lbs. (850 kg.) warhead 150 miles (240 km).[lxv]  They were vulnerable both to fighters and to ground fire, they were too slow for use, but the Germans launched them against the largest stationary targets.  For example, British aircraft Tempest Mk-Vs shot down 638 V-1s until 5 September 1944.[lxvi]  The Allies succeeded in destroying 7,076 of them.[lxvii]  The first 2000 V-1s were also faultily built and they were scrapped[lxviii].

V-2 was so fast that there was not an aircraft or an air defense that could stop it.  But V-2s were put into the service two years late because their production site, Peenemünde, was badly selected, and allied air units heavily bombed and delayed V-2 production.

9,251 V-1s were fired against England and approximately 12,000 V-1s (including 6,551 against Antwerp) against Western Europe.[lxix]  Of the total 4,300 fired, 1,500 V-2s were directed against England, and 2,100 V-2s against the Port of Antwerp.[lxx]  Nevertheless, they failed to play the decisive role in the Second World War.  All of these missiles had a capability of killing only a few thousand civilians and demoralizing others.

German scientists had also planned to develop an ICBM to fire against the American coasts.  This was A-9 / A-10, which had a huge explosive warhead.[lxxi]  If the Germans produced this type of missiles in large numbers the resource allocation of the country would have been finished.

Instead of V-1 & V-2, the Germans could have developed guided cruise missile to attack precision targets like factories and ships.  If the Germans launched these missiles against tactical targets they could have been more successful.  However, if the missile technology was transferred to aerial production Germans would have oversupplied their demands in the air.  The statistics have concluded that the production of V-1s and V-2s were two significant faults and that production of only V-2s kept the Germans from producing more than 24,000 fighters.[lxxii]  Speer confessed that the rocket program was not only their largest, but also their most wasteful failure.[lxxiii]

The resource-wasting projects were not only the missiles, but also there were other heavy projects on the ground.  Prototypes of the illogical super-heavy tanks Maus and E-100 were built.  Maus, at 188 tons, is the heaviest tank in military history.[lxxiv]  It was armed with two guns (one 128 mm and one 75 mm).[lxxv]  There were only two Maus built and nine others under construction, but they could not go to the battlefield because their weight did not allow their transportation on bridges (over 50 tons)[lxxvi] and their great mass brought transport difficulties as well.  Maus was the main example of the unnecessary exceeding of limits in weapon production on the ground.  E-100 was another super-heavy tank of 140 tons, but only one prototype was built.  It had two guns (one 150 mm and one 75 mm) and a heavy machine gun.[lxxvii]  The guns of both the E-100 and Maus were thought to upgrade to 170 mm.[lxxviii] It was ridiculous because Germans had never suffered the ability of their guns in the frontline in the late stages of the war.  If the production and research of these tanks were transferred to the other available types of heavy tanks or medium battle tanks, German Panzer Divisions would have been more satisfied. Two engineers named Grote and Hacker also offered a plan for a 1,500 ton tank powered by U-boat diesels.[lxxix]  After he had seen the negative effect of those projects, he put the stop to the super-heavy tank researches and gave them less priority.

CONCLUSION: A mental and physical contest waged by means of the latter

(Carl Von Clausewitz, On War)

During the Second World War, German tanks destroyed more tanks than the Allied Air Forces.  German pilots credited more aircraft than the Allied pilots did.  German U-boats sank over 2,779 allied merchant ships with 14,119,413 tons of supplies plus 148 battleships.[lxxx]  From medicine to atomic research, Germans innovated more than their Allied counterparts.  In short, whatever the Americans, British and the Russians made, the Germans made it better.  At any rate, German technology was more advanced and thus they risked the war.  However, in their decision mechanisms the seniors made wrong decisions that misdirected the development of the German R&D in weapons.  While many World War II researchers like B.H. Liddel Hart, Paul Carell, Kenneth Macksey and others interpret the events affecting the fate of the war, they have not ignored the contribution of decisions to the result of the war.  Many German generals, including Erich Manstein, Adolf Galland and especially Albert Speer, who served for the Third Reich during the war, shared the same ideas with those researchers.  The German Reich, which had stormed across Europe, could have continued their existence by making basic good decisions, but they did not.

GLOSSARY

A-9/A-10: Long-range rocket engine surface-to-surface ballistic missile, ICBM

Ar-234: Single-seat light jet bomber

ASW: Anti-submarine warfare

B-17: American four-engine heavy bomber

B-24: American four-engine heavy bomber

Bf-109: German single seat fighter/bomber

Blitzkrieg: Lightning War

C-in-C: Commander-in-Chief

Do-19: German four-engine heavy bomber

E-100: German super-heavy tank

Festung Europa: Fortress Europe, Nazi slogan about defending the continent of Europe against Western invaders

Fw-190: German single seat fighter/bomber

General: Lieutenant General[lxxxi]

Generalfeldmarschall: General of the Army, Field Marshal

Generalleutnant: Major General

Generalmajor: Brigadier General

Generaloberst: General

He-162: German single-seat jet fighter

He-177: German double/four-engine heavy bomber

He-178: First jet-engine aircraft of the world

Hurricane: British single seat fighter/bomber

ICBM: Inter-continental ballistic missile

JG: Jagdgeschwader, fighter squadron, containing 90-120 aircraft.

JS-1: Russian heavy tank

Ju-87: German double seat dive-bomber

Ju-89: German four-engine heavy bomber

King Tiger: Tiger-II, German heavy tank

Kriegsmarine: German Navy

KV-1: Russian heavy tank

Luftwaffe: German Air Forces

NSDAP: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartee, National Socialist German Workers’ Party

Maus: German super-heavy tank

Me-163: German single-seat jet fighter

Me-262: German single/double seat jet fighter/bomber

OKW: Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, High Command of German Armed Forces

OKM: Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine, High Command of German Navy

OKL: Oberkommando der Luftwaffe, High Command of German Air Forces

OKH: Oberkommando der Heers, High Command of German Army

Operation Barbarossa: Invasion of Russia

Operation Overlord: Allied landing on Europe on the western coasts

Operation Typhoon: German attack to surround Moscow in late 1941.

P-47: American single seat fighter/bomber

P-51: American single seat fighter/bomber

Panther: German heavy tank

Panzer: Armored Vehicles

Pz-III: German medium tank

Pz-IV: German medium tank

R&D: Research and development

RAF: (British) Royal Air Force

Reichsmarschall: Marshal of the state (title, created for Hermann Göring, head of Luftwaffe)

Spitfire: British single seat fighter/bomber

Waffen SS: Waffen Schützstaffel, SS Forces, Hitler’s Elite Guards

ENDNOTES

*Uluslararası İlişkiler, Bilkent Üniversitesi, 1998