German Logistics 1939-45

When we think of the German Army we think of the Blitzkrieg years, 1939–41. With their Auftragstaktik and cutting-edge weaponry, they epitomised incisive modern war. However, there was an elephant in the room, and in spite of their superb battlefield leadership, their brilliant victories, their technical prowess, their mighty Tigers and Panthers, they lost because of it.

It wasn’t, as the German generals argued postwar, the Soviet hordes that swamped them. It wasn’t the industrial capabilities of the United States. It wasn’t the control exerted by a dictator increasingly removed from the real world. It wasn’t the amount of effort spent transporting millions of people to their deaths in the camps, or the amount of concrete poured into the Atlantic Wall from the Arctic to the Mediterranean. All these points helped swing the war in the Allies’ favour but they weren’t the main reason why the German Wehrmacht lost. The elephant in the room was logistics.

It’s easy to talk about the positives of German logistics—the fact that they could advance so far into the Soviet Union over such difficult terrain; the way that German industry kept going in spite of Allied strategic bombing; the resilience and resourcefulness of the way they kept the railways running, allowing the movement of huge numbers of men and armoured vehicles. But in the end, at the critical moments in the war, their logistics failed them: at the gates of Moscow, their soldiers died because they lacked the winter clothing waiting in depots to be shipped east; in North Africa, Allied air and sea assets nullified critical supplies to Rommel’s Afrika Korps when it was within sight of the Suez Canal; at Stalingrad, 6. Armee couldn’t be resupplied by air because there were too few transport aircraft; in Normandy, Allied air power cut rail traffic towards the invasion front and harried the forces moving by road; and in the Ardennes, lack of fuel forced more Tigers and King Tigers to be destroyed by their own crews for lack of it than enemy action.  Fully illustrated, this book examines the logistics of the Nazis horse-drawn army, its successes and ultimate failure.