Who was more effective against Germany, Western Front or Eastern Front?

Just read an interesting article called "Mobilization of Troops in Germany." The article pretty much states that the USSR, today, are very underestimated in their occupance on the Eastern Front. According to the article, at some parts of the war, over 85% of Axis troops were occupied on the Eastern Front, with only 15% of troops fighting against the Americans and British.

However, it is plainly obvious that the British and Americans dominated the sea and air much more than the Red Army. I'm having a tough choice on stating my opinion on the matter. I do believe that the Red Army played a huge part in the war, but are overshadowed by the media today and all of the WWII movies about American/British troops. I do however, believe that the British were superior in the air (Battle of Britain) and the American's in the water.

What are your takes?

 

No question, the Soviets did the brunt of the fighting. They destroyed far more Axis troops and ground material than the Western Allies.

In the Air, the Soviets probably matched or were a little less responsible for the final destruction of the Luftwaffe compared to the Western Allies.

 

During WW2 Germany was able to muster roughly 13 million men.

Germany suffered 10 million casualties on the Ost front. That is 80% of her total casualties of which 3.3 million were KIA.

Until Normandy, Germany had 80% of her forces fighting in Russia.... After D-Day the tide had turned to about 60% in Russia and the rest in the West.

 

I've seen that disputed a number of times. Indeed the data up to 44 given at: Statistics and Numbers seam to indicate a somewhat smaller percentage. Still the majority though. What is your source for this?

 

ew ew I can answer this. David Glantz

Here is a little something by him.

http://www.strom.clemson.edu/events/notices/glantz.pdf

 

I think in material terms by Normandy 1944-1945, the Soviet effort was less dominant compared to earlier years. The Germans deployed most of their men to the east, but it was more even in terms of heavy equipment- aircraft, tanks etc. deployed against the Allies vs. the Soviets.

 

I wonder where u got that from...

Ok, I re-read your post and now understand it. Yes, these numbers began to dwindle in the East in 44' as troops were now needed for the second front, but Red Army still carried the burden.

 

Actually Tikilal provided the source for me

http://www.strom.clemson.edu/publications/sg-war41-45.pdf

Correction, it is on page 14. Glantz describes the German casualty figures through out the years....

He states.... That out of 13,488,000 German permanent loses in the East amounted to 10.7 or 80%.

THE LOSSES OF OTHER AXIS COUNTRIES
Dead and Missing POWs Total

Hungary 350,000--- 513,700--- 863,700
Italy 45,000--- 48,900--- 93,900
Rumania 480,000--- 210,800--- 681,800
Finland 84,000--- 2,400--- 86,400
Total 959,000--- 766,800--- 1,725,000

This grim toll brought total Axis losses in the Soviet-German War to the gruesome figure
of 12,483,000 soldiers killed, missing, captured, or permanently disabled.

 

One of Glantz's figures is mindboggling- how the Soviets lost over 100,000 tanks destroyed in combat in the East. Something like 120,000 tanks were deployed in action.

Compare that to the 3 month Normandy campaign (the last time the Germans committed a large tank force against the West), where tanks combined, Western Allies and German, were only over 10,000. In the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans deployed 1,000 tanks against a few thousand US armor units.

The soviet figures really shows the immensity and the intensity of the Eastern front.

 

A large chunk of the these tanks destroyed (about 24 thousand or so?) were hardly tanks..... BT-7's and such and were lost in the first year of the war. Also LL tanks are included in this count, perhaps an additional 1 thousand or so?

But yes the enormity and intensity of the war in the East is astonishing and sad.

 

I think the title of the thread is misleading... Are we talking about 'effectiveness' or 'scale'?

The scale undeniably favours the Eastern Front.

As for effectiveness... I'd lean for the Eastern Front too, as the operational skills and tactics of the Red Army constantly improved during the war, until reaching the excellence of 'Bagration'. There is nothing comparable in the Western or Mediterranean theatres. In fact, the Western Allies lacked a Kesselschlacht (annihilation battle) doctrine, that favoured the destruction of enemy formations rather than the capture of territory or key positions. That explains to an extent why the Germans escaped encirclement so many times in the West (El Alamein, Messina, Anzio-Cassino, Falaise), whilst the Soviets learned from the Germans and improved with time: destroying whole divisions in 1941, whole armies in 1943 and whole army groups in 1944.

As for the Luftwaffe... Let's remember that the bomber and transport wings of the Luftflötten met their fate in the Eastern Front, suffering apawling losses in experienced air and ground crews, technology and infraestructure. The attrition on the air arm, despite the miraculous efforts to re-build it, was fatal.

 

Great post.

Yes I meant the "effectiveness". Obviously the scale on the Eastern front was massive, especially because the Americans didn't join the war until later on, and Hitler deployed most of his army there.

Though the scale was much larger in the Eastern Front, it is safe to say that the Western Front was very effective in the outcome of the war, especially following D-Day. However, I've heard/read from many sources that the war could've been won (or have been a stalemate) even if the Americans hadn't joined the war. This is because the Red Army was already making positive advances in the East, and the British had been victorious in the Battle of Britain.

 

Well if by effective you mean casualties inflicted divided by casualties sustained I think it comes out with the west being the more effective. Other measures may lead to different answers. For instance if it's casualties inflicted divided by dollars (or what ever your currency of choice is) spent then the Eastern front is probably more effective.

When I've seen the 80% disputed it's usually been described as that percent of total fatalities or some other measure than permanent losses. Thanks for the link.

 

I don't think the Battle of Britain was that decisive in bringing down the Luftwaffe.

 

The Russians without a doubt shouldered the burden during WWII, though part of that blame rests on Stalin and his little non-agression pact with Germany which meant Germany could kick the allies off Europe and than turn on him. Of course this is 20/20 hindsight, but certainly the Russians shoulder the burden because the west couldnt come back until '44, due in part because the German attack west was supplied in part by Russian oil and the removed threat of their attack. I think once the west came back in '44 it certainly contributed significantly from then on to the struggle. The German losses in the west were certainly significant from June 6th onward, from what I have read from 600k to 800k losses in a mere six months since landing, not numbers to be discounted.

I think the important thing is all allied countries did their up most to defeat Nazi Germany and her allies. Russia had to suffer the most because of geography and circumstance. Even with the opening of the western front in 44 the Russians would have to carry the burden because the simple size of the German eastern front required more troops and tanks to man than that of the western front which could be, and had to be, held with less to maintain a coherent frontline.

I dont think the scale of the conflict on the eastern front should take away at all from the sacrifice made by men of other nationalities that found in other theatres . I think all their sacrifices, be it Russian or British or America or Canadian or ANZAC or Indian or any other combatant, are of equal value and should be appreciated, not devalued because they took part in less theatres or suffered inferior kill deaths or any of that garbage.

 

Well... that is debatable.

This was true until the 1945 offensives. The Saar-Palatinate and the Ruhr Battles engulfed 450,000 German troops in POWs alone. That would be a major Kesselschlacht at any front.

As for completing encirclements, this is a more complicated isse. Eisenhower had been consistent always in trying to impress upon his generals that the objective of the war was not to sieze some geological feature but "the total anihilation of German armed forces." Sealing off an encirclement however was exactly that something Eisenhower's generals lacked the skill or means to acomplish. Ike for example had great expectations for the Allied counteroffensive in the Bulge, but the attack failed to destroy the bulk of the German forces in the salient because while Montgonmery was committing his troops with his proverbial caution, Patton impetuously attacked everywhere at once with his forces so dissipated over a broadfront that he failed to ahieve a breakthrough. Then Bradley and Monty all agreed to do a frontal assault at the salient's nose instead of cutting it at its shoulders. The incompleteness of that victory, as well as the implication that the battle might not have happened at all if the Germans were more comprehensively destroyed in Falaise or even at the Seine, led to a greater focus on the sealing of an encirclement instead of just hitting the trapped enemy with airplanes and artillery until he escapes.

Part of the reason for those failures as I see it was not a just a problem of generalship but also certain defficiencies of the Allied armies. German armored counterattacks which almost never failed to rob the Allied spearheads of momentum when the rest of the troops made their escape. A crack German Panzer Division, even in a very enervated condition, could fight ferociously and successfully in a delaying action; the 11 Pz Div in Italy comes into mind, as well as the 12 SS Pz Div, 2 Pz Div and Pz Lehr in Normandy, to name a few. Even low grade German troops were more than enough to ward off the Allies, because they were sitting on the heaviest fortification in Europe, the West Wall. The Allies would not be able to seal off German troops until their troops acquired the requisite skill or attrited all of Germany's armor. Neither one of these could be expected to happen until after 1945.

As is noted elsewhere, the Allies deployed an inferior number of divisions compared to the Germans in the West; even taking into account the lower field strength of German divisions, this does not paint an all together misguiding picture of rough German numeric parity. In contrast, the Red Army overwhelmingly outnumbered the Germans, by 2:1 at the end of 1942, 3:1 at the end of 1944, and finally 4:1 at May 1945. The Allies were only able to achieve spectacular, Eastern Front type victories when they have had a measure of Eastern Front numbers.

I might be mistaken, but I recall Glantz to have stated that between 1942 and early 1943, the Luftwaffe fleet had 40% of its fleet total written off over North Africa and Sicily and that the losses in the transport arm was particularly severe. From memory, by mid 1943 something about 90% of the Luftwaffe was deployed at the West to protect the Reich against the Strategic Bomber Offensive.

I think the Allied contribution to the war would be better understood if we put them into the context of each year's fighting. The Russians certainly ground down far more German troops in a war of five years at the Eastern Front (75% total), but he Allies did not make a strategic ground offensive on Nazi occupied Europe until Jan 1944 which gave them no more than a year and half in engaging the Germans in serious combat.

After Overlord the Allies played a major part in defeating the Wehrmacht. Just by forcing the Germans to commit 40% of their armor and one third of their manpower to the West. This had an disporportionate effect at the Eastern Front because the frontage was considerably longer than that in the West and this decisively tilted the balance in favor of the Russians. At the height of the War at the West the Germans deployed 100 divisions in the West and 113 in the East; a whooping 2/3 of the Wehrmacht's armor was fighting the Allies. Undeniably, the Russians did the bulk of the fighting, but US-Common Wealth contributions from 1944-1945 was by no means small.

 

Good post Triple C

 

As for the Luftwaffe thing, I'll let the experts speak... My (only) source was John Pilmott's Luftwaffe and I was under the impression that the over-stretching of the Luftwaffe's resources from 1941 on was what definately broke its back.

1941 was a good year in the east, but the Soviet winter offensive deprived the Luftflötten from much necessary rest, refitting, redeployment and re-equippment. 1942 and the divergent offensives towards the Caucasus and Stalingrad over-extended the front even more and, for the first time in the war, we see the Luftwaffe's effectiveness diminishing. Then the Soviet counteroffensive and the huge losses in matériel and experienced ground crews fatally wounded the mighty Luftwaffe. Not only the Red Air Force was rapidly growing in numbers, quality and expertise, but the Luftwaffe struggled harder and harder to provide enough air-to-ground support. We know that after Kursk, its dominance on the air ended. Of course the increasing over over-stretching of its forces to other theatres (Norway, Germany and the Mediterranean) made it even worse.

The thing is that, after Kursk, despite the Luftwaffe's concentration in the Eastern Front was considerably lower (only 1/3 in January 1944) and even after the miraculous re-building of the eastern Luftflötten by mid-1944, the Ostfront just kept swallowing men and resources. The meat grinder just kept devouring everything the Germans poured in, on the ground as in the air, including thousands of planes and crews every year...

Now, I looked for figures but I couldn't find them... so, again, let the air-buffs speak!

Yes, indeed. The Normandy campaign succeeded in causing some 500.000 casualties on the Germans and removing them from an entire theatre of operations. However, the failed at cutting off their remnants and preventing them from scaping, thus allowing them to re-group and re-fit.

Well, it may not have broke its backbone, but it certainly crippled it.

And I do agree with most of what you said, Triple C. Good post.

 

If we're talking about the Western front, post-American/brit/Canadian invasion; You have to remember it was only a 9 month war after that. If Germany were fighting a one-side front, they'd obviously put up one hell of a fight, as they did while dealing with sub 85% of troops on one, and 15% on the other. The Eastern front was a 6 year war. So, in my opinion, it's hard to compare something that is so unevenly matched.