heroically defending the rights of people who wrongly vomit out wehraboo nonsense
Oh hey I love being indirectly accused of being a Wehraboo. After all the German military was a group of bumbling idiots who stumbled into defeating France.
I'm not saying that the Wehrmacht was somehow without flaws at the start of WWII. The Pz I, while still useful, definitely wasn't up to actual armor tasks anymore, and the obsession with stupidly heavy siege weapons had already started. But the French armor doctrine was not great (partially because a dedicated armor branch would have meant a professional core to the military), and their vehicle park was a mess (Chieftain,
Development of French Armor Doctrine). They also as a whole expected to fighter another trench was (which influenced parts their tank design). The Wehrmacht expected the next war to be another maneuver war once they got over the "we're just going to copy what the others did" phase of post-war analysis (and pretty successfully rebranded this maneuver warfare as "Blitzkrieg") (Also Chieftain,
Development of the Panzer Arm).
The BEF was equipped well, but it just wasn't as large as the big continental armies. Italy was Italy, and Polands army also was quite obviously not a first rate military at that point (39 divisions to 66 German divisions, and considerably less tanks, tankettes and aircraft). The Red Army had a doctrine that was suited to the war WWII ended up being (the Russian front after all never had become a trench war). But the last of Stalins purges had only ended a month before Barbarossa. If Barbarossa hadn't happened, the Red Army would have become the better of the two armies quite fast because they had more industry to build their solid next-generation tanks with. Barbarossa significantly delayed the vehicle replacement and meant that the previous generation of tanks, which were developed to a somewhat less coherent doctrine, had to hold out for a while longer. The BT series was not good on the defensive, the KVs were heavy breaching tanks, and there was some number of multi-turret monstrosities in there too. The T-34-76, despite having a cramped two-man turret, was already a good tank, there just weren't enough of them ready yet.
So, instead of making snide comments about how I'm a Wehraboo (because believe me, if we were to talk about the late war Wehrmacht, I would take a very different stance) or a general Nazi apologist, can someone make an actual argument for a European Army, 39-41, being an actually superior army that only lost because Germany got insanely lucky (or perhaps that they didn't fight in that timeframe, but they did fight against all the big armies of Europe in that timeframe).
But what's the problem with that? They're Just Asking Questions about the Nazis, after all.
Ah yes, because any time someone isn't circlejerking about how much Germany sucks is a troll and Holocaust denier.
There is no justification for defending Nazi Germany in any part or whole, period.
If I was talking about something even loosely approaching a moral issue, I would agree with you. But sadly, having something approaching morals is not a requirement for waging war. As it is, this is basically you swinging the "Nazis are evil" club to shut down an argument that is completely orthogonal to the Nazis being evil. Stating that noone can say that evil regimes actually performed well at something is an approach that is basically directly counter to actually studying history.
Also me: The only good Nazi is a dead one and fuck them all with a cactus may their memory be shat upon repeatedly and trampled until there is nothing left. They were and are monsters and should be reviled.
What a brave and controversial stance to take.
