Alexian Cale wrote:I'm sorry, I didn't know where a question like this would go. I find WWII fascinating, but I've been curious as to the power of Nazi Germany. I can't find a single, supercredible source that explictly states how Germany compared to other countries at the time of World War II.
Try the US Strategic Bombing Survey (Usually quoted as USSBS). It had a lot of detail about the Nazi and Japanese war machines and what the US did about them.
I've always assumed Germany was, at least, as strong as any individual nation on the planet, since it seems to me they practically fought against the Allies in Europe pretty much on their own.
in general, assumptions are dangerous things; they get people killed. Reading the rest of the thread, I'd guess that belief has been pretty throughly exploded by now. I'd add a couple more things.
Equipment cycles. An army starts off with obsolete gear, it decides to re-equip. It designs and/or selects its new gear at a specific time; therefore the technology of that gear is determined by the year in which the decision was made. That equipment is mass-produced and equips the armed forces - trapping them in technology of a specific year. A t a given point, the armed forces have their new equipment that represents that technology. Their rivals have technology form an earlier era and are outclassed. So they start to re-equip. By now, time has passed, technology has improved and a new generation of equipment is available so when they re-equip, they do so to a slightly later, slightly higher standard. That makes the equipment of the first country obsolescent so they start the cycle again.
In other words, the cycle goes Obsolescence - Superiority - inferiority - obsolescence.
Germany started its equipment cycle earlier than the allies therefore gained the superiority part first and then proceeded down the rear end of the cycle. We can see all sorts of examples of that, aircraft engine power, guns, ships, you name it. The German equipment cycle meant that their equipment peaked in 1940-41, the allied equipment cycle means they peaked in 1944-45.
Strategic Initiative In grand strategy, the attacker always has the initiative because he can pick the time and the place of an attack. Germany never took the whole of Europe on simultaneously, their strategic aim was to pick countries off one by one, defeating each with a short war. That worked until they ran into two countries that refused to fold, Russia and the UK. Germany was promptly doomed. Germany didn't have strategists, they had gamblers who went to a roulette wheel, staked everything on a black and let it ride. They may have won a few times but the odds favor the house and they were going to lose it all sometime.
My social study books and stuff have said that the German military was the best on the planet, outstripping Britain and France and Russia and the US, individually.
You need new social studies books.
It seems to me that they couldn't have fought as long and as well as they have unless they were pretty damn powerful (rivaling its enemies).
False assumption. Once they started to collapse they folded pretty fast, 18 months or thereabouts. The Russian Army killed the Germany Army, the British and Americans destroyed everything else.
Essentially: Was Nazi Germany -- militaristically speaking -- the strongest nation during WWII?
Not even close. The USA was the strongest and most powerful nation in the world in the 1940s (and still is), followed by Russia, Britain and Japan. In that order.
Just a last thought for you. Two thirds of all the aircraft engines built in the world during the 1940s came from American factories.
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It was not the uberwaffe idiots paint it to be, but despite it's flaws, it was a good raider-role ship.