Recently, I read
Hoger Eckhertz' excellent book, D Day Through German Eyes. The book consists of interviews with German
soldiers who were stationed on the Atlantic Wall when the Allies invaded Normandy
on June 6, 1944. Since the interviews
were done just a few years after the end of the war, the memories of the
soldiers were still fresh.
Already fairly
familiar with the facts of the invasion, I did not expect to gather many new
details about the invasion, but I was frequently surprised about the attitudes
and beliefs of the German soldiers stationed along the French coast. To a man, these soldiers believed they were
defending a “United Europe”—an invention of NAZI propaganda—against outside aggression. While most of the men had changed their
opinions since the end of the war, all had previously felt justified in their
roles of “defending” France, even as many admitted that the locals were less
than jubilant at their presence.
Repeatedly, the Germans
echoed a common idea: Their astonishment
at the complete mechanization of the Allied invasion. Or to put it more simply, “Where were all the
horses?” The Allies had come ashore
without a single horse or mule.
Not
surprised? Well, the Germans were. Or as one soldat put it:
Yes,
we found it astonishing. This huge army had brought with it not one single
horse or pack-mule! All their transport was mechanized. It may sound bizarre
today, but this impressed us greatly, showing that the Allies had no need of
horses anymore, as they had such huge oil resources and production capacity.
Because, of course, the German armies used horses for transport on quite a
large scale right up until the end of the war, due to limited fuel and
constraints on mechanized vehicle production. Every German unit had its stables
and veterinarian officer, and here were these English without that need at all.
For us, this symbolized the Allied capabilities.
Eckhertz,
Holger. D DAY Through German Eyes - The Hidden Story of June 6th 1944 . DTZ
History Publications.
The United States
had decided to fully mechanize the military as early as 1940. With abundant oil production and the
factories in Detroit already turning out vehicles in record numbers, we had the
luxury of completely modernizing our military—a process we had started shortly
before World War I. Though we were far
from finished with the process when the war started, draft animals would be
used only in the Pacific theater in locations too rugged or too remote for vehicles.
To give you an
idea of the difference between Allied and Axis mobility, where the Japanese
used one truck for roughly every fifty men in the Army, the United States had
one for every dozen.
Great Britain had
largely mechanized when the war started, but for an entirely different
reason. After the Irish partition in
1920, England no longer had access to enough horses to support its army, so it
had little choice but to mechanize.
Germany never
really had a chance to mechanize before the war. One of the provisions of the Versailles
Treaty was a limit on both the number and types of units. With a severe petroleum shortage, the
automotive industry had a shaky foundation.
What industry was available, was producing advanced weaponry: the factories that could have produced trucks
were building tanks, instead.
At the start of
the war, Germany had a superb internal transportation network, based on
excellent railroads, and canals and rivers that were all interconnected. By 1943, all of these transportation systems
were suffering from Allied bombing. By
late 1944, Albert Speer (whose title had been changed to Reich Minister of
Armaments and War Production), later wrote that the system was incapable of
delivering raw materials fast enough for production to the meet the needs of
the military.
When Germany
invaded Russia in 1941, the world was astounded by the 3500 advanced tanks the
Germans had. Less noticed was that the
invasion used 650,000 draft horses. Only
20% of the units were mechanized: almost
all artillery was still pulled by draft horses.
By the end of the war, the number of mechanized units would drop to a
mere 10%.
What few
mechanized units that did exist were an amazing hodgepodge collection of
assorted vehicles. Not only had the
German army practically stripped occupied Europe of almost anything with
wheels—creating even more difficulties for the domestic economy—but the army
that invaded Russia included more than 2000 different kinds of vehicles. Maintaining supplies for all these vehicles
was an impossibility, though the German army certainly tried. Despite maintaining an inventory of over a
million different parts for the assorted vehicles, you could follow the path
from Germany into Russia by following the trail of abandoned and inoperative
vehicles.
Note. By comparison, the United States between
1939-1945 bought 2.4 million trucks, and fully a third of them were the 6x6
deuce-and-a-half that stayed with the military right through the first Gulf
War. There is probably not a man over
the age of 30 in this country that hasn’t ridden in, worked on, or driven one
of those trucks. Among the “supplies” we
shipped to Russia during the war were more than 150,000 additional of these
trucks. The Russians called them
“Studers”, short for the Studebaker factory where they were built. As late as the early 1980’s, I saw Chinese
versions of those trucks on the roads in China.
One German
division went into Germany with 96 types of personnel carriers, 111 different
types of trucks, 37 different motorcycles.
Between the muddy quagmire roads of the fall and the frozen roads of the
Russian winter, almost all of the vehicles were inoperative within a year. Increasingly, the German Army had to resort
to the use of draft animals, who were frequently overworked and died
quickly. As the horses died, their
replacements were usually non-draft horses confiscated from occupied lands,
rarely suited for the heavy work required of a draft horse.
The only benefit
of using horses instead of vehicles that a starving German Army could eat the
dead horses. One German soldier wrote
after the war that the clanging sound of an axe bouncing off the frozen corpse
of a horse continued to haunt his nightmares.
Germany
requisitioned almost all cars and trucks from Belgium and France early in the
war. From Yugoslavia, not only was
virtually every vehicle removed, but in 1942, the Germans confiscated all the
bicycles for use by the German infantry.
Even at the onset
of the war, the majority of German provisions were moved by horse drawn wagons,
which created even more logistical problems.
Draft horses eat 12 pounds of food a day, and after 10 days of heavy
work, need weeks of recuperation. At
most, they can pull a wagon 20 miles a day with the load often determined by
the road conditions, but at most it was roughly 1000 pounds of supplies per
horse. The use of horses required far
more men than mechanized vehicles.
Besides veterinarians, stable men, and grooms, it takes six men an hour
to harness the six horses necessary to pull an artillery wagon, and even more
time to remove the harnesses and care for the exhausted animals at the end of
the day.
The Germans used
rails to move as much of their supplies as possible, but it was horses that
provided transportation past the railhead.
Since the further you travel, the more provisions are required by the
horses, there is an absolute limit to how far and how fast the German army
could advance, based on the available transport. Though the German Army never reached its
objectives in the war, as it was, over half the tonnage its supply lines
carried was fodder for the average 1.1 million horses being used to replace
trucks.
Before the war
started in 1939, part of Germany’s advance war planning was the creation of a
vast fleet of transport trucks. Just as
Hitler had promised the German Navy more time to develop its fleets, he had
promised the Army more time to develop its logistical infrastructure. Unfortunately for Hitler, Germany was going
to partner with Ford and General Motors to create the fleets of trucks
necessary. Naturally, when the war
started prematurely, these plans were dropped.
Historians have
used an ocean of ink explaining why Hitler lost the war. To that, you can add a dependence on horses
long after the time of the automobile and truck. Or as Admiral King wrote to the Secretary of
War in 1946, “The war has been variously termed a war of production and a war
of machines. Whatever else it is, so far
as the United States is concerned, it was a 20th Century war logistics.”
Or to put it more
simply, Hitler attempted to win a 20th Century War with 19th Century logistics.
