Stuart wrote:
I have a feeling that design was actually prepared by a British secret agent and slipped in on them. Three shafts (bad, inefficient arrangement to start with) and two diesels geared to each shaft (problem-soaked arrangement right there). Z51 would have been a nightmare.
I looked it up, the ship in fact had one 12,600hp diesel directly on each wing shaft, and four of the things geared onto the centerline shaft. To make it more absurd, the engine was a brand new 24 cylinder design work on which only began in 1943 along with the destroyer. Four were built but all work was abandon in Feb 1945 for lack of fuel to continue tests. Nazi Germany was that insane. Personally I would have ordered the engine blocks turned into anti tank barriers, that much steel would block a street nicely. The weight given for a complete engine 'without oil cooler' is given as 67 metric tons.
I agree fully with the conclusion that lower ranking officers bailed the Germans out time and again. That was backed up by an army system that emphasized use of heavy infantry weapons on a mass scale, one which vastly expanded in WW2. All those weapons gave officers low down a lot of firepower to apply on the battlefield, and Germans were good at employing weapons against the widest possible array of targets, but it didn't do wonders for mobility or mutual support. This approach worked well as long as they had chemical weapons or air power to suppress enemy field artillery. But if they faced field artillery that could engage at will, as became the case against American, Russian and British Armies, well, its kind of obvious that anti tank guns cannot defend themselves against howitzers. German field artillery was weak in WW2, and anything really heavy was quite rare even considering the excellent collection of railroad pieces.
A similar case existed in WW1, in which the Germans for example built very elaborate minenwerfer complete with rotating baseplates, to the point that they had almost no mobility outside of trench fighting, while the allies simply built steel tube stokes mortars. For a while the German system worked well, but then a new threat of tanks appeared, and suddenly such complicated mortars were a liability because they could not be easily withdrawn. Nor did such lavish production leave anything left to make anti tank guns with. Attempts to use the minenwerfer against tanks don't seem to have worked out on average.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
