GERMAN ARMY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 November 1941, Page 7

GERMAN ARMY

COMPARISON WITH 1914-18 MORALE MUCH INFERIOR. LOWER AVERAGE CAPACITY OF OFFICERS. It is a profound mistake to regard the German army of today, without reservations, as the equal successor of that of 1914-1918 and to attribute to it the qualities which the army of Imperial Germany demonstrated by its proved efficiency, writes a former German staff officer. In fact only the intellectual standard of the General Staff of the German army—this does not apply to the General Staff of the Luftwaffe in the same degree—is reproduced unlowered on the army of today. More than that, it may be assumed that the average quality of the rank and file in the purely technical sphere corresponds similarly with that of the last World War. On the other hand the morale of the troops is without question far inferior to that of the army of 25 years ago, and for the great mass of the officers’ corps in every department we must assume a far lower average capacity. The heads of the German Reichswehr estimated at the beginning of the rearmament campaign that at least a 10 years' term was necessary to produce in the officers of the new army, representing something like a tenfold expansion, the moral and technical qualities of the Imperial Officers’ Corps. This was unattainable without a long and systematic training-course. The officers’ corps in the Luftwaffe and the Panzer detachments, which had been practically improvised overnight and had to base their training not on practical experience on a large scale but almost wholly on paper plans, required a still longer period of thorough-going training to bring them to efficiency. Hitler refused to allow his army this period. This army must therefore necessarily be distinguished from the Imperial Army to its detriment by lower moral standards and a lower standard of purely technical efficiency., as the best of the infantry officers are the first to recognise-. In the War Office in Berlin there were no illusions about the weaknesses forced on it by Hitler's policy, and recourse was had to various compensations. Chief among these was the substitution of quantity for quality and the development of new methods of warfare which might prove decisive through a systematic insistence on mass-opera-tions.