Article excerpt. Collaborative Fund.

World War I & German Military

To understand the power of starting clean, you have to know the nuance of why the Nazi military became as strong as it did. It starts at the end of World War I, when the defeated German army was stripped clean.

Part of the Armistice that ended the war forced the dismantling of Germany’s military. This included virtually every weapon it owned. In the years after World War I the Allies undertook one of the largest industrial demolition campaigns in history. Six million rifles, 38 million projectiles, half a billion rounds of ammunition, 17 million grenades, 16,000 airplanes, 450 ships, and millions of tons of other war equipment was destroyed or stripped from Germany’s possession.

But 20 years later, Germany had one of the largest and most sophisticated militaries in the world.

It had the fastest tanks. The strongest air force. The most powerful artillery. The most sophisticated communication equipment, and the first missiles – all of which went on to inflict more suffering than the world had ever known.

A catastrophic irony of Germany’s military resurgence is that it partly took place not in spite of, but because of, its earlier disarmament.

After the [first] World War practically everything was taken away from Germany in the way of materiel. So when Germany rearmed, it was necessary to produce a complete set of materiel for the troops. As a result, Germany has an army equipped with the most modern weapons that could be turned out. That is a situation that has never occurred before in the history of the world.As war in Europe began in 1939, George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff, made a critical point to President Roosevelt about the Nazi’s technological capabilities

Supplying a military is one of the most expensive and logistically complicated things a country does. So it tries to get as much use out of its equipment as it can. But technological improvement doesn’t wait. It happens on its own terms, often very quickly. So militaries can be caught supplied with woefully outdated equipment. Deciding when upgrading is worth the cost is a terribly hard decision.

Germany in the 1930s didn’t have to make that decision. If it wanted a military – and it did – it had to build everything from from scratch. Germany’s upside was that every piece of equipment it had in 1939 was based off the latest technology. Not a single possession – from uniforms to guns to submarines – was outdated or obsolete.

That wasn’t the case for the Allies at the start of the war. When the war began in 1939, U.S. Army troops carried 1903 Springfield rifles. France had sluggish World War I-era tanks. Britain, at one point, pulled 19th century cannons out of museums to prepare for a German invasion.

The Allies eventually caught up, of course. But there was a hard lesson: There’s a set of advantages that come from being endowed with resources. There’s another set of advantages that come from starting from scratch. The latter can be sneakingly powerful. But we don’t, because we’re burdened by past decisions and, like the military with an aging fleet, are unsure if updating our equipment is worth the high cost.