[OKSooner]

No big deal, but six us army divisions held an entire German army off for three days while the 101st was moving into Bastogne.

At least one, the 28th division, Pennsylvania NG, was written off as destroyed in action.

The 101st wasn’t alone.

[mountainlion]

Arguing over which weapon is best would be endless. I am not a communist supporter so that is my prejudice. How many divisions did the Americans hold off the germans in the battle of the Bulge? How many American POWs were disappeared by the Russians? I did some ancestry of a girl that her father was one in a group of three that escaped the the russians and made it home. 3,500 in that group disappeared. Didn't Patton fight the Germans in North Africa? Didn't the 10th Mountain Division fight the germans in Italy? The russians did not hold off the whole german army as they were not in Africa and Italy and eastern Europe.

[SunkenCiv]

Wow, great subthread! This comes up once in a while.

KIA figures vary; the total German military war dead ranges all over, KIA and MIA through 1945, all theaters, adds up to over five million. Civilians killed in the war probably exceeded a million, and postwar civilian deaths due to murder, suicide, starvation, other privation probably exceeded a million.

Allies of Germany drawn from most of the countries of Europe are also sometimes counted, as they served in the Waffen SS, and they experienced high casualty rates and perhaps 25 percent KIA. It's difficult to figure that (and it's been studied a lot) mainly due to desertions being counted as MIA, and the volunteers/conscripts who'd deserted weren't likely to step up after the war and say, "yeah, I was in the Waffen SS".

Eastern front KIA and MIA figures work out to about 2.5 million -- but the campaign started in 1940 and went on until late November 1944, over four years. It should be obvious that the length of time the fighting went on had pretty much everything to do with the greater casualty figures.

The African front resulted in about 100K KIA/MIA (mostly the latter, but the WWII MIA figures for all theaters barely budged after the war, they were largely KIA but remains were never found, or generally even looked for) and the Germans only committed two Panzer divisions to the Afrika Korps (one of Hitler's remarkably stupid blunders).

Russian tactics were extremely tolerant of manpower losses (ahem), including friendly-fire, and relied on massive formations and massive firepower -- an idea ironically learned from the Germans in both WW. There weren't any great Red Army commanders, merely successful ones. Officers right on up to the top generals of the were nearly universally hated by the rank and file, right to the surviving veterans to the current day.