Klaus N schrieb am 02.10.2023 19:30:
Feldor schrieb am 02.10.2023 17:08:
[...] wird die Ukraine irgendwann das Problem haben, dass ihr die Soldaten ausgehen, ähnlich wie Deutschland am Ende des 1. Weltkriegs.
Ich will hier wirklich nicht die Dolchstoßlegende 2.0 proklamieren, aber dass fehlende Soldaten die Ursache für die Niederlage Deutschlands waren, ist mir neu. Hast Du Quellen?
Hier z.B. eine Analyse vom britischen King's College:
"Having experienced a population explosion between 1871 and 1914, the German Empire should have had more than adequate trained manpower available for the outbreak of the war. Indeed, Germany prided itself on its effective exploitation conscription in the Wars of Unification. However, after unification, the role of the army in German politics and society shifted subtlety. While defending the new state from external enemies was of course a prime mission of the newly unified German army, preserving the existing social and political status quo grew more important as a mission. Thus, the army and the government worked to keep the army as instrument that could be relied upon to suppress internal political unrest. Recruits were drawn disproportionately from rural, conservative areas, and conscription was not applied equally. As a result, in 1914 German mobilized some 3.5 million men out of the 10.5 million or so who were eligible for service. Of these 10.5 million only about half had received any military training at all. Of course, German war planners had assumed the war would be over before the need to draw on wider manpower reserves, but Germany struggled from the beginning to meet the manpower demands of the frontline.
It was not just the frontline that placed demands upon the young men of Germany. Above all else, the First World War proved to be a war of material. Although German industry was very strong in 1914, it relied upon the same pool of men to run the factories as the army did to man the trenches. This tension came to a head with the introduction of the so-called Hindenburg Programme in late 1916 and early 1917. This industrial strategy, a response to the far-better equipped and supplied French and British armies, aimed for machines to replace men in the trenches. The massive industrial expansion could not be carried out without withdrawing and exempting large numbers of men from the fighting front.
The Hindenburg Programme exacerbated and deepened a competition for manpower that German strategist were unable to resolve, and ultimately contributed directly to the collapse of the German army on the Western Front in 1918. By 1918, there were some 2 million military-aged men, who often had already been trained, working in the factories producing armaments and munitions the German army did not need, while the divisions in the front line defending against Allied attacks were hollowed out by casualties."
(Quelle: https://defenceindepth.co/2018/11/11/reflections-on-the-first-world-war-the-german-perspective/ )