Stardate 20021218.1836

(Captain's log): Nelson writes:

I remember having read somewhere (but cannot remember where) that in WW2 the only soldiers fighting on their own side (against the Russians) that the Germans considered better than themselves were the Finns, and that among their enemies the soldiers they considered the best were, first, the New Zealanders and then the Australians. It seems the skills of the Finn fighter pilots were also highly valued. Is this information right?

It sounds plausible. In addition to the Germans fighting on the Eastern Front, there were the Finns (as you note) and Italian divisions, and a lot of Rumanians, and some other units made up of people like turncoat Ukrainians and a fair number of men from nations Germany had occupied where they proceeded to forcibly conscript the local men. You even find that Dutch and French and Norwegians died fighting for Germany on the Eastern Front, though it would be a stretch to say that most of them were doing so voluntarily. Few of them had much stomach for the war, and in general they didn't tend to fight very well.

It turns out that in the Stalingrad campaign, that major sections of the front north and south of Stalingrad were held by the Third and Fourth Rumanian Armies respectively, and that's where the two major Soviet attacks were made which broke through and formed the pincers which surrounded the German Sixth Army, leading to its destruction. The fact that those major attacks struck Rumanian units instead of German ones was no accident; they were considered weaker and easier to defeat (which certainly turned out to be true).

The Finns fighting against the Russians actually cared about the battle. They didn't give a damn about Germany, but they fucking well hated the Russians. They had, after all, fought their own war against the Russians in 1940 which they eventually lost but only after really badly bloodying the Russians. So when the Germans gave them the chance for a rematch, it meant that the Finnish soldiers actually cared about what they were fighting for, which makes a huge difference. And they were fighting on their own border or east of there; the Finns fought at the northernmost part of the front.

With respect to ANZAC, there's no question that they were really good fighters and that the Germans respected them enormously. ANZAC was good in WWI (although they were just as badly wasted as so many others were elsewhere by stupid tactics at Gallipoli) and ANZAC was formidable in North Africa before Pearl Harbor.

But after Pearl Harbor, the governments of Australia and New Zealand quite naturally asked for their armies back so they could defend themselves against the Japanese. Churchill didn't really want to let them go but ultimately didn't have any choice. So the Germans never really saw much more of them after 1941. (There were still a few in the theater thereafter, but no significant numbers.) The Australians never caught any breaks; if there was anywhere more miserable to fight a war than the deserts of North Africa, it was the jungles of New Guinea, and that's where those troops went next. Some of them were there for years.

So who, among their later opponents, did the Germans fear the most?

As individual soldiers, the British and Canadians and Americans really were pretty much equal. The Polish may have been more dangerous because they hated the Germans more deeply, but there weren't very many of them. As individual soldiers, Russians were not considered as dangerous.

The fact was that in the west, the Allied force that the Germans faced of Canadians, Brits, Americans, French and Poles didn't really have any weak members; it wasn't really the case that one of them was perceived as being a soft spot the way that the Rumanians were on the Russian Front, or the way that the Italians were pretty much everywhere all the time. (There were a few formidable Italian units in the war but they were rare, and the Italians were not held in high regard by either enemy or ally, whether they fought with the Axis or after they changed sides.)

Even the French were not held in contempt after the Normandy invasion. One of the reasons why was that the Free French were organized along American lines and used American equipment and generally used American tactics and doctrine and were supplied at typically lavish American levels. They were incorporated as a part of one of the American commands. (At least part of the time they were under Patton.) And they performed well; they fought hard (especially during the liberation of France) and did not disgrace themselves. Among other notable successes, they helped close the Falaise pocket.

For all the rhetoric about "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", the French disaster in 1940 was due to failure at the highest levels. Individual French soldiers fought well, sometimes very well. They were good soldiers who were very badly led (and pretty badly equipped); they deserved better. One example of French valor was the fact that the "Miracle of Dunkirk" was in part made possible by the French who stayed behind to defend the pocket so that the British could be pulled out. It's true that the Germans didn't try as hard on the ground to crush the pocket as they might have due to Goering convincing Hitler to let him try to destroy it from air (and in part because the German Panzer divisions were running out of steam with accumulated equipment breakdown), but there was still a lot of ground combat even at that. Holding that perimeter was no picnic, esp