Yes, their vaunted martial tradition. The US Army exceeded them in every sane way. There’s very little to admire there. Look at them, they ran wild over an unprepared Europe still horrified from WWI that could not bring themselves to dream it would happen again.
Then they were stopped cold from invading England. Then they attacked Russia where they failed to defeat the Russians. Stopped by their bad tactics, and by their wasteful and evil energy spent on mass murder. Then they were driven out of North Africa. Then they faced the US Army and got a world class ass pounding that was born of true professional military skill and power.
But do they have any catchy songs about shooting naked women by a ditch, or locking all the village in a barn and burning it?
That lost cause thinking is just weird. Call it martial tradition, but if I was expressing admiration for the Kymer Rouge, you’d think I had a screw loose. I mean, they took over Cambodia FAST!
In fairness they were massively outnumbered and outgunned. And I’m not discounting the ability of the US Army that beat them, of which my own dad was a part. Even still, it was a close call, and could have gone the other way, especially if Hitler had allowed his professional General Staff to make decisions instead of constantly overriding them with disasterous results. And I do also have respect for the NVA and Russian Spetsnaz too.
I remember a story of an American tank commander who had a copy of Rommel’s book. An Iraqi prisoner asked why he had a book by an enemy of America. The soldier told him to STFU, if more Iraqis had read it they might not be prisoners.
Except for the part about them out killing us and the Brits, man for man, and they were vastly superior to the Russians.
The German and Japanese forces lacked access to oil. Germany was forced to use synthetic gasoline and when the allies started bombing these factories all was lost.