• ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    The French thought it was gonna be trench warfare

    Ironically enough, so did Hitler. In between the invasion of Poland and the invasion of France, he allocated an enormous fraction (around 40%) of Germany’s war materiel production to artillery shells - the primary weapon of WWI and the fundamental limiting resource for both sides during that war. Hitler expected a reboot of the prior war, with Germany holding off the Western allies with a small portion of their armies on the defensive while carving off huge swaths of Russian territory. He was as surprised as anybody by the rapid collapse of France - and was left holding a gigantic surplus of artillery shells.