Who had a better army during WW2 – the Americans or Germans in terms of discipline and training?
In this measure, they actually passed each other in different directions. When the war began, the Germans had a very disciplined and trained army, while the Americans certainly meant well but were thrown in with little training (Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia for example). As the war progressed, however, the Germans had a policy of keeping existing formations in the field and building completely new regiments and divisions with each progressing class of draftees. The result was that very few of the lessons learned by veteran soldiers were passed on to the new units, so the new soldiers were highly indoctrinated politically, but their combat training in 1945 was very little progressed from what it would have been in 1938. The Americans, however, made a point of transferring veteran soldiers back to the USA for training purposes. By the end of the war, the German army had very little unit cohesion especially in the East (Armies degenerated into huge mobs of armed and often unarmed s
