The Soviet Army had at least 3.5 million horses in service and deployed tens of thousands of mounted cavalrymen. They would have relied even more heavily on horse-drawn transport had the U.S. not played the role of shady wartime used car dealer. Now, you might expect as much from an army that famously didn't have enough guns for all its soldiers, but they weren't the only ones who relied heavily on horses.

The German "war machine" was actually less gears and sheet metal, more flesh and bone. When World War II began, horses outnumbered vehicles in the Wehrmacht by a good 3 to 1, and that figure only got worse as the war progressed and vehicles crapped out. When we think of the German army, we think of panzer and tiger tanks, but even the famous panzer armies had 15,000 more horses than motors. And here you thought those fancy jackboots were just for style.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-E10457 / CC-BY-SA
If there was such a thing as a "stately" blitzkrieg, you'd be looking at it.

Ironically, even as Nazi propagandists were inventing stories about Polish cavalrymen hopelessly charging German tanks, the German army was busy forming new cavalry units in an attempt to stop getting trampled by their horse-savvy enemies.

The United States had the only army that was mostly motorized, yet U.S. cavalry was responsible for one of the last mounted charges in history. And even though the U.S. was less reliant on horses, the Allied rolls contained thousands of veterinarians, veterinarians' assistants, and blacksmiths who kept animals and wagons on the road. While we firmly believe that Hawk Phoenix: Blitzkrieg Veterinarian and Flint McSteel: Wartime Blacksmith would have made excellent films, the animal-powered nature of the war got little airplay, thanks largely to Soviet and Axis propaganda efforts.

US Army Handbook
Armies really, really wanted that Humane Association label in their film credits.

As documented in such historical works as Captain America and The Official Wolfenstein Compendium of World War II, Nazi Germany was a technological juggernaut -- why, they were neck and neck with the U.S. in the race to develop the A-bomb. It was only blind luck (and the fact that Jesus likes apple pie more than bratwurst) that led to the good guys developing it first.

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"Fuck it. At least we still have that Ark project going, right?"

Why It's Bullshit:

In what was quite possibly the only good thing anti-Semitism ever did for the world, the Third Reich ostracized the very scientists capable of developing the atomic bomb. In fact, the Reich was so disdainful of that type of work that they considered the whole field of study "Jewish physics." So-called "Jewish physicists" like Erwin "quantum mechanics" Schrodinger and Albert "motherfucking" Einstein booked it out of Germany, and their exit lit the fuse that sent the Nazis' atomic aspirations up in a disappointingly non-mushroom-shaped cloud.

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"Albert E=FU squared."

While the remaining German scientists got the general gist of what it would take to make the bomb tick, the Nazi atomic bomb program was doomed from the get-go due to gross miscalculations in just how much uranium was needed to give the very face of Mother Earth a gigantic shiner. Add to that the fact that Germany had been largely expelled from the world's scientific community (nobody wants genocide-tainted fingers all up in their beakers), and they never stood so much as a snowball's chance of painting that shiny new doomsday device with stylized swastikas.

Pop culture has consistently depicted the Third Reich as a cruel, coldly calculating computer. Say what you will about the content of their lists, they were, at the least, impeccably organized. (And probably at least five items long, as all good list makers know is necessary.) It's almost impossible to picture Nazi Germany as anything other than a disturbingly efficient bureaucratic superpower.

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So whenever someone insists on competence, feel free to call them a genocidal maniac.

Why It's Bullshit:

It's absolutely true that Germany's government was a well-oiled machine ... before the Nazis came along and threw a big ol' Aryan super-wrench into its gears.

Back when Hitler wasn't much more than a Mussolini fanboy, the German government was ticking along about as well as a post-war, pre-Depression era government could be expected to. They were keeping up with their reparation payments from World War I, their currency was stabilizing -- the I's were dotted, the T's were crossed, and everything was in order. But then the Third Reich came along, slapped all those nerd-papers into the air, and walked away laughing.

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Josef Mengele was also a controversial proponent of titty twisting.

While it's true that the Nazis had a ton of paperwork, no one ever said that they were any good at it. The Nazi government was all about a political agenda and not so much about administration; from its very beginnings, it was a bureaucratic nightmare that completely destabilized itself through extreme politicization, intergovernmental conflicts, and other problems that didn't even exist in Germany until the Nazis came to power. Even the very poster child of unfeeling bureaucracy, the Gestapo, was an absolute mess. They were consistently and embarrassingly understaffed, and if it wasn't for the German public pulling Gestapo horror stories out of their asses, they'd have seen their influence crumble quicker than a certain young artist's career.

World War II's draft dodging numbers dwarf both Vietnam's and World War I's. Desertion rates between World War II and Vietnam were pretty much neck and neck. And when they weren't dodging or deserting, the Greatest Generation was doing the third best thing: getting completely shitfaced. Soldiers in Vietnam took a lot of heat for drug abuse, but the Greatest Generation was dying of alcohol poisoning so fast that the U.S. Army started putting up warning billboards displaying the "Deaths from Poison Liquor to Date" (G.I.s weren't picky about their booze and often drank methanol -- aka antifreeze). Not to be outdone, creative sailors sometimes swilled the alcohol that fueled torpedoes. When the U.S. Navy caught on and started putting additives in the "torpedo juice" to make the soldiers sick if they drank it, the submariners one-upped them and learned the art of distillation via torpedo engine.

The lesson here is: Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a conscripted serviceman looking to drink away his misery. Drunk finds a way. Drunk ... finds a way.