u/_phaze__

So, I stumbled upon these below numbers a bit ago and frankly, they're bothering me. Now, I solemnly, pinky swear I'm no wehraboo but even so, this vast gap doesn't quite mesh with my knowledge of campaigns that are part of this period (roughly 01.09.1944 - 16.12.1944) or my general reading about fighting in Europe. If true these would seem to point to staggering casualty effectiveness of the US army over Wermacht. I'm hoping for a second opinion or for same factoid that would make these make sense.

3rd Army: On page 592-593 of Official History Lorraine Campaign own casualties are given as 55,128 and POWs as: "Although the number of Germans killed and wounded cannot be determined with any degree of exactness, it is known that at least 75,000 prisoners passed through the Third Army cages during the Lorraine operation" https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Lorraine/USA-E-Lorraine-14.html

1st Army: Page 616 of Siegfried Line Campaign "The First Army incurred 47,039 battle casualties* during the Siegfried Line Campaign. (This was approximately half the number of German prisoners taken." "Although any attempt to fix German losses on a numerical basis would be little better than a guess, personnel losses obviously were high. This is evident from the fact that at least 95,000 prisoners passed through First and Ninth Army cages during the Siegfried Line Campaign.1"
*(US Ninth Army incurred additional 10 000 casualties) https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/USA-E-Siegfried/USA-E-Siegfried-27.html

The way I see it, reasons to be weirded out are:

• going by official history, both of the aforementioned armies captured more POWs than they themselves sustained total combat casualties. This is a massive discrepancy between the two sides. First Army's Missing and Captured are given as 4860, about twenty times less.
• Fall 1944 is a period of near stalemate or gradual but slow progress in abhorrent weather. In other words there aren't large operational encirclements or periods of pursuit that could create large prisoner hauls. The difference had** to be made in tactical combat. Which at least on surface level from my reading I do not see in Hurtgen or drive to the Saar.
• There are plenty of wehraboo stories or the wave of 80's revisionism but I've never seen these above numbers used by pro allied historians to fend this off. Generally even in period of more balanced takes on qualities of each of the armies I think the professionals haven't switched to "Germans just suck"
• As far as I know, most of histories of Battle of Bulge that followed immediately this period and are many more in number or detail, give casualties as near equal or with slight German superiority.

but:

• ** I might be simply underestimating effects of encirclements of Aachen or Metz. There had to thousands of troops captured there. For now the numbers I'm seeing quoted [Ambrose(I'm sorry) given 5,600 for Aachen.] are not enough to make up the difference but maybe I'm missing some.
• The allies were capturing civilian, non-combat personnel, occupational and administrational staff that they would point to POW cages and count them. I have no idea whether this was actually thing but could amount to substantial numbers.
• The newly raised volksgrenadier divisions rushed to the front were actually of really bad quality. Germans just managed to pour enough reinforcements for the front to not crumble despite this.

I guess the Green Books could be simply wrong ? Either author made a mistake or omitted the truth, or there were some mistakes in reporting the POWs at ground level ? Perhaps double counting when moving prisoners from one level to the next ? Never seen this process described in detail so no clue.