When I say Elite, I dont mean units like SAS or such because they dont really impact the war. More like the training to join 101 st is tougher and not all soldiers had the physical to endure it. When you have a conscription army you divide the manpower into categories. Some to the paras, some to infantry and some to logistics. so for a 1 million manpower pool, maybee a few percent can be paras or marines. At least thats how they do it now, maybee it was different in ww2 because the concept of the units in themselves was new?
It was definitely the case that the US Paratroops were trained pretty hard and had a pretty high drop-out rate. It'd add another level of management to the game, but you could divide your manpower pool up by quality and then decide where the good ones go, and this would give those formations a bonus (pro-rated to the proportion of 'good' manpower in the unit). Some kind of mechanic like this could also be used to reflect the old men and kids being drafted into German units towards the end of the war, where the manpower in the unit might only be 20% 'normal' and 80% 'too old/young', and then have some kind of penalty towards the units combat (and movement maybe?) because of it. Just thinking out loud. It would be another game mechanic, but it could be one that would fairly simply reflect some of the manpower decisions and difficulties during the war (for example, do you just spread your manpower around evenly, and mix in the good with the bad for an average modifier, or have a mix of 'good' and 'bad' units?) Just thinking off the top of my head, I suspect this might be a bit too much detail for what the dev team are looking for (and more detail than we've had in the past), but you never know our luck .