Andreas

The Germans did actually manufacture ammunition for the 122mm howitzer, so that should probably count as 'German' to all intents and purposes, since the ammunition could be drawn on in the same way as the one for the lFH andd sFH18. I am not sure about whether they did this for the 76mm divisional gun. BTW - what do these numbers of foreign guns tell you about the industrial capacity of Germany to equip all these new divisions with heavy weapons? tero - I never forget about AG North, and I think there are probably interesting parallels between the failure of the Red Army to deal AG North the deathblow they meted out to all other Army Groups, and the Red Army's failure to make short work of the Finns. I would have thought the Arctic theatre is quite different from the rest of Finland though - maybe you can tell me if that assumption is correct.

Maybe you can give me a single source for your claim? I have given you one that you can look up, if you care. So far all we have from you is 'it is basic knowledge'. Well, in medieval times it was basic knowledge that the earth is flat, and the sun is rotating around it. So unless you can come up with something better than your posts so far, I am afraid I have to decline the kind offer of further expertise by you, and will instead stay on my horse. BTW - care to tell me how many SP AT guns were present in the Wehrmacht on 21st March 1940? Maybe someone can give you the exact numbers.

Just an attempt to make sure everybody is clear about the distances involved. I was very surprised when I actually took the train to Anzio for the first time (my girlfriend's mother has a villa in Nettuno, and she lives in Rome), that it really is no distance at all. Regarding the forces in the area, on Monday I get back to my sources (Ellis and this German write-up, the latter is quite detailed), and post them here.

Ah, but attrition only works if there is something to attrit in the first place. The Soviets in the Vistula-Oder operation did attrition first, maneuver later. Lucas simply could not do attrition during the first days (there was nothing there), so the correct answer in this case is IMO not 'I shall sit on my ass until I can have a battle of attrition by being provided with a credible opposition courtesy of my esteemed opponent' but 'Yee-haa!', to put it into military expert lingo. Unlike some of the people who like to fight about it, I am very naive, and adamantly continue to believe that attrition and maneuver are inextricably linked. One is pointless without the other.

But that would certainly work both ways, wouldn't it? Once the Allied forces are in them hills, they would have a much easier time defending than in the plain in front of Anzio/Nettuno. Especially since that would have taken out a lot of the OPs from which the Germans had a good view into the beachhead later.

By looking at the official Wehrmacht organisation tables for a German infantry division - so thanks, I am feeling very well on the horse. The change was made official on 21st March 1940. Source is "Die Magdeburger Division - Zur Geschichte der 13. Infanterie und Panzerdivision 1935-45" by Dieter Hoffmann. How did you come to the conclusion that they are two different things? Let me tell you a story. How does a PAK hunt? Imagine you're a tank. You're prancing around. You get bored. You spot a little brook. You put your little tank tracks down to the clear water - BAM! A f*ckin' AP round rips off part of your turret! Your TC's brains are lying on the turret floor in little bloody pieces. Now I ask you, do you know how you call the unit that the PAK doing this to you was attached to? That's right, "Panzerjägerabteilung" after 1940, but if you were a Polish tank in 1939, it would be "Panzerabwehrabteilung". (With apologies to Marisa Tomei, who would look cute even in Feldgrau.) Now, you may not know this, but in German "Jagen" also applies to hunting where you just sit on a little wooden tower (Hochsitz), and wait for the deer to prance out of the forest. You don't move, you don't stalk, you just wait in ambush. Just like a PAK. But the same word also applies to hunting by a group of people (Treibjagd) or by stalking/following something or someone. So I ask again, where are the official documents showing that your definition is correct? Nothing cripped from a website please. And yes, I am German. Are you, or is German your native language?

Well, that to me is the difference between our thinking. I am quite sure that Patton's forces at Cobra were not sufficient to liberate the whole of Brittany, and attempt the southern pincer move on Falaise while simultaneously establishing a Seine bridgehead, and threaten Paris. But all of this they did, sometimes at great risk (the Seine bridgehead, Mortain). Speaking in Matrix terms - if they had freed their mind, they would have seen that there is no beach-head. Not if they do it right. Just look at what the Red Army did in Poland in 1945, during the Vistula-Oder operation (best source is probably Duffy 'Red Storm on the Reich'), or earlier during the raid by 25th Tank Corps on Tatsinskaya in 1942 (although I assume you would see that as a failure?). IMO it is a lack of imagination on the part of Clark and Lucas. You should not forget that the Germans also had no idea that there were only two reinforced divisions present, at the outset. As far as they knew it could have been a lot more - they only got this information later. Rapid, decisive action was what was called for, and the commanders failed to deliver it. If Clark had gotten round to the idea that he only wanted a bridgehead by this time, and not an attempt to destroy the Cassino position, he should have called off the whole venture, because then it was a total waste of resources. I am still wondering who should have interfered with the forward detachments, BTW? There was nobody there, and just in case you are not aware, it is an hour by slow train from Roma Termini to Nettuno. Or 51 minutes by car from Frascati to Anzio, according to viamichelin.com - none of that on the motorway. So if the Germans could have had some force there in 3 days to crush the over-extended reinforced 2 divisions is neither here nor there, seeing that at the time of the landing nobody was there. The allies could have organised rotating sightseeing trips to the forum for all the soldiers in the meantime.

OK. I ran the same tests again using the SNEAK command. The results are a little bit biased in that the slow moving units needed 2-3 turns to cover the 40m to the rubble (as opposed to just the one turn in all the other tests). They therefore are subject to more rounds of fire from the enemy. I actually took records after the 3rd turn.</font>

Well, shall we just say then that the decision, while in itself rational, carried unforeseen (?) consequences, such as reducing the ability of the affected divisions for self-sustained action, that made it, well, problematic. Mainly because no other changes seem to have been undertaken, and the reduced divisions were still expected to do the same job as the stronger divisions before, something they were not well suited for. BTW - I completely forgot about the change in the number of sections (not platoons I think). This would make for an even worse effect, since the reduction is not just 1/3, but 1/3 of the total + ~1/4 of the remaining, in terms of riflemen. That must have hurt somewhat.

That is an excellent documentary, apart from the fact that the Romanians get short-changed. The interviews with the veterans are the really important part. Watch out in a later part (I think) for the Soviet woman medic with all the medals, talking about how she rescued a machine gunner, and the German private taken out in one of the last planes from Gumrak. I think they have the pilot of the last German plane to try and make contact as well. I just hope they put it out on DVD as well. BTW are all the Soviets referring to the Germans as 'Fritz'? They seemed to in the episode I saw.

Quite wrong. I am reasonbly certain that no official "Panzer-Abwehr-Abteilungen" (sic) ever existed in the Wehrmacht. The term was always "Panzerjäger", whether towed or SP. </font>

Well, that is a different argument from saying 'look at the poor rangers at Cisterna'. If the same argument had been brought up against Cobra, for example, that operation would have had to be postponed as well, because really there were still too many German Panzer divisions around, and only with 20/20 hindsight do we know that they are not strong enough to win at Mortain. What this argument overlooks is the effect that speed and a daring advance would have had in the rear areas. You don't need a lot of forces to create total havoc in the German rear. The German HQ for Italy was located in frascati, a few hours drive from the beachhead, and the allies knew that. Threatening it would have ruptured the C&C chain of the Germans in the theatre while it PUFOs. Just an example. If the allies had pushed these FDs forward far enough, the Germans would not have been able to concentrate the forces as quickly against them. Remember that the 7 mile increase applies to the Germans as well, forcing them to spread their forces thinner - and while there were elements of 8 divisions in place within a few days, these were overall still weak. In the end, Lucas acted under Clark's instruction (ignoring Alexander's) at Anzio, namely to play it safe, instead of exploiting a very favourable situation. He was later made the fall-guy for that. A competent general of the risk-taking ilk, such as von Manstein, Rommel, Guderian, Patton, maybe Slim, or Juin, would probably have gone hell-for-leather to get out of the bridgehead and just disrupt the German rear-areas. One should not forget that Lucas' strategy, with 20/20 hindsight, does not look very impressive as a risk-reduction strategy, if you look at the situation in the German counter-offensive of February. It certainly was not risk-free, it just traded risk now for risk later.

Generic answer (this depends on the time of the war and what sort of battalion you talk about), one battalion consists of: 3x rifle company 1x heavy weapon company (HMG and mortars) This should get you about 7-800 men, at full strength. Reinforced could be anything, it depends on what it is being reinforced with. Possibilities could be: another rifle company a tank company an assault gun company/battery a tank battalion an assault gun battalion guns from the regimental gun company pioneers guns from the divisional artillery regiment an AT gun battery all of the above This is very much mission specific and also depends on what would kind of stuff be around to reinforce the battalion with. In most cases, you can expect some extra guns/mortars from regiment, and maybe some AT guns from regiment as well. Any regimental attachments are easy. It gets more difficult the higher up the assets you want to get are attached. So e.g. Stug Abteilungen were usually Heerestruppen in the Wehrmacht, meaning that you were lucky to have one under command as a battalion commander. The same goes for 17cm gun spotters.

Woops, wrong thread it seems. Mein Luftkissenboot ist (wie immer) voller Aale. [ July 31, 2003, 10:50 AM: Message edited by: Andreas ]

Ahem - when Lucas decided to hang around on the beach a bit longer (and the beaches there are very nice, so who can blame him), there was scarcely a German unit between him and Rome. A sharp advance with combined arms forward detachments would, in the opinion of German observers, have cooked the goose of 10th Army in the Cassino position (see e.g.'Anzio - Eine Schlacht der Fuehrungsfehler' or John Ellis' 'Cassino'), and they were flabbergasted (but very happy) that this was not done. By day three (but not before) they knew they had the Allies were they wanted them - bottled up in the bridgehead. The Rangers at Cisterna are absolutely not a valid comparison, because by the time that particular clusterf*ck happened, the Germans had brought up a whole new army to lock down and destroy the bridgehead, and the Rangers happened to run into them during a breakout attempt. At the time of the invasion, the Germans had a grand total of 2 batteries (one 10cm one 17cm) able to fire at the bridgehead, and the only forces available were the Reconnaissance Abteilung of 29. PGD (?), one company of which had been caught in their beds in Nettuno, according to the German history. Fortunately enough for the Allies, the German commander on the ground later on in the battle (von Mackensen) was giving Clark a run for his money in the ineptness compartment, and OKW interfered heavily in the counter-attack planning. As for Clark in general - read John Ellis' 'Cassino', he is extremely critical of the man. He is harsh on all involved, except Juin and the French Expeditionary Corps, but particularly harsh on Clark and the staffers in the British Corps who planned the move up the Liri Valley.

Okay, I have finally found some decent casualty statistics in an article on the fighting leading up to the Winter Line on CMH. 5th Army strength is given as ~100,000 men. Major units are split 50:50 US/British (3 divisions each). In the period 7th October to 15th November (5 1/2 weeks), which involved two river crossing assaults and a pursuit operation over extremely difficult terrain, but no encirclement and wholesale destruction of German units, 5th Army lost 9,693 battle casualties and a roughly equivalent number of non-battle casualties (US shouldered ~2/3rds of the battle casualties). That is just short of a 20% total casualty rate. I believe that the 17.5% for the Berlin operation includes non-battle casualties. So much for 'the Western allies/the US were more careful with the lives of their soldiers.' Interestingly, one of the US divisions was Truscott's 3rd Infantry. AIUI, Truscott is generally seen as a general who cared about the lives of his men - compared to e.g. Clark or Patton. 3rd Infantry had the highest casualties in the operation - 2,699. Assuming (heroically) the division was at full strength (14,253) when the assault began, this would be close to a 20% casualty rate over all, and between 25-35% of the rifle battalions - excluding non-battle casualties. I guess this shows that in World War 2, all sides were prepared to take 'horrific' casualty rates that today would be absolutely unacceptable for the same nations.

Indeed, Dobler outlines that quite clearly in 'Closing with the enemy', IIRC. But isn't artillery training (and maybe some real-life gunner can come in on this) a bit more tricky than you describe? I would have thought that crew members of a gun crew are trained in each others jobs, on top of their own, to be able to keep the gun functioning when casualties rise. ISTR that I was trained for two jobs on the 20mm AA gun in the Bundeswehr, not just one. My infantry training by comparison was nothing to write home about, but it was not intended to get the full ATN for infantry, just the one for Sicherung. See the point I made in the point above to Cogust. Sticking with stronger divisions, but fewer of them, may have had a healthy effect of bringing reality into planning in OKW. Who knows... But that is a massive change in the role of the division as a formation, is it not? By definition, in the Wehrmacht a division was the smallest formation capable of individual, sustained action. In the definition of what a division is in the history of 13.PD, it says 'Sie [the division] ist in der Lage, selbstaendig zu wirken.' But if you move the counter-attack forces one level up, you basically move towards something more like what I understand the Red Army approach to be - the Corps (until 1943 the Army) is the smallest formation capable of independent action. If this is indeed the case, this would indicate a quite significant structural change that may or may not have been conscious. I think only Panzerdivisions and the like were afforded this luxury. The ordinary infantry divisions tended to stay in the line, unless if they were actually disbanded following major desasters, e.g. 298.ID (IIRC, could be 295.ID) after Uranus. They may have been moved into a reserve role at some point, but even that was unlikely, I think. Of course, since most publications tend to deal with the 'sexy' formations, this is not a well-researched subject. Regarding equipment - as I said above, the heavy reliance on captured equipment in equipping new formations would indicate to me that the Germans were struggling on an industrial level to cope with the number of formations they created. This is also indicated if you look at the tank production, where new brigades were created, while panzer divisions in the field were going with single Abteilungen. Thanks - it has certainly made me think through the matter a lot more.

A six battalion infantry division in 1944 had probably the same frontage as a nine battalion division in 1941-2, but that's no what's important. What's important is what frontage a nine battalion division would have in 1944 if there were no six battalion divisions around. I'd say that their frontage would be roughly 33% larger than otherwise (simple math as if you have fwere but stronger divisions holding your line you must have more frontage per division). My point is that the smaller division, with the same amount of support weaponsas a larger division, would be able to hold more frontage per Landser than the larger division. This will make it possible to create a larger mobile reserve to use for attacks and counterattacks, imagine the Army Group Center having even smaller reserves on the eastern front in June 1944 than they actually did, what could have stopped the Russian tide then when the most successful approach in stopping Russian assaults was to converge sizeable reserves on the Russian breakthrough? </font>

Towed guns, and at the time at least 13.PD had been in a static defense role for a number of months along the Mius, followed by a period of one month or so for rebuilding prior to launching the attack into the Caucasus.

Well, the 6-battalion divisions did not have smaller frontages than the 9-battalion divisions, so care to tell me what, if any, relevance your comparison has? The point therefore stands - since the mission of the formation did not change, and no specific coping mechanism was invented, the move was a really bad idea. I don't really get what there is to argue about. Your personal insults do not detract from the fact that you have a really poor grasp on the issue at hand, and a clearly very limited understanding of the whole matter. So far you have dragged out: </font> Kampfgruppen</font>Finnish Brigades and</font>not much else</font> to show that the Germans somehow magically found coping with the structural change easier than one would suspect from outside appearances. You have just admitted yourself that the first two points do not really amount to much, since you now admit they are not relevant, so that leaves you with the latter. Others have used rational argument, and have not resorted to personal insults in the discussion. You obviously need to grow up. Regards 'twisting' your words - no need to. Here is what you wrote again, to remind you: My point of contention with this statement is that it means a lot more than just 'one battalion less in the regiment'. So far, you have singularly failed to address this point of mine. I take your continued resorting to personal insults to be an admission by you that you have run out of arguments, if indeed you ever had one to start with. [ July 29, 2003, 10:39 AM: Message edited by: Andreas ]

www.regiments.org has this list of abbreviations We aim to please.

Indeed, Michael is spot-on here. What the Germans were mostly credited with is not the formation of Kampfgruppen itself - anyone with a piece of paper, a pen, and an infantry division can do that - but with the ability to weld together highly effective Kampfgruppen from different formations, extremely quickly, and deploy these as fire brigades. Which is exactly not an Ubermechanism to compensate for structural weaknesses within the same formation. But maybe I am wrong, and Keke will show us the proof that Kampfgruppen were invented to deal with the structural reform by allowing quick internal reorganisation. I won't hold my breath though.

Keke, you can have a reasonable discussion with me, or you can go and screw yourself. Your choice, I wait for your reply to my comment on the post below. But anymore or 'you don't get it, and you can continue your Wehrmachtworshipping admiration fest alone. From my standpoint, Kampfgruppen were not an invention to deal with the sudden absence of 3 battalions. They existed well before that. That Kampfgruppen may have been used to cope with the effect is therefore neither here nor there, since they were not invented to cope with the sudden tactical problem. No matter how much you would like to think that only the Ubergerman Supergenerals could come up with this idea of forming KGs (what in your opinion are Soviet late-war forward detachments, if not a KG?). Now, let's do some math, it is quite simple. If you have three regiments, you can form three KGs, plus maybe another one from the support elms. So that much stayed the same. But do you honestly want to tell me that a KG based on a 3-battalion regiment is the same as one based on a 2-battalion regiment in terms of its combat value? Regarding the different roles - I look forward to you providing me with an analysis of frontages in later war, showing that the 6-battalion division only covered 2/3rds of the frontage of the 9 battalion division. Happy digging, or should I say 'inventing', of the data. Edit: when I understand more about the Finnish area of operations (your attitude pretty much ensures that I have no desire to educate myself about it though), I may come back to you on the question of the brigade against the division. My first question would be though - what are the respective frontages and missions. In the rather specific circumstances of fighting in Finland, this may well have been a better organisation. I wonder if the Finns would have done as well with it in Ukraine though. [ July 29, 2003, 09:53 AM: Message edited by: Andreas ]

That is an interesting point tero, and I had not really thought of it that way. I understand from discussing this with Grisha that a sort of continued preparation for defense was built into Soviet attack plans, which would probably be based on this contingency.

Rob, this is the first time I hear that it is cheaper to train artillery than infantry. Do you have any figures on that? I have always assumed the opposite is true, so would welcome a correction. Having said that, since there was much less capacity for training artillery men than infantry men, it is not just a pure cost issue, but also one of supply constraint. Something to think about anyway. Regarding your point on 2-regiment or 3-regiment organisation for a six battalion division, I would tend to agree that the light, and Jaeger divisions were not exactly marvels of divisional organisation, so it is a case of choosing between a rock and a hard place. Just to repeat this - I fundamentally disagree with the notion that a six-battalion division in the sort of combat expected from 1942 onwards (which is not quite correct anyway, the realisation that their offensive days were over did not dawn on the Germans until much later) would perform reasonably well compared to a 9-battalion formation, and that firepower can make up for the three missing battalions. Keith is fully correct on this in his first post, and no post-rationalisation of this re-structuring that I have seen in this thread is convincing me otherwise. What those who think that a six-battalion division could function decently in defense tend to forget is that German doctrine mandated counter-attacks to re-take lost positions. Obviously, you will have trouble doing that when you lack 1/3rd of the infantry. The other problem is that because of the lack of depth, any crisis moves up one level. What in a 9-battalion division is a regimental crisis, that a regiment can cope with on its own, is a divisional crisis in a 6-battalion division. Regarding the question whether Germany had the industrial capacity to fit all these divisions - I would disagree with someone saying that it did. The equipment of a lot of divisions with captured equipment should be a clear indication that this was not the case. Even if it had though, in terms of opportunity cost this industrial capacity may well have been employed better doing something else. Just another point here, I have numbers from at least two Panzerartillerie Regiments (13.PD and 4.PD, I think) saying that the regiments were not up to strength in 1942 - they only had three-gun batteries in the light batteries, and no or an even more reduced complement in the heavy batteries. If in 1942 even the elite formations could not be fully re-equipped for their losses, what hope for the infantry? So it stands to reason that in effect divisions were created that were short on manpower both 'Ist' and 'Soll', while short on fire-power 'Ist'. Cogust, I don't rate von Mellenthin particularly highly as a source. He is just another participant of Marshall's fantasy project explaining to posterity why the Germans actually won the war against the Soviet Union. I just remembered another shortage of ammunition case, in Normandy, of all places. Counterattack by 10. SS PD on Hill 112 (Odon battles). At one point two pages of the KTB were online somewhere, I have since forgotten where. The division had a total of 700 artillery rounds to support its attack. For comparison, that would be the daily rate of two guns in a 25-pdr regiment in their UK opponents during battles of this intensity. So unless you can convince me with actual production numbers, I am sticking to my guns (groan), that the Germans had ammunition shortages far earlier than 1945. BTW - small arms ammo and artillery ammo are rather different things, so availability of one would not indicate to me that the other is available as well.