Goering and Luftwaffe Infantry

[Gamer58]

As I understand it

1. Goering was the head of all marshals and generals in any service - a special rank was created for him

2. The LI got the best of equipment and was not often denied what they wanted because of Goerings position within the Reich

3. The LI were not any less well trained than the Heer, on average.

Right? Wrong?

Also, Kesselring was one of the better commanders in the war. What made a Heer commander transfer to the Luftwaffe? Curious as to how it worked.

Thanks.

[Mr.X]

The Fallschirm-Panzer-Division "HG" was equipped like any other Panzer-Division of the Heer, on average. During the Italian Campaign, it was one of the strongest divisions of Kesselring´s Heeresgruppe. When the division was transfered to the Eastfront during the summer of 1944, it became obviously, that most of its men weren´t trained enough to fight successfully against the Red Army. I got reports of the 3.SS-Panzer-Division "Totenkopf", fighting in the same sector around the town of Siedlce, in which "HG" is critizised for its very unexperienced units, which suffer high casualties.

Regards

Frank

[Aragorn2002]

The Fallschirm-Panzer-Division "HG" was equipped like any other Panzer-Division of the Heer, on average. During the Italian Campaign, it was one of the strongest divisions of Kesselring´s Heeresgruppe. When the division was transfered to the Eastfront during the summer of 1944, it became obviously, that most of its men weren´t trained enough to fight successfully against the Red Army. I got reports of the 3.SS-Panzer-Division "Totenkopf", fighting in the same sector around the town of Siedlce, in which "HG" is critizised for its very unexperienced units, which suffer high casualties.

Regards

Frank

Frank, can you perhaps share those reports? I'm always extremely interested in such details.

[JasonC]

Best equipment, no, the competition was stiff and Nazi Germany was a system of organized grab by empire builders of all kinds. Overall the Waffen SS got the best equipment in that game of grab. The best formations of the Heer also did well, because they were cream skimmers in a huge pool - but that means things like Panzer Lehr (created from training units that had their pick of the army and ran the army schools). The LW had some units well equipped, like PD HG as others have mentioned.

But it also had poorly conceived and equipped divisions like the 1942-43 era Luftwaffe Field divisions, which were basically an attempt by Goering to keep his hands on as much manpower as possible after it became clear the Luftwaffe was not the decisive arm, and ground forces were. Which basically happened as soon as the war in Russia "went long". These formations were made up of men transferred from existing Luftwaffe roles like AA, ground support units, and rear area staffs. They trained themselves, instead of going through the superior Heer schools, and it showed. Their infantry training in particular was extremely poor. They were also stuffed to the gills with repurposed AA guns in place of standard artillery, simply because the LW had gobs of the stuff lying around.

Earlier in the war, before Crete basically, the LW also had the FJ (paratroopers), as an elite but tiny force. They were picked men and thoroughly trained, but underarmed because they were meant to be airmobile, and that meant little artillery. Then they were mostly wrecked taking Crete, with only cadres left over after their heavy losses in that battle.

By 1944, the LW shifted its ground forces to the FJ designation, and left behind the experimental Luftwaffe Field divisions. It gave the newer FJ formations more in the way of artillery, and formed some StuG brigades to give them minor amounts of armor support. But they were basically just infantry divisions. And their quality level was quite uneven, much like the Heer infantry divisions. Some got cadre from the remnants of the original elite FJ, in the form of sergeants and lower ranking officers, and trained to something like their previous standards - though the ranks were filled with draftees, not volunteers or picked men. But some got desk jockie repurposed staffers for officers and raw recruits from wherever, and indifferent training, and maybe not enough regular artillery - and looked a lot like a new label slapped on an old Luftwaffe Field division.

Like I said, uneven. Some of the later war FJ formations fought very well, including some at Cassino and some on the US front in Normandy. Others... didn't.

But it was definitely not a picked or elite force. It was distinctly less well equipped than the late war Waffen SS, for example.

It is less well known, but the mid and late war Waffen SS also had its poorer component - the ragtag units formed from half-volunteers from all over Europe that the SS decided where objectively pro Nazi in this or that national, racial, or ideological sense. This lead to units like a Muslim SS contingent in Yugoslavia, and others from eastern Europe with only the vaguest interest in Germany winning the war. (Anti communism was sometimes sufficient). These formation were mostly straight infantry, were frequently just awful, and some ran away at the first opportunity. Other formations mixed some more select volunteers with a German core and fought better - e.g. 5th SS (portions recruited from Scandinavia and Holland).

Chaos and variation is the watchword, for anything about Germany in WW II, pretty much.

[Mr.X]

@Aragorn:

Unfortunately, I am not at home at the moment, so I can´t search the parts, where "HG" is reported to for its leck of experience (means Eastfront-experience)...

But may be, I´ll start to write an English Book, including the history of the 3rd SS...I am only not shure yet, if such a book would find many readers....

regards

Frank

[JonS]

I am only not sure yet, if such a book would find many readers

JJ Fedowicz have built an entire cottage industry on the answer to that question

[Mr.X]

Ok, this is an argument

But for example, JJ sells (what I know so far) only two book about the 3rd SS. One of them, "Like a cliff in the ocean" is sketchy and not worth the price. The other one about the Tigers of the 3rd SS is not much better, if one is interested in the history of the division....

[Sgt Joch]

on the origins of the Luftwaffe infantry divisions:

Even more frustrating to the German Army was the conduct of Reichsmarschall Herman Göring's Luftwaffe. Like the SS, the Luftwaffe benefited from an elitist image among German youth and consistently attracted large numbers of zealots who were prime soldier material. With the curtailment of its offensive air activities since the 1940 Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe found itself with an excess of ground support personnel. An attempt by the army to claim these men for retraining as infantry replacements during the summer of 1942 was parried by Göring, who argued to Hitler that transferring these "genuinely National Socialist" young men to the army would contaminate them by exposure "to an army which still had chaplains and was led by officers steeped with the traditions of the Kaiser."

Instead, in mid-1942, Göring ordered that 170,000 surplus air personnel be organized into twenty-two Luftwaffe field divisions for employment as ground units at the front. In the army's view, this remedy promised no relief since these Luftwaffe units would almost certainly be of low quality due to inexperience and lack of trained leadership. As Field Marshal von Manstein explained in his memoirs: "To form these excellent troops into divisions within the framework of the Luftwaffe was sheer lunacy, Where were they to get the necessary close-combat training and practice in working with other formations? Where were they to get the battle experience so vital in the east? And where was the Luftwaffe to find divisional, regimental, and battalion commanders?" These questions were tragically answered in late 1942, when several Luftwaffe field divisions fell apart at their first taste of combat on the Russian Front. These 170,000 men, who as infantry replacements could have nearly replenished the bedraggled divisions of Army Groups Center and North, thus added very little combat strength to the German forces in the east.

[Aragorn2002]

@Aragorn:

Unfortunately, I am not at home at the moment, so I can´t search the parts, where "HG" is reported to for its leck of experience (means Eastfront-experience)...

But may be, I´ll start to write an English Book, including the history of the 3rd SS...I am only not shure yet, if such a book would find many readers....

regards

Frank

Well, I wouldn't be too shure of that either if I were you.

[Michael Emrys]

on the origins of the Luftwaffe infantry divisions:

He must not have heard of Operation Barbarossa. Or the Balkans. Or the Med. The Luftwaffe had plenty of offensive ops prior to 1943. Otherwise, a pretty good article.

Michael

[Sgt Joch]

He must not have heard of Operation Barbarossa. Or the Balkans. Or the Med. The Luftwaffe had plenty of offensive ops prior to 1943. Otherwise, a pretty good article.

Michael

Its from Wray's article on German defensive doctrine on the Russian Front. I don't think the Luftwaffe was his primary focus.

http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/wray.pdf

However, you have other articles/studies which show that due to steady attrition of aircraft, the Luftwaffe had an excess of ground support personnel by late 41 which led to various plans on how to use this manpower.

[Michael Emrys]

I don't think the Luftwaffe was his primary focus.

Understandable. Still, a pretty big thing to miss.

Michael

[Gamer58]

Interesting.

So when the took the spare Luftwaffe troops and formed them into fighting units, these guys were trained by equally inexperienced infantry commanders? I don't get why they would not be well trained - was there no interest at all in this from Goering? If so, why?

Also, what are your views of Kesselring as a commander? Surely if there were guys around just like him, he would have done his best to ensure that the men under his command were beaten into shape before they hit the front lines?

[YankeeDog]

Interesting.

So when the took the spare Luftwaffe troops and formed them into fighting units, these guys were trained by equally inexperienced infantry commanders? I don't get why they would not be well trained - was there no interest at all in this from Goering? If so, why?

Also, what are your views of Kesselring as a commander? Surely if there were guys around just like him, he would have done his best to ensure that the men under his command were beaten into shape before they hit the front lines?

Kesselring's ability to influence things like administration and training of Luftwaffe divisions would have been extremely limited.

I'd really suggest doing some background reading on the tangled mess inter-service and personal rivalries that existed in the Third Reich. A whole mess of stuff that makes absolutely no sense on the surface suddenly becomes much more understandable once you see what was going on behind the scenes.

[JasonC]

To shortcut the research project YankeeDog recommends, the cliff notes version...

Hitler ran the Third Reich by a system of parallel bureaucratic competition. He let anyone who supported him loyally and mouthed his ideology get all the resources they liked for any purpose they proposed, growing any bureaucracy in the process. Whenever he encountered any form of resistance or pushback against his ideological or practical desires, he left those doing so in place and replaced their role and function with a new burgeoning bureaucracy that took their jobs and did them, Hitler's way. The existing formation just sat there, starved for new resources and ignored by every other part of the state, as now out of favor.

The Hitler personally sat at the center of all the competing resource grabbers playing that game, and played referee. This made everyone dependent on his nod and ensured his continued power. It also did an end-run around every form of bureaucratic resistance or "sit down strike", and every tendency for the experts in a given area to try to overrule him, citing their expertise on the one hand and their institutional positions and supposedly indispensible roles on the other.

If a state body wouldn't do something, he left it there and had a party body do it directly instead. If the police wouldn't do something, he got the SS to do it. If the army talked back, he gave all their men and equipment to Goering and Himmler, who were yes-men and knew how he played this game. He was always reaching down 2-3 levels in the organization charts and across some existing body's responsibilities, to get some ambitious firecracker who would suck up to him to do what he wanted, and thumb their noses at their supposed superiors.

The lesson was, there are no superiors in the Third Reich. There is only Hitler and his favor trumps everything.

Now, this left behind a complete chaos of duplicated functions. Someone had Hitler's favor 6 months ago and built a whole organization to do something, but then they talked back or tried to have something their own way, and he started ignoring them. There would be 2 separate organizations with the same role a year later, each grabbing for all the resources (in men, equipment, raw materials, etc) they could get their hands on.

How well any of these organizations actually did their job was an entirely secondary consideration. What mattered was their loyalty and the fact that the policy they strove to implement was not their own, but Hitler's. Would he occasionally starve an organization for complete incompetence? Perhaps. But it had to be pretty complete.

This drove the efficiency minded general staff to distraction, because it was horribly inefficient both militarily and economically. It wasn't meant to generate maximum military power for the available economic inputs. It was designed to generate maximum obedience with the available (stubborn and self-willed and arrogant) human material.

[Gamer58]

OK, well put (and thank you for the concision).

There's still one thing I don't understand:

1. What do you think of Kesselring as a ground commander

2. What were his sub-commanders like? Where did they come from? Any from the Heer?

3. Surely, even though there was jostling at the table for crumbs, Goering had a lot of say, given that he was after all, Marshal above all others and by 42? deputy Fuhrer and to Hitler in all other offices (until the revocation appointing Doenitz some years later). Would he not have had the ability to marshal more than practically everyone else, including even Geobbels/Himmler (for the Waffen/Security SS)?

[Jaeger Jonzo]

I remember reading a German vets account on the ost front who sat in his foxhole watching a Luftwaffe field division take over their forward positions. He marvelled at their immaculate uniforms and weapons including shiny new mg42's and high level of equipment. The same night the wily Russian foes launched a sneaky night assault and completely over ran the LF positions capturing all the shiny equipment and turning it on the now hard pressed wehrmacht unit who were attempting to stabilise the hole in the line.

Amongst other expletives he cursed them as chocolate soldiers and a waste of good manpower.

[Sgt Joch]

Kesselring was the overall theater commander over German forces in the Med: army, Luftwaffe, Navy, as such he commanded Luftwaffe, Navy and Heer units. However, he was more of a strategist and administrator. He does not appear to have interfered in ground operations, other than setting the overall strategy.

He certainly had good political and bureaucratic skills since he managed to stay in his post for so long and was forgiven acts which got other commanders fired. For example, he ordered the final evacuation of German forces from Sicily on his own initiative, before OKW and Hitler had made a final decision.

[Sgt Joch]

The HG appears to have been better than the average Luftwaffe field unit, certainly better equipped than regular Panzer divisions. The division suffered heavy losses in Tunisia, but had ample divisional reserves in the med theater, something which ordinary Heer divisions lacked. The division had been brought back up to full strength by july 1. The division also had a Tiger unit with 17 tanks attached as an organic unit on july 9, again very unusual for a Panzer unit.

However reports from the Tiger unit are not complimentary to divisional staff. 10 tigers were lost in the first 3 days through inadaquate planning/scouting. They were pushed too far forward, bogged on soft ground and could not be recovered due to enemy fire. However, Panzer offciers regularly complained that infantry officers did not know how to properly employ tanks, so it is not necessarily a HG problem.

The divisional commander, Paul Conrath, was a Luftwaffe officer who according to Kesselring, lacked the necessary experience in handling modern combined arms.

nervertheless, reports from allied units do not seem to show that the HG performed less well than other German units in Sicily. It did however suffer heavy losses and had to be rebuilt once again, once it was evacuated back to the italian mainland.

[Badger73]

<snipped>

1. What do you think of Kesselring as a ground commander

<snipped>

"Smiling" "Uncle" Albert was well regarded by both friend and foe; decisive, canny, and brave. He is primarily responsible for Germany's effectiveness in holding Italy with his "southern defense" strategy against the Allied invastions. Rommel was inclined to abandon the south and defend in the north. Kesselring understood that such a strategy would expose southern Germany to bombers operating from Italy; risk the Allies breaking into the Po Valley; and was completely unnecessary, as he was certain that Rome could be held until the summer of 1944. His assessment was based on his belief that the Allies would not conduct operations outside the range of their air cover, which could only reach as far as Salerno. History proved him right. He was a loyal Nazi and an excellent general.

[JasonC]

Well regarded? He was sentence to death for massacres of Italian civilians during the retreat north from Rome. Sure it was commuted, lots were, but he was still defending killing civilians as an ordinary military operation five years after he was released.

As for his military ability, he is overrated. His one piece of good operational judgment was evacuating Sicily as indefensible. In every other affair, he was just stupidly optimistic about everything, which is what the leadership liked best about him. That optimism got a quarter million Axis soldiers captured in Tunisia, which was even less defensible than Sicily was. His optimism worked in his favor in the winter line stand and immediate reaction to Anzio, but it was a stopped clock kind of thing. He ordered grandious and premature armored counterattacks in Tunisia, Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio that all failed with heavy loss, only the first having even temporary success. He was always pretending that everything was fine and expecting one last counterattack to save everything. To his credit (I suppose) he didn't panic when that proved completely wrong again and again, but he also didn't take much responsibility for those stuff ups. He just claimed he had bought time and it couldn't be helped and went merrily on.

Not a military genius. More a panglossian yes-man - not to mention a self excusing thug.

[Sublime]

While I agree with many of your points I have to disagree about your overall assessment of Kesselring. Though many commanders of superior morale fiber or ability certainly come to mind, to simply write him off as you did is to simply not acknowledge reality. The man was certainly a fairly capable military officer, and also certainly a man brave enough to stand under fire. Whether he was in over his head in his high position, etc, may also be true at the same time. The two aren't exclusive.

It's like dismissing Montgomery as an vain, slow going lame commander. I personally may not have liked the man, but he was a decorated veteran and a capable officer.. Or any other number of famous historical figures for that matter, that people tend to hate.

[Gamer58]

Now we are getting somewhere. JasonC's view of Kesselring, and yours too. This is what it's all about. Italy was an essential part of the campaign, important almost as much as the Eastern Front not in scale but symbolic and strategic importance as the gateway to Vienna.

Kesselring's influence over the campaign is what I and many others are interested in. Caliber of divisional commanders, influence over others through Goering, or otherwise, and ability to get the job done during the campaign. Just how good were they? What attempts did they make to ensure their front line soldiers were up to the job? There's a lot of revisionism about the quality of certain units and branches of the service, and surely the commanders did their level best to ensure that the bodies at the front line knew what they were doing. Did they?

[Sublime]

Im not so sure on the German side. Many opinions dont seem to be too high of US battalion-division level commanders - by other US commanders (and foreign). However I wouldnt take that as a rule even.

[JasonC]

Gamer58 - first I want to address the rather bizarre references to Goering, as though he mattered. He didn't. He had very little influence by this point in time, and Kesselring had never had very much to do with him anyway. Later I will get to Kesselring.

Goering was not important in the Third Reich primary as commander of the Luftwaffe, it was the other way around. He got command of the Luftwaffe because he was a Hitler crony who happened to have flown in WW I. He was one of the first to join the Nazi party and basically created the SA in that early incarnation. At bottom he was a paramilitary organizer and a party thug.

When the regime took power, it came in initially in coalition with pro army and conservative support, and the first order of business was to seize total power and remove all dependence on those elements. To appease them, the Reich interior minister of the new government was a non-entity they trusted. But Goering became interior minister of the state of Prussia instead, in a characteristic Nazi move of parallel appointments and bureaucracy building. Goering quickly fill the Prussian state police with his own men and that was the Gestapo. Goering did not have power in Germany as creator of the air force but of the Gestapo (and before it the early SA). He used it to destroy all the party's enemies by criminal direct action, as any capo might.

In 1934 he turned over the Gestapo to Himmler because the SS became the central organization when the SA was put down. In turn, the regime was encountering resistance from the finance ministry and central bank, and to bypass those opposition with a massive armaments program, the four year plan bureaucracy was created and Goering put in charge of it. He then had power as an economic dictator. The Luftwaffe was being formed at the same time, to be sure, and he held both portfolios, but the economic one was the larger commission, and in its own way gave him powers as wide as the police power had given him earlier (which passed to Himmler).

But all that was ancient history by mid 1943. Economic power had passed to Organization Todt and then to Albert Speer and Goering's role there shrank to nothingness. His standing from the Luftwaffe command suffered from the failure of the Battle of Britain and later from overpromising at Stalingrad (a pattern with him), and was in the process of collapsing due to the loss of the air war over central Germany. It wasn't until the fall of 1944 that his power was reduced to next to nothing and he became a standing joke, but he was on that path already. He was mostly focused on looting the art of Europe and eating whole bakeries at this point.

Kesselring has an old army Prussian officer, not a party type and not an air force creation. He was one of the few army officers retained in the smallest interwar force and responsible for parts of its training then - as pure a army general staff creature as existed at that point. In the mid 1930s he was transferred - by others, not at his own initiative, simply because his planning brain was wanted - to the Luftwaffe. He was an intellectual and a staffer type, used for talent not line command or political reasons, though he proved pliable enough politically to be popular with the ideologues running the party bureaucracies.

The MTO command was a Luftwaffe one simply because it was the most important German contribution to a mainly Italian theater in the early and early midwar period. The Italian air force was not equal to the task of denying the British the Med, the Luftwaffe was. There was a typical tug of war between Kesselring there and Rommel as field commander once he got going, and as was thoroughly typical the field command pulled its nominal superiors along, as long as Rommel appeared to be winning. So Kesselring didn't get his way in operations, until the Tunisia period, basically.

On Tunisia his strategic judgment was horrible and his operations technically sound and well directed. As usual, the importance of the former vastly outweighed the latter, and all his efforts were wasted. It made some sense to save Tunisia long enough to get the DAK out, but Kesselring optimistically tried to hold it and to even win by overly ambitious counterattacks. That predictably failed with the loss of 250,000 Axis troops and an irreplacable 4500 aircraft, more than half of them German. It was very dumb to fight on the other side of the Med, on thin air supply lines getting cut up by superior Allied air or thinner night time convoys. It was twice as dumb to throw away the cream of the Axis air forces in the Med in the attempt, but that is what Kesselring did. As usual, he was supported in all this because he was promising more than anyone could deliver and that is what the national leaders wanted to hear.

In Sicily he showed the reverse pattern - bad local direction (again the error was excessive optimism, more on that below) but eventually concluding, correctly, that the place could not be held and getting the heck out. What do I mean by bad local direction? He put Panzer Division HG on the main beaches in the south, and moved the more experienced 15th Panzergrenadier to the west. He thought HG PD was the stronger because it had more of the tanks - true - but it was newer to the place and still very untrained. (The previous version of the division had been destroyed in Tunisia; the infantry were green with less than a month's training as a unit and no familiarity with Sicily).

Next he thought he could hold the beaches by instant counterattack. He thought the Dieppe raid showed the way to defeat invasions, not comprehending the scale of a full Allied invasion of the kind of major fire support it had to call on. (The allies had more aircraft *squadrons* supporting the invasion than the Germans had individual *tanks* on the ground). The armored counterattacks at the beaches predictably failed as they ran into a wall of HE firepower from naval gunfire and air etc.

To Kesselring's credit, he then realized he had to run, and did so successfully - arguably his best piece of work, operationally.

Then in Italy, he thought the Italians would not switch sides, and was hopelessly wrong about that. He then was operationally competent in seizing southern Italy from them anyway. When the allies land at Salerno, he again expects to defeat them with a quick armored counterattack. It gets one day of successful "break in" that overruns one US battalion, then gets stopped by massive fire superiority. Here Kesselring saw the effects of naval gunfire first hand and finally got the point, but after throwing away two divisions plus worth of armor in the typical grand counterattack attempt.

Arguably his next best bit of operational work was selecting the positions for the Gustav line across southern Italy. He is frequently credited for the basic optimism in this, seeing that it could be held, but to me that is a stopped clock virture - he always oversold, and gets credit when it worked. The selection of the actual line was, however, technically competent as usual.

He next got to show his judgment dealing with the Anzio invasion - which, had it succeeded (which it could have with more aggressive allied and especially US command on the spot) would have made his decision to defend in the south look as stupid as Rommel thought it was, incidentally. Kesselring's solution to the invasion was - wait for it - optimistic that it would fail, plus a big instant armored counterattack. Which - wait for it - ran into a firestorm of Allied fire superiority and failed completely. The Germans would send a panzer division with 200 tanks and the allies would respond with single air raids by 500 heavy bombers saturating the battlefield with 500 lbs bombs until it was a muddy moonscape where nothing could move.

He managed to contain the beachhead for five months. It is fair to say the allies had failed, but what he got for it was stalemate for less than six months followed by large scale defeat - his usual pattern of "success".

By the time Rome fell in mid 1944, the whole theater was a sideshow, just as American strategists had always said. It was the British who thought it would be a softer target than France, where the Americans correctly saw all along that no victory in Italy would decide anything. The most that could be achieved was knocking out Italy and making the Med a safe English lake, and that was already achieved by the fall of 1943. Everything after that was an indecisive grind and a mutual waste of resources, at best marginally useful as an attrition drain on the Germans.

The big gain the Allies got from the whole campaign against Kesselring's command, from Tunisia on, was that the Med was part of the graveyard of the Luftwaffe. Even by mid 1943 they had hopelessly lost the air war in that theater, with thousands of planes lost etc. The allies could put up 10 planes to 1 by the time of Salerno and for the whole period after. This wasn't what broke the Luftwaffe over central Germany - that came later, only in the spring of 1944, and required P-51s and direct air to air combat over Germany - but the late 1943 Med fighting had already put their pilot pool into its long decline, kept their fighter count from building while the US air force count went up by a factor of 4, etc.

Hence my overall assessment of Kesselring - he is overrated. Yes he was technically competent, yes he had his occasional operational successes that can seriously be credited to him personally as a capable commander (getting out of Sicily successfully and cheaply, picking a good set of positions for the Gustav line). But he equally has staggering strategic errors (overcommitting to Tunisia) and tactical blindspots (overly aggressive with the armor and overconfident with it; poor appreciation for what allied firepower superiority did to any attempt to take the initiative even locally), for which he is unaccountable given a pass. And some of the items he is given credit for were just luck (defending southward, would have looked predictable and "predicted by Rommel" stupid if the US had taken Rome the day after the Anzio invasion e.g.).

One man's opinions...