Goering and Luftwaffe Infantry

[Sublime]

But Jason what could Kesselring really have done besides counterattack at Anzio? I suppose he could have resigned, but do you think a outright defense with no counter attacks would have been tolerated by Hitler? I think if he hadnt counterattacked he would have been sacked...

[JasonC]

Sublime - the foundation of leadership - real leadership of all kinds - is moral courage, not merely judgment and certainly not mere obedience. In war that means judging for oneself what is best for the men one leads, knowing to be sure what war can ask of them. When a man becomes a mere piece of tubing passing on ridiculous and murderous waste from insulated superiors to helpless subordinates, throwing away their lives for nothing, leadership has left the building.

Beyond moral courage, a professional officer is also expected to possess sound military judgment of what a situation requires and allows, an accurate assessment of what is possible, that guides the tasks he asks of those under his command. Well I'll just try something and hope and we will see, is not professional military judgment.

So what if a man gets sacked for proposing the correct course of action? Rundstadt got sacked, Guderian got sacked, von Bock got sacked, all before this time, and slightly later Manstein got sacked - all of them commanders far superior to Kesselring in every respect.

And it is not like Anzio was the only time it happened. It happened at least 4 times on his watch. In the first he might plead lack of knowledge of his adversaries and a particularly favorable but fleeting conjucture that had to be seized or lost forever (the moment of junction of DAK with the force sent to Tunisia, before 8th Army came up behind DAK in strength). At Gela in Sicily, he might plead not having faced such air power or naval fire support before, and so not knowing what it was capable of. By Salerno that excuse was already thin, and it showed he had not learned the lessons of Sicily. But by Anzio? Having seen the Salerno attempt and what happened to it?

Beyond that, it was a waste not just for the men ordered to try it, but for the German position in Italy. Which would have been superior in every respect with a full panzer corps sitting in Rome ready to back either the Anzio position or the Gustav line as required, than it became once the same was ground to powder in the mud outside Anzio.

As I said, there were a few cases where one can say Kesselring showed good operational judgment (Sicily evac, Gustav position choices), and he was generally competent technically, shifting forces as needed, not panicking, organizing reactions in a timely manner etc. All things you would expect from an old general staff favorite picked for his intellect. But neither sound strategic appraisals, military judgment of what was feasible particularly on the attack or using armor, nor moral courage, were long suits with him.

He is overrated.

[Erwin]

"...the foundation of leadership - real leadership of all kinds - is moral courage, not merely judgment and certainly not mere obedience. In war that means judging for oneself what is best for the men one leads, knowing to be sure what war can ask of them."

Couldn't agree more. But, every nation ends up with the same old stuff - where were our commanders "with moral courage in Iraq and Afghanistan...?" Mere obedience is of course what all military trainers aim for. So, we have to be understanding re how these things happen in history over and over again.

BTW: I never realized that Goering started the SS(!?) if so, I wonder why on earth he gave it to Himmler when the SS ended up being the most powerful enforcer of the Nazis and made Himmler #2.

[JonS]

Mere obedience is of course what all military trainers aim for.

No. That is, of course, not what military trainers aim for.

[Ithikial_AU]

Interesting reading. My thoughts on Kesselring mirror comments above. Brilliant at the administration and theater level decisions but less than average when deciding on strategic decisions, like where to counter attack. If someone like Rommel stayed in Italy and got along with Kesselring actions in Sicily and Salerno could have been a little different. Granted, sheer weight of firepower the allies had at this time however is something even strategic brilliance sometimes can't overcome.

Kesselring's organisation and rapid movements of troops to where they were needed is his biggest positive attribute to the theatre. When you look at how little the Germans had in manpower at some points it is quite impressive. Saying that there is another key factor that worked in his favour and could be seen as helping to mask his faults as a General and that's the terrain of Italy - it's a defenders paradise. In my opinion, he definitely had the easier job compared to his counterpart, Alexander.

You also have to remember Kesselring was defended by the likes of Churchill, Leese and Alexander when the initial death sentence was handed down, saying it was far to harsh for someone described a simply a military opponent.

[Freyberg]

Re one of the comments above: in fairness to Churchill, architect of the 'soft underbelly' policy, as well as his notorious optimism and adventurism, he probably also had in the back of his mind the desire to save Italy from Communism after the Axis were defeated, although he could hardly have come out openly and said that.

[Lethaface]

No. That is, of course, not what military trainers aim for.

On a larger scale, i.e. not only military: 'Mere obedience is what leaders and, derived from that, trainers should not aim for.'

However, in my humble experience with leaders and trainers in this world is that, while many realize, few dare to put this into practice. Politics...

[JasonC]

Erwin - Goering did not start the SS. He was the first real organizer of the SA back in the early 1920s, the one who made it a functioning paramilitary organization. (It already existed when he joined, but it was a few hundred street thugs in the party, nothing more). He later created the Gestapo - which was not initially an SS body but a state body -as the secret police of the state of Prussia, initially, and then as the secret police portion of the full Reich police, again as a state body. The SS was started as a personal bodyguard for Hitler within the SA, both of which were Nazi party, not state, formations.

But the SS along with the Gestapo were the instruments used to first, break all domestic opposition to the new regime and second, to destroy rival leadership of the SA in the "night of the long knives". *After* all that, Himmler personally was named chief of all German police - a state position - while he was already the head of the SS - technically, an organization within the Nazi party. After that appointment, the Gestapo came under his command. The association of the Gestapo with the SS stems from both being headed by Himmler and was not a legal thing; legally (not that law mattered much in the Third Reich) the Gestapo was a state body and the SS an inside-the-party special corps. But Goering had already shown that just by having a state body - the Prussian state police - hire exclusively picked party members (picked by Goering as Prussian interior minister), and then leaving them above the law by deliberate non-enforcement against anything they did - the party could capture and annex any legally-distinct state body it liked, and put itself above the law it was supposedly enforcing.

Think of a US political party official made head of the FBI, then hiring all his party cronies and completely staffing the FBI with them, firing everyone already there who didn't join in, and then doing whatever they liked to their political enemies - legally that would be the parallel procedure. Goering famously told his police officers that anyone they shot, he Goering had shot them, and if that made him a murderer that was fine because he was a murderer. He would defend their acts as his own no matter how criminal. When that is what the head of the police says and how he acts, the idea that the body he is leading is a legal state body rather than a party gang is pure fiction - but that is how they did the takeover. When Himmler as already head of the SS within the party was named chief of police for every legal police body in Germany, it was just repeating that for all other police bodies, and passing the command authority over the party-captured result to Himmler. People think of the Gestapo as an SS body from that date on, not because it was so legally, but because Himmler simply staffed the legal body of the police with his party goons from the SS, exclusively. (Exactly repeating Goering's procedure).

By the way, the command role of the SS also changed - it became a mass rather than leadership formation and internal security functions moved to the SD instead, under Heydrich, until his assassination in 1942.

Police power over domestic opponents was always the key political asset in this thuggish regime, and which bureaucracy wielded that power was always shifted with Hitler's favor. He didn't want any organized body to have that power permanently as a legal right; he wanted each of them to have it only temporarily as a function of present personal loyalty to him, as demonstrated in lack of resistance on the one hand and continuing ideological radicalization on the other.

This is the reason one cannot say anything about the authority or role of this or that formal body without a date attached. It was always moving - by design.

[JonS]

On a larger scale, i.e. not only military: 'Mere obedience is what leaders and, derived from that, trainers should not aim for.'

However, in my humble experience with leaders and trainers in this world is that, while many realize, few dare to put this into practice. Politics...

heh Well, my experience has been that the military has drills for a lot of basic tasks which are - generally - well thought out. When you're learning a drill you are expected to learn it and carry it out perfectly and exactly, which is perhaps where the "mindless automata" meme comes from.

What doesn't get mentioned are all the courses where creativity and lateral thinking are encouraged, which is pretty much every course that commanders go on. But creativity only works when you can rely on other people conducting the pre-requisite drills correctly. It's no good thinking about going left flanking through the wooded mountains when Private Ballbags is likely to get "creative" in his Battle Prep, and chose not to refuel the vehicles or clean his weapon.

[Erwin]

Thanks for the summary JasonC. I simply misread your earlier post re Goering and the origins of the SS.

[Lethaface]

Well who in the first place allowed Private Ballbags in charge of anything that has to do with inflammable liquids or even weapons? Nothing wrong with a bag of potatoes in need of skinning!

I thought drills were primarily conducted to enforce soldiers sticking to proper routine / disciplined reactions under heavy stress (incoming fire). But telling your commander that his tactical appreciation of a situation is plain wrong, because [valid reason]...? I'd be surprised that happening often even in case of [valid reason].

Unfortunately people barely seem to take the effort of thinking things through for themselves, whether it be the boss's orders, the news of the day or what any other expert or even moron tells them. Might be because nowadays life is complicated with cars, planes, computers, internet... heck, large hadron colliders producing black holes . So much stuff to understand, might as well just accept the information presented and not bother why or how. To steer back on topic: bit like how the average Luftwaffe infantry must have been coping

[Rokko]

Well it's not true that the police was entirely staffed with SS personell after 1936. These young SS and SD members, usually quite idealistic were just no match with experienced police officials, so many of them actually remained at their posts or even rose up in the hierarchy. The police was indeed purged of men who, for example were members in the Social Democratic Party but many just contiued serving under the new masters. Many welcomed how the Nazis increased their authority and their scope of action. Both the heads of the the Gestapo (Heinrich Müller, former head of the Bavarian political police) and Arthur Nebe (head of the criminal police Kripo) were not ardent Nazis before 1933. Many old Nazis in fact complained about Gestapo Müller becoming the head the centralized political police of entire Germany, because before the takeover he had oppressed the Nazis as well as the communists (he WAS an ardent anti-communist). The process of integrating the German police into the SS was pretty long and definately not finished by 1945, although in the end every policeman also held an SS rank.

Also it should be noted that, traditionally, the police in Germany was entirely decentralized. The Nazis reversed that which was new - after 1945, it became federal again though.

[JasonC]

Rokko - the amendment is basically friendly. As a state body the police certainly included other individuals; it even included whole subdivisions that remained mostly state bodies (the criminal police rather than the security or political police e.g., at some points in the timeline). The SS takeover of the police under Himmler meant that the direction of the institutions was captured and every important policy decision subordinated to the directives of that outside body and its own hierarchy - not that literally everyone in the state body was a member of the party body etc.

[poesel]

... - after 1945, it became federal again though.

For you US types: 'federal' in a German context means 'decentralized' or 'organized by state' and not the other way round as in the US.

[Sgt Joch]

I am currently reading the history of the Canadian Army in Italy and came across an interesting anecdote.

In december 1943, the Eighth Army was pushing up the Adriatic coast and Kesselring was running out of reserves. He pulled the reconnaissance battalion from the HG division west of the Apennines and sent it to cover a sector just west of Ortona.

On december 23rd, Kesselring received a phone call from Goring who chewed him out for committing "his division" piecemeal and demanded that it be used as a compact force. Despite this, the battalion stayed in the Ortona sector.

So Goring was keeping informed about the tactical use of the HG division and Kesselring, technically his subordinate in the Luftwaffe, had no problem ignoring his wishes.

[Mr.X]

At this time, 1943, Uncle Göring was a morphinist it is reported, that he sometimes used to sleep, while sitting in the middle of the daily "Führer"Conference....may be, a reason for Kesselrings insubordination

[Sakai007]

Here is a book that Amazon has made available free of charge for the kindle.

http://www.amazon.com/Panzer-Tactics-German-Small-Unit-ebook/dp/B00CDWVNXG/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1372969336&sr=1-1

You can d/l the Kindle emulator and read it in your browser with an Amazon account. I highly recommend it for the diagrams and pics alone.

EDIT - Guess i was a little late to the punch, as it isn't free anymore, but still worth a look if you have the $15 USD to shell out for it.

[Sublime]

Mr X he was probably 'nodding off' which is a very common side effect of morphine and its derivatives (like heroin)

[JasonC]

Mr X - Goering became a morphine addict after 1922, in fact. It started with a wound he received during the "beer hall putsch" coup attempt in Munich in that year, when he received morphine as part of his treatment. He was a strung out addict in the late 20s and a basket case. Political success pulled him together later. Declining fortunes in the war led to depression and relapse. But it didn't start then.

[Aragorn2002]

After reading most there is about the HG-division I can not conclude anything else than that they performed remarkably well, especially on the eastern front, where little honor could be gained against the time the division showed up. As always, go back to the source and don't listen to what others think to know.

[Mr.X]

I think to know, that HG units during the fighting of summer 1944 were critisized by several officers of the "Totenkopf" Of course, I am not sure, if these HG units really have performed the way, those TK officers reported later. But, obviously, most of the units, which arrived at the Eastfront and had fought in Italy or other western theatres before, got problems during their first weeks fighting against the RA.

Regards

Frank

[Sublime]

Well Im sure some had adjustment problems to the different nature of fighting in the East vs the West. You also see the reverse - units that fought well in the East did awful in the West. (IIRC 2nd SS is a good example. I may be wrong about it being 2nd SS, maybe it was 17th? Either way they fought well in East, awful in West in Normandy.)

Also a lot of memoirs I read actually thought fighting the West was worse. S. Knappes memoir mentions the level of firepower used by the Allies in the west was way worse than anything he'd seen in the East. However he also pointed out that ambulances and stretcher bearers generally werent shot at, like in the East. I guess its all relative.

[JasonC]

Sublime - you must be thinking of 2SS, which did fight in the east. 17SS was new to combat in Normandy, just formed.

[Gamer58]

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...

So...

What was his alternative to Tunisia? Losing half his men trying to get back across the Med... and then what?

What was his alternative to counterattacking the Allies on the beach - at Gela or on the boot of Italy? Staying back and getting pounded from the air and the 6" naval artillery?

[JasonC]

Gamer58 - the alternative to the build up and counterattack plan in Tunisia is to hold just long enough to get DAK across Libya and out through ports and by air. Do not commit the Luftwaffe to fight on the far side of the Med and get 2/3rds of it shot down doing so. Get as much men and material - especially the seasoned vets of the DAK panzer formations, and 10th panzer etc sent to counterattack historically, out through Tunis. If a rear guard has to stay and fight it out, let it be Italian infantry with minimum sufficient German infantry force stiffeners.

Then you have the full Luftwaffe on the right side of the Med, intact, to defend southern Italy against an amphib operation. The allies are at their weakest when farthest from their airbases, for fighter cover especially. You also get at least 3 vet panzer formations and a couple more mobile ones above what they had historically, for the Italian campaign.

Next on proper use of those mobile formations to defend Italy, it is as mobile linebackers, reserves, flocking to allied heavy points and countering their concentrations. Make them face German armor that is standing on the defense tactically, with full AFV numbers not fourths after attack losses. That may include very local counterpunching at the smallest scales occasionally, to be sure. It does not include trying to throw the allies into the sea, and thereby attacking with mass armor in the open in naval gunfire range. Just deny allied infantry their unchecked tank support tactically, by always having German armor to counter it. See Goodwood for the kind of problem that can present to allied attacks, even with heavy prep fires.

The Germans just did not have a proper doctrine for the specifically defensive use of armor. They also had a high command that picked proposals on the basis of how optimistic they sounded, without regard for their practicality. The result was waste of their strongest suit, the general combat power of their veteran mobile formations. Even severely depleted, those held the allies quite well, when standing of defense and making full use of terrain etc. they just had to do it with quarter the tanks because the rest had been thrown away in glorious death rides, and without any air cover because that was thrown away trying to hold Tunisia. Which a twelve year old could see could not and would not be held - and was not worth holding anyway.