New Book: "Battlegroup!: The Lessons of the Unfought Battles of the Cold War" (Jim Storr)

[Cpl Steiner]

Hi all,

This book looks interesting, due out soon...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Battlegroup-Lessons-Unfought-Battles-Cold/dp/1914059964/ref=sr_1_1?crid=35HWTT0QVZE3E&keywords=battlegroup+jim+storr&qid=1639151810&s=books&sprefix=battlegroup!%2Caps%2C160&sr=1-1

It might be useful for scenario designers.

[Simcoe]

Hmm doesn't look like the author has written many books. Have you read any of his? It looks like people say he is a bit disorganized?

[domfluff]

Ooh, looks great, thank you

 

[Combatintman]

12 minutes ago, Simcoe said:

Hmm doesn't look like the author has written many books. Have you read any of his? It looks like people say he is a bit disorganized?

Not everybody says that.  I think with this book he'll be on safe ground - he served in the British Army during that era and almost certainly spent a fair amount of his career in 1 (BR) Corps roled units.  The scope of the book, judging from the notes, I also think will limit any 'disorganized' tendencies.  He was a prolific contributor to the British Army Review so, while he may not have written too many books I wouldn't see that as a concern.  Number of books is not a qualification - Al Ventner has written gallons of books but they are all painful reading - I only buy his stuff because he's one of the few people that writes about the Portuguese colonial conflicts.  I am seriously thinking of buying it.

[George MC]

19 minutes ago, Combatintman said:

Not everybody says that.  I think with this book he'll be on safe ground - he served in the British Army during that era and almost certainly spent a fair amount of his career in 1 (BR) Corps roled units.  The scope of the book, judging from the notes, I also think will limit any 'disorganized' tendencies.  He was a prolific contributor to the British Army Review so, while he may not have written too many books I wouldn't see that as a concern.  Number of books is not a qualification - Al Ventner has written gallons of books but they are all painful reading - I only buy his stuff because he's one of the few people that writes about the Portuguese colonial conflicts.  I am seriously thinking of buying it.

Just ordered this as my Xmas pressie

[Megalon Jones]

My poor bookshelf overfloweth!  Looks like I’m pre-ordering.  

[Chudacabra]

Looks great, but the Canadian preorder price on Amazon is $115. Will have to wait and see!

[MikeyD]

I read the synopsis, it sounds either quite fascinating or it'll retread the same ground this title and discussion forum have already thoroughly covered. That's not a knock on the book, I mean everyone here is just too knowledgeable for our own good! 

[Aragorn2002]

17 hours ago, George MC said:

Just ordered this as my Xmas pressie

You buy your own Christmas present, George? That's what I call a MAN!

[Thewood1]

I would normally wait for an ebook version.  But Helion doesn't have many ebooks.

[MOS:96B2P]

18 hours ago, Combatintman said:

Not everybody says that.  I think with this book he'll be on safe ground - he served in the British Army during that era and almost certainly spent a fair amount of his career in 1 (BR) Corps roled units.  The scope of the book, judging from the notes, I also think will limit any 'disorganized' tendencies.  He was a prolific contributor to the British Army Review so, while he may not have written too many books I wouldn't see that as a concern.  Number of books is not a qualification - Al Ventner has written gallons of books but they are all painful reading - I only buy his stuff because he's one of the few people that writes about the Portuguese colonial conflicts.  I am seriously thinking of buying it.

 

18 hours ago, George MC said:

Just ordered this as my Xmas pressie

I will await both of your in-depth reviews (no less than 873 words, two diagrams & one photo).  I will then make the appropriate decision on if I should buy or not. 

[Aragorn2002]

1 hour ago, MOS:96B2P said:

 

I will await both of your in-depth reviews (no less than 873 words, two diagrams & one photo).  I will then make the appropriate decision on if I should buy or not. 

I will await the campaign George will be making based upon this book.

[Simcoe]

On 12/10/2021 at 12:55 PM, Combatintman said:

Not everybody says that.  I think with this book he'll be on safe ground - he served in the British Army during that era and almost certainly spent a fair amount of his career in 1 (BR) Corps roled units.  The scope of the book, judging from the notes, I also think will limit any 'disorganized' tendencies.  He was a prolific contributor to the British Army Review so, while he may not have written too many books I wouldn't see that as a concern.  Number of books is not a qualification - Al Ventner has written gallons of books but they are all painful reading - I only buy his stuff because he's one of the few people that writes about the Portuguese colonial conflicts.  I am seriously thinking of buying it.

Thank you for letting me know. Those were the complaints I saw so I wanted to check here.

I picked it up on Amazon. I can think of worse ways to spend $45!

[BeondTheGrave]

On 12/10/2021 at 3:55 PM, Combatintman said:

The scope of the book, judging from the notes

Have you had a chance to look at the notes? Would be curious to see them. Is there some kind of 'look inside' access on the amazon page I'm missing? 

I'm particularly interested in what his 'new untapped sources' are, and his new revelations on the Bundeswehr. 

Edited December 11, 2021 by BeondTheGrave

[Combatintman]

4 hours ago, BeondTheGrave said:

Have you had a chance to look at the notes? Would be curious to see them. Is there some kind of 'look inside' access on the amazon page I'm missing? 

I'm particularly interested in what his 'new untapped sources' are, and his new revelations on the Bundeswehr. 

No - just the product description on the Amazon page.

[sawomi]

Another  very good book is "Schlachtfeld Fulda Gap – Schriftenreihe Point Alpha, Band 2", published by Dieter Krüger.

But the English language version ("Fulda Gap: Battlefield of the Cold War Alliances" ) is expensive...

content (chapters):

1: Fulda Gap: A Flashpoint of the Cold War between Myth and Reality, Helmut H. Hammerich
2: The Eighth Guards Army of the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany and the Fulda Gap, Matthias Uhl
3: The Strategic and Operational Considerations of NATO in Europe since the 1970s, Helge Hansen 
4: The Development of the Military Conceptions of the Warsaw Pact in the Last Two Decades of the East–West Conflict, Siegfried Lautsch
5: The Development of NATO Defense Plans for Central Europe in the Final Decades of the Cold War, Gregory W. Pedlow
6: The Defense of Highway 84: Recollections of the Commander, B Troop, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, 1978–1980, Roger Cirillo
7: The Fulda Gap: A Personal Perspective from Platoon Leader to Army Group, Crosbie E. Saint
8: The GDR and its Mission in the Warsaw Pact, Torsten Diedrich
9: The Wartime Mission of the Border Troops of the GDR, Detlef Rotha
10: Brinkmanship in the Cold War: Theoretical Foundation and Application, Mathias Rupp
11: When the Cold War Almost Turned Hot, Albin F. Irzyk
12: When the World Stood at the Abyss—and No One Knew It, Volker Bausch
13: The Military Relationship of Forces between the North Atlantic Alliance and the Warsaw Pact, Michael Poppe
14: The Alliances and the Fulda Gap: A Balance between Ideology, Politics, Strategy, and Operational Plans, Dieter Krüger

 

[BeondTheGrave]

16 hours ago, Combatintman said:

No - just the product description on the Amazon page.

My bad, I must have misunderstood what you were saying. 

[Combatintman]

1 minute ago, BeondTheGrave said:

My bad, I must have misunderstood what you were saying. 

• No need to apologise mate.

[Simcoe]

This may be a bit premature but just thought I'd share.

I just got the book and read through around 40 pages. It's written well and I like the way it's organized.

The maps are useful and it's given me a new perspective on the situation. I never realized how much of the defense was held by the German army for example.

It's funny though. You write a book about a possible attack from the Soviet Union and in the first chapter you basically say "Ya, the Soviets never stood a chance and they never thought about initiating an attack. Manpower was roughly equal on both sides so it would never have worked."

I mean, we both know Superman is going to defeat Lex Luthor but at least make it "seem" like he has a chance.

All jokes aside, I'm liking the book so far.

[marais]

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments:

• It's well written, approachable but serious.
• There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition.
• The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations.
• That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper.
• I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army. 
• For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise.
• Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago.
• There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents.
• Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources.
• The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail.
• Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII.
• Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this.
• That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

[marais]

The book's full of little gems:

• Storr suggests that, because of range safety rules at BATUS that made it awkward to push past notional enemy units, British small unit leaders acquired the habit of attacking hostile positions rather than bypassing.
• A chapter about armor compares major MBTs by diagraming their protection, firepower, and mobility in a triangle. The Panther tank is represented as an equilateral triangle, as a baseline, and it appears on every tank's diagram as a reference. The Chieftain's heavy weight toward firepower is clear in an instant; the T-34's mobility but limited protection and firepower is equally stark.
• Storr examines readiness and deployment times in considerable detail, tallying up the number of formations that would have been available to mount an attack or to resist a Warsaw Pact advance. (Maybe Brigade! might have been a more appropriate title?)  

[Simcoe]

27 minutes ago, marais said:

Just received my copy and skimmed the whole thing. A few initial impressions, with the caveat that this isn't my field and I'm not really in the best position to evaluate the correctness of facts or strength of arguments:

• It's well written, approachable but serious.
• There is a clear influence of operations research. Storr points toward different countries' OR work, and the text itself leans on calculations of quantities like platoon/company frontages, weights of fire, and tons of ammunition.
• The book relies heavily on a relatively small number of sources, particularly US and UK field manuals, and reports from 1980s exercises and simulations.
• That said, the author's own experience in the field, along with those of correspondents, informs his interpretation of evidence on paper.
• I have a criticism of the chapter on reconnaissance. One of Storr's sources is McGrath's Scouts Out! Neither Storr nor McGrath addresses the doctrinal and cultural differences between reconnaissance and cavalry in the US Army. 
• For a book titled Battlegroup!, there's little discussion of the organization of battlegroups. Total quantities of TOWs and Milan firing posts, sure, but nothing that would tell you how a battlegroup operates. This comes back to the operations research perspective: Storr talks glibly about how it might be more efficient to organize a company in 10 sections rather than 9, without discussing the administrative and leadership issues that such an organization would raise.
• Having skimmed the book, I know no more about the organization of any battalion-size unit than I did 24 hours ago.
• There is good attention to human issues, like the unique amount of operational experience that British Army personnel had because of service in Northern Ireland. Everything in the book reflects the perspective of an officer who served in the era he's writing about, with input from a rich array of correspondents.
• Storr is skeptical of Soviet capabilities, and especially of Soviet forces' ability to function in a real operational environment. Much of the analysis of the Soviet side follows from WWII sources.
• The book focuses on British, US, and West German forces, with shorter passages about the French, Canadian, and Belgian armies. It does not look at the Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces at the same level of detail.
• Storr holds that the West German army was the most capable of the NATO allies, through training, tactics, and equipment choices, largely ones that built on and continued the lessons of WWII.
• Given that this is a semi-scholarly book, Storr spends a really bizarre amount of time talking about wargames that he and his brother played out. Those wargames drive more of his conclusions than I'm comfortable with, and the results get mixed with other sources of evidence. (Storr and his brother, both army officers, ran their own tabletop wargames for 32 years, apparently under rules systems of their own design.) If I were a journal reviewer in my own field, I would not endorse this book for publication without serious edits. I'm shocked that an editor let Storr get away with this.
• That said, I've quite enjoyed the book so far and have found it immensely illuminating. I'd recommend it for purchase.

Glad I'm not the only one who thought the wargaming examples were weird. I admit that I skimmed the chapter explaining the wargaming because it felt so bizarre to include in the book. Combat Mission has a number of people involved in researching armor values etc and no one is citing it as gospel. This is just too guys and some dice.

Another issue I had was how he utilizes citations. I think they should be used to support specific details/numbers (armor values, troop numbers) but Storr would state a generic maxim like "British infantry were just better" and a citation at the end. I am not going to read an entirely different book to confirm vague generalization.

I wish he focused on a few subjects and went into further detail. I was really interested in his discussion of mechanized infantry and how each nation preferred fighting dismounted compared to mounted but he only spends a few pages on it before moving on to another topic.

I'm being pretty harsh but I found the book interesting and finished it pretty quickly. For a casual like me, it's a wide but shallow introduction to operations in Europe.

[marais]

1 hour ago, Simcoe said:

Glad I'm not the only one who thought the wargaming examples were weird. I admit that I skimmed the chapter explaining the wargaming because it felt so bizarre to include in the book. Combat Mission has a number of people involved in researching armor values etc and no one is citing it as gospel. This is just too guys and some dice.

Another issue I had was how he utilizes citations. I think they should be used to support specific details/numbers (armor values, troop numbers) but Storr would state a generic maxim like "British infantry were just better" and a citation at the end. I am not going to read an entirely different book to confirm vague generalization.

I wish he focused on a few subjects and went into further detail. I was really interested in his discussion of mechanized infantry and how each nation preferred fighting dismounted compared to mounted but he only spends a few pages on it before moving on to another topic.

I'm being pretty harsh but I found the book interesting and finished it pretty quickly. For a casual like me, it's a wide but shallow introduction to operations in Europe.

Agreed—also found the book interesting and a quick, enjoyable read. It's given me perspective or confirmed ideas that I only had before from random websites.

I think I figured out how I'd sum the book up: good at thinking about battalion- and company-level organizational, training, and equipment issues that affect operations at the scale of divisions and corps. Talking about battalions and below, though, the book becomes more normative rather than descriptive.

Edited January 6, 2022 by marais
Removed a line that was sharper than I intended.

[John Kettler]

What a fascinating thread, to which would like to contribute a couple of points. The first is that after the Berlin Wall fell, and we were able to get some of our armor combat leaders, presumably in mufti, into the formerly denied areas by the border opposite the Fulda Gap, our people made a shocking discovery, which was reported in Jame's Defence Review: There was simply not enough room to bring in the Red Army forces our planners had long anticipated bursting across the border from there. The available space simply wouldn't have allowed it! How decades of across the border imaging and overhead imagery had failed to reveal this most salient of points, I know not, but it was a shock to the readers, including me. Second, the use of the equilateral triangle with vertices of Firepower, Mobility and Protection was, I believe, the creation of BG Richard Simpkin, MC, OBE, in his groundbreaking Race to the Swift. If he didn't invent this extremely clever technique, certainly he was the first to use it that I know of. BG Simpkin wasn't some armchair type, either, for he cut short his studies at Cambridge to fight with the RTR in the Western Desert in 1941. Wanted Red Armour desperately, but it was a lot of money I didn't have, every bit as out of reach as Chris Bellamy's marvelous Red God of War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Simpkin

Regards,

John Kettler
 

[Simcoe]

11 minutes ago, John Kettler said:

What a fascinating thread, to which would like to contribute a couple of points. The first is that after the Berlin Wall fell, and we were able to get some of our armor combat leaders, presumably in mufti, into the formerly denied areas by the border opposite the Fulda Gap, our people made a shocking discovery, which was reported in Jame's Defence Review: There was simply not enough room to bring in the Red Army forces our planners had long anticipated bursting across the border from there. The available space simply wouldn't have allowed it! How decades of across the border imaging and overhead imagery had failed to reveal this most salient of points, I know not, but it was a shock to the readers, including me. Second, the use of the equilateral triangle with vertices of Firepower, Mobility and Protection was, I believe, the creation of BG Richard Simpkin, MC, OBE, in his groundbreaking Race to the Swift. If he didn't invent this extremely clever technique, certainly he was the first to use it that I know of. BG Simpkin wasn't some armchair type, either, for he cut short his studies at Cambridge to fight with the RTR in the Western Desert in 1941. Wanted Red Armour desperately, but it was a lot of money I didn't have, every bit as out of reach as Chris Bellamy's marvelous Red God of War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Simpkin

Regards,

John Kettler
 

Could you elaborate on the first point? Are you saying the physical size of the border area was too small to allow a large force to move through it?