The German military tradition

[Tux]

Originally posted by pamak1970:

By the way,according to physics the center of gravity can be located outside of an object's mass . For example The center of gravity of two big spheres of equal mass seperated by a certain distance , is going to be located in the middle of that distance and away from either sphere's mass.

Sorry to tip things off topic for another split second, but, whilst this is correct, the centre of gravity of the system is still the same as the centre of mass of the system. You have described the centre of gravity of the system containing two masses and compared it to the centre of mass of a different system (that of a single mass). In your example the twin-mass system's centre of gravity is between the masses, as is the same system's centre of mass. Join the two (let us assume identical) spheres with a rod and the centre of mass/ gravity will be in the middle of the rod. The two will be identical unless possible fluctuations in the gravitational field within the system are taken into account, in which case the centre of gravity may shift.

As for the discussion re military strategy, excuse me for being slow but I'm encountering most of this for the very first time in this thread. Do 'modern manoeuvrists', as JasonC calls them, truly fundamentally disagree with the teaching of Clausewitz and Napoleon, or do they simply insist on a different interpretation? At the moment the crux of the argument seems to regard exactly what these two meant when they set down their respective theories, as opposed to whether they were right or not.

Do both 'sides' ('manoeuvrists' and 'attritionists') claim to have the ingenius backing of Clausewitz and Napoleon, and to have correctly interpreted their teachings where the other has done so incorrectly?

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Originally posted by Tux:

As for the discussion re military strategy, excuse me for being slow but I'm encountering most of this for the very first time in this thread. Do 'modern manoeuvrists', as JasonC calls them, truly fundamentally disagree with the teaching of Clausewitz and Napoleon, or do they simply insist on a different interpretation?

some disagree and believe that motorization, airforces and signalling technologies have fundamentally changed the nature of war. some just have different interpretation. some of it is just talk on different scale (e.g. "going around" and aiming at weakness on smaller scale to achieve enemy destruction on larger scale). much of it is just relatively meaningless mumbojumbo about terminology.

none of it is a new phenomenon. it certainly predates WW2.

the discussion is a bit of a mess and must be very confusing to read. for example in the original thread there was much talk about attacks that are blind rushes and evils of maneuver theorists, while many of contemporary methods of maneuver theories were specifically created to avoid having attacks that are blind rushes.

anyway, JasonC is of course in general absolutely correct about the common cartoony version of German military tradition, though he himself is a bit quilty of making cartoony generalizations.

[pamak1970]

Sorry to tip things off topic for another split second, but, whilst this is correct, the centre of gravity of the system is still the same as the centre of mass of the system.

Correct,and the center of the mass can be located outside of the mass itself. I think a more clear example is the case of a homogenous round ring which is a single object and still the center is located in the middle, outside of the physical dimensions of the ring

[JasonC]

URD - I resemble that remark lol. It is fair to say I am indulging, no doubt too much, in turnabout cartoon-ism.

As for the question whether attritionists claim Napoleon and Clausewitz, I'd say "no", as a general thing. But there are a few of their doctrines that attritionist thought accepts as simply sound. Seeking decision through annihilation battle, for example. The critical importance of numbers, since skill differences between leading states tend to be fleeting and bounded.

A BHL Hart would claim Napoleon was a great maneuverist committed to going around. As would many other cartoon maneuverists. This sometimes gets taken to comical extremes, like historians (e.g. Chandler) claiming all Napoleon's successful frontal attack battles were blind luck and him having a bad day, while his "going around", flanking victories were the essence of Napoleon. I think Chandler takes the cake treating Borodino as a disaster and blaming it on Napoleon having a kidney stone lol. So, they sort of claim him, but with lots of revisionism to reject anything insufficiently maneuver-ee as supposedly one of his "mistakes".

Mostly though, the maneuverists get away with cartoons because they have the field to themselves, and get to describe attritionism as everything idiotic and spin away all the cases where it worked. You must have encountered this tendency. Lee is brilliant and Grant is a blind butcher. Ok, so Grant won, huff huff. The Germans were brilliant and the Russians, especially, blind butchers. Americans not much better except for Patton. OK, so the butchers won. Huff huff. And so it goes.

When the maneuverists past gambled and lost, it is always put down to them not being sufficiently thoroughgoing in their maneuverism, or occasionally and inconsistently, in the odds being so stacked against them. (By what? And the view that odds is decisive is...)

[Incognito]

Ok, it's nice that someone is showig Germans in little different light. Surely yuor average 14 year old fatso wargamer is little prone to "compensate" his lacking qualities given how masculine most of German uniforms look.

I however can't fathom this hatred towards "Manouver". To me it seems like natural tendency for soldiers to turn their attention towards spatial matters and timetables as they rarely can affect into their equipment. What Im saying is, yuo go to battle whit gun yuor given and yuo can't choose if yuor fighting enemy bigger than yuo.

Are modern militaries fixed to terminology to the point where none one is even trying to see outside the box of mobility? Possibly, but if yuo look at how yuor average infantry platoon differs from that of 70 years ago. Yeah, trucks instead of ponies. What can yuo do if yuor faster, but nothing much more? Technical developement has ment that military terminology has centered around that.

It doesn't mean that that words like exchance ration and attiration containment are bad, they are just hard to measure.

Yuo may burn little manpower now, as attacker allways does, but if in the end yuo manage to surround the enemy it kinda makes up to it. Average commander probably doesn't know how many enemies he has killed irw unlike in CM. He only knows that he has this many troops left and that he is on schedule.

[Bigduke6]

Interesting discussion. I'd like to add an aspect that doesn't seem to have been considered much so far - German tactical/small unit tradition (for lack of a better term), and how that has affected the "overall German military tradition."

What I mean by this is that the original German military, well, the Prussian military that eventually became dominant in Germany proper, was originally distinctive primarily on the tactical level. The things that set Frederick II's army apart from the rest of Europe are well known:

* Brutal infantry discipline producing units able to issue fire somewhere between marginally and significantly faster than the opposition

* That same discipline making Prussian infantry substantially more reslient to fire, and able to maneuver under fire, than most of the opposition

* A shift from the "controlled trotting" cavalry attack, to the "gallop, balls-to-the-wall" cavalry attack; this supposedly made necessary because Prussian horseflesh was inferior to Austrian, and so Prussian cavalry units had to make up what they lacked in horse strength with velocity and the discipline needed to control it.

* Arguably Europe's best NCO Corps, and in any case one of the best, as a natural result of the need to enforce discipline, and also as Jason pointed out Germany's long tradition of educational excellence.

* A similarly highly-disciplined officer corps that took orders unquestioningly, though noble had pretensions to professionalism. It is quite true that limiting the officer corps limits the manpower pool, but since the Prussian Kings were military enthusiasts, the subjects that aped that behavior tended to get along in the military organization. Contrast this with for instance Austria or Russia, where the only prerequisite for being a combat officer was birth, no military knowledge required and in Russia sometimes not even literacy.

* An operational system focused on bringing that tactically-efficient army up against an opposing one, hopefully in an advantageous position, and striking an overwhelming blow.

The Battle of Leuthen is the classic example of this technique: use your army to make a clever approach march against an inert opponent, deploy efficiently, and trash the enemy army by crashing in on its flank.

The Battle of Rossbach is an advanced version of the approach: flank march, assault, and the arm of decision - the Prussian cavalry - not only demolishes large sections of the opposition, it has the discipline after its success to reform, re-organize, and perform subsequent attacks, and then a pursuit.

All of these facets of the Prussian army were driven by the Prussian basic assumptions that war is at least inevitable and in some instances even good, and in any case Berlin must be prepared for it; that Prussia will always fight outnumbered; and that the only possible way to advance the Prussian state is by creating Europe's most efficient army. And by extension, the national idea that in many ways, the German nation is the army.

I certainly don't want to denigrate Gneisenau's reforms, their effects on how Germans approached war on the operational and strategic level are of course massive.

However, I would argue that Gneisenau's reforms far more reinforced, rather than changed, the Prussian military tradition on the tactical level. Of course, the armies fielded post-Gneisenau were not conscripts kept in line by whip and chain, but increasingly, recruits told they were fighting for the German nation.

But a great deal of what the German army was and how it went about business remains the same all the way from 1807 - 1945. Discipline remained relatively severe by most European standards, the army remained the embodiment of the German nationalist idea, the NCOs stayed excellent, and the regimental officers were obliged to know their jobs better than officers in the rest of Europe. Throughout, the assumption remained: "Wars are won by efficient combat units."

What Gneisenau and the General staff that followed him did was add a layer to that, more or less "And those military units must be controlled by an intelligent and pro-active staff system."

It is of course debatable, when WW2 rolled about, how much of what we know of the "classic" German military tradition was due to the long existence of the world's best general staff, and how much that was due to the fact that that general staff's main tool was an army with regimental-level traditions carried straight back to Frederich the Great, and a manpower pool of Germans educated for about a century and a half that the German army must be Europe's best, and "best" is achieved with intelligent command enforced by discipline. And further, that as a centrally-located European state, Germany will almost always fight outnumbered, making efficiency and so discipline all the more paramount.

But the parallels are clear. Throughout, the German military system has always assumed that it must have the most efficient military units possible, and further, that those units are the necessary building blocks for a successful war.

Given those assumptions, I would say alot of the WW2 "maneuver" aspects of the German army were almost inevitable. In rough terms, if you reject an attrition/trench warfare approach to 20th century war, it naturally follows that you will search for a way to win wars with your efficient units, and Blitzkrieg becomes - almost - little more than a framework by which the modern German army could strive towards the same thing Frederick did: get the opposing army at a disadvantage and then knock it out in a single blow, with your tactically/technically-superior regiments and battalions throwing the punch.

It's almost a validation of the old "geography is destiny" argument. One might say, since the Germans were located where they were, they had no choice but to be militaristic and strive for an efficient army, and everything else followed from that.

I won't go so far as to say it was inevitable. But I think a discussion of the German military tradition should take the tactical level, and so the traditions of the importance of discipline and efficiency in the small units, into account.

In a phrase, and my opinion, you can't separate the German military tradition from its Feldwebels.

[JasonC]

Incognito - the maneuver theorists are insufferable. They slander all other methods, they ignore both empirical history and clear reasoning, they pretend their methods are the essence of military acumen etc.

And it has a direct and bad effect on military thought, on the preparation of modern officers, it systematically distorts military history research etc. My attitude toward the school is roughly parallel to what any rational historian thought about invading Marxist ideologues in general academic history 50 years ago, or any social scientist of the 80s thought about deconstruction. It is a pseudo intellectual fad trashing real thought in the disciplines it touches.

But take your post as an example. You speak as though attrition theory is the advice to have an advantage in numbers, and since that is out of the field commander's hands, of course he is left with maneuver as the only field of application for his own thoughts or decisions. This just reflects the cumulative effect of the collosal slander of all previous strategy by maneuver theorists. There is a whole art to attrition strategy, but their straw men have boiled that down to "have more at the outset", in your mind.

What gets forgotten or denied as a result?

Firepower kills.

The decision is achieved by fire.

Wars are protracted affairs.

Dead men hold no ground.

Brains blasted to atoms have remarkably long ODA decision loop times.

The winner is not necessarily the side that hits first, but is necessarily the side that hits last.

Reserves. Forces paced through the time dimension of combat.

Flexible formations, ranks and reliefs, that are not out of position no matter what the enemy does.

Flexible combat power conquering friction.

One way to impose your will on the battlefield is to ignore the enemy's, instead of trying to get inside it.

Mass. The avoidance of secondary efforts and distractions.

Decision. Selection of goals not based on hoped-for temporary enemy vulnerability to them, but on how final their effect promises to be.

Focus on capabilities, not passing stance.

Indifference between offense and defense. Tactically, the defense is often superior.

Choosing or denying battle. Choosing the level of the fight and pacing it in time and space.

Combined arms efficiencies, right weapon on right target, not for the plan, but the other way around - the plan chosen to allow it.

The fielded forces of the enemy as the decisive target, rather than a supposedly dangerous "surface".

Relative weapon efficiencies and their key drivers, over entire service lives.

Viewing all actions, decisions, and combats as exchanges.

Investment efficiency in exchange terms - how much, for what?

Getting time on your side, instead of racing against the clock.

Impervious positions, inexorable processes.

Blockade and systematic removal of choices from the enemy arsenal of moves.

Damping down the variance a gambling enemy seeks to ramp up.

The intimidation achieved by indifference to enemy razzle dazzle.

Odds always matter. Fielded forces always matter. Replacement rate always matters.

Flows not stocks - rates not single actions - logistic thruput not one-off counts. Make and move 100 million shells and bury the enemy in HE.

Brutality. Concentrated conscious systematic industrial murder.

Clear sighted acceptance of the costs of war.

Honesty in assessment of achievables, not overpromising.

Lion tamers - Wallenstein not Gustavus, Blucher not Napoleon, Grant not Lee, Vasilevsky not Manstein.

Professionalism, not primadonna brilliancy-hunt fame-seeking by wannabees. Know the trade, make sober, sound, rational decisions that apply all available power efficiently.

Is there room left in that for maneuver? OK, sure, it can sometimes provide force multipliers, typically of modest scope or for limited periods of time, but usefully so. The strategic wrapper remains attritionist - focused on odds and the live forces remaining and getting it to move in your favor.

Then there are the specific errors of maneuverism that all of the above avoids.

The illusion that wars can be short, quick, and painless.

The illusion that one breakthrough will destroy a major enemy state or settle everything.

The illusion that driving around an enemy will destroy him.

The illusion that enemy shortcomings he can readily learn and remedy, are your own brilliancies, under your own control, and can be duplicated at will.

The illusion that temporary advantages of position or stance matter more than lasting strength.

Failure of decision, when the momentary proves momentary as the moment passes and the enemy moves.

Failure of decision, when the enemy's weakness you sought to exploit was left weak by him for a reason - it objectively does not matter.

Attempting to achieve a decision by movement rather than fire.

Attempting to achieve victory by scoring a touchdown, only to find the enemy alive and kicking no matter where you are.

Reckless risks run chasing illusionary advantages.

Major forces misused in attempts to achieve too fast what requires time.

Winded forces, punched out, because sustainment and pacing were thrown out the window seeking immediate victory.

Everything committed, no reserves, because all seems to hang on one event, in your own subjective wishing rather than in the world.

Reacting so much to perceived enemy weaknesses that he can give *your* forces orders, by dangling perceivable apparent weaknesses.

While you go around the enemy, he goes around you.

Rommel dashing to the Egyptian wire while the New Zealanders relieve Tobruk.

Attacks pushed recklessly to total loss because all seems to hang on retaining the initiative.

Ground illusion. Fighting in the wrong place tactically just because it is farther east than yesterday.

Unrealistic self assessment - 100 wannabee Napoleons, not one actual.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking - Guderian turned right, turning right will win. Very slightly exaggerated for clarity.

Unrealistic underestimation of the enemy.

Unrealistic weighing of odds and positioning.

Asking far too much of the men, especially through time, to cover one's own lack of provision for pacing and sustainment.

Throwing away lives needlessly under the impression that all must be risked for this one decisive breakthrough. When there isn't just one, there isn't any breakthrough, and it wouldn't be decisive anyway.

I could go on for days...

[JasonC]

BigDuke6 - I don't buy it, I think you are mostly just repeating the typical revisionists myths of the maneuverists. Was the *later* German army well trained and its NCOs exceptionally competent, long after the time of Gneisenau, say by WW I or II? Sure. But I deny that was a result of a unitary Prussia tradition back to Frederick, and I think the geography destiny line is clearly just nonsense, and fails completely in the entire period between Frederick and WW I.

As for Frederick's own achievements, he was blessed with Austrians as opponents, and those incompetent even by the standards of their day. Everybody manhandled them - Frederick and Napoleon of course, both great captains, but also the Turks, who were not. 50 years later it is perfectly typical that one finds a single French cavalry regiment charging a giant Austrian infantry column and taking thousands of prisoners in minutes.

Besides his opponent's obvious stuff ups, one can say the Prussian cavalry had a certain morale edge that showed in head to head engagements with equal numbers of enemy cavalry. But the part about this reflecting some innovation in charge speed is nonsense, typical back-projected maneuverist revisionism worshipping speed. Gustavus, not Frederick, was the man who taught cavalry to charge home like that, and made it an arm of decision. His infantry already had any edge in drill or steadiness Frederick's might claim. So did Brit infantry as early as the New Model Army (and showed it in service abroad e.g. in France).

But none of it was due to real tactical innovation, nor held up when met with truly superior tactics. Open order of fire beats Frederick style lines trying to fire faster, hands down, for example. Which is why the Prussians get kicked in the teeth at Jena. And steady infantry that knows what it is doing doesn't evaporate on one cavalry charge like the Austrians, as scores of them broken easily by Davout's men at Auerstadt showed. It simply wasn't a superior miltiary system in any tactical sense. Frederick wielded it well, the troop quality was decent and the cavalry especially so, and his opponents were often screw ups.

Still Frederick was a reckless gambler who deserved to lose, and would have but for the timely death of a Russian queen, and in the end kept precious little for the years of war he subjected Prussia to. One clever marriage did more on the European chessboard.

But after him, the story that Prussia was always going to fight outnumbered and surrounded just doesn't withstand scrutiny. Even with horrible timing for Jena, Prussia was part of much larger coalitions that dwarfed the French. Even with Austria out and the Russians temporarily out of position, choosing battle recklessly at exactly the wrong time (they should have retired on Russian supports until linkup), they had even odds against the French.

In 1813 it wasn't even close. Prussia fought as a junior partner in a Europe wide coalition, and not as a lone outnumbered isolated state. And it stayed that way for most of the 19th century, diplomatically speaking. Bismarck was always careful to isolate his opponents, and if he went to war without a whole coalition behind him, it was always because he faced a state no better than equal, and alone. There is thus nothing to the story that the Prussian military was designed or had to fight outnumbered or surrounded or alone.

That doesn't become an issue again until Schlieffen, due to Kaiser Bill trashing the alliance with Russia and ignoring Bismarck's advice to seek a British alliance instead, if he did so. This was a pure diplomatic "own goal" created out of hubris and ideological, rather than strategic thought driven, foreign policy alignments.

And much the same is true in WW II as well. WW II as it occurred is unthinkable without the Ribbentrop Molotov pact, quick victories in the east rapidly broke any encirclement, and all Germany had to do thereafter was keep neutrality with Russia instead of recklessly attacking it. Germany wasn't surrounded until it chose to be by attacking states that tried to stay out of the war, at least against it. Wasn't much outnumbered either, until the same.

In fact, it would be truer to say the reckless promise of rapid victory against superior foes, that reckless German political leaders demanded from the military, and found some (not remotely all) officers willing to promise and attempt, was the cause of Germany being diplomatically encircled after overreaching, than the reverse.

The sounder Prussian generals in 1806 wanted to retreat on Russian supports - they advanced west instead largely out of prestige concerns and reckless braggadocio. The sounder German diplomats of the 19th century, pre WW I, advised against the commitments that brought down the encircling coalition. Even at its outbreak, Bethman Hollweg, the sounder politician of that time, wanted to avoid war with Britain, as Bismarck had advised - but the general staff told him they needed to go through Belgium to have a chance of knocking out France fast enough.

In WW II, the older professional staff thought the attack on Russia rather breathtakingly reckless - they'd thought the attack on France overly ambitious without mobilizing the economy at least, and a few had thought even Czechoslavakia reckless. But past successes of such recklessness silenced them. The Russians couldn't believe it for the simplest of reasons - it was a blunder of the first magnitude.

It seems to me this is hardly the picture of geographically entailed encirclement and enemy odds advantages that you and the revisionists pretend.

As for how educated the Germans were, for the officers it postdates the Napoleonic war period and the staff reforms of that era. There isn't the slightest sign of subordinate brilliance as actual generals, in any of Frederick's campaigns. Nothing like a Davout appears in them, or even the level of competence achieved by side army commanders in the second half of the Napoleonic wars, generally. This shouldn't be too surprising. The army corps didn't really exist yet.

As for it at least being better than Russia or Austria where all was birth and connections, I think it was all birth and connections in all of them, actually. Yes the Prussian nobility actually trained for war, while the Austria merely played at it. But the French nobility was about as serious in the age of Louis. The Russians in between. None of them was selected for ability, and none of them showed any to speak of. The Prussians were brave and it showed in a marginally superior cavalry. The Poles could claim as much, when they had a state to fight for.

But the real accomplishments were Frederick's own and not those of his system or his underlings. If he had an army of Gustavus' Swedes, or of Brits, he'd have done just as well. It probably wouldn't have been too different if he'd had an army of Frenchmen or Russians. I'm not saying he could have done as much with Austrians, or Spaniards, or Turks, but it wasn't an individual bottom up superiority that won his battles, and it certainly wasn't superior intellectual brilliance in his officer corps, or any auftragtactik reliance on them. It was the top general's commands, just as with a Gustavus or a Cromwell or a Marlborough.

The level of performance they reached was exceeded by far by that of Frenchmen motivated by nationalism, or by British infantry of the latter Napoleonic wars. I'd take a Scots highlander NCO over a Prussian one every day and twice on Sundays, in that period. The ascendency the Germans achieved in that respect doesn't appear until the mid 19th century.

Arguably, even their tactical performance in the Franco Prussia war wasn't much to write home about (losses were almost exactly equal in every fight up to Sedan, there were any number of bonehead frontal charges in column, and Sedan was won by staff pros directing the encirclement and by a superior artillery arm). A definitive German edge at the lower officer and NCO levels is present and real in both world wars, but it is revisionism (or national bias, or buying into the latter) to project that back to earlier periods.

It also isn't maneuverism, nor a particularly German way of war, before then. There was a Prussian way of war from Frederick to Jena, but it failed comprehensively at Jena, and it wasn't all that different from even say Gustavus before. The discipline was more ferocious, that is the most one might say. It takes a special kind of superstition to imagine that was any decisive superiority. Jena showed it wasn't.

[Der Alte Fritz]

To take Frederick as an example of his time and country is misleading. There are examples of Prussian generals being given independent commands and by and large they got themselves into trouble very quickly by following the great Kings lead. The outstandingly successful Prussian generals were of course Prince Henry in Saxony and Ferdinand of Brunswick (who commanded a coalition army of Hessians, British, Hanoverians and smaller contingents from the Protestant North German states). Both adopted completely different strategy and tactics from the King, following the path of careful positioning, husbanding their own forces and causing the enemy greater losses than themselves. This resulted in several great victories such as Minden, but their success was in keeping their army 'in being' and so tying down much larger forces than their own. Ferdinand and his multi-national band and Henry with the second class Prussian troops (including impressed Saxon levies who deserted at the first opportunity) achieved more at less cost than Frederick.

[JasonC]

DAF - the Minden point is certainly a fair one. There was a clear outperformance at the ranker level there, but it was the British who turned in it. And frankly, the way the Brit infantry there manhandled the French cavalry, is the best precedent for Davout's performance at Auerstadt, where the vaunted Prussian battle cavalry proved just as impotent. Steady infantry isn't like the Austrian infantry proved in Frederick's own victories, in the combined arms relations of the day.