Maneuver and Annihilation Battle

[Cuirassier]

"You bring up some very valid points, but your definitions are a bit off. Fall Gelb was maneuver warfare, period, by the definition of US and NATO military doctrine. Lind defined exactly what Maneuver warfare is in his book of the same name. The target in manuever warfare is not always a political target, it is anything that if destroyed/captured etc would cause the enemy to stop fighting. In actual maneuver warfare the goal is the enemy's 'critical mass'. In France this was surrounding the enemy and forcing him to surrender."

Thats the problem with 'their' definition of maneuver warfare. According to them, anything that wins, and wins cheaply and quickly, is maneuver warfare. Anything that is costly and stupid is attrition warfare. Their definitions are flawed.

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[RockinHarry]

Originally posted by Cuirassier:

Does anyone know any good online sources or books that discuss German tactical and/or operational doctrine?

There´s a whole lot of files (HTML and PDF) dealing with german WW2 tactics and doctrine. CARL and MHI require more of a search effort but keywords "german" and/or "tactic" should do the trick usually.

http://www-cgsc.army.mil/carl/contentdm/home.htm

that one you know already

http://www.lonesentry.com/

http://ahecwebdds.carlisle.army.mil/awapps/main.jsp?nid=-561/569

http://www.bvalphaserver.com/content-10.html

[Hetzer38]

Ja scheiss die Wand an! :eek:

Unbelievable how many documents are out there - for free!

Just downloaded a dozen pdfs, need more...

Damn, I'll never have enough time for ALL OF THIS!

Thank you so much Harry!

Greetings, Hetzer.

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[Cuirassier]

I've been continuing my search of the internet for relevant articles regarding this topic. One interesting essay I found is here

I think many of the ideas in that essay are relevant to CM. Thoughts?

Also, I've been having better luck finding information about German WWI doctrine (Stormtroop and Infiltration tactics), which is of course very applicable to CM as well.

Thanks to the people who have been contributing to this thread.

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[JasonC]

That essay is a nearly picture-perfect example of the blatant slander used to preach maneuver doctrine. The only thing it says about attrition strategy that is true, is that it seeks to achieve favorable exchange ratios.

[civdiv]

Originally posted by JasonC:

That essay is a nearly picture-perfect example of the blatant slander used to preach maneuver doctrine. The only thing it says about attrition strategy that is true, is that it seeks to achieve favorable exchange ratios.

What essay are you refering to?

[z-warfare]

Originally posted by Cuirassier:

I've been continuing my search of the internet for relevant articles regarding this topic. One interesting essay I found is here

I like "The Luftwaffe learned from the Spanish Civil War that it could not ignore ground attack and had four Stuka drive-bomber groups by 1939."

... DRIVE-bombers?

[Cuirassier]

AdamL asked, "Are you primarily interested in CM or something else?"

I'm primarly interested in the historical German doctrine used during WWII. Of course, I'm also interested as to how it can be applied in CM.

[JasonC]

Civ-div - the link Cuirassier provided, by the Marine corps officer extolling maneuverism. Attrition strategy is called plodding, slow, resulting in high losses, unimaginative, etc etc. Just utter slander of an opposing view, purely for the sake of contrast, without any honest intellectual attempt to understand it as a doctrine. It is simply presented as the stupid background against which the brilliance of maneuverism stands out. Without the slightest shred of historical justification, incidentally.

It also pretends packet movement is maneuverism, fire and movement is maneuverism, infilration tactics are maneuverism, maskirovka is maneuverism. Then it picks as its shining examples, various successes against tactical blockheads, and pretends they are the result of superior maneuverist virtue and speed and risk taking on the attacking side. To the point of citing the Brits in Libya in 1940 - which if ever there was one, is a complete "own goal" - brainless Italian garrisons sitting in their coastal forts watching the Brits runs rings about them. This is supposed to be evidence for maneuverism being brilliant instead of Italian command of 1940 being incredibly dumb.

I can knock over a toddler with a speeding SUV, too, but I don't call it a brilliant success for attrition strategy.

[JasonC]

If you want to see a good depiction of a maneuverist theory of WW II at the operational scale in the east, I heartily recommend a relatively recent board wargame called "A Victory Lost". The title of course is a reference to Manstein's memoires.

The subject is the period of Manstein's greatest accomplishment, but wittily turns his title around, since the victory in question is the Russian winter offensive following up Stalingrad. The game begins at the time of "Little Saturn", with Stalingrad already pocketed, and "Winter Storm" already a clear failure, but with the panzer corps for it still east of the Don, 50 miles from the wall of the pocket.

The system looks deceptively like typical combat factor hex and counter, as simple as a 1970s era offering from Avalon Hill. And the underlying mechanics are that simple. But the game is anything but. Very easy to learn, no groggy details to get lost in, very simply CRT, etc. Except for 2 little items.

One, ZOCs are "soft", costing 2 MPs to enter or to leave, cumulative.

Which doesn't sound like much until you see Russian RDs and axis minor IDs have 4 MPs, German IDs and Russian cavalry corps have 5, Russian Mech corps have 6, and German PDs have 10 (!).

As a result, the horde of Russian RDs find it very slow to move from combat to combat, but hit as hard as you please if you stand in front of them. Meanwhile PDs can snake through lines and block retreats against anything but a solid wall of divisions.

The CRT, incidentally, makes it easy to make someone retreat but hard to inflict an actual step loss. (Divisions have 2 steps except axis minors, 1). But any retreat through a ZOC, even an occupied ZOC, causes 1 step loss to *each* unit forced to do so. The result is tactical surrounds are the main kill mechanism, and this interacts with the soft ZOC business.

That is innovation 1, and addresses tactics.

Innovation 2 addresses operations, the "big chess", and the speed of decision loops, etc. The mechanism is again very simple, the effects profound.

Each turn, both sides put a number of HQ counters in a cup. These are drawn one by one, and those HQs activate. Any unit within their command range can move then fight. It doesn't matter if the unit has done so already this turn or who it was originally under, all that matters is that it is within command range of the active HQ. (OK, axis minors can't command each other).

The Russians get 4 chits every turn, and 1 of them is a special "Stavka" which allows the activation of all HQs simultaneously - the closest thing to a full "we go" move. The other 3, the Russian player can pick for that turn. But he picks them from a pool of 5 he has to decide on at the start of the game. He has 11 all told, but he can't pick from them all. These are infantry fronts or tank armies.

The Germans get a varying number of chits every turn, which starts low and rises. The first turn just 3, then 4 and 4, 5 and 5, 6 and 6, tapering off to 5 and 4 in the last 2 turns. Most of these are armies, including the axis minors and more capable German HQs. But 2 of them are general "Manstein" chits, AG south in other words. (They get the first of these turn 4 and the second turn 6, effectively). These allow the activation of any HQ of the German player's choice.

The result is both players have the chance to engineer multiple moves by sizable formations during each game turn. And sometimes these moves will happen back to back, before the enemy can react, or can react in any way that helps locally in this sector or that. Sometimes, late in the turn, you even know the enemy isn't going to get another move and you will have 2-3 in a row with with mix of HQs.

It may not be obvious what this sets up. But it recreates the importance of op-tempo and command shock and making decisions and creating threats faster than the enemy can adapt to. It makes exploiting that sort of thing vital to the overall campaign.

Each turn, you have to anticipate your opponent, head game fashion, to pick the right HQs to put in the cup. But neither of you has any control over the order in which they come out.

You can also pull some stunning maneuvers by the standards of other hex and counter games. A German panzer corps SE of the Don activates and uses road movement to run 250 kilometers into the Donets bend, and an impulse or two later activates again to rush to the front line north of Millerovo, midway between Donets and Don, with enough speed to enter ZOCs and deliver a counterattack. Where the heck did that come from?

The Russians face entirely realistic dilemmas about how forcefully to press with their faster mech corps. They get the most ground if they send those into holes made in a previous impulse, and just rush for ground and to take bridge sites and the like. But since PDs can come flying out of the ether in a heartbeat, this can also get said mech corps cut off and destroyed.

Or they can hang back with the rifle hordes, digesting axis minors and slower German infantry that can't get away fast enough, with the mech making shallow slices to gum up their retreats and inflict surround step losses. This will run the Germans out of minor help and kill half their IDs in a matter of a month or so. But it won't get all the way to the objectives, Rostov and Kharkov and the Dnepr beyond and between them.

The Germans meanwhile get railed in reinforcements if they hold long enough, some of them very strong PDs. If they have enough infantry left to hold lines, they can use these PDs to conduct very powerful counterattacks as their op tempo and flexibility rises (6 chit turns with 2 of them Manstein etc). On the other hand, if they are all in the line to patch holes left by evaporating infantry, it is harder to concentrate them for such purposes.

There is a VASSAL for it and I have a hard copy, if anyone is interested in trying their hand at it.

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[Cuirassier]

Another question: What are some good books that outline or discuss German tactical doctrine either during WWI or WWII (preferably company to regimental scale)? Where could I purchase them?

Thanks.

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[JasonC]

Actually, neither is any good on this subject. LV is all operational level, basically. AP covers the development of the panzer force and doctrine for it, and operations up to the gates of Moscow in 1941. Neither addresses tactics at the level below division, really, let alone the CM scale. The closest might be a few passages in Guderian that describe dealing with heavy French or Russian tanks, but are unreliable themselves.

The only classic original German source is Rommel's WW I book, Infantry Attacks. It is a good book and does cover a few essentials, but overall it has a breezy "then we just did this, and it worked" feel. Short on analysis, long on edited reporting of success, "just so" style. While there are valuable lessons in it, they are easy to miss because he doesn't really analyze how or why they worked himself.

For example, it is clear from his narrative that the effect of covering fire operated through reduction of enemy spotting - but he doesn't really say so or say that was the point of it. Just the principle, always support moves with fire to suppress etc.

There are also any number of contemporary German training documents that explain the doctrine. But they suffer from considerable idealization - everyone doing just the right thing and everything always working, that sort of thing. Or they often have a dubious didactic purposes - getting the men to fire, instilling confidence - legitimate in themselves but achieved by painting the tactical realities in rose colors.

Post war German interviews with the higher officers, on the other hand, are a uniformly bad source. They are full of fish stories and attempts to get the western allies to see the Russians as the real enemy, etc. Raus is the classic example of this. Mellenthin is somewhat better and worth reading, but still suffers from the tendency.

There are many good secondary sources, especially on WW I and the development of infiltration tactics. I don't recall titles because it is a long time since I wrote research reports on this stuff. They stress the importance of the switch to going deep, limited observation advantages (smoke, gas, night). Surprise of course.

You can also get a good sense of it from reading enough operational history at a low enough level, either side. Because it stands out that the Germans are mixing it up more than most - they try different things all the time, some of them quite clever and adapted to the conditions. This is apparent in the reactions of their opponents, maddened by how hard it is to accomplish even apparently simple things. (Which is really a sign of the Germans being less than predictable themselves, adapting a lot, anticipating correctly, etc).

They are also insanely aggressive - instant counterattacks being doctrine, sometimes a single platoon will deliver one against an entire allied battalion rather than wait for supports.

The single best description of how combined arms really worked in a desert attack, for example, is in a South Africa source, the Sidi Rezegh battles by Agar-Hamilton. On the receiving end. It is vastly more convincing than the German training documents, features very definite roles and sequencing of the arm used, which make clear sense once your seen them (so to speak), but might not be obvious beforehand.

(E.g. the way the panzers get a sighting differential over defending guns from the combination of backing and advancing out of their dust, and artillery plastering the guns. Or the way the heavy weapons debus out of small arms range after the AT net is smashed, doubling firepower and easing the ammo load on the tanks - before the infantry go in).

You won't find that sort of thing in Mellenthin or Rommel, let alone Guderian or Manstein.

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[Broompatrol]

This is very long thread so if what I say has already been said, I apologize for missing it.

Cuirassier was asking how to play a manuever oriented game v an attrition style in CM. I can't add anything useful to the theories presented by JasonC, but here are the way some of those things look and what I have learned works (and doesn't) in the actual video game:

No cross-country holidays with tanks (and vehicles)! I mean even though you must move quickly you can't just have your tanks speed along in the open hoping to outflank and annihilate your opponent. You can lose many tanks really fast (do I really need to say this?)

The scale is usually too small for wide sweeping manuevers.

Keep your operations simple and planned. Moving a lot of units at the same time is challenging. Try to anticipate what will screw you up. like a long range MG or 20MM making your guys go to ground or a HQ getting panicked during a mortar attack causing command delays. How many times have you had your inf jump off a tank or a crew abandon a mortar because someone took a potshot?

Trying to get everybody to show up at the right time can be hard. Try to avoid log jams and cluster****s. I'm really good at creating them but not so good at clearing them so I try to avoid them. An extra turn or 2 to stay organized has worked better for me than having units show up piece meal and then having to reorganize.

You still have to kill the enemy. I have found that you need a hammer and anvil approach. JasonC calls it using a fist and he is right. Getting a lone tank or MG on his flank will be annoying but probably not decisive. You need a strong force to keep him down and a strong force to kill him. If your method doesn't allow for that you may not get the results you want.

When the real fight happens try to keep it many on one. if you flank your opponent and it turns out his forces are deep but you have a spear tip aimed at his side he can just turn to face you destroying your lead elements before the rest of them catch up.

Hope this helps.

[Broompatrol]

One last thing:

Basically you are trying to put your forces in a spot where you can kill him without him fighting back. It may or may not be feasible to achieve. So you must ask yourself that at the start

[Cuirassier]

Thanks again for the replies everyone.

I've been looking forward to applying these principles in CM, especially versus other people via PBEM. Most of the games I'm playing now are too far in however to change my strategy, or they are me playing defense. However, I have done a few quickbattles against the AI just to get somewhat of a 'feel' for the German maneuver strategy.

Below I'm going to give a general description of how to conduct a maneuverist attack modelled after historical German methods. My interpretation of how to conduct such an attack has been influenced primarly by the contributors to this thread, online information I've found discussing German infiltration tactics, and my own observations while playing a couple QB's against the AI.

Of course, I consider myself a student of tactics, and am willing to recieve any criticisms and possible counters to what I've written.

For starters, lets assume I have two veteran companies of vanilla foot infantry (lets say June 1941), with organic heavy weapons (6 50mm mortars, a couple HMG-42's). I also have a pioneer platoon, which are veterans too, maybe a couple sharpshooters, and 1 or 2 105mm FO's.

The enemy has 1 basic rifle company with organic weapons, maybe and 82mm mortar FO, a couple light tanks, such as BT's, some mines, trenchs, wire and pillboxes. Maybe one or two infantry guns as well.

The battle is set in the north, within the heavy pine forests, which allows for infantry to use the maneuver approach. I'll pretend there are no flags, and instead focus on killing the enemy.

Knowing this, I study the terrain and identify covered approach routes, and routes that travel through dead ground that will either lead to where the enemy will likely be, or important terrain in his rear that will allow me to see much of his likely positions, cut up retreats, and hinder movements of reserves. Most importantly though, I want covered routes that will allow my main body to rapidly travel through, break through enemy lines, and outflank and roll up the enemy position.

I then decide which route I will likely send my main body through, though will want to keep my main body back far enough so it may take a different route if it looks more favorable. This is because I am constantly looking to see where the enemy is weakest, so my maneuver units have clear local superiority immediately over anything encountered. I plan to engage each position in sequence in this manner. Thus, I have a plan from the outset, based on my anticipation of where the enemy is and how he is going to be setup, though I remain flexible so as to either capitilize on unforseen oppurtunities, or to adapt, if my plan is wrong.

My attacking force will normally be seperated into three waves. The first wave is the recon line, and has the vital task of rapidly overrunning enemy outposts and scouts, lowering the enemies intel, infiltrating the enemy position wherever he is weak, cutting up retreats and his room to maneuver, while also identifying his main fighting positions.

The recon line will be a company in strength. Though a basic infantry company has only three platoons, each platoon gives one of its squads, preferably the best ones, to the company HQ, who makes a fourth platoon. The company HQ can also get a 105mm FO (must be radio to keep up), 2 or 3 pioneer squads, and maybe a couple 50mm mortars. It is the recon line's immediate reserve, and has a good combined arms mix to deal with any threats.

Thus, three platoons from the company travel all on line, traveling as fast as possible along their selected routes to maximize surprise, so outposts can't retreat in time. The fourth, heavy platoon, follows immediately behind, in the center. It can either help extricate part of the recon line that smacks into a full enemy position, detach to create a strong feint somewhere where your main blow will *not* fall, or can reinforce success found elsewhere, boosting firepower at a particular location of the recon line before the main body arrives to achieve a quicker breakthrough.

Typically, the third line of the attack overwatches the first line (recon screen), as it consists of the centralized heavy weapons supporting the attack. In this case, I don't really have one, as the terrain is too tight. Heavy weapons are instead decentralized to sub-formations, to give immediate support when and where it is needed. This is consistent with historical German doctrine.

The main body is the second company, echeloned in depth, or a wedge formation (1 up, 2 back), and forms the second, and decisive line, of the attack. It should be the better company of the two, and will have the remaining heavy weapons. The lead platoon can be heavy, having attached pioneers to deal with mines in case the recon line reserve hadn't, and can also have an FO and 50mm mortars to provide immediate support.

Again, the route of the main body is planned from the outset, based on however one thinks they can achieve surprise the best and attack the enemy in sequence, where they are weakest. However, it should remain uncommitted for as long as possible, so it can react to information the recon screen develops in its own battles. Then again, it must be close enough to the recon screen, so it can rapidly push through gaps in the defense before the enemy can react, close the door, or change his dispositions.

On the attack, the main body should suppress whatever defenders it encounters with the entirety of the force. Small assault detachments (couple squads, preferably pioneers) then close with the suppressed enemy and overrun them. Portions of the main body, if judged not needed to suppress opposition or assault, can be used to bypass remaining strongpoints and grab more terrain, cutting retreats etc. By suppressing and bypassing opposition, you look to strangle the defense through envelopment. Actual destruction of the enemy is not done by ranged suppressing fire, but by the small assault detachments that phyisically overrun and annihilate suppressed defenders.

Basically, IMO, the battle should be heavily in your favor *before* the main body is commited. This emphasises the importance of the first wave, or recon screen. If the recon screen has been successful, the enemy should have lost most room to maneuver, have his eyes gouged out, have his main positions identified and using ammo against the screen, and be unable to make any serious shifts in his dispositions, without being spotted and suppressed. Also, the recon screen, having held much of its fire for most of the battle, can help the main body suppress positions when stationary and in cover. The screen should also draw some of the defenders attention away from your main thrust. The main body is supposed to 'exploit' this state, murder the defense when and where it chooses, because of the said advantages the recon screen provides.

So basically this is how I see such an attack, in ideal circumstances, can be conducted, based off of what I've learned. Again, any constructive criticisms or additions will be accepted.

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[undead reindeer cavalry]

most (if not all) of the literature concentrates on panzers. "Panzer tactics" by Schneider is a very good book. if you have limited budget or don't have that much time, i recommed buying it. one other good choise would be two volume "Panzertruppen" by Jentz. it gives you good overall picture of the German panzer arm. if you want breath taking low-level battle stories etc, you want to read "Grenadiers" by Meyer, but be warned that he is the epitome of a SS commander. there are also some very basic literature on WW2 tactics, like the two volume booklet by Osprey. the other booklet covers squad & platoon tactics, the other company & battalion. but it is very light reading and is waste of time if one is at all familiar with basic WW2 weaponry & tactics.

[Broompatrol]

Something else to keep in mind when applying real world tactics to the game. As gamers we have a godlike view of the battlefield and can take in a very big picture.

Methinks "weakpoints" are weaker in real life because they don't necessarily have any idea what is really going on. As a gamer in a game environment we can (hopefully) tell when something is significant and can choose to withdraw or fight.