Pure armor vs German heavies

[SgtMuhammed]

Which is why the Germans ran rampant for the first couple years of the war. Everyone else was ignoring their own armor strategists and breaking their tanks up into penny packets while the Germans grouped theirs into an iron fist.

The biggest point, if you are the Germans, is to protect the flanks of the Ubercats. Even the AI seems to realize the need for flank attacks and will try to exploit an open flank. This, of course, can set the possibility for some loverly armor traps by your flank guard, muahahahahaha.

[ February 25, 2003, 02:11 AM: Message edited by: sgtGOody ]

[reinald@berlin.com]

Yep, and my favorite is: "There can only be one schwerpunkt."

Also very true for general civilian life.

[JasonC]

No, everyone else was not penny packeting. That is only half of the error the Allies made. They veered from that error ("infantry thinking") to the opposite one of massed tanks operating alone ("cavalry thinking"). In fact, both errors were made simultaneously by the same powers, using portions of their tanks in each of these ways. And later they thought they were solving the first by committing only the second. They missed the combination of concentration of tanks -plus- support of them by all arms.

Look at the history of the TOEs of the armor formations and this is clear. The Allies were very tank heavy compared to the Germans until 1943, and heavier for the entire war. The Germans did have a brief tank heavy period early in the war, when much of their armor was Pz Is and IIs incidentally, but they corrected this very rapidly. In mid war fighting, in the western desert by the Brits and in early counterattack attempts by the Russians, the Allies did use masses of tanks, but failed to support them with true combined arms.

They thought of the trade off as either use the tanks with infantry, and therefore spread them out like infantry. Or, use them alone so they could operate at their own pace (the problem being thought of as one of speed), not "tied" to the infantry. So they thought of combined arms and armor concentration as substantially opposite ideas.

The people who thought the tanks must work with infantry were not mistaken, and just massing tanks to use them independently failed disasterously (see e.g. Knightsbridge in the Gazala battles). And people who thought tanks must be massed instead of penny packeted were also correct (the French managed to put only two battalions of armor behind Sedan against a German panzer corps - incidentally, they did have massed armor elsewhere, and it also lost).

To avoid both errors, it was not enough to veer in a direction. You needed the right combined arms mix from the right formation TOEs and tactical doctrine suited to them. And you needed those in combined arms formations used on narrow sections of the front.

It was the rest of the German force mix that got the tanks across the Meuse at Sedan, for instance. It was combined arms and gun fronts that defeated the Arras counterattack by unsupported British armor, and wrecked whole brigades of pure armor at Knightsbridge, and dealt with counterattacks by Russian heavies in 1941.

Plenty of people were shouting to just concentrate the tanks, early, on the Allied side. (That was as far as pre-war Allied theorists like Fuller got). It is just that the arguments against them weren't as vacuous as some pretend, and when they were given their head they failed completely. Tank heavy formations operating independently were a disaster.

The Allies did not get an effective armor doctrine until they corrected their TOEs -away- from tank heavy formations. Which happened by 1943. By then the US had the 3-3-3 armor division and combat command structure, the Russians had the mechanized corps and tank corps structures of permanent brigades, all with integral infantry, which performed the same role. The Brits had armor divisions with as many infantry type battalions as armor type battalions. Of these, only the Russian mechanized corps was as infantry and artillery heavy, and as tank light, as the German panzer divisions.

[JasonC]

As for the idea that the Germans concentrated all of their armor, it is at best a half truth. They did use essentially all of their armor - all but a few armored cars - in panzer divisions. And they did use those panzer divisions in corps sized formations, typically 2 PDs accompanied by 1 motorized infantry division, used to follow up, hold flanks, etc. But they then spread these panzer corps along the front.

Meanwhile, other powers did dissipate a portion of their tank strength in independent battalions, regiments, and brigades assigned to support larger infantry formations, or to act as local reserves. But only a portion of their armor was so used. The Allies had more armor to go around than the Germans did. The French used division sized armor formations, tank heavy in the case of armor divisions and combined arms in the case of "light mech" divisions.

The Russians had mechanized corps of several brigades, larger and more tank heavy than German panzer divisions. And both the French and Russians directed these large armor groupings at various points in large scale armored counterattacks, delivered early in the campaigns.

In you look at France 1940, the Germans had one PD off helping the Holland operation, and 3 panzer corps spread out along the line. One aimed at Sedan and the Meuse crossings there, which proved decisive in the end. This was Guderian's formation. Another to its right, which in the event hit rather more Allies, crossed anyway, beat off the counterattacks, and widened the advance. This was the one containing Rommel's PD. Which defeated a French armor division and then beat off counterattacks by both British and French armor. And a third that went through Belgium, and fought the French combined arms formations, the "light mech" divisions.

The Germans did not get local armor odds in any of the battle areas except Guderian's. He got across the river without his armor to help - it did not reach the west bank until the following day. It then faced armor counterattacks by about 3 battalions of French armor, which were stopped by a mix of motorized infantry and panzer division formations.

The Germans won practically all of the armor fights, whether they had local odds or not. The one place they were checked was against the light mech guys, and that check came -after- they had destroyed the bulk of the French armor in those formations. It was a gun front in woods that eventually stopped that drive. They lost a battalion's worth of tanks in an afternoon at the climax of that fight. They then sidestepped to their left and trailed the formation led by Rommel's PD.

The only constant in the armor fighting in France is that the larger the absolute scale of a given tactical armor clash, the more lopsidedly the Germans won it. They won all of them, small or large. They generally had better odds in the smallest fights, but lost a few to kill a few in most of those. At company level engagements, they were winning several to one, even when the odds were even or only marginably favorable. In battalion and larger engagement, they scored run away kill totals of 5 to 10 to 1, even with the local odds even.

Which fits not greater operational concentration, but greater tactical coordination. Early war German tanks could see, and talk to each other, and coordinated their actions with each other as well as with other arms. Their early war Allied enemies, often their equals or superiors in gun and armor terms alone, were not their equals in these respects. The bigger the local fight, the more tactical coordination was required and the bigger the "soft systems" edge. (Radios, optics, cupolas, 3 man turrets, rate of fire, doctrine, training).

Yes, operationally the Germans put a panzer corps at a spot the Allies didn't, and broke through there. But they also broke through in places the Allies -did- put a corps' worth of tanks.

In Russia, there were places where the Russians managed counterattacks within the first weeks by multiple mechanized corps operating on the same frontages. But those counterattack attempts failed completely. The same coordination edge was there, and in addition the Russians lacked combined arms, and the bulk of their tanks were inferior in weight and protection.

Hordes of T-26s operating without much in the way of infantry, and with nothing in the way of artillery, support, dashed against German combined arms defenses and were shot to pieces in a few days. The Russians lost half their tank force in the first two months. Much of it in locally offensive actions, in strengths from a battalion up to several mechanized corps. Against infantry formations or panzer ones.

Then the Germans, far from having only one schwerpunk, cut up defending Russian infantry formations with multiple pincers, drew bags around them, and annihilated then in huge breakout fights. Again, often on the tactical defensive. They drove on Leningrad along two axes, on Moscow with repeated inward turnings by two Panzer groups, on Kiev with (eventually) an even more massive diversion.

If the Russians had only to discern a single heavy direction and put stuff in front of it, it would have been easy. In reality, the Germans shifted the direction of operations so often, so far, on such wildly varying scales (from division to army group), that there was no single clearly vital sector - or there were half a dozen at any point in time, and those bounced around like pinballs on a time scale of at most weeks. The Russians had much greater concentration on the direct route to Moscow than the Germans did. Those concentrations were evaded and became big bags of prisoners.

Mobile combined arms is rather more complicated than the cartoon version "just mass the tanks".

[ February 25, 2003, 04:45 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[Schoerner]

Excellent, Jason although it's a bit OT.

Only one point i was missing in your posts:

Air superiority was a main prerequisite for the new Blitzkriegtaktik.

The use of the Luftwaffe as part of combined arms and it's tactical bombers as flexible substitution of the way to slow field-artillery.

As you mentioned, the Germans always used combined arms.

The ignoring of flank threats for the mechanized Panzerdivisions (as you mentioned, they were not tank-only; they contained extremely expensive fully mechanized infantry [even with pioneers] to keep track with the, at full speed deep into enemy positions and their rear advancing tanks) was only possible with combined forces, capable to deal with every threat.

Regarding Guderians rule of "Klotzen statt Kleckern" the French give an excellent example:

France had the biggest tank-army in the world when the war broke out and their tanks were much better than the german PzI & II.

Their Char B beast, could only become knocked out with the 8,8 Flak (and with Ju87 Stukas ofcourse).

But they were not used as mobile tank-formations. Only single tanks of this beast were used as infantry-support.

[JasonC]

edited because its not worth it...

[ February 25, 2003, 09:52 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]