The Blitz myth?

[JasonC]

The ratio of error to signal is not falling.

Speed yes but the WW I commanders knew that. They tried to get speed from things like horse cavalry. Complete failure. Infantry breakthrough failed because infantry does not operate alone in the assault, it requires the support of heavy artillery. And heavy artillery requires masses of hard to move physical material, especially acres of shells numbering literally millions, to have operational impact. Those parks, not the infantry, are what could not be moved except by rail.

The attacking infantry at the head of the breakthrough fails deep in the defender's operational rear when it encounters enemy reserves, and lacks the all arms support needed to defeat those reserves. The same will happen if you send only tanks - or tactically, if they get infantry stripped off them by artillery and soft firepower defense. Operationally, if you run into a gun front in the enemy rear you need artillery right up with the tanks. If you run into enemy armor, if you are armor heavy you brawl. If you have all arms you put your own gun front ahead of them and hit next to them, forcing the defense to have an actual line.

So it takes all arms because of counter measures. As for outrunning a retreat, the actual problem is usually that no order to retreat was given. When it was, the defenders generally got away. The need for such orders was clearly seen by professionals in all forces but violently resisted everywhere, by politicos and by syncophant officers telling them what they wanted to hear.

If the defender has fast forces, speed works equally well for the reserves. The Bulge attack created a region of weakness a hundred miles wide and tore an actual hole tens of miles wide. But it sealed within a week because the troops on either side were fully motorized and the transition to an operational defensive stance was immediate. Russian reserves at Kursk were intervening heavily by the evening of the second day. In fact, physical speed was not the issue with their commitment, but command trying to gauge when they were needed, the "moment juste" for their intervention. So depth or speed fully countered it, the same as they did in WW I. It just was known how to do this quite early in WW I, and not known how to do it until midwar in WW II - and it took more, so it was easier to find occasions when the defender wasn't "rich enough" to stop it. Often those conditions had to be prepared by prior attrition fighting, however.

No, other nations did not abandoned large all arms forces. It is simply inaccurate. The Russians had dozens of mech corps larger than German panzer corps, let alone the PDs they matched in numbers. The French had full armor divisions - very tank heavy - and light mech divisions, the latter all arms formations that gave a reasonably good account of themselves in the real deal. Brits separated "armor" and "tanks", with the former in the hands of pure Fuller theorists and too armor heavy - but had ADs. The US came late and had some of the problems of the Brits in the development stage (reflected in the armor heavy TOEs of 2 and 3 AD), but by the time they were actually in the fighting had thoroughly modern mixes (if a bit light on the infantry). By the same time, the Russians had reinvented the tank and mech corps as formations a third the size of the 1941 variety but with adequate support elements and combined arms coordination - though they never got as good at tank-arty cooperation as the others.

The French armor failed in part because it lacked the modernized "soft systems" Guderian focused on in the interwar period - cross country mobility, vision, communications, undertasked tank commanders with time to think. Largely because they had portions of their armor dedicated to every theory there was, from infantry support to full ADs. The light mech were in the front line with a screening mission, because of cavalry thinking. One full AD was available for counterattack, but most were delivered by brigades or regiments that lacked all arms. Germans knew gun fronts already and had no problem dealing with them.

In Russia, the breakthroughs were multiple but they were not small. They were larger operations than the one that destroyed the British and half the French army in France. They were larger than the entire Polish campaign. Five of them bigger than either of those succeeded just as spectacularly, netting a half a million to a million men apiece (Minsk, Smolensk, in front of the Dnepr in the south, then Kiev, Bryansk).

Another poster fantasizes about the good Germans and whether those mythical creatures might have done better in Russia. It would have been hard to do worse I suppose. But the Germans had over a hundred thousand Russians who did fight for them anyway. They were OK as laborers but worthless for front line combat. They and the partisans helped kill millions of Russian civilians in the civil war raging in occupied Russia. Then there is the little nicety that given a crusade against communism without the commissar order is, um, let's say naive. By the time you are machinegunning party members nobody is going to think you are nice.

As for why the average Russian fought, it is true the Germans gave them transcedent motivation. All the government had to do was remind soldiers only they stood between arrogant murdering thugs and their womenfolk. A typical piece of Russian propaganda of the period does not discuss theories of value, it just shows a Russian woman sheltering her child from a German in a smart looking uniform with a horsewhip, with the caption "Soldiers of the Red Army - Save Us!" Not complicated. Men don't go get themselves killed out of fear. But trying to save others around them? Sure, it is the ordinary wellspring of human courage.

But a Germany that would have fought the war as recommended would not have fought the war, period.

As for how the Germans could have done better just technically, Moscow over Kiev isn't the answer, and being sweet little lambs isn't required. All they had to do was turn the economy on the moment they attacked. They racked up 10 to 1 kill ratios in 1941. But by the start of December, the Russian army was as large as it was on the day of the invasion - and the German army was smaller. How? How do you take out 10 to 1 and get fielded odds ratios to move against you? Did the Russians have 100 times the base to draw from? No. They had twice the pre-war population but no remaining edge there by December, when Axis minors and territory lost are taking into considerations. They had no advantage in prewar industrial capacity, and their economy was under much more serious disruption and strain. But the German replacement rate wasn't equal to the Russian one - if it were, they'd have had 3 to 1 odds in front of Moscow - or half of it - they'd have had 2 to 1 odds. It was zero, basically.

The Germans tried to defeat Russia without mobilizing their economy for war. This was hubris and madness. But it fit perfectly their magico-romantic thinking. Numbers weren't supposed to matter any more. The age of the masses was supposed to be over. War wasn't supposed to be a material struggle, a lethal industrial process. It was supposed to be the way superior elites deployed technical magic to rule their inferiors. It was supposed to be a Fuller-esque delivery from the hell described by Junger, not a re-descent into it.

It was crazy to think a new military technique would make odds irrelevant in warfare. And the old Prussians, trained in the tradition of Moltke and Napoleon, would never have believed it. Force multipliers were how you won outright from a position of equality. The enemy force was the target in order to get away from equality to superior odds. Multipliers plus odds were supposed to snowball. Makes much more sense as doctrine and everybody else believed and acted that way.

But the same odds calculations had told the Prussians not to risk entering the Rhineland, not to risk confrontation over the Czechs, to prepare for a long war of attrition as soon as France entered. There were officers ready to stage a coup as soon as one of these failed because of the Nazi attachment to wild magical thinking instead (as they saw it). But they kept winning. A Manstein was on hand to give a more ambitious plan for France. A Guderian was on hand to actually execute it successfully. By the time of Barbarossa, the army had given up second guessing the leadership on these gambles.

There was a disconnect here. The Napoleon-Moltke tradition stresses annihilation battle as the objective. This was sound doctrine and thoroughly believed throughout the German army, and by the high command. But seeing the purpose of maneuver as bringing about annihilation battle, means odds have to matter. As mere logic, there is no point attacking the enemy fielded forces unless you plan to run him out of them, have more remaining yourself, aka odds. But the leadership viewed the new magical techniques as a substitute for odds thinking, as a way to escape not defeat, nor indecisiveness, but material-struggle itself. Masses weren't supposed to matter anymore.

Well, they do. We live in a world in which there are populist regimes and democracies and economies are the focus of politics because mass matters. Be careful about wishing it otherwise.

Ok, then we also got some loose talk about Nam from people who apparently don't know the history of it very well, and seem to think underarmed guerillas defeated superior firepower. The VC were guerillas, they were also lousy, they didn't defeat anything, they lost, they are dead. The NVA was an excellent army, highly professional, not guerillas at all, though they understood their tactics. They carried the heavy part of the war and all of it in the second half. They also never defeated a force supported by US air, let alone US ground forces.

After all the US ground forces left, they tried in a mass cross border invasion - not guerilla anything - in 1972. Bombing broke its back and the ARVN held. (For those who belittle the ARVN, I simply note they were the last to give up. Who is talking?). To actually win, the NVA needed US air power pulled (which took Watergate, not "unpopularity of the war" - Nixon was re-elected in a landslide against the peace candidate in case everybody forgot), plus 6 divisions of Soviet armor leading a conventional force. The North Vietnamese conquest of SVN took place in a short span of time in 1975 using methods quite similar to those that destroyed Poland in 1939. Not guerilla anything. I don't wish to refight that war, just to prevent loose and inaccurate talk about it from polluting this discussion.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

JasonC,

Germans simply underestimated the size of the Red Army. not because of bying into some silly occulto-mystical crap, but because they didn't have full intel.

German plan was rational and well founded if you look at it objectively from their point of view. they thought they had just destroyed the Red Army a couple of times.

no need to have Germans buy into some "numbers do not matter" nonsense, not to mention some occult crap. i am puzzled by this weird trend of looking for the most absurd of explanations instead of going for the obvious known ones.

[Wartgamer]

The Germans had to 'blitz' for a simple reason...

Wartime Germany was a chemical empire built on coal, air, and water. Eighty-four and a half percent of her aviation fuel, 85 percent of her motor gasoline, all but a fraction of 1 percent of her rubber, 100 percent of the concentrated nitric acid, basic component of all military explosives, and 99 percent of her equally important methanol were synthesized from these fundamental raw materials.

Until the later thirties, most of Germany's liquid fuels were imported-she produced only a third of her 1936 liquid fuel requirements (Figure 1). Then extremely ambitious synthetic oil and war chemicals programs were started. Germany's military and economic planners were so convinced that this program could be completed and maintained without enemy interference that they went to war with reserves stocks equal to only:

3.1 months' war needs for aviation gasoline,

1.9 months' war needs for motor gasoline,

1.8 months' war needs for tetraethyl lead,

2 months' war needs for nitrogen satisfactory for explosives, and

2.4 months' war needs for rubber.

Germany never recovered from this precarious position, and throughout the war her oil stocks, particularly critical items like aviation and motor gasolines, were so tight that her whole military effort would have collapsed like a pricked balloon in three or four months had her oil supply been dried up.

Early in the war, when the 'blitz' worked, it had to work. If France could have put up a longer lasting defense, and other nations supported her at this point, then WWII would not have spread like it did. If most of the effort put into the maginot line was put into something as simple as mobile antitank guns and AA guns, 10's of million of people would not have died. A prolonged war against france would have rapidly depleted the German war stocks, and not having the ability to ramp up quickly, they would have been stopped from making the error of attacking the Soviets.

http://orbat.com/site/sturmvogel/images/ussbs/fuelpro.jpg

If Germany's fuel production could have been attacked earlier in the war, it would have saved many Soviet lives. Given the fact that the Germans were tight on fuel from the beginning, its startling that the industry was not identified and destroyed earlier.

[ May 30, 2005, 09:40 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

[Wartgamer]

I believe its true that the US supplied the SU with 60% of its aviation fuel. In other words, high octane refined gasoline. The SU had refining capabilities (and resources) and supplied its own diesal (and other fuels) it seems.

The SU probably could not have had half the working air force without US support. Sorties consume vast quantities of fuel.

http://orbat.com/site/sturmvogel/SovLendLease.html

I imagine that the US supplied diesal tank and TD to the soviets. The US made shermans with both diesal and gas engines. US trucks also ran on gasoline so they would have needed a source of lower octane gas. The US did just send truck chassis in some cases so I suppose that the soviets could have assembled diesal trucks.

It appears that the US supplied the SU with great quantities of rail equipment including locomotives, rails, cars. On the eastern front, rail was a major method of moving equipment. Between fueling half the Soviet airforce and supplying the majority of rail equipment; the Allied shipments to the SU decided the eastern front theater. If the Germans could have limited this pipeline of material better, they would have had some chance of winning on the eastern front.

Clearly the German inability to stop the Allied supply line to the SU was a major factor in its losing WWII.

[ May 30, 2005, 09:43 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

[A.E.B]

Speed yes but the WW I commanders knew that. They tried to get speed from things like horse cavalry. Complete failure. Infantry breakthrough failed because infantry does not operate alone in the assault, it requires the support of heavy artillery. And heavy artillery requires masses of hard to move physical material, especially acres of shells numbering literally millions, to have operational impact. Those parks, not the infantry, are what could not be moved except by rail.

Not true in 1914, nor in 1918 when mobile warfare was conducted without the need to cross the trenches of no mans land.

The speed = cavalry is a myth - infantry will march at a speed equal to cavalry over a period of days: cavalry is only faster over short distances.

The problem was the speed of advance vs. the speed of the defenders reaction. German plans in both 1914 and 1917/18 were designed to outspeed the French and British reaction, but they were not able to maintain the speed in the face of blocking forces and hence stalemate ensured.

So it takes all arms because of counter measures. As for outrunning a retreat, the actual problem is usually that no order to retreat was given. When it was, the defenders generally got away. The need for such orders was clearly seen by professionals in all forces but violently resisted everywhere, by politicos and by syncophant officers telling them what they wanted to hear.

Which proves my point. In the time it takes an enemy to decide to retreat, the breakthough will be far to the enemy's rear. And yes it is possible to retreat fast if you just run for it, the trick is to take all your heavy weapons and supplies with you.

As for reserves, you (a) must have them, and (b)they mustn't be within reach of the breakthough forces before they can be organised. Otherwise you get a collapse of Army Group Centre situation where your reserves are virtually forced to fight their way off the railheads.

No, other nations did not abandoned large all arms forces. It is simply inaccurate. The Russians had dozens of mech corps larger than German panzer corps, let alone the PDs they matched in numbers. The French had full armor divisions - very tank heavy - and light mech divisions, the latter all arms formations that gave a reasonably good account of themselves in the real deal. Brits separated "armor" and "tanks", with the former in the hands of pure Fuller theorists and too armor heavy - but had ADs.

But they didn't have the whole package, nor did they carry out the exercises needed to operate these forces enmass. The British and the French couldn't coordinate their tank forces to cut off Rommel's panzers, the Russians with a few exceptions used their tanks in an uncoordinated fashion in 1941. It isn't just having the tanks that counts, it is using them as a cooridinated mass on the battlefield.

The Germans invested heavily in mobile warfare, even down to tailoring the airforce for tactical support. Other nations built battleships and aircraft carriers, four engined bombers, and other items Germany couldn't avoid on top of the panzer divisions.

The whole German strategy was to win and win quickly. Given that the Germans could not occupy London, nor Moscow, nor Washington, it was a strategy that was doomed to fail.

I am not saying the German's could have won in Russia. Simply looking at a map of Europe shows the difference in distance between the German border and Paris and the 1941 German/Polish frontier and Moscow. The Germans error was to try the same tactics in Russia that had won them France: ignoring the inadequqte roads and railways it was obvious that Russia would require a number of seperate breakthough attacks, each followed by pauses to resupply and reinforce the spearheads.

The difference was that it took 35 days to reach Paris, but after 164 days the Germans were still 35 miles outside of Moscow. All of France was occupied except Vichi, only a fraction of Russia was occupied.

It is interesting to note that in many ways Fuller's dreams only became reality in 1991, when fully mechanised US, British and French forces carved through a numerically superior enemy dug in in-depth in Iraq. With complete control of the air, and everything on wheels or tracks, the Coaliton forces raced passed Iraqi units incapable of moving or retreating in order. If the order to stop wasn't given, Coalition forces would have beaten retreating republican guard units to Bagdad.

Those few days of operations in desert storm probably used as much fuel and ammo as the Germans had available in 1941.

I agree totally on Nam: it was the NVA that did the majority of the fighting in the South, with the VC being used mostly to police the civilian population and for point-sapper attacks. After Tet the VC almost ceased to exist.

The ARVN fell because in the end they couldn't support the forces needed to defend themselves once US support evaporated, while the North was still receiving supplies from the competing communist blocks. In the end it was tanks and infantry back by artillery that broke the ARVN defenses, and the speed of the advance coupled with the short distances meant that the ARVN had neither time nor room nor the resources to recover.

A.E.B

[Wartgamer]

..Almost forgot to mention the truck/jeep factor...

Even more important than the AFVs were the jeeps and trucks supplied by the West. Soviet trucks were copies of U.S. 1930-era designs and lacked the cross-country abilities of the modern vehicles given by the Americans. The U.S. alone gave some 151,000 1 1/2 ton and 201,000 2 1/2 ton trucks. The table below compares Soviet production of trucks with Lend-Lease deliveries, in thousands:

Year 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 Total

Soviet Production 62 35 49.2 60.6 74.7 281.5

Allied Deliveries 409.5

Grand Total 691

Allied Proportion 59.3%

Note: Figures for 1941 are for the second half of the year only.

On May 1, 1945 Lend-Lease vehicles comprised 32.8% of the Red Army's vehicle park. 9.1% were captured vehicles and 58.1% were domestically built. I can only explain the disparity between the Lend-Lease deliveries and the figures for May 1945 by suggesting that most of the Allied trucks were sent to the front where they were lost to enemy action while the Soviet trucks spent their time relatively safe in the rear because of their poor cross-country abilities.

These trucks enabled the Soviets to mount the offensives that evicted the Nazis from their territory and took Berlin. Without them they would have had to divert tank production to the manufacture of trucks. Undoubtedly this would have prolonged the war in the East, but not changed the outcome.

Clearly, the Soviet response to the 'Blitz' (Operation Art of War) would not have been possible without Allied pipeline of transport resources (rail/aviation-fuel/trucks).

[Generaloberst Guderian]

Perhaps I failed to make my intentions and argument clear. First of all, my intent was not to be underhandedly denounced. Second, it was not to subscribe to the mythical and unrealisic philosophy of the Third Reich, and finally, it was not to pollute any sort of discussion with talk of Vietnam.

The point I was trying to make was that sometimes, especially in recent history, the application of military theory, numerical superiority, firepower and qualitatively superior forces CANNOT surmount the political and cultural realities of war. Was the VC an elite guerilla force? No. Was it thouroughly decimated during the Tet Offensive, so much so that in military circles the Offensive was heralded as a great victory? Yes.

But what remains in the public consciousness from all that?

An American soldier with a revolver shooting a Vietnamese prisoner in the temple. Simply put, the casualties caused by both the VC and the ARVN soured the American publics' support of the war, so much so that it came to represent the injustices which an entire generation fought against. The US withdrew, and South Vietnam fell. Even before that however, we needed to have a draft to establish the force levels neccessary to wage war on that scale, bringing individual sacrifice and hardship to the doorstep of countless American families, something that no doctrine has yet accounted for.

I'll even go out of a limb and say that the same thing is occuring on a smaller scale with the current war in Iraq. Our invasion was brilliant, the destruction of the regime complete. Yet the 1,655 casualites, trivial by the standards of the Second World War, have caused a significant and very worrying drop in miltary recruitment during the past year. In turn more and more soldiers are serving multiple tours of duty and are getting burned out, both physically and emotionally, which only exacerbates the burdern placed on the all volunteer force.

In short, Vietnam reduced America's ability to sustain casualties forever. Whether that is the fault of the media or certain poltical groups is irrelevant, as even the most well executed campaigns take casualties, and even the smallest numbers of casualties make the headlines on CNN, generally with the words "Yet another American soldier killed in Iraq"

So, I remain skeptical. I don't believe in neat military and economic models that track mobilization and reduce things to a science, because in the end, I beleive that people all over the world are the same, and if America in the 1960s and 70s had a casualty threshold which it could not sustain poltically, then so did the Soviet Union in 1941-1945. That is why we speculate, that is why we have recreational and anonymous conversations on the internet, to satisfy our own curiosity. Not to push an agenda, not to revise history, not to glorify the German Army, and not to deal in "signal to error" ratios.

That being said, the scope of this forum obviously then does not include the type of discussion that I'm interested in having, and I respect that. I'm sure I won't be missed.

Best Wishes and Have a Wonderful Holiday Weekend.

[Wartgamer]

The 'Myth of the Blitz' was no more than an 'All-In' using mobile warfare against an enemy for the first time. It worked against the Poles and the French and defeated these nations. It was not a myth but a unique employment of weapons to maximize effectiveness.

It worked primarily because it accomplished exactly what it needed to do; it defeated the enemy before they learned the technique itself, or a reasonable defense against it.

The Germans learned from Poland that consumption of material would outstrip production. They knew that any further attacks had to be quick and decisive. They had to also benefit in some way from winning the next nation. Raw materials, food, coal, etc. were the payoff if the German Reich was to benefit from attacking nations.

The land-based 'blitz' technique failed against England. Airpower could not really 'blitz' and the Germans got a bloody nose. 'Blitzing' in the desert was just grinding sand.

The German 'blitz' into the SU was clearly the biggest mistake of WWII. It created an enemy with ample room to absorb the shock of initial losses, gain allies that would support her, and turn the Germans own weapon against it with an even more capable method of attacking.

The US/Allies also developed a mobile method of using brute force against an already over-stretched Germany and collapsed the Third Reich under logistical pressure.

Mobile Warfare replaced any 'blitzing' after 1943. All combatants had settled into using AFV in rougly similar practice and there were no more nation-toppling without brutal combat.

[ May 30, 2005, 10:47 AM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

[Bigduke6]

Wow, some interesting assumptions flying about. Here's my contribution point-by-point:

1. The idea that Germany failed in Russia as a result of "bad intelligence" is a ancient canard. The Germans knew perfectly well the Russians would mobilize upon invasion, and they knew even better that the only state more willing to use totalitarian techniques on its population, was the Germans themselves. They knew Russia was a major producer of military materials, they knew the size of the population, they knew all about Komsomol and the parachuting clubs, and they knew Russia's economy was geared towards military ends in a way not seen in the west.

It is close to insane to argue that the German army had a legitimate right to expect that the Soviet military, if hit with big defeats, would throw up its hands and give up. The rational reaction to invaders is to throw them out by whatever means you can, and if you lose the means, if at all possible you create more. So when you read about the Abwehrdienst whining in November '41 - yikes, 100 more divisions, where did THEY come from? ask yourself: How responsible was it to assume the Soviets would not mobilize every last tribesman and ore field to getting the Germans out?

The German leadership simply discounted the Soviet Union's military potential. They looked at the Soviet chaos in Finland and Poland, and concluded "These Russians are idiots, we can destroy them.They have been purging their military and the Red Army has grown too much too fast. They cannot resist us in battle. We are superior, and we will remain so."

That is not bad intelligence. It is in fact a fairly accurate appreciation of the situation in the SU, along with a disastrous understanding of its implications. The German army was betting Soviet Army would collapse after major defeats. That's Clauswitz in spades: destroy the main army, and everything else will fall into place.

Well, the Wehrmacht did precisely that - AND FAILED. Himmel! Betrayed by our own Clauswitz!

That's not bad intelligence. That's an intellectual failure - an assumption battlefield results will inevitably dictate socio-polticial results. Clauswitz, it turned out, was not gospel when it came to the Soviet Union.

The German military leadership were responsible for making that leap, and they did not. By the time they got to Russia, they didn't really think intelligence mattered. They felt they had an unbeatable army, and the idea subhuman Soviets could do what the French and British could not was ludicrous - although of course in the end, that is exactly what happened.

So don't blame intelligence. Blame the German General Staff. It was their army.

Now, you can argue at bottom of that failure was the army's willingness to buy into Nazi occult racial superiority hooey, and you can argue the German military's willful ignorance of Russia's size and military potential was classical Greek hubris, or you can even argue it was just an early case of Eisenhower's military-industrial complex gone amok.

But you can't argue that it was a giant mistake to invade Russia. The roots of those mistakes lie in irrational thinking by the German military leadership, NOT because of rational thinking queered by "bad intelligence".

2. The Soviet Union possessed massive oil fields in the Caspian at the time of the war, and very shortly after industry went east new fields were developed in the Urals, and in the Tiumen' region of Siberia. The latter is a sweet crude on a quality level with Libyan. The means to transport the crude - the Trans-Siberian - was in place.

I would be very suprised indeed to learn the Allies sent the SU signficant amounts of fuel. In the first place, the SU had all the crude it could want, and all it had to do was haul it to refineries. In the second place, no fuel shipment network for Allied deliveries via Murmansk, Arkhangel, or Iran existed; in part because of geography but mostly because at that point the SU wasn't a big crude exporter. Sending fuel to Russia would be exactly like sending coals to Newcastle, to coin a phrase.

3. Trucks - Nah, drop another line in the water. I ain't biting.

4. NAM - Me, I think Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, and their buddies did fine.They won, didn't they? So what if the body count exchange ratio wasn't in their favour? They weren't playing CM, they were trying to kick the foreigners out of their country so they could take it over themselves. They had something pretty important to fight for, and all the Americans had was their small unit buddies, and only then if the small unit was well-commanded, which frequently it wasn't.

Napoleon has a line: In war morale is to all other things as three is to one. I can't argue with that. Better morale - a belief by the fighters and the people behind their fighters that their cause was just and achievable - really helps when you are up against a more competent military than your own.

You want a hoot, read a standard U.S. history of Ia Drang or Parrot's Beak or whatever, and then ask yourself "How different is this from what von Manstein and Gudarian wrote?"

The parallels to me anyway are uncanny. We had the technology, we named the terms of combat, we had broken the code on how to fight outnumbered and win, we fought the good fight but due to forces beyond our control we lost the war, we were brave men and honorable soldiers - the enemy not, we were staving off the barbarian threat to western civilization, civilian high command made it impossible for us to win, and the enemy, tough crafty and primitive, doesn't deserve the rating of soldiers.

Coincidence? Or maybe it's case of the high-tech losers in a 20th century war justifying their defeat to themselves, so as to avoid looking hard at its real cause: a failure to understand war by the professional soldiers charged with that very responsibility?

5. This is really off the subject, bt if the VC were not "an elite guerilla force", then who in heaven's sake ever were? Belittling the Vietnamese military success against the US won't make it go away.

And for the heckofit I will repeat my other question because I think it's a pretty good one "Is it not the case that the Germans, by concentrating on battle-winning technologies esp. bigger badder tanks, inevitably dealt themselves out of the blitzkrieg business by about 1943?

[Wartgamer]

According to this source the Allies sent 59% of the Aviation (high octane) fuel. The Soviets were quite capable of supplying thier own automotive fuel needs (97.5%). You probably are not grasping that fact. It is very clear if you bothered to read the link provided. Evidently, they needed aviation fuel. More than likely, it is harder to process than lower ocatne gasoline or diesel.

Aviation Fuel

thousands of tons (includes Allied deliveries)

1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 Total %

889 1269 912 1007 1334 1017 4396

Allied Deliveries 2586 59

Soviet Production 1810 41

Trucks: They did recieve many trucks. They even used captured trucks also. They needed trucks. What dont you grasp?

CHAPTER VIII

Motor Vehicle Assembly

and Delivery

In the manufacture of motor vehicles American methods of mass production have achieved quantitative results unequaled by any other industrial power. This industrial potential, a valuable asset in mechanized warfare, the United States shared with its Allies through lend-lease. To the Soviet Union through 20 September 1945 went 409,526 lend-lease trucks of United States origin. Some idea of the extent to which the United States shared its output with the USSR may be gained from figures of its production of military trucks during the war years. Total output during the peak year of 1943 was 648,404 military trucks. The trucks sent to Russia were thus the equivalent of seven and a half months of United States output at the highest annual rate achieved during the war years. It has been estimated that the lend-lease trucks received by the USSR from the United States represented two years and seven months of the prewar capacity of the less highly developed Soviet motor industry. American trucks therefore bulked large as an addition to Russian production capacity. Nearly 45 percent of these American trucks reached the USSR via the Persian Corridor. Of these, 88 percent were assembled in the American-operated plants at Andimeshk and Khorramshahr from March 1942 through April 1945.1

Bibliography

Beaumont, Joan. Harrison, Mark. Accounting For War: Soviet Production, Employment, and the Defense Burden, 1941-1945

Ibid. Soviet Planning in Peace and War Jones.

Sokolov, B. V. "The Role of Lend-Lease in Soviet Military Efforts, 1941-1945"; Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3, Sept. 94

Trucks

http://www.army.mil/CMH-pg/books/wwii/persian/chapter08.htm

[ May 30, 2005, 02:58 PM: Message edited by: Wartgamer ]

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Generaloberst Guderian:

[snips]

But what remains in the public consciousness from all that?

An American soldier with a revolver shooting a Vietnamese prisoner in the temple.

That may very well be what remains in the public consciousness, but Mr. Picky is obliged to point out that the man wielding the revolver was Nguyen Ngoc Loan, an RVN police chief.

The fact that the VC Captain he executed had, it seems, just murdered the entire family of one of Loan's officers is also not generally recalled.

All the best,

John.

[Wartgamer]

Napoleon has a line: In war morale is to all other things as three is to one. I can't argue with that. Better morale - a belief by the fighters and the people behind their fighters that their cause was just and achievable - really helps when you are up against a more competent military than your own.

Perhaps if the French had as much space/bad weather as the Soviets 'enjoy', they too could have had some options.

If the French had an industrial Giant like the US supplying it, it may have also faired better/longer.

Napolean should talk to the US troops that fought in the Hurtgen forest perhaps? They had great morale initially, but were worn down by bad terrain, second rate troops (with lots of ammo for the tubes) and many realities that Mr. 3:1 did not dream about.

[JasonC]

A.E.B. - thanks for your constructive comments, in my opinion the most cogent on the thread. You said the point isn't just having tanks "it is using them as a coordinated mass". Yes, it is using them correctly, which includes mass and coordination, and all arms support, and soft systems tailored for it, and an overall operational plan where they fit. But the Germans did not have these things because nobody else knew about the subject or because they spent their money on other things. They tried.

Russia invested far more heavily in mobile forces, sooner, than German did. They had the largest airborne force in the world, the largest tank fleet by an order of magnitude, the best tank designs. They had a fully elaborated all arms formation built around high theory hashed out over about a decade, far in advance of anything the western allies had.

They also had a recently purged officer corps, a deliberate politically paranoid campaign against some leading mech theorists as smelling fascist and maybe pro German, incomplete personnel for their ambitious mech arm, low readiness, a poor maintenance culture, peacetime training that avoided stressing critical support elements, some disasterous recent experience that should have taught them more than it did (Finland, the occupations), and a few successes that taught a few of them some relevant lessons (in the east against Japan).

In the event, they made catastrophic mistakes and their mech arm was clearly broken. They were on the defensive and nobody yet knew how to stop modern all arms forces with proper doctrine when they were on the offensive. They tried the obvious, reasonable things, like coordinated mech counterattacks against the shoulders of penetrations - but their mech arm fell apart on them within days, without result. This did not happen because they hadn't spent money on it. It happened despite having spent money on it. It is possible to simply fail.

As for the French, their army was larger than the German one for a large portion of the interwar years and on paper hardly inferior at the time of the 1940 campaign. They were outplayed, operationally. They had to defend which is harder - they thought it would be easier based on WW I experience and picked the defensive, of course. The Germans did better tactically, so much so the German success was overdetermined.

A large part of my point, though, was that the Germans had a lot more going for them than their recent doctrine armor stuff. They had a sound military tradition going back several generations, long antedating the existence of tanks. The way breakthroughs are forced was something they already knew. Tanks amplified it, but it was a solved problem for them (which it wasn't, in the west). They had a proper aim - decision by annihilation battle under favorable conditions. The failures of the allies amplified these things - which isn't uncommon in military history, or for that matter in prior German military experience.

My point about speed was that the same relationship existed in WW II once the defenders knew what to do about a breakthrough threat. A foot slogging army without serious reserves can be sliced and diced, certainly. A motorized one that reacts sensibly seals penetrations from the shoulders in and then you get a nice big brawl between the attacker spearheads and the defender reserves, on terms either even (when the attack scale is large enough, relatively early) or advantage to the defender (any smaller attack, enough defender depth). Also, that since beating the enemy reserves is the requirement it isn't enough to be fast - the fast stuff also has to be combat tough. If it can't win a pitched battle it is rapidly checked and one develops, which it then proceeds to not win.

As for the bad decisions to delay retreats, I simply deny the attacker can count on them. I consider them entirely "own goals" by defenders who haven't seen the consequences yet and so underestimate the danger they are in, and fail to make the right moves in time, due to an inadequate sense of impending doom. That unprofessional officers exploit political naivety in such matters, promising sunnier outcomes than they can deliver, is simply criminal, and perfectly avoidable.

Nor do pols have to fall for it - if they have properly delegated military authority, they don't have to make the call, and can leave it to clear headed military men who will do what is required to preserve their force and let chips fall where they may. There was no lack of such men. Ike about the Bulge, Rundstadt or Manstein about numerous disasters, plenty of the better Russian generals gave the correct counsel and did so in time. Some political-military relationships were screwed up royally enough they did not allow that expert knowledge its practical effect.

Nor it is a matter of stuff not getting away. When retreats were ordered in a timely manner they worked. Those ordered back across the Dnepr in time made it, only to be refused a second backstep when the larger Kiev pocket came along. The forces opposite AG North backpeddled properly without any armies cut off, despite a coast and lake terrain that favored it. Forces in the south in 1942 got away. The German southern wing got away clean after Stalingrad, despite a second cut directed at Rostov, because Manstein saw it and (belatedly) was given authority enough to act.

Super breakthroughs of the era travelled 50 miles a day tops, with 15-25 mile days common throughout. Defenders with rail lines and motor transport can readily withdraw at least that fast, leaving blocking forces to delay the attackers, etc. It is a well understood military art, just one undercultivated by militaries focused on the more glamorous business of attacking. Nothing dictates the defenders must stand stock still, feet in cement, or thrusting the wrong way deeper into forming pockets (which even the Germans were doing as late as Mortain). When they do, it is an unforced error, not something the attack method itself forces or can reliably bring about.

Next on France, no the Germans did not occupied the whole thing. They took only the northern half of the country, actually, before the French sued for peace. They only occupied the rest after the US invasion of French north Africa, not wanting to allow a repeat of it on the mainland, no longer trusting Vichy (not that they ever did, much), and knowing the US was perfectly willing to attack French possessions and when necessary French forces.

As for what you can do in 35 days, the Germans were at Smolensk in that period, which was faster than the advance in France, against more opposition, and inflicting heavier losses. The difference was replacement rate. The French didn't have one, any more than the Germans did - both were effectively fighting the war out of a standing force, a stock, not a perpetual mobilization stream or a flow. The Russians were losing between half a million and a million men per month throughout 1941. But the size of their army declined only slightly to the start of November. That was the month is rebounded, and the German lost their odds edge (which they actually had achieved up to them, via lopsided losses, despite a replacement balance of tons vs. 0).

The Germans could have done dramatically better than they did, and personally I think it is clear they could have beaten Russia, had they simply turned on their own economy before the attack. Instead they waited until after Stalingrad, and only hit peak output in 1944. They only pulled out the manpower stops in the summer of 1944, to repair the collapses in white Russia and France. But tanks produced and VG mobilized in 1944 could not change the outcome of the war, while the same efforts made in 1941 and 1942 might well have.

This was a pure unforced error. There is nothing inherently daunting about being in front of Moscow in November, if you had a big replacement stream right along. In case nobody noticed, the German army spent 4 years in Russia. They fought well enough to have the initiative in 1942. No timetable written in the stars says "you must win before it snows".

It can snow for four years if you want, and you can still win. (It snowed on the Russians, and they won, didn't they?) The question is merely, is your relative strength continually increasing or is it declining? And there is no reason for it to be declining, when you are inflicting 10 to 1 losses on an enemy with the same industrial base you've got.

The army that had the snot pounded out of it from June to October had no business being the stronger one on the first of December. That is was, can be explained only by one variable in the entire equation - German replacement rate equals zero. If it had been half the Russian rate, they could have paused in front of Moscow with no decline in relatively strength, if they liked, not being forced to race any clock. Time would not have been on the Russian's side. The side that can wipe out a million of the enemy at will, and also mobilize new forces itself about as fast, is in no danger of being overwhelmed by enemy numbers. They didn't because they didn't think they had to. They thought numbers would not matter, that they were passe.

That is not what happened in 1991, incidentally. You'd be on stronger ground with the more recent one, where numbers actually were lopsided in favor of the hapless Iraqis - though on both occasions, they mostly just surrendered. Which was sensible, considering how little they had in the fight and the capital they were up against. But VII corps driving up to the Iraq border would have run over a Russian tank army, let alone the decimated and deserted Iraqi remnants it actually smashed. There was no stinting of the principle of mass on that occasion. 1000 M-1s on point is not penny packeting. Rumsfeld's win lite attempts are a better example of how far things have gone since. With truly revolutionary tech (universally smart firepower everywhere, every private a FAC, etc) clearly driving, not merely being tracked and having control of the air.

[JasonC]

As for the rest of the Nam, Iraq now, learn your Mao, failure to distinguish the VC from the NVA, aren't commies great, and the rest - if that is going to be the subject, I'd say take it to the general forum, if I could muster the strength to give a darn. If the intention is to drive anyone with two brain cells screaming into the tall grass, it is working. I was going to point out that people are also just plain lying, but John beat me to the punch.

[JasonC]

urd - I don't think size was the thing they underestimated. And I do think they thought odds simply would not matter, that their superior techniques simply trumped all that. Which is wild magical thinking and irrational, in my book. It is going on a savor of things, a smell they seem to have, not on facts. I can back it up with quotes and parallels. "Kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will fall to the ground". Well, they did, and it didn't.

One parallel is China. Japan invaded China in the 1930s. The Chinese wallowed under occupation, resisting feebly here and there. The Japanese occupied the whole coast, sent punishment expeditions where they wished. They didn't occupy more of the country mostly because of logistical limits. They looted Manchuria through a puppet state, taxed the cities and occasionally sacked them, and held down the rest with trainloads of infantry and artillery and a modest air force. For years on end. That war did not end, but there was no prospect whatever of China ever throwing the Japanese out, without outside assistance. I think Hitler thought Russia would be similar, once the European section with most of the population and industry was occupied. With Ukraine the puppet province, the Baltics eventually incorporated into the Reich, etc.

The other parallel is late WW I in the east. The Russians were knocked out of the war, a German army occupied Ukraine. They didn't go to Moscow and didn't think they needed to. Falkenhayn wrote "an advance on Moscow takes us nowhere". Russia was too disorganized to resist. When negotiations went poorly at B-L, the Germans just unilaterally resumed combat operations. There was nobody to really stop them. Hitler assumed support for the existing state would collapse after the existing army was carved up and defeated, and the disorganized remainder would either sue for something or lapse into ineffectual belligerence of the China variety.

Which was a crazy underestimation of one of the leading powers in the world, with a sixth of world industry etc. But exactly the kind of crazy I think they had contracted. They thought people who disagreed with them made themselves weaker by doing so, because they thought they had the secret of power. Which is wild magical thinking. I am not talking about the Rundstadts and the Mansteins, but of Hitler personally and his circle.

They did not intellectually understand the way mobile warfare succeeded. They understood *that* it succeeded, and that the success was a matter of superior technique and knowledge. And they thought superior technique and knowledge were their magical birthright, and others lacked them because they were inferiors. Which was a bit of elitist wild magical thinking very much in the air at the time - not just in Germany.

My point in bringing all of that up was merely to distinguish what actually happened at the level of professional understanding of, and development of, mobile warfare doctrine - on the one hand - and all the various misconceptions and oversimplifications about it all - on the other hand. The point was that the German political leadership had its own set of mistaken ideas about it (Hitler is not Guderian, he did not invent this stuff, he never really got it as all his later mistakes when he stopped listening to his generals abundantly demonstrate), which had serious consequences for how they prosecuted the war.

In particular, the traditional *target* of German grand strategy is the fielded forces of the enemy. Which is a sound target to aim at. But a strategy has to be consistent in the effects it expects from the means it employs, and use all means directed at those effects. Aiming at fielded forces means expecting *eventual* odds achieved to matter. Run the enemy low on forces while you build your own, outstrip them, win that way. But it becomes less than sound when you don't try to build your own. You won't get a forces remaining ratio moving your way just by wrecking the enemy on the field, if he mobilizes as fast as you wreck him, and you don't mobilize anything yourself.

Hitler thought mobile mech warfare made material struggle obsolete, that was its point for him. To replace a field of competition in which wealth, numbers, and odds all matter with one in which only an extreme of technique or skill matters. Thinking that was Germany's long suit, as a technological and military-theoretic leader. It is sensible to look for advantages that way, but it was magical thinking to expect it to make other factors just go away as unimportant.

There is no way the decision not to mobilize the economy can be defended (even if you probably are going to win easily, you won't lose instead if you mobilize), but there are ways it can be understood. This sort of delusion is one of them. Hitler emotionally avoided anything that smacked of material-struggle because it reminded of a hard previous war that Germany had lost. Yes he was underestimating the Russians. He also needed to underestimate them. Which is characteristic magical thinking, a wish dominating an obvious, objective interest. Presumably, to order economic mobilization as a precaution would break the shell of confidence he required.

[jacobs_ladder2]

Originally posted by Grisha:

To respond to Paul's comment on German/Soviet 'doctrine', I think you are pointing in the right direction. The problem in properly identifying the concepts you refer to is that there is no underlying universal terminology that addresses it.

Yep, that was part of my problem for sure. The other is that it has been a while since I did my research on Soviet operational doctrine and I have forgotten a lot of its finer points.

I think the Soviets had a very well-rounded idea of how things would need to go in order for them to beat their more advanced opponents. They were aware of their strengths and weaknesses and their doctrine evolved accordingly.

Unfortunately, most of it was derailed by Stalin and the full frontal labotomy performed on the RKKA in the 30s. However, the foundation survived, cracks and all, and was sturdy enough to provide a base for the massive mobilization that followed.

Which is not to say that Russian doctrine did not have major flaws, because it did, but it did have the total package of the three levels you describe (with a strong emphasis on the operational and less attention paid to the tactical).

Russian doctrine was extremely advanced in areas that are often forgotten in discussions of this type. The best example is their ability to deceive their opponents into completely misjudging the size and makeup of their forces. Russian deception played a large role in what is often described as the "failure" of German intelligence.

In fact, German intelligence did an excellent job of placing divisions and armies along the border, but was completely unaware of the second echelon forces deployed in depth to stop the inevitable breakthroughs that the Russians had always known would occur. Russian deception also played a large role in the German tendency to seriously underestimate the number of armoured formations and their strengths.

And as far as mobilization is concerned, clearly the Germans were basing their decisions on incomplete information. They did suffer from arrogance, but they were not idiots and they were not all deluded racists. They believed they could win in Russia and they held that belief due to sound reasoning (unfortunately based on an incomplete picture of their enemy).

I think it is important to remember that the Germans invaded Russian when the RKKA was in the midst of a massive and unprecedented transition. Stalin had finally softened his grip on the military and was allowing men like Timoshenko to get things done in a reasonable manner. That, and several other factors, more than explain the disaster they suffered in 1941. German superiority was only a small part of the picture.

Where the Germans failed was not in their tactics, and not even in their operational art. It was in their strategy. They went to war with a strategic assessment that was seriously flawed. Because of it, the Germans invaded the USSR without the means to win--except in the most advantageous of circumstances.

I agree completely. They did not think the campaign through to many of its more logical conclusions and plan for those eventualities. Then again, maybe they understood the futility of the whole situation. In other words, they knew they were fried chicken if they did not win in a matter of a few months, so why bother planning for it.

Cheers

Paul

p.s. Doesn't Glantz have a book on Soviet Operational Art?

[jacobs_ladder2]

Originally posted by JasonC:

Where to begin? There is so much loose thinking on this subject, among the original participants, later observers and historians, and in this thread.

And here we go again...

The earliest serious theorists of the armor revolution in warfare were not German, and they didn't wait until WW II. They were British...

Depends on how far back you want to go. Fuller was part of the picture, but so were the Prussians in the 19th Century. So were a lot of people. Armour played a natural role because it filled the gap so clearly marked out by the ideas. Namely, it is easy to break through, but hard to follow up. Fuller, like others, quickly recognized that the tank could bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Fuller was able to organize a lot of ideas and add some of his own, but he was not the end all say all in the evolution of the tactics we are discussing. He was the first to be given the opportunity to test out some of his theories, but as we all know, his attempts were corrupted by his opponents within the British Army. In any case, it is my understanding that Fuller got his inspiration from infiltration tactics used by German troops in WWI.

Hart also formed part of the picture, as did Schlieffen, Moltke, Tukachevski and many others. Blitzkrieg was not just about armour. The ideas that eventually evolved into reality in 1940 came from many sources.

In fact, the idea was German and most of the key players were German. Guderian, unquestionably, is the man that played the most important role in the evolution of the blitzkrieg. No amount of post-war manipulation of the facts can change that.

One of the principle myths raised by this discussion is the ludicrous idea that the British were responsible for the blitzkrieg.

You can't understand why these ideas all had the same "savor" to literary nostrils without seeing their nutty-elitist overtones. Free of morality, the new magicians...

Irrelevant. Colourful, yes. Entertaining, yes, but completely irrelevant.

BHL Hart was Fuller's sane publicist, trying to strip away the encrusted garbage and keep the military sense of the idea. But at bottom he was only an historian, and his military judgment was superficial at best...

Not to mention the degree to which he worked to vindicate his own ideas after WWII. Like writing himself into the English version of Guderian's memoires. Hart worked overtime to inflate his own importance. In reality it is, at the very least, debatable if Guderian ever payed him any mind at all.

The old German army had an actual military doctrine and quite a good one. Its defense schemes and some of the finer tactical points had been elaborated during WW I. The basic approach was much older, going back through Moltke the elder to Gneisenau and the lessons of the Napoleonic wars.and encirclement could combine the two...Nobody needed any tanks to encircle the French army at Sedan, and annihilate it as it tried to get out of the trap...When the German army crushed Poland in 1939, the pros running the show...

This is better. Of all the points you have raised this is the most relevant to what we have been saying. In fact, the Polish Campaign in 1939 had little or nothing to do with the Blitzkrieg. It is yet another myth that the Poles were the victims of the first blitz. They were not. The word may have appeared after the campaign, but in fact the invasion of Poland was nothing new. Armour played an almost insignificant role in the victory. Encirclement does not, and never did, require tanks.

So what happens when you give a few officers in this school Fuller and Hart to read?

Apparently very little, unless you believe different. This point lies on such shaky ground I wouldn't walk across it with stilts.

Luckily you followed this statement with a lot of very accurate points about decisions made by Guderian in the 1940 campaign.

Notice, however, that the same logic dictates the turn south for Kiev in 1941. That was no more a mistake than the turn to the channel was. It destroyed an enemy force of a million men for trivial loss, and seized the entire Ukraine. Yet monday morning QBs - including German generals after the fact - pretend it was insufficiently Fuller-esque, so it isn't maneuver-ee or something. Which is just nonsense. It was, and it cashed in previous positional advantage for more favorable odds through annihilation battle, entirely successfully.

It may not have been a "mistake" as such, but it was "plan b" as far as the German high command was concerned. The order to turn south was a substantial deviation from the previous order. It is entirely possible that the southward turn was as big a surprise for the Germans, in terms of how well it ended up working, as it was for the Russians. In fact, it is entirely possible that the Germans simply chose the path of least resistance. It is arguable that this decision, however much destruction it caused in the Ukraine, ended up costing Germany the war.

Hitler was going on promises and "scent". When people failed he just sacked them, he had no real ability to assess their talent beyond the empirical one, had they won? But he could be manipulated, readily, by flattery - giving him a whiff of romantic elitism and "counting him in" as "visionary" for "seeing it", as opposed to those old reactionary vons.

Horsepoop. Loose thinking at its finest.

...OK, afer El Alamein, did the Germans get away clean? Um, no. After the Russian offensives following Kursk, surely then the Germans just stopped 'em cold, right? Um, no. After Cobra? Um, no.

I believe a few of us loose thinkers raised this, and many, of your points. We just did so in a way that respected the intelligence of the listener.

In 1941, the Russians have armies in reserve lines, and it keeps individual breakthroughs from winning the war, but it does not remotely stop them.

No, but it does prompt them to make major changes in their plans like ordering panzer armies to make 90 degree turns away from their objectives.

Those are still the participants. The journalists come along and try to boil the whole thing down to a word so they can refer to it easily. The historians then going looking in German records for their doctrines of blitzkrieg and notice the word is not theirs. Every theorist who learned only a third of the problem writes a book describing the solution as one of the halfway misunderstood versions (like, just have tanks, or mass tanks, or use tanks to exploit), missing all the wider relations and nuances...Then, because all of that isn't involved enough, a third of the people talking about it don't actually give a rat's rumpus about military technique or the actual history, either of the practice or of the ideas, but instead treat the entire arena as a stage on which ideological or national points might be scored.

Good thing we have you to clarify it all for us. Else we might be led astray by charlatans, thieves and liars.

You accuse us of loose thinking and then launch into a lengthy diatribe detailing your own take on the evolution of the blitzkrieg. Well, misinformed and misled we may be, but innocent of the same crime you are not.

[Wartgamer]

You think he has any friends?

[Bigduke6]

I'd like to return to the Vietnam analogy for a moment.

It is a fairly well-accepted historical fact that though the Tet Offensive was a hands-down military defeat for Giap and Ho, on the political level it was for them a strategic victory of stunning proportions.

Basically, the U.S. government had been telling its citizens "Light at the end of the tunnel, Charlie is on the ropes, we're winning" and then the Vietnamese come up with this mucking great big offensive (I use that term advisedly). Thus the U.S. government is convicted in the minds of a majority of Americans citizens - and in the minds of an overwhelming majority of draft-age citizens - that in fact the U.S. government has been lying. Charlie is not on the ropes, the Americans are not winning the hearts and minds, and the most rational path for most American citizen is to get the U.S. Army out of Vietnam. And since it was a democracy, that's what they eventually made their government do. Score one for Charlie.

I point this out not so much to rehash Nam as to draw attention to what I see as a parallel intellectual failure between the US Joint Chiefs' in the 1960s, and the German General staff in the 1940s. In both cases professional officers leading arguably the premier military force on the planet were confronted with a war in which they, in the final analysis, failed to understand the terms.

The essense of that rather dull mistake - Don't underestimate you enemy! - lies of course in a failure to appreciate the war-fighting ability of their opponents. True the terms of those two wars were dramatically different - total vs. limited, mechanized vs. airmobile, etc. - but the root of the problem is quite the same: Both Hitler's and Johnson's generals focused primarily on the battlefield, when victory if it was to be had was really in the enemy "hearts and minds".

The thing that needed defeating more than anything else, in both cases, was the enemy will to resist. This was necessary because in both cases the wars' terms practically precluded straightfoward political victory as a result of battlefield success, like Clauswitz promised.

It is of course arguable that the Germans at least might have had a shot at straightforward military victory had they mobilized completely in 1941, but of course they didn't so that option is theoretical.

But what if the focus of the German effort had been not total domination of the Soviet Union but, say, removal of the western non-Russian republics from SU control and conversion of those regions into pliable allies (think Romania or Hungary) rather than conquered regions whose population by birth were slaves to the Reich? Could the Germans have pulled that off? At least from a technical/functional point of view, that could have been a real option.

But for one very big thing: The German war doctrine precluded limited victory. The doctrine was all or nothing, us or them, total battlefield victory or total battlefield defeat. In a word: Blitzkrieg.

I argue that faulty German military doctrine (with SU as an opponent, anyway) stemmed just as much from the German General Staff's living and breathing the precepts of Clauswitz for a good century and change, as the racial goofiness espoused by Germany's political leaders. It was that combination of faulty thinking that drove the Germans to attack the Russians and to try and defeat them in the wrong arena - the battlefield.

I believe we can see the Americans trying to learn from that type of mistake in Iraq. Clearly the modern Joint Chiefs understand just winning battles won't cut it, they need to repress an insurgency while dramatically limited in coercive tools to do so; so the technique is improving civilian living standards and building civil society.

Whether they can pull it off remains to be seen. But at least, you have to America's leading military men credit for having cast off from the idea of striving for battlefield victory at all costs - something Germany's military men proved incapable of doing.

[JasonC]

"it is easy to break through, but hard to follow up. Fuller, like others, quickly recognized that the tank could bridge the gap"

Fuller did not think it was easy to break through. He thought it was hard. He thought only tanks could do it, and that once it was accomplished, the rest would be relatively easy. That the rest would consist of driving for deep objectives to deliver the "shot to the brain", not annihilation battle against fielded forces. He did not remotely grasp the larger practical context in which his ideas were applied. He thought he did, but that doesn't mean he did. And his influence continue to push British armor use toward using armor alone, independent of other arms, a tactical blind alley. His critics got infantry support as an additional role for tanks, but neither camp found Guderian's solution.

His errors and his general nuttiness made it much easier for others to dismiss his ideas without fully exploring them and finding the germs of truth they contained. No, he did not understand German infiltration tactics - tank theory got started parallel to that in a different army. The two clashed in sequence at Cambrai, without either camp knowing the other side's advances. Guderian learned how to use the British innovations, it can't be said British armor theorists learned how to use the German ones.

"It is arguable that this decision, however much destruction it caused in the Ukraine, ended up costing Germany the war."

It is arguable the moon might be green cheese, but it isn't. The turn to Kiev did not cost Germany the war. They were stopped in front of Moscow by Russian forces that outnumbered them as they reached the end of their logistical tether, and they would have been a million men worse off in that respect if they hadn't gone to Kiev. Perhaps more, since the Russians used the intervening time to weaken their own forces in the center in fruitless attacks, setting up Bryansk perfectly. If they reached Moscow they would have faced the same odds behind it, and been driven back for the same reasons. There was no magical boffin in Red Square. The decision that cost Germany the war in Russia was the idea of attacking without mobilizing the economy for a long war of attrition, and the resulting millions to zero disparity in the replacement streams of the two sides throughout the 1941 campaign.

As for Hitler being manipulated by large promises, Manstein getting his French plan is one example, Guderian agreeing to Kiev but with his group kept together under his command is another. He sacked both of them, despite their obvious skills - Guderian the instant he recognized the need to retreat to defensible positions in front of Moscow, Manstein after the fight for the Dnepr bend. They weren't the only ones - practically the entire senior leadership that had successfully run the 1940 and early 1941 campaigns was fired as soon as Barbarossa failed to win outright in one short campaign. Rundstadt was removed for evacuating Rostov at the same time.

These were the most talented men in the German army. If Hitler had any actual intellectual grasp of the subject matter and independent means of appraising its teachers and practioners, he wouldn't have fired them. He did, because all he saw was confidence and success, giving way to lack of confidence. Which he immediately removed from authority. He was going entirely by superficial indicators, in judging which generals to believe and to promote.

My list of examples of others' breakthroughs was merely to point out that learning to defend against these methods was a harder technical task than learning how to attack with them - one the Germans themselves never really mastered. It seems to me bizarre to object to it, or to see anything insulting in the manner I said it. I simply gave the inductive evidence before the conclusion, it is harder to defend against than to launch such attacks.

[ May 30, 2005, 11:20 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[JasonC]

BD6 - for the last time, if you want to refight the Vietnam war, do it in the general forum. None of the tendentious political lessons you think you see in the events is an undisputed military fact in evidence to theorize about. For starters, the American people did not turn against the war - half the democratic party did. That split said party. In a few more years, that party was against the war. But as fast as the Democrats abandoned the war, the American people abandoned the Democrats. I know some people think the Democratic party is America, and it deciding something is equivalent to Jesus Christ deciding that same thing, but really, I swear, you can look it up, McGovern lost. Tet destroyed the Johnson presidency, not the US commitment to Vietnam. The US had plenty of political weapons and used them, it was not remotely stuck in military only thinking. The US commitment to Vietnam was alive and well, without a draft or ground troops, thus without unpopularity of any kind, and successfully keeping SVN independent through air power, the night some idiots went into the Watergate hotel without knocking. A million lines of revisionist lies will not suffice to turn the destruction of SVN into a poster child for successful Maoist guerilla war. It is a poster child for not spying on domestic opponents or at least not getting caught doing it, and for what 600 T-62s can do, unopposed by superior air and driven hard. The NVA were an excellent, disciplined, professional army. But they could not defeat arclights with AKs, and they didn't defeat Nixon with Cronkite either. The guy who got Nixon was Nixon. But none of this has anything to do with the subject of this thread, and your continued attempts to pretend it does are just dragging all this politics ward, which way lies no light, only heat.

[Paul AU]

With regard to the opening post, I'd read the idea refered to, and took it seriously. It's (usually) a pleasure to see any well-run challenge to historical orthodoxy. (Or any other kind of orthodoxy, in fact).

'People' do have a tendency to invent simple myths (because they're simple) - and run with them.

But as to the second part of the O.P., "...how to repeat the effect of blitzkreig on a CM scale...", surely one can't?

"Blitzkrieg", myth or not, isn't a company or battalion-level thing.

"It'll take more than a pointy hat, and bad breath to defeat the armies of King George, sir!"

[Bigduke6]

Jason,

On Vietnam, that's your opinion, and your interpetation of events. My interpetation differs, apparently fairly radically.

An issue in this thread is the failure of a high-tech, leading-edge military in a war it believed it had every reason to win, but ultimately experienced defeat. I think a comparison of the failure of U.S. policy in Vietnam, and the failure of German policy in the Soviet Union, is quite germane to a discussion on Blitzkrieg.

You have made it clear you don't. Fine.

If you want to debate Vietnam then please, start the thread wherever you want, and I promise you a very tough fight. If you think my position is grounded on superficial pop interpetations of the U.S. domestic politics of the 1960s, you are in for a surprise. If you think the arguements you have tossed out so far on the subject are air-tight, you are in for another surprise.

Ok, this is for every one talking about Blitzkrieg:

Let's go back to the Clauswitzian line about war being an extension of politics.

The whole point to Blitzkrieg was to achieve a political end - usually the exension of German political control over another portion of Europe - by the use of mobile warfare to inflict rapid defeat on an enemy army. That fixation on the decisive battle actually is pre-Clauswitzian, in German terms, dating back at least to Friedrich the Great. We're talking about an idea deeply embedded in the German military psyche.

Gudarian's memoirs make clear that as far as Gudarian was concerned, what we today call Blitzkrieg was the intellectual child of a radical wing of the German officer corps, which was able to hitch its idea to Hitler's total control of the German government. Fuller's writings were just that - a text available to officers interested in the subject, as a starting point for thinking on how best to fight Germany's next war. The solution the German army came up with - Blitzkrieg - worked great for a while.

The key question here is, why did Blitzkrieg stop working? We know the obvious answers: the depth of Russia, increased Allied competence, inherent German industrial weakness vis. its opponents, and so on.

I am introducing - okay, trying to introduce - another root of that failure to the discussion. I maintain a lack of imagination on the part of the German military leadership was a key contributor. Germany's top officers, meaning v. Rundstadt, v. Manstein, Model, Jodel, Gudarian and the rest, kept thinking "win battles" when material, attrition, and popular will were going to determine the result of the result of the war.

Certainly it's easy enough for me to point fingers: the Germans had a winning game and it was quite logical they stick with it. Of course I am not a senior officer sworn to defend Germany from its enemies.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

1. The idea that Germany failed in Russia as a result of "bad intelligence" is a ancient canard.

bad intelligence about the strength of Red Army & Soviet economy is not the reason why Germans lost. it is the reason why the Germans started the war which they weren't prepared for.

Germans didn't start the war knowing the full strenght of the Soviets and just thinking it wouldn't matter because they were Occult Aryan Overlords or other such nonsense.

The Germans knew perfectly well the Russians would mobilize upon invasion, and they knew even better that the only state more willing to use totalitarian techniques on its population, was the Germans themselves. They knew Russia was a major producer of military materials, they knew the size of the population, they knew all about Komsomol and the parachuting clubs, and they knew Russia's economy was geared towards military ends in a way not seen in the west.

yet they didn't have a clue how strong the Red Army really was & how strong the Soviet economy was. Germans were extremely surprised by both. "who could have guessed", as Hitler himself said.

It is close to insane to argue that the German army had a legitimate right to expect that the Soviet military, if hit with big defeats, would throw up its hands and give up.

German goal was specifically the destruction of the Red Army. i don't see much of going for hopes of Red Army just giving up or Germans focusing in pure moral targets like Moscow or Leningrad.

So when you read about the Abwehrdienst whining in November '41 - yikes, 100 more divisions, where did THEY come from?

exactly, they were surprised. they had thought Soviets would have had a lot smaller forces.

ask yourself: How responsible was it to assume the Soviets would not mobilize every last tribesman and ore field to getting the Germans out?

it's not "would not", it is "could not". Germans simply didn't know the Soviet capacity.

The German leadership simply discounted the Soviet Union's military potential.

and not just the potential, but the very strength itself.

They looked at the Soviet chaos in Finland and Poland, and concluded "These Russians are idiots, we can destroy them.They have been purging their military and the Red Army has grown too much too fast. They cannot resist us in battle. We are superior, and we will remain so."

which was a rational well founded conclusion and also proven correct by the events of summer & fall of 1941.

The German army was betting Soviet Army would collapse after major defeats. That's Clauswitz in spades: destroy the main army, and everything else will fall into place.

they were after the destruction of Red Army, not just some major defeats.

Well, the Wehrmacht did precisely that - AND FAILED. Himmel! Betrayed by our own Clauswitz!

they did not do it.

That's not bad intelligence. That's an intellectual failure - an assumption battlefield results will inevitably dictate socio-polticial results. Clauswitz, it turned out, was not gospel when it came to the Soviet Union.

i think you are jumping into an intellectual failure here yourself

The German military leadership were responsible for making that leap, and they did not. By the time they got to Russia, they didn't really think intelligence mattered. They felt they had an unbeatable army, and the idea subhuman Soviets could do what the French and British could not was ludicrous - although of course in the end, that is exactly what happened.

of course they were responsible for the decision of launching the war, but they didn't feel they had an Occult Nonhuman Army. most of them were professionals who were concerned about very mundane and carnal factors of the art of war & economy. you are bying far too much into pure propaganda.

So don't blame intelligence. Blame the German General Staff. It was their army.

i am not blaming anyone. i have no personal interests buried in this subject. i am simply trying to have an objective look on the subject based on what i know about it.

But you can't argue that it was a giant mistake to invade Russia. The roots of those mistakes lie in irrational thinking by the German military leadership, NOT because of rational thinking queered by "bad intelligence".

i can't see anything so irrational in the German plan, if i look it from their perspective.

could you show me how they were being irrational?

[undead reindeer cavalry]

Originally posted by JasonC:

urd - I don't think size was the thing they underestimated.

they clearly underestimated the size, as they were surprised by it. they were just as surprised by the Soviet capacity to produce tanks & soldiers. you must be well aware of both things - you just seem to consciously ignore it, or at least play it down significantly, for some reason that is unknown to me.

And I do think they thought odds simply would not matter, that their superior techniques simply trumped all that.

they thought, and rightly so, that their troops would be of superior quality, but not to the fantasy land level you seem to suggest. they were very concerned about the basic realities of the art of war.

Which is wild magical thinking and irrational, in my book.

your book seems to include lot's wonderous things, like that Nazis adored Thelemites and such. in my book those groups were amongst the first sent to camps. for what it's worth to point out the obvious: Nazis idolized agrarian lifestyle.

It is going on a savor of things, a smell they seem to have, not on facts. I can back it up with quotes and parallels. "Kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will fall to the ground". Well, they did, and it didn't.

do you really believe that Germans weren't in for the destruction of the Red Army?

That war did not end, but there was no prospect whatever of China ever throwing the Japanese out, without outside assistance. I think Hitler thought Russia would be similar, once the European section with most of the population and industry was occupied.

most likely yes. can't see anything Magico-Mystical in it.

Hitler assumed support for the existing state would collapse after the existing army was carved up and defeated, and the disorganized remainder would either sue for something or lapse into ineffectual belligerence of the China variety.

together with the capture of most of the industry and reserve base, yes. can't see anything mystical with this either.

in my opinion it would be Magical thinking to plan to invade & occupy Siberia right from the beginning.

Which was a crazy underestimation of one of the leading powers in the world, with a sixth of world industry etc.

nothing crazy in it, if you bother to look at it objectively from their perspective.

But exactly the kind of crazy I think they had contracted. They thought people who disagreed with them made themselves weaker by doing so, because they thought they had the secret of power. Which is wild magical thinking. I am not talking about the Rundstadts and the Mansteins, but of Hitler personally and his circle.

you are putting it grossly out of proportion, choosing to ignore the rational answers for the whys & wherefores.

They did not intellectually understand the way mobile warfare succeeded.

And they thought superior technique and knowledge were their magical birthright, and others lacked them because they were inferiors.

of course that's why they, for example, asked Finns, whom they considered to be Mongoloids, to train them in sub-arctic farware because they felt inferior in that aspect etc etc.

you are jumping to conclusions that do not reflect known reality. you are overemphasizing aspects that are marginal. you take poetry for science. you don't even try to look at things from the viewpoint you are trying to explain, distorting things out of proportion.

Which was a bit of elitist wild magical thinking very much in the air at the time - not just in Germany.

IMHO 21st century is not that different from 1941. judging from the first 5 years, 21st century is perhaps even worse.

My point in bringing all of that up was merely to distinguish what actually happened at the level of professional understanding of, and development of, mobile warfare doctrine - on the one hand - and all the various misconceptions and oversimplifications about it all - on the other hand. The point was that the German political leadership had its own set of mistaken ideas about it (Hitler is not Guderian, he did not invent this stuff, he never really got it as all his later mistakes when he stopped listening to his generals abundantly demonstrate), which had serious consequences for how they prosecuted the war.

i agree about this.

In particular, the traditional *target* of German grand strategy is the fielded forces of the enemy. Which is a sound target to aim at. But a strategy has to be consistent in the effects it expects from the means it employs, and use all means directed at those effects. Aiming at fielded forces means expecting *eventual* odds achieved to matter. Run the enemy low on forces while you build your own, outstrip them, win that way. But it becomes less than sound when you don't try to build your own. You won't get a forces remaining ratio moving your way just by wrecking the enemy on the field, if he mobilizes as fast as you wreck him, and you don't mobilize anything yourself.

of course, but saying that Germans should know in 1941 what we know in 2005 isn't rational argumentation or thinking. THAT is magical thinking.

had Soviet strength been of the size the Germans estimated, Germans would have captured the industry base (& offhand reserves) in 1941 & it would have been, in practice, game over for USSR. i can't see anything magical in it.

Hitler thought mobile mech warfare made material struggle obsolete, that was its point for him.

Hitler was very concerned about material struggle. that's why he invaded USSR in the first place.

To replace a field of competition in which wealth, numbers, and odds all matter with one in which only an extreme of technique or skill matters. Thinking that was Germany's long suit, as a technological and military-theoretic leader. It is sensible to look for advantages that way, but it was magical thinking to expect it to make other factors just go away as unimportant.

i can't see how Germans would have thought other factors would have been unimportant.

There is no way the decision not to mobilize the economy can be defended (even if you probably are going to win easily, you won't lose instead if you mobilize), but there are ways it can be understood. This sort of delusion is one of them. Hitler emotionally avoided anything that smacked of material-struggle because it reminded of a hard previous war that Germany had lost. Yes he was underestimating the Russians. He also needed to underestimate them. Which is characteristic magical thinking, a wish dominating an obvious, objective interest. Presumably, to order economic mobilization as a precaution would break the shell of confidence he required.

avoiding pure long war of attrition is a must. Germany has no chances to win such a war.

if Hitler wanted to ignore all things material, then how do you explain his obsession about getting & holding material sources?

as for the mobilization of economy, you need to avoid unnecessary mobilization because it seriously hurts economy.