Infantry Lessons

[jwxspoon]

August 18, 2002; Principles Of American Infantry Training in 1914. The following excerpt is from the "Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry of the Organized Militia and Volunteers of the United States -- 1914", page 262.

Inaction gives every advantage to the enemy.

The offensive alone gives decisive results.

A quick and energetic offensive minimizes losses.

An advance against the enemy's position once entered upon must be continued. To go back under fire is to die.

The best way to hold down the fire of the enemy and to diminish his power to inflict losses is to bring the position he occupies under well conducted and continued fire.

Present as small a target as possible to the enemy by utilizing every bit of cover the ground affords.

Individual skill in marksmanship is an advantage in battle only when united with fire discipline and control.

Constant movement to the front lessens the effect of the enemy's fire. The battles of the Russo-Japanese War show that the heaviest losses are in the mid and long ranges. When close range is reached the losses diminish rapidly.

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I found the previous article on the strategy page website.

jw

[JasonC]

In short, the cult of the offensive and fire ascendency achieved by mere rifles was the doctrinal order of the day before WW I. No surprise. The era of the lessons was Boer war and Russo-Japanese. None of it survived contact with real WW I conditions of artillery firepower dominance, improved defenses (the only effective riposte of infantry to artillery being the spade), MGs, barbed wire, and high ratios of force to space. Resolute movement to the front "once entered upon" yada yada was then just a recipe for pushing suicidal attacks to the breaking point.

[Chad Harrison]

Ironically enough, that is how you win by decisive measures in CM, once again proving how true to life CM can be.

Quick attack, with superiority in numbers of all arms (esp. fire support) has become a base for all my CM attacks. Massed infantry, but dispered enough to avoid a devastating artillery barrage or MG/tank fire, with multiple weapon platforms with lots of HE ammo (tank or guns) and ofcourse mg's and mortars. Worked in reality and works in CM like a charm.

Chad

[Frunze]

They didn't have tanks (or not many of them) in WWI, though. Even with CM's undermodeled machine guns, an infantry-only attack against well-chosen, dug-in defensive positions can easily get cut to pieces if it simply charges straight ahead. If both sides have artillery, the soldiers trying to move through the barrage will be more vulnerable than those hunkered down in foxholes.

That manual sounds like a pep talk aimed at getting the grunts to keep moving forward no matter what. Not advice on tactics.

[Chad Harrison]

Originally posted by Frunze:

They didn't have tanks (or not many of them) in WWI, though. Even with CM's undermodeled machine guns, an infantry-only attack against well-chosen, dug-in defensive positions can easily get cut to pieces if it simply charges straight ahead. If both sides have artillery, the soldiers trying to move through the barrage will be more vulnerable than those hunkered down in foxholes.

That manual sounds like a pep talk aimed at getting the grunts to keep moving forward no matter what. Not advice on tactics.

The manaul is a pep talk to give them incentive to keep shooting and to keep moving. Any moron who charges straight ahead in CM will get his head handed to him (outside of extreme overwhelming of numbers, or extreme cover fire). You send forward one platoon, all divided up and draw fire. MG's, infantry guns, and mortars take care of the defenders for a turn or two. Smoke is laid and then flank the bastages with platoons! If they have artillery, it becomes a rat race to see who can avoid the artillery the best.

Most of all, just have lady luck on your side. She seems to be the one who determines the winner of a lot of games.

Chad

[Guest Mike]

The date was 1914 - the info at the time was basically correct!!

[Chad Harrison]

Originally posted by Mike:

The date was 1914 - the info at the time was basically correct!!

From WWI we can see that it was just hit em with artillery and then run straight at them. No wonder so many of them died. There sure was amazing changes brought to warface in 20 or so years back then.

[Frunze]

Yeah, if aggressiveness was all it took, the WWI fronts wouldn't have remained in basically the same place for so long.

But they did. Huge numbers died to gain insignificant amounts of ground, or none at all.

So why was WWII different? Isn't the conventional wisdom that tanks were the biggest single reason WWII was more mobile?

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Chad Harrison:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Mike:

The date was 1914 - the info at the time was basically correct!!

From WWI we can see that it was just hit em with artillery and then run straight at them. No wonder so many of them died. There sure was amazing changes brought to warface in 20 or so years back then.</font>

[Guest Mike]

Exactly - in 1914 most artillery was still firing over open sights, there weer no radios or airborne observers, map fire or pre-registration.

There weer plenty of "modern" wars to learn from - Jap-Russian, Boer, Balkans, all of which showed the same things.

WW1 as we know it didn't start until 1915. What we think of as "the war in hte trenches" also didn't always exist in other places like Russia and Palestine.

The phenomena of the Western Front was because the war there degenerated into a seige rather than the open battles the work quoted envisages.

I'd be interested in what the US army doctrine of the time was for attacking fortifications, because that would be what was actually relevant to WW1.

[Chad Harrison]

Originally posted by Frunze:

So why was WWII different? Isn't the conventional wisdom that tanks were the biggest single reason WWII was more mobile?

I am no Uber historian (there are plenty here to put me to shame though!), but I know a decent amount about WWII history, but a lot less about WWI history. But here we go . . .

At the beginning of WWII Germany displayed tactics that no one had really ever had to deal with before, we all know it as the Blitzkrieg. Everyone else's (for the most part, not so much the USA and Russia) thinking about tanks before Germany attacked was that their sole purpose was to support the infantry. Germany saw it as the infantry (and airforce) supporting the tank.

Static defences dont work to well against a mobile army with tanks. If a strong tank force met a strong defence, a lot of times the tanks would fall back, let the infantry engage the defences, and the tanks then swing around into flanking attacks. It worked devastatingly well against everyone during the 1939-40 period.

However, by the end of the war, this was no longer the case. At the battle of Kursk on the eastern front, the German tank forces worst enemy was minefields and anti tank guns. They could no longer just show up in tanks and expect the infantry to run away as they did in the early war years.

I would say that the reason that things were so much more mobile is not merely because of the tank, but because formations themselves were much more mobile through trucks, halftracks, ect. And on top of that, prepared defenses (trenches) could be avoided altogether much easier, or bombarded with much more accurate artillery and MUCH more destructive air power.

I hope my ramblings helped! Michael, be nice to me , Im only a grog in trainging (if even that!)!

Chad Harrison

[Michael Dorosh]

Originally posted by Chad Harrison:

Michael, be nice to me , Im only a grog in trainging (if even that!)!

Chad Harrison

Hey, I'm the good cop. JasonC will be along in a moment. Actually, I'm happy to defer to him on this. Ask me what colour the button fly on a Canadian soldier's underpants were in 1942, though...

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by Frunze:

So why was WWII different? Isn't the conventional wisdom that tanks were the biggest single reason WWII was more mobile?

Armor was certainly a big part of it. It was less vulnerable to artillery and MG fire and so could maintain the momentum of the attack in the face of those. Having a lot of mobile firepower in the hands of squads in the form of LMGs was important. Tactical airpower was important for several reasons too. Not least though was the evolution in tactics that the technological revolutions made possible.

To understand why, we need to look at why it was so hard to break the stalemate in the trenches of WW I and what happened to finally end it. The key to battle is which side can reinforce at the point of attack the quickest. In WW I, this race usually went to the defenders, who were then able to successfully counterattack and win back whatever ground they had lost.

The attacker had to advance over a plowed up no man's land, dragging whatever supporting weapons he had along together with the necessary ammunition and he had to do it in the face of withering fire from well-supplied and emplaced MGs and artillery to boot. Then, assuming that the attacker does manage to carry the first trench line, his reinforcements and supplies have to be brought across that same no man's land often in the face of artillery barrage.

The defender, on the other hand, had a second and often a third trench line, well supplied with men, weapons, ammunition, and communications. Furthermore, his reserves could move up via protected trenches and were thus less exposed to artillery. All this usually enabled him to concentrate greater force at the crucial point in a timely fashion.

So...it was realized, and the realization more or less gradually percolated up to the higher levels of command, that one of the necessary ingrediants of a successful attack was going to be the isolation of the area of the break in from defending reinforcement. This had been attempted with artillery, but in the conditions of trench warfare plainly was not enough.

The opposing armies devised various means to do what artillery alone could not do. The Germans came up with the Stosstruppen who were trained to bypass strong points on the front line and get into the enemy's rear to prevent reinforcement of the front by the defender. These tactics worked well against the Russians and Italians, but were less successful on the Western Front. And here I come up against the limits of my personal knowledge of the subject. I do not yet know precisely why they were less successful in the west although one clue I've been given is that by the time they were attempted on that front the Germans were so worn down that they lacked the wherewithal to exploit their earlier gains.

Be that as it may, we now turn to the Allied answer to the same riddle. They relied on armor and airpower to achieve the same effect. I.e., to bring force against the enemies rear areas and to disrupt and dislocate his attempts to reinforce the battle.

In WW II, the Germans were the first to successfully marry these two streams, using armor and other mobile troops to get into the enemy's rear, which had already been disrupted by the application of tactical airpower. As long as they were able to do this, no-one could stand before them. It required an equal evolution in defensive warfare to rein the Blitzkrieg in. But right through the war it was usually the case that whoever held air superiority and superior armor would gain ground and whoever lacked those ingrediants would lose it.

Michael

[Chad Harrison]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Chad Harrison:

Michael, be nice to me , Im only a grog in trainging (if even that!)!

Chad Harrison

Hey, I'm the good cop. JasonC will be along in a moment. Actually, I'm happy to defer to him on this. Ask me what colour the button fly on a Canadian soldier's underpants were in 1942, though...</font>

[Grisha]

While the tank was vital to defeating the positional warfare of WWI, it would be more accurate to say that mobility, combined arms, and the radio were what was needed for operational success. Without operational success, the attainment of strategic aims would be left to tactical means, and consequently local tactical victories. Or, in other words, WWI.

OT material here, but ... the Soviets went one step further in this process in WWII. While most other countries recognized the need for operations to link battles into coordinated steps towards strategic victory, it was still a process whereby the tactics of battle were the sole means and measure of realizing strategic goals. It was the Soviets who formed an entire methodology at the operational level, called operational art. By doing so, they created a framework that allowed for the planned linking of operations to obtain strategic objectives. By giving operations and the entire operational level a defined structure and unique identity, it enabled the Soviets to conduct, by 1944, an extremely complex yet elegeant chain of interdependent operations under the unified direction of strategic goals.

[Londoner]

Spot on Grisha, wireless communications were arguably the single biggest factor that gave life to the offensive again.