17. SS-panzer Grenadier-Division

[sburke]

btw Michael, thanks for the recommendation. I spotted The Wages of Destruction on the shelf at my local used book store, it is now in my reading queue.

[Michael Emrys]

btw Michael, thanks for the recommendation. I spotted The Wages of Destruction on the shelf at my local used book store, it is now in my reading queue.

I noticed that several other people mentioned it recently as well as many times in the past, so it comes highly recommended. I found it just slightly a slog to get through, but it well rewards the effort as it corrects a lot of commonly held but incorrect beliefs.

Michael

[Narses]

Yes indeed Jason, but they never really tried again after that July attempt....nearly ten more months of bloody fighting before the end came.

No one in their right mind would've tried after July 20 !

There were several good attempts to kill Hitler. The best was the bomb placed on his plane that failed to go off. Then there was the officer wearing a strapped on bomb at a show of new uniforms that Hitler suddenly for no apparent reason decided at the last minute not to go to. And others........

[Magpie_Oz]

No one in their right mind would've tried after July 20 !

There were several good attempts to kill Hitler. The best was the bomb placed on his plane that failed to go off. Then there was the officer wearing a strapped on bomb at a show of new uniforms that Hitler suddenly for no apparent reason decided at the last minute not to go to. And others........

I think a lot of that was due to Hitler's generally Quixotic nature he often changed plans at the last minute.

It is debatable whether assassinating Hitler would have brought it all to an end. As has been pointed out Hitler's competent Generals where stymied by his interference so having him in charge was of great value to the Allies.

Had he been deposed a separate peace may have been pursued with the Western Allies but a separate peace was unlikely to be accepted. The Soviet Union would never have accepted, if a peace was even offered to them.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

URD wrote "anything starting with the break-out is not part of it -- so up to 20th August" - err, the breakout starts on 25 July, a full month earlier. Through 20 August includes the entire breakout, the entire Mortain counterattack, and closing the gap at Falaise. The only thing it excludes is the road march to the westwall against air.

lol yes, you are of course entirely correct about this.

As for the comments about Zetterling, yes he is completely hopeless on the subject, because he takes literally the timing of the QM corps dotting the i's in the returns for units that ceased to exist a month or more earlier. The proper way to account for the timing of AFV losses is - the moment a tank leaves "running" status and never thereafter returns to running status, is the moment it was actually lost. And whatever cause put it out of running status for the last time, is its actual cause of loss.

it's hard with the numbers for both sides.

By that simple standard, fewer than 300 German tanks of the 2200 sent to Normandy got out alive. Which puts the exchange ratio around 5 to 4 in armor, slight German favor. It was more than 2 to 1 against them in manpower, due to huge surrenders once the front gave way.

yeah, something like that.

June and July (taking British loss numbers at face value) are both 2:3, what comes to the turreted.

August would be something like 1400:1500, or 1:1 in practice (i'm probably causing too many German losses here).

the total ratio would be 5:6.

September would then be 2:7...

the alternative approach (containing September) gives end ratio somewhere around 2:3.4.

As for sburke's questions about what the Germans could have done differently, they didn't have to throw away their armor in reckless counterattacks that had no chance of operational success.

i did a silly thing and used generic OR numbers of France 1944 to toy with the above hypothesis. my main idea was to try to find out how much of a difference would less aggressive use of panzers have made in Normandy (ok in reality i did it just for fun, to test the OR numbers).

i used historical German panzer losses of June and July as base. then i halved it, to roughly get the number of panzers lost to enemy tanks (by OR studies results, but yes yes yes not very accurate). then i created a couple of formulas / algorithms based on a couple of OR studies on tank combat in 1944. i slightly adjusted average force sizes to get more workable numbers.

first i tried what kind of tank losses Allies should have suffered in Normandy, if Germans had attacked in 50% of tank engagements. surprisingly the results was that Allies suffered 7% less tanks in June and 17% less in July (in engagements with German tanks).

i was surprised that the result was so close to historical numbers. accidental probably, but who cares lol. if my OR based algorithm would create accurate results (it of course doesn't), it would mean that in June Germans attacked in slightly less than 50% of their tank vs tank engagements and in July a good number less.

then i altered the parameters so that Germans attacked only in 20% of the engagements. the algorithm still forced Germans to take their historical tank losses. the end result was that Allies lost 28% more tanks in June and 19% more in July (comparing to historical losses -- comparing to the first run of the algorithm the change is +39% and +40%).

based on that silly experiment, it would not have made much of a difference if the Germans had attacked only in 20% of the tank engagements. Allies would have lost only 53 extra tanks in June and 50 in July.

in the third run i made Germans attack only in 10% of the tank engagements (possibly impossibly low percentage). comparing to historical losses the Allied tank losses in tank engagements increased in June by 79 extra tanks (+42%) and in July by 83 tanks (+32%).

i also did a 4th run. this time i fixed the losses to historical Allied tank losses. this way i would see how many panzers Germans could save in tank vs tank engagements if they attacked only in 10% of the cases and Allied actions would be limited to their historical losses. in this scenario Germans saved 33 panzers in June and 35 in July, taking 71% and 76% of their historical losses in tank vs tank engagements.

not a big change, even if the percentages are quite high. it could be that Germans were more passive with their tanks in Normandy than usually considered or it could be that it's just hard for Germans to get very high tank kill ratios vs Allies (the OR numbers were based on Germans fighting Allies in 1944, and the kill ratio with my third experiment was 1:2.4).

of course my algorithm is far from perfect and there are a couple of parameters that i could adjust to tweak the results (simulating a bit different tactics). an important factor not really covered by the algorithm is the losses of German tanks to Allied AT guns & SPDTs -- of course almost totally related to German tank attacks.

if one would take the results of the silly experiments with face value, i think the conclusion would be that the only thing that really matters in Normandy is not to drive the German armor into the pocket and start withdrawing earlier. combat losses of tanks in tank engagements on both sides are more or less fixed. a more passive use of panzers might have prolonged the defensive battles by a couple of months.

These mistakes of overaggressive tactical use of armor threw away easily half of German tank strength in Normandy, when all added up.

i certainly agree, but i think someone should make a detailed look at the actions of some key PDs, collecting all the data. the absurdly stupid death rides may receive more attention than they perhaps should.

But pretending it was an efficiently conducted defense without screw ups is pretending. They could have fought the campaign *much* better than they did.

certainly true.

[JasonC]

URD - it is an interesting result, but I wonder. My read of the records for the individual PDs in Zetterling shows very high moves from "ready" into the repair categories on first commitment to combat, in every case where the initial commitment is in an offensive stance. And most of them never come back out.

I mean sure there is churn and individual vehicles did come out, but the unit never reaches anything like the previous number of operational vehicles. Meaning a high portion of that initial haircut are actually effectively lost. On defense, on the other hand, 250-350 tanks in the involved sector are sufficient to stop major offensives and cause serious Allied armor losses.

I don't think this reflects only force on force mutual attrition of the armor, though it certainly does involve that. It also reflects pushing the vehicles, getting them lost where they are harder to recover, losing them in action against other allied arms (besides their armor I mean), etc. Basically a carefully husbanded defensive employment of tanks seems to keep them alive much longer in every material respect, and the "half life" of a running tank seems to jump by a factor of 4 or more when it switches to defense.

Personally I think the Germans were "trained" in a Pavlovian sense to use armor in an overly aggressive tactical role by early to midwar experiences in Russia. I can find numerous major operations in which a couple of PDs thrown straight into an attack sector blunted an entire Front's offensive operations, and an equal number where forces on the same scale thrown in offensively on the flank of such an operation checkmated it, sometimes pocketing or destroying huge forces in the process. It was reaching those operational goals, stalls to enemy initiative and large scale destruction of his forces, both non-armor and armor, that they came to expect as normal consequences of "spending" the fresh strength of an up-to-TOE panzer division (or corps).

I think the Germans "institutionally" came to expect such results as the normal thing that could be accomplished by 1-2 PDs with reasonably topped-up AFV levels, tried the same against the western allies, and repeatedly got their heads handed to them. Not just in Normandy. That happened at Salerno, up to 4 times in Normandy on different scales, in the Lorraine, etc. The Germans thought that outcomes that actually hinged on Russian unpreparedness and lack of combined arms skills especially in their rifle formations, depended only on their own skills and on the essence of armor in modern combat. That is my read on why they spent their armor in offensive roles so often and so heavily, in the west.

[JasonC]

Nidan1 - they tried about 15 times before July 44 and they got close maybe 3 of those, including the last.

As for not attempting it after, it is a rather insensitive comment. Men with the principles and bravery to try it had been brutally murdered by then.

[undead reindeer cavalry]

I don't think this reflects only force on force mutual attrition of the armor, though it certainly does involve that. It also reflects pushing the vehicles, getting them lost where they are harder to recover, losing them in action against other allied arms (besides their armor I mean), etc.

that's very true and i was trying to address that by saying my simplistic playing with the OR numbers would not address German armor losses to AT and other non-armor arms.

Germans need to neutralize Allied armor and tank vs tank combat is one part of it. it seems that it's a part that wouldn't require much tweaking.

perhaps it's a bit obvious, but it's good to be methodological.

what would be needed next, is looking at other types of battles and finding what the actual failings were and what could be realistic and sound changes.

again it may be a bit obvious (lack of recon, overly aggressive methods etc etc), but it would be good to have some actual data about it.

Basically a carefully husbanded defensive employment of tanks seems to keep them alive much longer in every material respect, and the "half life" of a running tank seems to jump by a factor of 4 or more when it switches to defense.

yeah. it would be interesting to have a detailed study of it (correlations and causes). again, perhaps it's obvious (aggressive vs defensive etc) but would still be nice to have.

one way to explain it would be that German officers were unable to control such huge units as Panzer Divisions and Corps. it looks very much like early/mid Soviets with their big tank units. yet i think i have never seen this explored in any depth. it's just passed as aggressive use of armor.

Personally I think the Germans were "trained" in a Pavlovian sense to use armor in an overly aggressive tactical role by early to midwar experiences in Russia. I can find numerous major operations in which a couple of PDs thrown straight into an attack sector blunted an entire Front's offensive operations, and an equal number where forces on the same scale thrown in offensively on the flank of such an operation checkmated it, sometimes pocketing or destroying huge forces in the process. It was reaching those operational goals, stalls to enemy initiative and large scale destruction of his forces, both non-armor and armor, that they came to expect as normal consequences of "spending" the fresh strength of an up-to-TOE panzer division (or corps).

I think the Germans "institutionally" came to expect such results as the normal thing that could be accomplished by 1-2 PDs with reasonably topped-up AFV levels, tried the same against the western allies, and repeatedly got their heads handed to them. Not just in Normandy. That happened at Salerno, up to 4 times in Normandy on different scales, in the Lorraine, etc.

i can agree about that.

i have a paper somewhere that deals with some selected large armored offensives in West (1944-45) and compares various numbers and shows correlations. i have for some time intended to add numbers from various offensives from the East. the aim being the ability to see the relative force performance in various offensives, ignoring whether or not the offensive in question was considered a success or failure, and the ability to predict likely results in hypothetical offensives. this has of course been done to death in various papers already, but it might nonetheless be interesting especially as usually i have seen it done only on rather large scales.

The Germans thought that outcomes that actually hinged on Russian unpreparedness and lack of combined arms skills especially in their rifle formations, depended only on their own skills and on the essence of armor in modern combat. That is my read on why they spent their armor in offensive roles so often and so heavily, in the west.

that's quite possible and perhaps even likely.