History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

[JohannaK]

Eagerly awaiting Volume II.

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Guy Simonds, who spent most of the campaign in northwestern Europe as the commander of II Canadian Corps, was probably the best general officer Canada produced during the war. He was an innovative thinker, as demonstrated by the plans he came up to clear Walcheren Island in Operation INFATUATE. Simonds made some missteps, and like most Commonwealth military leaders he was too wedded to the step-by-step phase-line British style of campaigning that focused too much on consolidation and not enough on initiative. But overall, his press has been very good. The other Canadian corps commander, Charles Foulkes, was generally regarded as a competent but limited professional.

Harry Crerar, the chief of First Canadian Army during most of the campaign in northwest Europe, was flawed but suffered from an unreasonably bad postwar press. His military ability was at best limited, and he was better known as a "political" general. However, as the commander of Canada's forces in Europe, he had to be a political general. Monty ensured that First Canadian Army was invariably under-resourced, but had incredibly unrealistic expectations of it all the same. The situation culminated in early September 1944, when Crerar was assigned to clear all of the Channel ports and the Scheldt estuary, despite Second British Army being assigned almost all of the Canadians' motor transport. Monty attempted to blame the Canadians, and Crerar's alleged bungling, for his own inability to prioritize and the errors that his monstrous ego generated. He further criticized Crerar for attending a ceremony at Dieppe to memorialize the Canadian fallen there, despite the fact that it was basically his job and not appearing would have been ridiculous. Monty seemed to believe that generals should not have national responsibilities, if those generals were Americans or Canadians. Anyway, Crerar was not great at higher-level military operations but he wasn't that bad.

I no longer recall who nine years later, but I think this early SMACX custom faction leaderhead was one of these gentlemen - Foulkes sounds most familiar:

-That's a modified 1944 Time Magazine cover, a Canadian general I futured a little and altered to be Afghan-Canadian and moved the background from Belgium to Planet...

 

[Cutlass]

That's a bit of a stretch. Truth be told, de Gaulle couldn't even be said to be on France's side.

I once tried to start a topic to get people to educate me on deGaulle. Care to take a stab at it?

 

[Ajidica]

@Dachs: As long as we are on the subject of WWII generals and deGaulle, were the Free French generals -such as Gentilhomme- half decent or was the Free French military in such a poor state that "can read a map" was about as good as can be expected for them.

 

[Dachs]

So, Soviet leaders of the war.

Spoiler :

The Red Army of 1941 was, to put it bluntly, a catastrophe waiting to happen, and this was in large part due to its leadership. It has been fashionable for many people to argue that the effect of the Stalin-era purges has been vastly exaggerated. In civilian life, that may well be true. In the Soviet military, however, there is still virtual academic unanimity that the purges left leadership a hollowed-out husk. Many of the best officers were dead or imprisoned. Those that were left were usually terrified into submissiveness. Few outstanding officers remained in positions of high command. Many of those who were, were cronies of Stalin.

K. E. Voroshilov is probably the most egregious example of the latter. Voroshilov was not a complete idiot. He understood that the purges had gotten rid of better leaders than he was. He also understood when his own forces were not up to par. In his report on the 1936 maneuvers, he initially described the exercise (which British observer Giffard Martel characterized as two forces that "appeared just to bump into each other") in glowing term, probably to avoid appearing incompetent, but admitted to serious command and control problems later in the same document. Candor aside, however, his military ability can be charitably described as "limited". He was a member of Stalin's cavalry mafia, however, so he kept high leadership: member of the GKO, chief of a Strategic Direction, Defense Commissar, and so on. He was not up to the demands of modern warfare. He understood when subordinates lacked drive but possessed none of his own. His mismanagement of the Winter War was one of the epic military catastrophes of the twentieth century. He exhibited personal bravery on at least one occasion early in the Great Patriotic War during the defense of Leningrad, but at the same time was totally failing to organize his troops effectively. He was quickly replaced in that post by G. K. Zhukov, a much better choice.

S. K. Timoshenko, one of the other notable early Soviet commanders, was on balance more competent than Voroshilov. Timoshenko's generalship can be reasonably described as unsophisticated. The stereotype of Soviet soldiery repeatedly flailing away on the same axis of attack for little gain is an unfortunate one, but in Timoshenko's case it was reality. He was a general who could at least motivate his soldiers to fight, and fight hard. It was Timoshenko who kept the entire Western Strategic Direction from collapsing entirely during the ferocious battles for Smolensk and El'nia in the summer of 1941. In doing this, he expended a tremendous amount of manpower and materiel. He also probably saved the Soviet Union, by making it impossible for the Wehrmacht to continue east toward Moscow. He also led the counterattacks in the south in the winter and spring of 1941-42 that put so much pressure on the Germans...and which also led to the last great German encirclement of the war, Operation FREDERICUS, which annihilated several armies numbering a quarter million soldiers. Timoshenko undoubtedly lacked flexibility, and Stalin was probably correct in replacing him in 1942.

Another hard fighter of the early war was M. P. Kirponos, chief of the Southwestern Front, who defended Ukraine from Rundstedt and the German Army Group South. Much is often made of Kirponos' leadership in Ukraine, where the Nazi spearheads were badly stalled until help came from the north in the form of Guderian and Panzer Group 2. Had the rest of the Red Army held on like Kirponos and his troops, so the argument goes, the fascists might have been stopped long before Moscow. Of course, this ignores the fact that the Germans had little room to maneuver in the opening stages of the fighting in Ukraine, that Kleist's Panzer Group 1 was eventually able to slash through Soviet defenses too, and that Soviet forces suffered disaster in the Uman Pocket long before Guderian's panzers went south. Kirponos was unquestionably a fighter and was better at handling his armor in a counterattack than were many of his fellow Soviet officers early in the war, but both he and his instrument were not up to the task of fighting the Wehrmacht in 1941.

You'll notice a trend here. The most effective Soviet leaders early in the war were mostly the ones who were willing to spend their men's lives to kill more Germans. This was probably unavoidable, at least to some degree. The Red Army was not nearly as mobile as the Wehrmacht. The VVS could hurt the Germans but was totally incapable of protecting ground forces from the Luftwaffe. Soviet leaders were under supply pressure nearly as immense as that which faced the Germans, and transportation problems led to road marches that crippled many units before they even got to the front. Under such circumstances, generalship could not consist of formulating complex, balletic maneuvers to stupefy the opponent, to say the least. However, staff failures, and command failures, contributed to all of those problems.

The early war is littered with the careers of Soviet generals who simply lacked the ability to command effectively. D. G. Pavlov, commander of the Western Front, was generally incompetent, although he was simultaneously placed in an impossible position; his failures in the opening days of the war got him accused of sabotage and executed. He was later exonerated of the sabotage but will probably never be exonerated of the incompetence. Other officers managed to survive despite incompetence, like Voroshilov (moved upstairs) and Timoshenko (shifted to an advisory role). D. T. Kozlov's incompetent command of the amphibious assault on Kerch during the Crimean campaign in 1941-42 led to the destruction of virtually his entire force of two armies during the German TRAPPENJAGD counteroffensive; he continued in various posts in the Transcaucasus and Voronezh Fronts before being shuffled off to the Transbaikal where he couldn't do any more harm. I. E. Petrov also had a poor showing in the Crimea as the chief of the Coastal Army; he was more of a fighter than a manager, and his defense of Sevastopol was haphazard. Somehow he was given the responsibility for liberating the peninsula in 1944, which he also bungled; most of the Germans and Romanians got away.

Eventually, the Red Army developed to the point where it no longer had to expend soldiers' lives as an alternative to maneuver and materiel. Some generals were better at recognizing that fact than others. K. K. Rokossovskii was probably the finest Soviet operational commander of the war. He proved his mettle in virtually every situation imaginable: the swirling armored melees of Ukraine, the grim slaughter of Smolensk and Moscow and Stalingrad, the high-technology apocalyptic showdown at Kursk, the battles of annihilation in Belorussia, and the final march through Poland to Berlin. He rarely made a misstep (Belorussia in 1943 being possibly the only example) and demonstrated real genius at the operational level on both attack and defense.

Many of the other late-war Soviet marshals were true competent professionals. R. Ia. Malinovskii was a gifted armor commander who made his way up to Front command and masterminded the liberation of Hungary and Romania. (Interestingly, Malinovskii was one of the few Soviet commanders who had to interact with an allied force, namely the Romanian army after that country ended its association with the Axis in 1944. While the Romanians didn't exactly slot into the Soviet order of battle seamlessly, the two forces cooperated with each other reasonably well considering the circumstances.) I. K. Bagramian and F. I. Tolbukhin also demonstrated real skill in their assignments. Both of them were prone to commit missteps early in the war (Bagramian in his first field command at Sixteenth Army, Tolbukhin as a staff officer in the Crimea campaign in 1941-42), but both clearly improved as time went on.

Other Soviet officers of the late war lacked flair, but were broadly capable of doing their jobs. V. I. Chuikov gained historical immortality for his leadership of the stubborn defenders of Stalingrad in the dark days of 1942. As a commander in most situations, he was unspectacular, but frankly, leading the defenders of Stalingrad ought to be more than enough for anybody. G. F. Zakharov showed good aggressive spirit as an Army commander, but when elevated to Front command in 1944 the powers that be were displeased with his performance and he was demoted again. I. D. Cherniakhovskii showed general competence and some flashes of brilliance, especially during the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation, but the bloody operations to capture East Prussia in 1945 did not reflect particularly well on him (although they reflected even more poorly on Stalin and the GKO, who could easily have masked the province to maintain the drive on Berlin).

In sharp contrast to the Germans, the Soviet military leadership was also more willing, as a group, to take risks as time went on, a generally positive development. This did not mean that fear of Stalin and the NKVD was a thing of the past - far from it.

For example, during the Battle of Kursk, the commander of the Voronezh Front, N. F. Vatutin, became acutely aware that the German offensive was proceeding much more rapidly than he'd planned. While the Red Army's forces could contain the Germans at virtually any cost due to the vast reserve force assembled in the Steppe Front under I. S. Konev, Stalin and the GKO wanted that reserve deployed for counteroffensive operations only. Voronezh Front's objective was to defeat the German attack on its own resources. Within a few days of the beginning of the attack, Vatutin understood that this was no longer very likely.

One of the key German advantages was in their armored formations. The heavy tanks - Tiger, Panther, and the Panzerjäger Ferdinand - got the publicity, but many of the German formations relied on long-barreled Panzer IVs with high-quality optics. Whether the Nazis had Tigers or Panzer IVs, though, they outranged the Soviets with their increasingly obsolescent T-34/76s. Using the T-34s doctrinally, in a counterattack role, was suicidal. The T-34 was too large of a target and was too ineffective against German frontal armor for too long. German panzers picked them off at range like the armored equivalent of a sniper. (Later on, during the armored clash at Prokhorovka, P. A. Rotmistrov sardonically told the crews of Fifth Guards Tank Army to engage the Germans in close combat "and board them", as the only possible means of effectively coming to grips with the SS Tigers. Rotmistrov's plan did not work and his tank army was thoroughly wrecked.) One of Vatutin's high cards before the fight started was First Tank Army, under the outstanding armor officer M. E. Katukov, but with the German tanks so badly outranging the Soviet T-34s, First Tanks was increasingly looking like more of a joker than a face card. In response, Vatutin decided to deploy First Tanks in hull-down positions, dug in to the turrets. It would make them almost impossible for the German gunners to acquire and kill. It meant that the T-34s could not be used in a counterattack role, and this violation of doctrine meant dire things if it failed. Vatutin, however, was willing to risk it, even though it made him vulnerable to Stalin's wrath, because he knew that it only made him vulnerable to Stalin's wrath if it failed.

Vatutin was probably the Red Army's premiere risk-taker. Sometimes the risks didn't pay off. Vatutin was known for getting overaggressive, overextending, and biting off more than he could chew. His advance forces, including Group Popov, got annihilated during Manstein's "Rochade" counterattack in 1943. He again lost his spearheads to a German counteroffensive during the struggle for Kiev in the fall of the same year, when Hermann Balck's XLVIII Panzer Corps wrecked a Soviet tank corps and halted Vatutin's drive on Zhitomir. Risk-takers, however, were what the Red Army really needed, and contrasted very favorably with the unimaginative and destructive command style of many early war commanders. Vatutin had a real gift. which he demonstrated in the successful battles to reach the Dnepr River and in the Korsun-Shevchenkovskii Offensive Operation, and his death at the hands of Ukrainian partisans in 1944 robbed the Red Army of a general of genuine talent.

Some Soviet officers, however, did not grow beyond the disciplined but unimaginative stereotype of the early war years. G. K. Zhukov and I. S. Konev are probably the most famous Soviet marshals of the war in the rest of the world. They certainly had talent. Zhukov in particular was persistent to the point of stubbornness, possessed boldness and initiative and discipline, and, most of all, was aggressive. All of these are positive military traits, to a degree. That stubbornness, however, often led him down unfortunate roads. It took a total disaster for him to finally admit defeat and change his approach. Konev was in many ways broadly similar. Both men participated in the endless Rzhev campaign, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers over the course of an entire year with virtually nothing to show for it. It's fair to say that Zhukov, at least, was obsessed with the place. He attacked an incredibly tough target unimaginatively and his men paid the price again, and again, and again. Zhukov and Konev both repeatedly showed that even in successful attacks, they were usually less efficient (i.e. they got more of their own men killed) than other Soviet operational commanders. The casualty rate Konev's men suffered in the offensive against Army Group North Ukraine in late summer 1944 was simply embarrassingly, only matched by Zhukov's horrifying mismanagement of the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation in 1945.

Frankly, both Zhukov and Konev were butchers. They were the Red Army at its worst in the later years of the war. While many Soviet commanders fully understood operational art, and had developed effective tactics to counter the simultaneously-evolving German defensive tactics, others, with Zhukov and Konev chief among them, continued to bull ahead with relatively little concern for means to achieve the same result with fewer casualties. One of the most horrifying facts about the Great Patriotic War is that in almost every battle of the war, save perhaps the last few months of it, the Red Army suffered more casualties than the Wehrmacht - more men killed, more men wounded, more equipment lost or damaged, and so on, and so forth. The stereotype is that the Red Army could easily sustain those casualties. It could not. More than once during the war, the Soviet Union started to scrape the bottom of its manpower barrel, and conscripts from newly-liberated territory made the difference. By the end of the war, the Red Army was a truly powerful force of high quality and great quantity, led in the main by competent, seasoned professionals every bit the equal of their German rivals. But its great flaw remained that it took horrendous losses. Many of these were unavoidable, the result of a grim defensive campaign waged by a still-formidable foe. Many of them were absolutely avoidable. Officers like Rokossovskii did their best to avoid them; officers like Zhukov did not.

The best of the Soviet marshalate was not Zhukov. Instead, in my opinion, it was A. M. Vasilevskii, who spent much of the war as Chief of the General Staff. Vasilevskii was B. M. Shaposhnikov's protege, and showed his boss's attention to detail and planning in most of what he did. Stalin recognized his ability and from 1942 onward made him one of the "troubleshooters", Stavka's representatives sent to the front who could do anything from kibitzing and dispensing advice to actually assuming control of the battle. When the USSR launched its two grand offensives in the winter of 1942, Zhukov was sent to command one and Vasilevskii the other. Zhukov's attack, which was better-resourced, was Operation MARS, the climax of his obsession with the Rzhev salient, and it ended in bloody disaster due to command mismanagement. While Zhukov poured out his men's blood in the snow, Vasilevskii orchestrated the first great Soviet victory of the war by encircling and annihilating the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. One could not imagine a better way to contrast the two. Vasilevskii was a more thoughtful soldier. He rarely shied away from difficult (bloody) fighting, but did what he could to mitigate it and do it more cheaply. Furthermore, his staff work inaugurated a new era of remarkable effectiveness in Soviet organization; one can say that without Vasilevskii, Soviet operational art probably wouldn't even have existed. He was an excellent officer and one of the finest generals in Russian history.

@Dachs: As long as we are on the subject of WWII generals and deGaulle, were the Free French generals -such as Gentilhomme- half decent or was the Free French military in such a poor state that "can read a map" was about as good as can be expected for them.

They did a very much better job than "can read a map". In Italy, the French Expeditionary Force was regarded as an elite formation by both Allies and Germans, and usually participated in high-value operations. Field Marshal Kesselring relied on knowledge of the Free French troops' position to predict the next location for major offensives. (The fact that he could not do this for SHINGLE - because the French didn't participate - or DIADEM - because German intelligence failed to locate the French - materially aided the early success of both operations.)

Leclerc in particular showed himself to be an aggressive armor commander with all the qualities that one would want from such a leader. While he was undoubtedly a difficult subordinate, especially for Wade Haislip (his American corps commander) and Patton, he worked well with Devers once the 2e DB and XV Corps were transferred to Sixth Army Group in late fall. Patton had much more difficulty with the notion of an ally's forces having alternative national interests than did Devers, a weakness that Patton himself freely admitted. Anyway, Leclerc's exploitation to Strasbourg in November was one of the few bright spots for the Allies that fall and demonstrated that he and his 2e DB were on a par with the best of the Axis and Allied tankers. (It was also, y'know, an iconic moment in French national history.) It created remarkable prospects for subsequent operations, and the fact that those prospects were not exploited was not his fault.

Most of the other Free French leaders were a mixed bag. There's a reason that the Gaullists were okay with accepting the likes of de Lattre into the army after ANTON and the German occupation of the metropole: they needed the leaders and they needed the men. Legentilhomme, for example, rarely led troops in combat, and when he did (in Syria and East Africa) he did so unspectacularly, albeit successfully. To be fair to the French, they were attempting to fight with very little trained manpower, very few arms, very little industrial support, and on-again off-again support from the rest of the Western Allies. The Free French forces were generally reliable, if small in number, and they rarely broke or caused disasters. Later, after the liberation of France, the so-called "whitening" process, by which the French replaced African and Maghrebi soldiers with metropolitan Frenchmen (partially at the Anglo-Americans' behest, because racism), limited French manpower reserves and made military operations more difficult.

 

[Ajidica]

Later, after the liberation of France, the so-called "whitening" process, by which the French replaced African and Maghrebi soldiers with metropolitan Frenchmen (partially at the Anglo-Americans' behest, because racism), limited French manpower reserves and made military operations more difficult.

Thanks Dachs!

On the subject of "whitening", do you know how the French justified it? Like, were they fine with going along with Anglo-American racism or was it understood as, say, allowing the African and Maghrebi troops to go home after several years of hard fighting?

 

[Dachs]

Thanks Dachs!

On the subject of "whitening", do you know how the French justified it? Like, were they fine with going along with Anglo-American racism or was it understood as, say, allowing the African and Maghrebi troops to go home after several years of hard fighting?

Honestly, I'm not as familiar with the process as I'd like. I know that the Western Allies requested that it happen, but I don't know if it was solely motivated by that concern, and I don't know how the liberation government justified it.

 

[Ajidica]

You know of any articles or books I might want to try and track down?

Also, on the subject of the Soviet commanders, can you offer any insight as to why, say, Rokossovsky and Zhukov had different styles with regards to "meatgrinder" battles? You noted that Rokossovsky was quite skilled at operational decisions and avoiding unnecessary casualties by but Zhukov not so much despite Zhukov being a largely competent commander. Did Zhukov just lack imagination to have better plans or were other considerations at play?

EDIT: Was it you who has said Blaskowitz was the most underrated German commander of the war, or was that someone else?

 

[Michkov]

What was the Phantom Regiment mentioned in British sections above?

 

[r16]

that the American military mounted a main effort in its assault area and the Wehrmacht literally did not notice. Internal Wehrmacht communications after the first day of battle show that the Germans thought they had defeated a minor battalion-size probe, rather than an entire American division.

that was the 36th , from Texas and had the Japanese attached ? Could/would/should explain the lack of customary American fire support and the like ?

 

[JohannaK]

I wonder if you could do a similar post about the French, cause nobody knows about the Free French in WW2 other than the French

 

[Gen.Mannerheim]

In Italy, the French Expeditionary Force was regarded as an elite formation by both Allies and Germans, and usually participated in high-value operations.

The commander of the CEF, the Free French Corps during the Italian Campaign, was Alphonse Juin. A former Vichy commander of Vichy French forces in Morocco. After capture during Operation Torch, he switched over to the Free French forces. He voluntarily took a demotion in order to command the CEF under Clark’s American 5th Army. Most of the American commanders who served with/over Juin in Italy had positive things to say about him. The Juin was instrumental in the key role the CEF played in cracking the Gustav line in 1944. He actually argued against pulling out the French Corps from Italy for Operation Dragoon, as he was afraid that the smaller French forces would be relegated to minor action in the grander Allied Western Front and believed the CEF was making true gains in Italy. After Italy, Juin was made Chief of Staff for de Gaulle.

On the subject of "whitening", do you know how the French justified it? Like, were they fine with going along with Anglo-American racism or was it understood as, say, allowing the African and Maghrebi troops to go home after several years of hard fighting?

Well the mass raping and pillaging of Moroccan & Algerian troops in Italy during the Monte Casino campaign (the Marocchinate) played right into to those with racist thinking. Even Juin instituted the death penalty for rape during the later half of the Italian campaign for his troops.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

And then there the $640,000 from the Philippine treasury that Quezon ordered be paid to the personal bank accounts of MacArthur and three members of his staff "in recognition of outstanding service to the Commonwealth of the Philippines" on Jan 3rd, 1942...

Ah, the histories they don't tell you in school...

Anyway, can anyone give a short overview of what cavalry units transitioning to armored vehicles from horses was like? What challenges did they face in doing so in terms of training, logistics, and culture?

 

[Dachs]

You know of any articles or books I might want to try and track down?

Also, on the subject of the Soviet commanders, can you offer any insight as to why, say, Rokossovsky and Zhukov had different styles with regards to "meatgrinder" battles? You noted that Rokossovsky was quite skilled at operational decisions and avoiding unnecessary casualties by but Zhukov not so much despite Zhukov being a largely competent commander. Did Zhukov just lack imagination to have better plans or were other considerations at play?

EDIT: Was it you who has said Blaskowitz was the most underrated German commander of the war, or was that someone else?

The former British officer C. J. Dick recently wrote a two-part series comparing Western and Soviet operations in 1944: From Victory to Stalemate and From Defeat to Victory. They are very, very good. Although he's not a professional soldier or historian, John Adams' The Battle for Western Europe contains some very interesting takes on Western commanders during the fall of 1944. For Soviet forces overall, Glantz and House's When Titans Clashed is still excellent, although Alexander Hill's The Red Army and the Second World War is more up-to-date and focuses on the organization as an institution rather than on operations.

One problem is that, while all these books are reasonably authoritative on their own and in general, the literature on the war is so vast and the scope so huge that, invariably, many of my impressions come from things I have read in texts on other subjects related to the topic of Allied generals. For example, Rob Citino has written extremely extensively on the Wehrmacht, and one of the stronger aspects of his most recent books (Death of the Wehrmacht, The Wehrmacht Retreats, and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand) is his work to try to underline the different challenges faced by German military leaders compared to those of other countries; necessarily, he discusses those other countries' leaders, too. Similarly, although the overwhelming focus of David Stahel's series on the German offensive against the USSR in 1941 is on German documentary evidence, it's impossible to come away from his books without an appreciation for many Soviet leaders, as well.

The thing that most people emphasize about Rokossovskii is that, with the exception of the Soviet offensives against Belorussia in 1943 (in which his Front played a supporting role), it is basically impossible to find an example of him repeatedly hammering away at a failed line of attack or wasting his soldiers' lives. (Also, since the Belorussian campaign did not get a monograph until last year, when Glantz published an extensive, albeit extremely dry, study, most people weren't even really aware that First Belorussian Front was even doing anything between September 1943 and June 1944.) Rokossovskii is also associated with inventive military solutions and complex operations. Ever since John Erickson's The Road to Berlin came out in the 1970s, Western historians have been marveling at Rokossovskii's plans - how he managed to get heavy mechanized units through forbidding Pripet marshes, for example, or how in the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation he had to manage two complex attacks, spread out in both space and time, and synchronize them effectively with the other Fronts participating in the offensive. Just as Vatutin argued his case during the Battle of Kursk, Rokossovskii went to the Vozhd himself to argue for his plan in 1944, and possessed the immense moral courage to refuse to alter his plan, even when Stalin demanded it, until he successfully changed Stalin's mind.

It is extremely easy to find examples of Zhukov repeatedly hammering away at a failed line of attack and wasting his soldiers' lives. There is even a book about the most egregious failure: Zhukov's Greatest Defeat, Glantz's text on the failure of MARS in 1942. S. A. Gerasimova's Russian-language text, The Rzhev Slaughterhouse, expanded the treatment of the fighting in the salient and makes quite clear the unimaginative and bloody nature of Zhukov's repeated obsession with the place. If I had to guess about why he was so willing to do these sorts of things - and, again, I'm not even qualified to psychoanalyze people who are alive, let alone the dead ones - I would say that Zhukov's determination and stubbornness was just something he couldn't turn off. In 1941, when every defensive line the Red Army stood at collapsed, Zhukov's willingness to order men to stand and die in increasingly hopeless positions paid off. It saved Moscow. He refused to admit defeat. However, he also refused to admit defeat even when doing so would have saved his men's lives, like at Rzhev, which he spent fifteen months attacking - each time failing to reduce the salient while piling up massive casualty lists - before the Germans voluntarily withdrew from the salient to free up troops to fight at Kursk.

I don't know that I've ever said that Blaskowitz was the most underrated German commander of the war. I doubt I would've said that, because he spent most of the war in relatively undistinguished posts due to the questions he raised about SS and Wehrmacht atrocities against Poles and Jews in 1939. He possessed at least some moral courage, unlike most of Hitler's generals, but not very much: he continued serving the regime, albeit not in positions that made him responsible for atrocities.

Most of the successful and skillful German leaders have people to sing their praises, anyway. Men like Balck, Hube, Mackensen, Hoth, Raus, Guderian, Model, and (sigh) Manstein are securely ensconced in the history books. Balck's stand on the Chir River, Hube's "moving pocket", Manstein's Rochade - all are well-studied topics at places like CGSC or JSCSC. If anything, many of the German leaders of the war are overrated, rather than the reverse. Rundstedt, for example, enjoyed a tremendously good press, largely because he was not as overtly Nazi as many of the other members of the marshalate (and also because he defeated the British, who wrote the history books). Manstein himself was a highly gifted commander who thought he was God and did his best, in his autobiography, Lost Victories (even the title is super cringe), to perpetuate the belief. As Citino aptly points out, though, after the Battle of Kursk, Manstein got his opportunity to do the "elastic defense" he so often demanded of Hitler, and he had the majority of Germany's panzer forces to do it. The result was a bunch of inconclusive armored clashes at places like Okhtyrka that nobody will ever remember, all of which resulted in an increasingly disorganized Army Group South bugging out to try to reach the Dnepr River. For all his vaunted operational ability, Manstein failed, and it was not Hitler's fault.

What was the Phantom Regiment mentioned in British sections above?

Montgomery's network of liaison officers. "Phantom" Regiment was initially created as a reconnaissance unit; Montgomery adapted it to effectively spy on people lower in the chain of command, so that he could form his own opinions about things at the tactical level without getting that information filtered through his immediate subordinate commanders. It was one of his most effective tools at micromanaging 21 Army Group.

Most Americans know the Phantom Regiment better as an international-quality drum corps.

that was the 36th , from Texas and had the Japanese attached ? Could/would/should explain the lack of customary American fire support and the like ?

No. The Americans' problem wasn't really a lack of fire support. The location Clark selected for the crossing was a natural bowl-shaped depression, with II Corps' crossing point at the bottom. US forces had difficulty bringing German artillery under effective fire, but were themselves subjected to murderous fire from all varieties of German weapons. They also lacked the space to maneuver around the Germans effectively. A brief attempt to introduce 1st Armored Division directly into an already small bridgehead simply caused a traffic jam and clumped forces up too much, making them an even better target.

The entire assault was a fiasco from top to bottom.

Ah, the histories they don't tell you in school...

Anyway, can anyone give a short overview of what cavalry units transitioning to armored vehicles from horses was like? What challenges did they face in doing so in terms of training, logistics, and culture?

The problems are best documented in the British Army. Britain maintained extensive cavalry forces during the Great War and also possessed tanks in significant quantities. Several officers believed that tanks were the wave of the future and should be used like cavalry, riding hard to attack from unexpected directions at high speeds. British tank design philosophy emphasized purpose-built armor for different roles: "infantry tanks" for direct support of infantry, and "cruiser tanks" and "tankettes" acting as the light cavalry, moving quickly around enemy flanks and through breaches in enemy lines.

Conceptually, this kind of made sense. Plenty of other armies thought that there should be a division between lighter and heavier armor, and that some armor should directly support infantry and some shouldn't. However, the implementation was shot through with flaws. First of all, tankettes were a dumb idea, an attempt to directly transpose the cavalry concept onto tanks by having a tank that could move really fast and only needed one or two men to control. They were effectively worthless; any tank with armament worth using required more than one or two men to keep it working in combat. Secondly, the fascination with cavalry extended to British tactics. One officer in the Western Desert campaign ruefully noted that British tankers seemed to want to fight tanks like cavalry. All too often, Rommel's integrated antitank defenses found themselves pounding away at an unsupported line of British tanks, charging out of the dust like a bunch of horses. Unsurprisingly, British tank attacks usually ended with the Germans and Italians turning British armor into a line of smoking, burning hulls. The British abandoned combined arms in their early tank experiments, and it took them years to find it again.

(Interestingly, all-cavalry formations that were incapable of combined-arms fighting were also bad at cavalry warfare. In the First World War, the German Higher Cavalry Commands were an effective blend of horse cavalry, light Jäger infantry, machine guns, and light artillery. HKK 2 performed very well on the extreme right flank of the German army, despite the foibles of its commander, Georg von der Marwitz, and those of the commander of the infantry formation to which it was attached, Alexander von Kluck.)

The light tank mania extended to other powers, of course. Famously, over half the Soviet tank park in 1941 was made up of light tanks that were obsolete when they rolled off the assembly line. One of the reasons the Germans were able to destroy so many Soviet tanks early in the war was because the T-26 had very little prospect of surviving long in combat against virtually any German formation. Its armor was too thin, its armament too weak, and its speed too low. Germany itself possessed a very high number of Panzer Is and Panzer IIs, neither of which even had a main gun worth the name (Panzer IIs were armed with 2 cm guns), which comprised a shockingly high percentage of their armored force in both 1940 and 1941. The Americans mostly avoided light tanks, because they didn't really start mobilizing until 1940; the one light tank they produced in significant quantity during the war was the M3 Stuart, which still had some utility as a reconnaissance vehicle. It's also, of course, worth pointing out that "light" and "fast" are usually euphemisms for "cheap", and in the interwar years, most governments were very interested in "cheap", regardless of military doctrine.

In most other countries, cavalrymen contributed to armored doctrine, but did not control it. Many of the contributions were positive. In the USSR, M. N. Tukhachevskii, G. S. Isserson, and V. K. Triandafillov formulated the concepts of operational art and deep operations based largely on cavalry examples from Russian and American history, but adapted them quite easily to armored concepts. The notion of extended raids and strikes at enemy communications remained a constant when shifting from cavalry to armored doctrine. It is quite easy to imagine Tukhachevskii, for example, conducting his wide flank maneuver in the Polish campaign with tanks. So long as they avoided the less well thought-out aspects of applying cavalry ideas to armored warfare, cavalry generals could usually do quite well. Patton, of course, was the archetypal cavalryman, and the outstanding example of operational thinker in the entire US Army in the Second World War. But unlike the British, who maintained formations that were almost entirely made up of tanks and then, late in the war, attached them to infantry units as necessary, the Americans, Soviets, and Germans all used combined-arms formations as the core of the armored force. The US armored division, the Soviet mechanized corps, and the German panzer division all possessed large amounts of infantry, usually motorized infantry, to cooperate with the armor: breaking through enemy lines, holding flanks, and providing the core of the unit's fighting power. Cavalry-minded thinkers in all of those armies did not prevent those formations from being created.

Of all the interwar Great Power armies, the Germans were probably the one with the smallest amount of cavalry influence. Most of the German cavalry formations were disbanded during the Great War, and although the Reichswehr, the postwar treaty-limited army, was limited to nine infantry divisions and one cavalry division, many of the cavalrymen saw themselves as armored soldiers manqué anyway. The real testbed for armored doctrine was the German supply services, where the truck-mounted communications formations controlled by Oswald Lutz (and, later, Heinz Guderian) were in reality a secret tank training organization. Bizarrely, while the Wehrmacht largely abandoned the horse soldier (although not the horse itself, which formed the core of the German infantry's supply trains), old-style cavalry found a new home in the Waffen-SS during the second half of the war. Units like the 8th SS Cavalry Division were a mixture of horse cavalry, motorcycle infantry, and straight-leg infantry. In the conditions of Eastern Europe, they were more than just a curiosity, but they were undoubtedly an oddity.

The USSR, on the other hand, made the most effective use of horse soldiers. During the Civil War, Stalin and his cronies formed what was known as the "cavalry mafia". His buddies Voroshilov and Budennii remained in the army at the beginning of the Second World War and helped keep the spirit of horse cavalry alive. In some conditions, however, there was undoubtedly plenty of scope for the traditional horse soldier to shine. Horses required a vast amount of food, but no gasoline, and they could move more easily during the spring and autumn rasputitsa, the rainy period that turned the entire road network into an endless sea of mud. By 1943, cavalry groups were effectively cooperating with tanks; by 1944, the "cavalry/mechanized group" combined horse soldiers (for flexibility) and armored columns (for firepower) into a highly useful formation good for exploiting breaches in enemy positions and racing through to encircle them. I. A. Pliev's cav/mech group earned immortality in the Belorussian Strategic Offensive Operation by infiltrating through the swamps to take the German Ninth Army totally unaware.

Overall, then, the transition from cavalry to armored cavalry was relatively easy in most armies. It was not painless - the interwar era was full of acrimonious arguments over the proper role of the tank in doctrine, disagreements that were initially a matter of infantrymen vs. cavalrymen - but it was basically complete by 1939. Only in Britain did the cavalry issue actually crop up on the battlefield in a negative way. Only in the USSR did the military manage to find an effective, if technologically limited, synthesis between cavalry and armor.

 

[JohannaK]

Do you have formed opinions on the individual French generals?

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Was Marshal Stalin, notwithstanding his participation in military planning, anything like a real, albeit entirely rear-echelon, general?

I've long thought the Russians couldn't have done it not ruled by a remorseless bloody-handed butcher, but how bad were his strategic military decisions compared to, for instance, his German opposite number the allies concluded they oughtn't assassinate, he hurt his side so...

 

[Dachs]

Do you have formed opinions on the individual French generals?

For the most part? Not really. Most of what I understand about the Third Republic's military comes from "the other side", as it were. If you were to try to formulate your own, you would probably have to start, at bottom, with Bloch's Strange Defeat. He doesn't spend that much time on military leadership, but his whole set of conclusions contextualizes much of what follows. Robert Doughty's The Seeds of Disaster and Breaking Point form the core of the modern historiographical discussion of the French military collapse in 1940. There are some more revisionist accounts coming in more recently that take issue with some of the conclusions of Bloch and Doughty, e.g. Forczyk's Case Red, that are also worth a look.

It's hard to avoid the impression of most of the Third Republic's generals as simply having been overwhelmed at the crisis point in 1940. They were generally not good operational thinkers, although as the chaos on the German side shows, almost nobody was. They lacked the flexibility to respond to a rapidly changing situation vigorously. When given a chance, French soldiers fought hard in 1940, at places like Stonne, or in the defense of Dunkirk. The generals, and the institutions, failed their soldiers, not the other way around.

Was Marshal Stalin, notwithstanding his participation in military planning, anything like a real, albeit entirely rear-echelon, general?

I've long thought the Russians couldn't have done it not ruled by a remorseless bloody-handed butcher, but how bad were his strategic military decisions compared to, for instance, his German opposite number the allies concluded they oughtn't assassinate, he hurt his side so...

Early in the war, Stalin made some unquestionably disastrous decisions. His refusal to allow Kirponos and Southwestern Front to retreat did not cause the Kiev catastrophe, but it made the catastrophe much, much worse. His decision to have L. Z. Mekhlis act as a roving representative to various parts of the front and intimidate generals into fighting "properly" backfired when Mekhlis showed himself to be a military incompetent who made the situation for the Red Army incomparably worse.

After the middle of 1942, however, Stalin's effect on the war was noticeably more restrained. He gave his generals much more leeway to formulate their own methods within the context of existing plans, and he eased up somewhat on the threat of murder if a general faltered. The same did not go for the Red Army's private soldiers. Ni shagu nazad!, "not one step back", Stalin's general order from the summer of 1942, was the watchword of often-brutal discipline to ensure that soldiers stayed in ranks well into 1943; there are accounts of Soviet rear-echelon roadblocks at Kursk with authority to shoot stragglers, shirkers, and malingerers that unquestionably used that authority.

After the disasters of the first year of war, when generals' sometimes-complicated plans came to grief through German action and lack of Soviet means, Stalin became more critical of complex operations and unorthodox tactics. He believed that the Red Army was a blunt instrument best used in a way that would not offer much opportunity to the Germans to pull something clever. However, he could be persuaded to look favorably on complexity by commanders with good track records and firm beliefs, like Vatutin at Kursk and Rokossovskii at Bobruisk. He was also a highly effective manager who understood that significant sections of his marshalate were barely-restrained attack dogs (esp. Zhukov and Konev). Decorations rained down on their shoulder boards and across their chests for successes. He even managed to get their egos to work against each other. Of course, a primary casualty of this method of management was the Soviet soldiery, whose lives the likes of Konev and Zhukov traded for time (as, most memorably, in Berlin). Stalin was aware of the USSR's growing manpower problem and authorized ruthless combing-out operations in newly conquered territory to fill the ranks, but doesn't seem to have done much to force generals to curtail failed attacks quickly in order to mitigate casualties.

In recent years, there has even been a push to label Stalin as having become considerably more militarily competent over time, the inverse curve of Hitler, whose famous intuition worked quite well for him in 1940 and 1941 but who is usually described as significantly more unhinged after that. In the case of Hitler, this is exaggerated, mostly due to the effect of the German generals' memoirs after the war. Manstein and his ilk blamed Hitler for everything that went wrong for Germany during the war so they could escape opprobrium and enhance their own warriors' reputations. But in Stalin's case, it seems to mostly be correct. As a symbol, as a leader, and even as a military thinker, Stalin eventually became everything the USSR needed to achieve victory. He bears a great deal of responsibility for the high cost of that eventual victory, but the fact that it was a victory at all is due in part to him.

 

[JohannaK]

And about Free French generals in particular? Do you have a starting point for those?

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Thanks Dachs; that is a highly satisfactory answer, pleasingly confirming, as it does, my vague and uninformed conclusions.

Stalin was no simple character one ought to simply dismiss as Evil Butcher, and look no further, I think, same as with Hitler, though it seems far easier to find information about the latter...

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Got one for Owen -

A Belgian Flemish guest several years ago, as I was showing him around my home and native area -my family has roots that go back 500 years here- said there was a concept we were, over-all, talking about; -the word in question means something more than just Home, but your proper place, where you belong, if not own - it owns you back. He doesn't remember, now, suggested Dutch 'haard', or hearth, the other day, which jogged my memory to recall that he'd said hearth, and either said, or I just thought, that it's cool how close Hearth and Heart are in English.

And ISTR -at least I hope my imagination hasn't butted in as it will when you struggle to recall- the word he'd told me was supposed to be German, actually, at least a neighboring lowland dialect, the concept sounding one heck of a lot more Bavarian than Prussian, maybe...

Any help? It's a lovely concept for a well-rooted person...