History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII

[Cutlass]

Sure thing.

---

This isn't really a question. But I was recently reading Panzer Battles, the memoir of General Friedrich von Mellenthin, who was in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.

Mellenthin is associated with many skillful German armored maneuvers, like the Battle of the Chir River (which is still basically required knowledge for any armor officer nowadays) and the fighting around Zhitomir. He is widely and correctly regarded as an authority on the subject. But I had to laugh at one comment he made late in the memoir.

As chief of staff, Mellenthin was often paired with Hermann Balck as his commander. Balck, who was one of the contenders for best German armor officer of the war, was rushed to take command of Army Group G in the fall of 1944, and he demanded that Mellenthin be transferred to join him in order to keep the team together. They were presented with a tough mission. Army Group G covered the southern part of the German lines in the west, and in September they were in a state of collapse. As such, Balck and Mellenthin were responsible for stitching together some sort of defense against the onrushing tanks of George Patton's Third Army. When Balck and Mellenthin arrived in the west, they were thrust into the thick of things, as the Germans were in the middle of a counterattack. The panzer forces amassed for the counterattack, however, got stuck in the fog, where the power-traverse turrets and stabilized main guns of the American Sherman tanks gave them the upper hand. When the fog cleared, American tactical airpower appeared, and Jabos ripped the panzers to shreds. This battle, Arracourt, was one of the most lopsided armored battles of the war, a total victory for the Americans.

In discussing the results, Mellenthin bitterly pointed out that the rules of armored warfare apparently did not apply to fighting the Americans and their fighter-bombers.

This is...a little ridiculous. Tactical and close air support were always essential to armored offensives. Without the Luftwaffe and its Stuka dive-bombers, the Germans might not have even defeated France, let alone fought all the way to Moscow and Stalingrad. Once the Luftwaffe began to collapse, the German advance in the east also stopped. Once the Germans lost the ability to even contest the skies, they began their long, uninterrupted retreat. Air superiority - or at least, no threat of enemy air attack - being the prerequisite for offensive success was already one of the "rules of armored warfare". Mellenthin just had sour grapes.

Weren't the Germans of the late 30s-early 40s really the creators of the concept of combined arms warfare?

 

[Ajidica]

Weren't the Germans of the late 30s-early 40s really the creators of the concept of combined arms warfare?

I'm sure dachs will correct me, but all major countries were experimenting with combined arms since late in the Great War. It was just a matter of figuring out how to put it into practice and getting the equipment needed to carry out combined arms well. The Nazis initial plan for WWII was a quick thrust into Belgium so they could threaten the channel and then settle down into a war of attrition and hope the Allies would settle for peace before the German home front collapsed. The great emphasis the German military placed on combined arms was in part due to how they had been undergoing re-armament for longer than the Allies and in part because they knew they didn't have the industrial, financial, or manpower resources France or the UK could call on (and the less said about America the better) and put a lot of effort into figuring out how to perfect the Napoleonic maxim of concentrated force.

 

[r16]

well , ı do like Americans , when they are not supporting Counter-Revolutions and the like . Nor can deny they at times have first rate people . So , only as some contribution , isn't Arracourt the one where Luftwaffe throws everything into the ring and sends up every fighter to stop the American Jabos and they get intercepted 300 miles from the contact point , around their airfields in Paris , thanks to Ultra ?

combined warfare preference must be a relic of 1918 where Germans infiltrated successfully but ran out of support and cover , never minding the food stores that immediately stopped like starving attack battalions like no other . Hence Ju-52 gets a lot coverage not only for the paratroopers it dropped but for the fuel barrels it carried forward , but don't know much about food . (Excepting Demyanks , Stalingrad and possibly Tunus .)

 

[Dachs]

Weren't the Germans of the late 30s-early 40s really the creators of the concept of combined arms warfare?

Kind of yes, kind of no.

The coordination of all arms in some sort of synergistic fashion was around before armored warfare. For example, the close coordination of infantry, support weapons, and artillery was one aspect of the solution to the geometric increase in firepower before the First World War - a solution that every army in the world had worked out, even if it was awfully difficult to put it into practice. They didn't have armor to add to the equation until 1916.

Armor started out in a weird place on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. One of the methods that finally helped both sides unlock the Western Front stalemate in 1918 was achieving operational and tactical surprise while simultaneously amassing the firepower needed to achieve breakthrough and the reserves to maintain an advance once the front line was broken. This was an extraordinarily difficult thing to do! Since the Germans relied on artillery for their firepower, they solved the problem by developing extremely thorough means of maintaining operational security, and by improving their fire support and artillery preparation procedures to minimize the length of a bombardment while simultaneously maximizing its destructiveness. Tanks were the Allied solution. They could be massed quickly, without need for a lengthy artillery preparation, and they were at least somewhat mobile, albeit unreliable. Armor made General Mangin's counterattack at Soissons in July 1918 - the turn of the tide on the Western Front - possible. It was a strategic surprise, because OHL had convinced itself that the French military was incapable of further offensives, but it was also an operational surprise, because German higher commanders could not detect Entente preparations until the tanks were literally rolling into the German trenches.

Since armored attacks were largely conceived of as a way to eliminate the need for artillery preparation, it became difficult for some Allied leaders to conceive of them as working together with artillery. Everybody understood that tanks and infantry needed to be closely coordinated in theory, although the breakdown of that rule in practice made for high casualties among Allied tankers. But few people grasped the notion of coordinating them with other arms, as well. Even the British and Commonwealth efforts to closely coordinate their fires in the fall of 1918 looked less like modern combined arms: the various elements of the army were being employed in the same place, but not necessarily synergistically, if that makes any sense. (For what it's worth, there are some historians who argue that the BEF did have a concept of synergistic combined arms. I disagree, but it's a reasonable argument.)

Between the wars, many militaries developed a better understanding of combined arms. (Some armies developed a worse understanding; a few British officers with high profiles became convinced that tanks could fight on their own without any infantry at all, which was absurd on the face of it and led to considerable friction within the service with those officers who weren't so given to fantasism.) They also developed the most important tool for making it possible: the man-portable radio. Battlefield communications in the Great War were generally based on runners, flares, and signal flags, which made coordination almost impossible (and led to a frightening amount of fratricide from artillery units on both sides, even late in the war, as memorably related by Ernst Jünger in Storm of Steel). The radio unlocked that particular problem and made it possible for forward infantry and armored units to call for support more or less instantly.

The Germans, however, were the first military to create formations that were capable of actually synergizing the various components of an army. The real genius of the early-war panzer formations was that they had enough infantry, artillery, pioneers, AT weapons, AA, recon light armor, and so on, and so forth, so that each panzer division, in conjunction with close air support delivered by the excellent system of Luftwaffe liaisons, could operate as a single coherent combined-arms unit. The French Army also made efforts toward developing a unit that could execute a combined-arms mission - the "mechanized Light Division" (Division Légère Mécanique, or DLM) - but there weren't enough DLMs and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the panzers came crashing through the Ardennes in 1940. Also hampering the French was that many French tanks were designed so that only commanders' vehicles got a crucial radio; German tanks allotted a radio to each one, which made coordination and organization on the move possible.

By comparison, the British Army still concentrated its tanks in extremely tank-heavy formations with few attachments of relevant things like "infantry", and sent them charging at enemy AT fronts as though they were the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, an unflattering description which has not needed modification with time. It took until the second half of the war before the British military started making combined-arms battle groups. Even then, coordination between arms was poor; there was a significant disconnect between artillery and everybody else, and another between infantry and armor, which led to a lot of unfortunate situations. The Royal Engineers and the Artillery were outstanding technicians, but failure to closely communicate with infantry commanders led to either a lot of dead Tommies or a lot of Tommies who couldn't get past the LD. Neither one of those is conducive to offensive success.

The US military took its cue for organizing its armored divisions from the Germans, with a decent amount of homegrown theory and experience. American armored divisions of the 1944 model were amply supplied with infantry and not just tanks (although they did have an impressive number of tanks that American generals even managed to effectively command and control), were almost always fully motorized (unlike German panzer divisions, which were lucky if they could get halftracks to motorize even one of their infantry battalions), had better access to self-propelled artillery, and could draw on an even mightier air force than the early-war Luftwaffe for backup. The "combat command" system that the Americans developed, of structuring armored divisions in semipermanent subunits that were explicitly designed to be ad hoc independently operating combined-arms formations, was also wise; it drew a great deal from the German Kampfgruppe method, the British battle group, and so on. To top it all off, the US even developed some tactical innovations that the panzers and Luftwaffe had lacked, like Pete Quesada's concept of continuous fighter-bomber armored column cover that worked wonders in the fighting in France. The Americans needed two years to work out the bugs from their ideas about ground warfare, but once they finally did it the US armored division was probably the most fearsome such unit on Earth.

Soviet theorists came up with their own innovations in armored warfare. When making the first stabs at turning the ideas of "deep operations" developed by Svechin, Triandafillov, Tukhachevskii, and others into a real doctrine, Soviet officers came up with the concept of a mechanized corps. Like the British tank formations, however, mechanized corps were much too armor-heavy compared to infantry, and they were also probably too large to effectively command. Red Army officers were clearly unhappy with the concept based on combat experience in Spain, but they were unsure about how to best improve it, which along with the purges goes some way to explaining why the mechanized corps were disestablished and then suddenly reestablished in the years immediately before the Nazi invasion. During the desperate fighting of 1941, the naysayers' fears came true: the mechanized corps were ineffective on the battlefield and possessed little capacity to maneuver effectively. The mechanized corps were done away with once again during the fall of 1941 and the entire tank force was reorganized in units no larger than brigade strength. As the war ground on and Red Army commanders gained experience, they slowly rebuilt larger armored formations until six whole Tank Armies - the equivalent of a German panzer corps in firepower - existed from 1943 onward. A Tank Army, however, were more exploitation force than integrated combined-arms unit, at least in theory; in practice, they were usually reorganized to add enough infantry to make them effective.

One of the most useful Soviet combined-arms techniques from 1942 onward was the forward detachment. Armored officers in the Second World War were quite aware that reconnaissance units would have to fight to maintain an effective screen and gather intelligence, so they were equipped with vehicles designed for light armored warfare: the German Achtrad and Puma scout cars and the infamous Sd. Kfz. 222, the American M8 Greyhound, the British AEC and Staghound Armoured Cars, and so on. The Red Army went them one better. Soviet forward detachments weren't meant merely to fight for their information, but to actually maneuver tactically and conduct penetration attacks. They were used by both tank and rifle formations during the war, tailored specifically to the needs of the moment (deep penetration attacks by tank forces would need a different sort of forward detachment than defensive operations on the flanks by rifle forces), and served as the fundamental basis for Soviet combined-arms doctrine after 1945. Soviet development of the motorized rifle division's structure would not have been possible without the forward detachment concept first imagined in the 1930s and then tested and improved in wartime.

So, to answer the question:

Doctrinally, the Germans were not the only military that had ideas about combined arms in the 1930s. Soviet and French writers did, too, along with some Americans, and the Red Army and French military had gone to some efforts to put those ideas into practice. But in terms of force structure and inter-service cooperation, the Wehrmacht was the military that was able to make those ideas work well on the battlefield first. When Guderian's XIX Army Corps (mot.) fought its way across the Meuse River at Sedan in May 1940, it fought perhaps the first well-run combined arms battle in world history.

I'm sure dachs will correct me,

that really needs to stop being a reflexive thing to say on these forums

but all major countries were experimenting with combined arms since late in the Great War. It was just a matter of figuring out how to put it into practice and getting the equipment needed to carry out combined arms well. The Nazis initial plan for WWII was a quick thrust into Belgium so they could threaten the channel and then settle down into a war of attrition and hope the Allies would settle for peace before the German home front collapsed. The great emphasis the German military placed on combined arms was in part due to how they had been undergoing re-armament for longer than the Allies and in part because they knew they didn't have the industrial, financial, or manpower resources France or the UK could call on (and the less said about America the better) and put a lot of effort into figuring out how to perfect the Napoleonic maxim of concentrated force.

Looks about right to me.

 

[Olleus]

How does combined warfare in WW2 compare, in spirit to at least, to combined warfare in antiquity? I'm thinking of things like Alexander combining heavy infantry, light infantry, and cavalry together. Are they completely different things which only share a name, or are there some fundamental concepts they have in common?

 

[Dachs]

How does combined warfare in WW2 compare, in spirit to at least, to combined warfare in antiquity? I'm thinking of things like Alexander combining heavy infantry, light infantry, and cavalry together. Are they completely different things which only share a name, or are there some fundamental concepts they have in common?

I think it's fair to describe the armies of Alexander and the early successors as "combined arms". The various elements of the army often worked together in a fashion that made them more than the sum of their parts.

My main concern is that it's hard to tell in classical warfare how intentional anything was and how much of a retrospective, anachronistic label "combined arms" is. Edward Luttwak tried to talk about the "grand strategy" of the Roman Empire several decades ago without actually demonstrating that ancient Roman writers - let alone ancient Roman leaders - even thought in strategic terms. Similarly, while many classical military authors discussed the various elements of a Hellenistic army, they rarely described them as intentionally working synergistically, and the actions of Hellenistic officers on the battlefield often make it hard to believe that there was much of a coherent combined-arms idea there.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

How reducible is pre-Industrial warfare to simple rules of thumb?

 

[Dachs]

How reducible is pre-Industrial warfare to simple rules of thumb?

Hm. How do you mean? Are you talking about the practice of learning how to fight, and what people participating in the fighting would've learned? Or are you talking about the analysis of warfare and its outcomes?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Could it be taught through simple rules? That's the main thing, but I am curious about the other stuff as well.

 

[Dachs]

Could it be taught through simple rules? That's the main thing, but I am curious about the other stuff as well.

For the most part, it had to be taught through simple rules. Even in the modern era, it's often difficult to get commanders to ratiocinate, which is why they have staffs. Dennis Showalter, discussing the wars of the 1860s, comments that commanders' decisions seemed to come as often from their "ductless glands" as from any in-depth consideration of the issue. He's speaking of the era of refined texts on the art of warfare, too: Clausewitz, Jomini, Archduke Karl, D. H. Mahan, and the rest. Presumably, the soldiers of earlier eras were equally prone to careful consideration, that is to say, "not very".

The concept of "strategy" did not exist until the last few centuries, and "operational art" did not exist until the 1920s. "Interior lines" were first articulated by Jomini; battlefield concentration by Moltke. There are many such useful means of analyzing warfare, and we can try to explain some events in the past through using these ideas, but we should always be careful about being overly anachronistic. In reality, most commanders' decisions were constrained by what was logistically possible, which was "not much". Some modern writers, like Liddell Hart, have tried to crowbar the warfare of the past to fit their conceptions of modern warfare, and in doing this they are mostly wrong. Dead preindustrial generals seem to have generally understood varying levels of risk based on their actions, but rarely quantified or referred to it in their writings. Many generals had a rudimentary understanding of when it made sense to fight and when it did not, but many explanations of lost battles centered on religious, personal, or prestigious reasons rather than a clear explanation of what happened on the battlefield. The notion that, say, Alexander the Great, or Zhuge Liang, understood the concept of a cumulative and reinforcing series of combat actions designed to synergistically produce a desired outcome, is nonsense.

This is not to say that the simple rules that they learned were always wrong, or that they were all idiots. For example, much of Sunzi's Military Methods is still applicable in some way to the modern conduct of war, and he does not only touch on battle but on many other aspects of warfare. Military manuals of some kind were written by most "civilized" classical Eurasian societies; most of them were very narrowly focused on tactical minutiae not applicable to other times and places, but a few of them touched on general principles. The more general their subject matter, the less complex they were, such that Books 7 and 10 of the Arthaśāstra (the ones on warfare) and the thirteen chapters of Sunzi bingfa were considerably simpler than, say, Polyainos' Strategemata, which included 900 examples of tactical tricks employed by various commanders in Greek and Roman classical history. They divided armies into types of soldiers and understood what the different types of soldiers were good at doing, and they generally arranged them on the battlefield before fighting in order to achieve specific effects tailored to their armament and fighting style. Even explaining these things could take up large manuals, like Arrianos' Techne taktike (only the second half of which was of practical use for then-current - i.e. Roman - warfare; the first half was probably just classicizing anachronistic garbage).

The limitations of the sources cause a similar problem for us when trying to understand the vast majority of combat; experimental archaeology can help somewhat, but can never provide a full and definite answer. We have only recently begun to understand that some generally-accepted truisms about warfare in the past are totally implausible and that either the sources did not describe what occurred very well, or we misread the sources (usually the first one alone or a combination of the two). Historians were much more confident about what they did and did not know about some aspects of ancient battle back in the 1970s and 1980s than they are today, which is why texts like John Keegan's The Face of Battle are often such difficult reads nowadays.

 

[Olleus]

I feel the need to add to Dachs excellent post that, just because commanders were not cognitively thinking in strategic/operational/tactical terms, does not mean that they didn't act in strategic/operational/tactical ways. You can make a good decision by having a conceptual theory of something and then acting rationally on it. But you can also make a good decision by acquiring accumulated experience (your own or from reading) and building up an intuition for how to act when based on this experience. A good example of the latter is salty sea captains who can read changes in the weather before they happen, this is based on experience rather than a detailed understanding of atmospheric physics. Of course, both methods can also lead to more decision making: traders who overly trust their financial models and doctors sticking to poor old-fashioned methods are both examples.

I'd guess that most commanders in history where in the "learnt intuition" school of thinking. While that might make them less cognitive or rational, I'm not sure that makes them less strategic or tactical.

Rereading Dachs post, I feel he might be saying more or less the same thing actually, so apologies if this is needless repetition.

 

[Commodore]

Why were Italian tank designs in WWII so...inferior to the designs of all the other European powers and the US? And for clarification, I'm not asking why they performed so poorly as I know it's because of a general lack of supplies and equipment the Italian Army suffered from during the war. I'm asking why the designs themselves were so objectively terrible compared to the designs the other powers were putting out.

I mean, did Italy just not have the technical expertise the other powers had? Was it too much interference from Mussolini's government?

 

[r16]

it's a sign of decay in authoritarian regimes . You stab people in the back , people stab you in the back , gotta get fixated on how right and unfallible you are . If you can't fail , well nobody can outperform you . Italians were world leaders in 1932(?) , certainly not so in '42 . That they were the "least" of Great Powers also helped , too late to boost output when everybody was working hard . Considering even Germany was swamped by American Industry . Militaristic regimes should start early to make an unassailable lead , Italians couldn't .

 

[JohannaK]

Italians were actively designing tanks in the interwar period, and produced some of the more commercially successful designs of the 30s... Tankettes. It was only in the late 30s that design started on actual turreted tanks, and there was a limited manifacturing capability to produce them.

It seems that they managed to produce in quantities a fairly decent light and medium tank, the L6/40 (which was sort of a Stuart-looking Panzer II, started production in '41) and the M13/40 respectively.

It seems that a failure to properly upgrade these models, which were not suitably gunned to deal with newer, better armoured tanks, and suffered from a weak bolted hull construction limited their ability to perform. The M14/41, the M13/40's successor/replacement, addressed the construction problem, but because they needed to produce it in numbers and therefore to make relatively few changes, they kept the obsolescent 45mm gun. On top of that, they had overheating problems, which was a huge liability in Africa, the main theatre of operations for Italian armour.

All in all Italian armour was not too dissimilat from contemporary European designs, but suffered from some critical shortcomings that they never has either the time or the production ability to fix properly.

Apparently they worked on a couple fairly good designs from 1941 onwards, the M16 and P26, which were hampered by delays resulting in the cancellation of the M16 (it was a cruiser tank for the desert, and the Brits had just pushed the Afrikakorps into Tunisia) and a very limited number of P26 built (entering production in '43, shortpy before the capitulation).

 

[Absolution]

In the map below, where we see the Gulf's shore in its famous ancient shape, do we also have to achknowledge that the rivers had different lanes?
Is it possible, for example, that the Euphrates' stream used to run exactly through Uruk, Babylon and Sippar, and not just beside them?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Was there ever a socialist-leaning government that the US did not meddle in?

 

[Mouthwash]

Israel.

Well okay, they meddled. But not with every Israeli government.

 

[Ajidica]

Was there ever a socialist-leaning foreign government that the US did not meddle in?

Fixed that for you.
And no.

 

[Mouthwash]

Fixed that for you.
And no.

Mongolia.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Now I want to hear about CIA operations in Andorra.