Maybe this is a bit silly, but I was wondering how night affected wars. Did the fighting parties retreat to their "bases" every night?
Depends on context. If not occurring during a concerted and sustained offensive, yes. It would be impossible to hold gains made during the day, however, if one pulled back one's troops to the start lines every night. Usually, you'd just bunker down in the place you'd ended up in at the end of the day, guard and fortify the area as best you could, set up night sentries on rotatio, and get most of your men a few hours' rest.
dutchfire said:
Would an army be split up into different groups who would each do a shift, while the other shifts are sleeping?
An army, no. Individual small units, yes, frequently. The soldiers aren't going to be expected to fight for forty-eight or seventy-two hours nonstop, that's the quick route to losing, but in desperate or, sometimes, advantageous situations an fight might be continued into the night for some time with the main body of one's troops.
Rotating entire units out of the line was done on the basis of several days or weeks, usually, although during large sustained operations it might be even less; it generally didn't have much to do with night/day and more with the overall exhaustion of the men and their equipment and the casualties that a given unit had suffered. This also depends on a unit-by-unit basis. An Allied airborne division from the Second World War usually wouldn't be expected to actually hold ground on a day-to-day basis except in times of extremely dire need (e.g. the 82nd Airborne defending in the Ardennes against Peiper's force during the Germans' winter offensive) or in times where great potential advantage could be realized (e.g. that same division being placed in the van of the American forces attacking towards Lübeck in late March 1945), but since the losses incurred during its main operations were so heavy and the fighting involved in same was so intense, a long rest and refit period was seen as
de rigueur.
dutchfire said:
Did major offensive actions also happen during the night (for surprise effect)?
Rarely. The potential for confusion was enormous. Operations could be started in the early morning, around three or four local, with the tanks expected to benefit from improving light as they actually began to make contact with the enemy (and with prebattle recon making up for lack of visibility during initial fighting), as the Germans frequently did during ZITADELLE. And armored ops, like normal ops, could be continued into the night under certain circumstances (the same Peiper's attempt to cross the Ardennes rivers in the face of opposition from American engineer companies comes to mind). Actual night actions, much like with the infantry, were rare and special events. The likely cost of fighting at night was perceived as being very high compared to thee potential gains.
dutchfire said:
For armoured units: how did soldiers make sure nothing happened to their tank during the night? Did they sleep in their tank? Did they guard it? Were there ever situations were one group of soldiers would use a tank during the day, and then another group would come in to use it during the night (tankpooling
)? Did they have special night gear/equipment?
Others in the thread have explained this quite well. Tanks were organized into la(a)gers at nighttime with guards and sentries posted around the formation like any infantry unit. Rarely were tank units completely unaccompanied by infantry, especially in major offensives or in areas where the tanks could be expected to come into close contact with the enemy on a regular basis, so the laager would have assistance in defense from them as well. Sleeping in tanks was moderately common; it's hard to beat them as a heat source, as the men of the Red Army found out. I cannot recall any such thing as tankpooling; it'd be an enormous and confusing diversion of resources and a pain to organize such a rotation for minimal potential gains, and a very serious overuse of manpower into the bargain.
dutchfire said:
I guess I'm mostly interested in the World Wars since I suppose there this was most relevant, but information on any other period is welcome too.
Night attacks throughout history have been widely regarded as being high-risk endeavors with potentially high payoff. They have tended to rely on more luck than anything else and as such commanders tend to avoid them as best they can.
Take the example of the Peloponnesian War. Demosthenes, one of the Athenian generals (and one of the best single military leaders of that conflict), employed night attacks in rough terrain with lightly armed troops to great effect during his 426 BC campaign in Aitolia, and his troops ably defended the outpost at Pylos the following year from a Spartan night attack, then counterattacked the forces on nearby Sphakteria under partial cover of night. He was one of the most practiced night-fighting generals of the classical period.
So when he and his men were sent to rescue the Athenian besiegers at Syrakousai in 413 BC, he proposed a night attack on the Syrakousan fortifications on the Epipolai plateau to take advantage of this perceived advantage. The initial stages of that attack went very well indeed, and the garrison forces were smashed and driven back, but many Athenian troops lost their way in the darkness, with some even falling off the plateau to their deaths; small units of Syrakousan troops reformed and put up a fight disproportionate to their numerical strength due to the Athenians' lack of coordination, and the Athenian troops were themselves forced back in disorder. Even Demosthenes, one of the ablest nightfighters of his time, couldn't maintain
that much control over a night attack.
By and large, this state of affairs did not significantly change much over the course of the intervening millennia. Night attacks are dangerous in that it's harder to keep control over your men, visibility is poor, and your men are much more tired and less physically adapted to fighting at night. NVGs, radios, and stimulants can only go so far to rectify these states of affairs. Even the US military, which makes such a big deal out of its ability to play at night, as it were, still does not try to conduct night ops
that often unless there is a clear and easily realized advantage to doing so.
As Borachio quoted in Wikipedia, nighttime, being an excellent time to pause combat operations, therefore can become, paradoxically, quite busy, especially for rear-echelon units. Movement under cover of night without engaging the enemy has a long and proud history from before the First World War. Night marches, such as the one the Habsburg armies conducted immediately before the Battle of Pavia, have a celebrated place among hobby-historians and military lecturers. Nighttime is a good time to try to sap, or to move troops through an enemy field of fire, or to bring up replacement equipment and reinforcements.
Actually 3 naval battles in the Guadalcanal campaign were fought at night. The US did poorly and the IJN well in the first 2. But in the 3rd one the difference was really the weight of ships on the American side.
After the Gay Marriage thread, I'm this close to reporting your next post...
