Blitzkrieg Clausewitz Seeckt Guderian 1650-2000

Blitzkrieg Clausewitz Seeckt Guderian 1650-2000

1/595

1


2

La Esquina de la Historia Atenas Editores Asociados 1998-2017 www.thegermanarmy.org Tittle: Blitzkrieg: Clausewitz, Seeckt, Guderian 1650-2000 © Atenas Editores Asociados 1998-2017 © Gustavo Urueña A More information: http://www.thegermanarmy.org First Published: February 2017 We include aditional notes and text to clarify original and reproduce original text as it in original book All right reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmited in any form or by any mens, electronic, mechanical, photocopyng or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the autor or publisher. Design: Atenas Editores Asociados 1998-2017 © Atenas Editores Asociados 1998-2017 The Editors welcome all comments and observations: [email protected]

2/595


3

This is an editorial project of Athens Editors Asociated based on 20 years of studies and works related to EconomyPolitics, GeoPolitics, Social Sciences and the development of Military Science from its beginnings with the Battle of Cannas where under Anibal took place The first blitzkriegstyle confrontation to its use in the Desert Storm Campaign and all the political, economic, and military consequences these events have had on the development of Humanity. The Editor of the same came to the conclusion that to locate in the context of any era of History is necessary to have read about the political, economic and military events of the time under study, in order to draw the appropriate conclusions, thus, if we want to locate ourselves in the history of Greece, Egypt, Russia, Germany, Colombia at any time, we can not judge those events under the magnifying glass of the context of the XXI Century, because that will only give us a distorted view of why events happened as they did. The editor © www.thegermanarmy.org © Atenas Editores Asociados 1998-2017 © https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=gustavo+uruena+a

3/595


4/595

4


5

First Blitzkrieg: Battle of Cannae ...................................... 11 After Clausewitz.................................................................33 German Blitzkrieg ............................................................. 61 The Blitzkrieg in the Low Countries.................................. 77 Blitzkrieg............................................................................95 Carl von Clausewitz .........................................................183 Hans von Seeckt Theory ..................................................199 General Hans von Seeckt.................................................235 Schools of military thought within................................. 287 the Reichswehr ............................................................... 287 Roots of German military methods................................ 305 Methods of operations..................................................... 313 J.F.C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart ................................327 Myth of the Blitzkrieg......................................................333 Guderian Theory............................................................. 349 General der Panzertruppen Guderian............................. 417 Battle of Tannenberg .......................................................427 Panzer Tactics..................................................................441 Defensive Operations (Die Verteidigung) ...................... 483 Flanking Maneuver ......................................................... 521 Maneuver warfare ...........................................................529 The Art of War (Sun)/Section VII ................................... 541 Maneuvering.................................................................... 541 Ernst Volckheim ..............................................................545 U.S. Army Maneuver warfare......................................... 549 The New American Way at War ...................................... 561 Bibliography ................................................................... 583

5/595


6/595

6


7/595

7


8

In the midst of crisis and defeat at the end of 1918, the civilian leaders of Germany were demoralized and confused. Germany's military defeat had brought about the collapse of the Imperial government, the proclamation of a republic virtually by accident, and the establishment of a government whose authority was not recognized even on the streets of Berlin. On the surface, the army appeared to be in the same state. The rear units had taken part in the overthrow of the monarchy, and the field armies were being brought home and demobilized. Behind the scenes, however, the high command and the General Staff were not as confused and uncertain as civilian leaders. Even before the civil war ended in Berlin and Munich, the General Staff had absorbed the lessons of World War I and begun rebuilding the army. From its frank assessment of its strengths and weaknesses in the war, the army was able to remold its organization and tactical doctrine.

8/595


9/595

9


10

Schwerpunkt The Germans referred to a Schwerpunkt (focal point and also known as Schwerpunktprinzip or concentration principle) in the planning of operations; it was a center of gravity or point of maximum effort, where a decisive action could be achieved. Ground, mechanised and tactical air forces were concentrated at this point of maximum effort whenever possible. By local success at the Schwerpunkt, a small force achieved a breakthrough and gained advantages by fighting in the enemy's rear. It is summarized by Guderian as “Klotzen, nicht kleckern!” (literally "boulders, not blots" and means "act powerfully, not superficially"). To achieve a breakout, armoured forces would attack the enemy's defensive line directly, supported by motorized infantry, artillery fire and aerial bombardment, in order to create a breach in the enemy's line. Through this breach, the tanks and motorised units could break through without the traditional encumbrance of the slow logistics of infantry on foot. In the opening phase of an operation, air forces sought to gain superiority over enemy air forces by attacking aircraft on the ground, bombing their airfields, and seeking to destroy them in the air.

10/595


11

First Blitzkrieg: Battle of Cannae The Battle of Cannae was a major battle of the Second Punic War, which took place on August 2, 216 BC near the town of Cannae in Apulia in southeast Italy. The army of Carthage under Hannibal decisively defeated a numerically superior army of the Roman Republic under command of the consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. It is regarded as one of the greatest tactical feats in military history and, in numbers killed, the second greatest defeat of Rome (second to the Battle of Arausio). Having recovered from their previous losses at Trebia (218 BC) and Trasimene (217 BC), the Romans decided to engage Hannibal at Cannae, with roughly 86,000 Roman and Allied troops. The Romans massed their heavy infantry in a deeper formation than usual while Hannibal utilized the double-envelopment tactic. This was so successful that the Roman army was effectively destroyed as a fighting force. Following the Battle of Cannae, Capua and several other Italian city-states defected from the Roman Republic to Carthage. Strategic background Shortly after the start of the Second Punic War, the Carthaginian general Hannibal boldly crossed into Italy by traversing the Alps during the winter. He quickly won two major victories over the Romans at the Battle of Trebia and at the Battle of Lake Trasimene. After suffering these losses, the Romans appointed Fabius Maximus as dictator to deal with the threat. Fabius used attrition warfare against Hannibal, cutting off his supply lines and refusing to engage in pitched battle. These tactics proved unpopular with the Romans. As the Roman people recovered from the shock of Hannibal's initial victories, they began to question the wisdom of the Fabian strategy which had given the Carthaginian army a chance to regroup. Fabius' strategy was especially frustrating to the majority of Romans who were

11/595


12

eager to see a quick conclusion to the war. It was also widely feared that if Hannibal continued plundering Italy unopposed, Rome's allies might doubt Rome's ability to protect them, and defect to Carthage's cause. Unimpressed with Fabius' strategy, the Roman Senate did not renew his dictatorial powers at the end of his term, and command was given to consuls Gnaeus Servilius Geminus and M. Atilius Regulus. In 216 BC, elections resumed with Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilius Paullus elected as consuls, given command of a newly raised army of unprecedented size, and directed to engage Hannibal. Polybius writes: The Senate determined to bring eight legions into the field, which had never been done at Rome before, each legion consisting of five thousand men besides allies. ...Most of their wars are decided by one consul and two legions, with their quota of allies; and they rarely employ all four at one time and on one service. But on this occasion, so great was the alarm and terror of what would happen, they resolved to bring not only four but eight legions into the field. Polybius, The Histories of Polybius.

12/595


13

Estimates of Roman troop numbers These eight legions, some 40,000 Roman soldiers along with an estimated 2,400 Roman cavalry, formed the nucleus of this massive new army. As each legion was accompanied by an equal number of allied troops, and allied cavalry numbered around 4,000, the total strength of the army which faced Hannibal could not have been much less than 90,000. However, some have suggested that the destruction of an army of 90,000 troops would be impossible. They argue that Rome probably had 48,000 troops and 6,000 cavalry against Hannibal's 35,000 troops and 10,000 cavalry. Livy quotes one source stating the Romans only added 10,000 men to their usual army. While no definitive number of Roman troops exists, all sources agree that the Carthaginian army faced a considerably larger foe.

13/595


14

Roman command Ordinarily, each of the two consuls would command their own portion of the army, but since the two armies were combined into one, the Roman law required them to alternate their command on a daily basis. It appears that Hannibal had already realized that the command of the Roman army alternated, and planned his strategy accordingly. The traditional account puts Varro in command on the day of the battle, and much of the blame for the defeat has been laid on his shoulders. However, his low origins seem to be exaggerated in the sources, and Varro may have been made a scapegoat by the aristocratic establishment. Varro lacked the powerful descendants that Paullus had: descendants who were willing and able to protect his reputation — most notably, Paullus was the grandfather of Scipio Aemilianus, the patron of Polybius. In the spring of 216 BC, Hannibal took the initiative and seized the large supply depot at Cannae in the Apulian plain. He thus placed himself between the Romans and their crucial source of supply. As Polybius notes, the capture of Cannae "caused great commotion in the Roman army; for it was not only the loss of the place and the stores in it that distressed them, but the fact that it commanded the surrounding district". The consuls, resolving to confront Hannibal, marched southward in search of the Carthaginian general. After two days’ march, they found him on the left bank of the Aufidus River and encamped six miles (10 km) away. Reportedly, a Carthaginian officer named Gisgo commented on how much larger the Roman army was. Hannibal replied, "another thing that has escaped your notice, Gisgo, is even more amazing—that although there are so many of them, there is not one among them called Gisgo.» Consul Varro, who was in command on the first day, is presented by ancient sources as a man of reckless nature and hubris, and was determined to defeat Hannibal. While the Romans were approaching Cannae, a small portion of

14/595


15

Hannibal's forces ambushed the Roman army. Varro successfully repelled the Carthaginian attack and continued on his way to Cannae. This victory, though essentially a mere skirmish with no lasting strategic value, greatly bolstered the confidence of the Roman army, perhaps to overconfidence on Varro's part. Paullus, however, was opposed to the engagement as it was taking shape. Unlike Varro, he was prudent and cautious, and he believed it was foolish to fight on open ground, despite the Romans' numerical strength. This was especially true since Hannibal held the advantage in cavalry (both in quality and numerical terms). Despite these misgivings, Paullus thought it unwise to withdraw the army after the initial success, and camped two-thirds of the army east of the Aufidus River, sending the remainder of his men to fortify a position on the opposite side. The purpose of this second camp was to cover the foraging parties from the main camp and harass those of the enemy. The two armies stayed in their respective locations for two days. During the second of these two days (August 1), Hannibal, aware that Varro would be in command the following day, left his camp and offered battle. Paullus, however, refused. When his request was rejected, Hannibal, recognizing the importance of the Aufidus' water to the Roman troops, sent his cavalry to the smaller Roman camp to harass water-bearing soldiers that were found outside the camp fortifications. According to Polybius, Hannibal's cavalry boldly rode up to the edge of the Roman encampment, causing havoc and thoroughly disrupting the supply of water to the Roman camp.

15/595


16

The battle Forces Figures for troops involved in ancient battles are often unreliable and Cannae is no exception. Hence the following figures should be treated with caution, especially those for the Carthaginian side. The combined forces of the two consuls totaled 80,000 infantry, 2,400 Roman cavalry and 4,000 allied horse (involved in the actual battle) and, in the two fortified camps, 2,600 heavily armed men, 7,400 lightly armed men (a total of 10,000), so that the total strength the Romans brought to the field amounted to approximately 86,400 men. Opposing them was a Carthaginian army composed of roughly 40,000 heavy infantry, 6,000 light infantry, and 10,000 cavalry in the battle itself, irrespective of detachments. The Carthaginian army was a combination of warriors from numerous regions. Along with the core of 8,000 Libyans, 8,000 Iberians, 16,000 Gauls (8,000 were left at camp the day of battle) and around 5,500 Gaetulian infantry. Hannibal's cavalry also came from diverse backgrounds. He commanded 4,000 Numidian, 2,000 Iberian, 4,000 Gallic and 450 Liby-Phoenician cavalry. Finally, Hannibal had around 8,000 skirmishers consisting of Balearic slingers and mixed nationality spearmen, bringing Hannibal's army to a total of around 47,950. All of these specific groups brought their respective strengths to the battle. The uniting factor for the Carthaginian army was the personal tie each group had with Hannibal. Equipment Rome's forces used typical Roman equipment including pila (heavy javelins) and hastae (thrusting spears) as weapons as well as traditional helmets, shields, and body armor. On the other hand, the Carthaginian army used a va-

16/595


17

riety of equipment. Iberians fought with swords suited for cutting and thrusting and javelins or various types of spear. For defense, Iberian warriors carried large oval shields and the Falcata. The Gauls were likely wearing no armour at all and the Gaulish weapon was usually a long, slashing sword. The heavy Carthaginian cavalry carried two javelins and a curved slashing sword with a heavy shield for protection. Numidian cavalry were very lightly equipped, lacking saddles and bridles for their horses, and used no armor but carried a small shield, javelins and possibly a knife or longer blade. Skirmishers acting as light infantry carried either slings or spears. The Balearic slingers, who were famous for their accuracy, carried short, medium, and long slings used to cast stones or bullets. They may have carried a small shield or simple leather pelt on their arms, but this is uncertain. Hannibal himself was wearing Musculata armour and carried a Falcata as well. The equipment of the Libyan line infantry has been much debated. Duncan Head has argued in favor of short stabbing spears. Polybius states that the Libyans fought with equipment taken from previously defeated Romans. It is unclear whether he meant only shields and armor or offensive weapons as well, though a general reading suggests he meant the whole panoply of arms and armour, and even tactical organization. Apart from his description of the battle itself, when later discussing the subject of Roman Legion versus Greek Phalanx, Polybius says that "...against Hannibal, the defeats they suffered had nothing to do with weapons or formations" because "Hannibal himself...discarded the equipment with which he had started out (and) armed his troops with Roman weapons". Dally is inclined to the view that Libyan infantry would have copied the Iberian use of the sword during their fighting there and so were armed similarly to the Romans. Connolly has argued that they were armed as a pike phalanx. This has been disputed by Head because Plutarch states they carried spears shorter than the Roman Triarii and by Dally becau-

17/595


18

se they could not have carried an unwieldy pike at the same time as a heavy Roman style shield.

Tactical deployment The conventional deployment for armies of the time was to place infantry in the center and deploy the cavalry in two flanking "wings." The Romans followed this convention fairly closely, but chose extra depth rather than breadth for their infantry line, hoping to use this concentration of forces to quickly break through the center of Hannibal's line. Varro knew how the Roman infantry had managed to penetrate Hannibal's center during the Battle of the Trebia, and he planned to recreate this on an even greater scale. The principes were stationed immediately behind the hastati, ready to push forward at first contact to ensure the Romans presented a unified front. As Polybius wrote, "the maniples were nearer each other, or the intervals were decreased... and the maniples showed more depth than

18/595


19

front.» Even though they outnumbered the Carthaginians, this depth-oriented deployment meant that the Roman lines had a front of roughly equal size to their numerically inferior opponents. To Varro, Hannibal seemed to have little room to manoeuver and no means of retreat as he was deployed with the Aufidus River to his rear. Varro believed that when pressed hard by the Romans' superior numbers, the Carthaginians would fall back onto the river and, with no room to manoeuver, would be cut down in panic. Bearing in mind that Hannibal's two previous victories had been largely decided by his trickery and ruse, Varro had sought an open battlefield. The field at Cannae was indeed clear, with no possibility of hidden troops being brought to bear as an ambush. Hannibal, on the other hand, had deployed his forces based on the particular fighting qualities of each unit, taking into consideration both their strengths and weaknesses in devising his strategy. He placed his Iberians and Gauls in the middle, alternating the ethnic composition across the front line, with the general himself right at the front and center. Hannibal's infantry from Punic Africa was positioned on the wings at the very edge of his infantry line. These infantry were battle-hardened, remained cohesive, and would attack the Roman flanks. Hasdrubal led the Iberian and Gaulish cavalry on the left (south near the Aufidus River) of the Carthaginian army. By placing the flank of his army on the Aufidus river, Hannibal prevented this flank from being overlapped by the more numerous Romans. Hasdrubal was given about 6,500 cavalry, and Hanno had 3,500 Numidians on the right. Hannibal intended that his cavalry, comprising mainly medium Hispanic cavalry and Numidian light horse, and positioned on the flanks, would defeat the weaker Roman cavalry and swing around to attack the Roman infantry from the rear as it pressed upon Hannibal's weakened center.

19/595


20

His veteran African troops would then press in from the flanks at the crucial moment, and encircle the overextended Roman army. The Romans were in front of the hill leading to Cannae and hemmed in on their right flank by the Aufidus River, so that their left flank was the only viable means of retreat. In addition, the Carthaginian forces had maneuvered so that the Romans would face east. Not only would the morning sunlight shine low into the Romans' eyes, but the southeasterly winds would blow sand and dust into their faces as they approached the battlefield. Hannibal's unique deployment of his army, based on his perception of the terrain and understanding of the capabilities of his troops, proved decisive. Subsequent events As the armies advanced on one another, Hannibal gradually extended the center of his line, as Polybius describes: "After thus drawing up his whole army in a straight line, he took the central companies of Hispanics and Celts and advanced with them, keeping the rest of them in contact with these companies, but gradually falling off, so as to produce a crescent-shaped formation, the line of the flanking companies growing thinner as it was prolonged, his object being to employ the Africans as a reserve force and to begin the action with the Hispanics and Celts." Polybius describes the weak Carthaginian center as deployed in a crescent, curving out toward the Romans in the middle with the African troops on their flanks in echelon formation. It is believed that the purpose of this formation was to break the forward momentum of the Roman infantry, and delay its advance before other developments allowed Hannibal to deploy his African infantry most effectively. That being said, while the majority of historians feel that Hannibal's action was deliberate, there are those that have called this account fanciful, and claim that the actions of the day represent either the natural curvature that

20/595


100

the increased deadliness of the chasse-pot and mitrailleuse. They were not in effect during the battles of August 1870, including Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte, but they were by the time of the engagement at Le Borget on October 30,1870. As a method of attack, they typically involved three stages. During the initial or opening stage, swarms of skirmishers supported by artillery fire advanced by alternating rushes as rapidly as possible to a distance "about 500 meters from the French skirmishers." A firefight then ensued between each side's skirmishers, with the battle normally reaching "its climax" during this stage. The purpose of the firefight was to overwhelm the defender at the location chosen for the assault with as much firepower as possible. When the attacking commander judged that the enemy had been sufficiently "shattered" physically and psychologically, he gave the signal for the third and final stage of the attack, the assault. During this stage, the assaulting infantry rushed the last 100 to 300 meters to the enemy's position and carried it at bayonet point. Although bayonets were used in the final assault, Boguslawski stressed that their role was secondary to that of firepower. Bayonet fights, he pointed out, almost never occurred "in open fields, and but rarely in villages and forests." Rather, the bayonet symbolized the resolve to close with the enemy and to kill or capture him if he refused to abandon his position. Thus, this tactical system involved something of a one-two punch. The first aimed at physically and psychologically weakening the enemy by fire, the second at launching a vigorous assault before he could recover. In all cases, the firefight and the bayonet assault were to be used in tandem. Although sound in theory and effective in practice, the use of skirmish tactics involved some practical problems. For instance, controlling the fire and movement of troops spread over great distances was difficult, especially without the aid of such conveniences as modern wireless communications, as was the task of selecting the place and

100/595


101

time for the final assault: Ideally, the attacker's forces should not move forward unless covered by supporting fire, and the supporting fire should not cease until the advancing forces had closed with the defender. In practice, however, the attacker's fire was often interrupted, sometimes because the advancing infantry crossed the line of fire of other infantry formations or of the artillery, and on other occasions because the supporting infantry or artillery was forced to change location. It also proved difficult to maintain the forward momentum of the troops, especially if the enemy's fire was heavy. Historian Hans Delbriick, a reserve lieutenant in the Twenty-ninth Rhenish Infantry Regiment during the campaign of 1870-1871, reported that during one attack enemy fire was so intense that his comrades "could scarcely be moved to go forward..... Leadership either did not exist or was poor and the soldiers showed no courage: it was a pitiful sight." Such a loss of momentum usually spelled the end for an attack. In such cases, battle became a drawn-out contest of attrition in which the side that could reinforce the threatened point faster usually carried the day, and usually by a margin that was far from decisive. Whereas an attack might lose valuable momentum if soldiers stopped too often to take cover, the opposite - advancing too rapidly - resulted in outstripping their covering fire and rendered them vulnerable to enemy fire or to a counterattack. Furthermore, units usually required a prominent terrain feature, such as a farmhouse or a church, to guide them toward their objectives. However, when the smoke of the battlefield was too thick, as it often was with black-powder weapons, or when such structures were reduced to rubble, orientation became extremely difficult, if not impossible. In theory, the location chosen for the assault was to coincide with the "decisive point," the capture of which would render the enemy's position untenable, thus forcing him

101/595


102

either to withdraw or to face death or capture. In practice, however, locating the decisive point was more art than science. The same held true for determining when to assault, perhaps even more so. The attacking commander was to give the signal to assault only when he perceived that the enemy's fire had slackened appreciably, thus indicating that the defender had suffered heavy casualties or was perhaps preparing to withdraw. Either possibility gave the assault a reasonable chance of success. However, an immediate rush without a preparatory fire generally failed to strike home. Sometimes, as Boguslawski and others noted, the French had deliberately reduced their volume of fire to trick German commanders into launching their assaults prematurely. For this reason, an officer's professional judgment, the sixth sense or coup d'oeil he developed through years of experience and training, was considered indispensable during the conduct of a battle. This soldierly intuition helped a commander make sense of seemingly contradictory facts or served to warn him of an impending yet still invisible danger or perhaps to signal the arrival of an opportunity. Of course, the rub lay in distinguishing between genuine intuition and those perceptions influenced by fear or wishful thinking. Hence, as with any tactical system, it was only as good as the officers and noncommissioned officers employing it. They performed a critical task by directing the movement of the troops so that the attack gained and maintained momentum to strike at the right time and place. Skirmish tactics thus required a better system of control to prevent a dilution of effort. To execute such open-order tactics more effectively, Boguslawski advocated training every infantry soldier as a light infantryman - a skirmisher. Such training involved advanced instruction in fighting independently or in small groups, even when not observed by an officer, intermingled with soldiers from other units; the handling of firearms; and the use of terrain to cover one's movements. This proposal had far-reaching implications. It meant that

102/595


103

infantry had to master a larger number of tasks. Hitherto, training as a light infantryman was reserved for elite units, such as the Jager, or for seasoned veterans who had already mastered the basics. Henceforth, the solution that Boguslawski recommended would require raising the level of training necessary to make all soldiers more self-sufficient. Modern infantry training had to encourage soldiers to think and decide on their own, to exercise initiative (something they had rarely been required to do in Napoleon's day), and to stick with the fight even when out of sight of their superiors. As Boguslawski pointed out, bringing every soldier to the level of expertise typical of a light infantryman would necessitate streamlining military drill and education so that they focused on only those activities actually required in combat. Although not the first work published on the subject of the infantry crisis, Major von Scherff's Studies in the New Tactics of Infantry (1872-1873) was perhaps the most important. It examined the infantry problem in great detail, establishing a baseline for subsequent discussions, and was the study most frequently cited by American, British, French, and other German military writers during the two and a half decades following 1871. Scherff maintained that whereas previous improvements in firearms had generally favored the defensive, breechloaders also afforded an unprecedented increase in strength to the attacker. Unlike muzzle-loaders, which generally required the soldier to stand upright to gain enough leverage to ram the charge home, breechloaders could be loaded from any position, even while moving, which made firepower more portable than ever. An attacker could now fire without halting his forward movement. As a result, the principle of maneuver had become relevant to small units - companies, platoons, and squads - and even to individual soldiers; by contrast, in the Napoleonic era, it was rarely applied below the regiment or battalion level. Scherff also argued that breechloaders had tripled the effectiveness of the infantry arm.

103/595


104

As he pointed out, "An individual soldier can now fire three times as far, as fast, and as accurately as he did formerly." This increase in effectiveness, in turn, had raised the lethality and tempo - the ratio of activity to time - of modern warfare, which meant that units tended to reach their crisis points much more rapidly and commanders had to make decisions much more quickly. Thus, although breechloaders represented a mere evolutionary step for firearms, they amounted to nothing less than a revolutionary leap for tactics. Scherff's description of the modern battlefield, which was also accepted by most military writers abroad, would remain relevant for the next two and a half decades. It consisted of three zones of fire. The first zone was that of the artillery's "aimed" fire, which began at about 5,000 meters from the defender's position. The second zone, that of "unaimed" infantry fire, started at about 1,800 meters. The final zone, that of "aimed" infantry fire, commenced at about 800 meters. To negotiate this larger and more lethal battlefield, units would have to make greater use of openorder formations. Scherff maintained, in fact, that the German army should establish the combination of open order and the Prussian company column as the "standard formation" for both offensive and defensive operations. The new conditions of warfare required infantry formations to strike a balance among three requirements: mobility (Beioeglichkeit), security (Sicherung) or protection from the effects of hostile fire, and employment of firepower (Waffenwirkung). In Scherff's view, the Prussian company column was appropriate for moving troops through the first two zones of the modern battlefield. It was a much smaller target than the battalion column and allowed for efficient movement of troops. However, crossing the final zone required open order, though this ought not to devolve into a situation of "anarchy" in which every soldier went his own way. Scherff wanted to prevent such "atomization" by restricting the intervals between skirmishers and the

104/595


105

distances at which they operated from their parent unit. Throughout every stage of the attack, the synchronization between fire and movement was critical. Like Boguslawski, Scherff stressed that the bullet was not yet the "final argument." Alone, firepower might not be sufficient to force the defender from his position, in which case the attacker had to be prepared to use the bayonet. Yet the acknowledged key to success was achieving_/m? superiority at the decisive point, which entailed the suppression of the enemy's fire, not necessarily his destruction. In sum, both Boguslawski and Scherff maintained that the new conditions of warfare required three principal changes to the German army's current system of attack. The first was an increased use of open-order formations, albeit with a rather firm rein. The second was a greater reliance on firepower to "shatter" the enemy at the point where the assault was to be made. The last was the elimination of the battalion column in favor of the smaller, more maneuverable company column, which exposed fewer friendly troops to enemy fire. Several of their recommendations were in fact sanctioned by the cabinet order of March 19, 1873, which set the stage for the revised edition of the drill regulations that became official on March 1, 1876. These included identifying the company column as the standard formation for a battalion in the front line, with the role of reinforcing the skirmish line, and the greater use of open order to reduce the effect of an opponent's breechloaders. However, as with any committee compromise, this edition of the regulations was regarded by many officers as little more than a temporary answer to the problem of the infantry attack. Auftragstaktik The term Auftragstaktik has been greatly abused in military publications in recent years. Some analysts and historians have upheld it as the key to the German army's long record of success on the battlefield; others maintain that it

105/595


106

had no "official" existence. Auftragstaktik was in fact used in German military writings during this period, though with somewhat different connotations than one finds in today's literature.11 Derived in part from the tradition of Scharnhorst, Clausewitz, and Moltke, this solution was based on the premise that hard-and-fast rules had no place in the environment of war, which was the realm of human emotion, friction, chance, and uncertainty. Under this system, the selection of combat formations, as well as their route and rate of advance, was based on a unit's specific mission, the circumstances of terrain, and the enemy's dispositions. The system functioned best with units that were well trained and leaders who had worked together for some time and developed a sense of shared expectations. Major Verdy du Vernois, a veteran of the war against France, a renowned instructor at the War Academy, and the Reich's war minister from 1889 to 1890, was one of the first to advance an alternative to standardized formations. "In war twice two is not always four," he wrote. Hence, one can never tell whether to "apply a rule or make an exception."12 Like the proponents of standardized formations, Verdy argued that only open-order skirmish formations would prove practicable in future wars. However, he placed greater emphasis on the need to preserve the independent action of subordinates. Only by issuing individual tasks to each unit and by leaving the actual execution to the commanders concerned was it possible to "maintain supervision over the whole" and to grant subordinates the independence of action necessary for victory. Every commander, Verdy added, had the "right to solve his problems according to his own ideas, so long as he does not commit a manifest error, and he may proceed to do so in various ways." Although the temptation to interfere in details or to control everything was great, "One should never let himself yield to it." In Verdy's view, the diversity of modern combat situations and the faster rate at which they changed made it all the more essential to grant inde-

106/595


107

pendence of action to one's subordinates. Undoubtedly, the most significant contributions to the Auftragstaktik solution were made by Colonel Sigismund von Schlichting, a company commander in 1866, a battalion commander in 1870-1871, a regimental commander afterward, and subsequently chief of staff of the Guard Corps. In 1879, he published a seminal essay entitled "On the Infantry Battle." Like the advocates of standardized tactics, Schlichting maintained that modern rifles and cannon were three to four times more effective than those in use at the beginning of the century and that their greater effectiveness had rendered close-order battle lines and assault formations obsolete. Written after the Russo-Turkish War, Schlichting's essay was informed by his observations of the effectiveness of yet another generation of infantry weapons. "Even in the hands of untrained Turks," the firepower of an unshaken defender "inflicts devastation on the attacker." The conditions of modern warfare required four new measures: that infantry fight in dispersed order, that it deploy at greater distances from the enemy, that its movement into combat flow directly from this deployment, and that it use terrain to cover its movements. Schlichting proposed replacing the Imperial German Army's current method of attack with a system founded on a few governing principles. As the supreme cabinet order of March 19,1873, had decreed that "concrete cases are to be solved according to principles of engagement, no longer according to a scheme," Schlichting's proposal took the form of recommended principles. The first was to use extended order formations in conjunction with greater reliance on firepower. The second called for an increased use of the terrain tactically, and the third recommended an emphasis on enveloping the enemy's flank. The primary means for exercising control in an operation, Schlichting explained, was the commander's communication of his overall intent (Absichf) and his assignment of specific tasks (Auftrage) to his subordinates. Although the

107/595


108

Achilles' heel of this system was still individual caprice—a subordinate acting on his own initiative rather than according to his commander's intent—Schlichting considered this an acceptable risk. In short, Schlichting saw himself as a disciple of Moltke, applying the chief of staff's approach to strategy as "a system of expedients" to the tactical level of warfare. These principles became known collectively as the "Schlichting Doctrine." Schlichting's principles had much in common with the fundamental concepts associated with the armament for standardized formations. Like them, he maintained that the bayonet was now little more than a "metaphor" for the spirit of the offensive, the "last act in the action caused by firepower." His method, like theirs, sought to bring the maximum amount of firepower to bear against the enemy and employed the principles of fire and movement in a similar manner. Schlichting, too, felt that modern firearms afforded a great advantage to the attacker by enabling him to fire on the defender throughout the entire course of the attack. He advised caution in this regard, however, as such use would result in a greater consumption of ammunition, possibly causing severe resupply problems for the attacker. Likewise, he believed that modern engagements, except in the case of encounter battles, would probably last for prolonged periods. Attacks against prepared positions would likely unfold gradually, perhaps taking on the character of a siege rather than a classic confrontation over open ground.17 However, Schlichting's critics maintained that his doctrine was too ad hoc to synchronize the fire and movement of attacking troops to the degree necessary for tactical success on the modern battlefield. Colmar von der Goltz, whose enormously popular Nation in Arms first appeared in 1883, was one such opponent. Goltz maintained that the greater ranges of modern rifles and artillery, "ten times as broad as was formerly the case," made cooperation among units even more important. Under modern conditions,

108/595


109

cooperation could be achieved only through greater preparation and coordination, not by an ad hoc approach. Although the use of open-order formations was warranted, such clusters of skirmishers were "lost to control." A battalion in close order could, "at the word of command, wheel right, left, forwards, or backwards," whereas a company "fighting as a cluster of riflemen" was like a mass of atoms. In Goltz's view, the solution to the infantry problem rested on four principles: possessing numerical superiority, having better-quality officers and men, achieving greater cooperation among the combat arms, and obtaining superior mobility and speed of action. Other officers, such as Colonel Jakob Meckel, who would later achieve renown for training the Japanese forces that would eventually triumph over the Russian army in 1905, seconded this view. In 1888, he published an account of battle entitled A Summer Night's Dream, which described the anatomy of an infantry attack in the war against France. In one case, "The field was literally strewn with men who had left the ranks, and were doing nothing. Whole battalions could have been formed from them." Meckel's account, which was reviewed favorably in the pages of the Military Weekly, soon became an integral part of the argument for exerting stricter control over troops in combat. Meckel advocated using relatively close order formations that afforded greater control and speed of movement, even if at a higher cost in blood. In 1887, Schlichting became head of the committee responsible for revising the infantry drill regulations. Many of his ideas thus found their way into the new edition of the regulations, which appeared in 1888, the same year that the German army adopted the Model 88 bolt-action magazine rifle, which had an even higher rate of fire than the Needle gun. Among other things, the regulations included a greater emphasis on individual initiative, openorder formations, use of terrain, and firepower and a much-needed distinction between a meeting engagement,

109/595


110

or battle of encounter (Begegnungsgefecht), and a deliberate attack (geplanten Angrijf] against a prepared position. Indeed, when the infantry drill regulations appeared in September 1888, they represented a decisive, if incomplete, break with the past, placing greater emphasis on open-order formations and eschewing rigid forms of maneuver. Even Boguslawski expressed his satisfaction with them. "Rarely has an army been more unanimous in approval of its regulations," he wrote, adding that "they were the intellectual outcome of seventeen years' deliberation." Of course, acceptance was not unanimous. Some officers expressed considerable trepidation over the idea of abandoning standardized formations. Others argued over whether to retain the third rank in the firing line. Still others maintained that "individualizing" the actions of skirmishers would only ensure that they never accomplished their objectives. Other officers found ways to improve on the regulations by simplifying or consolidating some of their instructions. On the whole, however, the 1888 infantry drill regulations recognized the modern conditions of warfare and represented a step toward a more dispersed and decentralized execution of the infantry attack. Cavalry: Toward Greater Versatility and Firepower From the end of the Franco-German War to the early 1890s, cavalry theorists in Germany and elsewhere maintained their faith in the efficacy of the charge. However, they also admitted that opportunities for the charge had become much more infrequent, and its successful execution would likely involve crippling losses for the cavalry. The charge itself was to be prepared—much like the infantry attack—with concentrated firepower to "shatter" the enemy physically and psychologically. No theorist advocated hurling massed cavalry formations against an unshaken enemy, unless such a suicidal sacrifice was the only

110/595


230

they had not been produced. Von Kami's statement was not plausible. The Allies had seized upon the tank idea two years before the Germans. German engineers had shown that they could quickly develop tanks equal to the Allied models, but tank production was given the lowest industrial priority. At the same time that workers and steel could not be found for tanks, the high command authorized the production of two enormous railroad-mounted "Paris Guns," that could shell Paris from 70 miles away. These guns, built with great effort and at great expense, fired a total of 367 shells—weighing 229-307 pounds each—at Paris in 1918, the approximate explosive weight of an aircraft bombing raid. Putting Krupp to work on enormous guns while minimizing tank production is one of the clearest examples of military-industrial mismanagement in World War I. General J. F. C. Fuller asserted that for the 1918 offensive the Germans should have cut cannon production and built tracked tractors instead: "By the end of March 1918 the German attack 'petered out' for want of supplies. . . . Had the Germans possessed on March 21 and May 27, 5,000 to 6,000 efficient crosscountry tractors, each of which carried five tons of supplies, all the hosts of brave men which the United States of America could have poured into France, could not have prevented a separation of the British and French Armies from being effected." Ludendorff might have been a better tactician than Foch and Haig, but the latter two commanders possessed the imagination to grasp the fundamentals of mechanized war that Ludendorff did not. The first Allied tank theorists, Britons Fuller and Colonel Swinton and Frenchman Colonel Estienne, received full support from their respective high commands and were given the resources to develop their ideas by the British and French cabinets. The sharpest criticism of the German Army's approach to technology came from within the army itself. Colonel Kurt Thorbeck, president of the Rifle Testing Commission, wrote a blistering thirty-three-page study for the General

230/595


231

Staff in 1920 on the technical and tactical lessons of the war. His underlined conclusion was that "the German General Staff did not properly recognize the material demands of a world war and therefore did not correctly prepare for the war in peace. This was the basic mistake of the war." Thorbeck pointed out that the prewar General Staff had not properly studied the effects of the machine gun and magazine rifle. The General Staff had been filled with tacticians—no weapons technicians were given a place on the General Staff. Thus once the war began, there were no technically trained infantry officers at the high command to represent the infantry. If there had been, the army might have developed a better light machine gun. Thorbeck asserted that much of the equipment ordered during the war was a waste of money and effort, owing to the technical ignorance of the General Staff. For example, Thorbeck said, the 82.5 million marks used to produce heavy body armor for the infantry should have been used for building tanks.113 For Thorbeck, there was certainly "no stab in the back"; the army's disregard for technology had brought about national defeat. Conclusion During the First World War from 1914 to 1918, Germany mobilized eleven million men and suffered 6 million casualties. The Allies mobilized twenty-eight million men against Germany alone and suffered twelve million casualties, not counting those lost fighting other Central Powers. Colonel Trevor N. Dupuy took these statistics and other battle statistics and created a scoring system for military effectiveness. Against the British, the German average effectiveness superiority was 1.49 to 1; against the French 1.53 to 1. Against the Russians, the Germans scored at a ratio of 5.4 to 1” The lessons of World War I reinforced the German Army's belief in the superiority of its flexible and mobile tactics in offense and defense. Through tactics alone, the Germans

231/595


232

had found a means to break the trench stalemate. They were also confident of the superiority of their training system and of their aerial strategy and tactics. The negative lessons of the "war—the strategic failures of the high command and the superiority of Allied technology over German technology—would profoundly affect the German Army's training, organization, and tactical thought in the 1920s. The first problem, poor wartime strategy, did not lend itself to any ready solutions except to a retrospective study of the war. The second problem, appreciating the effect of technology on warfare, was solvable. Solving this problem was the primary reason for reforming the postwar General Staff and officer training. Von Seeckt and Rethinking Warfare In December 1918, as soon as the Imperial Army marched back into Germany, it virtually dissolved overnight. Germany was wracked by civil war, with Communists attempting to seize power in Berlin, Bavaria, and other areas. Many officers remained at their posts and a few Imperial Army units maintained a small cadre, but it is fair to say that in the first two months following the armistice, Germany effectively had no military force. It had to rely on short-term volunteers for well over a year after the war's end. Germany would have to create a new army and command system in an atmosphere of uncertainty, violence, military defeat, and partial occupation. This job would be done well. The army that was intended by the Allies to become no more than a border guard or police force would soon be considered a first-rate small army capable of forming the basis for rapid German rearmament. The architect of this force, its theorist and its primary trainer was Hans von Seeckt, first commander of the General Staff, or Troops Office (Truppenamt), and second army chief of the Reichswehr. Von Seeckt would have the opportunity to do what few military men have ever done: create an army from scratch, fashioning its organization

232/595


233

and doctrine after his own theories. Von Seeckt would serve as General Staff chief and army chief from 1919 to 1926, but he was by far the dominant figure of the German Army for the interwar period.

233/595


234/595

234


235

General Hans von Seeckt Johannes Friedrich "Hans" von Seeckt (22 April 1866 – 27 December 1936) Hans von Seeckt was born to a noble Pomeranian family in 1866. His father was a Prussian officer who would eventually attain the rank of general. Unlike most sons destined for the army, Hans did not go to a cadet school but rather to a civilian Gymnasium (preparatory school) in Strasburg, where he achieved his Abitur in 1885. That year he was enrolled in the Kaiser Alexander Guard Regiment of the Prussian Army as an officer cadet. He was commissioned in 1887 and in 1893 was accepted for the three-year General Staff course at the Kriegsakademie. In 1897 he was one of the small number of officers selected for the General Staff Corps. From 1896 to 1914 he rose steadily through the ranks, serving as a battalion commander and on several staff assignments. Probably because of his civilian education, von Seeckt showed a much greater breadth of mind than the average Prussian officer. He was fluent in several languages and well traveled: In the prewar period, he visited Egypt and India as well as virtually all the European countries. He particularly enjoyed reading English authors, including the works of John Galsworthy and George Bernard Shaw.

235/595


236

Von Seeckt was highly regarded in the General Staff Corps. The outbreak of World War I found him in an important position as chief of staff to the Third Army Corps on the right flank of the great advance through Belgium and France. The early part of the war made von Seeckt's

236/595


237

reputation as a leader and tactician. One staff officer who served with him in August and September 1914 described him as "always radiating calmness" and "maintaining control" in battle. At the end of October 1914, von Seeckt organized a limited corps attack to seize a French position on the Aisne. Rounding up all the artillery support he could muster, he planned for a strong surprise attack preceded by a heavy artillery barrage. The plan worked and the position was quickly taken along with 2,000 French prisoners. In January 1915, in response to a French advance near Sois-sons, von Seeckt orchestrated the German counterattack that threw the French back to their original positions and netted the Germans 5,200 prisoners and 35 guns. The January 1915 battle made von Seeckt's reputation within the army. In March 1915 von Seeckt was appointed chief of staff to the Eleventh Army, which was being organized on the eastern front with General von Mackensen commanding. Von Seeckt planned the llth Army's offensive against the Russians at Gorlice in Galicia, one of the greatest German victories of the war. Along a broad front of 40 kilometers held by 6 Russian divisions, the Germans secretly concentrated 14 divisions and 1,500 guns. After a short but intensive bombardment on May 2, 1915, the Eleventh Army broke through the Russian line. Instead of turning and enveloping the Russian flanks, the army kept advancing, effecting a deep penetration of the Russian rear. In 12 days, the Germans advanced 80 miles and broke the new Russian defense line on the San River. By June 22, 1915, Russia had lost all of Galicia and 400,000 men, mostly as prisoners. The Eleventh Army continued the advance during the summer campaign, while Hindenburg's troops in East Prussia attacked southward. By the middle of August, Poland was overrun and another 350,000 Russian prisoners taken. After the Gorlice campaign, von Seeckt was promoted to major general. In the autumn of 1915 Bulgaria entered the war on the side

237/595


238

of the Central powers. The scene of action on the eastern front switched to Serbia, where the German Eleventh Army was sent to reinforce the Austrian Third Army and two Bulgarian armies. Von Mackensen was put in command of this army group, with von Seeckt as his chief of staff. On October 6, 1915, the Austro-German-Bulgarian armies, following von Seeckt's plan, attacked and, in an efficient campaign, Serbia was overrun by the end of November. The Allied expedition to support the Serbs landed in Salonika too late. With their retreat cut off, the Serbs were forced to abandon most of their equipment and withdraw into Albania. In 1916 von Seeckt was again employed against the Russians. The Russian Brusilov offensive in the summer of 1916 shattered the Austrian Army's front and Romania entered the war on the side of the Allies. Von Mackensen was given command of an Austro-German army group on the Romanian front, again with von Seeckt as army group chief of staff. During June, with the whole Austrian front in retreat, von Seeckt effectively took command of the Austrian Seventh Army and fought to delay the Russians. In July von Seeckt became chief of staff to the newly created army group under the nominal command of Austrian Archduke Josef. For three months von Seeckt fought a defensive battle, retreating slowly and plugging holes in the line. By October the delaying tactics had served their purpose and worn the Russians and Romanians down. The Germans and Austrians were ready to attack the RussianRomanian front line with both Mackensen's and Archduke Josef's army groups. The offensive went well for the Austro-German forces, and by December 6, in a campaign of two months, Bucharest fell and the Romanians were effectively knocked out of the war. Von Seeckt saw further service on the southern portion of the eastern front with Archduke Josef's army group in 1917. From 1915 to 1917 von Seeckt demonstrated great strategic and political abilities in warfare. He worked well

238/595


239

with the Austrians and Bulgarians. He showed acute political perception when, in 1915, he advised the German high command that once the Bulgarians had beaten their traditional enemies, the Serbs, and seized Serbian territories, their war aims would be satisfied. The only practical reason for having Bulgarian Army stay at that point would be to use it on the Salonika front to hold the large Allied army in check. In a letter to his friend Joachim von Winterfeldt in August 1916, von Seeckt predicted that Russia would have a political upheaval after the war. He pointed out that one of Russia's greatest problems was the weakness of mid-level leaders. Austrian duke Windischgratz would write of von Seeckt, "He was one of the very few who truly understood our complicated relationships and understood not only Austria's weaknesses but their causes." Archduke Josef remarked in 1917, "Ludendorff sees in Seeckt a rival. . . . My view is that Seeckt possesses even more military talent than Ludendorff." Von Seeckt also maintained his reputation as a tactician. As the high command issued new tactical directives, which were primarily influenced by the western front experience, von Seeckt would analyze them, adjusting Ludendorff's tactical directives to the different conditions that prevailed on von Seeckt's front. In December 1917 the high command ordered von Seeckt to Turkey to serve as chief of staff to the Ottoman Field Army, a post he held to the end of the war. Von Seeckt went into a situation that was "unsalvageable," according to his ordnance officer, (later General) Ernst Kostring. Von Seeckt attributed his assignment to a backwater front to Ludendorff's jealousy toward him. However, von Seeckt made the best of things and, with his political and strategic talents, developed a close working relationship with the Turkish generals, especially with Minister Enver Pasha. Many generals believed that a man of von Seeckt's capabilities should have been employed on a more decisive front, yet the move to Turkey probably helped von Seeckt's repu-

239/595


240

tation. He had been continuously victorious from 1914 through 1917, and at the war's end, he was associated neither with Ludendorff nor with his failed strategy. After the armistice, von Seeckt was an obvious candidate for chief of the General Staff. In the immediate postwar upheaval, however, he was ordered to Konigsberg in January 1919 to take command of Grenzschutz Nord. In this special command, created to deal with the postwar emergency, von Seeckt was responsible for withdrawing the German armies from Russia, carrying out the anti-Bolshevik military campaign in the Baltic countries, and defending the eastern borders from Poles and Russians. From January to April 1919, von Seeckt successfully withdrew the armies from Russia and brought order to the eastern provinces. From April to June 1919 von Seeckt served as General Staff representative to the Peace Conference of Versailles, where he unsuccessfully attempted to get the Allies to soften their demands for virtually disarming Germany. After the German acceptance of the Versailles Treaty in June 1919, von Seeckt was appointed chairman of the Commission for the Peacetime Army Organization, which would reorganize the German Army in accordance with the Versailles provisions. Von Seeckt also served as acting chief of the General Staff. In November 1919 he officially dissolved the General Staff by order of the Allied powers, becoming chief of its successor organization, the Truppenamt. As chief, von Seeckt initiated a program to rethink and rewrite the entire body of German military doctrine in accordance with the experience of World War I and von Seeckt's own ideas. In March 1920, in the aftermath of the failed Kapp Putsch, General Walter Reinhardt—von Seeckt's greatest opponent in politics, tactics, and army organization—was relieved and von Seeckt appointed chief of the army command. In this position, von Seeckt was subordinate only to the defense minister and the president. Thus, until his own relief in October 1926, von Seeckt was able to remold and retrain the

240/595


241

army as he envisioned. Although von Seeckt would elucidate many of his military theories in speeches, army reports, and postwar writings (especially Thoughts of a Soldier and Die Reichswehr), his basic ideas were already clearly formed in 1919. In a report to the army high command on February 18, von Seeckt broke dramatically with German military tradition by advocating the creation of a small, elite professional army based on voluntary recruitment rather than conscription. (It is important to note that von Seeckt's advocacy of an elite professional army and his conviction that a war of maneuver was the superior military method was already firmly developed three months before the Allies imposed a professional army upon the Germans at Versailles.) Von Seeckt's concepts of warfare and military organization became the Reichswehr's primary body of interwar military doctrine. Von Seeckt proposed an army of twenty-four divisions with a minimum of 200,000 men: "With full awareness, I would like to see the present conscript army replaced by a professional army, if you will, a type of mercenary army." Volunteers would initially enlist for two years; material conditions - pay, housing, and so on - would be favorable enough to ensure a high proportion of recruits each year. Conscription would be considered :nly if not enough volunteers could be found. The volunteer army would be equipped with the best weapons, equipment, and training devices. For von Seeckt, one advantage of a highly disciplined and professional force would be its reliability in upholding the domestic authority of the government - a major consideration in February 1919, when Germany was experiencing a wave of Communist revolutions, including the seizure of Bavaria by a soviet government and civil war on the streets of Berlin. The professional army would be backed by a national militia based on a mandatory three-month military training program for all able-bodied eighteen-year-old males, with

241/595


242

additional militia training of shorter duration for another two years. Special courses would be instituted for militia officers. Although the militia was conceived primarily as a means of developing a trained reserve of manpower for wartime mobilization, militia units would not be used as wartime forces except in an emergency. Von Seeckt had been brought up in the military tradition of von Moltke and von Schlieffen, which affirmed that wars are won by destroying the enemy army and that the offensive and the use of maneuver were the primary means of achieving that goal. Von Seeckt accepted the basic Moltke -Schlieffen tenet: "The soldier knows only one aim of war: the destruction of the enemy forces." However, von Seeckt broke with von Moltke and von Schlieffen over the importance of a mass army. Von Moltke's great campaigns aimed at achieving numerical superiority over the enemy on the battlefield. This was done by rapid mobilization and the use of reserve units with the regular field army. It worked surprisingly well for him at Koniggratz in 1866 and at the French border in 1870. Later, von Schlieffen and the General Staff also devised a plan that would guarantee the German Army superior numbers in the invasion of France, especially on the right flank where the Germans expected the major battles to be fought. The experience of the eastern front, where well-trained, well-led, and well-equipped Germans had consistently defeated larger enemy forces, convinced von Seeckt that numbers were no longer the key to victory: To what military success did this universal levy in mass, this gigantic parade of armies lead? In spite of every effort the war did not end with decisive destruction of the enemy on the field of battle; for the most part it resolved itself into a series of exhausting struggles for position until, in the face of an immense superiority of force, the springs which fed the resistance of one of the combatants, the sources of its personnel, its materiel, and finally of its morale dried up. . . . Perhaps the principle of the levy in mass, of the nation in

242/595


243

arms, has outlived its usefulness, perhaps ihefureur du nombre has worked itself out. Mass becomes immobile, it cannot maneuver and therefore cannot win victories, it can only crush by sheer weight. For von Seeckt, the key to future victory was mobility. The small, professional force would be better led and equipped than the mass armies, and it would use mobility and maneuver far more effectively. According to von Seeckt, "The whole future of warfare appears to me to lie in the employment of mobile armies, relatively small but of high quality and rendered distinctly more effective by the addition of aircraft, and in simultaneous mobilization of the whole defense force, be it to feed the attack or for home defense." In addition, "the smaller the army, the easier it will be to equip it with modern weapons, whereas the provision of a constant supply for armies of millions is an impossibility." Rather than rely on the cumbersome mobilization arrangements of pre-1914 armies, von Seeckt proposed that his mobile, professional army be stationed on the frontiers in a state of readiness, primed to move with a minimum of mobilization fuss. Unlike the armies of other nations, von Seeckt's army could launch an offensive with little delay. While the regular army attacked, the militia would be called up to defend the borders and to train and to serve as a replacement pool for the regulars to sustain their offensive. A strong air force was essential to von Seeckt's concept of mobile war. After the war, he hoped that the army could retain a strong air service and he fought hard at the Versailles peace conference to hold onto the air arm. He thought of the air force as a tactical weapon for support of ground offensives, not as a strategic weapon. Von Seeckt affirmed that in the Great War, the air force had assumed a position of equality with ground and sea forces. In a future war, the war will begin with an air attack on both sides, because the air forces are the most immediately available for action against the enemy. It is not the chief

243/595


244

towns and supply centers which will form the immediate object of the attack, but the opposing air forces, and only after the defeat of the latter will the attack be directed against other objects. . . . We must lay emphasis on the fact that all great concentrations of troops provide easy and important targets. The disturbance of the mobilization of men and supplies is one of the chief objects of attack by air. . . . The attack initiated by the air force will be pressed with all possible speed by all available troops, i.e. in essence, by the regular army. In the tactical sphere, von Seeckt's emphasis upon mobile war and his wartime experience on the eastern front led him to support the maintenance of a strong cavalry arm. Trench warfare on the western front had put an end to cavalry in that type of conflict, but in the east, "where the conditions of warfare and topography were often more favorable, cavalry did useful work." Cavalry charges were a thing of the past, but von Seeckt saw cavalry in terms of all-arms light divisions for independent operations, for extensive operations of this nature cavalry requires the support of infantry; because without this its firing strength would fall too rapidly. . . . This infantry support must be maintained and made mobile by motor transport. . . . The variety of objectives assigned to a cavalry division necessitates a supply of mobile but effective artillery. ... In such extensive operations, when the base is left far behind, it is obvious that the communications service—especially the wireless service—plays an important role. Cooperation with the airmen is of very particular importance, and suitable aircraft formations must be placed at the disposal of the cavalry division. For units on independent operations, von Seeckt recommended aerial transport of supplies as a solution. The eventual motorization of the whole army was a longterm possibility, but von Seeckt proposed giving the cavalry first priority for motor vehicles for their supporting arms.35 Not only did motor vehicles provide transport for

244/595


245

men, guns, and supplies; for von Seeckt, they constituted a new arm as well. Armored cars also constituted a new arm of the army— alongside the infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Von Seeckt rarely discussed defensive tactics; for him, the defense was a temporary condition from which one goes on to the offensive. The particular mode of the offense was whatever the commander found sensible. Von Seeckt strongly criticized the prewar army and the Schlieffen School's preference for envelopment. The prewar army, von Seeckt suggested, had made a dogma of envelopment: "It has been a distinct proof, to my mind, of the power of catchwords and of military precepts in general that in post-war maneuvers the desire for envelopment at any price and the extension of the front until it ceased to be a front at all had to be combated as though there had never been a war to teach us. The consequences which this craze for envelopment produced in the war were inevitable." He argued, "Should no possibility of any kind of envelopment arise—and we have known cases of the kind—then the general cannot simply declare that he is at his wit's end; he will be acting quite in the spirit of Count Schlieffen, if, with a clear object in view, he launches his masses at the most effective point—even though it be in a frontal attack, for the success of which Schlieffen, we must admit, coined the sarcastic term 'ordinary victory.' " Von Seeckt, who had been innovative in the war and had pioneered the "breakthrough" battle at Gorlice stood against the Schlieffen School in favor of tactical flexibility. In von Seeckt's view, one of the greatest advantages of a small, professional army over the mass army was its superior leadership. The professional army needed to cultivate leadership at all levels, especially in the General Staff, and to promote technical education within the NCO and officer corps. In 1916 von Seeckt remarked that the mass of Russian soldiers had performed better than he expected but that the Russian Army's greatest problem was its weakness in leadership. By 1916 the British had built an impressive

245/595


246

mass army. Having analyzed the British Army, von Seeckt argued that not since Marlborough and perhaps Wellington have the British developed a military leadership that could command a large army. This made the British force considerably less dangerous despite its wealth in men and materiel. Realizing that technical training was essential to the modern officer, von Seeckt in his report of February 1919 proposed sending officers to civilian technical courses while the army was being reorganized. Only the technically trained officer could effectively operate modern weapons: The greater the advance of technical science, the more effectively can it devote its inventions and instruments to the service of the army and the higher will be the demands it makes on the soldier who manipulates these technical aids. Anyone who has the smallest idea what technical knowledge, what numerous instruments, operated only by carefully trained experts, what highly disciplined mental faculties are necessary for the effective control of modern artillery fire, must admit that these essential qualities cannot be taken for granted with men whose training had been brief and superficial, and that such men, pitted against a small number of practiced technicians on the other side, are "cannon fodder" in the worst sense of the term. Von Seeckt set extremely high education standards for officers and NCOs of the postwar army and particularly stressed technical education. Most important, von Seeckt strove to preserve the General Staff's personnel and training for the army. This was von Seeckt's most important postwar battle with other German officers. Reinhardt, as army chief, ordered in 1919 that preference for officer selection for the Reichswehr go to the front officers, the wartime commissionees who had distinguished themselves. General Maercker, one of the senior Freikorps (Free Corps) commanders, echoed this view. Young front officers, while brave, nevertheless did not have the education or military background of General Staff officers. Von

246/595


247

Seeckt wanted to give officer retention preference to the General Staff Corps members because of their experience in army organization and higher command planning. Without General Staff officers, he pointed out, the Freikorps could never have been organized or the army rebuilt. Von Seeckt insisted that the General Staff officer was indeed a "front officer." Even though the General Staff was unpopular at the time, von Seeckt argued that it had preserved the Reich since the November Revolution.44 General Groener, who—fortunately for von Seeckt— was Ludendorff's replacement, would passionately support von Seeckt's position to not only retain the General Staff and its prestige but to also ensure that as many General Staff officers as possible would be accepted by the Provisional Reichswehr (the official name of the army from March 1919 until January 1921, when it reached the 100,000-man strength mandated by the Versailles Treaty). Von Seeckt and Groener, both first-rate military minds, cannot be described as close friends, but they saw eye-to-eye on most military matters. Von Seeckt's decision to retain a disproportionately high percentage of General Staff officers was right for the army and the nation. It was less democratic than Reinhardt's vision, but von Seeckt was correct in recognizing the organizational and technical abilities of the General Staff as having first priority. Many of the wartime commissionees may have been brave storm platoon leaders, but the undisciplined postwar behavior of many members of the Freikorps, who were led by such officers, dismayed von Seeckt. Some of the Freikorps were no more than "mobs," and part of the border-troop Freikorps were characterized as "bandit gangs" by von Seeckt in 1919.

247/595


248

First World War At the outbreak of the First World War, Seeckt held the rank of colonel and served as chief of staff in the German III Army Corps. Seeckt marched with the Corps in the German offensive, and "distinguished himself" in fighting near Soissons, then in March 1915, he became chief of staff to General August von Mackensen of the German Eleventh Army. With the Eleventh Army, Seeckt fought in the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive, where he was credited with engineering Mackensen's breakthrough, and received the Pour le Mérite, Prussia's highest military honor. In June 1915, Seeckt was promoted to the rank of Generalmajor, and in September he followed von Mackensen to Temesvar, where he joined the campaign against Serbia. In June 1916 he became chief of staff for the Austro-Hungarian Seventh Army in Galicia. Seeckt spent the last years of World War I serving in the Ottoman Empire.

248/595


249

Reichswehr After the end of the war and the dissolution of the old imperial army, it fell to Seeckt to organize the new Reichswehr within the strict restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. He successfully laid the basis for a strong Reichswehr and disguised the new leadership, the forbidden General Staff, under the name the Truppenamt, or Troop Office. He is also known for his hostile attitude towards the Second Polish Republic, and for seeking an alliance with the Soviet Union against Poland. After seeing encouraging signs from the newly established War Commissar's Office of Leon Trotsky, Seeckt sent out a secret staff to conduct a military alliance with the Soviets, unbeknownst to the Weimar government. In October 1919 Seeckt sent out his close friend Enver Pasha on a secret mission to Moscow to make contracts with the Soviets. In the summer of 1920, Enver sent Seeckt a letter from Moscow asking for German arms deliveries to the Soviet Union in exchange for which Trotsky promised to partition Poland with the Reich. Through Seeckt did not hesitate to use military force against putsch attempts by the German Communists, this did not affect his relations with the Soviet Union. Seeckt regarded his informal alliance with the Soviet Union in purely non-ideological terms. Seeckt regarded the efforts of General Rüdiger von der Goltz and his Freikorps to create an anti-communist, German-dominated state in the Baltic as a ludicrous attempt to turn back the clock. Seeckt was all for seeing von der Goltz conquer the Baltic states if that was possible, but was very antagonistic towards Goltz's efforts to use his proposed state as a basis for overthrowing the Bolsheviks. Seeckt saw Poland as the main enemy and the Soviet Union as a very useful ally against Poland, so he viewed Goltz's anti-Communist schemes with some hostility.

249/595


250

After the Allies sent the German government a list of war criminals to be tried Seeckt called a conference of Staff Officers and departmental heads on 9 February 1920 and said to them that if the German government refused, or were unable, to reject the Allied demands, the Reichswehr must oppose this by all means even if this meant the reopening of hostilities. He further said that if the Allies invaded Germany—which he believed they would not—then the German army in the West should retire behind the Weser and the Elbe, as this was where defensive positions had already been built. In the East, German troops would invade Poland and attempt to establish contacts with the Soviet Union, after which they would both march against France and Britain. He added that German war material would now no longer be sold or destroyed and that the army should be reduced on paper only. An Interior Minister of Prussia, Albert Grzesinski, wrote that members of Seeckt's staff said that Seeckt desired a military dictatorship, perhaps headed by Gustav Noske. Seeckt's role during the Kapp Putsch of March 1920 remains uncertain; he refused to either actively put down the rebellion or co-operate with it. His remark to the leaders of the republic, that "Reichswehr do not fire on Reichswehr", was controversial. His reserved attitude towards Weimar Republic is illustrated by a brief conversation held with President Ebert. When asked by Ebert where the Reichswehr stood, von Seeckt answered “The Reichswehr stands behind me”, and after the question whether the Reichswehr was reliable, Seeckt answered: “I don't know if it is reliable but it obeys my orders!”. From 1920 to 1926 Seeckt held the position of Chef der Heeresleitung—in fact if not in name commander of the army of the new Weimar Republic, the Reichswehr. In working to build a non-political professional army within and without the confines of the Treaty of Versailles, Seeckt advanced the concept of the army as a "state-within-a-state". The military refused to accept the democratic Weimar

250/595


350

Altogether the terrain and the way it had been developed posed considerable difficulties in the path of cavalry when it was advancing along the roads; these difficulties became downright intolerable as soon as the Germans tried to make their way cross-country on horseback. On 12 August General von der Marwitz sought to outflank the defended sector of the Gette by a move northwards in the direction of Diest. With this intention he set 2nd Cavalry Division in motion by way of Hasselt, and 4th Cavalry Division (reinforced by 9th Jager Battalion and the cycle company of 7th Jager Battalion) by way of Alken and Steevort to Haelen, while reconnaissance patrols crossed an imaginary line running from Hechtel to Tirlemont by way of Beeringen and Diest. Ten Cavalry Brigade of 4th Cavalry Division remained at Saint-Trond to protect the left flank, with a reconnaissance squadron posted further south-west at Landen. Second Cavalry Division seized a number of weapons in Hasselt, and after some delay it marched at about noon to Steevort, on the Haelen road. Fourth Cavalry Division had already arrived at the same location, which meant that both divisions were now formed up in line ahead on a road which lay uncomfortably close to the enemy front. During the march General von der Marwitz ordered 4th Cavalry Division to open the passage of the Gette at Haelen, with 2nd Cavalry Division taking the lead by pushing to Herckla-Ville and securing the ground northwards in the direction of Lummen. The patrols reported that the crossing at Haelen was held by the enemy, and General von Gamier accordingly brought his artillery into position west of Herck-la-Ville, while he deployed the reinforced 9th Jager Battalion on both sides of the Haelen road, and set 3 Cavalry Brigade the task of outflanking the enemy to the south. Towards 1300 the Jagers seized the damaged bridge over the Gette and penetrated to the western end of the village of Haelen. It was now that the enemy artillery opened up — setting buildings ablaze, sweeping the village street

350/595


351

from end to end, and inflicting the first German casualties. The Germans now recognized that the heights west of Haelen were occupied by the enemy. Meanwhile 3 Cavalry Brigade (2nd Cuirassier Regiment and 9th Ulan Regiment) with the help of their pontoon wagons had made a passage of the Gette at Donck, south of Haelen, and were in the process of crossing the river. Seventeen Cavalry Brigade (17th and 18th Dragoon Regiments) had moved up immediately east of Haelen, and had designated 4th Squadron of the latter regiment as the reconnaissance squadron and sent it in the direction of the infantry who were deployed and in action on the HaelenDiest railway, and the enemy artillery which had been identified at Houthem. Our own artillery, which so far had given effective support to the attack on Haelen, now had to change position to accompany the advance. The intended battery sites, which were just west of Haelen, had first to be captured, and this mission was given to 17th Dragoons, who were following immediately behind 4th (reconnaissance) Squadron of the 18th. One event now overtook another with dramatic urgency. Fourth Squadron at once headed westwards through Haelen in column of fours, with the intention of carrying out the reconnaisance as had just been ordered. Seventeenth Dragoons came up behind through the village in the same formation, as a preliminary to exploiting the road which ran northwest towards Diest. Its two leading squadrons and the staff of the headquarters meanwhile remained in column of fours along the road, since the hedges and fences prohibited any kind of deployment. Third Squadron got entangled in wire fences and difficult country west of the road. The direction of the German cavalry was betrayed by a mighty cloud of dust, and Belgian skirmishers, machine-guns and batteries now opened a concentrated fire against the squadrons as they galloped from Haelen in their closed columns. The effect was devastating. After-

351/595


352

wards the remnant of the German cavalry was assembled at the western edge of Haelen, or just to the south of the village, while individual dragoons, who had lost their horses, kept up the fight alongside the Jagers. Meanwhile our artillery had been able to take up position west of Haelen and open fire on the enemy batteries at Houthem. The Germans hoped to hold down the Belgian artillery fire sufficiently to permit 18th Dragoons to pass through Haelen in their turn, and then, debouching by the exit which led south-west towards Velpen, spur on against the heights. The deployment from column of twos had to be accomplished under a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire. With standards flying the Germans moved into attack formation with two squadrons making up the first line, and the third in echelon to the left rear, and in the process the horsemen rolled over the foremost lines of the enemy skirmishers. Then, however, the attack was shattered by an outburst of violent defensive fire among a zone of hedges and barbed wire fences. The German losses were extremely heavy. While these events were unfolding 3 Cavalry Brigade met its own fate. The brigade had made a successful passage of the Gette at Donck, and it was there that it received the order to sweep onwards and capture the enemy artillery. Without losing a moment the regiment of Konigin Cuirassiers galloped through Velpen with a first line of three squadrons; this charge too was beaten off with severe losses. The regimental commander renewed the attack with the third squadron, which was still intact, and the remnants of the first two squadrons. It was all in vain, and a third and last effort proved :o be no more successful. Just to the right of the cuirassiers 9th Uhlan Regiment was attacking in the direction of Tuillerie-Ferme, with two squadrons in its first line and two in the second; after the first line collapsed the second took up the attack, only to meet the same fate. After the failure of the cavalry assault the push was continued in the direction of Houthem by the

352/595


353

Jagers who, from 1400, had the support of skirmishers from the Leibhusaren Brigade, who had dismounted for combat on foot. The Germans took Liebroek to the north, and Velpen to the south. However the fact remains that for the first time in the war an attempt had been made to charge modern weapons with cold steel, and the effort had miscarried. What had the enemy being doing? From 0500 on 10 August the Belgian cavalry division had been positioned behind the Gette between Budingen and Diest, with the purpose jf holding that sector and pushing reconnaissance patrols in the direction of Tongres, Beeringen and Quaedmechelen. The villages of Budingen, GeetBetz and Haelen had been put in a state of defence, and all the bridges over :he Gette had been destroyed except for the two at Haelen and Zelck, and these had been prepared for demolition. Enemy cavalry patrols had been beaten off. On the morning of 12 August strong forces of German cavalry were detected on the march for Hasselt. A request for reinforcements was accordingly made to the Belgian high command, whereupon 4 Infantry Brigade was put at the disposal of the cavalry division and had set out in the direction of Cortenaeken at 0815 on the day of the battle; without pausing for rest the leading reinforcements accomplished a forced march of twenty-one kilometres in crushing heat, and at 1600 they arrived on the scene of action in the form of four weak battalions of infantry and a battery of artillery. This battery was the first element of the Belgian forces to arrive, and after planting itself at Loxbergen it had taken up the duel with the German batteries. The Belgian positions at the beginning of the action are shown on Sketch Map 2. By 1600 most of the reserves had been fed into the infantry fight. After his 4 Infantry Brigade had arrived, the Belgian divisional commander, General de Witte, resolved on a counter-attack against Haelen on both sides of the Gette. The assault was broken at Velpen by the fire of the German Ja-

353/595


354

gers, machine-guns, the Leibhusaren and the artillery. Towards 1830 General von der Marwitz broke off the action and assembled his forces east of the Gette. Four German cavalry regiments had taken part in the attack, and their losses amounted to 24 officers, 468 men and 843 horses; total Belgian losses came to ten officers, 117 men and 100 horses. What is notable about the action at Haelen? It represents a commitment of cavalry in considerable force (if not simultaneously) against defending infantry and artillery. We see essentially the same outcome in the larger attacks which were launched in the face of enemy fire on the other fronts, such as those of the Bavarian Uhlan Brigade at Lagarde on 11 August 1914, or 13th Dragoon Regiment at Borzymie on 12 November. This indicates that the example of Haelen holds true for many other actions. The original task of General von der Marwitz had been to advance against the line Antwerp - Brussels - Charleroi so as to pin down the Belgian, British and French forces in Belgium. Nowadays it is fair to pose the question why von der Marwitz, once the Belgians had been identified behind the Gette south of Diest, did not attempt to strike out north of the Diemer. If he had succeeded in pinning down the Belgian north wing, he could have executed the reconnaissance at least as far as the line running from Antwerp to Brussels and operated against the enemy flanks whether by an envelopment beyond the Diemer in co-operation with the corps of First Army, or by making it difficult for the Belgians to break free in the direction of Antwerp by barring the crossings of the Diemer and the Dyle. It is also reasonable to ask why the attack on Haelen and the Gette, once it had been decided, was not carried out on a broader front by the whole of the cavalry corps simultaneously, and initially at least by a dismounted assault, so as to win a sufficiently wide bridgehead, break the cohesion of the defence, and then exploit the speed of the horses to pursue the shattered enemy.

354/595


355

We discover the answer to these questions when we identify the notions by which the cavalry in Germany — and indeed in foreign countries as well -were educated, equipped and trained. These ideas are expressed most clearly in the last set of pre-war regulations. They are dated 1909, and the section on tactics opens with the words: 'Mounted action is the predominant way in which cavalry fights.' Ignoring the lessons of one-and-a-half centuries of warfare, the authors of the regulations adhered not only to the spirit, but to a considerable extent also to the form, of the battle tactics of von Seydlitz [Frederick the Great's cavalry commander], and they believed that they could brush aside all the intervening developments which had been dictated by the accelerating march of technology. The equipment and weapons reveal a hankering after the great cavalry battles of the past, while the training put an excessive emphasis on riding school perfection, drilling in close formations and the mounted attack. We have seen the implications for the commanders and troops in the first actions of the war. We have noted the price that had to be paid in blood. In all probability the reports that Belgian cavalry were making a stand at Haelen led the Germans to believe that the enemy were indeed drawing themselves up for mounted combat; the reports also inclined the Germans to underestimate the endurance and tactical effectiveness of the Belgian cavalry in dismounted action. Here, as elsewhere, the result was a bloody repulse which sapped the trust of the troops in their leadership, while exaggerating their respect for the power of the enemy. Von Schlieffen painted a picture of the modern battlefield as early as 1909, and it is as valid now as it was then. 'Not a horseman will be seen. The cavalry will have to accomplish its tasks out of range of the infantry and artillery. Breech-loaders and machine-guns will have banished the cavalryman quite mercilessly from the battlefield.'

355/595


356

On the question of operational reconnaissance by cavalry, the following verdict is delivered by the Reichsarchiv's Official History: 'It became only too clear at the outset of the war, and along the whole battlefield, that in peacetime altogether excessive hopes had been pinned on strategic reconnaissance by large bodies of cavalry. As a general rule the probing cavalry managed to identify the enemy outpost line, but they were never able tobreak through and ascertain what was going on in the enemy rear areas.' (Reichsarchiv, I, 126). In 1914 the high command overestimated the effectiveness of operational reconnaissance by cavalry, but they neglected the new dimension of reconnaissance offered by aircraft, even though some machines already had a range of more than four hundred kilometres. The new aviation forces were therefore consigned to the headquarters of the individual armies and corps, and the high command therefore received only a patchy vision of the enemy deployment (Reichsarchiv, 1,12 7). The march of the infantry to the sacrifical Altar The finest army in the world had flooded like a wall of water across the Meuse and deep into the enemy country to the south. Two months later, when the leaves were falling in the autumn of 1914, the grey tide was ebbing - mistakes on the part of the high command, together with heavy losses and logistic problems had combined to bring about an equilibrium of forces along the whole long front between the northern French border at Lille and the Swiss mountains. Against this background the German command resolved to deliver a powerful new blow by fresh forces. It was to be struck in October by our far right wing in Flanders, and the aims were to prevent the front from sticking fast, and to seize the chance of victory before it could elude us. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers had flocked to the colours at the time of the mobilization - lads brimming with enthusiasm, and older men who were ready for any

356/595


357

sacrifice that might be demanded of them. Now, after a sketchy training which rarely lasted more than six weeks, they were hastening to the newly formed corps and divisions on the various fronts. The new Fourth Army was composed of XXII, XXIII, XXVI and XXVII Reserve Corps, together with III Reserve Corps and 4th Ersatz Division from Antwerp (which already had some combat experience) and a reasonably strong complement of heavy artillery by the standards of the time. On 17 October the army, began to move from its start-line running from Bruges to east of Courtrai, and made for the line of the Yser between Nieuport and Ypres. In all probability no German soldiers had ever gone into battle with such enthusiasm and elan as the men of these young regiments. 1 On 19 October contact was made with the enemy along the whole frontage of the army, and on the next day the combat in Flanders, the First Battle of Ypres, began to unfold. In addition to Fourth Army, attacking on its sector north of the Menin-Ypres road, the offensive was opened simultaneously by the formations adjoining to the south, namely the battle-tested right-flanking corps of Sixth Army (V, IV and I Cavalry Corps; XIX, XIII, VII and half of XIV Corps, with II Cavalry Corps behind) which had the task of striking west and facilitating the advance of the new corps of Fourth Army over to their right. We now turn to some features of the area designated for the attack. We first trace the course of the Yser from its mouth on the coast at Nieuport upstream by way of Dixmude to Noordschoote, and so to the Yser Canal, which runs by way of Steenstraate, Boesinghe, Ypres and HolleThe operations of the major cavalry formations in 1914 was a subject which had fascinated Guderian for years before he wrote Achtung - Panzer! These operations had formed an important topic of his military history teaching in the twenties and he had written about them for the military press. See 'Bewegliche Truppenkorper (Eine kriegsgeschichtliche Studie)' in the Militdr-Wochenblatt, No. 19, 1927, pp. 687-94. 1

357/595


358

beke to Comines. On each side of the Yser, from Dixmude to the sea, extends a deep polder landscape, some of it lying below sea level, which is intersected by numerous ditches and canals. The level of the water, and if necessary the inundation by the sea, is regulated by a system of sluices which has its most important concentration at Nieuport. Mount Kemmel, 156 metres high, stands south of Ypres. From here a circlet of ridges extends in a flattish arc through Wytschaete, Hollebeke, Gheluvelt, Zonnebeke and Westro-beeke in the direction of Dixmude. This feature was particularly important for artillery observation in this otherwise flat landscape, where visibility was heavily restricted by the numerous farmhouses, hedges, copses and villages. In such terrain the direction of combat, expecially where inexperienced troops were concerned, was severely degraded. On 20 October the troops of the new regiments assaulted Dixmude, Houthulst, Poelkappelle, Passchendaele and Becelaere, with the words of 'Deutschland iiber Alles' on their lips. Their losses were extremely heavy, but the gains were reasonable enough. On the night of 20/21 October came the order to continue the attack over the Yser. The village of Langemarck and the crossroads at Broodseinde lay in the path of the troops. The German artillery fired to supposedly destructive effect, after which the young regiments renewed the attack. Reserves pushed forward, filling the gaps in the forward lines as they were thinned out, but the result was only to increase the losses. The officers took a personal part in fighting, but this did nothing to diminish the carnage caused by the enemy fire; the losses became uncountable, and the offensive potential of the Germans drained away. A new bid was made to capture Langemarck on the 22nd. Not only did it fail, but the Germans came under counter-attacks which showed that the resolution of the enemy was still unbroken. Meanwhile a push farther to the north-west got as far as the eastern edge of Bixschote, while an assault yet

358/595


359

farther north reached the gates of Dixmude. The fighting on 23 October rewarded our frightful losses with no gains whatsoever, and our troops had to call for entrenching tools and dig in. 'By the evening of 23 October, after four days of battle, the first onslaught on the Yser Canal by the new corps had been brought to a standstill.' (Reichsarchiv, V.317.) The enemy had not been particularly strong, and yet our infantry did not have the offensive strength to overcome them, even with reasonably powerful support from our heavy artillery. The most noble self-sacrifice, the glowing enthusiasm and energetic command - all proved unavailing. Nowadays it is fashionable-to allege that it had been a mistake to choose this vital sector of the front as the place to commit the young and inexperienced reserve corps, with their ageing leadership and patchy training. People who argue along these lines fail to grasp the fact that the First Battle of Ypres shows that infantry lacks the striking power to overcome an enemy, even when that enemy happens to be numerically inferior. I am willing to concede that troops with combat experience might well have gained the same results with fewer casualties; but it is doubtful whether their losses would have been significantly lower, and more questionable still whether they would actually have scored a victory. We have to bear in mind that the inexperienced troops were not the only ones to be committed to that last great offensive of 1914 in those streaming wet days of October. The crack III Corps was in action on their right, and the combat-tested divisions of Sixth Army were fighting on their left; their opponents were not notably stronger or more battleworthy than the troops that faced the newly trained divisions, and yet the Germans achieved no more on these sectors than elsewhere. The Germans ran through most of their small stock of artillery ammunition, and from 24 October the attack petered out in individual engagements, and finally almost literally drowned in floods of water. Two final attempts were made

359/595


360

to exorcise the spectre of deadlock on the Western Front. They concerned brigades and divisions of picked troops which were withdrawn temporarily from the front line for this purpose, and yet both bids failed in a series of bloody combats. From 30 October to 3 November XV, II Bavarian and half of XIII corps were formed into an 'Assault Group Fabeck', and five of the divisions were pushed into the attack on a frontage of ten kilometres. The result was yet another bitter disappointment, and it was not ameliorated by the piecemeal commitment of 6th Bavarian Reserve Division, 3rd Pomeranian Division and elements of cavalry. Finally, from 10 to 18 November, yet further resources of battle-tested troops assaulted the Ypres Salient. Ninth Reserve Division went into action in III Reserve Corps' sector of Fourth Army's front; 4th Jager Division and the composite Winkler Guard Division were marched to join Sixth Army, where they were incorporated as the 'Assault Group Linsingen' together with XV Corps , which was already in action qn the Menin-Ypres road. On 10 November a number of fresh regiments captured Dixmude and made some progress at Drie Grachten and Het Sas; farther east, however, III Reserve Corps, its 9th Reserve Division in particular, met with no success. The division had been pushed into battle too soon and was badly mauled in the process. On 11 November the Guards and 4th Division attacked on either side of the Menin-Ypres road and made only modest gains; here again the casualties were heavy. The Germans saw that there was no hope of significant progress for the time being, and the commanders of the two armies demanded to be reinforced as a precondition for any further offensives. The high command consequently instructed Seventh Army to give up one of its infantry divisions to Sixth Army. In the same way Third Army yielded a further infantry division to Fourth Army, accompanied by an infantry brigade from the Army Detachment of General Strantz. The two di-

360/595


400

were to set out respectively thirty and twenty minutes after the attack began. We specify the details from the orders: Groupement Bossus was to move in a single column by way of Pontavert to le Cholera, where it would split into two columns - the left-hand column, consisting of the leading three groups, to continue the advance between the le Cholera-Guignicourt road and the Miette, while the righthand column, comprising the two rearwards groups, pushed initially along the le Cholera-Guignicourt road and then, after crossing the first German line, headed in the general direction of the Prouvais height. The approach was to be made in single file, and only after the first German line had been passed was the column to deploy into combat formation. The tanks had to wait for the barrage to cease, meanwhile occupying the line they had reached four to five hours after the offensive opened. Only then would they attack the third German line, and press on to Guignicourt and Prouvais; last of all, the three left-hand groups would attack Provisieux. The objectives were subdivided meticulously among the groups; after the attack they were to reassemble north-west of Guignicourt. Repair teams came up behind each group, and every column was in turn followed by a recovery group. Groupement Chaubes would likewise move in a single column, north-westwards by way of le Temple Ferme towards Amifontaine. Once the first German line had been crossed it was to form two columns, and then after crossing the second line deploy into combat formation and proceed to the attack. After the attack it would assemble west of Amifontaine. Such at least were the plans of the high command. In the event the mighty preparatory bombardment damaged only the first and second German lines, and these only in part; the rearward defences were virtually unscathed. On 16 April the tanks were standing in readiness at the appointed time; Groupement Bossus was up to strength, but Groupement Chaubes had lost eight tanks which had bogged down. As was stipulated in the plan of attack, the

400/595


401

infantry alone followed up behind the barrage. They took the first German line with no great difficulty, but it was a different story at the second line. The French arrived here between 1000 and 1100 only after they had suffered severe losses in heavy fighting, and their gains were confined to a sector running from Caesar's Camp by way of Mauchamps Ferme to the Old Mill south of Juvincourt; from here the line described a re-entrant to la Ville-aux-Bois, which the French were unable to capture. Further to the west the attack made no significant progress beyond the first German line, and at Craonne it failed altogether. Meanwhile Groupement Bossus set off at 0630 in a column measuring two kilometres long. Progress was slow, because the road was encumbered with infantry and artillery. At 0800 the head of the column reached the bridge over the Miette west of le Cholera; it was under heavy German artillery fire, but only one machine was hit. Two tanks broke down completely, arid two more got on the move again after being repaired. The escorting infantry had prepared the passage over the French front line, which was passed without difficulty, but the German front line occasioned a delay of forty-five minutes, and the first tank did not reach le Cholera Ferme until 10IS. Here the supporting infantry had already been broken up by enemy artillery fire, and they lost contact with the tanks. At 1000 the western, or left-hand group deployed into the attack. Immediately Major Bossus's tank received a direct hit on the top of the machine which killed the occupants and set the tank on fire, depriving the attack of leadership at the decisive moment. We shall now take up the story of the individual groups. A few minutes later the foremost group crossed the German front line, accompanied by weak units of the attacking infantry; over to the left there seemed to be French infantry advancing on Juvincourt, but nobody was coming up on the right. Seven tanks managed to cross the German trenches, but a further seven broke down. Shortly after

401/595


402

1200 the seven surviving machines reached Hill 78, and crossed the third German line behind, calling in vain on the infantry to follow. Two of the tanks were now put out of action, but the crews seized a German dressing station and took a number of prisoners. Two more tanks were shot up at 1315 and 1330 respectively. Finally the last three tanks made their way back in order to regain contact with the infantry, and they encountered nine tanks of the following group, the 6th, together with one of their own tanks which had been repaired. The 6th Group had lost two tanks through breakdown when crossing the German second line. On the far side it attacked pockets of German troops which had been interfering with the advance of the French infantry, then lost five machines to artillery fire at a range of between 1,800 and 2,000 metres, and finally deployed just to the right of the remnant of the forward group, the 2nd. At 1430 the thirteen tanks of these two groups beat off a powerful German counter-attack against Hill 78. Captain Chanoine, their joint commander, decided against plunging on without support, since the infantry to the right had been making no progress, and he recrossed the line south of Hill 78 so as to withdraw out of reach of the enemy fire. A little later Chanoine was able to establish contact with the commander of IS 1st Regiment of Infantry, which had now reached the area between Mau-champs Ferme and the Miette, and they concerted an attack with the limited aim of recapturing Hill 78; the assault went ahead and the infantry reached the objective between 1730 and 1800. By agreement with the regimental commander the tanks now fell back along the Miette to le Cholera; in the attack they had lost one machine to artillery fire, and another four which were stuck in shell craters. Group 5 delivered the third attack. It deployed to the right next to Group 6, waited for the artillery barrage to end and attacked at 1200. The French managed to take the third German line and occupy it with their supporting infantry.

402/595


403

The attack was continued by nine tanks which drove through a copse to the north-east of the captured sector of the line, and reached the Guignicourt-Amifontaine railway line without having encountered any further obstacles or enemy fire. Here the French lost one tank to artillery fire and another to a breakdown. Meanwhile Group S's commander had made contact with the commander of the following regiment of infantry, the 162nd, only to be told that the regiment had been too severely mauled to be able to continue the advance. Shortly after 1700 the tanks beat off a German counter-attack against the same regiment, and the machines were then withdrawn behind the infantry for the night. Fourth in line came Group 9's attack. It was held up by other troops for a considerable time at le Cholera, but thirteen tanks reached Mauchamps Ferme and launched their attack from there at about 1300. They ran into artillery fire and were wiped out south-west of the railway; the infantry did not follow them into the attack. Last of all Group 4 advanced in two columns between the Miette valley to the west and the valley of the Aisne to the east. It reunited on the second German line on the Aisne. After considerable delays and losses the five leading tanks opened an attack at 1500 in support of some infantry who were about 600 metres to the north and in a shaky condition. Two tanks were set on fire and the others returned after beating off a German counterattack. The rest of the group pushed along the Aisne and was able to clear a trench at 1530; two tanks were put out of action, but the supporting infantry of 94th Regiment were able to follow up the success. The group was then withdrawn to its original assembly area. Finally we turn to the three groups of Groupement Chaubes, which set out from their forming-up area at 0630. They advanced in a single column by way of le Temple Ferme, but were spotted by German aircraft, tracked by artillery observers, and came under concentrated fire. A

403/595


404

number of delays were occasioned by the fact that the supporting infantry failed to make passages in good time across the French and German trenches. The commander's tank of the leading group was immobilized by a hit, and the following group ran into the vehicles from behind. The German artillery fire increased all the time, and the crews of the knocked-out tanks extricated their machine-guns and went into battle alongside the infantry, who were likewise pinned down. In the evening no more than nine of Groupement Chaubes' tanks were able to return to the assembly area under their own power; essentially the group had been destroyed at a range of between three and six kilometres by the indirect fire of one battery of field artillery, two batteries of heavy field howitzers, one battery of 10.0cm guns and two mortar batteries. Under this fire the tanks had been advancing at the pace of the supporting infantry. Altogether the attack of 16 April 1917 proved to be a costly failure. The tank crews numbered 720 men, and 180 of them, or 25 per cent, were dead, wounded or missing. Of 121 tanks which set out from the assembly areas, 81 were lost, including 28 through breakdown, seventeen through artillery hits alone, and 35 through fires occasioned by artillery. A number of tanks caught fire without being hit at all. Twenty tanks were retrieved. The final loss came to 76 tanks out of a grand total of 132, or 5 7 per cent. After the battle the French drew the following conclusions from their failure: (a) the tanks had inadequate cross-country mobility; (b) the supporting infantry rendered virtually no help; (c) no tank had been disabled by small-arms fire, and the armour had met expectations; (d) on the other hand 57 tanks were knocked out by artillery fire: fifteen through direct fire, and 37 through indirect fire - mostly from heavy-calibre guns. This was due to the effectiveness of the German artillery observation, and the fact that on 16 April the German guns had been virtu-

404/595


405

ally untouched by the French artillery; in future something would have to be done to beat down the defenders' guns and blind their observation posts; (e) most of the losses had been sustained when the tanks were moving in column, or during the holdups or deployments. Losses could be diminished by advancing in deployed formation from the assembly areas, and these in turn should be located close behind the infantry's startline; (f) the main reasons for the disappointing results of the tank attack were associated with the failure of the offensive as a whole, which left the tanks vulnerable. The infantry had been exhausted and decimated during the previous fighting, and they were in no condition to exploit the successes which the tanks had achieved in the general direction of Guignicourt and the height of Prouvais; (g) tanks, even when operating'individually, proved very effective against moving infantry, as was shown by the rapid collapse of the enemy counterattack west of Guignicourt; (h) against dug-in infantry, however, lasting success could be achieved only when the attacking infantry was in a position to exploit without delay; otherwise the gains of the tanks proved to be as costly as they were useless. The French drew the further conclusion that tanks must fight only in close assocation with infantry - a notion which dominates French tactics even now. From the German perspective we must also add: (a) the French tanks executed their long approach marches at the infantry pace, and along roads that were encumbered with other troops. These marches and the consequent holdups could have been avoided; (b) the French should have prepared a whole series of crossings of the Miette and their own trenches, which would have permitted them to advance in deployed formation from the assembly area; (c) for the passage of the German trenches the French

405/595


406

would have done better to assign engineers rather than infantry to accompany the tanks; (d) the individual groups attacked in succession at onehourly intervals between 1100 and IS00, which made them easy targets for the concentrated fire of the German artillery. The tank groups would have been better advised to move up from their assembly areas in deployed formation and along cleared routes. This would have permitted a simultaneous attack, and made it a good deal more difficult for the Germans to hold them off; (e) if the tanks had been committed earlier, say at about the time that the second German line was under attack, they would have achieved a closer co-operation with the infantry, before the latter were weakened through prolonged fighting and casualties; (f) the barrage proved to be an obstacle in the way of a rapid advance by the tanks. There was a need to explore other forms of artillery support; (g) for all the mistakes in the way the assault had been prepared and carried out, the tanks still managed to advance 2 to 2.S kilometres further than the infantry. The foot soldiers were unable to follow, despite the weak resistance on the part of the Germans and the slowness of the tanks. We can only conclude that the main striking force of an offensive resides in tanks, and it is a question of developing the other arms in such a way that they can keep up with them; (h) a complete breakthrough on 16 April 1917 would have been well within the bounds of possibility, if only the tanks had been employed in a more effective way, and if the offensive tactics of the other arms had been brought into full accord with the performance of the new arm, the tank. At that time, in 1917, the Germans were impressed by their successes in beating off the attack, and they came to other conclusions. They should have entrusted the main responsibility for dealing with tanks to the direct fire batteries. Instead, the batteries in question were gradually disbanded, since the Germans believed that they had a com-

406/595


407

plete anti-tank defence with the infantry firing SmK rounds and special cartridge loadings, and the artillery, especially the heavy calibres, shooting from long range. In France the disappointment at the failure of the attack on 16 April 1917 led to some violent criticisms being levelled against the tanks. However it was not long before the worth of armour was vindicated in further combat, and indeed the contribution of the tanks had already been recognized in official circles, as witness the GHQ Ordre general No. 76 of 20 April that year: 'The tanks were the first of our forces to penetrate the second enemy line in front of Juvincourt, and they secured its conquest. This was their first appearance on the field of battle, and they won for themselves a place of honour alongside their soldier comrades, demonstrating what we may expect from the char d'assaut in the future.' We turn now to the story of Groupement Lefebvre, with its two groups of Schneider tanks and its single group of Saint-Chamonds. It had not been involved in the attack of 17 April in Champagne, but was committed a little later, on 5 and 6 May, in the fighting at Mannejean farm and the mill at Laffaux. These were elements in an attack by 158th Infantry Division, the composite Division Brecard and 3rd Colonial Division, which had the limited objective of pushing to the northern edge of the heights of the Chemin-desDames. Of the available tanks 158th Infantry Division was assigned the Saint-Chamond group and a 'battery' (four tanks) of Schneiders; one group of Schneiders went to Division Brecard and the remainder of the tanks stayed in reserve. On this occasion the splitting up of the tanks was justified by the conformation of the terrain. The missions of the groups and batteries were specified in detail, and 17th Light Infantry Battalion had been given a lengthy training in infantry-tank co-operation. The terrain on the plateau of Chemin-des-Dames was particularly suitable for tank operations because of the good going and the wellsited assembly areas on the southern slopes. It also pre-

407/595


408

sented difficulties to the Germans in the way of observation. There were unfavourable features however; these included the awkward approach routes, and a deep zone of craters after the French artillery had tried in vain to clear the belts of wire with delayed-action fuzes; the shell holes were to prove fatal to several of the tanks. The subsequent attack was not particularly successful in itself, but the few gains that were made were due primarily to the tank forces, which lost considerably less in machines and personnel than on the Aisne. Moreover the high command and the other arms were pleased with what the tanks had done, which secured the future of the new weapon. Just as had been shown on the Aisne, it was clear that armoured attacks could gain lasting success only when they were followed up without delay by the infantry. Once again this had not occurred, even though the tanks had given the agreed signals, and on occasion even driven back to the infantry in an attempt to get the foot soldiers to occupy the positions that had been cleared. The French scored a rather greater success on 23 October 1917, when they attacked the angle of the line at Laffaux. This time a considerably greater number of tanks was devoted to the assault. What was the wider background? The French had sustained heavy casualties during the fighting in the spring of 1917, and by the autumn had had no alternative but to await the entry of the Americans, meanwhile confining themselves to a series of small probes which were designed to improve the lie of the front line and try out new tactics. Moreover the French intended to carry out a number of augmentations by the summer of 1918 - increasing their heavy artillery two-fold, building 2,0003,000 Renault tanks, and assembling large stocks of gas and smoke shells. One of the small enterprises in question was to capture the Chemin-des-Dames. The operation was to begin with an attack on the Laffaux angle on a frontage of some eleven kilometres. There was no question of being able to take the

408/595


409

enemy by surprise, and by the time the attack began the French had identified the presence of seven fresh German divisions and sixty-four new batteries. The German positions were solidly built, and the belts of barbed wire extended in some places to a depth of ten metres. The defending troops had cover in the numerous shelters and dugouts. A rearward line stretched along the north bank of the Ailette, and it lay beyond the objectives of the French attack. On the other hand the ridge of the Chemin-desDames descended steeply to the north, which among many sectors cramped the depth of the German positions and limited their fields of fire, compelling the artillery observers to post themselves in the front line. The French carried out the attack with six divisions in the first wave, and six more in the second. The equipment and training of the troops had been fully restored since the spring battles, and in particular the French had rehearsed co-operation with tanks, and proved the ground with a number of probing attacks. The offensive was to be prepared by 1,850 guns firing some 3,000,000 rounds, while sixty-eight tanks executed the assault. The tanks were organized into three groups of twelve Schneiders each, and two groups each of fourteen SaintChamonds, with a number of tanks in reserve. Each group was furnished with a combat supply element and a mobile workshop, while every groupement had at its disposal a repair and replacement train. At the end of August two squadrons of dismounted cuirassiers were assigned as close support infantry and trained in working with the tanks, and the main body of assault infantry exercised jointly with the armour. Aerial photographs underwent constant study, and the routes were reconnoitred and improved. The offensive was ushered in by a six-day bombardment. At the points where the tanks were due to break in, the lanes through the obstacles were cleared by shells primed exclusively with instantaneous fuzes, which did not have

409/595


410

the usual effect of creating deep of shell holes. Aircraft were ordered to report the progress of the attacking infantry and armour, and artillery spotter aircraft were assigned to keep an eye on the movement of enemy reserves and anti-tank artillery. The tanks were distributed arnpng five of the six assaulting divisions. Tank liaison officers were attached to the commanders of the infantry regiments, while the senior officers of the tank forces were located with the divisional commanders and the commanding generals. A number of losses were incurred while the French were in the process of entering the assembly areas on the night before the attack. Half of Group 12, which was under the right-hand division, namely the 38th, was eliminated through breakdowns and German artillery fire; it was much the same story with Group 8, which was placed under 43rd Division; Group 11 with 13th Division reached its start-line without serious trouble, as did Group 31 (Saint-Chamonds) of 17th Division, and Group 33 (SaintChamonds) with 28th Division. However only 52 out of a total of 68 tanks reached the start-line, which shows how dangerous it was to keep tanks waiting within effective range of the enemy artillery, even though the Germans did not know the tanks were coming up and their artillery strikes amounted to no more than harassing fire on the roads during the night. The tanks set off behind the infantry at 05:05, while it was still dark, and they continued at the infantry pace. All the tanks of the right-hand group, the 12th, were hors de combat before they could reach the first objective. Group 8 was able to enter the fight with six of its tanks, though only after the French infantry had begun to advance on the second objective; the tanks moved forward in the space between the creeping barrage and the first wave of infantry, and a number of machines followed later, after they had undergone mechanical repairs. By 11:00 eight tanks of this group had reached the objective, and covered the infantry

410/595


411

while the troops were consolidating themselves there. Group 11 set off with 13th Division according to plan, and played a considerable part in its subsequent success, with twelve tanks reaching the objective. Group 31 did reasonably well, but Group 33 failed to reach the first German trenches. On 25 October the French reached the Ailette without any further help from their tanks. By 1 November 1917 the Germans had evacuated the whole of the Chemin-des-Dames, and in addition to their casualties they had lost 12,000 prisoners and 200 guns. French losses amounted to 8,000 men, or 10 per cent of the total in action. Of the 68 tanks that had been engaged: nineteen were lost during the fighting, though only eight of them were lost to enemy action, the remainder became bogged down; twenty gained their objectives; five functioned as wireless tanks. The casualties among the tank crews amounted to 82, or 9 per cent, which was of the same order as in the infantry. Most of the men had been hit when they were outside the tanks or had opened the hatches to get their bearings. On this occasion the French deduced the following: (a) tanks became effective against fortified positions only after they had crossed the zone of craters; (b) flanking units were particularly vulnerable, and need special protection on this account; (c) tank attacks must be carried out in depth. Objectives should be assigned not to individual machines, but always to whole units at a time, in other words to platoons or groups; (d) the attempt to comnmunicate with infantry by flags had failed, and the only effective means was by word of mouth; (e) the tanks were liable to heavy losses whenever they were standing still within sight of the enemy, and in future this should be demanded only in case of emergency; (f) close co-operation with the infantry proved its worth and indeed has remained the fundamental tenet of French

411/595


412

tank tactics until the present day (Commandant Perre, 'Les Chars a la bataille de la Malmaison', in Revue d'Infanterie). Concerning the last point we must add that being tied to the infantry as closely as they were on 23 October 1917, the tanks avoided being wiped out only because the Germans had no kind of anti-tank defence. The only effective antitank weapon available to them at that time was their artillery, and the unfavourable local conditions made it almost impossible to use; otherwise those huge and trundling targets would have shared the fate of the tanks on 16 April. In future such tactics will be suicidal. So much for the first French tank battles. We return to the British, who had determined on a mighty offensive in Flanders, at whose ports German U-boats were based. There was no question of a surprise attack - quite the contrary! The intention was to gain ground step by step, and only after that ground had been comprehensively pounded by artillery, gassed, and if necessary blown up by subterranean mines. This was to be a battle of brute force and attrition, sedulously avoiding any kind of novel or untried technique - indeed deliberately renouncing the possibility of exploiting any unexpected success which might come the way of the British. Such was the thinking behind the Third Battle of Ypres. On 7 June 1917 the British blew up the German positions on the Wytschaete salient, destroyed five German divisions and reached the Lys. This first blow secured the right flank of the coming offensive which was preceded by four weeks of bombardment and lasted until early December. The British tank forces were committed time and time again, but invariably in penny packets with strictly limited objectives, and frequently over the most unfavourable terrain imaginable — ground which had been reduced to a swamp by rain and shells. Seventy-six tanks were available

412/595


413

at Wytschaete,11 and 216 at Third Ypres, but they achieved little, and the blame lies with the defective tactics which were forced upon them. Did the other arms reap any greater rewards, after all their costly efforts? Nearly four weeks of drum fire, which consumed 93,000 tons of artillery ammunition, together with four months of heavy fighting and 400,000 casualties were the price of conquering a stretch of ground which measured at the most nine kilometres deep by fourteen kilometres wide. The Germans themselves lost 200,000 men, but they were able to prevent a breakthrough, and the Uboat bases were left undisturbed. The great sacrifice was squandered mindlessly, and yet it never occurred to the British high command that they were going about the offensive in totally the wrong way, and that it was quite impossible to conceal preparations for a push on this scale — giving the enemy time to take countermeasures, and presenting the British, after they had won every step of ground in such a costly way, with the prospect of having to overcome further lines to the rear. The command never appreciated that such a manner of fighting was no way to bring the war to a rapid conclusion. Any notion of surprise or speed had to give way before the tenacious attachment to brute force and an unflinching application of fundamentally flawed methods. The terrain, the weather, the physical and moral resources of the army - and ultimately also of the British nation itself - became of little account in this unrelenting struggle. The blinkered mentality of the high command also accounts for its lack of vision in other respects - no change of tack at any price! The battle which Guderian here refers to as Wytschaete will be more familiar to British readers as Messines. This limited action was one of the best planned and executed of all British attacks in the First World War. The contemporary official analysis of the performance of tanks at Messines is in the Kew branch of the Public Record Office (PRO) WO 158/858. 11

413/595


414

For heaven's sake, no novel weapons!12This was a period when the British Tank Corps, like the French chars d'assaiit, stood within measurable distance of disbandment, for they could do no better than the infantry in these muddy battles in Flanders. Mass production Although the British high command was averse to any innovation in tactics, the British and French armaments factories were set to work producing long runs of tanks, and the experience of combat in 1917 was evaluated in both the technical and tactical dimensions. By the summer of 1918 the British were supposed to have 1,000 tanks available for service, and the French 3,500. In addition the Americans intended to arrive in the theatre with 1,200 tanks, arranged in twenty-five battalions.13 These figures were never actually reached because of difficulties with production, but the tank forces were now so large that they had the means of expanding success beyond narrow tactical limits into something of great operational significance. On the technical side the new models represented considerable advances in respect of cross-country mobility, range, speed, armour, armament and steering; tighter control was made possible by grouping tanks in battalions and This very extreme denunciation of the British GHQ seems to be derived largely from Fuller's, Memoirs, especially pp. 13642 but there are also passages very hostile to GHQ in Swinton's Eyewitness. 13 On Allied plans in late 1917 to mass-produce tanks for the 1918 campaign the relevant British War Office file is (PRO) WO 158/813. Guderian omits to mention that by this stage in the war there was a considerable degree of inter-Allied planning in tank production matters. The most remarkable feature of this co-operation was a large, jointly financed Anglo-American tank factory which began to be established early in 1918 at Chateauroux in France. See Memorandum by Stern, 26 April 1918, Fuller Papers, Tank Museum, Bovington. 12

414/595


415

companies. Before the high command could get its ideas in order about the deployment of tanks in 1918, whether for defensive or offensive purposes, there supervened an event in the late autumn of 1917 which presented the importance of tanks in an altogether new light. Even after the passage of years it is an episode which rewards our attention.

415/595


416/595

416


417

General der Panzertruppen Guderian Heinz Wilhelm Guderian Dates: + 17 June 1888 – * 14 May 1954) He was a pioneer in the development of armoured warfare, and was the leading proponent of tanks and mechanization in the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces). Germany's panzer (armoured) forces were raised and organized under his direction as Chief of Mobile Forces. During the war, he was a highly successful commander of panzer forces in several campaigns, became Inspector-General of Armoured Troops, rose to the rank of Generaloberst, and was Chief of the General Staff of the Heer in the last year of the war. Early career Guderian was born in Kulm, West Prussia (now Chełmno, Poland). From 1901 to 1907 Guderian attended various military schools. He entered the Army in 1907 as an ensigncadet in the (Hanoverian) Jäger Bataillon No. 10, commanded at that point by his father, Friedrich Guderian. After attending the war academy in Metz he was made a Leutnant (full Lieutenant) in 1908. In 1911 Guderian joined the 3rd Telegraphen-Battalion of the Prussian Army Signal Corps. On October 1, 1913, he married Margarete Goerne with whom he had two sons, Heinz Günter (born Aug 2nd 1914 to 2004) and Kurt (born 17 September 1918 to 1984). Both sons became highly decorated Wehrmacht officers during World War II; Heinz Günter became a Panzer general in the Bundeswehr after the war. During World War I he served as a Signals and General Staff officer. This allowed him to get an overall view of battlefield conditions. He often disagreed with his superiors and was transferred to the army intelligence department, where he remained until the end of the war. This second assignment, while removed from the battlefield, sharpened his strategic skills. He disagreed with German surrender at

417/595


418

the end of World War I, believing German Empire should continue the fight writing "the most the Allies can do is to destroy us» Early in 1919, Guderian was assigned to serve on the staff of the central command of the Eastern Frontier Guard Service. This Guard Service was intended to control and coordinate the independent Freikorps units in the defense of Germany's eastern frontiers against Polish and Soviet forces. In June 1919, Guderian joined the Iron Brigade (later known as Iron Division) as its second General Staff officer. The regular German army had intended that this move would allow the army to reassert its control over the Iron Division; however, their hopes were disappointed. Rather than restrain the Freikorps, Guderian's anti-communism caused him to empathize with the Iron Division's efforts to defend Prussia against the Soviet threat. The Iron Division waged ruthless campaign in Lithuania and pushed into Latvia; however, traditional German anti-Slavic attitudes prevented the division's full cooperation with the White Russian and Baltic forces opposing the Bolsheviks. During the division's advance on Riga, it committed numerous atrocities as part of its ideological mission to "cleanse and clean"; these events are omitted by Guderian in his memoirs. After the war, Guderian stayed in the reduced 100,000man German Army (Reichswehr) as a company commander in the 10th Jäger-Battalion. Later he joined the Truppenamt ("Troop Office"), which was actually the Army's "General-Staff-in-waiting" (an official General Staff was forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles). In 1927 Guderian was promoted to major and transferred to the Truppenamt group for Army transport and motorized tactics in Berlin. This put him at the center of German development of armoured forces. Guderian, who was fluent in both English and French studied the works of British maneuver warfare theorists J. F. C. Fuller and, debatably, B. H. Liddell Hart; also the writings, interestingly enough, of the then-obscure

418/595


419

Charles de Gaulle. He translated these works into German. In 1931, he was promoted to Oberstleutnant (LieutenantColonel) and became chief of staff to the Inspectorate of Motorized Troops under Generalleutnant (Lieutenant-General) Oswald Lutz. In 1933 he was promoted to Oberst (Colonel). During this period, he wrote many papers on mechanized warfare, which were seen in the German Army as authoritative. These papers were based on extensive wargaming without troops, with paper tanks and finally with armoured vehicles. Britain at this time was experimenting with tanks under General Hobart, and Guderian kept abreast of Hobart's writings using, at his own expense, someone to translate all the articles being published in Britain. In October 1935 he was made commander of the newly created 2nd Panzer Division (one of three). On 1 August 1936 he was promoted to Generalmajor, and on 4 February 1938 he was promoted to Generalleutnant and given command of the XVI Army Corps. During this period (1936–1937), Guderian produced his most important written work, his book Achtung - Panzer! It was a highly persuasive compilation of Guderian's own theories and the armoured warfare and combined-arms warfare ideas of other General Staff officers, expounding the use of airpower as well as tanks in future ground combat. The German panzer forces were created largely on the lines laid down by Guderian in Achtung - Panzer! Guderian's theory The British Army was the first to conceive and attempt armoured warfare, and though British theorists were the first to propose the concept of "Blitzkrieg" (lightning warfare), the British did not fully develop it. During World War I, the German army had developed the idea of breaking through a static front by concentration of combined arms, which they applied in their 1918 Spring Offensive.

419/595


420

But they failed to gain decisive results because the breakthrough elements were on foot and could not sustain the impetus of the initial attack. Motorized infantry was the key to sustaining a breakthrough, and until the 1930s that was not possible. Soviet marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky pursued the idea, but his doctrine was repudiated as contrary to Communist principles, and Tukhachevsky was executed in 1937. Guderian was the first who fully developed and advocated the strategy of blitzkrieg and put it into its final shape. He summarized the tactics of blitzkrieg as the way to get the mobile and motorized armoured divisions to work together and support each other in order to achieve decisive success. In his book Panzer Leader he wrote: In this year (1929) I became convinced that tanks working on their own or in conjunction with infantry could never achieve decisive importance. My historical studies; the exercises carried out in England and our own experience with mock-ups had persuaded me that the tanks would never be able to produce their full effect until weapons on whose support they must inevitably rely were brought up to their standard of speed and of cross-country performance. In such formation of all arms, the tanks must play primary role, the other weapons being subordinated to the requirements of the armour. It would be wrong to include tanks in infantry divisions: what were needed were armoured divisions which would include all the supporting arms needed to fight with full effect. Guderian believed that certain developments in technology needed to take place in conjunction with blitzkrieg in order to support the entire theory, especially in communication and special visual equipment with which the armoured divisions in general, and tanks specifically, should be equipped. Guderian insisted in 1933, within the high command, that every tank in the German armoured force must be equipped with radio and visual equipment in order to enable the tank commander to communicate and perform

420/595


589

Index First Blitzkrieg: Battle of Cannae ...................................... 11 Strategic background .................................................... 11 Estimates of Roman troop numbers............................. 13 Roman command .......................................................... 14 The battle....................................................................... 16 Forces........................................................................ 16 Equipment ................................................................ 16 Tactical deployment..................................................18 Subsequent events........................................................ 20 Casualties ......................................................................23 Roman and allied......................................................23 Punic and allied............................................................ 24 Aftermath ..................................................................... 24 Historical significance...................................................27 Effects on Roman military doctrine .........................27 Status in military history ............................................. 29 The "Cannae Model" .................................................... 29 Historical sources......................................................... 30 After Clausewitz.................................................................33 The Tactical Crisis .........................................................33 The Infantry Attack ...................................................... 43 The Cavalry Question ................................................... 48 The Artillery Dilemma ..................................................54 Initial Solutions............................................................ 58 German Blitzkrieg ............................................................. 61 Notes .........................................................................75 The Blitzkrieg in the Low Countries.................................. 77 Blitzkrieg............................................................................95 Preface ...........................................................................95 Common interpretation ............................................... 96 Infantry: Normaltaktik Versus Auftragstaktik .............97 Normaltatik.............................................................. 98 Auftragstaktik .........................................................105 Cavalry: Toward Greater Versatility and Firepower... 110 Artillery: Balancing Concentration and Dispersion ... 118

589/595


590

Views from Abroad Britain ......................................... 124 United States...........................................................128 France ..................................................................... 133 Russia...................................................................... 139 The Crisis Expands...................................................... 143 Fin de Siecle Change ................................................... 143 A Larger, More Lethal Battlefield ...............................148 Views fron Abroad....................................................... 151 Britain. .................................................................... 151 Impact of the Boer War .......................................... 154 Threat to the Warrior Spirit ........................................ 161 Views of Abroad ..........................................................164 Britain. ....................................................................164 United States........................................................... 165 France. ....................................................................166 Russia...................................................................... 167 Civilian Views..........................................................168 Is War Now Impossible? ..............................................171 Views from Abroad...................................................... 179 Britain. .................................................................... 179 United States...........................................................180 Russia...................................................................... 181 Carl von Clausewitz .........................................................183 Life and military career...............................................184 Theory of war .............................................................. 187 Principal ideas.............................................................190 Interpretation and misinterpretation ......................... 191 Influence......................................................................194 Late 20th and early 21st century................................. 195 Hans von Seeckt Theory ..................................................199 The Lessons of World War I .......................................199 The strategic lessons of world war I........................... 200 The tactical lessons of world war I............................. 205 Troop training ............................................................. 212 The lessons of the air war............................................ 217 The technological lessons of world war I................... 223 Conclusion................................................................... 231

590/595


591

Von Seeckt and Rethinking Warfare.......................... 232 General Hans von Seeckt.................................................235 First World War ..................................................... 248 Reichswehr............................................................. 249 Later years.............................................................. 258 Reshaping the general staff.........................................259 Rethinking tactics ...................................................... 263 Tactical organization................................................... 271 Contrast with french doctrine .....................................277 Von seeckts greatest accomplishment ....................... 278 Debate within the Reichswehr ....................................279 Schools of military thought within................................. 287 the Reichswehr ............................................................... 287 The Defensive School ................................................. 287 The Psychological School ........................................... 290 The ''People's War"School.......................................... 296 Conclusion.................................................................. 302 Roots of German military methods................................ 305 Development of German tactical methods ................ 305 Return to Prussian and 19th century methodology... 306 Differing views ........................................................... 307 Britain .................................................................... 307 France .................................................................... 308 Soviet Union/Russia .............................................. 309 Germany..................................................................310 Guderian's armoured concept.....................................310 Spanish Civil War........................................................ 311 Methods of operations..................................................... 313 Schwerpunkt ............................................................... 313 Pursuit ......................................................................... 313 Destruction of pockets of resistance ........................... 314 Use of Air Power.......................................................... 314 Limitations and countermeasures .............................. 315 Environment ........................................................... 315 Air superiority......................................................... 316 Counter-tactics........................................................ 316 Logistics .................................................................. 317

591/595


592

Controversy .................................................................318 Strategic intent ............................................................318 Doctrine...................................................................... 320 Economy...................................................................... 321 Heer ............................................................................ 323 Luftwaffe doctrine...................................................... 324 J.F.C. Fuller and B. H. Liddell Hart ................................327 Innovation .................................................................. 328 Guderian..................................................................... 329 Myth of the Blitzkrieg......................................................333 Guderian Theory............................................................. 349 1914. HOW DID positional warfare come about? Lances against machine-guns ................................................ 349 The march of the infantry to the sacrifical Altar ........356 Trench warfare and barbed wire................................. 361 Waging war with inadequate weaponry......................365 The artillery combat................................................365 Gas Warfare.................................................................372 The Genesis of the Tank..............................................376 In britain .................................................................376 In france ................................................................. 385 First deployments, mistakes and misgivings............. 389 Mass production..........................................................414 General der Panzertruppen Guderian............................. 417 Early career ................................................................. 417 Guderian's theory........................................................419 World War II ............................................................... 421 Life after the war .........................................................425 Battle of Tannenberg .......................................................427 Prelude ....................................................................... 429 German consolidation of Eighth Army ....................... 431 Early phases of battle (23 August to 26 August) ....... 432 The main battle (26 August to 30 August) ................ 433 Aftermath ....................................................................435 Post-war legacy .......................................................... 436 Illustrations .................................................................437 Panzer Tactics..................................................................441

592/595


593

Development of german armor tactics ...................... 445 The first three Panzerdivisionen.................................447 First experience in war............................................... 450 Armored battle groups ................................................ 451 The panzerbrigade in 1944..........................................452 Reorganization after the second world war ................452 Why is the offense the main type of combat operations ? 454 Forms of attack............................................................455 Prerequisites for the attack .........................................457 The start of the attack ................................................ 460 Course of the attack.....................................................461 Meeting engagement (begegnungsgefecht) ............... 462 Attacks at night or in conditions of limited visibility 464 Attacks across water obstacles................................... 464 Breaching obstacles.................................................... 465 Pursuit ........................................................................ 465 Actions at the objective .............................................. 466 Issuing orders..............................................................467 Combat support (kampfunterstersutzung).................472 Command and control (fuhrung)................................473 Transition to the next operation ................................ 480 Logistics.......................................................................481 Defensive Operations (Die Verteidigung) ...................... 483 Commitment of forces................................................ 483 Preparing for combat ................................................. 483 Blocking positions ...................................................... 484 Defensive area (verteidigungsraum).......................... 485 The individual tank fighting position ........................ 486 The tank platoon position .......................................... 488 Company fighting positions or defensive areas......... 488 Selection of positions ................................................. 489 Counterattacks (gegenangriffe) ................................. 490 Relief (ablosung) .........................................................491 The missions of the reserve........................................ 494 Course of the defensive operation.............................. 495 Special conditions relative to defense at night .......... 499

593/595


594

Issuing orders (befehlsgebung) ................................. 500 Combat support (kampfunterstutzung)..................... 504 Command and control (fuhrung)............................... 505 Transition to subsequent operations ..........................507 Logistics...................................................................... 508 Delaying actions (hinhaltender kampf) ......................510 Course of the delay ...................................................... 511 Defense for a limited time period ............................... 512 Withdrawal (ausweichen) ........................................... 513 Counterattacks (gegenangriffe) .................................. 514 Issuing orders (befehlsgebung) .................................. 514 Combat support and logistics ..................................... 516 Command and control ................................................ 517 Passage of lines (aufnahme) ....................................... 518 Flanking Maneuver ......................................................... 521 Tactical flanking .......................................................... 521 Flanking in history ......................................................522 Maneuvering ...............................................................522 Defense against ...........................................................523 Terrain.........................................................................523 Fortification.................................................................523 Formations ..................................................................524 The First World War ...................................................526 Western Front.........................................................526 Sinai and Palestine Front .......................................526 Blitzkrieg and beyond .................................................526 Operational flanking ...................................................526 The race to the sea.......................................................527 Second fronts...............................................................527 Desert Storm ...............................................................527 Strategic flanking ....................................................... 528 Maneuver warfare ...........................................................529 Concepts ......................................................................529 Early examples ............................................................ 531 Napoleon's use of maneuver .......................................533 Mechanization.............................................................534 Maneuver Warfare Doctrine .......................................536

594/595


595

Development of Maneuver Warfare theories .............537 John Boyd and US acceptance of maneuver warfare .537 Recent theorists.......................................................... 538 Limitations in a modern context................................ 538 The Art of War (Sun)/Section VII ................................... 541 Maneuvering.................................................................... 541 Ernst Volckheim ..............................................................545 Influence on Heinz Guderian..................................... 546 World War II ...............................................................547 Awards.........................................................................547 U.S. Army Maneuver warfare......................................... 549 Battle Doctrine Rediscovering the "Blitzkrieg" ..........552 The Role of "Auftragstaktik" .......................................555 Political and Stategic Implications .............................556 The New American Way at War ...................................... 561 Waging Modern War................................................... 561 Transformers...............................................................562 First Strike.................................................................. 564 From Basra to Baghdad ..............................................567 How the War was won ................................................ 571 Fighting the next War ................................................. 577 Bibliography ................................................................... 583

595/595

Blitzkrieg Clausewitz Seeckt Guderian 1650-2000

Recommend Documents