Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (26 page)

Yet these successes by lightning strikes were exceptional. Most of Marlborough’s other battles (Ramillies, Malplaquet) were great, static bloodbaths in the Low Countries. Surrounded by enemies on all sides in the critical period of the Seven Years’ War, Frederick had on many occasions no choice but to stand and fight. Try as they might, Napoleon’s great marshals and battle-hardened armies could never achieve a decisive victory in Spain: the terrain was too broken and harsh, giving the advantage to the many Spanish guerrilla groups that sprang up to conduct irregular warfare, and giving the advantage also to the British-led coalition under Wellington, that cautious master of situational battles. The most spectacular exposure of the weaknesses of the Napoleonic way of warfare came, of course, in France’s catastrophic defeat in the War of 1812, where the weather, sheer distance, and the Russian willingness to pull back hundreds and hundreds of miles made nonsense of the very idea of an early, decisive victory. Moltke concluded a decade or so after his 1871 victory over France that fast campaigning across industrialized
western Europe by his Prussian armies would be impossible in the future: there were too many new urban zones, too many canals, too many railway embankments.

But the old field marshal was almost alone in this conclusion. His successors, Alfred von Schlieffen and Moltke the Younger, were mesmerized by the coming of railways and the telegraph, as were the generals in neighboring countries as 1914 approached. The advent of newer military technologies, such as modern aircraft and the tank in the years before the Second World War, saw another resurgence in the belief in swift military victories.

If we are looking to find the conditions, logically and logistically, in which lightning warfare doesn’t work, the first answer has to do with topography. A decisive victory isn’t achievable if the fighting has to take place across large mountain ranges, as the Wehrmacht discovered in trying to crush the partisans of Yugoslavia and Greece after 1941, and as, over centuries, successive waves of invaders have discovered in the high peaks of Afghanistan. Dense jungles, such as those in the southwestern provinces of China and across all of Southeast Asia, confirm this obvious military point: difficult physical circumstances tend to equalize the contest, even if one side possesses much more fighting power than its opponent (as was evidenced in Vietnam). And wide deserts, with hundreds of miles of shifting sands, definitely restrict the bolder Rommels of the world and give advantage to the more cautious Montgomerys. Great rivers, miles across from one bank to the other, slow down offensives; even if the attacking army has pontoons and other bridging equipment, such heavy stuff may have to be brought considerable distances to reach the water’s edge. Topography does not remove human agency, but the strategic planner who sees how best to exploit it will aid his commanding generals greatly.

Two further reasons, also very obvious, complete the picture. Fast mobile warfare leading to a swift and decisive victory in the field will, logically, not occur when the defensive armies themselves are too strong, too entrenched, too numerous to permit it. This would be true whatever the geographic extent of the battle zone. Yet it is also true that fast, aggressive forms of operation will most likely falter, then fail, if the attackers have to fan out over an increasingly broad area of land, with the
leading troop units ever farther from the home base, each other, and their supply lines.

So much for the historical and abstract theory of blitzkrieg, of swift, aggressive, and shocking warfare conducted by forces that usually were also very good at smart counterattack. But what exactly did it mean in the case of the Wehrmacht’s operational performance during the Second World War? In the context of modern, industrialized warfare, the internal combustion engine, armored and armed vehicles, railways, and aircraft were melded into a form of fighting that appeared to contemporaries to be totally new and could transcend the larger geographic constraints of earlier eras. If proof were needed, one need look no further than the German tanks bursting through the forests of the Ardennes in May 1940.

And why was everyone so astonished at these very short campaigns? It was because almost everyone’s image of great-power land warfare had been shaped by the experiences of the grinding, static, slogging-it-out battles of the First World War, particularly in the campaigns along the Western Front and in northern Italy. At the Somme, at Verdun, at Passchendaele, and along the Isonzo, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed for a few miles gained. Sometimes the attackers, after months of fruitless assaults, ended up right back where they had started.
This
was the reality of modern industrialized war, as confirmed and chronicled in the histories, memoirs, and literary writings of the 1920s and 1930s.

What almost all of this literature missed was that in the closing years of the war certain military staffs had privately figured out how to break the deadlock of static trench warfare. The first changes came, unsurprisingly, in eastern Europe, where the lengths of the fronts were far greater and thus less densely held than along the Western Front. The Brusilov Offensive of summer 1916, when the Russian army overran the flaccid Austro-Hungarian forces, had succeeded because the attackers did not use massive Haig-like bombardments (they had too little ammunition) against the sluggish defenders; instead, they employed surprise, and in various places attacked shortly after they commenced firing. A German offensive around Riga in the next year used the same principles of shock, swiftness, and going around obstacles. In 1917
also, Italy suffered its biggest defeat at Caporetto, when fast-moving German units (including a young Erwin Rommel), sent to reinforce the Austro-Hungarian armies, made a spectacular breakthrough and compelled the Italian high command to call for Allied assistance. Perhaps the most important point about all this, as Timothy Lupfer argued, was that the Prussian General Staff allowed midlevel officers to circulate impressions, ideas, and experiences from their respective fronts, to stimulate initiative.
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If surprise assaults by well-trained infantry had worked in the Baltic, why not see if they might also work in Italy, or even in the West?

Slowly, roughly, the German army stumbled toward newer tactics and, of equal importance, newer types of troops: shock troops, better-trained, equipped with a new package of weapons (machine guns, grenades, wire cutters), and encouraged to press forward swiftly and move around enemy strongpoints. Meanwhile, on the Western Front, the British Army was at last coming up with its own way of cracking the trench warfare deadlock, a mechanical way, in the form of the first tanks; despite many early setbacks, they intervened to great effect in the August 1918 offensives. In the age-old tale of the ebb and flow contest of offensive and defensive warfare, the offensive had once again taken over.
⁸
Here, in mobile strikes and fast-moving incursions, was the future of war, and the intellectual high priests of this latest “military revolution,” such as Liddell Hart and General J. F. C. Fuller, were to expend all their energies after 1919 in preaching the new gospel. Technology had conquered topography, newer types of armies could go any-where, and if the forward columns didn’t stop, the enemy’s nervous system would be paralyzed. Yet none of the armored-warfare enthusiasts considered that the greatest attempt at a decisive, swift victory—Ludendorff’s massive offensive in the West in spring 1918—had achieved significant advances initially but in the end could not get through the opposing defenses because the Allies’ firepower was too deep and the room for maneuver was far too small.

The lessons drawn from the First World War by the military experts about the potential of offensive mechanized warfare were therefore very mixed. The French high command, conservatively but rather logically, drew the 1918 lesson that only strength in depth had saved the Republic and that if it was attacked by Germany in the future, the
best strategy would be a defensive one. This led it to create an even greater physical barrier against invasion in the form of the Maginot Line. In Great Britain, the armored-warfare enthusiasts, Fuller perhaps in particular, argued for all-tank forces, expanding outward from the breakthrough points and paralyzing the enemy’s nervous systems; Liddell Hart pushed for the indirect approach to battlefield victory, which also involved swift-moving attacks but by mixed military units making flank approaches or landings from the sea. Large-scale tank maneuvers on Salisbury Plain in the late 1920s showed that this new type of warfare had a future. So, despite the opposition of the cavalry regiments, the British Army pioneered mechanization until the crimping economies of the 1930s. The Americans, having reluctantly come over to Europe to squash the enemy in 1918 by massive material superiority (as had happened in the Civil War between the North and the South), were not interested in planning for another great war in Europe; they went home and demobilized. The early Red Army under Trotsky, then more professionally under Tukhachevsky, studied this debate and discussed what were called “deep battle” tactics, until Stalin’s manic purges in the late 1930s brought everything to a halt. And Japan’s planned zones of expansion—chiefly rivers, deltas, and jungles in Asia—were not suitable for tanks, except for very light ones that could manage the narrow roads and wooden bridges.

This left the German military, massively reduced in troop numbers and weapons systems by the Treaty of Versailles, battered by the failing Weimar economy, and marginalized by the corrosive party politics of the time, to wonder how it might recover its old fighting power. With the coming of the Third Reich in 1933, the generals began to see a steady and then dramatic inflow of resources for a military buildup. Most of the senior officers were Prussian conservatives of a traditional bent; their feeling was that the more infantry and artillery divisions, the better. But there was also a sufficient sprinkling of more radically minded officers—Guderian, Manstein, Hasso von Manteuffel, Rommel—to urge the case for fast mobile warfare. The Wehrmacht that opened the Second World War with the vicious assault upon Poland reflected this uneasy balance between old and new, with a small number of mobile motorized and panzer units and a preponderance of slower-moving, often horse-drawn divisions. Still, the faster forces,
aided now by their own tactical air forces, had a punch that no one else possessed and the potential to execute that desirable, almost mythical battlefield operation, the
Kesselschlacht
.
^d
They also had a Fuehrer who wanted fast results.

In response, the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe produced for their leader a combination of aggressive weapons systems—infantry, panzer, air attacks—that no one else’s armed forces had ever encountered before. Was it any surprise that Nazi Germany’s more traditionally structured neighbors were blown away, one after the other? They had faced the coordinated force of the three components mentioned above: (1) mobile, highly trained infantry units, wherever possible transported by trucks or rail to save time, working in support of free-ranging panzer battalions; (2) the tactical/operational doctrine of unorthodox, fast attack, designed to push through a chink in the enemy’s defenses and range afield; plus (3) an air force, which had in large part been specifically organized for close-in and low-altitude tactical bombardments, to destroy its foe’s air force, shatter his communications, and demoralize defending troops who were unprepared for the horrid, whistling sound of Ju 87 Stukas diving at them from the sky.

So how could the Nazi blitzkrieg be checked? First of all, by an opponent who could deploy stronger, tougher, and better-equipped forces (with panzers, bazookas, mines, better tactical aircraft) to counter German operational boldness; and, in turn, being able to launch a heavy counterassault. But this simply could not be done by small or medium-sized nations. The aggressive style of warfare developed by the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe could be defeated only by the forces of another great power, or probably two. Practically, this meant the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States. None of these three was ready for large-scale modern combat during the first half of the war, but all possessed great inherent strength in the form of population, raw material resources, and technological expertise. And all three of them
enjoyed a sufficient geographic distance from the Third Reich’s forces—America especially, but also Britain (thanks to the RAF and the English Channel) and even the USSR (because of its vast interior, where its military production could be relocated)—to develop their capabilities and allow their inventors, production engineers, and strategic planners to come forward with the instruments necessary to take on the Nazi war machine in great strength.

Second, the two great powers most closely affected by Germany’s early successes—that is, Britain and the USSR—could defeat the Wehrmacht’s “lightning war” strategy by developing a counterstrategy that took advantage of their own geographic assets. The British counterstrategy, developed in minute detail by the Joint Planning Staff, which worked under Churchill and the War Cabinet, was to defend the country by airpower from the Luftwaffe and develop a vast bombing offensive of their own, to protect the Atlantic sea-lanes, and slowly to advance out of Egypt and the Mediterranean, where German units were badly overstretched and could not hold off forever the accumulating military resources of the British Empire. The Russian counterstrategy, forced upon Stalin and the Stavka (the high command’s General Staff) by the success of the Wehrmacht’s powerful advances, was to trade space for time until the Germans were so overextended that the counterassault, boosted by enormous military production from factories also safe from Luftwaffe attack, could commence. It was probably not a coincidence that, since Britain and the USSR both needed time to recover, their advances could not commence until late 1942 or early 1943.

The Nazi blitzkrieg was stopped, pummeled, and then converted into a disaster for the attackers in two places: on the barren stones and shifting sands of North Africa and across the great wide plains of western Russia. The first of these twin checks to German expansionism was, as measured by the size of armies and the extent of the casualties, much, much smaller than the second, for it was the war on the Eastern Front that proved by far the greatest check to the self-proclaimed Thousand-Year Reich. Yet the story of how the Wehrmacht was defeated by the Anglo-American armies in North Africa is very much worth including—if only as a comparison and a control—in our analysis of what happened when swift offensive campaigns came up against great powers that possessed the advantages of geography, production, increasingly
better weapons, and superior planning staffs. Before we examine the much larger battles that raged across the Eastern Front, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Operation Bagration, it is useful to begin with Egypt and the small coastal town of El Alamein.