Such a theory of tactics would seem quite astounding to most students of war, but it was a conceit that Montgomery found possible because his numerical and material superiority made the ultimate outcome of his battles almost a foregone conclusion. His timetables, however, could not be so guaranteed, least of all for the mobile armoured spearheads which he so often threw forward recklessly in front of his more methodical infantry. In these cases he could easily have explained away the resulting loss of time and casualties in terms of ‘risk-taking’ or ‘the accidents of war’, but instead he would always insist that they had been ‘part of the plan from the start’.82 Since he felt psychologically unable to admit to gambling, improvisation or swift changes of plan – all qualities which are surely close to the heart of armoured warfare – a genuinely mobile and fluid battle became officially unthinkable in his army. ‘Adjustments to maintain balance’ could be acknowledged, but nothing less predictable than that. The very concept of armoured warfare thus fell out of favour in Britain, in a way that would have seemed utterly backward-looking to the daring modernists of 1939–41. Astonishingly, therefore, the military outlook of a whole generation of British officers came to be turned through 180° by little more than the style in which one individual chose to write his own war memoirs.
Montgomery could not, however, suppress the reputation of the Germans in mobile war, which survived even their comprehensive defeat in every theatre. For a variety of good and less good reasons, western commentators from 1940 onwards have taken a perverse delight in praising their foe. Admiration for the German soldier – particularly as he appeared conveniently close at hand in Normandy83 – has become something of a cult among students of tactics. It may be worth remembering, however, that the bocage south-west of Caen was ‘a defender’s paradise’84 which did not, perhaps, need very exceptional qualities to hold. Certainly, the Germans do not seem to have done as well in their counter-attacks as the allies did in at least some of their attacks, while the very uneven standard of their manpower gives ample credence to the following opinion from one British infantry platoon commander. He found few high military qualities among the German soldiers he met, despite acknowledging their generally superior weapons and tactics:
In many attacks the prisoners we took outnumbered our attacking force and German units who would continue to resist at close quarters were few indeed. Unlike us, they rarely fought at night, when they were excessively nervous and unsure of themselves. Where we patrolled extensively, they avoided it.85
For the war on the eastern front, however, it is harder to find dissenting voices from the view that the Germans were greatly superior to their adversaries.86 This is partly because the accessible uncensored sources on the campaigns in Russia have come largely from the German side. In the absence of Hitler’s own point of view, furthermore, it is the specifically military interpretation of events that is predominant. A number of his generals have brought back confident, action-packed memoirs of their adventures in the open steppes, telling a tale guaranteed to stir the heart of young NATO officers. In Russia the German commanders of armour could successfully realise the free, virtuoso manoeuvres which had eluded their British contemporaries in the desert. Small detachments of tanks could switch off their rear link radios87 and follow their own initiatives, wheeling round behind cumbersome enemy groupings to launch devastating assaults upon flanks and rear. Thus Balck’s depleted 11th Panzer Division on the river Chir, during the attempt to relieve Stalingrad, was often cited as a model of a ‘fire brigade’ rushing to extinguish each enemy break-in before it had been consolidated. Manstein’s operational counterstroke at Kharkov represented a similar tactic on a larger scale, and a series of other variants are regularly paraded.88 These actions have come to be seen as the classic reference points of manoeuvre warfare in the era after Fuller.
From the Russian point of view, however, the picture looks very different. The relatively low fighting quality of their individual soldiers can to a large extent be explained by the incorrect political line of J.V. Stalin in the years before the Fascist assault of 22 June 1941. He deprived the army of its best trained leaders by purging the officer corps, and allowed most of the tanks and aircraft to be taken by surprise in exposed forward positions where they were rapidly destroyed. This was soon followed by the loss of many war industries and the displacement of others across the Urals. From there an army had to be improvised from almost nothing, and it was near miraculous that such a big and successful one could be mobilised as fast as it was. Whereas the Germans could usually field around 200 divisions in Russia, by mid-1943 there were almost 500 Soviet divisions to oppose them.89 The important point was therefore not that these formations suffered from defects in detail or tactical finesse, but that they could fight effectively at all.
The Russians survived because they remained undaunted. Not only did they launch major counter-attacks against the initial onslaught, but they did so on an even greater scale over the winter of 1941–2, and then at Kharkov in the spring. In the autumn they were counter-attacking again at Stalingrad, and then once more at Kharkov, Donbass, Orel and Proskurov-Chernovits during the first half of 1943. It has to be said that in none of these big counter-offensives were the Soviets particularly successful – except at Stalingrad itself – and the lessons learned were mainly of the ‘how not to do it’ variety. In common with the Anglo-American experience in the Mediterranean, in fact, it was only during 1943 that a truly confident and successful combat style could eventually emerge. Nevertheless, in the Kursk and Belgorod-Kharkov operations during the summer of 1943, the Russians began to show just what they had to offer.
An important difference between the Russian and the Anglo-American experience was that whereas the latter often seemed to make up their tactics as they went along, the Russians were able to draw upon a detailed official doctrine for modern warfare that had been mapped out by Triandafillov and Tukhachevskiy, and incorporated in the 1936 field regulations. The ‘deep battle’ with an all-mechanised, all-arms force was envisaged, including ‘manoeuvre tanks’, ‘mechanised cavalry’ and mechanised airborne forces simultaneously to disrupt the enemy’s rear and exploit breakthroughs in his forward positions.90 More specifically, a third of the Soviet forces would pin the enemy on a broad front as the remainder acted as shock armies breaking through in depth on a narrow front, opening a path for mobile groups of horsed cavalry and mechanised troops, with airborne support, to exploit far to the rear. The mobile groups would encircle the enemy to a depth of as much as 2–300km, leaving him to be mopped up by a second echelon of the less mobile forces.91
By the end of 1943 the Red Army had been re-organised several times since the 1936 operational doctrine had been laid down, but its final shape was nevertheless very well fitted to carry that doctrine into effect. The bulk of the army, as with the Germans, was made up of infantry divisions and armies which relied mainly on horse-drawn transport. Unlike German infantry divisions, however, these formations were notoriously cumbersome, inflexible in their tactics, and poorly equipped with supporting services apart from artillery. They did often fight at night and could make successful infiltrations, and in the last two years of war they were regularly topped up to strength in a way that the Germans could not be. Nevertheless, they were essentially cannon fodder, for whom the highest military virtue was to act with cog-like uniformity and predictability in the great machine of war. They provided the model from which most western caricatures of the Red Army have been drawn ever since.
In clear contrast to the caricature, however, stood the manoeuvre elements composed of tank, mechanised and horsed cavalry corps. The tank and mechanised corps were the mainstay since, with around 200 tanks at full establishment, each of them was roughly equivalent to a strong Panzer Division. A tank corps further contained over 4,000 motorised infantry (including an SMG battalion attached closely to each ‘brigade’ of 60 tanks) and 152 mortar or artillery tubes, while a mechanised corps had more than 10,000 infantry and a ma
ssive 252 tubes. To give extra flexibility in difficult ground for vehicles, a cavalry corps might be added to a mechanised one, and in practice these apparently anachronistic mixed formations often did very well.
The mobile forces were given the best available equipment and, still more importantly, officers. Unlike their colleagues in the ordinary infantry divisions, the tank and mechanised infantry commanders had to think on their feet and, within certain limits, adapt their battles to changing circumstances. This applied particularly to the higher echelons of command, where actions at the operational level were planned. The Russians were quite well aware that man for man their troops were only something like a third as efficient in tactics as the Germans, and that there were less than three times as many of them. Victory, therefore, depended on cleverness in the levels higher than tactics. If the majority of local combats were predestined to be lost, it was essential to ensure that a few really important ones would be won, and then transformed into a grand encirclement of the enemy that would quickly make his tactical superiority irrelevant.
Soviet Tank Corps, late 1943.
The hallmark of the Russian view of warfare was an emphasis on co-ordinated large-scale action in depth, using ‘operational art’. This was a very deliberate system during the vital phases of preparation, strategic deception-cum-concealment (maskirovka), and initial break-in. Provided the troops could be lined up and kept hidden, their chances of success could be precisely calculated. For example, specific ratios of artillery per kilometre of breakthrough sector could be relied upon to open a gap. This figure was between 103 and 220 tubes for the Stalingrad encirclement, rising to between 277 and 420 tubes for the Vistula-Oder operation.92 Again, there were specific rules for selecting the moment to commit the mobile group. This had been found ineffective when delayed six days in the disastrous 1942 Kharkov offensive, but totally successful when released during the first day of the Stalingrad encirclement. The normal expectation came to be that it would be released as soon as possible, but certainly within the first 36 hours.93
The massed mobile breakout itself, although open to flexible changes as the battle progressed, could also be carefully planned in its general shape, to the extent that by the end of 1943 it was felt that, with sufficient planning and maskirovka, a deep penetration and even encirclement could almost be guaranteed. The difficult part of the battle was now thought to consist in securing the claims staked out, against attack from both within and outside the lines of encirclement. The mobile groups therefore became heavier and more sustainable at longer distances from their bases, with each ‘Front’ putting out a united formation made up of between one and three homogenous tank armies, each of several mobile corps. This force would be expected to complete the breakthrough started by the infantry armies, although it might well lose a third or more of its strength in the process. Then it would advance in a concentrated mass, avoiding over-dispersion, to effect an operational encirclement and repulse counter-attacks. In addition to the Front’s mobile group there would also be local mobile groups for each infantry army, consisting of one or two tank or mechanised corps operating in a similar but smaller way.
All this was obviously conceived on a vastly larger scale than Montgomery’s attempted breakouts between Alamein and the Reichswald. Where he almost always had less than a dozen divisions committed to a breakout, the Russians would regularly have many more than that in each Front, and often several Fronts in each operation. Where he might think it daring to yoke two armoured divisions together in a single corps de chasse, the Russians could call on up to a dozen homogenous tank armies, and thought it normal to use two or three of them grouped together on a single axis. Where he believed 1,000 guns made an exceptionally heavy barrage, the Russians were habitually using 2,000 or more for their breakthroughs, and at Berlin they had over 6,000. Where Montgomery often took weeks to achieve his initial breakthroughs, they took just hours, and would realistically hope to close down each whole operation after only ten days – but some 2–300km further to the west.94 Perhaps most telling of all, the Russians had far more experience of the whole process of operational art, and far more opportunities to learn by their mistakes. Where Montgomery may have mounted a dozen or so offensives at most, they claimed to have mounted no less than 250 Front operations. At first these suffered from all the setbacks and frustrations that were familiar to the western allies, but in the last eighteen months of the war they were being properly set up and running smoothly in a way that was quite unknown in the west.
Despite all these important differences of scale, speed and professionalism, however, Montgomery and the Russians found themselves working to a not dissimilar basic conceptual pattern. They were both very systematic, and planned their build-ups, maskirovka and artillery preparations with great care and deliberation. They both aimed to launch a mobile group to complete and then exploit a gap in the infantry battle at an early stage of the fighting, and were prepared to accept heavy casualties in order to do it. Having learnt by hard experience to distrust the tactical sureness of their troops, they thought it important to over-insure against accidents. They both believed that the best hope of success lay in being so overwhelmingly strong at the points where it mattered that there would be nothing the enemy could possibly do to turn the blow. Both of them wanted ‘balance’, or the ability to transcend the accidents of minor tactics. In their own doctrinaire and statistical manner, in fact, the Russians were no less insistent on the inevitability of their timetable than Montgomery himself. Incongruously and unexpectedly, but nevertheless distinctly, we may even detect a passing echo of his historiographical style in their official accounts of these remorselessly victorious campaigns which won the war.
The question we should perhaps ask, therefore, is whether the operational art, as glimpsed by Montgomery and perfected in the Soviet Union, was really the only possible approach to offensive warfare in the conditions of 1943–5. Could not smaller but cleverer and more independently manoeuvrable spearheads have achieved as much but more economically? Could not the opportunism shown by such panzer leaders as Rommel or Balck have been harnessed to a lightning war which maintained the impetus won in 1939–41, even against the newly mobilised opposition? Could not a new style of warfare have emerged that would have been less elephantine than the corps de chasse or the Mobile Group, and nearer to the vision of the pre-war futurists?
We cannot know the answer to these questions, which must remain among the imponderables of history. The Germans ran out of resources at the moment when they might have demonstrated a fully mature version of armoured warfare, but not before they had severely mauled their opponents. Both the western and the eastern allies found they were left with no alternative but to improvise a system that worked, using only the relatively unpromising elements that had survived the first onslaught. They both therefore chose a cautious system that relied on over-insurance rather than fluid or brilliant manoeuvres. The liberation offensives may have succeeded in reaching Bremen and Berlin, but they never entirely convincingly shook free from the mud and the blood into the green fields beyond.
5
1965–73: The Alleged Supremacy of Technology in Vietnam
The Second Indochina War was the biggest and most important war between 1945 and the present day. At the political and psychic level this truth has been well grasped; but in purely tactical affairs it has not. There is a widespread belief that Vietnam was somehow outside the main line of development in the Art of War. It tends to be dismissed as either a sideshow or an aberration.
There are many reasons for this neglect. The military lessons of Vietnam seem to relate to something very different from the classical European style of combat. It was a war fought in an exotically un-European climate and terrain; with an ‘internal security’ or counter-guerilla task; and with an emphasis upon infantry rather than armour. There was a heavily political element which often seemed to undermine the military operations; and to cap it all there is a persisting bad conscience about
Vietnam which frequently interferes with objectivity in debate. Small wonder, then, that the military lessons of this war have been eclipsed today in rather the same way as were those of the American Civil War during the late nineteenth century.1
A further problem is that the war in Vietnam appears to be dauntingly complex. It defies easy study, since it was actually made of up five closely-interwoven and concurrent wars: viz. the international political struggle, the strategic bombing campaign, the interdiction campaign, the mainforce battle, and the pacification or ‘Village War’. None of these five campaigns had a clearcut outline, since each to some extent overlapped all the others. A great deal of confusion has resulted from this close proximity of the five different campaigns.
In order to look at the tactical developments in Vietnam, however, we must first attempt to isolate the mainforce war from the other four. For the purposes of the present study, at least, we should try to forget about the politics, the strategic bombing campaign and the village war; and should concentrate solely upon the pitched battles between regular mainforce battalions and divisions. This will enable us to examine combat techniques as such, and incidentally help us avoid the morass of political controversy which so bedevils the study of the war as a whole.
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