Forward into Battle

by Paddy Griffin

  During the First World War a disease called ‘shell shock’ had been identified as a medical condition, quite separate from the disciplinary contravention known as ‘cowardice’. Fear itself had also been redefined as a perfectly normal emotion for a healthy soldier in combat. Whether for external reasons, or simply because diagnosis had become more fashionable, the incidence of psychiatric casualties thereafter began to climb. In the First World War the British army recognised a level of psychiatric casualties of 4% of its total strength; the German army 0.2%. In 1944–5 it was running at 2.6% of all German troops, 11–12% of British, and as much as 26% of American. In Vietnam there were 2% psychiatric casualties at first, but later rising to a total of 12% serious cases by delayed effect, and a staggering estimate of 80% suffering some form of reaction. In the 1973 October War the Israelis reported between 3.5 and 5% psychiatric casualties, and scarcely less in the Lebanon invasion of 1982.80 The Israelis prided themselves on particularly good awareness of how the problem might strike, and rapid treatment very near to the front line, which allowed a maximum number of the casualties to be quickly returned to their units.

  In the 1980s studies of Soviet tactics were focusing attention on ‘continuous operations’, which would use night-vision equipment to keep rolling around the clock, imposing severe sleep deprivation on participants. Operations would also probably take place under an NBC threat that would keep each man isolated in his own protective suit or tightly closed vehicle.81 Where S. L. A. Marshall had wished to break down the isolation of men in battle, therefore, the new warfare of the near future seemed only to be reinforcing it. The general feeling was that this would inevitably make combat harder to bear, although the Airland 2000 concept did at least make a number of constructive high-tech suggestions as to how this might be countered. They ranged all the way from computer games to pass the time, through videotapes of personal counselling by a padre, to chemicals for hygienically disposing of smelly and disturbing human remains.82

  The massive artillery bombardments inseparable from the Soviet way of war were also identified not merely as a physical danger, but as a very major hazard to psychic welfare. Israeli experience of intense shelling in 1973 was cited in evidence, and the tales of survivors made a sobering impact upon soldiers accustomed to thinking of future combat in terms of dashing manoeuvres and ‘death-or-glory’ charges. Heavy shelling creates shock waves which numb the senses and cause bleeding from the ears. The danger makes victims’ adrenalin run strong; a reaction which in nature is designed to provide the extra energy needed for sharp bursts of life-saving activity. Under shelling, however, there can be no movement, and the victims are forced to lie still under as much cover as they can find, thereby denying the body’s demands for violent action to burn out the adrenalin. There is an internal physiological conflict within each man, and he quickly becomes exhausted or breaks under the strain.83 Added to this are the other horrors of shelling – the dense clouds of dust and fumes; the isolation, once again, from one’s comrades; and the appalling prospect of total physical oblivion. A direct hit by a high explosive shell leaves no trace of the person that was its target. There are no remains to mourn, or even to dispose of with hygienic chemicals.

  Practical experience of all this had been gained in every major combat from 1915 onwards, and predictions that high explosives would drive men mad had been made as early as the late nineteenth century. Yet western armies seemed to come to it anew in the 1980s, as if it were a specifically futuristic feature of warfare. Just as de Grandmaison and Maud’huy became interested in crowd psychology a generation after Sedan, in fact, so the whole subject of combat stress has gained in its perceived importance a generation after Normandy. Vietnam has spiced that interest with modernity and the immediacy of televisual images, but for the armies preparing to fight la grande guerre in Europe, not even Vietnam provides a sufficiently robust model for what may be expected. The likely future shape of large-scale armoured warfare looks just as mysterious and fearsome today as it has ever been at any time in the past.

  6

  The Recent Military Past and Some Alternative Future Battle Landscapes

  Armies have notoriously short memories for the realities of warfare, and despite various attempts to codify and disseminate ‘lessons learned’,1 they often become fixated on one particular aspect or procedure and institutionalise it rigidly, while neglecting a broad band of other considerations. Apart from the modern tendency for technology to change relatively rapidly from one war to the next, there are usually changes in the intensity and theatre of the next potential war, which may obscure the lessons from the last. Turnover in personnel is also important, as experienced officers move out of the army, or – no less importantly for doctrine – in and out of particular command appointments and ranks. The British army is perhaps no worse than many others in this respect, but the turbulence it has experienced even since the Falklands war means that it today has remarkably few officers or men performing the same sort of job as they did in battle in 1982 – or even having an influence on how those jobs may be done by others.

  A classic case of how a war’s lessons may be distorted came in the October War of 1973, when the Israeli army entered some of the fiercest armoured battles seen since 1945, expecting to have a clear field for mobile offensive operations. The war lasted 19 days. In that time, depending on how one counts such things, there were between seven and ten major attacking or counter-attacking moves on the two battlefronts. In the terminology of the Second World War we would say that there had been two ‘battles’, and at the moment when the war ended the Israelis were in a posture of favourable stalemate on the Golan front, and had won a partial victory on the canal.

  The significant feature of all these combats was that, without exception, the defensive side always won if it was properly emplaced and organised. It is quite true that three offensive moves did succeed – the Egyptian capture of the Bar Lev Line, the Israeli counter-attack on the Golan, and their canal crossing to encircle the Egyptian Third Army. None of these three attacks, however, met a strong defensive position head-on. To that extent they all had more in common with the early German blitzkriegs of 1939–41 than with the sort of fighting which was seen between 1942 and 1945. Whenever a well organised defensive system was encountered, the attack was always destroyed in a pretty conclusive manner.

  This result came as a surprise to the Israelis, who had prepared only to fight on the move, as they had in 1967, relying primarily on the firepower and shock of unsupported tanks.2 Yet the course of the fighting confirmed instead the findings of the last two centuries, in that it demonstrated, yet again, the difficulties which an attacker will encounter against a prepared and ‘balanced’ defence, while at the same time offering him the hope of triumph in a mobile or ‘encounter’ battle. At first, however, the results of the October War were interpreted rather differently. Many commentators saw it as conclusive proof that technology – in the shape of the anti-tank or anti-aircraft missile – had come of age. They claimed, somewhat hastily, that new machinery had at last blunted the supposed offensive power of the tank and the aeroplane. Weapons for which their manufacturers claimed a ‘one shot kill’ capability had apparently managed to overcome air and armoured assaults in the same way that the Maxim gun had overcome the assaults of unarmoured infantrymen in 1915. The power of electronic science, it seemed, had asserted its capacity to dominate ground of tactical importance.

  When the Syrians stormed the Golan Heights at the start of the war, for example, they were covered by an anti-aircraft screen which succeeded in shooting down about forty Israeli planes within the first two days. In the Sinai, equally, the Egyptians established a screen of anti-tank missiles around their bridgeheads which defeated all the early armoured counter-attacks against them. On one notable occasion the best part of an Israeli tank battalion was destroyed in a very few minutes and its commander carried as a prisoner to Cairo. It was feats such as these which made a great impression on the wor
ld’s press.

  On closer examination, however, it was found that the new missiles had actually been much less effective than these results would suggest. Far from being ‘one shot kill’ weapons, they turned out to require multiple firings to destroy their target – and in the case of one famous type of anti-aircraft missile no less than 5,000 rounds were fired to achieve the destruction of only four aircraft. In the tank battle, too, there were numerous stories of tanks coming unscathed from combat with veritable ‘cat’s cradles’ of guidance wires draped around their turrets from missiles which had flown high. Apart from the inherent unreliability of the new missile weapons, it was found that a wide range of counter-measures could be employed against them. As war continued the effectiveness of missiles dropped away dramatically, and more traditional weapons came to the fore. Against aircraft the greatest successes were scored by multiple heavy machine-guns. Against tanks the bazooka and the tank gun itself did much more damage than all the missiles put together.3

  Just as in the Second World War, tank commanders came to realise that they could not move forward without the close support of infantry, artillery and other arms. Before 1973 the Israeli tank corps had confidently relegated all other arms to a subordinate role; but now they were forced to reconsider this doctrine overnight. As at Alamein, it was found that the open desert terrain could be held by a relatively few defenders against all but the most methodical and well co-ordinated attacks. Far from representing a technological break-through, the October War soon began to look like a re-affirmation of past lessons.

  The Israeli army next went into action in 1982 in ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’, fought in a Lebanon where there had not been, and would not be, peace. An extensive attempt was made to apply the lessons of 1973, especially insofar as there was now much more inter-arm co-operation and a greatly expanded artillery. There was close infantry support for the tanks, and a willingness to use ‘prophylactic firepower’ against potential sources of anti-tank missiles or rockets. Technology was certainly harnessed with gusto, including sophisticated electronic warfare in the air, realtime RPV surveillance in the ground battle, much increased use of anti-tank helicopters, and a new Merkava tank with reactive armour and innovative systems to damp down internal fires. The Israelis lost only one aircraft, two helicopters and some 50 tanks, but sliced through the Syrian and PLO forces in short order, destroying 86 aircraft, all the air defences, and some 350 tanks including nine of the widely-feared Soviet T-72s.4

  On the other hand, the Israelis still found they were short of infantry, and were unprepared for some of the conditions they encountered. Beirut offered the prospect of fighting for a city, for which they had as little previous experience as had those other exponents of rapid armoured manoeuvres – the Germans when they first approached Stalingrad in 1942. In 1982 the Israelis chose not to repeat Paulus’ mistake, although by merely sitting back and using artillery they achieved little beyond attracting international odium. Nor were they fitted for the counter-insurgency warfare which followed. Prophylactic firepower is not an appropriate weapon for winning hearts and minds in built-up areas, and conscript soldiers trained for la grande guerre do not convert easily to the subtleties of peace-keeping.5

  If the stresses of fighting in populated areas were new to the Israelis in 1982, there had also been some severe psychological tensions in 1973. The wide dispersion of the defending force and the very long engagement ranges (in daylight at least) threw individuals back, once again, on their own resources. Sometimes under ferociously heavy shelling and often outnumbered by up to ten to one at the point of contact, the soldier felt the strains of battle weighing upon him very heavily indeed. We therefore find that after this war, as after so many others, the tacticians were at pains to stress the importance of finding soldiers of high quality. Realistic training to fit a few picked men for battle was seen as preferable to a system which trained more soldiers less well.6 This idea can scarcely be called revolutionary.

  Nor have different lessons been learned in other recent conflicts. The most celebrated case is the Falklands war of 1982, when the British landing force, consisting of infantry on foot with only relatively light artillery support, defeated twice its own number of dug-in defenders. It won a classic victory for training, unit cohesion and military professionalism, over poor Argentinian leadership and badly-motivated conscript soldiers. Some technological innovations were certainly highlighted by the campaign, such as the significant success of Harrier jump jets firing Sidewinder missiles in air-to-air combat, but generally the striking tactical achievements lay more in the realm of small-unit resilience, responsiveness and determination. Machine gun positions dominating bald hillsides had not cheaply been overrun in Flanders or Normandy during the two world wars, when casualties often reached between 20% and 70% in battalion attacks which ultimately failed. At Goose Green in 1982, however, the 2nd battalion of the Parachute Regiment lost only 52 casualties (i.e. 11% of its strength) in an utterly successful 36-hour ‘battle of annihilation’ against twice its own numbers backed up in depth positions.7

  The Falklands may perhaps be dismissed as too much of an ‘air and naval’8 or ‘limited’ war, with opponents too unequally matched to make a ‘fair’ or ‘representative’ fight. However that may be – and the calculus soon becomes bizarre – it scarcely featured a major clash of armour and helicopters. The Iran-Iraq Gulf War, in contrast, did see this on a large scale. So evenly matched were the combatants, furthermore, that for almost nine years neither one of them could push its offensives home, and a peace of exhaustion finally had to be declared. For the Iraquis there was the frustration of finding that their initial lightning all-arms thrust could be stopped in its tracks by determined militia deployed in depth. For the Iranians there was a repeated failure to launch a successful counter-attack, despite great advantages of numbers. By the end of the war they are estimated to have lost something like a million dead, mostly concentrated on a battle front little more than a hundred miles long.

  The war was one of attrition and fixed fortification, where the use of earth-moving equipment took on an enormous importance in the flat and featureless landscape. It was not entirely a static war, however, since relatively small numbers of well-trained and well-equipped Iraqui defenders were often able to use skilful manoeuvres to contain, counterattack and destroy large Iranian assaults. Used in mass, the helicopter came into its own as a mobile ‘fire brigade’ force that could rush to a threatened point and blunt the onslaught. Admittedly, the terrain was exceptionally inhospitable for the attacker, whose mix of weapons and training also usually left much to be desired: nevertheless, professionalism in husbanding scarce resources was a central feature in Iraqui survival.9

  The Gulf War confirmed the lessons of other recent conflicts insofar as it showed the enormous logistic strain imposed by modern operations, no less than the difficulties of penetrating a prepared belt of defences using troops of less than excellent quality. In Afghanistan the hardy mujahadin encountered similar frustrations in their own assaults, although their mountain strongholds proved inaccessible, in turn, to the road-bound Russians – apart from specialist units of commandos with helicopters. Just as the Gulf War reproduced the attrition of the trenchlock on the Western Front, so the Afghan war reproduced the attrition of Vietnam. Ancient military values re-emerged as important as ever, and modern technology could never provide more than a part of the answer.

  The non-appearance of a true revolution in tactics should not by now surprise us, since we have already found several other supposed tactical ‘revolutions’ which turned out to be nothing of the kind. We have also seen many cases of bright new technology failing to deliver what it promised, and the decision reverting to the quality of individual troops. To that extent the October, Gulf and Lebanese Campaigns fit easily into the pattern established in the past. If we consider the ranges of engagement in open terrain, on the other hand, we do find one significantly new feature which seemed to be emerging. Put simply,
we find that in these wars there was astonishingly little close combat.

  The prevention of close combat, however, has always been one of the primary functions of weaponry. By killing the enemy at a distance and in numbers one is able to put off the sickening moment of personal confrontation face-to-face. One can limit one’s personal exposure to danger and decrease the effect of chance upon the outcome. Instead of plunging into a roughly even contest of man against man, the warrior with the long range weapon can hover tentatively around the perimeter of the fighting. He keeps open the option of flight, or at least that of personal protection.

  To this extent improvements in weaponry tend to limit the intensity of the fighting rather than to increase it, and it is a remarkable paradox that the practical lethality of weapons has actually fallen away sharply over the past two centuries. In Napoleonic battles it was calculated that about three to five hundred shots had to be fired for each hit on an enemy soldier, whereas in the Manchurian war the number was nearer 20,000 shots, and in Vietnam around 600,000. In terms of Israeli history we find that in the highly mechanised fighting of 1973 and 1982 they suffered many fewer casualties than they had in the purely infantry battles of 1948. On the latter occasion the two sides did not have the heavy weapons which might have kept them safely apart, so they were forced to enter the dangerous and unpredictable business of close quarter combat.

  When measured by the rate of casualties, battle in general has become less and less intense as weapons improve. Napoleonic soldiers might manoeuvre for weeks or months before fighting for only a few hours; but when they did fight it was not abnormal for armies to suffer 20–30% casualties, and regiments at the spearhead to suffer 70–80%. The combined casualties of the two sides engaged at Waterloo were some 68,000 and at Borodino 75,000, each in a space of twelve hours. In the four-day battle of Leipzig there were 127,000 casualties, or 32,000 per day. As weapons improved, however, the rate of losses started to decline. In ‘America’s bloodiest day’ at Antietam, 1862, the combined total loss was 26,000 in twelve hours; at Gettysburg, 1863, it was 43,000 in three days, or 14,000 per day; at Mars-la-Tour/Gravelotte in 1870 it was something like 66,000 in a three-day episode, or 22,000 per day.10