Isegoria

Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations starts with “the Age of Fighting Sail”:

Since it was natural for sailing ships to fire abeam, the practice of positioning ships in a straight line in order to fight an enemy was entirely logical for that day. At the same time, because the admiral’s signal flags—then the only effective way of communicating orders within a squadron or fleet—were difficult to see for vessels arrayed in a single line, command-and-control was more reliable if the admiral placed his flagship in the center of the column.

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His objective was to bring all of his force against the enemy, “well ordered, well knit, and simultaneously,” and with no unengaged reserve. Training at sea improved captains’ seamanship skills, enabling fleet commanders to place a tightly spaced column alongside a raggedly disposed enemy line—a step that could significantly bolster the squadron’s collective firepower, especially in cases where enemy ships were spread thinly or where they overlapped and masked each other’s fire.

Indeed, it took skillful seamanship to bring the firepower of even two ships simultaneously against a single enemy. To be fully effective, guns had to be well within three hundred yards of the enemy, firing essentially at point-blank range. The maximum significant range for naval guns was eight hundred or nine hundred yards; beyond this the probability of hitting the enemy was remote and round-shot would barely be able to penetrate a hull. The firing arcs of broadsides were limited to about 25 degrees forward and aft of the beam. Training a gun was a slow and awkward process, so that, by and large, it was easier to train a ship’s guns by maneuvering the ship herself than by trying to turn her cannon to one side or another. As a result, it was rare for two consecutive ships in a column to enjoy the advantage of directing fully effective fire at a single enemy simultaneously.

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The most effective method of massing force and increasing the density of firepower was to stack cannon vertically—hence the logic of building two-deckers and three-deckers.

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In 1697 the highly respected Jesuit priest and French naval tactician Paul Hoste would write that the size of vessels contributed more than numbers to the strength of the fleet. Hoste cited two reasons—first, that larger ships had more and heavier guns, and, second, that a fleet of large ships would bring more and larger guns to bear in the same length as a column made up of smaller ships that were spaced more closely together.

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From combat experience the two-decker was known to have more than a two-to-one advantage over a single-decker (which later would be known as a frigate).

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Barring a lucky shot that landed in a magazine, ships were not often sunk by gunfire (although they later sank from hull damage, which is a separate issue). Ships were defeated by what today we would refer to as a firepower kill—by knocking out their guns and gunners and crushing the ships’ morale and their will to fight. As many ships were captured as were sunk. Since British seamen fought better and French ships had excellent sailing qualities, many of the ships sailing in the Royal Navy were rehabilitated French vessels.

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According to the computation, with simple continuous fire on both sides and no hull strength advantage for either, the two-decker would lose only five guns, at the same time destroying the frigate’s entire broadside of eighteen.

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If a two-decked seventy-four were matched against a three-decker rated at one hundred guns, then, using the same model and assumptions as before, the two-decker would be forced to capitulate before the three-decker had lost twenty guns.

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Admirals also learned, however, that keeping a close interval between ships could provide them with increased mutual support, so the distance specified in their Fighting Instructions could be almost unattainably short—as little as three ship lengths between vessels.

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A second reason for tight spacing was to prevent an enemy from breaking through the column and raking ships on either side with entire broadsides at pointblank range, and from an angle where the target ship was unable to return the fire.

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As a result, the tactician’s primary problem during this era was to concentrate firepower at sea at a time when effective gun range was very short—less than five hundred yards.

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The eighteenth-century French were such a reluctant enemy. Seeking to avoid a decisive action, they concentrated on improving their accuracy instead of on increasing the volume of their fire, arming their ships with more long-range guns, positioning themselves to leeward, and firing high into the rigging to cripple English ships, forcing them to slow, drop back, and weaken the line.

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Nelson stands out in memory because the Battle of Trafalgar, fought on 21 October 1805, was the last big fleet action for more than a century. Yet, his fame does not rest on an accident of history. The reason that there were no more fleet actions was that Nelson did what no one else had been able to do: he eliminated the enemy fleet, ending the need for further fleet actions and setting the stage for a hundred years of British naval dominance.

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The order of sailing will be the order of battle, he said. This notion, now a pertinent watchword for a modern fleet, was a stunning innovation in 1805.

One can learn the wrong lesson from Trafalgar. Had Nelson used his Trafalgar tactics against, say, Dutch Admirals Maarten H. Tromp or Michiel de Ruyter or France’s de Suffren, the result would have been disastrous. Every one of his ships in those light winds of October had to run a gauntlet of three or four unanswered broadsides, which would have guaranteed his defeat had his opponent been firstrate.

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For the Dutch, commerce via the English Channel was survival. With it they would prosper; without it they would wither into nothing. Neither side could decline battle and still achieve its purpose in the war. It either built up its navy and fought, or made peace and lost its objective. The wars had limited objectives, so the winner could indeed anticipate a net financial gain and the loser could anticipate financial and national ruin. As a result, the motivation to fight and fight to win was strong.

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It suited France’s strategic objectives to decline to engage in a decisive battle. For the French, the ocean was a flank to be held while the decision was fought out on land. Whenever they believed their war aim would be determined on land, they adopted one of two naval strategies: they either would maintain a substantial fleet to divert the British navy (not always successfully) and look for opportunities to do so, or they would conduct a guerre de course, raiding commerce in hopes of achieving a moderate gain at little cost.

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When the Royal Navy learned how to close and fight a decisive battle, the French, who wished to avoid fighting, were devastated tactically and therefore were severely hampered strategically.

Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations explains how naval combat differs from land combat:

For example, journalists who observed British and Argentine ships being sunk during the South Atlantic War of 1982 predicted there would be a dire future for surface warships because they had no knowledge of how deadly naval battles have been in the past.

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An abiding success has been our adoption of the inelegant turn-of-phrase as our central maxim of naval tactics, “Attack effectively first.” It has proven to be accurate, enduring, and much quoted.

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Another source of confusion is that substantial portions of modern “fleets” are land based. Much of the Soviet navy was made up of long-range bombers and missiles tasked with sinking American warships and shipping. The Chinese navy increasingly relies on those weapons as well.

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Prominent among the terms used here is scouting, which means reconnaissance, surveillance, code-breaking, and all other ways to obtain and report combat information to commanders and their forces. For all practical purposes the Russian word razvedka means the same thing. Screening, another navy word of distinguished lineage, is very similar to antiscouting, but screening includes the possibility of attacking a threatening enemy.

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Since a great constant of tactics is that there is never enough scouting capacity, these are some of a tactical commander’s most critical decisions.

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This volume uses the word littorals to describe “where the clutter is”—first, the sea side of the littoral, where islands and inlets, shoals and shallows, oil drilling rigs, commercial air traffic, coastal shipping and fishing, and electronic transmissions of many kinds abound to complicate combat tactics; and, second, the land side, where airfields, missile-launch sites, electronic detection systems, and dense populations complicate coastal warfare.

Technological advances have extended the lethal ranges of missiles, aircraft, and unmanned systems; and satellites or over-the-horizon radars now extend detection well beyond the clutter into blue water.

In narrow waterways such as the Skagerrak Strait, Taiwan Strait, Dardanelles, Strait of Hormuz, and the Bab el Mandeb, the littoral extends from coast to coast.

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The commercial airways of sea and land and radio broadcasts add to the clutter. Shoals and shallows affect underwater operations. A major factor in planning is the existence of so-called “moving clutter,” such as commercial ships and aircraft that are either transiting or operating in the region. In July 1988 the USS Vincennes (CG 49) mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner in the belief that the plane was an attacking jet fighter. Again, in the confined Arabian Gulf during operations preparatory to Desert Storm, Iraqi ground forces fired two Silkworm missiles at the USS Missouri (BB 63), which was shooting 16-inch shells at Iraqi coastal emplacements. Although the Missouri was eighteen miles to seaward no U.S. escort vessel got off a shot, partly because in the coastal clutter that filled the area the Navy ships wanted to be sure they were not shooting at an innocent aircraft.

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One may infer what it takes to win a battle from ADM Arleigh Burke’s often quoted words: “The difference between a good officer and a poor one is about ten seconds.”

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Leadership, morale, training, physical and mental conditioning, willpower, and endurance are the most important elements in warfare.

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Sailors matter most.

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Doctrine is the companion and instrument of good leadership.

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The nineteenth-century Prussian army leader Helmuth von Moltke said, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Nelson understood as well as anyone that doctrine is the glue of good tactics.

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Tactical and technological developments are so intertwined as to be inseparable. That is why ADM Alfred Thayer Mahan, USN, rejected (rather too readily) the constants of tactics while promoting the principles of strategy.

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To know tactics, you must know weapons.

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The seat of purpose is on the land.

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“A ship’s a fool to fight a fort.”

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The tactical maxim of all naval battles is: attack effectively first.

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There is no way to judge Napoleon’s assertion that “the morale is to the material as three is to one.” Although that may be true in ground combat, the ratio in naval warfare is probably narrower because in ships at sea the crews must go where the leaders go.

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Superior tactics may tip the balance, but in the latter stages of a long war the wit and ingenuity required for such tactics ultimately are overshadowed by sheer grit.

At sea the predominance of attrition over maneuver is a theme so basic that it runs throughout this book. Forces at sea are not broken by encirclement; they are broken by destruction. Over the years naval strategists have been careful about committing their forces to battle at sea because of its awesome destructiveness. Compared with land warfare, major sea battles have been few and far between. Partly this is because the estimation of material superiority is relatively easier to gauge at sea than ashore, and strategists in an inferior navy have tended to avoid battle until the jugular vein was threatened.

As a result, a superior navy with a modest force advantage often has been able to contain and neutralize a strong enemy and carry out many strategic objectives without fighting—up to a point. Considering the death and destruction wrought by naval warfare, it may be that the very decisiveness of battle at sea, which so often leads tacticians to try to avoid it, is actually a virtue for which the civilized world can be grateful.

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Doctrine is the commanders’ way of controlling their forces in writing before military action.

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Two points about doctrine must be remembered—that it is vital and that it must not become dogmatic.

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To a person, strong military leaders want freedom for initiative from their seniors and reliability from their juniors. Doctrine in the hands of able commanders will, at its most sublime, allow the achievement of both these things.

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The clearest evidence of doctrinal deficiency is too much communication—reams of orders and directives that in the planning stage are little more than generalities and exhortations, and which defer too much to the moment of decision.

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Doctrine is the basis for training and for measuring what training standards should achieve.

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Doctrine provides continuity of operations when captains are transferred or killed.

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Tactical doctrine is the standard operating procedure that the creative commander adapts to the exigencies of battle.

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Paradoxically, doctrine generates initiative: a trained subordinate can see from it not only what will be done but what will not be done and will know—as Nelson did at Cape St. Vincent—how to save the battle.

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These two facts are universally recognized: that continual advances in technology keep weapons in a state of change, and that tactics must be designed to fit the capabilities of contemporary weapons. The U.S. Navy in particular has been fascinated with hardware, esteems technical competence, and is prone to trying to overcome its tactical deficiencies with engineering improvements. Indeed, there are officers in peacetime who regard the official statement of a requirement for a new piece of hardware as the end of their responsibility in correcting a current operational deficiency. This is a trap. Former Atlantic Fleet commander ADM Isaac Kidd Jr. was always a champion of the need to be prepared to fight with what you have. And no wonder: his father died fighting in the USS Arizona (BB 39) at Pearl Harbor.

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Our ablest naval officers were tacticians who knew their technology. RADM William S. Sims, with his continuous-aim fire; RADM Bradley A. Fiske, with his host of patents, including one for aerial-torpedo-release gear, before aircraft were even capable of lifting a torpedo payload; and RADM William A. Moffett and other early aviators who foresaw the day when naval aircraft would be potent ship-killers and who helped develop bigger engines, better navigating equipment, and carrier arresting gear—all machinery to fulfill their visions.

The great historian of the Civil War, Douglas Southall Freeman, condensed the ten commandments of warfare into three: “Know your stuff; be a man; and look after your men.”

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But what is true in ground combat, where machines serve human beings, is magnified at sea, where human beings serve machines.

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For one thing, the study of maritime history shows that fleet battles have been rare; once again, the most common use of navies has been for the landing of ground forces, the support of operations ashore, and the protection of shipping at sea.

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The reason a fleet did not choose to fight protected land batteries toe-to-toe was well expressed by a man who ought to have known—John Ericsson, the designer of the armored Civil War ship Monitor. “A single shot can sink a ship,” he said, “while a hundred salvos cannot silence a fort.”

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When guns had far shorter ranges than they do today, a fleet could risk a run past to get beyond them. The gauntlet of fire usually was short enough to endure—if the reward were worth the price. The American Civil War is full of examples of subtlety and brute force, of success and failure. The many Union fleet engagements with fortifications along the Confederate coast and western rivers show that victory was difficult to achieve, and that it depended on preparation, choice of the moment, and well-coordinated execution, often in cooperation with land forces.

Strange to say, after the range of cannon had increased substantially, large guns ashore were no longer the sort of “forts” that frightened battleship captains the most. In World War I torpedo boats, minefields, and submarines held the Royal Navy at bay. In that conflict and again in World War II, the narrow waterways of the English Channel and North Sea were the domain of a flotilla of many small combatants. The flotilla threatened (yet could not stop) coastal shipping, dropped off spies and raiders, and rescued pilots who bailed out over water.

In missions involving an attack on a fleet that was anchored in a protected port, many commanders chose to approach from the rear. That was the tactical plan at Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War, Santiago in the Spanish-American War, and Singapore in World War II. The attackers landed ground troops against weak opposition and away from the center of gravity—the harbor—so that it could be overwhelmed by land, though sometimes at considerable cost, lives and time required. At Guadalcanal, where the airfield was still under construction and not yet operating, the American Navy was able to put the Marines so close to land that the leathernecks could walk ashore.

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In the battle over the Falklands, when the British were planning for their own amphibious landing, they saw that the islands covered enough real estate to ensure that their ground forces could get ashore at San Carlos Sound, remote from Stanley, banking on the navy’s mobility to help surprise the Argentine forces.

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In the few times when the opposition was weak and Marine Corps losses light, Nimitz used the Navy’s mobility to strike across vast distances before the Japanese could prepare a fortified response. A second advantage—and offsetting the punishment to an opposed assault—was that the tactic isolated the defenders so they could not be reinforced.

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GEN Douglas MacArthur’s long strides up the New Guinea coast are often cited for skill at maneuver warfare and his landing against weak opposition at Inchon is regarded as a masterpiece almost without parallel. This is the essence of operational maneuver from the sea and its latest Marine Corps manifestation, ship-to-objective maneuver.

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In World War II, carrier air strikes greatly increased the Navy’s potency from the sea. The British attack on the Italian fleet at Taranto in 1940 and the Japanese destruction of American battleships at Pearl Harbor a year later were precursors of crushing attacks by American airmen during the remainder of the war. U.S. carrier strikes against the air bases and ships at Pacific islands such as Truk and Rabaul were spectacular successes because a fleet of aircraft carriers could run in at twenty-five knots under cover of darkness to surprise the unalerted—and immobile—defenders. But it was not until October 1944 that the American Third Fleet and Fifth Fleet were strong and supple enough to begin in-and-out raids against the large airfield complexes of Formosa and Japan. These were land bastions indeed. When the fleet came and stayed—in support of the landing and of extensive ground campaigns in the Philippines and Okinawa—it relearned the hard lesson that when ships fight forts (in this case “forts” in the form of kamikazes), the ships will suffer again as they have in the past.

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The rule for ships is to move and hit from a place where a fort cannot hit back. If a “fort” is weak—whatever its composition—then crush it; if it is strong, avoid it. If a fortification itself is the center of gravity and is too resilient to be put permanently out of action from the sea—for instance, enemy bases, sensors, and a command-and-control system—then commanders should use the operational mobility that ships provide to gain a foothold ashore and then deploy Marines or special forces to attack the fortification from its metaphorical rear. If all these choices are foreclosed and the reward is worth the punishment, then mass against it in overwhelming numbers, assault it, and face the bloody consequences. Play the fool and fight the fort!

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At sea there is no high ground, no river barrier, no concealment in forests that requires what is often used as a rule of thumb on land, a three-to-one preponderance of force to attack a prepared position. As others have said, battle at sea and conflict in the open desert have much in common. Sun, wind, and sea state all affect naval tactics, but not to the extent that terrain affects ground combat. It is because of this that attacking has not carried the penalty at sea that is imposed ashore. Over the course of history, the central problem of naval tactics has been to attack effectively—that is to say, to bring the firepower of the whole force into battle simultaneously.

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Since the range of action of carrier-based aircraft on both sides was comparable in 1942, the side with superior reconnaissance and intelligence—in other words, better scouting—was the one that launched the first effective attack.

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Effective fusion of reconnaissance, surveillance, and intelligence information is so important that it must receive the same emphasis as the delivery of firepower. Contrarily, obstructing the enemy’s scouting by cover, deception, confusion, or distraction merits enormous attention, for successful scouting and screening are relative to each other and are a matter of timeliness.

The finest young battalion and company officers that S.L.A. Marshall knew, he explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation) were men of this type:

They were sedulous in planning and preparation. They made their dispositions painstakingly. They insisted on personal reconnaissance to a point where it nettled their subordinates. Thus they had at all times the feel of their own situation, which is half of the battle. But at the opportune moment they were ready to shoot the works.

Knowing is half the battle. The other half is extreme violence.

S.L.A. Marshall explains modern supply chains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation) in 1950:

The greater becomes the mobility and carrying capacity of an army’s transport system, the stronger becomes the necessity for keeping the supply system fluid, for reducing surpluses all along the line from the factory to the front, and for G-4′s learning to sleep without dreaming of disaster because he has no strategic reserve.

In industry or in military organization, what is the final justification for putting more money into an improved transportation system? Simply that it is the best way to forestall the waste that comes of warehousing, stockpiling and deterioration of goods. To develop yet greater road speed and dependability in military transport serves a valid strategic purpose only in the measure that it enables us to reduce the supply burden. It simply defeats its own ends if it finally builds up supply volume until it chokes movement and drains the fighting line of needed manpower. Tactical strength depends on fighting power based on freedom to supply the combat troops. But oversupply will as surely stifle that freedom as overproduction will impair the prosperity of a civilian economy.

Only the matériel moved and used contributes to success in war. That which remains stored is a gift to the enemy.

He then veers into what’s coming militarily:

Highly mobile advanced bases, field bases that scarcely need to resort to dumping, ports that measure their capacity in the speed of the tum-around of the carriers in both directions, maintenance crews as adept with a Tommy gun as with a grease gun-these things mean the kind of strategic mobility the future requires.

It is said that we are entering an era of area warfare, and that at last the old alignments are gone forever. Fronts may be anywhere; guerrilla warfare will be the normal order. Any link in the communications zone will be in danger of being overrun.

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The more fluid the form of war, the more necessary it is for flexibility to be the main characteristic both of the machinery and the lrainiPg doctrine. That is the logical counter to the increased range and killing power of today’s decisive weapons. As the threat rises against all rear installations, wholly new requirements will be imposed on military organization. And chief among them that all soldiers be trained for fighting — that the rear be supplied with mobile counteroffensive power — and that the structure of the rear avoid massiveness, and acquire a new mobility.

With the coming of the Age of Motor Vehicles
Unlimited, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation), the pressing danger of supply shortage was exchanged for the evil of a continuing glut of supply:

Reversing the tale of the hoopsnake, the tail of the army began to swallow the head.

More mobile capacity meant that more supply could go forward more rapidly to troops-or so it seemed. But the end of it was that there were fewer troops in the combat area, and more vehicles had to be brought in to move greater quantities of supplies to the ever-increasing number of soldiers cluttering up the rear.

And by the hundreds of thousands these men felt more or less clearly that the duties they were doing, the time they were marking, wasn’t even incidental to the prosecution of the war, with the result that many became unwilling and malcontent.

So Special Services was brought in to relieve these men from boredom. But to make that possible came more troops, more supply, more vehicles to move the supply, more crews to maintain the vehicles-’and still more men to get bored. The net effect was to drain fighting power away from the force as a whole, not only through sapping its moral strength, but assigning tens of thousands of men — enough to have made a national combat reserve — to unnecessary duties in the rear areas.

On December 1, 1945, near midnight, I stopped to talk to a Negro sentry who was walking post around a mountainous dump of medical supplies at Carentan, France, a few minutes’ drive from Utah Beach. I asked him how long the dump had been there. “Since three weeks after the invasion.” How long had he been doing guard duty at this point? “Since three weeks after the invasion.” Had anything been removed from the pile in that time? “Maybe, but it was so long ago that I’ve forgotten.”

And there he was, one poor soldier who had started walking around a pile of pills and bandages while the war was still within hearing distance. And he had kept
on walking around it for a full year and a half-till long after the guns had at last gone silent on the plains of Bohemia.

S.L.A. Marshall decried (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation) the senseless competition between the armed services in arranging special privileges and comforts for their separate forces when engaged in joint operations:

Consider what happened all too frequently in Pacific operations during World War II! The Army went ashore relatively light even when setting up a garrison operation. Because of the shortage of shipping space the men slept on the ground, with a blanket or so and a shelter half; they cut foliage for bedding. This would all have been tolerable if a Navy or Seabee unit had not set up next door with cots for sleeping, good housing and a ship’s store, complete with free beer. (Though it may have happened the other way, with the Navy taking the spitty end of the stick, I never heard of it.) The soldier compared his own lack of luxury and skinned-down installations with the luck of the people next door. The result was the demoralization of the service which felt itself discriminated against by higher authority, and forced by the country to suffer unnecessary hardship. In the beginning the Army had stuck to the policy of shipping luxury goods only when there was stowage space beyond that required for essential military cargo. It was soon compelled to depart from this sound principle and give shipping priority to welfare goods. The load continued to increase as one service vied with another in trying to make its men feel especially favored. That we did not pay an exorbitant price for this encumbering weight was only because we were meeting an enemy already short of shipping and other resources.

ln our times, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation), “we have permitted military thinking to become clouded by what social workers, psychiatrists, business counsel, public-relations advisers and morale experts have to say about what is proper in an army organized according to American standards, meaning the standards which are upheld in American institutions of a quite different nature”:

The military leader has become an unhappy worrier, confused and buffeted between rival groups of medicine men, each vending some special magic. He is told that a new order has arisen, that the rising generation is somehow different, that industrial change has revolutionized the military problem, that how he is presented to the public cuts more ice than what he really is and how he thinks, and that modern science and business methodology can rub a lamp and come up with the perfect answer to every age-old military problem.

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From the viewpoint of the businessman, and of his particular friends in political life, the wartime Army is a great business institution, and a shining mark for the sale of any product which can be given even the pale shadow of a legitimate purpose. They press upon command to accept all manner of things which it would not normally consider. Public sentiment — “nothing is too good for the boys” — moves in the same direction. That these pressures are hard to resist is well understood by everyone who was familiar with the World War II atmosphere in Washington. That they are ever likely to become less is a wishful thought hardly sustained by the passage of postwar events.

On the day before the Third Army was to attack into Brittany, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation), General Patton was visited by Generals Lord, Stratton, and Eyster of Communications Zone:

They wanted to know how he was set as to supply and what he would expect of the rear establishment. He said, “Gentlemen, I’ve got three days of POL, ammunition and food. That’s all we need for the start. It’s up to you back there to get the rest of it up to me.” He then outlined the operation as he expected it to develop. Brittany was to be cut off. One flank was to turn toward Brest, and the other was to advance on and over the Loire River. In short, he foresaw that his army would be in continuous motion for at least three weeks. The records show that he made the shot just about as he called it. His critics sometimes say of Patton that he did not know logistics and that this was his handicap. That is at best a negative truth. What he didn’t know about the supply problem never slowed the movement of his armies. He respected the controlling principle. He would not overload his own forces. He demanded all the support that could be had from those who were in position to help them along. He may have missed a tree here and there but he kept his eyes on the forest.

While the supply discipline of the United States Army is regulated by the pressure to give troops all the comforts the middle-class American has learned to expect, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation), the Russian Army, composed of men who have lived hard in their civilian environment, can operate in war on a minimum subsistence level without making its people feel abused:

As the Quartermaster General M. F. Kerner has pointed out, this means that the Communists have a relatively simple logistical problem,_ despite that we commonly think of the tran::portation of supply as being the weak link in the Soviet military system.

Many of Kerner’s revelations about how they improvise in the supply and technical field are highly significant. He continues:

“In my own experience I almost never saw a Russian military truck driver with the equipment to repair his tires. Hundreds of times I have watched these drivers patch up their punctures with the help of an empty oil can, a piece of crude rubber and the help of a heavy stone from the roadside. Piercing the upper part of the can, they filled the bottom with gasoline. Then they cleaned the tire tube, laid the crude rubber patch over the hole, and placed the stone on top. By setting fire to the gasoline, the patch was vulcanized to the tube in ten minutes.

“Fuel for the tanks was usually stored in huge cast-iron drums on trailers attached to the tanks and kept rolling along behind.

“When a tank was out of order, the troops improvised a repair shop in the forest by felling three trees, trimming their branches, and arranging them crosswise to make a lever for lifting the motor or any heavy part of the tank. Bridges were made entirely of timber. If the region was wooded, horses and oxen from local farms were commandeered to transport the trees; if there were no woods, the nearest wooden structure, whether a private home or a public building, was demolished and used for lumber.

“Russian engineers were trained in time of peace to construct wooden bridges, even massive bridges as high as 30 feet, such as those over the Don and Rivers. In the exigency of war, these engineers could put up a bridge with no other tools than axes, hammers and clamps.

“Every army has a system of priorities for supplying its fighting troops. But Soviet transportation, controlled entirely from a central office in Moscow, had a system of such sharp penalties inflicted for minor negligence that a small delay in loading and unloading operations was treated as a serious transgression. The personnel of all forms of transportation came under the jurisdiction of military tribunals which performed their duties right at the front, often trying and sentencing the offender within 24 hours of his dereliction.

“Staff training consists, as far as possible, in practice rather than in theory. During the war, military trainees had to study the current battles, analyze the mistakes made, and even visit the front to accustom themselves to actual combat. All branches of the army, including medical personnel and quartermaster corps underwent this same training.

“Little mail was transported to the front. A dilapidated three-to-four ton truck, no longer useful for priority materiel, sufficed to take care of the mail for a whole division. It was generally accepted as a mere weakness for the soldier at the front to want news of home, and the men were discouraged from writing. As in all other matters concerning the individual, the Russian soldier’s feelings were of no consequence.

“Their success with logistics, in sum, is due not to extraordinary skill and efficiency, hut rather to an endless ability to forage for themselves, to withstand the onslaught of the elements and to make do with whatever comes to hand.”

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This is what [a German general] said: “The Russian will not be held back by terrain normally considered impassable. That was where we made some of our early mistakes. Gradually we learned that it was in just such places that his appearance, and probably his attack, was to be expected. The Russian infantryman could not only overcome terrain difficulties but was able to do so very quickly. Miles of corduroy road were laid through swamp within a few days. Beaten tracks appeared through forest covered in deep snow. Ten men abreast with arms joined, in ranks 100 deep, prepared these routes in 15-minute reliefs of 1,000 men each. Following this human snowplow, guns and other heavy weapons were dragged to wherever they were needed by other teams of infantrymen. During winter, snow caves which could be heated were built to provide overnight shelter for men and horses. Motorization was reduced to an absolute minimum, only the lightest vehicles being used. The horses were tough and required little care. The uniforms were suitable but the men were never over-clad. Mobility came of the mass of men which moved all loads, doing the work of machines when machines would no longer work.”

Overloading has always been the curse of
armies, S.L.A. Marshall explains (in The Soldier’s Load and the Mobilty of a Nation):

Today we stagger along under a burden of soft drink machines, mammy singers and lollypops. In Wellington’s time, it was the soldiers’ wives and the regimental women which hindered movement.

While a prisoner in Srain, Baron Lejuene penned this arresting picture of military impedimenta in his time:

“First came the captain in his scarlet uniform, mounted on a very fine horse and carrying a big open parasol.

“Then came his wife in a pretty costume, with a very small straw hat, seated on a mule, holding up an umbrella and caressing a little black and tan King Charles spaniel on her knee, whilst she led by a blue ribbon a tame goat, which was to supfly her night and morning with cream for her cup o tea.

“Beside madam walked an Irish nurse, carrying slung across her shoulder a bassinet made of green silk, in which reposed an infant, the hope of the family.

“Behind madam’s mule stalked a huge grenadier, the faithful servant of the captain, with his musket over his shoulder, urging on with a stick the long-eared steed of his mistress.

“Behind him again came a donkey laden with the voluminous baggage of the family, surmounted by a tea-kettle and a cage full of canaries, whilst a jockey or groom in livery brought up the rear, mounted on a sturdy English horse, with its hide gleaming like polished steel. This groom held a huge posting whip in one hand, the cracking of the lash of which made the donkey mend its pace, and at the same time kept order among the four or five spaniels and greyhounds which served as scouts to the captain during the march of his small cavalcade.”