Isegoria

The War in Ukraine, Edward Luttwak notes, is a war that must be fought by sheer, grinding, attrition, just like the First World War on the Western Front, with almost none of the maneuver warfare exploits that made celebrities of Guderian, Rommel, Patton, and Rokossovsky in the Second World War, and Arik Sharon in 1967 and 1973:

All those masters of war won disproportionate victories with surprise offensives. Arriving in fast-moving columns, their forces greatly outnumbered and overwhelmed a specific sector, while the bulk of the enemy, distributed across an entire front, could not intervene in time.

In other words, “manoeuvre warfare” depends entirely on surprise. Even in the Second World War, there was reliable aerial photography, so that pre-battle concentrations of tanks, trucks and artillery tractors could not escape detection as they gathered over a period of weeks. But once the offensive columns moved, it was hard to keep them under observation, let alone predict their destination. Photography was impeded by night, clouds and enemy fighters, leaving more than enough uncertainty to deceive enemies with decoys, simulated radio traffic, and the false tales of double agents.

This is how it came to be that on D-Day, 6 June 1944, the strongest German Panzer columns ended up being massed behind Calais to face Patton’s fictional First United States Army Group, while the Allies were landing in Normandy 230 miles away. Douglas MacArthur’s Inchon landings in September 1950, which nullified a string of North Korean victories in the preceding months, likewise achieved total surprise by very elaborately simulating a landing at Kunsan, 100 miles to the south.

None of this could happen now. The Americans, Russians and other military powers have observation satellites equipped with synthetic-aperture radars, capable of revealing single tanks, let alone any large grouping of forces, regardless of visibility, while their returns are refreshed often enough to detect troop movements in hours if not in minutes. Any other information drawn from intercepts, aerial reconnaissance or ground observation merely supplements this reliable intelligence. It is enough to make the battlefield transparent and operational surprise impossible, killing off the manoeuvre warfare that can win battles quickly and without mounds of casualties.

In early summer, when the Ukrainians deployed the precious “operational reserve” they had built up, there was no great mystery as to what they would do with it: attack somewhere south of Zaporizhzhia and fight their way down to the Black Sea.

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While the Ukrainians were training and deploying, the Russians south of the Dnipro were digging trench lines shielded by minefields that stretch roughly 625 miles — 185 miles longer than the Western Front at its greatest extent. Napoleon called this style of linear defence a “cordon”, a thick rope made of infantry to hold the enemy along a long front. And, in his own time, he rightly explained why cordons were the stupidest way of defending a front: the enemy would arrive in columns and easily cut through the few troops holding the particular sector they attacked.

But once again the transparent battlefield has changed everything. Watching the Ukrainians advance in real time, the Russians could send their forces to intercept them in equal if not greater numbers. And even if the numbers were equal, the combat would be unequal because the Russians would be shielded by their minefields and by their trenches.

The Stalingrad campaign, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), is one of the most poignant examples ever recorded of a ruler engineering his own destruction:

When the army chief of staff, Franz Halder, protested the self-defeating operations, Hitler removed him. Only in the late stages when the German 6th Army had been isolated and a quarter of a million men were about to be lost was Erich von Manstein able to induce Hitler to grant just enough leeway to keep the entire southern wing of the German army from being destroyed as well.

After Stalingrad, Germany surrendered the initiative in Russia. Hitler never could summon enough strength thereafter to alter the balance of power against him. Despite heroic efforts by his soldiers, he had doomed himself to the slow, inevitable destruction of his army and his regime.

Two elements of the 1942 campaign stand out. First, Hitler committed the oldest and most obvious mistake in warfare: he neglected the principle of concentration and split his efforts between capturing Stalingrad on the Volga River and seizing the oil fields of the Caucasus.

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This brought on the second element of the campaign: Hitler, instead of being satisfied with an advance to the Volga and interdicting traffic on the river, which had been his stated aim, insisted on 6th Army capturing the city itself. This forced it to concentrate in the built-up area at the end of an extremely deep salient, offering the Russians an invitation to lock 6th Army in place by launching a street-by-street urban battle.

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Yet Hitler refused to allow 6th Army to withdraw, and — because he had committed his other forces to the Caucasus — had insufficient troops to strengthen either flank of the salient.

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At every stage Hitler made disastrous decisions — dividing his army in the first place, insisting on seizure of Stalingrad, refusing to allow 6th Army to retreat, failing to go all out to save the army once it had been surrounded, and refusing to heed evidence that the Russians were about to isolate the two army groups in the far south.

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The German army in the east (Ostheer) came out of the winter of 1941–1942 with 2.4 million men on the front, counting replacements, more than 600,000 fewer than had started the campaign in June 1941. The situation was worst among infantrymen, whose numbers had fallen 50 percent in the south and 65 percent in the center and north. This weaker army had to defend a line that, since Hitler prohibited straightening out loops and protuberances, wove in and out for 2,800 miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

The quantity of German weapons was declining as well. Tank production was below 600 units a month. When Halder told Hitler Soviet tank manufacture was more than three times as great, Hitler slammed the table and said it was impossible. “He would not believe what he did not want to believe,” Halder wrote in his diary.

At least the Mark IV tanks had been rearmed with long-barreled high-velocity 75-millimeter guns and could meet the Soviet T-34s on better terms. But nearly a third of the artillery pieces were old French cannons, the number of combat-ready aircraft had fallen to half what it had been in June 1941, while shortages of fuel and ammunition were great and growing.

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Hitler now made an irretrievable error. He had concluded, because of the initial success of the offensive, that Soviet strength had been broken, and diverted Hoth’s 4th Panzer Army south to help Kleist’s 1st Panzer Army cross the lower Don to open a path to the Caucasus.

“It could have taken Stalingrad without a fight at the end of July,” Kleist said after the war. “I did not need its aid, and it merely congested the roads I was using. When it turned north again, a fortnight later, the Russians had gathered sufficient forces at Stalingrad to check it.”

Panzer leader Friedrich-Wilhelm von Mellenthin voiced the opinion of nearly all senior officers in this campaign. When Stalingrad was not taken in the first rush, it should have been shielded with defensive troops and not attacked directly.

“By concentrating his offensive on a great city and resorting to siege warfare,” Mellenthin wrote, “Hitler was playing into the hands of the Russian command. In street warfare the Germans forfeited all their advantages in mobile tactics, while the inadequately trained but supremely dogged Russian infantry were able to exact a heavy toll.”

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In his original plan, Hitler intended four armies to press into the Caucasus, while one went toward Stalingrad. Now three armies marched on Stalingrad — an objective of infinitely less importance than the oil fields — while two armies drove into the Caucasus.

This was lunacy to every professional soldier, and Halder protested to Hitler. But the Fuehrer paid no attention, and also ignored evidence of powerful Soviet formations to the east of the Volga and in the Caucasus.

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General Gustav von Wietersheim, commanding 14th Motorized Corps, watched his strength decline. He recommended that 6th Army be withdrawn to the west bank of the Don, forty-five miles away. The only result was that Hitler removed him because he was “too pessimistic.”

As the German offensives stumbled to a halt, radical changes in leadership came about. On September 10 Hitler relieved List, because his army group had not captured the whole Caucasus. He did not name a successor, and commanded the army group himself in his spare time from supreme headquarters.

Hitler’s long conflict with Halder came to a head. Hitler reproached Halder and the army general staff, calling them cowards and lacking drive. When Halder presented proof of new Soviet formations totaling 1.5 million men north of Stalingrad and half a million in the southern Caucasus, Hitler advanced on him, foaming at the mouth, crying out that he forbade such “idiotic chatter” in his presence.

Halder, who looked and acted like a prim schoolmaster, persisted in explaining what would happen when the new Russian reserve armies attacked the overextended flanks that ran out from the Stalingrad salient. On September 24, Hitler dismissed him.

Hitler said arguments with Halder had cost him half his nervous energy. The army, he said, no longer required technical proficiency. What was needed was the “glow of National Socialist conviction.” He couldn’t expect that from officers of the old German army.

The new chief of staff was Lieutenant General Kurt Zeitzler, a tank expert and man of action. Zeitzler soon took note of the cliques and intrigue in Hitler’s headquarters, became excessively cautious, and did nothing to challenge Hitler’s decision to keep 6th Army at Stalingrad.

Yet, as Field Marshal Manstein wrote: “A far-sighted leader would have realized from the start that to mass the whole of the German assault forces in and around Stalingrad without adequate flank protection placed them in mortal danger of being enveloped as soon as the enemy broke through the adjacent fronts.”

With America’s entry into the war, Hitler had to decide between continuing the attack on the Soviet Union or going on the defensive there, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), and keeping American and British forces away from the continent of Europe:

For Admiral Erich Raeder, the choice was easy. On February 13, 1942, he proposed that Germany’s primary military tasks should be for Rommel to drive through Egypt to the Middle East, while the army in Russia did only two things: capture Murmansk and close that ice-free port to Allied convoys, and drive into the Caucasus to seize Soviet oil wells. After that the way would be clear to cross into Iran, close off that supply line to Russia, and join up with Rommel. Meanwhile, German war production should be shifted over predominately to the navy and air force to build more submarines and other vessels and aircraft to interdict the flow of supplies from America.

Hitler made it clear that he wanted first to destroy the Red Army and eliminate its sources of strength:

After that, other courses might be followed. But for now, the Ostheer — or army in the east — was to receive priority, and the German economy was to be directed at rearming this army, not at building a great U-boat fleet and air force, and not at reinforcing Rommel.

Rommel had learned something the British had not grasped about desert warfare, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), that attrition or wearing down of an enemy force and destruction of the enemy’s organic cohesion had to be the tactical aims:

In other environments where few units were mechanized, like Poland in 1939 and western Europe in 1940, the greatest danger a force could face was being surrounded. When encircled, and subjected to fire from all sides, a force tended to disintegrate, and could be destroyed or forced to surrender.

In the desert, surrounded motorized forces nearly always could mass at a single point and break out, thereby nullifying what elsewhere would be a devastating trap.

Rommel accordingly concentrated on winning battles of attrition and shattering the enemy’s organization. He came up with a five-point method of doing this. A commander, he wrote, must (1) concentrate his forces, while trying to split the enemy forces and destroy them at different times; (2) protect his supply lines, while cutting the enemy’s; (3) attack enemy armor with antitank guns, reserving his own tanks for the final blow; (4) operate near the front so as to make immediate decisions when tactical conditions change; (5) achieve surprise, maintain great speed of movement, and overrun disorganized enemy formations without delay. Speed is everything, Rommel wrote. And, after dislocating the enemy, he must be pursued at once and never be allowed to reorganize.

Rommel had only one “secret” weapon, the 88-millimeter antiaircraft (AA) gun that he and other German generals discovered in the 1940 campaign could blast through 83 millimeters of armor at 2,000 yards. This made the 88 the most formidable antitank weapon on either side. The British had a comparable high-velocity AA gun of about the same caliber (3.7 inches), which could have been as effective, but they did not use it against tanks.

Rommel also had the 50-millimeter antitank (AT) gun, which slowly replaced the poor 37-millimeter gun developed before the war. The 50-millimeter gun could penetrate 50 millimeters of armor at 1,000 yards. Although the Matilda with its heavy frontal armor was largely invulnerable to this gun, the more lightly armored cruisers could often be stopped, especially at close range. Both the 88 and the 50-millimeter AT gun could fire solid shot, to cut through armor, or high explosive, which could destroy or neutralize British AT weapons or crews.

By comparison, the British two-pounder (40-millimeter) AT gun was ineffective. It fired only solid shot, requiring a direct hit to destroy enemy AT weapons, and could penetrate merely the thinner side plates of armor at ranges below 200 yards. The British 25-pounder (87-millimeter) gun-howitzer, a superb field artillery piece, had to be pressed into service as an antitank weapon, though often at the expense of protecting infantry. Only in the spring of 1942 did the British begin to receive the six-pounder (57-millimeter) AT gun, which fired high-explosive as well as solid shot and had 30 percent greater penetration than the German 50-millimeter gun.

The British took a long time recognizing that Rommel was sending antitank guns against their tanks. In offensive or attack situations, Rommel leapfrogged the comparatively nimble 50-millimeter AT guns from one shielded vantage point to another, while keeping his tanks stationary and below the horizon. Once the AT guns were established, they protected the tanks as they swept forward.

In defensive situations, Rommel tried to bait or lure the British. He sent light tanks forward to contact the enemy, then retire. The typical British response was to mount a “cavalry” charge. But since visibility was obscured by stirred up dust and sand, British tankers usually did not see the 50-millimeter AT guns waiting in ambush in hollows and draws, nor the “gun line” of 88s drawn up at the rear. The 50s picked off British tanks that got within range, while the 88s took on the advancing enemy armor at distances far beyond the capacity of the tanks’ two-pounder (40-millimeter) guns to respond. The British added to the success of Rommel’s tactics by usually committing their armor piecemeal, mostly single units, instead of full brigades, and never massed brigades.

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The British dispersed their tanks because it was impossible to conceal armor in the desert from the air. Rommel tried to practice the opposite policy, drawing together every possible tank and gun to work against a single objective—which, because of British dispersion, was often a fragment of total British armored strength.

Finally, the British failed to copy the Stuka dive-bomber, which was in effect mobile artillery that could deliver fire on the point a forward force wished to destroy, or through which it wished to advance. The dive-bomber offered the vanguard of an attacking force a way to eliminate an enemy strongpoint shortly after its discovery without having to bring up more weapons.

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Consequently Rommel repeatedly caught British armor dispersed. As he remarked to a captured British officer after the battle: “What difference does it make if you have two tanks to my one, when you spread them out and let me smash them in detail?”

Hitler’s greatest strategic mistake, after he’d decided to invade Russia, Bevin Alexander explains (in How Hitler Could Have Won World War II), was his refusal to concentrate on a single, decisive goal:

He sought to gain — all at the same time — three widely distant objectives: Leningrad, because it was the birthplace of Russian Communism; Ukraine and the Caucasus beyond, for its abundant foodstuffs, 60 percent of Soviet industry, and the bulk of the Soviet Union’s oil; and Moscow, because it was the capital of the Soviet Union and its nerve center.

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He hoped to seize a million square miles of the Soviet Union in 1941, a region the size of the United States east of the Mississippi. The campaign in the west, on the other hand, had been fought out in an area of 50,000 square miles, roughly the size of North Carolina or New York State. Therefore, the ratio of space to men was twenty times greater in the east than in the west.

Field Marshal Brauchitsch, commander of the army, and General Halder, chief of staff, wanted the primary objective to be Moscow:

Stalin would be compelled to fight for Moscow. It was the hub of railroads, mecca of world Communism, headquarters of the highly centralized government, and a great industrial center employing more than a million workers.

Moreover, an attack into the center of the Soviet Union would turn the nation’s vastness—generally thought of as its greatest asset—into a liability. Once the Germans possessed Moscow’s communications node, Red Army forces on either side could not coordinate their efforts. One would be cut off from aid and succor to the other, and the Germans in the central position between the two could have defeated each separately.

The German army and economy could support a drive on Moscow. Though 560 miles east of the frontier, it was connected by a paved highway and railroads.

This would have still been a direct, frontal assault against the strength of the Red Army, but the ratio of force to space was so low in Russia that German mechanized forces could always find openings for indirect local advances into the Soviet rear. At the same time the widely spaced cities at which roads and railways converged offered the Germans alternative targets. While threatening one city north and another city south, they could actually strike at a third in between. But the Russians, not knowing which objective the Germans had chosen, would have to defend all three.

Hitler, by trying for too much and then altering his priorities failed everywhere:

These failures meant Germany had lost the war. By December 1941, there was no hope of anything better than a negotiated peace. This Hitler refused to consider.

Hitler’s plan rested on two false assumptions. The first was that he would have time enough (even without the shift of panzers to the Ukraine) to switch armor to the north then back to the center in time to win a decisive victory before the rains and snows of autumn. Distances were simply too great, Russian roads and climate too poor, and Red Army resistance too intense for such a plan to have had any hope of success. As Guderian summarized the campaign to his wife on December 10, 1941, “The enemy, the size of the country, and the foulness of the weather were all grossly underestimated.”