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miral -> Great Book - Why the Germans are Strategic Idiots (4/12/2008 12:09:44 AM)
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Recommend most heartily Robert Citino's "The Defeat of the Wehrmacht - The German Campaigns of 1942". He explained some things about how the Germans waged WWII that had mystyfied me for years. And I think it offers great thought for wargames.
His approach is not to write of the German Army in isolation in the WWI - WWI era but to take the entire history of the Prussian-German army (essentially the officer corps) and try to locate its philosophy of war and the enduring strands of this that run through the centuries. If I may make a big paraphrase indeed, I believe he is saying that the Germans developed a kind of Teutonic Samurai approach to waging war.
First, they confused the operational with the strategic for centuries, but no where more than in the two World Wars. One of their manuals actually speaks of War as an Art and the general as an artist. Bad analogy. Thus Citino comments on the German generals 'manical pursuit of capturing Moscow' long past the point in 1941 where it was at all possible, as if the Russian War was a wargame: capture Moscow, game over!
Second, aside from being Strategically Challenged, the Germans, like the Japanese, disdained logistics. I did not know that the German army did not even use the term logistics under after WWII; they refered to it as 'supply', as if nothing had changed since the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, again like the japanese (many more parellels between the two than I had thought) they tended to start even major campaigns with lack of logictical support and infratstructure. In reading detailed accounts of the '41 fighting, especially Operation Typhoon, I am struck at the number of times that entire Panzer divisions came to a complete halt for a day, or two or three because - they had run out of gas. The units at the front screamed for gas, ammunition and food constantly and yet the High Command (the Generals, not just Hitler) made conversion of the Russian rail gauge among the lowest priorities.
Third, intelligence. Again, like the Japanese, German military intelligence was absolutely awful. On the Eastern Front the Germans misguessed almost every major Russian offensive. But then, German commanders did not pay any attention to their intelligence, even when it was correct.
In short, the German way of war was, and this is a quote from Frederick the Great, 'the Prussian Army always attacks'. To which his descendents in WWI would have added, 'in the most operationally elegant manner possible."
Citino had a wonderful phrase to describe the German's strategic situation in June 1940 and the autumn of 1942: "The Wehrmacht had conquered itself into a strategic impasse.'
Perhaps all wargames dealing with WWII and Germany might usefully incorporate some of this. For instance, German logistics weakness would cause, randomly, certain units to be unable to move. Or the Germans have complete FOW but the Allies only partial or none.
Perhaps his best line was about Rommel immobilized before El Alamein in autumn of '42, unable to conduct those oh so elegant operational moves beloved of generations of German generals. Citino comments that Rommel's writings of that time have the plaintive whine of a great artist forced to paint houses for a living.
Oh yes, and why did the German army, the generals as well as Hitler, plunge into the streets of Stalingrad in what they knew would become a hellish war of non-movement? Why, because they could not think of anything to do strategically to get them out of the dreadful mess they had gotten themselves into and, besides, 'The Prussian Army always attacks." Kursk? 'The Prussian Army always attacks'. No wonder they lost both world wars, thank goodness.
An excellent book, amusingly written for serious military history, with many insights that would be useful for wargaming.
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