Investigations of a Dog

A link posted at Cliopatria by Oscar Chamberlain led me to an article by Larry Kahaner, promoting his new book about the AK-47 assault rifle. In order to dispel the myth of objectivity and neutrality, I have to make it clear that I’m prejudiced against journalists (Natalie Bennett is a notable exception, who couldn’t ever be accused of being lazy), and even more prejudiced against management consultants. Also much of the evidence I present here is based on things that I studied 10 years ago, so the details might be vague or wrong. The first point I want to make is that the AK-47 was not the first assault rifle, because the Germans got there first with the SturmGewehr 44. This isn’t a major point. “First in the world ever” is one of the genre conventions of popular history, which helps to draw people in so that you can make them read what you really have to say. What Kahaner really has to say is convincing: that the AK-47′s cheapness, reliability, and ease of use changed warfare in a way that more temperamental weapons like the StG 44 or M-16 couldn’t have done. You can read all about the strengths and weaknesses of the StG 44 in this Wikipedia article, which seems to be mostly reliable. Both the Wikipedia article and Kahaner’s article refer to something called “Blitzkrieg”. This is even more tangential to Kahaner’s argument, but it’s something I want to take issue with as it leads into some wider points about a disparity between popular and academic military history, and about popular perceptions of war.

Larry Kahaner says:

When German forces employed the lightning war, or blitzkrieg, in World War II, it was a marked change from how wars had been fought. Instead of static fighting — hunkering down in trenches for weeks or months at a time as in World War I — the blitzkrieg concentrated forces at one point in an enemy’s defensive line, broke a hole and then thrust deep into enemy territory, catching opponents off guard and subjecting them to waves of brutally efficient invaders.

And Wikipedia says:

A more compact rifle was also needed for the German Army’s mechanized and armored forces, and their fast-moving blitzkrieg offensive tactics, not to mention when fighting in dense urban surroundings.

Wick Murray said:

There is only one problem with this theory. It is wrong.

That was the perfect quote which featured prominently in a paper on the idea of “Blitzkrieg” which I wrote during my MA. By that time (the mid-1990s) academic opinion had turned strongly against the idea that the Germans had an innovative and consistent tactical and operational doctrine based on concentrated armour, rapid movement, and confusion and paralysis of enemies. Whatever the Germans thought they were doing, they certainly didn’t call it Blitzkrieg themselves (except in one or two documents of minor importance). The word was popularised by journalists and became a powerful myth in popular culture.

The spectacular success of the German invasions of Poland in 1939, and France and the Low Countries in 1940, and the initial successes against the Soviet Union in 1941, easily lead to a narrative of German superiority and innovation. However, this obscures the different approaches the Wehrmacht took in each campaign, how close they came to failure, and the continuity with previous wars. If you abstract each campaign far enough, it is true that all three involved encirclement, but this was done differently in each case. In Poland, the German attacks divided the Polish army into a number of small pockets, whereas in May 1940 there was one big encirclement which trapped the whole of the BEF and a large part of the French army. Operation Barbarossa was different again, with a number of large encirclements.

There was nothing new about encirclement. It had long been a sound and accepted principle of German/Prussian operational doctrine: surround the enemy and cut off all their escape routes, forcing them to choose between surrender and death. This was part of the Schlieffen plan in 1914 and von Moltke’s plan in 1870. Frederick the Great often tried (and sometimes succeeded) to outflank his enemies in order to annihilate them. Some versions of the myth say that Blitzkrieg differed from former plans, because it aimed to paralyse and demoralise the enemy rather than just breaking through by brute force or stealth. This is a teleological view which fails to distinguish between theory and practice. What actually happened in the field is not necessarily what German planners expected to happen. The most obvious example is the failure of the Schlieffen plan, but even the spectacular success of 1870 failed to correspond to von Moltke’s even more ambitious plan. “No plan survives contact with the enemy” is such a truism that I can’t even remember who said it. The reality of war is wildly unpredictable. Plans, doctrine, and training aim to reduce that unpredictability, but it can never be eliminated.

What actually happened in May 1940 was that the British and French armies became confused, paralysed, and demoralised as they were cut off by a rapid, concentrated armoured thrust to the Channel. So far, so Blitzkrieg, but was it really down to a brilliant plan and a completely new way of fighting? A popular obsession with German strength tends to obscure both Allied weakness and the chaos of war.

In some ways it could be suggested that the Allies defeated themselves. Operational strategy was limited by politics: Belgium refused to formally join the alliance before being invaded, but Britain and France were determined to save Belgium anyway, not least because the French wanted to avoid any fighting on French soil. This necessitated an advance into Belgium rather than building strong defensive positions on the French border, leaving the allied armies more vulnerable to being encircled. The Germans had probably worked this bit out, and their thrust through the Ardennes was likely to exploit this weakness. However, its easy to forget that this armoured thrust was a desperate gamble which might not have worked, and nearly didn’t.

The Arras counter attack posed serious problems for the Germans. The armoured spearhead was not adequately supported by artillery or infantry. The German tanks were not technically superior to British and French tanks, and some of them were vastly inferior (Mark I and Mark II Panzers were obsolete and couldn’t stand up to more modern tanks). When the British managed to organise significant resistance at Arras, the Germans were understandably worried. More resistance like that might have completely derailed their plan, but the Germans were lucky that it didn’t happen. The British and French were unable to organise sufficient counter attacks. This is partly down to inadequate systems of command, control, and communication. Alongside the problems of getting accurate information and organising resistance, British and French morale collapsed in spectacular and unprecedented fashion.

Allied soldiers came to hold a false belief in German superiority and their own inferiority, which became a self-fulfilling prophesy. The myth of Blitzkrieg itself might have played a role in this, but the related myth of the Fifth Column was at least as significant. While this was widely believed during the Second World War, it tended to be forgotten afterwards, in contrast to the continuing popular enthusiasm for Blitzkrieg. Meanwhile, historians weren’t much interested in the Fifth Column, because it didn’t really exist. However, Glyn Prysor showed the important relationship between the collapse of British morale and fear of an unseen (and non-existent) enemy in his article ‘The “Fifth Column” and the British Experience of Retreat, 1940‘ (War in History, 2005). Once you’ve read this fascinating and terrifying piece, you won’t be able to think about the “Dunkirk spirit” with any comfortable nostalgia or patriotism. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the Germans deliberately propagated the Fifth Column myth at this time. It certainly wasn’t a central part of their operational strategy.

During my MA, I also learned that academic military historians were challenging an even bigger popular myth: the futile and badly managed trench warfare on the Western Front in the First World War. The arguments against this myth should be fairly familiar by now, and were summarised by Gary Sheffield in Forgotten Victory (2002; ISBN: 0747264600). The two myths fit together very well and reinforce each other, to the extent that they are still being repeated by journalists and popular authors. The binary opposition between the static, attritional First World War, and the mobile, innovative Second World War makes a good story which strongly appeals to readers. The popular perception of the First World War as a needless tragedy, and the Second World War’s more well known justification, only strengthens the “good war” versus “bad war” dichotomy. This metanarrative is useful for governments which want to persuade us that their own wars are among the good ones, but it obscures the complexity and chaos of reality.

There are many ways in which the First and Second World Wars were similar. By looking at the combat casualty figures alone it would difficult to understand why the First World War was perceived as being much worse than the Second. In terms of human cost, both were disastrous. Both involved the development of new tactics and technology. And both had elements of mobile and static warfare.

The fighting on the Western Front was mobile in 1914 and in 1918, but this tends to get ignored by the myth which concentrates on the trench warfare in between. You can find many permutations of these misconceptions just by Googling for “trench warfare” (random example: Schools History, which claims to be educational!). The idea that trench warfare was something new and unexpected recurs quite frequently, sometimes giving the impression that these trenches just appeared as if by magic. From a military historian’s point of view, building defensive positions was a tried and tested method of making superior firepower count against superior numbers. If you put the trenches in the context of siege warfare, they look even less unusual. Wellington, Marlborough, Cromwell, and Henry V would all have understood the basic principles of what was happening on the Western Front. The genuinely unusual thing was the length of the siege lines: rather than surrounding a single town, they covered the frontier of a country.

Even at the height of trench warfare, British commanders looked forward to being able to fight a mobile war again. Haig would have loved to kick the Germans out of their trenches in 1916 so that he could send in the cavalry (he gets almost as much criticism for being obsessed with cavalry as he does for not having the imagination to fight a mobile war – he can’t win, can he?). In the Second World War, planned rapid movement was frequently stopped dead when it came up against determined resistance and/or strong defensive positions. Caen, Monte Cassino, Bastogne, Stalingrad, and Leningrad were all scenes of static attritional fighting. It should also be remembered that the vast majority of combat soldiers in the Second World War were infantry. Tanks were expensive and specialised pieces of equipment which couldn’t win battles on their own (unless the enemy happened to be suffering from paranoid delusions about paratroopers disguised as nuns!). The German army has a reputation for superior technology and mobility which it doesn’t deserve, because it was never completely mechanized. When the Nazis unleashed such technological terrors as the King Tiger, the V2, and the Me262, they were still using horse drawn wagons.

This all leads me to the hypothesis that rapid advances are a symptom, not a cause, of military success. Having the vehicles, the training, and the communication systems are all necessary for a successful rapid advance, but so is a certain disparity between opposing forces, or absence of serious opposition. Plans are not executed in a vacuum where commanders can make whatever manoeuvres they feel like. They also have to take steps to deny the enemy freedom of movement, otherwise an audacious armoured thrust could go horribly wrong. Concentrating your forces at one point is a gamble because it weakens all other points and gives the enemy opportunities to counter-attack. War is inherently unpredictable. Plans break down, systems fail. Victory goes to the side which fails the least, can most easily absorb the cost of failure, and learns the most from its failures.

Bibliography

1. J.P. Harris, ‘The Myth of Blitzkrieg’, War In History, 2 (November 1995), pp. 335-352.
2. Glyn Prysor, ‘The “Fifth Column” and the British Experience of Retreat, 1940′, War In History, 12 (2005), pp. 418-447.
3. Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (Headline Review, June 2002).