Arpig
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Time for another of my random essays….
This idea came to me from MusicMystery’s thread on the Civil War what-ifs. It seems to me that the side with the better generals looses. There are of course some exceptions (the Franco-Prussian War comes to mind) but over all it seems Napoleon was right….God is on the side of the bigger battalions.
In all the major modern wars (by which I mean the really big ones: Napoleonic Wars, US Civil War, WWI and WWII) one side has had an apparent monopoly of military genius and yet still lost…and lost to the same basic tactic. All the major wars have degenerated into wars of attrition it seems. They all started out with the eventual loser having the advantage to varying degrees, yet that advantage was of no real use in the final analysis.
Napoleon
When he started, Napoleon could not be beat, he revolutionized the art of war in his day with his concept of the corps as a self-contained combined arms unit that could function independently, as well as his ideas on the use of massed artillery at a single point of the enemy’s line to allow a breakthrough. On the level of grand strategy he was clearly the master of all those who opposed him, and on the battlefield he bested them all at one time or another. In the end he was brought down by sheer weight of numbers, there were simply too many opponents in the field (thanks in the most part to the incredible wealth of Great Britain). France was fought to exhaustion, its supplies of manpower depleted, its wealth squandered by years of fighting the same basic combination of states over and over. No matter how many times Napoleon (or his Marshals, several of whom were brilliant leaders in their own right) beat them, they just raised more troops and took the field again with a fresh army and a war chest refilled with pounds sterling. The big hero on the winning side was Wellington, but if you study his campaigns, in India, the Peninsula, and in the Lowlands it becomes apparent that his only strategy was to find a good defencive position that the enemy was forced to attack. In the actual battles themselves he was little different. He would stake out his position, form his lines and wait for his opponent to attack him. Beat off the attacks with heavy losses on both sides and force the opponent to withdraw. Very rarely did he attack, and only then when he had worn his opponent down using his defencive strategy. Granted he was very skilled at positioning himself such that his enemy had no choice but to attack him on his terms, but that was his one trick.
Once the strategic initiative passed to the Allies in 1814, Napoleon still fought brilliantly, defeating his enemies again and again, yet in the end he could not withstand the relentless advance of his enemies, he simply did not have enough men to stop them everywhere. His opponents didn’t do anything fancy, they relied on marching straight in and whenever they were opposed they simply attacked head on with all their weight and overwhelmed the French.
Civil War
The US Civil War is an extreme example, where one side (the South) pretty much had an absolute monopoly on skilled leadership. The North produced no leaders of any stature really. Grant was a butcher who relied on simply overwhelming his opponents by sheer weight of numbers and cannon fire. The one thing he did do very well was use the North’s superior rail network to his advantage, transferring enormous forces quickly from one front to another faster than the South could react, and thereby gaining overwhelming numerical superiority on whichever front he was concentrating on. But once he had those troops there, he generally relied on bloody frontal assaults to win the day (at enormous cost in manpower). Sherman, the other “hero” of the North was actually a better general than Grant. He was a average tactician, but a brilliant strategist. His March to the Sea was a master stroke that split the South, destroyed its economic base, and went a long way to undermining the people’s will to resist. As brutal and horrid as the march was, as strategy it worked exactly as planned….but again its success was mainly predicated on superior numbers, Sherman outnumbered his opponents throughout the campaign.
On the Southern side, on the other hand, they had illustrious generals by the score. In almost every campaign, regardless of its outcome the Southern commanders outfought and out thought the Northern ones, until they simply ran out of men and essential supplies. Lee was always outnumbered throughout his career, yet he thrashed his larger opponents time and time again, but his problem was that he had no ability to take the strategic offensive; he simply didn’t have the resources. The Gettysburg campaign is a good example of this; he manoeuvred brilliantly, fought brilliantly and totally outfoxed his opponents until he was brought to ground at Gettysburg where the North was able once again to overwhelm him with superior numbers and firepower. And Jackson, while he lived was arguably the best of them all. Again always fighting outnumbered he led several brilliant campaigns where he totally out foxed his opponents time and time again, but again superior numbers told in the end. There are many other examples of Southern generals performing brilliantly in a lost cause, but in the end they were all worn down by the same general tactic….frontal assault by vastly superior numbers supported by vastly superior artillery.
World War I
In this war there was precious little that could be called even competent generalship on either side. But what generalship there was, was with Germany. In the opening phase of the war, the swing through Belgium caught the Entente by surprise and came very close to defeating France, while in the East Hoffman’s brilliant plan allowed Hindenburg to defeat not one, but two numerically superior Russian armies at Tannenberg and Masurian Lakes. On the eastern front, the war was not as static as it was in the west, and here there were some examples of brilliant leadership on the German side. Granted they were facing a numerically superior force, but in this particular case they had all the advantages, superior leadership, training, equipment, quality of troops, morale…you name it, while there was occasional flashes of brilliance, the main tactic was again to simply charge straight at the enemy, and here is one of the few times in history where a numerically inferior force defeated a numerically superior one through frontal assault…the Russian troops had a nasty habit of running away, and their generals (with the exception of Brusilov) were utterly incompetent.
In the West, once their drive on Paris had been halted (again by superior numbers), they carried out a brilliant defencive campaign that held off the Entente for 4 years. In 1918, they tried again, and using an entirely new organization and offensive theory (basically blitzkrieg carried out by infantry) and again came close to taking Paris. But as in 1914, superior numbers ground them to a halt. The Entente offensive of 1918 was simply a general frontal assault all along the line by vastly superior numbers (thanks mostly to the large number of fresh American troops) and technology in the form of large numbers of primitive tanks. There was no originality or anything previously unknown in the generalship of the advancing Entente allies, they simply marched forward, accepting the losses, and overwhelmed the exhausted German armies.
The Middle Eastern front was an exception to this, there it was Hamilton (aided in a rather small way by Lawrence and his Arabs) who outfought the numerically superior Turks through flanking moves reminiscent of Rommel’s heydays in Libya. But once again, the losing side was outclassed in all ways except sheer numbers by the winning side.
World War II
Here again all the military brilliance was with the Germans, their innovative and daring generals led them to victory after victory, but in the end they were halted by overwhelming numbers (particularly on the eastern front). Rommel is probably the most famous of the German generals, but he was effectively a one trick pony…he won when he could use a right hook manoeuvre and he lost when he couldn’t. Others (Guderian, von Rundstadt, Jodl, von Manstein, Model, etc.) repeatedly outclassed their opponents, but it was to no avail, they could not, for all their brilliance and ability to win a battle finally defeat their opponents…there were simply too many of them. In Italy Kesselring brought the Allies to a stalemate and it wasn’t until mid 1944 when the Allies had accumulated some 28 divisions facing his 12 along the Gutav & Adolf Hitler lines that he was driven out. And what tactic did the Allies, with their overwhelming air superiority, use…you guessed it, frontal assault by overwhelming numbers, supported by vastly superior support, artillery, air power, and reserves.
In the East it was the Russians ability to retreat endlessly and to refill their ranks endlessly with new divisions that finally stopped the Germans…they were not so much fought to a standstill as they simply ran out of steam, they no longer had the troops to advance any further. When the Russians turned to the offensive their main tactic was to assault head on with huge numbers of troops & tanks supported by an even huger amount of artillery (they used artillery on a scale that dwarfs that of the western front of WWI).
In France starting with Normandy the Anglo-American forces forced their way ashore mainly on the basis of overwhelming air power which made it all but impossible for the Germans to move their forces around without incurring crushing losses. In Normandy, the British threw themselves at Caen over and over in a series of bloody frontal assaults to little avail, but the drain on the German forces combined with their inability to effectively move their reserves to the West is what allowed Patton to break out at ST. Lo. That breakout was achieved by yet another frontal assault by superior numbers. Once the breakout was achieved a period of movement followed as the Germans were retreating and the Allies following up…as it is, the Allies basically fumbled the battle of the Falaise pocket, allowing the bulk of the trapped Germans to escape.
Once the Allies caught up to the Germans in eastern France and the Low Countries, they adopted a strategy not unlike that used in 1918. Attack the enemy straight ahead all along the line. In terms of Generalship, Eisenhower was unimaginative and rather plodding, Montgomery was so famous for not attacking unless he was all but assured of victory through overwhelming superiority that the phrase “the full Monty” was coined. Even Patton wasn’t all that brilliant, the only thing he did that showed any brilliance was turning his army around to relieve Bastogne, other than that he relied on the same basic plan as the rest of them…frontal assault by superior numbers.
The war in the Pacific is an exception to the rule in many ways. It did start out with the Japanese out fighting and out generaling everybody, but the US Navy, fighting against a superior enemy in a series of brilliant battles destroyed the Japanese Navy, which then allowed them to overrun the Japanese islands at will. Overall, the Japanese had far more troops in the Pacific than did the Allies, but their need to spread them out to defend all their possessions and their inability to transfer troops from one place to another allowed the US to attack any given island with overwhelming force. Those places where the Japanese were too strongly established to just overwhelm (such as Raubul) were simply bypassed and cut off. MacArthur, for all his good press was not a genius, in fact he bungled most of his campaigns, costing his forces far more casualties than were required (not to mention outright fucking up the defence of the Phillipines). So while the Allies were always outnumbered by the Japanese in absolute terms their command of the sea allowed them to apply superior numbers at any given point of their choice, thus cutting off huge numbers of Japanese troops and leaving them to wither away with no effort on the US side. It is in the naval sphere that the exception occurs; in the Pacific it was the US who had the better Admirals, and their brilliance allowed them to hold off the Japanese long enough for the US industrial might to overcome their numerical inferiority. There was a period in 1942 when things looked bleak indeed for the US Navy, and there was even talk of withdrawing the Navy to the Atlantic to preserve what was left of it. But due to a combination of brilliant victories and a massive ship building effort, by the end of 1943 the US had total naval dominance of the Pacific, which allowed them to attack where and when they wanted to, on their terms.
So as can be seen from the above brief overview, there seems to be a trend of the weaker side having better generals who outfight their opponents again and again, but who in the end succumb to superior numbers. Not only are the leaders of the stronger, winning side generally not as good as those on the weaker/losing side, but they are generally somewhat of a bunch of dullards, showing very little aptitude to innovate or towards original thinking (even Patton based his few innovative battles squarely on the writings of Guderian), relying mostly on frontal assaults by superior numbers to win the day for them.
Your comments, thoughts and opinions are eagerly welcomed.
< Message edited by Arpig -- 8/30/2009 2:02:58 PM >
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I do think it was their racial ideas that prompted them to declare war. They,after all were the Ubermensch, the Master Race, and on paper they were winning the war at that point, they just couldn't see the reality of what was facing them already. Aswell Hitler and the leading Nazis had no comprehension of the US, they just could not conceive of its enormous resources and industrial potential, back then the US didn't need foreign oil, it produced enough of its own. There were those on the General Staff who tried to point out the obvious,but the top brass were yes-men and ardent followers of Hitler, so they shut up the nay-sayers and told Hitler what he wanted to hear. The US military at the time of Pearl Harbour, with the exception of the Navy, was pitifully small....again on paper it was no threat. What they refused to see was that the US had the capability to very quickly recruit, train and equip a huge military. (The reason why they refused to see this is hard to find...Churchill understood it perfectly well, and they had already demonstrated their ability to do so in 1917). 
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