In which I disagree with Paul Krugman, about something that was once very important
America’s other great moral war, World War II, was similar. The war movies I watched when I was a kid always had plucky, individualistic American heroes beating superbly equipped Nazis, but the reality was mostly the other way around. We had many heroes, but the truth is that Americans were never as good at the art of war as the Germans. What we were good at was the art of production, of supply. Honor the heroes who stormed Omaha Beach — but it was the floating harbors, the trans-Channel fuel pipeline, and the air superiority achieved through production miracles that really did it.
True but false. In the European theatre, maybe so, but then in the European theatre there weren't really all that many face-to-face, head-to-head, like-for-like scraps between the US Army and the Germans. In the Pacific, on the other hand ... it was indeed US industrial power that got them to Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but once they were there, it was nothing more nor less than exactly the kind of man to man combat that we were talking about. And the USA won. As I've noted elsewhere, it's surprising that the US Army has pockets of the "Warrior Ethic", because their finest hour was also the destruction-testing of "imperial martial culture versus citizen-soldiers of a democracy", and the right side won.
Bottom line is that it's a common and romantic notion (with roots in Ruskin, Nietszche and other Romantic types many of whom had a "complicated" relationship with sexuality) that industrial societies, for all their worldly wealth and productive capacity, somehow produce a slightly less worthy figure of human being; the triumph of the Last Man. Not true; actually they're better people as well.
"In the Pacific, on the other hand ... it was indeed US industrial power that got them to Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, but once they were there, it was nothing more nor less than exactly the kind of man to man combat that we were talking about. "
ReplyDeleteBut it seems that the whole point of Krugman's argument is that it was the industrial might of the US that produced all the guns, the air superiority, the shells, the grenades, etc. that allowed the US marines to win. I doubt the US would have won the Pacific War if we'd had only material resources of the (much poorer) Japanese.
What Russians?
ReplyDeleteWilliam Tecumsah believed that the squirearchy of the Confederacy produced the best cavalrymen in the world, but that these men were pretty much useless in every other respect, unless you needed to have gamblers and duellists sitting around your house, borrowing your money, eating your food, drinking your booze, and screwing your wife. He didn't spell it out quite that way, but that's what he meant.
ReplyDeleteBut U.S. Grant believed that his Northern volunteers were the best soldiers in the world. He wasn't too impressed with the lifers. (A fair proportion of the Union Army, probably including my g-g-uncle, were immigrants from Prussia who had had military training, and they tended to rise to leadership positions.)
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ReplyDeleteCavalry was basically the 19th century air force.
ReplyDelete[comment policy reminder - you have to leave either a name or some sort of content. Pointless insults aimed at the management are only allowed from reasonably consistent pseudonyms, as this guarantees I will be able to have a go back.]
ReplyDeleteAs you doubtless know, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor only after an oil embargo. They were and are a resource-starved nation, and by the time of glorious hand to hand combat they had lost their empire. They did not have the resources, for instance, to provide any serious air support.
ReplyDeleteAll of this is well known, which suggests that you are, after a valiant fight and many interesting blog posts, succumbing to the inevitable Colonel Blimp rot that afflicts bankers and those who associate with them. In a decade or two your opinions will presumably resemble those of Hitchens.
Are there many aristocrats in the air-force?
ReplyDeleteAlso true but false. Pacific U.S.-Japan encounters tended to be on islands (or isolated environments) where not fighting was not an option. European encounters were larger theater operations where smaller units could often get lost, retire from the field, etc. As with everything else, blanket statements are problematic. Circumstances matter.
ReplyDeleteAre there many aristocrats in the air-force?
ReplyDeleteGeorge W. Bush.
John Sidney McCain III. (Technically naval aviation, but he was a fighter pilot.)
George H. W. Bush (also a naval aviator).
M.
I think it is hard to argue that a country which made use of the tactic of literally building aeroplanes for the sole purpose of crashing them was facing an utterly binding resource constraint.
ReplyDeleteI think it is hard to argue that a country which made use of the tactic of literally building aeroplanes for the sole purpose of crashing them was facing an utterly binding resource constraint.
ReplyDeleteThat's simple: the Japanese were irrational. They also built the Yamato, after all.
Also, a story I have heard (second-hand) suggests that because of their American background, U.S. soldiers had certain unique advantages. For example, American army divisions moving through Europe tended to end up with more cars and trucks than when they started out, because Americans, who grew up with cars, would pick up abandoned ones in the villages they go through, and fix them up and take them along. That's not really in the "industrialized men are better fighters" category, that's in the "industrial men are cleverer" category.
M.
Don Freeman wrote:
ReplyDeleteAs with everything else, blanket statements are problematic
Is this statement exhibit a (and what do you call a statement that is proof ot itself? or one that just by being said, contradicts itself?
Marcel
Have to disagree on the kamikaze - it was, on a certain viewpoint, a rational response to having a surplus of aircraft over trained pilots and fuel. The deeper irrationality was the set of assumptions that led you into that desperate position in the first place (broadly speaking, assuming that the US response to war would be to send their entire fleet across the Pacific, and for the IJN to steadily attrite said fleet on its westwards journey, before annihilating it in one final battleship action - hence the Yamato. Unsportingly, the US refused to play ball, especially after Pearl Harbor did such a good job on wrecking the American battleship fleet.)
ReplyDelete[comment policy reminder ... ]
ReplyDeleteI hope my "What Russians?" ah "comment" wasn't taken as an insult, I didn't intend it that way.
A little bit more long winded: the idea that the carrier and intelligence components of the Pacific War were subsidiary to the gore certified bravery on Guadalcanal etc. is ridiculous. I mean look up "Island Hopping" for FSM's sake.
Just as absurd, I think, as the idea that that us brave Yanks did in the Germans through our sturdy Prus^H^H^H^H Mennonite work ethic. The character building techniques of the Soviet Industrial Empire were... not quite the same as in our doughty post enlightenment civilizations. See Glantz & House, the tables beginning on p. 292 do not lie, nor do I see any character traits evident on those pages.
So these attempted generalizations who who builds a "better man" are ridiculous.
I think the dare to die mentality contributed to massive Japanese wastage of men in the Pacific campaign: if you look at the comparative casualty figures, it wasn't so much a matter of "we will never surrender" as "we will let our men starve to death because dying is their duty, so pass the sake". Hezbollah showed that they'd got past their suicide bombing roots and got on the right side of this equation during the war with Israel in 2006.
ReplyDeleteRe: islands and not having the option of not fighting; surely this is what makes it such a good test of fighting ability? The UFC puts a cage around the fighting area to.similar effect.
ReplyDeleteRussell: yes I wouldn't want to argue that it was purely manlimanliness that won the Battle of the Pacific - Krugman is probably right that industrial superiority determined the outcome from day one. But the fact remains thatt there was actually a showdown and the US Army can be justifiably proud of how it fought - Krugman is giving away much too much in saying that the American conscript soldier was anything but the equal.or superior of his German or Japanese counterpart. I don't know if "The Deadliest Warrior" has ever done this one but if they did they really ought to have come.down on the right side.
Let's not let the line "in the European theatre there weren't really all that many face-to-face, head-to-head, like-for-like scraps between the US Army and the Germans" pass without comment.
ReplyDeleteThe adjectives here do seem to be doing a lot of heavy lifting, erasing most of the fighting in Italy, Normandy, and Germany. In which fighting, there appears to be virtual unanimity among military historians, German soldiers couldn't be shifted without (a) air superiority, overwhelming material support, many more tanks, many more guns, and all the paraphernalia of the 'art of production, of supply, and (b) two-to-one (or four-to-one, to be safer) superiority in numbers. They were, man for man, better soldiers. Such books as Overy's 'Why the Allies won' phrase this as something requiring an explanation specifically because an explanation is needed for why worse soldiers could defeat better soldiers. Overy points to various reasons why some of the factors that led to Germans being better soldiers on the ground contributed to them being worse war-fighters in the big picture, but he doesn't contest the specific superiority.
I really can't see that Krugman's point is even debatable.
And in the Pacific, it's really very hard to judge how face-to-face combat would have gone once you remove the handicap that stemmed from, for example, the US being able to supply each of its soldiers with four tons of supply compared with four pounds of supply for each Japanese (see Max Hasting's Nemesis). You can say "I think it is hard to argue that a country which made use of the tactic of literally building aeroplanes for the sole purpose of crashing them was facing an utterly binding resource constraint", but at the end of the war those planes had to be fueled by getting turpentine from pinecones - and even then, the Americans actually had more warships than the Japanese had planes.
Yes, it's true that in a fight between an "imperial martial culture versus citizen-soldiers of a democracy" the right side won, but it certainly wasn't because the individual citizen-soldiers were better: it was because the system that produced those citizen-soldiers was much more effective as a whole than its rival, and in the end that prevailed. To put it another way, it's complicated.
To put it another way still, the besetting fault of American and British soldiers was that when they met with stiff opposition they fell back and waited for air and artillery support to smash the opposition before they pressed forward. Sensible enough, and certainly as much or more than I would have done, but not what the Germans did, and not a method showing as much confidence as DD shows in their soldierly superiority.
I saw "Krugman" and hoped you were weighing in on the current Krugman vs. Post-Keynesian (which is apparently called MMT now) debate. I still can't tell if they're cranks or not.
ReplyDelete.said and Krugman are definitely right about Europe. Everyone agrees that the Germans were better soldiers on almost any metric (which, is not, by a long shot, the same as being better men). Western democracies are better at violence, but they do not make better warriors. (I don't think that should bother us.)
ReplyDeleteConsistently, in WW2, the Germans inflicted more casualties than they suffered, man to man, so that 100 Germans were a match for 120 Western troops, and probably 200 Russians. This is true even when the germans attacked.
Martin van Creveld's "Fighting Power" is about just this issue of relative martial prowess. He puts German superiority down to better officer training and better policies concerning replacements. (Briefly, the Germans would raise a bunch of men from the same area and sent them to the front together as a group to reinforce other men from the same locality. The americans would just send individuals to the front in dribs and drabs with no unit cohesion.) I do agree that the US army can be proud of its efforts, but, plattoon for platoon, they were no match for the Germans. Nobody was. (Except the New Zealanders, according to Michael Carver, who was a british tank officer through the war and ended up a field marshal and thought the Kiwis were the best infantry we had.)
British and US officers routinely complained that the infantry wouldn't press home an attack, and relied on airpower and artillery to do the business. (The germans thought that the British and American gunners were very good, but that the tanks and infantry were timid and - above all - unimaginatively led.)
The pacific is maybe a different story. And of course it's not just the Army but the Marines - who have a distinct ethos - as well as the US army. (And also the British and Indian troops who reconquered Burma.) Even in the pacific though, you are not talking much about pure man-to-man fights, since there was a much greater weight of artillery and airpower behind the forces of the US and British empire.
And whatever their nominal resource base may have been, Japanese logistics really were terrible; their troops often starved, and the entire japanese merchant fleet was sunk by US submarines.
In which fighting, there appears to be virtual unanimity among military historians, German soldiers couldn't be shifted without (a) air superiority, overwhelming material support, many more tanks, many more guns, and all the paraphernalia of the 'art of production, of supply, and (b) two-to-one (or four-to-one, to be safer) superiority in numbers.
ReplyDeleteBut my point is
a) that all these things were basically present from day one once the USA joined the conflict, so there's no test case and no telling what the Yanks would have done if they had been up against it (other than their results in the Pacific cage-matches). Lots of people still make the parallel argument about the Luftwaffe (better pilots man-for-man, vastly superior planes, only beaten by vast production of inexpensive Spitfires etc) but in fact they lost the Battle of Britain.
b) I am more keen to press the point about Japan than Germany, because unlike Japan and like the USA, Germany was basically a modern industrial democracy - the most civilised and cosmpolitan country in the world until it went mad in the 1930s.
Jamie: Hezbollah made very effective use of suicide bombing attacks. I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but I'm fairly sure that the death ratio was well in their favour. Also had a pretty significant affect on Israeli morale.
ReplyDelete2006 was a different kind of war.
Britain did have the home advantage in the Battle of Britain, as well as Radar. These things count. I'm with the guy who was suspicious of generalisations.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat relevant book review from the FT this weekend
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/9fd585be-5663-11e0-84e9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1I4AXSJk2
the most civilised and cosmpolitan country in the world until it went mad in the 1930s
ReplyDeleteThat would be fin-de-siecle France.
M
About Europe: There are few direct tests in the historical record taken straight, but after the war the US army did some quantitative modeling that tried to control for just the factors you want controlled for and looked at fights where things were more equal (US aircraft were grounded by weather and so on). They came to the conclusion that the Germans had outfought them.
ReplyDeleteJapan is a better case for you, as you say. But anything you say about the US army vis a vis the Japanese is also true of the Sikhs and the Gurkhas, and they weren't citizens in a cosmopolitan democracy. It does suggest that the material advantages were what made the difference, even against the Japanese. (Not that material advantage wins every time, because if it did the US would have won in Vietnam).
But why do you suppose that the question whether the democracies turn out better people is to be decided by comparing martial virtue? You sound like you think that Ruskin and Nietzsche got the values right, but were wrong about where to find them. I think that americans were better people than the Japanese in 1941, regardless of whether they could beat them in a bayonet fight.
@dominic: even you (or I) don't think martial virtue matters that much, there are enough people out there who do worry at least a bit about it.
ReplyDeleteAnd if there's enough of them, they'll propose things to raise the manly virtues of the people, with things like compulsory military service or throwing small countries to the wall to show we still can.
So instead of granting a priori a trade-off between a comfortable life and being prepared for battle, we can get in one station earlier and say that the existence of such a trade-off is in itself debatable. We can always fall back from there.
That said, I am not sure the pacific war is that strong an argument. The statistics might say that Japanese were killed in greater numbers than Americans, but that just means the Americans eventually won and that a lot of the Japanese fought to the death.
It doesn't necessarily mean the Americans were
efficient fighting men from the start of each battle, but mostly that the killing and dieing on each island kept going on after the Americans had secured the island and were fighting from a position of strength.
You sound like you think that Ruskin and Nietzsche got the values right, but were wrong about where to find them
ReplyDeleteI've misdrafted then. What I really want to say is that Nietszche's "last man" is actually better than Nietszche's "overman" in all ways, including those qualities that Nietszche regarded as the values of Overman. Or in other words, I'm taking Nietszche as having made an empirical claim in social science - that industrial society would lead to a decline in certain kinds of personal qualities - which turned out to be wrong, rather like Marx and the declining rate of profit. In all honesty I'm no longer convinced that I should have dragged poor old Ruskin into the argument, other than to shore up the joke about confused sexuality.
Or to put it in rugby union terms, martial/aristocratic cultures aren't like New Zealand, they're like Wales.
The most civilised and cosmpolitan country in the world until it went mad in the 1930s"
ReplyDeleteTo me, the madness began in 1914. All the great powers were wound up for war waiting for a trigger to be pulled somewhere or another. The productivity and efficiency of the various nations, the loyalty of their citizens, the competence of their ruling groups, and their humane values and Kantian ethical principles just made things worse, and did nothing to prevent the war or make it less horrible. Even the avant-garde poets pitched in. WWI was a pathology of order, and WWII was a late effect.
Nietzsche was an overachiever in real life whose great success disappointed him, so he invented the unattainable superman goal just to make sure that no one would be able to rest. He envied the aristocratic ability for unreasonable self satisfaction, but he still had to set the unattainable Romantic goal for everyone to make sure that they could not be satisfied.
ReplyDeleteHis stuff about breeding and manners is just the conventional middle class / gentry stuff you see all over the place, about who is a gentleman and who is a bounder.
A case can be made that Nietzsche is the prophet of a certain kind of coneventionality on steroids, first the snobbishness about breeding and distinction, and second the constant striving for an unattainable, ever-receding capitalist-romantic goal.
Schvejk is the real postmodern hero.
I wonder how much this has to do with modernity, though. Louis XIV's armies, led by pure-blood dukes and princes, were beaten again and again by a certain Mr. John Churchill. Could be that it's just all mythological.
ReplyDeleteI have to confess to being a little confused by the direction the conversation has taken and not least when I try to connect it to the earlier one about economists. Surely Burke rather the Nietzsche should be the reference?
ReplyDelete"The age of chivalry is gone. -- That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. ..."
Goralski's "Oil and War"
ReplyDeleteEllis's "Brute Force"
"Pointless insults aimed at the management are only allowed from reasonably consistent pseudonyms"
ReplyDeleteHave it your way, you riparian tootlebuggy.
"George W. Bush."
Erm, getting away with going AWOL from an already-cushy stateside Air National Guard gig might only be possible for aristos, but I'm not sure it counts as being in the Air Force. Especially not in the same sense as H.W.'s or McCain's service.
"Fighter pilot" is probably closest in romantic connotations to "cavalry officer," but my kneejerk impression is that the modern American aristocracy are disinclined to embrace the noblesse oblige of military service, since there's no longer much perceived advantage to it, nor even a token sense of identifying with the nation at large and its ideals. (McCain is again a counterexample, but I can't think of anyone else who has parlayed continual use of "I don't like to talk about it, but I was a POW" into obtaining and keeping higher office.)
Surely Burke rather the Nietzsche should be the reference?
ReplyDeletegood point I guess; in general if you're in the business of defending a class that's politically irrelevant and economically counterproductive, you're always going to be looking round for some other, special kind of value that they have. These were the good old days, when economists used to be on the right side.
John: Aren't there more direct ways to bash Brian Leiter?
ReplyDeletemy kneejerk impression is that the modern American aristocracy are disinclined to embrace the noblesse oblige of military service, since there's no longer much perceived advantage to it, nor even a token sense of identifying with the nation at large and its ideals.
ReplyDeleteOr merely that the armed services now have less place for them. Being an American military officer is not a sweet job; it's a strenuous one, to be taken as a career option.
M
Leiter is Nietzschean? That's more than I would wish on poor Friedrich, who tried so hard.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how much this has to do with modernity, though. Louis XIV's armies, led by pure-blood dukes and princes, were beaten again and again by a certain Mr. John Churchill
ReplyDeleteSee also, the New Model. Yours, in the good old cause.
If we're going to draw our evidence from the Pacific war, and if we're measuring last men against overmen, why not take a a case where the outnumbered overmen were able to knock over a superior force of last men? The fall of Singapore, for example. or Bataan.
ReplyDeleteThere's simply no reason why one ought to expect better men to be better infantrymen, and in fact they're quite often not.
Mr. John Churchill? Would that be any relation to the Duke of Marlborough, Imperial Prince of Mindelheim, Marquess of Blandford, Earl of Sunderland, Baron Spencer of Wormleighton and Baron Churchill of Sandridge? Good old John, the people's tribune. No side to him.
ReplyDeleteSmall factual correction, not affecting Krugman's main point: the cross-Channel pipeline used in 1944 was not American technology but the result of a collaboration between the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which knew about pipelines) and the British Post Office (which knew about underwater cables).
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Pluto
Just saying.
"To me, the madness began in 1914"
ReplyDeleteI would say 8000 BCE.
Mr. John Churchill? Would that be any relation to the Duke of Marlborough, Imperial Prince of Mindelheim, Marquess of Blandford, Earl of Sunderland, Baron Spencer of Wormleighton and Baron Churchill of Sandridge?
ReplyDeleteThat would be John Churchill the first Duke of Marlborough. He got his peerages and palaces after his military victories, as a reward for them. By birth he was, as Wikipedia has it "a lowly page".
"Lowly page" apparently means that his first job after school was as personal page of the crown prince, as reward for the loyalty of his father (an MP) to the royal court. His wife was a teenage friend of the future queen.
ReplyDeleteI suspect there were lowlier people in England in those days.
Well, really the madness is just Original Sin, which is the all-purpose explanation of everything.
ReplyDeleteIsn't one problem in comparing German fighting ability to Allied the fact that German commanders were much more prepared to accept enormous death rates (and to some extent the soldiers too)? I think Overy (again) makes the point that the British really weren't up for a repeat of 1914-1918 and fought accordingly.
ReplyDeleteCertain German Generals (I can't recall whome) thought that the Americans would crack when faced with modern warfare in Italy and Normandy, but in fact they did survive and fought well enough to beat the Germans.
ReplyDeleteOf course overwhelming material superiority also helped, but the American soldiers were also noted for having a greater ability to make do and mend and fix unexpected problems.
The Americans were also willing to accept higher casualties, so complained about MOntgomery's more cautious tactics which were designed to do the most with fewest casualties.
Dominic further up is perhaps pitting later research versus the views of those involved in the battles - such as Montgomery and others, who seemed convinced that the British infantry, when properly led etc, beat the germans, and proved it again and again. Of course they are likely to be unreliable witnesses, given their actual jobs at the time.
Ultimately, a great part of warfare is simply a matter of applying more men and material to a weak point in the enemy, thus you always aim to have surperiority in numbers and supplies. But it also helps to have superiority in generalship, and of course if Hitler hadn't been an insane fucker, the war would have been greatly prolonged.
No one mentioned motivation. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteFor whatever deep, dark, reason, America was attacked at Pearl Harbor. 10 millions volunteered.
The Nazis and Japs, on the other hand, were fighting for ideas.
In Europe, it wasn't like the armies of the Allies were so filled with Jews that your typically anti-Semitic Waffen SS member could justify warring with England just to purify the world.
And out in Japan, I can easily imagine people thinking "What's a 'Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere' to me? Sure, as the super-race, we deserve it, but should I be killing, and risk dying, for it?"
America, for years after 9/11, was on a desperate search to punish people who even vaguely resembled the people who flew those planes.
For whatever deep, dark, reason, America was attacked at Pearl Harbor.For whatever deep, dark, reason, America was attacked at Pearl Harbor.
ReplyDeleteAggh, frigging blogger.
ReplyDeleteBecause US/UK competing imperialist interests, and their attempts to contain Japan had nothing to do with Japan's "irrational" motives. Its the idiocy of decency which most annoys me I think.
"Ultimately, a great part of warfare is simply a matter of applying more men and material to a weak point in the enemy, thus you always aim to have surperiority in numbers and supplies. But it also helps to have superiority in generalship, and of course if Hitler hadn't been an insane fucker, the war would have been greatly prolonged."
ReplyDeleteOne of the things I've heard is that after (former) Soviet archives were opened in the 90's, there was a lot of revisionism in historian's view of WWII Red Army performance. It seemed that a fair amount of the 'they overwhelmed us with raw numbers' story which the German Army veterans told Allied historians was due to the Red Army getting it's act together, and being able to do blitzkrieg campaigns. They were able to concentrate forces and deceive the German Army as to where attacks were going to be.
The Mongols were always said to have outnumbered their enemies, but they never did.
ReplyDeleteInfantry-against-infantry combat in the post-machinegun era is slaughter for the attacker, pure and simple. Shy a covered and concealed route around the defender's machinegun positions, the attacker just has to throw bodies forward an hope the defender runs out of ammunition. So trying to judge the relative virtues of various societies by their willingness to do just that is like judging their courage by their suicide rate.
ReplyDeleteThe Japanese Imperial Army of the 1940s was perhaps the least tactically sophisticated of any of the great powers, and their record in the Pacific proves it. You'll note that the Japanese could never manage to mount a successful counterattack in any of their island defenses; they hadn't the material wherewithal to maintain a large enough reserve to throw the Americans off the islands they defended, and they didn't have (after Midway) the naval force they needed to provide that wherewithal.
That being the case, all the U.S. had to do was keep attacking, and eventually they'd break the Japanese defenses. They did, and it's to the credit of the draftee soldiers and the Marines that they did. But it says very little about the relative "fighting qualities" of the two societies. The U.S. had all the technical, tactical, logistic, and strategic advantages on the ground. We would have had to execute some sort of "reverse-miracle" (or lost the naval battles) for the Japanese to win.
Human beings who excel at slaughtering strangers are "better people"?
ReplyDeleteWhat an odd notion.
-eb53
(...after attempt to use OpenID resulted in "Open ID error").
In which fighting, there appears to be virtual unanimity among military historians, German soldiers couldn't be shifted without (a) air superiority, overwhelming material support, many more tanks, many more guns, and all the paraphernalia of the 'art of production, of supply, and (b) two-to-one (or four-to-one, to be safer) superiority in numbers. They were, man for man, better soldiers.
ReplyDeleteThe Germans were on the defensive in France and Italy. You need three to one superiority in numbers to succeed in an attack. So if your objective is held by a company, you need a battalion to take it. If it's held by a battalion, you need a brigade. Basic tactical rule of thumb. Anyone who did not know this should not really be pontificating about warfare.
(Except in cities. In urban combat it's ten to one. Which explains things like "2 Para vs. two Waffen SS Panzer divisions at Arnhem" being anything other than a complete pushover.)
I profoundly disagree - years ago an American Colonel (and military history anorak) called Trver Dupuy did a detailed statistical analysis on encounters between the Wehrmacht and the Allies.
ReplyDeleteHis results were, whenever the numbers were approximately equal, the allies ALWAYS lost. That's always - he couldn't find a single exception.
He put this down to superior staff work, and better trained junior leaders, although superior equipment was also a factor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_N._Dupuy