An Overextended Argument

March/April 2005 Historically Speaking hard in 1939-1940. Military analysts, failing to understand how German doctrine had developed in the first war, then replicated the process all over again. For a practical illustration of combined arms tactics in 1914-18, see the discussion in MGW, 55-66. There's no doubt that the Germans absorbed the lessons regarding combined arms by the end of the war (at the very latest ). See, for instance, the divisional organizational tables of the units operating in the Baltic in 1919, first published in Josef Bischoff, Die Letzte Front: Geschichte der Eisernen Division im Baltikum 1919 (Schützen Verlag, 1935), 263-64. A more detailed and comprehensive display ofthe organizational charts is to be found in Reichsministerium, Der Feldzug im Baltikum bis zur Zweiten Einnahme von Riga (Mittler und Sohn, 1937), 143-159. Much of the key to the success of German troops in the Second World War is to be found in the vicious combats of 1919-1921—routinely ignored by historians, who have by and large followed the lead of Robert G L. Waite, who sees the whole thing in such political terms as to demilitarize it entirely: Vanguard ofNazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany, 1918-1923 (Harvard University Press, 1952). As a result, the only comprehensive study of the situation is to be found in Dominique Venner, Baltikum (Editions Robert Laffont, 1975), recently reissued as Histoire d'unfascisme allemand (Pygmalion, 1996). 6 This idea bothered some readers, who brought up the strategic bombing campaign against Japan as the obvious counterfactual. Leaving aside the rejoinder that I'm not sure it accomplished anything other than killing hundreds of thousands of civilians (as an island nation with no natural resources, Japan was uniquely vulnerable to naval interdiction), the point confuses chronology: by late 1944, strategic bombing became technically feasible, but it wasn't at any point in the 1930s, or through the first part ofthe war. Of late there has been an attempt, mostly (and not surprisingly) by British analysts, to argue that the strategic bombing campaign was actually successful. See, for example, the comments by Frederick Taylor in Dresden: Tuesday, March 13, 1945 (HarperCollins, 2004), 413. This claim seems stretching it considerably. See the discussion of the actual results ofthe air war in Europe in TBM, 196-208; for the theoretical reason why not, see the next to last paragraph ofthis essay. 7 To summarize the data: in 1939-1940 two out of every three German tanks deployed were the obsolete Marks I and II, essentially armored machine gun carriers. The Mark III, which was intended to be the main battle tank, constituted only one out ofevery eight tanks, and the Mark IV, the only tank with anything approximating a decent gun, only constituted 9% of the tank force. Interestingly, the proportion of Marks III and IV was lower in May 1940 than in September 1939. See the discussion in TBM, 44-5 1 . 8 See the account in TBM, 62-77. In The German Army, 1939-1945 (Cooper and Lucas, 1978), Matthew Cooper makes somewhat the same overall point on pages 173-74. 9 Accounts of Finland and the Scandinavian fetish: TBM, 78-101. That the Dutch were not caught by surprise is one of those small facts that strikes me as standing much conventional history on its head. 10These battles, when mentioned at all, are simply dismissed, a tactic in military history that goes back to the previous war, when operations that contradicted the "victorious BEF rising out ofthe bloody stalemate" myth were simply written out ofthe record. But numerous local histories, eyewitness accounts, and commemorative markers make the violent and prolonged nature ofthe conflict along the heights ofthe Meuse quite clear. See the discussion in TBM, 131-33 and 139-141. 11See the account ofthe stall (TBM, 223-26), the breakout (227-230) and Hitler's disastrous offensive of August 3, 1944 (231-37). The interesting thing is the consistent refusal to plan for the actual battlefield, i.e., to modify plans based on the terrain, a principle which animates not only the plans of Hitler and the Allies, but the conventional accounts of these campaigns as...