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Bad ideas in war

Let's keep the balls rolling ;)

Speaking of D-Day since its anniversary was just yesterday, why were the Germans so bad at it? Well, that would be a whole book, but some of the basic reasons.

Before D-Day, Rommel was determined that the only way to stop an invasion was to stop it right on the beach and push them right back into the sea. The rest of the generals favoured an in-depth defense doctrine, where the divisions would be held way back, and they could retreat to prepared positions and basically trade land for time. (Which was one time where I'll admit Rommel was right, since the latter would allow the allies to establish beachheads... and we all saw in real history how THAT went for Germany.)

So, Hitler is called to arbitrate (the Führerprinzip said he knows better about everything, i.e., literally more infallible than the Pope.) And he makes a bad compromise, where Rommel gets 3 divisions to hold closer to the beach, while most of the rest are held back or even shifted to souther France. And they can only be moved to the beaches if Hitler personally gives that order. (Which I suppose was the only way to keep Rommel from doing whatever he wants.)

And so comes D-Day, where Rommel is visiting his family, the other generals are, ironically, off to an exercise to prepare for an invasion, and Hitler slept through the day until evening, so he CAN'T give the order to move the divisions in the back. And nobody dares wake him up, even while the invasion is happening RIGHT NAO. So 70% of the force is sitting around way back, twiddling their thumbs, because there's no order from Hitler to move.

So, yeah, bad ideas in war:

- a plan to let the enemy establish a beachhead, and

- creating that kind of non-overridable bottleneck that depends on whether one guy is awake to give the order or not
 
Don't forget they held back because the higher command and Hitler thought it was just a diversion from the real landing which would be further to the north. That's the area they would have chosen so it made sense that the Allies would do the same, plus various well known ruses were used to convince the Germans that's where they real invasion was going to be.
 
Defense in depth has its merits. While it does allow a beachhead it can also inflict many more casualties than trying to stop the beachhead. This was Japan's strategy late in the war as they had found just trying to stop the landings didn't work and caused more casualties for them.

Thing is, adding casualties matters when your plan is to get the enemy to the negotiating table. Hitler wasn't thinking in those terms. He was expecting his generals to rally, attack, and shove the enemy off the beach after getting themselves aligned.
 
Their big problem was movement. If they tried to move in daylight they got shot to pieces by the air forces. Any softskin seen moving or in the open was doomed.
Flags were pushed around maps but on the ground progress was slow and units got split up if they could move at all.
 
Andy_Ross said:
Their big problem was movement. If they tried to move in daylight they got shot to pieces by the air forces. Any softskin seen moving or in the open was doomed.
Flags were pushed around maps but on the ground progress was slow and units got split up if they could move at all.
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Surely, if you can't easily move your troops during daylight, it makes the case for trying to repel the landing at the beaches even more strongly? Because otherwise you won't be able to react quickly enough to push the beachhead into the channel.
 
jimbob said:
Surely, if you can't easily move your troops during daylight, it makes the case for trying to repel the landing at the beaches even more strongly? Because otherwise you won't be able to react quickly enough to push the beachhead into the channel.
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Rommel was promised he'd be provided air support tout suite in the event of invasion but I don't know if he really believed that reassurance was anything other than hollow.
 
kookbreaker said:
Defense in depth has its merits. While it does allow a beachhead it can also inflict many more casualties than trying to stop the beachhead. This was Japan's strategy late in the war as they had found just trying to stop the landings didn't work and caused more casualties for them.

Thing is, adding casualties matters when your plan is to get the enemy to the negotiating table. Hitler wasn't thinking in those terms. He was expecting his generals to rally, attack, and shove the enemy off the beach after getting themselves aligned.
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Defense in depth is a downright GREAT idea when it's land warfare. No argument there. It's a dumb idea when it means allowing superior military and industrial nations to establish a beachhead from which they can push you back indefinitely all the way to Berlin.

Again, don't trust my opinion. Just look at the real history and how having Allied beachheads worked for Germany.
 
HansMustermann said:
Again, don't trust my opinion. Just look at the real history and how having Allied beachheads worked for Germany.
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Fair point, but what history did Germany have that they could look at, to learn that lesson ahead of time?

Also, the D-Day beachheads were a logistical flex of epic proportions. I'm not sure it's fair to say the Germans were stupid for not expecting them to be as big and successful as they were.

Kind of like how the USSR was probably not expecting anything like the Berlin Airlift. And how NATO allies had to be shown REFORGER, in order to trust in the premise.

In fact, the west - especially the US - has a long history of epic logistical flexes that nobody imagines ahead of time. Saddam Hussein never anticipated the Coalition would launch a massive flanking attack against Kuwait from the deep Saudi desert. And the air campaign that kicked off the invasion of Iraq a few years later was truly gargantuan.

So were the Germans stupid to plan a defense in depth against the D-Day landings? Or could they have reasonably anticipated creating a Market Garden 2.0?
 
jimbob said:
Surely, if you can't easily move your troops during daylight, it makes the case for trying to repel the landing at the beaches even more strongly? Because otherwise you won't be able to react quickly enough to push the beachhead into the channel.
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As Posted, they didn't think it was the main landing.
Plus, spreading out your forces along the entire Channel coast would leave them unable to concentrate anywhere..

It's why you don't spread your forces along the length of any river or border. You keep them concentrated in positions where they can oppose a crossing in force.

The Germans big problems were as pointed out, the mistake of thinking it was a diversion and the failure to release the divisions that were available in time.

Also they didn't anticipate the strength of the tactical fighter forces which is ironic as tactical air support was one of their strengths.
My Uncle Harold went across on D-Day but not in the initial assault.
He was a radio operator with an RAF Forward Observation Officer unit A Foo as they were known.
Their job was to be at the front and call in the Typhoons of the tactical squadrons that were waiting in a 'cab rank'

They teamed with an artillery Foo and until they were out of range after the first month or so, a naval Foo was attached with them to call in fire from the Cruisers and battleships in the bombardment force offshore.
He had stories of the closeness of the fighting on several occasions, calling a strike almost on top of their own position.
At one point they lost their way in the dark and stopped just off a road. In the night they heard heavy pass and stop a short distance up the road.
As it got light they saw it was a German unit sheltering in a wooded area and after fixing their position in the light call was put in and their own aircraft, artillery and naval gunfire hit the Germans just a few minutes later.

Most of the calls were support calls and requests from infantry units of course, the response from call for fire to it actually arriving could be remarkably quick.

One of the biggest problems for the Germans was the 'free range' aircraft operating independently on targets of opportunity well behind the front. They were virtually unopposed.There was a saying

If it's silver it's American, If it's brown it's British, If you don't see it then it's ours.
 
HansMustermann said:
Defense in depth is a downright GREAT idea when it's land warfare. No argument there. It's a dumb idea when it means allowing superior military and industrial nations to establish a beachhead from which they can push you back indefinitely all the way to Berlin.

Again, don't trust my opinion. Just look at the real history and how having Allied beachheads worked for Germany.
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As I said, if you set it up to cause casualties so they give up then it works fine.

It can also work to contain the beachhead. Look at most of Anzio.

Edit: One of the reasons that most non-Rommel generals didn't want to stop them on the beach is because they had seen what the US & UK naval guns would do to any non-fixed forces. Rommel had not seen this in action.
 
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theprestige said:
Fair point, but what history did Germany have that they could look at, to learn that lesson ahead of time?
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Uh, Operation Torch for example?

Or hell, not a naval invasion, but just looking at the eastern front for what it means to have a more industrialized nation be able to just dump as many troops as they can on your border?
 
kookbreaker said:
As I said, if you set it up to cause casualties so they give up then it works fine.

It can also work to contain the beachhead. Look at most of Anzio.
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The Italian (mainland, not Sicily) invasion was more of a case study in what happens if you land and just sit on your ass while letting the enemy get the high ground and bombard you into oblivion. I'm not sure why anyone would assume that the Allies would show the same incompetence twice, especially since, as I've said, they hadn't shown it in Sicily or, for that matter, in Torch.

Seriously, when your plan is, basically, the enemy will be pencils-up-the-nose underpants-on-head stupid... well, even if it happened once before, it's... not really something you can RELY on, is it? :p

But anyway, sure, hindsight is 20/20, but benefiting from that we can still say they took a bad decision, innit? As in one that has already been historically proven to be bad.
 
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BTW, I may have failed to explain the details that would make it a bad idea. I'm not talking about a few kilometres behind, or closer to Calais than Normandy. I'm talking about REALLY in depth. USSR levels of in depth. As in they were prepared to go backwards all the way to behind the Seine river, i.e., on the other side of Paris. And frankly, the moment you've "contained" a "beachhead" half the size of France, and the US and UK and free France have the rest, you've already lost. So, you know, maybe Rommel had a point to try to push them back into the sea immediately.
 
HansMustermann said:
Well,

1. all of those were cases where the war had been already started by someone else. Whether you're pro- or anti-war, the USA didn't exactly make the choice to fight Japan or the Confederacy or any of that, it was forced upon them. And I wasn't arguing that anyone shouldn't defend themselves.
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The war may have been started by someone else, but the US didn't actually need to get involved. When Germany declared war on the US, they could have just responded "yeah, whatever" and stayed out of the war anyway. They didn't because there were good reasons not to. When Germany invaded Poland Britain and France could have said "war is always bad, we shouldn't get involved" and just stayed out, but instead they declared war because, even when you aren't being attacked, there are sometimes good reasons to go to war, including but not limited to the possibly that you'll be next. There are also good reasons to risk war. The US could have continued to trade oil etc. with Japan and stayed out of the conflict in the Pacific and pearl harbor never would have happened, but it's good that they didn't choose peace over all other considerations in that case.
They could have stayed out of the conflict in Korea, but again I'm glad that they didn't, even though the war itself was tragic.

As for aggressive war, I suspect China thinks that their invasion of Tibet worked out well for them.

Some of the benefits of war to the aggressor are the projection of power and "politics by other means". For example if you go to war against some weaker power when they do something you don't want, others will be more likely to take that into account next time you try to bully them. These kinds of tactics work less well in our world today because we have an international order supported by a superpower, economic sanctions, and potentially military force that attempt to make the costs greater than the benefits, but that's true by design not by definition.

2. It was started by someone who then lost. Which is kinda the important part. I'm not looking at it as "was it good for country A", but was it any good for humanity as a whole. As in, not just "was it good that the USA beat up Japan", but rather that we'd all have been better off if Japan just took a chill pill in the 30's instead of starting wars. Way I see it, starting those wars was a net loss for the planet. Is all I'm saying.
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I'll agree that war is, in general, not good for humanity as a whole. But humanity as a whole is never the one making the decision about whether or not to have a war. Instead you've got a bunch of individual actors making independent decisions. And there are game theoretic reasons why the best strategy for everyone as a whole isn't necessarily the best strategy for the individual actors involved.
 
Yes, obviously it's individual actors, but all I'm saying is that their (or any other individual actors') actions may not necessarily align with what's good for the rest of humanity.
 
HansMustermann said:
Yes, obviously it's individual actors, but all I'm saying is that their (or any other individual actors') actions may not necessarily align with what's good for the rest of humanity.
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Yeah, agreed, and to the extent that the point is that war is generally bad for humanity, I also agree. It's generally negative sum. I guess I read you as saying more than that, that it's always negative for all parties involved, and that's not always the case, even for the aggressor sometime they come out ahead, though I'd suggest that in the modern world that's rarer than in the past.

Furthermore, the main thing I'd like to emphasize is that conditional on one party's actions (Russia invading Ukraine, for example), the decision of other parties to either risk or go to war with the first party may be net positive to humanity. Yes, it would be better if Russia didn't invade Ukraine, but if they do the best response for humanity may be for others to resist them with violence, and not just the nation who has been attacked, but also others who form a coalition to punish aggressors who defect from the global peace.

I'm not suggesting that you disagree with any of that, I just think it's worth emphasizing. I think we are all pro peace, but sometimes a real deterrent to bad actors is the best way to ensure future peace.
 
HansMustermann said:
I'll start this out with the WW2 British idea that German paratroopers could just land in Central Park, and who's gonna stop them?
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They used gliders as well, which are much more useful for a targeted landing. Glider Infantry seem to get overlooked in the US, less so in the UK where Operation Deadstick is remembered.
 
HansMustermann said:
Let's keep the balls rolling ;)

Before D-Day, Rommel was determined that the only way to stop an invasion was to stop it right on the beach and push them right back into the sea. The rest of the generals favoured an in-depth defense doctrine, where the divisions would be held way back, and they could retreat to prepared positions and basically trade land for time.
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There's a few subtleties to add to this:

The original (conventional) concept was to have an outpost line on the coast, designed to identify the location and strength of the attack, and breakup its cohesion, with a main line of resistance a short distance behind with prepared positions. The armoured reserve would be held well back from the coast so that a planned mass armoured attack could be made later.

Rommel had operated under Allied air superiority and was concerned that the mass armoured attack would be slowed by Allied air interdiction. His alternative was to move the main line of resistance to the coast and to use beach obstacles as the outpost line. Armoured reserves were to be placed near the coast to launch immediate counterattacks. The downside of armoured reserves close to the coast was that units not near the landings would take longer to get there.

The key point missed by the Germans was that the Allies had evolved an effective anti-armour defence. A mass attack had been defeated easily at Medenine, an immediate response by a unit close to the coast had failed at Salerno.

In Normandy 21st Panzer was stopped dead on the afternoon of 6 June, and the mass counterattack against Epsom never really started. And to put the cherry on top, the RAF trashed the HQ of PanzerGruppe West, which was to command the armoured counterattack, on 10 June.
 
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@Roboramma
Well, obviously alliances and deterrence are the best form of self defense. Otherwise a more powerful actor could snowball by gobbling up smaller states with impunity.

Plus, obviously deterrence is better than an all out war.
 
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