Mythos revisited:
American Historians and German Fighting Power in the Second World War
by Thomas E. Nutter
Page 4 of 4
Chapter Eleven
Peter R. Mansoor, The GI Offensive In Europe
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A fashionable argument in the past two decades has been that the Allies won
World War II only through the sheer weight of materiel they threw at the
Wehrmacht in a relatively unskilled manner. This argument is actually a
restatement of the theory put forward by German officers to explain their
defeat, as evidenced by wartime interrogations and postwar manuscripts prepared
by the defeated.[222]
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So begins Peter Mansoor's The GI Offensive in Europe. The Triumph of
American Infantry Divisions, 1941-1945. The sympathies expressed in
this passage infuse Mansoor's work; indeed, it is not too much to say that the
evisceration of the "fashionable argument" is the raison d'etre of The
GI Offensive in Europe . The present study has already dealt at some
length with Mansoor's "analysis" of the purveyors of the "fashionable argument"
and their respective works. His "Introduction" lays waste, in a bare two and a
half pages, the reputations of S. L. A. Marshall, Trevor N. Dupuy, Russell
Weigley, Martin van Creveld, John Keegan, Max Hastings and John Ellis, whom he
collectively characterizes as "revisionist historians" [223]
The "Introduction" to Mansoor's work is so informative of the author's thesis
that it is worth considering it in some detail. Commenting favorably upon John
Sloan Brown's "critique" of Trevor Dupuy and his work, Mansoor highlights
Brown's contention that Dupuy's selection of engagements to study "is skewed
toward those battles in which the more elite German panzer and panzer grenadier
divisions, which constituted only a small percentage of the Wehrmacht,
participated. Dupuy thus compared the American army against the cream of the
Wehrmacht." Brown's opinion in this regard, which Mansoor obviously shares,
raises two interesting questions. First, Brown and Mansoor both take the view
that the American GI was qualitatively superior to the German landser; this
being the case, it should matter not one whit which German unit (elite or
otherwise) is compared to which American unit. Conversely, if Mansoor and Brown
believe that the U.S. army is unfairly prejudiced by Dupuy's comparison of it
with "elite" German units, then how is it that neither of them takes into
account the decrepit condition of the "run of the mill" German formations most
often encountered by the Allies in Western Europe in 1944-1945? Similarly, in
his brief commentary on Keith Bonn's When the Odds Were Even, Mansoor
emphasizes the author's contention that the U.S. Seventh Army prevailed in the
Vosges Mountains in the absence of its customary advantages in logistics and
close air support "and in terrain and weather conditions that clearly favored a
defensive stand by the numerically superior German forces." (emphasis
added). Yet, an essential element of the thesis advanced by Mansoor, Bonn, et
al is that numerical advantages (whether in terms of
ammunition, guns, trucks, tanks or aircraft) were irrelevant to the success of
the U.S. army in Western Europe.[224]
In moving on to outline his own thesis, Mansoor suggests that two factors,
namely the so-called "ninety-division gamble" and the simultaneous commitment
of American resources to active prosecution of the war in both Europe and the
Pacific, produced a situation in which "systematic unit rotation was impossible
in the ETO. American soldiers paid the price for the ninety-division gamble
from Italy to Normandy, across France, along the West Wall, through the
Ardennes, and into Germany." Although Mansoor does not ask it, this statement
implicitly raises the issue of whether such a policy constituted a shortcoming
in "the American way of war" comparable to the oft-maligned German decision to
fight a two-front war by attacking the Soviet Union before it had secured
victory against Britain. Mansoor then asserts that the pernicious effects of
the "ninety-division gamble" were compounded by an American personnel policy
that sent the highest quality draftees to the Army Air Force and the Army
Service Forces. "The result of this system", says Mansoor "was the siphoning
off of the most qualified inductees into almost any type of organization other
than infantry, armor, and field artillery." If such a policy was detrimental to
the quality of combat units in the U.S. army, as it surely must have been, what
must we conclude about the quality of German combat units encountered by
American forces in 1944-1945? Were those German formations composed of "the
most qualified inductees", made up as they were with under-aged boys, over-aged
men, unwilling and uncomprehending volksdeutsche , and unreliable,
unmotivated foreigners?[225]
Mansoor goes on to lament the "lack of personnel stability" that evidently
pervaded many divisions in the U.S. army. This resulted from the War Department
policy of stripping out trainees to use them as replacements for units in the
field. "Lack of personnel stability," Mansoor argues, "complicated the training
of these divisions before their entry into combat, often forcing them to repeat
basic training for new inductees at the expense of more advanced collective
training for battalion and regimental combat teams." As this study has already
shown, however, in 1944 there was no such thing as "personnel stability" in the
Wehrmacht; German inductees were fortunate indeed if they received as much as
four to six weeks basic training, and advanced tactical, combined-arms training
at the battalion and regimental levels was virtually nonexistent. While
complaining of the absence of "personnel stability" in the U.S. army, Mansoor
nevertheless concedes that "[F]acilities and training improved as mobilization
progressed" and that "[H]uge maneuver areas located across the United States
allowed the army to conduct sustained large-scale, multidivision maneuvers for
the first time in its history." It goes without saying that all such training
occurred in a secure environment, in which there was not the remotest
possibility of interference from enemy aircraft. It would be interesting to
know whether Mansoor could identify a single instance, subsequent to the first
half of 1942, in which the German army was able to engage in "sustained
large-scale, multidivision maneuvers."[226]
The most persistent theme in Mansoor's "Introduction", and throughout the
balance of his work as well, is that the U.S. army rose to the pinnacle of
professional competence by 1945 in spite of having been burdened during the
period 1941-1943 by innumerable obstacles. In addition to the "lack of
personnel stability" previously discussed, Mansoor points out that the rapid
expansion of the army after Pearl Harbor resulted in a shortage of competent
leadership, especially at the level of junior officers and noncommissioned
officers. There was also, according to Mansoor, a shortage of equipment until
1943, so that troops trained with weapons different from those with which they
would actually fight. These factors combined to reduce the effectiveness of the
army's training regimen; the problems caused by inadequate training were
compounded by two additional factors, namely the army's lack of combat
experience and its policy of scavenging training units in order to provide
formations in the field with replacements.
It was with the poorly trained troops fostered by the system Mansoor describes
that the U.S. army assaulted Festung Europa in the summer of 1944.
Mansoor characterizes the Normandy campaign as one of "fierce battles of
attrition" in which the inexperienced Allies, possessed of "a healthy
superiority of artillery and airpower", contested with a German force which,
though understrength, enjoyed the benefits of experienced leadership and "many
technologically superior weapons." He concludes that the Allies ultimately
defeated their foe in Normandy by wearing it down and bursting through its
weakened line. Mansoor laments the fact, however, that the bloody battle of
attrition in Normandy has led to "revisionist thinking" about the comparative
abilities of the German and American armies in 1944. Mansoor calls such
comparisons "misleading", and it is in his discussion of this point that his
argument begins to stretch credulity to the breaking point.
Mansoor begins by stating that during the period 1933-1939 (a "luxurious time
interval") the German army had every opportunity to, and did, expand itself
from the one-hundred thousand-man Reichswehr to the juggernaut that conquered
Poland and Western Europe in 1939-1940. Mansoor follows this observation with
the following remarks:
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The Wehrmacht seasoned its divisions in campaigns in Poland, Norway,
France, the Balkans, Africa, and Russia prior to D-Day. The Germans suffered
many casualties, but by June 1944 the Wehrmacht had combat veterans in
command of the vast majority of its units. The Germans had an established,
combat-tested tactical doctrine. Most German units had solid non-commissioned
officer leaders and well-trained soldiers, kept in line through ideological
indoctrination and rigid (and often brutal) discipline. German equipment was
among the most technologically advanced in the world, especially their tanks
and machine guns.[227]
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The present author admits to having reacted to this passage with astonishment
and, frankly, incomprehension. It did not seem credible that one who had earned
a doctorate in history could be capable of such utterances. Recourse to a
decent dictionary did not alleviate the situation. Webster's Encyclopedic
Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (Portland House, 1989) includes
among its definitions of the verb transitive form of the word season
the following: "to accustom or harden: troops seasoned by battle." This,
presumably, was the definition of the term season that
Mansoor had in mind when he wrote the passage referred to above. Leaving aside
any consideration of the other theatres mentioned by Mansoor, to characterize
what happened to the German army in Russia during the three years immediately
preceding the invasion of Western Europe as seasoning
positively beggars the imagination. Perhaps some details will help put the
matter in perspective.
During the whole of the United States' involvement in World War II (roughly
three and a half years) a total of 16,353,659 military personnel were drafted
or volunteered for service. The number of men killed in action totaled 292,131
(Army/Army Air Force 234,874; Navy 36,950; Marines 19,733; Coast Guard 574);
671,278 men (Army/Army Air Force 565,861; Navy 37,778; Marines 67,207; Coast
Guard 432) were wounded in action. American forces thus suffered 963,409 total
casualties against the Axis.[228] During the six-month period July through
December 1941, the German Ostheer suffered 767,938 casualties,
including 167,354 men killed in action, and 600,584 men wounded.[229] In this
six-month period, then, the German Ostheer alone suffered 0.797% of the total
casualties incurred by all United States armed forces in over three
and a half years of war. Breaking the numbers down still further, German dead
for the period in question amounted to 0.573% of the total American dead for
the entire war; the number of German wounded represented 0.895% of the total
number of American wounded in all of World War II .
Numbers such as these, it would seem, speak for themselves. Is an armed force
that suffers 167,354 irretrievable losses in a six-month period "accustomed",
in any conceivable definition of that term, by such casualties? How many of the
600,584 landsers wounded between July and December 1941 were"hardened"
by that experience so as to make them more formidable soldiers? Do we count
among such "hardened" soldiers those who were, though
not dead, so maimed as to be unfit for further military service? These figures,
be it recalled, do not include the hundreds of thousands of German dead and
wounded suffered by the Ostheer alone over the next two and a half
years preceding the Normandy invasion. Was the German army "accustomed"
and "hardened" in proportion to the amount of such
further casualties, according to the tenets of some remarkable calculus? If so,
then surely Mansoor and his acolytes are correct in their generous estimation
of the fighting qualities of the U.S. army, for the extent of the casualties
suffered by the German army between June, 1941 and June, 1944 must certainly
have rendered it so "accustomed" and "hardened
" as to be almost invincible---to any foe, that is, save the American GI. The
German army did indeed, as Mansoor puts it, suffer "many casualties".
Mansoor puts the case that the German army encountered in Western Europe in
1944-1945 "had combat veterans in command of the vast majority of its units".
Such a statement needs must be at least plausible, given the fact that, taking
into account the time period of which Mansoor is speaking, the German army had
been engaged in combat operations consistently for the better part of the
previous five years. The important question, of course, has to do with the
background, experience and training of the "combat veterans" to whom Mansoor
refers. This question, in turn, raises the entire issue of the effect that the
four and a half years of war that preceded 6 June 1944 had upon the German
army. Looking again at only the first six months of the campaign in Russia, the
Ostheer sustained a total of 11,335 officers killed in action,
including 3,888 regular officers and 7447 reserve officers.[231] Between
October 1942 and September 1943, the German army as a whole (excluding the Waffen
SS ) suffered a total of 33,157 officers killed (5,971), wounded
(16,615) and missing (10,571).[232] On October 18, 1944 German radio announced
to the nation that 50,000 German officers, including 138 General officers, had
been killed since the outset of the war.[233] Over the course of the war, in an
effort to address such losses, the German army promoted 238,283 men to officer
rank.[234]
While these numbers relating to losses of German army officers are indicative
of the crisis that confronted the Allies' principal enemy in Western Europe,
they do not really begin to describe that crisis in any meaningful way. During
the nine-month period 22 June 1941 to 31 March 1942, the Ostheer absorbed
567,461 casualties from sickness and frostbite, and 1,082,690 casualties from
fighting, for a total of 1,650,151 casualties. Over the same period, the army
in the East received a total of 814,600 replacements and recuperated soldiers.
For this period, then, the Ostheer suffered 835,551 losses that were
not replaced. The personnel situation of the Ostheer improved somewhat over the
next two months; in April 1942 it took 108,450 casualties (including 60,291
killed), and received 121,400 replacements, while in the following month it
absorbed 134,230 casualties (including 74,700 killed) as against 158,900
replacements received.[236] The effects of such losses on the army were, as one
might expect, deleterious and not long in coming. Whereas in June 1941, 134 out
of 209 divisions (64%) were classified as fit for any offensive action, at the
end of March 1942 only 8 out of 162 divisions (5%) were ranked in this
category.[237] The situation for the army only worsened with the coming of the
Kursk offensive and its aftermath. In July 1943 it suffered 215,100 casualties,
as against 92,100 replacements; in August 1943, 262,300 losses against 79,000
replacements; in September 1943, 231,700 losses against 127,000 replacements;
in October 1943, 198,400 losses against 121,000 replacements; and in November
1943, 87,800 losses against 100,400 replacements.[238] Overall, the strength of
the Ostheer decreased from 3,300,000 men in June 1941 to 2,200,000 men in July
1944.[239]
Mansoor's claims that the German army faced by the Western Allies in Normandy
had combat veterans (including "solid non-commissioned officers") in command of
the majority of its units beg the question, as those assertions fail to take
into account the decimation of the force that had brought about such a
"seasoned" officer corps. His argument that the German army facing the Allies
in the West was armed with "technologically advanced" weaponry is also
deceptive. In 1944 Germany produced 19,000 tanks and self-propelled guns. In
that year the United States alone produced 17,565 such vehicles; the figures
for that year for Britain and the USSR were 4,600 and 28,963 respectively. Over
the entire course of the war Germany produced a total of 674,280 machine-guns,
as against 4,744,484 such weapons turned out by the Allies.[240] Mansoor (like
Bonn, Doubler and Brown) may contend that the defeat of the German army in the
West was due more to the skill, tenacity and bravery of the common American
soldier than it was to the ability of the Allies to utterly swamp their foe
with men and materiel; such an argument, however, fails utterly to comprehend
the reality of the Second World War in Europe.
Finally, Mansoor's "seasoning" argument asserts that the German army in the
West overcome by the Allies in 1944-1945 enjoyed "an established, combat-tested
tactical doctrine" and "well-trained soldiers", both of which characteristics
were insufficient to prevent its defeat. If the present study has shown
anything, it is that the German army confronted by the Western Allies between
June 1944 and May 1945 was comprised of troops who could not, by any stretch of
the imagination, be described as "well trained". Indeed, the very antithesis is
true: from Normandy, to the Vosges Mountains, to the Ardennes, the German army
was composed of an ill-trained rabble, particularly when compared with the
highly-trained, cohesive force that was the United States Army. As to the
"established, combat-tested tactical doctrine" available to the German army in
its struggle with the Western Allies, is not the entire point of Mansoor's work
(and those of Bonn, Brown and Doubler) that the tactical doctrine employed by
the German army was inferior to that of the United States Army, and further
that whatever the tactical doctrine of the German army may have been, that
force was inept in its application of the doctrine in any case?
As silly as the above-described arguments of Mansoor are, his subsequent
remarks are equally incomprehensible. His Introduction, for example, concludes
with the following statements:
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The Army of the United States lacked most of these advantages [namely, those
ascribed to the German army in his "seasoning" argument] when compared with the
Wehrmacht. American rearmament began in June 1940 after the fall of France, and
within two and a half years the first American divisions engaged in combat in
North Africa against an experienced enemy. One wonders how the German army
would have fared if forced into combat against the French in the Rhineland in
1936 under similar circumstances. Indeed, historian Williamson Murray concludes
that "in nearly every respect, the Wehrmacht was not ready" to fight a major
war even as late as 1938, five years after the beginning of rearmament…A more
balanced comparison of German and American forces would compare each
organization at its zenith, say, the German army in June 1941 and the American
army in April 1945. I submit that one would be hard-pressed to choose between
the two forces on the basis of technical or tactical proficiency at the
division level…The Army of the United States reached its zenith of combat
effectiveness without the extensive ideological indoctrination and fear-based
discipline that infused many German units with their will to fight.[241]
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If the German army can be said to have been "advantaged" vis-à-vis the
United States Army in 1944 (or even in 1943, for that matter, after the
catastrophic losses suffered at Stalingrad and Alamein), having suffered
literally millions of casualties, including tens of thousands of officers
killed in action, dependent upon an industrial base wholly incapable of
matching the output of its adversaries, incapable of adequately training its
soldiers, and exposed to the untrammeled operations of the enemy's overwhelming
airpower, then surely, as Mansoor suggests, the United States Army was unfairly
disadvantaged in its struggle with the Wehrmacht.
The quotation from Mansoor cited above gives real insight into the dilemma
facing him and others like him in their effort to "rehabilitate" the image of
the United States Army in World War II.[242] That dilemma consists of
explaining how the United States armed forces, and particularly the United
States Army, blessed as Mansoor and others freely admit with the ability to
train under absolutely optimum conditions for a minimum of two and half years
before engaging its enemy, supplied with an historically unprecedented bounty
in weapons and supplies, possessed of near-absolute control of the airspace
above it, and at the time period in issue in essentially unfettered control of
its supply lines, was unable to bring down with dispatch a foe having no such
advantages, one indeed literally at the end of its tether and fighting for its
life. Mansoor's "resolution" of this dilemma, as can be seen in the foregoing
passage, is to resort to nonsensical arguments that cannot bear scrutiny.[243]
For example, Mansoor argues that the United States Army, after "only" two and a
half years training, engaged an "experienced enemy" in North Africa, wishing
the reader to draw the inference that if ever there were a military mismatch,
this was it. For the purposes of the present work, it will suffice to state
that the German army that the Allies confronted in North Africa after November
1942 was indeed "experienced"---it had experienced all of the effects of war
heretofore mentioned in this chapter, as well as two resounding defeats, at
Stalingrad and Alamein. The Afrika Korps, or what was left of it, was
quite literally "on the run", bereft of adequate supplies, at the mercy of
Allied airpower, and overwhelmed by a healthy Allied preponderance in men and
war materiel. The Allied invasion of Sicily, hard on the heels of the total
eradication of Axis power in North Africa, was another instance in which the
Allies were to successfully bring to bear, against a truly miniscule Axis
contingent, an accumulation of force exceeded in the Normandy invasion only by
the number of follow-on forces employed.
Seen in the foregoing light, Mansoor's rhetorical question concerning the
ability of the German army to fight the French in the Rhineland in 1936, or "to
fight a major war even as late as 1938, five years after the beginning of
rearmament" hardly resonates.
The notion that the German army was not prepared for war when it reoccupied the
Rhineland without French resistance in 1936 is not a new one. The Germans
themselves, including Hitler, knew at the time that the undertaking was filled
with risk. According to the testimony of former German officers given after the
war, the status of the German army at the time in question was such that armed
resistance by the French would likely have led to an ignominious German rout
and the elimination of Hitler and the Nazis as a political force in Germany.
These facts were well known long before Williamson Murray, according to
Mansoor, vouchsafed to edify us with them.
It is and has been equally well known that the other bloodless conquests of the
Nazi era, namely the Austrian anschluss and the incorporation of the
Sudetenland (and later the remainder of the Czech republic) into the Reich,
both of which occurred in 1938, also were undertaken by a German army that was
unprepared for a general war. Mansoor's attempt, however, to compare the German
army of the pre-war era with the United States army of 1944 (or even of 1943)
is inapposite. For while Mansoor's intent is obviously to cast the German army
in a negative light, the fact of the matter is that while the United States
army, with all of its advantages, struggled mightily to bring down a severely
depleted foe, the early record of the German army was one of nearly unmitigated
success against a number of different enemies, all of whom enjoyed the
"advantage" (as Mansoor, Bonn, et al are wont to describe the situation) of
being on the defensive, and none of whom had suffered the ill effects of years
of warfare.
It is also manifest that the comparison promoted by Mansoor involves facts that
are not amenable to the usage he attempts to make of them. Put another way, it
is pointless to suggest, as does Mansoor, that the German army would not have
stood up to the French army in the Rhineland in 1936 (or alternatively, to the
French and British combined in 1938), thereby implying that the United States
army was "better" than its German counterpart because it went to battle after a
shorter period of rearmament. This is so because of the patently obvious fact
that not only had the us war economy been growing rapidly during 1940, and
would quickly surpass the industrial capacity of Germany once the war actually
came, but the German war economy was not ready for war in 1936, 1938, 1939 or
even in 1941 and 1942, when the war was literally going full blast, and not
ready for war even in 1944, after the Nazi regime had declared "total war".
The entire line of argument that the German army enjoyed a "luxurious" period
of rearmament, as compared with shorter period available to the United States
army, bears closer examination. To begin with, Mansoor's work takes the view
that German rearmament began on January 30, 1933, the date on which Hitler and
the Nazis assumed power over the German state. This is not true. In fact, both
Hitler and the officers commanding the German army realized that a policy of
rapid rearmament would not be feasible, in light of the precarious position of
the German state, both domestically and internationally, in 1933.[245] A plan
for the expansion of the peacetime army was not enunciated until December 1933.
The army was to expand to a force of twenty-one divisions totaling 300,000 men
by the end of 1938. The plan promulgated by the army high command, however,
dealt only with personnel matters, and even in this regard was inadequate to
the task. For example, the chief of the Truppenamt (predecessor to the
general staff), General Ludwig beck, was of the opinion that the
build-up of the peacetime army could be conducted with an officer corps
totaling only three percent of the force. Yet even these 9000 officers were not
available during the period 1934-1935, the first phase of rearmament.[246]
If for no other reason than political reality, General Beck and his
colleagues realized quite clearly that the pace and even the purpose of German
rearmament must be regarded as tentative. This is reflected in the position
espoused by the Truppenamt on the question of the aim of the wartime
army, which was pronounced to be the conduct of "a defensive war on several
fronts with some prospects of success ." (Emphasis added).[247] In
this statement can be seen the caution created by the fact that at the time in
question, Germany was the master of neither the Rhine valley nor the Ruhr, both
of which were recognized to be essential to the defense of Germany. The
tentative nature of German rearmament after 1933 was the product of a
persistent tension between the ability of the army to satisfy its personnel
requirements (which were satisfied first through voluntarism and then via
conscription) and its inability to adequately equip the troops so
inducted.[248]
German rearmament policy was also affected by a fundamental conflict among the
very officers who were to formulate and carry out the means for realizing the
policy. General Beck favored a long-term, public policy of rearmament, one that
was based on solid fundamental training for both officers and men, training
that would take as its standard the exigencies of actual warfare. Beck and his
supporters in the Truppenamt lobbied for the reintroduction of general
conscription as soon as possible. In contrast to this view, a group of officers
centered on Oberst Fromm considered that all twenty-one divisions of
the new peacetime army should be deployed, at least in a basic organizational
sense, by the autumn of 1934. It was the opinion of this group that the
expansion of the army could be managed much more efficiently by thus
establishing the essential framework, into which troops and their officers
could be funneled as quickly as might be desired.[249]
While there was thus disagreement at the apex of the German officer corps over
the speed and manner of personnel expansion, there was an apparent unanimity of
ignorance as to the economics of such expansion. On may 9, 1934, Generalmajor
Liese, chief of the Heereswaffenamt (army ordnance office) informed
the commanders of the Reichswehr that within six months' time the best
that the army of twenty-one divisions could expect in terms of essential
equipment (including ammunition) would be an initial issue and six weeks worth
of replacement stocks. After that period, material replacements would be
totally inadequate, with ammunition supplies equaling only a tiny percentage of
what would be required. Should the army be expanded still further, for example
to the level of sixty-three divisions then being proposed, it would be 1938
before similar provisions of material (i.e., an initial issue and six weeks of
replacement stocks) could be made available. The prognostication proffered by
Liese did not even address the issue of fuel supplies, and furthermore was
based on an assumption that the Reich's production capabilities would be fully
utilized and would be unfettered by either financial considerations or the
availability of raw materials.[250] Liese's admonitions, however, were ignored,
and henceforth there was in fact "no co-ordination among the organizers of
material rearmament, the personnel build-up, and the plans to actually use the
army…".[251]
On March 16, 1935 Hitler declared the restoration of German military
sovereignty. The strength of the army was set at thirty-six divisions, and it
was announced that general conscription with a one-year period of service would
be introduced on October 1 of that year. The proposition that the army should
be established at thirty-six divisions was easier made than implemented. In
fact, it was almost immediately decided by the Truppenamt that the
October deadline would only permit the organizational formation of twenty-four
infantry divisions. Even this reduced number of formations was in jeopardy from
the beginning; although in March 1935 there were twenty-one infantry divisions
in organizational existence, of the 189 infantry battalions to be encompassed
by these divisions, only 109 had actually been formed. It was anticipated that
the remaining 80 battalions could not be formed and trained before the spring
of 1938. This situation was addressed by the simple expedient of absorbing into
the Reichswehr 56,000 men of the landespolizei quartered in
barracks in Baden, Bavaria, Hamburg, Prussia, Saxony and Wurttemberg, a step
that was formally concluded on August 1, 1935. This raised the strength of the
army to a force of 400,000 men in twenty-four infantry, three armored and two
cavalry divisions, one cavalry and one mountain brigade.[252]
In June and July 1935, the Reichswehr became redesignated as the Wehrmacht,
and the Truppenamt assumed the denomination "general staff". The
general staff began to formulate new plans for expansion that assumed the
establishment of a wartime army of thirty-five divisions in 1937, forty-two in
1938, forty-nine in 1939, fifty-six in 1940 and sixty-three by 1941. This was
in contrast to the planning which had occurred in December 1933, when the
wartime army of sixty-three divisions was contemplated for completion by the
spring of 1938. The formulation of these new plans, however, was undertaken
without consultation with the army ordnance office. Moreover, the plans for
expansion immediately confronted a very real problem with regard to the
availability of suitable personnel. The head of the army personnel office, General
von Schwedler, categorically rejected any notion of further expansion of the
army during 1936, on the ground that there could "no longer be any talk of an
officer corps in the true sense of the word." Schwedler's view was that the
expansion of the army which had heretofore occurred, based as it was upon the
use of non-commissioned, inactive reserve, and police officers, had resulted in
a decline in the quality of the officer corps of such a magnitude that its
effect upon the troops had gone beyond the point of acceptability. On this
point Schwedler was undoubtedly correct. In December 1933 General Beck
had opined that the officer corps should constitute not less than 7 percent of
the army's strength, but had been willing to accept a level of 3 percent during
the first phase of expansion. By the autumn of 1935, however, the level of
active officers had fallen to 1.7 percent, a figure that could be raised only
to 2.4 percent if supplementary reserve officers were included in the
equation.[253]
The successful reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 completely altered
German plans for rearmament. This event not only provided the Reich with
an additional and substantial reserve of manpower, but also gave it a tangible
security for its industrial base that it had not possessed since 1919. In
consequence of these developments, the general staff began to formulate plans
for the expansion of the army that were, measured against the standards set in
1933, little short of fantastic. In June 1936 the general staff submitted a
plan for the establishment of both a peace-time and a wartime army. According
to this plan, the wartime army, which would be considered to be fully mobilized
by 1940-1941, would include a total strength of 3,612,673 men in seventy-two
infantry, three armored, three light and twenty-one militia divisions, as well
as one cavalry and two mountain brigades. It was now accepted that the
proportion of officers to enlisted men in the wartime army would remain at the
levels pertaining in 1936, namely 1.7 percent, raised to 2.6 percent with the
inclusion of supplementary reserve officers.
The fact that such expansive plans were enunciated, however, did not mean that
their realization was a matter of routine. The nature of the task may be may be
at least partially understood by considering that in 1914 the strength of the
German army, which was the culmination of four decades of growth, stood at
eighty-seven divisions and forty-four militia brigades, with a total manpower
of 2,147,000, a number now to be exceeded by 1,500,000 men in 1940.[254] With
regard to the officer corps, such unprecedented expansion would mean that its
authorized strength in 1941 would be 33,950 officers, while the actual
effective strength was now calculated to be 20,800, with the assumption that
there would be no discharges. The shortfall of 13,150 officers would be
rectified only by 1950. The general staff therefore began to think in terms of
addressing this problem by four means, namely promoting more NCOs to officer
rank, substantially increasing the yearly quota of officer cadets, recalling to
active duty more reserve officers, and reactivating more retired officers.[255]
The inevitable degrading of the quality of the officer corps that would result
from these measures was only one of the problems engendered by the
extraordinary plans for expansion of the army now contemplated. For example,
the problem of equipping such a large force, apart from the strains that it
would place upon the German economy, would require substantial amounts of
foreign exchange and raw materials. Of these considerations the general staff
seems, for reasons that are not apparent, to have been blissfully unaware. More
fundamentally, the vision of a dramatically expanded army immediately came
adrift on the issue of available manpower. The most expedient solution to this
difficulty was expressed in Hitler's decision of August 24, 1936, increasing
the service period under general conscription from one to two years. The fifty
percent increase in the number of infantry divisions, from twenty-four to
thirty-six, along with the strains attendant upon the mechanization of a
portion of the force, were the ostensible reasons for the Fuhrer's decision. In
fact, however, it was the decline in the quality of the army, rather than the
necessity for greater numbers of men to fill the ranks, that motivated the
change in the service period. Much like the United States army during its
period of great expansion after Pearl Harbor, the German army simply could not
grow so rapidly without a precipitous decline in quality.[256]
In fact, the difficulties alluded to above, and particularly the lack of
adequate supplies of raw materials, slowed the pace of rearmament in 1937. It
was not until 1938, with the Austrian anschluss and the occupation of
Czechoslovakia, and the resulting expansion of both the manpower pool and the Reich's
industrial base, that German rearmament achieved a more solid footing. The
substantive benefits to the German army derived from these foreign policy
successes, viz., the integration of the Austrian army and co-option of
Czech industry into the German war economy, were nevertheless illusory.
Continuing shortages of essential raw materials meant that supplies of steel
and iron had to be allocated among the various services. The army persistently
suffered from such allocations. For example, on April 15, 1939, as a result of
the diversion of raw materials to the Luftwaffe and for the
construction of the Westwall, "the field army was without supplies of weapons
and equipment, thirty-four infantry divisions were only partially provided with
necessary weapons and equipment, the replacement army had only 10 percent of
the necessary rifles and machine-guns, and total stocks of ammunition fell to a
level sufficient for fifteen days of fighting." The net result of these
manpower and industrial problems was that on the very eve of war, the German
army was hardly in a condition to fight it.
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The infantry divisions in the field army were divided into four different
categories ("waves", Wellen). The thirty-five divisions of the first
category had in peacetime 78 per cent active-duty personnel and very few
reservists. In contrast, the sixteen divisions of the second category had only
6 per cent active-duty personnel; 83 per cent of their soldiers were Wehrmacht
reservists with at least nine months of training. The twenty divisions
of the third category were composed primarily of reservists from the
supplementary reserve units of the army and of men required to serve in the
militia, some of whom had completed their training before 1918.
Finally, the fourteen divisions of the fourth category had 21 per cent Wehrmacht
reservists, but contained primarily supplementary units and reservists from
such units. (Emphasis added).[257]
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The foregoing makes clear that Mansoor's effort to draw an invidious comparison
between the capabilities of the United States army, which went to war after
(according to Mansoor) only two and a half years of rearmament, and the German
army which did not go to war after three and a half years of
rearmament, is not only speculative but simply nonsensical. Mansoor, be it
remembered, wonders "how the German army would have fared if forced into combat
against the French in the Rhineland in 1936 under similar circumstances
. (Emphasis added) The fact of the matter, as we have seen, is that the
prevailing circumstances in the respective cases were anything but similar. Can
Mansoor demonstrate, for example, that German industry had already begun to
produce, or gear up to produce, large quantities of weapons and ammunition in
1932, as U.S. industry did in 1940? Would he suggest that the full-scale
rearmament that began in the U.S. after December 7, 1941 was impeded in any way
by the exigencies of international politics, as was German rearmament until at
least 1935, or that American rearmament plans and policy had to overcome the
fact that a foreign power occupied the nation's most significant industrial
center, in a manner analogous to the problem presented to the Germans by
foreign occupation of the Ruhr valley? Could Mansoor show that rearmament in
the U.S. was hindered during its first two and a half years by an inability to
draw upon all of the nation's manpower resources, in a manner comparable to
Germany's inability to make use of the manpower available in the Rhineland
until after 1936?
No responsible historian would suggest that armed French resistance to the
reoccupation of the Rhineland in 1936 would have had other than catastrophic
results for the German army. Such a circumstance, however, whether speculative
or real, would say nothing about the capacity of the U.S. army to make war in
1943 or later. The German army was not prepared for war in 1936, or indeed in
1939, as we have seen. This situation was the result, however, of demographic,
political, industrial and economic reasons that had no parallel in the United
States as that nation prepared for war. And once the war began, those same
factors worked inexorably against Germany and in favor of the Allies. In light
of these facts, the really meaningful historical inquiry concerns the roots of
the German army's offensive and defensive success in the Second World War, not
the comparatively poor performance of the United States army in that conflict.
As noted above, one of the final points that Mansoor makes in his introduction
is that "a more balanced comparison" of the forces in question would be one in
which the German army of June, 1941 is compared with the U.S. army of April,
1945. This comment is telling, since it serves as an acknowledgement that
Mansoor's own work is skewed by a false comparison, in much the same way that
Trevor Dupuy is alleged by Mansoor, Brown, Bonn and Doubler to have unfairly
compared "ordinary" American units with "elite" German units. For it is just
such a "more balanced comparison" that Mansoor does not make, for the very good
reason that the making of such a comparison would be impossible in any case.
What one would like to see, given that the comparison of which Mansoor speaks
cannot in truth be made, is a comparison that at least takes into account the
shredding of the German army that occurred at the hands of the Red Army between
1941 and 1944. It is regrettable that Mansoor and those who share his views
have not made such a comparison.
Two final comments concerning Mansoor's introduction are in order, bearing in
mind that the views expressed in it so inform the rest of the work. Mansoor
opines that if the idealized comparison between the U.S. army of April 1945 and
the German army of June 1941 were made, there would be little to choose between
the two forces with regard to "technical or tactical proficiency at the
division level." The veracity of this statement cannot be doubted, and indeed
the authors of whom Mansoor, Bonn, Brown and Doubler are so critical are at one
with him on the point. On the other hand, Mansoor states that the United States
"produced an army of citizen soldiers" in contrast to the (for lack of a better
word) "militarist" German army, which had its problems with rearmament "eased"
by the fact that German culture included a "tradition of compulsory military
service and obedience to the state." In a similar vein, Mansoor asserts that
the U.S. army achieved all that it did without the "extensive ideological
indoctrination and fear-based discipline that infused many German units with
their will to fight."
With regard to Mansoor's argument that culture favored the German soldier over
his American counterpart, one is reminded of a passage in George Orwell's 1984
in which the novel's protagonist, Winston Smith, reflects upon the convoluted
political theories and doctrines promulgated by the Party in defense of its
existence and power. Among the incongruities most confounding to Smith is that
the same argument is often used by both the Party and the resistance for their
own particular ends; each side recognizes that the same argument is made by its
opponent, and yet each praises the argument when made by itself, and condemns
it when made by its opponent. Something of the same thing goes on with
Mansoor's work. If a culture that favored compulsory military service and
obedience to the state is to be passed off as the explanation for German
military success in the Second World War, and the absence of such a culture
seized upon as the reason why the United States army did not perform with
greater proficiency, then what is to be said about the military performance of
Britain and France, especially early in the war? The cultural impact of a
military tradition in Germany must be viewed as pitifully small when compared
with the impact of the military tradition in Great Britain. The latter country
had at the time of the Second World War, and still has, the most illustrious
military history of any nation on the planet. In 1940 that history stretched
back for at least 250 years, and was responsible, in large part, for the
creation of the greatest empire in world history. The French as well had an
illustrious military past, rivaling that of Britain. French soldiers had
conquered all of Europe under Napoleon Bonaparte, and would have extended their
conquests further but for those self same Britons. Compared with such military
traditions, those of Germany paled, as indeed they must have done, since the
German state itself had existed for but seventy years in 1940.
The idea that the will to combat of German units derived from "extensive
ideological indoctrination and fear-based discipline" while that of American
units did not, and that this helps to explain the disparate performance of the
two armies, is one that also smacks of Orwellian "doublespeak". It may be
stated with some degree of certitude that no meaningful and successful military
force has ever existed that has not based its discipline upon fear. Indeed,
during the Second World War, the United States army also based its system of
discipline upon a fear of retribution. This is demonstrated by the provisions
of federal statutes in effect during wartime, as detailed in the 1943 edition
of The Officer's Guide: A Ready Reference on Customs and Correct Procedures
Which Pertain to Commissioned Officers of the Army of the United States:[258]
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Desertion from the Army is punishable by death in time of war.
Advising, persuading or assisting desertion from the Army in time of war is
punishable by death. Misbehavior before the enemy is punishable by death.
Compelling commander to surrender is punishable by death.
Forcing a safeguard in time of war is punishable by death.
Betraying a countersign in time of war is punishable by death.
Aiding the enemy is punishable by death.
Acting as a spy in time of war is punishable by death.
Sentinels found drunk or sleeping on post or leaving their posts in time of war
shall be punished by death.
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The rejoinder to this sort of data, at least the one given by Gerhard Weinberg
and others who have made a career criticizing the German army, is that the
Germans alone were guilty of executing their own soldiers in great numbers,
evidently in an attempt to enforce discipline. This argument rests on very
shaky ground, since it fails to take into account not only the avowed policies
of the Allies, including in particular the United States, but also the fact
that no accurate data on military executions is available from one of the
principal Allied combatants, namely the former Soviet Union. Both the Red Army
and the German army were in the hands of criminal regimes, each of whose
principal aim in life was self-preservation. This was manifestly not the case
with regard to other Allied combatants. Neither were the western Allies faced
with national annihilation, as were both the Soviet Union and Germany at
different stages of the war. It also will not do to suggest that only the
Germans subjected their troops to "extensive ideological indoctrination" in a
manner unparalleled in the Allied camp. During the Second World War, the
American cinema industry produced not only the "Why we Fight" film series, but
a steady stream of pro-war propaganda films as well. Tb imply that these films
did not have a didactic purpose, or that they were not intended for both troops
in service and the general population, would be a gross misrepresentation of
fact. Finally, as to the suggestion that the German will to fight was a
function of harsh discipline and propaganda, such an assertion fails to take
into account the stream of German military victories between the autumn of 1939
and the end of 1941. During this period, harsh discipline (as reflected in
military executions) was not practiced on the scale that would be in effect in
the latter half of 1944.
Mansoor's first substantive chapter after his introduction, entitled The
Mobilization of the Army, lays the groundwork for his argument that
the U.S. army triumphed over the Wehrmacht in spite of innumerable
disadvantages by detailing the manifold problems created by rapid expansion and
mismanagement. Under the War Department's Mobilization Training Program, each
new division was to be combat ready within ten to twelve months of activation.
After two weeks of organizational activity, the new division would spend
seventeen weeks in basic and advanced individual training, culminating in
testing conducting by army or army corps staffs. The division would then spend
the next thirteen weeks in unit training, with training moving progressively
from company to battalion to regimental levels. The following fourteen weeks
would be spent in combined-arms training, with large-scale exercises for
regimental combat teams and the division itself. After additional testing, the
last eight weeks of training would focus on coordinated operations with
aircraft and mechanized forces. If the level of training for a particular area
of concentration were found wanting, that training was repeated. The final
step, after a year of training, was for the division to participate in
multi-division maneuvers, after which it would be certified as combat
ready.[259]
Training of the kind just described would have been the envy of any general
officer commanding a German division during the second half of the Second World
War, and as we have seen, was unheard of among the German divisions confronting
the U.S. army in Western Europe in 1944-1945. Mansoor, however, moves quickly
to dispel any notion that American soldiers subjected to such training were
thereby prepared to face their country's enemies. As a general proposition,
Mansoor says, "[D]ivisions rarely met the optimistic timetable of the
Mobilization Training Program…". Large scale exercises "focused on training
senior leaders and their staffs at the expense of the combat soldier." The U.S.
army was inept at training small units, so that the individual soldier lacked
"an appreciation for small-unit tactics and the disastrous consequences that
awaited those who failed to master them." The American training system lacked
"a highly trained opposing force to replicate the enemy, dedicated
observer-controllers to facilitate training and conduct after-action reviews,
and an instrumentation system capable of simulating combat outcomes."[260]
Lamentable as these conditions were, they were not the only, or even the worst,
negative influences upon the preparation of the U.S. army for war. At least
until 1943, insufficient supplies of equipment and ammunition frustrated
adequate training. Shortages of ammunition were especially significant, because
they limited live-fire training. But by far the most insidious element
affecting the training of American soldiers was the army's ill-conceived
personnel policy. That policy, as Mansoor characterizes it, was to have
divisional organizations, rather than replacement centers, train draftees in
basic skills. Among other things, this meant, again according to Mansoor, that
the best of the new recruits were invariably siphoned off in the middle of the
division's training cycle to attend special schools, transfer to the Army Air
Force, or become officer candidates. The consequences of this pattern were
egregious. The affected division lost its primary source of noncommissioned
officers; new recruits arrived spasmodically or not at all; divisions deployed
for action "with a significant percentage of men who had not trained with their
comrades, who did not recognize their leaders, and who did not identify with
their new unit."[261]
Other and equally serious problems beset the U.S. army as it readied itself for
its confrontation with the Wehrmacht . Mansoor seems to concede to the
much despised S.L.A. Marshall ("[T]he assault on the reputation of the American
army began early and came from an unexpected source") the point that "some
American infantrymen lacked initiative in combat or failed to execute
aggressive fire-and-maneuver when faced with opposition in battle." He
attributes this malady to the "problem of personnel turnover" described above,
which led to the matriculation of recruits who were ignorant of tactics and
unaccustomed to firearms. Another factor that led to the "lack of
aggressiveness in American infantrymen" was that there simply were not enough
American combat formations. This was the result of incautious planning,
ultimately leading to an army without strategic reserves.
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Divisions were so scarce that American commanders routinely employed them at
the front long after they should have been withdrawn to retain and integrate
new replacements. The lack of divisions meant that units had to accomplish
these tasks at or near the front, which resulted in a high rate of casualties
among the new personnel. Some divisions literally fought themselves out in
constant operations; even the best American divisions, such as the 1st and 9th
Infantry Divisions, experienced collective exhaustion when they had been in the
line too long.[262]
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As a practical matter, all of this meant that by the time the Allies did invade
Western Europe, they did so, according to Mansoor, with only a 1:1 ratio of
combat divisions vis-a-vis the German army. In fact, Mansoor points out, the
War Department resorted to the expedient of reducing the authorized strength of
divisions in order to multiply their number. Because of the shortfall in
manpower, the infantry divisions "needed many attachments to function
effectively in combat." American infantry divisions were forced to make do with
non-divisional tank battalions, tank-destroyer battalions, artillery battalions
and the like. In the end, however, it was the U.S. army's flawed replacement
system that placed it at such a disadvantage with regard to its German foes.
According to Mansoor, the American divisions that fought in Western Europe in
1944-1945 were populated by a "very much picked-over lot" of men who amounted
to little else than "warm bodies" scraped together to fill the ranks. These
replacements, who by the time of the Normandy invasion were receiving a minimum
of seventeen weeks of basic and specialized training, often lost their fighting
edge while waiting to be posted to a fighting unit. Such men, in consequence,
often quickly became casualties.
The Mobilization of the Army contains one passage particularly worthy
of remark, since it places Mansoor into a position that is the polar opposite
to that of Michael Doubler on the same subject, viz., trucks. It will be
recalled that Doubler, who opines (on the dust cover of The GI Offensive in
Europe ) that "Mansoor provides compelling arguments, supported by
exceptional research and analysis, for the ultimate superiority of American
infantry divisions in World War II", has the following to say about trucks:
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Historians and military analysts have put too much emphasis on the army's
mobility…Trucks did give the army operational mobility, but motorized movement
had no influence on the battlefield…In reality, the army's means of logistical
and operational mobility had no direct influence on combat.
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In contrast, Mansoor states the following:
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The large number of vehicles enabled American infantry divisions to dispense
with horses, which the German army still used in great numbers. American
infantry divisions could conduct rapid, mobile operations when necessary
through the attachment of only six truck companies. Even without attachments,
infantry divisions could move quickly by shuttling their infantry forward in
trucks taken from within the division organization (usually from the
artillery).[263]
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The reader will appreciate that in spite of what is doubtless regarded in
certain quarters as a regrettable lapse by Mansoor (what was he thinking), he
and Doubler are of one mind on the relative merits of the United States and
German armies in the Second World War. Both of them suffer, however, from the
same malady, namely an apparently irrepressible urge to "have it both ways".
Put another way, each of them is at considerable pains to bring to light the
manifold difficulties that undermined the ability of the United States army to
prosecute the war in Europe more effectively, while at the same time completely
ignoring the effect that similar difficulties had upon the capacity of the
German army to resist. A perfect example of this tendency is Mansoor's long
discourse, previously discussed herein, on the twelve-month long training cycle
that the American infantry division had to complete in order to be certified as
combat ready. Mansoor's "exceptional research and analysis" on this point, so
gushingly praised by Doubler, unaccountably fails to acknowledge (for reasons
about which we may only speculate) that virtually none of the German divisions
encountered by the U.S. army in Africa, Sicily, Italy and Western Europe had
benefited from such a training cycle, to say nothing of the multi-division
training also undergone by American formations after their initial training.
In the same vein, the litany of problems advanced by Mansoor in an effort to
discount the extent and quality of training afforded American infantry
divisions totally ignores the fact that German infantry divisions suffered from
the same sorts of problems. The training of the combat soldier, Mansoor tells
us, was rendered little short of retrograde by large scale exercises that
benefited only commanders and their staffs, and a palpable ineptitude at
educating soldiers in the vital skills necessary for successful small-unit
actions, the latter difficulty arising from such shortcomings as the absence of
"a highly trained opposing force to replicate the enemy" and "an
instrumentation system capable of simulating combat outcomes." It has been
mentioned here before, but it bears repeating, that from about 1942 onwards
there were virtually no large-scale training exercises conducted by the German
army; while Mansoor might, and probably would, contend that such a state of
affairs actually benefited the German army, since it avoided the evident
negative effects that such training had on the U.S. army, no serious student
would accept such an argument. As to the subject of small-unit actions, the
most sophisticated "instrumentation systems" available to the German army for
"simulating combat outcomes" were the sand table and the map. Similarly, at
what point during the German soldier's four to six weeks of training was he
exposed to "a highly trained opposing force" replicating the enemy?
German forces in training also lacked equipment and live ammunition, such items
being deemed, under the circumstances, more useful at the front than at
training stations. Mansoor avers that because of the War Department's
ill-considered personnel policies, American divisions lost untold numbers of
non-commissioned officers as likely candidates for such ranks transferred to
specialty schools, became officer candidates, or otherwise disappeared from the
ranks. Ultimately, of course, the U.S. army had ample numbers of competent and
well-trained NCOs, else the field force would never have fared so well against
the Wehrmacht as Mansoor claims that it did. As we have previously
seen, however, the German army in extremis was repeatedly compelled to rely
upon redundant NCOs from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine to
fill out the ranks of non-commissioned officers in new divisions cobbled
together to confront the Allies in Western Europe. Still on the subject of the
iniquitous American personnel system, Mansoor bemoans the fact that many
American divisions considered ready for deployment were populated by men who
had not trained with the other men in the unit, did not recognize their
leaders, and were not mentally and emotionally identified with the unit to
which they belonged. Such circumstances call to mind the innumerable German
units in which the identical problems were present. Consider, for example,
whether many of the German divisions engaged against the Allies in Western
Europe (described in detail in the section of the present work devoted to
Michael Doubler) could be described as more favored than their American
counterparts, composed as they were of German draftees, volksdeutsche impressed
into service from places like Czechoslovakia, Romania and Hungary, as well as a
hodgepodge of foreign "volunteers" from, among other places, Armenia,
Turkestan, Ukraine and Croatia. Is it likely that such men, many of whom could
not speak or understand German, recognized their leaders or identified with
either their units or the cause for which they were fighting?
Mansoor makes much of the pernicious effects of the so-called "90-division
gamble", asserting that this policy resulted in divisions being left too long
at the front, so that they "fought themselves out" to "collective exhaustion".
The "gamble" also compelled the U.S. army to resort to the expedient of
reducing the authorized manpower of divisions in order to increase their
number.[264] As we have seen, the German army faced precisely the same
problems, a situation about which Mansoor (and Doubler, Bonn and Brown) is
either unaware or reticent to discuss. The list of German divisions that were
left in the front line too long, thereby rendered divisions in name only, would
fill this page. Likewise, as has been previously discussed herein, the German
army repeatedly reduced the authorized strength of its divisional formations in
order to have more of them. Mansoor also complains that American divisions,
once in action, were compelled to rely upon "attachments" (i.e., independent
tank and artillery units or other specialized formations, seconded to a
particular division for a certain purpose) in order to perform their allotted
tasks, as if to suggest that the American divisions were, by their very nature,
inadequately equipped. In fact, however, independent or specialized units, such
as panzer and artillery battalions, nebelwerfer abteilungen , "storm brigades"
and other such formations were routinely "attached" to German divisions as a
means of bolstering them on the eve of any new undertaking. Finally, with
regard to Mansoor's lamentations about the poor quality of the men who filled
out the ranks of American infantry divisions (the aforesaid "picked over"
soldiers, little more than "warm bodies"), it seems reasonable to ask whether
Mansoor would, could he have done so, exchanged these men for the rabble of
overage men and underage boys, volksdeutsche , invalids, recuperating
wounded and foreigners who composed so many German divisions in 1944.
The argument that the U.S. army was seriously disadvantaged, vis-à-vis the
German army, by its personnel policies, must be viewed with considerable
skepticism. It is ironic indeed that Mansoor and others should make this
argument, since it mimics in its essentials the position taken by the apostate
Martin van Creveld, so much maligned by Bonn, Mansoor, Brown and Doubler for
having allegedly misled the historical profession and the public in general
into the heretical view that the German army might have done something right.
Creveld, it will be recalled, was imprudent enough to suggest that the German
system, in which battalions, regiments and divisions, the essential building
blocks of the larger army, as well as the conscripts that made up and
replenished these units, were created and administered on a local basis under
the various Wehrkreise into which the Reich was divided,
seemed to be more well-adapted to fostering cohesive fighting units than the
American system, which placed no such emphasis upon the maintenance of local
connections for its soldiers. As we have seen, Mansoor is perhaps the harshest
critic of Creveld among the authors considered in the present work. Mansoor
concludes that Creveld is an extremist; Creveld's critical view of the American
personnel system is essential to that conclusion. More ironic still is the fact
that the more recent scholarship of Robert Sterling Rush, in his Hell in
Huertgen Forest , suggests a very different conclusion about the
effectiveness of the American personnel system, showing as it does that in this
battle, perhaps the bloodiest in the Western Allies' experience in the European
theatre, the personnel system of which Mansoor is so critical succeeded in
maintaining the battleworthiness of the American formations there engaged.
The GI Offensive in Europe, as the foregoing indicates, is a mass of
contradictions. Nowhere is this more evident than in its final chapter, The
Combat Effectiveness of Infantry Divisions . For here, after two
hundred-fifty pages in which the flawed American personnel system is
continuously held up to the reader as the handicap so gloriously overcome by
the valor and self-sacrifice of the American infantryman, Mansoor tells us that
the system not so bad after all.
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The United States was the only nation able to maintain its fighting forces near
full strength throughout the war, a fact that greatly impressed German
commanders. The individual replacement system had its flaws, but these flaws
stemmed from poor administration of the system rather than an inherent flaw in
the concept. Given the determination to limit the number of divisions
mobilized, the decision to keep them at full strength through the infusion of
individual replacements was the correct one . The task for division
commanders was to take these replacements and integrate them in such a manner
as to maintain the combat effectiveness of their organizations. By doing so,
American commanders were able to maintain the combat effectiveness of their
organizations even as the Wehrmacht slowly disintegrated. (Emphasis
added).[265]
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Should the serious student of military history accept Mansoor's contention that
the American personnel system that exacted a price in blood from the American
soldier "from Italy to Normandy, across France, along the West Wall, through
the Ardennes, and into Germany", and therefore explains any shortcomings in the
effectiveness of the U.S. army in Western Europe, was at the same time without
"an inherent flaw" and "the correct" personnel policy? Surely Mansoor's desire
to "have it both ways" must be troubling to someone in the historical
profession? From ought that appears in any of the work that has succeeded
Mansoor's, however, this does not seem the case.
Alas, one cannot reasonably expect the situation to be otherwise. In all of the
work that has heretofore appeared on the subject of the U.S. army in World War
II, there is only one of which the present writer is aware in which the author
cares to look at the condition of both the American and German forces that
encountered each other on the European continent after the Normandy invasion.
Instead, Mansoor and his colleagues consider the U.S. army as though it fought
in a vacuum. In his final chapter, for example, Mansoor returns to his
criticism of Russell Weigley, who argued, according to Mansoor, that "the Army
of the United States in World War II formed divisions with too little staying
power for the battles of attrition in France and Germany in 1944 and 1945."
Mansoor dismisses Weigley's argument as "attractive but superficial", going on
to point out that "American infantry divisions in World War II routinely
operated with numerous attachments in combat—to include artillery, tank, tank
destroyer, engineer, and antiaircraft units—which gave them much greater power
than one would surmise from a look at their tables of organization."[266] In so
delivering his coup de grace to Weigley, Mansoor for the first time indicates
that it is useful to go beyond the table of organization of a formation---but
only for the purpose of striking down a rival, not for the purpose of analysis.
It is manifest why Mansoor avoids studiously any consideration in depth of the
opposing forces about which he writes, for to do so would have led
him—perhaps—into revealing more about the condition of the German army than
would have suited his purposes.
In the end, the failure to delve more deeply into the facts undermining the
"fashionable" myth—if it is a myth—of German combat superiority is Mansoor's
undoing, as it is the undoing of those who write in the same school. Mansoor
says that "[W]hile American divisions had a uniform organization and a baseline
level of proficiency, the same was not true of the German army."[267] How does
such a statement advance Mansoor's argument, when he fails to consider whether
the German army "had a uniform organization and a baseline level of
proficiency" when it was at the height of its power in 1940-1941 (as the U.S.
army was in 1944-1945), or why the German army, in the last nine
months of the war, was unable to field "robust, balanced, and capable
divisions" as was the U.S. army.[268] Mansoor takes up the cudgel once again
against Martin van Creveld by asserting the obvious, namely that American
officers would not agree with Creveld that the German army was "more effective"
than its American counterpart. This statement adds nothing to Mansoor's
argument, as well as it misconstrues what Creveld's work is about. In
manhandling Creveld for one last time, Mansoor returns to his unbalanced theme.
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While the cream of the Wehrmacht, the panzer and panzer grenadier
divisions, were combat-effective organizations and a match for the divisions of
the Army of the United States, the bulk of the German army was not composed of
these units. The average German infantry division could not defeat an American
infantry division in battle…In terms of mechanization and their ability to
conduct mobile warfare, American infantry divisions were in a class by
themselves. Nor could the German army consistently sustain its fighting power.
The Wehrmacht could field superb formations equipped with
technologically advanced weapons, but its failure to provide adequate means for
support and sustainment led to their undoing. Historians may criticize the
American emphasis on logistics, but that emphasis helped lead the Army of the
United States to victory in Europe.[269]
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Mansoor's comments on the relative mechanization of the U.S. and German armies,
and on the logistical superiority of the Americans over the Germans are
certainly true, although they surely land him in hot water with the likes of
Michael Doubler, who baldly asserts that these factors had no effect upon the
fighting power of the U.S. army. The problem is that Mansoor, and he is not
alone, seems to assume that the German army chose to have a low level of
mechanization as well as a ramshackle logistics system. Even if we accept the
theory that the German officer corps was so hidebound that it actually
preferred that its infantry divisions move at the same speed as the Roman
legions, or that, if given the choice, it would have rejected the idea of
replacing horse-drawn supply with the vast fleets of trucks available to both
the Western Allies and the Red Army, what would that prove? Whether the
condition of the German army in these respects was the result of informed
choice or not, the fact of the matter is that the German economy, as Ellis and
others have demonstrated beyond cavil, was not capable of bringing the German
army up to the standards of its foes with regard to either mechanization or
logistics. To deny this fact, or to deny its impact upon the army in the field,
is simply nonsense. Nonsensical as well, and for the same reasons, are
Mansoor's comments about the "cream of the Wehrmacht" and the "average
German infantry division." Anyone who has read the present work carefully will
realize that the U.S. army did not encounter either the "cream of the Wehrmacht
" or the "average German infantry division" in Western Europe in 1944-1945.
Both the "cream" of the German army and its "average" divisions were buried in
Russia, where the Red Army had been hard at work grinding them up for three
years before a single American soldier set foot on European soil. It is,
nevertheless, true that the Western Allies encountered formidable resistance
from many German formations, which fought well and bravely almost to the end.
Had Mansoor cared to consider it, he had available to him a veritable mountain
of evidence and scholarship to elucidate the steady decline in the quality of
the German army since the beginning of its sojourn in the east. As that army
prepared for its second summer of campaigning in the Soviet Union, it was clear
to everyone (except Hitler) conversant with its condition that it would be
incapable of conducting operations comparable to those of the previous year.
The army had lost 35% (over 1 million men) of its average strength between the
beginning of the campaign and April, 1942, when the preparations for the second
campaign began in earnest. It had also lost almost 75,000 vehicles (cars,
trucks, motorcycles, tractors) since October, 90 percent of which remained
unreplaced as spring approached. In the panzer divisions, over 2,000 tanks had
been lost and never replaced. In a force still largely dependent upon the horse
for its mobility, over 180,000 animals had been lost during the winter; only 10
per cent of these had been replaced by the following spring. The effect of
these losses upon the mobility of the eastern army may be readily surmised;
Army Groups Center and North, their supply echelons, mobile troops and infantry
stripped of vehicles and horses in favor of Army Group South, were not capable
of major offensive operations. Yet, even in spite of the sacrifices of its
sister formations, Army Group South was reckoned to be at only 85 per cent of
its original mobility.[270]
In addition to its shortcomings in the area of mobility, the eastern army on
the eve of its second campaign also suffered from substantial shortages in
weapons and ammunition. Whereas Hitler had called for a six-month reserve of
ammunition before the outset of the new campaign, in fact the OKH advised
as late as April, 1942 that even if "makeshift expedients" were employed, from
about August onward there would be "bottlenecks" in the ammunition supply,
because production would not be able to compensate when existing supplies had
been used up. The army also had experienced such substantial losses in small
arms—rifles, machine-guns, trench mortars—as well as artillery of all kinds,
and German industry was so incapable of making up for such losses, that Army
Group South could only be "made whole" in these areas at the expense (once
again) of Army Groups Center and North. Compounding all of these difficulties
was the deplorable condition of the Soviet rail system, upon which, as a result
of the even more inadequate Soviet road net, the Wehrmacht was so
dependent for supplies. As a result of the destruction wrought by the Germans
in the previous year, it was necessary to rely upon German engines and goods
wagons, a development that in turn required that the Germans convert the Soviet
broad-gauge to the more narrow German gauge, a feat accomplished with respect
to 21,000 kilometers of track since the beginning of the Russian campaign. In
spite of their exertions, however, the Germans were chronically short of goods
wagons. In January, 1942 the daily average number of such wagons available
stood at 60,000, a number that General Halder characterized as
"catastrophic"; six months later, the largest daily average achieved was
130,000 wagons, a figure that was still regarded by the army's supply
administration as insufficient to meet the urgent requirements of the front. On
February 8, 1942, Hitler appointed Albert Speer Reich Minister for
armaments and ammunition. He and the transportation experts that he employed
were able, by mid-July, to raise the daily average number of available goods
wagons to 180,000, a figure regarded as adequate to meet the needs of the
advance of Army Group South. Nothing that the Germans could do, however, could
improve the road system upon which its supplies traveled after they left the
railhead.[271]
Operation Blue, as the 1942 offensive in the east was called, ended
not in the victory that Hitler, at least, had anticipated, but instead in one
of the most catastrophic defeats suffered by any army in the modern era. Such
also was the fate of Operation Citadel, the last strategic German
offensive of the war, in July of the following year. In the east, the
initiative passed irretrievably to the Soviets. Between July 1, 1943 and
February 1, 1944, the strength of the Ostheer fell precipitously from
3,138,000 men to 2,366,000 men. Among the huge number of men lost were many
officers and NCOs with invaluable training and experience. Because the Wehrmacht
could not meet this manpower crisis by simply expanding conscription, owing to
the negative effect that this would have on German industry, it was forced to
seek other sources of men. In October, 1943 men born between 1889 and 1893
(i.e., the age groups between 50 and 55) were called up; the previous month,
the conscription system had begun to list men born between 1884 and 1887
, with a view to calling up some of these men as well. Another expedient was to
literally comb the army for both officers and other ranks who might, for some
reason, be regarded as redundant. This policy, however, when combined with
losses in personnel now averaging more than 150,000 men per month, so depleted
the field army that it became necessary to reorganize it, a step the Germans
took in the autumn of 1943. As a practical matter, this meant not that the
number of German formations was reduced, but that the size and strength of both
existing and new divisions were considerably reduced. Whereas, as we have
previously seen, the nominal strength of a German infantry division in
September 1939 was on the order of 17,000 men, the neuer Art divisions that
began to proliferate in the fall of 1943 numbered 10,708 German troops and
2,005 Russian Hiwis .[272]
With the decrease in manpower came a further reduction in mobility, as already
hard-pressed infantry divisions lost their remaining motorized elements to the
panzer and panzergrenadier divisions. And in spite of the army's
reorganization, units throughout the German army were not able to maintain even
their nominal new strengths; units in combat were particularly afflicted. By
the early summer of 1944, on the eve of the Allied invasion of Europe, the
German army had lost 73 divisions since the beginning of 1943; the
process of breaking up burned out divisions, or of filling them out with entire
regiments of new recruits, was now well in hand.[273] The summer of 1944
accelerated this process; the Normandy invasion was followed, on the third
anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, by the commencement of the Soviet
Operation Bagration , an overwhelmingly powerful offensive that blew
Army Group Center to bits in short order.
Of the steady destruction of the German army Mansoor says nearly nothing.
Instead, like Bonn and Doubler, Mansoor paints a picture in which the German
and American armies contesting in Western Europe in 1944-1945 did so on an
equal basis. That this was not the case is manifest from all of the available
evidence, as Mansoor undoubtedly knew when he wrote The GI Offensive in Europe.
If it is to be argued, as Mansoor and his "school" have done, that the U.S.
army of 1944-1945 was at least the equal of its German foe, then it is
reasonable to inquire how it arrived at such a status of equality. Had the U.S.
army lost 73 divisions in the year before its trial of arms in Western Europe?
Where was its Stalingrad? Its Alamein? Unless Mansoor and his ilk answer these
questions, they cannot equate the U.S. army to the Heer.
Chapter Twelve
John Sloan Brown, Draftee Division. The 88th Infantry Division in World
War II
John Sloan Brown's Draftee Division had its origin in the author's
doctoral dissertation at Indiana University. The author's personal nexus with
his subject, however, is of much greater significance to his work than his
professional interest in it. Brown is a professional soldier; his father served
as a junior officer with the 88th Infantry Division, and his maternal
grandfather, Major General John E. Sloan, commanded the formation throughout
its career in the Second World War. This is an instance in which we may
truthfully say that the author's connection with his work is visceral.
The central theme of Draftee Division is training. In this sense, the
book has much in common with Mansoor's The GI Offensive in Europe .
Like Mansoor, Brown informs us that the Mobilization Training Program, later
the Army Training Program, provided that U.S. infantry divisions were to have
four major blocks of instruction before being certified combat-ready, viz.
basic and individual training (seventeen weeks), unit training (thirteen
weeks), combined arms training (fourteen weeks) and large-unit maneuvers (eight
weeks). At the end of each stage standardized proficiency tests were
administered by higher headquarters; if the unit failed such a test, it was
usually required to repeat the entire block of instruction. The 88th Infantry
Division did well on all of these "rigorous, demanding and instructive"
tests.[274]
While Brown points out that there were at least occasional problems with the
general mobilization that occurred in the U.S. following Pearl Harbor, he also
admits that with regard to certain fundamental issues, there were sufficient
systems in place even at the start of mobilization to ensure that the process
moved forward efficiently. While there were "logistical difficulties", the many
"draftee divisions" created during general mobilization "never were without
adequate food, clothing, fuel, ammunition, shelter, and equipment." He goes on
to say that
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"[R]ations never proved a serious problem for the fifteen million men America
ultimately put under arms. The Subsistence Branch, the most firmly entrenched
of all quartermaster sub-bureaucracies, had been a separate service until 1912
and had retained a tradition of autonomy through numerous administrative
realignments, including the wholesale quartermaster reorganization of March
1942. Stable bureaucracy produced stable procedure."[275]
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Equally lavish was the supply of wheeled vehicles thought necessary to meet the
needs of an American infantry division. In the case of the 88th Infantry
Division, although it did not receive its full complement of trucks and other
vehicles (more than 700 to support 14,000 men) until eleven months after its
activation, nevertheless "the division always had sufficient vehicles to meet
transportation requirements", both its own and those of "nondivisional
activities and facilities" at its principal training facility. Likewise, the
division never lacked for any sort of equipment, whether essential (weapons and
communications equipment) or otherwise, so that
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"…shortages of T.O. [table of organization] equipment did not much affect the
progress of the 88th Infantry Division through its training cycle. It was true
that equipment arrived later than mobilization planners had hoped, that
equipment shortages complicated scheduling, and that there was no real
substitute for the experience of operating at 100 percent of T.O. Nevertheless,
equipment on hand sufficed to meet actual needs, and equipment shortages never
forced major adjustments in the training program."[276]
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Indeed, so plentiful were vehicles that, like most draftee divisions, the 88th
Infantry Division left behind the vehicles with which it had trained upon
embarkation, and "then drew an entirely new issue of vehicles overseas." While
Brown admits that there were advantages to this procedure, he also asserts that
the training of American divisions was disadvantaged by it, in that the used
vehicles passed on to new owners became increasingly worn. He also claims that
training suffered because the divisions were without their vehicles "during the
months required to move overseas."[277] In this connection it seems prudent to
inquire whether it would have been profitable for the U.S. army to exchange
this problem for that of the German army—insufficient industrial capacity to
produce necessary vehicles for units in the field, let alone units in training,
a situation that in turn required recourse to the commandeering of all manner
of civilian vehicles, thereby compounding the army's supply and maintenance
problems—in order to avoid handicapping the training of the American soldier.
In December 1943 the 88th Infantry Division debarked about seventy-five miles
from Oran in North Africa. There it stayed for more than a month, a period that
General Sloan put to good use. Sloan was able to make use of a French Foreign
Legion base in the Atlas Mountains to retrain the division after three months
of inactivity while it moved from the U.S. to Oran. Some regarded this training
as "the finest training the division ever had." Very shortly after completing
this training period, the division moved to the combat zone. It did not move
into the battle line until the first week of March 1944, and it was May 11,
1944 before it undertook offensive operations.[278]
Even during the period between March and May 1944, General Sloan availed
himself of the opportunity to put the division through yet further training,
believing that time spent in defensive positions had deprived the men of their
offensive skills. The division therefore spent two weeks of intensive training;
this included forced marches over heavy terrain, maneuvers from squad to
battalion level, and special training on the reduction of fortified positions.
The men worked with new weapons, engaged in combined arms training with tanks
and learned to work with liaison officers from air units that would provide
close air support. There was marksmanship training for antitank crews and
individual infantrymen. The division's reconnaissance troop and combat
engineers honed their particular skills.[279]
In this heightened state of readiness the 88th Infantry Division undertook its
first offensive action as part of Operation Diadem a major Allied
undertaking that began May 11, 1944. Although Brown raises the same complaint
asserted by Mansoor, namely that the individual replacement system did not work
in combat, and for all the same reasons, still he refers to the enemy on the
receiving end of the offensive as the "ever wearier Germans" and
"[I]ncreasingly weary Germans" who faced not merely replacements taking the
place of fallen Americans, but fresh American companies moving to the assault.
Brown's verdict is that the 88th Infantry Division lived up to its magnificent
training during the first three days of Diadem . [280]
Over the next two weeks the 88th Infantry Division participated in the breach
of the Gustav Line, after which it pursued the retreating Germans and
"outmaneuvered and outfought" them "time and again." One reason for the
division's success was its superb physical conditioning, which left the
division "in better shape than the Germans of the 71st and 94th infantry
divisions, who had had little opportunity for exercise throughout the long
Italian winter." The Germans were also "fatigued and Americans were not"; and
whereas the 88th Infantry Division was able to frequently replace its leading
formations, "the Germans seldom enjoyed such a luxury." Other elements in the
division's success were an abundance of trucks and mule trains, which
guaranteed a steady flow of supplies of all kinds, and absolute control of the
airspace over the Allied forces.[281]
Following the capture of Rome in the first week of June 1944, the 88th Infantry
Division replenished its losses and commenced yet another period of exhaustive
training. Once again the division trained in maneuvers from squad to battalion
level. There were more marches of great length to improve conditioning, more
instruction in assaulting hardened positions, more close order drill. This
period of training lasted four weeks, in preparation for the division's next
tour of combat, which began on July 8. After seventeen days of fighting, during
which the division suffered almost 2,500 casualties, it again came out of the
line, this time for seven weeks of intensive retraining.[282]
The 88th Infantry Division went back on the offensive on September 21, 1944,
taking part in the U.S. Fifth Army's assault on the German "Gothic Line" in the
North Apennine Mountains. In seven weeks of fighting the division sustained
more than six thousand casualties. Brown asserts that the individual
replacement system failed the division, adding "more to lists of casualties
than to lists of accomplishments." Evidently because of this, "[F]or the first
time the division seems to have suffered more casualties than it inflicted."
"Well-executed German counterattacks" limited the division's gains; "a
masterful German counterattack" wiped out the division's lead company as it
strove to move into the Po Valley. Fifth Army called off the offensive;
throughout the winter the 88th Infantry Division retrained, so that when spring
returned, "the 88th was once again at a peak." It was in battle again for
barely two weeks time before the end came in Europe.[283]
With the end of the 88th Infantry Division's exploits in Italy, Brown moves on
to analyze the reasons for its success. Primary among these was its ability to
overcome the pernicious effects of the individual replacement system. It was
ironic, Brown points out, that the War Department considered the successes of
the 88th Infantry Division and the 85th Infantry Division during Operation
Diadem as vindication of the individual replacement system. This
"illusion that the system had succeeded" resulted in the near destruction of
the 88th Infantry Division in the fighting on the Gothic Line in the autumn of
1944. The only cure for such a problem would have been unit rotation.
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The rude fact was that only unit rotation could sustain prolonged combat, and
the United States had not raised a sufficient number of battalions, regiments,
or divisions to rotate them through a continuous major battle. War Department
planners excused American's relatively modest contribution of ground combat
units by extolling the virtues of an individual replacement system that was to
keep those units at full strength—even when in combat—indefinitely. The virtues
of that individual replacement system were more apparent than real.[284]
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The 88th Infantry Division "sustained its creditable reputation" by effectively
circumventing the individual replacement system by adopting a unit rotation
system. Under this unit rotation system, the division spent two to three weeks
in combat, followed by two to three weeks of rest and retraining. The 88th
Infantry Division was able to approximate this routine throughout the Italian
campaign, with the exception of the autumn of 1944, when it was nearly
destroyed by a prolonged period of combat.[285]
After discussing the need for unit rotation, and its role in the success of the
88th Infantry Division, Brown goes on to elaborate upon the necessity for a
period of gradual initiation to combat. Brown's comments on this point are
important enough to warrant quotation at some length.
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Of thirty-seven draftee infantry divisions, eleven spent a month or more in
England, then shipped to France; one stopped briefly in England, then had a
month in a quiet sector in France; twelve went directly to France and spent a
month in quiet sectors; three trained several weeks in North Africa, then spent
several weeks in quiet sectors in Italy; one went directly to Italy and spent
six weeks in quiet sectors; three went to the Pacific and trained several
months, although the training of one of three was badly broken up; and one went
to Hawaii and trained for the rest of the war without fighting at all. Of the
thirty-seven divisions, only five did not receive some kind of major retraining
experience overseas. These included the ill-starred 106th, sent to a
"quiet sector" that ended up in the path of the German Ardennes offensive of
late 1944; the 75th and 76th, whose retraining experiences were cut short when
they were hastily thrown against the shoulders of the Bulge; and the 92nd and
93rd, black units committed piecemeal rather than as divisions, with
predictable consequences.
The importance of a gradual initiation to combat—of a "warm-up"—should not be
underestimated. Divisions with both a retraining period overseas and a
tour in a quiet sector seem to have done the best of any during their first
major battles. Those with lengthy tours in quiet sectors but no retraining
program did almost as well, and those with neither retraining nor tours in
quiet sectors fared least well….
A comparison can be made, for example, between the 99th and the 106th infantry
divisions during the first days of the Ardennes offensive. By December 1944 the
99th had trained briefly in England, had had a month of combat experience in
low-casualty environments, and was considered prime for a major offensive
undertaking. Deployed alongside the 99th, the 106th had come almost directly
from the United States, without significant retraining in England, and was just
beginning to sort itself out in the quiet Ardennes. Both divisions found
themselves in the path of the German offensive. The 99th fell back on its
haunches, then very creditably held the northern shoulder of the Bulge until
help arrived; the 106th folded in a little more than a day. The 106th was more
exposed, to be sure. Among other differences between the two divisions,
however, one must number the previous combat experience of the 99th. (Emphasis
added)[286]
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The German army, Brown is frank to admit, not only lacked the ability to
retrain and acclimate its units to combat, but also suffered from more
fundamental problems that contributed mightily to its inability to defeat the
western Allies.
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Deprived of formidable defensive positions, German units of 1944 and 1945 were
generally inferior to their American counterparts. German soldiers were not
only less numerous, they were also less physically fit, less experienced as
marksmen, less thoroughly trained, less well equipped, less well supported, and
less able to make a combination of arms work for them. German counterattacks
often proved suicidal; the best the Germans could hope for from the mobile
battlefield was to escape from it with enough strength to man yet another line
of prepared defenses.[287]
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Having made these statements concerning the advantages possessed by the U.S.
army vis-à-vis the German army, Brown then descends into some of the
nonsensical theories espoused by his compatriots Bonn, Mansoor and Doubler. He
asserts, for example, that the German army in 1944-1945 fielded certain elite
formations—"panzer, panzer grenadier, and parachute divisions"—that "stood in
stark contrast to the infantry divisions that constituted the bulk of the
German army." This circumstance he ascribes to the "fact" that the German army
had a superior replacement system to that of the U.S. army, "and this muted
American superiorities that might otherwise have been more obvious." As has
been previously noted herein, the alleged "fact" that the German army possessed
a replacement system superior to that of the U.S. army has been very
effectively challenged by Robert Sterling Rush, whose pioneering work on the
battle of the Huertgen Forest has demonstrated, on the basis of very hard,
solid research, that the U.S. individual replacement system was not the failure
that Brown, et al have made it out to be, whatever the relative merits
of the German army's personnel system may have been. The present study has also
illustrated that the so-called elite formations of the German army in
1944-1945, while they may have been more mobile than the army's infantry
divisions, were not by any means the formidable juggernauts that Brown,
Doubler, Bonn and Mansoor have described. Most, in fact, even when prepared for
the Ardennes offensive, were undermanned and underequipped.[288]
Brown then moves on to take the same tack as Mansoor by asserting that the
Germans raised more than three hundred divisions during the war, "and did their
best to rotate units out of the line as a means to provide rest, retraining,
and replacement." As partial authority for this statement, he relies upon the
various reports and narratives compiled in the immediate post-war period by
former German officers at the behest of the U.S. army.[289] In this regard, it
would have been well if Brown had identified which of the three hundred German
divisions were rotated out of the line for rest, retraining and replacement.
This is not to suggest that there were no such divisions; politically favored
formations such as the premier Waffen SS panzer and panzergrenadier
divisions and the Fallschirm-Panzer Division "Hermann Goering", as
well as some similar Heer divisions, were indeed taken out of the line
at various times during the war. These formations, however, were not removed
from combat for "rest, retraining and replacement" in the sense that Brown
intends the phrase to mean. Rather, the German authorities invariably removed
these divisions from the battle zone only after they had been reduced to kampfgruppe
size. In these circumstances the divisions in question were not rested,
retrained and refilled by replacements; they were, instead, completely rebuilt
out of the shell that remained. As to the infantry divisions that carried the
greater burden of the fighting in both east and west, one looks in vain for one
that was rotated out of the battle line for the purposes claimed by Brown;
some, like the panzer and panzergrenadier divisions, were reconstructed from kampfgruppen
; many, perhaps most, of these divisions were totally destroyed in combat and
simply either never recreated, or totally reconstituted from formations whose
purpose was to supply cadre and troops specifically for the purpose.
Brown continues his theme—and Mansoor's—by claiming that even "severely
depleted" German units had "leadership and logistical cadres still intact, so
there were always experienced divisional bases to build upon." This is a rather
bald statement even for such a one as Brown to make; the present work has
demonstrated that this argument is fallacious in the extreme. To give but one
example of the errant nature of this theory, one need but look at the
consequences of the aforementioned Operation Bagration. In that case,
over a period of about twelve days the Red Army destroyed (in the
literal sense of the word) over thirty German divisions, with a concomitant
loss of 450,000 men. John Erickson opined that in this battle, the Red Army
"achieved [its] greatest single military success on the Eastern Front. For the
German army in the east it was a catastrophe of unbelievable proportions,
greater than that of Stalingrad…." While Erickson's remark in this regard does
not overstate the case, it should nevertheless be recalled that at Stalingrad,
a further twenty-two German divisions had been destroyed . If Brown,
Mansoor and others wish to make the case that these fifty-plus divisions were
reconstituted with intact leadership and logistical cadres, they should do so
in detail rather than in baseless generalities. Should they assay to do so,
they will find the going heavy indeed.[290]
Brown concludes his remarks on this thesis by stating that the German army
gained success by holding the line with depleted units, and "in the meantime
building others back up to acceptable levels of manning, training, and
capability. The reserve built up for the Ardennes offensive is the most
dramatic illustration of the process. Manteuffel's Fifth and Dietrich's Sixth
panzer armies were probably as good as any the Germans ever fielded." These
statements are palpable nonsense, particularly with regard to the German units
that the Western Allies confronted in Western Europe in 1944-1945. Brown must
take a truly dim view of the American training system if he is suggesting that
German divisional formations, composed of 10,000 to 12,000 poorly armed German
recruits and foreign "volunteers" who, if they were lucky, had trained together
for twelve weeks, were the equal of homogeneous American divisions that had
trained together for a minimum of twelve months . It is equally absurd
to argue that the panzer armies that took part in the Ardennes offensive were
"as good as any the Germans ever fielded," and for many of the same reasons.
The majority of the German soldiers who had comprised the panzer armies that
wreaked havoc in France and Russia in 1940 and 1941 had long since perished, to
be replaced by ill-trained youngsters. The quality of German weapons undeniably
had improved since 1942; those weapons were no longer wielded, however, by
soldiers so schooled in combined-arms warfare as to make efficient use of
them.[291]
Brown's motivation in mischaracterizing the composition and combat power of the
German army in the last year of the Second World War is manifest; such
dissimulation on the Wehrmacht allows him to make a colorable argument
that the U.S. army heroically overcame not only the German army but also the
insidious and ruinous American individual replacement system. Having thus
falsely inflated the composition and capabilities of the German army of
1944-1945, it is ironic that Brown then devotes his second appendix to
eradicating what he calls "The Mythos of Wehrmacht Superiority." The appendix
in question is a mere seven pages long; in it, however, Brown engages in
innuendo against the public at large as well as outrageous personal attacks on
other historians.[292] As we consider Brown's appendix in detail, the reader
should bear in mind that elsewhere in his narrative of the exploits of the 88th
Infantry Division Brown characterized the Germans as having "long since proven
themselves masters at improvisation;" as having "fought on tenaciously" in
spite of the general deterioration of their position in Italy in the spring of
1944; as conducting "well executed" and "masterful" counterattacks to halt the
Allied advance in the autumn of 1944; and last, but certainly not least, as
having possessed a personnel replacement system superior to that of the U.S
army.[293] Having in mind the tenor of Brown's second appendix, one would not
be remiss in concluding that these descriptions of the German army are totally
disingenuous, constituting mere puffery inserted by Brown to enhance the
achievements of the 88th Infantry Division.[294]
"The Mythos of Wehrmacht Superiority" begins with Brown's utterly
unsubstantiated assertion that the Wehrmacht is the object of
"pervasive adulation." Even at the time that Draftee Division was
first published (1986), and indeed well before that date, the Wehrmacht,
and particularly the German army, had been the object of widespread and
detailed criticism by military and other historians. Such criticism was founded
not only on moral grounds, but also upon analysis of the performance of the
German army, and particularly its officer corps, in battle. John Erickson's The
Road to Stalingrad and The Road to Berlin were published in
1975 and 1983 respectively; Earl F. Ziemke's Stalingrad to Berlin: The German
Defeat in the East first appeared in 1968; Bryan Fugate published Operation
Barbarossa: Strategy and Tactics on the Eastern Front, 1941 in 1984;
George H. Stein's The Waffen SS: Hitler's Elite Guard at War 1939-1945
first appeared in 1966; the first American edition of History of the German
General Staff by Walter Goerlitz came out in 1953; Gerald Reitlinger's
The SS: Alibi of a Nation 1922-1945 published first in 1957; Soldiers
of Destruction: The SS Death's Head Division, 1933-1945 by
Charles W. Sydnor, Jr. published in 1977; and Omer Bartov's The Eastern Front,
1941-45, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare first appeared
in 1985. It may be stated without fear of contradiction that none of these
works treated the German army with "adulation." Moreover, this short list does
not include reference to either the official histories of the war published in
the United States or Great Britain or any of the myriad personal memoirs of the
conflict such as James M. Gavin's On to Berlin: Battles of an Airborne
Commander 1943-1946 (published 1978) and Charles B. MacDonald's The
Mighty Endeavor (published 1969), none of which can be characterized
as adulatory of the German army. The very premise of Brown's second appendix is
spurious. So too is the "logic" of his argument; for example, Brown invokes the
image of thousands of captured German soldiers being herded by G.I.s "after
every major European battle the American army fought" as "proof" of the
inferiority of the German army to its American counterpart. If Brown's
intention is to engage in a numbers game to prove his argument, he ought also
to take into account the wholesale surrender of the French and Belgian armies
to the Germans in 1940, the fortuitous escape of the British Army from Dunkirk
in the same year, the capture of thousands of British Commonwealth troops by
the Germans in Greece, Crete and North Africa, and the capture of millions of
Red Army soldiers by the Germans in 1941.
No one is safe from Brown's invective. Not only the French, but also the
British—America's staunchest ally, who stood alone against the German onslaught
until the invasion of the Soviet Union, and whose army turned the tide in the
West at the battle of El Alamein—are accused of inflating German capabilities
for the purpose of "explaining their own ineptitudes." The cartoonist and
author Bill Mauldin, who suffered the same privations as the American combat
soldier (as Brown did not) in order to tell his story to the American public,
is accused by Brown of having "portrayed the American soldier as a lovable
nincompoop without providing a similar service for the Germans."[295]
Brown's particular criticism, however, is reserved for historians and other
academics. In general, Brown asserts, an "historiographical bias" developed in
the immediate post-war era, one that favored the German army over its American
counterpart.[296] More specifically, says Brown, "[S]tudies appeared favoring
those who had a point to prove or an axe to grind."[297] First among the "axe
grinders" is S.L.A. Marshall, whose Men Against Fire Brown condemns
for "suggesting that most American infantrymen spent World War II cowering in
the bottom of their foxholes." As the present study has shown, and the reader
may see for himself by reading the book in question, Men Against Fire is
totally irrelevant to a discussion of the relative prowess of the German and
U.S. armies. Nowhere in Men Against Fire does Marshall compare the
U.S. army to any other armed force, much less the German army. Indeed, as has
been pointed out herein numerous times, Marshall never mentions the German army
in Men Against Fire. Marshall's work evidently struck a nerve with the
U.S. army, so much so that the authors studied in this work have contrived to
make him out as little more than a traitor. This is all the more shocking in
view of the fact that Marshall did no such thing as suggest that G.I.s cowered
before the enemy. Either Brown et al did not read Men Against Fire or,
much more likely, they have deliberately mischaracterized his work for the sole
purpose of giving weight to their flimsy argument.[298]
Brown goes on to suggest that B.H. Liddell Hart "vented his pique on Allied
leaders who did not share his elevated impression of himself." In support of
this claim, Brown does no more than make reference (not in text, where a reader
may easily access it, but in a footnote at the back of the book) to Liddell
Hart's The German Generals Talk. Bearing in mind that no graduate student would
be permitted to criticize an established scholar in this manner, the student
may reasonably ask at least three questions about Brown's impugning of Liddell
Hart; first, what precisely does Brown mean by the phrase in question; second,
where in The German Generals Talk did the alleged venting of pique
occur; and third, what relevance to the "mythos" of Wehrmacht superiority
does Liddell Hart's venting of pique have? Put another way, if Brown finds that
The German Generals Talk contributed to the "mythos", would it not be
a simple matter for him to enumerate the ways in which this was done?[299]
Brown next excoriates certain "behavioral scientists" who "simply by their
choices of subjects, created candid documents hazardous when quoted out of
context."[300] The offending behavioral scientists are identified, again in a
footnote at the back of the book, as Eli Ginzberg et.al., The
Ineffective Soldier: Lessons for Management and the Nation (New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1959); E.A. Shils and M. Janowitz, "Cohesion and
Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II," Public Opinion Quarterly, 12
(1948); and S.A. Stouffer et.al., Studies in Social Psychology in World War II
(Princeton, N.J., Princeton Univ. Press, 1947-1950). Brown opines that the
cumulative effect of the efforts of Marshall, Liddell Hart and the behavioral
scientists has been "relative images skewed to favor the German soldier over
the American." We have already considered Brown's mischaracterizations of
Marshall and Liddell Hart. Consider now Brown's assertions about "behavioral
scientists", in light of his subsequent comment that the effects of their work,
and that of Marshall and Liddell Hart were not "ameliorated by the fact that a
significant fraction of the public buying World War II books consists of
enthusiasts who collect Nazi memorabilia, construct plastic panzers, and
energetically seek to be the German player in hex-grid war games." It is simply
astounding that such remarks have been published in what purports to be a work
of scholarship. Does Colonel Brown mean to suggest that scholars such as Eli
Ginzberg and Morris Janowitz wrote their works for the purpose of enhancing the
image of the German soldier over that of the American? Does Colonel Brown have
any basis for implying that readers of World War II books, collectors of Nazi
memorabilia, constructors of model panzers, and players of commercial wargames
formed their opinions about the relative merits of German and American soldiers
by reading the works of Marshall and Liddell Hart, to say nothing of the much
more obscure works of Ginzberg, Shils and Janowitz and Stouffer relied upon by
Brown? Upon what scientific basis does Colonel Brown reach the conclusion that
a "significant fraction" of readers, memorabilia collectors, plastic model
constructors and wargamers believe, as he suggests, that the German soldier was
better than his American counterpart? What, precisely, is a "significant
fraction"? Finally, if Colonel Brown is so clairvoyant as to be able to divine
all of the motives of those who purchase World War II books, collect
memorabilia, construct plastic models, and participate in commercial wargames,
then mayhap he should consider another calling more beneficial to himself and
humanity than the writing of tendentious military history.
It is against this background of Brown's false inflation of the composition and
combat power of the German army in 1944-1945, his inaccurate portrayal of the
historical literature, his mischaracterization of the works of Marshall,
Liddell Hart and behavioral scientists such as Eli Ginzberg and Morris
Janowitz, and his utterly baseless assertions about the beliefs and preferences
of the general public that the reader should consider Brown's efforts to
discredit the work of Trevor N. Dupuy. Chapter Seven of the present work
represents an attempt, however incomplete, to shed light upon Brown's
fundamental criticism of Dupuy's Numbers, Prediction, and War, namely
that it "demonstrates the intellectual intimidation wrought when complex
calculations are unleashed upon a liberal arts community," and accordingly it
is not necessary to repeat that material here. The student, however, should not
rely upon the present author's efforts; instead, he or she should take the
trouble to read Numbers, Prediction, and War itself to see whether
Brown's argument warrants serious consideration. For a more authoritative
consideration of Brown's argument, the student should read Christopher A.
Lawrence's Response, which appears in Niklas Zetterling's Normandy
1944 .[301]
Nevertheless, a few specific remarks about Brown's argument need to be made.
First, Brown resorts to the old canard that in Dupuy's analysis the "run of the
mill" U.S. army is compared to "the best of the German army" on the theory that
German panzer and panzergrenadier divisions are overrepresented in Dupuy's
calculations. German panzer and panzergrenadier divisions may have been better
equipped than German infantry divisions in 1944-1945, although it must be said
that in making his criticism on this basis, Brown offers no evidence whatever
to show that the particular panzer and panzergrenadier formations in Dupuy's
analysis were in fact better equipped than the particular German infantry
divisions in the analysis. It goes without saying that Brown also offers no
evidence to show that the German divisions in question were better equipped
than the American divisions included in the analysis. In this regard it should
be reiterated that in writing Numbers, Prediction, and War Dupuy did
look at the historical data; in making his criticism, Brown did not.
More importantly, the present work has demonstrated that the argument that
Dupuy improperly compared the "best" of the German army with the "ordinary" of
the U.S. army, even if true, is of no consequence whatever. Brown, as
well as Doubler, Mansoor and Bonn, have pointed out that the draftee divisions
of the U.S. army could not be certified as combat-ready without first
undergoing a minimum of twelve months' training, and that the testing regime
upon which such certification was based was rigidly enforced. If any of these
four authors can proffer evidence to show a single German division so
situated in 1943-1944, let him do so. The reality is that during the time
period in question, German divisions, no matter what their nature, were
fortunate to have three months' training before being committed to combat, were
smaller than their Allied counterparts, were composed of raw recruits and a
motley assemblage of foreign "volunteers" and were chronically under-equipped
and short on such necessities as fuel and ammunition. Further, more recent and
more well-founded scholarship has shown that the American individual
replacement system was well up to the task of keeping American divisions
combat-worthy.
Brown also complains that Dupuy's analysis unfairly skews the results in favor
of the Germans because in most instances studied the Americans are the
attacker. In so doing, he falls back on the contention that "[T]raditional
rules of the thumb, verified by experience as planning factors and still taught
at command general staff colleges, assert that one needs a three-to-one
advantage in effective combat power—not necessarily numbers of troops—at the
point of decision to overcome a defender in prepared positions." In so doing,
Brown ignores the fact that in Numbers, Prediction, and War Dupuy
called into question this "rule of the thumb"; presumably, Brown ignores
Dupuy's criticism of this time honored theory simply because it was made by
Dupuy. In this connection it is also worth mentioning that both Bonn and
Mansoor, while eager to point out that the German army was on the defensive
during most of 1944-1945, ignore the fact that the U.S. army had the benefit of
being on the defensive when the German army scored successes during the
Ardennes offensive and the Operation Nordwind offensive. Brown's
"traditional rule of thumb" seems to be a rather malleable concept.
Finally, Brown concludes his book by opining that American G.I.s "won World War
II…because, man for man and unit for unit, they were tougher than their
adversaries."[302] Leaving aside the fact that this statement ignores the
contribution—in the case of the Soviet Union, the overwhelming
contribution—made by American's allies to the defeat of Nazism, this statement
remains unproven by Brown, Bonn, Mansoor and Doubler, and will remain unproven
until they or their followers desist from treating the German army and the U.S.
army as equally matched, and devote study to the men and units that made up
each of them.
Copyright © 2004 by Thomas E. Nutter.
Written by Tom Nutter. If you have questions or comments on this
article, please contact Nutter at:
tenutter@gmail.com.
Last Modified on: 12/03/2006.
* Views expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent
those of MHO.
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