the great WWI infantry myth

[Don Corleone]

I'm afraid I'm going to have to claim a moment of ignorance here. You folks are using the terms 'infiltrate' and 'infiltrator's in a way that I don't understand. I know in WWII the Germans attempted to infiltrate enemy lines (dress their soldiers up in Allied uniforms, teach them to speak without an accent, etc), but that's more a function of espionage then battlefield tactics. Did the Germans in WWI actually send units dressed like BEF out onto the field to disguise them? Wouldn't that be INCREDIBLY dangerous, I would imagine the odds of friendly fire casualties would be very high.

[econ21]

Don, as I understand it, infilitration tactics are essentially trying to breakthrough weakpoints in the enemy lines and not bother initially about reducing strong points. The idea was to get into the rear - hit the vulnerable communications and supply lines, so that this demoralises, isolates and confuses the strong points left behind on the front lines. IIRC, Rommel pioneered the tactic with great success against the Italians, leading small groups of heavily armed men (lots of light machine guns, handgrenades etc). The Germans later adopted it wholesale with Strosstruppen (storm troops) that had a lot of initial success in the Ludendorf offensive 1918. The Wehrmacht armoured encirclements in Barbarossa are in some ways the ultimate extension of this principle. Part of the appropriate response, as the Russians and others discovered, was to create "hedgehogs" that could survive such encirclement rather than surrender en masse.

[Watchman]

The WW1 "infiltration tactics" could be basically summed up as "sneaking over the no-man's land in small groups of shock troops that open the way for the rest to follow" - basically, utilizing stealth, speed and small-unit tactics to avoid the crushing weight of artillery, MG and small-arms fire that invariably greeted open assaults. I wouldn't be surprised if the idea was derived from the "raids" into enemy trenches all sides engaged in, partly to gather intel from prisoners.

The breakthrough-and-isolate tactics of the mechanized Blitzkrieg are IMHO and entirely different beast. The infiltration tactics relied on the stealthiness of trained men, and the disproportionate effect well-trained and -equipped squads had in the restricted condition of trench warfare. Blitzkrieg armour tactics were almost the polar opposite, with no stealth in their actual execution and relying on the sheer overwhelming power and durability of massed tanks concentrated against a single point of the enemy line, and their mobility to exploit the breach created.

Far as I can tell the only shared element was the relegation of the "mopping up" of stubborn centers of resistance to the subsequent waves of troops, but as this was objectively dictated by the need to maintain momentum and deny the enemy time and opportunity to reorganize to contain the breaches I don't think it can be considered much of a "unifying feature."

Just my opinion though.

[econ21]

The breakthrough-and-isolate tactics of the mechanized Blitzkrieg are IMHO and entirely different beast. The infiltration tactics relied on the stealthiness of trained men, and the disproportionate effect well-trained and -equipped squads had in the restricted condition of trench warfare. Blitzkrieg armour tactics were almost the polar opposite, with no stealth in their actual execution and relying on the sheer overwhelming power and durability of massed tanks concentrated against a single point of the enemy line, and their mobility to exploit the breach created.

Far as I can tell the only shared element was the relegation of the "mopping up" of stubborn centers of resistance to the subsequent waves of troops, but as this was objectively dictated by the need to maintain momentum and deny the enemy time and opportunity to reorganize to contain the breaches I don't think it can be considered much of a "unifying feature."

You had me wondering whether I was being over-imaginative in relating infilitration tactics to blitzkrieg, but John Keegan makes the same claim in his book on WW1 (p405):

German infantry in 1918"had been trained to "infilitrate" enemy positions, by-passing centres of resistance, rather than stopping to fight when held up at the front. These tactics anticipated blitzkrieg, which the German army would apply so successfully in mechanised operations in a later war."

I am no military historian, but I'll wager that the German theorists of blitzkrieg, like General Von Seeckt in the 1920s, and the practitioners, like Rommel[1], explicitly acknowledged that their method of fighting had its origins in WW1 infilitration tactics.

Blitzkrieg was certainly scaled up, but it did rely on stealth at an operational level (and often at a tactical level, e.g. through the use of paratroopers and surprise assaults to secure bridgeheads). If the French and British knew the Germans were coming through the Ardennes, the 1940 campaign would have turned out rather different. Later, when the allies did anticipate German armoured thrusts - notably at Alamein and Kursk - the attacks were unsuccessful.

I am not even sure the blitzkrieg relied on that much on the power and durability of armour to break through the enemy lines - I thought the armour was more to exploit the breakthrough. Concentrations of artillery and infantry can smash holes in a line. The real role of the tank (and dive bomber) was in playing havoc once the line had been penetrated. In 1940, the French massed armour around Sedan and the British at Cambrai, but they achieved nothing and little respectively.

What to me is distinctive about blitzkrieg is the infilitration - the Panzer divisions in France in 1940 ranging hundreds of miles behind the allied frontlines, the massive pockets of Russians surrounded in Barbarossa. What was revolutionary about the German use of armour (although anticipated by British theorists such as Fuller and Liddell Hart) was that its aim was deep penetration. When the allies learnt how to deal with infilitration and even encirclement, the blitzkrieg ceased to work.

[1]Captain Rommel captured 9000 men and 81 guns in two days in Italy. IIRC, he had only around a hundred or so men of his own, although heavily armed with light machine guns and exploisives. It's hard not to see this foreshadowing the successes of the Wehrmacht in the first half of WW2.

[Watchman]

*shrug* Seems to get a bit semantical to me. However, to my knowledge the real pioneers of the Blitzkrieg theory were the Soviets with their "deep combat" concept, which the Germans - who were working on joint military developement programs with them around the time, the two pariahs of the international scene finding each other useful allies - picked up and put into practice a fair bit better than the Soviets who had some political issues involved.

The real key point of the doctrine in any case was massing armour into large units instead of spreading them all over in "penny packets", since massed armour obviously could easily destroy scattered armour piecemeal through local numerical superiority - and when tanks were about the only really workable anti-tank measure around...

Anyway, I find the tentative connections proposed unconvincing. All offenses, major ones in particular, were kept as secret as possible to prevent the enemy from massing their defences into the actual target area; they were obviously rather easier to deal with if they were spread out covering multiple possible approaches. Hardly anything noteworthy there, just military SOP. "Loose lips sink ships," remember ?

Particularly so if your "master plan" relies on catching the foe off guard by doing something unexpected, as was the case with the 1940 Blitz in France and Netherlands.

Put this way: if it's basic operational know-how and SOP that once realized is vigorously tried to apply whenever possible, it cannot in my opinion be "characteristic" of a particular tactical concept/scheme/technique and, hence, neither a connecting link between two or more of them.

As an example, in the naval tactics of both gunpowder-era galleys and sailing ships, firepower, maneuver and formation were very important.
The similarities pretty much ended there.

Ditto for the similarities/differences between mechanized Blitzkrieg - a tactic of mechanized forces, working best on open ground - and the "Stormtrooper" infiltration, a tactic of infantry primarily for fighting in "close" terrain such as trenches.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

*shrug* Seems to get a bit semantical to me. However, to my knowledge the real pioneers of the Blitzkrieg theory were the Soviets with their "deep combat" concept, which the Germans - who were working on joint military developement programs with them around the time, the two pariahs of the international scene finding each other useful allies - picked up and put into practice a fair bit better than the Soviets who had some political issues involved.

The Sovs did have at least one brilliant armor commander - purged by Stalin of course - but never built the support TO&E to a level that could have put the concept in practice. Rommel and the early Strosstruppen tactics are alike in concept to the blitzkrieg, albeit on a very different scale. JFC Fuller and Guderian were both early proponents. It would be hard to pin down any one source as the absolute.

[econ21]

The real key point of the doctrine in any case was massing armour into large units instead of spreading them all over in "penny packets", since massed armour obviously could easily destroy scattered armour piecemeal through local numerical superiority - and when tanks were about the only really workable anti-tank measure around...

Again, I disagree with you. Even the French and certainly the Russians had armoured divisions. The key point of the Panzer division was not to mass armour to destroy scattered enemy armour. German tanks initially were not supposed to fight tanks - that came later (when they started putting long barrelled AT-type (50mm, 75mm, 88mm) guns on their vehicles). The anti-tank measures were supposed to be anti-tank guns - both in theory and often in practice (Rommel delighted in leading British tanks into his anti-tank guns). The key point of massing armour in the Panzer division and Panzer groups was to use their armoured mobility to achieve a deep penetration. It is this aspect that is an extension of infilitration tactics.

Seems to get a bit semantical to me.

Except that I think the blitzkrieg theorists learned directly from the effectiveness of infilitration tactics. If the two ways of fighting came from totally different epochs, as in your galleys and sailing-ships analogy, then I'd agree it's not very interesting to draw a link. But if it is the same people just using technology, then the link is not only logical, it's causal.

[Pannonian]

Again, I disagree with you. Even the French and certainly the Russians had armoured divisions. The key point of the Panzer division was not to mass armour to destroy scattered enemy armour. German tanks initially were not supposed to fight tanks - that came later (when they started putting long barrelled AT-type (50mm, 75mm, 88mm) guns on their vehicles). The anti-tank measures were supposed to be anti-tank guns - both in theory and often in practice (Rommel delighted in leading British tanks into his anti-tank guns). The key point of massing armour in the Panzer division and Panzer groups was to use their armoured mobility to achieve a deep penetration. It is this aspect that is an extension of infilitration tactics.

Sounds exactly like Deep Operations. Concentrate artillery to blow a hole in the line, rush tanks and mobile infantry through the hole who then run riot in the enemy rear. The Russians even specifically organised their armies for this style of warfare.

Except that I think the blitzkrieg theorists learned directly from the effectiveness of infilitration tactics. If the two ways of fighting came from totally different epochs, as in your galleys and sailing-ships analogy, then I'd agree it's not very interesting to draw a link. But if it is the same people just using technology, then the link is not only logical, it's causal.

[/quote]
Blitzkrieg and Deep Operations emphasise what happens after the breakthrough. The breakthrough is assumed to be successful before they come into play. Infiltration enables to the breakthrough. The link you speak of is not doctrinal.

[Watchman]

The galley/roundship analogy comes from a very specific period, actually, namely the later 16th century when the Mediterranean war galley was reaching its evolutionary peak before becoming ebsolescent, and the sailing "roundship" was beginning to show it's true potential.

Curious detail: cannon-armed galleys served well in the coastal navies of the Baltic from about mid-1700s to mid-1800s, the broken coastline and extensive archipelagos of the region making their comparative agility and independence of weather highly valuable.

But anyway.

I'll grant you that the "stormtrooper" tactics no doubt played a key part in cementing the idea of "deep penetration" tactics, but I'd say that's more because they were the first tactical scheme developed that allowed such stratagems in the first place. Before them infantry assaults had inevitably been badly mauled during the advance and usually unable to properly force their way deep into the enemy trench system, at least without the committement of massive manpower and extended slugging matches between the forces in the tactical bottlenecks of the trenches.

"Stormtrooper" tactics were a means to deal with that through the use of speed, firepower and stealth to magnify the effects of small units beyond all reason and most importantly gut the front layers of the defensive system (as methods had been devised to counter the worst effects of artillery preparations, which in any case had trouble reaching the deeper layers). For the scheme to be worth anything it was pretty much a necessity for the assault units to bypass stubborn points of resistance (to be, hopefully, dealt with the later waves) and keep pushing forwards the maintain shock and momentum; had they gotten bogged down fighting such strongpoints, well, where'd the improvement to the old system been ? It'd have stalled their advance and dissipated their momentum, and allowed the enemy to form new defense lines and mass reinforcements very much defeating the whole point of the whole idea. Maintaining the advance denied the enemy breathing space, and allowed the spearhead units to engage the incoming reinforcements piecemeal, unformed and at least to a degree on their own terms.

Much of that latter part really goes under the maxim "kick 'em when they're down and don't let them get back up"; it's something commanders always strove for, they'd just been unable to achieve it with any degree of reliability for most of the war.

However, it is not difficult to find "deep penetration" elements in WW1 armour tactics either. Indeed, they tended to happen almost by default as the primitive tanks were virtually "blind, deaf and dumb" and primarily operated by proceeding along their pre-planned "attack corridor" and simply destroyed everything they could; machine-gun nests and other such troublesome strongpoints were particularly singled out for extinction. This had much the same effect as the infiltration tactics, albeit from almost polarly opposed starting point and through virtually opposite methods. The vulnerable flesh of the stormtroopers got over the no-man's land in one piece through stealth (well, the inevitable preceding artillery barrages and gas shells didn't exactly hurt); the tanks by virtue of their metal shells, which virtually bounced off anything short of cannon hits. The Stormtroopers fought their way through the maze of trenches with superior tactics, training and firepower, whenever possible circumventing stubborn strongpoints. The tanks specifically aimed to reduce such centres of resistance to smoking craters filled with bullet-ridden corpses, and crawled onwards largely by the virtue of their near invulnerability. Since they missed a fair few ones almost by default - they were nearly blind and deaf -

The end result was the same - the enemy defensive line was shredded in considerable depth (assuming the whole operation didn't go FUBAR, natch) and the rest of the infantry could pour through the gaps.

I'd almost be willing to claim the mechanized [I]Blitzkrieg[/] concept rather evolved from the massed armoured wedges the Allies started employing as battering rams to penetrate deep into German defensive systems towards the end of the Great War, the spread-out-and-isolate part being a natural addition once the mechanical developement of the fighting vehicles now actually allowed such sophistication (the developement of mechanized infantry capable of keeping up with the advance didn't exactly hurt).

What I'm trying to say is that there's no particular reason to believe the "deep combat" aspect of mechanized Blitzkrieg strategy came from the "stormtrooper" tacics save for the fact the latter was the first tactical innovation that made anything of the sort possible in the conditions of WW1 trench warfare in the first place. I'd even be willing to argue that it would have been developed even if the "stormtrooper" tactics had never been introduced - it was just too natural an element of the idea of using massed mechanized wedges to penetrate enemy lines not to have been, if such armoured Schwerpunkt strategies were introduced in the first place.

Even the French and certainly the Russians had armoured divisions. The key point of the Panzer division was not to mass armour to destroy scattered enemy armour.

The operative term is "too little, too late". At the start of WW2 the Germans were the only ones who didn't field their tanks primarily as infantry support vehicles, but as concentrated mechanized units. Even if it was an unintented side effect, the fact the massed German armour could overwhelm the comparatively isolated enemy armour - or for that matter AT guns - was certainly very useful and valuable, not in the least in sustaining the momentum of the breakthrough. It'd be kind of difficult to maintain mechanized deep penetration if it could be stumped by relatively few enemy tanks you couldn't dispose of, now wouldn't it ?

German tanks initially were not supposed to fight tanks - that came later (when they started putting long barrelled AT-type (50mm, 75mm, 88mm) guns on their vehicles). The anti-tank measures were supposed to be anti-tank guns - both in theory and often in practice (Rommel delighted in leading British tanks into his anti-tank guns).

They could, nonetheless. Tanks were eventually found to be a far better anti-tank measure than crew-served AT guns anyway, being far more mobile, durable and tactically flexible and, as a side effect, easier to concentrate if necessary. The guns weren't exactly well suited for mobile warfare either. To boot many early-war AT guns were actually rather inadequate for their job performance-vise, and in any case rarely present in enough numbers to be able to blunt the mechanized assaults; already by mid-war tank evolution was beginning to outpace AT gun developement, and the late-war heavy AT guns were becoming severely unwieldy, near-static monstrosities. Even the famed German 8.8cm (especially in its original AA configuration) was so large and heavy its deployement was often very troublesome; it made a really good tank gun though...

Let's be honest here. The theory and practice of tank design and deployement wasn't the only field where everyone had greater or lesser teething problems, and theory and reality often weren't compatible; anti-tank measures were another. Take for example the anti-tank rifles...

The Sovs did have at least one brilliant armor commander - purged by Stalin of course - but never built the support TO&E to a level that could have put the concept in practice.

The Soviets developed a rather sophisticated armour doctrine by mid-Thirties, and even started reforming their military to implement it. Stalin's purges and shifting favourites came in the way about halfway through though, with the primary theorists finding themselves in the camps, the idea itself blacklisted, and the (already badly gutted by the purges of the officer corps) army itself undergoing a counter-reformation back to the "old" system (ie. the same infantry-centered one everyone except the Germans had at the start of the war, which proved to be something of a liablity). Once the Germans proved the viablity of the "deep combat" concept in Poland and France Stalin duly made *another* about-face and started reforming the army yet again for the new system...

The Soviets got it going properly by about mid-war, at which point the remaining Western Allied had also caught the idea, and duly proceeded to roll the Germans back.

[Epistolary Richard]

Watchman in his first post summed up my sentiments on the matter pretty well, especially on the point of High Command's sheer ignorance of the reality of the ground that their men were fighting over. An aspect of the improvement in artillery was the ever-increasing remoteness of the general from the battlefield. One anecdotal piece I read was that a general venturing forth to the line of battle broke down in tears at having sent men into battle in such conditions - and he was still ten miles from the front.

I read the revisionist historical comment about ten years ago that the newly-recruited army was simply too inexperienced for anything but 'over the top' tactics walking across No Mans Land fully laden with pack and I originally bought it. But I put it to someone far smarter than I and they said 'ill-training isn't an excuse for bad tactics, it's a reason for better training'. There was nothing stupid nor cowardly about the British Tommy - if High Command had a more accurate understanding of conditions and if they had prepared the soldiers better in training then they could have had a more effective fighting force.

But it is one of those ongoing themes in military history - truly great commanders produce strategic and tactical innovations ideal for their situation, but these are then slavishly followed by inferior minds who live in the shadow of giants.

[Watchman]

One anecdotal piece I read was that a general venturing forth to the line of battle broke down in tears at having sent men into battle in such conditions - and he was still ten miles from the front.

I've read the same one. Although it's mentioned to be "it is said", the officer is identified as ...damn these military ranks... Lieutenant General(?) Sir Lancelot Kigell, Chief of Staff of Gen.(?) Haig during Third Ypres in 1917. In the version I have he breaks down in tears in his staff car and rhetorically laments "have we truly been sending men to fight here?" and the man accompanying him, who's been down in the trenches for much of the battle, flatly observes "it gets worse further on."

Anecdotal or not, it gets the point across. On the other hand a fair few senior officers died "with their boots on" at the front lines or were captured in combat, so all of them weren't comfortably insulated in their headquarters.

The big problem the WW1 military brass had was quite simply that nobody actually had practical experience of just what modern "industrial war" was like, or what all these new weapons developed since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 were actually capable of. It was partly sheer inertia and technophobia, not to mention arrogance, too; for example many viewed the machine-gun as fit for mowing down inferior natives in colonial wars, but of course civilized and trained and above all white Europeans would be another matter...

That they, like most people of the time, been brought up by heavily romanticized accounts of the Napoleonic wars and assorted other conflicts fought long ago didn't exactly help them develop a mental framework well suited for adapting to the new rules. All the more so as the top brass were on the average old; real Methuselahs. Now, age has its benefits, but has a notorious tendency to ossify people's thinking...

[Pannonian]

I read the revisionist historical comment about ten years ago that the newly-recruited army was simply too inexperienced for anything but 'over the top' tactics walking across No Mans Land fully laden with pack and I originally bought it. But I put it to someone far smarter than I and they said 'ill-training isn't an excuse for bad tactics, it's a reason for better training'. There was nothing stupid nor cowardly about the British Tommy - if High Command had a more accurate understanding of conditions and if they had prepared the soldiers better in training then they could have had a more effective fighting force.

If they had prepared the soldiers better. But they didn't have time. France was in danger of losing the war at Verdun, and a major offensive had to launched somewhere to divert German attention. An offensive using inadequately trained troops was going to happen, the only question was where. The High Command picked the junction between the French and British armies as the best place, far enough from Verdun to be a nuisance for the Germans yet working in combination with the more experienced French.

[Pannonian]

Don, as I understand it, infilitration tactics are essentially trying to breakthrough weakpoints in the enemy lines and not bother initially about reducing strong points. The idea was to get into the rear - hit the vulnerable communications and supply lines, so that this demoralises, isolates and confuses the strong points left behind on the front lines. IIRC, Rommel pioneered the tactic with great success against the Italians, leading small groups of heavily armed men (lots of light machine guns, handgrenades etc). The Germans later adopted it wholesale with Strosstruppen (storm troops) that had a lot of initial success in the Ludendorf offensive 1918. The Wehrmacht armoured encirclements in Barbarossa are in some ways the ultimate extension of this principle. Part of the appropriate response, as the Russians and others discovered, was to create "hedgehogs" that could survive such encirclement rather than surrender en masse.

The Germans learnt the technique of infiltration from the Russians, who used it with great success in the Brusilov offensive in 1916. The Austrians collapsed under the Russian attack and were effectively knocked out of the remainder of the war. German troops under Ludendorff were rushed in to stabilise the front, which they eventually did.