Reddit reviews The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich (Modern War Studies (Paperback))

Down to 11 minutes left in the podcast, but I think I have some insight for you guys about the whole "We need thinkers as soldiers instead of mindless drones" theme.

One of the big takeaways that the Americans took from fighting the Germans in World War 2 was the German concept of Aufragstaktik or Mission Tactics (Being literal here with my translation. Got a TL;DR at the end, but I figure u/feefuh would appreciate the deep military history dive:

After Napoleon crushed the Prussians at the Battles of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, the Prussian military stepped back and looked at why they lost. They saw that Napoleon gave his Marshals more freedom than the Prussian army did, which made their ability to respond to events on the battlefield far greater because of the time it took for decisions to be made up the chain of command as well as the thickness of the fog of war. In response, the Prussians made it a national policy to create a corps of staff officers who would teach officers about the art of war, draft war plans, and play out war games to test their theories. Officers who stood out for their aptitude and wits in their units were invited to be students at their Kriegsakadamie, or War Academy.

Officers were trained in all branches of the army—infantry, cavalry, and artillery at the time—with the express purpose of allowing them to share and spread ideas so all officers had a broad understanding of their forces’ capabilities as well as to keep officers from falling into the trap of groupthink. This showed itself in the German Wars of Unification and the Franco-Prussian War where the German curbstomped their foes through quick thinking and operational movement that was just beyond what their opponents could do.
The famous Schiefflin Plan that the Germans used in the opening rounds of World War 1 were the brainchild of staff officers in the General Staff, and while the Western Front was limited in its strategic and operational movement, the Eastern Front demonstrated this again where the Germans destroyed the Imperial Russian Army at Tannenberg, the Masurian Lakes (Twice!) and the blunting of the Russian Kerensky Offensive that knocked the Russians out the war and kickstarted the Bolshevik Revolution. This led the General Staff—especially Hindenberg and Ludendorff—to essentially usurp the German government and run the nation as a dictatorship to win at all costs. The Treaty of Versailles dissolved the German General Staff and banned their recreation.

Fast forward to World War 2, and the General Staff was not only revived, but the idea of Aufragstaktik had been pushed down to Non-Commissioned Officers (Corporals, Sergeants, etc.), so the entire German Army was built to fight the battle that was in front of them as they saw fit. It was totally common to have an artillery battalion commanded by an infantry officer and a company of infantry commanded by an armour officer because it was expected for all officers to command all men in all situations and fight with the tools they had on hand.

This allowed the Germans to fight against opponents who had massive advantages in men and materiel and win, because the Germans saw that information on-site was a huge factor in battle. The Blitzkrieg operations in Poland, France, and 1941-42 in the Soviet Union were examples of the Germans getting inside the information cycle of their opponents because their battalion, company, and even platoon commanders were given the freedom to improvise on the spot to meet the more generalized objectives they were given. For example, in France, the Germans famously raced through the Ardennes Forest and bypassed the French formations faster than the news of the initial breakthrough could travel up the chain of command. Even later in the war after D-Day, the Western Allies had trouble dealing with German units who would defer to the person on the spot and coordinate what should have been a rout into an organized rearguard action.

The downside to this in terms of the Germans was the latitude given to local commanders at times meant that war crimes were considered acceptable if it meant the objective couldn’t be met any other way. Got a hospital that a platoon of infantry is moving around to engage your infantry? Call in an artillery strike and demolish it. Your advance to take a vital bridgehead is held back by the company of soldiers you just encircled and captured? Machine gun them down. Not that it was a consequence of Aufragstaktik per se, but it can be war by any means necessary at the operational and tactical level without a moral compass.

With the Cold War looming, NATO was facing the Warsaw Pact that would outnumber them numerically and in terms of tanks, possibly qualitatively, and any edge on the ground would be welcome. The key weakness of the Soviets was they had a quite top-down command structure that, while they did allow officers some latitude at the platoon and company level, the operational (battalion/brigade/corps) level on upward was very much hierarchal. Using the pattern of training especially NCOs and junior officers in Aufragstaktik, NATO forces hoped that this would allow them the breathing space needed in West Germany to blunt any Warsaw Pact assault and allow reinforcements from the US to arrive.

A good book on this is "The German Way of War" by Robert Citino. He wrote a 4-part (I think) series on the German Army in World War 2 that looked at how they fought operationally, and this book expanded his thesis to the start of the General Staff. Very academic and military history-centric, but I enjoyed it a lot.

Essentially in Ender's Game you have in Ender Wiggins the archetype of Aufragstaktik-style command, and in the battle against the Buggers, he is able to make the decision on the ground necessary to win the battle and get inside the decision-making loop of the hive mind by doing something they would never expect.

TL;DR: The Germans made it a matter of military policy to give their leaders in the thick of the battle the freedom to make decisions based on what they were dealing with through deliberately open-ended orders. This made them immensely more difficult to fight than a more hierarchical military because the playbook was mostly thrown out. The US and by extension NATO armies adopted this during the Cold War as a deliberate strategy to fight the Soviets. Considering the time that Ender's Game was written, Ender being NATO and the Buggers being the Soviets/Chinese would be an apt comparison to look at militarily.

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics
Book Link: https://www.amazon.com/German-Way-War-Thirty-Studies/dp/0700616241

I wouldn't consider myself off-topic by far at all.

The deficiency was that though the fascist industrial base could build tanks which were of paper wonderful, they failed to even build enough tanks to replenish losses. The Wehrmacht was a force designed to win quick victories against opponents in Western Europe, where the distance between starting line and objective isn't very far, and there is a large and robust transportation network to rely on.

In Barbarossa alone, during the depths of the first period of war, when the Fascists had the strategic initiative, the Nazi losses were staggering. 18 Pz.Div had below 50 operational tanks by mid-august, and by 9 November only 14 tanks.^1 18th Pz.Div's problems did not stop there, as Bartov continues.

>Where?

In that the Great Patriotic War involved a great deal of armored warfare, and the Nazis were unable to fight and win it.

>What was a failure?

They couldn't build tanks that were good enough in large enough numbers to make a difference, and furthermore were out fought and out fought at the operational level, where the fighting quality of individual tanks becomes less important than the structural organization of the military.

>Fast nimble tanks?

Which they used astoundingly at Kursk to get all of, what, 8-10km in the North and 35km in the south? Even if their tanks were tactically mobile, such as the Panther was when it worked, they were not able to turn this into operational victory after Kursk.

>Armament capable of eliminating any opposition?

Which is nice, so long as the tank is in a position to shoot at other things. But each tank is only in one place at a time, and so you can't possess strength everywhere on the front. Combine that with the excellent Soviet reconnaissance capability and you get operations like Uranus, where they broke through the poorly equipped Italian and Romanian forces flanking Stalingrad and encircled an entire army, one of the greatest maneuvers of all time!

>Armour that was a problem even for the best allied guns?

Other than the point I made above, I don't have much to say to this, they did build well armored tanks! Even if they were impractical and didn't make much sense. See: Pz.Tiger Ausf.B, which had lots of armor and a stonking big gun, but they only made what, 450 of? To use on a front stretching from Leningrad to the Black Sea?

>The best optics of war?

If you'd watch the video, Moran an actual tanker explains the fallacy of this statement. The Germans may have had the best glass, but not the best optics, by virtue of poor arrangement and positioning.

>Vehicles that could fight outnumbering opponent and survive the engagement?

The Sherman did that fine at Arracourt. But to go on a little from here, why should you fight outnumbered? Isn't this a symptom of a greater strategic failing that these vehicles are fighting outnumbered? Shouldn't the mighty German economy, in addition to the bulk of conquered Western Europe, be able to produce a well designed tank in enough numbers to fight on equal terms? The Soviets certainly were able economize their production, they reduced man-hours required to produce a T-34 1941g/1942g by something like 1/3-1/2. link

Or perhaps indicative of the great Soviet strength, their ability to concentrate forces so as to have an overwhelming localized advantage while remaining at a far less decisive correlation of forces throughout the front? Certainly, this is an impressive feat of generalship, being able to do more with less.

>Or perhaps you aim at the fact that German tanks often lacked parts they were intended to have?

Not sure what you mean here, but my area of expertise isn't rivet counting, it's operational maneuver warfare. I don't know what wish list the Nazis had for their tanks, because I don't really care what their imagined super tanks were. You fight the war with the weapons you have, and that you can build. They didn't have enough tanks, and couldn't build enough to alter this difference.

>Where is a design flaw here?

Generally the failing to build a sufficient number of tanks which were able to function well enough to win the war. But, of course, tanks aren't the only thing which wins wars, generalship wins wars, and in that the Nazis were outmatched in theory before the war began, and in practice from 1943 onward.

>I always though it is a common knowledge that apart from Russians the allies had a prognostic ability of a fortune teller. That it took Russians a great deal of time before they were able to put already developed theory in useful practical form or even such basic things like coordinating support units to keep the tanks rolling.

The Red Army learned consistently and rapidly from its various mistakes, correcting them rather quickly. For example, the trial-and-error of creating a better armored unit organization which resulted in the 1943 model Tank Army, as orchestrated by Fedorenko, which served as the base model for further tank armies as the war continued, but which came out of the various mechanized corps concepts which were in service from 1941. This, of course, was all based on the theories of Tukachevsky, both deep operations and the need for continuous operations, which were far beyond the old-school Prussian ways of the Whermacht. The Nazis may have fought and won battles, though they increasingly were unable to win them as the war progressed and Soviets learned, but they were unable to translate this into winning the war. This truly is the ultimate test of a military, and of the society it is part of. The Soviet victory over Nazi Germany was total, and its peace Carthaginian, splitting Germany for 45 years among the 4 allied powers.

The Nazi and Soviet ways of war, and their entire societies, were put to the test, and the Nazis were found wanting. Their ideas, concepts, and vehicles were proved largely unsuitable in modern warfare. They tried to destroy the Soviet Army in one large operational maneuver in 1941, and yet they failed to understand both the immense soviet ability to generate forces very rapidly through the cadre and reserve systems, and that in the age of mass armies decision cannot be forced in a single operation. The Soviets understood this, it was Tukachevsky who explained it! Once Stalin realized his generals were competent and let them fight the war, they continually attempted to put into practice their theories of deep operations and continuous operations. From 1943 to the end of the war the Soviets unleashed a near continuous series of operations where they advanced hundreds of kilometers at a time and destroyed large Nazi forces.

>Is also the level at which the biggest successes of Wehrmacht were achieved. Is where schwerpunkt, envelopment and exploitation enabled Germans to fight enemies much bigger and better equipped than them.

Yes, but their concept of operations was found wanting, especially by Kursk. They were unable to translate their style of warfare, designed around fighting in Western Europe, to Eastern Europe and the European Soviet Union. Citino explains this far better than I could in this lecture

>Not sure if you heard about the fact that Germans critically lacked fuel from 1941 onwards. Assault on Stalingrad began with almost empty petrol tanks. Oil required for the success of the Wacht am Rhein/Ardennes offensive was within the enemy to be captured. Germans weren't encircled repeatedly because they were bad at planning but simply because they had nothing to move with. This is a reoccurring theme not only on the Eastern front. At El Alamein Rommel had fuel for literally one single defensive manoeuvre to counter the British assault.

This counts as being outfought. What sort of incompetent fights a war without petrol? OR continually builds larger and more fuel intensive tanks with a fuel shortage. This is emblematic of the failures of the German military. Even then, so much of their supply apparatus relied on horses that this is a bit of a red herring. 77 of their infantry divisions in barbarossa were horse drawn between the rail-head and front. As materiel losses mounted during the war this ratio only increased.

Furthermore, in operations like Vistula-Oder they certainly were out-fought. Or in Operation Kutuzov.

I would suggest you read the revised (2015) edition of Glantz's When Titans Clashed. It's the most balanced and authoritative general history of the Nazi-Soviet war to date. Or Bartov's Hitler's Army, or Citino's series starting with the German Way of War, through Death of the Wehrmacht, and on to his books on 1943 and 44+45. They should likely dispel a lot of this mythologized view of the Nazi military you have.

https://www.amazon.com/When-Titans-Clashed-Stopped-Studies/dp/0700621210/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0057CZ560/

https://www.amazon.com/German-Way-War-Thirty-Studies/dp/0700616241

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Wehrmacht-German-Campaigns-Studies/dp/0700617914

https://www.amazon.com/Wehrmacht-Retreats-Fighting-Modern-Studies/dp/0700623434/

https://www.amazon.com/Wehrmachts-Last-Stand-Campaigns-1944-1945/dp/0700624945/

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1. Bartov, Hitler's Army, P.21
   
   
2. Ibid

Here is a great book that goes into the benefits and major drawbacks of German military tactics. https://www.amazon.com/German-Way-War-Thirty-Studies/dp/0700616241/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2J0JQ0ZNDN2U3&keywords=german+way+of+war&qid=1551199580&s=gateway&sprefix=german+way+of+%2Caps%2C142&sr=8-1

One of the best would be a series of books about the Wehrmacht/Bewegungskrieg by Dr. Robert Citino, from the University of North Texas, formerly Eastern Michigan University, where I had him as a professor. The guy was/is an electric instructor, and I'm pretty sure was, at one point, the highest rated professor on ratemyprofessors.com.

Some of his books to check out:
The German War of War
Death of the Wehrmacht