Reddit reviews The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 (Modern War Studies (Paperback))
We found 2 Reddit comments about The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 (Modern War Studies (Paperback)). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
University Press of Kansas
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/
****
Glantz, David M and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015. 384 pages, available as paperback, hardback, and ebook.
This is one of the best single-volume operational histories of the Nazi-Soviet War. It is not as in-depth as, say, Erickson's duology, but it's relatively quick and easy to read. Glantz is still the English-language historian par excellence of the operational aspect of the Nazi-Soviet War and of Soviet doctrine and theory, though he is unfortunately semi-retired now. Jonathan House's coauthorship saves When Titans Clashed from the worst of the usual criticisms of Glantz's writing, namely his dry "I have copy-pasted and translated this section of a Russian field manual" style.
​
Smelser, Ronald M., and Edward J. Davies. The Myth of the Eastern Front: The Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 342 pages, hardback or paperback.
I recommend this book as a companion to Titans, as the two of them dismantle many Western assumptions & myths about the so-called "Eastern Front," albeit from different angles. Where Titans presents a less Wehrmacht-centric perspective on the purely military aspects of that conflict and sheds light on the actual military skill of the Red Army, The Myth of the Eastern Front explains the origins of many of those assumptions and is an important historiographic piece.
​
Merridale, Catherine. Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945. New York: Picador, 2006. 462 pages, paperback, hardback, or audiobook.
Ivan's War is a social history of the Red Army, told partly through interviews with veterans and civilians and partly through memoirs, and contextualized by improved access to archives during the post-Soviet, pre-current-unpleasantness era. It is less academically rigorous than, say, Reese's Stalin’s Reluctant Soldiers: A Social History of the Red Army, 1925-1941, but more approachable and quite compelling. If you're wondering what it was like to be an anonymous frontovik in the wartime Red Army, this is a good place to start. By dispelling the implicitly dehumanizing and racist narratives of the largely Wehrmacht-influenced prevailing Western literature on the Nazi-Soviet War, Ivan's War also rounds out a sort of mythbusting trilogy with Titans and Myth of the Eastern Front.
​
Continuing the World War II theme, Robert Citino's Death of the Wehrmacht: The German Campaigns of 1942 (448 pages), The Wehrmacht Retreats: Fighting a Lost War, 1943 (440 pages), and The Wehrmacht's Last Stand: The German Campaigns of 1944-1945 (632 pages) are, as a trilogy, a good look into the institutional culture of the German officer corps. Citino posits that, in addition to the distortive effects of Nazism on that culture, the officer corps embodied a long tradition of a particular way of war - short, sharp, lively wars of strategic preemption and the pursuit of the rapid defeat by encirclement of enemy armies - that proved unsuited for modern industrialized total war, and ultimately contributed to the Reich's defeat. Citino is quite readable; his prose is actually *enjoyable* which can be quite rare for military history.
​
Glantz, David M. Soviet Military Operational Art: In Pursuit of Deep Battle. New York: Frank Cass, 1991. 320 pages, paperback.
Returning to Glantz and the Soviet focus, this is a good surface-level (but satisfactorily deep) introduction to the history, theory, and practice of the Soviet concept of operational art - the intermediate level of war between tactics and strategy, involving the use of large formations like armies to achieve coordinated tactical successes, the sum of which contribute to strategic victory. It is, as I mentioned before, rather dry, but compared to some of Glantz's other stuff it's still perfectly readable. In my opinion, this text is an indispensable primer for understanding how the Red Army expected to fight at various points in its history, but also the roots of modern Russian theories of war. It is unfortunately a little expensive, however. I think Glantz might have long-form essays floating around on dtic.mil that summarize some of the book's content but I'm not sure.
​
Ferriter, Diarmaid. A Nation and Not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2017. 528 pages, paperback.
A departure from the rest of the list, I really like this book as a survey of the Irish Revolution and the beginnings of the IRA. It covers military matters, but mostly social and political matters, and for that reason alone I think it's a good introduction to the (arguably much more important) broader & less technical-tactical parts of military history. The first ten chapters cover the historiography of the Revolution, and a few chapters in the last third of the book discuss memory and how different communities have constructed different histories of the Revolution. These sections helped me, as a student of military history, to learn to look beyond the pure battlefield matters and examine the impact of war on society as a whole, because war is nothing if not a social phenomenon.