Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!ernie.Berkeley.EDU!tedrick
From: tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU (Tom Tedrick)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Soviet Access to Usenet (Blitzkrieg, etc.)
Message-ID: <27133@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 14 Dec 88 10:47:41 GMT
References: <5066@brspyr1.BRS.Com>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: tedrick@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Tom Tedrick)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <5066@brspyr1.BRS.Com> miket@brspyr1.BRS.Com 
(Mike Trout) writes:

[A pretty good article. A few comments follow. Quotes are
condensed.]

->>when all of those nasty countries like Poland (with it's 
->>horseback cavalry) and the such were threatening to take over 
->>the country!

->You have also completely misread the Germany/Poland military
->situation of 1939.  

Yeah. I was rereading "Lost Victories" (Field Marshall Erich von 
Manstein) today and he says things like:

(page 22) "It was not until summer 1939 that I learnt of the first
offensive deployment against Poland to be prepared on Hitler's orders.
No such thing had existed before the spring of 1939. On the contrary
all military preparations on our eastern frontier had been based on
defense."

(page 23) "We realized that Hitler was fanatically resolved to dispose
of the very last of the territorial problems Germany had inherited
through the treaty of Versailles. We knew that he had begun negotiations
with Poland as far back as autumn 1938 to clear up the whole 
Polish-German frontier question. At the same time we were aware of the
British guarantees to Poland. Not one of us in the army was so arrogant,
thoughtless or shortsighted as not to recognize the deadly seriousness
of the warning that guarantee implied."

(page 24) "But we recalled Hitler's assertion that he would never be
so mad as to unleash a war on two fronts, as the German leaders in
1914 had done. That at least implied that he was a man of reason, even
if he had no human feelings left. Raising that coarse voice of his,
he had explicitly assured his military advisers that he was not idiot
enough to bungle his way into a world war for the sake of Danzig or
the Polish corridor."

"Poland was bound to be a source of great bitterness to us after she
had used the dictated peace of Versailles to annex German territories
to which neither historical justice nor the right of self determination
gave her any claim. For us soldiers she had been a constant source of
distress in the years of Germany's weakness. Every time we looked at a
map we were reminded of our precarious situation. That irrational
demarcation of the frontier! That mutilation of our Fatherland! That
corridor whose severance of East Prussia from the Reich gave us every
reason to fear for that lovely province! For all that, however, the
army never dreamed of fighting an aggressive war against Poland to
end this state of affairs by force. Any attack on Poland would have
plunged the Reich into a war on two fronts, and with this it could
never have coped. In the period of weakness imposed on us at Versailles
we had always a nightmare that disturbed us all the more whenever we
thought of the aspirations for German territory still harbored with
such ill-concealed longing by wide circles of the Polish people. Poland
might take the initiative and set out to solve the frontier question
by force. Once certain nationalist circles had gained a decisive 
influence in Poland, an incursion into East Prussia or Upper Silesia
was just as feasible as the Polish raid on Vilna before it."

(page 25) "Whether we liked it or not, it was preferable to keep Poland
between ourselves and the Soviet Union. Aggrieved though we were as
soldiers by the senseless and explosive frontier demarcation in the
east, Poland was still less dangerous as a neighbor than the Soviet
Union. Like all other Germans, of course, we hoped a revision of the
frontier would come about sometime and return the predominantly
German-populated areas to the Reich in accordance with the natural
rights of their inhabitants."

->Poland was the FIRST nation to face Blitzkrieg tactics

You might argue that Blitzkrieg tactics first appeared in WW1, with
the Germans on the receiving end (which was partially responsible for
the Germans adopting such tactics in WW2: having faced them they 
realized more fully their potential).

(So the lessons of Blitzkrieg were available after WW1, for those
with eyes to see. True, there were few who understood until it was
too late. That kind of blindness seems to be something one can rely 
on repeating itself again and again :-)

For example, in "The Conduct of War 1789-1961" (Major-General J.F.C.
Fuller) we find (page 175)

"Tanks were first used on 15th September 1916, during the Battle of
the Somme. Few got into action, but those that did showed that used
in mass, instead of in driblets, the stalemate might be broken. This
is borne out by the German account which said 'that their men felt
powerless to withstand the tanks' - that is, felt themselves disarmed.
Unfortunately this was not appreciated by the British High Command,
with the result that, until the Battle of Cambrai, tanks continued
to be used in driblets."

"At Cambrai, the aim was to effect a surprise penetration of four lines
of entrenchments in twelve hours without any kind of preliminary
artillery preparation. Nine battalions of tanks, in all 378 fighting
machines, were to lead two infantry corps over the Hindenburg 
(Siegfried) line, the most formidable entrenched system on the
Western Front. The assault was launched at 6:20 a.m. on 20th
November 1917. The enemy broke back in panic, and by 4 p.m. a
penetration of 10,000 yards had been effected. Eight thousand
prisoners and one hundred guns were captured. There could no
longer be any doubt that the reintroduction of armour on the
battlefield could solve the stalemate, and the decisive battle
of Amiens, fought on 8th August 1918, proved this conclusively."

"In it 462 fighting tanks, in cooperation with aircraft, led three
corps of the British Fourth Army into battle. Again surprise was
complete, panic rampant, and the German front was penetrated."

" 'As the sun set on 8th August on the battlefield', writes the
author of the German official monograph on the battle, 'the
greatest defeat which the German Army suffered since the
beginning of the war was an accomplished fact.' It was the
terror the tanks installed, more so than their killing power,
which led him to entitle his monograph 'Die Katastrophe des 8
August 1918.' Ludendorff made no mistake over the situation
the tank created. 'Everything I had feared, and of which I had
so often given warning, had here, in one place, become a reality.
The 8th of August put the decline of our fighting power beyond
all doubt. The war must be ended.' "

Here are some interesting comments by Soviet Marshall Tukhachevski,
a month before he was liquidated by Stalin, showing that the Russians
had yet to understand Blitzkrieg.

(page 246) "In May 1937, a month before he was liquidated in Stalin's
enormous purge of 1937-1938, which gutted the Russian army, Marshall
Tukhachevski wrote in the Bol'shevik: 'The swift growth of our
aviation, tanks and mechanized formations at first provoked some
of the theoretical twist of the Fuller type. This was manifested as
a new manoeuver theory which considered that the great speed of the
tank did not permit of its use in combined operations with infantry.
From this grew an attempt to claim the complete independence of tank
formations, and non-understanding that tanks cannot successfully act
without mighty artillery support. Western military thinkers, like
Fuller and Liddell Hart, desire to limit the size of armies,
supplementing man-power by a highly developed technical equipment.
Their desire is merely a rationalization of the bourgeois fear
of masses."

Fuller speaks again: "Such Marxian silliness was to cost the Russians
dear. In 1941, their tactics remained what they had always been, slow
forward and backward movements of masses of unthinking men: an inviting
target for the German armoured tigers."

I could go on indefinitely, but if you want more example of Blitzkrieg
operations in WW1, the final campaign in Palestine in September 1918
is interesting (see "The Real War 1914-1918", by Liddell Hart, pages
439-448, entitled "Annihilation Of The Turkish Armies", for example.
Published in 1930, this book is practically a complete course in the
theory of Blitzkrieg.)