Depends if it’s a true Scotsman.
See, that’s where you lose me. If retreats that are authorized because of military necessity don’t count as authorized retreats, then what does count as an authorized retreat? Armies aren’t in the habit of retreating without good cause, after all.
You’re going to be disappointed if you expect his arguments to have logical coherence. Using the most generous interpretation of events for his position, the South and Southwest Fronts were already retreating when Stavka order them to continue retreating to form a new defensive line on the Don River. This (Stavka ordering a retreat) is something he’s said never happened. Clearly he is wrong. Rather than simply admitting such, he has to somehow make this not to have occurred, thus redefining the meaning of Stavka ordering a retreat to not include Stavka ordering a retreat. Rather than shape his views to conform to reality, reality must shape to fit his views.
Here is my original definition from reply #140:
Consider then the following scenario:
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The Germans attack at dawn. Numerous Soviet units break and retreat, and many dissolve in rout. Assume that retreat is fully underway at, say, 1200.
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Assume that at, say, 1800 Stavka belatedly accepts there is no possibility of stemming the unauthorized retreat, and that the front line will have to be reestablished later at some unknown place and time. Stavka therefore yields to military necessity and gives permission after the fact for a retreat already in progress. At this point Stavka’s orders have fallen outside my definition of an “authorized retreat.” Another way of putting it would be to say that retroactive authorizations do not count.
Obviously the Battle of Stalingrad,
I mean the whole battle was not even necessary, their where already German units heading to the Caucasus to secure the Oil fields and Grain supply. Hitler would have been better off to just go around like his generals had said.
Also, in regards to industrialization, Hitler refused to let the military needs disrupt the civilian economy until 1943, and Germany actually hit peak production in '44.
Which is, of course, a nonsensical definition of ordering a retreat. By this definition the French Army never retreated before the Germans in 1940, French attempts to fall back to the Weygand Line weren’t ‘authorized retreats’ as they only occurred after the Germans had already begun forcing them to retreat. This, of course, is nonsense. As Human Action notes, armies aren’t in the habit of ordering retreats for absolutely no reason, which is what you want an ‘authorized retreat’ to mean - an order to retreat given for no reason, not because the line is collapsing. If Stavka had given no order to South and Southwest Fronts to retreat but told them to remain fixed in place despite elements of the line having collapsed sending those forces into retreat, the rest of the Fronts should have been encircled and destroyed.
This all of course ignores the fact that even if Stavka was responding to a two Front wide retreat, they gave them orders to continue the retreat to the Don River and to form a new defensive line there. It wasn’t a ‘retrograde authorization to retreat’ in anyone’s mind but your own. What possible reason would there be for Stavka, or any high command for that case, to tell an army that the retreat they were conducting was authorized? They order them where to retreat to. In the best case situation for you here, that was to the Don River, which they were still 40 miles from. In the case of France in 1940, it was to the Weygand Line. The fact that the Soviet and French armies may already have been in retreat does not mean they were given orders to retreat to and form up new defensive lines.
The ‘surrounded forces’ exception you give- “Surrounded units would not be required to obtain permission” is equally ludicrous. This was the problem for the Soviets in 1941 in the encirclement battles, and for 6th Army at Stalingrad. They were ordered not to retreat regardless of the circumstances, the result of which they were encircled and destroyed in detail.
I note you fail to acknowledge your gaffe in bolding and emphasizing Halder making note of a deliberate retreat by Soviet forces in front of 9th Army while using it to buttress your contention that the Soviets never made retreats in 1941, completely undermining and demolishing contention. It’s equally absurd for you to continue to stick by your claim that Stavka never ordered a retreat in the face of clear facts and to try to redefine Stavka ordering a retreat to not include Stavka ordering a retreat, much as your attempts to hand wave away Odessa as ‘not counting’ despite Soviet forces deliberately breaking contact with the Rumanians and later being evacuated by sea to Sevostopol. Again, your ‘they were surrounded’ exception is useless. Prior to the complete evacuation, you have a documented retreat while not under pressure to improve their position. Regarding the evacuation, by your definition if 6th Army at Stalingrad had been ordered to attempt to break out and retreat by meeting up with Manstein’s attempted relief force, it would not actually have retreated, nor would orders from Hitler ordering their retreat count as orders by Hitler ordering their retreat since they were surrounded. The reason they were surrounded in the first place was Hitler denied them permission to retreat, and then denied them permission to attempt to break out and link up with Manstein. It’s an absurdity to claim that this wouldn’t have been a retreat. For another example from 1940 France, by your definition, the British didn’t retreat from Dunkirk, since 1) they were surrounded 2) they were evacuated by sea, and 3) the order for Operation Dynamo was given in response to the reality that the British and French armies had routed and were already in retreat when the order to evacuated them from Dunkirk was given.
I realize that this thread has taken a turn off the road. So, what do the military experts here think of the decision (by the German generals) to continue the Kursk offensive (after the first week)? The Soviet defense were unbreakable, and the fact that the Soviet commanders anticipated the German’s every move, must have convinced the Germans that it wasn’t working.The sheer scale of the destruction (of German materiel) was also a bad bargain-was it really worth it?
It was definitely not worth it; it cost them the mobile reserve with which they might have mitigated the scale of their following defeats. The Soviet offensives continued pretty much without pause until the end of the war. They kept going after Kursk all the way to force crossings of the Dnieper on the run and liberate Kiev. Even when one sector of the front had run out of steam, operations on another sector of the front were either already happening or about to start. A more profitable offensive option for the Germans might have been to conduct one of the more limited options of Operations Habicht or Operation Panther instead. Map of the proposed operations here on page 125, link is not directly to a pdf. colonial will no doubt not like it as it is from Earl F. Ziemke again. You know, that guy who wrote for the Army Historical Series. As in the Army Historical Series of the United States Army Center of Military History.
One thing notable is that Manstein was certain that he could still win at Kursk and protested Hitler calling it off, a position he maintained after the war. While Manstein was without doubt an extraordinarily talented officer, he was off his rocker on this one. His memoirs, Lost Victories, while definitely a good read, is very much of the blame Hitler variety: everything that went wrong with the war was Hitler’s fault and none of it Manstein or other generals.
Concur. While a key point of German General Staff doctrine was “always pinch off a salient,” not a bad idea usually, a more fundamental doctrinal point is “never attack the enemy where he wants you to” (Sun Tzu, et al) and the Soviets had turned Kursk into a gigantic anvil against which the Germans would batter themselves senseless. As a generalization, every instinct a commander has should be screaming not to attack such a well-prepared position.
Irrelevant note : it saddened me to read the late David Simmons’ posts at the beginning of this thread 