I gather that once upon a time leaving an intact enemy force in your rear was considered the height of folly. But this conventional wisdom was overturned in WW2, when it was discovered that you didn’t have to root out every last enemy stronghold before advancing. Can someone explain how this turnabout in military strategy was developed?
In any situation, resources are finite. The PTO was enormous. ‘Island hopping’ allowed the Allies to attack islands of strategic importance, while letting the non-strategic enemy positions to ‘wither on the vine’. This allowed the Allies to make strategic gains with the resources they had. A bunch of enemy sequestered on an island with no means of attacking (and whose supplies have been cut off by blockade) is not a threat.
What about Maginot? I’d guess this one was also about leaving enemy positions cut off from supplies, but I don’t know the history intimately. Reading the Wiki, it looks like the attackers first bypassed the defenses, then later concentrated an attack on specific points in the line, breaking through in a more classic way, so perhaps this isn’t a great example.
When the Persians marched through the hidden pass through Thermopylae that Ephialtes told Xerxes about they met about 1,000 Phocians who had volunteered to defend it. The Phocians took the high ground expecting to fight but the Persians just marched right on by without stopping to fight. Once the Persians walked past the Phocians it was pretty much all over even if they did have an armed group of Greeks at their back.
Marc
I was aware of the island hopping example, but that’s a special case because unless the Allies needed an island for themselves, that island’s Japanese garrison was irrelevent to a naval campaign. I was thinking of land wars.
(MOD: If this properly belongs in GQ, feel free to move)
During the 100 years war the invading English armies ended up ignoring most fortified towns. Really, ignoring fortified areas has been a part of warfare forever.
I would argue the increased importance of logistics has lead to the increasing viability of this tactic. Prior to the the mechanisation of warfare, a company that was cut off from it’s supply lines was greatly diminished in strength but still dangerous. People could live off the land, terrorise civilian populations into supplying them and do rudimentary repairs to their equipment.
Since gunpowder and tanks, a company that was cut off from fuel and bullets was now so ineffective they could be treated essentially as a civilian militia.
I don’t even think that Gunpowder has much to do with it, as Sherman gave up his supply lines after being flanked by Lee, and lived off the land during his infamous March to the Sea (US Civil War, for those non-US dopers).
I feel that the ability to largely ignore pockets of the enemy has largely been mitigated by the development of Air Power.
Starting in WW2, units that were cut off could be resupplied by air via cargo drops. Further on, in Korea and then much greater in Vietnam and subsequent conflict have seen the use of helicopter supply lines which ignore most ground forces.
Note, this tactic requires control of the air. Failure to secure airlanes would be even more disasterous than failure to control sea lanes in the earlier eras of warfare.
In the event an aggressor does NOT control the air, you will see less ignoring of large pockets of enemy forces, particularly those enemy forces sitting on supply depots, from which they can launch attacks into the rear of the enemy.
I am not a military tactician…
…but I thought the ‘blitzkrieg’ idea was not to ignore enemy in your rear because you were much more disruptive in the enemies rear than they are in yours. It was hit the enemy hard and drive deep into their rear so as to have maximum ‘shock’. It was the shock effect that overcame the liability of bypassing the enemy.
The bypassed enemy stlll had to be cleared out…by the infantry/artillery following behind.
You don’t pay the MF costs for the obstacle, but you’re subject to TPBF with the FFMO and FFNAM modifiers from anyone inside the obstacle, and other First Fire using LOS traced to the hexside junction gets the same mods. On balance, a bad idea. As for AFVs, I’d have to look it up.
5 free Geek Points to the first person to get the reference
Advanced Squad Leader
But I cheeted and looked it up 
Historically, an army which bypassed entrenched opposition would find itself at large in hostile country, and then frustrated by the bypassed army via classic Fabian maneuvers. The invader would find himself harassed, and unable to do anything of real consequence. To lay siege to enemy civilian areas took weeks at best, years at worst. During this time an invader is vulnerable to harassment and skirmish, to deprivation and to having his lines cut by the enemy he turned his back upon. Even with a superior force, he cannot effectively siege and is reduced to plunder and savagery with no ability to complete the conquest. Remember that his goal was not to fight the war but to end it in his favor.
The change was a function of two factors: 1) an increase in mobility, namely widespread use of mechanical engines and air power, and 2) the diminishment of siege as a cornerstone of effective war.
The first factor permits the bypassing of an enemy stronghold; on the ground by speed and endurance, in the air by the same or merely by virtue of elevation. This greatly reduces the vulnerability to Fabius. But the real change is the second issue: an invader no longer needs months or years to siege an enemy civilian center. Put simply, the modern military moves fast and doesn’t stop. Classical Fabian strategy is largely ineffective because time is no longer on the defender’s side. The attacker will reach up the defending command structure and force capitulation before the defender can get on the rear.
In theory, anyway. In my opinion, there’s much talk but no change in basic principles: siege is still a necessary area of study and practice. Stalingrad showed the continued viability of hardening a “soft” target, and even a modern army can be halted, hammered and anvilled between a pursuing/encircling army and a determined defender. It should not happen often, but when it happens it likely means the loss of an entire army, which is no less devastating today than it was a thousand years ago.
:dubious:
Sherman was not flanked by anyone, least of all Lee, who was in a totally different thater of war 600 miles away.
Sherman was attacking Atlanta shortly before the 1864 presidential election. In order to keep on the move he first built up supplies at Chattanooga. He then kept on the move, repeatedly flanking Joe Johnston’s force. Johnston, in fact, made a brilliant defense, but Sherman was a master of flanking and manuever in this kind of warfare and had much more men and material, and by this time probably knew the area better than the Rebs themselves did! A COnfederate soldier paid this grudging tribute, " Sherman will never go to Hell. He’ll flank the devil and make heaven in spite of the guards."
Sherman forced Johnston all the way back to Atlanta, and Confedereate Pres. Davis removed Johnston from command (Davis hated Johnston). However, Davis then put John Bell Hood in charge, who was possibly the single worst independant commander in the Civil War. Hood had also been feeding Davis false and self-serving information about events to ingratiate himself.
Robert E. Lee once wrote that Hood was “All Lion, none of the Fox.” This proved to be most accurate as Hood dove into a souple of breathtakingly stupid assaults and severaly damage his force. However, Sherman didn’t feel like a seige. He Abandoned his supply lines (which confused Hood, who though the Yanks were leaving) and swung around the entire city to cut the last railroad. Atlanta would starve very quickly without it and the rebels fled the city.
Now, after this, Sherman soon began his march to the sea. There were three big reasons for it. First, he wanted to draw resources from the Confederacy. Second, by demonstrating that the Union soldiers could march as they pleased and do as they wanted, he could damage southern morale. Third, claiming that swath of territory would fatally injure the South’s transportation network.
He took his knowledge of Georgia tax rolls and marched his soldiers down, living off the land. This was very unpopular for obvious reasons, but the troops were not particularly destructive about it. And there was little opposition.
See, Hood had done what was either the most brilliant idea he’d ever had or the dumbest. When Sherman had marched south, he marched north. Unfortunately, he was still a moron and in a fierce but terribly one-sided battle at Nashville, virtually destroyed his command. At some point, he apparently started blaminghis soldiers for cowardice essentially for not blindly charging the enemy. He failed to consider that the greenest buck private in the Confederacy was just too smart to charge breastworks. Hood’s command was lost and took months to reform, and even then was a shattered husk of its former glory.
Sherman rached the sea and then thought about what to do next, and figured he’s just march up the coast and hit Lee in the rear. Of course, this meant that hed have to go through the worst terrain in the UNion for marching, a maze-like bog of crosscutting rivers. Joe Johnston was now in charge of another force tasked with stopping Sherman, and his engineers simply said that Sherman could not do it. It was impossible.
Fortunately, no one told Sherman that. And he did. While building bridges and roads, Sherman crossed the swamps and cut a path right through South Carolina! This was a rather painful episode for that state. His men were po’d at the first rebel state and, while not generally harming civilians, destroyed everything they could in a 5-mile wide front cross the state. Houses, farms, barns -everything. This was economic warfare and the point was the simply destroy any resources they could gather from it. And it worked. Of course, people tended to tell tall tales and an awful lot of poeple made pretty wild claims about the Yanks massacring people, but theres no evidence any such thing happened, outside of the occaisional wayward soldier (it was a very large army).
Eventually, Sherman captured two of S. Carolina’s biggest cities, Charleston and Columbia. Columbia was burned. Confederates blamed Sherman, but the actual blame lies in two areas. First, The Confederates (who stole everything they could beforehand) set fire to the city’s warehouses. Second, the city fathers made the incredibly stupid mistake of getting the first Union troops drunk off their backsides. The troops then set about having fun, which, as you may guess, was not helpful in the least (sarcasm). Sherman finally arrived with more men and set about stopping the blaze, but it did desrtoy most of Columbia’s historic beauty. I doubt Sherman lost any sleep over it, and neither do I.
Sherman started to move north again afterward, but Lee surrendered before he got there.
I think the idea of BlitzKrieg was more to punch a fast-moving formation through the enemy line and then run amok in their rear area, cutting supply and communication links, overwhelming units that were not yet deployed into combat formation, and destroying headquarters. Deployed line troops then either sat there facing a pinning attack with no orders, supplies or reinforcements until they collapsed, or had to try to detach from combat, turn round, and then mount an attack back into their own rear areas - probably while still being attacked over the original front line.
The real issue is not with leaving an intact enemy force in your rear - that’s no big deal. Leaving an intact enemy force capable of taking decisive action in your rear and within reach of something valuable to you, is a whole different kettle of fish. Generally speaking armies tend to have a whole lot of fairly fragile logistics trailing behind them in a relatively constrained amount of space, so mostly it’s a good idea to clear out any pockets of resistance. But sometimes your supply troops are powerful enough to look after themselves, or you can rely on having a lot of room and being able to do everything at cavalry speed while the enemy can only move at infantry speed. Or you may just have more important things to worry about - in the case of the Fall of France, the blitzkrieg could have been halted relatively easily if not for the fact that they just were right in the Allies face the whole time and never lost the initiative. Slowing down for mopping-up operations would have screwed them totally, so it was worth the (very considerable) risk.
John Keegan has argued that the main psychological trick of blitzkrieg is to put the mobile formation in danger and out of reach of one’s own supporting forces, who then endure extraordinary hardship attempting to “rescue” their own comrades in the exposed mobile force. Basically, the infantry guys will do a lot more to catch up to, and save, the tank guys once the tanks have disappeared into dangerous enemy territory. The same technique is used with paratroop drops.
Sailboat
Hey, spending time looking up a reference for a geek game certainly qualifies for geek points.
/hijack
Hmm. I’m not entirely sure I buy that argument in any shape fashion or form, since I doubt it was logistically possible to keep the infantry informed of exactly where the Panzers were, how much danger they were in, or how exactly the average grunt could do anything about it.
I agree with Shalmanese - the big change has been logistics. In my opinion, the turning point was when armed forces mechanized. An army like Napoleon’s or Sherman’s could at least keep moving without a line of supply. But as Patton once said his men could eat their belts but his tanks needed gas. If you cut a modern army off from its supply lines, it’s quickly paralyzed.
Not sure I agree with this - if logistics were so important, would that not militate against dashing into the enemy’s rear and ignoring their positions? After all, your logistical tail is now exposed to any counter-attack they might make, leaving you stranded without supplies far behind enemy lines.
To my mind, it makes more sense to be the demoralizing effect of having the tanks ravaging rear areas, causing the front to collapse. It is a matter of taking the initiative and running with it, and a good deal of the harm inflicted is self-inflicted - “blitzkrieg” tended to not work nearly as well later in the war.
Only if you’re unsuccessful in your attack. If you succeed in encircling the enemy and cutting off his line of supply then his forces are helpless and will be unable to attack and cut off your line of supply.