Please explain bypassing enemy positions

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
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.
[/QUOTE]

Yes, but this relies on your opponent being basically paralized while you are penetrating his front and then ravaging around behind him to encircle.

Such paralysis is usually a symptom of panic and demoralization. If your enemy has a good idea of what you are up to, and the enemy troops are well prepared and do not panic, they can “pinch off” your advancing spearheads with local counter-attacks before you have a chance to force them into surrender through lack of supplies. After all, in order to encircle them, you must travel a considerably greater distance across enemy territory than your enemy needs to pinch off your attacks.

At the beginning of WW2 in France, the Germans had great success in inducing panic and demoralization in their opponents due to use of new tactics - massed tanks supported by tactical bombing and the like, and fighting enemies who expected WW2 to resemble WW1. When the tanks appeared, panic and demoralization set in, and by the time the allies undestood what was up and attempted counter-attacks they were too weak and too late.

22

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
:dubious:

Sherman was not flanked by anyone, least of all Lee, who was in a totally different thater of war 600 miles away.

[/QUOTE]

You are obviously much more correct than I was! :smiley:

We’re actually just covering this in class right now, and our instructor described what Hood was doing as a flank to get behind Sherman. I don’t know if that is correct, but the end result was the same… Sherman gives up supply lines, and runs amok at will in the south.

Going to spend the rest of the night studying maps and such with your post in another window. Hehehehe…

As for Blitzkrieg, the success of it lies in the fact that nobody had really figured out how to make defenses for it. Using armor as a spearhead was known, but nobody really figured out how much faster and harder they could hit by the time the germans were stomping around. (speculation on my part, with some reading)

The idea for a Blitz, as near as I can understand it, is to shatter the enemies morale, cut off his supply lines and if possible, his command structure. The key, of course, is speed.

If you can do it fast enough, the enemy collapses, and you can mop up any resistance at your leisure. But if your attack stalls, or is stopped, you are miles behind enemy lines, with the fuel and ammo you’ve got and that’s it. This, as any tactician can tell you, is bad.

23

Hood did try to flank Sherman - that’s what armies did at the time. Head-on assaults rarely worked out. Hood just never managed it. It’s always nice to hear people learning about the Civil War. :slight_smile:

24

True, but what I described is real and happened in many battles. Sometimes the attacking force is able to consolidate its forces quickly and cut off the defender. Sometimes the defender is able to react quickly and counter-attack. That’s the kind of thing that decides who wins the battle.

25

[QUOTE=Malthus]
Yes, but this relies on your opponent being basically paralized while you are penetrating his front and then ravaging around behind him to encircle.

Such paralysis is usually a symptom of panic and demoralization. If your enemy has a good idea of what you are up to, and the enemy troops are well prepared and do not panic, they can “pinch off” your advancing spearheads with local counter-attacks before you have a chance to force them into surrender through lack of supplies. After all, in order to encircle them, you must travel a considerably greater distance across enemy territory than your enemy needs to pinch off your attacks.
[/QUOTE]

I believe, too, that a lof of it is still going to go back to logistics. Much of the answer to the question of whether it’s safe to bypass a stronghold, without engaging it, is going to depend upon the degree of supplies that are stockpiled in that stronghold. Some things can be mitigated by foraging, but military supplies, esp. fuel and ammo, are going to be difficult, to impossible, to forage.

From the standpoint of military efficiency, there are a number of good arguments for keeping large supply dumps within every stronghold that one has garrisoned. From the standpoint of economic efficiency (and for these purposes military logistics as a whole is an economic activity - trying to match supplies as closely as possible between supply on one hand and need on the other) it makes much more sense to have a central supply depot that can issue supplies to each of several strongholds. This can reduce the redundancies that would be inherent to stockpiling each individual stronghold sufficiently to support sorties from its own internal resources.

Since any given nation or force can only produce a finite number of supplies, be they bullets, food or fuel, there is always going to be a pressure to make the most efficient use of the available supplies possible - which will tend towards the supply dump model that I’ve mentioned above. But, keeping more supplies pushed forward where they’re available for opportunistic uses has definite military advantages - if the stronghold is bypassed, but not fallen. The problem is that to supply all of a given front’s strongholds to that level would require vastly more resources than the supply dump model I’ve mentioned.

For that matter, supply dumps become serious tactical targets in their own right, simply because by eliminating them, the strongholds and the units in the field that depend upon them for their materiel needs can then be left to wither on the vine.

26

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
True, but what I described is real and happened in many battles. Sometimes the attacking force is able to consolidate its forces quickly and cut off the defender. Sometimes the defender is able to react quickly and counter-attack. That’s the kind of thing that decides who wins the battle.
[/QUOTE]

Oh, I agree totally. The question is why it has happened. There are two explainations for debate:

  1. Because the attacker is able to deny the defender re-supply; and

  2. Confusion and demoralization caused by the penetration of the attacker behind the defender’s lines.

There is also of course the effect of stupidity and bad generalship (or genius and good generalship).

My point is that the first is not in itself an adequate explaination without more, since, all things being equal, the attacker must expose its own supply lines in order to attack.

However, military matters are not decided by perfectly calm people having total knowledge of the facts; on the contrary, they are decided by people under supreme stress and based on limited information. If the generals and troops are caught by surprise, the knowledge that enemy tanks have appeared behind you (or worse, have overrun your field headquarters) can easily induce either a panic stampede to the rear or, almost equally disasterously, simply staying put and doing nothing but defend yourself until the situation has “clarified”. Either reaction - panic or indecision - gives the attacker the advantage it needs to consolidate its encirclement of the defender’s positions.

The correct reaction for the defender is, in most cases, to counter-attack the flanks of the attacker and cut its troops off, encircling them in turn.

27

[QUOTE=Sailboat]
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
[/QUOTE]

The idea of Blitzkrieg was to step up the tempo of modern warfare with coordinated attacks of air, armor, artillery and mechanized infantry. Remember that at the time, the European method of conducting warfare was a combination of artillery, slow moving infantry and fixed defensive positions left over from WWI. While tanks and air had been used, the tactics hadn’t really been perfected yet.

When Germany unleashed it’s Blitzkrieg, the other European powers could not react fast enough to the new style of combat. They were working with timetables of days and weeks appropriate to slow moving infantry formations while the Germans were working on hours and days.

In a fast moving combat environment, such as a Blitzkrieg or modern joint-combat operations, you may want to isolate and bypass enemy positions so as not to get delayed or waste resources on a fortified position. Depends though. For example, while you would want to bypass a Maginot Line and attack from it’s flank or rear, you don’t want to bypass a fortifed fire support base so that it can rain artillery down on your positions or leave an intact division of enemy armor in your rear area.

The danger, of course, is that you can end up with both armies broken up into small pockets interspursed with each other, with no one really knowing what is going on.

28

You seem to feel that an breakthrough and encirclement is some kind of near-impossible plan that could only succeed due to rare luck. But it’s a common operation that worked more often than not.

The attacker’s main advantage is that he knows where he’s planning on attacking - he can gather extra resources and focus them at the point of his choosing. The attacker’s disadvantage is that he has to expose his forces by moving them and approaching an enemy force. The defender’s advantage is that he can remain concealed and under cover while the attacker approaches him.

But the key of an encirclement is that the attacker is not seeking a direct confrontation. Ideally, he will surround and cut off the defending force without directly contacting it. If the defenders uses his seeming best advanatge and simply holds his position, he will lose the battle. To win he has to counter-attack.

And by doing so, the defender loses his defensive advantage and becomes vulnerable to all of the above-mentioned disadvantages of the attacker - now he’s the one who’s vulnerable as he moves and fights. And he doesn’t gain the attacker’s advantage - he was forced into an attack which he hadn’t planning on one and had not prepared his forces for. The battle becomes a contest between two attackers - one of them prepared and one of them not.

The confusion and demoralization that the defending force often experiences in an encirclement is not some fluke. It’s usually experienced by a force that objectively realizes that the other side has the advantage and is probably going to win. Soldiers generally didn’t lose the battle because they got demoralized; they got demoralized when they realized they we’re going to lose the battle.

29

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
You seem to feel that an breakthrough and encirclement is some kind of near-impossible plan that could only succeed due to rare luck. But it’s a common operation that worked more often than not.
[/quote]

Why would you say that? That wasn’t my intent at all.

You seem to think I’m assuming confusion and demoralization are rare events. I was at pains to point out that they are inherent dangers, indeed part of the attacker’s plan. If the attacker does not sow confusion and demoralization among the defenders, it is in serious trouble.

That is exactly what I said, isn’t it?

I never said it was a “fluke”. I said it was the whole point of the blitzkrieg style, a totally deliberate and planned-for purpose of that type of attack.

Once again, my sole point was to point out that an essentially economic analysis - that is, cutting off of the defenders from supplies - is insufficient to explain the success of the attacking strategy; that one must take into account the effects of confusion and demoralization.

You appear to agree.

30

[QUOTE=Malthus]

Once again, my sole point was to point out that an essentially economic analysis - that is, cutting off of the defenders from supplies - is insufficient to explain the success of the attacking strategy; that one must take into account the effects of confusion and demoralization.

[/QUOTE]

Nitpick, but it would be logistics, not economics.

31

My apologies for what’s probably going to be a long post. But I’m trying to clarify both my understanding of what Malthus posted and my response.

If I understood Malthus correctly he is comparing two possible reasons why an encirclement might succeed; a logistic defeat (“the attacker is able to deny the defender re-supply”) vs a psychological defeat (“confusion and demoralization caused by the penetration of the attacker behind the defender’s lines”).

He argued that a defeat for logistic reasons is unreliable because both sides face the same logistic problems and are equally vulnerable. He therefore concludes that most defeats must be due to the psychological causes - the shock of experiencing an unexpected attack from an unexpected direction.

Malthus, do I understand your views correctly?

My previous post was my response to this. In contrast to Malthus, I feel that logistic causes are often the reason for a defeat. Psychological defeat, while it may often occur, is usually an after-effect of a logistic defeat that already happened.

The reason I believe differently is because I do not believe that both the attacker and the defender face an equal vulnerability to a logistic defeat. As I stated in my previous post, the original attacker has the advantage because he is conducting a prepared attack while the original defender is conducting an impromptu counter-attack. Therefore while in theory both sides have vulnerable supply lines, in reality it will be the defender’s supply lines that most often get cut off. This means that it is possible for an attacker to launch an encirclement with a reasonable expectation that he can cut off his opponent’s supply and inflict a logistic defeat on him.

Hopefully, while we still may not agree we now at least will understand where our viewpoints differ.

32

Armchair tactician/Cavalry vet. chiming in here.

With the advent of the mechanized advance, “follow on” forces are expected to handle isolated pockets of resistance, in order to allow the lead element to maintain the pace of their advance. “Shock & Awe.”

This obviated complicated passage-of-lines maneuvers in which friendly units, keyed up for a fight (or from a fight), may accidentally fire upon one another as they pass through one another’s areas.

An “isolated pocket of resistance” could mean anything from a platoon to a regiment; depending upon estimated force composition and supply situation, as well as disposition, the lead elements may “hold” (hasty defense) long enough to insure that follow-on units are in position and capable of handling the situation before moving out to re-engage the enemy (movement-to-contact, hasty attack, prepared attack, hasty defense, movement-to-contact, rinse, repeat…).

Passage-of-lines are often quite necessary in combined arms operation, though. Armored Cav was quite good at them; being on the “tip of the spear,” we were usually confident that,

  1. There weren’t no other “friendly” non-Cav units about;
  2. We could tell the difference between friend-or-foe much better than the REMF Wind-Up Dirt Monkeys or Dumb Ass Tankers (yes, I was a “tanker,” but I was never Armor!).

If the Wind Dummies were anywhere in the area, all bets were off. Those assholes thought anything heavier than a bicycle was “tank,” and therefore “enemy,” and reacted violently.