Quest for Decisive Victory, and
Blitzkrieg to
Desert Storm
by Robert Citino
Citino's two volumes on operational warfare provide a clear, relatively concise, examination of the attempts to win decisive victories on the battlefields of the 20th Century. In Quest for Decisive Victory, Citino starts by reviewing decisive operational warfare; that is, maneuvering and fighting in a way so as to inflict such an important blow so as to cause a complete collapse of the enemy. Citino points out that this has been the goal of armies for centuries. By winning a decisive victory, wars are short, casualties are limited, and the victor is able to dictate the terms of the peace. However, as the 20th Century dawned, modern armies were no longer able to score these decisive victories. Maneuver warfare, for a variety of reasons, had degenerated into stellungskrieg: positional warfare. Wars ended in stalemate, with both sides exhausted, or with one side scoring some minor victories at best. If victory was eventually scored (the Italians in Abyssinia, the Allies in World War I, or the Fascists in Spain), it took enormous amounts of time and resources, and the butcher's bill was unimaginably high.
Citino demonstrates that in the early 20th century, the main causes of stellungskrieg were problems with logistics and command. Both of these causes are rooted in the fact that armies in the early 1900s had become very large. They were so large in fact, that they could no longer live off the land. Instead, huge logistical trains had to keep up with advances. With larger and larger armies, it became impossible to resupply on the move. This meant that even if a breakthrough was achieved, there could be no pursuit because a pause was needed to resupply, and logistics would not be able to keep up anyway. The enemy was then free to fall back in relatively good order and re-establish his defensive lines. Citino uses the examples of the Boer War and Russo-Japanese War to demonstrate this; in the former, the British simply could not keep up with the lighter Afrikaners and in the latter, the Japanese could merely push the Russian lines back and any breakthrough or flanking move failed because the Japanese would outrun their supplies.
The other problem, command and control, was also a function of large forces. Here, Citino points to communication failures as the key issue. Generals could not command their huge armies effectively because communication (and thus, orders) could not keep up the pace with battlefield events. Citino notes that by the 20th Century, the days of the general directing an entire battle (and being able to see much or most of it) from horseback with a telescope were long-gone. Divisions were spread out over miles. Battles involved many times the number of men. New technology and weaponry meant that movement would be faster and a breakthrough could be achieved more quickly. Yet communications were still slow, and commanders were thus slow to react. In this sense, the defender had a great advantage. He was not required to maneuver as much. His troops would be falling back on him, not getting farther away. And the great communication advancement, the telegraph and telephone, was more readily available to troops in fixed position since advancing troops would have great difficulties in laying new lines. In effect, generals could not control their troops. In order to regain control over their men, leaders had to order halts to reorganize, re-establish communications with higher and lower levels of command, and issue new orders. Thus, with the two problems of logistics and communications, decisive maneuver was out of the question.
Decisive victory on the battlefield remained an operational goal, however, even though the Germans were the only ones to actually attain that goal by the start of World War II. Citino clearly points out that the German advances in operational warfare (that is, finally being able to score decisive victory) in the interwar period were firmly rooted in the traditions of Moltke the Elder. "Blitzkrieg" was simply not a revolution in military affairs. What the Germans did was find a way to effectively solve the problems of supply and communications by grafting new technology onto existing doctrine, as well as by realizing that leadership ability had to permeate the army: in times when communications were out, the "leader on the spot" had to be able to made decisions in order to keep the forces moving (the famed German "auftragstaktik"). By coordinating tanks, trucks, airplanes, and radio technology, the Germans built and trained an army designed expressly for winning decisive operational victories. Citino stresses the German innovation of the Panzer division (that is, a balanced combined arms force capable of rapid maneuver, and able to fight a variety of types of battles). Even though the vast majority of German divisions were not Panzer divisions, it is clear that it was these units that scored the operational victories. Quest for Decisive Victory does a good job in showing the operational difficulties that commanders faced, through the Boer War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Balkan wars, World War I, the Italian "adventures" in Africa, and the Spanish Civil War. Citino shows that it was not technology (i.e. the machinegun, or huge artillery pieces) that caused these positional or stalemated wars. It was, rather, the fact that nobody had yet figured out how to feed and command these huge forces. He also points out that World War I was not an aberration; the "slide" down towards a stalemated front, with trench warfare as a predominant theme had already started over a decade earlier. It was not that commanders did not try to maneuver. The battles in 1914 were ones of maneuver, and the Germans did actually win decisive victories on the eastern front. In the west, however, the war degenerated into stalemate, as had earlier wars in the young century.
Blitzkrieg to Desert Storm picks up where Citino's first book leaves off. After briefly recapping the early German operational successes, he begins to document Germany's decline, and the adjustments made by the Allies. He is critical of each country's approach. Of Germany, Citino notes that although operationally the Germans were spectacular, when their operational victories did not translate into the enemy's defeat (in the Soviet Union), they had no idea what to do. So they continued to string together operations with no strategic sense. Towards the end of the war, German military decision making was bankrupt, producing operational foolishness such as Kursk and the Mortain counter-attack. Of Great Britain, Citino correctly notes that due to misguided ideas of armored warfare (and persistent lack of doctrinal revision) they never developed an adequate doctrine to produce decisive operational victory. Citino argues that while the USSR eventually was able to defeat the German army in the field, it was with rather clumsy, costly, operations. Even in 1943 the Soviet Union had offensives that were decisively defeated by the Germans. By 1944, when they finally could apply a doctrine of "successive operations" they could only do so at high cost. Citino even remarks that we should not be so quick to be willing to learn from the Russians, since nobody would ever want to foot that butcher's bill. Here, I think Citino obfuscates. The Soviets had problems at the tactical level, and this is why their casualties remained high throughout the war. Operationally, however, the Soviets had devised a system that caused tremendous problems for the Germans. The operations were sound, but the Soviets lacked the tactical finesse to carry them out without huge numbers of casualties. A more tactically efficient force would have done even better with the same operational thinking, so I feel it still is of value to study. Citino praises the Americans for finally being able to apply decisive maneuver against the Germans. Indeed, the COBRA breakout is a thing of operational beauty, to a point (the failure to completely seal off the pocket is a huge disappointment). Citino even states that it represented the epitome of the "American way of war". I would be a bit more cautious, however, as other decisive American operations were few and far between. One might be able to point to Sicily, or the sweep up in southern France after Dragoon. The attempted encirclement of Aachen was slow, messy, and ultimately involved heavy street-fighting. Additionally, the Americans passed up some tantalizing opportunities for decisive victory: Anzio and the clearing of the Bulge in 1945 come to mind. Still, the Americans got a taste of decisive victory, and Citino correctly concludes that the taste was enough to focus the American army on operational warfare for the remainder of the century.
Citino then uses case studies from the second half of the 20th century to determine how well various militaries applied the "lessons learned" from the Second World War. The U.S. struggled in Korea, making enough good and bad decisions to create much of the back-and-forth that so defines that war. In the end, Chinese operational ineptness and some good counteroffensives re-established the border, even if a decisive war-ending victory never materialized. In Vietnam, Citino points out that the true operational spirit of the U.S. military was never abandoned. Reactions to the Tet offensive, for example, are good case studies in operational warfare, emphasizing decisive maneuver (and saw the introduction of the helicopter as a new source of that maneuver). India produced a decisive victory in West Pakistan, and the Israelis several against their Arab neighbors. Finally, the Gulf War demonstrated that the US had lost none of its ability to produce a crushing operational blow.
Citino argues that none of these victories were pre-ordained, and all of the successes were firmly rooted in the application of traditional operational maneuver. If one is looking for a study of operational warfare in the 20th century, his books are hard to beat. Both are highly recommended.
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