Document created: 22 January 01
Air University Review, November-December 1983

Fighting the Russians: An Ultimate Test?

Total wars, as waged by industrial nations in the preatomic era, have tended to become wars of attrition, at least at some times in some theaters. The wearing-down process that took place during World War I on the Western Front occurred in Russia a quarter-century later. Yet the conflict that tore the heart out of Hitler’s war machine, which set the stage for British and American victories from El Alamein to D-day, until recently was relatively unknown to English-language readers. Language barriers combined with the destruction of German records and the reticence of the Russians to create an impression of prehistoric beasts grappling in a nightmare landscape composed of equal parts of snow, dust, and mud. The very scale of the fighting seemed to beggar description on any but the most general terms.

In this context, the memories of German generals with a literary bent acquired disproportionate importance. Autobiography has been aptly described as the life story of a hero by one who knows. The Wehrmacht’s commanders had to perform the dual task of explaining a lost war while justifying their service in the ranks of a hideous dictatorship. By and large the result was a tendency to devote several hundred pages to the glory days of Operation Barbarossa, then plug in a chapter deploring Hitler’s interference with one’s military genius, and finally skip lightly over the three years that brought the Russians from the Volga to the Elbe.¹ Yet despite their shortcomings, these works remain a major source of operational information on the Russo-German War.

First published in English in 1958, Erich von Manstein’s Lost Victories has contributed much to its author’s controversial image.* Some accounts make a virtual cult figure of him: the archetypal decent German who obeyed Hitler grudgingly the better to serve the men under him; the brilliant staff officer who designed Germany’s plan of campaign against France in 1940; the master of offensive operations whose genius almost rescued the 6th Army from Stalin-grad; the man who held Germany’s front together in southern Russia for more than a year against hopeless odds. On the other side of the coin are descriptions of a Manstein whose military gifts were not matched by a corresponding force of character. This Manstein sanctioned and endorsed atrocities against Russia’s Jews that earned him a sentence as a war criminal. This Manstein, early aware of the military conspiracies against Hitler, temporized for the sake of his own career and even after Stalingrad continued to walk the trimmer’s path. This Manstein developed such inflated ideas of his own capacities that as late as 1944 he believed Germany could win the war if he were only made commander in chief.²

*Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories, reprint edition, edited and translated by A. G. Powell, foreword by B. H. Liddell Hart, introduction by Martin Blumenson (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1982, $18.95), 574 pages.

A rereading of this unaltered reprint of the memoir’s original English version suggests that Manstein's professional achievements matched his character almost exactly. It is impossible to question his operative gifts. No high commander in World War II fulfilled a broader spectrum of responsibilities so brilliantly. The staff planner of Poland and France became the dynamic leader of a Panzer corps in the first stages of Operation Barbarossa. Transferred from Leningrad to the Crimea, Manstein assumed command of an army undertaking one of the war’s most complex sieges. His conquest of the peninsula after ten months of brutal head on fighting demonstrated that he could be patient as well as dashing, that he could use artillery as well as tanks. As commanding general of Army Group Don, later Army Group South, he played the Russians as a matador plays the bull, multiplying inadequate forces by his virtuosity in handling reserves, allowing local Russian breakthroughs to overextend themselves, then checking them by well-timed counterattacks.

Manstein was an optimist. Even after Stalin-grad he argued that a draw was still possible on the Eastern Front. In particular, the demonstrated weakness of the Russian high command justified a policy of taking big risks for big gains. Indeed, much of Manstein’s growing hostility to Hitler reflected his disgust with the Nazi leader’s lack of strategic sense. Manstein asserted that even Kursk was too limited in its conceptualization and its objectives to be worth the risk. His repeated insistence that only an elastic defense could maintain German’s position in Russia eventually cost him his command.

One of Manstein’s sharper critics says that he achieved "little" except for planning the French campaign, overrunning the Crimea, and containing the Russian offensive in the spring of l943.³ It seems reasonable to respond that any one of these feats would be quite enough for most soldierly careers. Combined, they ensure Manstein’s place among World War II’s great captains. Yet at the same time Hitler’s repeated criticisms of Manstein’s tunnel vision cannot be dismissed out of hand. Manstein was an able technician but not a commander whose genius transcended the military limits imposed by geography and diplomacy. Ultimately he accepted these; he did not challenge them.

In this context Manstein’s repeated descriptions of himself as a man willing to push Hitler to the limit and to disobey him when necessary are not mere window-dressing. But his arguments that he was to busy fighting a war to perceive Hitler’s true nature, and that in any case a general no more has the luxury of resigning than does a private, are less convincing. The essential difference in this respect between the general and the common soldier is that the former is tested morally rather than physically. When a senior officer’s personal integrity or professional judgment are unacceptably challenged, it is at least arguably his duty to refuse compliance whatever the consequences. Whatever his motivations, Manstein remained a step below the highest levels of his craft morally as well as technically. Is it too extreme to suggest that his limitations in one area reinforced as well as reflected his shortcomings in the other? And in that context, is it inappropriate to note that resignation was not an acceptable option for the U.S. Army’s generals in Vietnam despite their relatively high level of substantive dissent from administration policies?⁴

The most favorable description of Great Battles on the Eastern Front is that it is an extended working paper.* Trevor Dupuy’s Historical Evaluation and Research Organization has developed a complex and controversial method of applying statistical analysis to military history. Using mathematical formulae, Dupuy claims the ability to determine the outcome of battles future as well as battles past. Thus far the approach has been primarily illustrated with examples from Northwest Europe and the Italian front.⁵ Its application to the Russo-German War seems only a matter of time. As an apparent first step, Dupuy and his current associate Paul Martell offer a book consisting largely of statistical tables and orders of battle based on Soviet sources.

* T. N. Dupuy and Paul Martell, Great Battles on the Eastern Front: The Soviet-German War, 1941-1945 (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1982, $14.95), 249 pages.

Much of the material is intrinsically worthwhile. Buffs as well as scholars have had cause to bemoan the scarcity of such information on the Red Army. The exact operational deployment of individual fronts (the Soviet equivalent of a Western army group) at Kursk, or during the Battle for Berlin, can be useful knowledge. Comprehensive data on the tactical density of Soviet artillery and armor in key engagements are also welcome, though I would wish to learn whether the infantry’s 82-mm mortars are systematically included in the figures listed under "guns and mortars." Interesting, too, is the material on the organization of the 2nd Air Army in July 1944—among the few detailed breakdowns of the Russian tactical air arm at its cutting edge.

Unfortunately, however, the data are presented in what amounts to a raw state. The lists and tables are too often meaningless in the absence even of general information on comparative organizations and doctrines—the sort of thing that war-gamer James Dunnigan did effectively in War in the East.⁶ What is the use of knowing how many rifle divisions were in the first echelon of the 2nd Byelorussian Front at the start of the battle for Berlin if one remains ignorant of what a rifle division was or should have been? The number of tanks supporting the Steppe Front on 10 August 1943, as compared to 10 July 1943, means relatively little without an accompanying sense of how they were organized and what their formations were supposed to do. Dupuy and Martell appear to have adopted a variant of the common Soviet belief that statistics convey meaning in themselves.

The problem is made worse by the nature of the text. It amounts to little more than a series of battle histories, based heavily on Russian sources and incorporating neither analysis nor commentary. The authors make no significant effort to show how the statistical evidence they have so painfully compiled influenced the course of operations. Even more surprisingly, Dupuy and Martell begin their work by an eloquent description of the German performance against such odds as one of history’s greatest feats of arms. Then they refuse to tell their readers anything significant about how the Germans did it. What factors—perhaps nonquantifiable factors—enabled the Mansteins, the Models, and the men they led to hold off the Russian masses?

In Fighting the Russians in Winter: Three Case Studies, Allen Chew is less pretentious and more useful than Great Battles on the Eastern Front.* Number 5 in the excellent series of Leavenworth Papers, this work juxtaposes a series of company-scale actions fought outside Arkhangelsk in 1919 by British and American troops, the 1940 destruction of a Russian rifle division by a Finnish task force, and the winter campaign of 1941-42. Whether he is discussing platoons or armies, Chew’s conclusions are the same. Equipment, acclimatization, and training are the keys to winter warfare. Technical or numerical superiority can be irrelevant, or indeed a positive handicap, as the Russians 44th Division learned in 1940. Northern winters confer a disproportionate superiority on the defense and significantly extend the time required to perform even simple tasks, whether on personal or formation levels.

* Allen F. Chew, Fighting the Russians in Winter: Three Case Studies, Leavenworth Papers, No. 5 (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Combat Studies Institute, 1981), 51 pages.

Chew accurately criticizes the failure of Germans and Russians alike to draw conclusions from the experiences of 1918-19. Planners in both armies simply ignored the implications of winter conditions or expected that morale and general professional competence would enable their soldiers to cope. The school of experience charges notoriously high tuition. But as Chew demonstrates, the Russian army by 1941 had at least begun making institutional adjustments to its own climate. Had he chosen to enlarge his work, he could have shown that the Germans quickly learned their own lessons, developing increasing sophistication in winter combat as the war progressed.

Chew’s work invites more detailed consideration of the role of training, as opposed to heritage, in preparing men and units for winter warfare. The Finnish troops that destroyed the 44th Division, for example, included a large number of men with directly relevant skills: skiers, hunters, and lumberjacks. Fighting on their home ground, they reduced a motorized division of Ukrainians to a static target in a matter of days. It is not, however, usual to find a defending force so well adapted to its operational environment by virtue of the civilian occupations of its personnel. Are elite, specialist units necessary under arctic conditions, or can the requisite operational skills be acquired by any good battalion? In this context it is unfortunate that Chew’s third case study was a general discussion rather than a regimental-scale operational analysis like his first two. A treatment of the functions and limitations of air power under extreme winter conditions would also have been welcome.

Nevertheless, Fighting the Russians in Winter resembles the other books discussed in this review. All three incorporate warnings for an America whose geographical and political circumstances demand the ability to cope with a broad spectrum of enemies, climates, and terrain. Wars have a habit of being fought in unlikely and unpleasant places. They have a way of defying even the most sophisticated efforts of reducing them to quantifiable data. And above all they place demands on character as well as professionalism. No military system favoring the one-dimensional specialist, the man who executes but does not reflect, can ultimately expect to produce either great captains or competent commanders.

1. Gotthard Breit, Dast Staats-und Gesellschaftsbilder deutschen Generale beider Welkriege in Spiegel ihre Memoiren (Boppard, 1973) is a useful comparative survey of German military memoirs.

2. As introductions to the Manstein question, the essay in Nie AusserDienst. Zum achtzigsten Geburtstag von Generalfeldmarschall Erich von Manslein (Köln, 1967) are less sycophantic than might be expected. Andreas Hiligruber’s discussion of Manstein and his myth is particularly useful. Albert Seaton, "Von Manstein,’ in The War Lords edited by Michael Carver (London, 1976), pp. 231-43, is more critical.

3. Albert Seaton, The German Army, 1933-1945 (New York, 1982), p. 216.

4. This point is statistically established in Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1977).

5. Trevor N. Dupuy, Numbers, Prediction, and War (New York, 1979).

6. James Dunnigan et al., War in the East: The Russo-German Conflict, 1941-45 (New York, 1977).

Dennis E. Showalter (BA., St. John’s University; M.A., Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of History at Colorado College and editorial consultant to Archon Books. Dr. Showalter has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Military Affairs and is author of Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (1975) and Little Man, What Now? (1982). He is a previous contributor to the Review.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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