SOUTH of Chancellorsville, Virginia, predawn, 2 May 1862, at a planning meeting between General Robert E. Lee and General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson:
"What do you propose to do?" Lee asked.
"Go around here."
"What do you propose to make the movement with?"
"With my whole corps."
"And what will you leave me?"
"The divisions of McLaws and Anderson."
"Well, go on," Lee said.
Lee's "Well, go on" set off as grand a maneuver as has taken place in the history of the U.S. military. At a little after 0700 that same morning, Stonewall Jackson began moving his corps of almost 32,000 soldiers and over 100 artillery pieces twelve miles along the covered route of Furnace Road to Brock Road across the front of two Union corps. His movement would put his corps on both sides of the Old Orange Turnpike, facing east in a position of great advantage to attack into the now-exposed west flank of the Union XI Corps, who were facing generally south. Jackson's attack at a little after 1700 that afternoon caught the Union XI Corps completely by surprise and set off a chain of events that led four days later to Union general Joseph Hooker's quitting the field and moving his numerically superior army back north.
Normally, a tactical envelopment requires both a fixing force and an enveloping force. The fixing force holds the enemy in place while the other force maneuvers and envelops the enemy. In this case, Lee was left to fix Hooker with McLaws's and Anderson's divisions, while Jackson commanded the enveloping force.
In the history of warfare, the two warring sides have always tried to gain such positional advantage over each other. The reason is quite simple. Hit the other side from an unexpected direction with enough strength that he cannot recover, and you will soon own the initiative and then the battlefield.
Battle is chaos on a grand scale, with chance occurring continually. What you are trying to do as a commander is keep the enemy in this chaos, while operating with some sense of order and cohesion on your own side. You try to place your soldiers in an advantageous position where they can physically outfight the enemy. But in placing them in such an advantageous position, you are also outthinking the enemy commander--as Lee and Jackson outthought Hooker at Chancellorsville. You are trying to give the enemy more problems to solve in a given time than he and his organization can possibly handle. You are trying to run him out of options, and thus force him to fight you on your terms. Then you physically defeat or destroy him.
Combat is the application of physical force. Yet brute force applied directly against brute force is usually not the most effective application of physical force, and will soon wear down the attacker to the point where he cannot continue. Consequently, the aim of commanders is to maneuver and thereby gain positional advantage that puts the enemy into chaos and keeps him there by repeated blows until he quits or you own the area.
Thus, it is not only forms of mobility that make successful maneuver warfare. It is using whatever form of mobility is available to move forces to positions of advantage. From there you can then overwhelm the enemy with a series of repeated blows. Forms of mobility are important only as they move the attacker to those positions of advantage, and as they give the attacker relative advantage over the defender.
HISTORY
Evolution of Mounted Warfare
There have been many means of movement to these positions of advantage. Each of these has been adapted continually to remain useful, or else it has been discarded. For example, excellent training, discipline, and physical conditioning of soldiers on foot have given them a relative advantage over their battlefield enemies in many historical situations, and even today on some terrain.
Recent history is full of examples of the advantages gained in maneuver. In May 1940, German attacks into France across the Meuse River and on to the Atlantic coast allowed German armored forces to swiftly position themselves between major elements of the the Allied forces, forcing evacuation of British forces from Dunkirk and creating the opportunity to defeat the now-outnumbered French forces to the south. In 1941-42, Rommel's repeated flank attacks to the south of British Eighth Army defenses in the Western Desert led to the continued collapse of British positions almost up to Alexandria, Egypt. The maneuver of the Japanese fleet to a position north of Hawaii to attack Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 is another example. Yet the Japanese inability to follow up their initial success gave no staying power to the initial chaos caused by the attack. In September 1950, MacArthur's landing of U.S. X Corps at Inchon, Korea, put a major allied force well behind the North Korean forces and astride their logistics routes, and sped the destruction of that army in the field. Later, in the Vietnam War, refusal by our own government to permit land, sea, and air forces to maneuver to positions to cut off the flow of men and material from North Vietnam to South Vietnam lengthened that conflict and led ultimately to loss of South Vietnam by its physical occupation from the North. In October 1973, the Israeli crossing of the Suez to position a major force to operate well inside Egypt was a key factor in ending the brief but lethal war Israel fought with Egypt and Syria. Simultaneous air assault and airborne maneuvers by elements of XVIII Corps on the night of 20 December 1989 put them in positions to rapidly isolate and physically defeat Panamanian forces in less than forty-eight hours. These examples point to various forms of movement, foot-mobile infantry, tanks, ships, and aircraft, employed on land, sea, or air to gain positional advantage over the defender.
Forms of ground mobility have gone through several changes. The horse and the various formations of what we know as cavalry once gave skilled commanders a shock effect to the immediate battle, as horse-mounted soldiers swiftly attacked less mobile formations. These commanders soon found cavalry also useful for longer-range operations and missions, such as positioning in the enemy rear, then attacking his homeland. One notable example was Colonel B. H. Grierson's cavalry raid from La Grange, Tennessee, through Mississippi, to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 17 April to 2 May 1863, during the American Civil War. (This was the Grierson who went on to command the 10th Cavalry, Buffalo Soldiers, in campaigns in the Southwest following the Civil War.) With 1,700 troopers of 6th and 7th Illinois and 2nd Iowa Cavalry, Grierson's deep-attacking force, according to Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War, "in sixteen days traversed 800 miles of hostile territory, destroying railroad bridges, transportation, commissary stores, paroling a large number of prisoners, and destroying 3,000 stand of arms, at a cost of only twenty-seven men."
The arrival of rapid-firing rifles, machine guns, and more powerful, longer-range, accurate artillery soon called into question these horse-mobile formations in the increasingly deadly killing grounds of the close-combat battle. The idea of gaining a positional advantage, and the disruption it could bring to the coherence of an enemy formation, still had wide appeal, but the mobility to accomplish this was compromised, and then stopped, by the deadly fires of machine guns and artillery. Hence the stalemates of World War I. Not many battles of position. Just battles of brute force against brute force, hurling masses of men at each other in an attempt to break the firepower stranglehold of the other side. The cost in casualties, simply to gain and control even minor pieces of the enemy's real estate, became unacceptable. The result was the incredible human cost of World War I--8 million dead.
Military thinkers, especially in Britain, Germany, and Russia, looked for ways to restore maneuver to a battlefield that had evolved to gridlock.
What to do? The solution lay in developing mobile protected firepower, and then organizing these capabilities into formations that could operate with speed and combat efficiency on a battlefield dominated by defensive firepower. This became possible because of technology already available and in use during the early twentieth century, marking a convenient convergence of military war-fighting ideas and available technology.
Major technology available at the time included the internal-combustion engine, caterpillar-type tracked laying vehicles, wireless radios, and
the airplane. The internal-combustion engine led, of course, to a transition from horse-drawn or steam-driven mobility in the civilian sector to power provided by these new engines to a wheeled base for mobility. Heavier vehicles that had to travel over unimproved ground, such as farmland and construction sites, soon turned to machines known as caterpillar crawlers or tracked laying vehicles. Though earlier versions of these caterpillar vehicles had been steam driven, new possibilities arose with the internal-combustion engine. Around 1908, it was demonstrated that a heavy vehicle could be mounted on two oval "tracks." Connecting these tracks to the power output of the internal-combustion engine propelled the vehicle over the ground. The vehicle crawled like a caterpillar, or rather the tracks were laid out on the ground for the vehicle to ride over.
Enter the tank, an effective combination of protection for the crew, mobility to move relatively quickly about the battlefield, and sufficient firepower to destroy enemy machines like theirs.
Unfortunately, early tanks did not work as well as their developers intended. Significant technical problems plagued their early designs, especially during World War I. Not the least of these were difficulties with crew-machine interaction (what modern-day designers call ergonomics) and a reliable track and suspension system.
It was a case where the ideas endured long enough for the technology to catch up. This is not always so, but it was in this case.
Back on the battlefield, now with tanks roaming over it, another piece had to be added, to prevent more chaos. That piece was voice communications. In an attack on the enemy, in order to permit some semblance of continuing organizational coherence, soldiers in tanks needed a means to talk to other tanks. Without such voice communications, it would prove difficult to impossible to keep coherent hundreds of noisy, tracked vehicles moving at various speeds over broken ground. At best, major formations of armored vehicles would have to rely on visual signals in order to remain grouped together, and would have to stop frequently to dismount and talk among themselves to change or adjust orders. Lacking the coherence gained from some kind of fast, dependable communication, the attacker would not be able to physically mass firepower when needed, or to change direction or type of maneuver.
By the late 1920s, wireless radios capable of line-of-sight transmission would permit individual tank commanders to communicate with each other and with their larger unit commanders. Such a breakthrough would allow control of attacking formations without the continuing need to halt, dismount, and communicate. Continuous operations would now be possible, as would the ability to adjust tactics rapidly, while retaining relative order and coherence of attacking formations.
Other wider-ranging possibilities soon became apparent to military theorists. For instance, they quickly saw that indirect fire support could come from longer-range artillery units in formations positioned to the rear of the immediate battle area. Target information transmissions from frontline mounted tankers would allow these units to deliver volumes of accurate and deadly fire in support of tank attacks.
Meanwhile, airpower advocates were discovering that the third dimension of airspace could provide external combat support. They recognized that the skies above the battlefield provided a positional advantage and an attack direction that could produce effects similar to cavalry, both in close-in battles and deeper in the enemy's rear. Observers on the ground looking at enemy targets could pass on the enemy location to aviators via radio. The aviators would then attack the enemy from the air, and further introduce chaos to the enemy. This concept was first used with devastating battlefield effect by the Germans with their Stukas, from 1939 to 1942, and later by Allied forces, notably U.S. ground and air forces of Third Army and 19th Air Force in 1944-45.
Theories
Three breakthrough war-fighting ideas significantly influenced the early design and experiments with mounted armored formations in the 1920s and 1930s.
* The first has become known as all arms or combined arms. According to all-arms theory, all combat, combat support, and combat service support functions should be mounted and be immediately available to the mounted commander. This would create a self-contained mobile force, with its own tanks, infantry, artillery, engineers, signal, and logistics (such as trucks for fuel, ammunition, food, and spare parts). Such an all-arms approach allowed the mounted commander to devise a variety of combinations of forces from within his own basic organization. Using these, he could exploit opportunities in changing battle situations without the need to constantly stop and reorganize. Skilled commanders could then conduct operations at a tempo of attack that brought them to positions where they presented the enemy with more situations than he could possibly handle in a given time and space. In this way, the initiative lost in the firepower-dominated battlefields of World War I was regained.
* The second of these theories held that mounted formations would attack dismounted or less mobile units, break through their front lines, then operate in their rear, destroying artillery, command posts, and logistics. Using the metaphor of a small penetrating stream that swiftly swelled into a flood, British theorist B. H. Liddell Hart named this theory the "expanding torrent." According to Hart's theory, the penetrating tank attack would have the effect of first destroying the initial line and eventually of collapsing the front. . . .Some later critics questioned whether Hart's theory was truly innovative, or whether it was merely an adaptation of the infiltration tactics adopted by both sides to break the deadly trench warfare grip on opposing forces mainly on the western front. In fact, many theories, and many tactics, were tried by military professionals to break this grip. By war's end, they had used every technology available at the time--not only armored forces, infiltration tactics, and air, but also, of course, chemical warfare. Original or not, theories such as Hart's became important for the inspiration they gave to later experiments in restoring the maneuver option. Hart was one of many such theorists, albeit one of the more prolific, readable, and influential writers. Other practitioners worked less noticeably in field experiments with the same goal.
* Third: In battle, it was now considered possible to fight both close and deep. This concept of a battlefield of much greater depth was proposed by Russian theorists, notably Tuchachevsky, in the 1930s. (It must be noted that many ideas were being rapidly exchanged between theorists in England, Russia, and Germany at this time.) Tuchachevsky theorized that it was possible with operational maneuver groups and air to create a zone of attack where you would simultaneously fight close and deep in the enemy rear, unlike during World War I, where units slugged it out along a line. "Our technical equipment," he wrote in 1937, "enables us to put pressure on the enemy not only directly on the line of the front, but also to break through his disposition and attack to the full depth of the battle formation."Such theories would ironically see their greatest advocates in the early to mid-1980s in the U.S. Army's AirLand Battle doctrine, designed to defeat the military descendants of Tuchachevsky, the Warsaw Pact.
Few new theories advance without hindrance, and such was the case with these. There were many arguments against all of them. Indeed, the arguments particularly held back newer ideas from finding a place in the U.S. Army. In the United States, the Tank Corps of World War I was disbanded, and the National Defense Act of 1920 assigned tanks to the infantry. The doctrine that the tank "is designed to assist the advance of the infantry and the tank service is a branch of the infantry" lasted until 1930. Even as late as 1930, the newly appointed Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, would continue assigning tanks to assist various existing military branches, rather than use them in ways that would be truly militarily useful. In his own words, "The infantry will give attention to machines to increase the striking power of the infantry against strongly held positions." Liddell Hart, always impatient with the propensity among much of the military to lock itself into the status quo, would write about such attitudes, "The most difficult thing with a military mind is not getting a new idea in, it is getting the old idea out.
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In defense of the U.S. Army, we should point out that during the Depression, it had a strength of only a little over 100,000 men, it had little money for research and development, it thought as the nation did that another major war was not in its immediate future, and it was anyhow busy with CCC projects and assisting in maintaining federal law and order. (Today we call these last "Operations Other Than War.") The cavalry at Fort Riley even wanted to keep its horses. In other words, the context of the times did not help leaders look much to the future.
Meanwhile, land battles in Europe and Africa saw increasing application of new tank and other mechanized technologies employed in battlefield tactics derived from the three war-fighting theories. Spectacularly, the German Wehrmacht stunned the world with their lightning "blitzkrieg" attacks into Poland in 1939, France in 1940, and Russia in 1941. And Rommel's brilliant flanking maneuvers in North Africa in 1941-42 stunned the world yet again. The Wehrmacht's expert use of both battle in depth and all arms--including air, rapid penetration, and envelopment using mounted forces--not only came as a great surprise to the defenders, it also restored maneuver to the European battlefield lost in World War I. Later, in 1943, British and Soviet formations would apply similar methods and score successes against the same Wehrmacht in both North Africa and Russia. The U.S. Army came to adopt these new theories late, and as a consequence suffered a serious defeat against German forces at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943. Learning and adapting swiftly, however, by 1944-45, U.S. armor forces under Patton and others in France and Germany were as expert practitioners of maneuver warfare as any in World War II.
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