Breakthroughs: Armored Offensives in Western Europe 1944 Ed., Barry R. Posen and the MIT/DACS Conventional Forces Working Group © 1994, 2009, SSP/MIT draft: not to be used or quoted from without the consent of Barry R. Posen Preface June 6, 2009 marked the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings, the beginning of the challenging campaign to invade Germany from the West. Less remembered is that a period of brutal attrition fighting then began on the Normandy Peninsula, which did not end until the success on July 25 of “Operation Cobra,” a classical “breakthrough battle.” Shortly before the end of the Cold War, I and a group of graduate students became interested in the potential lessons that the experience of breakthrough battles on the Western Front could offer for a possible clash of arms between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Though that danger subsided, our interest did not. We launched a comparative study of several of the best known battles of this kind initiated by the British, the Americans, and the Germans and completed a draft of the study in 1994. As one might imagine, no publisher was then interested. As the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings approached, I recalled that I had retained digital copies of this work, and that an intervening invention, the internet, would allow us to share it. This study would normally have gone through one more editing before publication. We do not view this as a truly finished product. In the last fifteen years, however, the authors have developed other interests, and additional work is out of the question. Some of their names will be familiar to regular visitors to this site, as they have gone on to careers in security studies, while other authors have pursued different kinds of careers. We offer this study in the hopes that it will be of some interest and utility to students of armored warfare, and as a modest tribute to the allied soldiers who liberated Western Europe from the Nazi regime. Barry R. Posen July, 2009 Table of Contents Introduction -- by Barry R. Posen Goodwood -- by Eric Heginbotham The Cobra Breakthrough -- by Nick Beldecos Bluecoat -- by Kevin Oliveau The Mortain Counterattack -- by Jonathan Ladinsky The Battle of the Bulge -- by Brian Nichiporuk Blitzing by Numbers: A Quantitative Analysis - by Eugene Gholz and Ken Pollack Conclusion -- by Barry R. Posen Appendix I - Breakthrough Battle Data Base Appendix II - Breakthrough Battle Data Base: Guidance for Data Collection Maps - by Ken Pollack Map Key Planned British Goodwood Offensive Goodwood - Operations on Day One Goodwood - Operations on Days 2-3 Planned US Cobra Offensive, July 1944 Cobra - US Attacks 25 & 26 July 1944 Cobra - US Attacks on 27 July 1944 Bluecoat - British Breakthrough, 30-31 July 1944 Bluecoat - British Exploitation, 1-2 August 1944 Bluecoat - German Counterattacks, 3-6 August 1944 Planned German Offensive August 1944 Mortain Bulge - Fifth Panzer Army Attacks, 16-18 Dec. 1944 Bulge - German attack against the Schnee Eifel, 16-18 Dec. 1944 Bulge - 6th Panzer Army Attack, 16-18 Dec. Acknowledgments This is a project of the MIT Defense and Arms Control Studies Program. It was supported in part by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Lynne Levine provided administrative support. Cambridge, MA August, 1994 Introduction Barry R. Posen This is a study of armored breakthrough operations. This type of battle has been central to the conduct of warfare since the emergence of the tank as the core element of modern ground armies at the beginning of the Second World War. Wherever a defender can cover an extended front with many, reasonably well armed units, attackers must find a way to pierce these positions, widen the gap, and then push sufficient forces deep into the defender's territory to cause a general collapse of the frontal defenses. Since the early years of the First World War it has been clear that breakthroughs of extended defended frontages, and exploitations of these breakthroughs, is no easy task. There are, of course, other kinds of armored battles that merit study--flanking attacks, encounter battles, pursuits, and even ambushes. But where the opponents are strong and competent, their ability to execute or thwart breakthrough operations will likely influence the entire course of a campaign, and even a war. The tank was devised, but not yet perfected, during World War I to deal with the problem of penetration of defended fronts. Since then, many armored breakthroughs have occurred, but many have been thwarted. The subject of breakthrough operations has thus been of keen interest to attackers and defenders alike. Much craft knowledge has developed about the conduct of such operations, and much of it has been codified in military training manuals. Yet, the study of past armored breakthrough battles has been somewhat unsystematic. Single case studies abound. Systematic comparative case studies are rare. This book adds to the literature on this central question of modern conventional warfare. We conduct focused, comparative case studies of five armored breakthrough battles that occurred on the Western Front in 1944--Goodwood, Cobra, Bluecoat, Mortain, and the Bulge. My interest in this subject emerged during the great debate on the NATO-Warsaw Pact conventional balance that began in the late 1970s. It would be tempting to believe that the evaporation of the Cold War has rendered the whole question moot. But it has not. Wherever heavily armed conventional combatants oppose each other, the question of armored breakthroughs or defense against them will arise. In the Middle East and the Persian Gulf, mechanized warfare has been a normal political transaction among states since the end of the Second World War.1 The Arab-Israeli dispute saw a series of wars that prominently featured breakthrough operations. Peace agreements between Israel and her neighbors will of necessity involve arms control agreements that account for the possibility of a resurgence of mechanized warfare. Although the Iranians were relatively impoverished in terms of equipment, the Iraq-Iran war prominently featured attempted breakthroughs and exploitations-some successful. Even in Desert Storm the dim outlines of breakthrough operations can be discerned, although the massive coalition material and technological superiority and the huge preliminary air bombardment overdetermined the success. US force planning in 1993 for the preparation of the self-styled "first post-Cold War defense plan," the "Bottom-Up Review" aims to forestall a North Korean breakthrough operation. An even weightier planning contingency is a potential future mechanized attack against Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, by Iraq or Iran. More generally, where borders are in dispute, and political agreement is unachievable, it is conventional forces that are brought in to settle the issue--in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Azerbaijan, or Georgia. While the disputants are often poorly armed, they endeavor to acquire tanks and the weapons to support them as soon as they can. These are the ultimate weapons of territorial acquisition. The end of the Cold War has dumped a vast number of late-model heavy weapons onto the world market. Insofar as the collapse of Soviet power has removed Russia's ability and America's incentive, to suppress local conflicts, it is quite likely that the post-Cold-War world will see new incidents of mechanized warfare. For all these reasons, armored breakthroughs remain a fit subject for study. METHODOLOGY 1 Armored warfare and mechanized warfare are synonyms for engagements that involve large numbers of tanks, other tracked or wheeled combat and combat support vehicles, and (usually) truck borne logistical support units. 2 We have adapted a now standard methodology employed both in political science and history--the focused, comparative, case study method. Briefly, we isolated the factors that the expert community deems to be associated with successful breakthrough operations, or successful defenses against breakthrough operations. This was based on both a general survey of literature on military tactics, and a survey of breakthrough battles. We treat these posited associations as what they in fact are- hypotheses about what causes success in breakthrough battles. Our first purpose then was to examine breakthrough battles to see which of these hypotheses could be empirically supported in any way. We looked to see if the causes proposed by these hypotheses could actually be seen to contribute to success. For example, one looks for the processes through which quantitative superiority actually solves the multiple problems faced by an attacker in breakthrough operations. This is the crudest kind of "test." Historical cases are natural experiments. One conducts multiple case studies in part for the purpose of finding variation in the power of specific causes, and examining whether such variation produces variation in outcomes. To the extent that multiple case studies naturally vary the power of a given cause, they produce confidence in the importance of that cause if one also sees variation in the proposed consequence. For example, if quantitative superiority were a critical driver of offensive success, as the force ratio increases across a sample of battles, the operations should prove more successful. Multiple case studies can also produce variation in the simple presence of one of many possible causes. This is particularly useful in the study of complicated processes that seem to have multiple causes. In some breakthrough battles, the attacker has air superiority, in others not. In some cases the attacker had mastered combined arms tactics previously, in others not. In some cases defenders had tactical warning; in others not. Comparative case studies thus provide some insights into whether or not certain hypothesized contributors to successful breakthrough battles are necessary or sufficient.2 Of course, the extent of such insights is limited by the 2 The term "sufficient" should not be taken literally.