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Florida State University Libraries Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2018 Stuck in Trafic: The Wehrmacht's Failure iScnot tU T. Srinbisian Russia Follow this and additional works at the DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES STUCK IN TRAFFIC: THE WEHRMACHT’S FAILURE IN URBAN RUSSIA By SCOTT T. SINISI A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2018 Scott T. Sinisi defended this thesis on November 19, 2018. The members of the supervisory committee were: Jonathan Grant Professor Directing Thesis George Williamson Committee Member Michael Creswell Committee Member The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: THE DEVELOPMENT OF BLITZKRIEG ....................................................................... 22 Chapter Two: WAR IN THE WEST .................................................................................................. 34 Chapter Three: WAR IN THE EAST ................................................................................................ 55 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................... 76 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 81 Biographical Sketch ....................................................................................................................... 84 iii ABSTRACT On June 21 st , 1941, the German Army, along with contingents from its allies, invaded the Soviet Union in what was codenamed Operation Barbarossa. Although it won massive tactical and operational victories in the summer and fall of 1941, it failed to reach the objectives set for it by the end of the year, and was ultimately drawn into an unwinnable battle of attrition beginning in the winter of 1941. This paper seeks to add to the study of why Barbarossa failed by tracing an ongoing pattern of crucial delays in the operations of the Wehrmacht throughout the early stage of the Second World War whenever it was forced into urban warfare. Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, was the primary tactical and operational doctrine of the Wehrmacht, premised around speed, mobility, and avoidance of enemy strongpoints, formed in direct response to the attritional stalemate of the First World War. Blitzkrieg campaigns relied on constant motion of the attacking armored spearheads and intricate timing of the various elements of the attacking forces, both of which were fatally disrupted if the attacking forces found themselves forced into an environment for which they were not fundamentally suited, such as a city. This paper proposes that a clear pattern can be seen of this disruption occurring beginning in the German campaigns in Poland and the West, and that it contributed in a significant way to the ultimate failure of Operation Barbarossa. The effect was comparatively minimal in the former cases due to the relatively advanced state of their road networks, which allowed German forces to bypass strongpoints, but the primitiveness of the Soviet Union repeatedly forced them into fights they were expressly designed to avoid. iv INTRODUCTION The early victories and eventual defeat of Germany in the Second World War had their roots in the trenches of the First. In that war, the armies of both sides entered the conflict in the belief that it would be fought in the exact same style as the wars of the previous centuries, and blithely ignorant of the potential of new technology such as the machine gun and heavy artillery. Following the Battle of the Marne in August 1914, both Germany and its Allied opponents ordered their forces to dig long systems of trenches in whatever positions they currently happened to be in. Unable to cope with the static defenses they were now faced with, the high commands of both sides spent nearly the entirety of the next four years attempting to break through the enemy lines by means of endlessly repeated frontal assaults. Some had benefit of massive artillery support and some did not, but they all ended the same way: with the attacking infantry slaughtered by machine guns and the utter failure of the attack. With neither side able to gain any ground, the First World War devolved into a war of attrition, in which the loser would be the side that ran out of cannon fodder first. In this respect, Germany could not hope to compete with Britain, France, their overseas colonies, and the United States combined. Exhausted, the Kaiser abdicated in 1918 and Germany surrendered to the militarily crippling and seemingly humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles.1 Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war”, was the German response to the problems posed by static defenses and attritional warfare such as they had encountered in the First World War. Although it faced resistance from senior officers when it was first introduced, the advantages of the 1 Marc Trachtenberg , “Versailles Revisited,” Security Studies, vol. 9, no. 3 (2000), 191-205. 1 system, propounded by a few zealous adherents, soon made themselves apparent, and the elite units of the German Army were remade to better fight this new form of war. In its purest form, blitzkrieg doctrine called for the usage of all combat arms of the army—armor, motorized infantry, artillery, and close air support—to punch through enemy lines at their weakest point in one overwhelming blow.2 The combined forces would then make use of the superior mobility given them by motorization to run amok in the rear areas of their foe, deliberately avoiding any areas where they could be slowed down and leaving the enemy armies to wither without supplies and eventually be mopped up by trailing infantry divisions. Heinz Guderian, the German general responsible more than any other for this new doctrine, explicitly stated this in his 1936 book Achtung Panzer: “Does one want to storm fortresses and permanently reinforced positions with them or does one want to employ them in open country in a strategic sense with a view to carrying out encirclement and outflanking operations?..... Does one want to attempt to quickly resolve an imposed war of defense by a large scale, concentrated operation of the main means of attack on the ground or does one want to bind these means of attack, having, in principle, renounced their inherent capability for rapid, wide-ranging movements, to the slow course of the infantry and artillery battle and thereby conceding from the very outset the rapid decision of the battle and the war?”3 In Guderian’s new system, quickly picked up and advocated by other rising stars in the German Army such as Erich von Manstein, tanks were not to be shackled to any sort of slow moving forces such as heavy artillery or infantry divisions. With their entire purpose being to stay in constant motion and not get bogged down at any point, the average German panzer division contained no more than perhaps a battalion or two of motorized infantry, not nearly enough to 2 While blitzkrieg was never officially codified as the governing doctrine of German operations and strategy in manuals, many of its guiding principles, such as the emphasis on mobility and initiative by the local commander, were. 3 Heinz Guderian, Achtung-Panzer!, trans. Christopher Duffy (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1992), 164. 2 seize a well defended strongpoint or urban area. As noted in the quote above, this did not particularly concern Guderian—panzer divisions were supposed to bypass urban areas, not smash through them. This system of warfare proved to be devastatingly effective when applied in Poland and Western Europe in the first two years of the Second World War. Poland was never expected to defeat the German Wehrmacht, not by the Germans, not by its allies, and not by its own high command. Yet it was expected to hold the Germans off for at least a period of several months. Against blitzkrieg, it crumbled in less than four weeks. The results of this new form of warfare were even more astonishing in the West. The French, British, Belgian, and Dutch armies were all systematically picked apart and destroyed by roving columns of German tanks. Although it would be about a month and a half from the opening of the German offensive at the beginning of May 1940 to the final surrender of France in the middle of June, the campaign had in all meaningful ways been decided in the first week; the rest, with a few very specific and very salient exceptions, was merely slaughter. The exceptions, where British and French troops (mostly the former) fought the Germans to a standstill long enough to delay them for a significant period of time, all came in built-up areas. These delays were only significant in hindsight: British troops in Dunkirk and other Channel ports were able to tie down vastly superior German forces, and thus contributed greatly to the near total evacuation of the BEF, and many
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