Nazis and Radios

In July an online talk by Philip Blood (probably this guy) and a pass through Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy made me think of the old debate about the effectiveness of the American, British, and Commonwealth armies in the Second World War. I had not known that Six Armies in Normandy was just Keegan’s second book from 1982, and that my 1994 Penguin edition was a reprint (A.J.P. Taylor wrote a blurb!)

Keegan’s book shows his strengths and weaknesses as a historian: it is beautifully written, expresses his unique view of the world, but rarely acknowledges doubt or explains where his facts and interpretations come from. Keegan gives himself authority by dropping in French and German phrases and alluding to prestigious novelists and playwrights, but not by showing that he understands a mass of evidence and arguments and can argue why his interpretation is best. The maps are inadequate, the photos numerous but ornamental. Because Six Armies in Normandy rarely cites sources, and because I’m not a specialist in WW II, I will not try to review it. But I will use some quotes to show places where I might have been wrong or where I don’t know how to balance two ways of thinking.

One of the most common factoids about the Second World War in Europe is that during the Battle of France, French commanders settled comfortably into châteaus and communicated only by a small number of telephone lines. Naturally (the story goes) these soft, old-fashioned generals were beaten by their hard, modern opponents!

Rommel decided later that day, June 9th, that he would defer the counter-offensive until more of the marching divisions from the interior had arrived. Its planning meanwhile was consigned to Geyr von Schweppenburg. The officer’s headquarters had hihterto played the role of government-in-waiting for, though specifically organized to prepare and control large armoured operations, the necessary troops had been withheld from it until the appearance of the Allies on the beaches, and indeed for some time after that. Now called to life, it had installed itself with some amplitude at Thury-Harcourt, twelve miles south of Caen, where Geyr and his officers lived in the Château of la Caine and the clerks and signallers worked under canvas in the orchard outside. Communication was provided by four large radio trucks. As soon as they had come on the air, however, their transmissions had been picked up by the British monitoring service and the intercepts subject to Traffic Analysis. Traffic analysis is a technique which helps to identify where and from whom transmissions eminate, rather than what the encoded messages contain – that information was extracted by the Ultra service at Bletchley.
…
So, on the evening of June 10th, rocket-firing Typhoons of 83 Group, Royal Air Force, and Mitchell medium bombers of 2 Group suddenly appeared oover la Caine and subjected it to devastating attack. Geyr and one of his officers escaped with wounds. His chief of staff, von Dawans, and twelve other officers were killed, the equipment of the headquarters destroyed, and the survivors transferred to Paris. For the time being, Panzer Group West ceased to function alltogether, and command of the armoured divisions was temporarily entrusted to the chief of I SS Panzer Corps, who decided that he did not share Geyr’s belief on the feasability of a major armoured counter-stroke.

Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy (Penguin 1994) pp. 150, 151

The Allies did not have to fight the counterattack, they just bombed the people who were organizing it. There are many stories about German generals in Normandy being attacked in their staff cars and wounded or killed. Blood says that after 10 June, German commanders were scared to use their radios, so had to drive around and send messengers to understand the situation and communicate with their troops. The state which had pioneered the use of the radio for propaganda was unable to use radios to fight a war.

Another factoid about the period of German victories is that every German tank had at least a radio receiver while most of their opponents were reduced to sticking their heads out a hatch and waving flags. As most of their opponents had only one or two men in the turret, those men had many other things to do than see whether someone was waving at them (even if the air was not full of bullets and shell fragments). Some recent British research challenges this:

In all the studies commissioned by the British to report on captured Panzer IIIs in North Africa, all noted the absence of radios. It is unlikely that they were taken as souveniers, as more attractive items remained in the tanks, and therefore we can conclude that either the Germans were particularly good at removing radio sets when tanks were abandoned (often under fire), or that more likely there was a serious shortage of radios in the Deutsches Afrika Korps.

Haynes Pz III p. 140

(Notice how the book on arms and armour, written by an army officer, is more sophisticated in its argument and its use of evidence than the stylish history by a professor with a PhD?)

Keegan tells some stories where the German army’s use of electronic communication and sensing is not very sophisticated. I give one example with bonus Nazi-punching (and CanCon!):

(Some lifelong Nazi) intervened in the battle at a point near Caen. It was growing dark. Leading on a motorcycle, his preferred command vehicle, he drove westward down the Caen-Bayeaux road with the divisional Panther (tank) battalion strung out behind him and the men of the reconnaissance battalion riding on their hulls. Just short of the headquarters of the Regina Rifles in Brettenville l’Orgueilleuse, the tanks stopped to shoot up the village. Then, when persuaded that resistance had been crushed, they advanced and drove round the Reginas’ position Sioux-style to look for a way in for the kill. The Reginas had been holding their fire (with their six-pounder anti-tank guns) … Six Panthers short of the twenty-two with which he had begun his Walkürenritt six hours before, (the Nazi) turned his motorcycle as the glimmer of dawn showed before Bayeaux and rode away from the burning ruins.

Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy, pp. 149, 150 nb. I think Totenritt was the Prussian military expression, thanks Robert Citino

I don’t know much about modern warfare but what are the reconnaissance elements of an armoured unit doing riding on the tanks instead of driving out ahead of them so the tanks don’t stumble into antitank weapons? Shouldn’t they be driving armoured cars or motorcycles or something small and cheap? I feel like I don’t understand many things about how the old German army remained so formidable in 1944 and 1945 while losing more and more technical capabilities. And I feel like I don’t understand how to balance the argument that fighting Hitler’s ground forces was always hard and miserable, and the argument that from the middle of 1943, Allied artillery and airpower could pin Axis forces in Europe to the ground, break up their counterattacks before they got going, and locate and decrypt their communications so the outcome of the fighting was just a matter of time and blood. Americans in the 1980s complained that Nazi German infantry had had better machine guns and more mortars than their infantry did, but machine guns and mortars are cheap, short-ranged weapons. Even insurgents can usually keep a few machine guns rattling and a few tubes firing!

Keegan’s history from 1982 has other interesting aspects, such as the paragraph where he noticed that de Gaule refused to let black Africans take part in the liberation of France, even though they had been good enough to die for France in both World Wars (p. 303). I don’t know how to reconcile that with the Keegan who wrote a colonialist History of Warfare (1994) but the greatest of wonders or terrors is man. He also has space for vignettes like a refugee woman in Caen looking for something to protect her child from being blinded by the bombs of his would-be liberators. And a general history of radio and radar in WW II would have to touch on things like the proximity fuse or the Allies using radio signals to convince the German leaders that there was a First US Army Group waiting to descend on the Pas de Calais after D-Day so they could not move all their forces to Normandy until it was too late.

I have been reading about World War Two during the first four years of COVID because I don’t know much about it although I can sound like I know something from reading blog posts and listening to lectures. And a lot of discourse about ancient warfare is really about World War Two, particularly in the United States. So I thought it would be worthwhile to write this post about some of the things I don’t know, can’t reconcile, or where I may have some ideas from the 1990s which were refuted in the 2010s. On subjects where I am not an expert, I try to pass on what most experts seem to agree on, but I am not always right about what that is!

I think Trevor Dupuy in the 1980s was the most famous advocate that “On a man for man basis, German ground soldiers consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50 percent higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops under all circumstances,” and we have learned a lot about WW II and its documentary record since then. Many of the weapons which are in the news today such as drones, cruise missiles, and multiple rocket launchers were first deployed during WW II.

Further Reading: on the organization of engineering in WW II, it might be educational to read Calum E. Douglas, The Secret Horsepower Race: Western Front Fighter Engine Development (Tempest, 2020)

Sönke Neitzel, Deutsche Krieger. Vom Kaiserreich zur Berliner Republik – eine Militärgeschichte

Groß, Gerhard P. (2012) Mythos und Wirklichkeit. Die Geschichte des operativen Denkens im deutschen Heer von Moltke d. Ä. bis Heusinger. Zeitalter der Weltkriege, Band 9 (Ferdinand Schönigh: Paderborn). Translated as Gerhard P. Groß, tr. David T. Zabecki, The Myth and Reality of German Warfare: Operational Thinking from Moltke the Elder to Heusinger. Foreign Military Studies (University Press of Kentucky, 2018).

Edit 2023-08-28: added books by Groß and Neitzel

(begun 19 July 2023)