The Pankian Metaphor 3164

German "Auftragstactik" (mission tactics; that is to say, "Tell me what my goal is, don't tell me how to accomplish it.") goes back further than that. The elder Moltke wrote it into the manuals, but it's essentially what Blucher and the reformers (Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Clausewitz) of the Prussian army had been trying to drum into the Prussian officer corps back during the Napoleonic Wars. Much decision making got pushed down to the lowest levels, and initiative at all levels highly stressed. In the German army, disobeying orders was not necessarily an offense. As one story went, an officer committing an obvious tactical blunder defended himself against the criticism by saying that the order had come from a superior officer, and was therefore tantamount to coming from the King himself. Prince Frederick Charles then proceeded to whack the officer with the flat of his sword and chew him out because, "The King made you an officer because he thought you were smart enough to know when to DISOBEY orders!" There are many instances in the Austro-Prussian, Franco-Prussian, First and Second World Wars of officers on the spot disregarding what they felt to be ill-advised orders and taking advantage of what they perceived to be new circumstances and opportunites. Sometimes it led to bad things, but far more often than not, the low-level initiative of the German armies kept the pace of events inside the enemies' decision cycle and kept them increasingly, eventually hopelessly, off-balance. At least until their enemies began learning.

Radios helped a lot, of course, especially in the early years. Later on, British and American troops were even better equipped. From the Pz-III onward, German tanks had 5-man crews. The commander, gunner and loader in the turret, with the driver and radio operator-hull machine-gunner in the hull. This was the most efficient layout and was eventually adopted by everyone else. In the early years, they faced armies where many or most tanks lacked radios and had to communicate tactical orders with semaphore flags, and even when they had radios, they were often short-ranged, static-filled AM radios, not FM sets. Even inside the tank, the Russians rarely had intercom systems at first (just imagine the noise level, then trying to communicate orders to the crew without an intercom). Many early Russian, French and British tanks had 2-man turrets where the commander not only had to command the tank, but load the gun, as well, so they were overworked with their attention split.

It was a decision more-or-less forced upon them by poor doctrine before the war, not corrected until well into the French campaign. There wasn't really anything they could do until the new tanks (M-26 Pershing) came into full production. They didn't start arriving in the European theatre until the spring of 1945. Shermans weren't intended to fight other tanks, so they weren't armed or armored for the purpose. That job was supposed to be left to the tank destroyers like the M-10, which did have the armament, but since they were supposed to engage only at long range from cover, didn't have the armor (their turrets were even open-topped -- imagine that in urban combat (!) since their light weight and speed was supposed to protect them). It was a f***-up doctrine and it cost a lot of lives. The movie "Kelly's Heroes", comedy though it is, accurately depicts what American (and British) tankers thought about going up against German Tigers and Panthers. There were several instances of tanks being repaired in near-front-line workshops, just patched up with critical components repaired-replaced, with only the worst of blood and brains of the previous crew being cleaned out, with replacements grabbed up from any source (cooks, clerks, etc.) given a few hours of training and then committed to combat. Morale was often *not* good, to say the least.

--Larry