Since the 50th anniversary of World War Two (1994), there has been an increased interest in the Normandy campaign. The Normandy campaign was a watershed event for the US Army and left a great influence. General William E. Depuy, the first commander of the Army’s Cold War Training & Doctrine Command (TRADOC), was an infantry battalion operations officer in the 90th Inf. Division which had the very mission of encircling German forces in Normandy. Further, General Depuy was the author of the 1976 Field Manual FM 100-5 Operations and its concept of the “active defense.” Many would later compare US VII Corps’ Operation COBRA in Normandy to US VII Corps in Operation DESERT STORM and to the 1982 FM 100-5 Operations manual doctrine of “AirLand Battle” (ALB). While General Depuy did not have direct influence in developing “AirLand Battle,” he did have an indirect influence in selecting the tenets of “AirLand Battle:” agility, depth, initiative and synchronization. If one studies the Normandy campaign, they will see the German defenders executing an “active defense” with units defending in depth (Caen) and counterattacking Allied advances. Also, displayed by the Germans was the agility of their staffs and troops to quickly move “Kampfgroups” (combat teams) around the battlefield and small unit leaders taking the initiative in executing their “active defense.” Many have referred to Normandy as a logistical feat. I prefer to focus beyond the beachhead. By using ratios and attrition of combat power, I will attempt to provide a quantitative analysis of the Normandy campaign. Normandy covered the full spectrum of war: the defense and the offense. It is through studying the Normandy campaign we can extract valuable lessons learned relevant to the art of operational-level warfare.
The Eastern Front, 1941-1945, is one of the biggest and most decisive theaters of operation in modern history, and was the largest theater of war in World War Two. A total force of 9 million Germans and Russians battled on both sides with a combined strength of 590 divisions. Military losses approached 5 million German casualties, and 17 million Russian casualties. Altogether, both sides had an active strength of 13,000 tanks, 18,000 combat aircraft, and 50,000 artillery pieces. With the exception of the massive Allied Combined bombing campaign, the Allied effort of ninety-three divisions in Western Europe against seventy German division pales in comparison. Another interesting point in the Eastern Front was initial nature of German operational maneuver, followed by the evolution of Russian operational maneuver. By 1944, the Russian Army had become experts on operational maneuver, and maximized the principals of war of mass, objective, offense, and maneuver. The German Army against an army four times its size eventually culminated, but not until after four years of intense fighting. Eighty percent of total German casualties were lost on the Eastern front, 4.7 million of 6 million casualties. Further, both sides lost an estimated 65,000 tanks and 60,000 combat aircraft, two-thirds being Russian. The methodology of this analysis is chronological, based on the successive operational campaigns from June 1941 through May 1945. Each campaign lists the order of battle, and then the combat power using Lanchester equations (Frederich W. Lanchester) of military combat. In studying modern war, the Eastern Front is a case study in a maneuver oriented army versus a large attrition based army. With almost six hundred years’ worth of German divisional combat on the Eastern Front, valuable lessons can be learned in studying this theater of war.
This thesis examines the evolution of artillery tactics in World War II using General J. Lawton Collins’ U.S. VII Corps as a case study. This study first reviews artillery doctrine and tactics during World War I and during the 1920s and 1930s, in which time future leaders like General Collins were military students. In 1943, General Collins commanded an infantry division on Guadalcanal where he was one of the first American generals to implement the Army’s new doctrine of fire direction centers (FDCs) and massed fires using time on targets (TOTs). Collins then was selected to command the U.S. VII Corps for the invasion of Normandy and the subsequent breakout during OPERATION COBRA. From Normandy to the end of the war, Collins continued to hone his use of artillery based on his experience during the eleven-month campaign in Northwest Europe, contributing to his reputation as the best corps commander in World War II. This study looks at Army doctrine in 1944 to judge Collins’ artillery tactics and concludes that he used established doctrine and that his tactics are the foundation for today’s artillery tactics.
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