Erwin Rommel

He apparently had a good eye for evolveing tactical situations and by leading from the front he could influence them very quickly. That seems to have been the key to many if not all of his successes. It may also have been the key to his lack of appreciation of logistics as he wasn't placed so as to see just what was involved there.

 

To be honest you would be hard pressed to cite a high level German commander overly versed in logistics. Blitzkrieg, by its very nature was based on rapid, short campaign's that never took into consideration long term strategic needs. In this area Anglo-American commanders seem to have the distinct edge (or at least more effective staff's)

Then there is the overall Strategic direction. As a general rule Allied commanders were given objectives that realistically matched the resources allocated to them. Certainly there were exceptions but on balance this held true.

Not so for German commanders who were expected to go much farther with less.

 

Yes. Read "The Infantry Attacks" and then revisit your post ! Rommel was an infantry expert and his book was used as a text book, at least by Rommel when an instructor at the Infantry school. (There is more than a touch of JK Rowling's Gilderoy Lockhart in his character).

I see your line of argument, but surely there must have been some real logistic magicians in the German army to manage the operations they did.

It must be far easier to plan operations with the logistic support offered by the Western Allies than be faced with a bare cupboard and a Fuhrer who demands blitzkreig. They are not well known by the men who maintained the German army in Russia and North Africa had to have been pretty good.

The combined arms operations to capture Norway, Crete and the Deodecanese islands in 1943 required some logistic magicians!

Perhaps there is a new thread - German logisticians of Ww2. . .

 

I'm not so sure. While the allies certainly had more resources their log support system ran for thousands of miles and across oceans. Getting the right materials to the right place at the right time was a huge effort. The Germans on the other hand had a much simpler log system with the exceptions above plus North Africa it was almost all based on rail or at the very ends of the network roads. Of course parts of it were quite complicated, for example the Germans may have actually had more flavors of trucks than the allies (and thus more types of required spares). On the other hand my impression is that allied commanders often asked their loggies "Do we have the logistics to support this?" before an operation while the German commanders said "We need you to support this."

That certainly sounds like a good idea to me. It's amazing what can come to the surface in such threads. As an example may I point out the German railroads in the East thread over on the Axis history forum. Until then I hadn't realized just how much difference there was in the way the Soviets ran their RR as compared to the Germans or for that matter the Western Allies.

 

I agree that in the short term they were great at improvisation or making do with what was available to them.

The rub in my opinion had to do with the larger picture and a tendency to overly embrace short term solutions to long term problems. How they managed to keep a bewildering array of AFV's operating in Russia is something of a mystery to me. Not to mention Infantry divisions that rarely had identical TOE's. Some had German made equipment, others Austrian, others still Czech, or Polish, or French.

Take the Pzkw 38(t). It made great sense to incorporate those completed or in production to the German Panzer Divisions, but they remained in production, altered and produced into the Marder SPAT gun and then reimagined again into the Hetzer. On one side you can say you are squeezing the most out of a effective chassis. But you are also creating logistical problems for those on the pointy end of the stick, especially since they were making variants of they type vehicles of German design and even French.

A number of French AFV's were turned into specialized, low production combat vehicles, often deployed in company strength at best. Some of which were delivered to North Africa. All well and good as long as you could keep them running, but some weren't well suited to extreme terrain's like the desert or Russian plain's. This was done with artillery and trucks as well. I've seen photo's that make German column's look like Gypsy caravan's.

To bring this back on topic, somewhat, Rommel was given a rather impossible task to begin with and one a German commander of the period was not really trained for. To keep Italy from disaster in a theater where there were few natural defenses and one where the enemy would at some point employ naval assets to get around the only good natural defense they had in the Mediterranean ocean.

His training and doctrine called for rapid movement and attacks designed to defeat the enemy in the field. Nor was he getting any help from Berlin who had troops in Russia doing effectively the same things. Hitler was wedded to to the attack over all other strategies, and allowed defensive measures only as a pretext for farcical future attacks.

 

Wasn't there (at least) one occasion in one of the many battles against Tobruk that Rommel stubbornly pushed on his DAK infantry attacks with too high casualties (the (australian ?) defenders in well dug positions, DAK advancing on open terrain and barbed wire and mines) wave after wave after wave, that even his lower rank officers complained ?

I remember it having read somewhere on seen on TV.


Despite all accolades of Rommel, that stroke me as not being smart tactician.

Maybe the crossing of the Meuse of his troops in flimsy rubber boats (but with support of many staticly positioned german tanks) against in his luck a single french tank and a sole french/belgian MG must be looked at the same way....BIG LUCK that his adversaries were poorly equipped and in low numbers...

yes he can read the opportunity and seize it , but he had the fortune to have it presented on a plate.

 

I think you are right about Tobruk. I also seem to recall reading that he sent in relativly unsupported tanks against it as well with similar results. I don't recall reading that he repeated this error though.

 

Like I wrote earlier, Rommel had to learn being a corps commander, army commander and army group commander by OJT. Mistakes were indeed made and the first battle of Tobruk showed where he needed to learn. It seems he did since he captured Tobruk on the second try. Another problem he had was in properly integrating air power into his tactics. However, the idea that he had no appreciation of logistics is way off the mark. How could you command the Afrika Korps and not have an appreciation of logistics? However, he had little control in what got to him and was encouraged by Hitler to go as far as he could. The German (nee' Prussian) command system was based on having trained General Staff officers within every major command staff. Officers like von Mellenthin and Westphal were there to get the "beans and bullets" up to the front and advise their commanders on what was available and what was likely to be available in the future. If you read Rommel's writings you would understand that he did understand logistics much more than some people think. An example was the Battle of Alam Halfa. Rommel, according to von Mellenthin, was ready to call off the attack because of lack of gas. Kesselring promised 90,000 gallons of gas a day. This was indeed provided to Africa, but couldn't get to the front. On Kesselring's promise Rommel went ahead with the battle. When stopped, which they figured they would be, they requested permission to retire to Libya, which was refused by Hitler. In fact, Rommel, on the recommendations of his staff wanted to skip attacking the British BEFORE Alam Halfa, bring the non-motorized troops back to Libya and conduct mobile defense with the motorized and armored divisions. Mobile war was the German's forte while set-piece battles favored the British forces. As you can see, Rommel and his general staff had a sober consideration of what was possible.

 

There's a difference between appreciating logistics and having a detailed understanding of what's involved. He should by the way have had a considerable amount of control over what got to him as the real bottleneck was transport from the North African ports to the front and wasn't that at least nominally under his control? The problem was that he was often operating well past the boundries that could nominally be supported by a road based logistical system yet he continued operations even though his log system was tremendously over burdened.

 

As pointed out by other posters here, the German army operated on a thinner thread (as in pounds of supply per soldier) than the Allies and "made do" with a lot less. Even so, the Italian and German dictators made lots of promises re logistics that they couldn't/didn't keep and urged Rommel to make his plans according to their promises. To be sure, Rommel, and a lot of other panzer commanders pushed the limits mercilessly under the idea "who dares, wins". However, it seems that prior to Alam Halfa the RAF and RN made the forward ports such as Tobruk, untenable for use as supply ports. Those ports were what the German commander was expecting to use to bring in supplies. So, just prior to the battle Rommel's staff advised him that he did not have enough gas nor other assets to get to the Suez Canal. Rommel concurred and, as I posted above, wanted to move back to more tenable positions, using the armor in a mobile defense.

So, the short answer to your question is that Rommel did NOT have total control over his supply situation even in Africa. A lot of what he counted on didn't happen. My point is that he understood his logistical situation a lot better than some detractors would give him credit for.

 

Does anyone think that Rommel would have been a good commander/officer on the eastern front or do you think he spawns better where he was in North Africa?