The Dynamics Of Doctrine The Changes In German Tactical Doctrine During The First World War Illustrated Edition

[Includes 4 maps and 3 figures] This latest Leavenworth Paper is a case study in the wartime evolution of tactical doctrine. Previous publications of the Combat Studies Institute have examined the peacetime development of doctrine and have increased our knowledge of how doctrine has been applied. With the publication of Captain Lupfer’s study, “The Dynamics of Doctrine,” the Combat Studies Institute adds another dimension to the history of the processes of doctrinal change. Besides providing a summary of German infantry tactics of the First World War, this study offers insights into the crucial role of leadership in facilitating doctrinal change during battle. It once again reminds us that success in war demands extensive and vigorous training calculated to insure that field commanders understand and apply sound tactical Principles as guidelines for action and not as a substitute for good judgment. It points out the need for a timely effort in collecting and evaluating doctrinal lessons from battlefield experience. Finally, this study reminds us of yet another fundamental lesson from the past-that tendencies toward accepting the battlefield as a routine can be a deadly error. Altering previously accepted tactics in the middle of a struggle, as the author points out, is a very urgent and serious matter. As members of the Profession of Arms, we must be sensitive to the demands of change, visionary in our examination of their implications, and creative in our adaptation of combat organizations, tactics, and techniques.

Includes over 50 maps plans and illustrations. In this Research Survey, Major Timothy A. Wray provides an excellent survey of the intricacies of employing defensive tactics against a powerful opponent. Using after-action reports, unit war diaries, and other primary materials, Major Wray analyzes the doctrine and tactics that the Germans used on the Eastern Front during World War II. At the end of World War I, the Germans adopted the elastic defense in depth and continued to use it as their basic doctrine through the end of World War II. However, because of limitations caused by difficult terrain, severe weather, manpower and supply shortages, Soviet tactics, and Hitler’s order to stand fast, German commanders were unable to implement the Elastic Defense in its true form. Even so, innovative and resourceful unit commanders were able to adapt to the harsh realities of combat and improvise defensive methods that saved the German armies from complete annihilation. U.S. Army unit commanders on the future battlefield, while battling a motivated and aggressive force, will also face hard battlefield conditions. Therefore, these commanders, in applying the AirLand Battle tenets of initiative, depth, agility, and synchronization, will have to demonstrate the same type of innovativeness and resourcefulness as the Germans did in Russia. To operate on the AirLand Battlefield, U.S. soldiers must depend on sound doctrine and the ability to execute it intelligently. All Army officers will benefit from Major Wray’s new and vital assessment of how German doctrine was modified by the test of war.

Originally published: 1998. New edition published in hardcover in 2014.

Includes The Americans in the First World War Illustration Pack - 57 photos/illustrations and 10 maps The analysis of the impact of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in the Great War has fallen into two competing camps. The first believes that the AEF was the war winning factor in coalition warfare. The opposite view holds that the AEF itself had no true impact, but rather it was the industrial might and the manpower potential of the United States (US) that was the key element to victory. The caveat to both views was that the AEF did not have enough time in combat to truly show its martial ability. This thesis attempts to analyze the combat effectiveness of the AEF by comparing its experience with that of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in 1916. The rate of change in the ability of the AEF to adapt to modern warfare will be shown to be slightly higher than that of the BEF of 1916. By November 1918, the AEF was not completely tactically combat effective, but it had dramatically improved from where it started and clearly demonstrated the potential to continue to improve at the same pace.

The new edition of The Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare offers an updated comprehensive account of Western warfare, from its origins in Classical Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages and the early modern period, down to the wars of the twenty-first century in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

During the First World War, the British army's most consistent German opponent was Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. Commanding more than a million men as a General, and then Field Marshal, in the Imperial German Army, he held off the attacks of the British Expeditionary Force under Sir John French and then Sir Douglas Haig for four long years. But Rupprecht was to lose not only the war, but his son and his throne. In Haig's Enemy, Jonathan Boff explores the tragic tale of Rupprecht's war — the story of a man caught under the wheels of modern industrial warfare. Providing a fresh viewpoint on the history of the Western Front, Boff draws on extensive research in the German archives to offer a history of the First World War from the other side of the barbed wire. He revises conventional explanations of why the Germans lost with an in-depth analysis of the nature of command, and of the institutional development of the British, French, and German armies as modern warfare was born. Using Rupprecht's own diaries and letters, many of them never before published, Haig's Enemy views the Great War through the eyes of one of Germany's leading generals, shedding new light on many of the controversies of the Western Front. The picture which emerges is far removed from the sterile stalemate of myth. Instead, Boff re-draws the Western Front as a highly dynamic battlespace, both physical and intellectual, where three armies struggled not only to out-fight, but also to out-think, their enemy. The consequences of falling behind in the race to adapt would be more terrible than ever imagined.