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You are here: Experts > Homework Help > Military History > Military History > World War 2
Expert: Keith H. Patton - 11/5/2009
Question
What were the specific military tactics of the major powers in World War 2 and how did they differ?
Answer
Konnor:
The first thing you must know is that any military of any nation is used to obtain strategic goals and the high command plans a grand strategy. Next the theater commanders plan operations to implement that strategy. The field commanders employ tactics to win battles.
History books and history teachers tend to confuse these things or do not know the difference to start with.
Another thing to watch out for is that school history books are notoriously inaccurate and mistakes and outright errors in fact are propagated from one textbook to another until these misconceptions and errors become "fact". This is due to poor scholarship and fact checking on the part of the authors and publishers and personal political slant of the authors in some cases.
Now having said that, we'll look at the question.
The major combatants in WWII were the Germans, Japanese, Russians, British, Americans, and Italians.
During the interwar period all the major powers studied the same battles from WWI, read the same writings by authors who wrote on use of armor, aircraft and naval forces. Every country had War Plans filed away that they had prepared in case they had to fight this country or that country. The United States for instance had the Color War plans. War Plan Orange was for fighting the Japanese. War Plan Black, the Germans. War Plan Scarlet was for fighting the British and the invasion of Canada (remember Canada was part of the Commonwealth and was assumed to be an ally of Great Britain.) These plans outlined operations to achieve the national strategy to defeat any of those foreign powers. They were wargamed by the War Department to determine if they were winnable. All the major powers did the same thing.
So going into the war all the major powers had an idea of how they would at least start fighting the next war from a strategic stand point. All this changed to a degree because of changes in weapons and how they were used. For instance, the War Plan Orange of the US had the US Navy fighting across the Pacific to capture islands for Coal stations for the fleet. The Philippines were assumed to have been invaded but were still holding out. The battleships of the US Navy planned to meet the Japanese Navy in a titanic battle somewhere in the Pacific near the Philippines that would decide the war. Nobody planned that the aircraft carrier and not the battleship would be the new and decisive capital ship of the war. The Navy used the basic plan, but instead of capturing islands for coaling stations (ships in WWII used oil instead of coal) the islands were captured for air bases as it was discovered that Airpower either land or carrier based was a new decisive weapon in the war.
The Japanese did not change their concept of how they would fight the war. Even after Midway they still clung to the belief that their surface naval ships could and would meet the US Navy in a surface battle where their battleships would defeat the US Navy.
These were questions of strategy. How the ships were used by the Captains and Admirals are called doctrine and doctrine then dictates tactics. The same holds true for war in the air and on the ground.
The ground forces of the major powers had studied WWI and learned the same lessons but found different solutions. The Germans as usual studied things more in depth because they possessed a cadre of Senior officers that made it their job to do so. The military organizations of the allies were not so far seeing and tended to hold to the old ways. The US Army was an exception, with a few visionary officers, but little funding to pursue their ideas.
The Germans developed combined arms tactics. That is the use of infantry, armor, artillery and air power in a combined way they called Blitzkrieg. Just like the media does today, back in 1939 and 1940 the press made Blitzkrieg into the new Boogeyman. All the major powers except Japan had similar tactics, only the Germans did it better and sooner. Every power, except Japan had modern tanks, aircraft, artillery and well trained infantry. Where the Germans went one better was communications and training. They put a radio in every tank, aircraft and command vehicle. They coordinated all the arms. The Allies were slow in using aircraft to support ground fighting, where the Germans saw it as a Primary use for aircraft and had developed specific types for that, like the Stuka dive bomber.
You'll read about how big and bad the German Panzer divisions were. That is a fiction. The French and Russians had better tanks, they were just lousy at using them. Their doctrine or how they were taught to use them was poor, so their tactics were bad too. The Germans with weaker tanks were able to defeat them.
The Germans put all their tanks in large maneuver units, where the British and French place theirs in smaller numbers with their infantry so when they fought, the Allied tanks were always outnumbered by the German tanks. It was only later in the war, 1943 and 1944 that the bigger heavier tanks that the Allies were so fearful of were put into the field. The Panzers II, III were more like the Mk4 Stuart tank. The German Mark IV was similar to the early Shermans but not as good. The Tigers and such only came in the 4th year of the war. The Allies saw the tank as a support weapon for infantry and not as a hard hitting weapon of penetration. That is why the doctrine of the US army was to support the infantry with tanks and use tank destroyers to kill enemy tanks. This doctrine was flawed and was changed as the war progressed. This explains why the Sherman was equipped with a weak low velocity 75mm gun and not a higher velocity tank killing gun like the Tank Destroyers were. Tanks guns were improved as the war went on and it was learned that the best way to kill an enemy tank was with a tank of your own and not a “tank destroyer”.
Another lie is that the Germans were the first mechanized army. Pure BS. The German army used more horses than any army in the world. The British and American armies were the most highly mechanized armies. The only four legged animals used by them were mules used in Italy, North Africa and Burma to haul supplies in areas that vehicles could not go. The Germans and italians used hundreds of thousands of horses for transport. This required a vast amount of transport to just haul the food for the animals. Where a 50 gallon drum of gas could move several vehicles a couple of hundred miles in a day. A horse needed tens of pounds of fodder to move a meager load only about 20 miles and it usually took 4-6 horses to do it. So it took a lot of horses just too haul the food for the other horses, working horses cannot subsist on grass alone. They need higher protein oats or something similar.
The US army was the only army in WWII that had enough motorized transport to carry every soldier in the army. The bulk of the German, Japanese, Russian and Italian armies got to the fight the same way their fathers and grand fathers did…on boot leather. The US army rode to war on wheels and tracks. We manufactured enough trucks and jeeps to send some 250,000 trucks to the Russians too.
The British were also highly mechanized.
Land Tactics
The Germans used their superior communications and combined arms tactics at what they called the Schwerepunkt or point of attack. They would attack at one point where they outnumbered and overwhelmed the enemy, pierce his defensive line and penetrate deep in his rear areas to attack command posts and supply depots then fan out to encircle the other forces still holding defensive positions. These tactics allowed them to defeat first the Poles, then the French and British in France, and later the Russians in the early stages of the invasion of Russia. Pockets of resistance were bypassed for follow on foot slogging troops to clean up.
It was then that their weakness in tank design and lack of mechanization caught up with them.
The Russian T-34 a superior design caught them by surprise and helped stem their attacks on Moscow and defeat them at Stalingrad in 1943. The Germans still won successes but never on the scale they did early in the war. The follow on troops had a hard time keeping up with the more mobile armored and mechanized troops. There was also the failure of logistics.
A famous general once said, amateurs study strategy and tactics, professionals study logistics.
An army cannot fight for long no matter how good its tactics if it does not have ammunition, food and fuel. That stopped Napoleon and it stopped Hitler too.
By 1943, the Russians had learned the lessons the Germans had taught them to a degree. Napoleon once said, “Do not fight the same enemy too often, or you will teach them all your art of war.” This caused the down fall of the Spartans and the Germans too. All Germany’s enemies eventually learned what the Germans had to teach and actually went one better improving on things, but not always.
The Russians still did not put radios in every tank or airplane which led to horrendous losses. Tanks still communicated using flags. The tanks with antennae were the command tanks and the Germans knew this and they were the first ones to be destroyed leaving the rest leaderless.
Russian Infantry tactics were like those used in WWI: human wave. They had lots of poorly trained soldiers and attacked with overwhelming numbers. The Germans could not kill them fast enough. Even machine guns have to replace their barrels after a while. It is not surprising that 30 million Russians died in the war. They even executed their own POWs under the belief that their surrender was traitorous. Communist Commissars executed the equivalent of at least a division of troops (10,000) for failure to press home attacks or defeatism.
Infantry
German small unit tactics evolved around the medium machine gun. The MG34 and later MG42 were used as a base of fire, the remainder of the German infantry squad was in support of it and used to defend it on the defensive. On the offensive, the MG laid down fire and the German infantry squad maneuvered to flank and destroy the enemy. This worked so well it is the foundation of the US infantry squad today, only now our squads are divided into two fire teams, of two medium machine guns and supporting troops. The old M-60 US machine gun was actually a near copy of the German MG42 which the German army still uses today.
The US and British infantry used squads based on light machine guns too, such as the Bren gun and the BAR. They were used differently and not as effectively as the Germans. The Germans learned that superior firepower was key to pinning and holding enemy forces while the squad maneuvered. They could achieve this even though the bulk of the squad was equipped with bolt action rifles. The one MG made up the difference. The US squad could hold its own with one BAR and 11 semi auto Garands.
The Japanese army had its doctrine based solely on light infantry tactics supplemented by machine guns, but was outclassed in firepower by most western armies and resorted to defensive warfare for most of the war after 1941. They learned they could not stand up to the massive firepower that the US forces could bring to bear, so resorted to underground defensive tactics fighting from caves.
The Italians copied the Germans but never did as well due to poor equipment and fewer resources.
Artillery
The US army developed the most sophisticated artillery doctrine of the war. Sure the Russians and Germans and Brits had artillery, but they still used doctrine and tactics developed in previous wars.
The Russians just fired massive barrages. The US Army developed On Time On Target. This was coordinating fires from multiple batteries to land on target all at the same time. The Germans had never seen anything as devastating and fear it. What it amounted to was guns were fired such that all or nearly all the round hit at the same time in the same target area, blanketing the target. Not like the movies where you see the hero running through artillery blasts like a football player running down field. The rounds would hit all at once such that there was no where TO run.
In WWII there were still preparatory barrages fired to soften up an objective before an attack went in, but nothing like in WWI. In the Pacific war islands were bombarded for days and weeks by Naval and Air forces, and even army artillery landed on smaller adjacent islands in order to soften up the enemy defenses, but it was usually yielded poor results as the Japanese defenses lay beneath the ground.
Amphibious Doctrine, Operations and tactics
The allies, specifically the US and British developed specialized tactics that the enemy did not. They perfected amphibious tactics used at Normandy, and in the Pacific. The US Marines and Army refined amphibious operations to a fine art in the Pacific, where the US Army under Gen. MacArthur commanding had one of the largest navies in the world under its control solely to stage the many amphibious assaults that it undertook in New Guinea and the Philippines. This bothered the US Navy who was doing the same thing in the Central Pacific under Adm. Nimitz.
In the 1920’s the US Marines studied landing on islands for the navy for reasons described below…to capture islands for coaling stations. They developed a tracked landing vehicle called the LVT.
The Higgins boat, was also developed I believe by a Brit, the familiar landing craft with the front ramp.
These were improved and developed for use as amphibious assault craft and used to land on beaches and cross rivers.
Larger purpose built vessels were also designed by the Brits and built by the Americans…LST- landing ship tank; LCI- Landing Craft Infantry; LCT- Landing Craft Tank, the list goes on and on.
The basic operational doctrine for an amphibious assault was:
Obtain air superiority over the beaches.
Naval and air bombardment
Beach clearing
Amphibious assault to capture existing air strips or sites suitable for strip construction
Deploy land based air forces
Securing of the island and build up for next assault.
The Germans, Russians, Italians or Japanese never developed a similar capability, doctrine or tactics.
The Japanese did employ an infantry landing barge early in the war but never really developed a mature doctrine. That is why at Guadalcanal they suffered their first defeat. They were unable to resupply or reinforce their troops and they starved and died of disease, something repeated over and over during the war.
The Germans failed to capture Malta because of weak amphibious doctrine and capability.
Their air assault of Crete gutted their airborne forces and they were not willing to risk another “victory” that was as costly.
Airborne doctrine and tactics.
All the major combatants had airborne troops. The Japanese and Italians never made a large scale parachute assault. The Germans were the first to use them when they captured the Dutch fortress of Eban Emel early in the war using airborne and glider borne troops.
The US and British followed suit. The Russians too.
The Germans wasted a large portion of their airborne forces capturing Crete. Their doctrine was weak and their equipment their transports and gliders were not very good. The US and Brits employed large scale drops at least four times in Europe and the US executed at least three parachute assaults in the Pacific. The first assaults suffered large losses: up to 40% on Normandy. Doctrine was refined and changes made.
The Russians made at least one major use of paratroops in attempting a major river crossing.
In most cases, if the assault was at night, pathfinders would go in first to guide in the remaining planes with marker lights. Day time assaults would have paratroops land first to secure the drop zones and glider borne airborne infantry would then land as reinforcements with heavier weapons and equipment.
Air Power.
The US and Britain saw air power as a strategic weapon. They both thought that its use could defeat a nations means and will to fight by strategic bombing of factories and cities, reducing the morale of the population and the enemies means to fight.
The Germans, Japanese and Russians and Italians, saw air power as purely a tactical weapon. Something to help the army. This explains why none of them produced heavy bombers or engaged in strategic bombing. Another reason is that their industrial base could not support the effort. They were all busy producing fighter planes and medium bombers and could not afford the expense and resources to produce heavy bombers. The US produced three different heavy bombers during the war, the B-17, B-24 and B-29. The B-29 cost almost double to research and produce than the Manhattan Project that produced the two atomic bombs.
The US and Britain used air power both for strategic goals and for tactical goals. Tactical use of air power is using it like flying artillery, to help the ground forces. The Germans were the first to perfect this. The Americans, British and Russians followed and adopted similar tactics by converting and later building aircraft specifically for ground attack.
All major powers used fighter or pursuit planes for defense and offense. It took years before aerial tactics and strategy were worked out by the US and British. It was finally determined that the best way to defeat the Japanese and German air forces were not to attack the factories that built the planes, but to attack the planes. So the US Army Air corp goaded the germans to fight and over a series of months in 1944 decimated the number of german pilots through attrition. Soon all the experience german pilots were dead or so reduced in number that they could not put up much resistance to the vast number of pilots and machines that the Brits and Americans could field. The US alone was training 15,000 pilots a year. The Japanese Navy trained around 400 a year! American pilots returned home after 25-30 missions to help train new pilots. German and Japanese pilots fought until they died and only trained those new pilots that were under their command. So when one was killed, invaluable knowledge was lost.
Specific tactics used in Europe by the air forces were heavy bombers would bomb a target in daylight. The British prefered at night since daylight raids suffered higher casualties. US bombers were more heavily armed but still suffered large casualties until an escort fighter was developed with sufficient range to accompany the bombers to help protect them. Later in the war when the German air force was helpless, after the bombers dropped their bombs, the fighters would engage in search and destroy missions called sweeps to strafe any targets they encountered on the way home.
Medium bombers and fighter bombers were used to attack bridges, airfields and ground forces.
On a few occasions heavy bombers were employed to bomb tactical targets prior to large ground offensives.
The air tactics used in the Pacific were a bit different. Air bases would be established in range of the next target, either an island or enemy air base. Bombing and fighter sweeps would establish air superiority then ground forces would move in and invade to capture the air field and the whole process would start again. The land based aircraft could also see out and destroy any ships sent by the enemy to attempt reenforcemnt of threatened bases.
The US strove first for air superiority, then air supremacy. By 1945 the US had achieved Air Supremacy in both Europe and the Pacific. Our aircraft could fly anywhere at any time.
When air bases were captured close enough to Japan to allow large scale strategic bombing of the Japanese homelands to commence, factories and bases were first targeted. This proved fruitless since their industry was dispersed. Tactics were changed and areal bombing was adopted to burn out large areas of cities to destroy the small industrial shops and displace the population. High altitude attacks like those employed in Europe were first used , then tactics were changed so the B-29’s flew low and dropped incendiary bombs saving fuel and carrying larger bomb loads.
Eventually the Atomic Bomb was employed ending the war.
Naval Doctrine and tactics
I discussed this a bit earlier.
The British, American and Japanese navies were all about domination of the seas using battleships and carriers. The Germans had a navy, but they emphasized commerce raiding using surface ships because they could not face and compete with the British Fleet. The British had sunk a lot of the French fleet after the French surrender to prevent it from being handed over to the Germans. The Italians had a good fleet but were afraid to put it in harms way.
Submarine Doctrine and Tactics.
The major navies saw submarines as yet another way to sink surface warships. The Germans were the only combatant at first who saw the submarine as a strategic weapon and employed it against the merchant shipping upon which Britain relied so heavily for importing just about everything. They did this in WWI too. But they had better, quieter and faster subs in WWII and nearly brought Britain to her knees.
The US decided to copy German doctrine in the Pacific and attacked Japanese merchant vessels and by the wars end had sunk just about every merchant ship larger than a canoe that the Japanese had.
The Japanese never attacked American transports because their doctrine said submarines were for sinking enemy warships. So thousands of transports crossed the Pacific virtually immune from attack. The Japanese sent transports unescorted until late in the war when they adopted a convoy system but the damage had been done.
Russian, Italian and British submarines fought in the N. Atlantic, Mediterranean and Baltic but were confined to attacking warships and the odd merchant vessel. A Russian sub sunk a civilian transport loaded with thousands of German refugees late in the war fleeing East Prussia from the invading Russians. Most drown or froze to death.
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