Which WWII Officer/General is your role model?

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 12:52 PMvan Voort

Wrong

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 12:52 PM__deleted__

To cut a very long story short, Peiper was a very disturbing character even by the standards of the SS....

As for his leadership and tactical qualification, he undoubtedly eventually became a skilled SPW bataillon leader, gaining a number of significant successes especially with night attacks on the Eastern Front. However, when he assumed command of the Leibstandarte tank regiment, his limitations became obvious as he had no experience or training in handling tank formations and reputedly proved little tactical adroit. In consequence, lossess soared to completely unacceptable levels, making him quite unpopular with both his men and his fellow commanders.

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 12:56 PM__deleted__

Sigh.

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 13:49 PM__deleted__

Interestingly, he seems to have adopted that policy after reading a book on Genghis Khan which was required literature at the Junkerschule, the intent being apparently to sow terror, believing if he build enough of a "reputation" the Soviets would take to their heels if his bataillon showed up on the horizon...

Agte, well. Little if any actual scholarship, and an obvious political agenda...

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 14:32 PMvan Voort

Neither Rommel not Montgomery fought in a vacuum, both had to deal with politics and pressures and lobby for resource allocation, albeit in different ways.
True but trivial. What matter is not what they both necessarily had to do, but what obstacles they had to overcome, what problems they had to contend with, respectively. The hurdles encountered by Montgomery, both economical and political, were literally negligible in comparison to the ones facing Rommel. At no point during the campaign did Montgomery or any of his predecessors not operate from a position of considerably greater strength, through little effort of their own if I may add. This is literally the elephant in the room and I don't see how it can possibly be plausibly ignored.
Montgomery had to deal with Churchill wanting him to move before he was ready and bolstering the morale and training of an army that had been kicked around. In this he was entirely successful.

Rommel was given an economy of force mission and chose to exceed his orders in an attempt to win a victory and suck an ever-increasing amount of Axis effort into a peripheral theatre where victory, even if possible, could never be decisive and at the cost of weakening the Axis effort in the Eastern Front where the war was going to be decided*.
Rommels' was an economy of force mission alright, however, the Italians had different plans to start with, if only because it was their main theater of operations, and they had been kicked around so resoundingly they perceived IMHO correctly they were in dire need of operational success to gain prestige at the home front lest all remaining support for the war effort crumbled. Not to mention, what was the alternative in strategic terms? The British would only ever get relatively stronger, and if you look at the North African map and how the campaign was conducted, how could Rommel possibly hope to conduct a strategic defense or spoiling campaign, what terrain features could he possibly hope to hinge these on? The Cyrenaika? What would you have him do? Hunker down in Tobruk? How did that work out for the South Africans? The point I am making is not that his strong instinct to go on the offensive result necessarily in the better course of action, just that he was between a rock and a hard place to start with, while his opponents were not...

To argue that generalship consists purely of the narrow technical business of defeating the enemy in front of you with the resources you happen to have been allocated is myopic, and also the same attitude displayed the German Generals in both world wars. This wins them lots of battles and gets them lots of fanboys but doesn't win wars.
First off, there are obviously different echelons of generalship. Commanding a division or even an Army Corps is a very different business than conducting grand strategy. Secondly, what do you make of the already mentioned Hindenburg/Ludendorff? They seem to contradict your verdict entirely, as do people like Beck or Fritsch or Blomberg who, being at the highest echelons of military commanded, actively tried to dissuade the leadership from its aggressive course and even plotted to kill their CiC when they realised he was not to be reasoned with, who in short, were being politicians in every sense of the word?
To conclude: What lost the Germans both the first and the second world wars at the moment they started, were not at least primarily deficits in either their command cultures or their generalship, or a lack of military efficiency for that matter, as evidenced by the duration of the conflict. By far the largest factor in the German defeat was the entirely political decision, made by politicians, to go to war with half the world at the same time.

* It was good for Rommel that he got sent to North Africa, as he got to indulge his insubordination in a peripheral theatre without too much oversight. His reputation also gets bolstered as he kicked the British around and fought the Americans in the only ETO theatre that either had at the time. That doesn't make him the best man for the job. Had Paulus gone instead that would have been very different.

Meh, strikes me as petty character assassination coupled with ignorance of German military matters, no offence.
What you call "insubordination", aka, taking the initiative and exceeding or even contradicting orders when they were not appropriate, was actively encouraged in the German tradition, and it paid them more dividends than it ever damaged them as evidenced ie. during Fall Gelb. Of course later on with the more Soviet style, late war centralised command culture, where shortening a front for more than 500 meters required a written approval from the GröFaz himself, German military fortunes soared. And yes, I am being sarcastic.
Paulus did not possess the courage to stand up to Hitler and shorten his fronts when dangerously overextended, and then even worse not make a breakout effort against his own better judgement sealing the fate of an entire army. In his defence, he did not kill himself, spoiling Hitlers bizarre craving for some Götterdämmerung narrative at the expense of his soldiery... still, how do you think would he have managed the inevitable retreat from the African theater?

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 14:51 PMcoh2player

I am more interested in is military effectiveness as 1.SSLAH played major roles in late war operations. The rest I couldn't care less for. Pz General Balck wrote a high opinion on the 1.SS's, military effectiveness in the Ukraine 43/44..including the Pz Regiment. This is the opposite of the Jens W. narrative. The Parker/Jens books are opinionated themselves- they both clearly find the man morbid and their research is spun in that direction. The Parker book has little substance about military operations. I dislike the genre of biography and personality crafting as there is too much speculation in it with the Parker book being very "elaborate" in discussing his personal life. All in all, he is not really worth the attention that has been placed on him- just another SS criminal.

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 12:52 PM__deleted__

As to Jochen Peiper, there is a fairly recent biographical dissertation (2014) on him from Jens Westemeier which I would urge reading. A few things:
Peiper was in deep with the Nazi hierarchy, he had been Himmlers adjutant and had explicit knowledge of Aktion T4 and later the Shoah. Heck, his own brother was very likely murdered in T4 but that seems not to have overly disturbed him, and I could go on here. While he has gained some notoriety for Malmedy, where, while having command responsibility, he quite likely did not play any direct role btw, he demonstrably had PoWs murdered in cold blood by the hundreds as a matter of policy over several months on the Eastern Front, to the point where that alarmed his own peers and superiors. To cut a very long story short, Peiper was a very disturbing character even by the standards of the SS....

As for his leadership and tactical qualification, he undoubtedly eventually became a skilled SPW bataillon leader, gaining a number of significant successes especially with night attacks on the Eastern Front. However, when he assumed command of the Leibstandarte tank regiment, his limitations became obvious as he had no experience or training in handling tank formations and reputedly proved little tactical adroit. In consequence, lossess soared to completely unacceptable levels, making him quite unpopular with both his men and his fellow commanders.

True but trivial. What matter is not what they both necessarily had to do, but what obstacles they had to overcome, what problems they had to contend with, respectively. The hurdles encountered by Montgomery, both economical and political, were literally negligible in comparison to the ones facing Rommel. At no point during the campaign did Montgomery or any of his predecessors not operate from a position of considerably greater strength, through little effort of their own if I may add. This is literally the elephant in the room and I don't see how it can possibly be plausibly ignored.

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 21:14 PMvan Voort

Even if I were to accept that "At no point during the campaign did Montgomery or any of his predecessors not operate from a position of considerably greater strength" , which I don't, the fact would remain that everybody before Montgomery didn't beat Rommel.
That might just have been because Rommel was not all that comically inept as you make him out to be.
Also, I don't see why you would not accept the premise. I don't recall any situation after the success of Compass/arrival of the DAK where the Allies did not possess an overall favourable manpower/AFV/logistics heck anything situation.
You'd be underestimating the pressure Montgomery has on him:

He is the British General commanding the only British land effort against the Germans and everyone of his predecessors has failed.
I dont underestimate the pressure on him in the least. However, there are perks to soldiering in a democratic nation. If he had failed, his professional reputation (which he so jealously guarded) might have somewhat suffered, and/or the court of public opinion (which he pandered to even more) might have ripped him a new one for being the n-th general to not succeed against the much mystified Rommel.
In the so-called Third Reich however, leaders who found themselves in an unsalvageable situation were, somewhat literally, expected to fall upon their swords, a fate, that as you might recall befell a certain Friedrich Paulus come spring 1943. And if their was a whiff of disloyalty, your decision to put your pistol in your mouth might just be helped along by threatening to kill your family, as just so happened to Rommel; and Rommel had been a personal favourite of Hitler and a darling of the German propaganda effort to boot.
Just to, as they say, keep it real, when it comes to the notion of pressure.


Base off Tripoli, hit the British as he does initially while they off balance. Don't try and push into Egypt but keep mobile in the desert - fall back onto your own lines if necessary and let logistics work against the British. Don't get sucked into a set piece battle that plays to British strengths when you are at the end of a tenuous supply line and they are not.
Oh yes, with the benefit of historical hindsight I agree that the push on Egypt was certainly a mistake. However, how much time would that have bought? With the strategical situation being as it was, Malta remaining in British hands, and the weight of the US making itself felt? Two months? Three at the most? Yes, Rommel obviously commits mistakes (and El-Alamein was not his first one either), but so does ie. Montgomery, not to mention his predecessors. Why does Montgomery allow DAK to escape in the first place? The campaign might have easily been over then and there, he had the resources, the reserves, and ample capacity to interdict aerially. On balance, what made Rommel become so lionised was that he simply continued to archieve much with little, whereas his opponents did not.

Italian glory is not Germany's problem and nothing you achieve in North Africa will help you if you don't beat the Soviets. Every truck, plane and tank that goes to Africa takes away from that.
True, but did you not (IMHO rightly so) bemoan a German lack of perceptiveness for the political desiderata of coalition warfare? Italian glory is very much Germany's problem when you have Commando Supremo breathing down your neck, not to mention the question of the overall strategic balance. What is the worth of an ongoing actual Italian war effort compared to 2 armoured divisions worth of supply and logistics? Strikes me as a difficult question to answer.



H&L's record as German leaders is terrible, and rather than take responsibility for their failure they bought wholeheartedly into the "stab in the back" myth.
Was it? At what level if I may ask, and compared to whom exactly? Their operational performance and strategic dispositions strike me as certainly fairly sound, and sometimes outright spectacular, their major mistake at the political level obviously being not pushing for negotiated peace when it still might have been within reach. The fact that Ludendorff was a dishonest Schmuck should not cloud our ability to assess his operational, strategical, or economical merits for what they were.

Both Fritsch nor Blomberg are conspired against, not conspirators.

Beck is regrettably an almost unique case.


More later

Jump back to quoted post5 May 2015, 18:13 PM__deleted__

Do you speak German? There was a recent lengthy exchange between Westemeier and Roman Töppel of MGFA fame on just that matter, plus the proceedings of the symposion the W-SS have recently been touched upon where the question of its military efficiency during the Kursk operation was discussed at some length, and might be of interest to you. In my opinion, it appears that LSSAH and indeed the entire II. SS-Panzerkorps were at the peak of their efficiency through 1943 and spring 1944 until their losses in the Ukraine became too severe, and that in this timeframe, they were at least the equal of comparable Heer formations including GD. Afterwards, their showings appear much more indifferent.
Personally, I think that Westemeiers personal dislike for Peiper, however understandable, sometimes indeed gets the better of his judgement when it comes to the latters strictly military performance, however, I find his case for Peipers ineptitude in handling tank formations quite convincing, as he brings up quite a number of primary sources showing Peiper in a rather unfavourable light.
I haven't read Balcks account or at least I can't recall, could you post a source?

Jump back to quoted post7 May 2015, 13:24 PMcoh2player

This is actually wrong (Parker's bio goes into it). You seem to be parroting the neo-nazi version of Peiper. There is hard evidence that he ordered an American POW killed right in front of him. His command of KG Peiper was a big fail and his force only lasted over a week before being wiped out with most of men casualties. You may be forgetting that many SS wounded were with the Americans, and Peiper had good reason to radically alter his behavior. Peiper, although he was a convicted criminal & mass murderer of civilians and Soviet/American pows, had many friends in the SS that hooked him up with a good job after prison and it can be said that he was a "upper middle class" and then actually a well-off man who lived in a villa.

As far as his death, there is evidence that he severely depressed and then committed suicide. Get the Parker book if you are interested in the man.

Jump back to quoted post7 May 2015, 18:35 PMvan Voort

Basically Germans are very good at winning battles, not so hot at deciding which battles should be fought and terrible at winning wars.