TACTICS: Miles on What Happened

Many a soldier stays publicly mum because he believes laymen too stupid to comprehend the complex art of war. Many a layman believes that soldiers hang on to strategic traditions as a fan dancer does her fan, talk little because they think little and have little to say.

At the Institute of Public Affairs meeting in Charlottesville, Va. last fortnight a thinking soldier talked plain to some think ing laymen when General Sherman Miles confessed that in the past six weeks bright military minds had painfully shed many a long-held preconception, proceeded to analyze the Battle of Flanders and emerged with a big-time military man’s explanation of the success of Germany’s modern war machine — and what could be done about it. Said the U. S. Army’s Assistant Chief of Staff (G2 — Intelligence) and son of the late, great Nelson A. Miles: “In all military history, the balance be tween the defense and the offense has been tilting first one way and then the other.

. . . Beginning roughly with the Boer War, the introduction of rapid-fire small arms and cannon, and later the combination of the entrenched machine-gun and the barbed-wire entanglement, tilted the balance between the defense and the offense markedly in favor of the former. The great stabilized fronts of 1914-18 seemed to emphasize this growing power of the defense. . . . The idea reached its peak in the later writings of Liddell Hart, at one time recognized as the leading British military critic and in his early years an outstanding advocate of the offensive principle of surprise. I do not, of course, mean that any military men have ever given up the principle of the offensive. . . . We have always realized that the offensive alone could bring quick decisions. . . .

But . . . the relative superiority of the defense over the offense appeared to be an established and basic fact. . . .

“The astounding German successes since May loth completely reverse this assumption of the superiority of the defense. . . .

Always under the assumption of the great er power of the defense, the prompt sup port to the Belgians by the Allies . . .

seemed to be a sound military proposition. What ruined the Belgians and the Allies was the almost total uselessness of defensive lines.

“I saw something of the Belgian lines of defense less than a month before May 10th. They were stronger than I had supposed. … I was convinced that no army in the world could break them inside of two weeks. In the event, it was more nearly a matter of two hours.

“I was able to study a certain sector of the ‘Little Maginot Line’ even more closely than the Belgian positions. … I should have said that it was even stronger than the Belgian positions. But it lasted no longer. . . .

“The fact that the Germans were able to break the Belgian positions in two places—where, incidentally, they seemed to be strongest—and the ‘Little Maginot Line,’ is not simply an incidental surprise of this war. Its real meaning is that fundamentally our concepts of basic military facts are proved to be largely in error.

The matter is far broader than mere tactics. It affects, also very seriously, the question of logistics, of supply. The German tactical success, astounding as it is, is less difficult to comprehend than their ability to supply, and to continue to supply, their rapidly moving columns over great distances and throughout very considerable periods of time. I venture to say that hardly any military man in the world, outside of a few in Germany, would have hesitated to say that the German advance from Aachen to Sedan to Abbeville and north to Dunkirk, within the time they actually consumed, was a logistic impossibility in war.

“Accepting the reversal of our fundamental military concept, and accepting the new concept that the offense is infinitely stronger than practically any form of defense — a concept which, I may add, had always been the soldier’s dream — the question is — What is the secret of that offense? As the picture unfolds, it is becoming very plain that the secret of German success does not lie in any weapons unknown to us; that they probably have not even used that uncertain weapon — Chemical Warfare. Aside from their superiority in numbers of all types of weapons and of troops, the real secret of their success lies in the coordination of arms. In accurate timing of the air attack, with bombs, gliders and parachutes; in accurate timing of their mechanized forces, light, heavy and medium; in timing the arrival of their motorized forces which rapidly bring up the supports of Infantry and Artillery from the rear; and even in the accurate timing of the long marches of their heavy foot-columns—in all this, and particularly in the integration of all this, the Germans have proved themselves masters. Nor were they content to integrate solely their military forces. The ‘Fifth Column,’ tried out on the Spanish proving ground, has apparently been remarkably successful. One thing was impressed upon me in Belgium above all others with regard to their defenses—that was the thoroughness with which they had arranged their demolitions to destroy all bridges and culverts on the German line of advance. It was impressed upon me that, contrary to the usual procedure, the bridge and culvert guards charged with firing the explosives had positive orders to throw their switches at the first sight of a German soldier, without reference to any higher authority, even a sergeant. We know now that few, if any, of these bridges and culverts were blown.

. . . The poor devils probably never saw a German soldier, at least not a uniformed one. My guess is that they were shot by gentlemen who looked like simple peasants with pipes in their mouths. . . .

“Now coordination of arms is nothing new. It is what every army has striven for since man first learned to ride a horse, and so evolved a type of soldier differing essentially from the spearsman in the phalanx. And the essence of coordination is training. It is just as simple as that. Just as simple as the essential which makes for perfect coordination between the golfer, his club and his ball.

“To meet the new power of the offense, we must have a better offense. And a better offense means superiority of mobile force and superiority in training. We draw a somewhat false lesson when we say that this is the age of mechanized war. The machine does not think; even superiority in number of weapons promises no success unless they are handled by trained brains.

And in the enormous complexity of a modern army that training, beginning at the bottom, must be carried through all the possible combinations of echelons and of forces which a modern battlefield comprises.

“The great mobility of the air and of the mechanized ground forces suggests a certain analogy to the cavalry of the old days.

Stuart’s raids around the Union Army, for example, were very effective; and the ability of those splendid horsemen to serve as the eyes of their Chief and to blind the enemy counted perhaps still more. The answer to Stuart’s cavalry was simply still better cavalry and more of it. And so in the end, the Confederate horsemen were worn out or ridden down, and the scales were reversed. One can see no other answer to the offensive power of aviation and mechanized forces—almost ruinously expensive as that answer may be—than in having still more and better aviation and tanks.”