No Substitute for Victory by David Rigby

Author:David Rigby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carrel Books
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ENEMY MISTAKES

American military forces have benefited from the mistakes made by enemy forces in several different wars. In World War II, for instance, the German troops involved in Hitler’s Ardennes offensive, the Battle of the Bulge, made considerable progress for a week after the battle began on December 16, 1944. Ultimately, however, the Battle of the Bulge ended as a major Allied victory that greatly reduced what was left of Hitler’s already rapidly dwindling military strength. Hitler’s biggest mistake in this instance was to undertake that offensive at all, especially since by December 1944 the German Air Force had been almost completely destroyed and could provide little in the way of air cover. Thus, German troops in the Ardennes offensive could only advance while the weather was bad. Once the skies cleared on December 23, 1944, the overwhelming air power that the Americans and the British were able to bring to bear changed the course of the battle almost immediately. German supply lines were highly vulnerable to low level Allied air attack; a situation of which Allied pilots took full advantage. The Allies also used their vast fleet of cargo aircraft to drop supplies to the beleaguered American infantry within and facing “the Bulge.”

It does not seem to have occurred to Hitler that the Allies in 1944 would not behave as had the French when Hitler’s forces broke through the French lines in almost the same area in 1940. Namely, historians such as Omer Bartov have pointed out that the German victory over France in 1940 was not inevitable. The ground forces on each side were quite evenly matched in that campaign. What made the difference in 1940 was the German willingness to utilize new tactics: keeping all of their tanks together in armored divisions which could achieve a quick breakthrough—ably assisted by strong tactical air strikes furnished by the Luftwaffe.1 Along with these new “Blitzkrieg” tactics, the Germans held a psychological advantage in 1940. Young German soldiers in 1940 had been so heavily indoctrinated with Nazi ideology while they were in the Hitler Youth before the war that according to Bartov “conscription was not experienced as a move to a fundamentally different environment.”2 It is true that the German people as a whole were not delighted to find themselves at war in 1939, in stark contrast to the cheering crowds that had celebrated the outbreak of war in 1914.3 Nevertheless, young German soldiers in 1940 were deeply affected by having spent their teenage years reading about, and listening to, Hitler’s glorification of struggle.4 This Nazi idea that war and struggle were supposedly “good” things was a very different message from what young French and British soldiers were being taught in the late 1930s.

On a more specific note in terms of psychology, the French and the British were still “fighting the last war” in 1940. Thinking in terms of World War I, the French and British commanders on the scene during Hitler’s offensive in the west

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