Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

A second theory which paralyzed the Western Powers in the years before World War II was concerned with the superiority of defensive over offensive tactics. This defensive theory, of which the Englishman Basil Liddell Hart was the most voluble proponent, assumed that attack would be made in lines, as the Western Powers themselves were trained to attack, and that such an attack would be very unlikely to succeed because of the great increase in firepower of modern weapons. It was argued, on the basis of the experience of World War I, that machine guns could hold up advancing infantry indefinitely and that artillery fire, carefully placed and ranged so that it could cover the field, could prevent tanks from silencing the defensive machine guns to allow infantry to advance.

The Maginot Line was based on these theories. As such, it was not a defense in depth (which would seek to break up offensive columns by allowing them to penetrate to varying depths, thus separating tanks, infantry, and artillery so that each could be dealt with by proper weapons as impetus was dispersed), but was a rigid line (which sought to stop the offensive lines in front of it, as a whole).

The theory of defensive superiority left the military forces of the Western states with inadequate offensive training, poor offensive morale, and unable to come to the help of distant allies (like Poland); it put a premium on a passive, indecisive, inactive military outlook (such as shown by Pétain or Gamelin in the years leading up to 1940) and left them unable to handle any real offensive when it came against them. The theory of continuous defensive lines, which must be kept intact or instantly reestablished whenever they are breached, created a psychology which was incapable of dealing with an assault which came at it in columns and inevitably must breach any defensive line at the point of impact. When this occurred in 1940, French military units threw down their arms or tried to make a precipitous retreat to some point where a new continuous line could be established. As a consequence, the Poles in 1939 and, to a greater extent, the French in 1940, were constantly abandoning positions from which they had not been driven, until units were too broken up to allow hope of reestablishing any continuous line, and France proved to be too small to permit continued retreat. The only alternative seemed to be surrender. As we shall see later, another, highly effective, alternative was discovered, mostly in Russia, by 1942.

In the interwar period there was a third theory, violently disputed, about the effectiveness of air power. In its most extreme form, this theory held that the chief cities of Europe could be destroyed almost completely in the first twenty-four hours of a war, devastated by high-explosive bombs and rendered uninhabitable by gas attacks from the air. This theory, frequently associated with the name of the Italian General Giulio Douhet, was much more prevalent in civilian circles than in military ones, and played an important role in persuading the British and French peoples to accept the Munich Agreement. Like most farfetched ideas, it was supported more frequently by slogans than by logic or by facts, in this case by mottoes like, “The bombers will always get through.” The chief facts to support the theory were to be found in the Spanish Civil War, notably in the German destruction of Guernica in 1937 and the ruthless Italian bombardment of Barcelona in 1938. No one paid much attention to the fact that, in both of these cases, the targets were totally undefended.

The military advocates of such air bombardment, most of them considerably more moderate than General Douhet, concentrated their attention on what was called “strategic bombing,” that is, on the construction of long-range bombing planes for use against industrial targets and other civilian objectives and on very fast fighter planes for defense against such bombers. They generally belittled the effectiveness of antiaircraft artillery and were generally warm advocates of an air force separately organized and commanded and thus not under the direct control of army or naval commanders. These advocates were very influential in Britain and in the United States.

The upholders of strategic bombing received little encouragement in Germany, in Russia, or even in France, because of the dominant position held by traditional army officers in all three of these countries. In France, all kinds of air power were generally neglected, while in the other two countries strategic bombing against civilian objectives was completely subordinated in favor of tactical bombing of military objectives immediately on the fighting front. Such tactical bombing demanded planes of a more flexible character, with shorter range than strategic bombers and less speed than defensive fighters, and under the closest control by the local commanders of ground forces so that their bombing efforts could be directed, like a kind of mobile and long-range artillery, at those points of resistance, of supply, or of reserves which would help the ground offensive most effectively. Such “dive-bombers,” or Stukas, played a major role in the early German victories of 1939-1941. Here, again, this superiority was based on quality and method of usage and not on numbers. In the three major campaigns of 1939-1941 Germany had a first-line air force of about 2,000 planes, of which half were fighters and half were tactical bombers. On the other side, Poland had 377 military aircraft in 1939; France and Britain had about 3,500 in 1940; while the Soviet Union had at least 8,000 of very varying quality in 1941.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, ideas about sea power were so generally held and with such firm conviction that they were questioned only occasionally. One of these ideas was that sea power was dominated by big-gun capital ships, all other vessels serving simply as accessories to this backbone of the fleet. A related idea assumed that the area in which a fleet could function effectively was limited by the positions of its major bases, such as Pearl Harbor, Gibraltar, Singapore, Toulon, or Kiel. Another idea, rarely disputed, stated that no landing could be made from the sea on a defended shore. These ideas on the nature and limits of sea power had received only minor challenges in the interwar period, except from the extreme advocates of air power like General William Mitchell of the United States Army Air Force. Such extremists, who insisted that land-based planes could make all battleships (or even all navies) obsolete, did not succeed in convincing the admirals or politicians. In the United States Mitchell was subjected to a court-martial and forced to resign. Although the experiences of the Second World War did not support the extreme advocates of air power, either in respect to the navy or to strategic bombing, the ideas of land warfare and especially of sea warfare which were prevalent in 1939 had to be drastically modified by 1945.

The Battle of Poland, September 1939

The German invasion of Poland began with powerful air attacks at 4:40 a.m. on September 1. These attacks, aimed at airfields, assembly points, and railroads, wiped out the Polish air force of 377 planes, mostly on the ground, and, in combination with the rapidly advancing German armored spearheads of tank divisions, made it impossible for Poland to mobilize completely, crippled Polish reconnaissance, destroyed any centralized system of communications, and reduced Polish resistance to numerous fragments of uncoordinated fighting units. The Poles had 30 infantry divisions, a motorized brigade, 38 companies of tanks, and large masses of cavalry, but could bring only a portion of these into action.

Germany struck at Poland with 2,000 planes (of which 400 were dive-bombers) supporting 44 divisions (of which 6 were armored or panzer divisions and 6 were motorized). These forces were organized into 5 armies. The Fourth Army drove down from Pomerania in the northwest while the Eighth and Tenth armies drove Upward from Saxony, the three converging in a pincers movement at a point west of Warsaw. At the same time, a much larger pincer converging on the Bug River, a hundred miles east of Warsaw, was formed by the German Third Army, advancing from the Polish Corridor and East Prussia, and the German Fourteenth Army driving northeastward from Galicia and Slovakia. The armored divisions, supported by dive-bombers, raced ahead of their supporting infantry and disrupted all Polish plans, communications, and supplies. The Polish forces, caught in too advanced positions, vainly tried to fight their way eastward to the Vistula and the Bug rivers but were broken up, isolated, and destroyed. Violent but hopeless fighting continued in the pockets, but by September 15th, when Guderian’s tanks entered Brest-Litovsk in eastern Poland, the country had been destroyed.