June 1815 and June 1940

At Waterloo when Napoleon sent a dispatch rider back to Paris with a message saying the battle of Waterloo was won for France he complained of feeling ill and took a nap after placing Ney in command without giving him any specific orders. Wellington’s next move (designed to be seen by a Napoleon who was now asleep) was to allow his weakest troops to run from the centre of the field and move stronger troops from the flanks towards the centre to encourage Napoleon to think the centre was collapsing. What he will have been hoping Napoleon would then do is attack up the centre - yet again - using infantry. The ground there was too muddy there to deploy any of his considerable cavalry advantage, which he had not used all day. Instead Ney made a move which would only have been the right move if the centre was really in collapse and Wellington's army about to panic and flee: he sent in all of the French cavalry without infantry support. Wellington’s infantry formed squares which cavalry cannot break.

If Ney had attacked with a reasonably large force of cavalry with infantry support the French infantry would then have been able to deploy as a line. It would have decimated the British squares since the square is an easy target to hit even with inaccurate Napoleonic war muskets whilst only one side of the square can fire back at the line, a much more difficult target to hit. Wellington would have been forced to use cavalry to shift the French line and enable his squares to redeploy. (A square cannot redeploy under fire as the square is the last resort position adopted only when the only alternative is death, i.e. being run down by cavalry.) But since Napoleon had an overwhelming cavalry advantage and plenty of infantry this tactic could have been repeated until Wellington had run out of cavalry to shift the French infantry. But instead Ney threw all of the French cavalry in at once (and threw the battle away in so doing) as cavalry cannot break squares and can hardly ever be regrouped in time to be used more than once in a single battle.

Then Blucher arrived. If he hadn’t Wellington could have reduced the Chateau with his artillery and defeated the other remaining French forces (all infantry) since he still had infantry and heavy cavalry and Napoleon by then had none. Game set and match Wellington! This is why Clausewitz in Das Krieg, written to try and analyse why Prussian militarism and its forces had been so devastatingly defeated at Jena, argues that - however strong your position may be - you will throw it all away if you make the fatal mistake of attacking a strongly defended enemy position with cavalry without infantry support. According to Clausewitz if you do this, you lose. Game over.

Now what does all this have to do with June 1940?
 
In a rather frustrating book by Timothy Ryback called Hitler’s Private Library (the remains of which are now in The Library of Congress) Ryback notes that Hitler’s copy of Das Krieg by Clausewitz is heavily annotated and well-thumbed with quite a lot of marginalia. But he does not say which passages are underlined or what comments Hitler makes about which sections of the book! Hitler had this book with him in the Felsens Nest in June 1940 when the invasion of France was underway. I may not know which passages Hitler underlined but I can make a pretty good guess…

In June 1940 Guderian, in his memoirs Panzer Leader, says Hitler radioed him and asked him to stop outside Dunkirk and wait for the infantry to catch up. Guderian, who had a couple of SS Panzer divisions with him, thought this was crazy and radioed Hitler back to say that the British were sitting ducks on the beach, had no-where to run to, and had almost no heavy weapons. He should move in and annihilate the British! However, Hitler once again insisted that he stop and wait for the infantry. Guderian complied and the British were able to evacuate 330,000 troops. Perhaps Churchill would have been fired and the towel would have been thrown in had this turned out differently. Britain under Lord Halifax might have signed an armistice and not had the nerve or the confidence to fight the Battle of Britain if the rescue act at Dunkirk had not been allowed to happen.

Hitler’s great mistake in 1940 in France was to misread Clausewitz and identify Panzers with cavalry instead of artillery. Cavalry must never attack a strongly defended position without infantry support, as Ney found out to his cost. But as long as you have air superiority tanks are an unstoppable force of mobile artillery which can obliterate almost anything in front of them all on their own. Mobile artillery does not need infantry support.

So June 1940 was strangely like June 1815! From Napoleon’s point of view, if only Ney had not sent in the cavalry all on its own… From Hitler’s standpoint, if only Guderian had turned a deaf ear and sent the Panzers in without waiting for the infantry…

It was incompetent British generals who made more or less the same mistake in 1944. In Operation Market Garden British tanks crossed Nijmegen Bridge and were then told to wait for the infantry rather than moving to support British troops in Arnhem! In 1940 it was an incompetent German politician who prevented a superior German general from doing what he wanted to do.

Sometimes what is said and done before 1900 has a direct impact on what happens after 1900!
 
Please make your posts more succinct so that we can understand the point you're trying to make and start a discussion.

Most people see history as a progression - or timeline - that gradually involves and changes over time. Probably because we experience moving through chronological time as a smooth progression. Or do we? What about memory? What about the way we rediscover things? We remember and forget and sometimes pretend we never have. What about the way we retrospectively reinterpret history to make it meaningful in terms of what we think is going on now? I see history as being just as much a series of jump-cuts as a timeline.

Discuss! If you wish...

P.S. I did actually try to be as succinct as I could in describing the jump-cut I mention in the first two posts.
 
In a rather frustrating book by Timothy Ryback called Hitler’s Private Library (the remains of which are now in The Library of Congress) Ryback notes that Hitler’s copy of Das Krieg by Clausewitz is heavily annotated and well-thumbed with quite a lot of marginalia. But he does not say which passages are underlined or what comments Hitler makes about which sections of the book! Hitler had this book with him in the Felsens Nest in June 1940 when the invasion of France was underway. I may not know which passages Hitler underlined but I can make a pretty good guess…

In June 1940 Guderian, in his memoirs Panzer Leader, says Hitler radioed him and asked him to stop outside Dunkirk and wait for the infantry to catch up. Guderian, who had a couple of SS Panzer divisions with him, thought this was crazy and radioed Hitler back to say that the British were sitting ducks on the beach, had no-where to run to, and had almost no heavy weapons. He should move in and annihilate the British! However, Hitler once again insisted that he stop and wait for the infantry. Guderian complied and the British were able to evacuate 330,000 troops. Perhaps Churchill would have been fired and the towel would have been thrown in had this turned out differently. Britain under Lord Halifax might have signed an armistice and not had the nerve or the confidence to fight the Battle of Britain if the rescue act at Dunkirk had not been allowed to happen.

Hitler’s great mistake in 1940 in France was to misread Clausewitz and identify Panzers with cavalry instead of artillery. Cavalry must never attack a strongly defended position without infantry support, as Ney found out to his cost. But as long as you have air superiority tanks are an unstoppable force of mobile artillery which can obliterate almost anything in front of them all on their own. Mobile artillery does not need infantry support.

So June 1940 was strangely like June 1815! From Napoleon’s point of view, if only Ney had not sent in the cavalry all on its own… From Hitler’s standpoint, if only Guderian had turned a deaf ear and sent the Panzers in without waiting for the infantry…

It was incompetent British generals who made more or less the same mistake in 1944. In Operation Market Garden British tanks crossed Nijmegen Bridge and were then told to wait for the infantry rather than moving to support British troops in Arnhem! In 1940 it was an incompetent German politician who prevented a superior German general from doing what he wanted to do.

Sometimes what is said and done before 1900 has a direct impact on what happens after 1900!
This is very interesting (and well know with quite a few additional examples available) but where is alternative history part? You know, “... what if?” thing.
 
This is very interesting (and well know with quite a few additional examples available) but where is alternative history part? You know, “... what if?” thing.

To be fair, not every thread here has to be about alternate history rather than discussing details about OTL. Still, that's the key word: discussion. I'm not sure what there is for the rest of us to engage with here.
 

Derek Pullem

Kicked
Donor
The premise is that tanks do not equal cavalry. Actually I would argue that the analogy is reasonably valid and certainly in WW2 tanks were often mauled when they outran their infantry.

Hitler and XXX Corps mistake was not misunderstanding the vulnerability of tanks - it was overestimating the organisation of the infantry blocking forces ahead of them. Ney knew that the troops he was facing were organised and still attacked. Hitler and XXX corps assumed the troops were organised and didn't. Not incompetence - merely caution / poor intelligence.
 
To be fair, not every thread here has to be about alternate history rather than discussing details about OTL. Still, that's the key word: discussion. I'm not sure what there is for the rest of us to engage with here.

Well, due to the obvious fact that Hitler is post-1900, most of the controversial part belongs to a different forum. Of course, Ney's mistakes at Waterloo had been extensively commented upon (including Shliffen's "Cannae") but a sad fact that his main virtue was bravery and not brains probably is not debatable. So, unless we are going to expand the scope to something broader along the lines of "how much damage can be caused by an energetic fool?", I quite agree with your conclusion. ;)
 
Not sure what there is to engage with? Perhaps I should've made it explicit then.

Being British and old enough to have parents who lived through WWII I find myself meeting friends of a similar age in pubs and discussing June 1940 all over again once the beer has started flowing like wine. Why? After all, we've already done it quite a few times before. It hasn't really got much to do with what might have happened immediately after Hitler radioed Guderian to wait for the infantry if he'd actually turned a deaf ear and taken Dunkirk anyway. In other words, I'm not so much interested in the timeline. It doesn't really seem to effect me. It's a jump cut to an imaginary present that interests me, an imaginary present in which I have a Germanic name, speak German as a first language (which I would love to do in order to read Faust and all that Niebulungen stuff in the original) and is one of those "Isn't it weird?" conversations that sometimes happen round the bar. To me the "what if?" question doesn't link an actual past event to a hypothetical one, it links a hypothetical past event to an imaginable but unreal present. But maybe that's just my way of looking at things. It's why, in Britain, books like Fatherland and SSGB became bestsellers but then again maybe that's all a bit old hat these days.
 
Top