Moltke

In his book Infantry Attacks, Chapter 4: Attack in the Charlotte Valley page 58.

The situation is that he found a gap in the French wire and led a platoon or two through. Now the French were advancing on his west and east. His men are low on ammunition.
"Now for a decision! Should we break off the engagement and run back through the narrow passage in the wire entanglement under a heavy cross fire? such a maneuver would, at a minimum, cost fifty percent in casualties. The Alternative was to fire the rest of our ammunition and then surrender. The last resort was out. I had one other line of action: namely, to attack the enemy, disorganize him, and then withdraw. Therein lay our only possible salvation (Rommel 58-59)." Bottom line, his men attacks, pushed the French back and they only had to deal with harassing fire from the east, where they were too far to have any precision in their pop shots.

This is before he was assigned to the mountain battalion
 

SsgtC

Banned
In his book Infantry Attacks, Chapter 4: Attack in the Charlotte Valley page 58.

The situation is that he found a gap in the French wire and led a platoon or two through. Now the French were advancing on his west and east. His men are low on ammunition.
"Now for a decision! Should we break off the engagement and run back through the narrow passage in the wire entanglement under a heavy cross fire? such a maneuver would, at a minimum, cost fifty percent in casualties. The Alternative was to fire the rest of our ammunition and then surrender. The last resort was out. I had one other line of action: namely, to attack the enemy, disorganize him, and then withdraw. Therein lay our only possible salvation (Rommel 58-59)." Bottom line, his men attacks, pushed the French back and they only had to deal with harassing fire from the east, where they were too far to have any precision in their pop shots.

This is before he was assigned to the mountain battalion
Ok, that is a VERY specific situation he was in. It's not like he was sitting within his own lines and needed to withdraw for R&R. He was already leading an attack at the time. And a small scale attack at that. Not really something you can apply to the rest of the front. And at any rate, he was only taking about trying to withdraw to his lines, not withdraw from the field to resupply
 
An army with 320000 men is the bluntest and most unwieldy instrument ans is incapable of the sort of qiick action and precision you describe.
 

FBKampfer

Banned
I suspect the difference would be made not in the final days, but rather at its opening.

With more troops, it's quite possible the Germans advance more quickly (a day or two ahead of OTL perhaps) over the course of the operation.
 
True hehe I suppose so. It doesn' seem to be a rather traditional method of disengaging from combat.
I have not read extensively on this subject but it seems in this scenario the Germans have in fact just crushed or disorganized the armies facing them so they would need the rest to organize as much as the Germans would need to resupply/re-organize/rest.
That is the Rommmel example on a larger scale.
 
The French command structure wasn't broken - and was in fact working much better than the German one. The advantage the Germans often had was on the local level: confronted with a new situation, units up to regiment and brigade generally were acting quicker and with much more determination than their enemy counterparts. That is why meeting engagements usually were won by the Germans. But that didn't stop corps and army commands from sending their men into the wrong direction - and making other blatant mistakes. - Seeing what 2nd army did do IOTL, there is little hope that with one additional army corps they would have fared any better ITTL. And by the time they had ploughed through French 4th and 9h armies, the Saxons of 3 rd army were paralysed - because of utter exhaustion after the night attack and because their army staff was suffering from an acute attack of typhoid fever. They should have advanced on Troyes - and have cut the second great east-west rail line, but they did nothing.
 
Top