Napoleonic Order of the Third Reich, or Reflecting on the Intellectual Legacy of Svechin
A.A. Svechin
Study instead of dogmatization
Let's continue what was started in the article On the Anniversary of "Strategy," or What Svechin Foresaw and Halder Didn't Take into Account A journey through the pages of the works that constitute the military-scientific legacy of the tsarist general and Soviet division commander.
Before I begin, I believe it's important to emphasize that Alexander Andreevich's works need to be studied, not turned into rigid dogma. Unfortunately, in my opinion, we sometimes tend to view them in a clichéd way, like: Svechin knew it all, Svechin was ahead of his time.
Such cliches create a myth that, over the years, increasingly defies the divisional commander's scientific legacy. In reality, he wasn't ahead of the curve or unaware of it, but rather, like his fellow General Staff officers in the Red Army and abroad, he calculated the scenario of the coming war. He was wrong in some ways, but right in others, for example, regarding the need for permanent mobilization. However, no one could accurately predict the nature of the coming war.
Many military intellectuals pondered overcoming the nightmare of the positional stalemate of World War I in the 1920s and 1930s. And what Svechin wrote in the USSR was also discussed, to varying degrees, abroad. This should be accepted as fact, and, while honoring Alexander Andreevich's talent, we should calmly study his multifaceted legacy.
This article will discuss the term "Napoleoncioto," coined by Svechin. Its essence is as follows: the 19th century, militarily, was marked by the military genius of Napoleon, whose campaigns, up until 1812, became benchmarks in military conduct: the brilliant Ulm Offensive, the Battle of Austerlitz, and the rout of the Prussian forces in two battles in one day—at Jena and Auerstedt.
The Balkan Wars and the Napoleonic Wars
In a word, as Svechin noted:
The whole secret of the evolution of military art lies in the fact that at the beginning of the 19th century, we witnessed Napoleonic strategy in all its glory, crushing entire states with a single blow; Napoleon and his armies visited all the most important capitals of our continent.
However, according to the division commander:
In the 20th century, he (in this case, of course, we are talking about the imitators of Bonaparte - I.Kh.) degenerated into Napoleonchoto.
What is the cause of this degeneration? At least one of them is the Balkanization of Europe, which began after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, and then after the First World War.
The artificiality of the borders drawn in San Stefano - especially the disproportionately enlarged Bulgaria - seemed obvious, and at the Berlin Congress, O. von Bismarck really played the role of an honest broker, smoothing over the Russian-Anglo-Austrian contradictions, which was discussed in the cycle, which began with the article “On the Way to the Berlin Congress, or Passions for Bulgaria».
However, in 1878, it was only possible to temporarily dampen the aggressiveness of the newly minted actors in Balkan politics, who seven years later would clash in the Bulgarian-Serbian War. I note that this aggressiveness was not least due to the specific mentality of the Balkan elites: the murders of S. Stambolov and the Obrenović couple, monstrous in their brutality, even by unsentimental European standards.
The Serbo-Bulgarian War was followed by a series of Balkan Wars, characterized, if you like, by the swan song of Napoleonic strategy and the emergence of local Napoleonic wars, although even then the fighting sometimes took on a positional character.
Nevertheless, the limited theater of operations, the presence of a talented commander and the ability to conduct operations at a relatively shallow depth, with the prospect, with a well-planned campaign, of quickly and victoriously completing it, gave rise to Napoleonic wars in the Balkans.
D. Nikolaev
The first person to fit this definition, in my opinion, is Bulgarian Infantry General D. Nikolaev, who distinguished himself during the 1885 war. Under his command, the Bulgarians won the Battle of Pirot, shifting the fighting to enemy territory. Only the intervention of Austria-Hungary and Russia may have saved Serbia from defeat. Interestingly, Nikolaev held the highest rank in the Bulgarian army at the time: lieutenant colonel.
However, according to Svechin, the nickname Napoleonchoto was actually awarded to Lieutenant General R. Radko-Dmitriev in Bulgaria, who distinguished himself brilliantly in the First Balkan War with victories during the Lozengrad operation and the battle of Lyulya-Burgas.
"On the Knife." A 1913 painting by Jaroslav Vešin depicting an episode from the First Balkan War.
But did the Bulgarian general demonstrate such outstanding qualities in the Russian army during World War I? Svechin writes the following on this matter:
Radko-Dmitriev, a very respectable general, transferred from the Lilliputian scale to the gigantic framework of the world war and placed at the head of one of the tsarist armies, did not look like Napoleon at all, no matter how we looked at him.
R. Radko-Dmitriev
It's difficult to say to what extent the experience of the Balkan Wars influenced the General Staff officers of the Triple Alliance and the Entente. It's important to understand that the Balkans are only geographically part of Europe; culturally, in Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks were viewed as peripheral, despite the strategic significance of the region they inhabited. A similar attitude, I believe, was also felt toward their military art—secondary to that of a truly European nature.
In any case, the general staffs of the leading powers approached the coming year of 1914 with the expectation that the campaign would last no more than three months. When the opposite occurred, the strategy of annihilation proved unfeasible, despite the desperate attempts of Field Marshal Peter von Hindenburg, General of the Infantry Erich Ludendorff, and General of Division Robert Nivelle to achieve a turning point in the war through it.
Barbarossa and Napoleonic Wars of the Wehrmacht
However, almost thirty years later, Hitler, when giving the order to develop a plan for war against the USSR, assigned one of his military leaders to the role of Napoleon.
Colonel General G. Guderian recalled:
Shortly after Molotov's visit to Berlin (November 1940 – I.Kh.), my chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Baron von Liebenstein, and the chief of operations, Major Bayerlein, were summoned to a meeting with the Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces, where they received the first instructions regarding "Operation Barbarossa" – the plan for the war against Russia. When they came to me after this meeting to report and unfolded a map of Russia before me, I couldn't believe my eyes. What I considered impossible was about to become reality?
I believe Guderian didn't exaggerate anything about his reaction to Barbarossa. For a career military man, it couldn't have been any other way: choosing, instead of one, essentially three main directions, all expanding in space.
Guderian under interrogation: the logical outcome of the Nazi Napoleon's military path
Field Marshal E. von Manstein later lamented the latter:
Hitler wanted to achieve military success on both flanks, for which the German forces, given the balance of forces and the width of the operational area, were insufficient.
In this sense, the assessment given to the document on the pages of the fundamental work dedicated to the Second World War by Infantry General K. von Tippelskirch is interesting:
The main efforts of the navy fleet During the Eastern campaign, they continued to be directed only against England. These tasks for the army, navy and aviation show that the need to take into account the needs of other theatres of war severely limited the number of forces that could take part in operations in the East.
That meant three main axes instead of one, plus limited forces to solve the most complex strategic tasks across a vast area. Furthermore, the OKH clearly underestimated the Red Army command:
"The directive," wrote Tippelskirch, "exudes optimism, which can be explained by the impressions of victories over Poland and France. Therefore, it ascribes to the enemy the same passive role to which Germany had become accustomed in the past two wars. Once again, they hoped, by forcing a blitzkrieg on the enemy, to circumvent Moltke's principle that "no operational plan can remain unchanged after the first encounter with the enemy's main forces."
A clear example of the collapse of Barbarossa and the plans of the Nazi Napoleonic
Why is it appropriate, in my opinion, to compare Nazi military leaders to Napoleon? For the following reason:
A large state, wrote Svechin, is capable of inflicting incomparably more powerful blows than a small one; but its ability to withstand blows grows even more proportionately, and the larger the scale of the war, the less likely these blows are to become decisive.
The latter was not understood by Hitler, who, as Tippelskirch noted in the above quote, was impressed by the quick and comparatively easy victories achieved in Poland and France.
However, the armies of these countries were deprived of the opportunity for operational maneuver and regrouping after the defeat of the divisions deployed on the border (Poles) and those advanced into Belgium (Anglo-French); moreover, the attack through the Ardennes cut off the latter from their supply bases, and after Dunkirk and the fall of Paris, the French no longer had time to mobilize, which predetermined their strategic defeat.
The Barbarossa plan envisaged the attacks tank wedges in converging directions, simultaneously, as noted above, expanding the occupied space, which played against the Germans, which Svechin drew attention to, coming to the conclusion that it was necessary to rely on a strategy of attrition when planning a future war.
In Berlin, they expected that there would be no front, at least by August 1941, due to the Cannes campaign carried out by the armored fists of the Wehrmacht in all three strategic directions.
This was the mistake of the Nazi command, the possibility of which Svechin also wrote about long before Barbarossa:
The difficulties of implementing Cannes grow proportionally to the breadth of the enemy front. On the thousand-kilometer theater of the Russian plain, Cannes is generally unfeasible.
In fact, Cannes itself is sometimes identified with Sedan, which resulted in the capitulation of Napoleon III and the collapse of the Second Empire. And here, in my opinion, it's worth noting two of Svechin's observations regarding the 1870 campaign, directly related to our topic.
First.
The most reasonable course of action for the French would have been to retreat to Paris, which would have given them three weeks to form new units, would have allowed them to replenish all units to their full strength, would have forced the Germans to weaken their forces by deploying screens against the fortresses, and would have allowed them to re-enter the fight near Paris in favorable conditions at the beginning of September.
That is, in this case, albeit with a number of reservations, Svechin believed it would be more expedient for the French to adhere to a strategy of attrition, avoiding Cannes and forcing the enemy to operate at greater operational depth and, thus, weakening his striking forces.
The French command followed a similar strategy in 1914 and achieved its first victory at the Marne. Indeed, if in May 1940, instead of advancing his troops into Belgium, General M. Gamelin had deployed at least part of his forces northeast, forming a front along the Meuse against E. von Kleist's Panzer Group, he would have had a chance of stopping the enemy and implementing a strategy of attrition: simultaneously containing the enemy breaking through the Ardennes and beginning a permanent mobilization.
Second.
The Sedan operation exemplifies Moltke's ideal of strategy—a pincer-like clampdown on the enemy from two sides, facilitated by the obstacle of the Meuse and the Belgian border, and ultimately encirclement. Flank defenses such as the border of a neutral state or a major river could easily prove fatal for the weaker side. However, it should be noted that Moltke reaped more laurels at Sedan than he truly deserved for this operation.
Before us is the commander's principle of action, which fits into Napoleon's strategy, when geography became the attacking side's main ally, allowing it to inflict crushing blows on the enemy in a limited space, depriving it of the opportunity to carry out operational maneuvers and bring up reserves from the depths, not to mention mobilizing and forming new divisions.
In the realities of Barbarossa, geography, as emphasized above, did not play on the side of the Wehrmacht.
A destroyed German tank, 1941 – evidence of the collapse of Nazi strategists' plans already at the initial stage of the war
Let us return to Svechin’s thoughts, according to which the difficulties of implementing Cannes will increase as the front expands.
As is well known, the divisional commander's prediction came true. Thus, at the height of the Battle of Smolensk, in a conversation with Colonel General F. von Bock, who commanded Army Group Center, the commander of the Wehrmacht's ground forces, Field Marshal W. von Brauchitsch, remarked:
Furthermore, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that after capturing the areas around Smolensk, a sustained eastward offensive by the main forces of the field armies is impossible due to inadequate supplies. We will have to form something like "expeditionary corps" to carry out long-range missions.
It's easy to hear doubts in these words about the prospects of defeating the Red Army and achieving another Cannes. However, failure with the latter began to haunt the Germans in June 1941. The encirclement of the armies of the Northwestern Front in the Baltics, as planned by "Barbarossa," failed.
The defeat of General of the Army D.G. Pavlov's troops at the end of June also became a semi-Cannes in strategic terms due to the formation of a new front to the east of Minsk, headed by Marshal S.K. Timoshenko.
Svechin envisioned a similar scenario:
In a major war, only a half-Cannae or a quarter-Cannae is possible—the destruction of the enemy's manpower not all at once, but piecemeal. Of course, an uncut forest grows back, and piecemeal destruction requires incomparably more effort, time, and resources, and is far less cost-effective than a single, devastating blow—but the latter is impossible in a context of power struggle and the modern development of productive forces.
It's worth noting here that in the wars of the 20th century, Cannes was unthinkable without, as they say now, well-organized logistics. However, supply problems for Army Group Center, the Wehrmacht's most powerful force in 1941, arose in the first days of the war, as von Brauchitsch drew von Bock's attention to in the above quote, and as the latter noted in his diary:
By utilizing the local rolling stock and locomotives, we were able to transport troops and supplies using local railways. The line we used extends 80 kilometers east of Brest. This will relieve congestion on the roads, which are already clogged with motor vehicles, and facilitate the supply of Guderian's tank group.
You'll agree that when planning a campaign, relying on the enemy's railcar and locomotive fleet right on the front line is risky. Had our forces managed to blow up the tracks or disable the trains, Guderian would have faced supply problems, which would have negatively impacted the advance of his tank group.
That the Germans were getting a semi-Cannes instead of Cannes was something von Bock himself realized as early as June 26. According to an entry in his diary:
Brauchitsch arrived in the morning. I was so irritated by his order to close the pincers prematurely that when he congratulated me on the successes of Army Group Center, I grumbled, "I doubt we'll get much loot from this cauldron."
In the Southwest direction, everything went wrong for the Germans from the very beginning. It's enough to recall the largest military stories In terms of the number of armored vehicles involved, the tank battle in the Dubno-Lutsk-Brody region slowed the German breakthrough to Kyiv.
The Germans did not close the Uman cauldron immediately, losing time in its formation and allowing the command of the Southwestern Direction to stabilize the front along the Dnieper line, extending the defense of Kyiv and tying down the troops of Army Group South.
To sum it up, Svechin's prediction regarding the enemy's ability to carry out, at best, only a semi-Cannes in a war over vast territories proved correct, as did his reasoning about Napoleonicioto—that is, about commanders capable of achieving success in individual operations at relatively shallow operational depth and under favorable geographic conditions.
But it was precisely the half-hearted nature of Cannes that would force the enemy to repeat it again and again, exhausting its forces and exacerbating supply problems, which is what happened with Barbarossa by the winter of 1941.
No less important: Soviet commanders learned quickly, turning enemy plans to dust and bringing down the Führer's wrath on the German Napoleonic Order: all the aforementioned Nazi Wehrmacht commanders were removed from their command positions at various times. None of them became Napoleons, only Napoleonic Orders, and even then only briefly.
Finally, neither Hitler nor his General Staff officers, including Colonel-General F. Halder, took into account the USSR's ability to conduct permanent mobilization, as I mentioned at the beginning of the article. In conclusion, I will cite Svechin's thoughts on this matter:
A large state mobilizes 2-3 percent of its population at a time and trains 3-4 deputies in the rear for every fighter at the front, which gives its army enormous survivability.
The ability of a large state to carry out permanent mobilization makes all of Napoleon's efforts, in strategic terms, like the labor of Sisypheus, when a new wall rises before a broken one.
Incidentally, largely because the Turks failed to mobilize in time on the eve of the First Balkan War, they lost, the same thing happened to Napoleon III – his cumbersome mobilization system was discussed in the article “Mistakes in Mobilization as a Prologue to Defeat, or Three Lessons from History.”
But permanent mobilization in combat conditions requires the defending country to have large spaces and the ability of its mobilization apparatus to operate coherently and effectively. The USSR demonstrated this.
References
Bock F. von. I stood at the gates of Moscow. – Moscow: Yauza, Eksmo, 2006
Guderian G. Memories of a Soldier. – Smolensk: Rusich, 1999
Gusev N.S. The fate of Radko-Dmitriev and his memory in the context of Russian-Bulgarian relations of the late 19th – early 20th centuries.
Manstein E. Lost Victories. – M.: ACT; St. Petersburg Terra Fantastica, 1999
Understanding the Art of War: The Ideological Heritage of A. Svechin. – 2nd ed. – Moscow: Russian Way, 2000
The Russian Campaign: A Chronicle of Combat Operations on the Eastern Front. 1941–1942 – a book by Franz Halder, a war diary of the Chief of the General Staff of the Ground Forces of Nazi Germany. Moscow: Centerpoligraf, 2007
Svechin A. A. Strategy. – M.-L.: Gosvoenizdat, 1926
Svechin A. A. Evolution of Military Art. Volume I. – M. – L.: Voengiz, 1928
Tippelskirch K. History of the Second World War. St. Petersburg: Poligon; Moscow: AST, 1999
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