Canadians showed Germany the Blitzkrieg

[Habu]

Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
So now yoiu say Vimy didnt have a week long artillery barrage to start?

Or is Vimy no longer central tro your theory? I forget which version of the tale you are spinning now...

You are enttled to your own opinions, but not your own set of facts...

Grun if I am wrong in a fact show me where.

Sinced you asked. Vimy was attacked by the allies before the Canadians attacked it and each attack was the same. Weeks of artillery followed by a mass attack where the British or French were all slaughtered.

The Canadians got it and were expected to fail as well but they did not only take the ridge but lost relatively few men in the process. The key reason is they did things differently. The week long artillary barrage was not a random attack on the positions they were going to attack but was directed at wipeing out the German artillery, something that suprisingly had not be done before. The Canadians had maped each German gun before the battle and they had ranged all of their guns so they could zero in on each German gun.

They also did not pound no mans land but tried to keep it intact for the battle so their troops would not get bogged down in the mud.

They also cut the wire by hand and did not expect the artillery to destroy it so they were not funnelled into the machine gun killing zones.

They did other things as well but by now you should get my point that Vimy was full of innovative concepts all applied together to achieve victory where others failed miserably.

As to how Vimy fits into my theory Vimy showed that different tactics could have dramatically different results from the stalemate slaughters the British were so good at organizing. However after the Canadians took Vimy there was no followup plan. They did not know what to do once they were on the ridge as no one in the British high command expected them to take it. What the Canadians learned from this was what they did in the last 100 days and that is what the Blitzkrieg was based on.

The rest of the battle of Arras that was part of the Vimy campaign sputtered to the  halt and the British predictably failed to achieve their objectives which were against much easier targets than what the Canadians were given.

[Habu]

Originally posted by Pongo
My opinion of you started low and has stayed there or maybe dropped a bit.
You like the word allude. yet that is all you do. Allude to facts you do not present. Now we find that this is what you call debate.

Most of us do not. Most of us would say debate is you presenting your opinion and then supporting it.  Not you presenting your opinion and then alluding to some facts you want people to guess at to prove you right.

You now seem to be focusing on the crossing of some canal as the birth place of Blitzkrieg.
Give us the details.

Read up of the battle Pongo. Think about what you read then come back and tell me if there is merit to this idea or better yet show by example that there is not merit to that idea.

[Elfie]

I read the link Curval posted. The tactics used at Vimy Ridge don't even come close to even a remote resemblence to Blitzkrieg.

Also a British general was in command of the Canadian Corp with a Canadian general as Chief of Staff. There was also a British division assigned to the Canadian Corp .

Commanders generally issue orders to take a certain objective, or to hold a certain objective and the *how* is often left up to individual unit commanders.

Blitzkrieg was based on mechanized warfare. The armored units on the ground, supported by infantry and backed up with artillery and air support, would exploit weaknesses and breakthroughs to encircle enemy units. I personally see no correlation between tactics used by Canadian forces in WWI to tactics used by the German army in WWII.

[GRUNHERZ]

So Habu, Vimy ridge did not have a week long artillery barrage? Right?

[Habu]

Originally posted by Furball


It seems from what i have read, that contrary to what you have posted, it was Mitchell prophesising what the Japanese would do rather than the Japanese basing their attack on his report.


Its like saying the soviets based the iron curtain on Churchills 1946 prophecy.

Furball I am suprised after reading that you do not see the Japan did not adopt ideas originally proposed by Mitchell in their attack on Pearl Habor.

In 1924 the US general staff could not even believe a plane could sink a ship (until after much resistance Mitchel got permission to show them how). In light of the backwards of the military thought at this time for the man to write a 300 page report outlining that Japan was the next big enemy to the US and how they could attack the US was simply amazing. He was right too and his senario played out. Other authors took his ideas about an attack on Pearl Harbor and built on them and they were know to the Japanese.

His ideas were ignored and damned by faint praise as so often in the military. He was court marshalled later as well. Innovative thought had no place in the US military in the 20's.

[Habu]

Originally posted by Elfie
I read the link Curval posted. The tactics used at Vimy Ridge don't even come close to even a remote resemblence to Blitzkrieg.

Also a British general was in command of the Canadian Corp with a Canadian general as Chief of Staff. There was also a British division assigned to the Canadian Corp .

Commanders generally issue orders to take a certain objective, or to hold a certain objective and the *how* is often left up to individual unit commanders.

Blitzkrieg was based on mechanized warfare. The armored units on the ground, supported by infantry and backed up with artillery and air support, would exploit weaknesses and breakthroughs to encircle enemy units. I personally see no correlation between tactics used by Canadian forces in WWI to tactics used by the German army in WWII.

This is off the same site Elfie:

By late April it looked like the allies might lose the war - except for Vimy Ridge which had been held for a year. On August 8 1918 the Canadians, holding the Ridge, and Australians and some British units, attacked in one massive short bombardment and wiped out nearly all the German guns. As infantry, guns, air all moved into action, the entire force moved more in one day than in the entire war. All the elements of the battle worked: the German line collapsed utterly.

The Hindenburg Line fell and the Canal du Nord was crossed - in Berlin Kaiser Wilhelm was told he had lost, and must now surrender. There were no advances in the fall as details of the surrender were negotiated, led to the 1918 Armistice on November 11, 1918.

The war was over. But a new form of warfare had emerged, mobility-driven, that would be mastered by the defeated Germans and deployed as their 1939 blitzkrieg, or lightning warfare, embodying all they had learned (the hard way) in 1918."

 

Also regarding this point you made Commanders generally issue orders to take a certain objective, or to hold a certain objective and the *how* is often left up to individual unit commanders.


This quote is off the same site:

The Canadian Corps' commanders were determined to learn from the mistakes of the French and British and spent months planning their attack. They built a replica of the Ridge behind their own lines, and trained using platoon-level tactics, including issuing detailed maps to ordinary soldiers rather than officers or NCOs alone. Each platoon was given a specific task by their commanding officers, rather than vague instructions from an absent general.

[Habu]

Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
So Habu, Vimy ridge did not have a week long artillery barrage? Right?

Line 7 in my reply to you Grun.

[Elfie]

Just because the Canadians used different tactics than the French and British were using does not in itself equate to the beginings of Blitzkrieg.

Blitzkrieg was all about mechanized warfare, rapid advances to exploit breakthroughs by armor and encircling the enemy to force units to surrender so they couldnt *live to fight another day*. Artillery and aircraft were used in conjunction with the ground units. This resulted in a type of warfare never before seen.

[GRUNHERZ]

You lay oout a bunch of innovative ways to overcome trench warfare but none iof that is blitzkrieg, not even the start of blitzkrieg.  Like I said the germans developed ways to defest threnches by 1918 as well, but nobody in their right mind would claim that was the start of blitzkrieg.

[Bluedog]

Wouldn't the first use of shock troops and combined arms warfare be centuries ago with war elephants, cavalry, spearmen, swordsmen and archers?

Admittedly a very differant style of warfare than is really being discussed here, but the true origin of the use of combined, but differant forces in the one action none the less?

Romans, Pheonicians, Byzantines,Carthaginians etc used 'lightning war' style tactics many hundreds of years before anyone who took part in WWI was even a wicked grin and a glint in their daddy's eye.

As far as that goes, the first time Ugghmph realised that it would be harder for that brute Raaaarrr from over the valley to hit him with his half-a-tree-battle-club, if only Ohhhh would just stand behind him and throw rocks could be described as the first use of combined arms warfare.


I say blame it on the Italians and Greeks, most everything can be traced back to them screwing up somewhere

[newguy]

Hey, the Greeks invented everything. You saw the movie.

[vorticon]

Originally posted by Bluedog
Wouldn't the first use of shock troops and combined arms warfare be centuries ago with war elephants, cavalry, spearmen, swordsmen and archers?
 

using different types of units to support each other being used before the canadians...NEVAR! oh wait, i forgot this was grade 7 battle tactics, thought it was stroke canadas ego night at the strip club...

[Pongo]

Habu. Your using Vimy again. Whats it going to be.

I  have read about the battle.  You need to quit being a little tart and tell us specifically what about blitzkrieg the Germans learned from the Canadians that wasnt 1000s of years old. You seem to think that the entire history of warfare pre 1918 was trench warfare.

I dont see any of the centeral tenents of Blitzkrieg in anything that you have said. Manuver warfare sure. Fluid warfare sure.
But nothing an American civil war Calvary officer wouldnt have recognised.

Your just way off base.

Probably a bit of a reach for you..but blitzkrieg was a failure. No one has ever been able to make it work again.  When the Russians defeated it in 1941 it has stayed defeated. The US the Soviets the Germans the British,none could revive it.

They had manuver warfare. They had mechanized warfare. They had combined arms. But Blitzkrieg never worked again.

Personaly I think command and control and reconisiance evolved beyond the ability for blitzkrieg to overwhelm the whole enemy nation like it did in 1940.
But I suppose the canadians didnt know that when they designed it.

[Habu]

Ok Pongo since you have read some of the background important to my argument here are some fact to consider.

Most armchair generals consider Heinz Guderian the father of the Blitzkrieg and summerize this type of attack as an innovative use of tanks, combined with combined arms etc all learned from his study of  the ideas of British military writers such as Basil Liddell Hart and John Fuller.

I propose that the weapons used by Guderian are not the real core of Blitzkrieg theory.  Tanks were merely the most effective weapon at the time to execute such theory. In WW1 tank technology was in its infancy so they were less important in the actual battles fought by the Canadians. But central to the success of the Canadian troops in WW1 and the German Blitzkrieg were the following 4 concepts:

Center of Gravity
Mission type orders
Combined Arms
Surfaces and Gaps

Each of these tenets were first explored or fully exploited by the Canadians in WW1 and it was from these tenets that the Blitzkrieg concept evolved.

I will discuss Center of Gravity at the end but that was the lesson the Canadians learned at Vimy when the took the ridge and then did not exploit the gain quickly enough to have a much greater effect on the disoriented and defeated army that had lost that vital position.

Mission type orders: There are two elements (or contracts) to mission type orders. One element is the commanders' intent. This is a long-term vision of how he wants to attack the enemy and the final result he wishes to achieve. The short term and small slice of the intent is the order relating to a specific point within the accomplishment of a wider vision or mission. The key to success is ensuring a particular subordinate understands the commanders' intent two levels up, and those two levels below understand the order. Mission type orders can be thought of in very simple terms as centralized planning and decentralized execution.

Remember Vimy Ridge? It was the Canadian that pioneered a concept that they later used in every battle they fought. Contrary to conventional British military theory at the time that soldiers were ignorant and should only be pointed in the direction of the enemy and told to advance, and not be given detailed briefing or maps, the Canadian Generals believed individuals understanding the objectives of the attack and working together to overcome obstacles was key to the success. They trained using platoon-level tactics, including issuing detailed maps to ordinary soldiers rather than officers or NCOs alone. Each platoon was given a specific task by their commanding officers, rather than vague instructions from an absent general. This was a major and perhaps the biggest innovation the Canadians made in the war. No one else was doing it.

Combined Arms: Combined arms is the use of a combination of different types of fire. Actions taken by an adversary to avoid the effects of one type of weapon will quickly expose him to a second type of fire. This will result in confusion and a loss of cohesion within the enemies' forces and result in the creation of exploitable gaps within his defenses. In WW1 the Canadians used aircraft strafing, machine gun battalions, rolling timed artillery barrages, tanks and infantry all at the same time in their attacks. Every weapon available to General Curry was combined in each attack. They pioneered indirect fire by machine gunners and formed mobile machine gun battalions. They did not view the machine gun as a static weapon for example.

I will finish this tomorrow but do not leave with the idea Vimy ridge was a biltzkrieg attack. It utilized the concepts that were later central to the success of blitzkrieg but it was in the last 100 days of the war that the Canadians built on what they learned at Vimy and made full use of these at the time innovative concepts.

[john9001]

all of you are wrong, it was my US Marines (devil dogs) that won WW1 at the battle of bellou woods.


as in WW2 you euro's* can start wars but you can't finish them, so the americans have to come in and show you how to win wars.


* i consider canada, ozyland and NZ part of europe.