Showing posts with label Battle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Battle. Show all posts

Sunday, August 9, 2015

Karameh


King Hussein after checking an abandoned Israeli tank. The battle of Karameh.




After years of operating as clandestine cells, on 1 January 1965, Fatah began sabotage activities against Israel, and this event is marked as Fatah Day. Following the June War of 1967, the group operated from Jordanian soil, and on 21 March 1968, it joined hands with the Jordanian army at the battle of Karameh against Israel.

A number of versions of the Karameh battle exist. Many of these accounts are designed to present the battle in a manner that favors Israel, Jordan, or the Palestinians and some clearly meet the criteria for political mythology noted earlier. Other explanations are more objective. Retired US Army Colonel Trevor Dupuy has presented one of the best early accounts of this battle from the viewpoint of a military historian.' Journalist John Cooley has provided another useful description in his 1973 study of the Palestinian Arabs. 'Both of these authors based their evaluations on extensive interviews with witnesses and participants in the battle. In more recent years, a variety of Israeli participants have also presented their views of the fighting with a level of candor and self-criticism that did not characterize initial Israeli accounts. Most notable in this regard are works by Colonel Muki Betser and Colonel Eliezer "Cheetah" Cohen. These discussions of the battle contain aspects of Israeli self-criticism that challenge the more one-dimensional accounts of earlier Israeli authors. 

All serious descriptions of the battle agree that the operation began in the early morning hours of 21 March 1968 when an Israeli force of around 15,000 troops crossed the Jordan River and attacked the guerrilla base at Karameh. Dupuy describes this force as composed of an infantry brigade, an armored brigade equivalent, an airborne battalion, an engineer battalion, and probably up to five battalions of supporting artillery. Israeli jet aircraft and helicopters supported these troops. The Jordanian and Palestinian fighters, aware of the build-up of forces in Israeli staging areas, expected the attack and had prepared defensive positions and fortifications. 

The Israelis called the Karameh attack" Operation Inferno." Its purpose was to inflict a devastating and perhaps fatal blow against the Palestinian resistance. In order to do this, armor-heavy Israeli maneuver forces were to launch a frontal attack against lightly-armed guerrillas, making full use of Israeli tactical air support. Paratroopers would be deployed by helicopter behind Palestinian lines, in order to prevent a guerrilla retreat and thereby ensure the death or capture of all guerrillas operating from the Karameh base. Defeating Jordanian troops in the area was not the central objective of the strike, but the Israeli leadership may have recognized that any strike into Jordan risked involving them in the engagement. The Israelis, nevertheless, may have expected the Jordanians to limit their military response because of political differences and rivalry between the monarchy and the Palestinian guerrillas. This assessment was later proven to be mistaken. 

The Israelis faced the entire Jordanian First Infantry Division reinforced by a significant number of tanks, probably from the 60th Armored Brigade. Troops from the Royal Guard and two Saladin armored car regiments were also sent to the Karameh area prior to the battle, although it is uncertain that the latter saw any combat. In addition to perhaps 15,000 Jordanians, the attacking force faced around 300 Palestinian guerrillas. These guerrillas were equipped with light arms, some older mortars, and only a few anti-tank weapons, according to two Palestinian commando leaders cited in a recent scholarly study. Jordanian troops, by contrast, had modem M-48 Patton tanks, anti-tank weapons, and heavy artillery. The Jordanian Army, therefore, had at least as many troops as the Israelis available for this operation and were a quantitative match for Israeli forces in every military category except for air support. Jordan's air force had been almost totally wiped out in the 1967 War.

The Israeli attackers by all accounts ran into difficulties throughout the operation. The Jordanian Army carried out a well-prepared defense of the area around Karameh and provided artillery support to the guerillas at the Karameh base itself. Against this unexpectedly tough resistance, Israeli casualties were heavier than expected. Additionally, many of the Palestinians, after engaging in fierce resistance, were able to escape through the surrounding Israeli paratroopers who had been inserted by helicopter to help envelop the guerrillas. The Palestinian escape was made under an unexpectedly heavy curtain of ground fog. The Israelis began breaking off from the battle in the early afternoon after they had destroyed the Karameh base and all of the guerrillas had been killed, captured, or had withdrawn. The destruction of the base and infliction of a number of casualties was at least a partial accomplishment of the mission and, with higher than expected casualties of their own, withdrawal seemed the best option. All Israeli forces had returned to their bases in Israel and the West Bank by that evening. 

While these basic facts surrounding the Karameh battle are not usually subject to controversy, key differences nevertheless exist on many important issues. These differences include questions about (1) the full extent of Israeli goals involving Jordan as well as the Palestinians, (2) who planned and directed the Israeli attack (Defense Minister Moshe Dayan or a subordinate commander), (3) the combat effectiveness of all participants, and (4) the extent to which Jordan applied its available military strength to resist the Israelis. It is in the interpretation of each of these factors that the concept of political myth becomes relevant.


Thursday, June 11, 2015

Tank Shock - 1916



September 15, 1916, began as a routine day for the German infantrymen in the forward trenches around Flers on the Somme—as routine as any day was likely to be after two and a half months of vicious, close-gripped fighting that bled divisions white and reduced battalions to the strength of companies. True, an occasional rumble of engines had been audible across the line. But the British had more trucks than the Kaiser’s army, and were more willing to risk them to bring up ammunition and carry back wounded. True, there had been occasional gossip of something new up Tommy’s sleeve: of armored “land cruisers” impervious to anything less than a six-inch shell. But rumors—Scheisshausparolen in Landser speak—were endemic on the Western Front. Then “a forest of guns opened up in a ceaseless, rolling thunder, the few remaining survivors . . . fight on until the British flood overwhelms them, consumes them, and passes on. . . . An extraordinary number of men. And there, between them, spewing death, unearthly monsters: the first British tanks.”

Improvised and poorly coordinated, the British attack soon collapsed in the usual welter of blood and confusion. But for the first time on the Western Front, certainly the first time on the Somme, the heaviest losses  were suffered by the defenders. Reactions varied widely. Some men panicked; others fought to a finish. But the 14th Bavarian Infantry, for example, tallied more than 1,600 casualties. Almost half were “missing,” and most of them were prisoners. That was an unheard-of ratio in an army that still prided itself on its fighting spirit. But the 14th was one of the regiments hit on the head by the tanks.

Shock rolled uphill. “The enemy,” one staff officer recorded, “employed new engines of war, as cruel as effective. . . . It is necessary to take whatever methods are possible to counteract them.” From the Allied perspective, the impact of tanks on the Great War is generally recognized. The cottage industry among scholars of the British learning curve, with descriptions of proto-mechanized war pitted against accounts of a semi-mobile final offensive based on combined arms and improved communications, recognizes the centrality of armor for both interpretations. French accounts are structured by Marshal Philippe Petain’s judgment that, in the wake of the frontline mutinies of 1917, it was necessary to wait for “the Americans and the tanks.” Certainly it was the tanks, the light Renault FT-17s, that carried the exhausted French infantry forward in the months before the armistice. Erich Ludendorff, a general in a position to know, declared after the war that Germany had been defeated not by Marshal Foch but by “General Tank.”

In those contexts it is easy to overlook the salient fact that the German army was quick and effective in developing antitank techniques. This was facilitated by the moonscape terrain of the Western Front, the mechanical unreliability of early armored vehicles, and such technical grotesqueries as the French seeking to increase the range of their early tanks by installing extra fuel tanks on their roofs, which virtually guaranteed the prompt incineration of the crew unless they were quick to abandon the vehicle. Even at Flers the Germans had taken on tanks like any other targets: aiming for openings in the armor, throwing grenades, using field guns over open sights. German intelligence thoroughly interrogated one captured tanker and translated a diary lost by another. Inside of a week, Berlin had a general description of the new weapons, accompanied by a rough but reasonably accurate sketch.

One of the most effective antitank measures was natural. Tanks drew fire from everywhere, fire sufficiently intense to strip away any infantry in their vicinity. A tank by itself was vulnerable. Therefore, the German tactic was to throw everything available at the tanks and keep calm if they kept coming. Proactive countermeasures began with inoculating the infantry against “tank fright” by using knocked-out vehicles to demonstrate their various vulnerabilities. An early frontline improvisation was the geballte Ladung: the heads of a half dozen stick grenades tied around a complete “potato-masher” and thrown into one of a tank’s many openings—or, more basic, the same half dozen grenades shoved into a sandbag and the fuse of one of them pulled. More effective and less immediately risky was the K-round. This was simply a bullet with a tungsten carbide core instead of the soft alloys commonly used in small arms rounds. Originally developed to punch holes in metal plates protecting enemy machine-gun and sniper positions, it was employed to even better effect by the ubiquitous German machine guns against the armor of the early tanks. K-rounds were less likely to disable the vehicle, mostly causing casualties and confusion among the crew, but the end effect was similar.

As improved armor limited the K-round’s effect, German designers came up with a 13mm version. Initially it was used in a specially designed single-shot rifle, the remote ancestor of today’s big-caliber sniper rifles but without any of their recoil-absorbing features. The weapon’s fierce recoil made it inaccurate and unpopular; even a strong user risked a broken collarbone or worse. More promising was the TuF (tank and antiaircraft) machine gun using the same round. None of the ten thousand TuFs originally projected were ready for service by November 11—but the concept and the bullet became the basis for John Browning’s .50-caliber machine gun, whose near-century of service makes it among the most long-lived modern weapons.

When something heavier was desirable, the German counterpart of the Stokes mortar was a much larger piece, mounted on wheels, capable of modification for direct fire and, with a ten-pound shell, lethal against any tank. The German army had also begun forming batteries of “infantry guns” even before the tanks appeared. These were usually mountain guns or modified field pieces of around three-inch caliber. Intended to support infantry attacks by direct fire, they could stop tank attacks just as well. From the beginning, ordinary field pieces with ordinary shells also proved able to knock out tanks at a range of two miles.

In an emergency the large number of 77mm field pieces mounted on trucks for antiaircraft work could become improvised antitank guns. These proved particularly useful at Cambrai in November 1917, when more than a hundred tanks were part of the spoils of the counterattack that wiped out most of the initial British gains. They did so well, indeed, that the crews had to be officially reminded that their primary duty was shooting down airplanes. As supplements, a number of ordinary field guns were mounted on trucks in the fashion of the portees used in a later war by the British in North Africa.

If survival was not sufficient incentive, rewards and honor were invoked. One Bavarian battery was awarded 500 marks for knocking out a tank near Flers. British reports and gossip praised an officer who, working a lone gun at Flesquieres during the Cambrai battle, either by himself or with a scratch crew, was supposed to have disabled anywhere from five to sixteen tanks before he was killed. The Nazis transformed the hero into a noncommissioned officer, and gave him a name and at least one statue. The legend’s less Homeric roots seem to have involved a half dozen tanks following each other over the crest of a small hill and being taken out one at a time by a German field battery. The story of “the gunner of Flesquieres” nevertheless indicates the enduring strength of the tank mystique in German military lore.

Other purpose-designed antitank weapons were ready to come on line when the war ended: short-barreled, low-velocity 37mm guns, an automatic 20mm cannon that the Swiss developed into the World War II Oerlikon. The effect of this new hardware on the projected large-scale use of a new generation of tanks in the various Allied plans for 1919 must remain speculative. What it highlights is the continued German commitment to tank defense even in the war’s final months.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

A Retrospective of the Somme 1916 I




Although further attacks were planned, the weather again intervened and on 19 November it unexpectedly turned milder, which heralded a rapid thaw that soon turned the entire battlefield into an impenetrable quagmire. It was beyond the abilities of man, animal or machine to cross the battlefield, as trenches collapsed wholesale and troops were forced from their meagre shelters into the open. So appalling were the ground conditions that even the British Official History – not noted for its emotive use of hyperbole – was moved to comment: ‘Our vocabulary is not adapted to describe such an existence, because it is outside experience for which words are normally required.’ Private W. Wells, who went on to serve in the Passchendaele battles of the following year, commented of that Somme winter:

‘The conditions were impossible – no one could live in it. We couldn’t get hot drinks as the ration parties couldn’t get up. Most of us were soaked through and it was too wet to light fires even if we had something to cook. We heard that some men had shot themselves rather than go through anymore of it. Passchendaele was bad, but by then they [GHQ] knew how much a man could stand of those conditions. I think the Somme was worse, much worse.’

The Losses
So what had all the sacrifice achieved? In total the battle had advanced the British lines a little over 6 miles (9.6km) and in the course of the fighting some important objectives had been captured, such as Beaucourt, Beaumont Hamel, Eaucourt L’Abbaye, Lesboeufs, Le Sars, St Pierre Divion, and Thiepval Ridge. But at what human cost? Obtaining accurate figures for the casualties of the campaign is easier for the Allied forces, as the gathering of statistical information was generally more organized. The number of casualties from 1 July to 19 November was officially quoted as 498,000 with an additional 20,000 estimated to have subsequently died of wounds. A particularly sobering statistic is that during the battle, British losses averaged 2,943 men a day, the equivalent of about three line battalions. For each division it was 8,026 men over the entire battle. The Commonwealth Divisional losses were proportionately greater, bearing in mind the far smaller number of troops employed: the Australians 8,960, the New Zealanders losing 8,133, and the Canadians 6,329.

German figures are harder to estimate, as they did not include in their casualty returns heavy losses sustained through shelling prior to the 1 July attack. However, all indications are that they suffered considerably both before and during the battle. The figure for losses from June–November is now thought to be probably somewhere between 460,000 and 600,000 men. This should be compared with the casualties at Verdun of some 336,000 men, which at the time the German High Command regarded as unacceptably high. This was only a part of the overall picture, however, for the total losses for Germany in 1916 was over 1 million men, as the fighting on the Eastern Front had also been raging unabated. France did not come out unscathed either, losing some 210,000 men. By any standards, this meant the rate of British, French, and German casualties on the Somme was unsustainable. Like so many men of the old Regular BEF, most of the Germans who were killed or wounded on the Somme were tough, experienced soldiers who could not be readily replaced. 

Ludendorff was being candid when he stated that after the Somme: ‘The army had been fought to a standstill and was utterly worn out.’ After the campaign there was considerable analysis in Germany about why their superior army had not comprehensively defeated the British at the outset, but the reasons were many and complex. The amateur soldiers of the new BEF proved a far tougher proposition than anyone had expected, and British tactics had improved considerably during the campaign’s five months of fighting. After the Somme, Ludendorff was under no illusions about the ability of Germany to win a decisive victory on the Western Front, and he feared the constantly aggressive behaviour shown by the British High Command would simply prove beyond the ability of even the German Army to contain: ‘even our troops would not be able to withstand such attacks indefinitely, especially if the enemy gave us no time for rest.’

Manpower
For the British, the campaign had highlighted some serious shortcomings in both tactics and planning, as well as underlining the fact that, like Germany, the country was unable to absorb the levels of casualties sustained on the Somme. To attempt to do so would not only put an unbearable strain on the country to provide sufficient men, but would also stretch the ability of industry to produce sufficient war matériel. As it was, conscription had been introduced in January 1916, and by the latter months of that year, it was becoming obvious the standard of men entering the ranks was not the same as it had been in 1915. The ceaseless demand for manpower also meant there was no longer the luxury of retaining men at home until their training was complete. Private Clarrie Jarman had enlisted on the outbreak of war in 1914 and spent almost a year and a half in England training, before embarking for France. While this was exceptional, a year for training was considered normal. By mid-1916 this had dropped to six months, and by 1917 this had further been reduced to four months. In 1918, men were being sent to the front with under three weeks training, some never even having fired their rifles. It was clearly a situation no country could support indefinitely, and embarrassing questions were being asked in Parliament about exactly what General Haig’s long-term strategy was? Some suggested wryly that is was to wait until we had two men left and the Germans one, then declare a British victory.

Whether the Somme was the ‘ghastly failure’ that David Lloyd George had declared it to be is a moot point, for it had undoubtedly sharpened the High Command’s perception of how to wage efficient warfare on a massive scale. The tactics of early 1916 were essentially the same as had been used at the start of the war and were about as effective. Sending masses of men into machine-guns, uncut wire, and shellfire was not a recipe for military success. But the lessons of the Somme meant even those most remotely situated from the fighting had seen graphic examples of how well-planned attacks could work (as evidenced by the 27 July assaults): yet these lessons were not applied wholesale: some of the more traditional commanders remaining unconvinced. So the question must be asked, by what methods could things have been improved?

Communications
If there was one area in which technology could have radically altered the course of not just of the battle, but the entire war, it was communications. The methods employed had not materially improved since the days of the Greeks. Runners were still used by commanders to carry messages to units in the field: but by 1916 the chances of them reaching their destinations unscathed were slim indeed. During the battle for High Wood, one commanding officer sent six runners simultaneously to take a vital message back to GHQ and not one arrived. Not for nothing were runners among the most frequently decorated soldiers in the field. Wireless telegraphy was employed, but relied on a network of cables that were vulnerable to shellfire and passing traffic. Wires could even be snapped unwary infantrymen moving to and fro. Thus repairs were a constant nightmare for the linesmen of the Royal Engineers. The invention of the short wave radio came too late for the war. It would revolutionize battlefield communications, enabling instant decisions to be made and passed to combat units. Until then, semaphore and signalling lamps were the most commonly used means of communicating. Not unfairly has it been said that the availability of just one pair of walkie-talkies could well have altered the course of the war.