DOCTRINE AND DOGMA

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DOCTRINE AND DOGMA
German and British Infantry
Tactics in the First World War

MARTIN SAMUELS

Contributions in Military Studies, Number 121

GREENWOOD PRESS
New York • Westport. Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Samuels, Martin.
Doctrine and dogma : German and British infantry tactics in the
First World War / Martin Samuels.
p. cm.—(Contributions in military studies, ISSN 0883-6884
; no. 121)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-313-27959-4 (alk. paper)
1. World War, 1914-1918-Campaigns. 2. Germany. Heer.
Infanterie—Drill and tactics—History—20th century. 3. Great
Britain. Army. Infantry—Drill and tactics—History—20th century.
4. Germany. Heer.-History-World War, 1914-1918. 5. Great
Britain. Army-History-World War, 1914-1918. I. Title.
II. Series.
D529.3.S26 1992
940.4'14—dc20 91-822
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 1992 by Martin Samuels
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 91-822
ISBN: 0-313-27959-4
ISSN: 0883-6884
First published in 1992
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright Acknowledgements

The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge the following for permission to quote
from copyrighted materials:
Macmillan Publishers, for excerpts from Edmonds, Brigadier-General J. E. The
Official History of the Great War: Military Operations: France and Belgium, 14
volumes. London: Macmillan, 1922-1949.
Defense Analysis, for excerpts from Elliott-Bateman, M. with S. S. Fitzgibbon and
M. Samuels. "Vocabulary: The Second Problem of Military Reform—I. Concepts."
Defense Analysis 6, no. 3 (1990), 263-75.
Extracts from the following articles have been reproduced by kind permission of
Army Quarterly and Defence Journal, 1 West Street, Tavistock, Devon, United
Kingdom, PL19 8DS: "The Developments of the German Defensive Battle in 1917 and
Its Influence on British Defensive Tactics, Part III: Field Service Regulations (1935)"
by Captain G. C. Wynne, Army Quarterly and Defence Journal, October 1937 edition;
and "The Chain of Command" by Captain G. C. Wynne, Army Quarterly and Defence
Journal, April 1938 edition.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright materials in
this book, but in some instances this has proven impossible. The author and publisher
will be glad to receive information leading to more complete acknowledgements in
subsequent printings of the book and in the meantime extend their apologies for any
omissions.
 Contents

Illustrations xi

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1

Part One: The Storm Battalions 7

1: Sturmbataillone 9
2: Stosstrupptaktik 33

Part Two: German Doctrine 57

3: Tactical Concepts 59
A: Fuhrung nach Directive 83
5: German Training 97

Part Three: British Dogma 111

6: Bird Cages 113
7: Restrictive Control 137
8: British Training 1A9

Conclusion 169

Notes 181

Bibliography 205

Index 217
 Illustrations

TABLES

1. Formations Fielding Sturmabteilungen 21

on the Western Front, November 1916

2. Parent Formations of the Sturmbataillone 26

FIGURES

1. Forward Section of Vorfeldzone 74

2. German Front Regiment System 77

3. German Counterattack System 79

4. British Front Brigade System 124

5. British Counterattack System 127

 Acknowledgements

The writing of this book was aided by the support of

a number of people. The British Academy awarded me
the financial assistance necessary for the research
to be undertaken. The staff of the Department of
Printed Books, Imperial War Museum, were most helpful
and brought the British Army Printing and Stationery
Service pamphlets to my attention. Michael Elliott-
Bateman of the Department of Military Studies,
University of Manchester, spent many hours discussing
my ideas and provided constructive criticism of the
manuscript. The staff at Greenwood Press made the
process of converting that manuscript into a book as
smooth as possible. My wife, Helen, drew the figures
and gave me support throughout. All translations from
sources given in German in the bibliography are mine.
Any errors or omissions are my own.
 Introduction

RACE: It often seems to me that's all

detective work is, wiping out your false
starts and beginning again.

POIROT: Yes, it is very true, that. And it is

just what some people will not do. They
conceive a certain theory, and everything has
to fit into that theory. If one little fact
will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it
is always the facts that will not fit in that
are significant.*

At 4:40 A.M. on 21 March 1918,2 the sudden fire of

6,473^ guns heralded the commencement of Operation
Michael, the long-awaited German offensive in the
West. Only two weeks earlier, Field Marshal Douglas
Haig, the British commander in France, had stated: 'I
[am] only afraid that the enemy [will] find our front
so very strong that he will hesitate to commit his
army to the attack.' Haig need not have worried. By
the time the Germans called an end to the battle, on
5 April, they had advanced over forty miles and had
seized over one thousand square miles of territory.
In addition, they had inflicted almost a quarter of a
million casualties.
Nor was Operation Michael the only German
offensive in the spring of 1918. The German Army
struck further blows on 9 April, 27 May, 9 June and
15 July. On each occasion, they pushed the Allied
armies back in disarray. British casualties alone
exceeded four hundred thousand men. not far short of
the losses on the Somme in 1916. French casualties
appear to have been similar. It was clear that the
Germans had found a solution to the problem of attack
in position warfare, a solution for which the French
and British had been searching in vain since 1915.
To the Allies, accustomed to their own advances
being measured in yards rather than miles, the German
successes appeared little short of miraculous. This
was all the more so since the Germans, having been on
the defensive continuously since mid-1916, theoretic-
ally had had little opportunity to develop the new
tactics so obviously effective in 1918. It was
concluded that these new tactics must have been the
work of one man of genius, the Great Man theory of
history. A suitable figure was soon found in the form
of the German General Oskar von Hutier.
General von Hutier was born in 1857 and was a
graduate of the Kriegsakademie1^ (staff college). The
outbreak of the First World War found him in command
of the 2d Guards Division. In April 1915, he was
transferred to the Eastern Front and given the XXI
Corps, which he led for two years until promoted to
command the Eighth Army in April 1917. In September
of that year, von Hutier's army captured the
strategically important Russian city of Riga, in what
was considered by the Western Allies to be a
brilliant operation. In December 1917, he was
transferred to the Western Front and given command of
the newly formed Eighteenth Army, which he led
through Operation Michael.** In that battle, von
Hutier's troops advanced twenty-five miles in only
four days, a notable achievement when compared to
the British advance on the Somme of eight miles in
four months.
In true historical fashion, the popular writers
of the day noted von Hutier's victories at Riga and
in Operation Michael, put two and two together, and
came up with sixteen: von Hutier was acclaimed as the
inventor of the new German tactics, which were
consequently named after him. This identification was
accepted by the Allied nations at the time and is
still followed by many modern writers. It also became
historical orthodoxy that the 'Hutier tactics1 were
used by a few elite Stosstruppen divisions only. The
cream of the German Army was believed to have been
concentrated into these divisions.
The acceptance of this story had the important
consequence of allowing the Allied armies to explain
away their defeats. It was argued that the stunning
German successes had been due to the 'genius' of von
Hutier and the new invention of storm troopers,
rather than to any failings within the Allies' own
armies. Moreover, since the British defensive
organisation had been copied from that used so
effectively by the Germans themselves,*"* it was
considered that no fault could lie there. Indeed, the
British felt that this system had vindicated itself
because the Germans had not in fact broken through,
and it was still official British doctrine at the
start of the Second World War.
It is of interest that a similar process was to
occur twenty years later, after the collapse of
France in May 1940. Once again, it was believed that
the Germans had employed fundamentally new tactics,
Blitzkrieg, developed by one man of genius, Guderian,
and put into practice by a few elite divisions, the
Panzers. Once again, the intention was to explain
away the reasons for defeat, and so avoid the need to
analyse what happened, for fear that this might
reveal fundamental faults in the defeated forces.
Nevertheless, a serious defeat had been suffered,
and it was not felt sufficient merely to blame the
enemy. Someone had clearly blundered and had to be
punished as an example to others. In 1918, that
'someone' was General Hubert Gough, commander of the
British Fifth Army. This formation had retreated the
furthest and had come close to total collapse, both
cardinal sins. Furthermore, Gough had acquired a very
poor reputation as a result of his handling of the
British Somme and Passchendaele offensives in 1916
and 1917. It was felt that his leadership must have
been at fault in March 1918; he was therefore held
responsible for the disaster and was removed from his
command. The subsequent Allied victory seemed to
vindicate the command decision and existing
procedures, and no further analysis of March 1918 was
made.
Once the German advance was held and the tide had
turned, the British generals patted themselves on the
back for having done such a good job. The reality was
somewhat different. The 'Hutier tactics', which the
British Army now ignored, had not sprung fully formed
from the mind of General von Hutier as he
contemplated the attack on Riga in September 1917;
nor were they merely the preserve of a few elite
specialists, as imagined; nor, indeed, had the
British defensive tactics proved themselves to be
effective. In reality, the German Stosstruppen
tactics had been under development since the autumn
of 1914. By 1918, they had become the standard
tactics of almost the entire German Army. In
addition, the defensive system in which the British
still had such faith was not only a poor reflection
of the German system that it was intended to copy,
but was also seriously flawed and had contributed
very considerably to the disasters of March 1918.
The aim of this investigation is to substantiate
these claims. There are three main objectives: first,
to analyse the development of German infantry tactics
and the role of the storm battalions in that process;
second, to examine the British attempt to adopt the
German defensive system and to point out the reasons
for its being flawed in the process; and finally, to
compare and contrast the British and German armies,
in order to highlight critical factors that allowed
the Germans to develop the new tactics and the
internal influences and pressures, the 'pillars of
belief', that prevented the British from adopting
these tactics successfully.
The underlying hypothesis of this work is that
the 'value system' of an army is central to the
combat effectivenes s of that army. The tactics used
by the army are considered to be merely the external
manifestations of this value system. The term value
system is here used in a sociological context,
following the approach of Durkheim:

As persons associate, that is, develop

relationships, with others they tend to
develop common ways of perceiving,
evaluating, feeling and acting. These new
patterns of values, perceptions and action
then give rise to expectations and
constraints on how persons should or ought to
behave. Thus as persons associate with each
other, so there emerges a "collective
consciousness" which in turn constrains them
and obliges them to behave in particular
ways. *

It is, however, beyond the scope of this work to

examine the value systems of the British and German
armies during the First World War in any great depth.
Indeed, the concept of 'value systems' is inevitably
vague because it is actually impossible to define
'values' or 'belief systems', as they are funda-
mentally subconscious. Nevertheless, one can glean
important insights into such values inherent in a
military system by studying the relationships between
superiors and subordinates as reflected in the
command system they employ and by considering the
priorities afforded to certain internal activities,
in this case combat training.
This analysis is of more than merely historical
interest. Current research is showing that the value
system of the British Army today remains
fundamentally similar to that current during the
First World War. It was the inability of this value
system to adopt or to resist the tactics derived from
the concept of Auftragstaktik that contributed
greatly to the disasters of March 1918. Yet despite
this failure to adapt its traditional value system,
the British Army, starting in 1987, is once again
attempting to adopt a German approach to war,
'Manoeuvre War', of which Auftragstaktik is an
e
ssential factor. There is a considerable danger that
the resulting hybrid will be as flawed as that of
1918, with consequences even more calamitous if put
to the test in a major land battle. T h e intention of
this work is therefore to make clear the foundations
upon which the German tactics of the First World War
were based and to contrast this with the British
system. Such an analysis may provide a guide towards
a deeper understanding of the current situation and
may allow the British Army to avoid repeating the
mistakes of the past.