capacity, and policy decisions that spread available resources across the military
spectrum. The second factor was a strategic plan that denied any operational
element by its lack of focus. In what amounted to an offensive cordon deploy-
ment, Germany’s three army groups advanced in divergent directions, each led by
its own mobile divisions. Military, political, and economic objectives were shift-
ing and conflated—not least because of a belief that the panzers could make good
the mind-changes. The war aims of exploitation and extermination meant from
the beginning that the Germans were fighting in 360 degrees. Finally, the
Germans’ logistic weaknesses and the USSR’s underdeveloped infrastructure
made it impossible to sustain mobility. And underwriting it all was a level of
hubris alien to Moltke and Schlieffen, a technocratic arrogance that ignored
potential obstacles instead of considering them—or perhaps, seen from another
perspective, the solipsism of artists blinded by their inner visions. 76
Barbarossa’s scale exceeded the German grasp of operational art. The successive
victories won by the panzers, the huge losses inflicted on men and equipment, the
great encirclements of Minsk, Kiev, and Smolensk were essentially exercises in
grand tactics, in the context of unravelling strategic objectives that were poorly
defined in the first place. Operation Blue of 1942 suffered from the same
problems, and thereafter the German army in Russia was impelled into a defen-
sive mode whose paradigm denied any prospects of operational art. Manstein’s
riposte after Stalingrad, the successes of his backhand, and second-strike counter-
attacks in 1943 were virtuoso performances—but again on the level of grand
tactics, ultimately no more productive in terms of strategy and policy than the
Somme or Passchendaele. 77 They may be constantly described as ‘operations’,
particularly in German technical literature. But words are patient and calling a
dog’s tail a leg does not make it one.
Operational art is the o-ring between strategy and tactics. By the summer of
1943, the Reich was approaching a dead end in both. Some of the Eastern Front’s
most experienced armoured commanders were advocating a zone defence: deep
and complex, to be sure, but with the panzers being used for immediate inter-
vention to choke off local breakthroughs and mount local counter-attacks, en-
meshing the Soviets in a modern version of the Roman arena’sretiarius–secutor
gladiatorial combats. The concept owed more to 1918 than to 1940. Instead of
‘punch a hole and see what develops’, it was ‘plug a hole and hope for the best’.
The Soviet experience shows operational art can be defensive as well as offensive.
But operational art must serve a strategic objective. Otherwise, it becomes grand
tactics. For all its skilful execution, German practice in the war’s final months
owed more to Wilkins Micawber than to Helmuth von Moltke. 78
CONCLUSION: FROM WEHRMACHT TO BUNDESWEHRThe steep decline in the fighting power of the army’s non-elite elements meant
that by 1944 the panzers were being used not only as fire brigades, but also as
56 The Evolution of Operational Art