"Stormtrooper Tactics" Topic

This is old, but still a quite interesting article.

"The Western Front in WWI had been a largely static war since the freewheeling days of 1914. In this, it resembled less battles and battlefields than sieges and fortifications. The trench system that stretched from Switzerland to the English Channel meant that the traditional methods of open warfare–flanking maneuvers, for example–had become essentially impossible. What was left were frontal assaults, with all the expected sanguinary implications. The central tactical question, from 1914 onward, had been how to get an attack across No Man's Land, from one trench system to another, and then hold it, all without losing too many casualties in the process. The years 1916-1917 were experimental, as all the armies tried a variety of ways to mount assaults. Some were unsuccessful: the German gas attack at Ypres in 1915 momentarily opened a gap in the British line, but the German troops were mostly held by a combination of dogged Canadian defenders and the difficulties of moving up into their own gas. Some were successful: in 1917, the British mounted successful assaults at Messines Ridge and Cambrai, broke through German lines using, for the former, carefully organized artillery bombardments and "bite and hold" tactics and, for the latter, using mass ranks of armored vehicles, "tanks." Some were disasters: at the Somme and Verdun in 1916, and Passchendaele in 1917, British and German assaults had turned in cauldrons that boiled hundreds of thousands alive. This mixture of successes, failures, and catastrophes had killed millions and stretched the war out without result.

By 1918, the Germans thought that they had figured out a way to do it. A wide-ranging debate over tactics within the German Army had led to the creation–largely by General Oskar von Hutier–of a set of "infiltration tactics." von Hutier's formulation would wed short artillery bombardments, designed to keep the heads of the frontline defenders down, with specially trained units of elite soldiers–Sturmbattalione or stormtroopers–who would creep out in the middle of the bombardment get to the edge of the enemy trench system and, when it lifted, be among the defenders before they could react. Once the frontline was cracked, larger units would move to consolidate the gains, while the stormtroopers moved deeper into the defensive system. Hutier's tactics worked well on the Russian front, and at the 1917 Battle of Caporetto in Italy where, among others, Erwin Rommel, made his name…"
Full article here
link

Hope you enjoy!

Amicalement
Armand

Thanks Armand!

Sorry but this article is very out of date. Storm tactics evolved steadily throughout the war, based on the principles of fire and manoeuvre from before the war. The notion of 'infiltration' was not von Hutier's. There were very few specialist stormtrooper units involved in Operation Michael. Sturmbatallion Rohr, for example, was spread across an entire German army. They were given very very specific and limited objectives, such as the quarry near St Quentin which was attacked in combination with an A7V. British and Dominion soldiers were described as Sturmtruppen in German accounts of Passchendaele, Cambrai etc.

Robert

Thanks Armand. As an overview article that was not bad.

Happy you enjoyed it boys.
Good remarks my friend monk2002uk.! (smile)

Amicalement
Armand