land power

land power. With one significant exception—the atomic bomb—land power exerted the decisive influence in the Second World War that it had generally done throughout the ages. Ultimate victory was still fundamentally achieved, in spite of what some sailors and airmen might argue, through the infantryman (see infantry warfare) with his rifle and bayonet, helped by other forms of land power such as engineers, tanks and artillery, occupying the opposing sides territory.

The nature of land warfare during 1939–45 cannot be understood without considering the experience of the First World War. The bloody deadlock of trench warfare cast a long shadow, and no nation, least of all the Germans, wished to repeat that experience. If general war in Europe was to occur again, and for much of the inter-war period most people fervently believed that it would not, it must be of short duration, and they hoped that that technological development of the late 19th century, the internal combustion engine, would help make this possible. By 1914 it had already been adopted for military use in the form of armoured and staff cars, and the lorry. By the autumn of 1918 the tank, developed initially by the British as a means of breaking through heavily fortified trench systems, was becoming a decisive weapon, its main limitations being mechanical unreliability and relative low speed. Even so its performance on 8 August 1918, the first day of the battle of Amiens, and the first major action in the Allied counter-offensive on the Western Front which would bring the war to an end three months later, caused Erich von Ludendorff (1865–1937), the German chief of staff, to note that it was ‘the Black Day for the German Army’. The Germans, too, employed tanks during 1918, in small quantities, but they also developed an effective method of restoring mobility to a deadlocked battle field. This was through their storm troops who were trained to penetrate weak points in the defences and, bypassing strong opposition, which would be reduced by follow-up troops, make for the enemy's rear.

The move away from static warfare also affected artillery which between 1914 and 1918 was the dominant weapon on land. While the artillery barrages of 1939–45 seldom matched those of the Western Front in duration, the importance of this weapon was by no means reduced. Technical developments during the latter half of the First World War had made artillery much more responsive and accurate. Between the wars and during the Second World War itself the accent was on improving mobility and flexibility, especially when it came to providing intimate close support for the forward troops. Thus guns tended to be lighter and more manoeuvrable than their 1914–18 counterparts and were adapted for every theatre and form of war, from self-propelled guns to support armoured formations to guns which could be parachuted to operate with airborne troops. radio communications, too, enhanced the flexibility of artillery to bring down quick, accurate and highly destructive fire and was a vital, and sometimes revolutionary, ingredient in all forms of land warfare between 1939 and 1945.

The general reaction to the armistice in November 1918 was one of relief and the conviction that the slaughter of the past four years had been ‘the war to end all war’. Most British professional soldiers considered it an aberration and yearned to return to what they termed ‘real soldiering’, defending the frontiers of empire. Yet there were a few who recognized the influence of technology on warfare during 1914–18 and were prepared to look to the future of warfare rather than merely turn the clock back. Initially at the forefront was Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, who had been chief of staff of the British Tank Corps in France. He argued that the tank had restored mobility to warfare and enabled the pendulum to swing back in favour of attack as the stronger form of war. Furthermore, the armoured fighting vehicle (AFV) had the potential to increase dramatically the pace of operations. He was quickly joined by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart, who had turned to journalism after being invalided from the British Army. His starting-point was the concept of the Expanding Torrent, which was a plea to commanders at all levels to position their reserves so that, by rapid deployment, they could best influence the sector in which the most success was being achieved. He went on to develop the idea of the Indirect Approach. This argued that the strategy of 1914–18 was fatally flawed in being based entirely on the defeat of the other side's army. A more effective and subtle approach was to paralyse the opposing command, control, and communications systems. This could be achieved by threatening from several directions and launching high-speed, rapier-like strikes at operational headquarters and communications centres. Mechanized forces were the means of achieving this, and they brought in their wake a new form of mine warfare.

Some official note of the apostles of mechanized warfare was taken in the UK, sufficient to create an experimental mechanized force during the latter half of the 1920s, but the concept of a fully mechanized army was still only a distant dream. None of the victorious nations of the First World War wished to spend more than the very minimum on defence. In Europe the crippling costs of the war meant that public spending was at a premium, while the USA, which also created a small experimental mechanized force at the end of the decade, had the money, but perceived no real threat to itself, having reverted to its traditional isolationist policy. The tank had been one of the weapons specifically banned to the defeated nations because it was seen as an aggressive weapon. For the victors, too, determined as they were to prevent a future war through the League of Nations and disarmament agreements, large tank forces were politically unacceptable.

Military conservatism also baulked at mechanized forces. Some soldiers went so far as to claim that the tank was merely a product of trench warfare, which itself could never occur again. Others, especially cavalrymen, saw in the tank a threat to their beloved horses. Some, too, especially infantrymen and artillerymen, feared that their own arms would be taken over by it. Indeed, Fuller had begun to propose an ‘all tank’ army, with infantry merely being the occupiers of the territory that the tanks had overrun. It was at this point that Liddell Hart began to diverge from Fuller's views. He believed that infantry still had a significant role to play and began to look more in terms of what the Soviets later termed the Combined Arms Army. As far as the official view went, the tank's primary role remained support of the infantry in the attack.

The French who, given their horrific casualties during 1914–18, had most to fear from another major conflict in Europe, adopted an entirely different concept. In contrast with the pre-1914 view that the French soldier, with his singular élan, performed best in the attack, they took the doggedness of the poilu in defence at Verdun in 1916 as their guide. Germany, although militarily emasculated, remained the prime threat in French eyes. In order therefore to deter any future attack the decision was made in 1927 to construct a fortified belt, the Maginot Line, along the Franco-German border.

The Germans, although denied modern weapons and restricted by the Versailles settlement to a 100,000-man long service army, took a deep interest in the mechanization debate. In spite of their military disadvantages, they had two bonuses. Firstly, the disbandment of the old army meant that they could start afresh and develop new concepts. Also, through secret clauses in the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, they were able to send officers to the USSR for training in modern warfare in exchange for giving the Soviets technological advice, so that by the time Hitler came to power in 1933 the groundwork for both the Luftwaffe and Germany's panzer arm had been completed. The Soviets also created, after considerable debate as to the shape it should take, a new Red Army. By the early 1930s, led by its chief of staff Marshal Tukhachevsky (1893–1937), the Red Army had developed the concept of Deep Thrust. Once the opposing side's defences had been penetrated, swiftly moving mechanized forces would create local encirclements and then, in conjunction with airborne and airmobile forces (see also airborne warfare), enter the pursuit phase. Emphasis was on all-arms mechanized forces. By the mid-1930s the Red Army had developed, in the form of mechanized corps, a larger AFV fleet than any other nation. Close behind was the German Army, which formed its first three panzer divisions in 1935.

It was Hitler himself who first coined the term ‘lightning war’ or blitzkrieg. His own experience on the Western Front convinced him that if he had to resort to war to attain his ends it would have to be short. In the meantime the Wehrmacht had to be rapidly expanded, but the resultant demands on German industry were severe and Germany's armed forces could not have everything they wanted. Thus, while the navy was forced to concentrate on surface vessels at the expense of submarines and the Luftwaffe on large numbers of medium bombers as opposed to four-engined, long-range types, the army gave priority to armoured fighting vehicles. This meant that at the outbreak of war in 1939 the bulk of Germany's land forces consisted of infantry divisions dependent largely on their feet and horse-drawn transport (see animals).

The Western democracies, once they realized that war with Germany was possible, began to rearm. In the UK priority went to the Royal Navy and RAF. The army began to create two armoured divisions, one in Britain and the other in Egypt, but, unlike the Germans, concentrated primarily on motorizing transport. Thus, by 1939 the horse, apart from one cavalry division sent to Palestine, had been removed from the order of battle. France continued to rely on the Maginot Line as the bulwark of its defence, although in 1933 Colonel de Gaulle wrote a book entitled Towards a Professional Army. He proposed that a 100,000-man career armoured army should be superimposed on the existing conscript force in order to act as a shield against surprise attack. Little notice was taken of the book in France where the concept of a regular army was anathema to the left-wing politicians in power. Besides which, a large armoured force implied offensive operations, to which the French military establishment was totally opposed. Mechanized reconnaissance formations were raised, but the tank remained primarily wedded to the infantry. One of the false lessons from the Spanish Civil War was that the anti-tank gun (see anti-tank weapons) had outstripped the tank. This served to reinforce the belief that the tank could not be allowed to operate outside these two roles (infantry support and reconnaissance) unless the opposing side had first been broken by other means.

The Red Army also suffered, albeit indirectly, from the Spanish Civil War. Flying in the face of Tukhachevsky's doctrine, they had attempted to use tanks on their own, with disastrous results. Consequently, the lesson they drew was that tanks could only survive if used in close support of infantry. Stalin's purges were getting under way at this time and he used this failure as an excuse to liquidate Tukhachevsky and two-thirds of the Red Army's senior commanders (see USSR, 6(a)). The mechanized corps were broken up and tanks dispersed in small brigades among the infantry. Only the Far Eastern Army survived reasonably intact and Tukhachevsky's doctrine was proved effective during the clashes with the Japanese on the Outer Mongolian border with Manchukuo in August 1939 (see Japanese–Soviet campaigns). Little notice was taken of this experience in Moscow and the effect of the purges would be sorely felt during the 1939–40Finnish–Soviet war.

The German blitzkrieg in the Polish campaign of September– October 1939, and in the fighting which culminated in the fall of France in June 1940, stunned both the vanquished nations and the neutral Americans. Poland, of course, was in an impossible position; the fighting spirit of its troops could not compensate for lack of modern weapons and long and awkwardly shaped borders which committed its army to a largely linear defence. Even so, the campaign, short as it was, did produce some sobering lessons for the Germans. During the early days a certain hesitancy in the panzer divisions meant that higher panzer commanders needed to lead very much from the front and to make maximum use of the flexibility which radio communications, with which every tank was equipped, gave them. The German High Command revealed a nervousness over allowing the armour to get too far ahead of the marching infantry and putting itself in danger of being cut off. It was also realized that more panzer divisions than the six employed in Poland would be needed to overcome the western Allies.

The phoney war, which witnessed a winter-long tussle between Hitler, who wanted to strike westwards as soon as possible, and his generals, who wanted to delay until their forces were properly organized, should have been beneficial to the Allies, but was not. True, the seven months' pause gave them time to mass more troops, but their strategy and posture were fundamentally flawed. The Allied Plan D, which called for a move of the left-wing armies into Belgium, was designed to counter a repeat of the 1914 von Schlieffen wheel. The original German plan, with its limited objective of providing a shield for the Ruhr and gaining sufficient territory in the Low Countries and northern France to wage sea and air war against the UK, had some similarities to the 1914 concept, but when amended to mounting the main thrust through the Ardennes, it exposed the right flank of the northern Allied armies (see FALL GELB). Besides which, the French and British had had no opportunity to view the River Dyle positions because of Belgian neutrality. The Allied command, control, and communications structure was cumbersome and although they had more tanks, these were mostly dispersed along the front and could only be committed piecemeal.

Yet the Germans were not without their problems. High Command nervousness over the panzer formations getting too far ahead of the follow-up infantry and risking being cut off was even more apparent than in Poland, and resulted in the famous ‘Halt Order’ in front of Dunkirk. Within the panzer divisions themselves, the wear and tear to crews and tanks during the dash to the Channel was also a cause of worry. Nevertheless, the Germans were so successful because, as in Poland, the pace of their operations was such as to numb the Allied High Command and to make it incapable of effective reaction, let alone wrest the initiative from the attacker (see also France, 6(a)).

In the immediate aftermath of the French campaign the decision was made to raise the existing three British armoured divisions to seven, manpower and availability of tanks being the only brakes at the time. The USA, too, reacted on similar lines, forming an Armored Force with a projected strength of no fewer than 50 divisions. What had also been especially impressive about the German performance was the close air support provided by the Luftwaffe to the panzer formations. Luftwaffe officers equipped with ground-to-air radio travelled with the Panzer Divisions (see also FLIVOS) and this meant that air support was highly responsive. Indeed, the Ju87 Stuka dive-bomber was used as aerial artillery (see also bombers, 2). Before the war, jealous of the independent status of the RAF, the British air ministry accorded low priority to ground support. The machinery for employing air support on the battlefield did not exist and such air assets as were available were used, as they were in most other air forces, for reconnaissance, artillery spotting, and interdiction (attacks behind the battle area). The events of May 1940 forced a radical reconsideration and the result was the formation of teams to carry out the same role as the Luftwaffe ones with the panzer divisions.

The Western Desert campaigns were where the British close air support system was fully developed. It was also undoubtedly the ‘cleanest’ land campaign of the war in terms of low civil population density, the openness of much of the terrain, and the way in which both sides observed the laws of war. The desert also, at least on the surface, gave the opportunity for armour, the dominant land weapon, to manoeuvre like fleets at sea just as the tank pioneers of the First World War had envisaged. Rommel's handling of his armour proved to be more imaginative than that of the British. In defence he used it to draw the British tanks on to his anti-tank guns, especially the 88 mm. (3.4 in.), more powerful than any existing tank gun. The German formation of ad hoc all-arms battle groups (Kampfgruppen) in fluid tactical situations, something which had become doctrine common to all theatres in which the German Army was engaged, was also prominent. The British tended to be more rigid in their approach, but did recognize with experience that their armoured formations needed a better balance between tanks and infantry. Dominating all during the campaign in the desert was the question of logistics. The rapid and long advances by both sides overstrained supply systems and eventually brought these advances to a halt. Attempts to use the numerous ports along the Libyan coastline in order to shorten the supply lines were often frustrated by the withdrawing side's destroying the port facilities. Eventually the tide turned in favour of the British, largely because the Axis sea routes across the Mediterranean were successfully interdicted. Montgomery was able to take advantage of his material superiority at the second battle of El Alamein, but was also careful to ensure that his pursuit of Rommel was logistically supportable. Some commentators have accused him of being over-cautious, but he was only too aware of the supply problems that his predecessors had experienced.

In Hitler's eyes the Western Desert campaigns were never more than a mere sideshow; he had only become involved in order to prop up his Italian ally. In contrast, from July 1940 until the end of 1941 the battle for the Mediterranean was the only theatre in which British land power was actively engaged against the Axis. However, during much of this time British forces fought not just in Egypt and Libya, but also in the East African, Syrian, and Balkan campaigns, as well as on Crete, and in Iraq and Persia, and at times these additional commitments severely stretched resources.

From June 1941 the German–Soviet war dominated land warfare in Europe, and, indeed, the war in the northern hemisphere. War on the Eastern Front, as earlier great captains—Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII of Sweden, and Napoleon—had previously discovered, was much influenced by two factors, space and climate. Moscow, the USSR's capital, lay 965 km. (600 mi.) from the east Prussian border, but to the east again the Soviet Union extended for a further 16,000 km. (10,000 mi.). The weather is bounded by the spring thaw and the autumn rains, and the German planners recognized that the objectives of Moscow, Leningrad, and the Ukraine had to be gained before the rains arrived (see also meteorological intelligence). As it happened, the spring thaw came late in 1941 and this, together with the foray into the Balkans—another spectacular demonstration of blitzkrieg—delayed the starting date. Nevertheless, the German armies had major initial advantages in that Stalin refused to place his forces on alert until it was too late and the Red Army was in the midst of a major reorganization as a result of its poor showing in the war against Finland.

The summer of 1941 proved the high-water mark of the German blitzkrieg machine, with the Panzer Divisions gaining spectacular successes. At the same time it also showed up the German Army's main weakness, namely that the bulk of it still consisted of infantrymen relying on their feet. This meant that at times the German armour was as much as two weeks' marching time ahead of the main mass. Inaccurate maps were also a problem and often the tanks were merely directed by the smoke and dust produced by Stuka attacks on Soviet positions. Hitler increasingly interfered with the day-to-day conduct of operations and his decision to remove the armour from Army Group Centre in July 1941 and pass it to the flanks meant that valuable weeks were lost in the drive on Moscow. When the advance did resume the autumn rains slowed it and by the time the ground had hardened again with the onset of winter the Soviets had gained a valuable breathing-space. All this, and the strain placed on the logistical system by the autumn rains, left the Germans dangerously extended, both in front of Moscow and at Rostov, gateway to the Caucasus, and they lacked the clothing and other means to combat the severe Russian winter. The Soviets took advantage of this and their successful counter-attacks in front of Moscow and at Rostov marked the beginnings of the reorganized Red Army. This reformation was reinforced during the summer 1942 campaign in the south when instead of allowing themselves to be surrounded the Soviet fronts (army groups) withdrew in the face of the German thrusts.

Stalingrad, besides being the turning-point of the war on the Eastern Front, was also a reminder that an ancient form of land warfare, the siege, was by no means obsolete. Indeed, the Germans had successfully besieged both Odessa and Sevastapol on the Black Sea in 1941, but they failed against Leningrad, which held out for two and a half years before being relieved in January 1944. The British, too, had been besieged in Tobruk during 1941, and in the latter part of the war Hitler declared several towns and cities Festungen (fortresses), which were expected to hold out to the last man (see Breskens pocket and Breslau Festung, for example). During the campaign in north-west Europe the French Channel and Atlantic ports were so designated, and St Nazaire and Dunkirk did not surrender until the end of the war.

Although the Red Army made significant territorial gains during the winter of 1942–3, it was not until after the abortive German attacks on the Kursk salient in July 1943 that the Soviet counter-offensive really got under way. Stalin's strategy was to strike blows all along the front. As soon as one began to run out of momentum another attack would be mounted elsewhere, never allowing the Germans to reinforce threatened sectors from elsewhere on the front. The Soviet version of blitzkrieg drew on the German concept, but also on the Tukhachevsky doctrine in which major attacks were preceded by aggressive reconnaissance and accompanied by highly concentrated artillery barrages. Increasing emphasis was placed during the preparatory phase on deception measures (maskirovka) in order to achieve surprise. Once a breakthrough was imminent mobile groups, consisting of armoured formations, would be deployed. Their object was to reach the depth of the defences, seizing key terrain and disrupting command and control in order to facilitate the advance of the main body. Where defences were especially strong, the Soviet forces would be echelonned, with the first echelon achieving the break-in of the first line and the second being passed through it to deal with the depth defences. By 1945 they had developed the offensive art to a high degree and gave a spectacular demonstration of it in their overrunning of the Japanese Kwantung Army in Manchukuo in August 1945 (see Map 59).

The North African campaign, in Tunisia during the winter of 1942–3 brought the US Army into the European war for the first time. Inexperience resulted in some early reverses (see Kasserine Pass), but by the end of the campaign the necessary lessons had been learned. The closer terrain of Tunisia, compared with that of the Western Desert, and the realization that the same situation would be encountered when the continent of Europe was re-entered, caused the western Allies to reconsider their policy over armoured formations. There was a reduction in the number to be raised and more infantry were included in them.

Tunisia and Sicily (see Sicilian campaign) favoured the defender and Italy, with its numerous mountains and lateral river lines, did so even more (see Italian campaign). The Germans' defence was tenacious, as evidenced by the fighting at Monte Cassino, and when they did withdraw it was always to another prepared defensive line. Not until the very end did the Allies enjoy the rapid advances of other theatres, but then Allied strategy dictated that the Italian campaign was never meant to be decisive, but was fought to tie down as much German fighting strength as possible to prevent it being deployed in north-west Europe.

Following the Normandy landings in June 1944 (see OVERLORD) German resistance was also bitter and this in spite of the overwhelming Allied air supremacy and naval gunfire support for which the Germans quickly gained a healthy respect. But their failure to prevent the Allies from consolidating their beachheads—brought about largely by Hitler's refusal to release the theatre panzer reserves in time and the successful interdiction campaign by Allied air power and the French resistance prior to invasion—proved fatal for them. The panzer formations were committed piecemeal and found themselves having to assist the infantry in the line rather than being used for counter-strokes. To Hitler, voluntarily surrendering ground, even if it made sound military sense, was anathema, which meant that the armour could not be sufficiently concentrated to strike a decisive blow, and pressure on the Eastern Front made infantry reinforcements hard to come by. Thus the fighting in Normandy became a matter of wearing down the German strength, but it was not until the beginning of August that the Allies began to break out (see Normandy campaign).

The Allied drive across France during August 1944 was spectacular, but was eventually halted by the logistic brake. Hitler's Festung policy meant that all supplies still had to come through Normandy and eventually the supply lines (see Red Ball Express, for example) became overstretched and the armies began to run out of fuel. Not until the Scheldt Estuary was cleared and the port of Antwerp opened at the end of November were the Allied logistics put on a sound footing once more. It was the supply situation which in part provoked the argument between Montgomery and Eisenhower over the narrow versus broad front strategy (see OVERLORD). On the surface the debate appeared to be between sound military sense and political expediency; but, even if Montgomery's gamble at Arnhem had been successful (see MARKET-GARDEN), it is questionable whether his proposed narrow thrust past the Ruhr and then on to Berlin would have succeeded. By early September the Germans were beginning to recover, as they demonstrated during the fight for Arnhem, and Montgomery's resultant exposed flanks would have been very vulnerable to counter-attack. As it was, the fighting during the autumn of 1944 was bitter and protracted. Hitler's own gamble in launching the Ardennes campaign in December caught the Allies momentarily off-balance, but it could not conceivably do more than delay the inevitable by more than a few weeks, especially once the Red Army had begun its offensive across the Vistula in January 1945.

Although the German–Soviet war was the dominant example of the use of land power during the war—the navies of the opposing sides only played an insignificant part while their air forces had an important, but subsidiary, supporting role—mention must be made of amphibious warfare as an essential adjunct of the western Allies' employment of land power. The Anglo-French experience in the Dardanelles in 1915 had convinced the major powers that large-scale landings on hostile shores were not an operation of war and at best only lip-service was paid to the subject during 1919–39. Indeed, it was only in July 1940 when the Germans were confronted with the realization that cross-Channel invasion (see SEALION) might be the only way to force a British surrender that serious attention began to be devoted to amphibious warfare. As it was, they recognized that air supremacy over the beaches was an essential prerequisite to success. Similarly, the British and Americans quickly appreciated that the Axis could not be defeated without re-entering the continent of Europe and this could only be done from the sea. Hence Anglo-US strategy in Europe and in the battle for the Mediterranean was geared from the outset to this end. The British, recognizing from past experience the necessity for air, sea, and land elements to work closely together, termed amphibious warfare ‘Combined Operations’, establishing a special directorate for it, whose head was for a time accorded similar status to that of the naval, army, and air force chiefs. While the Americans agitated for a cross-Channel invasion of France sooner rather than later, the British preferred a more indirect approach. The Dieppe raid of August 1942 proved if nothing else that a successful landing would take time to prepare. In the meantime, the Allied expertise in mounting amphibious operations grew with the TORCH landings which began the North African campaign and the invasions of Sicily and Italy, and the experience gained in the Mediterranean helped to ensure the success of OVERLORD in June 1944.

The Pacific war was influenced by amphibious operations to an even greater extent than Europe, for obvious reasons. By the end of 1943, however, the overall Allied demand for landing craft and other specialized amphibious shipping was outstripping supply and strategic priorities had to be laid down. This meant that the Burma and Italian theatres suffered at the expense of the Pacific and north-west Europe, thus limiting the options open to the Allied commanders in each. But while OVERLORD represented the largest amphibious operation in history the projected Allied invasion of Japan, if it had had to be mounted, would have been just as crucial and significantly greater in scope.

At the outset of the war against Japan, the speed of the Japanese advance took the British and Americans by surprise, primarily because they had totally underestimated Japan's military capabilities, not the least of which was their expertise in amphibious warfare. Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Allied island possessions in the Pacific and South-East Asia were lost largely because they could not be given the necessary sea and air support in time, but in the Malayan and Burma campaigns, and in the fall of Singapore, it was Japanese land power which proved to be decisive. The British and Dominion troops had carried out little jungle training and assumed that the Japanese would rely on the roads. Instead, though they did have some tanks (and in Malaya they made good use of bicycles), they constantly outflanked Allied positions by using the jungle, despite not having any experience of operating in those conditions. And their rate of advance was rapid because the Japanese soldier required much less to support him than his western counterpart and hence had a much smaller logistical tail.

By late summer 1942 the tide had begun to turn in the Pacific war thanks to the Allied naval successes at sea (see Midway, for example) and the frustration of the Japanese landings in the New Guinea campaign. The Allied troops, however, had to learn how to both defeat the Japanese and master the jungle. The former was partly achieved by developing the technique of supplying ground forces from the air (see Chindits); the latter was accomplished through the setting up of special jungle warfare training centres which helped to instil the necessary confidence. Allied air and maritime supremacy proved to be crucial in the Pacific, and the former was also true in Burma, especially in the context of resupply. By the end of 1943 the British, under Slim's tutelage, had learned not to be panicked into precipitous withdrawals when their flanks had been turned—inevitable since it was impossible to create cohesive defensive lines in the jungle—but to stand and fight and encourage the Japanese to wear away their strength in attacks on specially fortified positions which were resupplied from the air and were, therefore, immune to the Japanese speciality of infiltration and then severance of supply lines. These ‘boxes’, as they came to be known, first proved their worth during the battle of the Admin Box in the Arakan in February 1944, while air supply was invaluable at Kohima and Imphal in April.

Once the tide had turned in Burma and the Pacific the Bushidō spirit of the Japanese soldier came to the fore. Many Japanese continued to fight on when their situation was hopeless and preferred to employ the banzai charge or commit suicide to surrender. This was why it took so long to capture Mandalay and to subdue such islands as Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and it was the Allies' belief that, given this obduracy, the invasion of Japan would be very costly. This perception influenced the decision to use the atomic bomb, which brought about Japan's surrender before ground troops set foot on its mainland.

The Second World War was unique, as regards land warfare, in the variety of the terrain and climate in which it was waged. Mountain, jungle, and desert, intense heat and extreme cold all required specialist skills and these were often employed as much in a battle with the elements as against the other side. At times, especially in the North African desert and on the Russian steppes, armour was able to operate in the way that the pre-war theorists had envisaged, striking swiftly. Yet in other theatres and conditions, such as Italy during the winters of 1943–4 and 1944–5, the fighting became as static as the Western Front during 1915–17. On balance, though, the pace of operations was faster than it had been during 1914–18, not only because of wider use of the internal combustion engine, but also because of the great strides made in radio communications since 1918, which made the passage of information and hence reaction times very much more rapid.

In spite of the improvements in weaponry and ancillary military equipment, however, the Second World War produced no radical new lessons for land warfare. It mainly served to reinforce old and well-proven maxims. In particular the principle of war, co-operation, took on an even sharper aspect. No one weapon was predominant, but victory usually went to the side which best combined its infantry, armour, and artillery and enjoyed air superiority. In addition, an army might possess more technically sophisticated equipment, but this was of little advantage if it lacked the necessary additional logistic resources to support its operations. Finally, the war showed that land power could never be decisive on its own. It had to have the support of air and, at times, sea power as well.

Charles Messenger

Bibliography

Keegan, J. , The Second World War (London, 1989).
Messenger, C. , The Art of Blitzkrieg (rev. edn., London, 1991).