logistics

logistics, an all-embracing term used to cover every aspect of maintaining armed forces in the field. These are normally divided into two main areas, personnel matters and equipment. The Table lists what comes under each. Of these the most important for giving forces immediate sustenance in action are fuel, food and water, and ammunition. The last was so vital that it had its own supply system (see Figure 1).

There are, too, a number of important principles governing logistics. Their operation should be kept as simple as possible and aim for economy of effort. An elaborate and over-complicated system will quickly grind to a halt. It is also vital that the logistical system is flexible: it must be capable of reacting to the unexpected. Another important principle is good co-operation. Many agencies are involved in handling logistics and it is essential that they co-ordinate their efforts. Logisticians also require the ability to anticipate, so that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time. Finally, no operation of war will be successful unless it can be logistically supported (see Figure 2).

Logistics: The two main areas of logistics

Personnel	Equipment
Source: Contributor.
Medical/Hygiene	Ammunition
Reinforcements/	Food and water
Replacements	Fuel
Discipline	Clothing and equipment
Pay	Maintenance and repair
Welfare	Quartering (barracks and camps)
Prisoners–of–war	Mail
	Salvage

The global nature of the Second World War meant that forces, particularly the western Allies and Japan, were often operating at a distance from their home base and were reliant on resupply by sea. Being islands, the UK and Japan were also dependent on maritime communications for maintaining their war economies. In the UK's case, communications across the Atlantic were vital. The convoys which used these sea lanes carried the Lend-Lease matériel produced by the USA to enable the British war effort not only to be sustained but, during 1940–1 when the UK stood almost alone, to survive. Convoys also brought across the US and Canadian forces deployed to the European and Mediterranean theatres, and their supplies, and took Lend-Lease from the UK to the USSR (see Arctic convoys). The importance of the lifeline across the Atlantic had been long recognized by the Germans and in the longest campaign of the war, the battle of the Atlantic, they tried to sever it. They failed, but the issue remained in doubt until the summer of 1943. In contrast, the US submarine fleet had by the end of 1944 totally throttled the Japanese sea routes between its new possessions in the Pacific and South-East Asia and the Japanese mainland. This proved decisive in that Japan was even more reliant on the import of raw materials than the UK. The Japanese themselves, however, expended little effort in using their submarines to attack the US Pacific supply routes, preferring to concentrate their efforts on warships. This proved a serious mistake.

Naval operations themselves require a large amount of logistical support. Naval bases are of prime importance, and such ports as Malta and Alexandria in the Mediterranean, Pearl Harbor in the Pacific, and the German U-boat bases on the French Atlantic coast had much influence on the conduct of the war at sea. Yet naval forces often operated at a considerable distance from their bases, especially in the Pacific and Atlantic. In order to maintain their combat effectiveness increasing reliance was placed on oilers, supply vessels, and repair ships; what the Americans called the Fleet Train. The Germans also made strenuous efforts to keep their surface raiders and U-boats at sea for the maximum length of time through the use of supply vessels camouflaged as merchantmen and the Mark XIV U-boat, an underwater tanker known as the Milchkuh (milk cow). The Allied success in tracking these down, largely thanks to ULTRA intelligence, and sinking them, was a contributory factor towards eventual victory in the battle of the Atlantic.

Aircraft, too, could not operate without bases and the extent of their operations was dictated by range. This was especially crucial in the context of close air support for the ground forces. During the Western Desert campaigns the desert became littered with advanced landing grounds, on which both sides relied heavily. These were stocked with fuel, ammunition, and emergency maintenance facilities to enable fighters and fighter-bombers to operate from as close to the front line as possible. The British, both for South-East Asia and the campaign in Europe, formed RAF Servicing Commandos, whose task was to follow up close behind the attacking troops and refurbish or create airfields for this purpose.

Transport aircraft also played an important role in both resupply and reinforcement. Part of the reason for the German success during the Norwegian campaign in 1940 and on Crete in 1941 was the quick seizure of airfields so that they could be used for flying in reinforcements. Similarly, when the TORCH landings took place at the start of the North African campaign in November 1942, the Germans were able to deploy troops quickly to Tunisia by air. It was perhaps in South-East Asia, however, that air resupply came into its own. For a start, when the Japanese closed the Burma Road, the highway which ran from Rangoon to Chungking, the only means by which Chiang Kai-shek could be kept supplied in order to maintain his resistance to the Japanese during the China incident, was to fly in stores and equipment from India using the Hump route over the mountains to Kunming. During the Burma campaign the jungle and lack of roads were a logistical nightmare for both sides and often the Allies found that aircraft were the only effective means of keeping the front-line troops supplied. This was especially so during the Chindit expeditions of 1943 and 1944 and the fighting around Imphal in the spring of 1944. Yet air resupply did have its limitations. Göring's boast that the Luftwaffe could keep the defenders of Stalingrad supplied with all their wants proved an empty one, and the Anglo-US attempts to use aircraft to maintain their high-speed advance across France in late summer 1944 did not prevent fuel tanks from running dry. In both cases there were simply not enough transport aircraft available to meet the demand.

Logistics took on a very particular character when it came to amphibious warfare. Planners had to grapple with two main requirements. First there was the need to keep supplied the troops who carried out the initial landings and established the beachhead. Sufficient stocks had to be built up also within the beachhead itself to maintain the advance once the ground forces broke out of it. The ideal was to land close to a port, but this was not always possible. One valuable lesson learned from the disastrous Dieppe raid of August 1942 by the planners of the Normandy landings (see OVERLORD) was that the French Channel coast ports were likely to be too heavily defended to guarantee success. Hence their selection of an area well away from towns, but the penalty to be paid was the problem of getting equipment and stores from ship to shore. It was overcome in part by the MULBERRIES (artificial harbours) and also by PLUTO. In the Pacific, where the distance from the mounting area to the objective was usually too great for such measures to be practicable, harbours were constructed by US Navy engineers called Seabees. There was, however, always the temptation to sacrifice surprise in favour of over-caution in building up supplies within a beachhead. A classic example of this was the Allied landing at Anzio in January 1944. Consequently, the Germans were able to deploy sufficient forces to prevent the early capture of Rome.

Napoleon's often quoted dictum that armies march on their stomachs serves as a reminder that logistics must be at the forefront of a land force commander's mind. Before the coming of the railway and invention of the internal combustion engine armies subsisted largely by foraging, both for food and fuel, the latter, of course, being horse feed. Indeed, armies often had to keep moving in order to survive. Railways were first used to a significant extent as a means of supplying armies during the American Civil War and in 1914 were to be the basis of the German deployment to both the Eastern and Western fronts. The First World War itself saw mechanical transport slowly begin to take over from the traditional horse-drawn variety, as well as the appearance of the first armoured fighting vehicles, and between the wars the pace of military mechanization reflected that of the world at large. Thus by 1939 some armies, the British and US, had largely forsaken the horse as a means of transport. The continental armies had done so to a lesser degree, especially the Germans, who went to war with a large amount of horse-drawn transport (see animals), employed with the infantry, while mechanized and motorized formations had mechanical transport supply columns.

tank warfare, as exemplified by the high-speed German blitzkrieg, brought special supply demands which were first revealed during the German march into Austria in March 1938, when the panzer formations involved suffered severely from both mechanical problems and lack of fuel. Steps were taken to improve the supply systems and to make them more responsive to rapidly moving armour, but even so in both the Polish campaign and in the fighting which led to the fall of France they became very stretched. The two main problems were supply of fuel and the repair of broken-down vehicles. The faster and longer the advance the greater these problems became. They cropped up again during the Western Desert campaigns where they acted as brake to the swiftly moving offensives conducted by both sides. Time and again these were forced to a halt because supply lines became stretched to the point of breaking. The only way in which they could be shortened was through securing ports. Hence the importance of Benghazi and Tobruk during the fighting.

However, the logistical problems in the Western Desert paled into virtual insignificance when it came to the war on the Eastern Front. According to the German plan for the invasion of the USSR (see BARBAROSSA), the German armies were expected to carry out an advance of up to 1,300 km. (800 mi.) on a 1,600 km. (1,000 mi.) front in the space of just four months while totally destroying the USSR's military power in the process. Apart from the distances involved, and the high rate of advance to be achieved, the German logisticians were faced with a sparse road network and the need to stockpile massive supplies of fuel, ammunition, food, spare parts, and all the other items needed to maintain a force of over a million men in the field. That the successes of the opening weeks of the campaign were so spectacular were in no small measure due to the efforts of the logisticians, but the coming of the autumn rains changed the situation. Wheeled vehicles stuck in the mud and horse-drawn ones could barely get through. The situation became especially difficult in Army Group South's sector when the retreating Soviets destroyed the bridges over the River Dnieper. This meant that the railheads, on which the advancing armies were so dependent, could not be advanced east of the river until these were repaired. It was, however, the coming of the snows which really overstretched the German supply system. It was largely for this reason that, in terms of clothing, the German Army initially found itself so ill-equipped to cope with the Soviet winter. It was not, as it is popularly believed, that no provision had been made for it, but that the supply system could not cope with these additional demands.

The Soviet railways played a vital part in the German supply system during the German–Soviet war and as such became a prime target for the partisans (see USSR, 8). The importance of railways was also recognized by the western Allies and was reflected in their attacks on them, and on road bridges, in Germany and occupied Europe during the last year of the war. In combination with the bombing of oil targets, they eventually brought the German transportation system almost to a complete halt.

The Allies, too, had their problems in supporting highly mechanized armies. A classic example of this was after the break-out from the Normandy beachhead in August 1944 as Hitler employed another means of interdiction by denying the Allies the use of the Channel ports, in much the same way as the British had done against Rommel with Tobruk in 1941. Consequently, as the Allied armour dashed across France their supply lines, still stretching back to Normandy, quickly became overstretched and, in spite of the efforts of the Red Ball Express, eventually forced it to halt. This was because, the further they got from their source of supply the more supplies, particularly fuel, the Allies needed to maintain the ever-increasing length of their supply lines and the broadening of their front. The Germans, on the other hand, were in retreat which shortened their lines of supply; by the winter of 1944 a German division needed only 200 tons a day while an Allied one needed 650.

Clearly when warfare was comparatively static resupply was much easier and smaller quantities were needed. Yet it was often the nature of the terrain which prevented mobile operations and provided its own logistical problems. While air resupply could help overcome these, it was usually necessary to resort to more primitive modes of transport as well. In the mountains of Italy and the jungles of South-East Asia resupply of the front line was often carried out by mules and porters, and during his Imphal offensive in the spring of 1944 the Japanese Commander, Lt-General Mutaguchi, took with him hundreds of head of cattle.

Even so, compared to previous wars, the armed forces of the Second World War generally required much more elaborate logistics to be able to operate effectively. Part of the reason, as we have seen, was the faster pace at which operations were conducted and the longer lines of communication. While many of the weapons employed were little different in their technical complexity from those of 1914–18, others, such as radar and rocket weapons, required highly specialist logistical support. Indeed, the range of weapons and equipments employed was much more varied and this added to the logistical burden.

There was, however, another aspect, which applied especially to the western nations. Armed forces are a reflection of the societies that spawn them. Western troops, especially the Americans, expected and received a higher quality of life in terms of food, welfare, clothing, and equipment than their Chinese, Japanese, or Soviet counterparts. This contributed to making their administrative machines larger and more complex and also meant that for every soldier in the front line many more men were needed to support him on the lines of communication. While eight soldiers were needed in a European army to keep one fighting, about eighteen were needed to keep one US soldier fighting in the Pacific. Such huge engineering tasks as building the Ledo Road in Burma and the vast distances involved in shipping supplies across the Pacific undoubtedly contributed to this imbalance, but by contrast the Japanese often employed only one man to keep one soldier fighting. However, this indifference to logistics proved counter-productive for them, and while the Allies employed some of their best brains in its administration Japanese staff officers were only interested in working in their formations' prestigious operations sections. The Chinese were equally unconcerned, James Lunt noting in his book on the Burma campaign (A Hell of a Licking, London, 1986) that much of the Chinese Sixth Army's transportation was by porters, that its logistics were ‘virtually non-existent’, and that one of its British liaison officers referred to it as ‘ Genghiz Khan's horde’.

Manteuffel's view of the advancing Red Army also indicates that the Soviets did not give logistics the same priority as the western Allies or the Germans. ‘The advance of a Soviet army is something that Westerners cannot imagine,’ he is quoted in Liddell Hart's book, The Other Side of the Hill (rev. edn., London, 1951, p. 339; The German Generals Talk in the US). ‘Behind the tank spearheads roll on a vaste horde partly mounted on horseback. Soldiers carry sacks on their backs filled with dry crusts of bread and raw vegetables collected on the march from the fields and villages. The horses feed on the straw from the roofs of houses—they get very little else. The Russians are accustomed to carry on for as long as three weeks in this primitive way, when advancing. They cannot be stopped as an ordinary army is stopped, by cutting their communications, for you rarely find any supply columns to strike.’

The western soldier's morale was also likely to be more affected if the logistical system broke down, hence the priority given to sustaining it. Morale was also maintained by insisting on high standards of personal hygiene and by the efficient and speedy casualty evacuation systems. Knowledge that if he was hit his wounds would be quickly and properly tended made the soldier much more willing to go into battle. Regular mail from home was also an important consideration, as were the availability of canteens and reasonable leave facilities in overseas theatres, and even the production of forces' newspapers. All these factors played their part and were included to a greater or lesser extent, dependent on nationality and theatre of war, in the logistics machinery.

Yet, however carefully logistical plans were laid, the unexpected could always create problems. One of the dilemmas that both sides had to face was the care of large numbers of prisoners-of-war (POW) after a victory. The vast pockets created by the Germans in 1941 in the USSR resulted in hundreds of thousands of POW suddenly falling into their hands. It was the same at the end of the war in Germany, and in both cases the victors found themselves with inadequate immediate resources to feed and provide sufficient shelter for their prisoners. The result was that many died, not so much through deliberate neglect but because the logistical system could not cope.

Logisticians have always been regarded by those who do the actual fighting with a certain disdain. Yet, even more than in previous wars, those who waged the Second World War realized only too well the fact that without sufficient logistics support they could achieve little. As the US Navy Chief of Staff, Admiral Ernest King, is supposed to have remarked in 1942, ‘I don't know what the hell this ‘logistics’ is that Marshall [US army chief of staff] is always talking about, but I want some of it.’

Charles Messenger

Bibliography

Thompson, J. , The Lifeblood of War: Logistics in Armed Conflict (London, 1991).
Van Creveld, M. , Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton (London, 1977).