ISBN 1-55587-950-0
361 pages

Foreword; Acknowledgments; Introduction; tables; charts; diagrams; photos; Selected Bibliography; Index; About the Book

Appendices: Allied Tanks of World War I; Allied Armored Formations, ETO; The M4 Sherman Tank; Armored Corps Casualties; Sample of Allied Tank Casualties by Theater; Tiger versus Allied Armor: Penetration Tables; Analysis of Allied Tank Casualties in Normandy, 6 June - 10 July

   Losing track of all the books published in the last couple of years about Normandy? It's no wonder, because a steady flow of such titles has been adding rapidly to the already voluminous literature on D-Day and the ensuing campaign.
   Roman Jarymowycz's book is one of the newest additions. As with many of the newer titles, his book finds a fresh perspective on Normandy and looks at aspects of the campaign through a different lens. In this case, the focus is on tanks, tank doctrine, tank combat, and tank leadership. While the bulk of the text covers the Normandy campaign, Jarymowycz also devotes a great deal of attention to inter-war and early war developments and, to a lesser degree, tank combat after Normandy. As a Canadian, his viewpoint is a bit different: not only does he pay far more attention to Canadian commanders and operations, he's also not shy about criticizing his American and British cousins (although it should be noted that his Canadian colleagues also come in for their fair share of acidic comments).
   The book opens with a review of the introduction of the tank by the Allies late in World War I and traces the evolution of machines and doctrine afterwards in the Soviet Union, France, Germany, and especially the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. In particular, Jarymowycz shows the European influences on American and Canadian thinking. These inter-war developments mostly proceeded as debates by established arms, notably cavalry, about how they could never be replaced by tanks. Jarymowycz enlivens the debates by quoting various commentators, including many of those with the most outlandish and inaccurate predictions. Surprisingly, George Patton was an early critic of tanks. Archibald Wavell, on the other hand, offered this thoughtful gem about creating infantry tanks fast enough to serve in the "breakthrough" role: "Speed is, unfortunately, a most expensive commodity: alike in battleships, motor cars, racehorses and women, any comparatively small increase may double the price of the article."
   In the end, those branches of service which resisted most tended to lose the most.

   The creation of the armored force is a melancholy tale of misplaced devotion and cantankerous shortsightedness. The U.S. Army chose to fight World War II with tanks and decided to create a new arm to safeguard the decision. The cavalry had lost the confidence of the War Department to conduct modern operations and was savaged—reduced from an arm of influence and power to an impotent afterthought. Initially, the opportunity to create an armored force that paralleled at least some French advances or the breakthrough experimentation in Germany and the Soviet Union had been trusted to the cavalry. Its leadership, instead of embracing and defining mechanization in the spirit of its traditions chose to defend the status of the horse. Chaffee's elegant rebuttal, "The tradition of Cavalry is to fight!" was ignored. The cavalry resolutely defended its roots: "There is no such thing as Armored Cavalry—remove the horse and there is no cavalry."

   That much was true in the US. The cavalry refused tanks, lost its horses anyway, and simply faded away; at the same time, those in charge of tank doctrine determined that tank destroyers would be more important in combat than tanks. In the UK, the debate led to two separate armored forces with different tanks, different doctrine, and different cultures. In Canada, developments mostly followed the British model, but with the added problem that few senior leaders had any background or understanding of tanks.
   The first hundred pages of the book are not without value, but mostly they amount to circling and jabbing. Jarymowycz doesn't really start throwing punches until chapter six when he begins to look at combat operations rather than the development of doctrine. Not all of his first blows land cleanly. For example, since this is not a book about the landings, he reduces Omaha Beach to a single sentence: "D-Day's success was marred by American stubbornness against using duplex-drive (DD) tanks with the assault waves and having to pay for it at Omaha Beach." This view seems totally at odds with the carefully researched material about DD tanks presented in Omaha Beach by Adrian Lewis, who relates the arguments between Omar Bradley and Gee Gerow about DD tanks, and further points out that they were launched in sea conditions recognized by everyone as beyond their capabilities, so that almost all sank to the bottom of the Channel and only two reached Omaha under their own power.
   In the same chapter, Jarymowycz foreshadows what's to come in his book, and it's worth quoting these two pages.

      The Normandy campaign may be summarized as an initial success stymied by determined panzer counterattacks that created a beachhead stalemate. It was a series of failed strategic offensives orchestrated by Montgomery to break out with armored forces, followed by the double envelopment at Falaise that encircled two German armies and led to the liberation of France and Belgium.
   Montgomery's attempts to break out of the beachhead featured four strategic offensives: Goodwood, Cobra-Spring, Totalize, and Tractable. The first was a British-Canadian effort, the remainder U.S.-Canadian. They are important in that they were to conclude with the first and greatest example of Western armored competence and completely overshadowed the remaining two Allied armored operations of the war: Patton's counterstroke against the German Ardennes offensive and U.S. armored operations in Lorraine. The Battle of the Bulge (Ardennes) became a series of operational thrusts that denied Hitler a strategic victory; the Lorraine contests were tactical but with decisive operational results. Only the Normandy campaign offered tank commanders the opportunity to demonstrate the validity of armor as an arm of operational and strategic decision. Further, it pitted an inferior armored force against a technologically vastly superior force. The scandal of the European campaign was the inability of Western democracies to produce armor and, perhaps doctrine, that was at least on a par with that of their opponents.
   For students of armor, among the dozen or so conflicts sufficiently documented to provide material for academic reflection, there are five important examples that ought to considered: (1) Operations Goodwood and Atlantic, July 1944; (2) Operations Cobra and Spring, July 1944; (3) Operation Totalize, August 1944; (4) Operation Tractable and Cobra's pursuit, August 1944; and (5) the Arracourt battles in Lorraine, September 1944. These operations serve to demonstrate both the status quo of Allied doctrine as well as the cultural and technical differences between the armies.
   Operation Goodwood was the first Allied strategic offensive (excepting D-Day) in northwestern Europe and featured the defeat of the entire British armored force. Atlantic, Goodwood's second act, briefly captured the vital ground of Verrieres (Bourguebus) Ridge, and despite the promise of a saved offensive was defeated by a series of German counterattacks.
   Operations Cobra and Spring were components of the second Allied strategic offensive in Normandy. Cobra was immediately locked up in bocage attrition warfare that would not end until early August; despite this, it evolved into an armored success and featured the first German operational counterstroke of the campaign. Spring was designed to support Cobra but failed miserably; it provoked a particularly interesting corps level counterattack by Dietrich's panzer units delivered despite total Allied air supremacy.
   Operation Totalize was the third strategic offensive, designed to complement Cobra's success and destroy all German armies west of Paris. Despite initial total success, Totalize foundered in the face of spirited armored counterattacks and a repetition of Western inability to put together a breakout doctrine at the operational level. Totalize was to painfully demonstrate how far behind the Soviets the Allies stood in military art.
   Operations Tractable and Cobra's pursuit are splendid examples of Allied armor at its operational best and strategic worst. Despite inspiring accomplishments by individual divisions and corps, the dynamic maneuver and total victory offered by Patton's U.S. Third Army were to be rejected by the conservative Bradley. Tractable is the only example of a non-U.S. corps acquiring operational maneuver and features the closing of the Falaise Gap by the Canadian 4th Armored Division and the Polish 1st Armored Division, then a unit in the Canadian First Army.

   Following that introduction, Jarymowycz begins to swing away. Bernard Montgomery takes the first punch.

   It is a matter of debate whether Gen. Bernard Montgomery had a strategic mind. Examination of his activities in Africa and after Normandy suggests that he liked to dabble beyond the operational art; he was just not good at it. Montgomery's great success is the set piece battle buttressed by a considerable superiority in men and material, total air supremacy, and an embarrassment of artillery. Fighting continues until one side runs out of men or equipment. This seemed to work in Africa. The breakout, often called the third El Alamein, featured an almost pathetic inability to use a force de chasse composed of two armored divisions designed to follow the British 8th Army schwerpunkt and overrun the remnants of the German-Italian army as it fled to Tripoli. Rommel, the dean of desert warfare, outfoxed Montgomery. The one "all-Monty" defensive victory over Rommel was at Medinine [sic], where the Afrika Corps threw itself onto the British antitank gun line and got some of its own medicine. Montgomery arrived in Normandy experienced in the ducks-in-a-row offensive....

   Not surprisingly, in the debate about Monty's intentions in Normandy, Jarymowycz comes down squarely on the side claiming Monty desperately wanted his own Anglo-Canadian forces to conduct the decisive break-out, and only his continued failure led the field marshal to claim his true plan all along had been to lure the German panzers into the British sector so the Yanks could smash through in the west.
   The book examines Guy Simonds' Canadian "Operation Spring" offensive of 25 July. Faulty doctrine doomed Spring, and a timely German counter-stroke inflicted heavy casualties and drove the Canadians back. Despite holding considerable British armor in reserve, the Allies failed to perform the same trick on the advancing panzers, and likewise failed to extend the offensive. At best, Spring might be considered a successful holding attack, but it failed in its larger design and in any event did not force the Germans to commit anything more than local reserves.
   Moving on to Operation Cobra, Jarymowycz continues to punch his way through the top layers of Allied generals, faulty armored doctrine, and utter reliance on strategic bombing to open gaps.

   Nevertheless, the shock and destruction created in the German front lines [by the heavy bombers] was everything Bradley hoped for. In a horrid irony, the advent of Cobra and the triumph of U.S. armor brought about the death of armor's nemesis, Leslie McNair. Perhaps because of his complete absence of operational experience, McNair had gone to great lengths to demonstrate his personal courage by visiting front-line troops. Wounded once in Tunisia, he again tempted fate at Cobra's launch, where, had he given Devers the support requested, there would have been ten U.S. armored divisions breaking out instead of five. However, there were forty-five tank destroyer battalions available to Bradley—a force equivalent to fifteen armored divisions except for the drawback of their being incapable of offensive operations.

   Relatively few pages are devoted to Cobra before the author moves on to Operation Totalize, Monty's offensive to support Patton's mounting success at the far end of the front. Totalize was to be another mostly Canadian affair, again planned largely by Simonds. The Canadians gained eight miles—the longest advance of any of Monty's Normandy offensives—but performed poorly, failed to follow up on their initial success, and lost hundreds of tanks. Jarymowycz rates the overall performance quite poor, compares the Canadian commanders unfavorably to the American tank commanders who had just conduced Cobra, and calls into question the determination of the Polish armored division.
   Here, as in Operation Tractable, the next offensive covered, the Allies relied on heavy bombers to burst open the front.

   By now the Allied offensive had been totally subverted by a dangerous dependence on air power.... Besides being used improperly as super-heavy artillery, bombers were, despite exaggerated claims, an area weapon. Bombing radii could vary from 2 to 15 miles.... During Cobra, Totalize, and Tractable, the USAAC and RAF killed or wounded an impressive number of senior officers and hundreds of Allied troops. It was big-scale, big-time fratricide.

   The closing, more or less, of the Falaise gap saw Stanislaw Maczek and the Poles redeem themselves while Monty vacillated, Simonds "finally caught the scent," and Kitching of Canadian 4th Armored Division was relieved for unsatisfactory performance. Despite Bradley's "stubborn inactivity" and "petty bitterness," Jarymowycz mostly faults Monty for the Allied failure to plug the gap in a timely fashion.
   He closes his Normandy chapters with a piece on American armor in pursuit, closely measuring doctrine—or what there was of it—against the actual operations conducted by tankers in particular as they rolled toward Paris and the Seine. The next chapter moves on to Patton's campaign in Lorraine.
   Regarding the strategic situation, Jarymowycz lands more punches.

   The Allies' greatest strategic enemies were supply and time. Although landings in southern France opened up more ports, the supply situation remained critical. The issue was petrol, and Eisenhower gave it to 21st Army Group. Montgomery responded by not opening the port facilities of Antwerp, not crossing the Rhine, and doing his best to annihilate SHAEF's strategic airborne force by dumping three parachute divisions into Arnhem in the disastrous Operation Market Garden. Given Montgomery's catalog of operational foul-ups, pompous self-patronage, and snippy attitude, Eisenhower's sustained faith and forgiveness were both saintly and militarily naive. His careful nurturing of British political sensitivities delayed both operational and strategic victory.

   The Lorraine battles show Patton in quite a different light than his rapid pursuit after Cobra. (See also Patton at Bay: The Lorraine Campaign, September to December 1944 by John Nelson Rickard.) Jarymowycz also illuminates some interesting tactical situations, especially involving units commanded by "P" Wood, where, aided by fog, out-numbered Shermans and tank destroyers took a serious toll of attacking Panthers "...and the results of three tank destroyers and five M4s lost for forty-three new Panthers, spoke for themselves." While Patton and Manton Eddy stumbled in Lorraine, at the tactical level American armor performed well. "Although the Cobra encirclement and Falaise pocket showed the armored force at its operational best, U.S. armor came of age in Lorraine." After Operation Tractable, Simonds sacked Kitching for poor performance even though Simonds himself was not entirely blameless. After Lorraine, Wood was sacked, although in this case it seems to have been because Wood had a better grasp of armored warfare than his corps commander, he out-performed his boss, and proved too outspoken about the whole situation. (See also Eisenhower's Lieutenants by Russell Weigley and Patton by Carlo D'Este.)
   Jarymowycz devotes the remainder of his analysis to larger issues. Why were the Allies until 1945 unable to produce a main battle tank which could stand up to the opposing Tigers and Panthers? On the American side, much of the blame is heaped directly on McNair and to a lesser extent Jacob Devers. This is all backed up with tons of statistics about tank effectiveness, kill ratios, and simple engineering solutions such as the German command cupola that exacerbated Allied problems in tank-to-tank combat. Despite the overall combat superiority of German tanks, in the end Jarymowycz concludes that, more than anything else, technical unreliability crippled the Tigers and Panthers and was by far the principle cause of panzer losses in maneuver warfare, and one of the few saving graces for the Allies.
   The next chapter compares and contrasts, with accompanying graphics, Western and Soviet doctrine from strategic offensives to the conduct of operational combat. Although he does not devote a great deal of attention to them elsewhere in the book, the Soviets, Jarymowycz observes, far out-classed everyone when it came to mounting strategic offensives and utilizing armored forces as strategic weapons.
   In his conclusions, the author unleashes a final flurry of blows. Here are some samples:

   The ability of American industry to create a speedy, mechanically reliable vehicle was only a partial victory. Selecting the M4 Sherman was a stopgap solution—there were supposed to be better tanks down the production line. The Sherman eventually won its campaigns but at considerable cost to men and machines. Further, while the staff at Aberdeen Proving Ground was fiddling with experimental armor, the Armored Force was being subverted from within. The artillery and infantry generals appointed by Gen. George Marshall to create the AGF were seduced by the antitank gun, and conducted a crusade against maneuver warfare. The result was that the Armored Force did not have a principal tank that could meet the enemy on equal terms until 1945. In fact, the U.S. Army would not have a main battle tank that replicated the psychological and technical superiority of the German King Tiger until it fielded the M1 Abrams in the early 1980s.
   Technical shortcomings were not limited to the West. The German army's tank development program looked good on paper but it was, in some ways, a sham. The folks who produced the Volkswagen could not manufacture a main battle tank able to move on the battlefield without a coterie of mechanics and spare parts. The Panther and Tiger were deadly killing machines but absolute mechanical nightmares invented by engineers with a surprising inability to correct breakdowns. Worse, the tanks arrived late—they were a response to Red Army armor. The Russians had fared better: their tanks were simple. They worked and had big guns. When bigger tanks with bigger armor and bigger guns were needed, Soviet industry promptly provided them. That the German Panther and Tiger were generally superior to the T-34 or KV, when they finally reached the battlefield, is incidental. The Red Army was not jousting. The Soviet strategic offensive required a mass of armor to execute deep battle: thousands of long-range tanks that moved quickly and required only elementary maintenance. The Red Army did brilliantly. Its accomplishments were nevertheless dismissed in a series of published apologias by German generals and a Cold War Western military content to believe that the Soviets achieved success only through crude mass.

   Again, on doctrine:

   Doctrine development required definition of first principles—primarily, What is a tank? More important, What are tanks? The difference is crucial to the creation of an armored force. An armored division required a doctrine integrally distinct from that of an infantry division. This was interpreted in various ways. The British and French convinced themselves that there was a requirement for two different types of tanks, infantry tanks and cavalry tanks. However, by 1945, even Montgomery was convinced that: "we require one tank which will do both jobs." The definition of what a tank is was quickly realized in combat: the tank (specifically, an armored, tracked vehicle mounting a powerful gun) could fight in any terrain, in any conditions, in any climate, singly or in small groups. The tank excelled in the attack but was also deadly in the defense. It best supported the infantry but could fight independently. There was simply nothing the tank, accepting its utter dependability on petrol, oil, and logistics, could not do.
   The second question of what tanks are (massed armor) revealed a very different doctrinal mission. Chedeville's lament that: "the tank is very delicate" is best applied to the armored division, corps, or tank army. Massed tanks are not capable of operations in closed terrain or urban areas and should not attack prepared defenses or fortifications. Massed armor was reserved exclusively for the breakout and pursuit. Combat doctrine soon determined that tanks must fight tanks but, specifically, they must maneuver. Armored corps, conducting operational maneuver can achieve strategic results; massed armor, maneuvering in deep battle, is therefore a strategic arm. This was realized in principle by most general staffs, but only effectively practiced by the German and Soviet high commands.

   On lessons learned:

   The doctrinal answer was that Fuller, Liddell Hart, and Hobart were wrong. Guderian was right, and what the Germans meant all along was not the supremacy of armor, but of combined arms: a cocktail of armor, armored infantry, mechanized artillery and armored engineers, all supported by tactical air attack.
   In general, Axis and Allied armies mirrored basic principles, but the Germans were considered better led. Maneuver was enthusiastically attempted and reached competence at corps levels by both sides, although the Germans (the Rommel effect) were the more creative. The North African experience, although important preparation for staffs and soldiers, proved to be a doctrinal detriment to formations training in Europe. British battle schools and war colleges continued to stress desert tactics: "the defensive box," "brigade fortress," and the "pivot" were taught to Allied armored divisions preparing for Normandy, all of which turned out to be a waste of time. The essence of maneuver warfare was overshadowed by Montgomery's "set piece battle" and interest in Waterlooesque defensive victories.

   And finally:

   Normandy has been misinterpreted, and there are many myths that still persist. The tactical issue was gunnery and armor. All the Allied armored offensives in the Caen sector were defeated by long-range tank fire. The Sherman's inferiority soon led to the "infantry must lead," solution and some have chided Allied armor commanders for holding back out of respect for (one might almost say fright) German main battle tanks: "Without question, the tank arm remained the weakest link in the Anglo-Canadian order of battle." However, a close study of the great armored battles (Goodwood, Totalize, Tractable, Cobra, and Arracourt) shows the very opposite. When ordered to attack, Allied armored divisions led throughout and regularly demonstrated aggressiveness to the point of recklessness.

   These concluding chapters, like the rest of the book, are punctuated with plenty of clear, helpful maps and a series of very nicely executed graphic representations of unit TOEs and comparative strengths, all of the sort too often left out of books these days (and in this case featuring images created on the computer by Jarymowycz).
   Tank Tactics ends up being extremely thorough on the Canadians, almost as thorough on the Americans, but less so on the tank forces of other nations, including the Soviets who are outside the bounds of explication but nevertheless ranked very highly by Jarymowycz in his conclusions. He also devotes a great deal of attention to the inter-war development of doctrine when most readers will probably be more interested in his chapters on the actual application of that doctrine. And there are at least a couple of questionable areas, such as the off-hand remark about DD tanks at Omaha Beach. Similarly, when he discusses the 1942 US Army plan for sixty armored divisions and speculates that with eight or ten armored divisions committed to Operation Cobra the "...Rhine might well have been crossed by fall 1944," the author makes no mention of where the additional gasoline, already in short supply at the sharp end, might have come from.
   The strengths of the book far outnumber the weaknesses, however, and Tank Tactics definitely deserves to be read and studied.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Lynn Rienner Publishers.
   Thanks to Rienner for providing this review copy.