Tactics for Dummies: Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard, Part I

This is going to be yet another redo of my old writing rants and tutorials on military stuff for fantasy and science fiction (and historical fiction to some extent, I guess, since the examples tend to be taken from history). It doesn’t correspond directly to any of the articles on the old site, though, since I realised there were some basics I had simply failed to cover there, and this is one of them. I’m going to call it “Manoeuvre is Hard.” Or maybe an even more dumbed-down version: “Moving People Around on A Battlefield is Hard.” Because it is. I know, I know. I don’t want to fall into the Clausewitzian cliché that everything in war is simple, but everything simple is difficult. The problem is that it became a cliché because it’s true.

For this first installment, we’re not even going to get into a battlefield at all. Or at least pretend that the opponent isn’t doing anything to harm us directly. They’re there, and we may feel their threat, but they’re not hurting us. Yet.

Now, one of the simplest kinds of fighting formations is the line. It puts the maximum number of people and weapons facing forwards where they can hurt the enemy (and, well, be hurt, but remember we’re pretending it’s not happening yet).

Looks like there’s nothing wrong, right? Not if the line stays and fights in place. But let’s say we have a line and the enemy is still some distance away. So we decide to march the line forwards. What happens?

Now the line is a mess. This is because a line formation is inherently difficult to control. One’s comrades are to either side and can only be seen by turning the head to the left and right (especially in a helmet that cuts down on peripheral vision), so each person or element within the line must split their attention between looking forwards along the line of march and to either side in order to keep track of the other elements. In addition, people have different natural walking/marching paces and they tend to drift towards their own most comfortable speed when they’re not paying extremely close attention to how far they’re falling behind or pulling ahead of their comrades on the line. This means a line has an inherent tendency to lose its alignment during a long movement unless it stops frequently to dress the formation. Marching in cadence or in lockstep helps, but the loss of alignment still happens eventually; and if the line halts to dress, it slows down its own progress, gives the enemy an opportunity to act while it’s halted, and all other kinds of nasty things. So it’s better to perform long marches in column formation instead — or, in this instance, a particularly simple variant known as the file.

Ruminations on Rommel’s “Infantry Attacks”

One of the books I read while stuck at home during this year’s COVID-19 thing was an English translation of Rommel’s “Infanterie Greift An” — an account of his experiences as an infantry officer in World War I. I promised that I’d do a writeup of some of the things I found interesting in it, but for one reason or another I’ve been procrastinating on it for something like a couple of months. I guess it’s past time that I made good on this promise.

The first thing I noticed was probably the details of the transitional nature of warfare in the earliest chapters describing the German advance into France in 1914. Here we see some aspects of warfare that would have been familiar to 19th-century observers such as Rommel riding on horseback while his unit was marching to the front, but also distinctly more modern details — not the least how Rommel dismounted once the unit got close enough to the front, and also how he exchanged his (semi-automatic) pistol for a (bolt-action) rifle when he went out to lead a scouting party into a French village, presumably to make himself less conspicuous as an officer. Of course, from a modern perspective, it’s highly unfortunate that he had to make this choice at all, but then this was precisely why submachine guns and semi-automatic rifles came into widespread service not that much later.