Among the new and valuable skills which Russia learned from foreigners was the art of war, that is, military organization, elements of strategy and tactics. Predictably, these lessons were to come from two outstanding authorities on the subject: Germany and France, the heirs of Charlemagne, no less!
In a historical overview, we may notice that all Russian rulers, starting early on, showed an active interest in the foreign know-how in military matters. A specific interest in German artists of war started back with Ivan Grozny, and was of course mightily rekindled by Peter the Great.
The inordinate love for Prussia, exhibited by Catherine the Great’s husband Peter III, was among the causes of his prompt assassination, yet his practice of emulating the Prussian drill and the other features of German military Ordnung did not die with him, but was retained by his successors, particularly prominent--- perhaps to excess--- during the reign of his (“dubious”) son Emperor Pavel I, who was also assassinated.
The most profoundly influential theorist of military matters in Russia, both in his lifetime and over all subsequent generations of Russia’s war strategists, was the Prussian officer and a thinker of genius Karl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), who served with the Russian army during the Napoleonic invasion, and later distinguished himself by his books on the philosophy, psychology, and practice of war, most specifically, a three-volume opus Vom Kriege (published posthumously in 1833), which would become one of the staples in Russian military academies from then on. (My father General Artem diligently studied Clausewitz’ Werke during his academy years, as part of the mandatory curriculum!)
A further example of German influence on Russian/Soviet military thinking was the careful study by Soviet military strategists (and remarkably by Stalin himself) of the thinking of the great German military strategist Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (1800-1891). The famous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was rationalized by Stalin in accordance with Moltke’s thinking, namely, that the Pact was not a strategic course to be followed, but only a temporarily acceptable option, with a host of other available contingencies never actually taken off the drawing board. In practical terms, this meant that the option of an imminent war with Germany was always under consideration, and Hitler’s sudden breach of the Pact could not possibly catch Stalin off guard. (There was only an intense desire to affect the timing of the breach, so that it would happen later, rather than sooner, in order to allow the next generation of Soviet weaponry to be ready for the action. When the war actually started, it came not as a shocking surprise, but as an acute disappointment in having been unable to hold it off any longer.)An interesting example of Russia’s use of foreign military genius is the case of the Frenchman Charles De Gaulle. (I have devoted a separate entry to De Gaulle under the title Le Général, which I have already posted on this blog.) A professional soldier and a great military thinker, De Gaulle foresaw the advent of highly mobile mechanized military units determining the difference between success and failure in the coming wars, and in his writings (Le Fil de l’Épee, 1932, Vers l’Armée de Métier, 1934 and La France et Son Armée, 1938), he had advocated speedy construction of large quantities of tanks and training of specialized personnel to man these new armor divisions. Ironically, De Gaulle’s urging fell on deaf ears in his own country and in many others, with only two nations heeding his advice, and those were Germany and Russia. As subsequent history tells us, Hitler’s utilization of De Gaulle’s ideas (courtesy of De Gaulle's biggest enthusiast in Germany General Guderian) was to account for the Wehrmacht’s overwhelming military superiority over France and other nations of Europe in the early stages of World War II, whereas the Russians were to get the final edge, breaking the German Panzer’s back with their own superior version of the Frenchman’s vision, as they combined superb operational skills with the technical advantages of their legendary wondertank T-34, in the titanic tank battle of Kursk in 1943.
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