The Need for Organisational Resilience Chapter-6

Dearest Lu

With a few hours’ sleep behind me, it’s time for a line to you. I am fine in every way. My

division has had a blazing success. Dinant, Philippeville, break-through the Maginot Line

and advance in one night 40 miles through France to Le Catâu, then Cambrai, Arras,

always in front of everybody else. Now the hunt is up against 60 encircled British,

French and Belgian divisions. Do not worry about me. As I see it the war in France may

be over in a fortnight. (Liddell Hart 1953, 34)

Deciding Factors: Abundance of resources, operational availability,

and logistical autonomy and cohesion

The failure of the Allies to successfully counterattack was due to numerous reasons already

touched on in previous chapters. Among others, strategic reserves were prematurely

committed to the wrong centre of gravity. As so often, logistical shortcomings additionally

constrained the operational movement of forces. In contrast, the Germans could rely on

logistical independence: abundance of resources, operational availability and cohesion.

Abundance of resources. The Germans concentrated most of their crack units on the

Schwerpunkt, the centre of gravity. They structured these resources around the formation of

Panzergruppe Kleist, a temporarily formed and largely operational independent formation,

true to Guderian’s maxim of ‘ Klotzen, nicht kleckern’ ('boot them, don't spatter them'). Under

its command, significant air forces were placed to provide close ground support. In order to

operate without any delays and downtime, the Germans pursued an ‘push’-effort of logistics,

ordering more than enough fuel, spare parts, lubricants and other material that keeps an

army moving and operational. Essentially, the operating area of Panzergruppe Kleist was

flooded with material, stored in depots, or being carried along (see the backpack principle,

introduced earlier in this chapter).

The Allies, in particular the French, ran short of supplies. Movements, attacks and

counter-attacks had to be postponed as machines were not refuelled or resupplied, because

resources were simply not available or not made available. The French artillery was supplied

with an abundance of shells, as the envisaged way of fighting was to saturate the enemy

with artillery fire. The more mobile forces, destined to ‘plug’ a breach in the front line learned

the hard way what it meant to ration movement and firepower, as the fixed amount of

resources allocated to a mobile unit was far from enough to keep the Germans in check.

Operational availability. The operational availability of an army is defined by the length of

downtime, non-operational periods associated with reliability, maintenance, and logistics.

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