Tactics, Not Just Numbers, Win Tank Battles

The Panzer I, armed with just machine guns was 

no match for any French or British tank.

The common view of the first year of World War II is that the British and French armies were routed and defeated in six weeks by a superior German armored force using Blitzkrieg tactics. 

The truth is, the invading Germans were outnumbered and outgunned by the defenders of France. They won because Erwin Rommel commanded 7th Panzer Division at the front of the invading German Army carrying out a brilliant invasion plan. The British and French had a combined 3,000 tanks, all of which had cannons capable of destroying any of the German tanks in the invasion force. 

The British Matilda tank. 

Better armed and armored than most German tanks in France in 1940

The Germans had 2,000 tanks, hundreds of them armed with just machine guns. But the Germans concentrated nearly all their armor on a 20-mile invasion front, while the British and French spread their tanks from the Swiss border to the English Channel. Rommel punched through the allied lines. He personally waded into rivers when his engineers were making bridges for his tanks. Rommel broke through the allied lines and captured huge formations. 

Without Rommel carrying out a brilliant invasion plan by General Heinz Guderian, the allied army could have stopped or slowed the German advance and dragged out the war in France. The great early success of Rommel, Guderian and the German Army led Hitler to invade Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Weapons of every kind are wielded by soldiers.  How the weapon is used, as much as the weapon itself, determines the outcome of battles.

Tanks Devour Fuel, Ammo and Spare Parts: Ukraine will be training tank crews, mechanics, and supply crews

 

M559 Goer Fuel Truck

One long night in November of 1977, my tank crew was on our third week of training in the West German countryside near the East-West border. We needed fuel. The 375-gallon fuel tank in our M60A1 Patton tank was at half full. To be combat ready, we needed to refuel.  Usually we refueled when the big M559 Goer fuel truck pulled up alongside us.  Other nights we would pull out of the line and go to the Goer.

M60A1 Patton tanks

On this night, the Goers were gone. I never learned what happened, but our only option was carrying five-gallon cans of fuel 200 meters up the hill from a five-ton truck with a fuel pod.  Two of us had to stay with the tank, while two of us carried the 40-pound jerrycans up and down the hill. We stopped at 100 gallons of fuel, 20 cans. Tanks drink fuel. We needed more fuel the next day; thankfully, the Goers were back.

German Leopard 2 Tank

I was thinking about walking uphill with eighty pounds of fuel when I heard the news about German Leopard 2 tanks going to Ukraine.  The BBC news report was talking about NATO training crews for the tank. Ukraine will also be training soldiers to fix, to resupply fuel and ammo and follow close behind the tanks with everything that a 60-ton, 1,500-horsepower tracked vehicle consumes.  

A Leopard 2 can fire on the move at up to 50 mph with its advanced electronic sights and gun stabilization computers.  It can fire a dozen cannon rounds per minute. But a Leopard only carries 42 120mm cannon rounds.  At a dozen rounds per minute, it would be out of ammo in four minutes.  To reload, the tank has to leave the battle area and go back a supply depot. 

Crew handing rounds up and into a Japanese Type 90 Tank.

At the supply point, each round is handed from a platform beside the tank or up from the ground. Each round is then handed through the loader's hatch and stowed in racks in the turret and hull of the tank. Even the fastest crew will take ten minutes or more to stow 42 rounds inside the tank. 

In a battle, a single tank can burn more than one hundred gallons of fuel, more than one hundred rounds of cannon ammunition and upwards of 5,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition. 

Abrams tanks in attack training exercise

A battalion of 50 tanks and fifty more support vehicles burns more than 100 gallons per mile of fuel. In a sustained attack it will fire 5,000 rounds of cannon ammo and a half-million rounds of machine gun ammo. If the attack covers 20 miles, the battalion will consume upwards of 100 tons of ammo and fuel in a day. All that fuel and ammo has to follow the tanks to the edge of the battle. 

Logistics win wars, said every general from Napoleon to now.  The Russians have shown themselves to be terrible at logistical support.  With these new tanks, Ukraine will get another chance to show how much better they are than the Russians, both fighting with the tanks and keeping the hungry beasts supplied.

The Death Camp Next Door: The Sites Where the Holocaust Happened

Auschwitz Barracks

 

Auschwitz rail siding where prisoners were sorted

 for slave labor or extermination

In March I will be speaking to a group at my synagogue about visiting death camps. More specifically, I will be talking about why I visited eight different death camps between 2017 and last year. Actually nine visits since I went to Auschwitz/Birkenau in both 2017 and 2021. 

Auschwitz Gate

It was not my original intention to visit so many death camps. In 2017, I wanted to see the worst death camp, the place where the Holocaust was the worst outside of a death camp, and a place where Jews left and did not return.  That year I rode from Belgrade, a place that once had a large Jewish community but now has none, to Auschwitz, the largest death camp, to Lviv, Ukraine, where the Jews were completely wiped out by their neighbors. The Nazis did not have to do anything.

The fence at Birkenau

Until 2017, I had never visited a Holocaust Memorial or a Holocaust Museum or a Death Camp. I lived in Germany from 1976-79, so I certainly had the opportunity, but I grew up in a very non-religious home, so the Holocaust was something that happened that no one I knew talked about.  

Then in 2016, Steve Bannon was named Co-Chief-of-Staff in the White House. He owned Brietbart.com, the host of Nazi and fascist web sites.  

In early 2017 I planned a trip that would take me to the worst of the Holocaust.  After riding from Belgrade to Lviv by way of Auschwitz, I visited the first concentration camp. It was a warehouse in the state of Hesse, Germany, put in service to Hitler in February 1933.  It was not a death camp. Anti-Nazi journalists and academics were the first inmates.

Less than a month after I returned from my 2017 trip, Nazis with torches marched in Charlottesville and the President said there were "fine people" on both sides of the protest. He was wrong. Nazis are evil. Nazi sympathizers are evil. I knew I should visit more death camps and be ready to fight Nazis wherever they crawled out from under rocks. Especially now that they had a friend in the American President.

In 2019, just months before the beginning of the COVID epidemic, I was in Germany again. My friend Cliff and I visited the Buchenwald and Dachau death camps. 

After visiting four death camps, it became clear that every camp was very different, built where it was for very different reasons and carrying out its mission of murder in its own way. 

On my first visit, I was stunned to see the Auschwitz camp was right in the town of Oswiecim, Poland, right near the Catholic Church. The Nazis need a rail junction and barracks to make the biggest death camp. Oswiecim in southern Poland offered both. And the town now lives with the legacy of horror. 

Buchenwald was built on a hill above Weimar, where the government was before the Nazis.  Hitler built Buchenwald on a hill above Weimar as a raised middle finger to Germans who hated the Nazis. They camp was visible and the smell of death floated down from the camp on the hill.

Dachau, was built early in the Nazi regime. It is first facility built as a concentration camp (Hesse was a converted warehouse) and remained in operation until the end of the war, in part as a "School of Violence." It is right on the edge of the town and, like Buchenwald, not hidden in any way. Dachau is in Bavaria, the most pro-Nazi region of Germany, so the hate was on display.

In 2021 I was vaccinated and returned to Germany.  Cliff and I visited the Flossenburg death camp in Bavaria, Auschwitz/Birkenau and Terezin.  Later in the same trip, I went to Berlin and visited Sachsenhausen. 

Last year on the way to Denmark, Cliff and I visited the Bergen Belsen and Mittlebau-Dora death camps.

Each camp shows another dimension of the Holocaust. I plan to visit more of the camps on future trips to Europe.

I wrote about most of the visits. I will write about the Belsen, Mittlebau-Dora and Sachsenhausen camps by the beginning of March. 

My first visit to Auschwitz is here.  

The Hesse camp is here.

Buchenwald is here.

Dachau is here.

Preview of the 2021 trip is here.

The 2021 visit to Auschwitz is here.

Flossenburg is here.

Terezin is here.

More Photos from PanzerMuseum East, Denmark

Soviet missiles, motorcycles, machine tools, models and helicopters at the PanzerMuseum East, Denmark.

This museum was built as a warning against possible Russian aggression. 

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that warning became prophetic. Here is my first post on the museum. 

 

The Physics of War: From Arrows to Atoms by Barry Packer, Book 1 of 2023

My first book of 2023 is one I was reading off and on through most of last year. It is an odd book that is more history than science, but not history of science. It is a history of weapons that has some very simple physics added to the descriptions to show how the weapons work.  

In its pages are brief origin stories of weapons, such as the long bow and the hydrogen bomb, with some details about the science behind them.  

If you are looking for a history of weapons with a little of the physics of how they work, this book is just what you have been looking for.  If you are looking for details of the science that underpins airplanes, bombs, and missiles, the references in the index will point you to deeper treatment of individual weapons.  

One very helpful aspect of the book is reading about the pace of weapons development and how rapidly those weapons changed war.  The first gatling gun, the predecessor of the machine gun, was developed in the mid 19th Century. Very little was done with it for a couple of decades, then at the beginning of the 20th Century the multi-barrel gatling gun had developed from a large horse-drawn-carriage weapon to a compact, deadly single-barrel weapon that could be fired by two soldiers.  The slaughter of World War I was in part set up by the machine gun which forced stagnant warfare and massive use of cannons.

The first aircraft flew in 1903. By 1916, both sides in World War I had fighter and bomber aircraft over the battlefields.  The first lumbering tanks rolled to battle at 3-5 mph at the end of that war. 

Two decades later tanks were fast, mobile and massed in thousands for invasion covered by swarms of bombers.  The war ended when those bombers dropped the first atomic bombs.  Radar and espionage get their due in this brief history with a nod to drones at the very end. 

Interesting history of weapons with a sprinkle of physics.  

 

From Arctic Norway to Israel to South America, Pandemic Travel

 

Bodo, Norway, at 2am on June 21 this year.

In the three pandemic years ending this month, I have traveled to twenty-one countries on four continents. I was going to write about traveling this year, the third year of COVID-19, but decided that travel this year is a continuation of the strange travel during all of the pandemic. Since February of 2020, I visited twenty-one countries, seven countries for the first time: four in 2020, three in 2022. 

A Ferrari at the Museum of the 24-hour race at LeMans

From Arctic Norway on the summer solstice to winter in Israel to equatorial Bogata, Columbia, to southeast Poland, to the Republic of Georgia, I made eight trips overseas between February of 2020 and December of this year. 

The cemetery at Omaha Beach in Normandy, France. I visited in 2017

In the three years before the pandemic, from 2017 to 2019, I was in twenty-nine countries, twenty of them for the first time.  Over the six years from 2017 to 2022, I was in thirty-nine different countries, twenty-seven for the first time, on five continents (I haven't been to Australia since 2000). 

Half of the countries I visited for the first time were part of a five-week trip in 2017. It was my first trip to Eastern Europe. I rode a bicycle from Belgrade, Serbia, to Lviv, Ukraine. On that ride I passed through nine countries. After the ride I visited Israel, Monaco and Sweden for the first time, plus returning to nine more countries I had visited before.

In his book Doom Niall Ferguson says he was warning colleagues in late January 2020 that a real pandemic was coming from China and would sweep the world. He was ignored.  He and his colleagues went to the annual Davos conference in early February--the attendees were dismissive.  It was the flu. It was a replay of SARS from the early 2000s.  Ferguson was right. The Davos consensus was wrong.

My February-March 2020 trip was haunted by the looming pandemic. I arrived in Europe February 12, landing in Paris.  I took a train to Darmstadt, Germany, where I met my friend Cliff. We flew from Frankfurt to Israel by way of Rome.  In the Rome airport we were escorted through the terminal by a woman who could have been a Drill Sergeant.  

Of all of Europe, the pandemic was at its worst in Italy. We just made our connecting flight and flew to Tel Aviv. In Jerusalem we stayed inside the walls of the Old City.  We heard that a whole plane of Korean tourists was sent home because of COVID on the plane.  We continued with our tour plans. A week later, I flew to the Republic of Georgia. Cliff flew home. 

I was supposed to visit Kyiv next, but went straight to Athens instead because of COVID reports in Ukraine.  I was supposed to visit Rome after Athens, but stayed in Athens a full week, taking a fast car trip to North Macedonia and Bulgaria. After Athens was supposed to be Rwanda.  But then I thought it would be more difficult to travel from Africa if COVID got worse. So I went to the Pyrenees for a few days, then back to Paris.  

America closed its borders on Friday the 13th in March 2020. Paris started closing around me. My ticket home was for the 17th and was cancelled on that day. I decided to wait and not join the tens of thousands of people trying to return to America on full planes and customs lines a mile long. 

There are worse places to be stuck than Paris.  It turns out bakeries are an essential service in France. I had lovely bakery takeout food to eat while I rode the empty streets of Paris.  My plane left on time and not crowded after all.  JFK airport was empty on the 17th of March. I made a one-way car rental and drove home.

Since the vaccine became available, travel in other countries meant changing rules at each border. But the rules were clear and people complied. Poland and the UK were very relaxed. Germany required masks on trains and planes right up to September of 2022. Brazil still mandates masks on public transportation. 

Outside the U.S. I could know what the rules were and expect those around me would follow the rules. In America, every boundary was a new policy. In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I live, COVID policy was different in the city than in the rest of the county. It was true all over the country. 

I had no trouble with COVID policy outside America. But inside America, the erratic policy led me to stay away from Red States, except one trip to see the Circuit of the Americas Formula 1 race track in Texas.

For me, traveling in Red State America was the risk not worth taking. Through 2021 and 2022, the anti-vaxxers clogged hospitals. People who needed other treatments could not get care in facilities overwhelmed with idiots. 

When I first heard about the pandemic, a doctor I respect very much said the pandemic would last three years then we would start living with it. He was right. In the coming year, I expect COVID will be in the background in most of the free world. The countries ruled by tyrants, not so much.

  

My Top Seven Books of 2022

Every year in the current century I made a list of the books I read.  This year, I went further and wrote a blog post about every book as I completed it: except the last three that I have not yet written about. That list of essays is below the Top Seven List: 

5. A Dance with Dragons: A Game of Thrones, Book Five by George R.R. Martin. I watched all eight seasons of Game of Thrones before the pandemic. I decided to read the books during the pandemic. Like two branches of a tree, the books and the series get farther apart the higher they go. The cliff-hanger ending of Book 5 (published in 2012) has been hanging for more than a decade waiting for the final (maybe) volume in the series. I really want to read the next one and am hoping the author stays healthy enough to finish it. Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

4. Unflattening by Nick Sousanis. A graphic book that is part science, part math, part philosophy and very entertaining.  Sousanis said in presentation I watched that he wanted to explore how best to use words and images to present the world. The result is fun to read and a unique view of the dimensions in the world around us. Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

3. The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini and Hitler by David I. Kertzer. If I were ranking the books that made me feel the most sad, this book would be Number 1. It is based on Vatican archives opened in 2020 that reveal the church has been lying about Pope Pius XII and his reprehensible record since he became Pope in March 1939. The book is well-written, deeply researched and puts the opulence of theVatican in a dark shadow. Pope Pius XII never condemned the Nazis or the Fascists or even said the word Jew during the entire war. The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer 

2. (tie) QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter by Richard Feynman. The deeper that every science goes, the stranger the world is. This brief book explains that the interaction of light and electrons is the basis of all that we call reality except gravity and nuclear reactions. That's a lot. Feynman is fun, engaging and shows his readers a world where, on the atomic level, a Rocky Mountain is no more solid than a summer breeze.

2. (tie) 1776 by David McCullough. This book is amazing. The story of the that pivotal year, beginning in triumph, filled with military defeat in the middle, punctuated with the glory of the Declaration of Independence, then ending in Triumph in Trenton and Princeton. The story is all in this book. I loved reading it.

2. Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall. In the first paragraph of the preface this book, published in 2015, says Vladimir Putin will invade Ukraine. And if he is successful in Ukraine, Moldova is next. The book is fascinating, taking each region of the world in turn and saying what is good and bad from the perspective of geography. Marshall says the best place to live is in a country bordered by two oceans and two peaceful neighbors with half of the navigable rivers in the world. Read this book and understand the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the looming threat to Taiwan and many other active and potential conflicts around the world.

1. Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander by David Cordingly is my favorite book of 2022. I loved the Master and Commander  series of novels and read all 21. Captain Cochrane was the inspiration of the series.  Here is the full text of my blog post:

Life really can be stranger than fiction.  In the case of Lord Thomas Cochrane, the actual man behind the Captain Jack Aubrey of the "Master and Commander" novels and the "Captain Horatio Hornblower" novels, real life is more dramatic and more tragic than the characters in the novels.  Cochrane: The Real Master and Commander by David Cordingly, tells the real life of a truly great military commander.

I have not read the Hornblower series, but I read all 21 of the "Master and Commander" series.  The real Cochrane had more wild and dangerous battles against incredible odds than Jack Aubrey did in all 21 novels. Aubrey has a lot of flaws, but is overall, a better man than the real Cochrane, who was, especially later in life, greedy, suspicious beyond all reason, conspiratorial, and vengeful.

But the great things he did are simply amazing.  Brazil became a free country because of several audacious battles in which Cochrane defeated the Portuguese Navy--at the time, still a powerful European navy.  He also won battles that led to independence for Chili, especially an amazing battle at Valpariso, and Peru. 

The whole time I read this book, I was comparing the novels and the life in my mind.  In the Epilogue, Cordingly wonders how Cochrane would be remembered if he had died at 34 years old, before all of the scandals that led to dismissal from the Navy and imprisonment.  The real Cochrane lived till 84, declaring his innocence and making great claims of money due him from many battles for several nations. Anyone who goes into old age rehearsing grievances after a life of true greatness would certainly be better off dead.  

Near the end of the book Cordingly describes the lives of Cochrane's children.  His older sons ran up huge gambling debts. One was dismissed from the Army. Another went into hiding from his creditors under an assumed name. The sons of great men (I suppose the daughters of great women are similarly afflicted) are notorious for dissolute lives.  In the history of Rome, the worst emperors were the sons of the greatest emperors.  

But the accounts of Cochrane capturing a 50-gun Spanish warship with a 16-gun sloop made me want to go back and re-read Patrick O'Brian's wonderful novels. Or maybe I will give the Horatio Hornblower novels a try. 

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The rest of the books I read this year:

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America by Stephen Bullivant

Poems in English by Samuel Beckett

Epigenetics: A Graphic Guide by Cath Ennis and Oliver Pugh

Life's Edge by Carl Zimmer

The Genius of Judaism by Bernard-Henri Levy

C.S.Lewis: A Very Short Introduction by James Como

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding drama by C.S. Lewis

Le veritable histoire des petits cochons by Erik Belgard

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen