Nothing new here,
Please find an excerpt from an interview with Lt Gen Gaecke, a German Divsional Commander and later Army COS on the Eatern front in WW2.
A full copy is available on request if you PM me. If you give me a bit of time I will find what his boss Gen Balck said in a similar interview from a Comd's perspective:
Q: Is the current German division staff organization similar to what it was in WWII?
A: No. It now has an Americanâstyle G-1, G-2, G-3, G-4 and a separate chief of staff.
When I see the enormous staff apparatus that we have now constructed, partly under your influence, I often ask, âMy God, how is this going to work?â
Here is how we controlled our divisions in both the West and the East in WWll; My division commander and I would sit together in a halfâtrack vehicle with the map on our laps, exchange opinions -- âShould we go to the left or to the right, should we do it tonight or tomorrow at dawn?â -- then weâd scribble our instructions, give them to the driver next to us, and heâd pass the orders along to a couple of radio operators in the back of our vehicle.
Now weâve built the division staff into a little city with operations centers, communications centers and whatnot -- with everything now in formal writing and transmitted by teletype machines.
I must add that what we now understand the daily command briefing to be -- this assembly of 10, 12, or 15 experts ranging from weather to religion -- simply didnât exist in World War II. One man, the Ia or the chief of staff, would go with his papers to the commander who was perhaps at his cot or his morning coffee; the verbal report would be delivered quickly while the general sat there. There was no huge theater required. During unusual crises, a second staff officer covering supply or intelligence, for instance, might come along.
I just borrowed from our military archives the combat diaries and logs of our division during the initial Russian campaign. It was a most peculiar feeling to see the orders, all very simple, that I had written in pencil so that the rain wouldnât smear them â- and each had the radio operatorâs stamp to confirm that they had been transmitted. I said to myself that these distinguished gentlemen of today probably wouldnât believe that we could actually run our divisions this way.
Q: What was the attitude toward verbal versus written orders?
A: The general approach was that orders were given individually and verbally by telephone or radio directly to the recipient. Then, in the evening, when things were less hectic, a written, sealed version of the order would be issued to follow up and to provide a basis for the unit diary. To actually operate using formal written orders would have been far too slow. Coing through the staff mill, correcting, rewriting and reproducing in order to put out a written order would have meant we would have been too late with every attack we ever attempted.
There are lots of other disadvantages to these huge staffs. You get far too many vehicles which are too hard to move and that attract the attention of enemy aircraft. The whole apparatus becomes sluggish and slow. All of that needs to have the fat thoroughly trimmed away one of these days.
Comments from a sucessful (He was, yes I know Germany wasn't) WW2 German general in 1979.
