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Nov 1, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

A tragic waste of a specialized unit, deployed in a suboptimal way in a constricted environment.

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Was it just the tactical situation, or yet again the inability of Commanders to understand anything but their own field?

It’s tough on anyone who isn’t infantry or perhaps armor to be properly used. Especially reconnaissance.

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Nov 1, 2023Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Likely a mix of both, especially when you have a surplus of enemies.

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After all that work.

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I am struck by the number of casualties (1,068 excluding sick) in a little over two weeks. Would you happen to have handy the number of soldiers in combat and combat-support units (think in latter war this was reported as Kampfstärke, earlier maybe Gefechtstärke, tho' I could be making that up), just to bring out even more starkly what a beating this unit took in proportional terms?

"[A]nd conducting small-scale attacks with limited objectives, often as part of battle groups attached to other formations" reminded me (vaguely, decades now since I read) of a complaint in Spaeter's book about the Grossdeutschland's deployment in Rzhev, namely that the situation at the front was such that the unit had to be in effect broken up to send kampfgruppen here and there to plug holes, which (argued Spaeter) led to higher casualties since the division was stripped of the combined-arms synergies of fighting as a whole unit.

Many thanks for this fascinating micro-organizational saga.

1,068

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