Kampfgruppe.

Just in case like me you have no idea
A simpletons guide to start


Battle group! German Kampfgruppe action of World War Two

In military history, the German term Kampfgruppe (pl. Kampfgruppen; abbrev. KG, or KGr in Luftwaffe usage during World War II, literally "fight group" or "battle group") can refer to a combat formation of any kind, but most usually to that employed by the Wehrmacht of Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II and, to a lesser extent, of the German Empire in World War I.

It also referred to bomber groups in Luftwaffe usage, which themselves consisted of three or four Staffeln (squadrons), and usually (but not exclusively) existed within Kampfgeschwader bomber wings of three or four Kampfgruppen per wing.


Kampfgruppe - Wikipedia

 

I have a passion for Slovakia's Second World War history. I find it all fascinating, particularly the Slovak National Uprising - overshadowed in the West by the Warsaw Uprising.

Amongst the many units sent to quell the uprising was SS Kampfgruppe Schill. They were extremely effective in dealing with the disarmament of loyal Slovak garrisons, suppression of rebellious Slovak troops and the dissolution of Partisan groups.

In my opinion, Schill was extremely effective and completed all its objectives in a very proficient way.

Cheers

 

Unaccustomed as I am to arguing, I would take immediate issue with the word 'formation'.

In the British sense, units (infantry battalions or artillery/armoured 'regiments') are single-arm, while formations (divisions and above) are generally - to use the modern parlance - 'combined arms'. Brigades may be single-arm on paper but there is an understanding that their HQs will fight 'Brigade Groups' of mixed units. The US took things a bit further with their Combat Command concept. It's probably reasonable to consider brigades as the upper limit of kampfgruppen (even the world's-bestest-combined-arms-practitioners-ever would have had to cross attach infantry and panzer units under one or the other's regimental HQs) but I'm not sure it will help as you'd end up looking at almost every brigade action ever fought.

I tend to define a kampfgruppe as battalion-sized or smaller combined arms grouping under a single commander, whether it's deliberate or truly ad-hoc. This is sort of reinforced by the post-war British Army 'Battle Group' being a battalion-sized combined arms grouping (companes and squadrons), with company-sized 'Combat Teams' (platoons plus troops) as the next level down.

 

It could be argued that British organisation operated in a similar way to the formal Kampgruppe. Operational orders identify task - list Div. level command, Brigade/s as main force, attached RA/RE/etc units, Corps and other assets put 'under command', support units, reserves, etc. All this potentially outside the standard ToE.
Where the perceived 'kampfgruppe' myth has hold is implying the Germans were more successful at pulling ad-hoc units together in a crisis (see authors such as James Lucas). Personally I think the history is less clear.

 

That's why I thought it might be useful to agree an 'upper limit' (whichever side of brigade it ends up).

The allyness of the term may explain the SS's predilection for its use - always one eye on the propaganda.

Hmm... was Schill's mob Waffen-SS or the harder-to-spell sort? I wonder if KG was (or should have been) more properly used outside the field armies, say for training units that were suddenly mobilised?

Is there also a correlation between the use of KG in offensive and defensive roles?

 

From a German or Prussian perspective, the concept of Kampfgruppen is based on the principles of:

Mission-type tactics (Auftragstaktik)

combined arms (Gefecht der verbundenen Waffen)

and the fact that since 1870 German armies have always fought the poor man's war.

The term Kampfgruppe is already mentioned in a description of the 5th Westphalian Landwehr Regiment from 1813:

The tasks of the non-commissioned officers were: Training the enlisted men, supervising the lower ranks, maintaining discipline, leading smaller detachments (guard, patrols, work groups, small kampfgruppen, e.g. in tirailling), keeping the unit together in battle and fighting enemy skirmishers.

Towards the end of WW2, the concept became an end in itself, because the orderly military structures (company, battalion, regiment, etc.) could no longer be maintained.

I would like to quote from Jack Didden's excellent dissertation "Fighting Spirit".

Study on the Battle of the Scheldt

Or, more realistically: What was available at the time. In principle, there is no upper or lower limit for battle groups. In the army, they only existed for active frontline units.

According to my rather modest understanding of the English language, "task force" is probably the closest equivalent to "Kampfgruppe" - at least in certain military terms

 

Didden'ts thesis is a must read for understanding German combat in NW Europe in 44-45.

 

EmpireUmpire refers to:

Never heard of them and found this reference on another website:

Link: Close Combat Series Forums » Post 90401 » Re: Kampfgruppe Chill thesis by Jack Didden

The article (401 pgs) is on a Dutch university website: https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/2066/98661/98661.pdf?sequence=1

The author is Jack Didden, referred to above by Itdan and his previous thread on his book, not this article. Link: Study on the Battle of the Scheldt

Is Kampfgruppe Chill the same as SS Kampfgruppe Schill? Confused here, as this is not my subject and without reading more..

 

"In the summer of 1944, an SS Panzergrenadier Regiment Schill was formed at the SS Panzergrenadier School Kienschlag.
It consisted of members:
- of the IIIrd /SS Panzergrenadier Lehrregiment
- of the SS-pionier-Schule Hradischka
- of the SS-Panzerjäger-Schule Beneschau
- of the SS Panzergrenadier Replacement Battalion 10 in Brno
- of the Wehrmacht
and was under the command of the former commander of Lehrgruppe B SS-Sturmbannführer Klotz.
After being assigned a battery, the regiment moved to Slovakia to suppress the uprising there.
At the beginning of February 1945, the regiment was subordinated to the SS Division 30 January, which was being formed, and was renamed SS Volunteer Grenadier Regiment 86 on 25 February."
source: Die 32. SS-Freiwilligen-Grenadier-Division "30. Januar", by Rolf Michaelis

"The name of the regiment referred to Ferdinand von Schill, a Prussian Major and freedom fighter from the War of 1809. "Schill" was in fact the code word used to trigger an an emergency mobilization of Waffen-SS troops in Bohemia-Moravia. On 29 August 1944 it had been radioed to all appropriate SS garnisions."
SS-Pz.Gren.Rgt. "Schill" - Axis History Forum

 

Auftragstaktik (Leading with mandate → mission tactics)
A method of command in which the subordinate has a large degree of freedom in the execution of his order within the framework of the commander's intention.
The orders should only contain those obligations which are indispensable for the cooperation with others and must be fulfilable with the subordinate's strength, means and authority.
(In this respect, this also explains the size and composition of many Kampfgruppen)

The actual basic idea in the spirit of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Moltke was to give the combat troops significantly increased flexibility in changing situations on the battlefield.
With this leadership principle, one has created the basis for Kampfgruppen

The advantages of Kampfgruppen are obvious: you can form individual units relatively quickly and flexibly from the forces available at the time, in order to meet the respective combat situation with the optimal deployment of forces --> economy of force.

However, there are also significant disadvantages:
At the operational command level, the actual balance of forces on the ground can hardly be reasonably assessed, which means the danger of overburdening the fighting units and can lead to dramatic undesirable developments.
At the tactical level, the cohesion of the troops is often lacking because the various subunits do not know each other and are not attuned to each other.
And, crucially, the entire logistics become a complete patchwork, which can often only be solved with improvisation, if at all.

Therefore, Kampfgruppen should only exist for a short period of time and should not exceed a certain size.

As already mentioned, the Prussians have always fought the poor man's war, so "conservation of forces/economy of force" has always been a high priority by sheer necessity
However, this basic idea did not preclude striking at the decisive moment with almost no regard for losses in order to achieve local success.
The idea behind it was to bring about a quick decision with a few, ruthlessly waged blows in order to avoid a protracted war of attrition. This was also an after-effect of the 7 Years' War, which had brought the then young Prussia to the brink of the abyss.

This worked well until the Franco-Prussian War of 70-71, but it quickly reached its limits in the trench war of the industrialised killing fields of WW1.
There, this concept was evolved in the Sturmtruppen. This era also saw a significant expansion of the competencies of the NCO corps.
At the same time, the idea of the principle of leadership by the (charismatic) character of the commander and the subordinated leaders was introduced, rather than the rigid hierarchical structure of the Prussian army.
(Which, by the way, was an outright horror to the Prussian Supreme Army Command until 1917).

In WW2, the concept was expanded again in the form of independently operating mechanised forces.
This worked quite well until 1943, then again out of sheer necessity it degenerated more and more into an end in itself: The "Infantry Division 44 neuer Art" consisted of only two regiments to two battalions each, and even these strengths could hardly be maintained. Eventually, the responsible staffs had no other choice but to form a somehow halfway usable fighting force out of the various remnants at hand.
A veteran once described it like this: "It's like using a bucket brigade to extinguish a forest fire that has got out of control. But there are too few buckets and many of them have holes..."

I could have formulated this better in my mother tongue, but I hope that I have expressed myself in a reasonably comprehensible way.

 

Given the rigid (and disastrous) control Hitler had over operations, the demands and realities of being part of a totalitarian state, and the draconian punishments for any backsliding, I have always been puzzled how Auftragstaktik worked in practice as it appears to be a doctrine diametrically opposed to these prevailing conditions under which the German ground forces operated. Perhaps it only worked at sub-unit and below (company, platoon, section) levels but not above. Discuss.

 

As long as the Wehrmacht hurried from success to success, it had quite extensive scope for action. And the concept of Auftragstaktik was one of the cornerstones of success
I think it was Manstein who said, mutatis mutandis, that generals from 1943 onwards became only very well-paid battalion commanders.
A few months later Hilter said: "The days of operating are over, now I only need standers".
These were then guys like Model, Heinrici (at best) or Schoerner (at worst)...

At front sections that were less exciting for the Gröfaz - or where the hullabaloo was quite big - the commanders still had a certain amount of decision-making leeway.
At the lower tactical command level, Auftragstaktik were still practised well into 1944, otherwise the warfare often would hardly have been manageable.
When the great dying began, the Wehrmacht finally burned to cinders and qualified command personnel was hardly available any more, command structures became as flexible as glass: fanatical resistance, fight to the last bullet, hold or die and draconian punishments (usually death) for violations.
As cynical as it sounds, given the extremely poor equipment, training quality and morale of the remaining frontline troops, any kind of organised resistance (at least in the West) would have been hardly to maintain.

 

If we take the path of understanding that a "kampfgruppe" is simply a group of forces - usually combined arms - organized temporarily from permanant single arm units, then the "kampfgruppe" is currently at the very centre of modern doctrine.

Whilst the permanent organization of the British Army is still wedded to single arm organization, it trains to fight a war as a combined arms force. The final phase of the training cycle for the big boys is (or at least was) completed at BATUS in Canada as a "battle group" not as individual single arm battalions or regiments.

In 2003, the British 7th Armoured Brigade was sent into Iraq with 4 constituent "battle groups" under command.

 

It is a matter of public record that the British Army formations sent to both Gulf Wars all had to be reinforced to bring them up to war strength, let alone add other support units to form a battle group. Tim Collins, OiC Royal Irish, in his book describes this. This practice I understand continues, for e.g. the infantry battalion in Kabul (on a short, six-month tour).

 

So what was Frankforce: Battle of Arras (1940) - Wikipedia ?

This was a British Battle Group of Infantry, Artillery - both Field and Anti-Tank, Recce, Tanks - British & French.

The date 21 May 1940.

What were Jock Columns if not Battle Groups?

 

At least in the German-speaking world it was exactly that.
The countless exceptions towards the end of WW2 were more like fraudulent labelling.

 

If we return full circle to von Poop's initial post, the answer as to whether "kampfgruppe" were good or bad is largely a function of understanding how and why a particular "kampfgruppe" was organized and for what purpose it was created.

A "kampfgruppe" created along doctrinal lines should fall into the good column as it has been created in a way, by definition, that is designed to be the most effective for the task ahead.

On the otherhand, a "kampfgruppe" created from a mass of disorganized leftover troops tends to fall into the bad column for obvious reasons.

In between these two you have such things as the "Jock column". A collection of troops brought together for a certain purpose - which it did pretty well - but then used as a go to grouping that was pretty ineffective at what it was now expected to achieve.