I see it the other way....
Till 1917, generally in all armies including German, there was almost no trend of General Staff officers visiting the frontlines...the first such instance was of Ludendorff once he started visiting the lines to interact with officers / men in order to get a first hand account of what they had been through......his findings resulted in to the German concepts of ATTACK IN DEPTH and DEFENCE IN DEPTH......
Perhaps I tripped over my own use of language; I meant that Commanding Officers visited the front, by implication, never his general staff.
Superiority of a General Staff...well in my opinion...if you are a good staff officer who has done all his homework, then once the plan is implemented on the battlefield, it speaks volumes of the hardwork behind it....
Example.....once the French mobilized for Franco Prussian war.......a staff officer went to info Motlke (one of my mentors) about this, he found Moltke calm and reading a book, he didnt budge since he knew that the Prussian General Staff under has been well prepared by him to prepare for all contingencies...right down to the number of axles passing through a point on a rail line in a second...such detailed planning.
You mean Moltke the Uncle, the Elder (just pulling your leg; of course you meant the elder Moltke)
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My own favourite is Patton turning his 3rd Army 90 deg. during the Battle of the Bulge to relieve the defendants of Bastogne - was it 101 Airborne or 82? A battalion, OK, a brigade, sure, a division (gulp, not impossible, but hairy), an Army Corps (let's just not think about it and have a chai instead) - but a full Army? With 3 Army Corps, and 14 Divisions under command?
The end of WW1, and then WW2 brought the importance of personal example back to the battlefield, where seemingly impossible situations were handled well just because the commander choose to go forward at the right moment and spur everyone to action....we'll discuss many such examples in this thread....
Which thread? This Manstein-Rommel-Guderian one? Oh dear, I may be admonished sternly in case I am found loitering about here.
As far as German staff officers' / commanders' losses of WW2 are concerned, we may not that they started to happen in big numbers during and after 1943, once the tide began to turn against them....
Reasons....
On the Eastern Front, Soviets using Deep Battle Doctrines, were able to engage all German levels at once (forward localities, depth locations, tactical / operational / strategic reserves)...
@Armchair ....so often it happened that German HQs found themselves engulfed in the battle and therefore became casualties.....hundreds of examples of this.....
On the Western Front....after Operation Cobra....breakout of the Allies from the Normandy beachhead....The German front was badly broken.....Allies since they were almost completely motorized and mechanized, managed to achieve the same effects which the Soviets did on the Eastern Front....
Hmm. You have a point, of course. But I do think cultural differences contributed. Incidentally, the Russian commanders never went anywhere close to enemy fire, as a practice.
You are right.....and you may note that whenever a subcontinent commander went tangent to these British traditions, he achieved unexpected successes...
Eftekhar Janjua being my own favourite example, although Harbaksh Singh did not fail to go right to the front lines fairly frequently. Another officer who had an outstanding career but who was so bad at boss management that he is hardly ever remembered is Sagat Singh, an Indian officer, and a great leader. Someone who never really got going, and died due to shell fragment injuries was relatively junior, and not a popular name in Pakistani annals, and that was Brigadier Usman.
Just some sort of trivia with which i tend to confuse my students......
Most famous armor officers of the world which generally everyone knows were NOT from armor background...take the three respected officers in view in this thread...
Rommel (mountain infantry)
Guderian (light infantry)
Manstein (infantry)
then....
Gen Abrar (infantry), GOC 6 Armored Division at Chawinda
Gen Iftikhar (infantry), Chamb 1971
LOLOL.
I did not know you had this mischievous streak in you!
To be honest, I don't know about General Abrar at Chawinda; Major Amin was rather lukewarm about him, if I remember correctly.
Perhaps you wanted to make a point by reversing roles, otherwise you might have mentioned that officers from armoured background had indifferent performances with armoured troops - J. N Chaudhuri fancied himself no end of an expert on armoured operations, and, of course, Rajinder Singh, after commanding 17 Cavalry, was the bees' knees. He contributed single-handedly to the iconic status of 26 Cavalry.
While he never commanded armoured troops in war, an infantry officer, General Sundarji, was one of the most influential thinkers and reformers of armoured troops doctrine, and became Rajinder Singh's distant successor in 1974, when as an infantry officer, he was given 1 Armoured Div.! But his then boss, K. V. Krishna Rao, another hugely under-rated officer, was given to taking very good personnel decisions.
