Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton

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2 Supplying War
basic, this kind of calculation does not appeal to the imagination,
which may be one reason why it is so often ignored by military
historians. The result is that, on the pages of military history
books, armies frequently seem capable of moving in any direction
at almost any speed and to almost any distance once their commanders have made up their minds to do so. In reality, they cannot, and failure to take cognizance of the fact has probably led to
many more campaigns being ruined than ever were by enemy
action.
Though it has been claimed that civilian historians are
especially prone to overlook the role of logistics,? the present
author has not found this fault confined to any class of writers.
Napoleon’s tactics and strategy have attracted whole swarms of
theoreticians, historians, and soldiers who between them were
able to show that both were natural, indeed necessary, outgrowths of previous developments. The one field of Napoleonic
warfare that is stitl believed to have been fundamentally
different from anything that went previously is the logistic one,
which is itself enough to suggest that the subject has been
neglected. Similarly, no one has yet made a detailed study of the
arrangements that made it possible to feed an ambulant city with
a population of 200,000 while simultaneously propelling it forward
at a rate of fifteen miles a day. To take another example: though
Rommel’s supply difficulties in 1941-2 are probably mentioned as
a crucial factor in his fall by every one of the enormously
numerous volumes dealing with him, no author has yet bothered
to investigate such questions as the number of lorries the Africa
Corps had at its disposal or the quantity of supplies those lorries
could carry over a given distance in a given period of time.
Even when logistic factors are taken into account, references to
them are often crude in the extreme. A glaring instance is Liddell
Hart's criticism of the Schlieffen Plan which, while concentrating
on logistic issues, does so without considering the consumption
and requirements of the German armies, without saying a word
about the organization of the supply system, without even a look
at a detailed railway map.’ All we find is a passage about the circumference of a circle being longer than its radii, which reminds
one suspiciously of that ‘geometrical’ system of strategy so beloved of eighteenth-century military writers. And this passage is
put forward by some, and accepted by others, as ‘proof’ that the
Schlieffen Plan, the details of which took scores of highly-trained

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