Envelopments often, if not typically, occur when the side being encircled aids and abets the side doing the encircling. The battles of envelopment along the Soviet frontier in 1941 and in other locations occurred just as much due to Stalin’s directives as to anything the Germans did. He ordered large armies to hold their ground, giving the attackers the opportunity to close the jaws of the panzers behind them. Sixth Army could have gotten out of Stalingrad if Hitler hadn’t put his pride ahead of the fate of his troops. The UN forces in North Korea during the first winter of the Korean War might have been enveloped by the Chinese, except that they withdrew rather than be enveloped. The larger the envelopment, the more the side being envelops has to participate in its own destruction.
Even into 1945, the Red Army rarely conducted deliberate envelopments. Stalin didn’t like them, the Soviet success at Stalingrad notwithstanding. Soviet attacks were conceived more as parallel wedges being thrust into the enemy’s front. The enemy would be forced to withdraw rather than be encircled. Where the defenders stood fast (thank you, Herr Hitler), they would of course be encircled.
The invasion of France worked in large part because events moved faster than the defenders could react to them. More exactly, events moved more quickly than the Allies had anticipated they could, and so Allied countermeasures to the German thrust towards the Channel typically were rendered moot by the rapid advance of the mobile attackers. Had the French been in possession of a better doctrine and a leadership not so inclined to think on WW1 time tables, the Allies might well have fared better.
In Poland, it’s entirely possible that there will be envelopments. They are unlikely to be the kinds of envelopments that occurred in Belarus in 1941 or Kuwait and southern Iraq in 1991. The Soviets in Poland almost certainly will use the pause in operations in that part of Europe (from the end of December through April) to construct a most formidable series of defensive fortifications. I think we all know just how formidable such defenses can be if constructed with a will and the kinds of resources the Soviets (and Poles) still had available. I won’t repeat what has been said in earlier posts on the subject.
On the NATO side, the goal would be to carve corridors through the defensive belts so that whole areas could be isolated and so that mechanized formations could break out into the open on the far side of the prepared defenses in Poland. The problem, of course, is that these defenses would be modeled on Kursk—squared or cubed. Having observed in China that a mobile attacker can have the steam taken out of his stride by confronting him with multiple echelons of minefields, wire, water obstacles, and well-fortified and camouflaged firing positions with overlapping fields of fire and connected by covered trenches and tunnels, the Soviets put into practice what they have learned in the Far East at great cost.
In this case, the Soviets tacitly aid encirclement efforts by basing their defenses on fixed positions. They are trying to buy time by trading Polish space. I think they would anticipate the NATO modus operendi and try to defeat it with mobile reserves. Just as the Allies try to isolate areas of fixed defenses for attention by light and medium forces which can attack the isolated defenders at a deliberate pace, the Soviets want to prevent their deep defenses from being neutralized through isolation. Ergo, there would be periodic counterattacks by heavy forces attempting to use tactical surprise and restrictive terrain to nullify the superior range of NATO main tank guns. The Soviet efforts don’t succeed in stopping the NATO offensive, as we all know. However, they do slow the pace of advance such that it takes nearly three months for the Allies to cross Poland.
The poor Poles. After all of the fighting in 1997, it’s a wonder one brick lies atop another anywhere in the country.
Webstral
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