Operational Warfare and the Second World War

Excellent overview of WWII

Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, students of how wars are fought, define military operations as “the violent actions undertaken by armed forces in the pursuit of strategic objectives.”[1] The pair describe the revolutionary nature of that era between the world wars as the “origins of a catastrophe.”[2] Gregor Dallas, a student of how wars end, notes that in post-World War II England “war rationing was at its height in 1948 (not 1945) and ended only 1954.”[3] England had been victorious in that war. Imagine, then, how it must have been in Germany, between the wars, in a country that had tasted defeat. 

Most of us have always believed that the First World War was concluded on the eleventh of November, 1918 with the signing of the Armistice, and that the terms of the peace were set out in the Treaty of Versailles. In fact, except for that brief pause that November, the fighting continued—in the east, while the Allies withdrew back to the west from whence they had come. A state of war continued between Germany and Poland. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution was proceeding apace. The old empires of the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs seethed as they came apart at the seams. Lines on maps were redrawn. Populations were in upheaval. Governments across Europe rose and fell and were replaced by yet other governments. 

Most of us believe also that the seeds of the Second World War were sown by the First and that the conclusion of the first one furnished the reasons for the one that followed barely two decades later. “From the moment he grabbed power,” observes Gregor Dallas, “Hitler promised Germans that there would never be another 1918.”[4] Versailles had imposed a harsh “peace” upon Germany. “The peace of 1919,” write Murray and Millet, “collapsed because the Allies, whose interest demanded that they defend it, did not, while the defeated powers had no intention of abiding the results.”[5]

The ‘violent actions undertaken by [the] armed forces’ of World War II were “unimaginable to the combatants of World War I.”[6] For, as Murray and Millet put it, operations in the Second World War “combined the technologies of the twentieth century with the ferocious ideological commitment of the French Revolution.”[7] Dallas’s observation is that, while “disillusionment and pacifism” gripped the west, “what spread through Germany in the 1920s and ‘30s was the cult of the soldier”; that “Europe was not united in her mourning”; that these were the times in which “‘the myth’” was born, that “Germany had been betrayed by the ‘fools of 1918.’”[8]

“Operations,” according to Murray and Millet, “might take the form of a specific mission”; the example which they provide is taken directly from the pages of the history of the Second World War: the “landing [of] an Allied expeditionary force in Northern France.”[9] Continuing to expand upon the term, the two military historians write that operations “may [also] be generic in nature, such as conducting amphibious assaults throughout the Pacific; that operations “entail armies, fleets, and air forces numbering in the tens or hundreds of thousands of personnel and operating over vast distances and extended periods of time”—as in campaigns. Operations may also include the “activities of smaller forces for shorter periods of time.”[10] They may have code names “like OVERLORD … ZITADELLE …or A-GO.”[11] Readers of their operational history of the Second World War will remember the time, location, and circumstances of the great battles fought under those names, in each of which the technologies of the 20th Century were manifested. 

Current U.S. military doctrine agrees with Messrs. Murray and Millet. Joint Publication 3-0 Joint Operations describes an operation as a series of tactical actions with a common purpose or unifying theme; a military action or the carrying out of strategic, operational, tactical, service, training, or administrative military mission.[12] Operational warfare, then, are the ways and means through which operational commanders employ their military resources in the furtherance of national war aims or strategic priorities; the employment of generally accepted tactics, techniques, and procedures to the end of accomplishment of operational goals; the coherent exercise of military power in order to achieve political objectives. 

Wars—even ‘good’ ones—require fighting. As Williamson Murray and Allan Millet put it, “moral righteousness alone does not win battles. Evil causes do not necessarily carry the seeds of their own destruction. Once engaged, even just wars have to be won—or lost—on the battlefield.”[13] That, in a nutshell, is operations. Commanders at all levels must understand the tenets of operational warfare in order to more effectively fight the battles that win a nation’s wars. Historians must understand the term and its usage in order to effectively describe events and to draw lessons from their outcome. 

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[1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 585. 

[2] Ibid., 1. 

[3] Gregor Dallas, 1945: The War that Never Ended (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), xiii. 

[4] Ibid., 15. 

[5] Murray and Millet, 1. 

[6] Williamson and Murray., 262. 

[7] Ibid., 1. 

[8] Dallas, 15. 

[9] Murray and Millet, 585. 

[10] Ibid. 

[11] Ibid. 

[12] Joint Publication 3-0 Joint Operations (Department of Defense, 11 August 2011), GL-14. 

[13] Murray andMillet, viii.