The New Zealand Division leadership hated the Brigade sized battle group and had to constantly fight the British high command to prevent our Division being split into Brigade sized groups and spread around the battle field to far from each other to provide support.Reb wrote:Monty made a big deal about not using Brigade Groups and then went ahead and used them!
The Germans used Brigade sized battle groups routinely and after the war this became sort of an accepted practice.
The problem the Brits had with it was not that the Brigade Group itself was bad (see Armd Div Org in Normandy - they codified it!). IT was that they didn't do it well.
Oddly enough - the NZ Div was pretty good at it. Which explains why they were assigned an integral armoured brigade (the 9th) and used as sort of a pz gren div.
cheers
Reb
They use to call these British tactics the cowpat theory because when you looked at a map the troop dispositions of all these brigades looked like a whole lot of cowpats.
To make matters worse no tank support was provided for the infantry which exposed infantry brigades to being overrun by tanks and we suffered from this many times after we had taken our objectives being counter attacked by tanks and having no means of defence.
Rommel was fighting the right way he didn,t disperse his forces all over the battle in Brigade sized groups with no tank support he fought with combined arms infantry,artillary,tanks andthat is why the eighth army struggled for so long.
Howard Kippenberger one of our best stated the the Brigade sized battle group was fine when travelling to a battle area but once you got there you bring the brigades together to fight as a division.
I can assure you our leadership had no time time for Auckinleck as a commander and no faith in his tactics and when we went to Syria after crusader the offical line was to rebuild the division but the real reason is because Our leadership wanted to get away rom the british high command because of how faulty there tactics were.
Brigade sized battle groups with no tank support are a death trap and even with tank support you don,t have the power to deliver a knockout punch you disperse your artillary, anti tank guns,mortars and everything else dispersing your power and as a result losing power.
I do know a bit about the New Zealand divisions history my grand father served with 2nd New Zealand Division in Greece,Crete and in the desert from June 1941-Jan 1043.
Cheers Steve