On Geography and War: New Perspectives on the Ardennes Campaigns of 1940 and 1944

We use examples from the European theater in World War II to argue that the assumption that combat is typically chaotic yields only limited insight into the large-scale evolution of military operations. To do this we examine the Ardennes campaigns of 1940 and 1944 in the context of explanatory devices used in physical geography such as complexity, nonlinearity, and emergence. We show that during the successful 1940 offensive that eventually led to the fall of France, the Germans were operating close to a set of thresholds in what we call the strategic space; the success of the offensive was contingent on a rapid advance and outmaneuvering of the Allied forces. In the readily defensible tactical space of the narrow Ardennes valleys, small changes in the conduct of or response to the German advance could have forced delays with profound consequences for the campaign. In 1944, by contrast, the Germans were not operating close to a system threshold and the attacking columns were frequently delayed or halted by determined resistance. Even if resistance had been weak, however, a breakout to Antwerp is unlikely to have been sustainable given the superiority in Allied power and the crippling supply problems facing the Germans.