This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Military, Military History, U.S. Army, USMC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
A battle hand off is when a unit which is in contact with the enemy hands the conflict over to a unit which has not been involved in the battle.
There are many reasons that the battle may be handed off from one unit to another. Some of which are; the unit engaged may have suffered significant casualties and needs to be taken out of combat for rest, rearming, and refitting; the battle plan may have been for the unit being replaced to delay the enemy advance for a while and then to withdraw; in a retrogade operation all of the withdrawing units hand the battle off as they withdraw. The purpose is to conduct a leapfrog like operation and withdraw until other units can be brought into play.
The battle handoff can be a complicated maneuver but combat arms military ring customers train regularily on its execution so it is second nature to them. The battle handoff is normally associated with a withdrawal type of operation but this is not always the case.
The Army units that I was a part of trained on the battle handoff but you don’t expect to have to use it much. Those of you military ring customers who are Veterans of the Korean War may have actually used this maneuver in actual combat.
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