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Pockets of resistance is a term made popular by the media, referring to widespread but separated resistance in Post occupied Iraq following the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States.

The term had been in use for about a century before that. Its first use in the Oxford English Dictionary was in 1899, and corresponded to the development of land warfare strategies using a continuous front. The static trench warfare of the Western Front during World War I did not produce many pockets of resistance; but as continuous front warfare became more mobile, pockets of resistance became more common as small groups of soldiers were bypassed by mobile offensives.

In World War II, the German Panzer divisions were deliberately used to create pockets of resistance that were encircled, then reduced and collapsed by infantry units. This strategy was described as Kesselschlacht ("kettle battle") and was employed with great success in the invasions of Poland (1939) and France, Belgium and the Netherlands (1940).

In France (1940) and in Yugoslavia (April 1941), pockets of resistance eventually developed into resistance movements. In both cases, small groups of regular army soldiers with their weapons became the nucleus of national resistance movements.

The same Kesselschlacht strategy was used by the Germans against the Soviet army in 1941 and initially produced even greater success, as the great encirclement at Kiev produced over 600,000 Soviet soldiers killed, missing or captured. But many pockets of resistance eventually fed the Russian and Ukrainian partisan movements; and the Red Army learned quickly, counterattacking at Stalingrad in 1942 and creating an encirclement that trapped and destroyed the German Seventh Army, along with two Romanian divisions. Other attempts to encircle the German army on the Eastern Front led to climactic battles at Korsun and Velikiye Luki, eventually culminating in the destruction of Germany's Army Group Center by dividing it into several small pockets of resistance in the summer of 1944.

The Western Allies had invaded occupied France at Normandy on June 6, 1944. This led to another attempt to encircle the German army in the "Falaise Gap." Eventually the American forces became overextended, allowing German Panzer divisions one final Kesselschlacht in the Battle of Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne Division was encircled. This time the encirclement was not a success, as General George S. Patton's Third Army broke the encirclement.

In the Pacific War, the highly mobile amphibious strategy developed by the Americans, known as island hopping, also produced pockets of resistance as many Japanese island garrisons were isolated.

External link

CNN transcript describing "pockets of resistance" Category:Effects of the 2003 Iraq conflict

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