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Are there any examples in history where the smaller nation won a battle of attrition vs a much larger one? Fredrick the Great maybe? If anyone did, how did they do it?
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Dec 20, 2014 12:55
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Comstar posted:Are there any examples in history where the smaller nation won a battle of attrition vs a much larger one? Fredrick the Great maybe? If anyone did, how did they do it? The Seven Years War is probably the biggest one. It's given hope to everyone from Napoleon to Hitler when fighting huge coalitions(Napoleon did not sue for peace in 1813 when Metternich had a fairly good offer on the table because he thought the Sixth Coalition would break apart). What happened is basically that the larger coalition fell apart and were eventually inclined to settle politically. These wars are never won militarily, it's usually political developments that give the smaller nation a chance.
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Dec 20, 2014 13:00
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Comstar posted:Are there any examples in history where the smaller nation won a battle of attrition vs a much larger one? Fredrick the Great maybe? If anyone did, how did they do it? History is full of asymmetric struggles in which great empires just say 'gently caress it, keep your malaria swamps if they're so dear to you'. 20th century history in particular is full of them.
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Dec 20, 2014 13:05
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Attrition is probably the wrong terminology for some of our examples - as, I'm assuming, is 'battle'? Often tactics of attrition are used most effectively by the superior force to ensure a safe, if long and costly victory - a commander like Grant can afford to take equal or worse trades against Lee every time in the knowledge that he has inexhaustible resources and his opponent does not. One of the ultimate examples of the phenomenon that Panzeh is talking about is the '48 war between the Arab and Israeli forces. Because each Arab nation had its own grandiose plan for Israel, they refused to cooperate and as a result Israel could mass forces locally and defeat each Arab nation's army in turn (although the Israelis were not as outnumbered as it is commonly believed). Israel had also fought off Palestinian opposition first, so was able to deal with that threat to a large degree before the Arab nations arrived. The second half of the American Civil War is a good example of a failure of this strategy - this hope that eventually northern morale would break as a result of inflicting terrible losses and attriting their forces. Which is all well and good, except that Sherman is sweeping from the West while taking almost none and undermining Lee's entire effort. Smaller forces have hopes to win in other ways, too. I'm thinking of all the campaigns the Italians managed to bungle against inferior numbers in WW2. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 13:10
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Comstar posted:Are there any examples in history where the smaller nation won a battle of attrition vs a much larger one? Fredrick the Great maybe? If anyone did, how did they do it? Both Vietnams wars, Every loving war in Afghanistan , the 20th century is chock full of these examples. Finnish Winter War. Chad-Libyan war, First Chechen war, you could argue Algerian war of independence, Rhodesian bush war. Saint Celestine fucked around with this message at 13:24 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 13:22
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Careful there. It's not like the Finns won the winter war, dogged resistance or no.
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Dec 20, 2014 13:26
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Disinterested posted:Careful there. It's not like the Finns won the winter war, dogged resistance or no. Considering who they were up against, I'd say they "won" the first one.
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Dec 20, 2014 13:34
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Soviets didn't achieve their war goals of making Finland a friendly satellite or annexed SSR, and given that in 1941 Finns gave up on neutrality and the front moved back to and beyond the border of 1939, the operation also failed in meeting its publically stated goal of propping up Leningrad's security (indeed, it's likely that Finland would have stayed out of Barbarossa if it weren't for Winter War). As the war dragged on and on it also started to look like Britain and France really would be going to intervene, so Stalin felt forced to strike a deal with Finns just as their front around Viipuri was beginning to collapse. But the war wasn't an outstanding victory for Finland, either, despite some tactical victories that greatly helped in equipping the army in the next war. Aside from economic implications of losing its second largest city and homes to 13% of population the war left Finland vulnerable to a follow up invasion which was only avoided because in late 1940 Germany already started backing out of their previous spheres-of-influence pact with Soviets. In conclusion, there were no winners, only survivors.
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Dec 20, 2014 14:01
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Disinterested posted:One thing that will immediately spring to mind when you read these texts is how unhelpful 'Asian culture' would be as a cipher for what is happening there (and, amusingly, Germany has its own small influence what is happening in Japan in the late 19th century). Did Protocols of the Elders of Zion make its way to Japan via Germany or direct from Russia? It's really weird to have Japanese dudes blaming the empire's problems on the approximately zero Jews in Japan. You're all right to correct me that it's way too broad to attribute things to Asian or Japanese culture in general, but there were definitely problems when it came to setting achievable goals and reevaluating them as circumstances changed. Hirohito would send his brothers out on fact finding trips, because the official channels were too often reluctant to report the full extent of their problems to the emperor. Whether Confucian face-saving or just generic human rear end-covering, it was a problem.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:17
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Comstar posted:Are there any examples in history where the smaller nation won a battle of attrition vs a much larger one? Fredrick the Great maybe? If anyone did, how did they do it? American revolution. Just got to outlast the empire until they give up and let you try your weird Republic thig.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:19
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Does the concept of face actually have anything to do with eastern philosophies? It seems to be just a regional slang term for the universals of dignity, prestige, thymos...
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Dec 20, 2014 15:22
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steinrokkan posted:Does the concept of face actually have anything to do with eastern philosophies? It seems to be just a regional slang term for the universals of dignity, prestige, thymos... As for face in general, there's similar concepts in every culture, but I don't know if the Venn diagram would overlap exactly. The 19th century Europeans who imported the expression "save face" into English apparently felt they didn't already have a word for it.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:34
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sullat posted:American revolution. Just got to outlast the empire until they give up and let you try your weird Republic thig. To be fair, only because America had one of the other empires (i.e. the French) on their side as well. Coalitions make this sort of thing more confusing.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:39
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Comstar posted:Are there any examples in history where the smaller nation won a battle of attrition vs a much larger one? Fredrick the Great maybe? If anyone did, how did they do it? Letting me score the two-fer here, the Russo-Japanese War. Which in turn is one reason why the Japanese felt they had a chance against the USA, because they'd pulled that very trick against the Russians 36 years ago. Of course there were significant differences between the Czarist Russia of 1905 and the America of 1941, but to their "we got nuked!" detriment, most of the Japanese planners failed to appreciate them.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:41
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steinrokkan posted:Does the concept of face actually have anything to do with eastern philosophies? It seems to be just a regional slang term for the universals of dignity, prestige, thymos... Pretty much. When I was doing cultural training for Japan there was a big deal about the Japanese having 'Inside' and 'Outside' faces, e.g. what they showed to outsiders/strangers vs. what they showed to close friends. I think we have a pretty similar thing in America except in some places (the South, say) that outside face generally has this very jovial friendly tone (as can, say, the super friendly shopkeeper in a big Tokyo tourist spot) or say a New Yorker's casual indifference to your existence (as, say, the bored rear end 20-something Lost Decade konbini cashier mumbling 'irashaimase'). And of course Americans and Nihonjin alike like to use the cross cultural contact as an excuse to throw the normal taboos out the window and I dunno, like, the Chinese made a big deal about the dirty roundeyes kneeling to the Emperor, but OTOH the British were quite upset that someone dared to ask them to kneel. It's a pretty universal thing. I dunno. A lot of Confucianism does sort of have this idea that you should be a model of morality so that others can follow your example, but that's not really any different than a lot of Western attitudes about inner virtue/outer expression. *And also gently caress.
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Dec 20, 2014 17:44
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I have boomarked three threads about that are talking about Nazis and/or Japanese. Good God, things are starting to blur a little. Hey Gal seems to be living a far more interesting life than I could hope to match. One thing you'll notice about XX century grind fests is that they weren't won just through the willingness of local populace to die in droves for their rocks/swamps/frozen tundra. Many of them seem to have had substancial backing from interested superpowers and such. Except for maybe Rhodesian war. People on /k/ and mil hist group on Facebook still cry about it like it the actual fall of Prester John's kingdom. A shining beacon of (white) hope, all alone in the dark (continent).
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Dec 20, 2014 17:46
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JcDent posted:I have boomarked three threads about that are talking about Nazis and/or Japanese. Good God, things are starting to blur a little. Algeria? There's also a lot of wars that didn't happen because the colonial powers looked at their situation post-WWII and said 'fuuuuuuuuuuuuck okay fine you can be free.'
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Dec 20, 2014 17:51
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:It wasn't a good plan, or even a remotely realistic one, but it was the best they had once they actually decided to go to war with the US. Their best hope (and really only one) was to catch the carriers in the port, but the reaction of the American Public to the attack was pretty much the exact opposite of what they were hoping for. Instead of getting "Oh no! We are ruined by the Unbeatable Japanese Military" they got "KILL THOSE FUCKERS!" ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:And by that point we had the atomic bomb, which removed the last advantage the Japanese still had. You don't need to suffer horrendous casualties on the beachhead when you can scour the land clean of life with the power of the atom. The US built at least 2 of them as far as the Japanese knew, so why couldn't they have built more? (I know they only had the three including Trinity at the time) And are you going to call a sorta-bluff that involved practically wiping two of your cities off the map with a single bomb each? gradenko_2000 posted:The Nazis had no way of actually winning the war either. For all of the landmass they had conquered by June 21, 1941, they were facing a Britain that was still on "sun never sets" mode if I'm not mistaken. They really didn't. Even without the economic inefficiencies that existed in the Germany industry at the time they still were fighting groups that overwhelmed their industrial base, even more so when the US entered into the war. The sheer intensity by which the US dominated the industrial output of WWII combatants is staggering, even before accounting for losses due to warfare. In the later stages of the war the US accounted for more than half of all of the industrial wealth in the conflict and was actually toning down the production of warstuffs because they had too much of it. Just think about that, it was the closest we got to Total War and the US is intentionally making less than it can. Taerkar fucked around with this message at 17:58 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 17:56
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sullat posted:American revolution. Just got to outlast the empire until they give up and let you try your weird Republic thig. As somebody else pointed out, this really isn't the case. The ultimate American military victory at Yorktown was dependent on European support, particularly French. Without the French there's not really any hope of the separatist colonists winning outright. The British were also tied down by French and Dutch efforts in India. In the end the Brits did wind up making the choice to preserve their Indian holdings and giving up The Thirteen. Which many liberal British politicians had been lobbying for in the first place; they correctly predicted that Britain would be the major trading partner of any new American state, and so from a customs revenue perspective it didn't much matter anyway.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:03
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
P-Mack posted:Did Protocols of the Elders of Zion make its way to Japan via Germany or direct from Russia? It's really weird to have Japanese dudes blaming the empire's problems on the approximately zero Jews in Japan. The answer here re: anti-semitism is not really. I'm not talking so much about anti-semitism, but more about things like aspects of Prussian militarism and the influence of certain German philosophers, and so on. Japan imported a lot of weird poo poo from Germany in the 19th century - not just objects, but certain aesthetic and cultural values. Inventing Japan is a workable introductory text here (it's short). It wasn't lost on the Japanese that the Nazis described 'asiatic' people as inferior at all, and the Japanese did not feel very strongly about German racial theories. Japan had its own, ancient race myth that placed Japan at the top of the Asian nations; these largely stem not from European pseudo-scientific perversions of Darwinist ideas or from perveted ideas of Romanticism (amongst other things), but from perversions of Japanese shintoist myths concerning the divine heritage of the Japanese emperor. If the Japanese tended to blame anything in their culture for failure, instead of the Jews it was often the failure of the subjects to totally and utterly subject themselves to the will of the God-Emperor (they still call him this, by the way) with the fullest bodily and spiritual commitment. Protocols of the Elders made it to Japan via the Whites from Russia, who the Japanese had considerable interaction with. Again, I cannot more strongly recommend to anyone with an interest in this topic Zen at War by Brian Victoria. He makes passing mentions to translators of the Protocols in Japanese. - Re your second point: You are alluding to a general problem in many Asian cultures, but it manifests itself differently and to some extent is caused by different things in each of the societies you are talking about. That is partly why it is unhelpful even if some generalisations can be true (to the extent any generalisation can be). For example: Confucius is less important to 19th-20th century Japan than he is to China even now. It is a very common problem in Japanese companies and culture that it is difficult to express dissent in the face of authority, which can stifle creativity. Japanese authors themselves describe this problem - this is something alluded to a lot in The Wages of Guilt - Japanese culture often has a tendency to commit very fully behind whatever the dominant idea or methodology is. This is a tremendous advantage when you're on a good set of rails and a tremendous problem when you are not.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:05
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PittTheElder posted:As somebody else pointed out, this really isn't the case. The ultimate American military victory at Yorktown was dependent on European support, particularly French. Without the French there's not really any hope of the separatist colonists winning outright. Sure, but you can argue that waiting for the French to get off their rear end and hatefuck the Brits because they were busy was part of the plan. "Look, you could squash eventually us but we're being total pains in your rear end and you have bigger frogs to fry, let us do our thing and we'll chill."
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Dec 20, 2014 18:07
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Cythereal posted:Finished Shattered Sword after about ten hours, skipping most of the appendices, and it was a pretty enjoyable read. I had been under the impression that the Japanese took a lot more losses than four carriers and a heavy cruiser, but evidently not. I recommend reading the appendix about the planned amphibious assault of Midway. It's pretty 
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Dec 20, 2014 18:08
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brozozo posted:I recommend reading the appendix about the planned amphibious assault of Midway. It's pretty It's like someone looked at going over the top in WW1 and wondered "How could I make this worse?" Waist high water and razor sharp coral is the answer.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:22
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Disinterested posted:
See, this poo poo bothers me. It's not like Japan has a separate term for 'totally secular and not divine emperor' that has ever been applicable to the royal family. Beside, the term 'god-emperor' means a totally different thing in Japan (e.g. mah bro Akihito) and in English (bringing to mind either Egyptian pharaohs or WH40k.) And no, they blamed a lot of poo poo for their failures. Go read the Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. The white devil was one but they didn't really have a betrayal myth the way the Nazi's did so much as a Napoleon complex/I wanna be one of the cool kids thing going on w/r/t Prussia, Great Britain, the USA and before that China. quote:It is a very common problem in Japanese companies and culture that it is difficult to express dissent in the face of authority, which can stifle creativity. Japanese authors themselves describe this problem - this is something alluded to a lot in The Wages of Guilt - Japanese culture often has a tendency to commit very fully behind whatever the dominant idea or methodology is. This is a tremendous advantage when you're on a good set of rails and a tremendous problem when you are not. Sure, but that poo poo isn't inherent to Japan (and it can wax and wane and turn on a dime, see also, Japan 1860's->20xx) The Meiji era kicked off when a bunch of clans said gently caress you to the shogun, the expansions in China were kicked off by groups of pissed off junior commanders, Japan went from a bombed out shithole to eating huge chunks of the American market based on relentless innovation for a good while. Do they have problems? Yeah, but go look at Lehman Brothers or Enron or the clusterfuck that is the American security apparatus post-9/11 and tell me that that's unique to the slanteyes.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:22
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brozozo posted:I recommend reading the appendix about the planned amphibious assault of Midway. It's pretty That's one of the appendices I did read, yeah.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:57
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Disinterested posted:
Definitely going to check this out. Bix talked a lot about the influence of Nichiren Buddhists in the Japanese government, but didn't go into the nature and justification of their beliefs. I totally get that the anti-semitism is a very minor footnote to Japanese right wing ideology, it's still kinda weird. the JJ posted:And no, they blamed a lot of poo poo for their failures. Go read the Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. The white devil was one but they didn't really have a betrayal myth the way the Nazi's did so much as a Napoleon complex/I wanna be one of the cool kids thing going on w/r/t Prussia, Great Britain, the USA and before that China. Yukichi Fukuzawa died in 1901. I was under the impression that resentment of and rhetoric regarding "the white race" ramped up later, post WWI, with the rejection of their racial equality clause at Versailles and perceived raw deal with respect to German territories in Asia. the JJ posted:Sure, but that poo poo isn't inherent to Japan (and it can wax and wane and turn on a dime, see also, Japan 1860's->20xx) The Meiji era kicked off when a bunch of clans said gently caress you to the shogun, the expansions in China were kicked off by groups of pissed off junior commanders, Japan went from a bombed out shithole to eating huge chunks of the American market based on relentless innovation for a good while. Do they have problems? Yeah, but go look at Lehman Brothers or Enron or the clusterfuck that is the American security apparatus post-9/11 and tell me that that's unique to the slanteyes. No one here is arguing that Japanese are untermenschen or that some cultural generalizations hold true always and explain all of Japanese history. We're just trying to understand a series of increasingly bad decisions during 1930s and 40s. I do agree that there are a number of high profile incidents of policy being hijacked from below that suggest the breakdown of the decision making progress went the other way too, with superiors unwilling to reign in subordinates who exceeded their mandates. Why? A desire to avoid internal conflict?
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Dec 20, 2014 19:14
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the JJ posted:See, this poo poo bothers me. It's not like Japan has a separate term for 'totally secular and not divine emperor' that has ever been applicable to the royal family. Beside, the term 'god-emperor' means a totally different thing in Japan (e.g. mah bro Akihito) and in English (bringing to mind either Egyptian pharaohs or WH40k.) It's a pretty interesting thing, in terms of how balls-to-the-wall the process of confirmation/coronation is/was.
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Dec 20, 2014 19:25
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P-Mack posted:No one here is arguing that Japanese are untermenschen or that some cultural generalizations hold true always and explain all of Japanese history. We're just trying to understand a series of increasingly bad decisions during 1930s and 40s. I do agree that there are a number of high profile incidents of policy being hijacked from below that suggest the breakdown of the decision making progress went the other way too, with superiors unwilling to reign in subordinates who exceeded their mandates. Why? A desire to avoid internal conflict? I think it's probably more helpful to look at other military dominated and/or authoritarian regimes (Iran and North Korea come immediately to mind) for illumination: while there may be intense internal power struggles and unilateral action taken by one side or another in these struggles, they're always presented to the outside world as a deliberate act by a unified government in order to protect the legitimacy of the state.
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Dec 20, 2014 19:34
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jng2058 posted:Letting me score the two-fer here, the Russo-Japanese War. Which in turn is one reason why the Japanese felt they had a chance against the USA, because they'd pulled that very trick against the Russians 36 years ago. Of course there were significant differences between the Czarist Russia of 1905 and the America of 1941, but to their "we got nuked!" detriment, most of the Japanese planners failed to appreciate them. Was that really a war of attrition though? I thought about that, but the Japanese just straight up kicked Russia's teeth in.
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Dec 20, 2014 19:56
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Saint Celestine posted:Was that really a war of attrition though? I thought about that, but the Japanese just straight up kicked Russia's teeth in. They did throw away thousands of men taking Port Arthur.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:So when did the US first start implementing carrier operations in a more organized manner? I have to assume by the timing that it had to be during the Guadalcanal campaign, even if they only had 1-2 carriers for most part until Nov 1943. After each carrier's first battle and then when they get things going from their experienced cadre. It's part of what's so frustrating reading about Midway. Yorktown's been in combat before, so she's doing everything all nice with all her squadrons going off as a unified group while the rest get their squadrons scattered all over the place. the JJ posted:Algeria? There's also a lot of wars that didn't happen because the colonial powers looked at their situation post-WWII and said 'fuuuuuuuuuuuuck okay fine you can be free.' I'd argue that with the Cold War going on, there's still the bigger fish to fry aspect of coalition building even if it's implicit. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 21:20
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The story of decolonization in Asia (apart from India) and Africa is pretty much the story of Western countries realizing that they're never again gonna turn a profit with their colonies since fighting insurgencies is so expensive. The Brits actually post-WW2 tried to reinforce their colonial system in Africa but failed.
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Dec 20, 2014 22:08
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HEY GAL posted:3 oz, huh? Unless that thing is chambered specially, when firing solid shot the powder would have been equal to the shot by weight irl. When you fire live shot out of a little gun like that it jumps up in the air and then skitters backwards until it either hits whatever's behind it or stops. From what I saw, they chock it down pretty good when they fire it on the ramparts. From what I heard, the 3oz charge is just to scare tourists and dignitaries when they do demonstrations. I doubt they fire any actuall projectile any more, as they might hit the booze cruise in the harbor, or people just pretending to be pirates attacking the booze cruise (also using blackpowder weapons!) 1 to 1 powder to projectile seems a tad high to me? I'm no expert by any means, beyond firing modern blackpowder muzzle loaders. I found a nifty link that goes into cannon balistics, it seems to indicate you use a 1/3 to 1/2 by weight (determinate of quality of powder) gun powder for round shot. http://arc.id.au/CannonBallistics.html Suspect Bucket fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 22:22
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As did the Portuguese goverment from 1961 to 1974 until democracy was implemented in Portugal and the new rulers just said " gently caress it, let them have them"
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Dec 20, 2014 22:25
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Apart from standing awkwardly and unnaturally with his weight leaning backwards and his knees locked, he's got a big gut and he's wearing jodhpurs tucked into his boots. Fat military dudes who think they look good in riding gear, war war never changes.
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Dec 20, 2014 22:43
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P-Mack posted:They did throw away thousands of men taking Port Arthur. Taking a lot casualties to take an objective, the primary objective of the war at that, is a pretty traditional way of warfare. The main use of attritional warfare is to allow the stronger or larger force to dominate the smaller one. You can have situations like WWI where each side perceives themselves to be the stronger force, with the end result of Verdun where the Germans were less interested in taking French forts than they were trying to bombard French troop movements. There isn't really a way for the smaller military to fight a total war of attrition effectively. But most wars aren't total wars, so the answer to your question depends on your definition of smaller. You wouldn't consider the Taliban to be superior to the US military, but the majority of US troops aren't actually fighting in Afghanistan. Who is the larger military? Well, it's the Taliban, who pretty much play by killing US soldiers whenever they can, usually without attempting to achieve something more.
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Dec 20, 2014 22:49
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Suspect Bucket posted:From what I saw, they chock it down pretty good when they fire it on the ramparts. quote:1 to 1 powder to projectile seems a tad high to me? I'm no expert by any means, beyond firing modern blackpowder muzzle loaders. I found a nifty link that goes into cannon balistics, it seems to indicate you use a 1/3 to 1/2 by weight (determinate of quality of powder) gun powder for round shot. Edit: Why so it does. I wonder if the reenactors who were telling me this were wrong. Edit 2: They weren't for muskets at least, I've read period supply things. Is there some physics reason why you'd use more powder proportionally for a musket than for a cannon? It's also quite possible that cannon get so good during the 18th and 19th century (a golden age for that particular technology) that they keep reducing the amount of powder. SeanBeansShako posted:Fat military dudes who think they look good in riding gear, war war never changes. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 23:25 on Dec 20, 2014 |
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Dec 20, 2014 22:49
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P-Mack posted:
Expel the barbarians, honor the Emperor! I mean, there was this whole fear of white people rolling in with their superior technology and imposing harsh economic treaties and humiliating their entire culture for little more than bragging rights, but I'd call that less paranoia and more basic awareness of the state of the world. They didn't blame the white man for holding them back, but they were sure as hell afraid of the white man rolling in and turning them into another China/Vietnam/India/Levant. You have to remember that they had a very similar 'no gently caress you... but also we want the things that make you strong' sort of attitude toward China* and then they woke the hell up and started taking note when China got it's poo poo pushed in. Modernization of the military and forts to western standards didn't start with Perry, it started with the Opium Wars. It's just that when Perry came in the Japanese looked at their ~1600's era cannons and went fuuuuuuuuuuuck and they got super serious about it. I mean, the Pan-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere as a bulwark against the White Devil wasn't wrong because colonialism wasn't a thing, it was wrong because the Japanese colonialism was just as bad, occasionally worse. Remember that after they're forced out Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and China all had their and you fuckers can get out too episodes w/r/t the roundeye scum. *arguably you can push this further back and to a smaller scale with proto-Korean kingdoms -> proto-Japan. Also obviously the Yuan Mongol invasions fall under this sort of heading. quote:No one here is arguing that Japanese are untermenschen or that some cultural generalizations hold true always and explain all of Japanese history. We're just trying to understand a series of increasingly bad decisions during 1930s and 40s. I do agree that there are a number of high profile incidents of policy being hijacked from below that suggest the breakdown of the decision making progress went the other way too, with superiors unwilling to reign in subordinates who exceeded their mandates. Why? A desire to avoid internal conflict? A desire to not get stabbed? Japan's actions really do make sense if put in context of a small power worried about getting squashed by the global big hitters. Aligning with the proto-Allies was out because of competing interests and Nazi Germany seemed like a rising star. In hindsight kowtowing before the inevitable industrial might of the USA or the USSR is obviously the right choice but I don't know if (on a purely pragmatic, set aside the morality of imperialism obviously) they made any obviously bad calls. Yeah, pissing off America was stupid but a somewhat limited colonial war sealed with a decisive victory like Russo-Japanese war wasn't super far fetched and it was their only option forward. Yeah it was dumb, but they saw the line, played to their outs, but couldn't seal it. After that they were pretty much in for a ride but they again decided to play for a negotiated peace where they could keep something against an enemy completely uninterested in negotiating. Like, yeah, it didn't work, but it's kinda regular nation-state dumb. It happens.
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Dec 20, 2014 22:50
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P-Mack posted:They did throw away thousands of men taking Port Arthur. They took a lot of casualties, but they did so doing what most would have considered impossible, and while employing innovative means. In the end it left them stronger rather than weaker - I wouldn't call it attrition.
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Dec 20, 2014 22:53
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This thread moves too quickly for me to keep up. I'd argue Algeria was effectively aided by Germany; like all of Europe France was devastated in WW2 and didn't have the strength they had prior. I don't think attrition is quite the right word, but it's true that modern nations have so many resources that only a tiny fraction of their potential military power can participate in any one battle. A decisive battle simply isn't possible, since it takes so many of them to exhaust an entire nation.
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Dec 20, 2014 23:37
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