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Ithle01 posted:I'm going to have to voice some disagreement that modern soldiers are in more immediate danger at all times than soldiers in older wars because gunpowder weapons and traps have been around for a very long time. Gustav Adolphus had cannon balls shot through his tent at least once. Just about any siege can take the better part of a year and involve snipers, night raids, mining (probably just as dangerous as being a tunnel rat in Vietnam), cannon fire, booby traps, and arson. All of which can kill you quickly and unexpectedly. As for the paranoia of being surrounded by the enemy we know that soldiers had to travel in groups and live in their camps for their own safety when they're not being quartered. Soldiers in the Napoleonic wars generally got at least a few months of the winter off (except the Russia campaign). Of course you were cold and miserable, but you weren't likely to get shot. Even in campaign season, you were mostly marching around and countermarching with very little danger to yourself 95% of days. The Guerilla was really the only exception to that rule.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:09
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The thing about psychological problems in military history is how ignored a problem it was. When Twin Tringula is writing about dudes who are clearly shattered psychologically and some aristocrat officers walk by and are all "this is cowardice, I think, and malingering" my heart breaks a little. I mean I know this is pretty much how it is today in the military, but still Also: do you want to build a really mean* diorama?! I have the link for you: http://www.italeri.com/scheda.asp?idProdotto=2492 *IE "cruel and heartless", not "good", though I guess it could also be a mean diorama, IE a good one
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Aug 26, 2016 20:22
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speaking of, i read an italian dude writing that german officers believe it's impossible to be happy unless they're drunk edit: if it makes you feel better, nebuchanezzar, in the 17th century both the dudes and the officers are in roughly the same poo poo, mentally. the officers make vast piles of wealth though HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Aug 26, 2016 |
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Aug 26, 2016 20:26
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Soldiers in the Napoleonic wars generally got at least a few months of the winter off (except the Russia campaign). Of course you were cold and miserable, but you weren't likely to get shot. Even in campaign season, you were mostly marching around and countermarching with very little danger to yourself 95% of days. The Guerilla was really the only exception to that rule. They killed themselves really because they were pushed to their limit, many knowing there was no way in hell they'd survive such a long march with little to no food in such cold. That and the terror of being captured by the Cossacks who'd butcher them for sport or sell them to a serf village where they'd be worked to death or just killed as a scapegoat. I imagine those men if given the choice would have died at Borrodino. There would be less suffering.
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Aug 26, 2016 20:46
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MikeCrotch posted:Ferdinand lied, Wallenstein died
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Aug 26, 2016 22:40
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A good talk by Wargaming's pet historian about the unspeakable ones, they who lurk in the shadows beyond, destroyers of cats and devourers of sanity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ho8TU_JpoI
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Aug 27, 2016 00:33
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Soldiers in the Napoleonic wars generally got at least a few months of the winter off (except the Russia campaign). Of course you were cold and miserable, but you weren't likely to get shot. Even in campaign season, you were mostly marching around and countermarching with very little danger to yourself 95% of days. The Guerilla was really the only exception to that rule. I was specifically mentioning the suicides of soldiers during the Russian campaign, but you did remind me that I forgot about the Penisular War and that's another example of soldiers existing in a state of paranoia to stay alive. SeanBeansShako posted:They killed themselves really because they were pushed to their limit, many knowing there was no way in hell they'd survive such a long march with little to no food in such cold. That and the terror of being captured by the Cossacks who'd butcher them for sport or sell them to a serf village where they'd be worked to death or just killed as a scapegoat. I get this and I'm not disagreeing, but at the same time isn't this indicative of soldiers snapping under pressure? Wouldn't they have an injunction against suicide similar to our own given the relative strength of Catholicism in French culture or has the Revolution eroded this to the point where suicide is more acceptable? I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you heard about soldiers undergoing something like this today and killing themselves would you consider it a rational act?
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Aug 27, 2016 00:55
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Ithle01 posted:Wouldn't they have an injunction against suicide similar to our own given the relative strength of Catholicism in French culture or has the Revolution eroded this to the point where suicide is more acceptable? https://books.google.de/books?id=jXYjY0Q9lVkC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false i found one suicide in my doctoral research. just one. and it baffled the guy's oberst, because the victim "feared God," he wasn't the kind of guy who'd commit sins. Until one morning in early january when he took his uniform jacket off, knelt down, set the butt of a musket carefully against the corner formed by a schoolhouse and the city earthworks, put the muzzle against the top of his nose, and blew the top of his head off. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 00:58
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HEY GAL posted:guy with that T shirt and guy with a HAPSBURG SERVICE: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT t shirt staring nervously at each other across the bar Accompanied by a dude with "HIT ME UP WITH THE poo poo THAT KILLED GALLAS" bumping in.
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Aug 27, 2016 01:07
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Ataxerxes posted:Accompanied by a dude with "HIT ME UP WITH THE poo poo THAT KILLED GALLAS" bumping in. a decent person, deserved better than he got, either from fate or from the Hapsburgs. he ruined his life for them.
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Aug 27, 2016 01:13
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HEY GAL posted:one day i will gallaspost Wikipedia says he was a terrible guy. c/d?
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Aug 27, 2016 02:46
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Wikipedia says he was a terrible guy. c/d? wikipedia can suck my drat balls i don't know anything about gallas
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Aug 27, 2016 02:49
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Ithle01 posted:I was specifically mentioning the suicides of soldiers during the Russian campaign, but you did remind me that I forgot about the Penisular War and that's another example of soldiers existing in a state of paranoia to stay alive. The Russian campaign was uniquely horrible for everyone involved. It's not representative of the warfare of the period for the average soldier.
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Aug 27, 2016 02:56
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Wikipedia says he was a terrible guy. c/d? Wikipedia thinks the Longstreet is a real tank. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The Russian campaign was uniquely horrible for everyone involved. It's not representative of the warfare of the period for the average soldier. Fun fact, the Russian soldiers more less were going through the same level of suffering and hunger now. I imagine with human remains from both sides you can easily follow the grim trail of that whole retreat. Assuming you don't get lost and follow the Nazi and Soviet remains of the 2nd World War. SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 03:23
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P-Mack posted:wikipedia can suck my drat balls fun fact if hegal used their research to change a wikipedia article it would be reverted due to being original research.
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Aug 27, 2016 04:29
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The Russian campaign was uniquely horrible for everyone involved. It's not representative of the warfare of the period for the average soldier. The great thing is that you can say this about any war!
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Aug 27, 2016 05:40
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Ensign Expendable posted:The great thing is that you can say this about any war! yes, but especially about any war involving russia
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Aug 27, 2016 06:20
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P-Mack posted:wikipedia can suck my drat balls
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Aug 27, 2016 10:22
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Agean90 posted:fun fact if hegal used their research to change a wikipedia article it would be reverted due to being original research. the gallas love comes from this book tho https://www.aschendorff-buchverlag.de/shop/vam/apply/viewdetail/id/3607/
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Aug 27, 2016 10:23
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clearly you need to write an article for the 1632 e-zine about gallas. The next book in the series sees the ottomans try to take vienna again....
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Aug 27, 2016 10:37
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Mycroft Holmes posted:clearly you need to write an article for the 1632 e-zine about gallas. The next book in the series sees the ottomans try to take vienna again....
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Aug 27, 2016 10:39
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HEY GAL posted:for the last time, if i write timetravel fiction about the 30s, it will be on my own terms okay. sorry, I'll stop.
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Aug 27, 2016 10:57
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HEY GAL posted:for the last time, if i write timetravel fiction about the 30s, it will be on my own terms Ok so what if, like, Mansfeld and Pappenheim was like the same person?
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Aug 27, 2016 12:24
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HEY GAL posted:the gallas love comes from this book tho Man I'm browsing that site and there is so much amazingly cool and weird stuff in there. A good publishing house.
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Aug 27, 2016 12:45
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Greggster posted:Ok so what if, like, Mansfeld and Pappenheim was like the same person?
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Aug 27, 2016 12:58
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aphid_licker posted:Man I'm browsing that site and there is so much amazingly cool and weird stuff in there. A good publishing house. https://www.amazon.de/Kriegsorganisation-dreissigj%C3%A4hrigen-Schriftenreihe-Vereinigung-Erforschung/dp/3402056763 which is good if you liek tables and charts of how much the Bavarians spent on bread for soldiers and whatnot
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Aug 27, 2016 13:00
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Mycroft Holmes posted:okay. sorry, I'll stop.
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Aug 27, 2016 14:04
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Hey Gal, do you have a dream team of military masterminds? Like if money and chronological period no object would you create the best team of generals and colonels and junior officers who would win the 30yw in one fell swoop? Supported by the best astrologists and battle wizards, etc etc
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Aug 27, 2016 14:08
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lenoon posted:Hey Gal, do you have a dream team of military masterminds? Like if money and chronological period no object would you create the best team of generals and colonels and junior officers who would win the 30yw in one fell swoop? Supported by the best astrologists and battle wizards, etc etc I'm curious if Zhuge Liang would be able to wrap up the 30 YW super quick.
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Aug 27, 2016 14:23
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lenoon posted:Hey Gal, do you have a dream team of military masterminds? Like if money and chronological period no object would you create the best team of generals and colonels and junior officers who would win the 30yw in one fell swoop? Supported by the best astrologists and battle wizards, etc etc And thus with this sentence fantasy footbal milhist edition was born.
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Aug 27, 2016 14:37
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Dibs on Sherman.
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Aug 27, 2016 14:43
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lenoon posted:Hey Gal, do you have a dream team of military masterminds? Like if money and chronological period no object would you create the best team of generals and colonels and junior officers who would win the 30yw in one fell swoop? Supported by the best astrologists and battle wizards, etc etc pappenheim and torstensson are his seconds in command. baner too if he and wallenstein can keep off each other's throats for five minutes, which they couldn't, you should probably only have one huge rear end in a top hat per army stallhandsch is one of the under-officers ernst von mansfeld handles keeping poo poo together in a retreat and raising troops, which he was good at even though he lost every fight he had ever been in montecuccoli will write the inevitable book but there's no such thing as winning the 30yw all at once, because of the way they raise armies. big defeats can be made good next year, there's no such thing as a decisive battle. the only way you can beat someone is to force them to the negotiating table or exhaust their economic ability to make war. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 14:50
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imo subutai+genghis khan is pretty much the dream team right there
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Aug 27, 2016 16:30
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V. Illych L. posted:imo subutai+genghis khan is pretty much the dream team right there What the gently caress are these guys without horses? What do we even do with them? They'd likely figure it out, the organization is what would really give them a nosebleed.
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Aug 27, 2016 16:42
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xthetenth posted:What the gently caress are these guys without horses? What do we even do with them? They organized the logistics of a continent-spanning empire after starting with semi-nomadic tribes, I think they could pull it off.
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Aug 27, 2016 16:45
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That's why you add in the other great cavalry commanders, let Cromwell deal with the logistics. Edit: I'm pleased and impressed at how quickly the Cast of Expendables 30
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Aug 27, 2016 16:45
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lenoon posted:That's why you add in the other great cavalry commanders...
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Aug 27, 2016 16:46
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lenoon posted:That's why you add in the other great cavalry commanders, let Cromwell deal with the logistics. I'd think Dwight Eisenhower would have a rightful place in such a dream team.
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Aug 27, 2016 17:11
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I have been reading a great book on the Economics of WW1, and it gave birth to this post: (I am sorry that this is very much a doom monolith of text, there were no appropriate pictures to break up the text  )Why did countries starve in WW1? The major countries that suffered widespread starvation were Germany, Austro Hungary, Russia and to a lesser extent the Ottoman Empire. While its commonly known that the Central Powers ended WW1 by being starved out, most things I have read on the subject say that it was because of the Entente blockade, but there is a little bit more to it than that, why did Russia also suffer widespread food problems despite being open to sea trade and being a net exporter of food before the war? The answer to that question, the question of the Central Powers and indeed to a major part of the German war economy in WW2, (they suffered the same issue and never fixed it) lies in the way that these countries’ economies operated, they suffered not only because of blockade but also because of a series of inherent weaknesses in their government infrastructure and society that combined with the fact that they were not able to patch the problem with imports meant that they very quickly started to suffer acute food shortage. All the countries that suffered starvation in WW1 shared the same quality: They had a largely peasant based agricultural structure. I’m going to go through the countries and talk about why they particularly ran out of food in WW1. Germany – Inefficiency, manpower and shortages. Germanys Achilles heel in WW1 industry was its Agriculture sector, this was also its weakness in WW2, why this is is actually fairly simple: The German agricultural sector was a very manpower intensive inefficient sector of the economy, it used a lot of small family holding farms and had a very low degree of mechanisation, it hadn’t moved on in a historical sense, the way that German farms worked in 1914 would have been largely recognisable to a German from 1814 or even 1414, and the same is true in 1939, this is distinctly untrue of countries like the UK and the US. The German Agricultural sector was protected by its government from international trade and as a result ended up as a very inefficient beast and had no real reason to develop and innovate. The high manpower usage in German farming meant that when that manpower suddenly went off to fight a war there was an immediate and sharp drop for the first 3 years of the war where production dropped by 35%, while a lot of the slack in actual employment was taken up by women, children and POW’s, their efficiency was significantly reduced, they quite understandably were not as good at the job of essentially manual labour farming as the experienced young men that went off to war. Productivity in German non war industries fell by around 35-40%, which accounts significantly for the drop in agricultural production of around 35-40% throughout the war.  German output throughout the war. Another critical reason as to why German productivity went off a cliff is that the blockade stopped their import of one critically important set of materials – The components for Nitrate based fertiliser came from outside Europe and this supply was completely cut off, the Germans did create artificial nitrate plants but these and any import that managed to get in were snatched up by war production to make explosives, so Germany was unable to fertilise its fields which was another large component of German woes in agriculture. The net upshot of all of this is that Germany towards the end of the war was suffering badly from Urban famine, despite being one of the richest countries in Europe it suffered just the same as the very poorest and for similar reasons, it had a huge amount of manpower tied up in farming which combined with the drop in fertility caused a heavy drop in domestic food production alongside the significant drop in imports. This was a large part of Germany’s uninterrupted economic contraction throughout the entirety of WW1.  Specific food output and imports of Germany. Austria-Hungary – Disorganisation and National Splits. Austria Hungary was significantly poorer than its counterpart in the Central Powers, it had around 60% of the GDP per head of Germany or France and 40% of the UK. It was the country that suffered the most and the most quickly from food shortage in WW1, despite the fact that it was self-sufficient before the war in food. One problem Austria Hungary had was that it had a significantly higher female labour participation at the start of the war, it shared the German style of peasant agriculture, at the start of the war around 45% of women were employed and 66% of those employed were employed in agriculture, that meant that there was little scope to increase female participation in agriculture as the men left to fight because you start butting into the hard limit of people who are physically unable to work the demanding tasks needed for agriculture. 8 million men were mobilised in AH throughout the war, and there was no way that they were able to make up for that shortfall. The table below is for all sectors of the economy, but it would have been more pronounced than that table shows given that the female increase for specifically the agricultural sector was much lower than it was for urban based manufacture. (Total A is total workforce, total B is total workforce plus POW labour.)  Total AH workforce as a % of 1913. The chaos of the AH railway network is relatively well known, differing national rail gauges and general poor development meant that its strategic transport network was an utter mess, this combined with the stresses placed on it by mobilisation meant that it spent the entire war on the verge of meltdown. This is especially detrimental to food, as the only way to transport large amounts of food from the countryside to the city before mass heavy road freight was either by river or by train, AH didn’t have a river network so it had to rely on its very shoddy rail network. By 1917 the railways were only able to meet half the demands placed on it, AH was relatively poorly industrialised and so could not produce rolling stock fast enough to make up the losses suffered in Galicia in 1914 and the losses from poor maintenance which lead to them wearing out their rolling stock very quickly. In 1914 the AH railway had around 12’000 locomotives, by the end despite a massive increase in production they ended the war with just under 7000, many of which were unfit for service. It also suffered from coal shortage, the rail network couldn’t transport enough coal to its central distribution depots to fuel its locomotives, and given that military transport always took a high priority it lead to an isolation of where food was produced, the countryside, from where it was consumed, the town. Galicia was an early casualty of the Russian advance, and it contained about a third of Hungary’s arable land, and also a large depot and distribution part of their rail network caused shortages early on, even after the Russians were pushed out the AH empire was never able to restore Galicia to full production. Organisational chaos is also a familiar refrain when talking about anything that AH did, given the two major blocs of Austria and Hungary the government was split into two, the governments of Austria and Hungary duplicated efforts and worked at solving the food problem from different ends, working frequently at cross purposes. The two different Austrian and Hungarian Ministries of Trade and Agriculture were working to maximise their own output rather than the empires output. They also made several poor decisions, they instituted price controls and compulsory purchase to try and keep the agriculture running, but they did it poorly and inconsistently, many farmers responded to this by moving out of crops and into livestock and using their grains as animal feed which produced much less overall calorific and nutritional content, output of grains and potatoes to between 30 and 50% of pre-war levels in Austria and 45 to 65% in Hungary. There was also widespread under-reporting of harvests in order for farmers to sell on the black market, this caused incredibly variable food distribution, with areas local to the farms being relatively well fed but approaching famine in the cities, the first food riots broke out in Vienna in 1915. Perhaps most interesting of all is that with the two different agencies managing food in the two different major parts of the empire, grain imports to Austria from Hungary fell from 1.4 million tons in 1913, to just 28’000 tons in 1917, with other crops suffering similar falls. Austria suffered much worse than Hungary and caused significant governmental infighting. Hungary’s reasons for doing this were largely political, its government was largely from a Magyar ethnicity, but the population of the country was significantly Slavic, so they saw food riots as the start of an end to their political domination, they were also deeply displeased with the government in Vienna’s conscription of large quantities of Hungarian peasants into the army, they sold a significant amount of food to Germany in exchange for currency and other war materials.  Austrian output.  Hungarian output. The ration supplied to the population of Vienna was from 1917 around 165 grams a day of poor quality flour, less than half the prewar average consumption, this was halved in 1918 and it got to such a stage that in April of 1918 the Austrian authorities seized dozens of barges carrying Romanian grain to Germany, by October 1918 there was at most two weeks food left in some areas of the empire, with zero at others. Galicia, Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia cut off trade to the rest of the country in order to desperately try to feed their own people. Austro Hungary had in an absolutely literal sense run out of food and could not continue to wage war in 1918. Ottoman Empire – Doing the best with what they had. The Ottoman empire was the poorest major participant in WW1, they had significant concessions to the European powers in the industrial sectors but their agriculture sector was still largely Ottoman, their output fell slightly to a similar extent to Germany and Austria Hungary, around a 40% drop in total, but their relative drop was lower, only losing about 22% of total efficiency, losses of farming land accounting for the other 18% of drop, as compared to Germany who lost no land but fell by around 40%.  Ottoman farm land utilisation, Yield and total output. As a much less developed country the Ottomans had much less scope to adapt, usually the reaction to losing manpower is to increase mechanisation, but they did not have the money or the degree of industrial advancement in order to achieve that. So you would expect the Ottomans to suffer similar problems to Germany and AH, and for a long time they did, with major urban centers having food shortage problems throughout the war, but it was most serious interestingly in 1916 and early 1917. The Ottoman transport network was not developed enough to fight a war and move food, so that caused similar problems to AH, it was very decentralised so the black market thrived and the anticipation of shortages caused many people to start hoarding, which caused exacerbation of the food situation. All of this lead in similar ways to AH and Germany to urban hunger, the government tried several efforts to deal with this. They relied on the market at first to run the agriculture sector, they believed the war would be short and so saw no need to intervene, when it became clear it would not however they started to regulate as shortages started and price inflation started. Late 1916 they mandated cereal producers could not stockpile, they could only retain enough for seeding and their own household, they had to surrender the rest at fixed prices significantly below the market prices of the time. However the government did not have the administrative clout to enforce this. Producers hid crops and bribed officials to sell as much on the black market for as much profit as they could, or just in order to eat themselves. This measure actually caused food imports to urban centres to decline. The government responded by cracking down and pressuring agricultural areas near the cities excessively hard, this caused a mass exodus of peasants to other areas of the empires, they fled to the interior of their countries, especially in modern day Syria they fled into the domain of the Druze sheikhs who gave them land and seed to start anew. Tribal chiefs all over the empire refused to sell to the main government or demanded payment in gold, famine struck in Lebanon and Syria killing around half a million people and this threatened to spread elsewhere. In 1917 the government did something unique, it significantly changed its policy, it adopted a tax in kind policy, producers were taxed a fixed proportion of their produce delivered directly to the government the rest they could sell as they wished, this policy encouraged higher production and removed the reason to sell to the black market, so production soared and the supply situation dramatically improved, there was still hunger but it was significantly ameliorated by this policy. It did disproportionately hit small producers however, but the government viewed that as a necessary evil. Russia – Starving with a full larder Russia mobilised vast quantities of men throughout WW1, around 18.5 million men served in the Russian army throughout the war out of a population of around 140 million. From the rural population 50.7% of all men of working age (18-60) were conscripted, the corresponding figure for urban areas was 24.0%, their workforce fell dramatically, this caused a relatively small drop in the production as many of the refugees and POWs were put to work to remedy this and Russia had vast reserves of unploughed land which was ploughed up to feed the increased demand from the Army and the refugee exodus. So why did Russia suffer food problems to the point where in Russian heavy industry where workers were not getting enough calories to work their arduous jobs?  Russian output of Grains. The Russian food production varied throughout the war going to +/- 15% of 1914 levels, there was a drop as compared to pre-war levels in most areas, the Russian agricultural sector did not employ fertilisers to the extent AH and Germany did so it suffered far less from the munitions industry competing, but it suffered from two large issues, the first being something we have seen to a lesser extent in the previous 3 warring nations, disengagement from the war effort, and the other being a vast increase in consumption, huge amounts of refugees were brought into Russia and the vast consumption called on by the swelling army. Disengagement from the war effort meant essentially that areas of the rural economy who were relatively self-sufficient stopped trading, they were subsistence farmers who sold around 25% of their crop before the war, but the government imposed a compulsory grain levy to try and feed the army and deal with its faltering finances, peasants responded by withholding their grain and consumed more of their product, as you can see in the table this was especially problematic in 1916 with an overall decrease in the grain balance caused by this disengagement, combined with an increase in the urban population of 5 million people over the course of the war lead to massive hunger in Russian cities. This problem appeared in all of the peasant farming based economies but most seriously in Russia, it is interesting to look at in terms of an economic feedback mechanism. In peace the peasant farmers sold their crops to buy necessary manufactured goods from the town, however in war, the young men who were most of the workforce left the countryside and still needed to be fed, vastly increasing the demand of the non-rural population for food. But due to war manufacture the urban civilian manufacturing output fell dramatically which is the very thing that the rural population sold its food to buy. Hence the rural farmers had no motivation to sell food, money was not in of itself useful for them because there was literally no consumer goods to buy, so they retreated into subsistence farming and stopped exporting, they had no real motivation to break their backs working really hard to increase output, especially given the general dissatisfaction with the government felt by many Russians, hence prices for food in the town soared. This caused famine not because there was no food available as in Austria Hungary, but because the food did not get it to the towns, what food there was was taken by the army as the government needed to feed them at any costs so they would keep fighting, the Russian urban workforce lost the ability to access food.  Balance of Grain imports in Russian regions, (Northern, Southern, Central and Eastern respectively) The Russian government could not afford or did not want to afford to pay farmers more, so they tried to legislate low prices, which the peasants responded to by sticking up two fingers and refusing to work for their benefit, this problem was not unique to Russia and happened in all the other countries that tried very low fixed prices, but it was the most serious in Russia. This bungling approach to food appropriation is how Russia managed to starve while still producing enough food, and how one of the largest food exporters pre-war managed to lose the war to hunger. Why didn’t Britain and France starve? As the two last early combatants left, these two were the only countries that did not suffer from widespread systematic hunger, they were never really in a huge danger of doing so because they had access to import markets to cover any shortfalls and the money to pay, but they also had much more robust agricultural sectors. France suffered from localised hunger caused by the stresses on its transport system and the loss of the grain producing areas of north eastern France to the Germans, but largely speaking it comes down to the fact that France had 3 things: 1: Access to the world economy and the food exports of its empire and the world at large, along with a robust economy and trade system that enabled them to pay for said food without incurring massive costs. 2: A very well developed train system with sufficient supplies of rolling stock. 3: The ability to mechanise and sufficient supplies of fertiliser and manpower to continue to farm. Britain was a very interesting case, a large part of the story of the U-Boat war is the threat of starvation, but Britain was never really in significant danger, rationing existed but it was not anywhere near as hungry as any other country in the war. Its own farming sector had shrunk significantly as it did not adopt protectionist policies in response to massive US exports, its agriculture focused into meat and dairy and remaining grain and crop producers had been forced to become highly mechanised and efficient to compete. This meant that Britain had vast amounts of untapped potential on the eve of war that other countries did not have, in 1916 in response to a drop in American output and U-Boat losses, meant that the government was able to guarantee a minimum price for grain and this lead to a surge in production as many fallow fields were plopughed up and subjected to high efficiency Industrial farming, this lead to a growth in output of crop agriculture throughout the war of around 30% from 1914 levels. Secondly Britain was extremely rich, it was able to loan to its allies in the early days of the war and it had an excellent record of paying its debts which meant that new lines of credit were very easy to come by, it was able to borrow and import to a huge degree more than any other power in the war. It is also the case that the government had a much stronger degree of legitimacy than the Central Powers or Russia, this meant that when it stepped in to control parts of the economy people were much more cooperative in working towards the common good and less likely to try to dodge the system as we saw in the other powers, (this also applies to France). Both countries also introduced a tax on excess profits of its companies, which raised vast amounts of money for their war chests, in Britain this tax reached 80% and was the single biggest income generator for the government. Concluding remarks. The First World War was a major point of change in warfare between the old style and the new, but it also represented a clash in Industrial terms between the old and the new, the US was the first to really adopt industrial farming and its massive output hit Europe hard pre-war, the countries that maintained peasant agriculture adopted protectionist tariffs and as a result had underdeveloped and inefficient farming industries that buckled under the stresses of war, even large food exporters like Russia failed to have their agriculture stand up to the stresses of war. The food shortages that this caused were a major cause of the defeat of the Central Powers, their populations refused or were simply unable to fight on, ultimately Falkenheim was right when in 1914 he informed his government that the only way out of the deadlock was to seek peace through diplomatic means, the CP were doomed to lose the war of economics, their economies and especially their agriculture could not stand the war of attrition they were to embark upon. Even with the defeat of Russia leading to a hope that the massive grain imports from the east would start again, Russian society had degraded to the point where it was incapable for many years after its surrender of feeding its own people, let alone another country. This catastrophe for Germany greatly informed its policy after WW1, having lost the naval struggle with Britain it turned again to being a land power and its desire for Lebensraum in the East, they wanted the great grain producing plains of western Russia and Ukraine to give security in food, indeed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk you can see that the CP occupied the large grain fields of Ukraine.  Hitler was to write after the first world war that Germanys trade rivalry with Britain had provoked the war, it was foolish to contest Britain at sea and Germany should focus on a continental empire, any war against Britain would need Russian food and other supplies, and any war with Russia would need British neutrality in order to not impede German access to international markets for the very same supplies, this thinking would contribute to the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum and eventually the Second World War. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 17:32 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 17:30
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wait, were you saying every general from the war is available or every general from ever?
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Aug 27, 2016 17:42
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