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Cyrano4747 posted:Short answer, not really. Here and there maybe some localized advantages that shifted a close battle just enough, but nothing truly decisive. There were a few early battles where superior recon was a big help for example. What about machine guns, in terms of sheer weight of numbers at the outbreak? All right, Germany having over 10,000 while the BEF and France had a few hundred each is less of a direct disparity than it seems when you consider that the machine gun at the time was bulky enough for it to be pretty much an exclusively defensive weapon; but then, most of the battles fought in 1914 saw the Allies on the defensive. In the opening exchanges the Allies did plenty of damage with two machine guns per battalion and the BEF firing rifles at 15 rounds per minute at Germans advancing in close order; surely with more machine guns they could at least have made the retreat from Mons a considerably more casual affair than it turned out to be? Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jul 11, 2014 |
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Jul 11, 2014 17:48
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mllaneza posted:And when you want to start digging in, anything by Lyn Macdonald is gold. I recommend her "1915", which has tons of good stuff including Gallipoli. There's an entire series of this: 1914 and 1915 are called that; then, by the nature of their years 1916 becomes "Somme" and 1917 "They Called it Passchendale"; then the one with 1918 in the title only covers the Spring Offensive, with nothing (as yet) to follow. If you're at all into oral histories, this is where you want to go; but I'd also strongly recommend pairing Macdonald or any other BEF oral history-type thing with the carnets of Louis Barthas, which is the narrative of a middle-aged French conscript corporal from a small town in Languedoc, called up in 1914 and spent practically the entire period of static warfare on the front lines. It's been a French classic and never out of print since its initial publication in 1978, but the English translation has only just been released. It's a completely different viewpoint to so many English-language sources; the vast majority of personal testimony that I've seen tends to have this underlying tone of "yes, it was complete hell, but you know, we watched out for each other and kept our heads down and saved our dignity and made the best we could of it, human spirit, yadda yadda". Even the ones who condemn the war can usually find something good to recall in the esprit de corps, or taking pride in being really good at their own jobs, or whatever. Barthas, on the other hand, hates most everyone and everything all the time, especially when it involves officers or orders, especially officers giving orders. His priorities are to not get killed, and to stop his men getting killed by stupid orders, and to not kill any Germans if at all possible, which he generally succeeds in doing. He complains his way through most of the major French actions on the Western Front: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Chemin-des-Dames; and generally he prefers to talk to German sentries than his own officers. He utterly refuses to put a brave face or a stiff upper lip on anything, but he's still able to bring out the ridiculous black comedy that he's stuck in. quote:Under cover of the thick fog which covered the landscape each morning, some of us went out to find rifles, revolvers, et cetera. A few of the less scrupulous went through the pockets of the dead men. Hopefully it will get noticed and get other people interested in what other works in other languages could use an English translation. Particularly useful to anyone who's ever wondered exactly why the French army went on strike in spring 1917. It's all in here. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jul 15, 2014 |
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Jul 15, 2014 00:17
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I mean, there's a reason that the French had to invent the term "grognard", right? It just makes so much sense, in the same way that of course German has "schadenfreude" in it.
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Jul 15, 2014 22:06
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e;f, bHEY GAL posted:Can someone post links to some hard statistics in here, before we all just drift around in circles discussing things someone heard once? 90% for the BEF in 1914 comes originally from Edmonds's Official History. They started with some 90,000 blokes and then sustained a shade over 85,000 casualties, with over 50,000 of them at First Ypres. The first two volumes of the OH cover Mons to the Aisne and then to the end of First Ypres, and it's a pain in the arse to dig anything out the copies available on archive.org - I can find casualties for First Ypres on page 466 of Volume 2, but I'm buggered if I can ferret out the casualty lists in Volume 1. There's some slightly different calculations out there, but you're arguing tuppence from a tenner. Something that's important to consider here concerning why such a high percentage of men became casualties at some point is that the back end of First Ypres was one of those moments where everyone gets a rifle and goes up the line. Cavalrymen, engineers, drivers, drummers, quartermasters, cooks, orderlies, the lot. There were points where even gunners were forced to leave their guns (something that usually happened slightly less often than the Pope might declare himself a Hindu) and plug a gap in the line. And if they were very lucky, they didn't even have to dig a hole for themselves when they got there... Even headquarters staff couldn't rely on being safe. Prior to First Ypres, a lot of staff wallahs installed themselves in a chateau near Hooge (it was chosen when the idea was that the front line would be somewhere east of Rouleurs/Menin), had a big meeting to deal with the line being breached at Gheluvelt, a German recon aircraft spotted all the staff cars lined up neatly outside, and very soon after that, some frightfully rude gunner dropped a few shells on the chateau, with predictable effects.
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Jul 19, 2014 19:37
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I'd like to make a left-field suggestion here. There's a book called Among the Thugs; it's about an only slightly mental American journalist who, living in England, decides in about 1983 that it'd be a boffo idea to follow a bunch of football hooligans as they troll around the country (and Europe), trying desperately to have fights with similarly-minded people before the police catch up to them and give everyone a good kicking. Why am I recommending it in this thread? It's the best thing I've ever read about what it's like to be in a giant barney, because it's directly concerned with not just a personal but an analytical account of participating in violence. The author doesn't just stand back and observe when it gets hairy; he gets stuck in with the rest of them. And he doesn't get away scot-free, either; a related attempt to attend a National Front disco ends with him getting his head introduced to a lamp-post several times, and the climax of the book is in Sardinia, where the police finally catch up to him properly to deliver the good kicking that he's been owed for years. It's a hell of an insight for anyone who's never been involved in anything bigger than a bar brawl. So it seems like it'd be directly relevant to anyone who's interested in the psychology of violence, what exactly goes on after the officers have declared "our chaps will fight their chaps over here", and now the chaps have to get on with it. Particularly if your particular era of interest is before the widespread adoption of modern military discipline, or that involves forces who don't respect same, or when hand-to-hand fighting was a major component of a battle. You're in an army unit, you've been marched to the battlefield, you've got something big and pointy, over there not very far away is the enemy. You're shouting at them, they're shouting at you; but what tips that situation past colourful language with handbags at twenty paces, and into an actual battle? This book may well have an answer for you. (Or, y'know, read another biography of a general, in which case I recommend Bill Slim's Defeat Into Victory, possibly the only thing written by someone at that level where I wasn't constantly thinking "well, you would say that now, wouldn't you?") Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Jul 24, 2014 |
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Jul 24, 2014 23:53
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On the 29th of July, the British forces were ordered into a "Precautionary Period", rather like the runners in a race coming under starter's orders; something very close to, and in preparation for full mobilisation, but not quite. Part of the Army at home had gone on immediate standby to be dispatched to resist invasion; the rest of it was sent to guard various points of interest around the coast. One of them was a young private in the Rifle Brigade, stationed near the port of Felixstowe (currently playing host to the cruiser HMS Amphion and its attendant destroyers), whose six days' stint of incredibly dull guard duty was about to get considerably more interesting.quote:The day after August bank holiday, I was on sentry from ten o'clock to midnight, on the seaward side of the oil tanks. It was a still, still night with no wind at all and the sea was like plate glass - the sort of night when sound travels for miles. Eerie, really. Just you and the stars and the sea and the sound of your own feet, soft on the grass. Suddenly, I heard this tremendous roaring noise coming from across the water - cheering and shouting. I couldn't work it out at all. Then I decided that it ust be the crew of the big ship cheering at the end of a deck concert. It was ages before it died away.
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Aug 5, 2014 00:55
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I remember watching a documentary where someone spent some time wandering around Dresden, and thinking "jesus, the entire city looks like a horrific 50s council estate, how did that happen?" ... "OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH that's what "firebombing" means"
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Aug 5, 2014 01:44
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MA-Horus posted:Some NCO's you do call sir, at least in the CAF. Master Warrant Officer and Chief Warrant Officer, namely. Well, but the clue here is that they hold a warrant from the Queen; it's not a commission, but in some ways they're more officer than NCO, including being called "sir". Still too much common sense to be commissioned, but good enough at their jobs to be given the real responsibility of Getting poo poo Done and, ahem, anticipating the officers' orders. A sapper who called his corporal "sir" in 1914 would probably be lucky if he only escaped with a clip round the earhole, it's a gigantic and classic schoolboy error along the lines of referring to sergeants as "Sarge". Something that's very easy to overlook and downplay about the BEF is how brutal a lot of the discipline was even by the standards of 1941. On active service there were IIRC about a dozen purely military offences for which the punishment was death*. A battalion's colonel had the summary power to sentence any man under his command to up to 28 days of hard labour or Field Punishment Number One, which had been introduced to replace flogging and wasn't much more humane. And then it was widely accepted that NCOs could use their judgement (and boots, and fists) to deal with all kinds of minor misdemeanours that weren't worth wasting the Old Man's time with. And this is without starting to consider the role and activities of the battle police, a surprisingly little-known concept where the provosts and RMP would patrol the old front line and set up stragglers' posts as a unit advanced; their job was to (among many other things) ensure that units ordered over the top actually went, and it's often said that they held the unoffical and unchallenged power to summarily execute any stragglers or funkers who refused to obey (whether they actually did or not is a Matter of Some Debate). The beatings will continue until morale improves! *No, there weren't nearly as many official judicial executions as is often supposed; no, the vast majority of them were not for cowardice; yes, quite a lot of the soldiers were probably guilty and many of them had been previously sentenced to death and subsequently commuted; yes, despite all those caveats there were plenty of miscarriages of military justice (although considerably less than in the French army, which was far too fond of the Paths of Glory scheme of punishing recalcitrant units by drawing lots and having a man or two executed, pour encourager les autres). Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:34 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 23:30
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The old Blackadder line about Haig and his drinks cabinet's an exaggeration, but not much of one. The line was capable of moving significant distances, but at horrific cost and with the obvious disadvantages of moving further and further from your own railheads, across complete wastelands, towards an army that was being moved closer to its own supplies, with little hope of being able to create a gap wide enough for long enough to shove some cavalry through. What it's not is a simple case of Germans advancing, then Allies retreating; then Allies advancing while the Germans retreated. Until mid-1918 the front line was perfectly capable of moving both ways; this is not at all like WWII in Europe, which you can reasonably depict as "the Germans advanced on all fronts until the Xth of X 1942, then the Allies advanced on all fronts thereafter". In Belgium the BEF installed itself a few miles outside Ypres and was pushed back completely by accident after the Germans conducted a little gas test in the Ypres salient and ended up nearly throwing them into the sea; as it was they were pushed out of their unsafe-but-defensible positions and forced to occupy much worse ones right on the outskirts of the town, which they then broke out of in 1917 and advanced about ten miles before being bogged down at Paaschendaele. The Somme is of course the greatest British image of futility and slaughter, but unlike Verdun it did actually result in an advance (much like how Third Ypres was ultimately a failure because they failed to reach the rail junction at Rouleurs, the objective of the Somme was the rail junction at Bapaume, which they stalled out well short of), and by the winter of 1916 they'd advanced six miles, which was the biggest advance since the Marne. Of course in 1918 the Spring Offensive happened, and by the end of that the front line had in some places moved forty miles or more. But that had been preceded by the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, during which the Germans had voluntarily given up about forty miles... So it was possible for the front line to move during the static period, but you can also draw a very narrow set of lines on a map of France and Belgium marking the two furthest lines of advance (and it doesn't get too much better if you expand the lines to mark furthest advance during the whole war). On that grand scale, it really was chateaux and drinks cabinets.
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Aug 9, 2014 10:18
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I can't imagine anything other than this sketch, sorry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2QJBWq-gY0 You've got a nice army base here, Colonel...
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Aug 11, 2014 13:09
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gradenko_2000 posted:Can someone explain to me the importance of NCOs in an army? It was mentioned that a super lack of them was a big cause of why the WWI Tsarist army was so bad. Basically: Officers decide what to do, and automatically are superior to all NCOs and private soldiers (in Britain collectively referred to as Other Ranks, "the ranks", "the men", and so on). The most green Second Lieutenant can give orders to the oldest, most flea-bitten Regimental Sergeant Major, although he often knows better than to try. Non-Commissioned Officers get told what to do, and decide how to do it and who does it. And then the private soldiers, led by their NCOs and officers together, go and do it. An NCO enlisted as a private soldier and during his service, demonstrated the correct mix of bravery and luck to be promoted from that rank. They're an "officer" in the sense that they are in charge of people, but they didn't obtain that rank with book learning and their power derives from the Army. They didn't go to military academies, they learned their soldiering on the job. They are in charge of small groups of men and carry out simple tasks given to them by a junior officer: "attack that trench", "clear that pillbox", and so on. They are the corporals and sergeants; they are the blokes who are responsible for Actually Getting poo poo Done. It doesn't matter where the order comes from, whether it's something thought up in the middle of No Man's Land by a harassed lieutenant cowering in a shell-hole, or a carefully-designed part of a multiple-army movement decided over several months; at some point someone will have to tell a sergeant to make it happen. The sergeant is who the private looks to for his immediate instructions and general guidance on how to soldier effectively and not die. Officers are very rarely promoted from the ranks (immediately before the war, in a good year, five senior British NCOs would be commissioned as officers). They join the Army by going to a military academy of some sort and (in theory) they learn how to be leaders and tacticians; they are then granted a commission by the King (or other head of state) and their power derives directly from that source. They have their own rank structure and role, completely separate to the NCOs' structure. The officers do the thinking so the blokes can concentrate on the shooting (this is why they're armed with pistols instead of rifles), and certainly in the period we're talking about, they are very definitely from a higher social class to the Other Ranks. On the ground officers and NCOs both provide leadership, but in different ways. An officer will give his men a rousing speech about King and Country; a sergeant will remind them to keep their bloody heads down when they go to the latrine. Ideally, the men will look up to their officers, but form close social bonds with each other and with their NCOs. (In order to maintain the distance necessary for effective command, officers are strictly forbidden from socialising with other ranks.) Critically, officers and NCOs both must lead their men over the top, and will therefore be first into the teeth of whatever opposition might lie ahead. The effective NCO does many useful things. Perhaps most importantly in this social context, he acts as a vital bullshit screen between the twits in command and the oafs with the rifles. He can make suggestions to his officers about the best way to proceed; and if he has fifteen years' soldiering and the lieutenant has six months, he'll often be able to spot all the practical problems with the officer's clever plan. His men will also be a lot more likely to take orders from someone they recognise as being one of their own, rather than some chinless toff who might as well be from a different planet. An army without some layer of insulation between officers and men will find it very hard to function in action; the officers on the ground will be distracted from their tactical concerns by having to control a large group of individuals, and the men will lack someone nearby who can give them clear, simple commands. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 00:57
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It's important to bear in mind here that the US army has a much expanded concept of the warrant officer to other world militaries. (For those in need of a quick conversion, we only have the equivalent of master sergeants and sergeants-major - you can have a technician who is some flavour of WO, but he'll always have been a technician and will have been promoted as a technician throughout his Army career - there's no such thing as a separate Warrant Officer corps that you can join. British helicopters are piloted by officers; that's what William and Harry were doing when they were on active service.) When the rest of the world hears "warrant officer", they think of the bloke in a battalion who's responsible for managing the sergeants. A BEF battalion would have had a Company Sergeant-Major (this is a title, not a rank; his rank is Warrant Officer Class 2) for each company of men (at full strength, four companies of 250) in addition to its commanding Major, and his second-in-command, and each battalion would have had a Regimental Sergeant-Major (ranking WO Class 1) in overall charge of all the NCOs; the RSM would frequently be a close confidante of the battalion's commanding officer and would fulfil a broadly similar role, except managing the NCOs instead of the officers. Good officers would become good officers at least partly by asking for and listening to advice from their CSM and RSM, who would (at least in 1914!) have got a lot of service in and been an invaluable source of military memory. (In the modern-day Army a lot of good WOs gain commissions, on the grounds that they've spent a number of years sorting out the messes created by clueless subalterns and would therefore make good subalterns themselves.) Again, they're basically responsible for Getting poo poo Done, but at a higher level than the sergeant. For instance, on a multi-day route march, the unit CO will say "OK, we'll stop here for the night", and then it's the RSM who sees that everyone has a place to sleep and that the quartermaster issues the rations properly, while the officers retire to keep on top of their moustache care. That's basically what a warrant officer does in the rest of the world. The exact ranks, titles and duties are of course subject to change, and in particular you should be careful extrapolating from the British model because it was invented to police a colonial empire and is organised with that in mind. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 21:50
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Kaal posted:And then finally they ended with a suggestion that the group should have abandoned their position and retreated - as if British WWI history isn't filled with examples of soldiers being shot for cowardice for doing exactly that. Yeah, um, if you actually go and have a look at the details of the charges against men who were executed (more commonly in these cases for desertion or for quitting their post without authority, both easier charges to prove than cowardice), nobody was shot for retiring in good order and in the face of the enemy from an untenable position to a defensible one. The expectation was never that any position should be held to the last man and the last round (with perhaps a few highly specialised exceptions like Gheluvelt in 1914, when there were no reinforcements and nowhere left to retire to). In cases where men gave up a position en masse and one of them was later executed, I've always seen some kind of aggravating factor involved in the charges. The most common narrative presented to a court-martial in those cases went something like this: panic spread among men who were still in a defensible position and in some kind of contact with superior authority, and they then fled in rout from their positions until they ran into someone senior or scary enough to exert some control over them, who then restored order; the man being charged would either be a private who could be painted as a ringleader of the panic spreading, or an NCO who the authorities considered should have taken control of the situation and kept the men in their positions, and instead encouraged the panic by joining in. I'm not trying to defend the executions as being in any way fair, just or proportionate, but the tale of military executions is tragic enough without needing to invent things that didn't happen. Troops were forced out of High Wood and positions like it on innumerable occasions throughout the war, and if they'd all been shot then 306 wouldn't be the total number of executions for the entire war, it'd be the number of executions for offences committed on most days during any major action.
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Aug 16, 2014 00:00
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's also really, really obviously aimed at the 14-24 year old crowd. They layer in modern music in places in a way that I honestly found obnoxious but which someone fifteen years younger - or maybe just with less of a stick up their rear end - would probably find pretty cool. They also used a lot of overhead top-down CGI to show developing tactical situations that just pulls you out of the action really badly. It looks like FLIR imagery from a drone or something and was probably put in specifically to appeal to the Call of Duty demographic. See, I absolutely loved that idea, because it's a great way of solving the problem of how to maintain the mood of "the blokes on the ground have no loving idea what's going on if they can't see it" while also getting the dramatic irony from having the audience know exactly how hard the hard place is that the rock is bashing them against. quote:The camera work also makes me kind of want to kill someone, as there is a LOT of clearly GoPro inspired shooting. Camera fixed over the gun barrel facing back towards the shooter, camera fixed on the chest of the shooter facing outward, camera up-and-under the guy's face while he runs, that kind of poo poo. Lots of shaking as a result. The net result just makes it feel a lot like I'm either watching a video game or kit-mounted GoPro footage of something in Afghanistan or maybe a 3-gun competition. Do you not think that this might be kind of the point? Show people images in a familiar style to drive home the point that if you were living 100 years ago, you'd be right in the middle of all this? I'd file it with the stylistic choice of having the blokes use modern inner-London accents rather than making them speak like period gorblimey-guv'nor-apples-and-pears-and-strike-a-light Cockneys would have done. Having watched only the first episode, I was seriously impressed by how effectively in an hour they managed to cover a shitload of the cultural issues facing the BEF at the time with just a little line here and a line there and without dwelling on anything or taking away from the Zulu feel that the episode had to it; no machine guns, poor use of artillery, overconfidence from the staff, failure to use the Engineers properly, and half a dozen other things I noticed at the time and then forgot once it hit the fan. By the way, the runner in that one is Bill Holbrook, whose stories are all over Lyn Macdonald's BEF oral histories, and if you want to go to the source 1914 is absolutely stuffed full of him, particularly regarding the outbreak of war, the long march to Mons, and the rather quicker retirement.
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Aug 17, 2014 22:17
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PittTheElder posted:Any one know the approximate proportion of guys that would have been classed as front liners in WWI? For all we here about the trauma of the trenches, there must have been a gigantic supply train behind those guys. Or was the tail end mostly women and people otherwise considered unfit for combat duty? Well, what's the definition of a front-liner? There's absolute shedloads of men who weren't in an infantry battalion, but whose duties meant that they went up the line at least occasionally, certainly if you define "up the line" to be anywhere a German gunner might try to drop a shell on your head. Speaking of which, that's without considering the pedantry you could play over whether the artillery are front-liners or not...
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Aug 20, 2014 20:46
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Koramei posted:Troops were only on the front line like 10% of the year or something, were they not helping with logistical stuff the rest of the time? If not, what were they doing? This is one of those statistics you have to be very very careful with, else it's easy to make an error along the lines of the classic one we've all done at some point when we were getting into this poo poo and thought that "casualties" was a synonym for "killed", instead of "killed/wounded/missing". So, 10-15% was the amount of time an infantryman spent actually occupying the main fire trenches, in what you might call the Blackadder position. However, it's important not to equate this figure with the total time spent "up the line", which was about 45-60% of a fighting man's time. Trench systems were complicated things, even on the Allied side, and there was more than just one trench to be occupied.  15% of yer man's total service might be in the fire trench, and then another 10% in the support trenches immediately behind (or t'other way about); then 30% back in the reserve trenches; and then the rest of your time would be out of the line; but you'd probably have spent more of your time up the line than not, depending on how your luck fell. As to what they did while they were out of the line? Resting, training, going on leave, gambling, eating egg and chips in town, contracting an exciting new venereal disease, getting put on a charge, or some combination of those things. Certainly they were only allowed to participate in logistics as passengers or recipients of mail. You don't want a load of pongos who have spent the past however long getting yelled at by their sergeants to not think trying to do work that requires thinking, and you don't want their officers screwing you up with Good Ideas; if any of them were suited to that sort of thing, they'd have been identified and sent to a logistical Corps in the first place and not to a fighting regiment.
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Aug 21, 2014 00:54
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Mind you, if someone needed something to be carried up the line, and they'd run out of Pioneers to grab, of course you just found the nearest bunch of blokes who didn't seem like they were doing anything and asked the officer for a carrying party, and officers who'd say "no, my men are here to rest" weren't nearly as common as they should have been. It was actually a fairly common complaint among the PBI that "rest" was often not nearly as restful as it could/should have been, partly due to things like that, and partly due to the regime in the training camps (Etaples is of course the most notorious, but there were plenty of others).
Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 13:16
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Something else to remember is that in areas with a high water table, if you had enough time your engineers could build something called a breastwork, which is like a trench except you construct it upwards instead of digging it downwards.Alchenar posted:What I find weirder to contemplate are the two ends of the line. What it was like to be the last soldier before the sea, or right up on the Swiss Border. There's a great bit in one of the Lyn Macdonald books from a BEF officer who did actually spend some of his time occupying the very last length of line before the coast, and how he always made a point when he did his rounds every day to go right up to the end so he could say he was the last/first man on the Western Front. IIRC there was some impassable marshland covering the last ~500 yards between the end of the line and the sea. I'll see if I can dig it out. edit: apparently it's just a reference rather than a quotation, but if you want to track the man down, you're looking for Lt Paddy King of the 2/5th East Lancashires, stationed at Nieuport in summer 1917, in the period between blowing up Messines Ridge and the start of Third Ypres proper: quote:The land beyond Dixmude petered out into impassable swamp, where the situation had been static ever since King Albert had ordered the floodgates of the canals to be opened in 1914, in a last, desperate effort to stem the German advance. So the waters spread over a large area of land, a stagnant, insurmountable barrier between the opposing armies, although the Allies had managed to retain a toehold around the coastal town of Nieuport. Nieuport was literally the end of the line. On his daily inspection of the trenches, 2nd Lt "Paddy" King of the 2/5th East Lancashire Regiment always made a point of going right to the end of the very last trench which abutted on the beach. It appealed to his sense of humour to feel that, for a few seconds at least, he was the last man on the Western Front. At such moments, in that time of misunderstanding and confusion before the offensive, he was probably the only man on the Western Front who knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 16:47 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 16:31
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In theory you could have put a bloke at the Swiss border and he could then walk from Switzerland to Nieuport, trenches all the way. In practice, of course shells and mortars can knock trenches in, and units get dislodged to inferior positions, and then an attack happens and some blokes are left cowering in shell-holes for a month, trying to hang on long enough for the heat to die down enough for the engineers to come up in force and dig them a new proper front line, and rivers and forests happen. There's something from the Wipers Times that illustrates just how powerful even trench mortars became as the war dragged on; this is from the recurring column "Verbatim Summaries of Intelligence Reports". It probably helps to know that the Flying Pig is a 9.45 inch quote:At 1.0 p.m. the "Flying Pig" dropped a round in our front line at (map reference). The trench was completely wrecked, the crater formed being 14 feet deep and 25 feet across. It is consoling to think that over 40 rounds have been fired from this gun into the enemy trenches during the last week. The editor then comments "Very consoling to the P.B.I."
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Aug 21, 2014 18:44
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Raskolnikov38 posted:In the hundreds of feet, something that heavy isn't going anywhere far without a rocket motor or much larger gun behind it. And that's why they're called "trench" mortars, their range was so short that they had to be fired from the trenches (rather than the artillery's usual, rather more comfortable positions back behind the nearest hill) before they could hit anything worth hitting. In some ways, the Flying Pig's existence is kind of like if Hitler had actually succeeded in fielding the Ratte in large numbers; it needed to be broken down to travel and all its bits and bobs loaded onto multiple carts, then hauled up the line and reassembled in situ. Once functioning it could then in an emergency situation fire one ludicrously destructive projectile every few minutes or so, the usual rate of fire being rather less on account of either the chronic shortage of ammunition or the disinclination of its operators to annoy the enemy and risk drawing a response (delete as appropriate). All this faff made it mostly useless in any kind of mobile situation, such as "being attacked" or "going on the offensive", although it was very good for blowing up dugouts and pillboxes located near the enemy's front line before an attack was due. Considering that the whole point of a trench mortar is that (unlike a gun) it's supposed to be small, simple, flexible and easily portable... By comparison, the 3-inch Stokes mortar could be carried anywhere by a pair of idiots, set up quickly in a small hole, and it could then fire 20-odd rounds per minute in an emergency and 6 rounds per minute on a sustained basis, at a range of some 800 yards (nearly double that of the Flying Pig, although its projectiles were of course far less destructive). A hell of a lot of the pain suffered by the Allies in the early going can be directly attributed to going into the war without any kind of mortar capability, while the Germans had a healthy allotment of the famous 25-cm Minenwerfer (which the Stokes was a direct answer to), quickly nicknamed Minnie. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Aug 21, 2014 |
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Aug 21, 2014 22:07
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100 Years Ago: About now, the BEF is digging temporary positions along the line of the Mons-Conde canal. On their right, the French Fifth Army is being extremely hard-pressed by the German 2nd and 3rd Armies at Charleroi, and now there are even more of the buggers threatening to outflank the French and surround them. The BEF's orders are to hold the line of the canal for about 24 hours to allow the French to disengage and retire in good order, and then to conduct a similar orderly retirement themselves, in order to make another stand somewhere slightly further to the rear. Cavalry patrols cross the canal and execute successful harassing operations against German advance units.
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Aug 22, 2014 16:54
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Something else to consider; when you've been thinking about the war as a whole, it's pretty easy to forget that the Germans came incredibly close to taking Paris in September 1914 (if the Marne had been bungled, they'd have been completely stuffed), and even after they were forced to retire to the Aisne, they came even closer to at least pushing the BEF and the Belgian army into the sea and taking control of the Channel coast from Wilhelmshaven to Bolougne. A war where the line stabilises on a front that (say) continues running along the line of the Somme all the way to the Channel is a completely different proposition, and one that's impossible to consider without wanking over counterfactuals. (But here's one; imagine if the little German gas test that accidentally caused Second Ypres had been conducted with a little more foresight, and had been done with the aim of marching on Rouen and Beauvais from the Somme to encircle Paris...)
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Aug 23, 2014 10:30
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100 Years Ago: Horrendously outnumbered, the BEF is doing the only thing it can, bravely running away. 80,000 men are directly in the way of an entire German army, intelligence having initially believed that they were facing rather less than that. Not only must they retreat, but they have to do so while both Corps keep in touch with each other, and II Corps maintains some sort of contact with the French 5th Army, to avoid leaving any gaps for the enemy to exploit. It's easy to sit in judgement over French's apparent loss of nerve after 100 years of hindsight; but at the time, all he's receiving are reports of Germans further than the eye can see (when reports can reach him), his ally's carefully-laid plans to take the offensive are in tatters, he can't properly resupply his men because they're going backwards too fast, and if his flank is turned that's certainly the end of his force and very possibly the end of the war. He's also had to take the (entirely correct) decision to evacuate GHQ from Le Cateau after a single day of fighting and is retreating along with everyone else. He's also doing something he's never been prepared to do, in commanding a concentrated continental body of men; the entire Army was designed to police an empire, operating at battalion and company level, conducting small, widely-flung operations. He's also just had a stroke of very bad luck when his friend Grierson, the commander of II Corps, died suddenly on a train a week earlier. Even worse, Kitchener then ignored his advice and (in full knowledge of what he was doing) appointed Horace Smith-Dorrien to replace Grierson, a man who he both disliked and distrusted, and who is sending his own private dispatches to the King. In that context, I think it becomes a lot easier to understand why French poo poo his breeches so completely. In 1914 he was the only serious candidate for CinC, and this undoubtedly played a major part in why he kept the job for so long. He'd been promoted to field marshal, he had the right political connections, he'd served as Inspector-General of the Army and as CIGS, he hadn't embarrassed himself in South Africa, he'd been directing the Army's annual manoeuvres, and some plans had already been laid on the assumption that he would be appointed. If you're looking for fault here, you must look past individuals and start to examine the entire system.
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Aug 24, 2014 09:21
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Aw, thanks. Have another one! A lot of the "but why the gently caress would they do X????" completely baffling questions I used to have about this stupid war suddenly became a lot more explicable once I found out some things about what exactly happened in 1914, and the ideas that they lodged in people's heads. 100 Years Ago: As the retreat continues, II Corps proves to be particularly hard-pressed, with the weight of the enemy opposite them. They've lost contact with the Fifth Army (cue 100 years of arguing about General Lanrezac) and are barely keeping in touch with I Corps (who have suddenly and unexpectedly found their own battle to fight at Landrecies). A number of desperate rearguard actions have been fought, often by impromptu groups of stragglers and randoms thrown together by on-the-spot subalterns acting on their own intiative. Smith-Dorrien's subordinates are unanimous. Their men physically cannot continue to retire as fast as their pursuers are pushing them. They must have some rest; and since that means the Germans will be upon them, why not take the opportunity to fight a more controlled battle than the earlier rearguard actions, and buy some time for the rest of the army to rest and then continue moving? French insists that the army continue retiring. Smith-Dorrien disobeys the order and, in the evening, II Corps arrives at Le Cateau and begins digging in as best they can (which isn't much; most of the men are too tired to do anything than collapse and sleep). It soon becomes obvious that there will not be nearly enough time for the guns to take cover, and they will have to operate in classical fashion, firing at targets they can see over open sights. So here's another reason to think again about John French: it would have been very easy for him to instruct a few days ago that the BEF should retire from Framieres to the Gallic fortress town of Maubeuge and use its extensive prepared defences to make a stand on the River Sambre; the defences were strong enough and extensive enough that both they and the French garrison might possibly hold out long enough for Joffre to send help. He recognised that occupying a static position would give the Germans an opportunity to encircle them (the German intent during this period was always to outflank the BEF, rather than chase them down the road), and also that a chance for the BEF to reorganise and resupply was a chance for the enemy to do exactly the same thing, and so ordered the retirement to continue to Bavai and then Le Cateau. (IIRC he later claimed that he recalled what had happened at Metz in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War.) Even stopping to make this stand could spell trouble; if I Corps gets its flank turned in the meantime, or if the Germans can punch a gap between the two Corps, that could well be curtains for the BEF. The French garrison was surrounded at about the time II Corps were on the road to Le Cateau, besieged without hope of relief as the French army disappeared over the horizon, and was forced to surrender a fortnight or so later, after extensive bombardment from guns taken from the Belgian fortresses at Liege and Namur. gradenko_2000 posted:The British 'countered' the new strategy by attacking the first line, then immediately taking over the strongpoints and digging in furiously. The Germans expected that any Entente offensive would try to push for a penetration/breakthrough that would play into the second and third defensive lines, but if instead the Entente stopped after taking a little bit of ground and immediately fortifying it, then the German follow-up with a counter-attack would fail because then they'd be facing a dug-in enemy instead of an advancing one. Of course, it took quite a while for bite-and-hold to go anywhere; IIRC (the details of generals' squabbles with each other aren't my strong point) General Plumer was a huge fan of it, and was its primary advocate, but he could only do so much because he was never more than a corps and army commander, and both the Chiefs didn't like bite-and-hold because it was a far less offensive strategy than the big push, which could theoretically "force a decision" (for some reason, lots of people and Haig in particular loved using this phrase to mean "end the war") very soon thereafter.
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Aug 25, 2014 12:00
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100 Years Ago In Africa, a British-French force completes a successful invasion of the German colony of Togoland, which is later partitioned. So, things I learned from 1914: This holds true for all wars, but due to the unique circumstances of this one (vastly increased weapons range, but radio not yet being a mature enough technology to be of much use), it's particularly relevant and will crop up time and time again. During a war, lots of people make lots of decisions, many of them at a very senior level, based on imperfect information, and over the course of a war, both sides end up making a truly humungous level of gently caress-ups. The side that wins tends to be the side that fucks up the least, and makes the best use of the information it does have. II Corps, supported by a French cavalry corps somewhere on its left, is making its stand at Le Cateau. Both their flanks are dangling in air; both the 5th Army and I Corps are disinclined to be of any help and continue retiring. Unlike Mons, the battle proves to be an artillery duel, the British guns turning all around and about to interdict the Germans as they try to outflank the Corps in both directions, while taking merciless counter-battery fire. Somehow, with tireless support from the French, they hold out, and then get out. Somehow, the Germans fail to realise how precarious the Corps' position is, and quite how easy it would be to outflank them. The order to break off and continue retiring comes at 2pm, and a vital day of rest has been bought for everyone who's not gone into action. It takes the order an hour or more to reach a lot of units; and for more, they never receive it at all. Some of those eventually retire on their own intiative, having to fight their way back through Germans who have advanced past them, but plenty more hold their positions and are either captured or destroyed. The Corps is intact, but only just. Some companies of 250 officers and men have been reduced to 50 or fewer, and are frequently in the charge of subalterns or NCOs. Off they plod towards St Quentin, sure that the Germans will be after them again soon enough. But they're not, and somehow, improbably, over the next few days the BEF is able to slip away entirely. Exactly why this occurred is a Matter of Some Debate, but from what I can make out, it goes something like this. German intelligence was poor, and it vastly overestimated the strength of the force opposing them. This is where people usually start to mention the probably-apocryphal stories that the BEF's rifle fire was so intense that German officers reported being opposed by vast armies bristling with machine guns; probably an exaggeration, but the basic truth that the Germans overestimated the strength of the Allied left flank is just that. They also blundered in predicting that the BEF would think of saving itself above all else, and retreat to defend the Channel ports, its lines of supply, and its quickest route home. Instead, they were retreating with the French, back towards Paris, to defend it if need be. Alternate lines of supply ran to Le Havre and St Nazaire. And so, the Germans angled further westwards, looking to find and turn a flank that wasn't really there any more, while the BEF continued south and escaped. Rearguard actions continued (particularly involving I Corps on the far left, who were still out of contact with II Corps and, being further north than them, didn't have as much breathing room as they did), but the gap widened over the next few days, as Joffre continued retreating his left flank (the 4th and 3rd armies have now been compelled to retreat alongside the 5th) in search of a good place to turn and fight, and the BEF was left with no option but to continue heading further and further back into France. The Germans may have got there firstest with the mostest; however, since leaving Mons the BEF has hosed up the littlest and the leastest, and the immediate danger has passed. But the Allies haven't won anything, they've just succeeded in not losing, yet. Germans are still advancing deeper and deeper into France, relatively unchecked, and still broadly in agreement with the Schlieffen plan.
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Aug 26, 2014 11:24
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100 Years Ago: This is where we start to come up against the limits of what I feel I know enough to talk about. The main action today would be on the Eastern front, where a prolonged period of heavy skirmishing in Prussia finally coalesces into the Battle of Tannenberg; over the next six days, the German 8th Army gives the Russians, and particularly their 2nd Army, one of the more comprehensive kickings ever dealt out. German casualties are a shade under 14,000 (five digits); the Russians suffer 170,000 (six digits) killed, wounded and captured, and are also relieved of some 350 guns. And all this despite a Russian paper advantage of 80,000 men at the start of the affair. Anyone know a bit more about it? About all I know is that it was a huge kicking, and that none of the fighting happened anywhere near Tannenberg, the name being chosen for propaganda reasons. Another major Eastern battle had begun on the same day as Mons between the Russians and Austro-Hungarians; it's one of those things so large that it can be divided into several distinct phases and goes by several different names. I've seen "Lemberg" and "Galicia" used at different times by different people. And finally in poo poo I Know Little About, a combined British/Japanese force begins laying siege to the German-controlled port of Tsingtao in China. Back in France, the BEF fights a vigorous rearguard action at Etreux, in which two guns and three rifle companies of the 2nd Royal Munster Fusiliers keep the entire German 1st and 2nd Armies going absolutely nowhere for some fourteen hours, outnumbered six to one at the sharp end, while I Corps makes good its escape behind them. It's a much smaller affair than Le Cateau, but arguably just as important for the retreat in general. Of an initial strength of 800, 240 men and four officers survive longer than their ammunition does. They have no option but to surrender with dignity, and many later accounts report the Germans congratulating them on their fighting spirit. Perhaps, once the retreat is finally over, this war will soon provide ample opportunity for daring and glory on the offensive?
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Aug 27, 2014 10:56
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LordSaturn posted:Just trying to link up effortposts - quickly shoring up my memory on Wikipedia, the German naval forces at Tsingtao include the Scharnhorst and Gniesenau, under the command of Graf Maximillian von Spee, who manages to break out and tries to get home via the Strait of Magellan. ...I'm sure I'm not the only person who knows a thing or two about World War II naval engagements and just went "WAIT WHAT" at all these familiar names being thrown around, right? The 1930s battleships Scharnhorst and Gneiesenau were of course named after their predecessors who fought in 1914; and the pocket battleship Graf Spee was named after those ships' admiral. This is a hell of an interesting story now I look into it; I was vaguely familiar with what happened at the Falklands, but not with what the hell the relevant German ships were actually doing there.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:32
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100 Years Ago: On land, everything that's been happening, continues to happen. At sea, the first major naval action of the war occurs in the Heligoland Bight; a detachment of the Grand Fleet conducts a successful ambush on a number of High Seas Fleet vessels, sinking three cruisers and one destroyer, and damaging three more cruisers, in exchange for one cruiser and three destroyers damaged. Again, not a thing I know a great deal about, and I'm especially wary of talking about naval affairs because I know we've got some people in here who seriously know their poo poo on that score. So here's something else. Cards on the table time. I absolutely despise military history (or to be fair, any history) when it's presented as the story of feuding old men, the relationships between politicians and generals. I don't care if Loos was the fault of Haig or French for positioning the reserves improperly, or Haking's for not understanding that his men might be needed quickly, or all of them for agreeing to participate in a major offensive while the artillery's ammunition supplies consisted of three working shells, six duds, the battalion tea-urn, and a sack of rotten apples scrumped from Dead Cow Farm. What I'm most interested in is that someone at GHQ made some decisions, and some other people had some Good Ideas, and the practical upshot of all this is that now several hundred ordinary blokes are taking a tour of interesting shell-holes in No Man's Land, trying not to piss themselves and trying to remember if they filled out the "Last Will and Testament" section of their pay-books. Who are they? What are they doing there? What's the daily reality of life up the line, and out of the line? How do they get fed and watered? On a day-to-day practical level, how do they not die? And who exactly was Mademoiselle from Armentieres, anyway? So, here's something on conditions during the long retreat for anyone who ranked below Brigadier. (Sure, it's not possible to understand things properly without some wider grasp of tactics and strategy, but I'm happy with enough to gain a broad understanding of where any individual bunch of blokes are and what, in theory, they're supposed to be doing.) Above all else, the word is "chaos". If you're good, or lucky, or both, then you end up with relatively organised chaos. If you're not, that's when retreat turns into rout, which is one thing that the retreat from Mons categorically never did. The chaos remained relatively organised from start to finish and the BEF remained able to watch its own back; fight simple, directed rearguard actions when required; and in so doing allowed almost none of its guns to fall into enemy hands. That's about as much as you can expect from an army undertaking the third-longest retreat in its history (Corunna was slightly further, and both of them are of course dwarfed by the truly epic withdrawal from Burma in 1942). Of course there was a whole cavalcade of small, individual gently caress-ups, but they never combined into an omnishambles. But chaos it was. To begin with, the average Tommy marched to battle with fifty-odd pounds' worth of equipment on his back and about his person. This of course was discarded as soon as it became apparent that the retirement might go on for some time, if it hadn't already been left behind in the course of fighting. Some lucky or resourceful officers commandeered lorries, carts and wagons of all kinds, piling them high with their men's baggage and coats. Mindful that "shamefully casting away arms" was a capital offence on active service, and also driven by basic soldierly pride, most men retained their rifles and ammunition, or obtained new ones when their previous owners didn't need them any more. More importantly, there was a vast contingent of stragglers, and each traffic jam, each halt, each rearguard action added to their numbers. When ordered to retire, staying with one's unit was always considered secondary to actually getting the gently caress out of it (in any case, they were often in such dire straits that the actual order was accompanied by "every man for himself!"), and this was planned for; officers or NCOs who became separated from the body of their unit would gather stragglers at every halt, and ensure that they didn't turn into deserters or casualties. They could rejoin their proper units later, once the retreat ended and everyone had a moment to breathe. In the meantime, the stragglers had someone to take orders from and now could be useful for something other than retreating. Here's Bill Holbrook, 4th Royal Fusiliers; he was a runner at Mons who was away from his company with a message when the retirement began, and was forced to start going back with whoever he could find: quote:It was days before I saw any of my lot again! I just kept following the crowd, and there were so many stragglers they didn't notice me. It's a blank, really, most of it is. For the first few hours, anyway. After a bit, I came up with another bunch. There was an officer at the side of the road, rounding up stragglers and gathering them together, so I thought I might as well join up with them. They were all sorts. There was about fifty of us altogether, I suppose, and I don't believe there were two men from the same unit. It's not difficult to imagine the havoc and panic that even a small cavalry patrol could have caused among a disorganised mass of rag, tag and bobtail; but as long as there was someone who was able to think and give orders, rearguard stands could be organised and the situation could not break down entirely. And then there was the traffic. The retreat was naturally going down roads which were mostly already packed with fleeing civilian refugees before the Army came along. Carts full of the contents of houses, teetering and falling. Entire extended families shuffling backwards, all over the roads. Most could not cut across country because they couldn't find their way without a road to guide them. And in 1914, even the most modern of tarmac main roads were barely country lanes by today's standards; a wide road was one with room for two cars to pass in opposite directions without either having to pull over. Tarmac itself was rare enough; even cobbled roads could be a luxury, and there were many sections of road to march over that were merely dirt tracks, with predictable consequences once rain and feet and horseshoes and wagon wheels had all taken their toll. And then there were the livestock owners, driving animals of all kinds before them. Some mobile refugees abandoned their carts when faced with delays, with predictable results. At some points the traffic became so bad that individual soldiers literally had to push their way through the crush of people. Animals were knocked down and trampled, and men already exhausted by days upon days of marching had to look sharp to avoid meeting the same end. Communications never quite became impossible, but getting any kind of message to anyone who you couldn't directly see required a great deal of effort and luck, and orders in any other than the most general terms quickly became out of date and useless. Fortunately, at the time, "keep retiring thataway" generally sufficed... Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 10:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's a bit pricier (well, not for a historical monograph, but compared to a your average book) at around $30 but Hagemann & Schüller's "Home / Front: The Military, War, and Gender in 20th. Century Germany" is a pretty good edited volume on exactly those issues from the German perspective. A lot of the more theoretical stuff will hold water for other national cases as well. I suddenly feel a whole lot better about randomly picking this up in Henry Pordes for about a fiver a couple of months ago! They had a whole stack of them, too. If they've still got them at that price, it probably works out cheaper to get someone to pick it up there and have it sent over... (Read the first quarter, put it aside to read something else, never got back to it. First one was pretty interesting, though, and skimming it again there's plenty of stuff that's directly relevant.)
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Aug 28, 2014 23:03
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100 Years Ago: In command of the French Army, General Joffre has finally found somewhere he thinks he can make a stand, on the line of the River Oise. In order to do this he needs to buy some more time to get his forces into position, so the 5th Army is ordered to launch a delaying action on the German 2nd Army, which has just arrived in St Quentin in search of the BEF. However, bad luck strikes; a French officer has been captured the previous day while in possession of a full and detailed set of orders for tomorrow's offensive, and German intelligence is not slow to act on information received. Around St Quentin itself, the French make very little headway and take serious casualties; however, units north of Guise meet with more success and force the Germans in that area to fall back to the north. Fighting goes on all day, and again the advance is stopped while they deal with the latest speed-bump. Job done, Joffre orders the retreat over the Oise and destruction of the bridges. The Germans attempt a half-arsed pursuit in the morning, but the Gauls successfully disengage and are allowed to go. Again, more time has been bought, and the BEF also benefits from an opportunity to take a short rest before continuing southwards. Now Joffre tries to persuade John French to join him in his stand at the northern reaches of the Oise. French flatly refuses him. The gap between II Corps and the 5th Army has almost been closed, but they're still out of touch with I Corps by some seven miles. All the men are still completely knackered, hungry and badly supplied. He's also well aware that his force has spent the past week frantically trying to catch up with the 5th Army, and he doesn't trust that General Lanrezac will not leave him in the same position again when things get hairy (French and Lanrezac have had personality clashes during the last ten days). So he insists that he must be allowed to withdraw the BEF completely from the fighting for rest, resupply and reinforcement. (Whether this all was a reasonable reaction to the situation is, of course, a Matter of Some Debate, but hopefully it isn't totally inexplicable.) With some success, Joffre is rapidly scraping together a 6th Army to reinforce his left flank and, if necessary, replace the BEF in the line. However, there's now no way it can be done at the upper Oise in time to give any kind of battle. The BEF has just spent a week retreating to stay in touch with the French Army; and now Joffre's only option is to retreat his army to keep in touch with the BEF. He desperately needs somewhere else to turn and give battle, but he's starting to run out of country and natural features to do it in. The Oise runs almost due south-west from St Quentin, until it becomes a tributary of a larger river at a small town you've probably never heard of, called Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. You probably have heard of the river that the Oise flows into, though. It's called the Seine. Conflans is about 25 miles west of the Champs-Elysees.
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Aug 29, 2014 10:46
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Okay, here's another thought about French and his reputation. There are two major perspectives on British generalship in the war: are they the lion-muzzling donkeys of legend, or good men trying to do the best they could in a completely unprecedented and unforseeable situation? Here's the thing. It actually benefits both sides of this argument to paint French in as poor a light as possible. Sure, if you're a "donkeys" person, the logic here is obvious. French was the first Chief, French was a donkey, no surprises there because every man jack of them from Allenby to Wilson were donkeys. But why does the "good men" side also benefit from bagging on French? Well, because there were two Chiefs. If you're on the "good men" side, you probably got there via the thought that Haig (and his now-legendary drinks cabinet) is far too harshly treated by the popular imagination (which is an intellectually defensible position), and the tendency becomes to start digging trenches to defend Haig, to remind people that after all, he was in charge when the war was won. It's kind of hard to argue the "good men" viewpoint without being able to paint Haig as a good man, and if you can paint the winning Chief as a good man, everyone under him looks better by association. If you don't, everyone under him looks like a dickhead for following his orders and refusing to cooperate in the subsequent plots to replace him, and you have to keep explaining away why they didn't. Haig now becomes the Verdun of the argument; it would be politically unacceptable to lose him, so no matter what the cost, you have to keep defending him. One of the obvious ways to do this is to make him look better by comparison to others. Who's the most obvious person to compare him to? His predecessor as Chief. In 1915, Haig pulled a political power play after the Battle of Loos to get French sacked and himself installed in the big chair. This is inarguable. Haig openly admits to nobbling his superior in his letters and diaries. It now becomes imperative to make French look like a bungler who Haig was duty-bound to remove, for the good of the BEF, the country and the Empire. If this isn't the case, Haig now looks like a grasping, ambitious careerist who callously and dishonourably betrayed a good man for his own personal ends. So you blame French for the failure at Loos, and then for the rest of 1915, and it only strengthens your case if you start to portray 1914 through that same lens. It benefits nobody to stand up for French, although from my perspective he's only slightly less defensible than Haig, and so nobody ever makes a case for him in the way that people line up to defend Haig.
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Aug 29, 2014 14:10
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100 Years Ago: The rout The retreat from Mons continues, and now some politics happen. General Joffre is deeply unhappy with being forced to retire from the Oise, and makes this known. In response to this, in London, Lord Kitchener takes a closer look at the state of the BEF. Meanwhile, the Germans are preparing to do something extremely unexpected. August 30th is probably the single most chaotic day of the retreat, and one of the most chaotic of the entire war. It's another day light on grand events, so let's go back to the blokes on the ground, who know nothing of all this, who know only that they've been marching continuously for seven days with only the barest of rests. Supplying the army in such a situation was virtually impossible. At first, they were retiring past field supply dumps. In very short order the quartermasters in charge were handing out whatever they could give away to whoever could carry it until the time came to set fire to whatever was left and get out of it along with everyone else. After that, it became an absolute lottery. (From Lyn Macdonald's 1914, Richard van Emden's The Soldier's War, and Max Arthur's Forgotten Voices of the Great War.) quote:Rifleman Gale, 1st Rifle Brigade quote:2/Lt Hodgson, 122 Battery Royal Field Artillery Legendarily tough army hard-tack biscuits (impossible to eat without a small ration of jam), water, rum and bully beef were the staple foods of the British Army in the field. "Bully beef" was a particularly foul version of canned corned beef. quote:Sgt Packham, 2nd Royal Sussex Regiment quote:Gunner Palmer, RFA quote:Sgt Sanderson, 2nd King's Royal Rifle Corps quote:2/Lt Anderson, 108 Battery RFA quote:L/Cpl Cook, 1st Somerset Light Infantry
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Aug 30, 2014 01:39
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PittTheElder posted:What was the POW situation like in WWI anyway? Part of me wonders if getting captured almost immediately wouldn't have been the best possible outcome, given the sheer horror that was the fighting itself. Though things might have started getting pretty dire towards the end as the blockade really starts to hit home. Here's an interesting thing that not many people know; accounts of attacks on German positions are often full of something like "well, we got across No Man's Land okay, and they all came out with their hands up shouting 'Kamerad, Kamerad'. There weren't really enough of us to take prisoners, so we detailed a couple of men to see they got back to our lines and moved on, and when we looked back we saw this straggling line of grey heading backwards..." If you could actually get across No Man's Land, a lot of the time you'd find the enemy far more prepared to surrender and go quietly than actually defend the trench; the trick was in getting there before their officers could do enough shouting to get the men back up out of the dugouts and standing to. As for the experience, "who you were and who you were surrendering to" about covers it. Officers were generally treated better than men, prisoners sent to Britain did better than ones sent to France or Germany, who did better than ones in Turkey and Russia; and within a system it wasn't uncommon for various nationalities to receive different treatment.
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Aug 30, 2014 10:43
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100 Years Ago Lord Kitchener concludes his review of the BEF's situation and decides to cross the Channel himself. He believes that French is probably being overly cautious in his assessment of the situation and is inclined to agree with Haig that, while II Corps is in serious trouble, I Corps is relatively unscathed and is capable of going into action if it can sit down and have a breather first. Meanwhile, some very odd intelligence reports land on General Joffre's desk, courtesy of the reconaissance aircraft. The course of the German right wing has been obvious and unchanged for the last week; it's been heading south-west, towards the confluence of the Oise and the Seine, to encircle Paris and complete the Schlieffen plan. But now, somehow, unaccountably, inexplicably, it has changed direction and is now marching due south in the rough direction of Compeigne, and appears now to be intending to bypass Paris and attempt to encircle the French army from somewhere east of the capital. The importance of this German strategic decision cannot be over-estimated, and I can't see any way to interpret it as anything other than a blunder of the first order, very probably the worst single mistake of the war. The Germans appear to believe that the BEF has been given enough of a kicking to no longer be effective as a fighting force, and that the French 5th Army's flank is completely vulnerable. They appear not to think that the Parisian garrison troops can participate effectively in any action east of the city, and they are completely unaware of the existence of the new 6th Army, which is massing west of Paris, well beyond the range of the Germans' recon planes. (In their defence, if you look at a geographical map of the area immediately north of Paris, it has a number of large woods and other annoying features that could potentially have been garrisoned to great effect. Even today, they're of similar or larger size to places like Polygon Wood or High Wood, places that would later be the sites of some of the most bitter and brutal fighting of the war. To bypass them completely would mean crossing the Seine at somewhere like Vernon or even Rouen, which would add several extra days' worth of marching to the legs of the army, and if you think 5th Army's flank is wide open so you can kick them in the teeth, you're still going to be able to encircle the soldiers by marching south, and doing that is far more important than besieging Paris.) But, whatever the reason, the encirclement of Paris has unquestionably been abandoned, and this gives Joffre a great deal to think about over the course of his customary excellent lunch. It's far more than he could possibly have hoped for just a few days previously, when faced with the news that he'd have to retire from the Oise.
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Aug 31, 2014 08:43
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100 Years Ago The final major rearguard actions of the Great Retreat, as the Germans unexpectedly encounter BEF elements at Villers-Cotterêts, Crépy-en-Valois, and Nery. The first two are standard enough affairs; Nery is particularly remembered for being a cavalry battle, as the British 1st Cavalry Brigade is unexpectedly attacked in their billets while unable to move out due to heavy fog, by the German 4th Cavalry Division (who themselves were surprised to find anyone), but escape with almost no casualties under heavy fire, and while giving back as good as it got, thanks to the efforts of six guns of the Royal Arse Hortillery. L Battery lost all its officers and more than half its men killed and wounded, and is no longer able to function as an operational unit (happily, they were back to strength just in time to catch a boat to Gallipoli), but the guns are saved. Three are awarded the Victoria Cross, and more are decorated by France. Meanwhile, Lord Kitchener arrives on the Continent and confirms his view that I Corps at least is fully capable of participating in a major offensive. Strong words are had with Field Marshal French, who is eventually persuaded to adopt this way of thinking. The two men subsequently meet with General Joffre, who is now in extremely good spirits. The plan that he and the French staff have developed is probably easiest to describe via the medium of crude MSPaint drawings, so here we go. Not to any kind of scale or accuracy in terms of exact deployments, but close enough. Here's what the Germans thought the situation was:  And what it was actually closer to:  They were trying to do this:  But what eventually happened at the start of the battle is more like this:  Kitchener informs French that he will be participating in the battle, and departs. As a later great Scottish tactician might say, it's squeaky bum time. The war may yet be over by Christmas.
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Sep 1, 2014 10:49
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Tomn posted:Is...is that an actual nickname for them? Let's remember here that this is the same army for whom in modern times, the most important system on any armoured vehicle (up to and including a Challenger 2 main battle tank) is its BV, the purpose and importance of which should be obvious. (Boiling Vessel)
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Sep 1, 2014 13:31
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Bacarruda posted:Psst, amateurs. Just drive around in a desert and cook off your tank's hull. The BV can be used to heat up rations, but that's merely a fringe benefit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-yPZ9_2EBU
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Sep 1, 2014 20:37
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100 Years Ago: For most, the final day of the Great Retreat. After one final 20-odd mile slog on the hottest day of the year, the BEF reaches Meaux, on the River Marne. It has marched some 200 miles in 13 days, fighting innumerable rearguard actions along the way, and by that indispensable combination of good luck and good judgement, is not yet out of the fight. They have incurred 14,409 casualties, from an initial strength of 80,000; 18% of their total strength, and the losses have fallen extremely disproportionately upon II Corps. The precise details of casualty reports from other nations are much more frequently argued and haggled over, but ~200,000 German and ~325,000 French are enduring estimates. If prisoners are excluded, German and French casualties have surpassed those of the War of 1870. Meanwhile, the Battle of Galicia enters its final phase with a major Russian offensive at Rava-Ruska. Today, the town is in western Ukraine. The more things change! quote:Rifleman Gale, 1st Rifle Brigade [at Penchard, three miles from Meaux] As the battalion retires, its men hear explosions in the distance. The Engineers start destroying the bridges over the Marne. Azran posted:Trin Tragula, did I read that wrong or did the GUNS got awarded the medals? I mean, considering cannon used to get names, this wouldn't surprise me. No, they went to the chaps. I've found the full list of gongs, it's bloody large for such a small action (Le Cateau and Mons, both many orders of magnitude larger, only saw five and four VCs respectively). VCs were awarded to Captain Bradbury (posthumously), Battery Sergeant-Major Dorrell and Sgt Nelson of L Battery RAH; those two were subsequently commissioned from the ranks. The DSM and DSO (the not-quite-a-VC, Conduct Medals for men and Service Orders for officers) went to Maj Sclater-Booth (commander L Battery), Lt Lamb (commander Queen's Bays machine gun troop), and Privates Goodchild and Ellicock from that troop. The French, never shy of giving gongs to their allies, additionally decorated the Queen's Bays' Lt-Col Wilberforce, Lamb and Lt Heyderman, and Lt Gifford from L Battery, with the Legion d'honneur; and the Medalle Militaire for Cpl Short (Queen's Bays), and Gunner Darbyshire and Driver Short from L Battery. 2-for-1 in Aisle F!
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Sep 2, 2014 11:58
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HEY GAL posted:No idea, but probably comparatively sober/less drunk, because when alcohol is a mitigating circumstance the accused will usually mention it quite naively. "Why did you do that?" "I was so drunk I have no idea." I'm reminded of an incident from one of Spike Milligan's war memoirs (if you haven't read them, they're amazing and you should do that); he was put into a heavy artillery regiment, seeing action at Tunisia and then Monte Cassino, where he was seriously wounded. After the fall of Tobruk, certain members of the Battery had a rather prolonged celebration. quote:Approaching are Gunners Musslewhite, Roberts and Wilson, riding donkeys and completely drunk: days later they were found in Sousse [approximately 125 miles from where they were supposed to be] with no recollection of anything.
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Sep 2, 2014 20:13
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100 Years Ago A rare quiet day in the early going. With a moment to stop and think about his dispositions, General Joffre begins sacking large number of his subordinates; the most notable casualty is Lanrezac, who is replaced in charge of Fifth Army by Franchet d'Esperey, who is rather more offensively-minded than his predecessor. Some uncharitable people suggest that if the BEF had been a pair of French corps, he would have done dismissed their commander as well, or instead of canning Lanrezac. The question of Lanrezac's reputation is a Matter of Mass Debate. On the one hand he's a cowardly fat pedant who refused to engage the enemy despite ample opportunity, who retired prematurely and left his allies and comrades on either side in the lurch, who lost his head under stress, who was consistently rude and insubordinate, who caused unnecessary friction between Britain and France. On the other he's a tall, far-sighted and perceptive man who predicted exactly how hosed his army was going to be but was ignored by Joffre, who took the necessary and prudent steps to save it, who like any fighting man hated to retire but saw it was the only option, who it was not surprising if he was suffering from stress owing to the extreme situation, who could easily have folded up entirely but got his army safely back to the Marne and in condition to counter-attack. These positions are not exactly in accord, have been defended over the years with shouts and great action, and provide a great example of why I have absolutely no time for this sort of thing. It just ends up making allegedly distinguished, educated people sound like bitchy high school kids defending the leader of their clique in the cafeteria. "It's all Joe's fault! You've got to be loyal to your friends! Charlie warned Joe that this would happen!" "No he didn't! And anyway, he was rude to Joe and John! Joe was completely out of order!" Etc and anon. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Sep 3, 2014 |
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Sep 3, 2014 10:40
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