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Alchenar posted:I would say that the Maginot line was a disaster. It didn't work because it achieved the thing it was supposed to achieve - and that thing did not improve France's situation. Moreover the German plan of 'invade France through Belgium' long predated the existence of the Maginot Line because it had been German policy for decades. The Maginot Line committed France financially, politically, and doctrinally to a policy of Static Warfare, which all built up to a catastrophic inability to adapt when that policy turned out to be mistaken. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:[citation needed] This is both right and wrong. Alchenar is just plain out in left field with respect to how the French envisioned in the 20s and 30s about how the next war (WW2) would be fought. Because of the massive casualties sustained by the French in WW1, emerging from 1918 was that the French imagined any future conflicts to be decided by the firepower of artillery and methodical movements of infantry supported by tanks. Massed artillery fire with entrenched infantry would be capable of stopping or at the very least inflicting such grievous casualties on the attackers that they could not be sustained. The French didn't abandon the idea of the offensive either. Far from being a 'policy of static warfare', the French army was drilled to take the offensive but the offensive action was nothing like what the advocates of mobile warfare in the 30s envisioned. The French like everyone else understood that tanks were the solution to static trench warfare and that infantry supported by tanks could cheaply overwhelm any reasonable defense but they stuck to what worked in late WW1 from an operational pacing perspective. A combined arms approach where the enemy was subjected to a concentrated barrage of mass artillery followed by infantry assault with tanks as tactical support. Coordination of artillery and command was centralized and attacking units were given, and expected to adhere to, strict timetables where objectives and phase lines would be taken by subordinate units in an orderly fashion to minimize casualties. Once completed, units would reorganize, artillery brought up and the next assault prepared and this would continue until the enemy was no longer able sustain operations. Basically, the French imagined fighting an updated WW1 where tanks were available right from the start. The Maginot line as mentioned by others already was built at great expense to ensure that this policy of slow and deliberate battle would be waged in Belgium, and not on French soil. It was meant to be a defensive line so outrageously strong that even with tanks in support, the cost of breaching it head-on would be unacceptable. If the Germans wanted to smash their heads and men into the concrete fortifications, so be it. And as pointed out, it worked to perfection. No German plan in WW2 that was considered in the Battle of France had the assault of the Maginot Line as a primary avenue of advance. Fixing attacks conducted by the German units opposite the Maginot Lines generally were ineffective and suffered high casualties. The failure of the French and arguably the British BEF in the Battle of France was more due to the fact that the Germans had trained and practiced a much higher tempo of operations and allowed subordinate units a higher degree of autonomy, especially in their mobile tank formations. The Germans understood that tanks made trench lines of WW1 breachable but they also understood that the Allies generally did not use them to maximum effect (partly because of technological hurdles). They understood that an assault led by infantry and tanks vs a static position without antitank weapons could succeed very cheaply and quickly but they noted how in WW1, breaches made to German lines went unexploited and new defensive positions could be established and lost positions even taken back if reinforcements and reserves were committed to a counter-attack swiftly. Incidentally in WW2, one of the main doctrines for Germans on defense was to quickly organize all available forces to engage in tactical counter-attacks as soon as positions were lost before the enemy could harden their newly gained positions, if at all possible. The failure of the French army vs the Germans was doctrinal but not in an offense vs defense sort of way. The French always intended to be able to attack. It was just that their centralized control of everything from artillery to subordinate units meant that the French frequently were making moves 24 to 48 hours too late. By the time information was relayed from the tactical units (battalion-regiment) up the chain to where senior commanders had the authority to act (Corps level) and orders disseminated back down to tactical commanders responsible for executing such plans, they were already woefully out of date. I recall reading stories about French generals issuing counter-attack orders to formations that had already been overrun by German formations. Such orders would be passed down until local commanders understood them as nonsense, relay the information back up the chain and they would sit on their hands unless directly under attack while the Germans just kept moving. At some point in time, the French understood what was happening to them but it was too late by that time. You can't retrain your entire command structure which was geared on a WW 1 pacing of events while Germans were crushing you operating on timetables and decision-making cycles two or three times as fast. This also isn't an issue of HOI 4 style Grand Battle Plan vs Mobile Warfare. You can have both. There is a universe where mobile warfare theorists held enough sway in the French military that the Maginot Line gets built but the mobile field force and the reserve formations were trained to operate with the same autonomy of command and the same speed of decision making as the Germans did theirs and the Battle of France maybe looks very different. As pointed out earlier by others, the German doctrine of Bewegungskrieg (war of movement) didn't mean that the Germans didn't commit to building fixed fortifications when it made sense. This is not an either/or scenario. There were a lot of problems with the French Army in 1940. Overreliance on, or the failure of the Maginot Line to do its job wasn't one of them.
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Jul 21, 2022 00:12
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Alchenar posted:The problem is that from 1927 onwards France adopted a whole war concept that envisaged a static front running from the alps to somewhere in Belgium, with a period of about two years sat generating combat power before starting serious major offensives. This is still not true as I pointed out earlier. I don't know where you are getting this idea of a "static front". The French doctrine of 'Bataille Conduite' is not a doctrine of static defense only warfare. It is the acknowledgment of the superior killing power of modern artillery and machine guns combined with the entrenchment of infantry in depth. The offensive component of their doctrine remained focused on the lessons learned in World War 1. After the endless bloodletting on the Somme and Verdun where the doctrine was to use mass artillery and infantry to break through enemy lines and continually push until your forces could no longer sustain the offensive (the Neville doctrine of Assault Brutal et Continu), the late war and post-war doctrine developed was on the concept of 'Bataille Conduite' (literal Guidance of Battle? the common translation is 'Methodical Battle') where attackers play a 'small ball' version of offense where they 'bite and hold' small well-defined objectives and then rapidly dig in. Just to reiterate the core concept so we are on the same page of what French doctrine actually was. The reason for this way of doing business was because so long as the attacker had good coordination of artillery and tank support for the massed infantry assault, it was the defenders which actually suffered the unfavorable casualty ratios and the attackers could gain ground relatively cheaply compared to the defenders. The old problem was always that attacking infantry, in the quest to defeat the entrenched defense in depth strategy on the Western Front, would always outrun their prepared artillery fires and reach exhaustion at which point further attacks would favor the defender - especially when the enemy counter-attacked en masse with 2nd line units and reserves before the attacker could bring up artillery and refortify. The answer in the eyes of the French was simple. Never advance to that point. Always conduct centrally planned, well-supported attacks where the casualty ratios favor the attacker and when the initial limited goals were reached, immediately fortify the newly won gains, bring up artillery, and shell the defender's anticipated positions to break up any formations attempting a counterattack. Once the units were reorganized/rotated out and artillery brought up and intelligence gathered, the next attack would occur until the attrition forced the enemy to quit. Because any attack relied on high degrees of coordination and planning, initiative and decision-making was stripped away from local commanders and offensive action was not to be taken unless you had good intelligence and backup. This was no doctrine of "static" defense. It was slow and grinding for sure, but it was hardly a strategy of static defense you keep trying to say it is. Also the Maginot line didn't commit the French into a doctrine of 'static defense' as you claimed. The cause and effect are the opposite of what you are trying to say it is. The Maginot Line was built because of French doctrine and the industrialization and increased economic importance of the French border provinces. The French thinking was that it was unacceptable to potentially have those valuable resource-rich provinces once again turned into a battleground. If lost to Germany in the early days of the war, the prospect of a quick battlefield victory to regain those lost provinces was nil thanks to Battle Conduite and the loss of such economic assets in those border areas was unacceptable. Thus the Maginot Line was born. Any German attack would instead have to be funneled through the low countries, which is exactly what happened in 1940. The plan was to meet the Germans in battle in Belgium and win. The only problem was the Germans did go into Belgium....and the French lost that fight due to Bewegungskrieg (or Blitzkrieg). The Germans and other countries (like the Soviets) who signed up on mobile warfare bet that massed tanks with infantry and air support could sufficiently penetrate and clear a defense in depth before an opponent could mount a counterattack and then proceed to flank and crush tactical and operational defenses before the enemy could react. And they were right, as mentioned French commanders operated on a decision-making cycle that was often several times higher than German commanders operated on. The building of the Maginot line also didn't hinder the French from building a mechanized army. France had more tanks, more aircraft, and more men than Germany did. That is 100% an absolute fact, I am not sure but they probably had more mechanized and motorized infantry as well. The failure of the French in 1940 was that they got to fight the battle they want - in Belgium - but their doctrine and tactics was bested by an opponent which was better trained, better motivated, and had a more foreward thinking doctrine in terms of what tanks could do operating independently and with motorized infantry as well as a better understanding of what air power could do (both tactical support and interdiction in and out of the primary battle zone) in terms of neutralizing an opponent which relied on a slow deliberate plan of battle.
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Jul 22, 2022 01:38
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Maginot line wasn't built to directly protect anything lost in WWI, as it was built entirely in Alsace and Lorraine. The fighting in the Vosges was fairly static too. I never said it was? The Maginot line was built, instead of a modernization of the old WW1 fortifications which ran along the Verdun - Belfort line, precisely because a frontier fortification would protect the two "reconquered" provinces that you named which were economically important to the French. It would do no good surrendering that ground yet again to a quick German attack as I discussed. The French doctrine of battle was given its full test in Case Red, the German attack on Paris following the liquidation of the Dunkirk pocket. Tactically, the French fought very well but as mentioned before, their slowness in decision-making let them down. I'll quote https://www.jstor.org/stable/26070790 quote:What the documentary record leaves eyond a doubt is the disintegration of command, control, and communications above the divisional level. Too often divisional commanders were left to their own devices. They went hours, sometimes several days without instructions, unaware of developments unfolding 20 or 30km to left or right, blind to the bigger picture.....French communications problems, not just in the disjointed encounter battles of May 1940 but when fighting much better in June, suggest it was at the intermediate command levels - the army/corps and the corps/division interfaces - where technology, systems, and mindsets were most dificient. The French mobilized 5 million men or just about 1/3rd of their male population of warfighting age in the army. The Germans had something like 5.2 million between the (4.2)Heer and the (1)Luftwaffe of which not all were available due to commitments in Poland and the Scandanavian Front. The German mobilization rate at that point in the war was lower than that of France. In terms of the actual battle of 1940, the French allocation of manpower towards the battle (retaining significant numbers in the colonies) was the cause for the numerical disparity though it was offset by the BEF and Belgian army. In terms of combat aircraft strength, French Air Strength in May 1940 Faris R. Kirkland Air Power HistoryVol. 40, No. 1 (Spring 1993) disagrees with you. Total number of modern aircraft (which he defines as designed no earlier than 1933) favoured the French though they committed only a fraction of their air power to the battle. Why I don't know, I never heavily dug into French airforce deployments/doctrine. But the numbers according to this published source clearly says the French had sufficient combat aircraft. Once again this is just to disprove Alchenar's claims that the Maginot line somehow prevented the French from building sufficient aircraft or some other baloney. Alchenar posted:This is the bit where you skip over the detail of the Dyle plan and concede the argument. The French plan was not to win a meeting engagement with the German army in Belgium. It was to rush to positions behind various iterations of canal lines (with some mechanised forces moving about in case of a meeting engagement) and dig in to wait for the Germans to arrive. The assumption was that a transition to offensive operations and 'winning in Belgium' would take months and be long after the German offensive had culminated. That is a commitment to an assumption of a battlefield that becomes static until one side can develop overwhelming force. Gonna need a source for this one. Professional military officers disagree with you. quote:Methodical Battle doctrine favored a highly rigid battle where units moved obediently between phase lines and adhering to strict timelines. French military leaders believed this was necessary to command and control forces in modern warfare. They also believed they could weaken an attacker with defensive fires before destroying the attacker with a massive “battering ram’ attack. Contrary to perception, French doctrine did not abandon the offense but placed greater emphasis on the strength of the defense. https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/a...dern%20warfare.
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Jul 22, 2022 07:39
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Raenir Salazar posted:Yeah I'm not completely sure of FishBulbia's context/paradigm that they're operating under, I assume that their thesis goes something like this, "For an Empire to raise Capital-L LARGE armies, it needs to create an imagine community that it imposes on the constituent communities within its borders in order to motivate them to accept large scale military service and recruitment from those communities in service of the imagined community; which was only possible from the Napoleonic Age moving forward. As such, the average individual living in the Empires of antiquity didn't belong to an Imperial imagined community, and thus didn't feel obligated to support it via military service unless they had a direct stake. Thus that is why there would be no difference between an Empire today trying to take over the world and Empires of the past trying to take over the world." Given that the majority of human civilization throughout the ages (and arguably continues to this day) has been spent under some form of authoritarian rule and that levies of some form or another were the norm for raising armies, Fish Bulba is certainly wrong about nationalism or its ilk being required to raise large armies. Conscription existed in almost every society I have ever studied unless it became rich and populous enough to sustain a standing professional force and those occurrences were exceedingly rare. The Achaemenid Empire repeatedly raised massive armies to wage war against the Greeks throughout early antiquity and there is little evidence of an empire spanning sense of an imagined culture that drove levied semi-professional peasant soldiers forward, especially among the non-ethnic Persian conscripts from the satrapies which formed the rank and file of the standing armies of Persia. The Japanese Sengoku period also saw some purportedly massive armies (100k) and they were primarily filled with peasant conscripts who held allegiance to local lords in a feudalistic fashion rather than some loyalty to some greater polity. To be fair to Fish Bulba though, where nationalism or some sort of belief in the greater state does play a role is the ability of a polity to defend itself for prolonged periods of time under severe stress. In cases like that where the ruling elite might suffer devastating setbacks on the battlefield, it was essential for local elites and the local populace to believe in the greater polity enough to continue to fight for its continued existence. The classic example of state endurance where nationalism or nationalistic type forces within a populace managed to sustain a polity through incredibly tough times is the Roman state. In both the 1st and 2nd Punic wars, the Roman Republic was tested to its very limits where Roman and allied forces suffered numerous catastrophes which involved wholesale destruction of navies and armies yet the citizens of Rome continued to endure relentless losses to carry the fight to Carthage. Even more impressive was the fact that despite its system of allies in the Italian peninsula largely held firm despite plenty of times when Rome looked down and out and the opportunity to break away presented itself. Another example of the robustness of the idea of an Imperial Rome was how the polity survived the crises of the 3rd century. After the battle of Edessa which saw Shapur I of the Sassanian empire crush the Romans and invade the Eastern provinces, local elites led by Odaenathus raised an army without Imperial support to defend the eastern holdings of Rome and keep the Sassanians at bay while the Romans in the west dealt with their internal strife. That his wife eventually tried to rebel and form the Palmyrene empire due to personal ambition doesn't severely undercut the point that in some of Rome's darkest days, there was enough belief in the greater political state that local elites managed to independently raise a force from scratch to hold off and subsequently defeat a dangerous rival power, not for immediate self-gain, but to restore the frontier of an empire to which they belonged despite the fact that the capital of the said empire was a thousand miles away. Also while powerful and capable of raising large armies, Imperial empires like the Persians and their armies tend to be incredibly brittle since as soon as battlefield setbacks render the ruling elite less threatening than the invaders to local elites, the will to continue to fight for the polity evaporates rather quickly independent of its population's ability to raise more troops. Alexander the Great rolled through Achaemenid Persia in less than a decade with little to no pushback from local leaders. So I think there are 2 angles here. Is some sort of pseudo-nationalistic belief or faith in the state a requirement to raise large armies relative to the size of the population? No. So long as local elites, be they, feudal lords, in Europe or Japan or appointed governors of satrapies or provinces in Imperial China, support the imperial centre, large armies of conscripts of semi-professionals were not only possible but often the norm when times of war came. However, the existence of robust faith in the state definitely allows for the state to absorb damaging events and keep the state from fragmenting under stress, even if that faith is mainly based on the local ruling elites rather than the peasantry in continuing to raise forces or man fortifications to actively impede invaders. Such a belief even if it is not strictly nationalism as defined in political science terms arguably allows a state to access far more of its economic potential and convert it into warfighting potential.
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Aug 3, 2022 04:11
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This characterization of the Achaemenid Persian military and its levy component is wrong. The standing army were Persians, and rather than peasants, they were the upper strata of Persian society, or at least a professionalized soldierly class not unlike that of the Macedonians (under Philip II and Alexander). The levies of their subjects were also not peasants, in the same way that a Gallic or a Greek army were not peasants. These soldiers were also the upper strata of their societies, able to afford their own equipment and bound in some way to maintain it. We know this because it is mentioned quite frequently that other contingents under the Persians fight with completely different arms from each other. The Cappadocians like axes, the Karians used square shields, the Parthians were horse archers, and so on. It's much easier to understand the motivations of these armies when you consider that these are not freshfaced farmboys from Iowa heading off to the war, but the guys who fight local village wars being obligated to show up for much bigger affair. I am far from well-read on this topic but Sean Manning who recently published this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3...27e6a2bc9ff4ac2 (disclaimer, I have not read it) indicates that the majority of the Persian army was not the upper crust of society and that conscription was definitely the norm and formed the rank and file along with all the shenanigans that conscription brought with other societies (like paying someone to go in your place). His dissertation can be found here.https://diglib.uibk.ac.at/ulbtirolhs/download/pdf/2800681?originalFilename=true Once again I do not want to pretend to be an expert on Achaemenid Persia but his work does not seem to indicate the historical descriptions of the Achaemenid armies passed down by the Greeks with these colourful descriptions of troops were probably not super accurate.
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Aug 4, 2022 01:04
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canyoneer posted:Read this the other day, about how a combination of weird weather and geography made it so that people near or participating in American Civil War battles sometimes couldn't hear the sounds of battle. Makes it hard to coordinate things like "your cue to begin your attack is when you hear the artillery a half mile away firing" and they can't hear anything Poor Rosecranz. Grant always thought Rosecranz screwed him over and cost him a victory. The bad blood persisted and eventually led to Rosecranz being relieved after Chickamauga when Grant assumed control of Union forces in the Western theater. A lot of ink gets spilled about this Civil War general being better than that general but really, a lot of it came down to luck, coincidence, and having subordinates and staff that followed orders and do a competent job of what you expect them to do. Not something always in great supply given the relatively large contingent of politically appointed officers and a lack of a large professional army pre Civil War days.
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Aug 29, 2022 18:46
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Can we all at least agree that Phil Kearny whipped rear end? Not sure if the quote is apocryphal or not since a lot of quotes in the Civil War turn out to be made up. Wandering into enemy picket lines and getting shot however was actually an occurrence of some frequency given that there was no radio and armies often marched well into the dark and couriers would be ferrying orders all throughout the night. If you kept your cool though you could sometimes bluff your way through and escape unscathed.
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Aug 30, 2022 01:20
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Chamale posted:We have an eyewitness report. He said "They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance." A soldier replied, "General, I dodged a shell once, and if I hadn't, it would have taken my head off. I believe in dodging." Sedgwick said, "All right, my man, go to your place," and then he was fatally shot. No, they likely understood the risks but personal reconnaissance of the terrain that your command would likely have to travel over, defend, or attack was a requirement for commanding officers at that time. You could be censured if something bad happened and it turns out you didn't look over the ground personally. Sedgwick is right to an extent though. The odds of even rifled artillery managing a hit on an individual is slim to none especially given the fact that exposure is likely brief if it was just to get a look at the terrain or enemy-held positions. If you were flinching and constantly dodging random fire due to nerves, the odds of you sticking around for a frontal attack were suspect. Personally leading an attack on the other hand was borderline suicidal especially later in the war when both sides rapidly entrenched once coming to a halt and it was difficult to clear opposing infantry and artillery even if you had your own guns in support. Hence, most of the time, division commanders and up were not in line with the more junior brigadiers and colonels in charge of regiments and brigades when it was time to step off. Appearances by higher-ups were made however when their commands were mostly committed (hence no more real decisions to make) and it was important to be seen at critical points in the line to maintain morale and keep the men steady.
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Aug 30, 2022 04:19
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:speaking of US civil war generals and last words, I feel bad for Barnard Bee. His "Stonewall" epithet for Jackson just before dying is immortalized as "there stands Jackson, stone cold badass" when it's equally plausible he meant "what the gently caress Jackson, don't just stand there, come help" Regardless of what Bee meant by "Stonewall", Jackson almost certainly performed the correct action of holding steady on top of Henry Hill rather than immediately trying to aid Bee's command since by all accounts it was already broken and unable to fight. His main body of troops stood protected from enemy artillery and used them skillfully to break up successive piecemeal attacks until reinforcements came up to support him His subsequent actions during the war also don't indicate any type trepidation with respect to risk taking when required. Nessus posted:I doubt a cannonball would literally rip your hand off unless you went to catch it like it was a fly ball, but break your fingers and perhaps your wrist? Absolutely. You guys don't need to speculate. Buy an iron dumbell around 10 lbs or so, have a friend drop it from about 2nd floor of your average home several times. The first time catch it with your hands, the 2nd time stick your foot/shin out off the ground, and finally once those are broken, have them drop it on your shoulder from that height while you lay in agony on a light picnic table. This will simulate the effect of a cannon ball that has bounced a couple times and impacts to human body. Be sure to have a 3rd friend video capture everything in case your friend misses at any point in time and the dumbell lands on your head.
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Aug 30, 2022 18:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:
General Gabriel Paul comes to mind. Shot in the left temple with an exit wound out of the right eye socket at Gettysburg. Survived after being left for dead.
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Aug 31, 2022 15:32
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Flesnolk posted:What are some good sources on the use of paratroopers post-WWII? Both actual historical engagements and writing on how they might be used in a conventional conflict would be helpful - I've been reading up a bit on the battle of Hill 3234, and I imagine in a peer war if you had to use them you'd send them behind the lines to take strategic positions and pretty much hold until reinforced, but I'm running an Only War game where the players wanted to be drop troops (basically space paratroopers) so reading up on stuff to take inspiration from other than "recreate one of these three WW2 battles AGAIN" is helpful. I don't have any links for you but you could dig into US military accounts, reports, and assessments of the paratrooper operations in Grenada and Panama. In the former, the US Army sent in 2 of their Ranger battalions to secure an airfield before airlifting additional troops as reinforcements. In Panama, that mission fell to units of the 82nd Airborne. In both cases, the mission was pretty similar. Seize a hostile airfield capable of supporting an airhead from which to fly in reinforcements before moving on to further objectives. For a more apocalyptic scenario that never happened, look up Soviet paratrooper doctrine. These troops would have likely been sent in to strike at and disable NATO tactical nuclear weapon systems, high-level command and control headquarters, and vital bridges while awaiting ground forces to link up and relieve them. Look for information from the infamous "Seven days to the River Rhine" wargame that the Russians played and how paratroopers would have been employed.
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Sep 2, 2022 06:10
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Has there been a serious effort by Diamond to update or revise his central thesis in GGS? I do think an inter disciplinary approach in general tends to at least challenge some blindspots that academics entrenched in a field might dismiss or have overlooked as a course of habit.
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Sep 23, 2022 14:19
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Xiahou Dun posted:You’d need to have a test culture that didn’t have writing and then suddenly gained or lost it without other major changes or a lot of time passing (then subject to this being just a case study). Maybe Cherokee? A particularly violent group of novel sign language users that someone hands a writing system to? Not a language expert but the Central Eurasian Steppe tribes (Xiong Nu, Scythians, Huns) were always taught to me as nomadic empires without a written language or simple script not yet developed into a full language at best. We do know some of the Xiong Nu eventually were taught Chinese script from the endless exchanges/extortion/bribes/princess brides with the Han dynasty but it appears they created their massive confederation/empire without the aid of writing. The Scythians also did quite well for themselves without writing although it can be argued that since Steppe armies were generally not bound by a logistic train that it didn't hinder them.
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Sep 27, 2022 02:43
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Tomn posted:Steppe logistics can’t be easily replicated without wholesale adopting a steppe lifestyle, though, no? Like an agricultural empire can’t theoretically go “We don’t need writing to manage our logistics, we can just rely on a permanently mobile herd of animals tended by our equally mobile non-combatants and moved by vast herds of horses across constant rotating grazing lands not used for anything else, bing bong so simple.” Feels like that might be a slightly apples to oranges comparison if we’re talking about whether writing is necessary for sophisticated logistics. For that matter, don’t most steppe empires tend to be built around tribute networks rather than any real administrative control over the territories they covered? So the question originally was whether writing translated into greater military power or the ability to power projection. Without any qualifiers attached to the question, one has to point out that nomadic cultures often commanded great tracts of land and defeated agrarian-based empires in head-to-head confrontations repeatedly, and extracted great amounts of wealth via vassalage or "peace terms" otherwise known as bribing you to go raid somebody else. It should also be noted that many dynasties in agrarian-based empires were originally nomadic steppe warriors that conquered an existing agrarian society and became the ruling nobility or administrative class or the regions they came to dominate. Examples of illiterate nomadic cultures that defeated agrarian societies include the Parthian Arsacid dynasty and the aforementioned Scythians who dominated the Black Sea steppes and ruled over the settlements that rimmed the northern part of that area. We all know about the Huns who were finally turned back at the Catalaunian Plains and eventually settled on the Hungarian steppes. Certainly after the steppe nomads had won and settled down, they either conscripted the existing civil service they inherited to do the work for them or had to learn reading and writing to manage it themselves. While nomadic kingdoms and empires were often shortlived, they were extremely powerful militarily, once every few centuries whenever a steppe warlord managed to overcome the hurdles of binding the various clans into a horde and gain the first few victories needed to snowball, few civilizations managed to remain intact. The fact that this pattern persisted both before and after the widespread adoption of Turkic script in the 7th(?) CE by the nomadic central steppes suggests that they didn't need writing to go rampage across civilized lands. While the nomadic steppe peoples throughout Antiquity were not by any means homogeneous, ranging from archaic Iranian-speaking peoples of Cimmeria and Scythia to the Xiong Nu who was probably some sort of Turkic in their ethnicity, their basic military organization of massed horse archers along with sometimes conscripted infantry from vassals or subjected peoples is remarkably consistent. So much so that two military treatises, written by civilized societies on opposite ends of the Central Eurasian steppe corridor, at different periods in time, on exactly how to deal with these nomads in battle are similar. The Strategikon and the Guard the Frontiers and Protect the Borders were two different documents, one Byzantine and the other Han Chinese, which outlined similar nature of nomadic steppe warfare despite being written 500+ years apart. So with that out of the way, a poster said yes, writing does increase military power/ force projection because of logistics. If that is the case then the question has to be asked how the steppe nomads did it conquering vast swathes of civilized lands in repeated waves throughout history? Or is it the case that writing is required for centralized agrarian societies which wage war in a particular fashion and if you are able to free yourself from that constraint like the steppe nomads, then it is no longer required to be successful militarily and to project power over vast distances? If you want to say limit the hypothesis to "writing improves an agrarian society's ability to wage war" then it has to be pointed out that without writing, complex centralized agrarian societies which need logistics of the type suggested wouldn't even exist, to begin with. As Xiahou Dun notes, it is very difficult to disentangle the two.
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Sep 27, 2022 06:35
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Military observers were very commonplace in the 19th ans 20th century. German, French, and British observers traveled to the US for the ACW and American generals traveled to Europe to observe their conflicts. They were mainly there to observe the effectiveness of tactics and equipment and relay that back home to improve their own military. Back the it was relatively easy to avoid harm as everyone dressed in distinct uniforms and the action wasn't conducted at such long distances that you couldn't stand back and still see what's going on Countries still send observers as attaches into war zones today though probably less on the battlefield as modern weapons are far more hazardous and everyone conceals themselves.
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Sep 27, 2022 21:07
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Defenestrategy posted:What do "the observed" countries get out of it? I assume that as a union general or diplomat you don't want a random french dude walking around your lines and maybe getting a really really really unlucky bullet to the leg. Is it just a quid-pro-quo understanding of you let our guys hang out and we'll let yours? Most of the time it is allowing friendly nations to observe for similar access. For example in the Russo Japanese war, the Brits and Japanese had close ties and the British actually built warships for Japan. In the case if the ACW, the South allowed access and used them to lobby for European assistance. As expected, it would be unusual for a potential enemy nation or one that you are in geopolitical competition with to be given access, just like today how nobody gets access to Russia or China while exchanges between NATO and potentially NATO/western friendly countries get exchanges.
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Sep 27, 2022 21:21
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Tulip posted:So like what degree of detail do you feel passes this boundary? We have a fair degree of detail for Kadesh, but like nowhere near the kind of detail we have for like Pydna or Changping. You can check out Jinyang (455 BCE), Boju (506 BCE), Chengpu (632 BCE), Muye (1046 BCE), or Mount Li (771 BCE) and see which of those pass your standards I guess. I think we should draw the distinction between saying we have been told details about battles in Antiquity when what we actually have are almost always second hand accounts recorded decades or even centuries after the fact and details we *know* due to surviving primary documents that are in relative abundance. For me, the ACW stands out as something I am always drawn to because of the spike in literacy rates among the common soldier and the fact that both sides regularly had reports written by commanders even down to regimental levels submitted on a fairly frequent basis. That for me is the first war where we can say for sure we *know* details down to the granular level if enough work is done on the subject (there remains a massive amount of research to be done due to the volume of primary sources available). I am not well read on the Napoleonic wars so maybe the practice of field reports was present there as well but AFAIK, the ACW is the first war where we have the kind of verifiable accounts suggested by the poster.
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Sep 29, 2022 19:17
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Tulip posted:TBH the underlying question is philosophical rather than material and I'm not honestly a fan of the question for that reason, since there's not a meaningful resolution. "Accurate" and "detail" are the big fuzzy ones here. We have a LOT of detail about the Siege of Troy. How accurate those details are is questionable. Lendon does a really admirable job of teasing out and explicating some parts of the Illiad that may not reflect the specific battle but he thinks are a meaningful and useful source of information about the general form of warfare in that era (i.e. formations, tactics, equipment). Glah posted:We know that ancient people's had very thought out tactics that they drilled and then there's the larger institutional knowledge about how to do logistic, campaigning, building forts etc., things that make for a successful military. I don't really have a huge disagreement with what you guys posted. I have no doubt that empires of Antiquity with professional or semi-professional armies would have some equivalent to what modern armies would call "doctrine". Nor do I doubt that the leaders of said armies would have had some sort of guidance or training even if only in the informal sense of princelings accompanying their Kings to put down rebellions and wars to learn on the job (many such instances in Medieval Europe for example, Alexander learning his craft in Greece with his father, or junior members of the Senatorial class joining Legions as staffers or sometimes if they were a bit older given positions like a Qaestor or Tribune and lessons would be passed on either through experience or through written text. I also do not dispute that one can glean a lot of information even from things like the Illiad. There are caveats though. There are a number of pitfalls to avoid when studying such surviving records. First of all the reader has to consider whether any surviving text or manual was descriptive or prescriptive. The writer of the manual might be describing a 'doctrine' that was taught and practically applied when on the field of battle. If this is the case then even if the writer was not a primary source (ie served in the army themselves or was present for the campaign) and only relied on oral accounts passed on then there is a good chance that the tactics and strategies written down were actually what was practiced in reality. However, there is also the chance that the writer's manual is meant to advocate for or to demonstrate how things *should* be done and whether or not this advice was heeded by those who actually commanded the army is in question. For example, if in 2000 years from now after an apocalyptic event in which civilization was wiped out, a future historian uncovered Heinz Guderian's OG copy of "Atchung! Panzer" 1937, he might mistakenly believe that all armies and campaigns of the next century fought in precisely this fashion. We of course know this to not be the case and while the tank revolutionized warfare, operations and tactics evolved quite quickly due to new technologies or lessons learned from actual battles on the field. Or maybe this future historian uncovers' the US Army's summary of lessons learned from Vietnam in partial form and thought that helicopters and airborne infantry now dominated the battlefield after a brief dominance of the tank. Or maybe they uncovered this one only and never found Atchung! Panzer and never realized that tanks were a thing and thought 20th and 21st-century armies all flew around in helicopters! Also, are writers who are putting pen to paper decades or centuries after the fact mixing up oral traditions? A good example from the Illiad is the hero Ajax described with a massive tower-type shield which is clearly out of place for Achaean wargear at the time of the supposed historical battle of Troy but was more in line with earlier Greek armies? Another example is Vegetius from which modern scholars lean heavily for information on the supposed sorry state of the late Roman army which has a hodgepodge of references to armies of earlier times. Was Vegetius just reading scraps from centuries earlier at the height of Roman dominance and presumed that the Roman armies were much better than the ones that were serving in his time and his writing is tainted by the dark times in which he wrote? Because the situation of the Roman empire was much different back then and even the legions at the height of their powers in the 1st century AD suffered massive defeats as well. There is real value in these documents like Caesar's account of his Gallic wars or the Strategikon from mid-Byzantine. But the reader should always keep in the back of their mind that this is a singular snapshot of someone's writing on military tactics, strategy, and equipment. Contrast this to the ACW in which we have full copies of the military treatises in use at the time (ie Casey's Infantry Tactics) as well as field reports from officers right down to the regimental level describing whether or not such prescriptive tactics were practiced and then can be verified by cross-referencing the mountain of surviving letters and accounts of the common soldier on the field. We can zoom in at a microscopic level and then also zoom out to see how often this experience was shared by others writing in the same battle, other battles that year, and battles across different years of the ACW and view changes in strategy, tactics, and operations. For example, even in a battle as chaotic as Chickamauga, we can place individual Federal regiments and gun batteries at specific pieces of terrain at a specific time and read how both the officers and the common man described their actions and then verify with a corresponding report from a Confederate officer or soldiers' letters home of the opposition they faced and the effects. Outside of a few minor disagreements (understandable given the noise, chaos and fear), we can get a very good idea of how troops behaved, the intensity of the fighting, and the effectiveness of their weapons and the ranges at which they engaged. This is why I draw the distinction between what we know of conflicts before the ACW and those after. Our ability to take a piece of documentation or account and be able to reliably cross reference it with other accounts is what makes those conflicts much clearer in terms of knowing what actually happened vs what we know to be a description of what happened which may more may not have inaccuracies, biases, and anachronisms.
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Sep 30, 2022 01:02
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VostokProgram posted:I'm trying to understand the high-level organization of the union military in the ACW. For example, Lincoln created this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Division_of_the_Mississippi?wprov=sfla1 Think of these as geographical administrative regions in which all troops operating within the boundaries answered to a single commander. Often but not always, the post was held by the Commanding General of the primary army operating in thr area (ex William Rosecranz held the command of the department of the Cumberland and he also commanded the Army of the Cumberland during that time). If there were two or more armies, one would be subordinate to the other like how George Thomas held command of the Army of the Cumberland but was subordinate to Sherman who held command of the department with two other armies (Ohio and Tennessee) under his command. Other military departments had no major armies operating in their jurisdictions and were more garrison or logistics commands or simply out in the sticks where the biggest formations on the field were maybe a few brigades if the entire garrison command was forced to consolidate to meet a threat.
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Sep 30, 2022 19:40
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In general terms, you don't really need to understand departments and divisions to understand the Federal high command and operations. What is important to understand was who was in nominal command of each operational area and the forces at their disposal. Departments and divisions would be divided, merged, created, and destroyed based on the needs at the moment and were rather transitory structures. As the original question pointed out, the creation of the Military Division of Mississippi was done simply to give Grant complete control over the entire Western theatre of the war, and from the time of its creation, the armies that converged on Chattanooga operated as if they were a single army first under Grant, and then under Sherman until the fall of Atlanta. This conglomerate of forces should be viewed as Grant's/Sherman's army with them as the principle commander and primary decision maker. Commanders of the armies serving under this principal decision maker were more glorified middlemen who would manage their respective "wings" of their armies and would provide advice and counsel as well as plan and execute the details of the mission assigned to their forces. But make no mistake, when operating under such conditions they were army commanders in name only and the in battle would have little latitude for major decision making as the primary commander was close at hand. The communications of the day though also meant that the focus was on whoever was the nominal head of an independent force even if they were nominally subordinate to a geographic department or division. Even though Sherman was in command of all forces west of the Appalachians when Grant moved East, the communications of the time meant that any detached forces from Sherman's main army were effectively operating on their own on a day-to-day basis. They may have been given specific assignments or tasks but a department/division commander far away would be unable to supervise or scrutinize daily operations much less conduct battles from a distance. Examples of this include Sherman's march on Meridian in early January 1864 after Chatanooga when he left portions of his army with Grant, and traveled back to Vicksburg to personally assume command of the 2 corps that never left the area to conduct the Meridian campaign (a preview of his March to the sea). Once again Grant while nominally Sherman's commander as head of the Division in which Sherman was operating was not involved in day-to-day operations. Similarly, when the Army of the Cumberland and Ohio under Thomas/Schofield was detached from Atlanta to go after Hood, day-to-day operations on how they were to execute the mission assigned to them were left largely to their own devices and the Battle of Nashville saw no involvement from Sherman in any capacity with George Thomas as the principal commander of the Federal forces in the battle.
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Oct 1, 2022 14:57
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Greggster posted:How did the command structure work from top (I would assume the president) down to corps commander? I haven't really studied Lincoln's personal involvement in military operations much, but I know enough to say that the administration along with the War Department were the ones that set priorities but the Generals in command of armies decided when and where to move. There would be consultation between 'Theatre' commanders and the War Department but if the General really was obstinate, the War Department really only had one card to play which was firing Generals. Washington was extremely busy though constantly harassing its Generals to be more active and to focus on Rebel armies and their destruction rather than taking land. Lincoln correctly determined that centres of gravity were the Rebel armies and early Federal Generals were sometimes too cautious in confronting them leading to what Lincoln bemoaned inaction commenting "This seems like the McClellan and Rosecrans strategy of do nothing and let the rebels raid the country" when Thomas was very methodical in the buildup to and careful organization before his smashing victory over Hood at Nashville. Or when Hooker contemplated taking Richmond when Lee and his AoNV slipped away from the Rappahannock line to begin his 2nd invasion of the North, Lincoln told Hooker " “I would not take any risk…and liable to be torn by dogs, front and rear, without a fair chance to gore one way or to kick the other. If Lee would come to my side, I would keep him on the same side, and fight him or act in defense.” If Lincoln didn't personally telegram army commanders, the War department was no less snide at times sending a message to Rosecrans ".....Lee's army overthrown; Grant victorious. You and your noble army now have the chance to give the finish blow to the rebellion. Will you neglect the chance??". All this despite the fact that Rosecrans had just finished pushing Bragg out of Tennesse but failed to bring him to decisive battle. Rosecrans would be repeatedly pressured into launching his Chickamauga campaign, but he wisely made all the required preparations before trying to take Chattanooga.
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Oct 1, 2022 22:12
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wiegieman posted:The ability to attack an enemy while simultaneously threatening to envelop him and while sustaining fewer casualties or a parity in casualties because you hold the initiative is the mark of a good strategist (also, remember that leaving troops in place was a good way to get them to die of wretched diseases during this period.) Grant was a superior general. That is not an accurate assessment of Grant imo. Many of the casualties inflicted occurred when he sieged and took a lot of Confederates captive or faced off against Confederate forces which were severely undermanned in the area. In major battles in which he fought a respectable force, he wasn't exceptionally brilliant tactically. His strength was his ability to correctly identify key targets which would force the Confederates into battle where he was competent at the task and knew that in the long run (as many others on both sides knew), the North would exhaust the South. His management of Vicksburg remains a testament to his willingness to take risks to get the job done though, severing his army from land-based supply lines to meet up with Federal naval forces controlling the river to get at Vicksburg from an unexpected direction.
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Oct 3, 2022 23:46
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Tomn posted:Eh? Wasn’t Germania essentially a collection of Stone Age tribes with nothing worth taxing, levying, or occupying until centuries later after a long period of trade, raids, and general interaction with the Romans? I don’t think Germania was any more economically and culturally vibrant than Pictland was for most of the Empire. Am I wrong on this? Since the tribes of Manga Germania did not leave behind writing, there is little that can be verified. Aside from archaeology, most of the information comes from their contemporaries in the literate world. One thing we do know however is that they were an Iron Age culture so classifying them as stone age tribes would be inaccurate. The landmass and geography of the area were known to the Romans. Tacitus who lived in the 1st century AD had quite vivid descriptions of the people, and their customs, and apparently knew the approximate layout of tribal territories in his text Germania so I don't think the Romans viewed the land beyond Rhine border as empty. Indeed Tacitus describes a certain territorial holding as "overflowing" with a certain tribe so there definitely was a sizable population. We do also know that during the peaceful time during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, after the revolt of the Batavi, trade between the Roman world and the tribes bordering the Rhine did take place and the reach of Roman artifacts penetrating deep into non-Roman Europe suggests it was sustained and substantial. While it is true that it simply wasn't a profitable exercise for the Romans to invade and Romanize the rest of Germania, I think we should clearly understand that there exists a huge space between 'rich near/mid east cities/states' ripe for conquest and 'sparsely inhabited hinterlands'. Germania appeared to be well settled - just not urbanized - and was a well-established agrarian tribal society. The climate and soil definitely sustained a denser population base than the lands north of the Hadrian Wall and the regular inflows and outflows of Germans and Celts moved in and out of Roman territory whether they be traders or groups of mercenaries entering contract service with Rome or individuals and groups being recruited into the Auxilia both pre and post-army reforms by Diocletian and Constantine. I would imagine such border postings to be rather monotonous but not in an isolated sort of way. At the height of Pax Romana, most legionaries or auxilia stationed on the Rhine border would, outside exercises or civil war conflicts, rarely be formed into an army and would spend much of their time on endless patrols in the border zones to regulate the flow of people and goods like customs police etc. sullat posted:IIRC even though Germania wasn't developed like, say, the east, it did have significant populations and some resources to trade; furs, amber, and of course, slaves. The tribes near the border were often basically client states, except when they weren't and needed to be defeated. Amber was one of the major exports according to Tacitus since the Romans apparently paid an "astounding" sum for it.
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Oct 11, 2022 23:24
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Tomn posted:All right, fair enough, I was going off vague memories of a Peter Heather book that I last read ages ago. I will suggest however that "Germania" changed quite a bit between Octavian's time and Romulus Augustus. As far as I recall, that was in fact a contributing factor to the Western Empire's decline - there was originally an enormous societal and technological gap between Rome and Germania that allowed them to keep the border pacified with a minimum of force, but by the late empire the Germans had collectively developed sufficiently that the same economy of force was no longer sufficient and was getting harder and harder to pay for and man, as well as Roman weakness allowing more and more Germanic polities to consolidate into larger, more powerful units as opposed to the past when the Romans could afford regular expeditions to cut down anyone getting dangerously large. I'm well aware that the Germans of late Antiquity were pretty close to par with Rome (albeit with smaller populations economies), but weren't the early Germans less so? Again, operating off vague memories of a book last read years ago, so I'm fully willing to acknowledge that I'm mistaken on this. I do not believe this is the case but you should check the other thread and maybe there is someone who specializes in this area. First of all on the technological front, the Roman army did not hold much of a technological edge. The Romans certainly were better equipped on an individual level during Pax Romana of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD than your average Germanic tribesman in battle but the metallurgical knowledge would have been quite similar. Simply put, the German tribes could make steel of similar quality as the Romans and if you got stabbed or cut with their swords, you were as dead as if you were cut or stabbed with a Roman sword. Roman soldiers might have more kit but kit is often overrated as a factor in battles of Antiquity. There are also no clear indications that I am aware of that indicate a societal transformation other than the inflow of military techniques and knowledge from mercenaries and auxilia who migrated back to German tribal lands after their service to Rome. There is no indication that the groups that ended up penetrating Roman territory in the 4th and 5th centuries AD were somehow more sophisticated in their tribal organization. The big reason, IMO, why Pax Romana was as cheap to maintain as it was for the Romans in the early years was that the Central Asian steppe lands were relatively calm and quiet during that time period with no major confederation driving groups out of the hordelands and sending them spilling into the civilized lands of China, the Iranian plateau or the East European plains. The Germanic tribes didn't all of a sudden start mass migrations into Roman territory because they could in the 4th and 5th centuries AD but couldn't in the first 3 centuries. They migrated because of population pressures as they were literally pushed out as the Huns gathered strength and arrived in force on the Pontic Steppe in the mid-4th century AD. First contact with the Goths occurred in the 3rd Century AD as these tribes moved out of Scandanavia due to overpopulation (classical theory) and raided/traded/served the Romans until the Huns moved in from the East. During the 3rd Century and most of the 4th Century AD though, the Romans held or beat them back every time they made a serious incursion (see Gallienus, Cladius II, Aurelian). The Gothic War of 376 was a direct result of the Goths getting ejected from their homelands on the Pontic Steppe and the subsequent terrible treatment of these migratory Goths by the Roman authorities. These migratory pressures were simply not present in the early Empire aside from minor revolts such as Bodicia and the Batavi, or the Dacians getting uppity. There is also some evidence that the Roman armies of the Late Empire were not as strong relative to the Goths as the armies of the Principate were against say the Batavi or Dacians but that is more of an erosion of Rome's economics and thus their ability to project military power at the edges of their empire. Though I am not totally convinced that this is THE reason, but there is evidence that Constantine's reforms with the creation of the permanent border guards (Limitanei) and several field armies located in the interior formed from Comitatenses and Palatina units was because it was no longer economically viable to place "tier 1" units along the border in the numbers required to prevent penetration of a "barbarian" raider or invader so Limitanei were there to deal with day to day matters or small incursions and the field army was called in to deal with matters if it was serious. This could have been because of the combined effect of the Antonine plague which supposedly decimated the Roman population followed by the incredibly destructive civil wars of the 3rd century AD meant that it was no longer economically feasible to defend the empire in the same way the Trajan might have been able to do it (through sheer economic and military brute force). So while you may be correct that the disparity between Romans and Germanic Tribes was reduced in later years, it was more of erosion in Roman military capabilities than it was the Germanic Tribes ascending the 'power rankings'. Also if you are a leader of a confederation of tribes and nomadic horseman are driving you out of your lands, you are extra motivated to move in on Roman territory otherwise your people are either killed or enslaved. The big caveat here is that the sources from this time period are so sparse that it is very difficult to draw firm conclusions on anyone's military ability relative to anyone else. In any case, though, we do know very definitively that the migratory pressures that pushed the German tribes into Roman territory and thus into conflict definitely did occur thanks the rampaging Huns. ulmont posted:…although the graphic novel collections from Manga Germania do give us some insight into the daily lives of the schoolchildren of the period… Fook.....got owned by a typo. Jamwad Hilder posted:The early Germans famously annihilated a Roman army so badly that it's arguably Rome's greatest defeat after Cannae. Not picking on anything but Roman armies were regularly and thoroughly destroyed over and over again throughout all of Roman history whether it be the Republic, the Principate, or the Dominate period. Though famous, the Teutenburg disaster was in no way definitive or extra damaging to the Romans long term. By the time of Trajan, 100 years later, the Romans had more legions than they did even before the defeat and destruction of Varus's legions. All evidence does suggest that Roman arms were superior to whatever the German tribes could muster for most of this period. The core question is whether the Germanic tribes got better or whether it was the Romans who got worse and that's why the military equation equalized. IMO, the evidence suggests the latter,
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Oct 12, 2022 03:42
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Koramei posted:Not something I personally know much about (hence previous question) but Bret Devereaux seems to suggest the former. I think he's brought it up a few times, but grabbing an example quickly in his Decline of Rome series for instance: If you read the whole article it is also made clear that he also (rightly) points out that Roman power at the late stages was nowhere close to what it was during the Principate. It is a question that will never be answered definitively since we simply don't have the sources to tell us. There are a few things that stick out as problematic with his view in this piece. Among them is the claim that they developed more complex social systems by differentiating between tribes and kingdoms of Germanics when in fact the Celts and Germanic tribes regularly formed tribal confederations when a particularly charismatic or talented warlord appeared in history and was not unique to the late empire. Even in the late republic, before the conquest of Gaul and the establishment of the Rhine and Danubian frontiers, tribal confederations invaded Roman territory and regularly required Consular armies to put them down. The emergence of such kingdoms and confederation is not particularly new. What was new was the inability of the Roman state to recover militarily after a disaster like Adrianople when in centuries past, they would simply raise new legions and call in reinforcements from other parts of Roman territories and go after the invaders till they were all dead or enslaved.
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Oct 12, 2022 15:06
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Cyrano4747 posted:I mean, I'm not going to plant my flag on this and insist it's so if anyone has a compelling counter-argument, but we do know that they didn't hamper the normal movement of people back and forth, and I can't think of any times when a river posed a challenge to a moving army that was otherwise unimpeded (e.g. you'll have poo poo like battles at fords, but not a big 'ol army just staring at the water going "whelp." If you are saying that rivers alone don't stop armies, sure. But rivers and the ability to cross or deny the enemy the ability to cross them have shaped battles and campaigns right up to the modern day (look at the current situation at Kherson). It is always a benefit to have a river line to defend either tactically or operationally and always a hindrance to the force that must, for whatever reason, find passage across a water obstacle especially if they are under pressure.
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Oct 13, 2022 23:00
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Tomn posted:I don't think this is strictly true. I did up an effortpost a while back here about medieval naval combat (particularly in the context of England), and the upshot was that up until the development of large, organized standing navies armed with cannon oceans tended to facilitate the ATTACKER, rather than the defender. The issue is that while it can be a pain to assemble a naval force, once you HAVE assembled it you can move a lot more troops and supplies a lot more quickly than you can by land, giving you the strategic initiative and the ability to strike wherever you please. Meanwhile, the defender can rarely muster a fleet in time to respond to a raid, and by land suffers from having to potentially defend every possible naval landing spot and having to rely on local musters to respond to any given incursion. I get what you are saying but that is only because one side has capabilities the other doesn't (naval power). If anything it proves the point rather than disproves it. If a water barrier separates you from the target of your attack, you need to invest not only in the land forces needed to conquer your objective, but now you need to invest in a navy to gain control of the seas. Yes, once you gain control of these pathways, it allows you an advantage over the defender but you still need to invest in that capability first *and* retain enough economic resources for a land army to facilitate the defeat of the defender once you breach the water obstacle. And if the attacker cannot generate supremacy on the waters to invade then you win the defense by default. I mean think of it this way, was the British Isles easy or difficult to invade for the Germans in WW2? Clearly, the British being on an island didn't make it easier to invade than France right? In every situation where there is a water obstacle, it is the attacker that must come up with the necessary resources to overcome that obstacle before they can even proceed to have a fight with the defender over the objective. The size of that obstacle may dictate the magnitude of defensive advantage and what scope it offers (ie a creek offers benefits only tactically if the battle was to be fought there while a free following river with few fording points may generate an operational advantage) but in every case, the attacker must be the one that overcomes that obstacle first. And if you don't have a monopoly on naval power or an ability to control the river with military warships and must win the naval fight first, well then you are doubly disadvantaged. Just ask Napoleon.
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Oct 14, 2022 03:36
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Don't disagree with anything there and I don't want to misrepresent your your position. Are you positing that England and the British Isles in general were more vulnerable to invasion and raiding because they were an island and that all things being equal, inhabitants of the islands would be safer and more protected if they could have magically drained out the North Sea and English Channel?
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Oct 14, 2022 14:37
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Tomn posted:Don't think I'd go quite that far, and in any event that's a hard counter-factual to answer (what kind of polities would arise in the English Channel, and what would their relationship with what are effectively the Highlanders be?). But I do think it can be clearly stated that the sea didn't present that much of a barrier to invasion prior to the rise of gunpowder and standing navies, and in some ways facilitated invasions that might have otherwise been difficult. It's worth noting that the history of the British Isles included quite a few successful invasions - the Romans, the Angles and the Saxons, the various Viking invasions, and famously William of Normandy (and as noted, William III later in something of a freak incident). It's worth noting too that despite neglecting their navy compared to the Saxon kingdom they conquered, the Norman Kings nevertheless prosecuted the Hundred Years War for as long as they did and mostly campaigned in France, despite having to shift armies from England over to France to do so, and maintained links with their French territories (including notably Bordeaux) despite the sea being in the way - again, all without having seriously invested in sea power. Compare also the islands of Sicily and Crete, both notably multicultural in part because of various successful invasions and counter-invasions in their past. It's pretty clear, I think, that being an island is by no means a guarantee of security in the pre-modern period. This is where we diverge wrt "quite a few" successful invasions. In recorded history, from the time of the Romans on, there have been exactly 3 successful invasions that brought about a major lasting cultural change to the Isles and or resulted in a major ethnic shift. The first was the Roman invasion, the 2nd was the destruction of Sub-Roman Britain and the ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Anglosaxon invaders, and the final one was William I and the defeat of the House of Wessex in 1066. While the Viking era saw multiple invasions that temporarily secured lands, ultimately time and distance from the Scandinavian homeland meant that the Anglo-Saxons and other ethnic groups such as the proto-Scots (Kingdom of Alba) and Irish were the ones that ultimately retained control of the land and importantly retained their identity (remember it was Harold Godwinson who fell to William - NOT a Viking king). Certainly, the Viking invasions infused some Norse culture into the Isles but they failed to conquer the Islands and they remained distinctively British in nature outside of a few brief episodes like Cnut founding the North Sea Empire which lasted all of 30 years. Your assertions that the English managed to prosecute the war against the French without "seriously investing in sea power" is simply factually incorrect. It is estimated that about 30% of the entire expenditure of the war from 1370-1453 by the English was on the navy. Critical naval battles like Seine in 1416 had to be fought to keep the English war effort on the mainland going. The requirement of the English, especially during the Lancastrian phase of the war, to constantly maintain a supply of ships for logistical purposes was one of the major financial burdens for the English crown. The failure of the English to maintain a working navy after Henry V's death was a direct contributor to their eventual loss of French holdings. Lacking university library access these days, it is hard for me to go back and get journals for specific information but there is a free article on the net which details some of this https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03044181.2016.1236503. Recall the discussion on Roman power vs the Germanic tribes in that same period in modern-day Germany and their migration patterns due to population pressure. If you want to see what happens to territory that does not have defensible features you need only look at the history the Pontic steppe and the constant revolving door of ethnic change (this is what "quite a few successful invasions" looks like). The Scythians were ejected by the Germanic tribes coming out of Scandinavia, who then, in turn, were kicked out by the Huns, which was subsequently replaced by the Avars and in less than a couple of centuries was in turn replaced by the Bulgars who intermixed with the slavs who were yet another group from the steppes/taiga regions east of Europe. They lasted a few hundred years before being conquered by the Magyars who then in turn were overrun by the Mongols. In a comparable time period from Roman Britain to the end of the Hundred Years war, eastern Europe saw no less than 6 major waves of invasions which brough significant cultural and political changes to that region not counting successful Roman incursions and temporary stays north of the Danube. Meanwhile the British Isles really only had three such major events the first being Romanization and the 2nd being the successful migration of the Anglo-saxon tribes into Sub Roman Britain and finally the installation of a Norman dynasty on the throne of England. Even then there wasn't nearly the successive waves of population replacement and mixing going on. There is no way you can say it was "easier" to invade when the Vikings for all their naval prowess couldn't bring about full capitulation of the Anglo-Saxons and really only managed to hold parts of the British Isles before Wessex reconquered the lands subjugating the Viking territories. The heyday of the Vikings really only lasted about a hundred years and they failed to gain control. I will note that while the seas are great for raiding and extracting booty, it is difficult to conduct a full-scale invasion and move vast numbers of people over them. Which is why "Viking" DNA is virtually nonexistant in the British Isles according to a 2015 study. Slim Jim Pickens posted:The history of post-Roman Britain consists mainly of naval invasion and then settlement. From like... every direction Greatly exaggerated, see above. Tulip posted:Which yes that seems stupid to even consider but I think that outside of Japan and Britain, it'd be a struggle to conceptualize a place where political boundaries and geographic boundaries were so neat. Like I'm not gonna stick my neck out and say that France's current borders are the natural borders it should be judged by going back to Big Carl, and without something like that I don't even know how we'd judge anything. Especially not helped by like, what even is a polity in a lot of these periods? Is a duke declaring independence and taking a chunk of the realm with him an "invasion"? That doesn't seem right. There are times in history when clearly a distinctive outside group appears which is culturally and ethnically distinct and moves in and the culture and/or ethnic makeup of a region dramatically shifts. Despite the fact that the Celtic tribes of those regions were definitely not united, we can all agree that Romanization did occur in those areas right? And that as the Western Roman Empire disintegrated over the 4th and 5th centuries AD, that distinctive Germanic groups such as the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards etc moved into these lands and effective another cultural shift? Island territories that have sufficient population mass tend to have fewer of these events. Tulip posted:One angle that's a little interesting but I still think a bit short is that England did have land borders with other kingdoms during its premodern existence. The measure would be "was England more threatened along its sea borders or its land borders," which can be answered with "well we have a lot of successful sea invasions, including the Irish into Scotland to become the Scots but far fewer successful land invasions," and that can also be dismissed with "yeah no poo poo Britain's garbage land of course they were more threatened by continental powers who had way larger populations." Well, if goons want to take a contrary view to several thousand years of military thought, who am I to dissuade them? We haven't even gone in-depth into other islands like Taiwan which were effectively independent till the Dutch arrived and not under Chinese control till the Qing dynasty. One with think being surrounded by water would have made them been invaded many times before that given water makes it easy? Or the isolation of Japan which saw no major ethnic or external cultural influence since the initial displacement of the aboriginal Japanese by the Yaoyoi which ended sometime in 200 AD. Once again if Tomn's theory holds then you would expect far more of these events rather than a one-time occurrence. The Mongols rampaged from China to Poland but couldn't get Japan.....despite this theory that water helps invaders, not hinder it.
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Oct 15, 2022 06:04
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Something to keep in mind about the military impact of rivers is that they don't just serve as a barrier to attackers - if a defender gets pinned against one, it can easily result in their destruction since it may become difficult (if not impossible) to retreat. Vicksburg is a classic example, as Grant managed to pin the Confederate garrison against the river with no possibility of retreat. And a year prior, A.S. Johnston tried to do this to Grant at Shiloh, attempting to push the Army of the Tennessee off Pittsburgh Landing so they couldn't be reinforced, and then pinning them against the river so they couldn't retreat - an attempt which ultimately failed and cost Johnston his life. Which is why no sane person ever defends in front of a river if they can help it. But according to thread logic, generals have been getting it wrong for 5 thousand years or more since you should deny the river to attackers or it will facilitate their offensive actions.
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Oct 19, 2022 18:53
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Tulip posted:First you're confusing questions about tactics and logistics, but more importantly that is a thing that happened what are you talking about. I was clearly being facetious. The thesis being presented by Cryo, Tomm, and others is that it is worse to have waterways such as rivers and oceans since they are conduits for invasion and hinder the defender. Only goons would find this statement controversial. MikeC posted:If you are saying that rivers alone don't stop armies, sure. But rivers and the ability to cross or deny the enemy the ability to cross them have shaped battles and campaigns right up to the modern day (look at the current situation at Kherson). It is always a benefit to have a river line to defend either tactically or operationally and always a hindrance to the force that must, for whatever reason, find passage across a water obstacle especially if they are under pressure. But Tomm and co will cite things like English kings coming back from exile as proof that oceans and waterways actually hurt defenders or made them more vulnerable ignoring things like the fact that the Romans held a river line as the defensive frontier for almost half a millennium or that the Mongols managed to conquer almost the entire Eurasian landmass but losing a couple of fleets to storms made them decide that maybe Japan wasn't really worth it. As I said, who am I to question such great minds? Carry on.
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Oct 20, 2022 04:51
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The Kickstarter backed sequel of arrows vs armour 2 just dropped on Tod's Workshop YouTube channel. The original piece 2 years ago was one of the more consequential works on the time period and they are back for a much more indepth look at the Longbow effectiveness during the Hundreds Year War. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds-Ev5msyzo
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Nov 22, 2022 17:04
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Cross posting a take from the authors in the US Army on replacements from the Ukraine thread that originated this discussion. Additional links provided in the pdf. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/January-February-2020/Haider-Replacements/
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Dec 30, 2022 18:57
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feedmegin posted:American Civil War cavalry (so without the same transport issues of being on foot) would sometimes carry like 4 pistols/revolvers and a sabre, if I recall correctly. Check out this lad 4 pistols and sabre seem strange for an ACW trooper in any army or theatre. The standard issue for mid-war volunteer Federal Cavalry was 2 pistols, a sabre, and a carbine of the breech-loading variety. Less if you were a confederate trooper who might have to make do with sawed-off smoothbore as times got tough. If you expand cavalry to mounted infantry who effectively were tasked as cavalry units then pistols as primary weapons were even rarer. The only time I have ever heard of 4 pistols as a loadout is from Mosby's guerillas which could barely be called a cavalry unit where men had to bring their own horses and weapons.
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Jan 6, 2023 02:53
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Cessna posted:1861 Tacticool with four pistols: I have no doubt people take pictures of all sorts but in the field, it is unlikely they pack 3+ pistols. Troopers in cavalry units in service with the army and not on irregular duties are far more likely to value their shoulder-fired weapons. Federal cavalry especially since as the war progressed, they were given the lion's share of the most advanced small arms such as revolver rifles and magazine-fed metal cartridge semi-automatics. I have read about Rebel "cavalry" units who were more robbers and partisans than anything else carry a pair on their bodies as well as additional pistols on pommel holsters because they would never be doing real fighting and the pistols were best when dealing with pursuing horsemen. Assuming that soldiers would preserve and carry the weapons most useful to them, a Confederate report on Wheeler's Cavalry Corps in late 1864 showed the following armaments being in "serviceable conditions": Among around 6670 men supposedly inspected, 3896 Rifles, 500 Carbines, and 1978 pistols was the total count. In total 50 sabres were found in the entire corps and the report noted that the men largely used captured weapons and complained about the non-uniformity of calibres within the Corps. It can be inferred that the troopers valued long guns far more than pistols though I guess there is the chance that pistols were difficult to loot and maintain and that no one gave a poo poo about swords (the report complains even many officers failed to have swords). I don't want to undersell pistol and sword as both saw some limited use in cavalry skirmishes and certain units were retained as cavalry with sabre, carbine, and pistol, but by mid war most cavalry units in regular service fought dismounted on foot. Rifles and carbines were the predominant weapons of choice. Defenestrategy posted:Speaking of cav, horses are skittish creatures who are prone to killing themselves in ridiculous fashion even in the best of time. How do you train them to have a mini explosion go off right over their head? From Cavalry Tactics: Or, Regulations for the Instruction, Formations, and Movements of The Cavalry of the Army and Volunteers of the United States (1864) quote:"The horse, broken to obedience to the hand and legs, can be brought to face most things with little trouble. Encouraged gradually to approach anything which he fears, as a drum being beaten, until he feels it with his lip, he will then cease to be alarmed
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Jan 7, 2023 01:00
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:That is a weirdly useful analogy. Thank you! Besides what was posted, it can be difficult to generalize ACW cavalry because the two opposing cavalry forces morphed tremendously relative to each other during the 4 years of conflict. What is interesting is how the operational duties of the Federal Cavalry changed throughout the war. The US Army (professionals) had a grand total of 6 regiments at the outbreak of war shortly after they abolished the cavalry vs dragoon designations and merged all mounted units under the general cavalry designation. The recon/screening/flank security aspect of traditional light cavalry and the more robust mounted light infantry aspect of dragoons were effectively understood to be fulfilled by any mounted unit. This may have been due to McClellan's new manual that he wrote in 1856 after being an observer in the Crimean War. During the first year and a half of the war through to the early months of 1863, Federal volunteer cavalry was somewhat hampered by the fact that no one seemed to appreciate or trust volunteer cavalrymen to do any sort of independent work. Examples include both Mclellan and Grant divying up the cavalry at their disposal piecemeal to the infantry to act as local security though Mclellan did form the professionals into a unified reserve but often went unused as a strike unit en masse. They were called on tactically to blunt enemy advances with the sabre charge like at Gaines Mill and though they typically succeeded in their mission (saving the infantry) they often got shot up in the process. The move toward consolidating cavalry into a distinct arm didn't really start John Pope took over the Army of Virginia in the East in the summer of 1862 and was completed by Joe Hooker prior to his Chancellerville campaign in 1863 where the Federal army in the Eastern theatre finally had a unified cavalry corps responsible for supplying the army with its security and screening needs. I found writing on Federal cavalry and their performance especially in the operational sense prior to this inflection point tends to be fragmented outside jounalistic scholarly work probably due to the fact that there was no counterpart to JEB Stuart due to the parcel-like nature of their deployments. Writing on Federal cavalry (and cavalry operations in general) is a lot more detailed starting in 1863 thanks to the Gettysburg campaign and the massive effect cavalry had in shaping the events leading up to the battle. Also contributing to the increased attention was Rosecran's formation of mounted infantry units which were de facto cavalry units when the War Department refused his request to create new cavalry units for his army since only Congress had the authority to create new formations. A lot of ink has been spilled analyzing JEB Stuart's actions and the success of the Federal cavalry in successfully outworking and outperforming the Rebel cavalry arm in the weeks leading up to Gettysburg and the contribution of Rosecran's cavalry units in the Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns approach the stuff of legend in those familiar with the Western Theatre in the ACW world. Up to this point, Federal cavalry and their operations fit comfortably in the old mold of supporting infantry and doing the thankless recon and screening work that is so vital to successful campaigns. Rosecrans' insistence of creating mounted infantry units and supplying them with the best arms money can buy though sharply changed how cavalry was viewed by a few influential members of the Federal army and how they operated in 1864 and 1865. The outsized performance of these units like the Lighting Brigade at Chickamauga left an impression on a certain Gen. Phillip Sheridan who served in the Army of the Cumberland and was handed command of the Cavalry Corps in the East in 1864. Under his direction, he started viewing Cavalry as an independent offensive component of the army - able to ride independently to seek out and destroy elements of the enemy army if they were not consolidated as well as to undertake some of the largest cavalry raids and protect the infantry indirectly by forcing Rebel cavalry to react to his en masse movements. Meade (the army commander) and Sheridan didn't get along and saw things differently but Sheridan was part of Grant's crew in the West before Grant assumed overall command and Sheridan was given his wish. The Overland campaign results for Sheridan are largely a mixed bag though to his credit, for most of the campaign, the Rebel cavalry had their hands full and the Army of the Potomac was not a victim to Stuart's exploits like in years past. Indeed Stuart ended up KIA in one of these cavalry brawls and while Meade and Grant at times were left without cavalry resources, Lee was often in the same boat as he had to commit his own mounted arm to stop Sheridan's Corp from rampaging in his rear area and cutting off routes as he tried to match Grant move for move in Virginia. Within the span of 3 years, the Federal cavalry had gone from an inept organization hobbled by army commanders who dispersed them to the point that they couldn't even fulfill their screening mission into an independent striking arm of the Federal armies they were nominally attached to and arguably the strongest pound-for-pound units available to their commanders.
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Jan 7, 2023 07:33
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Siivola posted:Could you recommend a good source that explains that in detail? The Crecy book I listened to earlier made me realize I can't really imagine how things look from a scout’s perspective, because I’ve only looked at battles from above in games and books. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_in_the_Saddle Is an easy read for civil war era. Focuses on a specific campaign but can be applied to how cavalry was viewed in that war.
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Jan 10, 2023 15:27
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Siivola posted:That does help a lot, thanks! I guess skirmishing infantry do the same thing, but on a smaller scale? So instead of riding to the next town to see what's up, they would hustle up a key hill to make sure there's nobody hiding behind it in ambush? Infantry either in march or battle always throws out their own screen but they would be within a couple of hundred yards of the main body. Their job would be the immediate security of the command and would serve two purposes. The first would be to protect against enemy skirmishers so the main body couldn't get harassed while in the battle line or to warn their troops to get into battle line if the enemy wasn't spotted and the march column was about to be hit. The second was to provide a first layer of resistance to see how determined an enemy attack was or the likelihood that the enemy was just demonstrating to tie down resources. Opposing skirmishers leading an attack would pressure hard to push in pickets and defending skirmishers to mask the strength of the attack as long as possible or if the attack was a demonstration, to try and prevent defending skirmishers from providing accurate information. The difference is that these skirmishers would be tactical while the cavalry screens would operate at a higher level denying information on army or sub-unit movements as a whole during the movement prior to a major fight. Once it was certain enemy infantry was in front of you, cavalry typically retired to the flanks or rear to guard ammunition trains.
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Jan 11, 2023 07:59
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zoux posted:Seems pretty damning. Didn't know that Lee had that many cav on hand, why didn't he use them? Of the 4 brigades left to Lee, two were essentially partisan/home guard cavalry (Imboden and Jenkins) and assigned to areas of least risk due to being untested and unreliability. The other 2 brigades (Robertson and Jones) were left the responsibility of blocking Snickers and Ashby Gap. The former were in proper screening position and Imboden turned out to be a good commander. Jenkin's brigade came up short and Ewell's men were generally not impressed. Jones and Robertson were supposed to keep watch and pass movement of Federal forces to Lee while Stuart was incommunicado but it is likely they were overtaxed and had personality issues between them. The timeline of events meant that for Lee to cover Stuart's mistake, he would have had to know immediately that the Stuart would fail his screening mission and reassign that task even before Stuart left Middleton. Not a realistic option for Lee
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Jan 11, 2023 17:01
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zoux posted:I feel like that's pretty critical information to leave out of an article weighing the culpability of Stuart's raid. The entire campaign is filled with 'ifs and buts' or what could've been. Suffice to say that you can view any writing that assigns strong blame to any particular player in the events as suspect. ACW military history also doesn't pay well so quality of work is lacking. Fwiw, I feel Stuart hosed up kinda huge but to hang Gettysburg entirely on him is nonsensical.
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Jan 11, 2023 17:10
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