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 This needs to be on every first page of every thread I'd also like to encourage all the lurkers who feel intimidated by big hulking megathreads to get stuck in and just ask whatever's on your mind about military history.
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Dec 6, 2020 22:07
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Ensign Expendable posted:Oh look, I can change the thread title. Well in that case, let's have it proper in the thread like! It's from Spike Milligan's WW2 memoirs, which if you haven't read you need to do that yesterday. He was in the artillery and saw action in Tunisia which went very well for him; and Italy, which went less well, he was eventually invalided to the rear with what we'd now call PTSD. This is from the celebrations immediately after the fall of Tobruk. quote:Approaching are Gunners Musslewhite, Roberts and Wilson, riding donkeys and completely drunk: days later they were found in Sousse [approximately 125 miles from where they were supposed to be] with no recollection of anything. Major Chater Jack is the commanding officer we all hope we'd have, if it ever came to that; Leather Suitcase and Jumbo Jenkins are the commanding officer we all fear we'd end up with.
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Dec 7, 2020 11:53
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Memento posted:British machine guns were originally part of the Royal Artillery but after the first year of butchery in WWI they were reorganised into their own Corps. You sure about that? They were organic assets in 1914, two per battalion in their own machine-gun section. The Machine Gun Corps was founded by abstracting the Vickers gun sections from the infantry, who got the man-portable Lewis guns instead. The smallest thing the RA had was the pom-pom gun.
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Dec 17, 2020 18:35
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My usual recommendation for a one-volume starter history of the First World War is Peter Hart's The Great War: A Combat History. He's in charge of the Imperial War Museum's sound archive and he just loves a good personal account.
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Dec 18, 2020 19:21
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ChubbyChecker posted:I've read a story, which was probably made up, that during some bluffing operation a single German plane flew over a fake airfield that had dummy planes and dropped a wooden bomb on it. I've heard the wooden bomb story, it's got all the hallmarks of an old soldier's dit.
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Dec 20, 2020 00:14
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Fearless posted:I cannot fathom what being in a heavy battery during the Great War would have been like. Far preferable to being in the PBI, let me assure you
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Dec 26, 2020 14:41
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I think the point is the [citation needed], though: how is it that we know what Zee Chermans were supposedly thinking?
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Dec 27, 2020 15:10
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the paradigm shift posted:What do you mean by trains A whacking big long fing wiv an engine onna front
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Dec 30, 2020 00:30
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BalloonFish posted:And here is the view slightly inland, to seaward, at the end of the trench system proper: The chap you're thinking of is another subaltern called Paddy King who was in a very Territorial Territorial Battalion, the 2/4th Useless Fat Bastards or something like that. ... I looked it up, it was the 2/5th East Lancashires. The "2" in front indicates that this is supposed to be a second-line battalion for crocks and old farts. At the start of the war they were fit only for garrison duty in England, then they became fit only for garrison duty in France, then lines of communication work, then fetching and carrying up the line and back again and other pioneer work, by 1917 they're going up the line properly in quiet sectors, and by the time Third Ypres rolls round they're (literally, it's very wet) in at the deep end like everyone else.
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Jan 12, 2021 19:00
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Dragoons were used as doctrinally intended, though. I think the distinction with modern paratroopers is that they really never get used in combat drops. It would be like if dragoons never actually rode their horses. Stephen Badsey has this gimmick where he likens the intended role of WWI-era cavalry to very, very short-range paratroopers; you drop into the enemy's rear somewhere inconvenient, get off the
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Jan 13, 2021 23:55
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White Coke posted:I've heard that the Germans didn't like American soldiers using shotguns, or British soldiers using serrated bayonets in WWI and that they threatened to execute anyone they captured using these weapons. Is that true, and were there any other weapons that were considered similarly criminal in WWI? There were two widespread and major moral panics among Entente soldiers, specifically about things that Zee Chermans might do to them personally, that began right in the very first days of 1914 (importantly, long before poison gas came out). Those were Germans using serrated bayonets, and also Germans either being issued manufactured expanding ammunition, or turning ordinary ammunition into expanding ammunition by slashing the tips of their bullets. As far as I can tell, expanding ammunition was purely a moral panic and is in any case impossible to verify; and serrated bayonets were definitely issued to Germans. Which is an excellent excuse to re-repost French grognard-in-chief Louis Barthas telling the tale of the fighting Father Galaup (a bit less resigned than Job on his dung-heap) and his quest to obtain just such a bayonet as a souvenir of German barbarity... quote:The abbé Galaup was haunted for some time by the desire to find a German rifle with a sawtoothed bayonet attached, to take home as a souvenir. The Germans had one of these in each squad, in case it was needed to cut a branch, saw up a wooden plank, etc. Of course they would occasionally put it on the end of a rifle, to cut through a thorax or a belly. It served double duty. Father Galaup, in search of this combination weapon-tool, went out into the fog each morning, at the risk of intercepting a bullet along the way. The time for wasting perfectly good equipment had not yet arrived... Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 11:55 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 11:52
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best bale posted:someone early in the thread mentioned that there’s been new scholarship in WWI studies since Guns of August was written. Anyone have a list of the “new classics” for wwi? Both broad and narrow focus welcomed For the causes of the war I would strongly advise pairing The Sleepwalkers with Margaret Macmillan's The War That Ended Peace; it comes from a completely different angle and draws some different conclusions which you may prefer to Clark's. (I also highly recommend Macmillan's superior and variously-titled work on the Paris conference of 1919.) There will never be One True Holy & Apostolic explanation of the causes of the war, and it's vital to take in alternative viewpoints. Anyway, this sounds like an excellent excuse to draw up a reading list for someone who's read a general history or two, or seen a few big documentaries, and wants to dig down a bit more without getting too deep in just yet. Pick the bit that sounds most interesting and have at it. N.b. no personal accounts here, they need their own post. If you're going to read in English you have to go for Forgotten Victory by Gary Sheffield; the first blast of the trumpet of the monstrous regiment of revisionists. Even if you're going to disagree with him about some of the conclusions he draws, you still need to read it. Most of what he says is accurate and well-founded and will help guide you away from the Blackadder telling of the war, and towards a more nuanced understanding of what was going on. The Western Front As ever, the Western Front is hugely over-represented and it's quite hard to go properly wrong. If you have a good tolerance for very dry dates-and-places recountings of grand strategy, and the doings of generals and politicians, everyone benefits from reading Robert A Doughty's Pyrrhic Victory, which is the grand strategy of the war from the French perspective. Which makes sense, as they were the primary strategic movers for the vast majority of the war. I can't recommend it highly enough for breaking people out of Anglocentric ways of thinking and conceptions of the war. You need a proper understanding of what the French thought they were up to; otherwise it's like reading about 1941-1945 with Eisenhower and Macarthur being occasional supporting characters instead of pivotal figures. It is very dry and academic, but it's worth persevering with. For the German perspective, no less important (again, it's like reading 1935-1945 and only barely thinking about Hitler), go with Alexander Watson's Ring of Steel, which will also introduce you to the German home front, the clusterfuck in Austria-Hungary, and the Eastern Front; and if you can cope with drier, more academic writings, Jorn Leonhard comes in with Pandora's Box. The last few years have also seen a wealth of works on under-appreciated elements of the Western Front. Martin Davies comes in with Conceal, Create, Confuse (the development of deception); Simon Jones with Underground Warfare (mining and sapping); John Glanfield with The Devil's Chariots (the invention of the tank and development of tactics). The Eastern Front Yes, there's an Eastern Front in this war, too. It's the direct cause of one of the two most geopolitically important consequences of the war, the Russian Revolution. Until very recently we were reliant on Norman Stone's ageing 70s The Eastern Front, weird cheap shots at Romanian officers and all, but he's now finally been knocked into a cocked hat by an excellent three-volume series from Prit Buttar (or Douglas Boyd's The Other First World War, which goes coast-to-coast in one volume, and naturally rather less detail). For a less imposing introduction to the sort of horror you're dealing with here, Graydon Tunstall's Blood on the Snow is short and snappy and focuses on the brutal fighting in the Carpathian Mountains in early 1915. Italy You've read Forgotten Victory to get away from the Blackadder view of the war. After that, Mark Thompson's The White War will take you to the Italian front and introduce you to General Luigi Cadorna, who genuinely did treat his men with levels of callousness far beyond what Blackadder could imagine, as he engages in twelve consecutive and entirely unsuccessful attempts to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Trieste and so turn the Adriatic Sea into an Italian pond. This front will also help you understand the post-war rise of OG Fascism on the backs of the Arditi and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Beyond Mainland Europe To get away from Europe entirely, the best starting point is probably Roger Ford with Eden to Armageddon. He briefly but comprehensively covers the three theatres of the war for the failing Ottoman Empire: Anatolia & the Caucasus; the modern-day Middle East; and Gallipoli. The section on the Anatolia/Caucasus campaign against the Russians is still the only English-language work I know of to attempt any kind of detailed recounting of the fighting in this area. The section on the Middle East is vital for understanding how that part of the world came to be how it is now. And there's also a nice unsentimental recounting of the disaster on Gallipoli without any unwanted over-the-top Anzackery dragging it down. Alternatively, go even further afield and join Edward Paice in west Africa for Tip & Run, on the war in modern-day Tanzania. This will introduce you to (among other things) a masterpiece of guerrilla warfare, a number of masterpieces of engineering, a lot of awful Boers, an attack thwarted by a storm of bees, naval supremacy being held by a flat-pack steamer (which is still sailing today) with a really large gun on it, and Winston Churchill quite literally trying to set a river on fire. It's such an odd place, even Portugal manages to be relevant somehow. Tiddly Up-Up-Up If there's anyone who likes planes and wants to go into military history with a popular bent, we're still waiting for a comprehensive bestseller about the birth of aerial warfare. Peter Hart has more than one volume of oral histories from the Royal Flying Corps. However, if you can slog through John H Morrow's pricey, vital, yet surpassingly boring The Great War in the Air, it's indispensible for showing how the situation went from the occasional recon aircraft with pilots waving at each other in 1914, to the birth of the modern fighter (Sopwith, Fokker, and SPAD) and bomber (Caproni series, the only good thing the Italians contributed), with constantly-evolving tactics to match. It's a fascinating subject, and urgently deserves attention from someone who can actually string a sentence together. Big Boats Go Bang Robert Massie. Castles of Steel. It's about more than really big ships that do gently caress-all except crash into each other during gunnery practice. The British Official Naval History is also freely available on the internet and is shockingly readable and entertaining, and you'll find out about all kinds of fun little minor actions and epic tales of derring-do as the tiny German colonial navy tried to escape the RN for as long as possible. Genocides And finally. Everyone should know about the Armenian Genocide, the event for which the word "genocide" was coined. Not least because the modern Turkish state has decided to go all-in on denying there was a genocide, to the point where scholars of the genocide have been murdered or forced to flee Turkey; and it'd really annoy a lot of people who deserve to be annoyed if you find out as much as possible about it. Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide will help get over what kind of villainy we're dealing with here; for more, Taner Akcam's life's work has been documenting the genocide and the intentions of its architects in painstakingly-evidenced detail. The great Jewish writer S Ansky also wrote a memoir of his time on the Eastern Front working to relieve the suffering of civilians, as each side freely committed war crimes in turn, and particularly targeted local Jewish populations for anti-Semitic violence. It was translated into English as The Enemy at his Pleasure, and these events would undoubtedly be far more notorious but for the surpassing industrialised crimes that would follow a generation later. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jan 26, 2021 |
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Jan 26, 2021 00:51
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best bale posted:I don’t see this book mentioned very often, but it’s fantastic brb, writing a deeply offended six-page letter to Le Midi Socialiste
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Jan 27, 2021 01:32
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Baron Porkface posted:Is it a hot take to say that the Macedonian Front was the turning point of WW1? It liquidated Bulgaria and exposed both Austria-Hungary and Ottomans to an attack that they had no preparation for and resulted in their groveling armistices. Is this a common belief outside America/Britain or did I get suckered by Greek nationalists? You got suckered. The Central Powers had been worn down so far that they simply lacked the resilience to react to major offensives in the way they'd been able to previously. If you must have a turning point for that war, it's the entry of the Americans, but it really doesn't make much sense to think of WW1 as even having turning points. Everything happens very quickly at the start, then everything bogs down forever while the strain increases and increases and increases on both sides, but by 1918 there's so much pressure going one way that all the others can do is collapse, which all happens so suddenly that even at the start of October 1918, everyone's planning for the grand war-winning offensives of 1919 and it isn't fully apparent just how hosed the Germans are.
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Feb 3, 2021 00:02
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HookedOnChthonics posted:World War I tanks give me the same vibe, tbh—did anyone else watch that three-part BBC series that was on Netflix that had one standout episode set almost entirely inside one? It really captured how utterly little compromise was made for human bodies to fit and function inside it You're thinking of Our World War (although I prefer episode 2); and, to the contrary, they ensured all mod cons by making it possible to fry eggs on the engine, at the cost of only a 14% increase in one's chance of having an arm taken off by the exposed flywheel, a highly attractive bargain for the average squaddie. Cessna posted:I'm not good at extemporaneous comments, it's a lot easier to answer questions. Anything you want to know about German infantry crap? What's the Wehrmacht's equivalent of the Macadam Shield Shovel?
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Feb 17, 2021 21:46
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Always interested in history. Everyone kept crapping on about the Second World War, so I wanted to know about it. Including how it got started in the first place. And what those masks were about. And why I was suddenly hearing about countries that didn't seem to exist any more. And why the poor ostrich died for nothing.
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Mar 3, 2021 00:31
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SkyeAuroline posted:Hoping for general pointers, but more specific threads to follow up on are appreciated. Got recommended here as a good source. TLDR: looking for resources to read up on Ottoman participation in WWI, potentially relevant internal politics in the same period. Start with Roger Ford's Eden to Armageddon for an overview of what you're dealing with. Follow up with Eugene Rogan, and you can also look into Edward J Erickson's stuff so long as you remember that he bought his extensive archive access by agreeing to downplay and deny the Armenian genocide. quote:I can follow up with more context related to the use case in question if it helps (and to find out just how inaccurate an author who cites Dan Carlin in-text actually is). Dan Carlin can get tae gently caress Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 23:18
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Nessus posted:If the Germans had been able to follow through on their first use of poison gas on the Western front, could they have broken through and ended the war with, if not necessarily a total crushing of France and British forces, a situation where they make enough gains to call it quits on their end? I have never been clear on that, but it seems like that is an under-examined counterfactual. On the other hand I may have done an undergraduate paper about chemical warfare The Second Battle of Ypres happened completely by accident. Both sides had experimented briefly with using tear gas in 1914 and it had proved to be an interesting sideshow and something that might maybe possibly be situationally useful in a real corner case, but it wasn't going to be a wonder weapon or anything like that. German planning was based on the idea that the best case scenario was going to be reducing the Ypres salient in possible preparation for a later attack, and disrupting the other side's preparations for renewed offensives in Artois and Champagne. They completely failed to appreciate how effective the initial attacks were, and it's the kind of weapon whose best effectiveness has an extremely short window, before the other side can get effective-if-rudimentary masks issued. Had they known for sure that for a week or so they were going to have an instant win button, it almost certainly would have been used somewhere near Noyon (the point at which the front stopped running broadly north/south and started running broadly east/west). There are two obvious strategic possibilities; drive south towards Paris and shock the French government into suing for peace (or collapsing then suing for peace), or west to Dieppe to cut off British access to the best Channel ports. Both of those things require adopting a completely different strategic attitude to the entire war to the one they in fact had, ("stand in France, attack Russia") and making easily-observable preparations, while not also having one's own faith in the ability to gain from an offensive dented by the easily-repulsed French attacks over the winter. They're probably not going to be achievable goals if opposed with fortitude; the only way I see the war being significantly affected is if they do somehow spook the French into withdrawing inland and giving up every port from Le Havre east, which may have tipped British thinking away from using the New Armies to enlarge the BEF, and towards sending them to Gallipoli/Salonika/Mesopotamia/Tanzania. Or, y'know, maybe it actually redoubles British desire to support the French more directly and the New Armies arrive in France sooner and start learning sooner. Maybe Louis Renault pulls his finger out in response, and we get the FT in mid-1916 instead of 1918.
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Apr 3, 2021 14:39
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Nobody who's writing in English seems to know what's up with Renault. It just goes from, he has zero interest in developing armoured fighting vehicles in 1915, he explicitly tells the French Army's tank pioneers to gently caress off in December 1915 (which is why the first French tanks were built by Schneider and Saint-Chamond); and yet by July 1916 he's personally got his drawing board out to design the FT, for reasons unknown.
Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Apr 4, 2021 |
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Apr 4, 2021 20:11
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I think there's a non-zero chance that the Germans could have pulled a quick victory off in 1914 using the same basic concept of inviting the French to advance through the revolving door of Alsace and Lorraine, whereupon the STRONK RIGHT VING wheels round to kick them up the arse and cut them off faster than they can retreat. However, what it's also going to take is big enough brass balls to bring the French all the way up to the Rhine, and possibly even allowing them to cross it, before the hammer falls. This shortens the distances involved far enough that it's possible that the SRV might actually be humanly capable of marching and fighting the required distance in the required time without collapsing well short of the finish. That's an absolutely massive risk; it's entirely possible that the Kaiser would have taken fright and forbidden it; and even if allowed to play out without any interference like we're in a Paradox game, it's just as likely that if things go down this way, the Western Front ends up running from something like Trier to Liechtenstein by way of Stuttgart, which is a far worse outcome for Germany than what they ended up with.
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Apr 6, 2021 18:09
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EggsAisle posted:My understanding of WW1 is that nobody expected or predicted it would play out the way it did, or that it would draw in so many countries. Is that actually true? Or was there anyone in like 1912 (or even in the early weeks of the war) looking at the situation and thinking "we're in for a long, bloody mess if this blows up." I heard an anecdote once of an American remarking that Europe was like a powder keg- but that's literally from my high school history textbook, so who knows. The way I read it is, you've got a bunch of drunk people in the middle of a really killer party. They're all standing around something really flammable, juggling lit candles. They're all very good at juggling candles. Most of the time the candles stay in the air and nobody gets hurt. Every so often, someone fumbles and some other people all dive after the falling candle to stop it setting fire to the entire house. Someone catches it, there's a few awkward looks, and then everyone goes right back to juggling candles. They're all preparing for what could happen if a candle falls all the way and how they might best take advantage of this and how to make sure Neil gets stuck with the burning bedroom, but nobody's actively trying to drop a candle; it's just that everyone's going to do it if they're pissed and juggling candles. And then one day, someone drops a candle, but this time around, independently, all for their own very good reasons, everyone just stares at everyone else while it falls, and goes "actually it's your job to catch the drat thing this time". The candle falls, the house burns down, and someone posts that old meme about WWI as a bar fight. In the European system after 1871, crises were inevitable. It was never inevitable that any given crisis would lead to war, as demonstrated by the large number of crises that came and went and everyone carried right on rolling. It wasn't inevitable that the crisis of July 1914 would lead to war...except that everyone decided it was someone else's responsibility to back down. It could have just carried on and history would have taken a different course.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:10
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Hannibal Rex posted:Thinking about this has led me to a question of my own: if the Central Powers had had enough foresight to consider the war unwinnable by that time, could they have used a magnanimous treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a diplomatic signal for better peace terms for themselves later on? The problem here is, by the time Brest-Litovsk is being negotiated, you've got on the one hand Woodrow Wilson let out of his box and banging on about the Fourteen Points and self-determination; and on the other you have Georges Clemenceau, about whom it is deeply unfair to say he was the French Churchill, because if you're going to put it like that you should say Churchill is the English Clemenceau. Neither of them are even remotely interested in buying gay black Hindenburg and Ludendorff's KK-Brot and nail statues. Even if you want to handwave some sensible Germans into power, you also have to handwave in a Joseph Caillaux premiership in France after the failure of the Nivelle offensive. Then, and only then, might you actually get somewhere with peace talks.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:19
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Neophyte posted:Y'all should stop making repetitive jokes and talk about actual milhist like the Battle of the Isonzo. Indeed, an important victory for Theodoric.
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Apr 23, 2021 10:12
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Can't make an invasion without blooding the pups...
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Apr 28, 2021 11:20
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Tomn posted:You know, promotion talk got me thinking of a silly pop culture question - I remember when I was very young in one of the Tom Clancy books there's a scene where an American officer (probably ubermensch Jack Ryan) runs across this highly efficient British sergeant and thinks "drat, what a waste. If he was in the US military he'd have been promoted to officer. Instead he's stuck in the British Army as a NCO for the rest of his career." Was that an accurate representation of promotion patterns in the two countries at the time (I assume around the '80s-'90s)? If it was, do we know why their patterns diverged, and how it impacted overall effectiveness, if it did? In the British context this is historically a simple and ironclad class issue. Until the Second World War the situation is one that Sharpe would have recognised, in which about two people a year are commissioned from the ranks, and they are inevitably quarter-blokes who are going to become logistics officers; as one does eventually need the occasional competent man to make sure the pipe-tobacco and cigarettes keep arriving on time. After the Second World War, the general spirit of relative egalitarianism allows people doing National Service to be selected from the ranks for officer training, and it's found that wearing red trousers and shouting "hurrah!" is not as important as was previously thought. By the 90s, it's just about starting to become an accepted career path for high-flying senior NCOs to take a Late Entry commission. In, say, the Royal Tank Regiment. Good luck trying to do that in the Household Division.
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May 21, 2021 17:18
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Arbite posted:Were any studies done on what an exclusively Austria-Hungary vs Serbia 1914 conflict would have looked like? Not really. It's kind of like asking "what would have happened if gunpowder weapons didn't exist yet?" At this point, you're so far from reality that it stops being useful. Everyone's thinking was shaped by the certain knowledge that Russia would intervene on Serbia's side.
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May 23, 2021 01:25
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I'm not sure I see the value in trying to slap a label of "best" or "better" or anything else on either army.
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Jun 3, 2021 01:20
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Tulip posted:Heck even ACW battlefields are still typically recognizable as fields even after heavy fighting, which is a pretty radical contrast to 50 years after that when WW1 artillery could alter the physical terrain very rapidly. The sites of the mobile fighting in the first couple of months of the war recovered well enough. There are relatively few scars left over from the Eastern Front. You don't get Morannon-inspiring hellscapes until you sit somewhere for months on end, then you dump three months' worth of shell over the course of a morning, then you fail to meet your goals for the offensive and so the original front is still getting knocked about even though it's now half a mile in somebody's rear.
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Jun 8, 2021 22:33
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I would like to make sure this doesn't drown in tankchat:Cracker King posted:Any recommendations for early naval history (or really “figuring this navy stuff out”) like during the first two Punic Wars. Particularly the development of the Corvus.
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Jun 21, 2021 00:53
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If the CIA killed anyone at about that time, it was Dag Hammarskjöld
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Jun 28, 2021 02:59
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Nenonen posted:Do you mean predecessors? Stephen Badsey likes to refer to the intended role of cavalry in WW1 on the Western Front as being that of very, very short-range paratroopers; the idea being that they move faster than walking pace to arrive somewhere inconvenient in the enemy's rear, with the objective of causing havoc and holding that inconvenient point until the main thrust of the offensive can arrive and relieve them. The horses may stay with them, but they're not relying on the horses to leave again, in the same way that paratroopers don't expect the plane to land and pick them up again later; once they're in, they're in for good. It's not a perfect analogy by any means, but it's a simple and memorable way of getting across what they were trying to achieve and were never quite able to. It does also go against the "hidebound donkeys" narrative to an extent; there's nothing wrong with the basic concept, which is both sound and innovative, they were just 25 years too early for it to be practicable.
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Jul 6, 2021 15:46
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Jobbo_Fett posted:So I'm currently doing a dumb thing for my aviation podcast and, as a non-German speaker, this quote is very good at confirming my childishness. The moment when Anglophones realise that it is very difficult for a German to go anywhere without Fahrten is always a wonderful and glorious one.
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Jul 20, 2021 23:09
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FPyat posted:I'm having trouble finding a book that will give me a more than barebones understanding of the Hundred Days Offensive in 1918. Peter Hart will give you more personal accounts from ground level; Jonathan Boff with Winning and Losing on the Western Front will give you more of a structural understanding of the combatant armies. Both are inevitably Anglocentric, and if you can cope with extremely dry-but-worthy writing then the end of Robert A Doughty's Pyrrhic Victory is indispensable, as it's the grand strategy and politics of the war from the French perspective, who were the prime strategic movers for the entire war. You wouldn't put much stock in a book about the grand strategy of 1944 that barely mentioned Eisenhower or Patton. Above all, remember that "Hundred Days" is an absolutely awful name, in the same way as "Race to the Sea", because it implies deliberation and purpose in something that happened by accident. Right up to the moment when the German government fell and the new goverrnment indicated they were willing to negotiate, Winston Churchill was arguing most strenously for caution and husbanding of resources for use in the war-deciding battles of 1920; and Haig still thought it as likely as not that the war would last into the spring or summer of 1919.
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Aug 6, 2021 23:16
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Randarkman posted:The Schlieffen Plan is kind of great in that it seems to exemplify what happens when you have your military intricately work out this war and mobilization plan to the minutest details without basically any oversight by civilian authorities and it results in a mobilization plan where you have given yourself no other option but to immediately attack France through Belgium, also since it the plan hinges on being able to defeat France before Russia can fully mobilize, you have also left yourself in a position where you absolutely can't not mobilize if Russia does so. German pre-war planning was very much more complex than the Chancellor running in a panic to the Sacredschlieffenkabinett on about July 23 with a large hammer, breaking the glass, pulling out the One True Holy and Apostolic Plan to Win a European War Which Cannot Possibly Be Questioned, and finding out to his own horror that it was all about giving the French a well-deserved slapping, again, and it was now far too late to consider doing anything else (except fatally weakening that STRONK RIGHT VING, natch). The Prussian army is not solely or even mainly responsible for creating the web of interweaving alliances which made it likely that, if it came to it, they would have to fight a two-front war; and they planned for a variety of potential scenarios while giving most attention to what they thought was most likely to happen. quote:Also the extremely intricate railway tables for mobilization with the Schlieffen Plan. The sheer size of the active-duty German army, coupled with the need to recall reservists to the colours and the need to supply all these millions of men made intricate railway timetables inevitable. Everyone needed intricate railway timetables in the event of war. The railways were what made mobilisation on that scale and at that speed possible. So much disproportionate focus goes to how Zee Chermans did it in popular histories, and more than anything it's because that plays into our cultural desire to tell reassuringly stereotypical stories about Teutonic efficiency. The French required equally heroic efforts of logistics and supply to get their army into the field, but they don't get any popular attention at all. Like most things about France in the Great War, it doesn't fit with our image of who the French are as a nation, so popular histories just quietly shuffle them to the background in favour of Tommy and Fritz and Those Wacky Anzac Scamps.
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Aug 17, 2021 01:24
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Just about since their invention, a tank has been a really convenient way of moving an inconveniently large gun to a place from where it can seriously inconvenience a conveniently sited enemy.
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Aug 25, 2021 18:09
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Mycroft Holmes posted:If you enlisted as a private soldier in the British military in 1914, how high could you rise by 1918? What if you were lower class? Assuming humble origins: Sergeant, easily. CSM or RSM, if you were lucky. If you were a decent quarter-bloke on top of that, there was half a chance of a commission in the usual way. As the war wore on and the Trinity Tiddlers diminished in number, there was a distinct rise in the use of temporary short-service commissions, and a vast widening of the backgrounds considered acceptable for an officer down to the Pooterian middle classes. This was open both to new entrants and applicants from the ranks, and quite a few of the New Armies duly signed up for two years of being casually patronised because they said "pardon" and thought going to Badminton involved a racquet and shuttlecock. It wasn't impossible to get a temporary commission from humble origins, but dig into working-class temporary gentlemen's stories and they tend either to be long-service SNCOs who look very like a modern day late entry officer, or else had a generous officer as patron to ease their path. In either case, Major was generally the most that could be hoped for, and that only rarely. Clement Attlee is the most famous example, and he'd been to Haileybury and Oxford, albeit coming from a family of solicitors.
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Sep 5, 2021 00:55
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Nebakenezzer posted:Mr. Trin: do you know of any good books on the WW1 Zeppelin flight to Africa? I'm also looking for good books about LTA flight in WW1 generally, but focusing on ze Germans, don't know if you know of any. Not on the flight specifically, no. My go-to books for flyers were Peter Hart's various oral histories for developments in people and tactics, and then the entirely indispensable and surpassingly boring The Great War in the Air (John H Morrow) for the developments in technology, comparative strengths in airframes, political considerations, and so on and so forth. There's a real gap for someone who can write entertainingly to come along and tell funny stories about the Flying Circus and parochialism in Seriously, it's almost on the level of the Imperial Free Air Force of That One Guy (and his trusty mechanic).
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Sep 8, 2021 16:27
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mllaneza posted:US Amazon too, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POH14-HMGFc quote:At the head of our column marched our new commandant, named Leblanc. He was small, thin, and scrawny. A wag had baptized him Quinze-Grammes [fifteen grams; “half-pint”], which was an immediate success. He would never be called anything else by the irreverent soldiers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nay3Eo9aF2Q Reigning world champion, and world raining champion. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Sep 25, 2021 |
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Sep 25, 2021 23:40
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Are we really struggling to deal with the possibility that a Frenchman might have an unreasonably large ego and take offence when mildly slighted? This would not exactly constitute scoop of the century in 1940.
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Oct 24, 2021 00:18
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