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So it wasn't the legions...it was the roads
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May 25, 2023 17:25
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Cessna posted:As with Nelson, you don't get talented subordinates unless you develop them*, and that's a massive part of generalship that is often overlooked. And the dude pretty much had a very solid choice of experienced captains of his staff too. While greasing the political wheel helped with the Admiralty and all that the man also had quite the career climbing the rigging of the Royal Navy.
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May 25, 2023 17:34
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Vahakyla posted:Yes they are, BECAUSE most of the good poo poo is already written down and established, researched and rehearsed. One can't invent new poo poo constantly. Being able to follow all that has been learned and taught is the genius part here. I think there are tiers. From worst to best: - Doesn't really understand the manual, can't do the basic but necessary work under pressure. - Understands the basics / the manual and is capable of handling operations even in difficult conditions or unusual circumstances. - Understands the manual and is capable of innovation beyond it. I mentioned Nelson earlier, he's clearly in the latter category. The "by the book" way to fight was to use the line of battle. He went beyond that by using squadrons led by empowered subordinates to break up the enemy. This was a tremendous gamble, but he pulled it off.
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May 25, 2023 17:36
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yeah people underestimate how much of winning a war is just getting your army from point A to point B while staying in fighting shape
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May 25, 2023 19:44
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Fangz posted:Commanding an army is really loving hard. A simple tactic that you wouldn't think anything of in a RTS videogame in reality would need a shitload of drilling and planning and excellent battlefield awareness. Don't be too smug about it. yeah, for most of human history command and control was very primitive and ineffective. commanders largely just decided on how to position before the battle and then when to send in the reserves. Once troops are engaged it's very hard to get them to do anything else. Because well, they are likely too distracted by being in a life and death fight with the enemy in front of them to follow your orders. And if you try to order them to retreat or reposition all it takes is a couple of panicky guys running away to turn the maneuver into a route. Typo fucked around with this message at 19:57 on May 25, 2023 |
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May 25, 2023 19:53
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Zorak of Michigan posted:WRT American generals and brilliance, I think one aspect of it that has to be included in the conversation is an understanding of the tools at hand. From the Civil War through WWII, it's a force being created as the war goes on, backed by vast resources. Some elite units may be strong at every level, but most will have some fraction of officers who were promoted because, well, we needed officers, not because they had the ability needed for the rank. I think Grant used his army according to its strengths, and if the results didn't look as clever as one of Rommel's crazy gambles-that-worked, well, why would Grant gamble when he didn't need to? The problem with Civil War Union generals in the eastern theatre was that they were constrained by Lincoln playing amateur strategist that prevented some of the more clever/ambitious plans from being carried out. Like when Lee invaded the north Joseph Hooker basically said "haha this is great we should just march on Richmond now wtf is Lee gonna do" but Lincoln was obsessed with the idea of destroying Lee's army in the field so he ordered Hooker to move north to fight him. The problem was that Lincoln got it backwards: he wanted to destroy Lee's army in order to capture Richmond. But in reality the way you destroy Lee's army was to threaten Richmond and force him to defend it in set-piece battles where superior Union engineering and artillery can attrition it to death. That was basically McClellan's plan in 1862 on the peninsular just executed poorly. And it's what Grant eventually did successfully at Petersburg. Typo fucked around with this message at 20:10 on May 25, 2023 |
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May 25, 2023 20:04
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zoux posted:So it wasn't the legions...it was the roads Well, the Roman road network worked against them sometimes. Having great roads is wonderful until your enemy is using them to invade and your response isn't ready yet.
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May 25, 2023 22:29
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zoux posted:So it wasn't the legions...it was the roads I thought in a lot of ways it was back then, because logistics and ease of travel was super important so your army didn't die or exhaust themselves getting to the fight
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May 25, 2023 23:31
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Typo posted:The other weakness was that he as a mediocre tactician at best: that's how you get those costly frontal assaults. And to be fair to Grant the most notorious examples of this (Cold Harbor) was in a campaign he didn't even want to fight. I am not aware of any firm plan put forth by Grant to perform a redux of McClellan's 1862 campaign to take Richmond. Certainly not after he was elevated as the top General. To my knowledge, he did purpose in a letter in January of 1864 a campaign to move 60,000 troops from the Eastern Theatre (basically the strength of the AotP) to Suffolk and begin a campaign to essentially destroy Southern infrastructure to the city of Raleigh before swinging down to the port of Wilmington which Grant felt was a port more valuable to the South than the entire rest of the coast. Grant pointed out that this would get a major army in southern climates where there would not be the need for extended time spent in winter quarters and force the Confederates to fight within its interior by threatening their last major rail line linking the South together, hopefully forcing many North Carolinians to desert, and potentially liberate a lot of blacks. This was just a rough sketch in response to a feeler by Halleck about how Grant sees the overall strategy picture. This recommendation was indeed rejected by Lincoln on Halleck's advice but this was before Grant was promoted to LTG. Following his promotion, Lincoln and Grant put together the Overland Campaign with Grant acknowledging the very real political concerns that Lincoln had about not allowing Lee to yet again rampage in the North if he and the Confederate leadership chose to ignore Grant's grand chevauchée in the south. The peace movement had grown the point where Lincoln genuinely feared for his political future and anticipated losing the election. He felt that another major incursion by the South, and this time left unchecked because Lee was not pinned down, would be the final nail in the coffin on the North's chances of winning the war. Typo posted:The problem with Civil War Union generals in the eastern theatre was that they were constrained by Lincoln playing amateur strategist that prevented some of the more clever/ambitious plans from being carried out. I think you sell Lincoln short here. While he never had formal education in military matters, he was alone in understanding that the North's advantage was in men and material and that the surest way to end the war was to apply maximum pressure simultaneously on all theatres of operation till the South collapsed. He recognized this in early 1862 when Halleck, still an army commander in the west at the time pushed back on Lincoln's repeated calls for him and Buell to work together simultaneously to crush the Army of Tennesee. When Halleck cited the issue of the Confederates possessing interior lines as his issue with Lincoln's idea, Lincoln immediately and correctly pushed back by stating that you defeat an enemy's interior lines by applying your superior material resources along multiple areas at the same time. It wasn't until Grant was elevated that Lincoln found a man who shared his vision for how the war should be prosecuted. The only difference was that Grant was more interested in pressuring the economic centres of war while Lincoln understood that the Rebel armies were the centres of gravity politically and that they needed to be destroyed if the will to fight was to be maintained in the North. Lincoln also didn't interfere unless he had no choice. Mac was allowed to proceed with his peninsular campaign despite the fact that Lincoln had insisted on a safer overland route to operate against Johnston which kept the AotP close to its bases of supply and offered a chance at battle sooner rather than later. Lincoln also correctly pointed out that such a maneuver South would take time and Johnston would simply maneuver to block him if he was delayed and you would have the same fight only now Johnston would be fighting close to his own base of supply. Mac disagreed and Lincoln let him do his thing. Even when Lincoln was proven correct as Mac dragged his heels, he didn't order McClellan into doing anything other than reminding him that time was of the essence. Mac waved him off and then he found himself stuck in front of fortifications before Lee sent him packing. Burnside and Hooker similarly had their chances with Fredericksburg and Chancellsorville without political interference from an operational standpoint. Rosecrans and Grant were never interfered with in the West despite what felt like maddening monthslong delays by Rosecrans following their narrow victory at Stones River and another lengthy delay after the Tullahoma campaign and the start of the Chickamauga offensive. Lincoln only interfered when Northern generals refused to take on Southern armies when they started their intermittent rampages into Northern soil. While the generals were correct in that these actions may not ultimately be threatening militarily, Lincoln understood that politically, to keep the country in the fight these activities could not be tolerated since they inevitably generated great panic every time Southern armies began northward marches. Hence the veto of Hooker's proposition. Its also not like Lincoln and Halleck just let Richmond off the hook that campaign. The Federals scraped together 30,000 men for a run at Richmond while Lee was up north but a weak commander faced with uncertainty in Confederate numbers in front of him wasn't up to the task.
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May 26, 2023 00:22
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Gort posted:This is a pretty tough question to answer. What point in history are you thinking of? It’s the time when people have gobbled up much of the previous harvest, but before the overwinter crops had grown - I don’t know what proportion of farms across history did so, but I thought they gave an earlier harvest. Foraging in winter is more difficult, with need for firewood, but I was more trying to guess at what times would give meager pickings.
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May 26, 2023 02:24
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FPyat posted:It’s the time when people have gobbled up much of the previous harvest, but before the overwinter crops had grown - I don’t know what proportion of farms across history did so, but I thought they gave an earlier harvest. Foraging in winter is more difficult, with need for firewood, but I was more trying to guess at what times would give meager pickings. Huh? How are those causally related? If you’re still doing anything with firewood besides burning it in winter you have deeply hosed that entire task for the year already.
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May 26, 2023 02:43
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Xiahou Dun posted:Huh? How are those causally related? Men in the field during the winter need a lot of fuel, a huge amount, and it takes up too much space to store a lot of it in any mobile fashion. It basically doubles the workload on foraging, and in winter foraging is already harder since there are fewer animals around and no crops out to steal -- you need to go kick over more concentrated and fortified stores.
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May 26, 2023 03:19
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O it’s talking about the soldiers foraging, not the farmers from the previous sentence. My bad.
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May 26, 2023 03:47
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zoux posted:We will stab them with our swords. Or spears, if that's what you have. *conquers Asia in a week* Didn't Shaka have a great deal of success with this strategy as well?
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May 26, 2023 03:48
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The Lone Badger posted:Didn't Shaka have a great deal of success with this strategy as well? I didn't know about the Asian Zulu empire before!
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May 26, 2023 03:55
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The Lone Badger posted:Didn't Shaka have a great deal of success with this strategy as well? I've read previously that Shaka's great innovation was changing from highly-ritualized, low-fatality combat to a tactic of encircling and annihilating enemy troops. There are claims that Shaka had a policy of executing the families of any warrior who retreated from battle, or even those who failed to attack with enough aggression. As I just went to read more about this, I also read that some scholars contend that Shaka's brutality was exaggerated by Apartheid-era historians as a way of justifying racism against South Africa's Black population. Does anyone in this thread have good knowledge about the current scholarship and how many of the stories about Shaka are actually true?
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May 26, 2023 16:30
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Any recommendations on a good single volume history of WW2 in the Pacific? Ideal if it's on Audible. Or a good youtube or something. The way the Pacific war is not quite geographically contiguous and linear has always made it hard to follow for me.
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May 26, 2023 18:02
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Any recommendations on a good single volume history of WW2 in the Pacific? Ideal if it's on Audible. Or a good youtube or something. The way the Pacific war is not quite geographically contiguous and linear has always made it hard to follow for me. Audible seems to have the audiobook version of it available. I'd love to hear suggestions for a newer/better book. I had hopes for the Harmsen War in the Far East series (which flips the script and treats it as primarily an Asian conflict, with all the USN/IJN island hopping a sideshow) but I was deeply unimpressed by the first volume.
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May 26, 2023 18:13
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Any recommendations on a good single volume history of WW2 in the Pacific? Ideal if it's on Audible. Or a good youtube or something. The way the Pacific war is not quite geographically contiguous and linear has always made it hard to follow for me. John Toland's The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 is good, especially because it covers a lot of why the war started in the first place.
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May 26, 2023 18:19
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Something I'll throw out there is that much like the war in Europe, you really have to conceptualize the Pacific as two loosely related but ultimately independent conflicts. You have the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and the American-Japanese War (1941-1945). Note that I'm simplifying by calling the second one the "American" war, it's more broadly against the US and all the European colonial powers, although it rapidly became an American-dominated show. Massive asterisks on that, but it's worth noting that even Australia was sending a crap ton of soldiers to N. Africa at the very moment when they were most threatened by the rapidly advancing IJN. Either way, you've got some coordination and communication between the Chinese and the rest of the Allies, but it's more or less the same kind of nominal cooperation that you see between the Western Allies and the USSR. And of course once you start getting into China poo poo gets complex, fast, as it's not as simple as just "China vs. Japan" because of Mao and the Nationalists etc.
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May 26, 2023 18:27
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Cyrano4747 posted:Either way, you've got some coordination and communication between the Chinese and the rest of the Allies, but it's more or less the same kind of nominal cooperation that you see between the Western Allies and the USSR. Somewhere the ghost of Claire Chennault is sad now.
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May 26, 2023 18:48
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MikeC posted:II think you sell Lincoln short here. While he never had formal education in military matters, he was alone in understanding that the North's advantage was in men and material and that the surest way to end the war was to apply maximum pressure simultaneously on all theatres of operation till the South collapsed. He recognized this in early 1862 when Halleck, still an army commander in the west at the time pushed back on Lincoln's repeated calls for him and Buell to work together simultaneously to crush the Army of Tennesee. When Halleck cited the issue of the Confederates possessing interior lines as his issue with Lincoln's idea, Lincoln immediately and correctly pushed back by stating that you defeat an enemy's interior lines by applying your superior material resources along multiple areas at the same time. It wasn't until Grant was elevated that Lincoln found a man who shared his vision for how the war should be prosecuted. The only difference was that Grant was more interested in pressuring the economic centres of war while Lincoln understood that the Rebel armies were the centres of gravity politically and that they needed to be destroyed if the will to fight was to be maintained in the North. I think Lincoln did suffer from "amateur talk tactics, professionals talk about logistics" when it come to military operations. Like I"m not sure about Halleck incident, but famously after Gettysburg Lincoln blamed Meade for being slow at pursuing Lee and destroying him. Meade basically said "I don't have enough supplies and the horses need rest": Lincoln just dismissed that as an excuse and that's one of the reasons why he and Halleck brought in Grant to displace him. Modern historical research (like https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA288206.pdf) showed Meade was right: the Army of Potomac had being shot to pieces. They were short of ammunition/horses etc and needed resupply to conduct a pursuit, said re-supply was delayed by rain and other difficulties. By the time Meade caught up to Lee he was -still- undersupplied and the Confederates were in a strong defensive position itching for the Union to attack so they can get their payback for Gettysburg. So he didn't attack. The more I read about Lincoln the more I'm beginning to think that he was just out of his depths and didn't grasp what a massive place America was and how difficult logistics actually was in just getting army from point A to point B across massive distances. I think because of his popularity the traditional historical narrative just took his side and blamed the generals. But I really do think he could sometimes be the equivalent of the dude who plays total war yelling at actual generals why don't you just win by cycle-charging the enemy with ur cav units. quote:The peace movement had grown the point where Lincoln genuinely feared for his political future and anticipated losing the election. The impression I got is that the peace movement grew in strength -because- the overland campaign took horrendous casualties and Grant didn't seem to have achieved much. Typo fucked around with this message at 19:00 on May 26, 2023 |
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May 26, 2023 18:58
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quote:Lincoln also didn't interfere unless he had no choice. Also somewhat related: both armies during the Civil War were -very- politized and it very much did matter if you were a Democrat or Republican and what your stances on domestic politics were. There was internal army politics which was basically office politics that largely revolved around the whether you liked Halleck more or McClellan more. If you were a Union general the worst thing you could do was piss off Halleck because he will undermine you and destroy your career regardless of how competent or not you were. Halleck was the master of army politics and all of his friends ended up in prominent command positions by the end of the war. Sherman and Grant were both part of his clique and largely owe their careers to him.
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May 26, 2023 19:16
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ulmont posted:Somewhere the ghost of Claire Chennault is sad now. Chennault is kind of the exception that proves the rule. The 14th AF was certainly a thing, but it wasn't decisive and frankly if it hadn't been there it doesn't really change the outcome of either the war as a whole or the war in China specifically. Same with the joint Chinse-American/British/Indian/etc operations in Burma. There are always going to be places you can show connections, but fundamentally the land war in continental Asia and the island-hopping campaign fought by the Americans were separate conflicts.
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May 26, 2023 19:18
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Of course they were separate wars, iirc the IJA never declared war on the US, while the IJN did.
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May 26, 2023 19:47
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Of course they were separate wars, iirc the IJA never declared war on the US, while the IJN did. This is an interesting note to make about the war. I do have to wonder if this makes any real difference though. Did it affect how the war played out is my main thought at the moment, though I am open to any and all insights that can be gleaned from this one. Really appreciate this post, never knew this was a thing at all. Thank you.
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May 26, 2023 19:56
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Typo posted:I think Lincoln did suffer from "amateur talk tactics, professionals talk about logistics" when it come to military operations. To be fair to Lincoln, he'd spent a lot of time dealing with a general who did, in fact, constantly make excuses as to why he wasn't waging the war with aggression. There's some excuses for why McClellan was as... deliberate as he was, of course. He was easily taken in by Confederate deception tricks, and he always doubled Pinkerton's assessments of enemy troop strength - which Pinkerton had already doubled when his agents sent in their (usually very accurate) reports. A bigger part, though, is that McClellan was a superb organizer who always wanted to wait for just one more set of supplies or just one more bit of drill.
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May 27, 2023 01:39
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Of course they were separate wars, iirc the IJA never declared war on the US, while the IJN did. War was between the US and Empire of Japan. If you mean the US never fought the IJA, thats not true. They fought in the Philippines, Raubal, Guam, Iwo, Okinawa, etc. The IJA fought in pretty much all the island battles.
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May 27, 2023 02:32
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Typo posted:I think Lincoln did suffer from "amateur talk tactics, professionals talk about logistics" when it come to military operations. There is no doubt that much of this is true. Lincoln and Stanton frequently underestimated the logistical constraints that at times hampered or dictated Federal operations. This persisted through to the end of the war when Thomas was on the verge of being relieved for taking his time to assemble his new command to finish Hood at Nashville. But your charge that Lincoln talked tactics is false as is your assertion from the previous post that Federal commanders were constrained. McClellan despite having 4 corp commanders imposed on him was allowed to carry out his op. Those subordinates forced on him were not the cause of failure in 1862, McClellan's own illusory phantoms of hordes of Confederates blocking him and his own timidity lost him the Peninsular battles (having Lee opposite you didn't help I guess). Burnside was given a timetable to move out but Fredericksburg was all him, and Hooker was given a free hand for the Chancellorsville campaign. Halleck and Buell in the West followed by Grant and Rosecrans were similarly free of interference. Rosecrans despite constant hounding by Stanton was given all the time he felt he needed and both the Tullahoma and Chickamauga campaigns were his own without input from Lincoln. Lincoln wasn't a Hitler fiddling with battalions and regiments. It simply wasn't feasible given Lincoln was in Washington and the time delays of 19th-century communications. What Lincoln did talk about strategy. He and the War Department frequently set the goals or boundaries in which Federal armies and their commanders had to operate which is sensible. While he and Stanton frequently pushed for a higher tempo, only Buell was outright relieved of command on that basis. Operational control was left to them. Lincoln wasn't the guy at the map telling generals where and how their corps and divisions were to march. What he did demand was activity, aggression, and coordination and the record backs him up as correct on this. From the time McClellan launched his Peninsular campaign to Grant's ascension to the commander of all Federal armies, the AotP engaged only in 6 major operations over the span of 24 months. Besides time spent in winter quarters, the biggest army on either side was frequently idle and not engaged especially after a major battle. For example, even if Meade could not immediately pursue Lee following Gettysburg, there was little excuse for being as idle as he was till the Bristoe Campaign. This lull allowed Longstreet to be detached for duty in the West and his presence along with 15,000 men from the ANoV was a major contributing factor to Rosecran's defeat at Chickamauga. Lincoln was infuriated as he should have been as this type of idleness allow the Confederates to shuffle men from crisis point to crisis point while Federal armies lay inactive. If not Lee's two separate forays into the North where McClellan and Hooker were forced into action by Lincoln to put an end to Lee's rampage, that idle time might have been even worse. Compare this to the final 12 months of the war when the AotP was in almost constant movement from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania, to the battles on the North Anna before settling into the siege of Petersburg in July. Even while in siege, Grant kept Meade and satellite armies active with numerous raids in the Richmond area preceding the fiasco at The Crater, and subsequent to that an extended effort on the Weldon rail link to Wilmington. Simply put there is no excuse for the previous commanders in the East to have been as inactive as they were even if Lincoln was wrong on occasion about what was, or was not possible in a given situation like the aftermath of Gettysburg. Typo posted:In early 1864? Lincoln's political position was already severely weakened in the mid-terms of 1862 when the Republicans bled seats in the House. Dissatisfaction with the war and the lack of enthusiasm was evident with the failure of the recruiting drives and I am sure you know how popular the draft law was in 1863 that ended with New York riots. Without modern polling techniques, it is impossible to know the strength of the Copperhead movement but politicians openly ran on the peace/negotiation platform starting on the bottom half of 1863. Copperheads by Jennifer Weber details some of the day-to-day violence that was occurring in Northern communities that began to come out in force in 1863 after the draft law was passed. You are correct that the summer of 1864 was especially bleak but it wasn't as if public sentiment flipped overnight from enthusiastic to total dejection due to the losses sustained in the Overland campaign. War weariness had already crept in by the start of 1864. The relative lack of success on all fronts in the summer campaigning season for all 4 major Federal areas of operation until Atlanta fell made prospects even bleaker but Lincoln's political future was far from secure. Lincoln continued to believe, as he did since the start of the war, the war would continue until the rebel armies were defeated and scattered and directed Grant to go after them. MikeC fucked around with this message at 02:44 on May 27, 2023 |
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May 27, 2023 02:40
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Epicurius posted:War was between the US and Empire of Japan. If you mean the US never fought the IJA, thats not true. They fought in the Philippines, Raubal, Guam, Iwo, Okinawa, etc. The IJA fought in pretty much all the island battles. It's a joke about how the IJA and IJN were so unwilling and unable to cooperate that they effectively fought separate wars.
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May 27, 2023 04:13
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I'm still amazed they worked together during the Siege of Shanghai.
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May 27, 2023 13:12
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TheWeedNumber posted:This is an interesting note to make about the war. I do have to wonder if this makes any real difference though. Did it affect how the war played out is my main thought at the moment, though I am open to any and all insights that can be gleaned from this one. Really appreciate this post, never knew this was a thing at all. Thank you. Preeeeeetty sure that was just a joke about the ridiculous interservice rivalry going on in Japan, not an actual thing.
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May 27, 2023 13:41
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I think there's also a point to be made that despite the casualties of the Overland Campaign, morale in the AotP generally remained high because this time they were actually doing something. They were going forwards after every battle rather than marching back north.
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May 27, 2023 14:02
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There was a Leyte Gulf derail in the GiP Ukraine thread and I was recommended to cross-post this here:bees everywhere posted:I know it has nothing to do with Ukraine but I have enjoyed the Leyte Gulf chat. In case anyone is interested, my grandpa was on the USS Louisville (heavy cruiser and Oldendorf's flagship at Surigao Strait). After he passed away I was given a CD with a digital "cruise book" that was supposedly put together by the crew after the war. I figured a few of you would be interested so I took some screenshots from the relevant chapters and posted them here (imgur) edit: I'll post one more chapter since it's Memorial Day Weekend and I'm thinking about the old man, this is the chapter immediately following Surigao Strait: Kamikaze  (pictures of KIA/WIA)
bees everywhere fucked around with this message at 03:11 on May 28, 2023 |
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May 28, 2023 02:35
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Tomn posted:Preeeeeetty sure that was just a joke about the ridiculous interservice rivalry going on in Japan, not an actual thing. yeah and im still curious enough to want to to hear more Zorak of Michigan posted:It's a joke about how the IJA and IJN were so unwilling and unable to cooperate that they effectively fought separate wars. 
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May 28, 2023 12:34
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TheWeedNumber posted:yeah and im still curious enough to want to to hear more Well, among other things, the interservice rivalry was part of the reason why Japan went to war in the first place. To the best of my understanding, broadly speaking almost everyone in the Navy high command knew that war with the US would end in disaster, and most people in Army high command were aware that it wouldn't go that well either. However, in government planning sessions neither side was willing to admit that the Navy/Army couldn't shoulder the challenges ahead of it, so you'd get more or less the following farce: "Oh, so the Navy thinks peace is a good idea? Are you saying the Navy is unable to do its duty?" "Of course we can, we can take on America any day if that's what we decide to do! Can the Army say the same?" "Of course we can, we can do anything you're willing to do!" "Oh yeah?" "Yeah!" "YEAH?" "YEAH!" There were other factors in Japan's decision to go to war of course, but the fact that it wasn't possible to have an honest and open conversation about how a war would go because both factions were busy waving their dicks at each other didn't really help much. It also really didn't help that this was merely what was happening at the high command level - at the lower level aggressive junior officers easily brought into the idea that it was their patriotic duty to assassinate any politician or member of high command who they felt weren't being patriotic enough (i.e. "hey maybe we should think about trying to negotiate harder for peace or maybe consider pragmatic concessions or hell maybe aggressive colonialism isn't actually a good idea right now") Japanese decision-making was deeeeeeply hosed in the run-up to WW2, and during as well. I'm not as clear on the details of the rivalry during the war itself but I recall hearing about for instance the Army drafting necessary shipyard workers more or less purely and deliberately as a "gently caress you" to the Navy. As well, every strategic conference was tinged by both sides thinking "If we agree to this and the Army/Navy succeeds, they might gain more prestige which they'll use to override us at the next conference and argue for greater resource allocation, so do we really want to devote OUR resources to help THEM out like they're demanding?"
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May 29, 2023 01:29
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Tomn posted:Well, among other things, the interservice rivalry was part of the reason why Japan went to war in the first place. To the best of my understanding, broadly speaking almost everyone in the Navy high command knew that war with the US would end in disaster, and most people in Army high command were aware that it wouldn't go that well either. However, in government planning sessions neither side was willing to admit that the Navy/Army couldn't shoulder the challenges ahead of it, so you'd get more or less the following farce: There was an even more fundamental element to this. When Japan went looking for an Empire, China was their obvious first step. Their second step, however, was a matter of debate - they could go for the known oil-producing lands colonized by the Western Europeans, taking advantage of said Europeans being just a wee bit occupied by an enemy close to home. This was designated the Southern Resource Area. The alternate option was the Northern Resource Area, which wasn't as significantly developed but had a good chance of being far richer. This area is more commonly known as Siberia. The Army favored the Northern route, not least because the role of the Navy would be minimal and all the glory of the conquest would thus go to the Army. The Navy favored the Southern route, because the Navy would bear the bulk of the fighting and thus the glory of the victory. The final decision to go south was primarily because the Army suffered significant defeats in Manchuria, the disgrace of which gave the Navy just enough weight to push over the edge. One of the largest reasons that Japan decided to go to war with the US was that the US-held Philippines was a deadly threat to the southern empire they wanted to build. Had they gone north, there's a good chance that they wouldn't have decided they had to pick a fight with the US at all (though they'd probably eventually have gotten squished by Stalin).
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May 29, 2023 01:46
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Tomn posted:Well, among other things, the interservice rivalry was part of the reason why Japan went to war in the first place. To the best of my understanding, broadly speaking almost everyone in the Navy high command knew that war with the US would end in disaster, and most people in Army high command were aware that it wouldn't go that well either. However, in government planning sessions neither side was willing to admit that the Navy/Army couldn't shoulder the challenges ahead of it, so you'd get more or less the following farce: Gnoman posted:There was an even more fundamental element to this. When Japan went looking for an Empire, China was their obvious first step. Their second step, however, was a matter of debate - they could go for the known oil-producing lands colonized by the Western Europeans, taking advantage of said Europeans being just a wee bit occupied by an enemy close to home. This was designated the Southern Resource Area. The alternate option was the Northern Resource Area, which wasn't as significantly developed but had a good chance of being far richer. This area is more commonly known as Siberia. Thank you for this. This was worth every word and I enjoyed reading about this.
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May 29, 2023 10:57
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Apart from the failure of what might have been the start of the northern push at Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol, there are also a couple of other nuances: - Manchuria was used to lager said dubiously-loyal officers because doing so kept them physically out of the metropole and unable to strike at any of the decisionmakers without inflaming middle-class opinions any further, which meant that in addition to it having failed it was also considered politically unreliable--there were even abortive thoughts by the Japanese left that they could pull off a coup there and then use it to crack the homeland. - While the Navy featured a major split between moderates and hawks just like the Army did, the exact nature of the southern focus lead to these finding a compromise on "colonize, colonize, economically colonize, fight if there's pushback on any vital colonies" in a way that the Army's "finish China" moderates couldn't with the "contain the Soviets" hawks. - The swing back toward the south was initially specifically a win for the moderates. Development toward the war we got was in large part a failure of any of those colonies to strike oil in an oil-rich region; "fight if there's pushback on any vital colonies" occurred when the US oil embargo led to a conclusion that the Dutch East Indies, and Singapore and Manila overlooking shipping lines between there and Japan proper, were vital colonies for the maintenance of any navy or motorized army at all--less "yeah we can take the Anglos", more an RL equivalent of "well this save's probably hosed, may as well see if we can take the Anglos and salvage it". It's a rather pithy observation, but Japanese decisionmaking at the time resembles nothing so much as someone who's half-paying attention to a mapgame while they listen to podcasts. Very disconnected "oh doing this will clear that alert, I'll deal with the fallout later" approach.
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May 29, 2023 16:05
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| # ? May 10, 2024 17:43 |
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Are there good examples for Sun Tzu's precept that giving the enemy a path of escape is better than entrapping them?
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May 30, 2023 06:46
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