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e: wrong thread.
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Mar 23, 2015 20:40
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PittTheElder posted:Go back, lets talk about this. I've heard that argument (that the Schlieffen Plan had no real basis in reality, and it wasn't a war plan to actually be followed, but more of a budget sell), but I can't recall the source, though I don't recall the author being particularly crazy. Well the plan, if executed perfectly, could maybe possibly have led to German victory over France and forced them out of the war. And there were several points where if one army didn't move quickly enough or another moved even more quickly, then it could've worked (in encircling Paris and forcing a French surrender). The great failing of the plan was that it needed to go off without a hitch to work AND it wasn't flexible at all to deal with battle-field realities. The Germans had nothing prepared in case things went sideways which contributed to the decision to dig in once the plan fell apart.
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Mar 23, 2015 20:57
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Well that and it was executed in a compromised fashion.
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Mar 23, 2015 20:58
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PittTheElder posted:Go back, lets talk about this. I've heard that argument (that the Schlieffen Plan had no real basis in reality, and it wasn't a war plan to actually be followed, but more of a budget sell), but I can't recall the source, though I don't recall the author being particularly crazy. I've heard before that the Schlieffen plan was written as part of a "WE NEED MORE TROOPS ON THE WESTERN FRONT" presentation some time before 1914, but I don't remember the source.
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Mar 23, 2015 21:14
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Also wasn't it originally written a decade earlier and pushed by a retired general who was completely out of touch with practical realities?
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Mar 23, 2015 21:17
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The insane "THERE IS NO SCHLIEFFEN PLAN THERE WAS NEVER A SCHLIEFFEN PLAN WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA" guy is Terence Zuber, who likes to pass the time by getting into ridiculous arguments on that theme, and he isn't particularly fussy whether he does it with academics in the pages of a scholarly journal, or with any old Tom, Dick & Harry in an internet forum. On the other hand, the idea that pops up quite frequently of von Moltke reaching into a filing cabinet on about July 15th 1914, pulling out a well-thumbed file marked "The Schlieffen Plan" in big letters, and attempting to follow it precisely, railway timetables and all, except for that bit about "keep the right wing strong!" has taken a serious kicking over the course of the last twenty years or so. (It doesn't help that the documentation that would let historians know exactly what they were thinking disappeared when the archives got bombed thirty years later.) (Writing more about this, watch this space, it'll be useful when I get done trying to make the July Crisis interesting and can start revising and expanding August and September, which needs doing.)
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Mar 23, 2015 21:43
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Trin Tragula posted:(It doesn't help that the documentation that would let historians know exactly what they were thinking disappeared when the archives got bombed thirty years later.) Which leads to one of those awful thoughts that keeps the historian side of me up at night: what if everything we know about a particular period is completely wrong because the only primary source available is completely full of poo poo? I just imagine the face of some future time traveler going back to see an ancient peoples who are like "Livy? Guy was drunk half the time. Don't believe anything he writes. Don't you have access to *insert several sources that were lost to history*?"
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Mar 23, 2015 21:51
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Thwomp posted:Which leads to one of those awful thoughts that keeps the historian side of me up at night: what if everything we know about a particular period is completely wrong because the only primary source available is completely full of poo poo? Or worse, if the only sources available are the ones approved by some revisionist leader who doesn't want people knowing what really happened.
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Mar 23, 2015 21:54
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At worst it'd be something like the US' war plan orange, which was as much an ongoing discussion involving the dudes who'd be leading forces as a set in stone timetables and everything plan(though they did have a bunch of worked out example stuff with timetables drawn up to draw from), right?
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Mar 23, 2015 21:54
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Thwomp posted:Well the plan, if executed perfectly, could maybe possibly have led to German victory over France and forced them out of the war. And there were several points where if one army didn't move quickly enough or another moved even more quickly, then it could've worked (in encircling Paris and forcing a French surrender). Those failings are exactly the point of the argument though (as I remember it anyway). The Schlieffen Plan was absurdly detailed, and the very capable Prussian General Staff would surely have realized would never have held up in battle because of exactly these issues. The formally adopted version of the plan is just a plan of deployment, and doesn't specify any operational details, because the thinking was that the army commanders would have to make those sorts of decisions on the fly. Disinterested posted:Well that and it was executed in a compromised fashion. The Schlieffen Plan could never have actually been implemented "correctly" though (not that it was supposed to be either). It called for significantly more forces than Germany actually had available in 1905 (the 1.36 million men is close to what Germany actually deployed in the west in 1914, but presumably the French army was larger than it's 1905 counterpart as well), and a one-front war. Moltke the Younger correctly deduced that planning for having a go at France without having to contend with Russia somehow was ridiculous.
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Mar 23, 2015 22:44
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Animal posted:Can you guys bring up some good examples of competent generals/officers who got screwed over after losing a war? I don't mean guys getting hanged for crimes against humanities because they had it coming, or soldiers of what was considered a rebel army. More like legitimate states warring against each other, a soldier doing his job effectively (maybe TOO effectively), ultimately losing, and the winning side just holding a massive grudge against him/her and making their lives miserable (or ending it.) Doenitz and Raeder are maybe good examples of this.
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Mar 23, 2015 22:53
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Thwomp posted:Which leads to one of those awful thoughts that keeps the historian side of me up at night: what if everything we know about a particular period is completely wrong because the only primary source available is completely full of poo poo? Procopius? 
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Mar 23, 2015 22:59
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my dad posted:Procopius? Wait, so Justinian wasn't literally a demon in human form betrayed only by his shadow? Byzantine history makes a lot less sense now.
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Mar 23, 2015 23:19
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OK, so if I were to start writing blog entries today about the "Schlieffen Plan" (and it would have to be in quotation marks), it'd probably look something like this.  Warning - wall-o-text follows. In 1906, Alfred von Schlieffen retired as German CIGS, leaving behind him a number of different documents (even the question of whether or not they should be called "plans", with all that that word implies, is a Matter of Some Debate - they're often described instead as think-pieces) which in some way contain some ideas about various scenarios for a European war. If you squint hard enough and tilt your head to the side, you can see at least a few similarities in all of them with what eventually happened in 1914. Until the last years of the 20th century, no historian had actually seen them and they were assumed lost; IIRC they were found by accident in a completely different set of files by someone who was looking for something entirely unrelated. Terence Zuber then picked up on them and concluded that there was no such thing as "the Schlieffen plan". He then proceeded to tell everyone. In a very loud voice. So, the first point to note is that of Schlieffen's various "plans", the ones that deal with a two-front war against Russia and France together (and possibly Britain as well) are fundamentally defensive. Which is interesting in itself; the traditional Schlieffen Plan narrative presents him as an inflexible single-minded cult-of-the-offensive berk. The German army deploys primarily to resist an offensive by one or other of France or Russia and evict them from Germany, then turns about and does the same thing on the other front, and then we go outwith the scope of the document. Then there's the really interesting "plan", which is the one dealing with a one-front war against France. This one is offensive, and it assumes a larger army than Germany would have been likely to field (and is much larger than the one that was fielded in 1914). It's got the familiar curved arrows/revolving door concept. France mobilises on the border, the French Army kicks the door in and rushes into Alsace and Lorraine, they get stalled out by a combined German/A-H/Italian watch on the Rhine, and as soon as the French Army stops moving forward, the door keeps swinging round, having marched through the Low Countries, and kicks them firmly up the arse, cutting the French supply lines, besieging Paris, and eventually starting to squeeze the French army down into nothing on about the 40th day of mobilisation. So von Schlieffen retires, von Moltke takes over, the years tick on, the Russians begin vastly expanding their army, and, under this reading, the General Staff starts to worry about their existing plans for a two-front war. They're both essentially defensive deployments that will probably be very good at not losing the war, but don't seem to offer too many opportunities to win it, at least not quickly. The solution is to have their cake and eat it; the staff begins by bolting the revolving door from the France-only plan onto the two-front defend-against-France-first plan, looking for that quick western victory that will allow them to turn full force against Russia as soon as possible. What they come up with (we can infer from what actually happened) is naturally very different from Schlieffen's 1905 documents. With a two-front war, their allies will be busy dealing with Russia; that weakens the right wing because now you need more Germans defending on the Rhine. Then they get worried about letting the French so far into Alsace and Lorraine, strengthen the left again, and possibly start making plans to defend further forward. Somewhere in here the far right wheel through the Netherlands disappears entirely and only Belgian neutrality will be violated. So now there's the question of the extent of the right wing's march into France. Until very recently it was absolutely unchallenged that the original intent was to encircle Paris (as in the 1905 one-front document), which was then changed on the fly to a march east of the city by von Moltke for reasons unknown but heavily speculated about, on about the last day of August. However, something that struck me when I was turning the end of the Great Retreat into blog posts is how absolutely knackered all the blokes on both sides were by the end of it, some of them literally with their boots wrecked and falling off their feet, and what this implies for the practicality of the 1914 plan. (By the route they took, the German First Army marched about 250-odd miles in 30 days and fought several actions.) A march around Paris would have left the Germans having to put even more miles on the legs of that strong right wing. It's recently been suggested that actually by 1914 the General Staff recognised that a march around Paris was beyond the endurance of their blokes or the reach of their supply lines, and never intended to do that at all; it's just been assumed that way because (among other things) from the French side it's easy to assume that if your enemy is marching in the general direction of your capital, he intends to attack it. It also allows people an easy explanation for why the war was in fact not won quickly, and Zuber argues that "The Schlieffen Plan" was invented almost out of whole cloth by apologists for the German staff to shift the blame from them. If only von Moltke had just followed von Schlieffen's magic stroke of genius without deviation, repetition, or hesitation! So what we're left with from looking again at what the Germans actually did without preconceptions, is a heavily modified attack, which you might call the Moltke strategy or the Moltke-Schlieffen plan (or, indeed, whatever you like - I'm arriving at "the 1914 plan"). Calling it "the Schlieffen plan" is probably like calling the Race to the Sea by that name; but at the very least, the people who drew it up would have been familiar with Schlieffen's 1905 thinking, even if you think the 1914 plan didn't actually look much like any of it. There are still plenty of grounds for critique and disagreement with what actually happened that don't revolve around "a bloo bloo Moltke changed the magic plan" or "a bloo bloo Moltke sent some men to the East too early" (which seems like a smelly red herring to me). For instance, the left wing was probably far too aggressive and defended too far forward considering what the right wing was doing, which made it much easier for the French army to meet the blow behind the Marne as the revolving door swung round towards their rear. (Whether this was designed by von Moltke or happened because the army commanders took a Russian approach to their orders in search of personal glory is an open question, owing to lack of documentation.) Also, even if we assume that a march east of Paris was always the plan, I think it still probably asked far too much of the men of First Army to complete an encirclement while being completely shagged out and moving ever further from their supply lines; the French Army would likely have been able to retire south and avoid the big squeeze, although it's not too difficult to imagine a situation where they have to give up the Reims-Verdun-Nancy-Belfort line and leave the Germans in possession of much more of north-eastern France than they eventually ended up with. Given that, it may have been a better idea to march through much less of Belgium, and compensate by moving the German left back, which might not have provoked Belgium, which might have denied the British cabinet its easy casus belli... (You can keep going like this for a long time, and indeed, people have.) So there seems now to be general agreement among specialists that the old idea of "The Schlieffen Plan" as a Teutonically inflexible and impractical plan, drawn up in arse-numbing detail by Schlieffen in 1905, and slavishly followed by unoriginal thinkers and duffers who were in love with their railway-timetables, is inaccurate. (Unfortunately, their ideas don't appear to have made it very far out of academic circles yet - finding the details of some of these arguments without access to academic journals and arse-clenchingly expensive books is very challenging.) There's plenty of room for disagreement still, but it's now revolving around answering the question of exactly what was happening, if it wasn't "The Schlieffen Plan" as popular culture knows it. Zuber and his supporters think that the actions of 1914 are so far removed from the documents of 1905 that Schlieffen's influence on the 1914 plan was minimal or non-existent. Opponents like Terence Holmes (yes, it's very annoying when the two figureheads are both called Terence) and Holger Herwig think that Zuber goes far too far with this theme and that there's considerable direct Schlieffen influence in the 1914 plan. If you're not bored yet, there's that forum link to Zuber yelling like a cranky old grandfather at some Internet randoms (I got bored somewhere around page 20 of 36). He's also archived his side of his long-running bunfight with Holmes in the pages of War on History on his website. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 00:25
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So that's where Dan Carlin gets his "if there was a Schlieffen plan" thing from.
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Mar 24, 2015 00:39
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Chamale posted:Or worse, if the only sources available are the ones approved by some revisionist leader who doesn't want people knowing what really happened. That probably can't happen with fairly recent bureaucracy. Coverup or not, there's likely going to be a paper trail.
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Mar 24, 2015 01:54
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PittTheElder posted:Go back, lets talk about this. I've heard that argument (that the Schlieffen Plan had no real basis in reality, and it wasn't a war plan to actually be followed, but more of a budget sell), but I can't recall the source, though I don't recall the author being particularly crazy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_Zuber He just keeps writing the same book over and over in different forms. It's kind of weird, though (as with Suvorov) the result has been, through the process of all the rebuttals, a much better understanding of what actually happened. EDIT: oops, missed all those posts somehow... Xotl fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 02:08
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Trin Tragula posted:The insane "THERE IS NO SCHLIEFFEN PLAN THERE WAS NEVER A SCHLIEFFEN PLAN WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA" guy is Terence Zuber, who likes to pass the time by getting into ridiculous arguments on that theme, and he isn't particularly fussy whether he does it with academics in the pages of a scholarly journal, or with any old Tom, Dick & Harry in an internet forum. Hoo boy that's a read. After a while Zuber starts saying Germany's invasion of Belgium wasn't the start of the war, French and Russian mobilization was. Also if you need stuff on the Royal Navy in the July Crisis, I can write something for you complete with primary sources. What I find quite interesting (and ironic in the non-Alanis Morissette meaning of the word) is that when the July Crisis came, as far as I can recollect the Kaiser and Tirpitz, who had been responsible for so much of British hostility towards Germany, were for erring on the side of caution but the Army comprehensively outmaneuvered them (Willy was at sea with the High Seas Fleet in Norwegian waters during the last few days of July so he couldn't personally intervene) and got the war they thought they wanted. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 02:23
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Speaking of WW1 plans, how gay black Kaiser is the idea of an (insane?) flank attack via part of Switzerland or a reverse Schlieffen where Germany tries to knock Russia out first?
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Mar 24, 2015 02:40
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AceRimmer posted:Speaking of WW1 plans, how gay black Kaiser is the idea of an (insane?) flank attack via part of Switzerland or a reverse Schlieffen where Germany tries to knock Russia out first? A flank attack through Switzerland wouldn't happen because there's not enough good terrain to maneuver through before you hit the Alps unless you have an army of mole people to dig through the mountains. As for an eastern concentration of German forces against Russia, I think it was discussed by the German commanders in the prewar years but I don't really know any more, and there's too many Gay Black Hitler variables to even guess how it might've turned out unless you wargame it out.
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Mar 24, 2015 02:56
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Trin Tragula posted:The insane "THERE IS NO SCHLIEFFEN PLAN THERE WAS NEVER A SCHLIEFFEN PLAN WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA" guy is Terence Zuber, who likes to pass the time by getting into ridiculous arguments on that theme, and he isn't particularly fussy whether he does it with academics in the pages of a scholarly journal, or with any old Tom, Dick & Harry in an internet forum. 
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Mar 24, 2015 02:57
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Arquinsiel posted:I love how he gets snide straight off the bat and the internet is all "WELCOME TO THE FUNHOUSE" in return Having read some of his articles from War and History, he seems like a real rear end in a top hat. Later in that thread he sneers at someone for going to the Army War College. God knows why.
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Mar 24, 2015 03:09
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:A flank attack through Switzerland wouldn't happen because there's not enough good terrain to maneuver through before you hit the Alps unless you have an army of mole people to dig through the mountains. The important thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the top military fellows in all the great powers took the wrong lessons from the Russo-Japanese War and the Balkan Wars - the general run of thought was that any war would be decided in less than a year's time. With that in mind, defending against France while knocking out Russia doesn't have a lot to recommend it - Russia is a vast amount of land with relatively poor transportation networks (a thing Herr Hitler would have done well to remember) which makes a quick knockout blow very difficult. By contrast, France has very little strategic depth and logistics are easier, so a quick campaign to knock out the French to turn the war into a 1-front fight is more reasonable. Had the German General Staff realized what WWI would have looked like, they might have considered an attack Russia first plan - indeed, Falkenhayn's 1915 strategy was essentially to go after Russia while standing on the defensive in France - but given their pre-war thinking, it was never going to be a realistic option. As for how such a strategy would have played out, it probably ends up fairly beneficial for Germany since a strong attack into Poland probably preserves some of the Austrian armies and the French are attacking into even worse terrain than the trench systems they've been attacking in Trin Tragula's posts. The biggest benefit, however, is in terms of diplomacy - since they don't violate Belgian neutrality and aren't occupying a great deal of French territory, a status quo peace on the Western Front might be possible; at the very least, Britain and the US won't be nearly as eager to get involved. Of course, that's Gay Black Kaiser territory, so you might as well say the Russians also see what's coming and don't mobilize over Serbia so that the Revolution doesn't happen and we don't get WWI at all.
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Mar 24, 2015 04:43
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A WWI German invasion of the Russian Empire truly designed to conquer the whole thing by main force would have been a total disaster, I mean, just imagine how hard a time a largely unmechanized army would have had trying to advance to something like the A-A line!
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Mar 24, 2015 04:51
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Frostwerks posted:The war in East Asia before/during/after WW2 seems like the biggest clusterfuck I could conceive of in living memory. Jesus Christ, what a mess. I can't with any confidence definitely say that I know all of the competing factions involved in it. Actually, if anyone's willing to do an effortpost on this very topic I would love to read it.
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Mar 24, 2015 06:02
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Someone asked about armor and guns a while back, and I should have posted this picture.
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Mar 24, 2015 06:28
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HEY GAL posted:Someone asked about armor and guns a while back, and I should have posted this picture. Black (Knight) drivebys were a thing back then?
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Mar 24, 2015 06:46
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HEY GAL posted:Someone asked about armor and guns a while back, and I should have posted this picture. 
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Mar 24, 2015 06:47
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HEY GAL posted:Someone asked about armor and guns a while back, and I should have posted this picture.  Somebody stole my pants
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Mar 24, 2015 07:17
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JaucheCharly posted:
17th century best century
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Mar 24, 2015 07:20
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Japanese Explosive Ordnance Vol.2: Army Ammunition | Navy AmmunitionArmy Ammunition Introduction posted:
The Japanese Army had two color systems for marking ammunition. The Old and New systems differed in the number of color bands they used, the New system had the body of the projectile colored to indicate the group in which the type of ammunition was categorized and the color bands determined specific properties. *I apologize for the quality of the photos, my copy of the book is less than perfect and I don't have the skill to re-draw them at the moment* Old Color System  Notes: Common Explosive Types Japanese characters giving the type number of the projectile (painted on projectile) and type number of the gun (painted on the case) appear only when there is a chance of confusion with similar projectiles or cases. Chemical (Gas or Liquid Filled) Projectiles  Notes: Special-Purpose Projectiles Projectiles designed for special purposes are painted black over all and are identified by a special symbol stenciled near the middle of the body. A list is provided in the New Color System. Weight Variation Marking The variation of individual projectiles from standard weight is important in the ballistics problem and can be corrected for insetting sights. The variation is therefore indicated by plus/minus signs painted on the projectiles code: Notes: Common Explosive Types Hollow charge ammunition is distinguished from other types in the H.E. high grade steel (yellow band) group by the presence of the symbol. Chemical (Gas or Liquid Filled) Projectiles  Notes: Special-Purpose Projectiles Projectiles designed for special as listed below are identified by the overall body color and by a special symbol stenciled near the middle of the body. code:^: Non-liquid Edit Army Projectiles - Part 1 Type 38 6.5mm Ammunition There are three different 6.5mm rounds detailed in the Technical Manual, describing the size and weight of the cartridge; Ball, Training, and Wooden. They all used the same case and vary in the length of the projectile, overall length and weight of the projectile. It is interesting to note that there were 2 training, or blank, rounds and 1 practice (Ball) round. Ball rounds had a CuNi or steel jacket and a lead core; Tracer rounds had a CuNi jacket and lead core; Blank rounds had either a paper or wood projectile; Practice ball rounds were snub-nosed, had a copper jacket and a lead core. To tell these rounds apart, they had a colored band located where the projectile and the case meet. The type of shot and color are as follows: Ball : Pink Tracer : Green Blank : Wood Blank : Paper (purple) Practice Ball : Pink The 6.5mm cartridge was, as mentioned in the introduction, still fairly common in the Japanese inventory. 6.5mm Rifles: Type I rifle, Type 1 rifle, Type 30 rifle, Type 35 rifle, Type 38 rifle, Type 44 Carbine, Type 97 rifle 6.5mm LMGs: Type 11 LMG, Type 96 LMG 6.5mm HMGs: Type 3 HMG Notes Ammunition when used in rifles and LMGs will be found in clips of 5 rounds each. When used in HMGs it will be found in feeder strips of 30 rounds each. The wooden bullet round is used with the rifle to launch the rifle smoke grenade. The paper bullet round is used to launch rifle grenades. The propelling powder used in the blank rounds is nitro-cellulose while in the other rounds it is graphite-coated nitro-cellulose. Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 10:01 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 07:52
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HEY GAL posted:Someone asked about armor and guns a while back, and I should have posted this picture. buff coat
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Mar 24, 2015 09:37
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A thought on the theme of "what if the Germans had stood on the defensive against France in 1914?" One of the main reasons the war dragged on as long as it did is that it's relatively easy to put an army somewhere and relatively difficult to make it go away again. The Germans have control of Belgium and north-eastern France, therefore in order to make them go away diplomatically, you're going to have to buy them off with something, probably your colonial holdings. So let's assume that Germany tries to execute something like Schlieffen's two-front Russia-first exercise. This probably involves accepting the presence of the French Army in Alsace and Lorraine for a few months, sitting in Metz (you're standing on the defensive and you have a big-rear end fortress line, why wouldn't you use it?) while you give the Russians a jolly good seeing to. Then we'll assume that somehow conditions become favourable for a German counter-attack. This does depend entirely on what Gay Black Joffre might have done in this situation, but it's not impossible that having retaken a lot of Alsace and Lorraine, they might have been prepared to dig in and go "okay, we're here now, make us go away if you think you can". Now the situation is entirely reversed and it's the German army that's being forced to feed its blokes into a French meat grinder because the price to buy them off is politically unacceptable...
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Mar 24, 2015 10:10
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AceRimmer posted:Speaking of WW1 plans, how gay black Kaiser is the idea of an (insane?) flank attack via part of Switzerland or a reverse Schlieffen where Germany tries to knock Russia out first? Besides the abovementioned point of Russia being something you can't just march into and knock out of the war in a short period of time, there's also the fact that the German military leadership wanted a repeat of the greatest triumph in German history, the Franco-Prussian War. I can't see them giving up another shot at the French because of that, it's just too appealing to think that you can pull off another Sedan and humiliate the French quickly, so I give this speculation four gay black Kaisers out of five.
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Mar 24, 2015 10:14
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Animal posted:Can you guys bring up some good examples of competent generals/officers who got screwed over after losing a war? I don't mean guys getting hanged for crimes against humanities because they had it coming, or soldiers of what was considered a rebel army. More like legitimate states warring against each other, a soldier doing his job effectively (maybe TOO effectively), ultimately losing, and the winning side just holding a massive grudge against him/her and making their lives miserable (or ending it.) Pretty sure winning a war could be hazardous to your health in some societies as well. Can't have someone getting popular enough that they start thinking about taking over.
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Mar 24, 2015 10:20
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Trin Tragula posted:Schlieffen effort post Thanks a lot for that post. Highly informative. Were documents really only discovered in the late-20th century?
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Mar 24, 2015 14:28
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Trin Tragula posted:A thought on the theme of "what if the Germans had stood on the defensive against France in 1914?" It seems like the key part they were missing after the Russo-Japanese war is the ability of an army if not totally broken and left connected to the manpower reserves in a working nation to regenerate until national exhaustion. Does that sound accurate?
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Mar 24, 2015 14:33
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AceRimmer posted:Speaking of WW1 plans, how gay black Kaiser is the idea of an (insane?) flank attack via part of Switzerland or a reverse Schlieffen where Germany tries to knock Russia out first? Nobody could have predicted the collapse of the Russian Empire. As far as the German high command was concerned, knocking out Russia may well have required marching all the way to St Petersburg, which is in many respects a far more difficult prospect than getting to Paris, even if the French Army is better trained and better equipped than Russian peasants. xthetenth posted:It seems like the key part they were missing after the Russo-Japanese war is the ability of an army if not totally broken and left connected to the manpower reserves in a working nation to regenerate until national exhaustion. Does that sound accurate? I would say yes. The Japanese were pretty much completely exhausted by the end of the Russo-Japanese War, but the Russians were fighting at the rear end-end of a single rail-line and had to sue for peace themselves. The take-away was that determined offensive effort really could force decisive results in a war, without making the connection that the Japanese basically had to accept whatever they could get in the peace talks because they couldn't fight any longer and that things would have been vastly different if the nations in question had far better infrastructure, ergo Western Europe.
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Mar 24, 2015 14:46
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No single position being able to last indefinitely without reinforcement seems a lot less important when no single position will win the war. I think the biggest other surprise was probably the ability of a static army to entrench itself so that anywhere could become very hard to take, so the ability to regenerate became much more important. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 14:59 on Mar 24, 2015 |
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Mar 24, 2015 14:56
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Rabhadh posted:buff coat
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Mar 24, 2015 16:30
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