JcDent posted:So basically the french were good at herding abu hajaars. Those dudes loved the revolution/Napoleon until they died.
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Oct 26, 2016 12:33
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I guess those who didn't love the revolution/Napoleon and dodged draft died later. Wasn't it that service in Russian military was for 25 years back then?
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Oct 26, 2016 12:36
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I looked it up, and apparently chicken marengo actually is supposed to be named after Napoleon at the Battle of Marengo. I though it was just some dumb coincidence.
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Oct 26, 2016 12:52
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The most delicious of close runs.
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Oct 26, 2016 12:56
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xthetenth posted:And now I know the wine match for horsemeat. Didn't expect it to be chianti but the more you know. 
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Oct 26, 2016 13:08
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JcDent posted:So basically the french were good at herding abu hajaars. The revolutionary French army still had a significant number of regular troops available but the need to fight so many campaigns at the same time overtaxed them.
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Oct 26, 2016 13:21
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Military History Mk III: basically the french were good at herding abu hajaars.
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Oct 26, 2016 13:22
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Panzeh posted:The revolutionary French army still had a significant number of regular troops available but the need to fight so many campaigns at the same time overtaxed them. Seriously they fought so many campaigns and at the same time too. It was insane.
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Oct 26, 2016 13:25
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gradenko_2000 posted:What was the strategic significance of the Khe Sanh combat base? Why was LBJ and Westmoreland even willing to consider the use of nuclear weapons just to protect this place? On top of what Tias has said, Khe Sahn took on an almost mythical importance for LBJ, who (along with many other Democrats) was terrified of losing Vietnam in the same way they had "lost China". People around him said that he felt like Khe Sahn was some kind of totem for the war itself, where if the US gave up Khe Sahn they would basically have given up the war. Fake Edit: As for Westmoreland he was constantly under the mistaken impression that the Vietnam war was a conventional one that could be won by conventional means. To him, Khe Sahn was holding up a huge chunk of the NVA and was crucially important for the big-unit battles that Westmoreland thought was going to be the key to winning the war. MikeCrotch fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Oct 26, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 13:25
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Man portable automatic weapons were not relevant when trenches were first constructed with zigzags. The Lewis gun for example dates back to 1911, and the same logic also applies to regular rifles as well.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:03
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feedmegin posted:The Lewis gun for example dates back to 1911, and the same logic also applies to regular rifles as well. 
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Oct 26, 2016 14:09
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Ghetto Prince posted:I've got some important questions about trenches. They're neat, but they also look really horrifying to have to live in They're better than a shell-hole, or nothing at all. It was popularly said in the Army of the time that a hole one inch deep quadrupled one's chances of staying alive under fire, and whether it was strictly true or not, it motivated a lot of people to dig very very quickly in time of need. quote:I understand that holes dug into the water table will quickly fill with water, and you have to fortify the back to keep the stupid fuckers in the rear trench from shooting you in the back of the head That's not why you have a parados; if that were the concern, it would be much better for defence to flatten it out and trust your blokes to keep their stupid heads down (because then if you lose the trench, the enemy has nothing to hide from when you try to shoot them from the reserve lines). The reason you have a parados is that if a shell lands 20 yards behind you and there's no parados, your entire platoon is going to be rendered militarily useless very quickly. This war is not about shooting each other with rifles or stabbing each other with stabby things. It's about protecting your own artillery so it can fire unmolested, and hiding yourself as effectively as possible from the enemy's artillery. A single HE shell that catches a platoon in open ground makes that platoon disappear. quote:How does it drain? As a rule, very badly. But, do you see how it's designed with a sump? The "floor" of the trench is not the mud at the bottom. In an ideal world, your well-constructed duckboards are firmly lodged into the walls about six inches above the mud at the bottom. The blokes walk about on the slatted duckboards, and when it rains, the water passes through the gaps in the duckboard into the sump and then either drains into the mud below or runs off downhill to a place known only to the Engineers and whichever battalion hosed up when it paraded for the General last month. This is the theory. In practice, well, there's a reason the medical establishment still calls "continuous immersion syndrome" by the name "trench foot". quote:What's that bell for? If this is before April 1915, then it's just a jolly souvenir that someone put there as a joke. If it's after April 1915, then it's the gas alarm. "Gas gas gas!" is hard to hear when it's being shouted through several layers of chemically-treated flannel, but you can ring a bell or bang a gong just as well inside a gas mask as you can outside it. quote:How would you cook your horsemeat in a trench? You wouldn't; cooking draws attention, and if you're lucky it only draws the attention of a sniper and not an artillery observer. On the Western Front you have food cooked for you (for a given value of "food" and "cooked")when they're at the sharp end and then brought up by carrying parties; the cooks live either in a cookhouse dugout or an intact house in the reserve positions, or a field kitchen somewhere further to the rear. If you hear a story about some light-fingered chaps confiscating edibles and cooking them, it's almost certain that they did it during the ~50% of the time they spent at rest, out of the trenches quote:
Put it like this: the combined casualties for the Battles of the Frontiers in 1914, which were fought without trenches, were about 650,000 in a month's fighting. Add 550,000 more over one week for the Battle of the Marne. The Somme and Verdun each had comparable casualty figures; it took the Somme five and a half months to get near a million casualties; Verdun lasted 10 months and by some ways of adding up, never broke a million. Artillery fire will gently caress you the gently caress up if you do not have a hole to hide in. A quick-firing field gun fires 15 rounds per minute, but fortunately it also has a flat trajectory, so it's relatively difficult for a shell to fall into a trench and explode inside. Which is the difference between being sent home in a very small box, and just being showered with dirt and muck and the rotting remains of half the body you found last Tuesday; especially if you survive long enough to be issued a steel helmet. (Then Zee Germans shout across that they've been looking in some history books and found out about this thing called a "mortar", which is a totally obsolete concept for an artillery piece that fires at short range but high elevation. And now it happens to be perfect for dropping explosives into a narrow target. They've got several thousand of them. You don't have any. Have fun.) quote:
effortpost on just this question pending, on how German defensiive doctrine changed after von Falkenhayn got shitcanned quote:What happens if someone poops in the trench? If your latrine is unusable, or you're just feeling lazy, you poo poo into a can and then (carefully) throw the can over the parados; out of sight, out of mind. The whole place will smell bad enough anyway that one more turd outside the trench isn't going to matter.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:15
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I think I agree with Kyoon that the principle of not letting the enemy put your entire trench in enfilade is not dependent on them having automatic weapons.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:18
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I forgot to respond to you! Sarmatism is very striking to me because it seems like such a divergent cultural trend in comparison to the rest of Europe at the time. The "kooky steppe outfits" is something I remember from an essay on Polish nobility that basically railed on them for dressing "in the manner of tartars", it was all very Orientalist. I'm not going to defend that view, but I'm also somebody brought up in a very Western Europe-centric viewpoint, so I still don't understand how Sarmartism really manifested as a Polish idea. Well, whoever wrote that was wrong. Poland-Lithuania between the 16th and late 18th centuries was very culturally distinct from Western Europe, as it drew a lot on Turkish and Hungarian influences (to a degree also Russian, but in this particular period it gave Russia far more than it took), which manifested in many ways, and fashion was one of them. But let's start somewhere else. Poland in the 16th century was one of the greatest political laboratories of the period. Beginning in 1505, with the passing of the Piotrków Constitution1, better known as the Nihil Novi Constitution, from its key point: Nihil novi nisi commune consensu, "Nothing new without common consent," Poland saw the power shift from the King to the Sejm, an elected body of noble representatives. This new system, called "Noble Democracy" by historians, quickly prompted a great rise in political thinking, which sought the best organisation for this new Commonwealth2. With the subsequent rise of the Reformation, everything seemed to be in flux: while no-one proposed anything truly radical (at least in published works3) and there was a consensus that the system would have a King and some sort of representation for nobility, the specifics were fair game. This is how we ended up with an elective monarchy with a very strong parliament, a "constitutional" document (The Henrician Articles, detailing the obligations of the King towards the nobles and the state), legally enshrined principle of religious tolerance, and legal equality of the nobles. That last point requires some elaboration. Nobility in Poland was both more numerous (estimates vary, with some putting it as high as 10% of the population, Norman Davies suggests 6.6%; it was also very unevenly distributed, as in some rural counties the nobility made up even 47% of the total population, while in cities it was usually below 3%) and more diverse than in Western Europe. It included the "magnates" or "crimsons", i.e. great landowners with private armies and obscene wealth, it included minor landowners with just a village or two to their name, it included nobles who had to work their own croft, and the gołota, i.e. completely landless nobles, usually in service to some patron or another. Yet regardless of status, each enjoyed identical legal privileges, could (at least in theory) be elected to the Sejm, could take part in royal elections and so forth. The nobility was legally barred from holding titles so as to not create differences within the class itself (i.e. there are no Polish barons, dukes, marquises or what have you), the only exception being the old princely houses of Lithuania. Instead, they created an elaborate system of elective or appointed offices (including offices in service of the courts of other nobles), some more prestigious than others (the most prestigious being probably the Great Hetmans and Great Treasurers, separate for Crown [i.e. Poland] and Lithuania), but none of them hereditary. The period also saw the rise of the so-called "Execution Movement", which was a political movement amongst the middle noble class supposed to safeguard the laws and ensure they were not being infringed upon, particularly by the magnates and the King. This movement is notable not only because of what it had achieved, but also because it was yet another factor promoting and expanding Polish-Lithuanian political change and experimentation in the period. All this made up what was later called "The Golden Liberty," i.e. a perceived set of rights that the nobility considered paramount for their freedoms and privileges. It is around this time that the nobility gains the sense that they are a distinct social group, different from not only other social groups within the state (peasants, burghers), but also from the nobles of other European countries, who were considered tyrannized by more absolute monarchs and unjust laws. The Polish-Lithuanian nobles - rich from the grain trade, well-educated (usually abroad), politically empowered, combative, proud of their martial traditions, many of them at least amateur writers or poets - saw themselves as the pinnacle of European society and wanted to elevate their culture to the same level. Around this time, they begin to mythologize their own lineage, claiming to be descendants of the Sarmatians, from whom they inherited virtue and valour. While widespread and very characteristic (with Sarmata being a commonly understood synonym for a nobleman), this myth is not exactly central to the Polish or Lithuanian noble identity of the period, nor was it crucial in what came next. The name of "Sarmatism" was chosen mostly because of this emblematic status it enjoyed, rather than due to any real significance it carried. Sarmatism becomes prevalent in the early 17th century. At that point, plenty of important political and social changes happen, and without understanding them, it is hard to see why Sarmatism is the way it is. The Reformation is in full withdrawal, which, while not intrinsically good or bad, means that the religious controversy which prompted so much political and social thought is now gone. The Execution Movement is strangled by magnates, who cement their hold on wealth and use it to turn the country from a restricted democracy into an oligarchic cleptocracy through bribery and demagoguery; as a result, participation in political life is now much weaker. Grain, which made even average nobles rich and able to travel the world or send their sons to Italian universities, is no longer the moneymaker it used to be, rapidly pauperising large segments of the noble society (and, by extension, peasants, whom the nobles lean on in order to salvage their revenues). Meanwhile, Jesuit schools mean that good education is available locally (at a much lower cost than schooling abroad), which means plenty of nobles are still well-educated, but no longer have experience of cultural contact with the West. It is in these conditions that Sarmatism fully develops. Its tenets are basically the Polish Renaissance thought flipped on its head: the Commonwealth is the perfect country, where everything is perfect, nothing is to be changed, lest it collapses. The political system is to never be touched again. The Golden Liberty is the apex of social thought. It is still an era of a great flourishing of the arts, both under Western influence and uniquely local. In painting, vanitas scenes are very popular, as are portraits; there is a great influence of Western Mannerism and Baroque. Poland did not produce any great painters during this period, but patronaged many from Italy and the Netherlands, and it did develop some forms of painting unique to it, the most common of which is the coffin portrait, hanged on the front of the coffin and thus instantly recognizable thanks to its characteristic shape. In literature, treatises, moral guides, and other typical Renaissance forms give way. In their place appear collections of sermons - a form that reaches it literary pinnacle during the period - and various forms of memoirs, the most famous being the Memoirs of Jan Ch. Pasek, a flamboyant schemer, greedy warfighter, and active, if not exactly bright, politician. What truly flourishes is poetry - almost everyone writes, even if they do not publish; the most common themes are love, death, life, war, and religion. Marinist and conceptismo influences are very strong. It is generally considered that this period is not as important to Polish poetry as the Renaissance - when Jan Kochanowski essentially broke the hold of Latin on verse forever - but it is still at heights it will not achieve again until Romantism. Public life becomes full of theatrics. Visitors often remark with shock that many Poles are extremely outlandish during the period - we have notes of nobles who, when Mea culpa was called in church, routinely broke into tears and slammed their heads into the pews. Political gatherings were full of exaggeration and pomp, with long-winded speeches filled with macaronisms and apocalyptic predictions, while any proposed act on any tiniest issue in a provincial sejmik was likely to be met with cries of "The Commonwealth is being sold here, as if it were a foot of cloth!" (It should perhaps be noted that before the introduction of liberum veto the political practice was to always debate everything until consensus was reached - and usually it happened, sooner or later, - plurality or majority voting was extremely rare.) Funerary rites became extremely elaborate, including a nobleman riding into the church on horseback in full plate armour, then collapsing onto the floor with as much noise as possible. Although I probably haven't really demonstrated it here, Sarmatism is a blanket term that usually includes things that are not really related to the strict meaning of the term, which is, in short, "a line of thought implying that Polish and Lithuanian nobility is unique, often with attribution of special mythical features, especially ancient origin", which might lead people to believe that it was a full-fledged philosophy or that the notion of Sarmatian origin was so important it was enough to alter Polish and Lithuanian art, politics, and social life. Neither of these is true. While there is some relationship between it and other elements, none of them stem from or directly lead to Sarmatism existing. It would be far more precise to speak about Polish-Lithuanian baroque in arts and literature, Polish-Lithuanian 17th century in politics and society, and Sarmatism as either a largely undeveloped political mythology or a literary motif. And this is particularly true of fashion, which develops on the back of hundreds of years of prior changes, and which I shall cover in detail once I dig up that article I have about it. 1. This is not "constitution" in the present meaning; it is not a document outlining the legal basis of the political system in the country. In the Polish parlance of the period, a "constitution" was simply a legal act of the parliament. This would only change with the passing of the 1791 Constitution of the Third of May, the first modern constitution in Europe and a major reformist document (which prompted a 1792 Russian invasion and the subsequent Second Partition of Poland). 2. Language note: "Commonwealth" is the term applied by English-language historians to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which only comes into existence following the 1569 Union of Lublin. The term is supposed to serve as the translation of the Polish word Rzeczpospolita, which itself is a calque of Latin res publica and in that time was the general Polish term for "state as an institution" (when discussing hypothetical or thought-experiment polities) or "republic" (when referring to actual states). Today, Polish for "republic" is republika (e.g. Republika Czeska, Republika Francuska), but any Polish republic throughout history (and today) is referred to as Rzeczpospolita (i.e. Rzeczpospolita szlachecka, II Rzeczpospolita, Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, Rzeczpospolita Polska). 3. Suggested further googling: Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski, De Republica emendanda libri quinque, quorum primus de moribus, secundus de legibus, tertius de bello, quartus de ecclesia, quintus de schola; Łukasz Górnicki, Rozmowa Polaka z Włochem o wolnościach i prawach polskich; Dworzanin polski; Stanisław Orzechowski, Quincunx.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:24
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feedmegin posted:The Lewis gun for example dates back to 1911, It wasn't issued in any significant numbers until 1916. quote:and the same logic also applies to regular rifles as well. But this is correct. The zigzag prevents an enemy from taking the entire trench under enfilading fire should he breach the line. Like Hegel says, you don't need machineguns to do this. One great example is the Bloody Lane at the Battle of Antietam in the American Civil War. Confederate troops in one sector used a sunken road as a makeshift trench to repulse several attacks by Union infantry. However, the road was long and straight so when an attack finally reached the road, they raked the Confederate defenders with enfilading fire and broke them in short order.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:25
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feedmegin posted:The Lewis gun for example dates back to 1911, and the same logic also applies to regular rifles as well. If you think the Lewis gun is a man portable assault weapon I really don't know what to tell you. It has a bipod and is only fired using the bipod. I agree that the same logic applies to regular rifles, but it's more important for explosives and artillery. Note that in the Era of Scientific Warfare they only zizagged the communication trenches, and not the parallels, because it was very difficult to get a shell or ball in to a parallel trench.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:27
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quote:You wouldn't; cooking draws attention, and if you're lucky it only draws the attention of a sniper and not an artillery observer. On the Western Front you have food cooked for you (for a given value of "food" and "cooked")when they're at the sharp end and then brought up by carrying parties; the cooks live either in a cookhouse dugout or an intact house in the reserve positions, or a field kitchen somewhere further to the rear. If you hear a story about some light-fingered chaps confiscating edibles and cooking them, it's almost certain that they did it during the ~50% of the time they spent at rest, out of the trenches WWI also spawned the golden age for canning food. I think you would be pretty lucky to get a cooked meal in the front lines. Expecting to eat something out of a can was probably close to the norm. Cooked meals becoming much more common the further you are from the front line.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:32
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Note that in the Era of Scientific Warfare they only zizagged the communication trenches, and not the parallels, because it was very difficult to get a shell or ball in to a parallel trench. 
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Oct 26, 2016 14:39
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:If you think the Lewis gun is a man portable assault weapon I really don't know what to tell you. It has a bipod and is only fired using the bipod. Dude, the thing was adopted precisely because it could be carried and operated by one strong bloke, it only weighs 30 pounds, and it was widely used slung from the shoulder to lay down immediate suppressing fire as soon as someone explained to the BEF liaison officers what a Chauchat was for. You sure you're not confusing it with the Vickers or Hotchkiss heavy guns? BattleMoose posted:WWI also spawned the golden age for canning food. I think you would be pretty lucky to get a cooked meal in the front lines. Expecting to eat something out of a can was probably close to the norm. Cooked meals becoming much more common the further you are from the front line. Louis Barthas expects his food to be cooked and his coffee to be hot and complains whenever his situation leaves him stuck eating cold coffee and muddy bread.
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Oct 26, 2016 14:51
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Nebakenezzer posted:Welp: Loving the effortpost, was reading through it this morning when I found the Gene Autry/Roy Rodgers slapfight/flameware right below the above link: 
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Oct 26, 2016 15:18
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HEY GAL posted:incorrect; the attackers are just not close enough yet Got to get those heavy siege guns into range.
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Oct 26, 2016 15:26
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I remember the first time I learned about trench foot and thought it would be a good idea to GIS that. It was not a good idea.
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Oct 26, 2016 15:41
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Trin Tragula posted:Louis Barthas expects his food to be cooked and his coffee to be hot and complains whenever his situation leaves him stuck eating cold coffee and muddy bread. 
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Oct 26, 2016 15:49
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What about onions? he did ensure he and his men had all the onions and the Germans had none right?
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Oct 26, 2016 15:59
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:If you think the Lewis gun is a man portable assault weapon I really don't know what to tell you. It has a bipod and is only fired using the bipod. It is obviously not man portable in the sense that you can hip fire it like a submachinegun or something. It is man portable in the sense that it's trivial to lug it across No Man's Land, and then having captured a small section of trench, either by surprise or assault, set it up in minutes (unlike e.g. a Maxim gun on a carriage), at which point, in a straight trench, the remaining defenders to either side of you are going to have a Very Bad Day. But, yes, this is just an amplification of the already existing problems you'd have from a few dudes with rifles; I misspoke in suggesting it was specifically because of the invention of machineguns. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Oct 26, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 16:11
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or those grenade launchers they had back in the early modern and gave to the musketeers during assaults in sieges
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Oct 26, 2016 16:13
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SeanBeansShako posted:What about onions? he did ensure he and his men had all the onions and the Germans had none right? He got on very well with the Germans because they were less likely than his officers to tell him to do something stupid and dangerous; however, I am quite sure that the supply of onions to the Austrians was successfully interdicted for the duration of the war 
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Oct 26, 2016 16:31
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Trin Tragula posted:He got on very well with the Germans because they were less likely than his officers to tell him to do something stupid and dangerous  ) in anecdotes in your reading?
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Oct 26, 2016 16:34
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Nenonen posted:Uh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBWtiFUm2Gs
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Oct 26, 2016 17:03
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Remulak posted:Loving the effortpost, was reading through it this morning when I found the Gene Autry/Roy Rodgers slapfight/flameware right below the above link: During Life's peak years, reader submissions and letters are very close to some sort of old timey internet, pictures of pets included
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Oct 26, 2016 17:17
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There was a lot of fraternisation across the trenches which didn't require much understanding of languages. Even if it did, British troops recounted endless anecdotes of Germans who could speak English - London was a common destination for middle class German men in the early 20th century that wanted a few years working abroad, to the extent that there was a "waiter crisis" in 1914 before war privation kicked in: Germans apparently made the best waiters. Lots of Germans would similarily been able to speak French, and many middle class british people spoke German - surprisingly large amount of my blokes too. Even without the ability to speak the language, in quiet sectors there was a lot of informal communication, mainly seeming to rely on exactly what you'd pick up from the guys on the other side when they're in your earshot. Lots of "hallo tommie! Zorry for der prussians!" And "gutten targ fritz, ows the frau?" Edit: Article on fraternization that I read fairly recently. Relates instances beyond the Christmas truce. lenoon fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Oct 26, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 17:25
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lenoon posted:Lots of "hallo tommie! Zorry for der prussians!"
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Oct 26, 2016 17:30
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Did the sort of person recruited to be in the German army in WWI change over the course of the war?
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Oct 26, 2016 17:32
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Like everyone else except the USA (who did it a bit) Germany gradually moved older and older conscript classes first into reserves, then rear echelon positions, then the front lines. In Britain the process was known as "combing out" - gathering the men who had avoided military service through war work or exemptions, shuffling men rated fit for front line service into combatant positions and replacing them with older men, and then finally moving older men into combatant positions while conscripting even older men. Im much more familiar with the mechanics of how it was done in Britain, but while I cant quote specific laws in Germany as I can for the UK, I know enough to say that the system resulted in the same end point - except Britain, with the Empire and the US, never got to the point Germany did in terms of a manpower crisis. Edit: details! So Germany had young conscripts serving their first tern, then the older reservists in the Landwehr, and finally the oldest reservists in the Landsturm. In the longest expected war the Landwehr would be called up to reserve positions and rear line duties, with some of them (depending on fitness and age) fighting. In 1915 there was an army reorganisation that reduced division sizes and created more - mixing in increasing numbers of landwehr who hadnt already volunteered. We tend to think of older German soldiers guarding pows etc but they were fairly active on the eastern front, for some reason. By 1916 all the age bands in either group had been called up, and thats when the combing out begins. Of course this is complicated by landsturm and landwehr battalions in 1914 - volunteers, rather than called up conscripts. As the war progressed age bands of men were called up into what would have been the wehr/sturm, and ended up in combatant roles. lenoon fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Oct 26, 2016 |
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Oct 26, 2016 17:48
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I think that by the end of the war, Germany had reduced its age of conscription as well.
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Oct 26, 2016 18:01
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Yeah they call up the 1917 class in 1916, for example. Britain did effectivelt the same in 1918 when the Military service act called up younger and older men - the about to turn 18 and the 41-51 year olds.
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Oct 26, 2016 18:06
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It's almost like WWI was an unvarnished meat grinder into which nations sent entire generations of men. That's a ridiculous simplification, but everyone was planning on just throwing bodies into the mire until the other side gave up, ostensibly by running out of bodies. What kind of material is out there on the long-term demographic effects of countries like France, Germany, and Britain from losing that many (relatively) young adult men? There must have been just a gaping hole in the labor force, not to mention birth rates and the effect of fewer consumers, borrowers who went to Ypres and never came back, etc.
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Oct 26, 2016 18:15
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Grumpy that I missed trenchchat, but I would also like to add that a key thing with trenches is you don't just have one of them. You have loads of the fuckers stretching back multiple lines, and you intersperse them with dugouts and buried bunkers and stuff. The actual trenchy bit is not where you live (hopefully) and not where you do much other than be at your post in case the enemy tries attacking, or in case some idiot wants you to try and attack. Ideally you sleep and eat and cook and poo poo in one of the dugouts, if you're lucky not all in the same one. Trenches are what would today be just open ground between a series of fortified points, the issue at the time being that people were in the same fortified positions for a long time and needed to get between them without being artilleried or machinegunned to death. Both sides basically couldn't shift the other so they just kind of fortified up a bunch because there's not really a better option until we invent something to unseat the other guys. Like the tank.
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Oct 26, 2016 18:34
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Once you get to ww1 levels of entrenchment the tank doesn't really help that much. Tanks are more useful for keeping the fight fluid in the first place. I remember reading somewhere that NATO tactical doctrine for a WW3 situation where they ran into something as fortified as the western front ca 1916 would involve tactical nukes.
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Oct 26, 2016 19:05
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 13:42 |
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Cyrano4747 posted:Once you get to ww1 levels of entrenchment the tank doesn't really help that much. Tanks are more useful for keeping the fight fluid in the first place. I wouldn't be so dismissive of WW1 tanks against entrenched targets. Certainly a tracked, armoured vehicle with a gun worked better than the man-portable direct fire light guns that were used against strongpoints. 
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Oct 26, 2016 19:55
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