“Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I Read Your Book!”
---George C. Scott in **Patton**Myth: We can tell from paintings where children back in the day were dressed like little adults, and also from the infant mortality statistics, that there was little concept of childhood in the past and parents didn’t get attached to their children.
Reality: That’s patently ridiculous.
That’s also why a lot of town names in the east end in “-field.”
In my area, there’s the story of one of the early settlers/pioneers who burned hundreds of acres of “Indian Corn” when they were fighting the natives for posession of the land.
Archaeologically speaking, one of the reasons a majority of people don’t realize how much the natives farmed was because those tools didn’t survive. What people see in museums are the hunting impliments-- spear points and arrowheads made of stone. The wood and bone farming tools decayed when buried.
Nor were the natives as “in tune with the earth” as they’re often credited. They could be just as wasteful as modern folks, burning forests to clear land and the like. Archaeological digs have shown that they’d sometimes kill an entire herd just to get the tongues or other select tidbits.
De Gaulle (and Fuller/Hart’s) books on the predate Rommels by several years (and his book was ‘Infanterie greift an’, infantry attack, he never finished ‘Panzer greift an’).
Needless to say that was the established military opinion particularly in France. De Gaulle’s career suffered greatly for being openly critical of these policies army (in particular the Maginot Line which was pride of the French military).
Y’know, the story of the pilgrims is an amazing microcosm of the history of the interaction of Europe and America. Settlers, disease, farming, slavery (Squanto was an escaped slave), starvation, warfare, peace, religion, the “empty continent” that is nevertheless densely populated, the Pilgrim story has everything, it would be a really great teaching story in the hands of the right teacher.
Who propagated that myth? Could it be the New Age crowd? Seems like everyone romanticize about those noble Native Americans :rolleyes:
Yep.
Gates was a competent (although underrated, then and now) commander, but he was a better strategist than tactician–and much better at strategy than at directing the chaos of battle.
It was Arnold who spurred the specific attacks that broke the British line and then deprived them of fortified redoubts from which they might have launched renewed attacks.
Arnold displayed similar audacity in the assault on Lower Canada and in defending Lake Champlain the previous year.
If we’re going to discuss myths regarding the War for Independence, however, the great myth (which rises to the level of the anthropological definition because it continues to shape the ways in which Americans see themselves, today) we need to consider the oft-repeated claim that the Yankees were shrewd enough to ignore the eighteenth century rules of engagement regarding fighting in open lines, thus winning their battles by brilliantly fighting independently from behind walls and trees.
It just ain’t so.
First, the British were not so foolish as the popular narrative tries to make them appear. The only engagement in which the British actually attempted to fight “European style” against an “American style” was at Braddock’s loss when attacking the French and Indians in Western Pennsylvania in 1755, 10 years prior to the American revolt–an event that occurred using a lot of Yankee troops (George Washington became a hero by salvaging the army and covering the retreat).
In wilderness conditions, the British (and the Hessians) were quite capable of using terrain, and did so. Similarly, in set piece battles, the Yankees used the same tactics (less effectively than the British until trained by von Steuben, Lafayette, and others). At Saratoga, for example, both the fights at Freeman’s Farm and the fight at Barber’s farm were carried out in “European” style.
The myth gets a solid boost from the events at Lexington and Concord where, over the course of the day, the British lost around 75 dead and around 175 wounded to the rebels’ losses of approximately 50 dead and 40 wounded. However, the British detachment sent to Concord had not set out intending to fight a battle. The two actual firefights were carried out in the typical European formations with the overwhelmingly outnumbered rebels driven from the field on Lexington commons and a small detachment of British at the Concord bridge defeated by a 3-to-1 ratio of rebels. Most of the British casualties were suffered on the retreat back to Boston in which the 900 (finally reinforced to 1,900) British soldiers were attacked by up to 4,000 rebels. Reading the a narrative of the actual events, one is struck by how frequently a handful of rebels would take potshots at the British column, only to be driven off by a small detachment of British troops bearing bayonets.
Somehow, in the retellings of the Yankee side, I suspect that tales of Braddock’s defeat were conflated with the details of other battles and eventually grew into the myth of the “independent” American soldier not bound by “obsolete rules” triumphing over the “hidebound tradition” of Europe. That would have come as a surprise to the Yanks who suffered losses and defeats at the hands of the “hidebound traditionalists” at battles such as Bunker (Breed’s) Hill or Brandywine, or the capture of New York City.
Except that it would perpetuate the myth/misconception that colonial history begins with the Pilgrims.
Try Jamestown instead.
(English colonial history, I mean.)
The myth that the Maginot line was useless and a waste. The Germans chose to invade through a neutral country in order to avoid it. Had the French the foresight to extend it to the sea, 'twould have been better.
Or as I like to call the first English settlement in North America, Roanoke. 
I don’t count lost colonies.
Like you’ve never lost anything. Besides, colonies are easy to misplace.
I recently read a book review on CNN.com about a new book about the Lincoln assassination. The review had the position that the majority of Americans believe Booth acted alone and there was no conspiracy and certainly no accomplices… This blew my mind so I startered asking people I knew and most of them just didn’t know anything about it except that Booth shot Lincoln. That also blew my mind.
Strangely enough this story to has some myth involved.
Mann, Charles. C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2005.
Squanto had been kidnapped nearly seven years earlier and taken to Europe so it isn’t unreasonable that he might have picked something up from them. I think another myth was that Europeans were crappy farmers but I don’t think that’s very fair.
Columbus knew that he was nowhere near China, so what was the opinion in Europe? Were the voyages of John Cabot (ca. 1500) known widely? Had people forgotten the Viking voyages? I find the lack of information about the N. American continent strange-since the basques had been fishing on the Grand Banks since about 1470 or so…
To elabaorate further, the false belief that Columbus was the sole believer in a spherical earth can most likely be traced to Washington Irving’s 1828 novel, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.
People in Europe had known that there were islands in the Atlantic (Iceland, Greenland, the Azores), and presumably took Newfoundland/ Labrador for more of the same. What was new beginning around 1500 was the realization that there was mainland (what we would now call continents) across the ocean. Columbus claimed that it was Asia, others soon proved that it wasn’t. The idea that there was a “New World” comparable to the Europe/Asia/Africa mainland was what was so startling.
The main thing about Douhet was that he based his doctrines on the presumption that all future wars would be deadlocked on the ground. He took WW1 to prove that technology had advanced to the point that any army that left it’s protective trenches and exposed itself to modern weapons would be annihilated. Strategic bombing was his vision of how any future war would have to proceed. The famous SF movie The Shape of Thing to Come perfectly illustrates the predictions of the strategic bombing advocates. Virtually everyone learned the wrong lessons from WW1, and the strategic bombing crowd was no exception. They vastly overestimated how effective strategic bombing would be and vastly underestimated how effective air defense would be. The Americans and the British, perhaps because both were “overseas” powers, choose to give long range heavy bombers a try; nearly everyone else focused on tactical and what would later be called “theatre” or “interdiction” bombing. In short Douhet was influential to a certain school of air power advocates prior to WW2, but his predictions were found wanting.
And yeh, basicly everything Irving said about Columbus was a big fat lie, but his book was influential for generations.
The purpose of the Maginot line was to force the Germans to attack only on ground of the French choosing - across the north Belgian Plains (or through Switzerland, carrying its own risks for the Germans). Confine the attack to a small enough area that German numerical superiority would not be useful (and use the Maginot fortifications as a force multiplier to allow the French/German border to be held with a relatively small number of troops, again working to bring force parity betwen Germany and France). A non-allied Belgium adamant about its neutrality could be sacrificed.
That the deployment and actual execution by senior French leadership in 1939-40 was so execrable does not mean the idea had not been thought out.
The Maginot line is a fascinating topic. It used up a trmedous amount of the French military budget, and it was largely bypassed. I expect that the French thought they were deterring attack by building it, but the Germans knew all about it. One thing I never understood-garrisoning the line tied up a large number of troops-why wer’nt they employed when the Germans struck through the Ardennes? Of course, the French were complacent, but the Ardennes forced the Germans to invader in a very narrow area-they French could have easily stopped them with a determined defense (troops equipped with 75 mm znti-tank guns).