The feeling that the army had not “actually lost” WW1 was strong in post war Germany but that does not mean it was true. The returning soldiers did not want to believe they had been beaten and the defeated Generalls were very happy to support the view that it was the damned civilians who had stabbed them in the back.
As to “Almost nothing justifies all but wrecking your civilization, and “earlier German defeat” isn’t enough.” This is 100 percent hindsght speaking. There was no way any of the combatants could anticipate the long term consequences and, looking from the other side, what would the consequences been for Britain if Germany hand gain effective control of the Continent?
I think the tens of thousands of Germans surrendering every week in 1918 would not consider they didn’t lose the war. The reason that, as pointed out Little Nemo, the Germans were in Belgium and France at the end of the war wasn’t bebcause they were capable of holding onto them long term, it was because that is where the Armistice lines were drawn.
And why did the German Army break? The following quote after the breach of the Hindenberg Line pretty much sums it up…
The reason the Germans of two years ago weren’t sitting defending the line was that they were rotting in Ypres and the Somme. Had the Allies been sat on the defensive, they would have been manning machine guns.
The British showed how to break defensive lines, at Aimes for instance, and it was’nt post war memoris that, it was Ludendorff himself, called it the black day of the German Army.
I think we’re arguing extremes here to a degree. I certainly agree with you that wishful thinking was part of the German belief they hadn’t lost on the battlefield – but there’s a hard kernel of truth to the statement that the war was complicated by the blockade and not decided by outright defeat. And the point about relieving Verdun’s pressure on France is a good one.
But I’m not arguing – and I doubt anyone else here is – standing strictly on the defensive. There’s got to be some middle ground between massed frontal assault and hiding in your holes. In fact, there was – the infiltration tactics developed toward the end of the war. What we’re blaming the generals for is repeating the frontal attacks over and over at such cost instead of attempting the (not very mysterious) infiltration tactics sooner.
This isn’t hindsight at all. Here, let’s perform a thought experiment. Take any effective, optimistic grouping of people you like: a nation, a corporation, a religion, a family.
Ok, now kill almost all of them in a drawn-out agony of futility and bad decisions.
What’s the effectiveness and optimism of the remaining survivors?
I’ll treat this seriously, of course there were memoirs for all sorts showing how wonderful they were (and how bad everyone else was) but the judgement that both sides knew how to break into fixed lines is just an objective fact.
I’ve already said what I felt would have been a better strategy. I’ve read what you and others have said but I disgree with your views. I am surprised that you regard the historical consensus as being with you. I’ve found that the majority of historians consider World War I to be an example of poor military leadership.
There’s been a pretty big swing away from the idea that the British were lions led by donkeys. It was a common and understandable theory early on, given the horrendous levels of casualties, but the trend of academia certainly seems to be away from the outright criticism of Haig. Foch, however, I neither know enough about, nor have an interest in defending.
I thought Hitler’s big point which found such a sympathetic audience in Germany was the canard that Germany had been “stabbed in the back” by defeatist politicians, greedy businessmen, Jews etc., not that the civilian and military had been gravely weakened by the blockade.
A successful war of movement against entrenched lines stocked with adequate troops and machine guns was not a fixture of WWI offensives, but really was absent until near the end of the war.
And this could probably be argued till doomsday, but accounts I’ve read suggest that one initial British goal of launching the Somme offensive was to relieve pressure on Verdun, but that the French had the tide turned on that battle before the Somme offensive started, so that rationale arguably no longer existed. (Incidentally, the German general who oversaw the Verdun battle, Falkenhayn, probably deserves a few “bad general” votes for planning a battle to “bleed the French white”; but winding up bleeding both sides and allegedly squandering a chance for a German victory by holding back on critical troop commitments).
Yes but the First World War did not kill anything like “almost all of them” nor were the casualties exceptional. About 2% (0.9M out of 45M) of the British population were killed in WW1 which is just about the same as the population of the United States killed in the Civil War. France and Germany each lost about 3%. In many cases these percentages are lower than those for WW2 - do we talk about a lost generation of Durch in 1945-65?
I’m not in any way trying to play down the significance of the casualties suffered by all sides in the war; they were clearly horrendous and had a major impact of the post war psyche in many countries but the likelihood of casualties did not deter the statesmen and generals - nor the general population - from fighting the even more destructive Second World War only twenty years later.
What’s actually really pathetic about is that there was no need for it. Regardless of WWi’s long-term social effects, the generals were grotesquely incompetent in the Allied side.
For whatever reason, Europeans (before then, then, and now) do not want to learn from Americans, or anybody else either. The ENglish and French were no different. We could pretty much have told them what was going to happen, because it happened in miniature to us, but they really didn’t listen.
It is possible to break a trench. It was possible to break trenches in WW1. They did not do it, and it was years before the British began to figure that out. While I do not especially credit any of my countrymen for genius in WW1, we knew how to break trenches and did so.
Human wave tactics are not one of those ways, never has been, and never will be.
But it did fundamentally change the way the Second World War was fought, particularly by the British. Most noticeably, if you take the destruction of the First World War out of the equation, I am not certain you get the obsession with strategic bombing developing. The British casualties also were not equally spread - when a “fallen generation” was spoken of, it wasn’t necessarily the numbers that mattered, but the devastation meted out to the upper classes who in the start of the war formed the junior officer ranks (and I am pretty certain that 2nd Lieutenant was the highest casualty rate of any rank in the war).
Fortunately, for the British at least, there was another partner better suited, and more willing, for the necessary task of grinding the blood out of the Wehrmacht - the Soviet Union.
Grant didn’t break the Confederacy through attrition? I had always heard differently.
Why don’t you tell us the tactics the British Army should have used in 1916, with an inexperienced army of volunteers up against a well trained, well entrenched professional army?
What is a miracle about the Somme is that the British Army didn’t crack, and in the end ground out a victory.
Attrition was Lee’s strategy, not Grant’s. Grant wanted to win, and eventually did win, through break the rebel lines and outracing them to encircle the Confederates. I can hardly blame you for getting that one wrong, however, because generations of stupid people, and a lot of older Southern historians who idolozed Lee like a living god, said a lot of very stupid things about the Civil War.
Second, while trench-busting is hard, it has the singular advantage that it actually works. Not every time, but it doesn’t take too much training. It takes discipline, and the British had that. The French too, before they wasted their strength. And as I said, I can understand trying the massed attacks once or twice, but that’s would be it.
The “top-level basic idea” is to put a lot of men through a very narrow area. Then they can fan out. Depending on the circumstances, of course, it’s good to have covering fire, but the soldiers must under all circumstances move like a freight train with no brakes. Night attacks, or perhaps dawn or dusk attacks, are encouraged. The covering fire and darkness prevent reinforcement at that area or effective fire on it (and you always choose a weak spot or vulnerable salient. You then move in reserves into the trench area. Depending on circumstances, units to the flanks begin to move forward, pinning defenders between soldiers pouring from the sides and those advancing on the front. Special units should be set aside to stop any attempt by the enemy reserves to move forward before their lines are thoroughly disrupted.
That sounds complicated, but it’s not that hard to set up. You just make sure that each unit (and commander) understands what’s up and knows their own role. Someone also needs to lead from the front.
Second, the simpler idea is to simply retreat a short ways but keep up artillery fire. The enemy can either sit defending nothing and wear out his strength or advance on you and then face a more mobile situation. This was not well tried in WW1 (in the west anyway), either.
A third opion, more rarely used, are various special operations - the creamy sweet topping on the cake of war. Find ways to pysche-out the enemy or confuse him or sneak into or over or under his lines. The famous Battle of the Creater was one such attempt that went very right and then very wrong (they don’t always succeed), but it certainly was a good plan. It got fouled up largely because Burnside chose a front commander by drawing straws and that man got drunk and ignored the battle (I Am Not Making This Up). Grant bears part of the blame for switching the assault units, but the troops involved did the most absolute stupidest thing imaginable, which no reasonable man would do: they run straight into the crater instead of fanning out and then… stopped, blocking the ath of reinforcements).
The Civil War roundtable of which I’m a member has a big debate every January on a different topic. A few years back it was, “Who was the absolutely worst general of the Civil War?”
Burnside was one of the nominees, for screwing the pooch so remarkably at Fredericksburg. For terrific potential badly squandered, flagrant disrespect of his CINC, unearned arrogance and noteworthy timidity, McClellan was also in the running (and had my vote). Less well-known, I give you the guy who was most directly responsible for losing the Battle of the Crater (as smiling bandit just alluded to, and the winning of which might have ended the war in weeks), this drunken bastard: James H. Ledlie - Wikipedia
But Sampiro and AK84, you’ll be glad to know that, at the end of the debate and when the membership of the roundtable voted, there was a tie between Bragg and Hood. Both Reb generals were gawdawful, but in creatively, appallingly different ways, for all the reasons you stated.
This is just nonsense. Whatever the American Army had learned in the Civil War it had forgotten by the time the AEF arrived in France in 1918. As to not learning, it was Pershing that refused to take advice from his more experienced allies and committed his troops to frontal attacks on prepared position using tactics the British and French had discarded after 1916. Don’t take my word as a Brit on this, see the work of American historians who are scathing about his methods - Braim, Cooke, etc.
Wow! I’ll leave it to the American Civil War experts to take the rest of this apart but the bit about “trench busting” is absurd. I have no idea where this has come from but it is certainly not the technique that all armies on the Western Front used successfully by the end of the war. In some respects it sounds like the doctrine adopted by the French in 1914 - fire power to be defeated by the fighting spirit of the troops - that led to the massacre in the Battle of the Frontiers. I can think of no point in the First World War when this would have been an effective tactic.
It’s been quite some time since I really got into the Civil War, but it seemed to me like Grant won in the East precisely because he, having more men and an actual industrial base, realized that if he just kept engaging the Army of Virginia in a battle of attrition he was bound to win. Wasn’t that what the Wilderness Campaign and Petersburg were all about?
If I’m wrong I’d love to be convinced otherwise, but even if this wasn’t Grant’s actual strategy, surely its the reason he won, right?
To your post, the Franco-Prussian War, which was the formative war for much of the military thinking at the start of WWI was a rapid and dynamic war, the exact opposite of the Civil War. So there was little reason, at least at the start, for any of the generals in WWI to have based their tactics on what was successful in the Civil War.
I’m no defender of Lee, but all that I have read suggests that Grant’s tactics to do with Lee involved grinding him down.
The British Army did not have the experienced NCOs needed for this kind of operation. 1916 saw a mass volunteer army. There was a massive lack of experienced NCOs and junior officers. Something the German’s did not face. And the depth of the trench fortifactions seem to work against this. Capturing the frotn lline wasn’t an issue and was done regularly. The trouble was, the enemy was then nearer his supplies, you were further from yours, and you had to bring yours up and over destroyed territory, where enemy artillery had already laid in fire plans.
Politically impossible to expect the French to withdraw. And Britain was the junior partner, certainly in 1916. Withdrawing would never have been allowed by the British government, and would have fragmented the line with the French, allowing a weak point for the Germans to attack.
Again, I don’t see this as providing the full scale breakthrough needed. Such tactics were attempted in small areas - such as the mines dug by the British under German lines. And they were successful short term. Trouble was, you run into the inevitable second, third and fourth lines of defense. And again, Jerry is nearer his supplies, and his reinforcements. You are further away from yours. Until enough of Jerries men are dead, he can plug the gaps.
By 1918, he didn’t have enough to do that any more…