> "The machine gun is a much over rated weapon.." - Field-Marshal Douglas Haig
> "Whatever you do, you lose a lot of men." -- General Charles Mangin
> "Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value" -- Ferdinand Foche
> "My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack." - Ferdinand Foche
> "It takes 15,000 casualties to train a major general" - Ferdinand Foche
Who was in the wrong here? Were they all retarded?
Was there -any- competent commander in WW1? The whole war was a lot of entitled shits who never actually earned their positions casually throwing lives away because "they're beneath me."
>officers aristocrats
>nepotism through the fucking ass
>incompetent people on all sides
>if you disobey you get shot
>no trial for disobeying an order till 1940
May not count because he was American (and I could be completely wrong) but Pershing seems to be an acceptable commander morale/compitence/etc wise.
Arthur Currie.
Literally pioneered the idea of being a competent leader who gave a fuck about his men.
Where is the Glory in that?
This is a meme. Many of the commanders were competent. It was an extremely difficult war and massive casualties were unavoidable.
Foch won the 2nd Battle of the Marne and Haig won the Hundred Days. Fuck off and get your history from something other than Blackadder.
>The whole war was a lot of entitled shits who never actually earned their positions casually throwing lives away because "they're beneath me."
This is a fucking brainlet meme popularized by left-wing antiwar academics in the 1960s. Fuck, I'm so tired of hearing people repeat this.
Cardona would like a word with both of you.
>blackadder and GCSE history
Jesus Christ
even Cadorna didn't say "they're beneath me"
The only person I know of who expressed total contempt for casualties was one of the division commanders at Gallipoli, who said "what do I care for casualties?"
protip: he was replying to his superior officer, General Hamilton, who had just suggested to him how he could reduce casualties. Because Hamilton, like most sane officers, cared about casualties.
The only absolutely retarded doctrine in 1914 was the French shock doctrine, and that was corrected literally within weeks by the very men who created that doctrine.
Foch is responsible for his dumbass bayonet fixation, but he is also responsible for exploiting the strategic mobility of French railways to redeploy his entire army to successfully defend the Marne and prevent defeat. A retard would not have done that.
also it is worth noting that the French doctrine was based on perceived lessons from the Russo-Japanese War in which Japanese forces overcame entrenched Russian machine gun positions. This appeared to prove that well-handled and motivated infantry could defeat fire by maneuver and shock.
Cadorna said the only reason his men were dying to machine guns and grenades was that they were pussies, had nothing but contempt for his casualties, because according to him, anyone who's brave enough can just decide not to be affected by bullets, or something, to the point of denying what few comforts his soldiers had before he threw them away.
The war was full of shit like this and you know it. Commanders didn't give a flying fuck, or were told not to give a flying fuck about stupid, reckless actions for no gain and exorbitant loss.
Haig, Petain, Pershing, Foch, Hutier, Bruchmuller...
They were used to earlier forms of shock warfare, where muh guts did indeed play a major role.
The wombo combo of railroad supply networks with early industrial firepower was a new one.
And I'd say you had a point if this wasn't the state of things for years.
all wars are full of shit like that.
average daily casualties for allied divisions in the Ardennes 44-45 were the same as casualty rates in the Ardennes 18. Attrition is a fact of industrial war.
Not really. Pershing's greatest strength that he was willing to actually accept when he was out of his depth and let someone else lead. (Hunter Liggett).
At the start of the war, he was convinced that the American soldier was, by the virtue of being American, a vastly superior rifleman to any European soldier. That's partially why America never adopted the Lewis gun, or any decent light machine gun (the BAR got a pass because it was a 'rifle').
People adapt slowly, user. Early tanks and shock trooper tactics were not enough to beat railroad resupply.
Thinking you're smarter than the people of the era because you read a vague and inaccurate account of it is dumb egoboosting.
you say this as if military adaptation is easy
The Great War was waged, so the Central powers would be no longer a trade competition to Bongs. Also the Tsarist Russia would be dismantled and robbed.
i wonder who could be behind this post
Not smarter, necessarily, but I'd like to think it wouldn't take me four years of literally apocalyptic body counts to figure out something isn't working.
Nah, not the sixties. It was the fucking nihilists who wrote the books immediately after the war. If you look at it by 1917 it was a mobile war on both fronts with trenches being bases of operation not the whole front, even in france. But then you got books like All Calm on the Western Front pro porting that to the very end it was a horrible stalemate.
I suggest you read about the actual course of WW1 doctrinal adaptation. From literally the first week they were adapting and trying to find solutions. Do you think industrial war is easy? Nobody had ever fought under these conditions. They had no idea what the fuck they were getting into.
>If you look at it by 1917 it was a mobile war on both fronts with trenches being bases of operation not the whole front, even in france
That's a pretty significant exaggeration. Until the Spring Offensive of 1918 the Western Front was still fairly locked down. The Spring Offensive and Hundred Days were the wars of maneuver.
if the generals didn't care about casualties, explain the elaborate ruses the British used to evacuate Gallipoli with literally 0 combat casualties. why did they bother if they didn't care?
A fucking limey?
Can you recommend material, then?
War of Attrition by William Philpott is a very good survey of the Western Front
Peter Hart's The Great War is honestly very solid and there's always Martin Gilbert's The First World War.
This is interesting. What was the difference between both situations that made things go so badly for the French?
One, checked, two, the Russians were absolutely fucking abysmal on firepower and leadership. Technically the Russians were supposed to use the Mosin Nagant but thanks to supply issues, most units used the Berdan rifle, which was a 1870's rifle. Meanwhile the Japanese were already onto the Arisaka.
Combine this with better supply lines for the Japanese, better leadership, and many other things, and suddenly the Japanese seemed to have shown that guts were still better than guns.
>not just surviving the absolute worse of the war by sheer, touched-by-an-ancient-war-god luck
>not assaulting enemy positions to stave off boredom
>being a bad sport by using weapons other than rifles
> Were they all retarded?
yes, see
First of all they were overlooking the fact that the Japanese attacks on Russian positions still sustained massive casualties.
Second, the Russians had far fewer machine guns than the Germans, and their entrenchments were much less sophisticated than Western Front entrenchments. For example, the Russian Army in Manchuria didn't have enough barbed wire, so they had to resort to using telegraph wires as a stopgap to defend their positions.
Third, the war was simply smaller and took place in different conditions. The Western Front had a far higher density of formations and materiel, and better equipped forces on all sides.
It is worth noting that the French shock doctrine was an aberration - the French doctrine before 1904 was fire-oriented, and they were starting to transition back towards it when war broke out.
There are many other minor doctrinal quirks which were reasonable-sounding but turned out to be wrong - for example, the French were never ignorant of the need for fire support. The French main field gun was the 75mm schneider, which was designed for direct fire to provide close range, mobile support to the infantry. But it turned out that trench warfare really needs INDIRECT fire weapons at long distance to arc over embankments, so the French had to switch their production to howitzers and rework their artillery doctrine.
Massie's Castles of Steel is a great naval history of the war
It's important to remember that our view of the war is heavily defined by the British experience, which is a bit unrepresentative. The British Army was fucking tiny and had very few career officers. This meant that most of their commanders had no experience, and they had to recall a shitload of retired officers whose experience was totally outdated colonial warfare.
Thanks, anons.
All generals will be incompetent if your idea of a general is Julius Caesar.
Add up all of these factors.
>War is not glorified anymore, in the best case is considered a minor bump for a better objective but never the objective
>Most modern figures are subjected to strong scrutiny so their flaws are more apparent
>Those that seem flawless are propaganda either way.
That's not to say that all generals were retarded or something, just that when you look into the achievements of military leaders you will find as many blunders as successes, just that their successes happened to be with the appriate support and in the right context and many times is not that they were genouses but rather that they had the oportunity to apply the experience accumulated in several conflicts and by the time they reach that specific conflict they shine like they came out of nowhere.
Experience is key, give people the means to battle but if they never trained or saw combat.
en.wikipedia.org
Give an army over 20 years of experience and a minimum of resources and...
en.wikipedia.org
Have a dreadfull working environment for your generals and...
en.wikipedia.org
But, yes sometimes they are actually incompetent without many excuses...
en.wikipedia.org
In war, I would dare to say, that what you see far more is not the ability of the military to be efficient, but rather, the ability to take advantage of the mistakes the enemy make.
I forgot that European nations actually used ironclads
>Haig
hindsight is 20/20
He isn't wrong though.
Haig was honestly one of the better generals of the war. For all the critiques you could have of him, we're still using his model as a basis for combined arms tactics, ideas about operations, and especially his work on attrition warfare. Much as he had his issues, the man is still the basis for all warfare from the 20th Century onwards.