Things Noticeable this week

[Roubignol]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Our entire culture was affected by this wound and we feel the effects even today.

Do you think that today, Western active men (in France all valid men between 20 to 48 years old had to fight, at the end of the WWI France had lost 30% of its active male population (1.3 million dead and 4.6 million wounded soldiers)) would agree to be massacred like during WWI ?

France already was defeated during 1870 war. They had not the same "prestige" than the British Army.
Why French (but even German or British) soldiers agreed to be massacred during 4 years?

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by xyzde69

Do you think that today, Western active men (in France all valid men between 20 to 48 years old had to fight, at the end of the WWI France had lost 30% of its active male population (1.3 million dead and 4.6 million wounded soldiers)) would agree to be massacred like during WWI ?

France already was defeated during 1870 war. They had not the same "prestige" than the British Army.
Why French (but even German or British) soldiers agreed to be massacred during 4 years?

Under the circumstances which applied in 1916, I do not think they would. They have many more sources of information today and would know that the battle was not going well. Even in the Battle of the Somme there were some instances of British units refusing orders and staying in their trenches because they had already seen preceding human wave attacks killed to the last man and knew they would be killed too, and for no gain whatsoever.

But conversely, the British people have not lost the will to fight. If they think the stakes are high enough they have risked death before - famously in 1940, when they thought the game was up after the Battle of France but rebuffed peace overtures and prepared to go down fighting. In those stark days everyone expected the Germans to invade and very few people really expected Britain could win if that happened; but we didn't want to give in.

Nations that went down fighting rose again, but those who surrendered tamely were finished.
~ Winston Churchill.

The naive enthusiasm for war and battle is much less these days. But we know that people who refuse to fight when attacked are destined to be helots. Life is good; but the price can be too high and death can sometimes be preferable. When enough is at stake, we will certainly fight; but we understand these days that dying bravely is the way to not get the job done, and getting the job done is what counts. General Patton summed this point up extremely well.

The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his.

[SanteeFats]

Tactics lagged weapons development for a long time.
The US Civil War-massed soldiers shoulder to shoulder and as huge gaps were ripped into the formations they closed ranks because that is what the tactics said they should do A scattered, spread formation would have made a lot more sense but current doctrine dictated otherwise.
WWI- trench warfare with massed charges that resulted in 10,000's of dead and wounded from one attack Once both sides dug in it was over for the infantry. The generals were inculcated with the old tactics and refused to change when faced with the stalemate.

[Brecht]

There are quite a few important dates this month that remind us of the horrors of WWI and its consequences. Yesterday marked 100 hundred years since the end of WW1. And on this day, November 12th, 1918, the Republic of German-Austria was proclaimed. It was a "rump state" that definitely broke with the monarchy and told the Habsburgs to get lost. Making a new start was hard. The scale of misery, poverty, unemployment and lack of housing was best visible here in Vienna. The city was overrun and overcrowded with refugees and disabled soldiers. But the young republic managed and especially Vienna began to flourish during the 1920s, a time of great social achievements and huge public housing projects that influenced similar projects all over the world, most notably New York.

Here are a few examples of the 1920s Gemeindebau in Vienna:



The end of WW1 also resulted in the German Revolution of 1918/19 during which the monarchy was abandoned and replaced by the Weimar Republic. Thousands of German soldiers were in revolutionary mood and instead of shooting at their British brethren as ordered by the Naval command, they turned their rifles against their commanders who kept pushing them into one bloodbath after another.

Why are ordinary people still willing to kill and get themselves killed for the benefit of a small elite? To find an answer would require a lot of studying and debating. But a man who thinks it's his "patriotic duty" to follow every call for war, never questioning the motives of those who made the call, and always uncapable of bearing the consequences of his actions, is a morally corrupted fellow traveller with the conscience and perceptive faculty of a tool.

On the night of the 15/26. September 1983, the Soviet missile defence system reported the approach of an American intercontinental missile. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, had to decide over life and death for billions of people and he had less than 20 minutes to do so. But Mr. Petrov decided that it was a false alarm and, fortunately for all of us, he was right. If he were "just following orders" and doing his "patriotic duty", we wouldn't be sitting here now.

There are times when it is necessary to fight for the benefit of all, be it mankind of one's own nation/society. World War 2 was such an episode. Mankind was faced with the threat of a genocidal, fascist menace that could only be brought down by force and at a great price. But that's what it took and we are grateful today. In situations like these, conscientious objections are not justified. They're even immoral.

However, the absolute majority of modern wars is fought for the interests of a wealthy elite and their insatiable greed for resources and new markets, subsidised by the people's tax money and lives. And whoever still volunteers to "defend freedom and democracy" in Iraq, Afghanistan or, if we're to believe the orange baboon, on the Moon or perhaps Mars in the (near) future, should not ask for any understanding and compassion when the price to pay becomes too high. Try to learn from the courage of Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world.

[Rogerbh]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...liticians.html

Is this a joke? The Daily Mail doesn't print jokes, does it?

[DTravel]

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

Tactics lagged weapons development for a long time.
The US Civil War-massed soldiers shoulder to shoulder and as huge gaps were ripped into the formations they closed ranks because that is what the tactics said they should do A scattered, spread formation would have made a lot more sense but current doctrine dictated otherwise.
WWI- trench warfare with massed charges that resulted in 10,000's of dead and wounded from one attack Once both sides dug in it was over for the infantry. The generals were inculcated with the old tactics and refused to change when faced with the stalemate.

The truly sad part is that many European countries sent observers to the American Civil War and saw for themselves that the days of close packed mass formations were over yet 50 years later still hadn't learned the lesson.

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by SanteeFats

Tactics lagged weapons development for a long time.
The US Civil War-massed soldiers shoulder to shoulder and as huge gaps were ripped into the formations they closed ranks because that is what the tactics said they should do A scattered, spread formation would have made a lot more sense but current doctrine dictated otherwise.
WWI- trench warfare with massed charges that resulted in 10,000's of dead and wounded from one attack Once both sides dug in it was over for the infantry. The generals were inculcated with the old tactics and refused to change when faced with the stalemate.

To be fair though, it was the state of various technological developments that dictated WHAT infantry could do on the battlefield, which wasn't so much. Machine guns were well developed, and slaughtered infantry crossing open ground. And artillery had got pretty modern, which meant that if you stayed in your fixed position trench, you got blasted by that instead.

Tanks were primitive to nonexistent, being used at Cambrai to good effect IIRC, but mostly there was no armored support for troops to advance behind when trying to overrun enemy trenches. There were no assault rifles to give advancing infantry suppressive firepower. And no well developed aircraft to give good ground support.

So you have smokeless powder, nickel steel and TNT as well entrenched military components, but internal combustion and flight were still in infancy, relatively speaking. And WWI is what you get.

I don't understand why there wasn't an automatic rifle developed during that time frame by various powers for assaults during this time. Even years later in WW2, the British and Germans were STILL giving their troops Enfield and Mauser bolt action rifles. Maybe they thought it was cheaper to expend peasant soldiers than pay for the inevitable much greater expenditure of ammunition.

Dinosaur thinking. Scrooge deciding if you will live or die for the good of the exchequer.

[haroldeye]

Bowling you miss the point.

In 1914 tanks had not even been dreamt of. They were a technolgical development brought about by the dominance of arty and mg's. Likewise the lack of fire support in sections was addressed by bringing in the Lewis gun as a portable fire support weapon. Several automatic/semi auto rifles were designed but none proved viable. There were production difficulties, the level of technology especially in metallurgy was not there to produce something that was light but robust and simple to use. Likewise with aircraft the reason they didn't have good ground support was because they didn't have engines that were powerful enough and light enough to have bigger aircraft with greater payloads. The technology just wasn't there.

You have missed out one very important factor - Comms. None of the belligerants in 1914 had useable radio equipment. Messages were passed by landline, runners or gallopers and a variety of gismos such as heliographs or just putting identification panels on the ground for aircraft to spot. Remember C3 (Command, Control and Communications) well if you ain''t got good comms you're buggered on control and command.

The armies of WW1 had to cope with all the problems you outlined, that they did so is quite remarkable. It took time to do but the concepts they brought in are with us still.

Oh and the Brits were still using Lee Enfields in Korea. They were a bloody good rifle.

[Mal Hombre]

The US had the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) and the Germans had the Bergman MP 18,The Italians invented the eccentric VillarPerosa M1915 which was effectively two sub machine guns with a bipod but was sometimes carried in a chest harness.

The Lee Enfield was still killing Russians in Afghanistan from beyond Kalashnikov range.

[Wendigo]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

The Lee Enfield was still killing Russians in Afghanistan from beyond Kalashnikov range.

Wouldn't it have been much easier though if we had just hired a couple of religious architectural nerds and sent them there on a holiday