My Bride (who is a terrific person for lots of other reasons, too...) was wonderful enough to gift me Tim Dowling's 2008 The Brusilov Offensive and I wasted no time curling up amid the wrapping debris to begin reading.
In the opening chapter I came across something that intrigued me a bit, and thought I'd throw it out here for the patrons to swill along with their Christmas nog.
On page nine, Dowling recounts a general consensus among what he describes as "...a great many people - most notably the Russian general staff - that technological advances would play a minimal role." in the coming war of 1914.
He then goes on to say that this "cult of the offensive" dominated most of the tactical to grand tactical thinking of the European powers. The paragraph concludes with a summary of the work of Austro-Hungarian GEN von Hötzendorf, as concluding that "Firepower was certainly beneficial, but its effectiveness was limited..."
I won't argue too hard against this; certainly there was a hell of an influential clique for the attaque à outrance idea in the French Army, and most of the other combatant army planners of WW1 seemed unwilling to abandon the notion that you could figure out some way to outrun a bullet or a shell and gain that elusive decisive victory if you just tried hard enough.
I get that part of that had to have been the lack of actual Great Power combat in the forty-odd years between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and 1914.
But, still...
You'd had the Russo-Japanese War just ten years earlier, and that had featured all the things that would kill all that "offensiveness" deader'n a Japanese rifleman hanging on the wire outside Port Arthur; deep entrenchment and obstacles behind machinegun beaten zones and heavy artillery.
Pretty much every other European power had observers with the combatants, and it sounds like a ton of them reported all the same problems for the attackers facing these defensive measures, it sounds like none of them - particularly the Russians themselves, if Dowling is correct - learned anything from the lessons of others.
That, in turn, makes me wonder; how often in history have we soldiers (or the civilian leadership that directs us...) done that - learned from the experiences either of our predecessors or others - versus how many times we've failed to learn those lessons? It seems off the top of my head that the failures seem more common than the successes, that it seems more likely that military organizations will fail to recognize critical changes in technical or tactical conditions rather than anticipate or adjust to them.
Is that really the case, though? Or am I just being influenced by a sort of military "recency factor" that occurs because those failures tend to be more spectacular than the less catastrophic effects when an organization does react and adjust appropriately?
And is this something that tends to happen to all large military organizations at some point? Is there an example of an army (or navy, or air force...) tending to be uniformly decent at learning from the lessons around them rather than having to learn the hard way?
The Battle of Elli; Greek Navy against Ottomans afloat, and the Superhero Armored Cruiser of Doom.
Possibly one of the strangest military engagements I've ever encountered. Seriously; it's naval war as Chuck Norris flick, where Chuck just tosses all the minions around and stomps them flat.
In my youth 11 November was touted as Armistice Day here in the States.I still call it that in deference to my
grandfather and great uncle.I never
understood why Ike changed it to Veterans Day.We already honored veterans on Memorial Day and on Armed Forces
Day.Why have another?Don’t bother to answer, I was only asking old
Ike a rhetorical question.Since World
War One was touted as the ”War to end all wars”, then IMHO
Armistice Day was honoring the stopping of war, any war; honoring ceasefires
regardless of where or when; honoring a truce no matter how short; honoring
peace.The Veterans for Peace organization still honors Armistice
Day as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of
world peace and to be thereafter celebrated."
But
unfortunately war never stopped on 11 November 1918.In the period just after the 1918 Armistice
there were at least 27 violent transfers of political power, many accompanied
by violent civil wars.Not just in Russia.
Winston Churchill in his arrogance commented
sarcastically: "The war of giants has ended, the wars of the
pygmies begin." Yet Europe
between Armistice Day in November of 1918 and the Treaty of Lausanne July 1923
was the most violent place on the planet.Four million people died during that period as a result of armed
conflict.Millions more died of the
great influenza pandemic between 1918 and 1920, much of it had been spread by
war.And hundreds of thousands died of
starvation due to those post-Armistice conflicts.
Yugoslavia
sparred with Italy over Rijeka.Poland did the same with Czechoslovakia over Cieszyn Silesia, and with
Germany over Poznań, and with Ukrainians
over Eastern Galicia.
The
last Sultan, Mehmed VI, was overthrown in Turkey.And Turks fought their own War of
Independence
against France, Italy, Britain, Armenia and Greece.
There
was the well-known Russian Civil War between Reds and Whites with various
interventions by French, British, Australian, Italian, Canadian & US troops
in Arkhangelsk;British, Canadian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese &
US troops in Vladivostok; Romanian troops in Bessarabia; Greek troops in the
Crimea and Odessa and Kherson; Estonian troops in northwestern Russia; and the
Czech Legion throughout Siberia.Plus
Russia repressed breakaway republics in the Caucasus and the western
borderlands, and the kulaks, anarchists and moderate socialists.Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Estonians
and Latvians fought against each other and against the Russians.
In Bulgaria there was the coup against Prime
Minister Stamboliyski by IMRO. His hand
that signed the Treaty of Niš
was cut off.Then he was blinded, tortured
and his head cut off, which sparked bloody uprisings
and repression.
I would guess I missed many more of the conflicts
during that period.And the above mostly
speaks of Europe.There was also much bloodshed
in Africa, Asia and the Americas during that timeframe to include the Rif War
in North Africa, the revolt in Egypt, the Amritsar massacre (and others) in
India, the March 1st Movement in Korea, the Warlord Era in China; the
continuation of the Mexican Revolution, and many more.FDChief is correct: the hairless ape has
never figured out a way to solve problems without violence.
At eleven minutes after eleven a.m., one hundred years ago today, one of the many great mass murders that have torn the European continent ground to a fitful stop.
As an American I do not have any real sense for the immense pile of death and suffering that was The Great War (and that in itself is pretty appalling - that the conflict those who fought and those who lived through thought had been, and would be, the most awful war in human history would within a generation be relegated to a mere number) even though my great-uncle was killed somewhere in the Aisne-Marne campaign while serving as a runner for his battalion in the 42nd ("Rainbow") Division. I'm like almost all Americans; any knowledge we have of the war is at a far remove. The trenches have no hold on me. I can read the accounts, the military histories, the poetry and the novels, and understand in a sort of distant way the horrific day-to-day reality of the war.
But it doesn't really affect me.
But for many of the peoples of Europe it was a stone in the chest. It wasn't just four years of ruin and merciless hatred; the Great War dominated political, and many personal, lives for decades.
And some places the War still has not ended; immense mines still lie in uneasy sleep beneath the soil of France.
And there is the Zone Rouge.
And that brings me to the tale I want to tell today.
As an American of the 21st Century I cannot do justice to the horrors that ended a century ago today So, instead, let me tell you the story of the village of Fleury-devant-Douaumont.
In August 1914 the village was just another little farming town in the wooded hills east of Verdun. The census of 1913 had recorded 422 inhabitants: Three innkeepers, a baker-confectioner, M. Simon - who was carpenter, cartwright and cabinetmaker - a shoemaker, three seamstresses, a builder, a tinsmith, five masons, a blacksmith, a baker, M. Tardivat the "inspector of works", a tobacconist (who may also have been the baker, the grocer, and one of the innkeepers or the brother of one of them), and six farmers who owned the land they farmed. And, of course, their wives, daughters, sons, and the various landless laborers who worked for them.
The village lived like the others around it; from farming and vinticulture, and timbering from the wooded hills where the lean gray wolves still watched from the shadows under the trees as they had in Merovingian times.
The fighting of 1792, 1814, and 1870 had passed Fleury by; all that touched it were the sons who returned with tales of battles far away...or never returned at all and were mourned in the old stone church.
Even the battles of 1914 were fought to the north and east, and the families continued to sow and harvest with, perhaps, no more than a nervous glance to where the night-horizon was lit with gunfire. All of that ended on 21 FEB 1916.
It was snowing that morning. The horizon lit with gunfire as the order came from the military district to evacuate. The villagers piled what belongings they could into carts and wagons and walked or rode southwest as the sky between the louring cloud and the frosted hills burned behind them.
They never saw their homes again.
The site of the village - since by mid-summer all that remained were rubbled heaps where the houses and shops had been - changed hands 16 times altogether.
The "powder magazine" (La Poudrière, described as "...an advanced artillery munitions dump to more quickly supply the field and fortress batteries between Douaumont, Thiaumont, Froideterre and Fleury-devant-Douaumont as well as some secondary munitions dumps...") located near the village was fought over again and again.The village site was finally retaken on 18 AUG, when after ten days of hard fighting Moroccan infantry went in singing the Marseillaise and held.
The site of Fleury is the photo at the head of this post. As you can see, the ruins of the little town have almost disappeared in the succeeding 100 years; only the shellholes remain.
The debris of warfare, particularly the massive amounts of unexploded ordnance including phosgene and chlorine gas shells, had made the entire area next to uninhabitable and certainly unfarmable.
It was included in what was called the Zone Rouge, the “Red Zone”, that portion of northeastern France too badly battered in war for human habitation.
After initial attempts to clear away the mess the Third Republic made the decision to let the Red Zone return to wilderness. Tree plantations were established, and the area let slowly regress into forest and meadow. The grass grew long in the cratered fields, the young poplars and maples formed doghair copses that welcomed back foxes and coneys.
Fleury, and eight other small villages around Verdun, were designated casualties of war – “villages that died for France” – and were honored by a representative in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris that served the memory of places that no longer existed save for as scattered stones in a tormented woodlot.
The area is now managed by a municipal council of three members appointed by the prefect of the Meuse department.
Much of the rest of the old Western Front has physically recovered from the wounds inflicted in the Great War. Even other areas within the old Red Zone have slowly been reclaimed, becoming farms and homes, towns, and even parts of cities as St. Quentin, Soissons, and Loos slowly grow with the new 21st Century.
The old days still take their toll, however; the occasional buried round - the "iron harvest" - is encountered by a disk harrow with unpleasant results, or, less violently, is seen placed carefully alongside the road verge to await the arrival of the Département du Déminage disposal teams.
The old border is a peaceful sort of place where the business of human life seems never to have paused. The old wars seem hard to imagine as lorries full of German machine parts roar west to Brest or French artisan cheese north to Brussels.
But Fleury-devant-Douaumont has never been rebuilt.
The village is tenanted only by the past, the only dweller the silent sleekness of the marten, the only passersby the ghosting wings of the thrushes.
The rustling passage of the hedgehog is all that recalls the lumbering walk of M. Body the grocer, and the owl-eyes the hooded glance of Mlle. Alpert the seamstress, gone these hundred years never to return.
And since the day wouldn't be commemorated correctly without some sort of poetry, here's a war song to listen to while you read the tales of battles long ago.
Out old Intel Dump pal Phillip Carter has a piece up at Slate discussing the presser put on by the White House Chief-of-Staff, former GEN Kelly.
Carter says all the usual things that are being said elsewhere about the Kelly presser - that it pretty much told anyone who doesn't have a DD214 that their only role in military affairs is to "support the troops" and STFU - but one line from the Carter piece really struck me.
It was this:
"The burden of our post-9/11 wars has been heavy but not widely shouldered nor shared. The result, echoed in opinion surveys of veterans and military personnel, has been a mixture of pride, nostalgia, and resentment."
Yeah, well, there was another group of veterans and military personnel who held strong feelings of pride and nostalgia about their recent wartime service and deep resentment towards the civilians and political leaders of their nation they held responsible for their failure.
They were the guys from the Kaiserlich Deutsches Heer, the Imperial German Army, after 1918.
And by the 1920s they had given up pretending even notional submission to the civilian government of Weimar and went out into the streets to fight, helping to contribute to the chaos and social unrest that eventually enabled totalitarian rule come to power in Germany.
In the bitterest of ironies, the supposed true German nationalists they helped to power considered them a danger to the fascist state. Many of the ex-freikorps were murdered or disappeared in 1934 when the true believers consolidated power.
Are the situations of interwar Germany and post-modern America very different?
Yes.
Is it good to have a small, self-selecting group within a popular democracy with a monopoly on the use and understanding of armed force and the attitude that that monopoly makes them politically superior to those without it?
No.
You can argue about the iniquities of a draft and I won't argue back. But the Founders of this nation had some strong opinions about the danger to a republic from praetorian treason.
I will suggest that former GEN Kelly's remarks should make you nervous about listening for the sound of the dagger leaving its sheath.
There is more than one way to get stabbed in the back.
Didn't post anything yesterday on observed Memorial Day. But the 31st is the true day, isn't it? Spent most of the day on a couch reading Henri Barbusse's horrific novel of a French squad of soldiers in the trenches of WW1. Titled "Under Fire" in the English version, in the original French it was titled "Le Feu: jounal d'une escouade". Written in December 1916 based on the authors trench diaries. Hard-boiled anecdotes of the trenches at the squad level. Only speaks of privates and the corporal squad leader, hardly never of sergeants and officers. Author was 41 in 1914 when the war started yet still served.
But despite my negligence in posting, both FDChief and Ranger Jim had good Memorial Day posts. Worth reading, both of them, if you haven't seen them already.
In WW2, they again suffered and endured Churchill's overreaching in Crete and mainland Greece.
That same year they fought off Rommel's (at that time undefeated) Africa Corps for eight months at Tobruk until finally relieved by the Eighth Army. Later they fought with distinction at the 2nd Battle of El Alamein.
But the Australian mainland had suffered the first of 97 separate air attacks by the IJN and IJAAF (that first attack was by 242 aircraft, most of them from the same aircraft carriers that had hit Pearl Harbor). And at Singapore, Churchill's so-called Gibraltar of the East, Britain's disastrous defense lost the Australians 15,000 troops to Japanese POW camps. Many of them died during the Sandakan Death March which matched (or was worse than) our experience at Bataan. Or they died on the Burma Railway. So the Aussie Prime Minister turned down further requests by Churchill and brought his troops home to the Pacific Theater.
Then in New Guinea, the ANZACs saved MacArthur's entire SW Pacific strategy by taking and holding the Kokoda Track; and doing outstanding work at Buna-Gona and Salamaua-Lae. After that, Mac then gave them the dirty jobs of mopping up Bougainville, New Britain, etc. And relegated them to the flank in Borneo while the US Sixth Army got the glory in the Philippines. There was some strong resentment in Canberra for that treatment. And rightly so IMHO.
No space to list all their contributions - I missed many other battles. But on the 25th, my bride is promising to cook up some ANZAC biscuits (guaranteed not to crumble no
matter how long they spend being bounced, banged and beaten in the
bottom of a military mail sack): http://allrecipes.com/recipe/9816/anzac-biscuits-i Might even need to wash them down with a tinny of Australia's favorite bevvie.
The Battle of the Somme lasted five months from July
to November 1916.There were over a
million dead and wounded:420,000
British, 200,000 French, 465,000 German.It was
going to be a major British/French offensive.However, with the German offensive at Verdun and Paris threatened, the
French diverted many of their Somme divisions to prevent a German breakthrough
to Paris.There was also a three pronged
offensive by the Entente that summer: the other two being the Brusilov
Offensive in the East (one million eight hundred thousand casualties), and the
Sixth Isonzo Offensive on the Italian Front (a paltry 100,000).Throw in the casualties for the German
Offensive at Verdun (976,000), plus those from the everyday grind of war and then the
total for the year is well over five million.1916 was a bad year to be a soldier.
Mametz Wood was an objective of the British in early July.A newly formed unit, the 38th
(Welsh)Infantry, got their baptism of fire at Mametz. The unit defending Mametz was the Lehr Regiment of the 3rd (Prussian) Guards Division, rated as one of the best German combat units by Allied intelligence. The 38th took massive casualties and had to be
pulled out of the line to be rebuilt and were not combat effective for a year
afterwards.
Soldier-poets Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and David Jones were at Mametz. As was Frank Richards, a buck private who in 1933 wrote the memoir"Old Soldiers Never Die", the line that Dugout Doug MacArthur used 20 years later. Sassoon won a Military Cross for gallantry at Mametz. Modern Welsh poet Owen Sheers writing in 2005 composed this piece to commemorate those who died there:
Mametz Wood
“For years afterwards the farmers
found them –
the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades
as they tended the land back into itself.
A chit of bone, the china plate of a
shoulder blade,
the relic of a finger, the blown
and broken bird’s egg of a skull. … Their socketed heads tilted back at an
angle
and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open. As if the notes they had sung
have only now, with this unearthing
slipped from their absent tongues.”
An
elastic defense was used by most notably by Hannibal at Cannae, Daniel Morgan
at Cowpens, and then polished by Ludendorff late in WW-1.Many call it ’flexible
defense’ (CvC??), or ’resilient defense’.Or sometimes it is referred to as ’defense in depth’ although dummy that I am, I do not see
for sure that the latter fits perfectly.A defense in depth can certainly be part of an elastic defense and vice
versa.But I am stumped as to how they
would fit into Venn diagrams.Zhukov at
the Battle of Kursk is probably the best example of defense in depth.Petain reportedly pushed for defense in depth
up to and during the 1918 Ludendorff Spring Offensive, but could not always get
his subordinate generals to go along.
One
French General who did use an elastic defense in WW-1 was Henri Gouraud, the
one-armed Commanding General of the Fourth Army.
In
1918 during the 2nd Battle of the Marne the Fourth Army held a line 50 kilometers long from the Argonne Forest to
Rheims.And by-the-way in addition to
French troops the Fourth Army included the 42nd Rainbow Division (whose
CofS was young Colonel Douglas MacArthur), also the 369th Infantry
aka the Harlem Hellfighters (formerly the 15th New York National
Guard Regiment), and later the American Railroad Artillery (Naval). Here
is a quote from Col William Hayward, Commander of the 369th
Infantry:
"This
is what Gen. Gouraud—Pa Gouraud we called him—did: He knew the Boche artillery
would at the appointed hour start firing on our front lines, believing as was
natural, that they would be strongly held. So he withdrew all his forces
including the old 15th, to the intermediate positions, which were at a safe
distance back of the front lines. Then, at the point where he expected would be
the apex of the drive he sent out two patrols, totalling sixteen men.”
Those
sixteen split up and sent up rockets when the German attack started, mimicking signals
from regimental size units, which the Germans were assumed to know as well.They also set up unmanned machine guns all along
the line that continued to fire automatically after being started off.They had also placed gas canisters in all the
bunkers and dugouts along the line --- and then initiated the gas flow before
retreating. Meanwhile the artillery had pre-registered directly on those
frontline trenches. NOTE: 16 would not be enough for a 50-kilometer front, so I am assuming there were many such units perhaps for each regiment at the supposed apex?
Hayward
continues:
"Five
minutes before the Germans started their artillery preparation for the drive
Gen. Gouraud started his cannon going and there was a slaughter in the German
lines. Then when the German infantry crossed to our front line trenches (now
entirely vacant) they were smashed up because the French guns were firing
directly upon these positions, which they knew mathematically. And those of the
Boche who went down in the dugouts for safety were killed by the gas which the
Frenchmen had left there for them.
"This
battle—the supreme German drive—raged over eighty-five kilometers (51 miles).
West of Rheims the enemy broke through the line, but they did not break through
anywhere in Gen. Gouraud's sector. Stonewall
Gouraud stopped them.
"That
was the turning point of the war, because soon thereafter began Marshal Foch's
great counter thrust, in which the 1st and 2nd American Divisions participated
so wonderfully about Belleau Wood, Chateau-Thierry and that district. Gouraud in my belief, turned the tide of the
war.”
High praise in those underlined passages.
So did General Gouraud get the idea for such tactics from observing Ludendorff's empty battlefield technique? Most probably. But he possibly also got it from his 15 years experience in Africa where he served in the Mandingo Wars in what is now Mali and Guinea, and against Berbers, Tauregs, Hausa and other native people in Morrocco, Mali, Chad, and Mauritania.
In any case, as Wilhelm Balck is supposed to have said: “Bullets quickly write new tactics.” Too bad the butcher Field Marshals Sir John French 1st Earl of Ypres and Sir Douglas Haig 1st Earl Haig never understood that. Amazing that their nation bestowed honors and earldoms on them for their murderous incompetence.
Just a few days over a century ago the Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk.
There is a good article in Fortune magazine about stalled attempts to recover her and to determine if she did in fact carry war material to England as the Germans claimed. This time though it is the Irish Government and not the Brits that are holding up the attempt.
At the time (and since then) there was lots of propaganda and counter-propaganda regarding the event. There have been other articles in the past confirming that there was ammo aboard, tons of speculation but was there any definitive proof? Not sure myself but I would not put it past the British war office. One article from the Daily Mail in 2008 'seemed'' to confirm they carried 303 rifle cartridges. The bigger question is whether or not they carried guncotton and/or artillery shells that could have caused the lerge secondary explosion. It would be good IMHO to know the truth. I do not believe it was the Lucy that got us into WW1, but perhaps it head-shaped us into our eventual entry two years later.
Interesting link from Hurriyet, a major Turkish Daily and
reportedly the third most visited news website in Europe, probably due to the large number of immigrant Turks and Kurds in northern Europe. In any case it shows a large digital album of 100 year-old
photographs.
Unfortunately they are not captioned.Photo #23 was particularly intriguing: six
Turkish soldiers smiling at the camera next to a tent with an American flag
hanging at the entrance. I am conjecturing that they are Turkish-American returnees. New York and New England received many ethnic Turks from the Balkans and Cyprus prior to WW-1.
Photo #40!!!Wow,
that is a genuine old-school kanonisti.My
back hurts just looking at that guy.Gallipoli probably and I bet that shell has either General Hamilton’s or Admiral de Robeck's name written
on it in chalk.
Gallipoli is where Ataturk (Mustafa Kemal) made his
bones.His face is undoubtedly in a photo of one of
those groups of officers.A young Mulazim (Lieutenant) Tahsin Yazıcı was also at Gallipoli and may be in one of those pics. 35 years
later he commanded the Turkish Brigade in Korea as part of the United Nations Command.
I used to associate Turkey during WW1 only with the Aussies
at Gallipoli and Faisal’s Arab Revolt.But wait, not so fast: In eastern Turkey and the Caucasus the Ottomans fought battles at Ardahan, Sarikamish,
Van, Koprukoy, Trabizon, Bitlis & Mus, Erzinca, Baku, Sardarapat,
Kara-Killisse, and Bash-Arbaran.Circassian and Kurdish cavalry, Azeris, Persians, and German advisers fought alongside peasant Anatolian infantry (some Kurds fought for the Russkies too, they were not a monolithic bloc). The initial Russian advances (along with their Armenian and Assyrian allies) were most
likely due to a priority Ottoman defense of Gallipoli. The Turks fought and won the the Battle of Ctesiphon and the Siege of Kut in Iraq. They beat Allenby in two of the three Battles of Gaza in Palestine but lost the third and the Battle of Megiddo. They stalemated the Brits in the Yemen. Turkish Navy ships in addition to contributing to the allied defeat at Gallipoli accompanied battlecruiser SMS Goeben (redesignated TCG Yavuz) on raids to Russian ports in the Black Sea.
Good reads on the subject are by Professor Edward J Erickson,
former US Army Field Artillery Officer, and is now a professor of military
history.He has written several books on
Turkey and its history.
UPDATE:I have
been scolded, and rightfully so, for not mentioning five other WW1 Fronts in
which Ottoman troops served:
Galicia where the 19th and 20th
Turkish Divisions were hastily sent after Austro Hungarian Forces melted during
the Brusilov Offensive.The famous 19th
Division had previously been commanded by Atataturk at Gallipoli.They fought alongside the German 55th
and 1st (Reserve) Bavarian Divisions. (Note – This area is now
mostly the Western Ukraine)
Romania where the 15th and 25th
Turkish Divisions fought under von Mackensen against both Romanian and Russian
troops.
Macedonia where two more Turkish Divisions (50th
and 46th) reinforced the Bulgarians and fought against an Anglo-French
Expeditionary Force. (Note – The Turks arrived there to much cheering by
Khosovars and Albanians.)
Libya where the Turks armed and advised the Senussi
guerrilla war against the Italians and also invaded the British in Egypt.They were reinforced with a single Turkish Infantry
Battalion. (Note – The Senussis were a key anti-Gaddafi faction in the 2011 Libyan Civil
War.)
Iraq/Persian border where a small Turkish detachment
held off Russian attacks on Khanaqin. (Note - Khanaqin is just a short distance
away from Jalawla where heavy fighting is going on today between Kurds and IS.)
