[Thanos]

$1:

Stone crosses marking the graves of German soldiers are overtaken by time and the growing trunk of a tree in Hooglede German Military Cemetery on the centenary of the Great War on August 4, 2014 in Hooglede, Belgium.

- Andrew Sullivan

[PostFactum]

Well, time can kill everything. Now we speak about WWI and have a strong remembrance. Later, humanity will forget, and will just know that "there was some kind of World War in 1914-1918. This trees are good symbols of short human memory.

[bootlegga]

Thanos Thanos:

That sort of thinking was still prevalent in 1939 too, which explains why the Germans caught the Allies so flat-footed in France in 1940. Nazism allowed anyone, regardless of class background, to move upwards in the military if they proved themselves capable of leading. The old "vons" and "aufs" of the old Prussian Junkers nobility no longer had a stranglehold on the officer ranks and lots of colonels and generals that came from more modest middle-class backgrounds had great success in the German military. The British however were still too dominated by the Sir Dipshite Weasel of Lower Duodenum types, especially in the general staff. It showed in the desert war where, despite having an almost continuous supremacy over Rommel in terms of men, vehicles, airpower, and naval support, the British nearly lost North Africa thanks to the chaos their incompetent leadership was causing. It was more or less corrected by the end of the war but it asks how many battles and lives were lost all due to the residual stubbornness of social class in British thinking.

I would argue that there are plenty of other factors that explain why the Germans caught the Allies flat-footed in 1940:

- French belief in the invulnerability of the Maginot Line (and a similar Belgian belief in Eben Emael) as well as the belief that the Ardennes was unpassable to armour,
- Allied policy of spreading armour piecemeal throughout infantry units instead of consolidating them into armoured divisions like the Germans,
- Hitler willing to gamble like the crazy bastard he was (the original war plan for France was just an updated version of the WW1 Schlieffen Plan until he ordered a review),
- lack of interoperability between Allied air and ground forces,
- lack of radio communications (French General Gamelin didn't even have on in his HQ),
- superior German coordination between combined arms (infantry, armour, artillery, engineers, airpower, etc),
- German forces were mostly state of the art - one of the few benefits of the Versailles Treaty (they had to develop armour and air forces from scratch in the 1930s and had far fewer obsolete tanks and planes),
- Higher German morale from winning battles in Poland and Norway

To name just a few...

[bootlegga]

Thanos Thanos:

$1:

Stone crosses marking the graves of German soldiers are overtaken by time and the growing trunk of a tree in Hooglede German Military Cemetery on the centenary of the Great War on August 4, 2014 in Hooglede, Belgium.

- Andrew Sullivan

German War cemetaries are a stunning visual contrast to Allied war cemetaries.

[Thanos]

bootlegga bootlegga:

Thanos Thanos:

That sort of thinking was still prevalent in 1939 too, which explains why the Germans caught the Allies so flat-footed in France in 1940. Nazism allowed anyone, regardless of class background, to move upwards in the military if they proved themselves capable of leading. The old "vons" and "aufs" of the old Prussian Junkers nobility no longer had a stranglehold on the officer ranks and lots of colonels and generals that came from more modest middle-class backgrounds had great success in the German military. The British however were still too dominated by the Sir Dipshite Weasel of Lower Duodenum types, especially in the general staff. It showed in the desert war where, despite having an almost continuous supremacy over Rommel in terms of men, vehicles, airpower, and naval support, the British nearly lost North Africa thanks to the chaos their incompetent leadership was causing. It was more or less corrected by the end of the war but it asks how many battles and lives were lost all due to the residual stubbornness of social class in British thinking.

I would argue that there are plenty of other factors that explain why the Germans caught the Allies flat-footed in 1940:

- French belief in the invulnerability of the Maginot Line (and a similar Belgian belief in Eben Emael) as well as the belief that the Ardennes was unpassable to armour,
- Allied policy of spreading armour piecemeal throughout infantry units instead of consolidating them into armoured divisions like the Germans,
- Hitler willing to gamble like the crazy bastard he was (the original war plan for France was just an updated version of the WW1 Schlieffen Plan until he ordered a review),
- lack of interoperability between Allied air and ground forces,
- lack of radio communications (French General Gamelin didn't even have on in his HQ),
- superior German coordination between combined arms (infantry, armour, artillery, engineers, airpower, etc),
- German forces were mostly state of the art - one of the few benefits of the Versailles Treaty (they had to develop armour and air forces from scratch in the 1930s and had far fewer obsolete tanks and planes),
- Higher German morale from winning battles in Poland and Norway

To name just a few...

True enough, but the British system lacked too much of the required adaptability that they needed to confront blitzkrieg tactics. The war in the desert came a year after the disaster in France. Not only should they have learned from what happened in France on how to combat the Afrika Korps, they really should have learned enough to have routed the Italians out of Libya altogether long before Erwin Rommel even arrived on the scene. Superior numbers of men, aircraft, vehicles, and nearly overwhelming support from the Royal Navy should have meant that the African front should have been secured a year before it actually was. Delete that clusterfuck in the army command in Egypt and probably would have been too. At certain points Churchill must have been wondering the same way Abraham Lincoln did about the Confederates as to why the other side got all the good generals and Britain got stuck with the other kind.

I compare the British more to the Japanese than any other one of the WW2 belligerents, at least in terms of how social attitude could affect the results in battle. After a string of victories, the Japanese were on the defensive from Midway right thru to the end of the Pacific war. It wasn't just American superiority in numbers or quality of equipment that beat them. It was also due to American adaptability. The Americans learned as the war went on. They didn't rely on repetitive tactics that were increasingly obsolete. They also had a different social arrangement that allowed such things as the naval air corps being open to any man, regardless of background, who showed enough basic competence to fly a fighter or dive bomber. The Japanese looked at it in terms of an elitist arrangement where their air corps was composed of a social elite. Highly trained and very skilled, of course, but with a system open only to the social upper class of samurai/knights they weren't capable of recovering after losing too many of their best pilots at battles like Midway or Guadalcanal. The British might have been moving away from this attitude by the time the war began but there was still enough of it in place in their upper ranks to negatively affect their fortunes on the battlefront during the early and middle stages of the war. If it weren't for the sheer size and power of the Royal Navy, and the ever increasing size and skill of the Royal Air Force, eliminating the chance altogether of a cross-Channel German invasion from happening after the summer of 1940 had concluded, the obsolete British way of doing things could have been a key factor of knocking them out of the war entirely after Dunkirk.

[Jabberwalker]

The Germans were famous for re-grouping, re-jigging themselves on the fly ... large groups ... small groups were all capable of retreating into good defensible situations. They thought on the fly. This was never the British way but the Commonwealth troops became pretty good at it.

[Jabberwalker]

martin14 martin14:

Aug. 6


Battle of the Frontiers begins in France.



Britain accepts Canada's offer of 20,000 troops.

On the evening of August 6th the Minister of Militia Sam Hughes sent a letter gram to the 226 Militia commanding officers
across Canada announcing the formation of the Canadian Expeditionary Force to be mobilized at camp Valcartier P.Q.
Valcartier had already been selected as a military training ground before the war broke out; but little had been done to put it in shape to serve as a mobilization centre for an expeditionary force of over 20,000 men.
On the day after war was declared, however, the engineers were already at work at the camp; and in less than three weeks there had sprung up what was perhaps one of the finest military encampments in the world.
A mile of rifle ranges was constructed; a waterworks system, a telephone system, and an electric light system. were installed; storehouses, offices, a moving picture palace, rose overnight; and ordnance stores began to pour in.


By the end of August, over 30,000 volunteers would be in Valcartier.


Some images of Valcartier.








Valcartier is still used as a CFB today.

I was only at Valcartier on one occasion for a few days "just passin' through". It was weird, though because it was a few months after a live grenade had gone off in a wood hut full of Army Cadets leaving a number of them dead, wounded and otherwise scared shitless for life. The windows were still shattered, there was yellow rope all around the WWII "temporary hut" and the investigation was still going on. There was a bit of a pall over the place. I have a daughter off at a similar Cadet camp right now and I'm confident that she is in better hands.

[CKASlacker]

Thanos Thanos:

Hitler didn't like them or trust them very much, that's for certain. Bit him on the rear end when he stopped listening altogether to the generals, even the ones who had proven their competence, and took over all the war planning (even down to the tactical level) for himself. Foolishly repeated in 1943 through 1945 exactly what Stalin did in the first year after the German invasion and issued a bunch of ridiculous stand-and-die orders that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers and lost dozens of battles that should never have been fought. The inherent egomania of dictators usually turns out to be one of the best weapons to use against them because, apparently, most of them will do something really stupid and effectively destroy their own cause.

Yes -- dismissing Erich von Manstein and the forced suicide of Rommel (albeit because of his involvement in the plot to kill Hitler) come to mind as foolish.

[Thanos]

$10 says the war would have lasted until at least 1946 if the Stauffenburg plot succeeded and generals like Rommel and Manstein took over the military command.

[Jabberwalker]

Talk of WWI naturally seems to lead to the same about WWII. It really was the same war, in many ways.

So, the little British army in August 1914, only about 230,000 strong worldwide was able to spare 100,000 for France. It was a professional army but they were up against 1,800,000 Germans mobilized in the first phase. The fleet was an instrument of siege and defence but not of offence. So, Lord Kitchener appealed to his people to build a volunteer "New Army" to take it to the foe.

[2Cdo]

I forget who it was that said the Armistice at the end of WW1 was merely a 20 year ceasefire.

[Gunnair]

[martin14]

2Cdo 2Cdo:

I forget who it was that said the Armistice at the end of WW1 was merely a 20 year ceasefire.

Ferdinand Foch, overall allied Commander.



Aug 8.


The BEF lands in France. 6 divisions infantry, 5 brigades of cavalry, commanded by Sir John French.


Douglas Haig is in command of I Corps.

Arthur Currie isn't even in charge of 2 Brigade, 1st Division yet.

[Jabberwalker]

Arthur Currie isn't even in charge of 2 Brigade, 1st Division yet.

He would have been trying to slip quietly out of Victoria, headed for Valcartier, lest anyone take a gander at his militia unit's books.

[martin14]

Aug. 10


On this day, the Princess Patricia's Light Infantry is officially authorized.

A private battalion raised by Andrew Hamilton Gault, who spent $100,000
(about $2 million today).

This would be the last privately sponsored battalion in the British Army.




After 10 days of recruiting, the PPCLI will have 1098 men, almost all with previous experience in the British Army.

They tried to get out over to England ahead of everyone else, but were forced to wait
due to German submarine activity.

The PPCLI shipped out at the end of September with the other 20,000 soldiers of the First Canadian Contingent, along with the Newfoundland Regiment

The PPCLI will be the first Canadian unit on the front line, entering around Dickiebush in Belgium on January 6. 1915, as part of the British 27th Division.

They would not join other Canadian units until December 1915.