On May 31, 2017, at 6:51 PM, David Jaques-Watson <xxxxxx@pcug.org.au> wrote:

Dear Folks –

 

C. Berry wrote:

> The whole trend of military history over the past 700 years or so has been to put a greater emphasis on maneuver.

 

Yeah, except you have to explain WWI trench warfare.

 

(Answers:

a)  the high command really didn’t know how to use their modern weapons – they were still fighting the _last_ war

b) the high commands believed in attrition – keep throwing in more troop, especially the colonials (British attitude), and as long as you kill more of them than they do of us, we’ll win in the end.

 

Powerful artillery + machine guns + no mechanization.  

Remember that for most of WWI pretty much anything that wasn’t done on foot, was done with horses. Cavalry couldn’t maneuver on the front, all that was left was hurling bodies at the other side.  The high command WERE using their modern weapons: howitzers, rifled guns, machine guns, gas. 

They didn’t have the rest of the modern mechanization formula, until quite late in the war. 

In was Monash who came up with combined ops – artillery, bombers, tanks, infantry – who brought back maneuver.

And this was realized in the Battle of Hamel….in July 1918, 4 months before the end of the war, using advances such as the Mark V tank, which arrived on the front barely in time for it’s use. This isn’t meant to diminish his enormous accomplishment, but in many ways he couldn’t have done this style of combat until that moment. His genius was seeing what was possible with the new tools at his disposal and a unified command structure. (itself only possible with the advent of modern communications..the REASON previous commanders didn’t widely use combined operations was that communications still largely moved at the speed of travel. Hmm, now just WHERE have I read that concept before ?? :-)

A large part of the the horror and carnage of WWI was due to the British generals sticking to their ages-old tactics of ‘line the peasant redcoats up and march toward the enemy’, but a lot of it was due to the asymmetry of technological advancement, guns (both large and small) were much more advanced than anything else on the battlefield. The British did use their most modern weapons at the Somme, but the Germans were better at building trenches and emplacements, and largely survived the ‘softening up’ shelling, which also failed to destroy the wire between the lines. 

The British command's stupidity was in not calling off the advance when it was clear it was a slaughter.

It’s kind of staggering how rapidly technology advanced in just four years. (and in another sense, how little it changed. Horses were an enormously important component of the German Blitzkrieg in 1938.) 

-- 
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs

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