Some things don’t change. Around 1970 we had US radios (?10 sets?) which came with very nice US pattern harnesses which, alas didn’t fit onto anything on our 37 pattern webbing. So the choices were lug it by hand with your weapon in the other hand or rig up a Heath Robinson arrangement which fundamentally bore the radio’s weight by tying a couple of straps in front of your throat, which was a bugger in heavy country as the aerial snagged every branch and nearly throttled you. The best part was that a lot of the time the radios were out of contact, so they weren’t worth carrying anyway.
Which allowed for them to in effect serve as a strategic reserve, and to allow for a more aggressive stance of a seasoned, reinvigorated British Army…
It’s relatively easy to make an arguament that all the battles were allied defensive victories. The Germans never managed to break through the line and suffered horrendous casualties in the process. Much worse, they started suffering from breakdowns in discipline in the process - breaking off attacks to loot captured stores for instance. An army that acts like that is on the verge of total defeat - as happened a few months later at virtually the same point during the battle of Amiens.
Well I’ll agree that if they weren’t Allied victories, they were certainly Pyrrhic ones for the Germans…Interesting point about the break downs in discipline though…
Ummm… Bellau Wood was one (rather small) part of the big battle. It has loomed rather large in US perceptions because it was their first major battle, but they weren’t all that big a part of the battle. Overall, in the Second Battle of the Marne the French suffered 95,000 casualties, the BEF 13,000 and the Americans 12,000. That puts US casualties at 10% of those for the battle of the Marne (and it was after all the battle of the Marne as a whole which stopped the German thrust on Paris, not the US contribution in particular).
German casualties incidentally were 1.4 times more than the combined allied total.
Quite correct. But Bellau Wood was a battle that’s significance lies far beyond American national pride (of which both the British and French went to good lengths to squash by unfairly judging an amateur army, or Marine Corp in that case, built largely from scratch from an enfeebled, tiny peace time ‘constabulary force,’ as second rate when they themselves were second rate an amateurish in 1914). Albeit, the US Army was quite a mechanized one at that, and did in fact have experience in wide maneuver in the 1916 “Punitive Expedition,” however European battlefields were not always kind to mechanized warfare. Also keep in mind that only recently (1916) had the US even bothered to update its organization of the primitive colonial era militia system to one of a more standardized Nat’l Guard akin to the TA and whatnot. The last large scale US military adventure beyond what were essentially counterinsurgency campaigns in the Americas, The West, and in the Philippines in addition to a small, limited fight against the second rate Spanish Army was the American Civil War. Still very much in living memory, the institutional knowledge of commanding and maintaining a huge army was lost and there was relatively little experience or doctrine at commanding such a force, which would of course take time.
Gen. Pershing was under considerable political pressure from the overall American public that had in fact witnessed first class endemic incompetence and inability to decipher the modern changes in warfare which caused the slaughters on the Somme…I can’t say I blame him for being skittish at the prospect of lending out his forces piecemeal to the French when it took so long for a unified command structure to be put in place…
Back to the Wood. What Belleau Wood showed was that the Americans, inexperienced and green, were indeed prepared to fight toe to toe with battle hardened German units, and the German hopes that perhaps the Americans would be completely useless for years and a quick defeat could be inflicted were extinguished there. And beyond the Marines at Belleau Wood, the US Army played a far greater role in blunting the German advance than did any other Allied force in that particular offensive or sub-offensive or whatever is was…
Maybe. Thing is the Allies were planning on this and the plan said that they would be launching the attacks to win the war in 1919, not 1918. It is actually very interesting to look into this planning (see this link) as it throws a great deal of light on the development of modern warfare. It’s virtually the prototype of Blitzkrieg, while there are some major errors in it that the Germans largely carried forward into WW2 and were only fixed by the Soviets.
One other important thing to remember - the general perception that attacking is more costly than defending just isn’t true. It’s a classic case of “the other side of the hill” in action - you see your own losses but not those of your enemy. Even in battles such as the Somme generally considered an attacking disaster casualties were roughly equivalent, and by the end of the war the attackers routinely took much lower casualties.
Absolutely agreed.
I recently saw something on the military channel entitled “Battlefield” (I think) featuring a British historian and his son recounting battles with the aid of computer CGI and modern demonstrations with (mostly) the British Army…They do a pretty impressive job.
One of the things they presented as the knew British planning to counter act the War’s main scourge: what was the technology of defense versus the lack of tech for offense, as even the tank, though very effective when properly used, was still too primitive automotively speaking (i.e. unreliable, and sadistically wearing on their crews) to have much of an impact. So the general staff used an intricate plan of artillery bombardments that would only cease as the infantry wheeled up onto the German positions confounding the German expectations of warfare and causing a catastrophic breakthrough; inflicting a “shock and awe” on the Kaisers troopers akin to what they would do to the French 22 years later. The attacks were so precise and timing was the key, that the Germans simply didn’t know what was happening and like the French of 1940, became catatonic…
I am wondering if you find this assessment correct?
Only in terms of warm bodies. The troops withdrawn from Russia weren’t actually up to much - they had large numbers of communists within them, and since they’d been fighting a very different war weren’t really suited to the Western Front. It’s also worth noting that the Germans had to leave a million soldiers engaged in occupying the territories handed over at Brest-Litovsk.
Interesting. But I just read on Wiki that it was like about 50 divisions, which is no small number.
Again, that’s something that’s badly overblown. Fire and manouver, hurricane artillery bombardments etc. were all features of the battle of Passchendaele nearly a year earlier. The only substantial difference was the emphasis on hitting weak points in the initial attack, leaving any points of resistance to follow on units. Given the conditions prevailing in WW1, that is at best of marginal benefit.
One big thing to point out about the initial German offensives against Fifth Army is that it had been gravely weakened prior to the attack - from memory the Germans outnumbered it about 2:1, and it was holding what was generally recognised at the time as too much front.
And as a general compliment, I must say I find your off-hand knowledge on WWI quite impressive. Well played sir, well played…
Maybe. I really need to read up a hell of a lot further on the correspndence between Haig, Foch, Pershing and Lloyd George to comment either way on this one. It is by no means simple - Lloyd George was persistently trying to undermine Haig and commit the UK to a strategy of attacking anywhere but the Western front. There are a lot of second-order effects like whether the level of US presence in France strengthened Haig’s hand in his arguaments with Lloyd George that I really can’t answer from what I know right now.
The discipline thing really came back to haunt the Germans shortly afterwards. Ludendorff described the battle of Amiens as “the black day of the German army” not because of the scale of the defeat but because discipline broke down and large formations gave up and surrendered rather than fighting. When this started happening he knew Germany was finished.
That’s something of an understatement. Trying to fight that sort of battle in the circumstances prevailing on the Western front is a good way to get a lot of men killed to little effect. The first day of the Somme was planned by soldiers with a similar history (Boer war, various imperial wars, etc.). It was only the later experience on the Western front - which Pershing thought was evidence of defeatism - that enabled them to win battles later on.
Again, not exactly a problem unique to the US. When Haig took over the BEF in 1914 the largest and most complex force previously commanded by a British general had been that under Wellington on the field of Waterloo. France, Russia and Germany were mostly ready for a large industrial conflict but nobody else was close.
From a purely American point of view he was making the correct decision. From an allied point of view it was the wrong one.
Peter and Dan Snow? They’re TV presenters, not historians. Indeed, Peter Snow is best known for presenting election results as they come in on TV with his Swingometer!
Very much so. Typically an offensive would be lucky to have half of it’s tanks still working by lunchtime on the first day, and 10% by day 3. They were extremely vulnerable to direct fire artillery and mechanical breakdown, and even if not knocked out the crews routinely had to be hospitalised after an operation to recover.
The other bits that should be emphasised here are that the volume and competency of the artillery was continually improving rapidly throughout the war (even relatively minor offensives on a narrow front would have more guns supporting them than the entire battle of the Somme did by late 1918) and the move to bite-and-hold tactics. Bite and hold requires an acceptance that you aren’t fighting a battle of manouver and that this battle has no chance of ending the war - both of which are politically very hard to sell - but the artillery tactics mentioned above simply won’t work without it.
Remember the scale on which WW1 was fought. From memory the British chewed up and practically destroyed 88 German divisions in the battle of the Somme. Even relatively small battles such as Cambrai involved 40 or 50 divisions between the two sides. Force densities were very high - divisions typically only held a couple of miles of the front - and they had to be frequently rotated to rest the men because trench warfare was so physically demanding.
Do you have any solutions, P.K., given the circumstances?
Stosstruppen, Oh…I forgot, those were german ones. :mrgreen:
It’s all greek to me. 
Salutations to PDF.
Below are extracts from ‘The Face of Battle’ by John Keegan. I acquired this book about twenty years ago (yet another book hiding in my loft), and so it may be out of print, but the extracts do serve to reinforce some of the comments made above.
Creeping Barrage
Following the shrapnel barrage was, for all the tumult produced, not in itself a dangerous thing to do, given accurate gunnery, for the cast of shrapnel is forward, only the occasional base-plate whining back to inflict injury on the infantry behind. By late 1917 British infantrymen had learnt, and were glad, to walk as close as twenty-five yards in the rear of a boiling, roaring cloud of explosive and dust, accepting that it was safer to court death from the barrage than to hang back and perhaps be killed by a German whom the shells had spared and one’s own tardiness had allowed to pop up from his dug-out. In July 1916, however, few gunners knew how to make a barrage ‘creep’ at a regular walking pace across a piece of enemy held territory and, prudently, few infantrymen would risk approaching too close to a barrage line until they saw it lift and move to the next target. The consequence was that the advance, even when it worked to plan took the form of a series of discontinuous and quite literally breathless jerks forward, the lift of the barrage to the next objective being the signal for the waiting infantry to leave their positions of shelter and race the intervening two or three hundred yards to regain its protection.
Captured Trenches
The British could not remain in the German trenches they had reached, having objectives to reach which lay much deeper within German trenches, yet had to remain to fight for a while if they were not to be attacked from the rear when they pushed on. The Germans, moreover, had enough of their telephone cable network intact sometimes to be able to inform their batteries which trenches were in British hands, and so to be able to call down fire on them. The British had no such link with their artillery, the telephone lines they had across no-man’s-land having almost without exception, and to no ones surprise, been cut.
This lasted rather a long time in British artillery policy. With a barrage like this, the logical conclusion is that you want lots of relatively small shells - lets you get close but keeps the enemy heads down. Thus the UK was using for instance the 25 pdr field gun long after other countries had gone to larger calibres, and it was only removed from service under the impetus of NATO standardisation (indeed, when that happened we stayed with the smallest calibre we could - 105mm - for quite some time).
The 105 pack howitzer was a terific gun and saw service in Borneo and the Radfan in South Yemen.
http://www.history.army.mil/books/www/278b.htm
The 25 pounder was used in the defence of Mirbat in July 1972.
http://www.britains-smallwars.com/Desert_song/Mirbat.htm
The Mirbat gun can be seen at the Royal Artillery Museum, Woolwich.
The latest of the 105 light guns used mainly by 7 Para (RHA) and the Royal Marine Commandos
Interesting.
How does that work when the shell is a spinning tapered cylinder packed with explosive?
I would have thought the explosion and shrapnel were more or less evenly distributed fore and aft, depending on the angle of approach in ground and air bursts, subject to the current forward velocity of the shell imparting forward movement.
Pass!
Not being an expert in Quantum Physics, I wouldn’t even begin to try to describe a quark (I’d probably give you the James Joyce version). I merely accept, or not, what the experts describe. The same applies to the ballistics and technicalities of artillery shells. I leave the serious stuff to the ‘Shelldrakes’. I have, in the past, called in the odd fire-mission, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin now, and have no interest in finding out.
Never been much interested in technicalities beyond what I’ve needed to know to do the job. Not that I criticise those that are interested in such things - we’re all different.
The shell is in contact with the ground, furthermore when bursting fragments will tend to fly out perpendicular to the surface of the shell. As it’s at an fairly shallow angle to the ground the bits that would otherwise fly backwards are going to hit the ground pretty rapidly. That leaves only the shell bases.
This obviously doesn’t apply to mortars/aircraft bombs…
Okay, what’s a good primer on WWI to get started?
Keegan?
To get started, I would begin with ‘The Guns of August’
Barbara Tuchman (An American author).
http://www.abbottsys.com/reviews.html
http://www.amazon.com/Guns-August-Barbara-W-Tuchman/dp/0345476093
Excellent book by Keegan
http://www.amazon.co.uk/First-World-War-John-Keegan/dp/0712666451