posted
So I finished reading "The Myth of the Great War", and I'm a little unsettled. First let me acknowledge the weaknesses of the book. It's clear to me that Mosier is very ready to see stupidity where there might be good explanations for why certain things were done. His comparison of casualties often feels cherry-picked to me - he takes the statistics that make the Germans look good, or the Allies bad. He completely ignores any source that might give a nuanced picture - in his evaluation of the American attacks in 1918, for example, he is utterly silent about the administrative muddle of the logistics behind the lines, concentrating instead on the fine achievements of the men at the front - who, nonetheless, were fighting a German army that clearly was not at its best anymore, a factor he also ignores. He also seems a bit sloppy with numbers; at one point an 8-km advance over a 40-km front becomes 2500 square km of ground occupied. I don't think so, and there are other examples of similar mistakes.
But with all that said, he does present one statistic which makes you wonder, namely the number of soldiers killed in action on the Western Front for both sides. The French and British totals are much, much higher than the German; twice and three times. If you look at totals for the whole war, the Allies look better; but just on the Western Front, the Allies look quite incompetent, and Mosier's thesis that they held on through sheer numbers and were then rescued by the Americans providing them with some more numbers looks - not proved, exactly, but worth thinking about.
So, does anyone know anything about this? Are Mosier's overall numbers reliable? It appears that he uses German sources a lot and dismisses the British and French histories, and also their armies' estimates on which the histories are based, as propaganda. Were the German records trustworthy? Is there some other source of error?
Further, his thesis is that the Germans were able to kill disproportionately because they realised from the start that it was going to be an artillery war, supplied their troops with lots of artillery at the divisional level, and decentralised artillery control. I had the impression that the Allies eventually deployed rather more guns, including heavy guns, on the Western Front than the Germans did. Does anyone know of a good source of statistics on this? Mosier is clearly cherry-picking the few times he does give numbers of guns.
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
My impression was that the 75mm guns the british and french used were poorly suited for static warfare as they wouldnt hurt the troops hiding in a trench.
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Right, that's certainly true and Mosier makes much of it. And what was worse, up to 1916 or so even the heavy guns were firing a lot of shrapnel shell, which was basically useless against the wire it was intended to shred (the fuses weren't sensitive enough; this was fixed later on) and also against troops in dugouts. But my impression is that after the Somme and Verdun, both British and French learned from their mistakes, got their industries in gear, and added a lot of heavy guns firing high explosive shell to their orders of battle; and Mosier seems to elide this development - he doesn't even mention it to dismiss it.
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posted
I'm a little confused what the overarching point is. Assuming he's right, the Germans made a good tactical decision in the beginning, killed disproportionately, then lost for some reason anyway. What lesson are we supposed to take from that, or is it simply a matter of finding truth its own sake?
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posted
I suppose in the end it does boil down to truth for its own sake, but really, history is hardly an abstract, academic study with zero applications to real life! For myself, if the consensus view on a vast, epoch-making event like the Great War is wrong, I very much want to know about it.
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posted
I currently have almost zero knowledge of what we're talking about to begin with. Do you mind giving me some cliff notes on what the current consensus is?
This might just be a difference in interests, but I see a difference between "social history" and "strategic history" (I just made those categories up and am not entirely sure what I mean, bear with me as I ponder this 'out loud'). Social history reflects decisions made due to collective societal pressures, "strategic history" reflects decisions made due to technical facts surrounding the current situation.
I've heard a lot about both sides losing many people in World War I because they didn't anticipate (or fully anticipate) the consequences of trench warfare, and vaguely remember something similar happening in World War II (might have been airplanes, dunno, this isn't my field). This strikes me as a valuable lesson to remember because technology is constantly changing and we need to plan to fight the next generation of warfare, not the last one. (Good example being traditional military tactics vs terrorism).
But a century after the fact noting that "this particular weapon was useful at this particular time because of these particular circumstances that will probably not repeat themselves" seems a little silly to be devoting books about.
Eh, I guess that's not actually that different than the point I made in the previous paragraph, so maybe it is just a matter of "military strategy isn't that interesting to me." Dunno.
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posted
Well, I can hardly expect to do justice to the historiography of the Great War in a forum post, but I'll give it a shot. The issue under discussion is twofold: First, how much of the slaughter was due to incompetence, blindness, and other personal qualities of the generals involved (especially Haig), and how much was due to structural factors of the technology at the time? Second, (and this also pops up in discussions of the Second World War), to what extent was the Allied victory won by throwing superior numbers against the superb German soldiers led by the best generals in the world, and just drowning the problem in blood? As an aside, if you think I exaggerate in the second part, you should see some of what's posted in wargaming forums about the Wehrmacht, not to mention the heated discussions one way or the other in quite respectable military-history journals. Incidentally, there is a strong continuity of tradition between the General Staffs of Prussia in 1870, Imperial Germany in 1914, and Nazi Germany in 1940, and much to be said for the proposition that they really did have a better army, unit for unit, than their opponents. The debate is more on whether they were ten feet tall, or - taking the garrison units and Volksturm with the Panzers - only seven feet on average.
Anyway. The immediate consensus during and after the Great War was that the generals were, by and large, competent enough sorts with impressive personal qualities; Joffre, to take one example, was famous for imperturbability, and the calmness of his response even to the disastrous 1914 battles was quoted approvingly. Then came a string of war memoirs in the nineteen twenties, and they tended to be written by people who had seen the worst of it; opinion shifted to the "lions led by donkeys" which is still the mass view. Professional historians, however, had a bit of an adjustment of this judgement around 1960; I don't think anyone these days will hold up Haig as a Great Captain to be compared with, say, Wellington or Grant, but there is much allowance made for the sheer structural difficulty of trying to control units in a no-man's land swept by artillery and machine guns, without radio. (Man-portable radio was still a few years away in 1918, at least for combat use - you might have built one that could have survived being carried a few miles somewhere the carrier wasn't being shot at, but that wasn't going to do you any good in the trenches.)
Let me take an example: You'll occasionally find people being castigated for making attacks with the expressed purpose of "straightening out the front". Now on first glance, this does seem like rather a silly reason for getting soldiers killed; but in fact there's a reasonable explanation, having to do with the artillery. For the best effects, you wanted your artillery shells - of every calibre, fired from batteries in many different places behind your line - to arrive all at the same time, what is now called a time-on-target bombardment; the psychological effect is devastating. You also want to be able to advance the place where your shells are hitting at a slow walking pace, so that you can have a curtain of explosions just in front of your advancing infantry - presumably hitting the retreating enemy, or preventing them from counterattack and generally keeping their heads down - in what's called a creeping barrage. Both techniques, however, require much calculation of which guns should fire when and at what declination. Now these days the battery commander will just feed his problem to a computer, probably with three clicks of a mouse - I'm sure there are absolute legions of DoD programmers who think of nothing but how to make this really simple to do even when you're being shot at. Obviously that's not the case in 1916; every calculation had to be done by hand, and there were only so many 'computers' - in the old sense of people with pencil and paper! - available. (Grant you, the English public-school tradition of teaching Latin, Greek, and character, with not much mathematics, wasn't doing them any good here. No calculators for the trig, either!) So, if you straightened out the front, you made the problem much simpler, because you could do just one calculation for every battery! A lot of the things that pretty silly and wasteful are like this: There's some reasoning behind it.
Anyway, Mosier comes down pretty heavily on the "English commanders were stupid and also unable to learn from their mistakes" side of this debate. He is particularly down on their doctrine of taking trenches with the bayonet, and contrasts this very unfavourably with the German doctrine of taking them by bombardment and just having the infantry occupy. It's here I feel he is being particularly tendentious. At the Somme, for example, the British put up more guns than they had ever assembled before, and fired absolute millions of shells for the week preceding the attack. They did in fact expect that this would pulverise the German lines and let the infantry just walk in; bayonets be damned, they expected to offer the few German survivors a stiff drink to steady their nerves! And conversely, I think a careful study might find some instances of German bayonet doctrines before the war; the Kindermord bei Ypern is not the sort of thing that happens to an army which has completely given up on massed charges.
Anyway, then: The consensus view, as I see it, is that the Allied generals weren't utter military geniuses, but they had a tough job and weren't total idiots either; while the Germans were probably a bit better on average, but likewise had a tough job and in the end their army was ground down. Mosier challenges this to the effect that the English were utter idiots, the French were slightly less stupid, the Germans were geniuses, and the Americans were pretty close to being geniuses, with a small amount of luck in being able to learn from French mistakes.
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quote:(Good example being traditional military tactics vs terrorism).
This has nothing to do with the Great War, but I have to point out that the US Army is not using anything remotely resembling "traditional military tactics" in the war on terror. That's because the traditional military means of dealing with irregulars who strike from ambush, avoid hard targets, and melt into the population is to take hostages liberally, shoot the entire population of the closest village to each ambush (if you're feeling merciful, only the male population), and generally hold the population collectively responsible. You know, the sort of thing Lisa wants to do to the Palestinians. It works, too, when applied consistently by armies with no major regular opposition. Of course any such thing is impossible for the modern American army; that's another good reason not to get into nation building in far corners of the world.
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posted
Ah-hah. Mosier is apparently comparing incompatible statistics. For the Germans he gives the numbers listed as killed in the after-action reports of their units. For the Allies he gives that number, plus the number that later died of wounds received in the hospitals. (Not Mosier's fault, he's following the German Reichsarchiv - but a bad mistake, nonetheless.)
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posted
You should check out episode 16 of the Hardcore History pod cast. Link It deals with Hitlers rise to power and touches on WWI a lot. One interesting tidbit is the average German soldier was shocked to hear Germany surrendered, not because of propaganda but because they heard this news while they were occupying land in France.
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posted
Not by any very large margin, by 1918. But more to the point, in the preceding four years Germany had successivly knocked out Belgium, Serbia, Romania and Russia (yes, three of these technically remained belligerent, but as serious military factors they were done), annexing most of modern Ukraine and Poland. They might be forgiven for thinking they were winning.
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posted
Darth, you should read The Mint after you're done.
As for my general views on this, I don't think the Allies held ground because they were tactically better, only that it was extremely difficult to gain or lose ground either way. If you keep throwing people at a wall, they're going to die more than if you mostly stay put. I don't think tactics really came into it, only ability to stay put. When I read about WWI, I read a lot about the Allied pushes but very little about defence against the German pushes. If this is due to reality and not to me usually reading about WWI from an Allied standpoint, then that explains why the casualties are so unbalanced. It's easier to mow people down when they are running towards you than when they're hiding in trenches.
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posted
I think you're mistaken. If you go into the details, there's a lot of difference between the way the British attacked on July 1st, 1916, and the way they were attacking four months later. And there's a lot of difference in the results, too - not so much in ground gained, but in how many Germans they were killing per British casualty. There were a lot of incremental improvements between then and 1918, too.
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That is likely, since I have never actually researched WWI. Were there more Allied attacks than German attacks or is that just what I'm getting from my information bias?
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posted
In the sense that, say, the Somme offensive was a British attack, yes. But the Germans had the doctrine that if they lost a trench, they would instantly (well, as soon as some officer could get some men and a gun together) counterattack and try to retake it, and the Allied starting position as well if it proved possible to take advantage of the confusion. So on the ground, the soldiers were quite likely to be have equal numbers of jump-out-of-the-trenches moments, independent of who was technically on the offensive.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: they held on through sheer numbers and were then rescued by the Americans providing them with some more numbers
Pretty sure that was taught to me as an accepted fact in both high school and college history classes.
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posted
I thought that was obvious. Mosier is an American too, of course.
And while I don't recall if my hs textbook cited sources that were international, my college classes most assuredly did so.
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: American high schools and colleges, perchance?
It was an accepted fact at the British university I attended... and it fits with Churchill's account of the war.
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posted
For the best, most truthful, most historically accurate account of the war, from the view of the average English soldier in the trench, I suggest an extended viewing of "Black Adder Goes Fourth"
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Mosier is an American too, of course.
