'Preserved' WWI British officer found 90 YEARS ON (In Flanders)

The Scotsman ^ | Mon 30 May 2005 | ALLAN HALL

[NMC EXP]

When will the War [on terrorism] really begin?

When they figure out how to wage war on a tactic rather than an enemy.

[finnigan2]

"Some half-a-million allied soldiers died in the mud and blood of this sector of the western front before the assault intended to smash the German line was called off after four months."

- Just some of the deaths caused directly by General Haig, who oversaw this fiasco. A man with no military imagination and whose major tactic throughout was to argue that if we killed 1.2 Germans for every one of ours, we would have to eventually win due to the laws of attrition. A butcher who carried a bible a prayed constantly. All in all, a scary guy.

[Sen Jack S. Fogbound]

"Those are some astounding numbers. One can easily seey why, with >70% casualties, Russia was ripe for revolution and France was sent into a seemingly irreversible decline. It's also easy to see wny the Western democracies had such an aversion to war during the twenties and thirties--an aversion that Hitler used to his advantage."

Yes, they are astounding. It brings one to realize the number Russia (USSR) lost not only during the War but also in the purges, starvations, more purges, and in the WWII!

This explained much of the USSR's fear of war and their military build-ups!

[Straight Vermonter]

The sad thing is that the western powers had sent observers to the US Civil War but learned nothing from that slaughter. Mix in machine guns and more trenches and you get WWI.

[ABG(anybody but Gore)]

The sad thing is that the western powers had sent observers to the US Civil War but learned nothing from that slaughter. Mix in machine guns and more trenches and you get WWI.

True enough. The last few months of the war saw both the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac locked in the same static trench warfare that Europe would see 50 years later.

European observers dismissed the lessons as the result of amateurs playing war and ignored the effects of rifled muskets and concentrated artillery on mass lines of troops marching across an open field. They still thought that Napoleonic warfare was viable, and would go on thinking that till they bled Europe white.

Of course, there were more than a few Union and Confederate generals who were still enamored of Napoleon themselves, including Lee, who blew the war at Gettysburg by ordering Pickett's Charge, a hopeless attempt to break the Union center. He told Longstreet that by breaking the center, he'd crush the Yankees like Napoleon had done at Austerlitz. All he managed to accomplish was waste a lot of his troops lives for nothing, something the British, French, and German generals would prove themselves more than adept at 50 years later.

[BibChr]

"This was a wonderful find."

I suppose I know what old Juergen means, but still... br-r-r-r-r!

"Ghoulish" comes to mind.

Dan
Biblical Christianity BLOG

[Straight Vermonter]

Good points. Lee was a great believer in trench warfare and used trenching to great effect. He was called the "king of spades" by his own troops.

[massatoosits]

But some learn...Consider the German staff officers who devoured Charles DeGaulle's seminal works on mobile armor warfare. There were Franks and Allemeni who learned from the monstrous failures of the elders in the Great War..