Posted on 10/25/2014 8:10:03 PM PDT by goldstategop
Rochereau's books are arranged in neat piles on the mantelpiece, his collection of sabres hangs on a wall, and his bed is still covered by the same lace spread as when, nearly a century ago, he left home for the last time.
A vial on the desk sports a label saying it contains "the earth of Flanders in which our dear child fell and which kept his remains for four years". On his bed the medals he was awarded for bravery, the croix de guerre and the Legion of Honour, are displayed in a glass case next to his képi and the cassowary plume of the elite Saint-Cyr military school where he trained.
Hubert Guy Pierre Alphonse Rochereau died in an English field ambulance on April 25 1918, a day after he was wounded in a battle near the Belgian village of Loker. Four years later his parents recovered his remains and took them to be buried in a cemetery in Bélâbre.
The 21-year-old's name was inscribed as one of the "Morts pour la France" on the war memorial in the village square, and on the memorial in Libourne, where his 15th Dragoons Regiment was based.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
His grave in his hometown of Bélâbre is crumbling and no one has tended it for decades. Its a sad sight. But this story reminds us of how much we truly owe to the soldiers of the First World War and we are alive today in part because of them.
Hubert Guy Pierre Alphonse Rochereau: you have a family all over the world and you're not forgotten! RIP gallant soldier!
In many ways the First War was even worse than the Second, wasn’t it?
The immense waste of young life for what? A century later a lot of us can’t grasp why Europe went to war.
And it changed the world immensely, and not necessarily for the better. We lost millions of good men who would never have offspring.
We did and it unleashed another and even more horrible world war.
We need to think carefully before we send our sons and daughters to fight one, if its really worth it.
From what I have read and seen on historical shows, it must have been in some ways the worst war of them all.
Still there were vestiges of gallantry especially in the air war.
World War I basically is responsible for much of what the world is today. WWII was just a continuation of the first World War.
Remarkable!
Imagine if our civil war between the states had been fought with Maxim machine guns and breech-loading artillery.
Massed formations were marching into walls of lead. They were using 19th century tactics and 20th century weapons.
It was slaughter.
Actually, our Civil War ended up with men marching into repeaters and Gatling guns so not terribly different. Breechloading artillery began appearing in mid-war with increasing frequency towards the end as well. If the war had gone on longer, it would have devolved into trench warfare entirely (it already did in some of the later battles) and most of the lessons were there already. Europe failed to learn anything from it and wasted many years marching men into automatic gunfire.
Yes. It has been said that we always fight the last - previous war...
So sad.
Trials were held by the U.S. Army for the Armstrong breech-loading cannon from 1862-1865, but the examples were not successful. I believe they were smoothbore.
So the Army went back to muzzle-loading cannon until 1869.
Gatling guns were still pretty much a novelty, even late in the war. It was used to good effect out west. The Spencer carbine was a good repeating rifle but there were never enough of them.
My point is, almost fifty years after our Civil war and the Franco-Prussian war, the Europeans were still using what were pretty much infantry squares and cavalry tactics.
WW I and WW II were—in many ways, the same war with a 20 year break to re-arm. But, if WW I had been ended well—there would never have been a WW II. The Allies won the war but ensured another. Hitler would have been an artist maybe a racist speaker but never the leader of anything—lots of people would be alive because there would be no ww II.
You’re forgetting the 12 pounder Whitworth breechloaders brought in from Britain from the mid to the end of the war. It was used for counterbattery and long range direct fire as it could put five rounds in a 10” circle at 1600 yards. As you might expect, it was in fact rifled. They were actually too accurate (and too small) for counter-infantry fire and therefore were relegated to a supporting role unless the targets were on the other side of a body of water. Whitworths fought at Gettysburg and almost every major action thereafter.
https://markerhunter.wordpress.com/category/battlefields/cold-harbor/
Two Gatlings took part in the surface combat near Petersburg VA during the Siege of Petersburg. Eight Gatlings were mounted on gunboats later in the same action and used to great if localized effect.
My point is that there wasn’t a need to imagine the Civil War being fought with breechloading artillery and machine guns - because, towards the end, it was. Which makes your point both correct and so very much more damning - they didn’t even have to imagine the effects of the Maxim gun, they only had to look at the American Civil War for that. And they didn’t.
It’s even worse than that. The Europeans had yet another advance notice of what industrialized warfare as introduced in the American Civil War would look like later on. In 1898, the Battle Of San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill could summarized as “Initial old-style infantry assaults fail bloodily, Gatlings show up, Gatlings open fire, Gatlings kill so many Spanish defenders the few survivors fled, Gatlings slaughter the Spanish counterattack (at one point a single Gatling firing at an advancing Spanish formation killed 560 out of 600 men before the survivors could successfully flee), Gatlings get bored and start successfully dueling with artillery, Spanish give up and leave.”
Less than 15 years later, Continental Europe was still trying the same failed tactics against automatic gunfire because they ignored the lessons of the prior 50 years (for various reasons).
The Siege of Petersburg & the Battle of the Crater were eerie forerunners to trench warfare in 1914-1918.
In the Civil War, massed ranks using 18th Century tactics faced rifled musket fire that mowed down soldiers like grass before the scythe.
Contrast that with setpiece battles in the Revolutionary War which typically involved two volleys of inaccurate fire from smoothbore muskets, with the battle being decided by fixed bayonets (artillery took its toll as well).
“Seeing the elephant” in the Civil War meant laying eyes on the enemy in mass. The mortal fear that followed was less about the gleaming forest of bayonets facing one, than the murderous sheets of incoming lead about to be delivered with cold precision.
“Armies are always fighting the previous war”
Tiny Spring Lake Cemetery at Prior Lake, Minnesota is the final resting place for an American who fell in the Argonne Forest.
Walter J. Scherer, 1893-1918, was with the 33rd Division, 130th Infantry, Company K.
He sailed for France May 14th, 1918. Killed in Action October 14, 1918.
He was 25 years old.
What was left of the risk-takers was lost in the second war. That left Europe open to socialism and the nanny state.
Korea and Viet Nam opened us up to the concept of war without closure. Now, we are exposed and infected with socialism and the nanny state.
Interesting take on history...
WW1 was probably the most brutal war of modern times.
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