91–97 of 97 posts
It's remarkable how little of what Putin and Russian state median say internally to Russians is covered in Western media. They are obsessed with old maps. A few months ago Putin flaunted a map from the 1700s without Ukraine as proof as that Ukraine has always belonged to Russia and that "Russians" live in all regions of Ukraine (beyond Crimea and Donbas).
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The american civil war was a full 50 years before WWI.
Yeah, but during the later stages of the American Civil war, machine guns mowed downs entire cavalry regiments. Many European officers didn't realize that made cavalry shocks useless and thus rapid advances would not be possible. Only infantry advances were possible and only under slower moving artillery cover. That made shock tactics mostly impossible until mechanized warfare became a thing in world war ii.
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Not to mention that Cannae was famously a double pincer and the Schlieffen plan was not.
I think this is the key point. Sending columns through Belgium to try to envelop Paris from the north wasn't a particularly faithful recreation of Hannibal's battlefield-scale double envelopment It was however the logical way to attack France from Germany given the geography. WWII generals, who weren't as obsessed with Cannae as Schlieffen, but were well aware the "Schlieffen Plan" was a failure, took the same route…
They pulled a switcheroo on the allies in WWII and attacked through the Ardennes. The French & English forces rushing to counter Schlieffen II instead found themselves cut off in Belgium.
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Author here - yes, this is what I was getting at. The false promise of a rapid victory over the French via encirclement from the right flank (in the style of Hannibal) really was a major factor in justifying the risks of war for the German General Staff. And because Schlieffen was preoccupied with the idea that an ancient battle could be a model for that approach, it distracted from the now-obvious technological chan…
Were machine guns really the cause of 'defensive' warfare? Rolling artillery barrages would send the front-line machinegunners hiding in the trenches. The wave of attackers behind the artillery barrage, when moving quickly had a very good chance of capturing the front line of trenches. The problem that they would face is that rail-deployed reinforcements on the defender side would pour in as a counter-attack... And t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The american civil war was a full 50 years before WWI.
Yeah, but during the later stages of the American Civil war, machine guns mowed downs entire cavalry regiments. Many European officers didn't realize that made cavalry shocks useless and thus rapid advances would not be possible. Only infantry advances were possible and only under slower moving artillery cover. That made shock tactics mostly impossible until mechanized warfare became a thing in world war ii.
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I think there's something there, and I did enjoy your article. WW I had a lot of causes, at the head of which I'd put the Kaiser's stupidity and weakness. But yeah, Cannae did (and still does) exert a big influence on military planners. As others have pointed out, Schlieffen depended on massive luck and adherence to The Plan, neither of which obtained. It was not machine guns that made it fail.
it's a fascinating topic, but how can one person's stupidity and weakness cause millions and millions to go die far away from their homes in dirt? I could never understand that. surely there must have been some massive underlying reasons why a self-respecting burgher would suddenly leave his cozy family to die a terrible miserable ugly death in a faraway foreign land?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, but during the later stages of the American Civil war, machine guns mowed downs entire cavalry regiments. Many European officers didn't realize that made cavalry shocks useless and thus rapid advances would not be possible. Only infantry advances were possible and only under slower moving artillery cover. That made shock tactics mostly impossible until mechanized warfare became a thing in world war ii.
I’m assuming you mean Gatling guns, since machine guns hadn’t been invented yet. Out of curiosity, do you have an example of an “entire cavalry regiment” being destroyed by Gatling guns in the Civil War?