Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panick21_ | Hacker News Reader

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That WW1 is special is mostly a myth.

The reason we have this view of WW1 is that after WW1 in the 20s many normal people in the 20s started writing about the horrors of war and that combined with the strong anti-war sentiment lead to the view we have now. Claiming that generals like Haig was an incompetent butcher. The whole 'lions led by donkeys' myth.

However non of that is actually true. Or not anymore true then in any other war. For example, there is stark contrast to right after the war, where Haig was considered a hero and most soldiers in their post-WW1 writing liked him.

In terms of causality rates, WW1 isn't that special, high intensity combat in modern war isn't that different, from Crimea to WW2. If you have warfare at that level, even if you are successful, you have massive causalities. The Somme for example wasn't that different from the Normandy campaign in WW2.

These generals had to deal with armies of literally million of people and they didn't even have wireless communications. How do you command 500 men in a coordinated attack without communication?

The Americans had to go threw the same learning curve as the others, but they started right away fighting against an enemy that was mostly veterans. Americans could have learned better, but it also has to be said that Pershing by command from the president was not allowed to fully integrate his troupes with that of the French army.

> I assume that this was because many generals were trained on Napoleonic-Era tactics

This is complete and utter nonsense. Please stop spreading these myths. This all just Post-WW1 anti-war politics propaganda.

> against machine guns and semiauto rifles

This is again a myth. Semiauto rifles practically didn't exist in the beginning of WW1. And machine guns had existed for a while and were not that effective.

The big killer on the battle field is the fast shooting artillery. Massive innovations in that had happened in the 30 years before WW1.

> Semiauto rifles practically didn't exist in the beginning of WW1

And even at the end of the war, only the French fielded a couple dozens thousands of them (sounds like a lot, is not).

Submachine guns were pretty common if I recall. But full rifle semiauto were very rare.

The generals were looking for the 1914 style maneuver warfare. They didn’t understand and didn’t learn the lessons of the us civil war that the capability of production made defeat of the enemy in the field impossible. French strategy was attack, period.

They didn’t contemplate the impact of the lines moving out to 1000 yards, machine guns at the company or platoon level and the idea of the entire state as the enemy. Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.

Calling critiques of a conflict that slaughtered 20 million as propaganda is probably one of the more ridiculous statements I’ve read in awhile.

> made defeat of the enemy in the field impossible

And what happened in 1918 then? I'm pretty sure what happened is exactly that, the German army was defeated in the field and was in full retreat.

> They didn’t understand and didn’t learn the lessons of the us civil war

Americans need to stop bringing up the US Civil War. It was way earlier with way different technology and frankly with mass armies that were essentially untrained and were really behind European armies in many ways.

The Civil War was actually studied quite a bit but the lessen you suggest in them wasn't actually there.

And that this point is false you can see from the Russo-Japanese War where there were defeats in the field and against much superior weapons then what was in the Civil War. This was a far more relevant data-point.

> They didn’t contemplate the impact of the lines moving out to 1000 yards, machine guns at the company or platoon level and the idea of the entire state as the enemy. Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.

They did actually contemplate that. In fact, they spend decades contemplating that.

But its one thing to study something in theory, and its another to execute it in the real world against an enemy who has studied the same things.

Machine guns were very much accounted for in their tactics and operation, and this is cleary evident when you look at some of the early battles, where Germany repeatedly overran French and British position, even when well defend with lots of machine-guns.

In fact, even during full trench warfare, the initial 2-3 trenches were usually taken by the attacker.

They also contemplated having states and whole societies as enemies. The Germans had dealt with that already in the Franco-German War and they were terrified of that happening again. They had prepared ways to deal with that.

But the real world is a harsh teacher and once the initial plans have stalled it becomes an arms race for both sides to innovate and adopt to the new situation that nobody had planned for. But of course, your enemy is doing the same thing. Repeatedly generals believed they had figured something about, only on the next attack to realize that the enemy had already responded.

> Germany ultimately collapsed because their society was sucked dry.

They collapsed because the German army was completely defeated in the field and in retreat into Germany. Had the Germany army stayed strong inside of France, the society might have made it for a while longer.

> Calling critiques of a conflict that slaughtered 20 million as propaganda is probably one of the more ridiculous statements I’ve read in awhile.

So because something is 'bad', anybody can say anything about it as long as its something 'bad'? What kind of logic is that? If I see bad history, I'm going to mention it.

WW1 in a way was special, because you had modern weaponry with 19th century medicine (and arguably 19th century tactics - meaning an army that wasn't mechanized).

The fact that the war was effectively stalemate for 2ish years also contributed to both the medical issues involved and the psychological impact of combat too.

They did have fairly strong and comprehensive landline field phone networks, wireless wasn't really needed.

The landline only work if you are standstill. As soon as you have open war, even just over 50m no-mans land, you were out of reach, you lose the connection and it takes a while to catch up.

Specially as artillery shells destroyed wires. So pulling a phone over a few 100m of no-mans land was not that hard, these places would be shelled when the counter-attack happens.

So yeah, in pure trench war-fare they had comms, but coordinating an ongoing attack is really what you can't do.

Eh. Certainly not worth fighting over.

> This is complete and utter nonsense. Please stop spreading these myths.

Which seems to be your goal, here.

Have a great day!

I have no idea what you are saying.

What I am saying is the current stand of historical research on the topic. What you are saying is a bunch of stuff we teach to high schoolers that hasn't been updated since the 60s.

And I'm not 'fighting' with you, I just wanted to inform you and people that might be reading this.

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