Dimitri > Recent Status Updates

I wish people back home would - instead of thinking of the boys as football stars - see'em as miners trapped underground, or suffocating in a 10 story fire. I wish people 'd think of'em as wet, hungry, terrified and homesick boys. I wish people'd get a little sick, thinking about 'em.

I've seen riflemen climb on top of German tanks in an ettempt to shoot through the slits or throw in grenades. Other tanks machine-gunned them off. They simply drive over the wounded & did another turn wity their tracks over 'em.

After a roaring, 10 day slaughter, a ghostly SILENCE fell over the field of battle. In the dawn it would be broken by the sound of typewriters in tents, where writers had busied themselves all night with translating the sacred mysteries of sacrifice & destiny in tidy lists of missing, wounded and killed.

After a roaring, 10 day slaughter, a ghostly slaughter fell over the field of battle. In the dawn it would be broken by the sound of typewriters in tents, where writers had busied themselves all night with translating the sacred mysteries of sacrifice & destiny in tidy lists of missing, wounded and killed.

1916's cliché Blind faith in Big Guns for Big Breakthroughs had its kinks: Verdun saw a saturated small front with unprotected flanks, while the Somme spread its many shells too thin at 50% density of Neuve Chapelle.
Artillery evolved on Somme between July & September: 'stop firing at Hour H' combined with the creeping barrage; in reply, counter-barrages to kill assembled attack troops joined counter-battery fire.

"Yet cooperation between all the arms was not given top priority and was not enforced or was perhaps not even recognized as lacking by the higher command." His last remark reflects upon inadequate training before battle. His main source is J.F.C. Fuller, who drew 4 lessons for battle planning:
- a broad frontage
- a tank reserve
- there are limits to infantry penetration depth
- tanks cannot sweep villages solo

The scientific foundation for a " standing & lifting" barrage of counterbattery fire without previous registration is impressive, a combo of sound ranging & meteorology that took from Somme to Vimy to tune. With 10:1 in guns, tanks crushed lanes with lil loss. Surprise & Overwhelming artillery were the key at Cambrai.

Here we see earlier discussed strategies of "abundance" & "technology" melt perfectly. I think.

Cambrai was born out of 8 months of various tank schemes great & small, most of'em designed for Ypres. Byng (3rd Army) was in charge again, but without the Canadian corps which had given him Vimy. On the political level, Haig used the success at Cambrai to distract his critics, foremost Lloyd George.

Betio Island was an obvious target of sorts; the airfield threatened the Anzac/Pearl Harbour lines or could conversely umbrella the Marshalls to support the next American hop. Still with no less than 8 Jap-garrisonned islands identified by submarine periscope, where to attack a hydraesque defence on interior lines? How to attack a coral atol exactly? This type of amphibious target was virgin territory.

Various sources show Haig aiming for that high ground as an artillery platform for 1918 offensives, or simply as part of the greater "Ridge Sweep" at Vimy, Messines etc. In absence of a clear goal, attrition was defended by numbers, hotly debated in press n' Parliament and by historians ever since.
Either way, the slogfest continued...

The overall Pacific strategy of island-hopping is only straightforward in hindsight. The Germany First principle implied that amphibious vessels - there were never enough to go around in WWI of the crucial types such as the behemoth "Landing Ship, Tank" - were perpetually earmarked for a return to the invasion of Europe [Alexander does not specify if the physical transfer ever occured before cancellation of the plan]

"the crude strip itself was unremarkable but whoever controlled that facility could influence the sealanes to the South Pacific & to the Northwest the approaches to the Marshall Islands."

Why the Gilberts? Central Pacific Campaign was a reboot of Plan Orange: through the Marshalls&Carolines to Formosa&Japan. But the Marshall's were a blank spot on the map & too remote for an photoreconaissance return trip by air.

The chapter title 'paralysis of command' is telling for the second half of '17: "It is probably that in the later stages of Passchendaele, Haig didn't clearly know what he wanted." as in he cannot choose between a breakthrough or step by step approach at Passchendaele, which was important with the Gheluvelt ridge in front of your nose, especially on the right flank.

Most Haig critics will disagree. BREAKTHROUGH!!!

Two well identified misconceptions about Britain's GHQ: that it ever saw gas or tanks as war-winning weapons to unlock the West. Vulnerable and slow, tanks were a welcome addition but no more than that. The fickle nature of gas was clear once Loos left more Tommies than Jerries coughing.

Mao's victory surprised both Washington & Moscow, which spontaneously got his allegiance, unlike other communist leaders who secured their countries without Soviet help, such as Tito. The next year, Korea looked like a safe bet to Stalin: USA hadn't given the Chinese Nationalists much help, so maybe they'd stay out of a proxy war. But Kim's surprise invasion of the South triggered like a new Pearl Harbour.

On cue, the first armed merchant was torpedoed off the Breton coast on 1 April as antiwar rallies reached pitch to no aval & faced harrassment. "ironically in one sense the Chief Executive was requesting war in order to preserve his nation's rights as a neutral" i.e. protect its maritime power.

A string of sinkings in the first quarter of 1917 was pushing public opinion over the brink; the State Department no longer protested the Royal Navy's blockade & the Federal Reserve resumed the purchase of treasury notes [IOU's].
Hoover's Commission for the Relief of Belgium was ordered to pull out of Belgium and France [no note whether it continued its activities, in absentia, via Brotain and/or the Netherlands ?]

As early as mid-october, Joffre realised he had an old-fashioned SIEGE on his hands which required a different set of tools than his accustomed open warfare. Unfortunately he was too anxious to restore battlefield mobility to await the arrival of his siege train. By the time Neuve Chapelle made headlines in London, over 250.000 more poilus were hurled against the presently entrenched Germans all along the line.

The Germans were incapable of holding onto their freshly overrun territory for the reason of simple statistics so familiar to casualty list writers in the optimistic days of summer 1914; the return to open warfare had upped the attrition even beyond Somme or Ypres levels: by the end of April, the count stood at 700.000.

Because the Germans started to stagger again on the splindly legs of their logistics. British MG's hidden in bushes & buildings behind the lines shredded the morale of men who'd already been on the push since Michael.

Mount Kemmel even saw the first tank-on-tank battle in an effort to dominate the threatened Ypres.

But despite all the friction and retreats, the British and French held their bulges, jointly.

Haig's "Backs to the Wall" speech was issued here on the Lys; the uncharacteristic bombast was probably emotional blackmail for French reinforcements; he got 12 divisions for Flanders, almost as much as guarded Paris, in spite of unaccounted units in the German Order of Battle., while Plumer ran a tactical retreat around Ypres, bitterly evacuating the ground gained in 1915-17 and forever contested since, because....

USA no longer sounded convincing in its neutral idealism. A final "Peace Without Victory" speech on 25/01/1917 to endorse an international coaltion was dismissed asutopian.
On February 3rd, unrestricted submarine warfare resumed.... but:
"You carry food to an enemy of my country & tough I am sorry it is my duty to sink you." Captain Rose of U-53 rescued the entire crew of his target & dropped them off at Cornwall.

"Stand Fast" in the West went beyond a High Ground Fetish. Not atypical, a strategic target had economical value. The Bruay-Béthune coalfields, roughly two thirds of which were in German hands, had given 70% of France's pre-war supply. British aleviation efforts were a snake devouring its tail: British ships burned British coal while transporting more British coal and more British miners in uniform across the Channel

By mid-day on that July 1st, a few rough lines can be drawn on the curved map of the Somme front lines. The 3 corps south of Fricourt were doing okay. The 4 corps between La Boiselle and Gommecourt weren't. The Ulster Division had overcome the Schwaben redoubt on Thiepval Ridge, but Thiepval itself & Beaumont-Hamel (of Newfoundland infamy) were still firmly in enemy hands.

According to George Kennan's 'Long Telegram', "Stalin needed a hostile world in order to legitimize his autocratic rule.[...]The solution was to strengthen Western institutions in order to render them invulnerable to the Soviet challenge while awaiting the mellowing of the Soviet regime."
[quotation from online version].
He was so spot-on with this CONTAINMENT that it would remain an invaluable guideline until 1991.

"the learning process was hampered by the antipathy shown to all things scientific by many senior artillery officers"
- OH REALLY?
The fire planners of the most mathematic branch of the service whose old habits had their asses handed to them by the Boers ?
Who had the only ready-made "key" to unlock the Western Front by combined virtue of quantity and precision?
BOO PRIOR.

The prevalent cockiness among Europe's governments in turn deepened the split between the two American parties over the pro & con of intervention, but they jointly urged both belligerents to show their true aims; if these weren't "noble enough", the US would take sides. As Lansing sold it to the press: we send a peace note but prepare for entry. This "si vis pacem para bellum" approach caused a short PR panic.

The prospect of another "Portugal" was indeed alluring. With a little help of the April fog, they had chased two out of three divisons of uninspired Lusitanians straight across the Lys, for the biggest daily gain of the war. At Ploegsteert and Messines, the British again saw many of their bloddiest wrestled gains of 1915-1917 swiftly reversed in a reprise of foggy Michael.

Stalin raised the Iron Curtain in response to the Marshall Plan. Never mind that it made him look like the Bad Guy (again), he'd simply use the USA as the imperialist posterchild. The post-1953 atomic parity helped his successors continue this line, as it triggered a US military presence in Europe.

All quiet on the Somme it may've appeared but there was a daily routine of small-scale interaction: listening, watching, shelling, raiding, as each side prepared for the coming fight. With odd inequalities. The Germans had good phone interceptions while the French did accurate daily counts of mutual shellfire.