Dimitri > Recent Status Updates

Ecological awareness linked against spiritual poverty? Do I sense echoes of Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes ? "les 2500 ans du processus de civilisation ont institué en Occident une mentalité d'appropriation, d'exploitation de la planète et des richesses naturelles y compris des facultés intéllectuelles de l'homme."

Travers can claim some credit for mixing 3 traditional ingredients into a recepe for victory, unless John Terraine said it first? (1) External factors: German exhaustion. US intervention. Ludendorff's mistakes. (2) Internal factors: BEF art of attrition under Haig's leadership. (3) new technology, foremost the tank.

Like Tim Travers before him, Prior in traditional Donkey fashion blames the Generals. While the gunners themselves seem to have mastered the art of bite&hold, they themselves fell behind on the learning curve in "Their determination to persist in doing badly what on so many earlier occasions they had done badly already".

Secretary of State Lansing's diary entry: "When we do go into the war & we might as well make up our minds that we are going in, we must go in on the side of the Allies, for we are a democracy... we can determine to a large extent who is to be financed & who is not." True; 30% of British imports came from Neutrals; 40% of its chemicals & alloys for guns 'n shells from the US and Wall Street was its main creditor...

In his memoirs, "Desperate Frank" (Louis Franchet d'Espèrey) made the Marne repulse possible when he secured BEF participation for his own 5th & Galiéni's 6th Army. He'd historically reinforce it when Sir John French swallowed tears:
- Monsieur le Maréchal, c'est la France qui vous supplie!
- Damn it, I can't find the words. Tell him we'll do all we can !

Once the elderly Mathilda II Scorpions, like early "Howard's Funnies" had sweeped the minefields for Compass, the pursuit into Cyrenaica could begin to unlock the coast as an invasion platform: narrow so easy to defend, anchored upon sea routes with naval support. The attack at Bardia (3.1.41) was reminiscent of a dusty Somme.

"At least as concerned military command, war studies have yet to escape their protacted adolescence" Easy to see why Prior (with Wilson) has earned a reputation as the antipode enfant terrible of Western Front historians; he even accuses Annika Mombauer [fresh off "Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the first world war" (2001] of validating Fritz Fischer's 1960's claims to Germany's bid for world power in 14-18.

it's important to keep the strategic picture in mind when we evaluate the decisions taken by the imperial HQ in the early days of the revolution, when Russia's political fate was being decided. The first priority was plainly to keep the front line troops from being infected by politics. But the Tsar was not thinking about mere survival, he genuinely believed Russia was primed to win the war.

In a twist on Antietam, a captured German map revealed their First Army's reorientation to the East of Paris. Amidst other reports, this did not immediately spur Joffre to order that famous flank attack, but it did plant a seed of "Kesselschlacht" plan in his mind. The German Army as a whole was sinking towards the Seine&Aube between Paris&Verdun. Joffre would spend most of the war hammering this Noyon salient flat.

Things were looking up as 1941 dawned. Operation Compass against Sidi Barrani coincided with victory over Italian forces at Eritrea, Abyssinia & Greece. the Lend-Lease proposal made it through Congress. But the Axis acquired the aligeance of Hungary and Romania, while the Luftwaffe started clouding the desert skies.

The Germans had invested more wisely in heavy artillery and kept their 77's in tandem, but they had flaws of their own: dense infantry against the 75mm, marching in the execution of an overambitious doctrine. The simple truth was that armies numbering millions of men could not be broken in a single battle.

It was not so much that French doctrine was fundamentally wrong in 1914; rather when they went to war, the French commanders had not made up their minds on what that doctrine should be. "Élan" would work best over a short distance against an enemy already softened. Joffre admonished the artillery cooperation by late August for this very reason.

Like all texts, the Getha's are re-interpreted with each translator and by each reader; notably by Protestant orientalists, who project their anti-Catholicism. This suited Nietzsche, whose belief in supranationalism for Europe didn't stop him from seeing Asian cultures as complimentary to his own (!). The connection between both beliefs is not clear to me.

Teacher to Greek philosophers, medieval sourcerer, Renaissance white magician... Zoroaster's reputation wore many hats. Perhaps disentangling his Gheta's from the corpus of the Indian Avesta (translated into German in the 1770s) would clarify matters.

The salaving intro already echoes Buddhism via a non-antropocentric creation, hints at Goethes Divan, announces Plato & St. Augustinus, uses "man is dead" as an intellectual predecessor to "workers unite" and shows respect for individual spirituality as "to each his Zoroaster".

The 1st National Defense Act of June '16 was too cautious to satisfy the preparedness lobby, out of touch with the WWI numbers game & even a disappointment to the isolationists. The National Guard, placed under Federal control, showed (only) defects in training & material when they reinforced their brethern in the southern border states after Pancho Villa's raid on the town of Colombus earlier in March..

The British were in a Catch-22: do well against Italy & Germany intervenes sooner. Logistics were the constant linchpin of desert warfare, with always too many trucks nibbled out of service by sand. RAF superiority hopped forward over improvised airfields w/ the Hurricane as Jack-of-all-trades. You'll see no sexy spitfires in the MTO sideshow, only obsolete material outclassed in the ETO given a 2nd life.

The necessity for a morale-stiffening German corset required for Italian units meant there was no mobile reserve for Rommel to counter the Alamain breakthrough.

The 1917-style infantry had performed adequate enough in Abyssinia, Spain and the French Alps to not learn lessons brutal enough to wake up its complacent HQ.

These personality quotes are apt & awesome to memorize!

- Hitler was an opportunist out of opportunities.

- Mussolini suffered from strategy attention deficit disorder.

- the history of Britain as Churchill interpreted it was a declaration of faith in ultimate victory; he had been ordained by providence to deliver it.

Was for the British the M.T. a crisis of opportunity? PERSONALLY I don't think it was better than another Western Front. A list of ports shows how much the fall of France had hurt the freedom of the Royal Navy in the region to protect or amphibious operations or logistics:
Oran, Algiers, Dakar, Marseilles, Philippeville ...

The M.T. is showcased as a theatre where Hitler had no geostrategic interests but rather was reluctantly dragged into by his allies, whose military contribution was far from equal to their appetite for colonial gains at the expense of France.

"the year 1940 found the Italian Navy at its pinnacle of their possibilities and they positively declined to go on the offensive." ...because they had no own air arm to exploit its advantageous position in the central Mediterranean. The attack on a convoy to supply the BEF to Greece off Cape Matapan reveiled other operational deficiencies of a navy still stuck in WWI: No radar, night fighting or air-sea cooperation.

If Mussolini is portrayed as a buffoon and his forces as bumbling cowards, there's a lot of truth to that. Even by the lenient standards of professional historiography.

1940 would've been the perfect time to attack Malta & Egypt and even sever British access to the Western Mediterranean. But Italian industry couldn't replace losses even in a "come as you are" war.

the (first) (modern) blacklisting of firms by Britain & next by her Allies was widened to include US based firms under German management in July 16. It was the rivet that resurrected the US merchant marine from the mists of the Civil War.

the Sussex pledge was ripe for criticism. It was an either/or stance, harsh on Germany but without a hard word on the British blockade. By its logic, hostilities would break out the moment the benefits to unrestricted submarine warfare became preferable to those of a neutral America. It steepened the slope.

The misidentified superior force of the Right Wing pushed the Battle of the Frontiers into retreat within a week. Joffre didn't loose his cool because he had adapted to Schlieffen's strategic surprise. He could wait to resume the Outrance with better infantry-artillery coordination... as soon as he had envelopped the entire Right Wing. The BEF's unsynchronised retreat from Mons to St.Quentin however taxed his left.

By 15 August Joffre started shifting forces left in recognition of the violation of Belgium NORTH of the Meuse, with Territorials extending the wing to the sea. The next day the BEF was called upon to mind the gap around Mons next to Lanzerac 5th Army. By then Liege fell and the Belgians were out of the fight, into their Antwerp redoubt. A fortress-studded line was marked, running from Amiens over Reims to Verdun.

Joffre grudgingly acknowledged that attacks needed careful preparation as his armies were pushed back and beyond their starting point. That German right wing seemed to be penetrating deeper than presumed but still on hither side of the Meuse. He knew where all the active German divisions were & damn the reservists ! Its Interesting to see how truth gradually dawned as sightings creeped north & enemy numbers swelled.

August 8th: in essence Joffre would jab with his right, incl. raiding Alsace, to fix the Germans in the widening Lorraine front, while attempting a knockout blow with his left at the German centre.
Within 2 days his tactics received a rude wake-up as the German heavies outranged his Soixante-Quinzes while also lending a hand to entrenched infantry to paint to elan-filled blue jackets as red as their trousers.