Greatest Commander of all time?

[Grisha]

What brings about victory is not so simple, exactly true. Modern nations are much too complex with too much infrastructure to be reduced with simplistic notions of victory or defeat. To defeat a modern nation requires a systemic approach to strategy and operations.

[JasonC]

Cuirassier is correct that putting men on territory in no way assures victory in itself. Moreover, in practice they do not get there while the enemy maintains a serious army.

The tales of the home front stuff mattering more in WW I are false. The armies came apart on the field. Losses too high and inability to replace them drove front line rifle strength below levels needed to hold the line and provide regular reliefs. Once that happened, morale of the remaining overtaxed men plummeted. When attacked, they surrendered by the tens of thousands per day on top of battles losses, rates no army could sustain.

Nor is it true that the enemy can always put new forces in the field as long as he controls his homefront. 90% of Austro-Hungarian men mobilized during the war became casualties or surrendered well before the end. 76% of mobilized Russian manpower became causalties. Neither sustained themselves in the war. 73% of mobilized French personnel became casualties, and they were carried by their allies, Brits as early as 1917 and Americans in 1918. For Germany the figure was 65%, at which point the army broke.

The early 1918 offensives inflicted a million casualties on the Allied armies. (The Brits alone lost a quarter of a million in the first 6 weeks). German losses were roughly half that. The reason they were not more decisive is Americans were arriving in France as fast as Brits and Frenchmen were being killed or wounded, while the German killed or wounded could not be replaced. US forces in France reached 650,000 at midsummer, in time to help stop the offensives. By the fall there were 4 million US soldiers mobilized and half of them were already in France.

At the start of the offensives, forces transfered from the east were sufficient to give the Germans numerical superiority on the western front, for the first time since 1914. They fielded 220 divisions to the Allies 160. And they performed significantly better per man, despite Allied strengths in weight of artillery metal from industrial output (much of it American for years, incidentally), and tanks. If millions of Americans had not been arriving to replace Allied losses, Allied strength would have declined seriously due to the 1918 offensives, faster in fact that the Germans and from a lower base.

The Brits still had significant manpower reserves. No one else did. They did not on their own stand up to the German offensives, which ripped wide holes in their front and lead to PW bags in the 6 figures. Conscripts being sent back to the front showed signs of unrest similar to those seen in the French army the previous year.

In principle, Britain might have traded blows with the Germans for another year, with their greater remaining manpower depth (not as yet mobilized or trained, however) fighting against the headwinds of superior German numbers at that point, and proven superior German skill per man. It might have taken 3 million more casualties to drive the British past their own breaking point if they pull out all the mobilization stops, and Germany might not have had the wind for that.

But it was darn close, and in the first half of 1918 the Brits were in no shape to stop the Germans. It was the pointlessness of reducing the allies by a million at enourmous cost, only to see 2 million Americans step in, in their place, that drove the Germans to despair. And it was inability to replace their own losses at that point that reduce their average battalion size 20% by the turn in the summer.

WW I was a much more near-run thing that people here seem to imagine, and the processes involved were as decisive as you please. They were just horrendously expensive in human terms, as well. Guess what, so was WW II. Ask a Russian.

[chiavarm]

The German attack in WWI faltered in the infancy of the war. To suggest that the German could have won the war in 1918 had the Americans not intervened is highly improbable. The weapons at the time were suited more for defense and Germany did not have the manpower necessary to move the line or inflict causalities to win plus to attack across the channel. The best Germany could have hoped for was an armistice with its present territorial gains.

Most of the causalities were sustained while attacking. Defenders, while not immune did enjoy a more favorable survival rate.

When thinking about what is victory,

The American tactic of engaging the Me 262 when it was coming in for a landing comes to mind. The 262 is low on speed, altitude, fuel, and ammo. Hit 'em where there vulnerable.

Destroy the enemy on your terms not his!

By the way, about the laundry list of causalities, these countries did field armies again.

I guess what I am trying to say don't just defeat a nation's army. Conquer IT!(the nation)

Oops not politically correct!

[ December 08, 2005, 09:34 PM: Message edited by: chiavarm ]

[JasonC]

It is not true that the attackers took higher losses and the defenders always took less. On the contrary, practically every major German offensive of the war inflicted more casualties than they took themselves. They inflicted 9 million causalties on the Russians, suffering far fewer, and attacking the majority of the time. They crushed Rumania in weeks, taking tiny losses. They inflicted losses an order of magnitude higher than their own on the Italians. The French and Brits were tougher, but they still inflicted 3 to 2 attacking at Verdun, as well as 3 to 2 again defending on the Somme.

The Germans had a qualitative edge in WW I, initially from better strategy and superior heavy artillery, at midwar mostly from the latter, and late (when they no longer had an artillery edge) from advanced infantry tactics, far beyond those the other powers had attained (despite continual improvement on their part, as well).

And they did not need to cross any channels. Taking Paris would have been quite sufficient. Or more likely, just getting either the Brit or the French army to come apart in the field. No, nations whose armies come apart in the field do not raise up new ones and just fight on, unconquered. Russia left the war and had a revolution. Austria-Hungary left the war, had a revolution, and ceased to exist as a unified state. Germany left the war and had a revolution. Turkey left the war and had a revolution.

And the same would have happened to Italy after Caporetto had French and British troops not held the line for them, and to the French after the Nivelle attempts in 1917, had the Brits not carried the weight for them. (French army morale was sustained only by the promise of no more offensives, on the slogan "wait for the Americans and the tanks").

Attrition is not an indecisive process. Europe is not run by large multinational empires. Kaisers and Czars do not sit on thrones clear across it, ordering their minions about following geopolitical schemes. War so conducted smashes states to pieces. Which is decision by any objective standard.

People who pretend otherwise mostly just mean they wish it had been easier to win. Some also confuse how little they had to do with winning other wars in which their losses were modest, with those wars having been easier to win. WW II was not more decisive than WW I, and the process of winning it was just as dominated by horrendously expensive, sheer attrition. Ask the Russians.

[Wisbech_lad]

Some counter factuals - the offences had failed before midsummer. They were spring offences.

Both Russian & German revolutions happened before the end of their fighting, not that they left the war and had a revolution.

The "far advanced" infantry tactics were, ironically, part of the German collapse. They were attained by basically putting all the best remaining troops in the assualt divisions, that then ran out, leaving no cadre.

If home front didn't matter, then why did the side with the larger and more efficient economies win... One reason for the drop in German morale in 1917/18 was the fact that to keep up with UK and France, even after collapse of Russia, a simply massive amount of GDP went into war - I've seen stats that has UK domestic GDP consumption at levels 7-8 times higher than Germany. German civilians were starving, social tensions were massive

UK and France were still decent places to live, as long as you weren't near a front. Germany was not. Remember one of the main lessons learned from WW1 was "destroy the home front" (strat bombing, blockades etc) as it was reckoned that home front morale collapse played such a big part. Hitler's "stab in the back" argument played so well, because there was enough truth in it to make it plausible. The fleet did mutiny, the new government did call for armistice

Of course, in WW2 that turned out (as usual) that everyone was preparing to fight the previous war. Plus on defensive measures, everyone realised the importance of propaganda & social cohesion at home to sustain the effort.

[JasonC]

The Germans were still trying to attack in June. The tide didn't turn until counterattacks started succeeding in July.

German tactics were superior independent of individual manpower or unit quality. You can't find a major battle from one end of the war to the other in which the Germans did not outperform, man for man, until the last four months.

You can find occasions when other people's attacks worked as well - against Austrians or Turks. Otherwise, not. With strong tank support and massive relative artillery expenditure the western allies occasionally reached near-equality, they did not exceed it - again until morale collapsed in the last four months.

Revolutions first brought new governments willing to continue the war, but they could not repair their armies at the front, stop the bleeding, our make the enemy stop. Nor could they survive politically against promises to achieve the latter at the expense of the former by giving up - which is exactly what happened.

Stab in the back, homefront myths are myths, they are directly falsified by the leaders themselves. Ludendorf knew the jig was up when single allied attacks, heavily supported by tanks, began inflicting superior losses on the Germans. With Germans at the front surrendering in five digit figures over 3 days.

They did not beat the US to the field time-wise, US numbers weren't going to go down, they could not inflict losses on the Allies faster than they did so, they could not trade them off, and they could not trade fewer than one for one and survive. They were also out of reserves with trench strength per unit dropping as a result, with no other front to draw more from.

The army lost, because there were too many enemies to contend with. Numerically, not just economically. Economically the running was closer, in fact. Economic strength mattered not for home front morale but for shell production, which translated pretty linearly (though with different coefficients for different countries) into enemy losses. But to sustain those losses took population, and in case nobody noticed, France, Britain, and the US combined are much larger than Germany. (AH was worth about as much as Italy by then).

[JasonC]

Not that a desire for peace led to peace. Unwillingness to last one more year against the Germans doubled the length of the war for Russians. They just got to spend the second half of it killing each other instead of Germans.

[Moronic Max]

No, nations whose armies come apart in the field do not raise up new ones and just fight on, unconquered

Unless they're Rome, and they're facing Hannibal.

[NameUsedBefore]

Might be a stretch, but I'd say Russia during WWII had its initial armies dismantled but later re-organized to fight on as well.