Battle of the Somme

[SuburbanFarmer]

I'd say that WW1 is uniquely meaningless, given the incredible lack of adaptation shown by the commanders. How many millions charged into machine gun fire, even when it was known to be futile?

Grumpy, you have got to be the stupidest fucking moron of all time when it comes to shooting your mouth off about anything military, World War One is literally the most innovative and adaptive war in human history, the entire world, starting with warfare, can be divided into before World War One and after World War One, almost everything in the contemporary warfighting paradigm, is a result of innovation in order to adapt to World War One.

They entered World War One as Napoleonic armies fighting Napoleonic warfare, and came out the otherside with modern warfare as we know it today, the most central innovations of course, being air warfare, mechanized warfare, and combined operations.

I'm not unaware of that. However, if you were to withdraw your phallus from the muzzle of your firearm, and re-read, you may note that I'm not discussing the technological advances involved. In fact, one might even come to realize, once the hazy afterglow of ejaculating on a military manual has subsided, that I was, in fact, referring to the overall human aspect of sending millions of worthy young men off to die in clumps, running headlong into a storm of bullets, or huddled in the dirt, awaiting an enemy explosive launched at them continuously - all for pieces of paper signed by their slave masters, and ignorant fools hellbent on "dying gloriously" in a mud pit.

[Montegriffo]

I'd say that WW1 is uniquely meaningless, given the incredible lack of adaptation shown by the commanders. How many millions charged into machine gun fire, even when it was known to be futile?

Grumpy, you have got to be the stupidest fucking moron of all time when it comes to shooting your mouth off about anything military, World War One is literally the most innovative and adaptive war in human history.

More even than WWII?
Piston engined planes to jet fighters and sub orbital rockets, The A bomb, radar, code breaking computers and penicillin G.
Seems like there's a good argument for WWII when it comes to technological innovation at least.
Then there's blitzkrieg, anti submarine development, aerial support of ground troops and other tactical advances.
I'm interested to hear why you put WWI first.

[Smitty-48]

I'd say that WW1 is uniquely meaningless, given the incredible lack of adaptation shown by the commanders. How many millions charged into machine gun fire, even when it was known to be futile?

Grumpy, you have got to be the stupidest fucking moron of all time when it comes to shooting your mouth off about anything military, World War One is literally the most innovative and adaptive war in human history.

More even than WWII?
Piston engined planes to jet fighters and sub orbital rockets, The A bomb, radar, code breaking computers and penicillin G.
Seems like there's a good argument for WWII when it comes to technological innovation at least.
Then there's blitzkrieg, anti submarine development, aerial support of ground troops and other tactical advances.
I'm interested to hear why you put WWI first.

How do you have jet fighters, if nobody ever invents the fighter plane? Why is there such a thing as a fighter plane? Where does the concept of using a plane to fight the enemy with even come from? Answer; innovation to adapt to the stalemate of World War One.

Adding a jet engine didn't actually change much, almost nothing has changed in tactical air combat since World War One simply because the fighter planes fly faster, they still use the same tactics from World War One.

The computer was actually just an extension of the codebreaking from World War One as well, World War One is also the birthplace of SIGINT.

Blitzkrieg is World War One, the first use of tanks for a lightning attack ahead of the main force coordinated with airpower, that's World War One.

Anti Submarine warfare, World War One, use of aircraft, sonar, depth charges, all invented in World War One.

All tactical advances used in World War Two come from World War One, World War Two is just World War One at a slightly faster pace.

I put World War One first because it is the war that changes everything, World War Two was just a slighty updated version of World War One.

From stategic bombing, to aircraft carriers, to combined arms mechanized assaults, even genocidal holocausts, all this shit that World War Two is infamous for, was actually an innovation from World War One.

Now, they did invent the atomic bomb in World War Two, but did you know, the first atomic bomb like event; bomb destroys entire city in blink of an eye leaving devastated wasteland in its wake, actually occurs for the first time in World War One; Halifax Explosion, 6 December 1917, which becomes the model that the Manhattan project uses to calculate what an atomic bomb would be like.

[Montegriffo]

Doesn't the speed of innovation and new ideas in WWII make it more adaptive? To my untrained eye it seems like little changed for the first 2 or 3 years of WWI. Mass attacks against fixed positions in a Napoleonic war of attrition. Siege warfare almost medieval with it's mining and headlong attacks of the forlorn hope into breaches in the wall.
I get that many tactics came from WWI but there seem to be even more advances in the more mobile and strategically much wider WWII.
Not doubting your military knowledge but I'd have said WWII was at least as innovative if not far more so.

[Smitty-48]

I get that many tactics came from WWI but there seem to be even more advances in the more mobile and strategically much wider WWII.

No, there isn't, the strategies are exactly the same, strategically, both wars are industrial attrition wars, and all tactics in WWII, are just WWI tactics slightly sped up.

Your analysis is facile at best, you don't even have a basic understanding of what you are talking about, for example, I don't think that you even understand what strategic means in this context, or what the difference is between the tactical, operational, and strategic levels, nor do you really have any reference as to the differences in mobility between the two wars, which was actually minimal, both wars using rail, horses, and trucks of similar capacity for the most part.

Slightly faster tanks, slightly faster planes, doesn't actually a more mobile war make, and that's not the reason why World War Two was fought on longer fronts than World War One, and there were theaters and fronts in World War One which were just as if not more mobile than most fronts in World War Two, to wit, there are plenty of trench warfare stalemates in World War Two, just as there is plenty of mobile warfare in World War One, make no mistake.

My guess is that you simply don't have a grasp of World War One in its totality, it seems like you are probably referencing the same handful of battles on one front over a two year period, Flanders, 1915-16, the same which the media tends to focus on, and that's World War One for you, which is causing you to have skewed idea as to what World War One was like, here's a hint though; the low information media gets it mostly wrong and always has.

[Smitty-48]

The most important thing to understand about the portrayal of World War One as being this fruitless, pointless, mass slaughter without reason nor respite, with the poor poor soldiers being murdered in the trenches by the evil ruling classes, this is an entirely fabricated ahistorical narrative invented by the Left and propogated for decades by the Left wing media, but it actually bears very little resemblance to the reality of the Great War, and this is, at its core, the seminal reason why people on the Left really have no understanding of war, nor in fact their own history, and for the most part live in a fact free caricatured information bubble on this subject.

[Smitty-48]

you may note that I'm not discussing the technological advances involved.

Indeed, but you also clearly have no grasp as to revolutionary upheaval and complete reordering of the tactical and operational art in the First World War neither, you have no clue what you are prattling on about, not just the means by which wars were fought, but all the ways in which wars were fought, was completely and utterly changed in every aspect, and war became exponentially more dynamic in the process.

Before World War One, there was no tactics below company level, there was no combined operations, there was no fire and manuever, the entire operational art as it is practiced by all armies now, was all invented in World War One.

The Western Front in the First World War, is where they discover everything, try everything, and invent everything, and all armies in the world have been employing what they discovered, tried, and invented, ever since, contrary to your idiotic assertion, it was in reality the most dynamic and inventive battle lab in the history of warfare, and a lack of innovation and adaption was in no way the cause of the attrition, the attrition would have been exponentially worse if they had not changed the way that they fought, fundamentally, in every aspect, really in a span of just 24 months.

Your view of the First World War, is actually the exact opposite of the reality, you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.

[katarn]

you may note that I'm not discussing the technological advances involved.

Indeed, but you also clearly have no grasp as to revolutionary upheaval and complete reordering of the tactical and operational art in the First World War neither, you have no clue what you are prattling on about, not just the means by which wars were fought, but all the ways in which wars were fought, was completely and utterly changed in every aspect, and war became exponentially more dynamic in the process.

Before World War One, there was no tactics below company level, there was no combined operations, there was no fire and manuever, the entire operational art as it is practiced by all armies now, was all invented in World War One.

The Western Front in the First World War, is where they discover everything, try everything, and invent everything, and all armies in the world have been employing what they discovered, tried, and invented, ever since, contrary to your idiotic assertion, it was in reality the most dynamic and inventive battle lab in the history of warfare, and a lack of innovation and adaption was in no way the cause of the attrition, the attrition would have been exponentially worse if they had not changed the way that they fought, fundamentally, in every aspect, really in a span of just 24 months.

Your view of the First World War, is actually the exact opposite of the reality, you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.

Smitty's stuff falls in line with everything I've seen. The tactics and the strategy of pretty much everyone changes quickly after the war starts, because of those many dead futilely marching into machine guns. After the first bit, a lot of that that happens is with different things in mind. Generals try to adapt, some fail, some succeed, and the stuff that works is revolutionary.

Side question to Smitty: I've seen about a dozen translations of Nec Aspera Terrent. What do you associate it with?

[Smitty-48]

Side question to Smitty: I've seen about a dozen translations of Nec Aspera Terrent. What do you associate it with?

They're all good; "Hardships Do Not Deter Us" to "No Fears On Earth", I apply it in the full spectrum of contexts, as appropriate to, and quite often all at once as a boxed set.

[Smitty-48]

Doesn't the speed of innovation and new ideas in WWII make it more adaptive? To my untrained eye it seems like little changed for the first 2 or 3 years of WWI. Mass attacks against fixed positions in a Napoleonic war of attrition. Siege warfare almost medieval with it's mining and headlong attacks of the forlorn hope into breaches in the wall.

All the adapting happens in World War One, there's almost no adapting going on in World War Two, because it was all figured out 21 years before, this is why World War Two can kick off as a faster more manuerable version of World War One, they didn't have to figure anything out in World War Two, it had already been figured out for them, in World War One, combined arms mechanized air land mobile warfare; that had already been invented for them by World War One, so the reality is actually opposite of what you are thinking, World War Two seems faster and more dynamic to you, but that is not adapting, that is simply exploiting all the adapting which was required to break the stalemate in the last war.

To wit, it is the lack of having to adapt, which makes World War Two so dynamic and explosive right out of the gate, they were just doing World War One all over again, but on steroids.

You can't go from Napoleonic war straight to World War Two, the innovation and adaption phase, where they invent modern warfare as we know it, is World War One.