Battle of the Somme

[ssu]

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.

Perhaps not only the left. Ignorance plays a major part too.

The avoidability of WW1 is also something I doubt. With the Agadir crisis in 1911 the World already got close to the Great War. Would it have happened then, the narrative would all be about Morocco, not someone from the Austrian royal family being assassinated in the Balkans. And people would be bitching that all this meaningless carnage happened because of Morocco and make the statement how logical it was that the colonialism then turned into WW1 (a line that the left simply would love). I think the Great War simply would have happened sooner or later, the jingoism was there and wouldn't have gone anywhere, because there had been such a long time from a major war. And wars were then a normal part of European history. They weren't something people were so horrified at.

How worse would it have been if we would have gotten to a later time, lets say the Great War would have erupted in the 1930's? A lot more machine guns with Infantry tactical manuals from the 19th Century. After all, Leo Slizárd patented the nuclear bomb, the the idea of a nuclear chain reaction via neutrons, in 1934. Now there's a new inventive way to break the deadlock in the trenches on the West Front, right?

[Smitty-48]

See, the problem with all you Hipster Faggot World War Two fanbois, is that you have hindsight bias, modern warfare as we know it, combined arms, fire and manuever, small unit tactics, mechanization, air land operations, etcetera, etcerera, etcertera, this only seems obvious, because you're looking back from the future.

Going into the First World War, as Napoleaonic armies, they had no concept of these things, nobody had invented them yet, because nobody had ever had any reason to, the only reason any of this shit was invented, was to solve problems which were only encountered; once World War One was in progress. Neccessity; the mother of invention, World War One; the neccesity that invented everything.

[Smitty-48]

And you know, if Britain hadn't entered the war over Belgian Nuetrality causing it to become a World War, and so Germany had defeated France and Russia in relatively short order in a theater war, modern warfare as we now it would not only not have been invented, but none of this other stuff, tanks, jets, rockets, computers, space programs, nuclear power, robotics, the internet, etcetera, etcetera... none of that shit would have been invented neither.

So World War One literally invented everything, the world as you know it, is the adaption and innovation of World War One, simply run amok, which includes World War Two therein.

[Smitty-48]

The avoidability of WW1 is also something I doubt. With the Agadir crisis in 1911 the World already got close to the Great War. Would it have happened then, the narrative would all be about Morocco, not someone from the Austrian royal family being assassinated in the Balkans. And people would be bitching that all this meaningless carnage happened because of Morocco and make the statement how logical it was that the colonialism then turned into WW1 (a line that the left simply would love). I think the Great War simply would have happened sooner or later, the jingoism was there and wouldn't have gone anywhere, because there had been such a long time from a major war. And wars were then a normal part of European history. They weren't something people were so horrified at.

Oh I disagree, I think there could have been a series of theatre wars which would not have had to escalate to a World War, if Britain and by extension America would have simply stayed out of direct intervention. I think it could have been Franco-Prussian War 2.0, without initiating the Age of General Relativity.

I think there is a parallel world, which is industrial but not post industrial, in 2017, modern, but without the Age of Relativity, no computers, no nukes, no space programs, a 2017 which has only moved marginally past 1917, just as 1917 really didn't move much past 1817.

The velocity of history that we live in now, is all incited by Britain entering the war, that is the inflection point, which not only changes history, but accelerates it by many orders of magnitude as well.

The sudden and unexpected entry of the British Empire into the Second Franco-Prussian War, is what causes everything to go critical mass, like an implosion charge going off on the plutonium core.

It was like if America convinced everybody in Europe that America was in Splendid Isolation and not going to get involved in anymore European Wars, but then as soon as the Russians invaded Latvia, the Americans nuked the Russians for doing so, Bam, right out of the blue.

[Hastur]

Anyone else following The Great War channel on Youtube? They do a show every week about what happened this week in WWI 100 years ago. Apart from that they also put out a couple of specials every week and lots of Q/As.

Highly recommended.

They have summary episodes for those who want to catch up as well.

I didn't know how little I knew about WWI before.



A lot of content and more to come.

[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.

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.

Ok, I get it now, thanks.
So the innovations in WWII were mainly technological rather than tactical.
Radar must have changed tactics in a large way though, and that was not available in WWI, especially when it came to aerial and naval warfare.

[C-Mag]

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.

One of the obvious things that most don't realize is that the basic unit in which all infantry is based off of today is the Infantry Squad and the Infantry Platoon. Going into WWI there were no Infantry Squads, the commanders organized their armies based on Napoleanic Tactics that called for controlling the center mass. Further, in 1914 the technology of weapons for the Infantry Squad wasn't widely available. By the end of WWI we have all armies using the platoon and squad, they have distributed in their squads the ability to fix the enemy with fire suppression and advance to destroy the objective. This is on small unit on unit scale.

I've argued previously that you could take the infantry weapons of 1919 and give them to an infantry platoon today and you wouldn't have a huge drop off in effectiveness. The biggest difference would be the rate of fire, reload time and weight. But the effective ranges are the same, the types of targets you can engage are the same.

M1903 Springfield
Browning Automatic Rifle
Thompson Sub-Machine Gun
M1897 Trench Shotgun
M1919 Browning 30 cal

Another key feature that is overlooked is how the Commanders Intent is communicated on the Battlefield. There was no Operation Order before WWI, that was developed during the war. How many historical battles have you read about that orders and intent were not understood and it impacts the entire battle.

[jbird4049]

See, the problem with all you Hipster Faggot World War Two fanbois, is that you have hindsight bias, modern warfare as we know it, combined arms, fire and manuever, small unit tactics, mechanization, air land operations, etcetera, etcerera, etcertera, this only seems obvious, because you're looking back from the future.

Going into the First World War, as Napoleaonic armies, they had no concept of these things, nobody had invented them yet, because nobody had ever had any reason to, the only reason any of this shit was invented, was to solve problems which were only encountered; once World War One was in progress. Neccessity; the mother of invention, World War One; the neccesity that invented everything.

Yeah looking at all the fabulous innovations does not change the human costs of it. An entire generation of men especially British, French, and German. Four empires gone. Much of the accumulated wealth of the previous century burnt up. Followed by the idiotic Treaty of Versailles, and just as stupid reorganization of the Middle East in such a way to guarantee strife.

[Smitty-48]

Yeah looking at all the fabulous innovations does not change the human costs of it. An entire generation of men especially British, French, and German. Four empires gone. Much of the accumulated wealth of the previous century burnt up. Followed by the idiotic Treaty of Versailles, and just as stupid reorganization of the Middle East in such a way to guarantee strife.

Rly? You're purity spiralling over World War One?

You're a walking cliche, bro, I get it that you're young, but that's still no reason to get your personality from a gumball machine in the college dorm.

[Fife]

Yeah looking at all the fabulous innovations does not change the human costs of it. An entire generation of men especially British, French, and German. Four empires gone. Much of the accumulated wealth of the previous century burnt up. Followed by the idiotic Treaty of Versailles, and just as stupid reorganization of the Middle East in such a way to guarantee strife.

Are you really purity spiralling over World War One?

You're a walking cliche, bro, I get it that you're young, but that's still no reason to get your personality from a gumball machine in the college dorm.

You're being a little harsh, IMNSHO.

To gumball machines.

When I was a kid in the 70s, I would give quarters to the pretty girls to feed into the gumball, and zodiac machines. Those machines always paid off for me.