re: Apocalypse WWI: debating the tactics

Watch the movie "Gallipoli" sometime... very early Mel Gibson war movie.

The British in particular had some really wacky ideas about warfare. Heck, in the Revolutionary War, they often wore bright red coats with a white St. Andrews cross on the front. They may well have the most effective self-targeting strategy in the history of warfare.

And the same for the trench warfare surges (as shown in Gallipoli). It was almost as if their goal was to make the other guys run out of bullets, and to hell with our own casualties. I guess war is a little more... impersonal... these days, and maybe that's why we have so many of them. A lot less people see the horror and devastation caused on a first hand basis.

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I'm aware, but the majority of officer casualties were the lieutenants and captains charged with leading their men in suicidal charges. When I say generals, I should say the field marshals coordinating the war, not the commanders of individual units. Still, as a common soldier, you would rarely get a direct order from your commanders to conduct a charge.

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I see what you're saying. But if you compare the number of generals who became casualties in WWI and compare that to WWII, you'll see that for most armies WWI was far more dangerous than even WWII. One reason of this is the communications between the front and rear areas was not near as advanced in WWI as it was in WWII for generals. It was still common for even high ranking generals to make frequent, and in some cases daily, visits to the front line trenches. During attacks it was also common for at least brigade or divisional level generals to follow the first couple waves of troops quite closely.

The generals of WWI were not lazy, stupid, or cowardly.They were confronted with a war unlike anything the world had ever seen. They could not fall back on their training to figure out how to deal with the new battlefield they were confronted with. They had to figure out a solution to the stalemate "on the job" and without a manual. And I'd say considering the solutions they came up with, namely the concept of combined arms warfare (an early form/precursor of Blitzkrieg) that is still used in all modern armies around the world, they did a damn good job.

watch the original "All Quiet on the Western Front" starring Lew Ayers. he movie affected him so much he was a conciensius objector in WWII

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I think he was just pointing out the failure to adapt to evolving ware fare by the generals and throwing away hundreds of thousands of lives in pointless experiments

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This goes back to what I was just saying. You cannot accurately judge the performance of WWI generals with the benefit of hindsight. The war they were fighting was completely new. There was no manual to tell them what to do. There had been no training before the war to let them know what to expect. Before the war everyone on both sides assumed things like modern artillery and machine guns would actually shorten the war by allowing one side to totally defeat the other in one huge battle similar to what had been see at Waterloo almost a century before or Sedan 44 years before. The one conflict the could have looked at and seen a preview of what they'd face in WWI was the Petersburg Campaign in the American Civil War almost 50 years before.

Apocalypse: WWI

...the best docu-series I've seen on WWI. I cant go to sleep tonight because it's a marathon.

U-VERSE - Channel 1259

ETA: Looks like original air dates of fall 2014. I can't believe there was so much film shot during and around WWI. This is a very thorough series covering all sides, all fronts, politics and military.

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SurfTide

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If you're still around I guess you need to lengthen your title. Seems this otherwise great thread has drawn an anchor. The extremely short title is the only thing I can see that would cause this.

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All I'm saying is considering the circumstances, and setting aside hindsight, overall they did about a good as any generals from any time would have done in the same situation.

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I can probably agree with this. I was taking more of a individual soldier viewpoint- the men suffering through this horrible war at the ground level, rather than the view of the war as a whole. Just saw that many injured troops left behind in no man's land from the inevitable charge and retreats would crawl into shell homes for protection, only to drown when the rain filled them. I mean, good god.

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You have to be able to command your troops on smoky battlefields. You need all the help in understanding evolving situations and colorful uniforms helped genarals understand the battle.

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Fair enough.