A European Ruby - WWI French Handgun

Am Shooting Journal ^ | 5/8/2017 | R Reed

[Secret Agent Man]

In WWI it wasn’t that French men couldn’t fight.

For the allies, it seems that their officers (English, French) were incredibly terrible at strategy and their solutions to everything were to just throw bodies at whatever and subsequently get those guys massacred. They stacked up like cordwood.

I mean when the officers and politicians fear that the fighting will stop because the troops on both sides at Christmas come together and start singing, and don’t want to go back to fighting, your officer leadership has problems in the head.

[american_ranger]

Back in 1981 I attended the Armor Officer Advanced Course at Fort Knox, KY. We received briefings from liaison officers from our NATO allies.

During the German officer’s briefing one of the other students made a wisecrack about the French army. The German officer took umbrage at the remark and said that the French enlisted men were superb. He blamed the French officer corps (corpse for zero) for their poor performance.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

when the officers and politicians fear that the fighting will stop because the troops on both sides at Christmas come together and start singing, and don’t want to go back to fighting, your officer leadership has problems in the head.

I think there’s no gainsaying the fact that WWI represented mismanagement at its worst.

People always try to develop technology to defeat the tactics of the last war - and equally, there is always a tendency for the leaders to be people who prospered by employing those same tactics in the last war. So the contest between “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “nothing could be worse than repeating the same mistakes and expecting a better result in the future” goes on.

WWI was a classic case of dramatic tech changes in armaments transcending the advantages of previously successful tactics. The conservatism of the military command, especially in the French Army, simply went into “sorcerer’s apprentice” mode. And the same thing happened in WWII, when tech changes had transformed the advantage from the defensive (trench warfare, with a “no man’s land” dominated by machine guns and repeating rifles) to the offensive (blitzkrieg, dominated by mechanized mobility).

It occurs to me that the singular mobility technology opportunity of WWI which could have made a difference would have been the use of trucks for maneuver. In WWII, the US sent the USSR thousands of Studebaker-built trucks which the Russians used to move their troops much faster than they could march. Some have rated that truck one of the most significant “weapons” of the war on “der Ostfront.”