I put myself firmly into the Terraine school of thought, and so suspect that I would largely agree with Hart as well. I will have to read his book.
That said, I snatch up every scrap of wartime verse that I can find, for those words capture so well my own experiences of infantry warfare from another era. War at the platoon and company level is a visceral and emotional experience that sears one’s soul whether it be at Agincourt or Khandahar.
Combat at the personal level is an entirely different experience than at the political or command level. They are different worlds. The tragedy of World War I was that technological advance of the machine gun had not yet been matched by the ability to mass through coordinated indirect fires and maneuver in order to counter the advantage of defenders with machine guns. But, everyone from Private to General worked to solve that problem and largely had done so by the time the Armistace came. World War II was an entirely different war because of what happened in France in 14-18.
The British, French, German, and even American leaders had their share of blunders, to be sure. I think that Terraine points out in considerable detail the lengths that the British Army went to avoid such blunders. Consider the alternative had Germany won.
Oh What a Lovely War is a great movie despite its stereotypic theme. Its available on DVD, and the songs can be viewed on You Tube - there are some good ones.
As much as I’d like to despise Hitchens completely, I must admit he has a well rounded intellect and his writing reflects it.
A bloody and wasteful war, that WWI.
The mindless viciousness of it all. Who’s idea was it to destroy Europe and kill the best of the world?
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Also, I highly recommend John Mosier's The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I....a 1961 book, The Donkeys, which was a history of the British General Staff in the First World War. The title came from a famous comment that had supposedly been made at that epoch by a German military strategist. Told by the highly impressed Quartermaster General Ludendorff that "these British soldiers fight like lions," General Max Hoffmann had responded: "Yes, but lions led by donkeys."Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. |
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Bump for reading later....
“Your fascist is a little middle-class creep who worries about his dividends and rents. The true National Socialist feels that the ruling class has a debt and a tie to the working class. We sent the British workers off to die en masse in the trenches along the Somme, and then we rewarded them with a slump and mass unemployment, and then that led to another war that gutted them again.”Too many Americans these days do not make the important distinctions between Socialism, Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, etc., and it makes it sound like we are just throwing out slurs. It also blurs the focus on important similarities, such as the eerie similarity of Bush/Obama's Corporatist bailouts of financial and large manufacturing sectors to Mussolini and FDR's.
Hart succeeds in showing how the gunners got steadily better (as did the guns).
And ammunition quality assurance/quality control.