Comments on: ANZAC Day

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:13:03 +0000

In reply to Badtux.

Uncle Billy tried one frontal assault in the Western Campaign and got his butt kicked by Joe Johnston, so he never did it again. While Sherman v. Johnston was the class action of the Civil War, the Europeans, when they noticed it all, studied the actions of Robert E. Lee, especially Lee v. Grant. That was a replay of Napoleon’s tactics, which were highly influential. It has always annoyed my that general staffs spend more time looking at what losers did, that the actions of winners. [Note that I’m not at all impressed by US Grant who won by accepting huge losses knowing he could afford them more that Lee could.]

At many points in his books, Basil Liddell Hart gets downright nasty about this tendency to glorify those who lost in the end and to treat them as the font of all military wisdom.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:43:22 +0000

The astounding thing was that if the Europeans had just looked at the astounding carnage of the American Civil War, they should have figured out immediately that simply charging enemy trenches was suicide. William Tecumseh Sherman invented the blitzkrieg for exactly that reason (or as close to the blitzkrieg as you can get with 19th century technology, but the reason his March to the Sea succeeded was because he was moving faster than the Confederates could move to put together an army to stop him). But the Europeans then were as smug and insular as Americans now — if it didn’t happen in Europe, it never happened. And so human stupidity remains the one constant…

– Badtux the War Penguin

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:16:42 +0000

It was a terrible war with a lot of people in charge who didn’t understand the effects of the new weaponry on their old tactics. In many ways, the peace was worse than the war because it resulted in the Second World War and the disaster that is the Middle East.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 07:45:13 +0000

For us, it has a very different meaning. 🙂

Aus only had a population of about 4 mill back then, so almost 9,000 killed was a lot for us.

A sad day.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 05:54:43 +0000

The Gallipoli campaign actually did have one utterly unexpected effect. It made a hero of a young colonel who was the only Ottomon military leader to manage to stop Allied forces during the course of the war. This young colonel eventually went on to become known as Kemal Attaturk and the founder of the modern Turkish republic after the final collapse of the Ottomon Empire. If not for Gallipoli, this young colonel would likely have remained unknown, and there would have been no hero of the Turkish people to set up shop in Ankara and threaten to go back to war again if the British and French forces that were setting up shop in Istambul tried to divide the remnant Turkish rump state between themselves, and we’d have two nations where the modern nation of Turkey now sits, probably nations as seriously FUBAR as the other Mideast nations that the Brits and French divided between themselves.

And that, my friends, is the rest of the story :).

– Badtux the History Penguin