February 17, 1871

Passez la Champagne: Or a Conqueror's Guide to Paris.

Today we once again turn to our Gallic brethren to provide us with a chance to look at one of those events that seems to repeat itself throughout military history. Few cities in the world have the majesty, culture, and history of Paris, and surely few have evoked as much awe, envy, and even contempt. Throughout her history, the city on the Seine has been the target of a number of invaders and would-be conquerors.

Prussian soldiers march through Paris after the end of the Franco-Prussian War, February, 1871.

On February 17, 1871, Prussian troops celebrated their victory in the Franco-Prussian War with a parade past the Arc de Triomphe. The demonstration capped celebrations following the coronation of Wilhelm I, the first German Emperor. Fought mostly to unite Germany's southern kingdoms with Prussia against a common foe, the war was neither the first nor last period that saw foreigners march through Paris. To shake things up today, we'll take a look at some of the darker days in the City of Light.

52 BC:
During his conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar crushes a local uprising led by the legendary Vercingetorix on the left bank of the Seine. A nearby settlement, named for the Parisii people, is renamed Lutetia by the Romans and begins growing rapidly.







Caesar is still in Paris, but only at the Louvre.








1420 AD:
During the Hundred Years' war, and after years of local popular uprisings, the English under Henry V capture Paris. Henry VI is crowned King of France at Notre Dame in 1429, and the English hold the city for seven more years.

The coronation of English King Henry VI as King of France. Note the fleur-de-lys on his crest.

1814:
After Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia, his enemies in the east followed him back to France, culminating in a parade through Paris. Czar Alexander I was at the head of the column.

Russians parade though the city after the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon in 1814.

1871:
Following a four-month siege of the city, Prussian troops enter Paris, resulting in the coronation of Wilhelm I, and yet another parade. Here is an awesome description of the first Prussians entering the city, originally published in Blackwell Magazine and reprinted in the New York Times, December 10, 1893:

[One] came tearing up the hill. As he neared we saw he was a hussar officer...He charged past us, his sword uplifted, his head thrown back, his eyes fixed straight...By Jove if that fellow's mother could see him, she'd have something to be proud of!

The youngster raced on far ahead...[to] the Arch of Triumph...We caught sight of him on the other side through the archway, his sword high up, as if he were saluting the vanquished city at his feet.

The coronation of Wilhelm I, held in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, 1871.

1940:
After the Germans failed to capture the city during the First World War, Adolf Hitler makes sure Gay Paree sees the indemnity of a Wehrmacht parade in the Second. Later, with Allied armies closing in, Hitler orders the city to be destroyed, but Paris is spared by the military governor General Dietrich von Choltitz.

Hitler found the exact railroad car in which the Germans signed their surrender in 1914, and used it to hold the ceremony in reverse in 1940.

To be sure, Paris' position as the envy of Europe has put it in some perilous spots in the past. The last time foreign soldiers paraded through her streets, it was on a much more joyous note. On August 25, 1944 American troops, spearheaded by Free French forces, marched into the city to end the German occupation.

Americans march through Paris after the liberation in 1944. That familiar landmark is just visible in the background.

February 12, 1946

The U-Boat Graveyard: Or Why Germany Has To Stay in the Shallow End.

Well, we're almost afraid to show our faces around these parts lately, given this blog's laughable rate of production, but all the same we're proud to say that Lies Agreed Upon is back with a bang here in the middle of February. Call it a Valentine's Day gift to our wonderful readers, whose French sensibilities are soothed by the romantic. All the same, we appreciate your patience during this apparent "work stoppage."

We dive right back into the water today, and turn back the clock to a war ravaged Europe less than a year after Adolf Hitler's Third Reich had collapsed into rubble. One of the many steps it would take to rebuild the continent was getting rid of the countless pieces of war that Germany suddenly no longer needed. Tanks, vehicles, guns, planes (if there were any left), small arms; all the surrendered working parts of a war machine that had been dismantled. Included in the tally were over 154 vessels of the Kriegsmarine's prized U-Boat fleet.





Officers salute from the tower as U-107 sets out from Lorient, France, 1942.










U-Boats or Unterseeboote, were the scourge of the blue water at one point in the war, and for that matter, played the same role a generation before. Pan-European conflicts tend to make land powers like Germany susceptible to blockade, particularly when the British are fighting on the other side. Under both Hitler and Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Germans turned to unrestricted submarine warfare to break the blockade and cut England's lifeline to the outside world.

We enjoy the debate on the effectiveness of this tactic for two reasons, the first of which is the reaction of the United States. In both wars, U-Boats succeeded in sinking millions of tonnage and likely cost billions of dollars in losses, but in both conflicts they caused Germany to incur the wrath of a growing superpower. In 1917, knowing full-well what the response would be, the Germans unleashed their unrestricted subs on American ships and brought the U.S. into the war. Prior to Pearl Harbor, German wolf packs, or groups of subs, hunted in waters as far West as the Gulf of Mexico. This succeeded only in driving the U.S. to aid the Allies to the point of undermining her status as a neutral.

The sinking of the RMS Lusitania in 1915 caused outrage in the United States, and the Germans halted their unrestricted submarine warfare. When it resumed in 1917, it drove the US to enter the war.

To us, the cost of bringing an immensely powerful enemy into the fray is not covered by the success the subs did have. But what really pique's our interest about the U-Boat is the fact that Germany had to turn to them at all. Looking back, it was the build up of the Imperial German surface fleet that first alarmed Europe's established powers. At the turn of the 20th Century, the Kaiser's desire to launch a fleet to rival England's posed a challenge to the long recognized ruler of the waves. Yet when hostilities broke out, Germany was out of her league at sea and her new ships spent most of the war bottled up in port. As it happened, the oceans would be her downfall.

It was the oceans that brought the supplies an exhausted Britain needed to survive until 1918; that brought millions of fresh American troops when the First World War was still very much in doubt; that saved England from invasion after Dunkirk; that kept supplies from Rommel in North Africa; that carried thousands of tanks and planes to the Soviet Union on the frigid "Murmansk Run"; and it was from over the oceans that wave after wave of Allied troops came to places like Casablanca, Salerno, and Normandy.

Germany's designs on a surface fleet made her persona non grata at the European power table, but she never built an armada even close to what was feared. Because of this, she was forced to dive below the surface in two World Wars, thus creating more enemies than she could handle. On February 12, 1946, a little over nine months after the U-Boat fleet was surrendered, over 120 German submarines were scuttled in Operation Deadlight; blown up and sunk intentionally off the coast of Northern Ireland.




52 U-Boats are prepared for scuttling as part of Operation Deadlight, February 1946.









Germany had long desired a world renowned fleet, and the one scuttled in Deadlight was infamous indeed. But designs on a navy caused an exhaustive world war and planted the seeds for the vengeance-fueled second. The fleet they got might not have been exactly the one the Germans pictured, but it brought on a host of enemies just the same. When the U-Boats were finally scuttled it was the end of a sad chapter in naval history, and closed the book on Germany as a world naval power.

Dead General Quote of the Week

A Worthy Adversary.

This Dead General Quote of the Week comes from the commander of the Deutsches Afrika Korps, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel. Rommel's panzers fought a see-saw battle back and forth across the Libyan desert against General Bernard Montgomery's British 8th Army for almost two whole years. Made up mostly of Commonwealth troops, men from all over the British Empire became the Desert Rats needed to flush out the Desert Fox. After one battle, Rommel himself commented on the tenacity of these men gathered from around the globe:

Give me two Australian Divisions and I will conquer the world.

Rommel in his Afrika Korps gear. Note his trademark: captured British desert goggles, donned solely for PR purposes.

Dead General Quote of the Week

Good Advice.

Just a quick Dead General Quote of the Week to assure all our readers out there that we are indeed still in production. Here is one of our favorites from Frederick II, King of Prussia, better known today as Frederick the Great. This is known to be one of George S. Patton's favorite quotes. Stay tuned for more posts.

L'audace. L'audace. L'audace. Tujuors de l'audace.


Audacity. Audacity. Audacity. Always Audacity.

Dead General Quote of the Week

A Cold Day in Hell.

A Note from the Editors:
On Wednesday night, we promised to cover Operation Uranus for the next day, November 19th. We backed out on that, collectively opting to go with a more personal story rather than just discussing a battle that would result in a post too cluttered with background.

Every good journalist (and we think every writer, really) knows its a sin to abuse the reader's trust, however slight the transgression. We promise we won't do it again. To atone for that we are announcing the installment of a new feature here at Lies Agreed Upon, Dead General Quote of the Week.

To make up for our wrongs, the inaugural Dead General Quote of the Week comes from Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, commander of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. After Paulus was cut off by Operation Uranus, Hitler refused to allow him to break out and reunite with German forces. Instead, Sixth Army was forced to stay, and suffered through one of the most desperate battles in history. Hitler later promoted Paulus to Field Marshal, a not-so-subtle way of telling him to win or fall on his sword. After the surrender at Stalingrad, Paulus, who became the highest ranking German ever to become a prisoner, had this to say:

"I have no intention of shooting myself for that Austrian Corporal."

November 20, 1917

Landships: Or the Day the Cavalry Died.

At the beginning of the week, we briefly discussed the reluctance early flight faced from conservative military minds. Today the calender offers us the opportunity to examine another aspect of modern warfare we take for granted, but was met with the same skepticism as aviation. As is our goal with most of the topics we attempt to cover at Lies Agreed Upon, today we look at an event that had a far reaching affect on the conduct of war as a whole.

Despite continual evidence to the contrary, many leaders during the First World War believed the key to breaking the stalemate in the trenches lied with mounted troops exploiting gaps in the enemy front. In battle after battle, commanders envisioned their horse cavalry galloping through breaches in the line and rolling up the enemy's flanks. Cavalry charges, along with chivalrous images of mounted medieval knights, had been the norm on battlefields for thousands of years. But the tangles of barbed wire and the deathly efficiency of machine guns on the Western Front had relegated most cavalrymen to fighting in dismounted roles by 1917.


Dead horses often littered the battlefields of the Western Front during World War I.






Both sides had experimented with alternatives to mounted cavalry since the beginning of the war. Oddly enough, it was the Royal Navy who first proposed the idea of a "landship", a heavily armored moving gunship that used tracks instead of wheels to roll over any obstacles. These supposedly impregnable fortresses were intended to do the job of both the infantry and the cavalry; blasting a hole in the enemy line and then using mobility to exploit its own gains. Commanders believed the answer to their prayers had arrived.

The first modern tanks that appeared at the front during the Battle of the Somme, however, found little success. The tracked chassis often stalled in the mud, the armored interiors were hot and smokey, and troops found the art of moving and shooting difficult to master. The first tanks were little more than armored deathtraps. Nevertheless, tank advocates insisted that if the right number of vehicles was used on the right battlefield, the long awaited breakthrough on the Western Front could be achieved.

On November 20, 1917, in front of the French town of Cambrai, the plan was put into action. For the first time in history, tanks were massed on one sector of the line and featured in the main assault. In the early morning mist, 378 British Mark IV tanks slipped the cover of Havrincourt Wood and made their way toward the German line. Just the sight of the slow, loud, smoke-spitting beats caused most of the enemy to flee from their trenches, and the British we able to penetrate five miles in just 10 hours (a huge gain by Western Front standards).




A British Mark IV tank during a training exercise, 1917.

The battle is important for several reasons, some more obvious than others. The tank was not the only new innovation on display at Cambrai. After the initial British gains, the nature of the German defensive line allowed them to reform in positions to the rear and eventually halt the attack, a practice that is seen in most modern day defensive plans. Furthermore, in the ensuing counterattack the Germans unveiled their new stormtrooper tactics to push back the British. This approach had been developed on the Russian front, and proved to be extremely effective at breaking through trenches during the German Spring Offensives the next year.

The British attack lasted less than ten days, and within a month, the front line punctured by the tanks had been restored. Nevertheless, the tank had arrived. Working in teams of three, the tanks had covered each other, plowed through barbed wire, and bridged trenches so the infantry could follow behind. The Allies would not attempt another large-scale tank assault during the war, but the Battle of Cambrai was one of, if not the first combined arms operations in history. Today, most conventional military tactics are based on the combination of tanks and supporting infantry.

As usual, such military progress was not immediately recognized. In fact, during the battle stubborn British leaders had horse cavalry waiting behind the lines to be deployed should the tanks fail. The new German tactics in the counter attack were seen as more important, since it now seemed possible for the enemy to breach Allied trenches, even without tanks of their own. Stormtroopers, teams of shock troops using grenades and automatic weapons, indeed became a force to be reckoned with for the remainder of the war. The notion of combined arms would take another generation to prove its worth, when German stormtroopers, following behind tanks, launched the first blitzkrieg across Poland in World War II.

Military minds are traditionally very slow to react. Nevertheless, it was clear modern weaponry had rendered horse cavalry obsolete. Furthermore, the time and money it took to train, feed, and care for the animals used by an ineffective branch of service soon became an obvious excess. While the horse was used to move supplies and the wounded during the Second World War, its days as a weapon were numbered. The Battle of Cambrai, while doing little to decide the outcome of the war, still shaped the face of all ensuing conflicts. Cavalry was gradually phased out and replaced by tanks. Even today in the United States Army, many modern tank outfits are designated as "Armored Cavalry."



The shoulder patch of the armored US 1st Cavalry Division still bears the horsehead insignia. Yellow is the traditional cavalry color.

November 19, 1941

A Long Way From Home: Or Why They Call It a World War.

We've got good news and we've got bad news. We went to bed last night making a promise to our readers about a few irritated communists and maybe a T-34 or two. We hate to do it, but we're backing out on that. We woke up this morning realizing we had just done pissed-off Russians two days ago, and would thus be luring our reader into the same trap as yesterday's. Fortunately, (for us more than our audience) we have come across another one of those little stories that end up serving as a microcosm for war as whole.

Captain Theodor Detmers, a twenty year veteran of the German Kriegsmarine, must have thought his luck had run out early in the evening of November 19, 1941. He was skippering the auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, a blue water commerce raider that had been at sea for nearly a year. In the bountiful eastern Atlantic, his ship had executed a impressive run of successful raids. But as they passed the Cape of Good Hope and neared the coast of western Australia, their haul had dried up.



Captain Theodor Detmers, skipper of the Kormoran.









The Kormoran was struggling with a malfunctioning engine, and had not made contact with any enemy ship for months. Detmers planned to deploy a complement of sea mines before leaving the Pacific and returning home for repairs. He barely avoided an Australian convoy off Cape Leeuwin, but then on the evening of the 19th, sailed right past the light cruiser HMAS Sydney. Intercepted by the faster and better armed Sydney, Detmers disguised his vessel as a Dutch merchant ship. Now, the Sydney was so close, he could see Australian sailors moving around on her decks.

Detmers was puzzled, too. This warship, which easily out-gunned his disguised raider, was bearing down on him just off his starboard beam. Now, she had hoisted the letters IK, warning him to prepare his ship for a hurricane. In the serene waters off of western Australia, Detmers had no idea what the signal meant and had no idea how to answer it. After fifteen minutes of nerve-shattering tension, the Sydney signaled "Show your secret sign", and Detmers knew his ship was in trouble.

The Kormoran in 1940, pictured here from the deck of a German U-Boat.

The fact that Detmers was even in this situation is what we'd like our readers to pause and think about today. At this point in the war, Germany had tasted very little defeat practically anywhere. With France overrun, England stood alone in the west, and Hitler had bailed out his ally Mussolini in Greece. Russia was on its heels, although the Germans were running into stiff resistance in front of Moscow. In North Africa, they were pushing on Tobruk. In the Pacific, a secret Japanese task force was just a week away from sailing for Pearl Harbor.

Still in its infancy, the Second World War had truly earned its name. Take Detemers' stand-off, for example. A German commerce raider, nearly 8,000 miles from its home port, was staring down the barrels of an Australian cruiser, on its way home from a tour of duty in the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, Japanese boys were in China; Americans were in the Philippines and on Wake Island; Italian soldiers were stuck in the Libyan sand dunes, and the young men of the British Isles were in places as far flung as India and New Guinea, while fending off the Luftwaffe in the skies over Europe.

It is hard to imagine such a scenario today, most of the world at war in all corners of the globe, with more nations and more territory soon to be thrown in. By 1945 there had been at least some fighting on six of seven continents and on all four of the oceans. The sheer number of people involved and the size of the military machines required to sustain that effort is something we cannot comprehend today. There were times when it seemed no one, no where, could escape the war.

Certainly, Captain Detmers could not escape it, and by 5:30 pm on the 19th he had a decision to make. Obviously, the Sydney was challenging him with some sort of code. Unable to produce the correct response, Detmers had only one choice. What happened next was later pieced together with accounts from the survivors of the Kormoran.

Detmers ordered his men to run up the German colors and open fire on the Sydney. The Australian ship, finally realizing who she was along side, fired almost simultaneously. But the cruiser had come in too close, or her guns were still sighted for a warning salvo. Her first volley mostly flew over the smaller German craft. The Kormoran, however, didn't miss. Her salvos were raking the enemy fore to aft. The Sydney fired away for nearly half an hour, eventually damaging the raider, but was struck by a German torpedo and forced to retire.

Detmers' craft had fended off the bigger vessel, but with no safe port anywhere in reach, the Captain ordered his men to abandon their burning ship. 318 of the 399 German sailors would await rescue in lifeboats for days. On the night of November 19, the sky above them was lit by the fires aboard the Sydney, slowly dying somewhere beyond the horizon. The cruiser sunk sometime after that, and none of the 645 Australian sailors was ever found.



Crew of the HMAS Sydney before the war.

Afterward, the Australian government would launch inquiries into the case of the Sydney, trying to determine what events had caused such a superior ship to be sunk by an inferior enemy. Few clear conclusions were drawn, and some accused Detmers of firing before revealing his German colors. Survivor accounts refute that, and it is most likely the damage from the enemy torpedo did in the Sydney and her crew. Either way, Detmers was an Australian prisoner, and sat out the greatest conflict in human history far from home on the other side of the world.

November 16, 1940

Erasing the Front Line: Or a Look at War as We Know It Today.

After a long layoff, Lies Agreed Upon returns to examine one of the more unfortunate chapters of military history, and modestly attempts to trace the path belligerent nations took to change the face of warfare as we know it. During the First World War, the newly invented airplane took a backseat to conventional ground and naval tactics. In the generation between that war and the next, however, military leaders ensured that rapidly evolving aircraft would play an ever-increasing role in the conduct of war.

While many doubted that airplanes had any military importance at the start of hostilities in 1914, by the fall of 1940 it was clear that the future of warfare was in the sky. With devastating effectiveness, the Luftwaffe had cleared the way for German panzers to bulldoze a path across most of Poland, the Low Countries, and France. Without a naval force large enough to challenge his enemy's dominance on the waves, Adolf Hitler once again turned to his air force to reduce Great Britain, his last challenger in Western Europe.


Stuka dive-bombers became a symbol of the German Blitzkrieg. While lethal against ground targets, they were essentially useless in air-to-air combat.



In May of 1940, in complete control of the Continent, Hitler launched wave after wave of bombers in an attempt to subdue the British and prepare for a cross-Channel invasion. Initially, the Germans targeted shipping and munitions plants, but led by the indomitable Winston Churchill, the British resolve failed to waver. German strategy would have to change.

Soon, they began targeting civilian areas, hoping to demoralize the population and blast the British right out of the war. On November 14, 515 German bombers attacked Coventry in one of the most destructive raids seen during the Battle of Britain. Two days later the British enacted their revenge.

A little after midnight on November 16, 1940, 200 bombers of the Royal Air Force rumbled their way over Hamburg, Germany, leveling parts of the city. It was not the first raid on Hamburg, nor was it the most devastating night the area would see during the war, but the raid was launched in direct response to the raid on Coventry. For the first time, even though they claimed the moral high-ground over the modern day "Huns", the British carried out an attack with the express purpose of targeting German civilians. War, as it was known at the time, was changed forever.

Hamburg, pictured here at the end of the war, was one of the many victims of the Allied Combined Bomber Offensive. Particularly effective was a new weapon first used by the Allies in 1944: napalm.


It had become increasingly clear during the first years of the Second World War that civilians were no longer safe in their homes behind the front lines. The German and Japanese genocides in their conquered territory hinted at this, but the Battle of Britain confirmed it beyond all doubt. Not only did airplanes make civilians living near military targets vulnerable, but as the war progressed they found themselves liable to be targeted directly. Over 50,000 residents of Hamburg were killed as a result of the Allies' Strategic Bombing campaigns.

In centuries past, Western warfare was limited to opposing armies meeting on a clear field of battle. While the landscape was open to devastation, civilians generally found themselves out of bounds. As war changed, and concepts of total war came into play, civilians saw every aspect of their lives geared toward arming, clothing and feeding a far-off army. With the advent of the airplane as a major weapon, however, civilians found themselves just as likely to be killed as men in uniform.

At the outset of World War I, few commanders believed aircraft could be used even for reconnaissance, let alone for aerial combat. In less than twenty-five years, military aviation had evolved to be the most important factor in a nation's ability to project power. The Battle of Britain was the first large-scale air battle in history. Eighteen months after the raid on Hamburg, the Americans and Japanese fought the first naval engagement to only involve aircraft in the Battle of the Coral Sea. A few years later, the war came to a conclusion in the clouds above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In just five years, and only a generation after flight was first used in combat, the face of war underwent a complete overhaul.

The Second World War was the first major conflict to see a higher number of civilians become casualties than combatants. Civilian deaths have outnumbered military deaths in every single major conflict since.

July 1, 1916

Over the Top: Or Debacle on the Somme.

Last week we took a quick look at the effects of frontal assaults in the face of modern weaponry at Belleau Wood. Today we examine another First World War battle which has become synonymous with the futility and slaughter of Western Front trench warfare. The Battle of the Somme, which began on July 1, 1916, is not only remembered for its unfathomable bloodshed, but also for the fact that such bloodshed could have been avoided.

After the Germans failed to reach Paris in the first days of war in 1914, it is well known that the Western Front settled into a stalemate for most of 1915. The following year saw both sides attempt to break through the maze of trenches that now stretched from the English Channel to Switzerland. An attack on the Somme River in the Picardy region of France had been planned for a combined Anglo-French force, but the German attack at Verdun in February diverted almost the entire French army to that sector of the front.

To relieve the pressure on the French, the British planned to go ahead with the attack. At the outbreak of war, British Secretary of State for War Horatio Kitchener warned that the struggle would be a long and costly one. To prepare for this, he sent out a call for volunteers, which he hastily trained and equipped for the fighting in France. In an attempt to make up for the number of men being fed into the meat-grinder at Verdun, the British supplemented their forces with these raw recruits, disparagingly known as "Kitchener's Mob."

In such a rush to get these men and the proper ordinance to the front in time for the attack, the British made several key errors. First, as mentioned, the men in the new divisions were not nearly as well trained as the veterans in the British Regular Army. Secondly, the number of artillery shells needed for the assault caused quality control issues at British plants; an unbelievably high number of dud shells would be dropped on German lines July 1. And finally, the shells that were in working condition at the time of the attack were not the high explosive variety needed to dislodge the deeply entrenched German defenders.

All this, in effect, added up to disaster. While French history was being altered in the ten-month slugfest at Verdun, the climactic British moment of the war occurred, for all intents, on a single day. On the morning of July 1, under Hawthorn Ridge on the Somme sector's left flank, 40,000 pounds of high explosives were detonated, signaling the start of the attack. The problems with British artillery meant the week-long bombardment prior to the assault did little to weaken the German line. The mine explosion under Hawthorn Ridge did nothing but alert the Germans to the attack's imminence. Thus, when wave after wave of untried British youth poured over the top of their trenches, the Germans were waiting for them. The scene was a nightmare, the likes of which have not often been seen in a single day of battle, certainly not in British history. By the end of the day, over 57,000 men of Kitchener's new divisions were lost, almost 20,000 of them lying dead in No Man's Land.

Incredibly, July 1 was just the beginning. The battle would last nearly six months, with countless more frontal assaults to follow. British persistence (some would say obstinance) however, was not the only cause for the continued bloodshed. Surely German arrogance played a part as well, for commanders were ordered that every yard of ground lost had to be immediately retaken, resulting in countless see-saw, hand to hand battles. Hindsight suggests that had the Germans given ground in some places, thousands could have been spared without sacrificing the main line of resistance.

Regardless, by the end of the battle in November, 1916, nearly a million men had been lost between the two sides. The Battles of Verdun and the Somme have endured as symbols of the stalemate and attrition of the First World War and serve as a chilling reminder to all of how capable man is at destroying himself.

June 26, 1918

A Note on Frontal Assaults: Or Germany's Rude Introduction to the United States Marine.



The calendar could not be more cooperative in the first week of this blog's existence, as it has allowed us to cover three of our favorite things: cold Germans; over-zealous Frenchmen; and now, the U.S. Marine Corps.

After America entered the First World War in April of 1917, the country was caught in the same patriotic fervor that had gripped European nations in the late summer and fall of 1914. Clearly, report after report of the horrific carnage and waste in the trenches of the Western Front had done nothing to dissuade American boys from thinking a great adventure awaited "Over There."

That first April, hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteered for the armed forces, and they were quickly joined by the millions of draftees Uncle Sam needed to back up his promise to defend democracy. By year's end, French ports were teeming with American supplies and cocky young Yanks itching for a fight. Alone in this group of army citizen-soldiers was a brigade of United States Marines, professional fighters seasoned from their role as Teddy Roosevelt's "Big Stick" in Central America.

When revolution forced Russia out of the war, the Germans were able to free up huge numbers of men and equipment to redeploy to the Western Front. In the spring of 1918 they used these resources to launch an offensive aimed at destroying the Allies before the untried Americans could be put into battle. It almost worked, as they penetrated further than they had since the first days of the war, but were halted just 40 miles from Paris after American units saw their first combat.

The Germans then turned to try and flank the capital, and on June 1, 1918 entered Belleau Wood, a forest occupied by French troops. Just arriving to the front and filling in the line to the right of their ally, the Marines saw French forces fleeing from their positions. Told that the situation was hopeless and to turn back, Captain Lloyd W. Williams uttered the famous words "Retreat? Hell, we just got here." Aren't Marines fun?

The Marines, soldiers of the U.S. Army's 9th Infantry and the French stopped the attack, but then had to enter the woods themselves to clear out the remaining Germans. To do this, they attempted the same frontal assaults on fixed positions that had failed so miserably at places like Verdun, Ypres, and even Gettysburg the century before. Even with the wholesale slaughter seen up and down the Western Front, tactics had still not evolved enough to avoid so costly a sacrifice. The Marines entered the woods shoulder to shoulder, bayonets fixed, and were mowed down by German machine guns.

Yet as usual, the individual valor of the Marine was not absent during these bloody assaults. Under fire, out-numbered and out-gunned, two-time Medal of Honor recipient Sergeant Dan Daly led his men in an attack with the stirring cry "Come on you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?" Shocked at the ferocity of their fighting and impressed by their professional attitude, the enemy was said to distinguish Marines from army units with the nick-name "Teufelhunden," a crude German translation of "Devil Dogs."




On June 26, 1918, after nearly a month of fighting throughout the woods, the Marines and French soldiers finally cleared out the last of German resistance. With the German spring offensive finally snuffed out, the momentum shifted to the Allies, who soon began their own offensive into the German line. So depleted by their last gasp attempt at winning the war, and faced with the prospect of fighting millions of fresh American troops, the Germans were near the end. Nevertheless, the suicidal frontal assaults and bloody fighting continued for another four months.

The final exclamation point on the Battle of Belleau Wood was a sparse report dispatched to American headquarters after the forest was cleared. Brief and to the point, qualities every Marine values, the report summed up the battle simply and humbly: "Woods now U.S. Marine Corps entirely."

June 24, 1812

A Note on General Winter: Or How We Cover Napoleon, Sun Tzu, and Hitler in a Single Bound.

Although we covered an invasion of Russia just two days ago (and quite a similar one at that), this gives us a chance to look at the comparable invasions of Adolph Hitler and Napoleon Bonaparte. Plus, we will never pass up a chance to give the Little Dictator some press. He did name this blog, after all.

At the height of the Napoleonic Wars, Bonaparte had a strong hold on most of continental Europe. The defeat at Trafalgar in 1805 proved he lacked the naval power to invade the the British isles, but he beat back a Russo-Austrian invasion in the East a few years later. Just as Hitler would over a century later, Napoleon sought to destroy his biggest enemy on the mainland. On June 24, 1812, his Grand Armee, 690,000 strong and composed in large part of foreign conscripts, crossed the Nieman River and set off to Moscow. When they returned six months later, they numbered just 22,000.




Both the 1812 (Patriotic War if you're a Tsarist) and 1941 (Great Patriotic War if you're a Soviet) invasions failed, stymied by the size of Russia's territory and the sacrifices of her sons. For five more quick reasons why, we can go to our old friend Sun Tzu, whose Art of War never fails to prove itself as the authority on warfare.

Sun Tzu wrote "the art of war is governed by five constant factors":

(1) The Moral Law
(2) Heaven
(3) Earth
(4) The Commander
(5 )Method and Discipline

For fun, lets see how Dolph and Nap match up against ol' Mother Russia.

(1) The Moral Law- Sun Tzu describes this as identifying with which side the morality lies. Which side, if any, has a more just cause for fighting. Defending themselves from invasions attempting to wipe them off the map, in both cases surely the first point goes to the Russians.
(2) Heaven (And we don't mean God)- When Sun Tzu wrote "Heaven" he meant time, weather and seasons, not Jesus, Allah and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Notice these invasions were launched just two days apart on the calender. At least Hitler and Napoleon were mindful of this, jumping off at the start of summer. But costly battles and logistical nightmares kept them from prevailing before Russia was saved by her greatest ally: General Winter. Russia up 2-0-0.
(3) Earth- Location, Location, Location. By earth, Sun Tzu meant the very land on which the battles are fought. Russia is impossibly large, and any plans to invade it are impossibly ambitious. Two armies, both at the time of invasion the largest in the world to that point, failed to conquer all that territory. Furthermore, had they succeeded, maintaining a presence in that area for any period of time would be a more than herculean effort. Russia still pitching a shutout as we go to the top of the fourth.
(4) The Commander- This one speaks for itself. There is definitely something to be said for conquering most of Europe, as both Hitler and Napoleon did. However, they both suffered from, among other things, over-ambition, the same strategic flaw. And if a commander is supposed to extend some of his own virtues into his army, surely the virtues of these two men were not desirable ones to inherit. Hitler loses the point for his martial ignorance. Napoleon was a much better military mind, but if you're a commander and you decide to invade Russia, you lose this point automatically. 4-0-0.
(5) Method and Discipline- Napoleon himself said an army marches on its stomach, and Sun Tzu's methods and disciplines revolved mostly around logistics and supply. As mentioned, maintaining armies across the vast Russian steppe, even in high summer, is a daunting task. Combined with these first four points, even in mildest winter an invasion of Russia is just a no-win.

So, it was worth looking at the 1812 invasion of Russia, even if we just did Barbarossa. The similarities between the two campaigns are remarkable, then add in the lofty personalities involved and this is too good to ignore. Plus, 6th Century BC Sun Tzu still relates to military history in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Any time we get Sun Tzu in here, we've done our job.

June 22, 1941

Operation Barbarossa: Or Das Lange Krieg.

In the predawn hours of June 22, 1941, a sound that had become familiar in Western Europe finally rumbled its way into the East. From the early summer stillness that Sunday morning erupted the largest land invasion in history, the culmination of more than a thousand years of socio-ethnic tension and the catalyst of the most destructive war in human history.


No guarantee these pics are of Barbarossa (I think the machine
gun this guy is humping is an MG-42, putting this pic post 1942)

The now familiar sounds echoing across the Eastern European plain included the whine of Stuka dive-bombers, the roar of Panzers and the endless hammer of hob-nailed boot after hob-nailed boot. With an open-ended war still raging with Britain and Free French forces in the West, Adolf Hitler had finally launched his invasion of the Soviet Union. In doing so, he hoped to rid Europe of what he perceived to be a Judeo-Bolshevik menace, and secure for the Third Reich the lebensraum, literally "living space", it needed to assume its rightful place as the world's leading power.

But if you follow this blog, you know nothing is cooler than Germans live in technicolor.

Barbarossa, launched with 4.5 million men over a nearly 2,000 mile front, opened up the Eastern front of the European Theater of World War II. Over the next four years, more men fought over more square miles of territory, resulting in more casualties than in any other land conflict in human history, all of it done with a savage inhumanity that is nearly incomprehensible. To be sure, the war in the Pacific that began following the attack on Pearl Harbor six months later was fought over a larger area and could lay claim to being the Eastern Front's equal in sheer brutality. However, the number of men engaged in the Pacific and the casualty numbers, even with the two atomic bombings, are not even comparable.

From June 22, 1941 to Germany's surrender in 1945, most of Eastern Europe was laid to waste, resulting in the deaths of upwards of 30 million people, both in uniform and out. The siege of Leningrad; the extermination of Eastern European Jews; the battle for Moscow, which remains to date the largest battle ever fought; the infamous and pivotal battle of Stalingrad; the Soviet rape of East Prussia; and the battle of Berlin all were direct effects of Operation Barbarossa, along with countless other battles where the notoriety was more fleeting, but the death just as permanent. Not only were the depths of human depravity made evident during Barbarossa, but the borders and authorities created by its resolution would set the stage for the Cold War that would plague the world for the next 50 years.