323. Golden Age for the casual study of military history

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Military history

I've been sitting on something I started months ago about this being the Golden Age for the casual study of military history, thanks to all the great things on YouTube. I may pull that in here, but, at least to start, I'm going to talk about last night.

It was cold and I decided to stay in with a bottle of wine and amuse myself on the computer. I had nothing particular in mind. So here's how I ended up spending my evening: "The Great War" channel was back with a new host and an episode on the German revolutions of 1918 and 1919. This got me off in a military history direction. 

The day before I had watched a "Military History Not Visualized" episode on "The Rzhev Meat Grinder." 

HERE's the link.

This was a Soviet campaign in 1942 that doesn't get the attention it deserves because there was very little movement. The Soviets attempted to smash in the German salient near Rzhev (it looks like the more famous Battle of the Bulge in 1944, but the German line held.) So, having been thinking about the consequences of that action, I finally clicked on something I had been ignoring for a long time, "TIK's" "Fall Blau 1942."

HERE's the link.

Military History Visualized, and now Military History Not Visualized, are often interesting and sometimes go into great detail on subjects like the actual composition of German divisions at various times during the war. But TIK may be my favorite military history presenter. His background is in economics and he's relatively new to military history. Unlike most of us, who have been reading about these topics for decades and who often started reading sub-standard books full of misinformation, he is starting fresh with the best sources he can get his hands on. And his economics background works to his advantage when it comes to logistics and the essential economic aspect of modern war. (Really any war.) His episode on the importance of oil for the Germans in WW2 is probably the first thing a student of the subject should view.

TIK has also done videos where he carefully looked at German and Soviet troop strength from year to year and where he broke down German reinforcements not just by year but by the particular front -- North, Center, South -- they were sent to. All this to show that much "common knowledge" about the relative strength in numbers of the two sides is simply wrong.

What I wanted to see in his presentation of Fall Blau, was if my guess from watching the Rzhev video was correct, that the Soviet offensives in the Center prevented sufficient strength from being sent to the South, where the Germans would fail to capture the oil resources they desperately required in the Caucasus. And the answer is, maybe.

According to TIK, the Germans were so successful in the opening phases of Fall Blau, that they concluded, mistakenly, that the Soviet Army in the South was broken and the battle was won. They then redeployed significant forces to the North and Center and even sent some divisions to the West, as the Anglo-Saxon Allies were starting to get a bit frisky. So you could argue that it was the strain of the Soviet attacks on the North and Center that pulled those troops up from the South where the Germans would soon run out of gas before reaching Grozny, and where the 6th Army would get trapped at Stalingrad when the remaining German forces in the South proved too weak to break them out.

But, of course, there's another way to look at this. When I said the Germans "ran out of gas" I meant this literally as well as figuratively. They were simply overextended. Every success had pushed their lines further from home and made the supply situation worse. They now had an increasingly active line to defend starting at Leningrad, running almost to Moscow, and then south past Stalingrad and into the Caucasus. And unlike the Allied shortage of supplies in France in 1944, this shortage wasn't temporary. Wasn't going to be made better in time as oil pipelines connected France to Britain and as the Allies finally won port facilities. For the Germans, with the failure to take the Caucasus, the future was simply the inevitable consumption of what little oil they had on hand.

What I don't know is which of the two factors most drove the decision to remove divisions from the army groups in the South. Was it mostly logistics or mostly the strain on the other fronts? Or was it an even blend of the two? 

Though it may not matter that much. One of the things I noticed watching TIK's excellent coverage of the British Operation Crusader in North Africa in 1941, is that you can look at these extended WW2 campaigns in the same way you look at a Napoleonic battle that takes place over a day or two. If you imagine Napoleon (and Berthier) in command on the Soviet side of this fight, they would have done exactly what the Soviets did. They would have spread the Germans out as thinly as possible, waited until they spent their attack, and then launched a shock attack. Stalingrad was a more vulnerable salient than the one at Rzhev and, since the Soviets actually had more to lose in the South anyway, breaking the German line there was almost ideal. It relieved Astrakhan as well as the Caucasus.

But this was just the start of my evening. Next was "The Chieftain's" lecture on the development of armored warfare by the French Army leading up to 1940. 

HERE's a link to his coverage of the Renault R35.

HERE's a link to part 1 for the SOMUA S35. Part 2 HERE.
The Chieftain is one of my experts on tanks and armored warfare. He has the distinction of actually being a tank commander with fairly recent experience in M-1 Abrams tanks. He's done a long series of videos about particular Armored Fighting Vehicles (AVFs) describing them inside and out -- with way too much information about track maintenance -- but his insights into the ergonomics of the various machines is particularly useful. And this is particularly true when it comes to the French Army tanks of 1940. After watching his videos, shot inside the turrets of these French tanks, you feel nothing but pity for the poor French tank crews. 

But this video is about the development of French tank doctrine and the uncomfortable relationship between the Army and the government in France at the time. He has done a similar video on the British situation which resulted in a fatally flawed doctrine that didn't get improved until 1942 -- and I still don't understand how the Brits screwed this up so badly. The French infantry, the French cavalry, and de Gaulle, all had quite reasonable ideas about what their armored warfare doctrine should be, but political factors seem to have made it impossible to implement these ideas. 

(Now, knowing something of the doctrine of the U.S. Army, the German, the British, and the French armies, it would seem that the French were actually closest to having it right in the 1930s. The Germans would end up having the advantage as they were able to learn from their mistakes in some relatively easy early operations, and at least their main tanks were solid enough to remain useful throughout the war.)

The ergonomic failures of the French tanks, especially their tiny turrets and the inability to see the battlefield around them, or to communicate with supporting elements, would not have been so fatal if the tanks had been used in the combined arms formations that everyone wrote about. Instead, nearly blind French tanks, in small numbers and unsupported by infantry or artillery, had to joust with Panzers that could see them, communicate with each other on the radio, and that had three man turret crews to efficiently deploy their weaponry. 


And finally, just as I was about to go to bed, Drachinifel, my favorite source of naval history information, posted his 29th question and answer video. Another 47 minutes of geeky delight. 

HERE's a link to the episode.

What amazes me is that these people can all find audiences. I certainly don't know anyone who would willingly submit to watching this much military history, or listening to, since all of these channels are mostly audio with some providing images or maps when absolutely required. 

And there is yet another channel, "Forgotten Weapons", that specializes in in-depth information about particular weapons. (The "Forgotten" part is a little confusing at this point as he also covers the best known weapons as well.) His episode on the first domestic machine gun used by the French Army is an engineering delight. 

In some ways, Forgotten Weapons is the best of these channels in that it presents information in a way that no other media could equal. Neither a documentary nor a book could be as informative as Ian taking apart, reassembling, and often firing the weapon in question. Watching Ian try to control a fully automatic M-14 tells you everything you need to know about why the weapon was a failure -- and it also suggests why the U.S. Army held on to the heavy B.A.R. as long as it did.

HERE's the link to the French St Etienne Mle machine gun of 1907.

286. Calvinism part 1 (Anglicanism?)

Link to Chronology

Link to Table of Contents

Not so much Calvinism as the history of the Church of England

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War



Book Nine
The Renaissance and the Reformation

Chapter II
The Reformation

2. The Spread of the Reformation. Calvinism [But we will start with England]

p571 ...It was because the times had changed that the dispute with regard to indulgences almost immediately assumed the form of a religious revolution. Fifty years earlier the same man, [Luther] with the same conviction, the same fire, the same eloquence, would have interested, at the very most, a few theologians in his own province, and history would have passed over him in silence... [so the Reformation was a side effect of technology and media. Without the press, it could not have occurred. ] And further, it may readily be shown that the fundamental ideas of Lutheranism itself were not really individual to Luther. In the Low Countries Wessel Gansfort, who died ignored in 1489, and whose works were not published until 1522, has already formulated the majority of these ideas; and we find them again in France among the members of the little circle that gathered, about 1515, round Lefevre of Etaples... 

p572 ...Closely subjected to the secular power, the Landeskirchen lacked the liberty of procedure and the independence which would have been necessary for an effective external propaganda. They were too completely adapted to the political environment of Germany... Their nationalism, so to speak, made it impossible beforehand that they should exercise a universal influence. The only conquest of Lutheranism was that of the Scandinavian countries, and it was victorious there because the kings declared for it...

p573 ...Promulgated by authority and accepted in obedience, it progressed... by annexation. Conversion came afterwards, and slowly, just as a conquered people is slowly assimilated to the conquering nation.
...

It is only too evident that in those countries whose princes remained faithful to Rome the Church had nothing to fear from the Lutherans... It was soon realized that they were not very dangerous, and even in the Low Countries the Inquisition of Charles V, so ferocious in its treatment of the Anabaptists, prosecuted the Lutherans with a certain laxity.

...Henry VIII, who prided himself on his theology, regarded Luther as a mere heretic, and attacked him in his Assertio septem sacramentorum, which earned him the title of "Defender of the Faith," conferred upon him by Leo X. He persecuted Tyndale, and placed an interdict on his translation of the Bible. The motives of his opposition to Rome, and of the constitution of the Anglican Church, were entirely external to the domain of faith. Neither Henry nor -- above all -- the English people felt the least inclination to reject the traditional beliefs of Catholicism... The Pope's opposition to the King's divorce from Catherine of Aragon certainly induced him to have himself proclaimed by the assembly of the clergy "the chief protector of the church and clergy of England" (1531), in order that he might obtain the dissolution of his marriage (1533). But there matters might have stopped... The elevation of Thomas More to the post of Chancellor, after the condemnation of Cardinal Wolsey (1530), proves that the government had no thought of turning away from Catholicism. Parliament, which supported the King's cause... wished to profit by the situation and establish a national Church. But no one was dreaming of a schism, much less of a heresy. On accepting the post of Chancellor, More no doubt intended to lead the English Church... toward those moderate reforms of which the humanists had dreamed. Like Erasmus, he wished to preserve the traditional faith while purifying it... But the government was then in the hands of a man who was devoting all his energies and his genius to making England an absolute monarchy. Formed in the school of the Italian politicians, Thomas Cromwell's only conception of the State was one in which the Crown was omnipotent. [I strongly recommend reading that Wiki entry on T. Cromwell. What a life. And during a time when politics was played for keeps. It seems there are a number of films and mini-series dealing with the later stages of his life, but I would love to see something about his younger days wandering around Europe.] For him, as for Machiavelli, the Church was merely a factor of politics, but whose importance was proportionate to its influence over men's minds. To place it at the service of the prince was therefore to invest him with a power and ascendancy which he derived from its sacred character. In 1534, profiting by the obedience of Parliament and its hostility to the court of Rome, he caused it to pass the "act of Supremacy," acknowledging the king as the sole and supreme earthly head of the Church of England... In the following year the king appointed Cromwell his vicar-general in ecclesiastical affairs... This was schism, but it was not yet heresy...

p575 ...all the monasteries were subject to a "visit," the result of which was a foregone conclusion. The all-powerful minister had resolved to confiscate their property, partly for the benefit of the Crown, and partly for that of the nobles, in order that the lords and gentlemen of the country might henceforth be unanimous in favor of maintaining the new ecclesiastical constitution, just as the purchasers of national properties in the France of the Revolution were in favor of the maintenance of the Revolutionary regime... The "Articles of Religion" which the assembly of the clergy accepted without protest in 1536 cut the last tie which, by community of faith, still bound the English Church to the Catholic Church. As the bases [basis?] of dogma they accepted only the Bible and the three first Oecumenical Councils ("the Bible and the Three Creeds"), retaining as sacraments only Baptism, Penitence and the Eucharist. No modification was introduced either in the ritual or in the organization of the hierarchy. A position was adopted which was half-way between Protestantism and Catholicism, and apparently very like that toward which the humanists had wished insensibly to lead the Papacy.

p576 Yet the best and most celebrated of these humanists, Thomas More, had resigned his position as Chancellor as early as 1532, and two years later his head had fallen on the scaffold. The most pious and enlightened spirits among those who aspired to reform the Church were revolted by the violence which was imposed upon it. The government appeared to them, and actually was, a moral despotism imposed by terror. Cromwell's police carried on a veritable inquisition; and victims, chosen for the sake of example among the most illustrious men in the country, were pitilessly sacrificed to the end envisaged by the terrible minister...

...After 1536... [Henry VIII] sought to return to tradition, and the six Articles which were submitted for the approval of the clergy in 1539 marked a fairly definite revulsion in the direction of the Catholic faith. The sensational fall and death of Cromwell in 1540 were explained in part by his attempts to draw England into an alliance with the Lutherans of Germany...

p577 After... [the death of Henry VIII] there was chaos. The minority of Edward VI (1547-1553) enabled the "Protectors" -- the Duke of Somerset, followed by the Earl of Warwick -- openly to favor Protestantism. The Mass was suppressed, images were removed from the churches, the celibacy of the priests was abolished, and a Prayer Book was adopted, together with new articles of religion, constituting the doctrine to which the Anglican Church has remained faithful to this day. All these things were imposed by violence, in the midst of veritable religious anarchy. While the exasperated Catholics were inciting to revolt on every side, a new party had lately made its appearance. Calvinism had entered upon the stage. 

I will tell you what you can't tell, because you don't have the book in your hand. We are very close to the end. While this entire work is supposed to be a first draft, this section seems to be especially rough. For instance, this section really should be two sections. Here we shift from the history of the Anglican Church to Calvinism from one paragraph to the next. Since I can't do the best thing and create a new section, I will simply break here and resume next time with Calvin.

This break is all the more important as the Lutheran and Anglican sections share an indifference to the beliefs of the actual faithful. So far we've been talking about a new faith imposed by princes and kings. That this -- seemingly arbitrary, though profitable to men of importance -- change continued to split English society into the 20th century is pretty amazing. Especially when you consider what a degraded institution the Catholic Church was at this time. And I love (holding Burke's proxy here) how even the realization of the reform ideas of the "humanists" took the form of a "terror" with random victims. 

Perhaps next time we will actually get into matters of faith, because so far this all seems to be much ado about nothing.

To be continued...

The Great War

I believe we are now ahead of the events one hundred years ago in Europe. The tide on the Western Front is yet to turn, yet Pirenne is wrapping up. He seems eager to pack his bags and return home, leaving me frustrated at missing the next phase of European history. 

The Entente Powers were planning a big offensive for 1919 including improved tanks and many more American divisions. If only this had been allowed to happen Pirenne might have made it up to the European centuries I'm more familiar with. Suddenly I find myself sympathizing with the Tietjens boys... though I still don't understand what they would have preferred to have happened in 1918. I just don't want Pirenne released from his confinement.

I haven't mentioned The Great War for some time. This year, and last, has not been encouraging for any optimists in the audience. The stupidity of man, or at least of military men, has been repeatedly confirmed. Ludendorff (for the sake of simplicity) came up with a clever system of defenses in depth on the Western Front for 1917 that allowed the Germans to hold their front, by not defending every square mile of it, with a modest force that made German divisions available for the more vulnerable Eastern Front. This all went well for the Germans as both Russia and Romania were forced out of the war. 

The French and English figured out what Ludendorff was doing in the West, and the English, of all people, came up with clever tactics for taking advantage of the defense in depth. They would take just as much as the Germans were willing to risk, and then stop. Brilliant... though Haig was unable to control himself and went back to trying to "break through" with the usual results. 

This year, 1918, the Germans threw divisions freed up by the collapse of the Eastern Front against the West in an attempt to defeat the Entente before the Americans had time to arrive in strength. The French had also learned the lessons of defense in depth and, officially, adopted that idea... only many of the army commanders refused to agree to something so practical and un-glorious. But here's the funny part: When the Germans were able to break through the too-thin French lines, they quickly ran into the usual logistical problems of not being able to reinforce and supply their attacks as quickly as the defenders could bring help up by rail. It was the American Civil War in Virginia all over again. The idiocy of the French generals lost them more men, but actually succeeded in ruining the German offensives through too quick a success.

And now the first American units are catching a first sight of the elephant at places like Belleau Wood. The German window of opportunity is closing.

281. The Renault FT

Note:
I've finished my other book (The Storied Life of A.J. Fickry by Gabrielle Zevin, is very enjoyable, especially for someone who was in the retail book business for a number of years). I inadvertently started writing a -- very, very concise -- history of the Pacific War. And I anticipate resuming my Regieren blog soon, when I start rereading The Magic Mountain with my book club. 

I also just browsed ahead in this book (A History of Europe) and discovered we end with the Reformation. So... I'm going to try to wrap this up before I move on to those other projects.

P.S. After writing the above I resumed reading Pirenne at page 536. *Sigh* Pirenne's account of the Renaissance and the Reformation is so like Mann's use of Settembrini and Naphtha that I feel like I should have been directed to Pirenne rather than to Goethe and Nietzsche to obtain a better understanding of The Magic Mountain. TMM is simply the European society of the early 20th century wrestling with the opposing social, intellectual, and moral trends of the 16th century. And all this continues today in the Age of Trump. For five centuries human society has attempted to transcend into a rational realm, and repeatedly failed. Each time we've tried to soar we've fallen back to earth like Goethe's Euphorion.

Now I'm feeling bad about finally convincing my book club to read TMM.

At this point, the two books I would suggest to people puzzled by TMM would be A History of Europe and The Brothers Karamazov.

But now for something completely different...

The Renault FT tankette

I ran into a feature on this little tank from the Great War, on the BBC's website, HERE. It's a nice piece on its own, but there are some things left out. 

The main problem with both aircraft and armored vehicles during the Great War was the state of engine development. There simply weren't good enough (power for weight) petrol or diesel engines to power the things. The Renault design works around this to some extent by creating the lightest possible armored fighting vehicle. 

If you look closely at the photos of the FT, it is amazing how many things the design got right (quite possibly by accident, but there's nothing wrong with that.) It took the Germans until the Panzer V (Panther) to adopt sloped armor, but the FT already has sloped armor. (Sloped armor increases the stopping power of a given weight of armor. And it increases the likelihood the shell will simply ricochet away.)

And look at those large front drive wheels. Future tanks would not copy this feature, but those steel wheels provide effective side armor protection for the driver, and thus do double duty.

But there are also some problems with the design. The one man turret set what would prove to be an unfortunate precedent for the French Army. It works fine when your primary weapon is a machine gun, as here, but when artillery is added and loading and aiming becomes more complicated, as was the case by 1940, then a single person was incapable of both manning the gun and staying aware of the battle going on around him. This is why three man turret crews became the norm in WW2. Now, if the French could have equipped their Char B1 tanks with something like today's 25mm to 40mm automatic chain guns, the history of the Battle of France might have been very different.

Mounting the engine in the rear did become the standard for tanks, but the Israelis -- who really know armored warfare -- have elected to put their engines in the front where it acts as additional armor  protection for the crew. This also permits them to place a hatch at the back which makes egress easier. They can even easily load a few infantrymen or casualties without exposing them to small arms fire. This is also the standard layout for Infantry Fighting Vehicles, because they also need the door at the rear. Though back in 1918 all this would have been very hard to anticipate.  

And finally, the English, by the end of the Great War, had realized that their huge lumbering tanks were also valuable as trucks -- I suppose I should say, "as lorries." Those Schneider CA1 tanks may have been failures as fighting vehicles, but they look like they could have been useful hauling men and material through a blasted battle zone. The difficulty of doing that was what stopped the German offensives of early 1918. This is also why I think the U.S. Army DUKW was as important as any fighting vehicle to winning WW2 -- transporting the stuff of war is as important as fighting.

And given what I now know of the impressive Jean Baptiste Eugene Estienne (thank you BBC), it really should have occurred to him that even the CA1 could have been adapted to carry an indirect fire weapon, like a mortar, forward to support an attack. He could have been the creator of the first mechanized version of horse artillery. Of course hindsight is always 20-20, but you really would think that a French artillery officer would have been alive to the importance of all aspects of cavalry operations. That, as Ney demonstrated so thoroughly at Waterloo, the best light and even heavy cavalry in the world can achieve only so much without proper support by horse artillery and/or dragoons. (I hope I've already written somewhere that I now think Ney isn't so much to blame for this as I used to think. I now think his horse artillery was decimated at Quatre Bras. I still need to research his strength in dragoons.) This was a lesson the Germans learned in 1940 and they converted some of their Panzer Is (which was the German equivalent of the FT) into modern horse artillery which helped them on the Eastern Front.

Converted Panzer I.