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Originally Posted by bristol
And indeed anyone wanting a 'flavour' of how deadly ground strafing was need only read 'Winged Victory'. " Unfortunately they (camels) were good machines for ground strafing..............it was, indeed the great casualty maker........you could do very little to avoid machine gun fire from the ground (which)...no one could get used to...."
I must draw your attention to 'futile offensives'----If the Germans had been in occupation of half of England, and quite content to stay there---would it have been futile to attempt, time and time again, no matter what the cost, to drive them out? Futile is a word not always best used when Democracy itself is fighting for it's very existence. And talk of how 'futile' had been that war, led inexorably to 'appeasement and dis-arming ---which, equally inexorably led to the next war---was that war futile? And yet such great bloodbaths as happened on the western front, and indeed on all fronts--- also happened in the later war---the names were mostly Russian names, and not French or Belgian ones! The grinding down, attritional battles still took place---how could they not---it was the era of mass armies par excellence.
The invention of one piece of, in a later war almost ubiquitous, kit would have changed the face of that war, namely, the hand held walkie-talkie.
I have little time for 'Futility'.
Dave.
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At the risk of going very far afield, Sir, I must stand by the assessment. It is hard to describe the predominantly French offensives prior to Verdun as anything but futile, or to regard the Somme or the various offensives of 1917 as victories for the Allies. The tool of attrition worked both ways, and harmed the Allies quite as much as it did the Germans. I should state, though, that in assessing the overall conduct of the Great War, I am not a 'Westerner' but an 'Easterner', and am of the view French and English generals made a bad mistake in war policy by concentrating on their enemy's strongest point rather then seeking ways around, which were open. As a matter of fact, the Allies won the Great War in the east, not the west, and no less than Gen. Ludendorf considered the tipping point to be the belated break-out from Salonika, rather than the repulse of his offensive in the west. The tremendous loss of life and limb absorbed by all major participants in the Great War left them hollowed out as societies, and it is in this great fact, rather than in atmospherics of its characterization, that the seeds of both 'appeasement' and 'revanchism' are best sought. That the French leadership desired above all else to expel Germany directly from French soil is understandable, but it played into their enemy's hands, particularly when pursued in the manner it was. Nor do I consider that 'Democracy itself' was at stake in the Great War. The real stake of the Great War was the Ottoman question; even the long rivalry between France and the Germans was a comparatively minor element. A German victory would have resulted only in the creation of a land empire in western Europe, similar in most ways to that of Austro-Hungary in central Europe and Russia in eastern Europe. England would have maintained its maritime empire, though without its Middle Eastern elements that would have remained with a revitalized Ottoman realm, and the United States would have remained effectively an imperial power in the Pacific and Latin America. All major contenders in the Great War were imperial powers to one degree or another, and in empires democracy is solely for the metropolitan population. Without regarding this as a particularly good outcome, a decent argument can be made that it might have been preferable to the decades of totalitarianism that did eventuate from the pressing of the Great War past 1917.