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Hi Steve,
I, for one, am quite happy with that. Worth remembering what i think Corelli Barnett once said----For the first AND ONLY time in it's entire and illustrious history the British Army had taken on AND DEFEATED the main body of the main enemy in a continental war...I paraphrase him a bit, but the essential truth is, surely----'Every road was littered with broken down motor trucks, guns, machine guns and trench mortars. Great stacks of supplies and of military hardware of all kinds were abandoned. Every railway line was blocked with loaded trucks which the Germans had been unable to move....It is beyond dispute that on Nov.11th. the lines of communication immediately behind the German Armies had been thrown into complete disorder by the streams of traffic converging on the Muese bridges, disorder greatly intensified by the attacks of the allied airmen. The German armies, unable to resist on the fighting front, could no longer retreat in good order, partly because of the congestion on the roads and railways behind them, which not only hampered the movements of the troops, but prevented the systematic supplyto them of food and ammunition, partly owing to the fact that there were no horses left to draw the transport to the fighting troops'
Sir Frederick Maurice.
This is what causes an army to be beaten--in a word CATASTROPHE!--it reads like something from a later war.
This is what the allies accomplished---and a great part of that was done by British and Dominion troops-----troops who had become superb battle practitioners--on the ground and in the air--the hard battles of attrition that had gone before had ground down the German army and the reward was victory. As in any defeat, any number of theories will emerge as to why --but you never need to look much beyond the quality of the men who inflicted that defeat to explain it!
Dave.
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