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Matt,
As far as the theory about Germany having a military machine that war better than most of the other European countries is correct, their fleet rivalled the British fleet for supremacy. The Kaiser had spent the years from mid 1890's to just prior to the outbreak of hostilities to ensure that his fleet was = to or greater than the British. The German army at the time of WW1 was better equipped than most of their contemporaries and France and Russia both feared going to war with Germany. However when the war came, the French siezed on it as a chance to get back the territories of Alsace and Lorrain that they ceded to Germany when they lost in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Russia had a huge army but how well were they supplied, and why the the mutiny of the Sailors at Stevastopol in 1917?
England had a large contribution in the war effort to be sure but they really didn't start any major operations until the Somme.
As far as the Generals in the first world war fighting with 19th century values, it's true because they only taught frontal assault. But then I guess professor, that the slaughter of the British horse calvary at High Wood July 15th 1916 by the Child of the 20th century (the machine gun), should have evoked some change in tactics even for the slowest of them, don't you think professor? To have your army march across no mans land in rank and file by order is not the act of butchery. Martin Middlebrook author of 'First Day on the Somme' cites at length one Karl Blenk, a German infantryman who was manning the trenches in front of the village at 7:30 that morning: " When the English started advancing we were very worried; they looked as though they must overrun our trenches. We were very surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before. I could see them everywhere; there were hundreds. The officers were in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing, we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them. If only they had run, they would have overwhelmed us." Perhaps that should've clued somebody in, eh professor?! Yes the Generals all had a case of Clue Deficit Disorder, and the criminality of it was that they were allowed to use the same tactics over and over again with similar results. Perhaps that's why Siegfried Sassoon in his poem 'The General' has the line "He did for them all with his plan of attack". With the prepositional discretion of the British- "did for them all" means "had them killed". BTW Siegfried Sassoon was a British poet of the 1st World War who fought in France at Arras. Another British soldier/poet of the 1st World War Isaac Rosenberg who was killed in battle in 1918 wrote in his poem 'Break of Day in the Trenches':
The darkness crumbles away-
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand-
A queer sardonic rat-
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now that you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German-
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes
Less chanced than you for life,
*Bonds to the whims of murder,*
Sprawled in the bowles of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver-what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in a man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
If it wasn't murder then why could their own troops see it and not they?!!
Don't tell me, let me guess, they were doing such a bang up job that they couldn't hear the screams of the dying.
VBR,
Jim
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