The Americans of 1944 also had an overwhelming tank advantage with tanks suited for such an operation, overwhelming air superiority with a developed CAS to make up for any lackings of artillery, only 50,000 Germans had escaped Falaise a few months previous and, finally, the defenses of Metz had been left in disrepair for over 20 years at this point. Finally, despite the fact they did take Metz, the Allies did not successfully make any advances from this avenue into Germany until months after.
1944 CAS is far less effective for sieging enemy fortifications than super-heavy artillery, and ultimately the Americans did succeed in taking Metz, if after a long time, and certainly not in the shambolic state that you predict for them. And again, this is all after the Americans had been driving forwards in lightning speed across France and were at the end of their logistical line and the ending point of their offensive. Unsurprisingly, once the Americans rested, resupplied, and re-evaluated their strategy, Metz was leveled and taken.
For a 1919 attack, the Germans will have had six months to replenish themselves and continue to fortify their lines while the Americans will effectively be doing this attack alone with no real experience in such operations. They had done the battle of St. Mihel, but that was against a 50,000 man force of second rate German divisions that were already in the process of pulling out.
Meanwhile in these 6 months the Allied armies make no significant improvements with the manpower, industrial, and intellectual resources of the entire world, while the Americans are hapless morons who receive no support from their allies in adapting to the conditions on the Western Front and themselves integrating their lessons of combat.
The funny thing about this claim is that you ignore mobile warfare had ended between August and that winter, meaning lessons were already being learned. Further still, you're being obtuse on this point in that whatever specific lessons the French learned that winter was irrelevant to the fact that they had, as a force, experienced combat and gained that knowledge from August on. Sending in green troops, no matter how well trained, against well prepared defenses is a blood bath.
Apparently Meuse-Argonne, Saint-Mihiel, the substantial American troops who served alongside the French, apparently all do not count and do not matter, what a fascinating alternation of the historical reality of the American forces. Pretending the Americans had not fought is a rather painfully sad diversion... I suppose the 320,000 casualties they suffered simply appeared magically, and that their presence in battle had nothing at all to do with it? For reference, these numbers are roughly equivalent to those the French sustained in the Battle of the Frontiers: even taking into account the influence of the Spanish Flu, this claim that the Americans had done little fighting in 1918 is at best misguided and at worst insulting.
Furthermore, the French lessons that they were learning were coming at a time when they were not fighting, from a time of limited combat, in every sense comparable to the American experience in 1918. Neither would be perfect by 1915/1919, but to take their 1914/1918 performance and assuming that it will continue forever on a base flat line is absurd.
Yes because you actually have to do things to get better at doing them.
Thank goodness the Americans had been doing them, and a terribly obtuse and incorrect claim in any case: I suppose that if we lived in the very intriguing world of your own, then there would be no differences among armies whatsoever outside of that which is gained from combat experience... the reality of the world and military history has been that armies make dramatic improvements outside of combat as well, which is well demonstrated in the very war we are discussing with the relative state of preparation of the various combatants at the start of the war.
And Tooze demonstrated that for World War II, not World War I. Blithely assuming constants for both wars is a fools gambit.
No, because the German economy in 1918 and 1942 have far more in common with each other than the German economy of 1942 has with its Anglo-Saxon counterparts. A gap of twenty years hardly discredits the basic institutional arrangements from being compared, no more than say, a 1960 mobilization system is inherently comparable to a 1940 mobilization system: the inherent aspects of it are the structural elements at its heart. Naturally, these two German economies, both being broadly similar, as a highly productive industrial core on the basis of an only partially modernized, still largely, agrarian economy, suffer from the same sort of limitations and problems. A critical element of this is the requirement for large quantities of agricultural labor, which in wartime naturally are filled by women, instead of them being put into factories. The only reason you have proffered for this claim of the Germans not being willing prior to implement female labor is that the German elites found it distasteful, something which apparently didn't stop them from much more radical things such as a sweeping economic rationalization of the country transforming it into a effectively state-directed economy. Now, after 4 years of the bloodiest war in European history, 4 years where the course of the war had so constantly swayed in the balance with the fate of the nation on the hand, 4 years where the Kaiser had apparently stalwartly resisted even the very idea of putting a hammer in the hand of the weaker sex - ah, now, now at last, the situation has surpassed a magical moment and becomes critical enough that the German government will so reluctantly decide that the fairer side of the human race will be gifted with employment in factories, indeed, so that millions of them will be sent there to free up millions of Michaels for the front line in a stunning volte-face! Truly, what an inspiring story.
Forgive if me if I may express my utmost doubts concerning this ridiculous hypothesis, that somehow the Germans found this measure, and this measure alone, of their objectionable measures, too harsh to do, that a magical pool of women lying around the country apparently engaged in nothing more than cocktail parties while the nation burned exists, and that only now, after 4 years of bitter war, would a bureaucrat in the economics ministry finally remember that this pool of labor existed. On all accounts, this is a ridiculous idea.
Ah, it took them until 1918 to get serious about it. Sounds kinda like why the Germans waited till then to consider women, eh?
Have you actually read even a short paper about French colonial recruitment? I dare say there must be a Wikipedia version somewhere, or even if you need it some sort of youtube video, if apparently reading a book about the subject is too lengthy. The French were fully earnest about their colonial recruitment campaign from at least, from my recollection, 1915 onwards, and had black colonial soldiers serving outside of West Africa since 1912. There was not a problem of will which prevented this program from succeeding, but rather appropriate management and organization, which had meant that the initial campaigns had faced resistance and non-compliance which the colonial government was ill equipped with. The French continued with it and reformed their approach with the arrival to government of Clemenceau, and successfully managed to introduce a far more effective campaign relying upon recruiting methods which were much more effective in managing to attract soldiers, using encouragement and persuasion, particularly by Blaise Diagné, which managed to both dramatically accelerate the number of recruits they had, while also ending resistance. Post-war the French continued their recruitment schemes and never faced any significant rebellion or dissent in Black Africa until at least the WW2 era. The French mobilization and colonial production campaigns failed to achieve full fruit not because of any inherent problem to themselves, but rather due to lack of shipping (which with the capture of the Belgian ports, collapse of Austria-Hungary, and the American entrance to the war, becomes much less of an issue) and the end of the war.
The contrast between this and your faulty attempt to conflate this with German proposals about putting women in industry is a horrifically flawed one.
1)The French had consistently throughout the war attempted to mobilize colonial manpower. The Germans never had done the same for women.
2)French problems, where they existed, stemmed from lack of experience and institutional knowledge. The Germans never attempted, according to you, such a project of female recruitment in the first place.
3)The French recruitment project faced significant resistance from established interests, particularly that of the colonial administration. According to you the German project never happened because of this resistance. The parallels that you draw between the two further discredit the idea that this really was the reason for why women's participation in the industrial effort could not be expanded: resistance on the part of the colonial administration was pushed asides due to the utmost necessity of winning the war, which almost certainly would have been the case in Germany as well.... unless if there happened to be a very good, structural, reason, preventing an increase in women's involvement in war work.
Artillery alone never achieved that, nor does it in of itself represent a war winner; you said it yourself, it is a force multiplier.
But by contrast it did: by 1918 artillery was fully capable of blasting a hole in the opposition and the capture of the enemy lines, if not necessarily capable of their exploitation and their defense against enemy counter-attacks. This was clearly demonstrated by both the Germans and in turn the Allies during their two offensives, and there were vanishingly few frontal lines which survived the artillery strikes, although plenty of defenses did hold through the effective application of reserves and counter-attacks.
Sure, if you leave out the fact they were unable to openly bomb logistics lines like they could during the 1944-1945 period in WWII.
Irrelevant and something which belongs to a different war, they profit nevertheless from their ability to conduct reconnaissance, aerial attack, and artillery spotting while denying all of them to the enemy, in particular you would be well advised to read about the impact of aerial superiority on artillery effectiveness.
Who would've thought the 1918 situations could inform us of 1919? Also, doesn't that undermine your entire argument?
Only in your universe apparently do the British sit immobile and incapable of advancing again after half a year, do the French not receive more bodies, and the Americans don't work alongside their allies, train, and absorb the lessons of their experience (which apparently they do not have according to you....) while all of the problems of the Germans are magically fixed.... the reasons for why the British offensive ended in 1918 were not due to exhaustion or collapse, but due to an offensive having reached its culmination point and its logistical tether being reached. The British by 1919 would have resolved these issues.
Furthermore, I fail to see how it in any way undermines my argument.
Cite exactly where I claimed they could not repair a tank, a railroad or a road because we both know I damn well never said that.
....And that's exactly my point. By November they'd effectively used up their advantage and it wouldn't be until sometime in 1919 they could restore it.
This was followed by constant talk of production, ignoring that the reduction in Allied tank numbers was caused by the need to repair and refit, and facetiously using it as a way to argue against the idea of the Allies having huge numbers of tanks in 1919.
I bring up Fuller because to claim the tanks of 1918 could be decisive weapons without the specifications he called for is a non-suitable proposition. To achieve the Blitzkrieg type of conduct you seem to believe would occur, you need what he called for.
1)Fuller is one officer, and the tank officer in the smaller tank army to boot. At best he can be referred to the British, but he has absolutely nothing to do with the French who produced more tanks than the British.
2)You have brought up Fuller and used him in what is at best simply a misguided and at worst a dishonest attempt to declare the Allied armies a failure for not meeting the hypothetical napkin sketches of one man, while ignoring whatever actual doctrine, operational art, and forces available to the Allies in 1918. If we were to do this with every military and them living up to the standards set up by their theorists, then there would be no military on earth which actually could be deemed a success.
3)You are the only who has mentioned anything like a blitzerkrieg-type operation on the Western Front in 1918 or 1919, which is in any extent irrelevant to my argument about the abilities of the Western allies to break through in 1919. By contrast, both myself and various other posters throughout the thread have consistently chosen to place less value on the writings of a single British tank officer, and more interest in
real events, in regards to how the Allies actually used their forces in a methodical offensive and bite-and-hold type doctrine.
That's good I've never claimed that again, given Fuller's plan was for 1919 and that was what we were talking about. I'm also again amused as you calling it imaginations when it was a detailed plan, the British were making efforts to put it into operation and, further, it became the basis of armored warfare in future conflicts. I'm also especially amused at your attacks on hypotheticals
when we're discussing a hypothetical campaign in 1919.
You are the only one here who has ever mentioned the word Fuller or ever has taken anything he has said seriously. Let me make this clear to you. I do not care about who Fuller is. I have never read his napkin-drawing plans beyond skimming through a painfully poorly cited Wikipedia page (perhaps this is from whence hails your contestation of the British being eager to put it into effect?) and I have never expressed the slightest interest in what his hypothetical idea of a 1919 offensive would look like. My interest has never been in hypothetical fantasy worlds that you prefer to inhabit, and has always been concerning
what actually happened in the war, specifically how the Allies used their tank forces and what they looked like. There is a world of difference between looking at what a single British officer scribbled as his idea of what a 1919 offensive would look like, deciding that the Allies failed to measure up to this, and then obviating their vast forces of tanks, and looking at what the Allies actually did and what their doctrine was and how it would continue to develop if the war had continued. It does not matter in the least if Fuller's plan was influential in the future, no more than if I was to begin to write up reams of text concerning Estienne's plans for offensive armored warfare or De Gaulle's plans for a professional tank army and then attempt to snap my fingers and dispatch into the aether the Allied tank forces of 1919 for not meeting these imaginary standards: the Allied armies fought which what they had in 1918 and what they would have in 1919, which was fully capable of providing a decisive advantage in the context of the way the Allies had used them, in methodical bite-and-hold offensives. You are the one who is creating a false dichotomy by declaring that because apparently the Allies did not meet whatever Fuller's half-baked idea was, their armored forces might as well as not exist.
Yes because those conflicts of interest and alterations were limited to, you know, the place where the conflicts of interested actually existed.
Which is a strawman as I've never claimed it would result in the end of participation in the conflict. It would, however, be sufficient to scuttle coordinated actions and planning.[/quote]
Which again, as history demonstrates, was not enough to prevent all factions from participating to the war effort against the Central Powers, so regardless if the Yugoslavians and Italians squabble at the edges of whatever individual sections of the front they are on, it doesn't actually do anything to help the poor Germans.
600-700k was being called up through the normal means. The additional one million that could be called up was not due to political considerations; the same reason why the British were not deploying massive amounts of colonial troops to Europe.
The British took long enough to get their forces themselves equipped, there were good reasons to not deploy colonial troops beyond political reasons alone, and in any case I have shown you why the idea that women were not deployed to the factories for political reasons alone is ridiculous.
You mean the British and French did as well? But I thought they had all those colonial troops!
This is a red herring and a false sequitur. The French
did undertake efforts to raise more troops with their colonial forces, and important reasons for why the British troop numbers were low were due to political machinations in keeping their forces deployed back in England, both of which showed they had more available forces or were trying to increase their force totals, the latter of which obviously takes time. By contrast the Germans did nothing at all to raise more troops apparently: why? The world wonders...
The ability to occupy sections of the collapsing Empire is not the same as conducting an offensive of hundreds if not thousands of miles through major mountain chains.
When there's no resistance available to resist, unless if you're fighting in the Himalayas, then offensives are frighteningly quick and efficient. Bad geography is principal an obstacle therein as it enables a defending force to magnify their combat power, without a blocking force, as it was the case in the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire, those distances and mountains become next to meaningless, and revert to the same situation as happened when the Germans attacked Soviet Russia: as fast as one can catch the train from one station to the next. And by 1919, the Allies would have plentiful resources and preparation to launch a set-piece offensive against the Germans... except the Germans have no troops to be able to stand against this so it isn't so much a set-piece offensive, and more a "march to Berlin".
Which right there should tell you how irrelevant they are.
Are you referring to the Romanians or to them as a whole? The Romanians in 1918 certainly (although by 1919 probably not as demonstrated by the brief and nasty Romanian-Hungarian War, and certainly enough to guard lines of communication in any case), the others certainly not - they're entirely enough to occupy the lines of communication in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially given how most people are friendly to the Allied cause there, and contribute to the Allied offensive.
See previously.
Except there would be units to oppose the attack, occupying distances on a flat plain is different than supplying forces through a mountain chain and what rail forces could the Balkan nations martial? Given their occupation and the ongoing collapse of the Austro-Hungarians, I'd doubt the rail system was in the best of shape. Speaking of the lines, by the way,
there was only three main rail routes into Germany.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918 and there are no troops to resist there. The only forces available are the Hungarians, who were brushed asides almost contemptuously by the Romanians who had been themselves so painfully obliterated just a few years before. Allied industrial and financial resources were certainly sufficient to repair and put back into action the railroad lines, and besides, take a better map anyway: there were certainly far more than 3 railroad lines between the two countries.
And 500,000 British troops in Arabia means nothing to Germany at this point.
Apparently, since there are millions of German men who will by miracle's sword join them on the front line, from the endless manpower supplies of Germany that enable it to fight the rest of the world without missing a beat! I must also congratulate you for trying to ignore the presence of the 20 divisions freed up, who again, wherever they go, are no longer shooting at Bulgarians, Turks, or Austro-Hungarians, but rather at Germans, meaning that they now become the Germans' problems.
Further, I would like some citations for the ability of the Anglo-French to supply the Balkans.
Anglo-French-Americans*. Concerning their resupply efforts, they had entirely supplied the Serbian army, and we've already discussed how by 1918 French military production was starting to outstrip their own capability to absorb it, leaving plentiful spare military supplies for distribution to the Romanians, Yugoslavs, Italians, Greeks, etc.
I think the use of quotations quite effectively signals the point I was making and your belaboring of this shows quite clearly why it was necessary.
Where I do it it is strawmen, where you do it it is effective rhetorical arguments, a debate with you is always such a fascinating experience.
You've yet to do this anywhere.
So far I have shown that the Germans a)Cannot hope for massive reinforcements of fresh troops without fatally weakening their Western front, b)That in the absence of these forces geography melts away, as can be shown by the rapid French offensives against Bulgaria at the end of 1918, the Romanian offensives against Hungary in 1919, or the German offensives against the Soviets in 1917, c)That the idea that disputes between the Allies will prevent pressure from being brought to bear against Germany is unrealistic, d)That there are plentiful resources for equipping and supplying the Balkan forces in view of the immense industrial capacity of the Allies, e)The initiative of advance lies on the German side which means the Germans are at best extremely hard-pressed to try to preempt the Allied advance given the Allies are already on the move and the Germans are the ones who have to react while their Western Front was already in chaos, f)That the geographic obstacles in the region are overrated, g)And that in any case, this all constitutes another drain on German resources where the Germans were already clearly unable to constrain the current struggle (and indeed, the patience of the world must wear thin to hear that the Germans will succeed in winning a battle of attrition against the entirety of its serried legions.... the story is David and Goliath, not Michael and Goliath).
To which your response has been only the blasé comment:
You've yet to do this anywhere.
I feel that at the least, I should congratulate you for chutzpah.
