Evolution of French WWI strategy, tactics and technology

[Kanye Wyoming]

I'm not sure where else this would go, so I just started a new thread. Shitty mods, please feel free to move as appropriate.

I found this a very interesting Twitter thread and figured a few others here might as well. This is a link to the unrolled thread, so now need to have Twitter.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...438785537.html

[Coyotesfan97]

Have you ever read Poilu by Louis Barthas? He survived four years in the trenches like Junger did but definitely has a different outlook. He’s a self described socialist/pacifist but he lasted the duration until his body wore out and he was assigned to a training unit.

“ Along with millions of other Frenchmen, Louis Barthas, a thirty-five-year-old barrelmaker from a small wine-growing town, was conscripted to fight the Germans in the opening days of World War I. Corporal Barthas spent the next four years in near-ceaseless combat, wherever the French army fought its fiercest battles: Artois, Flanders, Champagne, Verdun, the Somme, the Argonne.

First published in France in 1978, this excellent new translation brings Barthas’ wartime writings to English-language readers for the first time. His notebooks and letters represent the quintessential memoir of a “poilu,” or “hairy one,” as the untidy, unshaven French infantryman of the fighting trenches was familiarly known.”

His viewpoint is a polar opposite of the author in the link. Officers and NCOs leading from the front? He’d probably laugh and/or curse in Gobry’s face. Barthas definitely did not like Officers.

He never writes of elite infantry jumping in trucks and moving from pint to point in lightening strikes. He does talk numerous times about being made to march longer distances than needed.

I don’t ever remember him mentioning attacks coordinated and tightly controlled by radio.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a claim that the WWI French army had better coordinated arms then the modern US Army.

He seems to have failed to mention the French army mutinies and how harshly they were put down.

Trench warfare was just one “phase” of the war?

[Kanye Wyoming]

Have you ever read Poilu by Louis Barthas?

No. But just downloaded and now I will, thanks.

$2.99 on Kindle at the moment.

[TGS]

Large scale maneuver warfare was developed during WW1, which is true. A French infantryman from 1918 had more in common with one from 2022 than 1914...also something I would agree with in principle, even if a bit hyperbolic in nature. The entire concept of maneuver warfare was foreign to large armies outside the use of light infantry specialists, titled as skirmishers, jaegers, or cacadores, and the French were indeed the first to employ the infantry automatic rifle/LMG concept with mobile support by fire.

This dude takes it to the extreme, though. You know all those people who make nonstop French surrender jokes? This guy is the cockgobbling fanboy on the other end of the spectrum.

[Jared]

He’s obviously a fanboy and misses a lot.

The role of the Royal Navies blockade of Germany in the final outcome of the war.

Somehow glosses over the disastrous Nivelle offensive of 1917 and the plunge in morale it caused. The French were quite lucky that Germany never exploited the mutinies like they probably could have.

He mentions all that French equipment, which is partly right, but ignores that one of the reasons Americans used so much French equipment was because the other Allies needed fresh soldiers so badly they were willing to equip the doughboys themselves so the troop ships could hold the maximum number of troops.

If I recall correctly, the combined arms offensive was largely developed by a British General, Henry Rawlinson, but I may have that wrong.

The First World War is a very complex conflict. It’s more than just trenches, that’s for sure. It also wasn’t won by any single nation or event. I also read one account that the only troops the Germans really feared were the Canadians, but Canadas contribution to the effort is almost never mentioned.

At any rate, it think he misses out on a lot in the name of praising the French, but he’s probably trying to generate clicks so he’s likely succeeded.

[Coyotesfan97]

The crazy thing about WWI is all the Europeans had military observers here for the Civil War but they all apparently missed the lessons of Cold Harbor et al with massed troops assaulting fortified, trenched positions and the ensuing bloodbaths.

[NH Shooter]

Today, the Russians are still trying to perfect this.

[MountainRaven]

The crazy thing about WWI is all the Europeans had military observers here for the Civil War but they all apparently missed the lessons of Cold Harbor et al with massed troops assaulting fortified, trenched positions and the ensuing bloodbaths.

You underestimate the role that racial and national prejudice played in military thought and theory in Europe during the late-19th Century and early-20th Century.

To Europe's military minds, the American Civil War was a conflict fought a long way away by upstart colonial simpletons.

More immediately, European observers watched the Japanese throw wave after wave of men at Russian fortifications during the Russo-Japanese War, and broadly accepted the successes the Japanese experienced to mean the tactics were successful and that Japanese failures were because the Japanese are not white.

[Joe in PNG]

Then they watched the entrenched Boers slaughter the Brits, but dismissed that because 'colonials'/ the Brits aren't a 'real' army.

[rcbusmc24]

I remember a conversation over coffee and tea at about 0200 in the 1 MEF FWD Combat Operations Center on Camp Leatherneck back in 2012 when I was the Watch Chief and I had a Royal Marine LtCol as a Assistant Watch Officer. He was a history buff and as we discussed the various places we had been deployed to and fought, as both of us had been in Iraq and Afghanistan along with doing the typical ship riding stuff Marines do.... He made a off handed comment about how Iraq and Afghanistan were similar to some extent in his mind to the British experience in the Boer War, and that experience led the Professional British Army to march off in 1914 confidently, yet with tragic results, because even though they had glimpsed upon the future of warfare they had not quite learned the lessons they had been taught yet. Every now and then I think about that when I see certain things happening. He predicted that something big was going to eventually happen in the near future and that Iraq and Afghanistan would be our "generations" Boer War in comparison to what was to come...Hopefully he was wrong about that but....Well, The world's been pretty stupid recently.