sol_invictus
Posts: 1961
Joined: 10/2/2001
From: Kentucky
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I agree about Turkey and Austria, but they weren't as much of a soft underbelly as was supposed. The opinion was that Turkey simply needed one swift kick and the whole rotten structure would collapse. Events proved otherwise of course. Even suffering through such horrible catastrophies as the fight against Russia in the Caucasus's and the grind throughout the Middle east, Turkey was able to hold out to the end. Austria as well was able to sustain the war effort after repeated drubbings by Russia and even Serbia, as well as the drain in Italy. It is amazing that either of these two countries could remain in the war as long as they did.
I think the comparison between the American Civil War and WWI are informative and appropriate. Here you had a much stronger North in all catagories of national strength, opposed to an agrarian and much weaker South. Yet it still required four years and massive casualties for the North to subdue the South. I believe the reasons for this are much the same reasons that WWI developed as it did. Most leaders, both political and military, expected a short war. Military leaders who had little or no experience cammanding such large masses of men. Advances in technology that made the battlefield much more lethal than anyone had previously experienced, thus requiring the attempt to adapt tactics to the new reality through bloody trial and error; and never really being able to overcome the difficulties. Combat finally evolving into trench fighting that more resembled siege operations than the expected Napoleonic battlefieds, in the case of Civil War generals, and Franco-Prussian War battlefields in the case of WWI generals, had expected. Finally ending only after a long attritional grinding down of the enemy through bloody battles and naval blockade.
The only real complaint that I would feel comfortable making against some leaders of WWI, is that they ignored the hints of the future through a disdain to study the American Civil War, Russo-Japanese War, and the Boer War and to take heed of some of the lessons that could have been learned from those experiences. It is the sad fact that military experience is a very fleeting commodity that without constant practice, is quickly lost, with the need to be learned again through bloody trial and error.
It will indeed be very interesting to see if we, with all of the benefits of hindsight, can achieve decisive results within four years. It is my opinion that if the game engine is modelled in a historicly accurate way, that victory will only be possible by having the last man standing with the last cartridge in his breech.
< Message edited by Arinvald -- 7/1/2006 8:25:01 PM >
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RE: Top Five of World War I - 
Justified or not, WWI was not the kind of war that almost every general had expected to fight. I think the mindset of the vast majority of military leaders expected something similar to the Franco-Prussian War, since this was the last major war between major powers in Europe. Military minds are usually backward thinking and look to past examples in order to extrapolate future events and outcomes. The problem of course is that in those years of peace, while military thinking has no updated examples or chooses to ignore what few examples there are, technology marches forward. 
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