Adrian Laguna wrote:Jalinth wrote:Of course no one took him seriously. After all, what could a damn rebellious ex-colonial hack from a mickey mouse military teach the European powers?
It isn't just Buford, Europe in general ignored the American Civil War. I'm not sure if the Americans themselves failed to learn the lessons of the CW, American tactics during WWI is not a subject I'm familiar with.
Cold Harbour - Confederates in trenches inside a forest anahilate charging Union forces.
Checellorsville (or was it Fredricksburg?) - Confederates take cover behind a stone wall and cut the advancing Federals to ribbons.
Gettysburng - Union forces are dug-in, fortified, have plenty of artillery support, and a mile-long shooting gallery in front of them. One hour of constant artillery barrage does jack-shit to them. Rebels advance, Yankees kill them and rape the corpse.
How is it that nobody noticed that charging a prepared position was a great way to get your men killed and do a shitload of nothing? And that was with soldiers armed with fucking rifled muskets, a few single-shot rifles, and even fewer repeater rifles. They say hindsight is 20-20, but consider that the trench warfare the happened in the Great War could have been extrapolated to a certain degree from the ACW.
Black Jack Pershing was an incompetent prick. The only thing that saved his ass after the war is that the congressional hearings were fucked with for political reasons.
Cold Harbor, the one Grant wanted back. This one was fuck-all stupid.
It's Fredricksburg. Longstreet set his corp up on Marye's heights, dug in, and watched Burnsides army wait for pontoons for a few weeks. Quote the Longstreet "Line up every Yankee there is, and give my men plenty of ammunition, and I will kill them all, before they reach our lines." Also, the more famous "It is good war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it." Longstreet proves once and for all not to fuck with fortified positions.
Gettysburg. Longstreet bangs his head up against a tree while 15,000 Conferderates march for a mile across an open ground up hill in the face of enemy artillery and entrenched infantry behind a wall.
Longstreet is the clearest example of an officer who thought that marching out in parade blocs was batshit loco. stonewall Jackson represents the opposite view rather well: he ordered
spears for his men. And there was a Pennslyvania cavalry unit that actually
used lances until 1863.
Vote for Worst battle goes to Stalingrad. It can't be worse then that, unless you fight the same battle with poison wind, acide rain, and spontaneously exploding dirt clods thrown in for kicks. That's the absolute horror.
Someone should have taugh WWI generals about Petersburg, and the sorts of things Grants machine guns did to an attack, on top of everything else.