Moment of Battle

[pbrower2a]

Originally Posted by B Butler
You are looking at it in terms of destroying key infrastructure. I'm interested in the change in supply and marching doctrine. Both were important. If armchair historians have different interests, it's kind of hard to have a meaningful and decisive conversation.

Union strategy included breaking the Confederate economy so that it could no longer supply the critical implements of war. Such required a naval blockade and the capture of the effective 'military-industrial complex' (to use an anachronistic term) of the South. Take away the foundries, and the South could no longer produce the artillery and small arms, let alone any ironclad ships -- or repair or replace the rolling stock of its railroads or the rails themselves. The Confederacy fought hard to keep a part of Tennessee that was never particularly sympathetic to the Confederate cause; Chattanooga was the Foundry of the South, and once the Confederacy lost it it the Confederate armies lost their effectiveness.

At the Third Battle of Chattanooga the Union exploited the one great vulnerability of the Confederacy -- excessive centralization of its production of armaments. After that General William Tecumseh Sherman could make a long, narrow thrust through Georgia, effectively the geographic middle of the Confederacy east of the Mississippi River... and get away with it. The Confederacy lost its mobility and hence its ability to respond to such a thrust. This is much like the German attack to the English Channel from the Ardennes in 1940 that effectively cut the Allies in France and Belgium into two manageable pieces for the German Armed Forces -- which would have been the critical battle of the Second World War had the Nazis won in the West by knocking out Britain.

There is much debate as to what Lee intended in the Gettysburg campaign. There was a big argument after the war between Longstreet's supporters and most everyone else.

The south had a lot of Stonewall Jackson fans, though, who thought the Army of Northern Virginia was at its best when on the offensive, taking risks, turning flanks, and in general driving the conservative Union commanders nuts. This group thought Lee marched quickly north, spread out to make their intent unknown and divide the Union forces, then concentrate suddenly to overwhelm the opposition offensively in detail.

The Union was never as vulnerable as the Confederacy. Lincoln could have vacated Washington for Philadelphia or New York. The economy of the Union was more decentralized. The topography of central Pennsylvania is very different from that of northern Georgia, and the only natural route to the north from southeastern Pennsylvania to the Great Lakes is the Susquehanna canyon.

The Battle of Gettysburg was an over-reach, a blunder. But the Confederacy could retreat and regroup... and fight hard in Virginia for nearly another two years. The war in Virginia would go increasingly badly for the Confederacy after Sherman's march through Georgia as supplies dwindled for the Confederacy. The Confederacy fought hard and effectively until the battle of Petersburg, the death-blow for the Confederacy because the Confederacy no longer had enough troops to perform trench warfare to thwart a flanking move of the Union Army that then allowed the Union to evade the trenches at Petersburg and what was then a stalemate and then give the death blow to the Confederacy at Richmond. By taking Richmond the Union broke the chain of command of the Confederacy -- but such might not have been accomplished without Sherman's march through Georgia that severed the South and disrupted the mobility of troops that might have relieved the Army of Northern Virginia at the critical moment. -- and thrown the technological capacity of the once-formidable Confederate war machine back decades.

Recovery from a failure or a blunder negates the significance of a failure or a blunder. The Wehrmacht may have fallen short of a decisive victory at Moscow, but it was on the advance for nearly another year. It was mauled badly at Stalingrad due to the overreach of Hitler, but only after Kursk did things go uniformly bad for the Wehrmacht. The Battle of Kursk effectively decided that the Soviet Union would gain hegemony in central and Balkan Europe.

From what I have heard, the amateurs discuss how troops move -- but the experts discuss logistics, intelligence, and communications. That explains what made Lincoln and Churchill such superb wartime leaders.


Longstreet supposed the intent was to march north, find a strong defensive position too close to Washington for the Union to ignore, and try to fight a battle where the Confederates were behind stone walls on the high ground. Then again, Longstreet preferred the defensive. If more generals thought like Longstreet, there would have been more World War I style trench warfare during the Civil War. As is, after the defeat at Gettysburg, Lee dug in more. Without Stonewall, with Longstreet, Lee used the preferred tactics of his best available general. Gettysburg was a heavy price to pay for learning this lesson.

The loss of Stonewall Jackson crippled the Confederacy, compelling Lee to make mistakes that Jackson would never made. "Critical persons" -- political and military leadership -- can decide a war. A premature death of Churchill or Lincoln might have made their wars go differently -- and much to the worse for their sides.

You read Lee's own work, and you can get a third version of what they were trying to do. It was a large raid, roughly what Sherman did with the march to the sea. Lee was not seeking battle, either offensive or defensive, but would have avoided battle if he could. The intent was to make the Union look bad to shape election results. Alas, Meade changed the marching doctrine, which kept Stuart from reporting to Lee in a timely manner, thus denying Lee a scouting force. Without knowledge of what the enemy was doing, maneuver war became difficult. With the Union army close, Lee had to concentrate for battle, which meant he couldn't raid for supplies. That forced a major battle, which depleted his ammunition, which meant he would have had to retreat south whether he won or lost. It all fell apart. Still, tactically, the battle was a draw. The day after Pickett's Charge, both armies stayed on the field, but neither felt it was in position to take the offensive. Politically it was a Union victory as Lee had to retreat, but this was more for supply reasons than because his forces were significantly more crippled than the Union.

Lee assumed that Abraham Lincoln would have allowed a fair election that would have allowed him to lose the Presidency at a time of military distress. Of course Lincoln had a free and fair election in 1864 -- but not with military distress. Had he needed to impose martial law to win the war and cancelled or delayed the election he would have. Would FDR have allowed a free and fair election in 1944 after Britain had been knocked out in 1940, had the Japanese won Midway and were mopping up resistance in Australia and New Zealand and taken Hawaii, and had China and the Soviet Union collapsed, allowing Japanese forces to take Alaska, had the Germans taken over the British Royal Navy to threaten the American position in the Caribbean and the Gulf, with perhaps a defeatist movement using slogans like "Why die for the Jews?" against FDR?

All democratic orders have their limits.

You will still find armchair historians debating still about what the intent of the Gettysburg campaign was. The result was by all accounts bad for the south, but what shaped the loss is still muddled by the controversies that grew when Longstreet got too friendly with northerners after the war, which caused a lot of southerners to bash Longstreet. A lot of Civil War history written by Confederates in the immediate aftermath of the war had a lot more to do with whether the historian supported or hated Longstreet than anything objective. The echoes of that still linger.



People are still discussing Waterloo (two centuries later).


The Battle of Midway wasn't about islands. It was about destroying aircraft carriers. Midway was a target as it would force the Americans to commit to battle. Given US code breaking, for Nimitz it was an opportunity to ambush the mobile fleet.

If the Japanese had taken Midway, they would have had an island in range of US land based air and out of range of Japanese land based air. It would have been a liability, not a threat. It was early on in the war, though, and it isn't clear the Japanese had figured this out.

Maybe -- but before Midway, things were going well for Thug Japan. After Midway they didn't go so well. But note well -- communications, supply, and intelligence can be critical, as with the radar that gave the RAF the critical edge over the Luftwaffe or the Allied code-breaking. The Nazis were stupid enough to put such stock phrases as "Sieg Heil!" and "Heil Hitler!" in code.


The trick isn't so much in cracking a code, as the Union did to the simple Vigenère cipher that the Confederacy used. The trick is in preventing the enemy from knowing that his code has been broken. A broken code works to the extent that it seems like nothing more than simple bad luck.

What Midway did do was give the Americans a chance to take the initiative. Without a clear win at Midway, it is doubtful the US would have tried to land the First Marines at Guadalcanal. The airstrip there was the real threat to the supply line between the US and Australia.

Communications and supply determine what is sustainable and what isn't. That is the difference between the shrinking pocket at Dunkirk in 1940 having to evacuate or perish -- and Malta.

Again, one might make an argument that World War II was a war of attrition and supply. I might put the turning point at Stalingrad and El Alamein. It was then that enough US armament production was sufficiently on line to give the allies the edge that grew ever larger as time progressed. Mind you, if the Battle of Britain and the Atlantic hadn't been won, US production might not have come on line in time. It could have turned into a very different war.
Stalingrad had one mitigating effect for the Third Reich; it allowed an abortive German thrust into the Caucasus region to pull out of an untenable position and keep fighting. The Wehrmacht could fall back on its lines of communication and supply and fight back hard. After the Battle of Kursk such was ineffective. But then, mistreatment of people under Nazi occupation made a Soviet victory look like a deliverance.

Again, depending on one's field of interest, you can come to different and plausible opinions.

Maybe I need to get my hands on a certain book by Clausewitz.

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Piercing the Reich, by Joseph Persico.

The Hogan's Heroes depiction of Nazi 'efficiency' pops up there -- but it is justified. The Gestapo was easy to infiltrate because it was a plainclothes outfit. The Wehrmacht and the SS were tougher.  One of the American agents got dragooned into the task of monitoring where German troops went... and relayed the information. Wartime governments make much of "Zip your lips, or sink our ships!" and "Loose talk costs lives!"... and that infiltrator was able to relay the information to Allied intelligence. That's one of the last things that the Germans would have wanted.

Many of the infiltrators were Socialist refugees from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. They knew the culture and the lingo. The Americans and British got good at forging documents -- often credentials lifted from German prisoners.  

Some countries fight smart. Some fight dumb.

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Attila;474288 Wrote:The simple fact that Kursk is more important than Stalingrad makes this list a bad joke at best. The Soviets lost more troops during the battle of Stalingrad than all casualties of both the American and British combined through out the entire war. It was also the turning point of World War II. That battle proved the Fascist could be decisively beaten which was still questionable by your average man during the time.

A few months after Stalingrad Hitler still believed that he could go on the offensive -- as shown at Kursk. After Kursk the Wehrmacht endured one unqualified defeat after another. A stalemate seemed possible even after Stalingrad. After Kursk such was no longer so. The Wehrmacht could not stave off defeat even though it was falling back on its lines of communication and supply.

Quote:Why is Vietnam even on this list? To sell his book that's why. There was nothing world changing about Vietnam. Sure it raised some hell here in the states and drastically changed the Vietnamese but certainly was not world changing.

Absolutely! Which explains why I consider a critical battle in northeastern China that began Mao Zedong's rout of the Chinese Nationalists. China is now a superpower -- but who won the bulk of its territory in 1948 and 1949 determines much of what is possible today.

Quote:  He also does not mention the Battle of Ain Jalut, when the Malmukes decidedly beat the Mongols and basically stopped their impressive bid for world domination.

I missed that one. In my Eurocentric view I saw the Mongol retreat from central Europe lacking a critical battle determining who would rule Germany, France, and most of Italy. Probably Britain as well. Aside from the Caliphate the only political entity then capable of resisting the Mongols was the Byzantine Empire.* Of course I see the consequences of a Mongol conquest of central and western Europe rather slight. The Mongols invariably assimilated into the conquered people, adopting the culture and religion of the conquered.  They married the women of the old ruling elite, and all that I can say is that the last two stanzas of the Marseillaise

...qu'un sang impur/ abreuve nos sillons

would have been literal contempt of a political elite that had epicanthic folds leaving little question about their 'impure blood'.

Quote:At best this list is a very very very lop sided view from a Anglo-American perspective and is nothing but a marketing scheme to sell this book to white Americans. Where is Waterloo which ushered in liberal democracy across the globe? Where is the battle of Tours which solidified a Christian Europe instead of a Muslim Europe?

The paucity of battles in South and East Asia  and in any part of what is now Latin America showed an exaggeration of the role of the US and western Europe. The author fails to recognize the significance of the Battle of al-Qadisiya that made possible the Muslim/Arab conquest of Persia. Is the Indian subcontinent less important than North Africa?

Quote:Actually there are only two battles on this list I can agree with which is Marathon and Gaugamela.

Yarmuk, of course. Midway. Kursk. Saratoga.

You have some very important points.

*Comment on May 9, 2016: Maybe.  Just maybe.

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Attila;474299 Wrote:This is a good point, Pizarro and the Battle of Cajamarca comes to mind. I think this battle won the largest land grab in human history. Which would be a world game changer in my opinion. Yet the author does not mention it? He brings up Vietnam instead.

It is hard to imagine any subsequent battles analogous to those of Tenochtitlan that destroyed the Aztec Empire or of Cajamarca that destroyed the Inca Empire. The Aztecs and Incas had allowed Cortez and Pizarro to infiltrate their capitals without realizing how much literal firepower and horsepower the Spanish had. They did not know guns and they did not know what horse-based cavalry could do.    

Quote:I would also have to disagree with you on the Battle of Midway. The Japanese were doomed no matter what. If they would have won that battle it at most would have put us back a year. Which means we would most likely have had more than 2 nuclear weapons. Worst case scenario would have been the Japanese under a Communist flag.

Midway is essential to maintaining supply lines between the US and both Australia and New Zealand. After Midway is Hawaii, the last set of significant islands before the North American mainland. Hawaii might not be an obvious base of any Japanese invasion of any part of North America even if it had gone under Japanese rule.

The big issue is not whether Hawaii remains under US rule and becomes the 50th State or becomes a part of the Japanese Empire; it is whether Australia an New Zealand can remain outposts of Western Christian Civilization after they are cut off. The Japanese of WWII were unqualified brutes whose sole virtue was religious tolerance. As badly as they treated Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, and Indonesians under occupation and their willingness to mistreat any prisoners of war of Caucasoid origin, I can only imagine how bestial their conduct would have been in Australia and New Zealand. The Japanese would have faced hard resistance  because the Australians and New Zealanders would have well known what was intended -- genocide followed by replacement with Japanese settlers. But even had the Japanese eventually been defeated in some ensuing war in -- let us say the 1980s -- the 'ethnic replacement' would be a fait accompli much like the 'removal' of First Peoples from most of the agriculturally-desirable parts of the United States. The Japanese could have no more assimilated the Australians and New Zealanders than they could have assimilated Indonesians into their brutal New Order. Australia and New Zealand would have become permanent outposts of Japanese civilization within ten years of conquest.

The Japanese had imitated many of the of the ways of European powers just to maintain independence; they had to imitate those powers to keep any national dignity. But they also adopted racist and colonial attitudes as vile as any in Europe or the US. They had their own concept of Manifest Destiny, their own racial pride, and their own militarism. They had abandoned the most humane aspects of their culture -- the pacifistic nature of Buddhism. The worst of the West includes the Atlantic Slave Trade, massacres of First Peoples (with Wounded Knee as a glaring examples) and the Holocaust. The Japanese Thug Empire had to be defeated and humbled.

This is opinion. Whole nations can go horrifically bad in a 4T -- a warning to any nation proud of its Dark Side. We Americans have our own Dark Side -- one that includes Wounded Knee and My Lai, brutal management as practiced by Henry Clay Frick, and racist violence that would shock South Africans. If America goes bad we may need similar defeat and humiliation if the rest of the world is to have any dignity.

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Quote: It is telling that I see several key battles of World War II among the most portentious battles of human history; World War II was basically several wars -- but that I see only one post-WWII battle, and that in the Chinese Civil War that decided whether China would be under the Communists or the Nationalists. It is entirely possible that had the Nationalists won China would have become a democracy as Taiwan is today,
and the country would approach Japanese or at least South Korean standards of economic development. The Communists basically abandoned Marxism-Leninism as an economic philosophy but maintained the dictatorship.

Korean War? Very important to Korea, but I can easily imagine the relevance of the Korean War coming to an end. I can imagine a scenario in which the insane leadership of North Korea does something incredibly stupid, and the 'provisional' armistice becomes irrelevant. Korea, even if unified, is never going to be a Great Power for the simple reason that it is hemmed in by China and Japan.

Vietnam War? Probably no more significant than the War of Independence of Bangladesh, a more populous country.

India, Indonesia, and Pakistan achieved independence without wars against the colonial power. All in all, except perhaps for the Communist takeover of China, the independence of the Indian Subcontinent is the most significant political event since World War II.

If we wish to speak of an abominable genocide, there is likely no key battle in the victory of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. That said, it is hard to distinguish one pointless murder from another. The only comparable decimation of a people was of course the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler intended to kill every Jew in the world, and in view of the disproportionate achievements of Jews, success at such a crime would have retarded human advances in culture, industry, academia, and science. Just imagine a world with no Freud, Mahler, Einstein, or Kafka -- like most of the European continent today because of the Holocaust.

At the end of the Second World War, Nazi archives were captured, and among them were the plans and records of the Holocaust. The plans included the extermination of the large Jewish population of the United Kingdom. The plans for the extermination of British Jews could never be implemented -- because of the successful defense of a nation taxed to the limit of its abilities in the Battle of Britain. There would obviously be no Israel, either, and some of the best medical innovation in our world would not exist without Israel.

Cultural effects of such a battle can be subtle. Does anyone think rock-n-roll important? OK -- the Beatles were not Jewish... but it is hard to see (the most polished pop music group that has ever existed) getting a chance in a Nazified Britain. Their music is clearly not in line with Nazi ideology. But as a group -- their manager was Brian Epstein, a Jew, who would have certainly never been around in a Nazi Britain that mercifully never came into existence.

Quote:Last edited by pbrower2a; 01-07-2014 at 02:18 PM.

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Here's one -- an obscure battle that defined what a large part of South America would be like: the Battle of Cuzco, 1781. A rising of the indigenous population of Peru against Spanish rule (non-Spanish people were compelled to work for a pittance and then were compelled to give the pittance back through severe taxation) came close to overthrowing Spanish colonial rule. Tupac Amaru II, who claimed descendency from the Incas, forged an alliance with the Afro-Peruvian population similarly abused and came close to victory.

The seeds of defeat came in, ironically, what should have been a decisive victory: the Battle of Sangrara that destroyed a Spanish force. The rebellious army failed to concentrate its forces upon Cuzco and instead went to seize outlying areas and went on indiscriminate massacres of the white population contrary to the orders of Tupac Amaru II. The Spanish used the usual methods of European armies (and the recently-victorious Continental Armies of a superpower that came into existence almost due north of Peru. Tupac Amaru II could, had things gone right, been another George Washington. Instead he was defeated and executed brutally.

To be sure, Spanish dominion in Central and South America (except in Cuba and Puerto Rico) would not endure only four more decades -- after the weakening of Spain during the Napoleonic conquest. But native populations of Latin America never got dominion anywhere -- ever.