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#241
12-27-2010, 01:33 PM
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Yeah the things that Commanders would come up with to keep troops busy...
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#242
12-27-2010, 05:25 PM
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I remember one Team Spirit Ex in Korea the Capt had me washing rocks and putting them on a wood boardwalk. Mud off the walk was 6" deep. I made sure every time someone would ask who's bright idea it was, I told them EXACTLY who. "That would be Capt McMannis' bright idea, SgtMaj."
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Just because I'm on the side of angels doesn't mean I am one.
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#243
12-27-2010, 05:27 PM
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#244
12-27-2010, 07:21 PM
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__________________
Just because I'm on the side of angels doesn't mean I am one.
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#245
12-27-2010, 09:56 PM
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It goes something along the lines, wipe your nose son, suck it up, and drive on...lol
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#246
12-27-2010, 10:45 PM
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One of the best conversations I ever overheard was a Lieutenant complaining to the Commander about something the Sergeant Major said to him. The Commander said:
"You mean that the Sergeant Major gave you a suggestion and you didn't even consider it?!" And then the Commander gave the Lieutenant a "dumbshit Lieutenant" sort of laugh...
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I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons...First We Take Manhattan, Jennifer Warnes Entirely too much T2K stuff here: www.pmulcahy.com
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#247
12-27-2010, 10:52 PM
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#248
12-28-2010, 07:48 AM
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There is a story that comes out of Armor Officer Basic, that dates back to when ole George Patton was organizing the OCS school at Fort Know prior to WWII...
The story goes that Patton gathered the first group of candiates together and said "Gentlemen! This is your first lesson in how to be an officer! I want this flag pole erected before retreat!" He then stood back and listened to the converstations that followed. Various plans to use tripods or manpower to raise the pole, how deep to dig the foundation, when to mount the hardware, and so on... GSP finally called the group to attention and said "Gentlemen, I have listened to your various ideas and you have come up with some intresting ideas. But you are in training to become officers. There is only one correct answer to the question of getting this flag pole erected in time for retreat." George then turned to a NCO who was standing nearby. "Sergeant, organize a detail and have this flag pole erected in time for retreat!" There are many who concentrate on the infamous slapping incidents, on GSP's outbursts with the press, there are even some you claim that he was promoted to fast and to high a position. But no soldier who ever served in the Third Army under him, ever had anything but the highest of praise for him as a fighter, and above all else as an officer and as a leader.
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#249
12-28-2010, 09:30 AM
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GSP was a great leader and believed in leading from the front, not some HQ behind the line. Most Generals have done something to the extent of his outburst with the press or worst. Lot of the time, it all depends how well HQ can suppress the information. Just like the recent General who was dismissed from Afghanistan several months ago. I am pretty sure all Generals and HQs have their dirty little secret about how they feel about their orders and who is leading them.
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#250
12-28-2010, 04:57 PM
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Ever wondered on how a Black Jack Pershing, a George Patton, or a Erwin Rommel would have fit into today's military?
Would strategic mistakes like not finishing Desert Storm by seizing Basrah, not completing the fighting in Afghanistan before invading Iraq, or not blocking in Ossoma prior to cleaning out Bora-Bora have been allowed by any of these generals? Or even better...would GSP have told Bush/Obama were to shove their stars and ripped them both new orifices after he had retired?
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#251
12-28-2010, 05:54 PM
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#252
12-28-2010, 06:07 PM
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Way way back in the day on AHWI newgroup, there was talk on various ways that the end of part two of the great european civil war could end with the "good" germans doing ok (and Rommel living) and the bad ones getting what they deserved. But the on topic bit if it was that it also posted that the Soviet Union viewed VE day as a operational stand down for maintenance and promptly decided to see if Paris was as nice as every one says. The real debate was who would be better: Patton or Rommel, since this time they both would be drawing from the same logistical tail and sharing the same air cover.
A later version of the thread joked that the two of them running in the same tank country would be called the "Great Tank Race." My money is on Rommel.
__________________
Member of the Bofors fan club! The M1911 of automatic cannon. Proud fan(atic) of the CV90 Series.
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#253
12-28-2010, 07:31 PM
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#254
12-28-2010, 08:09 PM
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Due to my, admittedly rather odd, upbringing I always found myself in the middle on Monty. Americans think that he was horrid, yet the English thinks that he was outstanding. To be honest, with the exception of operation "what the hell was I thinking-garden" he, once he went on the offensive, did rather well. But that is the catch- once he went on the offensive. He had the tendency to be the ACW General (I know who it is but for the life of me I can't get the name right - sigh) that was asked by Abe "if you are not using the army, could I borrow it?" I feel that whilst he did not win the war for England, he did build the army that did so- under lower but much better -fighting- leadership.
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Member of the Bofors fan club! The M1911 of automatic cannon. Proud fan(atic) of the CV90 Series.
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#255
12-28-2010, 09:33 PM
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McClellan comes to mind. Yeah, I think that was part of the problem. Everything seemed to move at slower pace, as oppose to under some American Generals like Patton where you couldn't move fast enough...
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#256
12-28-2010, 11:01 PM
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__________________
The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#257
12-28-2010, 11:04 PM
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Rommel was an infantry officer, while he pulled some wonderful moves, a lot of them were handed to him by the Brits. To throw three armored brigades along three different axis at threes different times simply allowed the Africa Corps to nail each brigade one at a time. Rommel was an excellent division commander, he just didn't have the feel for corps/army level.
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#258
12-28-2010, 11:11 PM
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To give him credit, he did propose to increase the D-day force from 3 to 5 divisions. But where he gets caught was in an early briefing in which he told the assembled allied generals of his intention of have British armored in Caen on D-day. When it turned out that the Germans held Caen, he then writes of it always having been his intention that the Americans being the breakout force. When you read his book, the entire war progressed, just like he had predicted it would and if only Eisenhower had pulles his head out of his ass and made Monty ground forces commander, the war would have been...tra la tra la tra la........ The main problem with Monty is that he believed his own press. He should have been relieved after Market-Garden for his insubordination to Eisenhower. God knows Brooks would have supported the ouster. Even Churchill admitted that a relief was the correct decision to make. But Eisenhower gave Monty another chance. And the old poison pen came out after the war!
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#259
12-28-2010, 11:21 PM
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__________________
the best course of action when all is against you is to slow down and think critically about the situation. this way you are not blindly rushing into an ambush and your mind is doing something useful rather than getting you killed.
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#260
12-29-2010, 12:14 AM
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He proved himself both in Poland and France at the beginning of the war. Given that he never went to the Eastern Front you can't really judge how he would compared to Corps commanders out there. One thing was that him and Montgomery probably owe their Field Marshal rank to each other. Otherwise I don't see either going beyond Corps commanders much less leaders of rival Armies and later Army Groups. Every war has General or two who make in command of units that they should never have been allowed to command, but since they were Great Regiment/Brigade commanders they would naturally be Excellent Division commanders and so forth on up...
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#261
12-29-2010, 06:22 AM
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Firstly, Rommel was a good Divisional commander. He was not great at commanding anything much larger.
Secondly, Market Garden, in theory, was a brilliant plan. Unfortunately the necessary intelligence was not passed back to those who needed to know about it, and that little which did get back was basically dismissed as there was little supporting evidence. Montgomery cannot be blamed for not knowing about the presence of two understrength SS Panzer Divisions in Arnhem if he hadn't been personally told about them (amongst other intel deficiencies). Another problem with the operation was the radios used by the British Paras - they simply didn't work due to (I think) moisture getting to the crystals or something... If they had, then the dire situation could have been relayed back to HQ and the Poles dropped earlier (and on the right side of the river), supplies dropped in amongst the British soldiers instead of in fields covered by the Germans, and about a dozen other things too. There were a number of other issues such as the bridge being blown in the face of the US 101st which held up the advance by about a day, the stubborn defence of the bridge at Nimegen, and the single narrow road up which nearly every man, tank, artillery piece, and especially supplies was to move. Yes, it was a complex plan, but if it had worked, if the British Paras had been able to hold out another day or two and armour reinforcements arrived.... And now on to the reason the British were so hesitant - they'd been fighting the war just a bit longer than the Americans - a couple of years longer.... The British manpower reserves where almost spent, they simply couldn't afford to throw men away on operations that only had a marginal chance of success unless sufficient reserves were available to at least hold the gained ground. The Americans on the other hand hadn't really fought before Italy (Africa doesn't really count as a major engagement when you consider how few Germans were actually left and how few operational tanks Rommel had available most of the time). The Americans also had a massive pool of reserve manpower they could draw upon and hadn't suffered the near catastrophe of Dunkirk, nor Rommels drive across North Africa and into Egypt.
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If it moves, shoot it, if not push it, if it still doesn't move, use explosives. Nothing happens in isolation - it's called "the butterfly effect" Mors ante pudorem
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#262
12-29-2010, 06:41 AM
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These two items alone allowed him to out maneuver every attempt by the British to have the AEF ship over only riflemen and machinegunners; their stated desire was to use these troops to reinforce the depleted British divisions,following the 1916/17 battles. They were to serve under "experienced British officers" The problem is looking over the histories of the period, one is left wondering just how many experienced British officers had not been killed or wounded following the battles of the Somme and Ypres to name two particulary bloody diasters. Pershing wanted to field American divisions, under American command. And there was unholy hell to pay when it became apparant to the British that the Americans were not going to turn over their troops to British command. When reading British histories from the post war period, one is left with the impression that the Americans were idiots, commanded by cowards and fools incapable of the simplest staff work. Every American victory was achieved at tremendous cost and only because of superior British cooperation by taking pressure off the Americans where there any successes... The stand of the 3rd Division on the Marne and the counterattack by the 2nd Division at Belleau Woods gave notice to the Germans that the "green" Americans were well trained and aggressive. To be certain, losses were heavy when attacking the entrenched Germans; but to be brutally honest, every other Allied nation that had attacked dug-in Germans had suffered worst losses. The difference was that the Americans were cracking the German defenses. When the Germans launched their sudden counter-attacks, the Americans were holding and then launching their own counter-attacks. They were taking the hard, bloody lessons of the previous years and learning from them. By the end of the war, the German High Command regard the Americans as their most dangerous foe. Throughout the American involvement, Pershing guided the AEF, protecting it from the Allies and leading it through its campaigns. In the post war years, certain British historians made it a point to slam Pershing for every decision he had made. But the greatness of Pershing is that he won, defeating the Germans on the field of battle and the British in the hallways of power. And there are damn few commanders who can make that boast!!!
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#263
12-29-2010, 07:01 AM
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If you dig a little deeper I think you'll find that was the Australians..... The ANZACs (Australian and New Zealand Army Corp) suffered the greatest casualty rate of any of the western nations (because the British always put us into the thick of things), but also gained, man for man, the greatest amount of ground.
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If it moves, shoot it, if not push it, if it still doesn't move, use explosives. Nothing happens in isolation - it's called "the butterfly effect" Mors ante pudorem
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#264
12-29-2010, 07:12 AM
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To be sure the intelligence failed in warning of the presence of two understrength, battered SS Panzer Divisions. These divisions proved the key to encircling and slaughtering British 1st Airborne Division and holding the key bridge at Nimegen. But it is also true that the decision to drop the Brits over 12km from their target, and then to drop the division over three days doomed the Arnhem fight to a certain conculsion. The failure to drop a regiment on the bridge at Nimegan was a operational failure...but the 82nd Airborne always had the primary mission of seizing a low ridge mass that provided plenty of positions for artillery observers on that damned highway. The loss of a key bridge early in the fight also speaks volumes about the difficulty of running "a one track railroad". Airborne divisions have minimal engineer support and none of what they had was dedicated to building bridges to support armor. The failure of the Guards Armored Division to assign engineer bridging support to the front of their column was a major failure...but one forced on them by the tactical situation that they faced. But then when one throws armor up a highway covered with over a dozen bridges, would it not be fair to assume that the enemy would get lucky, at least once? Finally, Monty did have access to a wonderful source of intelligence. The Royal Dutch Army. A full brigade was operating with the British and yet their knowledge of local conditions was ignored. And to add insult to injury, the pre-war Dutch Army staged their field exercises in the Nimegen/Arnhem area, they were well aware of the difficults of the terrain and they even knew about the Driel ferry and how it could have been used to transport reinforcements and supplies north of the Rhine. I have always felt that Market-Garden accomplished several things; first it created a sixty-mile long bulge that led nowhere (and indeed several miles of it had to be abandoned during the fall when the Germans started flooding the Rhine); it destroyed one airborne division and shot up two others; it diverted attention from the vital clearing of Antwerp and the clearing of Antwerp's even more vital passage to the sea, causing further supply problems for the Allied forces. The planning and execution of Market-Garden showed Monty at his worse.
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#265
12-29-2010, 07:23 AM
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The ANZACs were never present in large enough numbers to dominate the Western Front. By the end of 1918 there were over two million American troops present for the next offensive. And I've always felt that the casualties suffered by the British Colonial troops is what made Pershing so hesistant to allow the Brits to have command of American troops. To be certain, during the crisis of 1918, Pershing did allow troops to serve under the British and his fears were confirmed.
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The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#266
12-29-2010, 07:38 AM
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"The Canadians played a part of such distinction that thenceforward they were marked out as shock troops; for the remainder of the war they were brought along to head the assault in one great battle after another. Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line they prepared for the worst." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militar...ng_World_War_I "Australian and Canadian divisions deployed amongst British forces in France quickly came to be regarded as the best shock troops in the Allied ranks due to their ferocity in battle, and were employed accordingly." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_troops "The Canadian corps, now known everywhere to consist of shock troops second to none on the western front, was frequently used as the spearhead with which to pierce particularly tough parts of the enemy defenses." http://www.oldandsold.com/articles26...r-one-26.shtml Of course, this is not to disparage all the other forces who fought bravely and of course were equally feared by the Germans. One thing that is interesting is that aside from the native (Indian) snipers, Canadians were not known as being as good shots as the British in the early war or the Americans in the later war. The CEF was raised from a small pre-war militia and neither had the professionalism of the early BEF nor the time and resources to train like the later AEF. Tony
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#267
12-29-2010, 11:42 AM
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For reference I would class both Montgomery and Patton above Rommel as commanders as they both were masters of logistics, something which Rommel ignored to great cost. "Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics."
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#268
12-29-2010, 11:55 AM
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Me, I've become something of a Montgomery fan over time, recognizing that he had to work with the tools he had-- a British army that had been defeated more often than not, and was on the wrong side of the manpower curve. The British seemed to do well in controlled, "set-piece" battles, and not when improvising. Against the Germans, one needs to bring one's "A" game, and not just slap something together. That's something Alanbrooke tried very hard to impress on US staffers prior to D-Day, too.
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My Twilight claim to fame: I ran "Allegheny Uprising" at Allegheny College, spring of 1988.
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#269
12-29-2010, 12:25 PM
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In WW1, the reason the Australians had the highest casualties of any combatant nation was that the ANZACs relied almost entirely on British logistical support; their army was almost all teeth and no tail. Look at the casualties as a proportion of combat troops and the figures are a lot more level. This in no way detracts from the enormous courage shown by the ANZACs; the British Army in WW1 was full of things which probably seemed like a Good Idea At The Time.
Another GIATT was the "Pals" battalion. Many units were formed of volunteers from a particular location; in extreme cases from a particular workforce. One example was the 15th Battalion Highland Light Infantry, also known as the Glasgow Tramways Battalion as many of the troops were peacetime employees in the Glasgow public transport system. The theory was that men who had lived together, worked together and even supported the same football teams would fight well as a unit. In practice, this meant that when a battalion took heavy casualties, that could mean an entire town where almost every family had lost a member.
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#270
12-29-2010, 01:09 PM
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