Originally posted by Old Greg
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Mince will be mince.
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Sigh. Don't encourage him. You'll go back and forth and it'll take him 20 posts to get the point, if he ever does.
Mince will be mince.Hard Brexit now!
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Originally posted by Old Greg View Post
Do attempt to explain where I am wrong, you may borrow Assgoos crayons.
I admit it is a little simple but I have to think of my audience.Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.Comment
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Originally posted by vetran View PostI thought you were a bit of a stats expert??
Assuming that the "donkeys" were responsible for excessive deaths etc. due to incompetence the statistics would clearly indicate the worst military strategists among the major players?
The Great War . Resources . WWI Casualties and Deaths | PBS
Country Total Mobilized Forces Killed Wounded Prisoners and Missing Total Casualties Casualties as % of Forces ALLIED AND ASSOCIATED POWERS Russia 12,000,000 1,700,000 4,950,000 2,500,000 9,150,000 76.3 British Empire 8,904,467 908,371 2,090,212 191,652 3,190,235 35.8 France 8,410,000 1,357,800 4,266,000 537,000 6,160,800 73.3 Italy 5,615,000 650,000 947,000 600,000 2,197,000 39.1 United States 4,355,000 116,516 204,002 4,500 323,018 7.1 Japan 800,000 300 907 3 1,210 0.2 Romania 750,000 335,706 120,000 80,000 535,706 71.4 Serbia 707,343 45,000 133,148 152,958 331,106 46.8 Belgium 267,000 13,716 44,686 34,659 93,061 34.9 Greece 230,000 5,000 21,000 1,000 27,000 11.7 Portugal 100,000 7,222 13,751 12,318 33,291 33.3 Montenegro 50,000 3,000 10,000 7,000 20,000 40.0 TOTAL 42,188,810 5,142,631 12,800,706 4,121,090 22,062,427 52.3 ALLIED AND ASSOCIATED POWERS Germany 11,000,000 1,773,700 4,216,058 1,152,800 7,142,558 64.9 Austria-Hungary 7,800,000 1,200,000 3,620,000 2,200,000 7,020,000 90.0 Turkey 2,850,000 325,000 400,000 250,000 975,000 34.2 Bulgaria 1,200,000 87,500 152,390 27,029 266,919 22.2 TOTAL 22,850,000 3,386,200 8,388,448 3,629,829 15,404,477 67.4 GRAND TOTAL 65,038,810 8,528,831 21,189,154 7,750,919 37,466,904 57.5 So British deaths & casualties by mobilised forces 35.8% were nearly half in percentage compared to Germany 64.9%. What where the Germans led by?
The French were at 73.3% yet they were on the same major battlefields as us for the majority of the war.
death wise it was
British 10.2% chance of death.
German 16.1%
French 16.1%
So the Lions had 6% fewer dying must have been a mistake the generals didn't kill enough to keep up with the others.
There are plenty of other stats to look at if you want.Using the express was meant to trigger your arrogance and as usual it worked you attacked the messenger not the facts
Personal attacks. Tut tut tut.Originally posted by vetran View Post
You have got yourself in a bit of a muddle.
First you talk about 'excessive deaths'. What do you mean by that? Excessive to what? The 'donkeys' analysis is really stating that poor strategic and tactical decisions were leading to unnecessary deaths. How can you possibly arrive at a point where you think that % of forces who were casualties demonstrates what you claim it does?
Simple it is, and we all know why.
Fundamentally you have thrown some numbers down, but without understanding what they mean within the context of the 'donkeys' analysis.
Classic vetran.
Here's a question for you. Given the differing historical analyses, what is your view of the 1943 Bengal famine?Comment
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Originally posted by Old Greg View Post
Sorry I shouldn't insult you that is your tactic when you are losing.
OK maybe a little simplistic but most people tend to measure military success by actually winning and the percentage of soldiers that died or were seriously injured to obtain that win.
The British won and a smaller percentage of our soldiers died compared to our allies or foes.
That does not support you & Ass's theory of widespread incompetence in our generals.
If you can suggest a better metric go ahead.Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.Comment
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Hard Brexit now!
#prayfornodealComment
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So now you are correlating military success with strategic and tactical competence on the battlefield. Can you really not see how this is wrong? Can you not see how economic factors, weapons development and weight of numbers play important role (and in 1918, critical roles as the Allies brought in new artillery and the Germans saw that they needed one more throw of the dice to knock France out of the war (the Spring Offensive etc.) before American troop numbers overwhelmed them and simultaneously the German economy collapsed.Originally posted by vetran View Post
The 'donkeys' analysis is (in part) that the British generals were wedded to an 'over the top' strategy that was ineffective and caused many needless deaths and which was repeated time and again. You can't expect to pick that up through these high level statistics. I'm sure there are good arguments against it (but my area of historical (kind of) expertise is 1600 years beforehand), but you won't find those arguments int the statistics you present.
The problem you have is that you are trying to use statistical metrics in the wrong way in a discipline like history. Stats can be useful in history. I recommend 'The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000' by Paul Kennedy, if you like that kind of history. But what is really needed is analysis and argument, and this is why there are often differing views.Comment
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Apparently the website didn't craash:
Shapps says the website didn’t crash; the slots for today were just taken up.
...
He says 16,000 online tests were booked and the site has been brought back up online now and more tests will become available tomorrow and the days after.“Brexit is having a wee in the middle of the room at a house party because nobody is talking to you, and then complaining about the smell.”Comment
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I dunno, I haven't applied for a gig in about 5 years.Originally posted by sasguru View Post
As pointed out in the briefing, the site didn't crash. It was just fully booked. CV testing is the new Glastonbury.
Sent from my ONEPLUS A6003 using TapatalkOriginally posted by MaryPoppinsOriginally posted by vetranComment
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Originally posted by Old Greg View Post
The 'over the top strategy' was pursued by all the armies along with Artillery, tunnelling , Gas and even tanks (a British invention enthusiastically adopted by the military that made trenches nearly obsolete in WWII).
The majority of soldiers were killed by artillery not going over the top so the 'over the top strategy explanation' you like doesn't hold water.
If 70% died by artillery not the machine gun that suggests every side quickly realised the machine gun was a lot more deadly than a Zulu with a spear so they dug trenches that would suggest that tactics changed appropriately in response to the situation - hardly incompetence.
The great misconceptions of the First World War - HistoryExtra
Not sure if this bloke knows what he is talking about he seems to disagree with our two experts
David Olusoga - Wikipedia
Seven out of ten British casualties were victims of artillery shells and the statistics were similar for the French.
None of the armies of 1914 had gone to war expecting a conflict dominated by artillery; they all planned for a war of manoeuvre and movement. But once the western front had stabilised in late 1914, the importance of artillery and high explosive shells increased enormously. Howitzers and mortars, once seen as specialist siege weapons, were manufactured in huge numbers and with each offensive the number and the calibre of the guns increased.
so same level of Artillery deaths as the French but about 6% more British soldiers lived? Damn those incompetent generals?
So why has this misconception come about? I think it is partly because many of those who were killed by the machine gun fell in tragic but dramatic offensives, calamities like the first day of the Somme, when the sheer scale of the bloodletting was so shocking that the events seeped into our national consciousness.
The death toll reaped by artillery, by contrast, was an incessant part of daily life. You did not have to be in an attack to be hit by a shell, you could be having breakfast deep in your trench. You could be miles behind the lines but still within the killing zone.
The war was close but the Americans came in and Germany made a massive tactical error. But we won it again not a sign of incompetence.
German defeat in the war was an inevitability
Wrong, says David Stevenson
There’s an idea that’s been put forward recently that the economic advantages on the Allied side were so enormous that there wasn’t any chance that the Central Powers could have won the war.
However, I think that the Germans – if, perhaps, not capable of winning the war outright – could have forced some kind of compromise in which the Allies would not have achieved many of their objectives.
The Allies were, after all, in a real mess in 1917. The Russians were in the midst of a revolution that would take them out of the war. And the failure of a massive French offensive in April 1917 produced widespread mutinies in the army.
As for the British, they were experiencing a major financial crisis at the beginning of 1917, and didn’t know for how much longer they were going to be able to keep funding imports from the US. The Admiralty had no answer to the amount of shipping that German U-boats were sinking – by 1917, the Germans had twice as many U-boats as they had in the spring of 1916 – and was extremely worried.
What denied Berlin the opportunity to capitalise on these Allied weaknesses was its decision to implement a campaign of what was called unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917.
Needless deaths suggest that the situation would have been different if the leadership was better than their peers. Comparing death statistics suggests that the chance of being killed was less in the British army than the German or French ones as they were all in roughly the same place. There are plenty of other experts that agree.
The fact fewer soldiers died compared to the other armies suggests the Generals were not incompetent.
Viewpoint: 10 big myths about World War One debunked - BBC NewsLast edited by vetran; 24 April 2020, 16:57.Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.Comment
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