Isegoria is on a roll, on the sort of thing he does best - deep historical thinking on military matters.
Who was a tougher WWII opponent, the Germans or the Japanese? If those traits could have been combined, we might not have been able to win. It might even be that probably we couldn't have won. Yikes. I'd extend his thinking to say that al Qaeda was trying to introduce some of the German General Staff concepts to what is essentially a WWII Japanese mindset. Thank the Lord and the U.S. Military that they cut that particular experiment short.
Perhaps that's Osama bin Laden's great Strategic Fail.
Who was tougher, WWII Marines or today's Marines? Very interesting reading. Two different approaches to the problem of how you bring maximum firepower to bear.
If you (like me) groove on military history, you should be following him. Just sayin'.
6 comments:
I doubt very much that the combination of strict, professional armies and fanatical enthusiasm could ever be cleanly married. That being said, i also doubt that if one were to be able to amrry them that it would work any better than one or the other alone. YOu have to beat your opponent's tactics. Once you've beat his tactics, you've beaten him. A professional army retreats from the field to regroup and fight another day. A fanatical army keeps charging until you've slaughtered them all.
Which is the more difficult to defeat?
I find myself thinking that I'd rather have the fanatical army, that allows me to finish them all off after they've been beaten and I have superiority over the field, rather than the professional army, that leaves, regroups, and considers other ways to best me on another day.
Thanks for the kind words, Borepatch.
As to Goober's point, I suppose you want professional officers and fanatical enlisted men.
I think we would have defeated them even if their best traits had been combined because both the Japanese and the Germans had a fatal flaw that was the same: their executive military leadership was dysfunctional. They ware dysfunctional in different ways, but both the Germans and the Japanese suffered mightily from a top military leadership that made everything else they did much less effective.
Biggest problem with both the Germans and the Imperial Japanese was that they believed their own propaganda. "Aryan supermen", really? Descendants of the "sun goddess"? Really?
They underestimated us. They always do.
MAJ Mike
We didn't beat them in the field. We beat them in the factories.
B-17s, B-29s, tanks, trucks, rifles, artillery, rifles, and an unending stream of bombs and bullets.
Yes, it took soldiers, sailors, and Marines, but the war was won with resources.
Plus, ze germans were busy being fanatical with the soviets. many were willing to surrender by the time we got there (also a supply issue).
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