Lexicus
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The parallels between the right's view of the Vietnam War and the Dolchstoßlegende are creepy though.
History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VIII
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The parallels between the right's view of the Vietnam War and the Dolchstoßlegende are creepy though.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
With an outfit like that, we have to assume that the glamour of Dastardly Villainy was what drew him to military service in the first place.
"While the general course of the western campaign of 1914 is well known, much uncertainty remains about what the Germans actually planned to do."
-Hughes and DiNardo, p. 231
In fact, the Reichsarchiv concluded after the war that there was no blueprint and no written plan whatsoever for the conduct of operations after deployment. This makes sense and is consonant with the war planning of the other Great Powers in 1914. France, for example, made use of Plan XVII, which Marshal Joffre insisted was only a deployment plan and not a war plan. Reemphasizing this point is another great service Zuber did; contrary to the common myth that the German war plan of 1914 had a strict timetable (the "six weeks" claim mentioned above), the German General Staff's expectations about the campaign were open-ended. In fact, there is good evidence that the Germans were surprised that they succeeded so well in the initial battles. Most accounts of the fighting before 27 August 1914 are full of astonishment at the results, which the regimental historians universally described as a "triumph for [their] peacetime training!" If they expected the war to be over in the West within six weeks, they certainly didn't show it.
So much for a blueprint for victory. However, in order to make deployments, the general staffs of the various countries had to have a general concept of operations, and the chiefs of the general staffs would have had to create instructions to guide the subordinate army commanders and their staffs in the direction intended. Joffre was correct that Plan XVII was not a war plan, but he did have a general idea of what he wanted to do with it, contained in the plan itself: launch a general offensive to the northeast against the German army. His specific deployment strongly favored an attack on both sides of the Metz-Diedenhofen fortress complex, which was, as it turned out, exactly what the French Army did in August 1914. Moltke, too, must have had some concept of operations contained in the mobilization and deployment document (or Aufmarschplan).
The original Aufmarschplan documents were destroyed by a British firebombing raid on Berlin in 1945 that destroyed a warehouse full of Reichsarchiv archival material. We do not have any part of the original documents.
What we do have, in terms of unimpeachable primary sources:
1. The Aufmarschanweisungen (mobilization and deployment instructions) for three (Fifth, Sixth, Seventh) of the seven German west-front armies;
2. small portions of General Moltke's Lagebeurteilung (General Situation brief) for the west-front armies, published by the Reichsarchiv before the destruction of its archival material as part of the German official history Der Weltkrieg; and
3. the Lagebeurteilung specific to the Sixth and Seventh Armies, written by the Chief of Staff of the Bavarian (Sixth) Army, General Krafft von Dellmensingen, in early August 1914 (after mobilization began, but before fighting started) and found in his Nachlaß.
We also have documents left behind by several of the German General Staff and field army officers after the fact, as well as their memoirs. These are less unimpeachable because many of them were composed after the campaign of summer and fall 1914 ended.
One of Moltke's problems was that he (and Schlieffen, his predecessor) relied heavily on war games, exercises, and written strategic problem tests to convey his philosophy of war and expectations for the German field army commanders. He saw his task as being that of a teacher in peacetime, and more of a supervisor than field marshal during the war itself. He would train the generals, and they would have the flexibility to respond to specific situations as they saw fit, within the context of his teachings and general principles. This may have been an admirable attempt to account for the problems of fog, friction, and decentralization in modern warfare, but it left the field army commanders largely directionless and, well, able to act as they saw fit. Moltke issued few directives during the campaign itself, in sharp contrast to Joffre, who spent August and September 1914 manically driving from command post to command post to ensure that his commanders were doing what they were supposed to be doing.
Kind of, but the US Army was highly critical of its management of the war in Vietnam after the fact, which spawned the very doctrinal renaissance that I mentioned. The Army's conviction that it had lost a winnable war led to a series of reevaluations that, in Army lore, eventually spawned the fully updated variant of FM 100-5 Operations that contained its new modern doctrine. There are still plenty of individual US Army officers who do whine about things like political interference in Vietnam that allegedly made the war impossible to win, but there are people who will complain about anything, and the Army institutionally seems to view the conflict as "we screwed up in a bunch of ways and needed to do a bunch of things better".
This is in sharp contrast to the German Army's memory of the First World War; not everybody subscribed to the claim that Jews, republicans, workers, and socialists lost Germany the war, but most of the army's officers were quite happy to blame a small number of officers, who were conveniently dead or ailing, for the defeat. They admitted no institutional faults.
Could've been worse. He could've gone with the truly evil "pointy ghost" look.
As it was, Mackensen was so awesome that the Nazis had to try to steal his look to make themselves seem cool by association. But I'm pretty sure nothing could've made Theodor Eicke and the rest of the SS-TV seem cool.
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Lexicus
Deity
Granted, but do you think that matters to the anecdotally large number of right-wing internet posters I have seen claiming we "lost" Vietnam because we were betrayed by the press and the liberals? The fact that the US Army gained a lot of technical knowledge of counterinsurgency operations from the experience in Vietnam doesn't seem wholly relevant to the political question there, except that it's useful to note the US Army was much less ready to publicly fan the flames than was the Reichswehr.
Ajidica
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But was Vietnam winnable? While I'm no expert on it, everything I have read on it suggests to me that while we didn't have to lose the war, it wasn't really possible to win it short of embarking on honest-to-god crimes against humanity and a land invasion of the north. Any invasion of North Vietnam was going to seriously escalate Soviet and Chinese aid to Vietnam and bring us dangerously close to a Yom Kippur War situation where Israeli tanks almost started shooting at uniformed Russian soldiers in the outskirts of Damascus. Conversely, the successive military kleptocrats we kept sticking in South Vietnam had neither the ability -or even desire- to implement the reforms necessary to get popular support and get the Viet Kong weak enough for the ARVN to handle it on their own.
I dunno. That's not my area of expertise. I used to have stronger opinions on it, but not anymore.
Well, yeah. But that's just fascists. To them, there's always someone else who is the enemy responsible for everything wrong in their lives.
r16
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thanks to all , and especially Dachs for his bringing the entire stuff up to date . One book / tons of opinions works up to a point but ı wouldn't have known the later developments and the like , now that ı was considering Zuber as a German history graduate of late 20s maybe , with a Anglo American name and shunned for good ... Saving the page , need to read it slowly as well .
Sure thing.
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This isn't really a question. But I was recently reading Panzer Battles, the memoir of General Friedrich von Mellenthin, who was in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.
Mellenthin is associated with many skillful German armored maneuvers, like the Battle of the Chir River (which is still basically required knowledge for any armor officer nowadays) and the fighting around Zhitomir. He is widely and correctly regarded as an authority on the subject. But I had to laugh at one comment he made late in the memoir.
As chief of staff, Mellenthin was often paired with Hermann Balck as his commander. Balck, who was one of the contenders for best German armor officer of the war, was rushed to take command of Army Group G in the fall of 1944, and he demanded that Mellenthin be transferred to join him in order to keep the team together. They were presented with a tough mission. Army Group G covered the southern part of the German lines in the west, and in September they were in a state of collapse. As such, Balck and Mellenthin were responsible for stitching together some sort of defense against the onrushing tanks of George Patton's Third Army. When Balck and Mellenthin arrived in the west, they were thrust into the thick of things, as the Germans were in the middle of a counterattack. The panzer forces amassed for the counterattack, however, got stuck in the fog, where the power-traverse turrets and stabilized main guns of the American Sherman tanks gave them the upper hand. When the fog cleared, American tactical airpower appeared, and Jabos ripped the panzers to shreds. This battle, Arracourt, was one of the most lopsided armored battles of the war, a total victory for the Americans.
In discussing the results, Mellenthin bitterly pointed out that the rules of armored warfare apparently did not apply to fighting the Americans and their fighter-bombers.
This is...a little ridiculous. Tactical and close air support were always essential to armored offensives. Without the Luftwaffe and its Stuka dive-bombers, the Germans might not have even defeated France, let alone fought all the way to Moscow and Stalingrad. Once the Luftwaffe began to collapse, the German advance in the east also stopped. Once the Germans lost the ability to even contest the skies, they began their long, uninterrupted retreat. Air superiority - or at least, no threat of enemy air attack - being the prerequisite for offensive success was already one of the "rules of armored warfare". Mellenthin just had sour grapes.
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This isn't really a question. But I was recently reading Panzer Battles, the memoir of General Friedrich von Mellenthin, who was in the Wehrmacht during the Second World War.
Mellenthin is associated with many skillful German armored maneuvers, like the Battle of the Chir River (which is still basically required knowledge for any armor officer nowadays) and the fighting around Zhitomir. He is widely and correctly regarded as an authority on the subject. But I had to laugh at one comment he made late in the memoir.
As chief of staff, Mellenthin was often paired with Hermann Balck as his commander. Balck, who was one of the contenders for best German armor officer of the war, was rushed to take command of Army Group G in the fall of 1944, and he demanded that Mellenthin be transferred to join him in order to keep the team together. They were presented with a tough mission. Army Group G covered the southern part of the German lines in the west, and in September they were in a state of collapse. As such, Balck and Mellenthin were responsible for stitching together some sort of defense against the onrushing tanks of George Patton's Third Army. When Balck and Mellenthin arrived in the west, they were thrust into the thick of things, as the Germans were in the middle of a counterattack. The panzer forces amassed for the counterattack, however, got stuck in the fog, where the power-traverse turrets and stabilized main guns of the American Sherman tanks gave them the upper hand. When the fog cleared, American tactical airpower appeared, and Jabos ripped the panzers to shreds. This battle, Arracourt, was one of the most lopsided armored battles of the war, a total victory for the Americans.
In discussing the results, Mellenthin bitterly pointed out that the rules of armored warfare apparently did not apply to fighting the Americans and their fighter-bombers.
This is...a little ridiculous. Tactical and close air support were always essential to armored offensives. Without the Luftwaffe and its Stuka dive-bombers, the Germans might not have even defeated France, let alone fought all the way to Moscow and Stalingrad. Once the Luftwaffe began to collapse, the German advance in the east also stopped. Once the Germans lost the ability to even contest the skies, they began their long, uninterrupted retreat. Air superiority - or at least, no threat of enemy air attack - being the prerequisite for offensive success was already one of the "rules of armored warfare". Mellenthin just had sour grapes.
I also want to point out that the Americans were simply more experienced and better trained at this point. They were led by their own armored-warfare legends, like General "P." (for "Professor"; his real first name was John) Wood, Colonel Bruce Clarke, and Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams. The tankers in Fourth Armored had trained exhaustively before the Normandy invasion and had fought their way through the Germans in Operation COBRA. By comparison, the quality of German panzermen was markedly down from earlier in the war. Many of the crews of the Fifth Panzer Army in September 1944 were poorly trained. Their leaders were often experienced veterans of armored warfare, like General Hasso von Manteuffel, but those leaders were no longer working with the elite early-Welle veterans of the Reichswehr that had filled the mobile divisions early in the war. That also mattered.
Pretty much the only advantage the Germans mustered at Arracourt is that many of their tanks were the heavily armored Panther-As, which had a more ballistically effective main gun than did the American Sherman tanks and M-10 tank destroyers. The heavy armor and big gun mattered in a long-distance duel, but Arracourt was a close-quarters knife fight where the Sherman's own technical advantages were more important. And in every other major category - in troop quality, air support, and leadership - the Americans came out on top. Which is how a numerically superior force of the vaunted German Panzerwaffe was ripped to shreds by the much-maligned Amis.
Weren't the Germans of the late 30s-early 40s really the creators of the concept of combined arms warfare?
Ajidica
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I'm sure dachs will correct me, but all major countries were experimenting with combined arms since late in the Great War. It was just a matter of figuring out how to put it into practice and getting the equipment needed to carry out combined arms well. The Nazis initial plan for WWII was a quick thrust into Belgium so they could threaten the channel and then settle down into a war of attrition and hope the Allies would settle for peace before the German home front collapsed. The great emphasis the German military placed on combined arms was in part due to how they had been undergoing re-armament for longer than the Allies and in part because they knew they didn't have the industrial, financial, or manpower resources France or the UK could call on (and the less said about America the better) and put a lot of effort into figuring out how to perfect the Napoleonic maxim of concentrated force.
r16
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well , ı do like Americans , when they are not supporting Counter-Revolutions and the like . Nor can deny they at times have first rate people . So , only as some contribution , isn't Arracourt the one where Luftwaffe throws everything into the ring and sends up every fighter to stop the American Jabos and they get intercepted 300 miles from the contact point , around their airfields in Paris , thanks to Ultra ?
combined warfare preference must be a relic of 1918 where Germans infiltrated successfully but ran out of support and cover , never minding the food stores that immediately stopped like starving attack battalions like no other . Hence Ju-52 gets a lot coverage not only for the paratroopers it dropped but for the fuel barrels it carried forward , but don't know much about food . (Excepting Demyanks , Stalingrad and possibly Tunus .)
combined warfare preference must be a relic of 1918 where Germans infiltrated successfully but ran out of support and cover , never minding the food stores that immediately stopped like starving attack battalions like no other . Hence Ju-52 gets a lot coverage not only for the paratroopers it dropped but for the fuel barrels it carried forward , but don't know much about food . (Excepting Demyanks , Stalingrad and possibly Tunus .)
Kind of yes, kind of no.
The coordination of all arms in some sort of synergistic fashion was around before armored warfare. For example, the close coordination of infantry, support weapons, and artillery was one aspect of the solution to the geometric increase in firepower before the First World War - a solution that every army in the world had worked out, even if it was awfully difficult to put it into practice. They didn't have armor to add to the equation until 1916.
Armor started out in a weird place on the battlefields of Europe and the Middle East. One of the methods that finally helped both sides unlock the Western Front stalemate in 1918 was achieving operational and tactical surprise while simultaneously amassing the firepower needed to achieve breakthrough and the reserves to maintain an advance once the front line was broken. This was an extraordinarily difficult thing to do! Since the Germans relied on artillery for their firepower, they solved the problem by developing extremely thorough means of maintaining operational security, and by improving their fire support and artillery preparation procedures to minimize the length of a bombardment while simultaneously maximizing its destructiveness. Tanks were the Allied solution. They could be massed quickly, without need for a lengthy artillery preparation, and they were at least somewhat mobile, albeit unreliable. Armor made General Mangin's counterattack at Soissons in July 1918 - the turn of the tide on the Western Front - possible. It was a strategic surprise, because OHL had convinced itself that the French military was incapable of further offensives, but it was also an operational surprise, because German higher commanders could not detect Entente preparations until the tanks were literally rolling into the German trenches.
Since armored attacks were largely conceived of as a way to eliminate the need for artillery preparation, it became difficult for some Allied leaders to conceive of them as working together with artillery. Everybody understood that tanks and infantry needed to be closely coordinated in theory, although the breakdown of that rule in practice made for high casualties among Allied tankers. But few people grasped the notion of coordinating them with other arms, as well. Even the British and Commonwealth efforts to closely coordinate their fires in the fall of 1918 looked less like modern combined arms: the various elements of the army were being employed in the same place, but not necessarily synergistically, if that makes any sense. (For what it's worth, there are some historians who argue that the BEF did have a concept of synergistic combined arms. I disagree, but it's a reasonable argument.)
Between the wars, many militaries developed a better understanding of combined arms. (Some armies developed a worse understanding; a few British officers with high profiles became convinced that tanks could fight on their own without any infantry at all, which was absurd on the face of it and led to considerable friction within the service with those officers who weren't so given to fantasism.) They also developed the most important tool for making it possible: the man-portable radio. Battlefield communications in the Great War were generally based on runners, flares, and signal flags, which made coordination almost impossible (and led to a frightening amount of fratricide from artillery units on both sides, even late in the war, as memorably related by Ernst Jünger in Storm of Steel). The radio unlocked that particular problem and made it possible for forward infantry and armored units to call for support more or less instantly.
The Germans, however, were the first military to create formations that were capable of actually synergizing the various components of an army. The real genius of the early-war panzer formations was that they had enough infantry, artillery, pioneers, AT weapons, AA, recon light armor, and so on, and so forth, so that each panzer division, in conjunction with close air support delivered by the excellent system of Luftwaffe liaisons, could operate as a single coherent combined-arms unit. The French Army also made efforts toward developing a unit that could execute a combined-arms mission - the "mechanized Light Division" (Division Légère Mécanique, or DLM) - but there weren't enough DLMs and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time when the panzers came crashing through the Ardennes in 1940. Also hampering the French was that many French tanks were designed so that only commanders' vehicles got a crucial radio; German tanks allotted a radio to each one, which made coordination and organization on the move possible.
By comparison, the British Army still concentrated its tanks in extremely tank-heavy formations with few attachments of relevant things like "infantry", and sent them charging at enemy AT fronts as though they were the Light Brigade in the Crimean War, an unflattering description which has not needed modification with time. It took until the second half of the war before the British military started making combined-arms battle groups. Even then, coordination between arms was poor; there was a significant disconnect between artillery and everybody else, and another between infantry and armor, which led to a lot of unfortunate situations. The Royal Engineers and the Artillery were outstanding technicians, but failure to closely communicate with infantry commanders led to either a lot of dead Tommies or a lot of Tommies who couldn't get past the LD. Neither one of those is conducive to offensive success.
The US military took its cue for organizing its armored divisions from the Germans, with a decent amount of homegrown theory and experience. American armored divisions of the 1944 model were amply supplied with infantry and not just tanks (although they did have an impressive number of tanks that American generals even managed to effectively command and control), were almost always fully motorized (unlike German panzer divisions, which were lucky if they could get halftracks to motorize even one of their infantry battalions), had better access to self-propelled artillery, and could draw on an even mightier air force than the early-war Luftwaffe for backup. The "combat command" system that the Americans developed, of structuring armored divisions in semipermanent subunits that were explicitly designed to be ad hoc independently operating combined-arms formations, was also wise; it drew a great deal from the German Kampfgruppe method, the British battle group, and so on. To top it all off, the US even developed some tactical innovations that the panzers and Luftwaffe had lacked, like Pete Quesada's concept of continuous fighter-bomber armored column cover that worked wonders in the fighting in France. The Americans needed two years to work out the bugs from their ideas about ground warfare, but once they finally did it the US armored division was probably the most fearsome such unit on Earth.
Soviet theorists came up with their own innovations in armored warfare. When making the first stabs at turning the ideas of "deep operations" developed by Svechin, Triandafillov, Tukhachevskii, and others into a real doctrine, Soviet officers came up with the concept of a mechanized corps. Like the British tank formations, however, mechanized corps were much too armor-heavy compared to infantry, and they were also probably too large to effectively command. Red Army officers were clearly unhappy with the concept based on combat experience in Spain, but they were unsure about how to best improve it, which along with the purges goes some way to explaining why the mechanized corps were disestablished and then suddenly reestablished in the years immediately before the Nazi invasion. During the desperate fighting of 1941, the naysayers' fears came true: the mechanized corps were ineffective on the battlefield and possessed little capacity to maneuver effectively. The mechanized corps were done away with once again during the fall of 1941 and the entire tank force was reorganized in units no larger than brigade strength. As the war ground on and Red Army commanders gained experience, they slowly rebuilt larger armored formations until six whole Tank Armies - the equivalent of a German panzer corps in firepower - existed from 1943 onward. A Tank Army, however, were more exploitation force than integrated combined-arms unit, at least in theory; in practice, they were usually reorganized to add enough infantry to make them effective.
One of the most useful Soviet combined-arms techniques from 1942 onward was the forward detachment. Armored officers in the Second World War were quite aware that reconnaissance units would have to fight to maintain an effective screen and gather intelligence, so they were equipped with vehicles designed for light armored warfare: the German Achtrad and Puma scout cars and the infamous Sd. Kfz. 222, the American M8 Greyhound, the British AEC and Staghound Armoured Cars, and so on. The Red Army went them one better. Soviet forward detachments weren't meant merely to fight for their information, but to actually maneuver tactically and conduct penetration attacks. They were used by both tank and rifle formations during the war, tailored specifically to the needs of the moment (deep penetration attacks by tank forces would need a different sort of forward detachment than defensive operations on the flanks by rifle forces), and served as the fundamental basis for Soviet combined-arms doctrine after 1945. Soviet development of the motorized rifle division's structure would not have been possible without the forward detachment concept first imagined in the 1930s and then tested and improved in wartime.
So, to answer the question:
Doctrinally, the Germans were not the only military that had ideas about combined arms in the 1930s. Soviet and French writers did, too, along with some Americans, and the Red Army and French military had gone to some efforts to put those ideas into practice. But in terms of force structure and inter-service cooperation, the Wehrmacht was the military that was able to make those ideas work well on the battlefield first. When Guderian's XIX Army Corps (mot.) fought its way across the Meuse River at Sedan in May 1940, it fought perhaps the first well-run combined arms battle in world history.
that really needs to stop being a reflexive thing to say on these forums
Looks about right to me.
I think it's fair to describe the armies of Alexander and the early successors as "combined arms". The various elements of the army often worked together in a fashion that made them more than the sum of their parts.
My main concern is that it's hard to tell in classical warfare how intentional anything was and how much of a retrospective, anachronistic label "combined arms" is. Edward Luttwak tried to talk about the "grand strategy" of the Roman Empire several decades ago without actually demonstrating that ancient Roman writers - let alone ancient Roman leaders - even thought in strategic terms. Similarly, while many classical military authors discussed the various elements of a Hellenistic army, they rarely described them as intentionally working synergistically, and the actions of Hellenistic officers on the battlefield often make it hard to believe that there was much of a coherent combined-arms idea there.
SS-18 ICBM
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How reducible is pre-Industrial warfare to simple rules of thumb?
Hm. How do you mean? Are you talking about the practice of learning how to fight, and what people participating in the fighting would've learned? Or are you talking about the analysis of warfare and its outcomes?
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
Could it be taught through simple rules? That's the main thing, but I am curious about the other stuff as well.
For the most part, it had to be taught through simple rules. Even in the modern era, it's often difficult to get commanders to ratiocinate, which is why they have staffs. Dennis Showalter, discussing the wars of the 1860s, comments that commanders' decisions seemed to come as often from their "ductless glands" as from any in-depth consideration of the issue. He's speaking of the era of refined texts on the art of warfare, too: Clausewitz, Jomini, Archduke Karl, D. H. Mahan, and the rest. Presumably, the soldiers of earlier eras were equally prone to careful consideration, that is to say, "not very".
The concept of "strategy" did not exist until the last few centuries, and "operational art" did not exist until the 1920s. "Interior lines" were first articulated by Jomini; battlefield concentration by Moltke. There are many such useful means of analyzing warfare, and we can try to explain some events in the past through using these ideas, but we should always be careful about being overly anachronistic. In reality, most commanders' decisions were constrained by what was logistically possible, which was "not much". Some modern writers, like Liddell Hart, have tried to crowbar the warfare of the past to fit their conceptions of modern warfare, and in doing this they are mostly wrong. Dead preindustrial generals seem to have generally understood varying levels of risk based on their actions, but rarely quantified or referred to it in their writings. Many generals had a rudimentary understanding of when it made sense to fight and when it did not, but many explanations of lost battles centered on religious, personal, or prestigious reasons rather than a clear explanation of what happened on the battlefield. The notion that, say, Alexander the Great, or Zhuge Liang, understood the concept of a cumulative and reinforcing series of combat actions designed to synergistically produce a desired outcome, is nonsense.
This is not to say that the simple rules that they learned were always wrong, or that they were all idiots. For example, much of Sunzi's Military Methods is still applicable in some way to the modern conduct of war, and he does not only touch on battle but on many other aspects of warfare. Military manuals of some kind were written by most "civilized" classical Eurasian societies; most of them were very narrowly focused on tactical minutiae not applicable to other times and places, but a few of them touched on general principles. The more general their subject matter, the less complex they were, such that Books 7 and 10 of the Arthaśāstra (the ones on warfare) and the thirteen chapters of Sunzi bingfa were considerably simpler than, say, Polyainos' Strategemata, which included 900 examples of tactical tricks employed by various commanders in Greek and Roman classical history. They divided armies into types of soldiers and understood what the different types of soldiers were good at doing, and they generally arranged them on the battlefield before fighting in order to achieve specific effects tailored to their armament and fighting style. Even explaining these things could take up large manuals, like Arrianos' Techne taktike (only the second half of which was of practical use for then-current - i.e. Roman - warfare; the first half was probably just classicizing anachronistic garbage).
The limitations of the sources cause a similar problem for us when trying to understand the vast majority of combat; experimental archaeology can help somewhat, but can never provide a full and definite answer. We have only recently begun to understand that some generally-accepted truisms about warfare in the past are totally implausible and that either the sources did not describe what occurred very well, or we misread the sources (usually the first one alone or a combination of the two). Historians were much more confident about what they did and did not know about some aspects of ancient battle back in the 1970s and 1980s than they are today, which is why texts like John Keegan's The Face of Battle are often such difficult reads nowadays.
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