Why US generals were more successful in World War II than in later wars.

[Dachs]

Even as that may be, according to the lecture lots of generals were relieved of command in the second world war for delivering mediocre results. If you had put this question to the guy, Mr. Ricks, he would probably respond that it is hard to point to any specific instances of inspired generalship during the post-war era. Mediocrity and risk aversion (his terms) crept in as a result of the rotation system, according to him, so that no, you wouldn't find anyone doing an outright bad job and taking undue risks and making it impossible for the US to win. You just wouldn't find anyone doing an outstanding job, either.

You emphasize that the nature and/or parameters of the new conflicts are so different; perhaps these conflicts have not allowed for bold deeds, so to speak. I argued that people back home protested the conflicts on such a scale and manner that it made things much more complicated for the army, but I mainly brought this up because the lecturer said the same thing but did not explain. I don't see how these points don't coexist.

Again, the lecture had a narrow focus. He seemed to be zeroing in on an internal matter because his audience was Army ROTC. He didn't go into our points.

Mmm. I understand the point.

Risk aversion is a Bad Thing and I understand what he's going for there. But I disagree about where it comes from in American generals, and I also disagree about the value of "inspired" generalship.

I think Tom Ricks is a pretty damn good journalist with an understanding of the modern US military that dwarfs my own experience, but I also think that he might be suffering from a bit of recency bias in this case, if these are the arguments that he's making.

Allies could have launched d day in 1943. If the can land 9 divisions in Sicily you could have landed them in France 1943.

German Garrison in 43 was weaker along with the Atlantic wall. German production was also lower. All the toys they had could have been made in 43 as well.

No, they couldn't have.

Marshall wanted to avoid deploying troops to North Africa, a secondary theater. However, British pressure to help relieve Eighth Army in Egypt pushed the Americans toward launching Operation TORCH. (Again, coalition management: not everybody's strategic interests are the same.) Marshall understood that TORCH would effectively push the invasion of Northwest Europe to 1944. However, he himself didn't really have any other suggestions. Roosevelt pointed out, quite correctly, that if the Americans focused on the buildup in the United Kingdom in 1942 and 1943 then the US Army would be taking itself out of the war for those years. He wanted the Americans to do something against the Wehrmacht, but in 1942 the US was definitely incapable of invading Europe. The desultory conclusion was North Africa.

In both theaters of war, Marshall fought hard against the diversion of assets to secondary tasks, like the brilliant strategist that he was. However, he was unable to effectively answer the British criticisms of the ROUNDUP plan to amass assets in Britain. For political reasons as much as anything else, the US Army had to get into the fight in 1942. Marshall understood that the internal logic of the Mediterranean theater would make it hard for strategists to be willing to close it down to focus on the main effort against Hitlerism. He knew that once North Africa was conquered, it would be impossible to resist the argument for moving on to Sicily, and from there to Italy, all the while sucking up valuable soldiers, equipment, and ammunition that could have been clearing a path to Berlin. Roosevelt and Churchill were made very aware of those arguments and opted to fight in the Mediterranean anyway.

Even had Marshall won his argument with the other Americans, it would have been impossible to sell the British on a real 1943 invasion. (Brooke agreed in principle to it at some early CCS meetings for tactical purposes, to get the Americans to agree to some British priorities.) Some of the British arguments were good (the Western armies were probably not ready to go toe to toe with the Nazi colossus on its home turf yet), some were not as good (the brainless "soft underbelly of Europe" nonsense), and some were unanswerable due to differing national priorities (the security of Egypt and Malta, opening the Mediterranean for traffic with India, British influence in the Balkans, etc.). Britain was also not the only ally to have national priorities in the Mediterranean. The Free French, too, argued in favor of fighting in North Africa to rebuild their armies and prepare for the redemption of the metropole.

The delay to 1944 proved highly valuable for the Western Allies in other ways. In 1943, the West had not yet secured air superiority over Western Europe. Its strategic bombers were not capable of the overpowering force they would be able to deploy the following year. The Luftwaffe still had high-quality avgas, good airmen, and lots of airframes. Launching the Normandy invasion after the colossal successes of "Big Week" and the Transport Plan bomb strikes gave the Allies a far bigger advantage than the Germans gained by working on the Atlantic Wall and mounting their buildup in France. Air superiority was the sine qua non of a successful offensive in the Second World War.

That's also not to speak of the advantages in experience that accrued to the Allied commanders and staffs after extensive fighting in the Pacific and Mediterranean. By 1944, the Americans and Commonwealth forces had an extremely well developed amphibious warfare doctrine, based off of the experience of Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio. Airborne doctrine was not as well developed but still in a far better place than it was in the summer of 1943. Douglas Porch argues persuasively that the Mediterranean theater was the "path to victory" not in and of itself - the defeat of Italy would not and could never bring down Nazism - but rather because in large part it served as the school of the Allied armies. Learning those lessons in the desert and in Italy was far better than trying to learn them in the middle of the apocalyptic, war-deciding struggle for Western Europe.

 

[Lexicus]

I disagree with this appraisal of what happened in 1944.

The problem that the Allied generals had during the battle for the Westwall was not about an aversion to taking casualties, and it was not about a "broad front". The "broad front" is largely a misnomer based on the memoirs and postwar lectures of Field Marshal Montgomery. The SHAEF plans before the invasion, that Eisenhower used as a basis for his concept of operations in August and September, was for a two-pronged, two-phase battle. He wanted to fight the reassembling Wehrmacht on the western side of the Rhine and he wanted to gain the advantages of advancing on mutually supporting axes. These were fundamentally good choices that were founded in an intelligent appraisal of the situation. They are sound operational art. Modern officers would have little to argue with in the SHAEF concept. Montgomery's "broad front" libel was typical of his refusal to intellectually engage with concepts that he himself did not originate.

However, Eisenhower and SHAEF's concept was not something that could be imposed from top down. The Supreme Allied Commander had to keep both American and Commonwealth forces moving in the same direction constructively. He could not simply dictate orders without an extremely high political cost. Eisenhower and SHAEF understood that the Wehrmacht was rapidly reconstituting itself and that there could be a sharp fight for the West Wall and the Rhine. Bradley and Montgomery, however, did not agree. Both generals incorrectly believed that the Wehrmacht was in a state of total collapse, as it had been in August, and that their armies should remain in a pursuit configuration. Bradley thought that the Germans were weak everywhere and wanted to keep pushing to gobble up as much territory before an eventual stop. Montgomery understood that the Germans were creating some defenses but incorrectly believed that they would be a thin crust that could be easily cracked by a single operational-level penetration attack. Both men lobbied politically to get Eisenhower to water down the existing two-thrust, two-phase attack into a bizarre mutant with a poorly defined main effort. They then committed actual insubordination in effectively rewriting Eisenhower's orders (Montgomery) and misleading him to get him to make the decisions that they wanted him to do (both, but especially Bradley). They were in fact too aggressive, not insufficiently aggressive, and that was why they failed.

These errors were extremely difficult to avoid. Eisenhower could not impose his vision on his subordinate commanders in large part because he had to be a coalition manager, not a generalissimo. And in September 1944, the Western armies were operating with a fairly low margin of error. German force regeneration was proceeding rapidly. The Allies were at the end of an extremely tenuous supply line that wouldn't be effectively reestablished until December if not January. During the initial fights for the West Wall, the American and Commonwealth forces didn't have overwhelming airpower and armor to throw at the Germans: they didn't have the fuel, railroads, replacement vehicles, parts, open airfields, or infantry replacements that they had had in Normandy. They were near culmination. The distance between victory and defeat was razor-thin.

A concept of operations that might have worked would have been to designate British Second Army and US First Army as the theater main effort and aim them at Wesel and Aachen-Köln respectively. Those attacks would have been in mutually supporting distance, and those field armies' presence on the Rhine would have been impossible for the Germans to ignore. If First Army were properly concentrated, rather than dispersed (with V Corps attacking in the Ardennes, VII Corps aimed south of Aachen, and XIX Corps north of Aachen but two weeks too late due to poor supply priorities), it would probably have been able to punch through. Second Army would also have had a tough fight in difficult terrain, but it would've been a much easier fight than what it actually got in MARKET-GARDEN. If those two field armies could have crossed the Rhine, assisted by the First Allied Airborne Army, German defenses west of the river would have become untenable. However, the Allies would still have been at the culminating point of their offensive. They would have had to halt anyway for awhile - but at least they would have been across the Rhine.

Such a solution would have been reasonably close to the SHAEF concept but utterly impossible to enforce due to the nature of coalition warfare. Montgomery and Bradley would not have been able to make that happen in September 1944, before the Allied window closed. They didn't fully understand how quickly the Germans were rebuilding their forces, and they were far from alone. Victory disease wasn't exactly a malady unique to Bradley and Montgomery. The Red Army piled up horrific casualties throughout the war when it pursued offensives beyond culmination, which was constantly (and, in fact, happening concurrently in September-October 1944, as their offensive in East Prussia was repelled). The Germans stuck their collective dicks out at Moscow, Stalingrad, and Alamein and got them chopped off for similar reasons. It's an extraordinarily difficult thing to keep an offensive going for that long before it has to stop, which is why, I think, my view of the Allies' failure is a little more charitable than yours.

Ironically, out of all the field army commanders under Eisenhower's command, Patton came closest to doing his job correctly in August-September 1944. He was in charge of a tertiary offensive that generated an opportunity for follow-up (an opportunity that was not taken because theater main effort was elsewhere) and that attracted German reserves away from the main effort. Despite some mistakes committed during the crossing of the Moselle due to Patton's own slowness to recognize the end of the pursuit, Third Army reorganized quickly and was able to push enough troops across the river to defeat a German armored counterattack at Arracourt. Patton made much more severe mistakes later that autumn, certainly, but out of all the field army commanders he is a bizarre target when complaining of incompetence. Courtney Hodges was far worse in virtually every way.

I don't think that this is really the case. I think that political processes made some officers in the Second World War untouchable despite horrific failures. Douglas MacArthur is the ultimate example, of course, but there were others. Meanwhile, it's hard to point to any specific untouchable generals in the post-1945 wars that have made it impossible for the US military to win. What are the staffing situations that would have made real scenarios change?

I think the parameters for victory are much more important. The Second World War had a defined end state. Some other recent wars did and do not.

The political nation determines the parameters for any war's success or failure.

You can say the exact same, down to "three years later", about the Republic of Vietnam.

I'd like to say I intentionally was being polemical in order to provoke a post like this, but the truth is the popular historians I've read uncritically reproduced Monty's narrative and I stand corrected.

 

[zazazuzu]

I haven't read this thread. I'll simply answer the question posed in the thread title.

Because they weren't hampered by considerations of civilian casualties, or long term civilian consequences. The war they waged was very rightly seen as a war of survival, so that considerably freed their hands when it came to how that conflict was conducted. In any similar conflict now, any generals on staff would also be thought of as 'geniuses'.

 

[abradley]

Just finished this video where George C Herring gives a good run down on Vietnam and effectively sez 'You can't get there from here.' It was hopeless!

But in his narration he mentions Gen Creighton Abrams who replaced Westmoreland and how he'd started turning the war around but we were gone.

A Better War : The Unexamined Victories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (1999)
http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/829

So the war was winnable, but not with the Johnson's staff.

We needed officers that believed in winning like in WW2 Operation Compass and General Richard O'Connor.

 

[FriendlyFire]

Allies could have launched d day in 1943. If the can land 9 divisions in Sicily you could have landed them in France 1943.
German Garrison in 43 was weaker along with the Atlantic wall. German production was also lower. All the toys they had could have been made in 43 as well.
Patton wasn't a nice human being, over rated General, incompetent not so much. That would be Churchill only thing he was good at was stand up to Hitler and making speeches his military ideas and adventures sucked.

Churchill might have sucked as a general but he did a better job then a Meth addicted Hitler
I doubt a second front adventure in france would have worked out so well, attacking the German weaker allies was a pretty good strategy, though the terrain of mainland Italy was a terrible choice.

Maybe taking Sardinia next would have been a better choice.

 

[Dachs]

We needed officers that believed in winning like in WW2 Operation Compass and General Richard O'Connor.

This battle has literally nothing to do with anything about the Vietnam War.

 

[r16]

the 1943 case apparently is argued by some British Diplomat Cripps who might have supported working with the Commies and stopping them at the Gates of Balkans and the like . But the thing is USN was badly "hurt" by Pearl Harbour and it needed a "visible" offensive against Japan and try as they might the Aliies did not enough landing ships to support both the Atlantic and the Pasific . Italians were poor allies which justified an "easy" attack on them , while Nazism was very interested in making the French "brothers" . A 1943 Normandie would have been opposed with more German assets , while Italy was prime defensive country .

 

[abradley]

This battle has literally nothing to do with anything about the Vietnam War.

Agree, but both battles had commanding generals with their attitudes towards war fighting.

 

[abradley]

A few posts above I posted a video entitled "Why we failed in Vietnam." that showed why we couldn't win.
The below video recounts Westmoreland life and gives more info about what we did wrong during his Vietnam tenure, with another general we might/should have won.

 

[Hrothbern]

Long vid again.
I just wrote some down what I picked up:

For Westmoreland "the measure of merit in the war of attrition was bodycount"
Search & Destroy actions his pet.

To a US Senator: "we're killing these people, the enemy, at a ratio of 10 to 1"
The Senator: "the American people don't care about the 10, they care about the 1"
But Westmoreland never got it.
And that "1" was US troops only, not the casualties of the ARVIN, the South-Vietnamese troops, not the casualties of South-Vietnamese civilians.

As General Maxwell Tara, Westmoreland's long time patron, put it: "we never gave a damn about them [the ARVIN]"
US Ambassador Bunker, a hawk, had the same general criticism as expressed in his communication to the President in 1967, just before Westmoreland was replaced by General Abrams, after 4 years as supreme commander in Vietnam.
The idea of Westmoreland was: "get in, do the job, get out, enjoy the glory of victory". All without the ARVIN. Without really training them, without having the ARVIN participating.
And related: Westmoreland did not understand "pacification" as well.
That during the war the North-Vietnamese troops got better and better equipped, from US weapons picked up, from better USSR-Chinese weapons & equipment, surpassing after a while the South Vietnamese ARVIN....affecting the morale of the ARVIN...
Westmoreland never got it.
When Westmoreland was back in the US end of 1967, he stated that "we have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view", "the enemy's hope are bankrupt" and to a joint session of Congress another optimistic message. He later described his attendance there as "his most memorable moment of his military (!) career, and his finest hour"
The Vietnam war dragged for another 7 years until 1974. The first 4 year with Westmoreland as Chief of Staff of the US army. Westmorelnd continued to defend his military approach in Vietnam until he died.

The vid shows that Westmoreland did not got it and believed strongly in his own approach, ignoring info directing otherwise.
The vid does not really explain how the war could have been won.
You could even argue that the war was won because communism as China-USSR puppet was blocked, because Vietnam had a huge national self-confidence after the war including enormous amount of (also US) military equipment.

If I wind back time to the period my info was restricted to the Dutch TV news, newspapers, some background TV docs and articles in the late 60ies, early 70ies, during that war...
The picture in NL given already around 1968 was that this war was impossible to win in the traditional sense.
* North Vietnam fought a full national, peoples, freedom war whereby casualties did not stop them, nor would ever stop them (unless nukes would be used).
* The war was asymetrical and the US abundance of ammo, firepower, bombing, tanks, airplanes, choppers, had little effect on monsoon jungle guerrilla.
* The South Vietnamese regime was corrupt and impopular, and a puppet of the US. How would that support a genuine South Vietnamese army fighting for its own population ?
* This was also a war between an Asian people against a "superior" Western country. That goes deep. We, the Netherlands, had from the freedom war of Indonesia learned how strong such sentiments are, and how effective simple guns, even with shortage of ammo are in a jungle guerrilla warfare (like shoot one Dutch soldier in the knee, to take out three Dutch soldiers on a mission)
* and increasingly: the optimism of US generals was not believed anymore.


If I now look back at it... also at the Westmoreland metric of: "we're killing these people, the enemy, at a ratio of 10 to 1"
Besides the fact that this metric ignored casualties among South-Vietnamese civilians and soldiers.
How silly to think that this would work !
North-Vietnam had a population growth of roughly 500,000 people per year. Both genders were fighting the war.
=> North-Vietnam could afford to lose at least 250,000 soldiers a year without affecting the normal demography and economy.
A CIA report even mentions that North-Vietnam had issues from a too strong population growth, an overpopulation: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00875R001900010212-2.pdf

 

[Cutlass]

There was no real prospect of an American win in Vietnam, even before the military screwed up everything.

 

[abradley]

Long vid again.
I just wrote some down what I picked up:

For Westmoreland "the measure of merit in the war of attrition was bodycount"
Search & Destroy actions his pet.

To a US Senator: "we're killing these people, the enemy, at a ratio of 10 to 1"
The Senator: "the American people don't care about the 10, they care about the 1"
But Westmoreland never got it.
And that "1" was US troops only, not the casualties of the ARVIN, the South-Vietnamese troops, not the casualties of South-Vietnamese civilians.

As General Maxwell Tara, Westmoreland's long time patron, put it: "we never gave a damn about them [the ARVIN]"
US Ambassador Bunker, a hawk, had the same general criticism as expressed in his communication to the President in 1967, just before Westmoreland was replaced by General Abrams, after 4 years as supreme commander in Vietnam.
The idea of Westmoreland was: "get in, do the job, get out, enjoy the glory of victory". All without the ARVIN. Without really training them, without having the ARVIN participating.
And related: Westmoreland did not understand "pacification" as well.
That during the war the North-Vietnamese troops got better and better equipped, from US weapons picked up, from better USSR-Chinese weapons & equipment, surpassing after a while the South Vietnamese ARVIN....affecting the morale of the ARVIN...
Westmoreland never got it.
When Westmoreland was back in the US end of 1967, he stated that "we have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view", "the enemy's hope are bankrupt" and to a joint session of Congress another optimistic message. He later described his attendance there as "his most memorable moment of his military (!) career, and his finest hour"
The Vietnam war dragged for another 7 years until 1974. The first 4 year with Westmoreland as Chief of Staff of the US army. Westmorelnd continued to defend his military approach in Vietnam until he died.

The vid shows that Westmoreland did not got it and believed strongly in his own approach, ignoring info directing otherwise.
The vid does not really explain how the war could have been won.
You could even argue that the war was won because communism as China-USSR puppet was blocked, because Vietnam had a huge national self-confidence after the war including enormous amount of (also US) military equipment.

If I wind back time to the period my info was restricted to the Dutch TV news, newspapers, some background TV docs and articles in the late 60ies, early 70ies, during that war...
The picture in NL given already around 1968 was that this war was impossible to win in the traditional sense.
* North Vietnam fought a full national, peoples, freedom war whereby casualties did not stop them, nor would ever stop them (unless nukes would be used).
* The war was asymetrical and the US abundance of ammo, firepower, bombing, tanks, airplanes, choppers, had little effect on monsoon jungle guerrilla.
* The South Vietnamese regime was corrupt and impopular, and a puppet of the US. How would that support a genuine South Vietnamese army fighting for its own population ?
* This was also a war between an Asian people against a "superior" Western country. That goes deep. We, the Netherlands, had from the freedom war of Indonesia learned how strong such sentiments are, and how effective simple guns, even with shortage of ammo are in a jungle guerrilla warfare (like shoot one Dutch soldier in the knee, to take out three Dutch soldiers on a mission)
* and increasingly: the optimism of US generals was not believed anymore.


If I now look back at it... also at the Westmoreland metric of: "we're killing these people, the enemy, at a ratio of 10 to 1"
Besides the fact that this metric ignored casualties among South-Vietnamese civilians and soldiers.
How silly to think that this would work !
North-Vietnam had a population growth of roughly 500,000 people per year. Both genders were fighting the war.
=> North-Vietnam could afford to lose at least 250,000 soldiers a year without affecting the normal demography and economy.
A CIA report even mentions that North-Vietnam had issues from a too strong population growth, an overpopulation: https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00875R001900010212-2.pdf

Interesting, but can't agree withe the conclusion. May I suggest you read Lindell Hart's '
The Strategy Of Indirect Approach' https://archive.org/details/strategyofindire035126mbp/page/n15

Free legal download in most formats.

Some consider it more important then Clausewitz's 'On War.'

That's all folks.

 

[Dachs]

Interesting, but can't agree withe the conclusion. May I suggest you read Lindell Hart's '
The Strategy Of Indirect Approach' https://archive.org/details/strategyofindire035126mbp/page/n15

Free legal download in most formats.

Some consider it more important then Clausewitz's 'On War.'

That's all folks.

This is not really the foundation for a discussion. You don't bring in any specifics and simply hurl a book recommendation at the other poster. If you want to have a fruitful discussion on these lines, you should actually summarize what Liddell Hart had to say on the Vietnam War, and say why you agree with it.

Basil Liddell Hart was a very prolific writer. He is not generally regarded nowadays as having had very much useful insight into warfare. After all, he was only ever a company grade officer during his military career (and an early twentieth-century British one at that) and immediately moved into punditry, where he remained the rest of his life. His technique was to grab hold of the latest military fad with both hands and write it up relentlessly. His written arguments were always more forceful than reasoned. And like some other think-tank-style writers who ventured into discussing history, his conclusions have been repeatedly savaged by historians with a more well-developed understanding of the events he wrote about.

Liddell Hart's vaunted "indirect approach" was based on the not-at-all-revolutionary concept that doing unexpected things in warfare is good. That's basically it. No one would argue with the watered-down version of this thesis, but he went much further and claimed that great results in warfare were only possible through an indirect approach. Unfortunately, most of warfare consisted and consists of relatively straight-up force-on-force collisions from squad level on up, so this meant that he stretched the meaning and applicability of "unexpected" in comically absurd ways to account for all the military victories that came about through anything other than a Cunning Plan. He vaguely waved his hand in the general direction of psychology by asserting that generals find it difficult to reset after something unexpected and that this can set the condition for the entire rest of a battle or campaign, but of course, as a pundit, he rarely did the legwork to demonstrate any of that.

Instead, he aggressively misinterpreted existing history to try to shoehorn anything and everything into his indirect framework. Probably the funniest examples of this came in the text you linked, published under the titles The Strategy of Indirect Approach and Strategy, an extended rewriting of the military history of the (Western) world with his precious indirect approach at the fore. He made the bizarre claim that, in the American Civil War, George McClellan generated the Union's best chance to win the war through his "indirect" Peninsular Campaign aimed at Richmond. Never mind that the Peninsular Campaign was in no way unexpected, that it was aimed at the wrong objective (the relatively meaningless capital compared to the extremely important Confederate field armies), that a capture of Richmond without an extended demolition of the South's ability to make war and keep slaves would have been worthless, and that McClellan was perhaps the worst general officer in the US military to command such an ostensibly war-winning stroke. Instead, Liddell Hart blamed Lincoln's supposed parsimony for the campaign's failure, which has, um, literally nothing to do with reality.

Another glorious example came from his misreading of the so-called Schlieffen plan, in which Liddell Hart compared a massive field army of three million men spread out across hundreds of miles as a "swinging door" because an attack against one end would supposedly cause the other end to pivot about more quickly? It...yeah, it was bad. It was bad long before the likes of Zuber and Holmes forced a reevaluation of the campaign of 1914; people knew it was dumb even compared to the stuff that we now know is inaccurate.

Liddell Hart was in no way a more influential writer than Clausewitz, and he certainly wasn't a more insightful one. Clausewitz was the guy who came up with the concept of the center of gravity, who emphasized fog and friction, and who discussed the interplay of warfare and politics. He's the guy whose book has remained both popular and useful, where most writers on warfare fall into one category or the other. By comparison, Liddell Hart was Churchill's Good Idea Fairy and the gadfly of the interwar British military press.

Given his antipathy to genuine historical insight, I find it difficult to believe that Liddell Hart would have had much useful to say about the Vietnam War. I am, of course, willing to be proved wrong. Unfortunately, the linked version of Strategy is not one that includes his later attempt to discuss strategy in the atomic age and how to fight partisan wars.

 

[abradley]

This is not really the foundation for a discussion. You don't bring in any specifics and simply hurl a book recommendation at the other poster. If you want to have a fruitful discussion on these lines, you should actually summarize what Liddell Hart had to say on the Vietnam War, and say why you agree with it.

Did I ask for further discussion, not to my knowledge. I thought I ended with

That's all folks.

As far as "hurl" a book, is linking to a book 'hurling'?

As for Lindell Hart's 'Strategy' try this https://www.classicsofstrategy.com/2016/01/liddell-hart-strategy-1954.html

Not hurling, just a suggestion.

 

[r16]

little Hart's chances of staying in the limelight were also hurt by being a man of some British Defence Minister in the Press , by the looks of it and the guy being Jewish or something he had even less popularity . To overcome that he lauded any German General as long as he supported an idea that they learned it all from Little Hart and et all when it came to Blitzkrieg and armoured warfare . One can understand his quest to be remembered better only one suddenly feels old and there are less years ahead than to those already behind . Says the guy who hurt his arm opening the window yesterday and whimpered for 5 minutes .

as for ARVN being unpopular , one can already blame the Americans who thought Vietnamese were just another coloured bunch of people and what had worked in the Pasific and Korea should also work "now" , despite the fact that the fear of Korea was what limited the options of Americans to be extra brutal and stuff and perhaps go and invade North Vietnam and hope the insurgency would die away .

 

[Modder_Mode]

Because the Soviets took the brunt of it during WW2.

One of the Vietnam wars big mistakes was the "body count" rather than "land occupation" strategies, as some Vietnam vets will tell you, they'd fight for a hill, take it then leave and then fright for that same hill a week later.

 

[Zkribbler]

Churchill only thing he was good at was stand up to Hitler and making speeches his military ideas and adventures sucked.

He did invent the tank.

 

[Dachs]

Did I ask for further discussion, not to my knowledge.

You are posting in a discussion forum.

As far as "hurl" a book, is linking to a book 'hurling'?

As for Lindell Hart's 'Strategy' try this https://www.classicsofstrategy.com/2016/01/liddell-hart-strategy-1954.html

Not hurling, just a suggestion.

Since you are refusing to even explain your views, let alone engage in conversation, I suppose "hurl" is an inappropriate metaphor. Perhaps it would be better to call it "dropping a fetid, steaming turd in the middle of the thread and walking away".

 

[abradley]

You are posting in a discussion forum.

Since you are refusing to even explain your views, let alone engage in conversation, I suppose "hurl" is an inappropriate metaphor. Perhaps it would be better to call it "dropping a fetid, steaming turd in the middle of the thread and walking away".

I felt everything had been covered in my previous posts.

Am looking around 'don't see no fetid, steaming turd'.

Speaking of turd, am going to poop soon, nothing to do with you, just the old man needs to poop soon.