Just watched a programme on channel 4, very thought provoking and in a similar situation today a very difficult decision to make.

kids today have no idea what they would have faced 85-90 years ago. A lot of people basically were told to go and die - imagine the sense of injustice of having been born at that time, and being denied the rest of your life?
Obviously WWII sent even more people to their deaths needlessly, but despots are born all the time and I've no doubt there will be another big war one day with many killed. The last five or so generations have been extremely lucky not to have undergone conscription or even national service of any kind. Joining the armed forces has become an option, and human rights bills protect those who do not wish to fight, so the choice is an individual's. It is very haunting to think of what many young men were forced to go through, and not being emotionally or psychologically equipped to deal with that.
It's very sad, but wars will always be fought as soon as somebody ill-equipped to handle power gets hold of it, and the cycle of death will continue

There were CO's who won the VC as medics/stretcher bearers so you can object and support but each has their own right to choose. Personally I'd do it all again tomorrow

WWII was certainly a different scenario = much more tactical and although the risk of death was high, at least it wasn't an absolute certainty like it was in WW1

I don't think Simon Sharma could have summed it up any better

Just how did these people manage to be commanding officers though?

What possessed them to wake up one morning and decide, 'i have a great idea, lets send wave after wave of people to run towards them lot over there and if they dont make it, we'll send more'

Genuis!!!!

Most of them became officers automatically as a result of being the remote descendants of someone who once did a favour for Charles 1.
As for the second question...God alone knows. Perhaps the result of not having sufficient brain cells to take a decision to stop, even when a course of action turned out to be disastrous...coupled with the usual aristocratic belief that the lives of hoi polloi really aren't worth bothering about

you hit the nail on the head with that last sentence I'm afraid. That's why the statue of General Haig was removed and melted down. Pity they couldn't have done it to the bloke himself. The reason the British are hated around the world is because of c-unts like that and what they did to people in those other countries, as well as what they did to their own. Things like the trade unions movement and the rise of the original, proper Labour party cut the legs away from these upper class wa-nkers, who would still be doing the exact same thing today if they could get away with it.

The main cause of WWI was the countries making their stupid alliances in the first place.
Just because the Germans had decided they'd like a couple of colonies too, and maybe had the right to their own navy, we sided against them and joined up with the most unnatural ally you could imagine.
Britain and Germany could have worked very constructively together as friendly nations - and avoided two world wars; not just one.
Even then it wasn't too late. We could have pulled out of the First World War on the grounds that we'd sacrificed enough of that generation.
Without British involvement the French would have fallen in less than a year. Did the French do us any favours after we saved their country? It seems to me the only thing they did was make damned sure there was going to be another war hot on the heels of the first.

In WWI, don't forget they didn't have the communications we have these days. Decisions on troop movements couldn't be changed in a flash. It took days to coordinate and prepare all the actions. Once the wheels were in motion it was virtually impossible to stop them.

Blame the commanders if you will, but above all blame the governments.

The whole thing was a morass. One of the reasons WW1 started was, probably, the countries involved had amassed so much armoury that some sort of action was felt to be obligatory, to justify that.

But I'm not sure what you mean by Germany and England working constructively together....to do what? To agree on which countries to colonise next and how to divide the spoils between them?

it was a glorious get-rich-quick past for the upper classes

There is many a true word spoken in jest...

Colony grabbing began 40 years before WWI. I don't think there were any interesting ones left for grabs by 1914.

Don't you think it paradoxical that the Franco-German axis became the backbone of a united-ish Europe? A UK-Prussian axis acting sensibly could have done that eighty years earlier. At a time when the ever-narky French had virtually no worthwhile contribution to make.

aye - all they ever done was to send spies to Hartlepool

Most wars are fought by working class lads defending the interests of the rich. Education is the answer , but in this country prefer you not to be educated, rather you be p*ssed or drugged up, talking about nothing else but football and reading the Sun.

I cannot think of one person I know who has ever read the 'Sun'

Its a paper printed by bounders, written by bounders and the less said about the readers the better

Well, I hadn't thought it paradoxical, no; not until now
But surely the last thing Prussians thought about at that time was uniting Europe? They were far too busy looking in their mirrors and preparing for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.....

Christ, I feel like I'm back in 1986 doing my History 'O' level

MadJohn would never let me copy his work.....

Here we go, the sme old prejudice about the so called generals in WW1, a little research and a bit of 'seeing the full picture' may help to see this more logically. ALL generals of all nationalities made the same mistake and why, because technically they were lost after the first few months of the war when its free flowing nature was bogged down in the trenches. most of those in high positions were equipped to fight colonial wars and wars where there was a vast difference in firepower between the two sides, the main powers never fought each other for 50 years prior to this. The First World war re-wrote the book on tactics and strategy and was the first example of war fought on an industrial scale and until the advent of weapons to break the stalemate i,e the tank, the stalemate was inevitable as were the results. All sides were short of ideas to break out as the book was being rewritten ... the book duly was and Hitler went through France and Belgium in weeks because they'd absorbed the mistakes and took to heart the tactics of two British officers who'd wrote books on the subject in the inter war years.
To put it bluntly they didn't have a clue, but no one else did either and they weren't eqipped to deal with such a war, but war on such a scale was unimagineable anyway.
Can we stop applying contemporary standards and hindsight to something that happened nearly a hundred years ago. it was a different world with different standards...and are ours any better than theirs?

But shouldn't our leaders have known about the weapons they'd been stockpiling?

Surely it comes back to the same thing...the people who created the war didn't bother about the people who were going to be using them

They weren't stockpiling anything it turns out, most of the stuff was pretty basic by todays standards but the ability to produce it on a bigger scale was the factor. Don't forget that because there hadn't been a meaningful conflict for many years, the politicians forget the consequences of war and march off blindly, like that nice Mr Blair did, generally, ex soldiers turned politicians would rather avoid it. Didn't the yanks denigrate Montgomery because as a General he was cautious with his mens lives...?

It would have been nice though if they'd realised after a few attempts instead of millions of lives, that throwing young men against machine guns wasn't really working.

True, but what would you have done, you can't walk away can you?..if you do you find you've lost.

Plenty of Commanding Officers died in the fighting, the culpable were the General staff - people like Haig.

I've just read Snowy's point.

At some point you have to accept that when a million have died with the same tactics its maybe time to try something else.

I read the Sun. I'm sure lots of people in Hartlepool do.

I'm thrilled for you, really

It's easy to pigeonhole people isn't it Talbot?

Damn right

What do you want, a medal

The sun is still a crap paper, chewing gum for the eyes

I have some positive thoughts about the Sun. Tom Newton Dunn (Defence Editor) is an old mate of mind and he genuinely gives a shit about the young lads and lasses serving in the military. He also arranged for the paper to pay for the video (unpublicised) when we did the Brothers in Arms re-release last year.

Well, I hadn't thought it paradoxical, no; not until now
But surely the last thing Prussians thought about at that time was uniting Europe? They were far too busy looking in their mirrors and preparing for the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.....[/quote]
I chose my dates carefully. The Franco-German economic axis developed in the 60s.
80 years before that was just after said war.

When all the Generals of all the nations involved couldn't work out what to do, it's obvious an impasse has reached and the result of this was new tactics did develop, but you can't afford to abandon the methods that are least stopping you from losing, ghastly as they were. The First World War was the great transition and while the new ways of fighting were being formulated, the old ways had to hold the line.... mores the pity.

Obviously, but we're dealing with humans here and the obvious never gets noticed.

I saw a programme recently about Verdun, where the German general's tactic was to simply kill as many French soldiers as possible, literally "Bleed France White".
He knew the French wouldn't retreat as Verdun was important to them strategically, but also like Paris it meant more to the French than just anywhere.

Fritz was busy wasting his generation too. So it should have been possible.

But if we had pulled out and left him to it, it wouldn't really have been our loss would it. France would have been conquered: so what? The Germans didn't have enough men left to go on a European rampage afterwards.

If there hadn't been an influx of new cannon fodder from the USA, assuming we'd stayed in it, the war would have fizzled out because there was no one left to fight it.

Which all comes down to the same reason every time since Louis XIV: Gallic pride.
The loss of Lorraine in 1870 rankled them. They saw 14-18 as a chance to get it back. When the war started they were as much inclined to attack Fritz as he was them.

So all those years living in Montpellier didn't give you an affinity for thr French then Mr Head?

Just what I've observed, Mr P. The French are good at many things but humility isn't really one of them.

From 1870 onwards, the Germans did have a habit of 'visiting' the French and kicking their door in, so to speak.

I think the obvious doesn't get noticed only when it's not in the interests of those making the decisions.
Anyway, Snowy, it has to be said we've moved quite a long way from your 'same old prejudices' argument. It seems to me that people have every right to the view you opposed, and that their view is based on more than prejudice

I was merely pointing out that WW1 was a war unlike any other war where the 'experts' were totally out of their depth through no fault of their own, technology had moved on and they were quickly unable to come to terms with it,
The trouble is that no one looks at it objectively and merely accept the same 'old prejudices' provided by the media in all its forms, something I was guilty of till I decided to read the views of all parties. I can only express my view and not tell people what to think, but sometimes these things are never quite black and white...Admiral Jellicoe said of his decisions at Jutland..."I am the man who can lose the war in an afternoon". sometimes in war, caution, not wanting to lose and hesitation, can cost the most lives of all, as no doubt Mr I can testify.