Top 11 Stupid Moves of Early WW1

[SilverDragonRed]

I was browsing the Great War channel on YT when I found they made Top 11 list yesterday. What are your thoughts on it?

[Sea Skimmer]

This guy is kind of a moron.

[Simon_Jester]

Running down the list...

11) Ottomans launch offensive against Suez Canal in early 1915, are spotted by aerial reconnaissance, and their attack gets pounded. From a purely Wikipedia level of information, the Ottomans send about twenty-five thousand men to attack the canal, and the defenders turned out to have thirty thousand. This is an unfavorable balance of forces but not totally unreasonable, especially since the Ottomans may well have underestimated British strength. Even without total surprise, they should have had at least a chance of seizing a lodgement on the banks of the canal at some point, which is all they'd need to cut it, I would think.

Moreover, the Ottomans may well have not expected the British to be keeping up regular air patrols in that time and place, or may have taken precautions they thought were sufficient to avoid being spotted by reconnaissance planes but proved inadequate. Or they may have been relying on German/Ottoman aircraft to fend off the British scouts- at this time, while aerial reconnaissance was known, air warfare was still a very new thing, and it would have been nearly impossible to form a realistic impression of what one's own planes could and could not do to defend against enemy planes.

...

10) A disastrously mismanaged campaign by Enver Pasha in January (?) 1915. Can't comment on that.

9) Breakdown of communications at Neuve Chapelle, resulting in failure to effectively exploit a breakthrough of the German lines by British forces. The man in the video mocks this. I must point out:

-Everyone's communications were rather primitive at this point in the war, it's not like you could whip out a walkie-talkie.
-The war had not really been going on long enough for a new and highly reliable communications establishment to be created at this time; such things require more than a few months.
-Again this is based on a Wikipedia level of knowledge, but I am seeing claims that reserves WERE sent in in a timely manner, they were simply unable to punch through or fight past a relatively small number of German troops defending critical strongpoints.

So this doesn't sound like a stupid move, so much as it sounds like an army that was inadequately prepared in 1914 for a task no one knew how to perform. Which is a good description of all sides of the entire war in pretty much every way possible anyhow.



May do more later; right now I feel like heading back to bed.

[Ziggy Stardust]

11) Ottomans launch offensive against Suez Canal in early 1915, are spotted by aerial reconnaissance, and their attack gets pounded. From a purely Wikipedia level of information, the Ottomans send about twenty-five thousand men to attack the canal, and the defenders turned out to have thirty thousand. This is an unfavorable balance of forces but not totally unreasonable, especially since the Ottomans may well have underestimated British strength. Even without total surprise, they should have had at least a chance of seizing a lodgement on the banks of the canal at some point, which is all they'd need to cut it, I would think.

Moreover, the Ottomans may well have not expected the British to be keeping up regular air patrols in that time and place, or may have taken precautions they thought were sufficient to avoid being spotted by reconnaissance planes but proved inadequate. Or they may have been relying on German/Ottoman aircraft to fend off the British scouts- at this time, while aerial reconnaissance was known, air warfare was still a very new thing, and it would have been nearly impossible to form a realistic impression of what one's own planes could and could not do to defend against enemy planes.

Take this with a grain of salt, because this is based off of what I remember from a book I read about the Middle East theater during WWI that I don't have handy at the moment to double-check.

Anyway, IIRC, the Ottomans knew that British aircraft could/would spot them as they crossed the Sinai peninsula. However (for specifics that I don't quite recall), they had a not totally unreasonable belief that they could trick the British into thinking they were trying to cross the Canal at a different point of attack than they actually were. And, in fact, I believe they were almost successful in effecting that surprise, as I believe the initial raid was thwarted when the Ottomans crossing were spotted in the middle of the night.

However, I believe one of the overall motivations for the Ottoman attack was based on the mistaken belief that the Muslim population of Egypt would rise up against the British. The Ottomans, IIRC, knew the British forces at the Canal were numerically stronger. However, they believed that they could gain a quick surprise victory and gain a foothold on the other side of the Canal, at which point anti-British rebels would attack the British from behind. Something to that effect, anyway. The exiled Khedive of Egypt, living in Constantinople, had been telling the Ottoman higher-ups that he was so beloved by the Egyptian population that they would immediately cast off the yoke of British oppression to welcome back their beloved Bey. This, of course, turned out to be folly, as I believe the German advisors tried to warn the Turks.

[Elheru Aran]

Egypt and the Ottoman Empire had a fractious relationship throughout history. Occasionally the Ottomans would take over Egypt for a while, but Egypt generally ended up maintaining its independence. So it's no surprise the Egyptians would've flipped the Turks the bird, seeing it as a fairly blatant shot at re-conquest.

[Alkaloid]

This guy is kind of a moron.

Care to elaborate? I'm sure your thorough and enlightened analysis of the strategic and geopolitical blunders of the opening year of the first world war will prove to be far, far superior and naturally indisputably correct.

[Simon_Jester]

It is instructive to read accounts of 1900-era warfare; I recently reread Winston Churchill's The River War, a book he wrote in 1899 detailing the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of (the former Egyptian province of) Sudan.

Most of the weapons used in early World War One are present in that campaign, or their immediate precursors are... and yet the tactics are essentially Napoleonic-with-railroads. No one seemed to think this was odd or unusual, and it worked quite well, all things considered, just as nations using basically those same kinds of tactics had done all right in the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War when the weapons were vastly more primitive.

What was missing, really, was any concept of how these new weapons and technologies would perform when combined with a dense transportation infrastructure, multiplied by the enormously larger scale of mobilization of European conscript armies. And literally no nation involved in the conflict really had a means to handle that.

So when it came down to clashes of hundreds of thousands of men, armies large enough to form continuous fronts hundreds of kilometers long (totally unprecedented in modern warfare!), armed with weapons so powerful that they could slaughter ten thousand people in an afternoon, retreat and be ready to do it all over again ten kilometers further back the next day...

This was simply an outside context problem. No one had a system of communication adequate to the task. No one had a doctrine for breaking a fortified position that could not be surrounded because it was a true line and not a system of defenses around an isolated point, not when that line could regenerate itself further back over and over again.