Dimitri > Recent Status Updates

The authors' conclusion sees an overemphasis in the optimal use of manpower rather than (MG augmented) firepower as the lessons of the Boer & Russo-Japanese wars were translated into the 1906 manual's dispersed formations - insofar as the army corps commanders took notice to really modernise their training.

"The lack of army group commands between the OHL in Luxembourg and the two field armies was certainly a major factor contributing to the Marne disaster" - meaning communication at a pace of 1 Q&A per X hours, via heavy wireless stations ranged 150 km apart, fragile telegraph lines & the time for (D)encryption.

In peacetime, Württemberg formations were based only in Württemberg; non Württemberg troops could be based in Württemberg only with the endorsement of the King of Württemberg, except for the fortress of Ulm, where the Kaiser reserved his right of assigning troops. The issue of the Ulm fortress was regulated in a specific contract between Prussia, Bavaria and Württemberg.

THESE INNER WORKINGS ARE GETTING COMPLICATED.

There existed a feeling that once the chips were down, the British government would perceive it to be in its interests to stand by the Porte (after the Crimea, it usually did). Perhaps crucially, the Turks believed that they would be calling Russia's bluff. St. Peterburg's financial problems were well known while Miliutin's army reforms still had some way to go.

The Russians were already determined on taking action, provided that is, that they could do so without most of the rest of Europe lining up against them, as had accoured at the start of the Crimean war.

The Germans probably possessed enough combat power around Bastogne to take the town by sheer weight but all the attacks had been piecemeal permitting the light 101st airborne & key attachments such as 10th armored to repeatedly react at critical sectors to prevent a significant breakthrough against a superior armor heavy force.

To be fair (to and Ike and Bradley and Patton...) based on how Twelth Army Group was receiving information from the front on 16-17 December, the situation looked like piecemeal efforts to kick-start small scale attacks, possibly spoilers for the US army's own offensive plans.

By not mentioning the Black Hand, the note lost an opportunity to line up all the monarchs of Europe in a display of monarchical solidarity against an avowedly terrorist organisation.

The Emperor had experienced many crises in his life & his reign had taught him the incalculable dangers of war. He realised that the assassination was a provocation; he was gently testing the brakes.

Nothing demonstrated better the 84 year old monarch's grip on affairs & commitment to peace than his first meeting with Berchtold, whom he counselled to speak with the outspokenly pro-Serbian Hungarian PM Tisza.

The publication of private memoirs of K.ü.K. Navy officers in the siege of Pekin offer a belated but valuable counterview to the conventional narrative much influenced by the Times correspondent. G.E. Morrison has dominated most Western descriptions, yet his correspondence was prejudiced with regards to the Austrians. The contingent was small, 36 out of 420 defenders, but it contributed a Maxim gun.

The uncoordinated attacks upon the heights of Hohenlinden crippled the Austrian army badly enough to put it out of the War of the Second Coalition. It was rebuilt, but the Emperor, focused on Italy, repeated the error of not giving command of the principal theatre (Rhine/Danube area) to archduke Charles. Napoleon himself went for the jugular at Ulm.

Lulled by the wildly over optimistic reports of the incompetent & boorish British envoy, Frederick was encouraged to think bribing a Russian minister would secure neutrality. He even denuned his units in East Prussia. On Christmas day an unwelcome present arrived: the payment notwithstanding Russia was preparing to put 100.000 men into the field against Prussia the following spring.

One of the greatest warlords of the 17th century had fallen victim to that one trait no Habsburg could ever forget or forgive: disloyalty.

As Wallenstein's bankers' financing system came more and more to resemble a giant pyramid sheme, it could only be sustained by Ferdinand the only way he could- by ceding yet more lands to the warlord. Next to the systemized plunder of levying contributions for the upkeep of the army without touching the treasury.

The Habsburgs had come a long way since 1218 when a modest count by the name of Rudolf had, through a series of battles & dazzling dynastic marriages, propelled a family of inbred Alpine nonentities into the cockpit of Europe.

Austria has not been lucky with its biographers. The two schools of Victorian liberals & German nationalists in the next century seemed to link hands over a sea of Austrian military ineptitude, with Talleyrand's quip "l'Autriche a la fâcheuse habitude d'être toujours battue" as bridge.

[2] Afterwards no one could any longer believe that Lenin's men could be talked into abandoning power. Since there was no effective armed opposition by socialist intelligentsia to them in the central regions of Russia, common sense dictated that the Bolsheviks could use brutality with impunity. The machine gun became for them the principal instrument of political persuasion. From the knowledge gained on January 5.

The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on 5.1.18 met with surprising indifference in Petrograd. There was none of the fury which in 1789 had greeted rumors that Louis XVI intended to dissolve the Parliament, precipitating the assault on the Bastille. After a year of anarchy, the Russians were exhausted. They yearned for peace & order no matter how purchased. The Bolsheviks had gambled on that mood and won.

The Bolsheviks had made their initial concessions to legality only because they could not be certain what the future held in store; they had to allow for the possibility of Kereksky arriving momentarily in Petrograd with troops, in which case they would need the support of the entire Soviet.

(After the failed july putsch) "All power to the Soviets" had lost its validity. The new slogan called for the liquidation of Kerensky's "miltary dictatorship". This was the task of the Bolshevik party, rallying itself behind all anti counterrevolutionary groups headed by the urban proletariat & supported by the poor peasantry.

Until 1904 formal war planning and informal studies mostly featured an Aufmarsch Ost, with 50-60% of the army counterattacking a Russian invader & only turning on the French after they left their border fortresses. One 1900 Denkshrift had a two-prong attack via Ardennes and Lorraine [which reminds me of Tannenberg] where the French could defend in Lorraine based upon their fortresses & mass in the Ardennes: no dice!

Nicolas like Louis XVI tought he was facing a rebellion not a revolution. He believed disorder could be quelled by force.
The Duma saw only themselves as capable of restoring order, but their political consessions had the opposite effect of transforming by 1 March the mutiny into a national contest between Duma & Petrograd Soviet.. with an irrelevant Tsar.

(Alltough) February Revolt is often depicted as a worker revolt it's important to emphasise that it was first & foremost a mutiny of peasant soldiers whom the authorities had billeted in overcrowded facilities in the Empire capital city. LIke kindling wood near a powder keg, these reservists born in the 1880s carried in their bones 3 centuries of serfdom, obeying only as long as there was mandatory punishment.

Time was running out in late '16: the opposition felt they were racing against the clock, the question was no longer if but when and IN WHAT FORM a revolution would occur, from above as a coup d'état directed by themselves or from below as a spontaneous and uncontrollable mass revolt.

Thus in the midst of war a new Russia was quietly taking shape within the semi patrimonal state, resembling the vigorous growing of saplings in the shade of an old decaying forest. The participation of citizens without rank in government institutions & the introduction of worker representatives into industrial management were symptom of a silent revolution, effectively to meet actual needs instead of utopian visions.

(Panzerkreuser Potemkin) was Eisenstein erst mit "Streik" herausgearbeitet hatte, kommt nun im ganzen wie in Detail voll zur Anwendung. Historisches Material wird als dialektischer Prozess betrachtet und in dialektischer Form dargestellt.

There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness. It all depends on where you set the bar and how hard you look. What is a myth is that we are mostly mentally well most of the time.

" The guilt of the industrialists and financiers, as Shea saw it, was that they had given Hitler the material means to rearm Germany, with full knowledge that Hitler planned to use these armaments to carry out his program of German aggrandizement by military conquest."


The sinews of war were easy to prove, the intent less so...

The Archduke's murder did not seem as important in summer 1914 as now, a year later. Even with the Russian declaration of war in the newspaper, war remained surreal. Wegener contrasts the extatic crowds in Berlin with the calm acceptance in his Holstein village, minus one eldest son of an officers family who hangs himself. In Berlin, there is no use for a war correspondent in the first few weeks. He learns Patience!