Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 6a: The Crisis (Lorraine and The Ardennes).

I apologize for the long delay. I won't pretend differently than that I just lost heart for some time.

The rolling clusterfuck that is my country's descent into stupid white Christopathic fascism simply got too much for me to ignore but too hopeless for me to talk about.

It seemed to be louche to be discussing a horrific event of more than a century ago when the horrific events were and are happening here, now, all around me. I still haven't really changed my opinion on that; like hanging, ongoing Naziism concentrates the mind wonderfully. I'm still hanging on in a state of barely suppressed rage, wanting like Caligula (as I've said repeatedly) that all these scum, from Trump through Miller, Hegseth, Bondi, Bannon, Johnson...all the way down to the grotesque freaks like Ernst and Greene...had one throat, the better to slit it.

And for Fucking Trump? That's the pisser. Jim Wright nails it hard here:

It's being ruled by these fucking goobers that's more infuriating than anything else.

That said. there's only so much I can do without access to heavy weaponry, so at some point I might as well get back to the events of August 1914.

So...where'd we leave off?

Back in May we took a short diversion into the question of "How much did signals intelligence play into the events of the first month of World War 1 in the West?" to discover that there seems to be no definitive answer, at least not the way history understands it. In the East, yes: German radio intercepts were critical to the crushing victory at Tannenberg. 

In the West? Maybe, sorta, kind of, tangled up with the other intelligence sources.

Earlier in that month we'd looked at the opening tactical moves, from the first engagements to roughly the third week of August. That meant three very different things in different parts of the front:
- In Belgium, the reduction of the fortresses of Liege (and to a lesser extent, Namur), and the beginning of the German "right wing sweep" predicated in the Schlieffen Plan,
- In Alsace and Lorraine, a back-and-forth struggle; a French offensive per Plan XVII, an unplanned (but effective) German counteroffensive - but one that contradicted the Spirit of Schlieffen by not letting the French jam their head into the mangle - and,
- In the center, through the Ardennes, the "curious case of the German in the nighttime"; that is, the French recon actions that suggested the opposite of the tactical reality and convinced GEN Joffre that an offensive into what he thought was a lightly-defended hinge would cut off and disrupt the German right wing.

We're going to talk about that a LOT, because it turned out to be pretty critical.

Before that we discussed mobilization and the opening moves in February,

Aerial reconnaissance assets back in November 2024,

Ground reconnaissance - mostly cavalry - back in September 2024,

 Even further back, we discussed French war plans in August 2024 and German war plans in July,

 And, first of all, the geopolitical setting of the whole nutroll a year ago.

Whew. I'm already exhausted just from recounting all that.

Okay, well, now we're up to date, let's break this post out.

First, we're going to use the same breakdown we've been using and discuss the Frontier in geographical areas, these:

I'm going to discuss two of these three in this post.

The Southeast - the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine - because it's relatively simple and straightforward tactically.

And the Center - the Belgian Ardennes - because while it's not simple, it's less complicated than the Northwest and the issues we're concentrating on (reconnaissance) are important, but somewhat subordinate to problems of doctrine and training in explaining the Allied failure there.

Regardless of the location, however, this and the following post, of all our reflections on the Frontiers, are perhaps the most essential.  

As the title implies, this is where and when the critical engagements occurred. This was the critical time period in which the Allies lost the battle but could have lost the war and didn't. And the German Army won most of the battles but not decisively enough to win the larger war.

In the Southeast the "Battle of Lorraine" included several fights that have been described as separate engagements those were really a series of running fights along a fairly restricted corridor, beginning with the French offensive in the second week of August, then a German counteroffensive in the beginning of the third week, and a French defensive stand at the end of the week.

In the Center a series of closely physically- and temporally-spaced engagements now collectively termed the "Battle of the Ardennes" began sometime between 20 AUG and 21 AUG, and were effectively over except for French withdrawal and (fairly leisurely) German pursuit by 23 AUG.

In the Northwest the fights were more geographically distinct, and have been divided into the "Battle of Charleroi" between the French 5eme Armee and the German 2.Feldarmee and 3.Feldarmee that began with cavalry encounters on 20 AUG and was ended by a relatively orderly French withdrawal on 23 AUG, and the "Battle of Mons" between the British BEF and 1.Feldarmee which began with skirmishing on 21 AUG, flared to formed cavalry unit contact on 22 AUG, even further to full infantry and artillery assault on 23 AUG, and ended with British retreat in the early morning of 24 AUG.

I don't want to dig too deeply into the tactical minutiae of these engagements.

First, because as the first really "big" engagements of WW1 they've been covered to death. There's no point in my regurgitating Edmonds (1926) about Mons, or Zuber (2007) on Ardennes.

Second, because our initial thesis was that it's possible that reconnaissance inadequacies, or failures, played a large part in the Allied defeats along the frontiers. As I wrote in Part 1:

"Was this (the Allied defeat) the result of both sides' failure to anticipate the tactical "facts on the ground" affecting reconnaissance and making plans that assumed conditions that no longer existed?

Or was it technical, the conditions themselves, that had changed beyond the ability of clever plans to account for them? Was the problem that the older means and methods of reconnaissance - horse cavalry and light infantry - and security were just no longer effective in the tactical environment of 1914, and the new techniques - air reconnaissance - un- or under-developed to the point where the commanders didn't receive (or were unable to process) the intelligence?"

So that's what I'm going to focus on here; were there problems with the reconnaissance and, through it, intelligence - collection, interpretation, and/or dissemination - that led to problematic or fatal tactical, grand tactical, or even strategic errors by the Allied (or German) leadership?

Before we dive deep into these engagements, we should dispense with the least-most-critical of the Frontiers fights during this period, the "Battle of Lorraine".

The Crisis - Southeast (20-25 AUG) 

 

The southeastern piece of Frontiers was actually several engagements: the Battle of Morhange-Sarrebourg (20-22 AUG), the Battle of the Trouée de Charmes (24-25 AUG), and the Battle of Rozelieures (25 AUG)

We talked about the French defeat at Morhange-Sarrebourg in Part 5b ("First Encounters"), noting that the German success and French failure had a lot to do with the respective success and failure of their respective air arms:

"Bowdon (2017) notes that poor weather and the press of retrograde displacements had limited air activity between 15 and 17 AUG, but that on 18 AUG a patrol from FFA 20 (the XIV.Armeekorps flying detachment) found an untenanted gap in the French FLOT. The 1er Armee was still attacking to the east towards Strassburg, while 2eme Armee had turned north to envelop Metz.

After a day to prepare the counterattack, now known as the "Battle of Morhange-Sarrebourg", kicked off on 20 AUG."

In what seems to have been a Frontiers meme, the Armee d'L'Air was unable to perform similarly successful flights over the Bavarian assembly areas to suss out the counteroffensive, so Rupprecht's landsers kicked ass and sent the French fantassins, those who survived, reeling back south and west.

To the gap between the fortress complexes of Toul to the northwest and Epinal to the southeast, where the unfortified gap of Trouée de Charmes provided a possible high-speed avenue of approach into the industrial heart of northeastern France.

As the linked Wiki article puts it succinctly:

"The French had suffered a crushing defeat in the Battle of Lorraine and retreated in disorder. Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, the Chief of the General Staff of the German army had a difficult choice. The apparent collapse of the French Second Army (General Noël de Castelnau) made possible a breakthrough at the Trouée de Charmes (Charmes Gap) and the encirclement of all French troops in Lorraine and the Ardennes."

For once in August the French fliers seem to have gotten there first with the most; an air recon patrol spotted Rupprecht's troops pushing into the gap, and GEN Castelnau effectively used firepower and local maneuver to hammer the 6.Feldarmee.

The Bavarians weren't finished, mind; though it's outside the scope of this work, Rupprecht continued to slam his soldiers' heads against the defenses in Lorraine, culminating in the brutally indecisive Battle of Grand Couronné in September that helped blunt the German attempt to win the war with the Schlieffen coup de main. The linked article cites Herwig (2009) that:

"...in September, (6.Feldarmee) suffered 28,957 casualties, with 6,687 men killed, despite half the army being en route to Belgium; most lost in the fighting at the Grand Couronné. The (7.Feldarmee) suffered 31,887 casualties, of which 10,384 men killed. 

The German army never calculated a definitive casualty list for the fighting in Alsace and Lorraine but the Bavarian official historian Karl Deuringer made a guess of 60 per cent casualties, of which 15 per cent were killed, in the fifty infantry brigades which fought in the region, which would amount to 66,000 casualties, 17,000 killed, which the Verlustliste (ten-day casualty reports) bore out."

After September the Lorraine front calcified and didn't move until 1918. So:

1) yes, there were some critical reconnaissance failures in the Southeast in August, notably the French failure to effectively use their cavalry and aerial recon elements to find the Bavarians massing for the counterattack of 20 AUG. 

(If you wanted to be grudging you could include the 6.Feldarmee failure to figure out some weakness to pry open 2eme Armee's defenses in the Charmes Gap, for all that Bowdin (2017) goes out of his way to point out several minor recon successes by the Bavarian FFA 2b and 3b. But the reality was that the terrain didn't really allow for maneuver, and Moltke's orders to "relentlessly pursue" the supposedly-broken 2eme Armee didn't give Rupprecht the option of not at least trying a shove at the French defenses.)

2) no, those failures weren't decisive. They cost lives, so awful in that. But the tactical reality of the Lorraine topography is that neither the French (before Morhange) or the Germans (before Couronné) could have broken through into the open country behind the trench lines, no matter how good the reconnaissance. 

So we'll leave them to dig in for a four-year stay and turn to a more essential area.

 
The Crisis - Center (20-24 AUG)

The Sources: I want to specify that the vast bulk of this section is drawn from three sources:
   Steg, J-M. (2022) Death in the Ardennes: 22nd August 1914: France's Deadliest Day, University of Buckingham Press, 256 pp.

   Zuber, T. (2007) The Battle of the Frontiers Ardennes 1914, The History Press, 313 pp.

and the Bowen (2017) work on German aviation cited earlier.

Movement to Contact (20-21 AUG)
Zuber (2007) describes the region as follows:

"The triangle of the Ardennes forest extends like an arrowhead with its base in Germany into southern Belgium and France. The Ardennes is thinly populated...does not favor operational maneuver...(t)he road net is not well developed and the forests and underbrush are thick...

The nature of the terrain made the operational problem for both armies extremely complex. The terrain...rewarded good reconnaissance, march discipline, effective staff work, and initiative. The terrain mercilessly punished deficiencies in all of these areas."

As we noted in Part 5b, the French strategic reconnaissance work in August, including the anabasis of Sordet's cavalry corps, was misleading to GQG not just because of the difficult terrain but because the main body of the German feldarmee in the Ardennes hadn't yet advanced into the southwestern Belgian forests. The French fliers and horsemen didn't find anyone there because they just weren't there yet.

But when the French horsemen and aviators didn't find anyone in the woods it led GQG to the assumption that there wasn't anyone there at all.

Which was dead wrong.

 
Here's Zuber (2007):

"Joffre believed that the German army was divided into two masses, one in Lorraine, the second...on both sides of the Meuse...(and) the Germans had left few forces in the Ardennes."

The plan was for the 3eme and 4eme Armee to strike north:

"...towards Arlon-Neufchateau...to push the opposing German forces into the angle formed by the Meuse...and the Ourthe. The attack...would catch the left flank of the German main attack (that is, 1. and 2.Feldarmee making the big Schlieffen sweep)...and roll it up...".

The French movement orders went out 20 and 21 AUG; 4eme Armee led off on the left towards Neufchateau, with 3eme Armee refused in echelon on the right towards Arlon, with each army's corps echeloned similarly, refused to the right. 

First contact came on 20 AUG, when the two 4eme Armee cavalry divisions ran into German infantry divisions near Neufchateau and, as Zuber (2007) sums up concisely, "...were thrown back 15km, without being able to advance..."

This was the beginning of a theme. Zuber (2007) is full of comments about the problems of the French cavalry such as:

"On the left (of 4eme Army) the two cavalry divisions were unable to cross the Our (river) due to enemy security detachments..."

"7 DC (division d'cavalrie) was on the far right flank (of 3eme Armee) where it could contribute nothing to the 3rd Army reconnaissance effort."

And his damning conclusion of the overall cavalry battle was:

"The anonymous author of the FAR (German field artillery regiment) 25 regimental history said that the French cavalry simply would not fight. From the smallest patrol up to the level of cavalry corps, the French cavalry avoided combat and when it unexpectedly did meet German forces...the French cavalry withdrew. The German cavalry was able to screen the movement of its own forces, while on 21 and 22 August provided accurate information concerning the French advance."

Okay, now. Keep in mind, Terence Zuber has a very one-sided opinion of the tactical competence of the opposing armies. Germans good, French bad. He needs to be seen as a partisan of the Imperial forces, horse, foot, and artillery.

That said...the records do show that the German troops' operational art was better than their French counterparts, and that presumably included their divisional cavalry and the HKK/Feldarmee-level horse soldiers.

 
Meeting Engagements (22 AUG)
Even had the forested hills of the Ardennes been transparent from the sky in the air both sides were struggling with the late August weather over Belgium and Luxembourg. 

Fog and heat haze when the skies were relatively clear, thunderstorms when it wasn't. Steg (2022) says that "...heavy rains had blanketed the entire region the previous day (21 AUG)...and the thick fog on the morning of 22 August would only clear by around noon..." 

On the ground, however, the German commanders had a much better picture than the French commanders, and were using that, as well as their more flexible command and control ("Aufstragstaktik") setup, to gain the advantage.

As we noted, we've been repeatedly told that the French cavalry were unable, or unwilling, to fight for intelligence, while the German horsemen somehow - better training, better leadership, better something - seem to have been sending intelligence up the channels. 

Worse, the French staff work was slow - many times the day's orders were not issued until well after midnight - and sloppy. Units were misinformed, or marched and countermarched pointlessly. Intelligence was not collected, or if collected, neither analyzed nor disseminated.

Steg (2022) tells the story of one such cavalry unit attached to the French "Colonial Corps" on 22 AUG, quoting the Corps chief of staff as observing that:

"The three squadrons of the Sixth Dragoons marched a few hundred meters ahead of us. These poor dragoons, who had been assigned to us only the previous night, had arrived dog-tired and without maps. We were...surprised at seeing them take the wrong turn at every intersection."

With this sort of clusterfuck in progress it's hardly surprising that the French went into the meeting engagements in the Ardennes already behind the power curve.

Once the maneuver units actually got within rifle range things only got worse.

All the accounts emphasize that their training and doctrine made the German infantry and artillery quicker to react, and more flexible in their tactical employment. German infantry units used the terrain better - French infantry tended to rush forward, German used the ground to place fire on target and maneuver effectively - and the German artillery was better at coordinating fire with their infantry as well as getting trails down, more quickly, and in better overwatching positions.

 
The French commanders from companies up to corps tended to flail tactically under fire. While individually courageous, the French officers seemed to have a difficult time adjusting to unforeseen tactical problems. 

Steg (2022) describes one of these, when the Colonial Corps infantry first encountered dug-in German infantry in hasty defense:

"It is this defensive line...that the soldiers of the 1st Colonial Infantry Regiment's second battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Vitard, will be the first to encounter."

The battalion goes forward and is shot flat by German rifle and machine gun fire. The first runners return to inform their battalion commander of this, whereupon...

"...the French commander's reaction is identical to the one that will be seen at the various Ardennes battle sites whenever enemy opposition makes its presence known; he calls for an immediate reinforced attack."

The typical explanation for this is supposed to be the pre-war adherence to a sort of all-in manic bayonet charge, the "Attaque à outrance", and the explanation has been fossilized as conventional wisdom about the French infantry of 1914.

 
While there does seem to have been something of this sort spread throughout the European armies of 1914, it seems to me that as much as a reflexive lunge towards the enemy the problem with the French commanders seems to have been a combination of a failure (or absence) of doctrine, and an unwillingness to try and take time to think. 

LTC Vitard and his peers seem to have had little or no experience at solving tactical problems using their heads as opposed to hands and feet. They had no doctrine, and little training, to guide them to alternatives, and no inclination to try and figure one out.

That might well be where the advantage of Aufstragstaktik came in; German subordinate commanders had to figure out the how, where, and when for themselves. They'd been given only the what and why. The rest was up to them to figure out. 

Their French counterparts were handed explicit orders, and when their German enemy didn't oblige them? They seem to have had trouble coming up with non-suicidal alternatives.

The same problems hammered the 3eme and 4eme Armee troops throughout the Ardennes. Poor or absent reconnaissance left the French leadership ignorant of their enemies until the German 4. and 5.Feldarmee tore into them; many French units were so clueless that the German attacks caught them in march order.

Once under fire French tactical doctrine proved flawed, and French command and control inadequate, compared to their German opponents.

The result was a bloody nightmare; 27,000 French soldiers were killed in a single day, 22 AUG, the highest death toll of the entire war. 

 
The Great Retreat Begins (23-24AUG)
By the end of 23 AUG both French armies had been forced back to their start lines, the opportunity to unhinge the big German right wing sweep lost. 

We've talked about the stand of 2eme Armee at Grand Couronné. There was no such doorstop in the Ardennes. What prevented the defeat in the Ardennes from becoming a strategic disaster was not so much French resolution as the pace of 20th Century operations overwhelming the German General Staff.

Zuber (2007) presents a little vignette of what that meant:

"...on the morning of 23 August IR (German infantry regiment) 155 began to dig in...No one knew anything concerning the situation...At 0900 an officer arrived from division HQ saying that the French were not going to attack and work on the trenches stopped.

The troops warmed themselves in the sun, and then moved to a bivouac at 1130 and the field kitchens arrives...bringing hot coffee. The troops cleaned their weapons and equipment and wrote letters home while patrols were sent to find the wounded and dead."

Obviously though the German attacks had succeeded in driving back or shattering the French offensive the campaign was far from over, and the also-obvious inference from that was that vigorous pursuit of the defeated French units was the next step in turning tactical into strategic and political victory. But the German higher seems to have struggled to figure that out.

Zuber (2007) again:

"French casualties had been three of four times higher than...the Germans. Nevertheless, German losses had been significant and these, as well as the exertions of hard marching, combat, and a night spent digging defensive positions, had worn down the German soldiers, who on 23 August were physically and mentally exhausted."

The casualties were a problem, yes. Neither side had been prepared for the scale, or the appalling lethality, of 20th Century industrial war.

 
But a cardinal principle of military planning is preparing for unforeseen problems, such as husbanding reserve units and adapting to combat results.

Both 4. and 5.Feldarmee had units that had seen little or no combat on 22 AUG, and the Army staff, or if not at feldarmee level then at the overall Army ("Oberste Heeresleitung" or OHL) level, should have been pushing the armeekorps commanders to pursue the French armies to destruction.

Instead:

"The corps and army HQ on both sides lost control of their units. Many of the German units could have pursued on 22 August but never received orders to do so. The situation was unclear to German leaders at division level and above, and they preferred "safety first'. When the extent of the French defeat became evident in late morning on 23 August the French were out of ranges and recovering from their defeat." (Zuber, 2007)

I think that's a bit harsh. The meeting engagements of 22 AUG were, literally, the opening shots of World War 1. Neither side knew what to expect, and both were more than a bit shocked at how sudden, violent, and lethal those engagements were.

Remember, too, that the aerial recon assets of both sides had been largely sidelined by weather, so the German armeekorps and feldarmee commanders had a lot of blank space behind the forward enemy units. For all they knew a whole 'nother French armee might be backing up the retreating units smashed on 22 AUG, and a disorganized pursuit through the Ardennes might in turn be smashed as the Bavarians' had been a Grand Couronne'.

The German commanders could certainly have done better.

But the French commanders show how much worse they could have done.

 
Conclusions, Lorraine and The Ardennes
I think we're seeing - for the first time - some answers to our questions about reconnaissance and the outcomes of the Frontiers.

I also think that the answers might not be as generally definitive as we'd like, and vary quite a bit over the geographical areas we've covered.

In Lorraine the German aerial reconnaissance picked out a critical French tactical error - the separation between 1ere and 2eme Armee - that was exploited by German counterattack at Morhange.

However this appears to be not a general technical or tactical issue - that is, it doesn't seem to have been something applicable to the conditions or doctrines of 1914 air recon - but a local success on the part of the Bavarian feldfligerabteilungen; the French Armee d' L'Air didn't match it by detecting the counterattack building up in the 6.Feldarmee assembly areas.

In the Ardennes the same sort of pattern seems to have reoccurred but on the ground.

The German divisional and HKK cavalry units seem to have both screened and collected intelligence fairly effectively, while the French cavalry at all levels appears to have performed both tasks very poorly.

This difference doesn't seem to be related to any sort of general or overarching conditions or planning, but (based on the accounts we have) on national differences in training, doctrine, and leadership.

So, remember, our thesis was that, if the issues affecting the success of the various war plans were related to reconnaissance and intelligence derived from reconnaissance, we would see some sort of generalized problem(s) resulting from a misfit between what the planners thought their recon elements could and would do and what they actually could and did.

But in both these geographical areas the problems seem to be related more to those national differences. The German fliers and cavalry just seem to have been better at flying, scouting, and screening, just as the German infantry and artillery seem to have been better at moving, shooting, and communicating, than their French counterparts.

But we still have one more geographical area to examine, and that one perhaps the biggest and best known of all the engagements that make up the Battle of the Frontiers, so...

Next: The Crisis Two, Electric Boogaloo - The Strong Right Wing

Independence

This year's national birthday celebration seemed very...troubling.

It was hard to wave a flag and celebrate the nation's government that has spent the past half-year speed-running every fucking thing that provoked the white guys who mattered in the British colonies to piss and moan about their government to the point of rebellion:

"He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."

What the actual fuck has Donnie Dollhands done that his counterpart George of Hanover didn't? Substituted his immigration Gestapo for "foreign Mercenaries"? Yeah, right.

Is there any particular reason that anyone not completely in the basket of deplorables would WANT to be part of that shit? The 1776 crowd would have rebel against his ochre-colored ass as they did against the king of their day, and we owe it to them to rebel against the modern version of German George.

Fuck that 1776 noise; there's an old school 1789 solution to King Trump, and rather than bands and fireworks, using it on him and a whole bunch of the crowd of MAGAts clustered around his golden throne seems like a much more joyous use of the day we mark the founding of this nation.

Because the country I served, the country I believe in, is the mirror image of the white man's neighborhood Trump and his the Trumpers believe in.

It's the one where anyone can be "American". No matter who they are, no matter where they were born, no matter what language they speak. All that's required is a fervent, passionate belief in the ideals of this country; equal justice under law, the republic that the foundational documents - ALL the documents, including the important changes wrought by the Civil War amendments that define the Second Republic from the slave-holding First - promises.

Ken ("Popehat") White has a moving story about what that means - or meant - in practice:  

"The people I despise, and who despise me, believe America’s values and goals are blood, soil, swagger, and an insipid and arrogant conformity. They are the values of bullies and their sycophants. They may prevail. There’s no promise they will not...I am just more acutely aware that doing better will not be easy and may not be peaceful, and that doing it will require fighting people just as dedicated to low and ugly values, and that we may lose.

America’s history is the story of people — like those Filipino-Americans — who had much less and faced far more daunting circumstances and kept fighting. It would be shameful to give up that fight. The bullies may win, but they will not win by default, and they will not win without a bloody battle."

The thing is...I'm old. Dying slowly of a neurological disease. Tired of "fighting", fighting what is now the weight of my own government. Tired of re-fighting battles I thought we'd won and settled long ago.

Last night sort of reminded me how ridiculous this nonsense all is.

Several years ago the City of Portland passed an ordnance prohibiting personal fireworks during the summer. It made total sense; we're highly flammable in July. Turning thousands of knuckleheads loose with pyro? NOT a good idea.

For years the family used to go north to Washington - where "projectile"-type fireworks were legal - and haul back a load of mortars, rockets, and roman candles to fire off in the blacktop playground behind Astor Elementary School. 

It was a critical part of "fun" on the 4th, history and patriotism be damned. It was all about the pyro.

But the City was right; it's a damn dumb idea. So they banned it.

Well, turns out that here, in the neighborhood around my new condo in the Lower Depths of St. Johns, we laugh at your silly fireworks ban, Portland. The firefight was in full swing moments after sundown.

At which point, sitting out on my porch to admire the lawlessness, I discovered two things:

1) Someone in the demo site down at the end of the street had some really BIG explosives. Either a seriously big-ass mortar or just the old "M-80" quarter-stick dynamite-type charges we used to use to blow our fingers off as kids in the Sixties. Big. Loud. I mean seriously loud.

So interspersed with the "regular" fireworks every so often there'd be this ginormous flash and BOOM!! when one of these things would go off, rattling the windows and shaking the tree branches.

And...

2) Someone else had set his car alarm, including the fucking motion detector.

Which went off every time Person #1's bombs would explode.

Which meant that all evening we were serenaded with a fusillade of smaller pyro, a massive blast, and then the whooping of the fucking Car Alarm of Freedom.

"Boom-crackle-boom-pop-pop-crackle-boom-BOOM!!!whoopwhoopwhoop!"

It that doesn't say something about the State of This Goddamn Union right now, I can't think of a better.

 

Damn it. I miss my country.

It's a hell of a town

It's also all the way the hell across the continent and very much "not Portland" but I'm tickled to death that the people of New York City gave a big middle finger to the politics of surrender to plutocracy and corporatism: https://www.theguardian.com/.../winner-supporters...

Because the man himself sums up the real problem of NYC that's the same as the real problems here in Portland: "...there are far too many New Yorkers who do not know if they will be able to call themselves that next year, who do not know if they will be able to afford their rent, or their child care, their groceries, or even their MetroCard.”

 

It's past time that we liberals stopped cowering and apologizing. These billionaire-fluffers are evil and wrong. The GOP is lost, as gibbering mad as a rabid dog, so we can expect nothing from them except their usual lunacy. 

 

But we're not in the Trump Cult and it's time we reclaimed our roots.

 

 

Bomb, bomb, bomb. Bomb, bomb Iran

Friend of the Blog mike wanted a response to the latest U.S. "fucking around in the Middle East", so here goes:

1) Meh.

2) Well...meh IF this is all it is. Dropping ordnance from the low stratosphere is the ultimate in Rich Man's War. Provided your target lacks similar capabilities? You can pretty much stroll away whistling. I don't see this as much, if any, different than bombing Serbs or Libyans, and all the earlier examples of Aerial Gunboat Diplomacy didn't result in any real military escalation. That sucked for the dead and maimed people within the impact areas, but otherwise? Meh.

3) Now...in terms of "the law of war"? This is obviously criminal, the crime of "making aggressive war" for which we hanged the leaders of Germany and Japan. It's technically "unconstitutional" as well, a violation of Congress' explicit war-making power. Which, as we all know, is as dead as the dodo assuming that the GOP majorities could even be bothered to stop fucking with idiocies long enough to bother.

4) Okay. Now...if this ISN'T all it is - that is, if Tubby wasn't just showing his whole idiot ass when he burbeled about "Make Iran Great Again" - and there's a faction in the Fraudulency Aministration that genuinely wants to put GIs in Tehran? Ohfuckno. THAT's beyond insane. This country couldn't do "regime change" in Iraq, a much smaller and less fractious nation, and after fucking around we found out when the Islamic State emerged from the ruins.

5) My opinion on the whole "Israel is the most utterly worthless "U.S. ally" in history" hasn't changed, either, other than this reinforces the whole notion. That kind of pisses me off, since the original Tzahal of the Six Day War was one of my childhood heroes, and the descent of the tough sabras of 1967 into the thugs of the West Bank checkpoints makes me grieve for everyone involved.

6) Jeffrey Lewis has a nice thread on the technical issues with these strikes, as well: https://bsky.app/profile/armscontrolwonk.bsky.social/post/3lsageddlpk2l - well worth a look.

So, to sum up, these things are actually one of the less-harmful (to his own nation) examples of Trumpfuckery. Fairly pointless? Yep. Driven by "addled FOX News grampa" energy? Sure. Possibly relating to the limp-dick performance of his Big Beautiful Birthday Perade? Maybe.

The wild card now is "what happens next?"

If the mullah government falls...then what?

Who or what replaces it? I wouldn't bet that Freedom Will Reign; Iran hasn't had decent governance since the Fifties, if that.

And this whole nonsense frankly just hammers home the lessons of Libya and Ukraine versus North Korea and Israel; if you're a smaller nation and you don't want to kiss the ass of (or get pushed around by) a Great Power?

You NEED fucking nukes. Now. Yesterday. 

So whoever replaces Khameni, unless they really, really want to kiss Trump and Netanyahu's asses, need to speed-run Khameni's nuke program, which is kind of "the opposite" of what this nonsense is supposed to be about. 

But we're going to have to just wait and see "what's next"

Update 6/24: Apparently what's next is "Tubby declares "ceasefire!", and both Israel and Iran reply "WTF, dude?"

There's no upside for Netanyahu to stop belting the mullahs. The IAF has got to be struggling - my understanding is that, for one thing, their aerial tanker fleet is aging and small - but anything that keeps the Israeli public angry and scared keeps his ass out of court/jail.

Iran? I'd sure they'd love to nope out of this. They're getting mauled. But, as I noted above, if they want ANY hope of not becoming the pawn of every nuclear power with a grudge (or a grift) they still HAVE to keep the hope of nuclear retaliation alive.

My guess is that both Iran and Israel will reach a sort of "peace of exhaustion" and Fatso can claim credit for that. But it won't be "peace" in any sense of the term. And what comes after that? I have no idea. 

Just for fun - Friday palate cleanser

Given the dire and dreary doings of the Second Fraudulency Administration, I've been trying to actively avoid all their bullshit in the news - it just makes be want to kill people and break shit, which at this point is still somewhere between "treason" and revolution" - and instead I've been trying to find things to enjoy.

Like this; "The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland" from Bret Devereaux's wonderful A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry blog.  

Besides the pure entertainment value of a serious discussion of the mechanized combat of the "Mad Max" world (and related/similar movies or video games) it introduced me to this insane IRL thing; the "Toyota War" in Chad.

Now there's a fun subject for a "battles" piece! Toyota Hilux versus T-55! I could see doing either the January 1987 Battle of Fada, or the larger and more critical engagement where the Chadians took the Libyan post at Ouadi Doum in March...any interest in either or both? 

What's not to like?

I think I need to get my hands on a copy of Ken Pollack's Armies of Sand first, though. It's supposed to have the best account of the Toyota War, and I'll take a look and see.

But if you've got a moment or two, go read up on Devereaux's take on the Road Warriors:

"All of that is a kind of warfare that actually supports the fractionalization of power, producing the sort of smaller-scale warlordism that the fiction tends to want in these settings. But rather than display their power with massive (but very vulnerable) war rigs, such warlords would likely attempt to overawe foes with impressive displays of their large stock of technicals. And, this being a Mad Max themed setting, by large spikes placed on everything."

Make sure you read the footnote that I've omitted from the end of the final sentence in the above quote to learn more about the "armored codpiece". 

Which reminds me of...

..."Ironlily's" cute take on 14th Century religious orders of knighthood, girly Gothic armor (including armored codpieces) and (okay, yeah, a lot of...) cartoon cheesecake in general. 

Nothing serious, but kind of adorable (in a sort of smutty way...)

OTOH here's cartoon "adorable" without the smutty: Carol Cao and her delightful "little life in the woods" artwork:

(I apologize for the Muskrat link, but Cao doesn't seem to be posting anywhere else...). I love both the sweet feeling of her art and the attention to detail of the things like the rebounding raindrops on the little temple roof, or the suggestion of the kitty hanboks.

I've also been trying to find kind, soothing, happy reads. These have included the very "cozy" little adventure story The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong as well as several more chapters in Kashiki Takuo's series ハクメイとミコチ, Hakumei to Mikochi. 

Not all of this effort has been successful; I'm presently struggling with Axie Oh's The Floating World. 

I love the idea - Korean folklore meets science-fantasy (think a sort of Ghibli-world-building only without the aircraft...) and hero's quest fiction - but the writing just plods. It's not gross or face-smacking, it's a slow drip of little stuff, like this:

"...they waited for the guards to pass, their bright lanterns giving away their positions."

I don't know any other kind of lanterns, do you? I mean, if the guards had something dim, something like little chemlights, that only hinted at their passage, sure, that would be worth detailing. But "bright" is kind of a default "lantern", innit?

Or this, just a couple of sentences later, when one of these random NPC guards stumbles into our heroes:

"Sighting Sunho, he lashed out at him with a concealed dagger."

Not really "concealed", is it now, seeing as how the guy "lashed out" with it? And how do you "lash" with a dagger? Did the author mean "slashed"? Then why not say that? Mind you, slashing with a dagger - unless it's made on the lines of a full-size bowie or a pesh-kabz (a "Khyber knife" for you Great Game/Kipling fans...) is kind of a mug's game, especially given that the Macguffin of this part of the story is that these aren't random rent-a-cops but "Sareniyan soldiers", the regular army of the Evil Warlord dude of the story.

I mean, I get what the author was trying to say; this troop pops out of a door and immediately attacks our heroes who are very obviously not supposed to be where he finds them. Presumably because he's not on guard at the moment he lacks his issue weapon - probably a spear or sword, based on the worldbuilding - so he whips out his sidearm knife to take them out.

So that seems pretty easy to me:

"They stared at the guard and the guard stared back - for only a moment before drawing his belt knife and stabbing (slashing?) at Sunho, the closest of the three intruders."

Fixed.

I've got a couple of almost-sure-winners on hold at the library; Chris Moore's Anima Rising, more inspired wierdness from the Dirty Jobs guy, and a local author (Mark Pomeroy)'s Tigers of Lents, a semifictional story about soccer and our local Felony Flats, the southeast Portland neighborhood once famed for the New Copper Penny and now the home of the ridiculous Portland Pickles amateur baseball outfit.

Portland being Portland you knew there'd be a homegrown reaction to the feeling of being mulcted by big-time pro sports outfits like the Trailblazers and Timbers. This "Pickles" ballclub is one.

(The other is a nonleague soccer team run by the Pickles people called the "Bangers".

I've never seen the Bangers but if the Pickles level of play is anything to go by, well... let's say that I was a Cubs fan back in the day so I've seen some pretty bad baseball, but...

Then you realize that these are college dudes who aren't getting paid, so. 

 One last "fun thing" - Adult High School.

 This little chanbara/bad girl/school comic is just 100%, no-holds-barred, pure fun.

 

 Like BIG fun.

 

If you have a moment and a spare dime. go kick Alexis Flower a buck or three.

That's all I got. 

Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Am I Blue..?

One of the Portland newsweeklies is doing a worthwhile civic service; turning the paper over to members of Portland's Black community to talk about The Oregon Problem Which Dare Not Speak It's Name; systemic i.e. "institutional" racism.

Of all the places in this country I've lived Portland (and Oregon) is the whitest place I can think of. The racism is baked in, going back to the original Oregon Constitution of 1857. Here's the Oregon Encyclopedia on the subject:

"Incorporated into the Bill of Rights, the clause prohibited Black people from being in the state, owning property, and making contracts. Oregon thus became the only free state admitted to the Union with an exclusion clause in its constitution."

Hell, I wrote a whole post about it a decade or so ago. 

Oh, and I love the part about the Oregon Bill of "Rights" being clear that while you had rights to trial by jury, free speech, and from not having GIs in your guest bedroom, you didn't have a right to be Black and Oregonian.

Nice.

One of the most visible, and intractable, pieces of this racist history that isn't just history is the Portland coppers.

They were lethally racist fucks then, and by and large they are now.

We've gone through a covered-wagonload of schemes to change that and it hasn't worked. Portland's Thin Blue Line is both racist and lethal to people of all colors; as the first linked article points out, they killed 78 people over the past four years up from 51 between 2014 and 2018.

But mostly Black.

So I'm with Mr. Smiff, the goatherder of the Mercury piece; the problem is the cops, and the problem is bred into the whole outfit's bones. It's not "reformable", it's not "redeemable". The only real solution is to burn the fucker hull and sticks, break up the ashes, and start again from scratch.

Call it "defund the police"? Fine. The point is that this blue village has to be destroyed in order to save it.

Then...what do you do?

And there's the big question. Because here's my theory: Portland police aren't bad just because they're lethal racist fucks. they're lethal racist fucks because of policing.

At least the way we here in Portland (and much of this country) do policing. And that, to a massive extent, is because of who we Americans are.

 

Specifically, the "occupation" model of policing - a relatively small number of coppers racing around in cars responding to emergency calls - means that the cops themselves typically only work with:
1) drunks and dopers,
2) belligerent assholes, and
3) poor people.

And many of these people are armed; indeed, the number of guns lying around means that if you have to try and deal with whatever fucking thing they're doing you kind of have to start from the assumption that they're strapped.

That's kind of it. 

People don't call 9-1-1 when they're having a nice day. They don't need cops when they're being friendly, or happy, or peaceful, or content. The cops only get involved when somebody's mad, or whacked out, or scary, mean, violent, or some other form of assholery, and as often as not with a deadly weapon.

Lots of these people are poor, and lots of them are Black because it's way more likely that you're poor when you're Black; that's how we roll here in the Land of the Free. And poor people don't have the options that better-off people do, especially if they're on the street, but just in general it's harder not to end up breaking the law which forbids rich and poor alike to steal bread if you're poor.

And there, told to enforce that law, on "those people", are the cops.

Think of how you'd feel about your work, and your co-workers, if it meant constant irritation and aggravation dealing with assholes?

After not too long you'd probably conclude that most people are assholes, many are dangerous assholes, and that almost all poor, Black, and poor Black people are dangerous assholes that you'd need to shoot first to stay alive. 

In other words, you'd be a lethal racist asshole.

Even if you didn't start that way, the way the United States works now goes a long way to ensuring you'd end up that way.

So how do you change that?

My only thought is that you'd effectively have to change 1) U.S. society, and 2) how we police it.

You'd have to get rid of the fucking guns, for one thing.

If any interaction with an asshole, or even just someone having a bad day - angry, depressed, even suicidal, argumentative, irrational, out of control - might involve a firearm? Then anyone whose job involved stopping that bad day would have to have lethal force, if not in hand at least at hand, and be mentally prepared to use it.

That's the kind of hypervigilance that produces "combat stress" and PTSD  in soldiers. Until the cops don't have to start from there? Every cop incident is going to have the potential to go lethal pretty quick smart. With the expected consequence of the cop starting every incident halfway to drawing down on someone.

Then you'd almost have to have a cop living, or at least walking around, in every street in every neighborhood.

Because the other part of this is the "working with nonstop assholes" thing, remember?

To change that the cops would have to interact with other kinds of people; happy, peaceful, friendly, non-asshole people. They'd have to see the good side of the people around them, instead of seeing them as random "civilians", randos they jump out of the car on, who are either useless NPCs, or assholes that need a beatdown.

Remember "Officer Friendly"? Yeah, well, it's kind of hard to be friends when you only drive in once or twice a year to thump some asshole and haul them off to Detox. 

And then there's the whole "right of the people to peaceably assemble" thing...

...yeah, that. 

This is a long way around to get to the part where I say "I don't see any simple, easy, straightforward way to fix the cops".

Do we need some sort of police? Yes.

Do we need the police we have now? As I think I've made clear; no. The current cop model is broken. It doesn't prevent crime. It doesn't solve crimes, not very often, and often not correctly, given the number of people whose convictions turn out to be mistaken or, worse, deliberate frame-ups.

But ISTM that "fixing" that involves "fixing" a huge chunk of modern American life; society, economy,  politics...and we can't even agree to get a fucking ketamine-addled Afrikaaner's fucking long nose out of our collective governmental pocket, or send a corrupt and predatory grifter and former real estate slumlord to the pokey instead of the Oval Office.

WASF.

Decisive Battles: Frontiers 1914 - Part 5c (Interlude) SIGINT

 

On the last Frontiers post commentor Carsten reminded me (Thanks, Carstens!) of another August 1914-thing that changed how armies fought; "Signals Intelligence", or in the term the U.S. Army uses, SIGINT.

Now you could say that SIGINT wasn't exactly a new 1914-thing. Enemies had been trying to steal each others' secrets and communications since, well, probably the Late Stone Age. After all, when you know what your enemy is going to do, and when and where, you can be there (or not be there...) sooner, in greater force, and with surprise.

And both battles and campaigns before the 20th Century were affected by the loss (or gain) of communications, obviously in the form of things like written orders. Back in 2008 we discussed the 1862 Battle of Antietam, where the accidental discovery of the Confederate operations orders ("Special Order 191") should have resulted in a crushing U.S. victory.

The big difference between 1862 SIGINT and 1914 SIGINT was the invention of "wireless telegraphy" (principally) by Guglielmo Marconi around 1895.

Of course the use of electrical power - which the new "WT" or "Radio" depended on - to send signals was as old as the mid-19th Century, when the electrical telegraph had replace the "optical" telegraph (stuff like this thing, a signal station with movable panels or arms to send semaphore signals...)...

...and telegraph wires were strung all over the world.

The problem with wires - and all the armies of 1914 still strung and used miles and miles of wire, mind! - were multifarious. First you had to string them, which took people and time, since existing wires often didn't run where the armies needed them.

Then you had to protect them, particularly from artillery fire, which as you can imagine was a very "1914" kind of problem.

And third, the wires literally tied you in place. If you moved away from the existing wires you'd be voiceless and deaf until you reached (or ran) a new set of wires,

So the ideal way to use electricity would be to power some sort of equipment capable of sending and receiving electrical pulses (since that's all the telegraph was; turning "on" the current for a signal, turning it off for a gap or pause) through the air, without the wires.

Marconi did that, building on the work Hertz had done, using a form of electromagnetic radiation; "radio waves".

Here's the thing about those early radio sets, though.

They were big and heavy. They were also fairly fragile, and didn't like rough handling which, as you can imagine, is kind of a "war thing". And they required a steady supply of electricity, meaning if you couldn't just plug into the wall socket (not a "war thing", either) you needed a generator, also big, heavy, and fragile (or two guys riding a stationary bike...

...which is kind of weird when you think of it as "war", but, then, war is fucking weird.)

Which is why the first radio SIGINT was by navies and directed at warships.

Which is where we talked about this in our 2013 discussion of the Scarborough Raid and the activities of the British "Room 40" naval SIGINT people involved.

By the time the first rounds went downrange in 1914 the armies of all the major combatants had radio, though, and were developing their own SIGINT capabilities. The U.S. Naval Institute has a good little summary of early radio warfare, including the drawbacks, including that...

"...its use alone might reveal one’s presence and position to the enemy. (T)he very presence of wireless messages in the air will enable the enemy to guess that something is happening. By the time World War I broke, radio-direction-finders were coming into existence, which would enable the enemy to pinpoint one’s forces."

What didn't help was the crudity of the early radio transmitters:

"(I)n the early days of radio...any time one sent a message over the air, practically any one with a set could pick it up. (W)ith the spark system and the primitive receivers, there was no selectivity of stations...as late as 1914 the equipment in use emitted a signal many kilocycles wide, one signal covering perhaps the whole of the present broadcast band."

To a former GI used to the frequency-hopping sophistication of modern military commo gear that's utterly horrifying, the COMSEC equivalent of adorning your foxhole with flags and streamers and ginormous speakers blaring Bohemian Rhapsody whilst you prance around it in a pink tulle' tutu. 

Why not just paste a sticker on the front of your helmet reading Just Shoot Me Now!?

The SIGINT people of 1914 kind of had to figure this out for themselves, though. 

Famously the German radio intel people were reading Russian e-mails in August that provided extremely useful intelligence about the Russian offensive in East Prussia that led to the thumping win in the Battle of Tannenberg, but as noted in this NSA briefing,

"When the war broke out...there was no fixed organization in either the German or Austrian side for intercepting foreign radio traffic...field regulations for German telegraph troops did foresee the the possibility of listening in...when their own was dormant.

At the time there were two rather large fortress radio stations in eastern Germany which had relatively little traffic of their own and were consequently in a position to listen to the enemy...(e)ntirely on their own initiative a few operators (at the fortresses of Konigsburg and Thorn (Note: this 19th Century fortification was located near the current Polish city of Toruń), and the former civilian station at Breslau) attempted...to listen to Russian army traffic as a sporting proposition, so to speak; it was not long before the first messages were intercepted but no one knew quite what to do with them..."

Fortunately for 8. Feldarmee commander GEN von Hindenburg the fortress CO at Thorn decided to send these intercepts on to Army HQ on his own hook. 

But you get the idea; this was an ad hoc sort of thing for the German Army.

It sounds like the French were a bit better organized. Here's what the WarHistory.org article about SIGINT on the Western Front says:

"The French Deuxième Bureau on the Western Front was well prepared for the signals war...even though they did not have the benefit of the plain text messages that Hindenburg enjoyed reading during his campaign in the east. However, they were able to decipher the German messages quite easily."

Some of the French SIGINT was simplified by sloppiness in German COMSEC brought on by the stress and pace of the "right wing sweep".

"(German 1. Feldarmee commander) Von Kluck’s rapid advance...used radio extensively to co-ordinate the units of his army according to plan. German radio operators...sent transmissions correctly in cipher to begin with, but as the heat of battle increased, messages were sometimes sent in plain text and security procedures began to flag."

Apparently the German Höheres Kavallerie-Kommandos (the HKKs) were the big problem:

"The Cabinet Noir was the cryptographic department of the Deuxième Bureau (French Military Intelligence) and intercepted over 350 radiograms transmitted by the German cavalry corps over a two-week period during the campaign. Radio station staff had no clear instruction on wireless security so the call-signs of each station in the army invariably started with the same letter and remained unchanged as their advance progressed, nor was there any change in wavelength of the broadcasts. 

Cavalry units were the worst offenders, probably due to stress of their fast-moving formations...Each German cavalry control station, for instance, had an identifying letter: ‘S’ was the designation of units in Belgium, ‘G’ in Luxembourg, ‘L’ in the Woëvre and ‘D’ in Lorraine. Confirmation from some messages came in plain text and could even be clearly signed by the sender with their rank and name"

I'm not an intel weenie but even I can figure out that's not good. 

As you can imagine, the Eiffel Tower made a terrific radio listening post

It's difficult for me at this distance to tell how each element affected the course of the Battle of the Frontiers. Certainly reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance on the ground made differences, both from what the aviators and cavalrymen discovered...and what they probably should have and didn't.

Certainly SIGINT (and it's "opponent", COMSEC) made differences, too. The author of the War History piece certainly thinks that French SIGINT was crucial:

"Von der Marwitz’s cavalry were ordered by radio to provide a thin screen of lancers to cover the widening gap between First and Second armies. The French identified this as a weak spot in the German front that began to stretch for miles as the two armies advanced at an uneven pace. Using signals intelligence gleaned by the Deuxième Bureau on 8 September, the French general struck at the critical point between the two German armies’ line of advance. They soon began to threaten the German First Army with encirclement and outflank von Bulow’s Second Army in the process, causing both German armies to retreat...the German Army retreating in the face of a desperate French resistance became known as ‘The Miracle’ in public parlance. The French High Command and the Deuxième Bureau, however, knew better."

As we'll see in the next several parts, reconnaissance troops on the ground and in the air played a big part in the "Miracle" as well as the engagements leading up to it, so...is there a definitive "answer"?

No. Like much of modern warfare - indeed, like much of warfare, period - the real effects and impacts of all the various factors; physical, emotional, intellectual, as well as things like weather, terrain, organizations and equipment, doctrine...are all related and interacting with each other.

All we can do from a distance is try and tease out how and why each affected the outcomes.

Certainly the radios, both as part of each side's "C3I" (command, control, communications, and intelligence) as well as the SIGINT people's use of them as enemy intelligence sources, played a role. Befitting the relative unfamiliarity all the armies had with radio, though? My guess is that those roles varied significantly, from critical to marginal to overlooked entirely.

Anyway...I thought the SIGINT part of the story was worth discussing. Thanks again, Carstens, and we'll be back later in May with the "big story" of the Frontiers; the critical Battle of the Ardennes that kicked off in the third week of August 1914.