So, since I'm around this joint, a question for the readership (if any of you remain...)
Thinking of battle pieces, and I've actually come across several I'm interested in writing up. Wondering if there's any sort of preference on order of precedence.
I've been getting kind of intrigued about the "Battles of the Frontiers", the August 1914 engagements along the French and Belgian borders that opened the Great War. It started with a little book called Death in the Ardennes that discussed 22 AUG 1914, the single bloodiest day of the entire war.
I'm not sure I can write up all that in a single post. But, much as Steg, the author of the Ardennes book did, I can pick one of the engagements fought between 21 and 23 AUG that would serve as a good illustration for the actions of that brutal week.
The other just came across my notice for some odd reason; Yarmouk.
It's an early medieval (7th Century CE) engagement that marked the beginning of the Great Eastern War between the rising power of Islamic polities - in this case, the Rashidun Caliphate - and the Eastern Roman Empire.
I kind of like Yarmouk, both because it really WAS decisive and because chasing down these ancient source materials is more fun.
But...the customer is always right.
Thoughts?
9 comments:
Hi chief - I'd go for Yarmouk. Some of your best posts are historiography where you have tricky sources, it's a real insight into the historian craft and you are good at telling the story.
Though battle of the frontiers is certainly really interesting too, as the Great Powers put into practice their pre war plans.
As someone with The Guns of August, Storm of Steel, The Marne, 1914 and The Sleepwalkers on the shelf, I would absolutely LOVE to read your take on the Frontiers. To me it's the most interesting part of the war, back when the belligerents still thought they knew what war they were fighting, the war they'd so long been preparing for. That said, if you prefer to follow your nose and take us through Yarmouk first, I'd be delighted to read that too. And besides, what's the point of being retired if you can't set your own schedule?
I'm partial to the Battle of the Frontiers. We tend to pass over the early parts of the war and focus on the trenches and the big battles (Verdun, Somme, Kaiser's Offensive, Paschendale, Vimy, etc...)
By the way, I just finished a book by David O'Keefe called One Day in August about the Dieppe raid. He makes the case that the entire raid was about stealing intelligence materials, especially the new 4 rotor enigma machines. They just made it so massive that the Germans wouldn't believe that it was all put on just to steal intelligence. Thus they wouldn't change all the codes and settings for the enigma machines. All this was buried under the restrictions about Ultra (which was only acknowledged in 1974) so they put in various claims to hide the real reason. I think he makes a good case here.
Yarmouk is interesting, but the Frontiers is fascinating.
The Russo-Japanese War was only 8 years prior, and its lessons about the horribly lethal environment created by crew-served automatic weapons and magazine rifles were sinking in very poorly.
Bruce Gudmundsson wrote that intake of those lessons was spotty even in the German Army, apparently due to their practice of localizing troop training. In fact, Gudmundsson writes that the German Army was the most decentralized army in Europe. Absence of a real centralized Training Command meant that the incoming recruits and/or draftees had to be trained in a process whose bauplan hadn't really changed much since the days of the Marian legions. So some troops were drilled in open order tactics prior the the outbreak of the war. But others had apparently never heard of them, until the day they were handed their lessons by the brutal tutelage of the Western Front.
Even so, they appeared to be better off than the British and the French.
But most histories of the first six months don't really discuss how the various armed forces reacted, when they were handed evidence of the fact that they'd been kicked in the teeth by the consequences of failure to consider the effects of technological change over the course of the long 19th century.
So my heart inclines me to Yarmouk, but my head says "If you can't lay hands on an actual translation of the Fatuh al-Sham you might as well give it up"; the only detailed account of the fight is there - everybody else give it the usual "the saracens and greeks fought and the infidels kicked ass" treatment.
Fortunately I have rented the 2020 translation, so I'm going to start on that first.
I need more sources for Frontiers; that's next. I'm guessing closer to October.
Yarmouk is my vote.
The other thing about Frontiers is that it's been covered a LOT better. A guy named Terence Zuber wrote an entire book about it in 2007. I've got it and I'm going to take a look. But I'll have to find a real hook to hang a post here on or I'll just be repeating the good work someone else has already done. I note that the Wikipedia entries (on both the Frontiers in general and the Ardennes fights which caught my interest) are well researched and written.
It's an interesting bit of history...but it looks well-covered already...
Just a quick (passing by) comment regarding the (implied) question of whether readership remains... Recently I may not have had time to read much but definitely still around!
In fact even though I don't have the time to read the post in detail to answer the main question and even though I have not been seriously online for a while, I suddenly felt the need to check the blog simply to see if in my absence there have been any new entries in perhaps the best series the internet has to offer (you know, probably after some series from the thing everybody uses the internet for I guess...)
So not much help for the main question but will read anything that you find interesting enough and with enough material to provide an entry on!
Good to see you posting, Chief. I've been abroad so havent' checked lately.
I'd vote for Frontiers too but that's out of personal interest; you would do an excellent job on either and I hope you do both.
I did a lot of research about Dieppe a few years ago for a long magazine article on the raid and I discount the code-machine-snatching mission.
Not saying it wasn't there, somewhere among the inchoate mass of other things the raid was supposed to do (draw out and eliminate fighter aircraft, cutting-out some nasty old landing craft and taking them back to the UK, show resolve for a Second Front to relieve pressure on the Soviets some time in the future, test out weird new equipment, blood the Canadians who were getting bored biffing around in the countryside and whose government was jumping up and down to do something, etc. etc.), but whether it was or wasn't doesn't really matter as all the battle achieved was a bunch of dead people on a beach.
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