Category Archives: The Great War

Lanchester’s Laws

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While playing an online multi-player wargame, someone attacked 10 units with 19 units of the same type.  How many attackers survived?  Contrary to what some might assume, it was not nine units.  They were equally matched and 16 units survived of the attacking force.

This is a very simplified version of reality, but essentially there are, initially, nearly twice as many attackers as defenders shooting, so a defender will be killed in half the time of an attacker.  Then the ratio of attackers to defenders is even greater: 19 to 9.  Now the likelihood of a defender being killed before an attacker is even greater than before.  Eventually, only a few defenders are being outnumbered 4:1 or 5:1 and so they are eliminated very quickly, with few if any losses to the attackers.

This is described in Lanchester’s Laws which say that when you have people shooting at one another at range, and each can fire on any other opponent (as opposed to one-on-one melee combat), the effectiveness of the forces are in proportion to the squares of their numbers meaning the attrition over time is far greater for the lesser force.  That is, the smaller force, will lose members faster and faster and the greater force lose them slower and slower.

One can imagine how ten people shooting at two people may manage to shoot both before any of the ten are themselves shot, contrary to what is usually represented in Wild West and action movies.

As examples, assuming a 1% chance of killing with any given shot, a battle between 100 attackers and 50 defenders will – statistically – end in victory after 55 rounds with 86 attackers surviving.  Some more analysis:

Attackers Defenders %likelihood Rounds Survivors
100 99 1% 265 13
100 90 1% 148 43
100 50 1% 55 86
100 14 1% 15 98
100 10 1% 11 99
100 99 50% 5 6
100 90 50% 3 28
100 50 50% 2 65
100 10 50% 1 95
100 99 90% 2 2
100 90 90% 2 19
100 50 90% 1 55
100 10 90% 1 91

The lower the likelihood of killing with one shot, the greater the Lanchester Law effect: the larger number of attackers will whittle away the defenders before the defenders can respond in a significant way.  At the other extreme, 100% likelihood of killing in one shot, it resembles melee combat and the number of survivors is simply the number of attackers minus the number of defenders.

What is the point of this?

  1. When playing tabletop wargaming, always attack with overwhelming numbers to maximise enemy losses while minimising your own.
  2. The Generals of the Great War were indeed incompetent buffoons, believing attrition would win them the war, by sending in wave after wave of small numbers of their own troops in short lines on the front to be massacred.

The second point is particularly so since the infantry were walking into defensive machine gun fire, where the likelihood of killing per unit of time was far greater than for the attackers.  Attacking in that way maximised the losses for the attacker.  And this would have been apparent for any player of wargames or mathematically minded person at the front.  The defence for the the donkeys running the war was that they knew no better – then they were idiots.

The Prussians had been playing wargames as a military training tool for over a century by the time of the Great War.

Why do I as a pacifist play wargames?  Partly recreation, partly research.  It helps one to understand the true horror of mechanised, organised, warfare.

I have a problem with Max Weber

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Max Weber, an influential German sociologist, said in 1918:

the state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

This statement is used as the argument for policing, criminal justice, prisons, war and all manner of violent acts initiated by the state that cause harm to its people.

Note that he said ‘territory’ not ‘people’, and that he said it immediately after Germany lost the Great War.

Weber, a Prussian by birth, was raised by a strict pro-Bismark politician and a strict puritan Protestant and grew up in Berlin surrounded by the political elite that were promoting the development and growth of a united Germany on the world stage.  He was a strong proponent of liberal imperialism: imperial expansionism that would allow Germany to compete with France and Britain.

He had identified a strong correlation between capitalist success in Germany and Protestantism.  This he attributed to predestination associated with protestant puritanism that was elsewhere suppressed by the Catholic Church.

During the Great War, Weber argued for strength and unity for Germany.  In 1916 he said the conquered nations of Europe should, in Germany’s long-term interests, remain as independent political countries within the greater German economy.  In 1917 he was one of those advocating ceasing the war, when Germany put the proposition to the Allies to leave the boundaries at their new positions based on the front line, that is, accept Germany had won.  This would allow the extended Germany to keep Belgium and other territories gained in the war to that point.  Unfortunately for Germany, the Allies decided to fight on.

During the Great War, Germany had committed ‘the Rape of Belgium’.  This was the taking from Catholic Belgium – at that time one of the world’s largest and most modern industrialised economies – of its machines and resources.  Its male population was transported to Germany to provide forced labour for the German war industry.  Belgium was stripped of its factories and experience and has never recovered from what Germany did.

After the Great War, discussions took place in Paris about what reparations Germany should be making for what it did in Northern France and Belgium.  It was during these discussions that Max Weber, pro-German, anti-Catholic, pro-capitalist gave his speech about the state being entitled to use violence within its territory.  That is, that Germany was perfectly entitled to do what it like to Belgium as it was German conquered territory.

That his quote “the state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” is still used today as an excuse for police brutality, the death penalty and genocide is beyond my comprehension.  Max Weber was an apologist for this worst atrocities Germany committed in the Great War and his defence of Germany in the context of a horrific war in which war crimes and genocide occurred is being used today in modern democracies to excuse immense social harms committed by states upon their citizens.

And yet he is considered a founding father of modern social science and this quote appears in text books as an essential foundation for functioning societies.

Some more of his statements from that period of the post-war German revolution:

The decisive means for politics is violence.

and

the world is governed by demons and that he who lets himself in for politics, that is, for power and force as means, contracts with diabolical powers and for his action it is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.

and

Whoever wants to engage in politics at all, and especially in politics as a vocation…lets himself in for the diabolic forces lurking in all violence.

Quote

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“…the bodies of strong, young men were being poured ruthlessly into the 500 mile long gutter that was the Western Front.” (BBC, 2015, 14:55)

That came, quite unexpectedly, from the mouth of a young student about half-way through a Sherlock Holmes / Mary Russell story on BBC Radio 7.

BBC, (2015) ‘The Beekeeper’s Apprentice’, episode 1 of 4 of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, London, BBC, [online].  Available from: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0075z3b (accessed 9 June 2015).

The horrors of war: the gueules cassées

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I believe gueules cassées is French for ‘broken faces’ or ‘broken jaws’ (I know not which) and is the term used for the French men who had their faces blown off in the Great War.

Some 15 million men were crippled by the Great War.  In the UK alone by the late 1930s there were still over half a million men receiving pensions for physical disability caused by that war (National Archive).  And then there were those who remained in hospital for the rest of their lives.

The nature of trench warfare is such that the face is often the most exposed part of the body meaning the Great War – with its shrapnel and grenades – was the cause of a huge increase in the number of severe facial wounds.  Also, battlefield medicine began to improve during that war increasing the likelihood of wounded men surviving terrible wounds that would have previously been fatal.

But what happens to a young man with no lower jaw or a hole in his skull where his nose was?  And in France losing ones face was not considered a disability so they received no pension, despite being unable to go out in public.

Léon Dufourmentel (1884 – 1957) was a French surgeon responsible for caring for the gueules cassées and was innovative finding methods for repairing facial wounds by transferring flaps of skin from the scalp to, for example, the chin.

Apparently five of his patients were taken from the hospital to the Palace of Versailles for the signing of the peace treaty in 1919.

Such people are still supported in France – because soldiers are still being shot in the face – through the Union des Blessés de la Face et de la Tête (Union for those with Facial and Head Injuries) and the Foundation for Gueules Cassées are.  They organise international events to raise awareness and funding.

Whether you choose to do a Google image search for the term is up to you.  They are seriously horrid pictures.  They are the sort of images the media are prevented from portraying during a war for fear of upsetting morale.  Whether you call that sensible censorship or propaganda is up to you.

Alternatively view the war memorial in Trévières to the dead of 1914-18.  She was herself maimed in the Second World War and now stands as an inadvertent representative of the broken faces.

The War Memorial at Trévières with her lower jaw blown off

The War Memorial at Trévières. Taken from Traces of War.com

As I write this, there is nothing on the English language Wikipedia about the gueules cassées.  Nowadays plastic surgery is commonplace, even expected of the rich and famous – every day the newspapers and news web sites are littered with such ‘news’.  But nothing much is said about those who suffered and made it necessary for innovative techniques in surgery to be invented.  Perhaps a little more exposure to the horrors of war, and a little less commercial censorship, rather than glorifying and sanitising war by  the media and search engines, might not go amiss.

Dinosaur poets

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A fellow Open University student wrote in Dinosaur poets TM:

what is/are Poets

Can they die and emerge again

like Dinosaurians

?

which made me think of some of the First World War poets and haiku in response.

Brooke.  Grenfell.  Munro.
Owen.  Rosenberg.  Sorley.
Thomas.  Wilson.  Wyn. 

The Great War is history, and the poets above did not survive it.  But fragments of their work live on, typically preserved in stone, like the fossils of creatures who lived at a time before ours when great beasts roared across the earth, ripping gentler souls limb from limb in the quest for blood to spill and flesh to consume.

Which got me thinking about the metaphor of Hollywood B-movie dinosaurs as great monsters, roaring and killing like the great guns of the artillery blasting away at the soldiers in the trenches.

Children love to see reconstructed dinosaurs and stomp about roaring and pretending to be a T-Rex, chomping great chunks out of authority figures like parents and teachers and elder siblings.  Being so big and powerful that they can do as they like, ruling the earth.

Is this the childish, base desire that prompts people to like to watch war being made on the news?  Gore-porn as entertainment?  How advertisers are clamouring to get their products promoted alongside clips of people being beheaded, blown up, burning alive, shot and gently rotting in the sun?  The advertisers and media know what we like.

Civilisation is a transparently thin veneer.

Maybe the world ends with a text message

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100 years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated which was the catalyst for the Great War.

That prompted someone called Night-Gaunt49 to comment on the Candorville comic strip of 27th June 2014 to say:

Seems insane that the murder of one person would start a global war, but it did. The stupidity of “entangling alliances” that Washington warned us about did them end.

The “entangling alliances” view is from pro-German revisionist thinking of the 1960s. Academia is now reverting back to its view of the time that it was about the unified Germany’s rapid growth and expansion not being matched by having a presence on the world stage. Germany would have started a war before 1918 whatever happened. The death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was merely a conveniently timed catalyst. It was used by Germany as an excuse to push the Austro-Hungarian Empire to start a war (it mattered not with who) so that Germany could conduct either an expansion to the East, or, if necessary, follow the Schlieffen Plan to quickly defeat attack France and then Russia. Either would have achieved the desired effect and likely given Germany diplomatic presence on a par with France, England and Russia.

The Schlieffen Plan was ‘improved’ by a committee which reduced the size of the attacking force, which meant the German forces failed to sweep through Belgium and France as quickly as intended. That resulted in the trenches and the machine-gun meat-grinder that killed millions.

It was not one murder that started the Great War. That was just one tiny step in a long succession of events and circumstances.

It was not inevitably a global war. That was caused by Germany not following their well-designed plan, resulting in them being delayed by defensive forces, which allowed time for lots of other states to pile in to see what land or diplomatic advantage they could grab in the process.