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Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

dudalb said:
I wonder if s similair mistake was why the Hood blew up so quickly in 1941,
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No, Hood was redesigned to take on board the lessons of Jutland. As built it had equivalent armour to the Queen Elizabeths and much modified and improved anti flash and magazine protection.

Hood sinking is covered in great detail by Drachinifel in several videos.

This one specifically covers Hood blowing up in great depth.



 
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And I thought I was going to beat you to "Drachinifel has a video on that" for a change, but no such luck. :p

I will, however, share an OT but funny story about Drach that I was reminded of the other day. When he visited the USS Alabama in Mobile, I was living in the Florida panhandle, so I drove over for the meet-and-greet he had scheduled for after he finished his tour and filming. There were about 30 fans there, and one person had an immature canine on a leash. I thought, "Damn. That looks like a wolf." I wondered whether it might be one of those wolf-looking dogs they used for GoT.

When Drach finally appeared (late, we were informed by one of his traveling companions, because he was so fascinated by the engine room), he said, "We'll get started in a minute, but first I have to pet this cute little doggie."

The owner informed him, "It's a wolf."

Drach said to the wolf, "Please don't eat me." :D
 
HansMustermann said:
History, including military history, being a bit of a hobby of mine, I thought I'd put forward some of the moments I find fascinating in a "what were they thinking?" kind of way.

And I'd like to start with the battle of Agincourt.

Now probably even people who don't know much about history know about how the English put like 1500 arrows a second into the air, and mowed down the French, but that is only a small part of the picture. It even more a merit of the terrain preventing the English from being flanked, as well as creating a slight funnel shape for the advancing French that plays silly buggers with tightly packed rows of advancing infantry.

What I find more fascinating, though, is that location and terrain was the choice of the French. It's rare that you can force the enemy to have no choice but to attack in the exact place of your choosing, but marshal Jean II Le Maingre (a.k.a., Boucicaut) managed just that. The English had been harrassed and forced along a way that led to exactly where the French wanted them, and were prepared for them.

Except the place that the French wanted them, was a place that would massively favour the English :p

And that's what I don't get. I'll even admit that other topographical features may have been less obvious at the time as a potential problem. BUT when you have an army whose main advantage is in its large numbers of heavy cavalry... how does one come to the idea of forcing the enemy into a position that has secure flanks and prevents said cavalry from flanking them?
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Just coming back to the OP, as it's just got into my notifications.

I've always wondered if it was basically like a crowd crush that led to the French defeat.

The footwear and heavy armour in a crush with slippery mud could have made it difficult to get up again for any men at arms who slipped and fell.
 
FOr repeated sancthing defeat frm the Jaws of VIctory I give you George McCleenan during the American Civil War. The guy was expert at throwing away every advantage he had. Yes, he was a very good organizer, but he was a lousy combat general. TIme and time again he threw away chances to destroy the Army Of Northren Virginia becuae he was too timed.
Yes, I don't like Little Mac very much.
 
dudalb said:
FOr repeated sancthing defeat frm the Jaws of VIctory I give you George McCleenan during the American Civil War. The guy was expert at throwing away every advantage he had. Yes, he was a very good organizer, but he was a lousy combat general. TIme and time again he threw away chances to destroy the Army Of Northren Virginia becuae he was too timed.
Yes, I don't like Little Mac very much.
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McClellan's tactics at the battle of Antietam were stunningly inept. He still "won" the battle since Lee withdrew, but his attacks were piecemeal and not coordinated resulting in one attack being made and then after that stopped another etc. and so on. McClellan's holding back 20,000 men. McClellan's foolish belief that he was outnumbered, despite what his intelligence services were telling him. Despite this it was still H.P. Hill's appearance that prevented a truly serious Confederate defeat.

What gets less criticism is Lee's tactics during the battle. In older history books Lee's army is said to have suffered more casualties than McClellan's, (c. 13,000 vrs 12,000), this seems to be in error the actual casualties were about 12,500 for McClellan vrs 10,500 for Lee. Still given that Lee was on the defensive the whole day and McClellan was attacking I find the casualties to be surprisingly even. Did Lee do something tactically wrong?
 
Pacal said:
McClellan's tactics at the battle of Antietam were stunningly inept. He still "won" the battle since Lee withdrew, but his attacks were piecemeal and not coordinated resulting in one attack being made and then after that stopped another etc. and so on. McClellan's holding back 20,000 men. McClellan's foolish belief that he was outnumbered, despite what his intelligence services were telling him. Despite this it was still H.P. Hill's appearance that prevented a truly serious Confederate defeat.

What gets less criticism is Lee's tactics during the battle. In older history books Lee's army is said to have suffered more casualties than McClellan's, (c. 13,000 vrs 12,000), this seems to be in error the actual casualties were about 12,500 for McClellan vrs 10,500 for Lee. Still given that Lee was on the defensive the whole day and McClellan was attacking I find the casualties to be surprisingly even. Did Lee do something tactically wrong?
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McClellan was a great general in peacetime and must be given credit for ensuring that the Union army was a serious fighting force from day one. As a war time general he was pretty useless.
 
Andy_Ross said:
No, Hood was redesigned to take on board the lessons of Jutland. As built it had equivalent armour to the Queen Elizabeths and much modified and improved anti flash and magazine protection.

Hood sinking is covered in great detail by Drachinifel in several videos.

This one specifically covers Hood blowing up in great depth.
Click to expand...

I would also recommend this follow-up that adds further research into what exactly happened:

 
HansMustermann said:
I would also recommend this follow-up that adds further research into what exactly happened:

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Bookmarked for later.

Here's Drac on the Times Radio Channel talking about Bismarck and the battle.
He has several vids of his own about the design of the Bismarck and a good one on how Rodney managed to get there so quickly.

 
About Bismack being or not being a super-ship... I'm going to do a bit of a semantic squabble, but I guess most of history is about that. There were almost no "super-ships" in human history, in the sense of being technologically more advanced. There's the Dreadnought, Monitor, Napoléon, Gloire and maybe a couple of others. And even some of those were not as far ahead of the curve TBH. E.g., HMS Dreadnought barely beat USS South Carolina to the punch, and arguably the USS South Carolina was a better idea with its superfiring turrets.

And notice the timeline there. We're talking mid 19'th century to before WW1.

By WW2, what most of us would call a "super-battleship" is simply a frikken big one, like the Yamato. Not something that's more technologically advanced. Basically just who cheated the treaties harder.

Basically same as today we use the term "super-carrier" to mean the biggest carriers. Otherwise there's really not much technological difference in the equipment and aircraft you can launch between, say, a Nimitz and the Charles de Gaulle. It's just the former is about 2.5 times bigger than the former.

So, short version: is Drach right that the Bismarck wasn't some future-tech battleship? Well, yes. Definitely. Does he use a different meaning of "super-battleship" than most other people? Also yes :p
 
But Dreadnought had turbines, oil firing and a number of other advances over the South Carolina. As ever Drach has a couple of good videos on the subject.
Warrior was probably more of a leap forward than Dreadnought and in it's time a genuine 'super ship'. Nothing else afloat could harm it and it could destroy any other ship it came across.

Bismarck suffered from the lack of experience of the German designers, they hadn't actually built anything since WW1. It used an outdated armour system, was hugely over weight and inefficient in design and didn't have a dual purpose secondary armament.

Yamato was big but not 'super'. It too had an indifferent armour layout, no dual purpose secondary armament and inefficiencies in it's design.
For the same tonnage the USN or RN would have had much better ships. You just need to look at the designs the RN was planning to build before the treaties stopped them, plus the Lion Class that was laid down at the start of the war and then abandoned.
There were even plans for 20 inch gun ships to match the Yamato.

Super Ship is one of those terms that means something different to different people.
 
HansMustermann said:
The idea of flanking is there since ancient times, though, not an 18'th century invention. As an even more extreme case of outright hitting the enemy in the BACK with the cav, the first recorded use IIRC of the Hammer And Anvil tactic is by Alexander The Great. And would then continue to be used at the battles of Cannae and Zama. And it never really stopped being used by the Byzantines, when they could.

I would grant, though, that hubris might have "helped" with that choice of tactics, though.
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I think the first time I heard of the Anvil and Hammer tactic was in discussions about Vietnam, For all the good it did, the US and South Viet militaries would blast the crap out of an area and then move troops into that area, drop airborne forces elsewhere and then they would form the Hammer moving to disrupt the forces between the two.
 
@Andy_Ross
On the other hand, the Yamato tried to have dual purpose PRIMARY guns. Now seriously, though, every gun in the Japanese navy above 5 inches had AA beehive shells, aka the San-shiki-dan or Type 3 shell, which, yes, were supposed to make them dual purpose. In fact 40% of the shells carried on the Yamato were the San-shiki-dan.

I mean, they were utter crap against aircraft, and their only major battle achievement was exploding early and disabling the Musashi's own secondary guns at he Battle of the Sibuyan Sea. But TECHNICALLY they could shoot AA shells even out of the 460mm (18.1 inches) Yamato main gun. And most definitely it made every single secondary gun on the Yamato be a dual purpose gun. A USELESS one, to be sure, but most certainly capable of shooting at aircraft too.
 
Mikemcc said:
I think the first time I heard of the Anvil and Hammer tactic was in discussions about Vietnam, For all the good it did, the US and South Viet militaries would blast the crap out of an area and then move troops into that area, drop airborne forces elsewhere and then they would form the Hammer moving to disrupt the forces between the two.
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Arnhem
 
HansMustermann said:
@Andy_Ross
On the other hand, the Yamato tried to have dual purpose PRIMARY guns. Now seriously, though, every gun in the Japanese navy above 5 inches had AA beehive shells, aka the San-shiki-dan or Type 3 shell, which, yes, were supposed to make them dual purpose. In fact 40% of the shells carried on the Yamato were the San-shiki-dan.

I mean, they were utter crap against aircraft, and their only major battle achievement was exploding early and disabling the Musashi's own secondary guns at he Battle of the Sibuyan Sea. But TECHNICALLY they could shoot AA shells even out of the 460mm (18.1 inches) Yamato main gun. And most definitely it made every single secondary gun on the Yamato be a dual purpose gun. A USELESS one, to be sure, but most certainly capable of shooting at aircraft too.
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There's a reason the RN and USN settled on around 5 inches for dual purpose armament, it comes down to rate of fire, and training speed.
The first RN Town class cruisers were going to have their 8 inch guns as dual purpose, that's why they could elevate to such high angles. It was abandoned because of the low rate of fire of an 8 inch gun and the increased top weight of turrets large enough for extreme elevation.
By the end of the war the rate of fire problem was fixed by the development of fully automatic 6 and 8 inch guns but they were never used in dual purpose mounts, the nearest was the N5 automatic 6inch gum in the high angle Mark 26 mounting on the RN Tiger-class cruisers just after the war.
HMS Blake the last of them was decommissioned just before I joined the navy but there were still examples of the mount along with the automatic twin 3 inch at HMS Excellent the RN gunnery school.
 
Yes, well, I'm pretty sure I've already said they were USELESS at being DP guns. Just saying, you can't say they didn't have DP guns :p
 
Gettysburg comes to mind. It started as a simple meeting engagement between two groups of light cavalry. If either Army swung away it would have tipped the war, but they turned to clash. It was pretty even odds,, but the Union Army reached one of the ridge lines and created a field of fire across the valley that slaughtered every attempt to cross it.

The only possible area that could have tipped the balance was in the south of the battlefield. If the Confederate Army captured that, they could have wrapped up the flank of the Union Army. It was decided, in part, by better reconnaissance by the union Army and a speedy advance guard that was able to secure the southern hills and create a killing field, followed by so many futile attempts to breach the Union lines culminating with Pickett's Charge.

The Confederate losses where huge and pivotal and led to Sherman's drive south waging Total War on the South, it was a turning point in the war. If either force had turned away from the site, history could have been very different
 
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