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Going Over The Top: Kitchener's Army

Ooof. The only thing more grim than reading about the violence in World War One is reading about people being chucked in the meatgrinder with shoddy training and equipment.

This bit stood out:

It was decided that OTC (Officer Training Corps) at a good school was sufficient training for a junior officer, and hundreds of such public schoolboys were given commissions straight away.
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because I remembered many of those public school junior officers ended up dead. No wonder if they don't know what they're doing.
 
Depressing subject but excellent article.
 
Jesus Christ that's worse then I ever thought. What was Kitchener thinking?! Did he think enthusiasm would cut barb wire? Or teach soldiers to shoot straight. Fucking hell.
 
Sulemain said:
The initial premier of blasting the Germans to little pieces was impossible with the tech of the time.
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When you do the math, the realizations of the war materiel needed are staggering. I have a programmer acquaintance I turned onto the problem, and his conclusion was... interesting. The short of it is, though, the ammount of men you need handing up bullets is far too many for most commanders' taste- especially ones that think they can win with fire and manuvere.

Fire two shells a minute for an hour, at ~20kg a shell, plus a couple kg for the shell-boxes, and that's a quarter-ton per gun, and a ton per battery. Early wave Wehrmacht used 3 battalions of 12x10.5cm leichte Feldhaubitze, so 36 guns is nine whole tons of ammunition gone in an hour, without even considering the 15cm battalion they also had, or the weight of mortars used down the chain. So that's about four trucks loaded with ammo that need to arrive on the hour every hour to keep that division in supply just for the 10.5s, assuming everyone is conveniently located. Keep that firing up for a day of heavy combat and you're going to need a train load to replenish that unit by itself.
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David Flin said:
Similar thinking happened in WWII, Vietnam, and countless other places where it was assumed that putting enough explosive into a target area will do the job, no problem. They also had few answers to the question: "What if it doesn't?"
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Tactically, putting enough explosives into an area will, if not solve the problem, generally suppress it to let other people come up to help handle it. Trying to use it to substitute for strategy is where the real trouble comes from.
 
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