They Would Have Know By Now It Wasn't Going To Be All Over By Christmas.

[sandyRoe]

At this stage of the Great War 100 years ago they must have realised they were in for a long haul. It seems the technology they already had, machine guns and poison gas for example, had far outstripped tactics. Even to a layman, sending men walking into the teeth of machine gun fire looked a very poor use of resources.
Was there nobody to say we need to rethink how we're conducting this?

[Old_Geezer]

Probably loads. I suspect a dearth of good ideas, and a situation where those making the decisions weren't the ones having to live (or not) with them. In a less tragic way that sounds much like today's top management. Little changes then.

[stuey]

Sandy, I just found this on the BBC site: it sort of fits it with your thread. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-30296660

[Peter Pedant]

Haig - not one of my favourites as I was brought up in the ear of Lions led by donkeys - maintained that the only way to Germany was over the top

and so it proved - after the disastrous last push by Germany in March 1918, following the mutinies in most armies, they went over the top to undefended trenches....

[stuey]

"It [the letter] was given to Staffordshire County Council by the general's family in the 1960s but was only unearthed, among hundreds of other documents, this year." I would be really immensely angered, even urinated off, if me or members of my family gave something of historical importance to such an institution and is was just shoved into a nook to be found decades later. And yet this kind of "find" seems to happen so often.

[Peter Pedant]

Good progz being re broadcast

1964 - the Great War
and on Al Jazeera - Arabs in the First World War
ALOT of archive film from then Trans Jordan

[sandyRoe]

Haig, being a soldier, would say that, wouldn't he?
The Gremans must have had trench warfare in the back of their minds when they came up with the concept of Blitzkrieg. I think there was an English military tactician, whose name escapes me, who became influential in the 1930s.

[stuey]

I knew I'd read it somewhere, probably in "The Guns Of August" by B Tuchman, but I had to look it up. The general military strategy prepared by the Germans prior to the war was known as the Schlieffen Plan.

[sandyRoe]

Liddell-Hart, it was.
It seems there were men to say, 'We need to rethink how we're doing this'. The problem was getting somebody to listen.

[sandyRoe]

Not 'somebody' but the right people to listen.

[stuey]

Any other thoughts on that letter, mentioned above, and "hundreds of other documents" being "discovered" 60 plus years later...Absolutely unforgivable in my opinion.

[sandyRoe]

An archive might contain tens of thousands of documents. It would be a disgrace if it had been known about and just ignored. If it hadn't been known then to have uncover such a gem was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack.

[stuey]

I would gladly volunteer, perhaps even maybe pay, to have a position in which I could go through such documents and ensure that they weren't just forgotten and ignored.

[sandyRoe]

We live in straightened times. The last thing a council could afford to do is pay researchers to sift through old collections of documents.
Maybe that particular document was found by a volunteer.