In European/Western armies, air forces and navies, those decisions are implemented primarily by NCOs, enlisted and junior officers, but the decisions themselves almost always flow from the top. The decision to begin fighting is exactly that, a decision, and the decisions made why, when and how to prosecute a war are also fully human. War is the bloodiest, dirtiest, nastiest action men can take on this Earth, and war is not ever divorced from its creator. War is first, foremost, and last a human endeavor. As A J P Taylor put it: “It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.” ![]() The scope for a cataclysm by accident – with uncomfortable echoes during the Cold War, and Korea today – was obvious. In such circumstances, what would appear to a rational mind to be a mere precaution for war and a warning to the other side becomes de facto the first act of war. Your troops could be languishing in their barracks, still scrambling to get their kit ready, whilst the enemy rapes and pillages your people and captures your capital. The technology and the newly developed logistical ability to move hundreds of thousands of troops and horses, plus supplies, to an enemy border meant that once one state had mobilised its troops, its neighbour would have to do the same – because not to do so would offer the side that was already on the move an immediate strategic advantage, and possibly decisively so in a lightning war. The argument runs that the war was the ultimate triumph of the steam age: the fat, efficient system of railways reached almost every hamlet and village across Europe and, like most technical innovations, could be adopted for martial use with relative ease. (He could deliver a perfectly worded, argued and timed lecture live on TV to a peak time audience – those were the days.) This was the idea famously put forward by the first of the telly historians, A J P Taylor, in the 1960s. It smacks too much of the “climax to the railway age” argument: ![]() ![]() Our chief beef with MHV’s pronouncement, especially in regards to Plan Z and the Kriegsmarine’s strategy in the Second World War is “naval strategy is build strategy” is too sterile. This leads to a quite obvious question, but one without an obvious answer–could the Germans, had they focused on building U-boats from the outset of their military and maritime recovery in 1935, have turned the tables on the British before the American entry into the war at the tail end of 1941 and forced the UK to terms? The Men Matter The T2 tanker program, along with the C3, Liberty and Victory Ship building programs seeded the oceans with so much Allied shipping that MARCOM might be credibly argued to be the single greatest factor in the Second World War struggle for sea supremacy. Simply put, there is no question that the output of American shipyards made the war at sea unwinnable for the Axis powers. From having written 15 previous installments that vociferously argue against the idea that naval strategy is build strategy, we will take a new tack and give MHV’s assertion the benefit of the doubt:Īfter all, there is a kernel of truth to MHV’s pronouncement.
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