What on earth....

"Jolly good old chap! No one hit the lad! No one was shooting at him either, but that's petty detail... Now let's have a jolly cup of tea shall we?"

Indeed, it all sounds good but that doesn't mean you can just field it and it'll work, Same went for the tank in 1916...

 

You tell them that.
I'm surprised they did not try to get the red uniform brought back.
Or order the troops to stop fighting at 4pm on a Sunday so they could have a jolly game of cricket, what what!

Did you know that many senior cavalry officers requested that tank crew should be 'allowed' to wear spurs inside the tank, as they were technically cavalrymen? :roll:

 

Traditions can really be taken too far...

It's almost a rule that those who lead the army of today fought in it yesterday and therefore often favor the methods of yesterday as those 'with honour' or 'of glory'. Therefore in history generals have often been surprisingly uninsightful and that got many soldiers killed.

I'm almost certain that 'uninsightful' is not a word.

 

I can top that, Ricky. In the 1920s, US Army aviators were *required* to wear spurs while flying their planes. You can imagine what the pilots thought about it... :roll:

 

or get hit on the rump while he was trying to disentangle that contraption...hahahah!

 

You best hope if you had to use that thing would be that the Germans would be laughing too hard to shoot straight.

 

That must have been bloody inconvenient.
They must have inscribed grooves into the cockpit floor to allow them to use the rudder pedals (or rudder bar, depending on the plane!) properly.
And imagine trying to get in & out of an open cockpit with spurs on!

And I thought that the English were hide-bound conservative idiots...

 

Generals get the rap, and in many cases they are indeed to blame-one reason politicians in England and France became more vocal in military matters were the dissastrous battles in the Western Front, when the home front was kept pretty much in the dark about the heavy cassualties-but on the other hnd, politicians could be a drag as well: There was no properly centralized Intelligence Service in the US until Bill Donovan established the OSS. When first approached with the idea of a central intelligence service, the then Secretary of State; Cordel Hull dismissed the ida saying:" Gentlemen do not read other gentlemen's mail!" This poor, bucolic narrow minded functionary apparently had no conception of what the real world was like.....

 

No doubt! The age of conservatism and reaction was still at work about WW1. With the familiar but no less disastrous consequences.

 

In WW1 all major powers seemed to have ignored the destructive power of modern artillery and the machine gun...weapons had evolved but what about tactics?....there were plenty of Colonel Blimps in all the major armies involved...

 

There still are, to some extent. And there likely always will be.

 

Unfortunately for the troops yes....

 

Conservatist hardliners, or out of the earth reformists, which is the greater danger to a modern army?

 

Its easier to conserve than to reform - Reformists always draw flak from everyone else, and there aren't a terribly large number of them either.

And reformers removed from the realities of life are far more damaging too. At least conservative doctrines used to work.

 

Both.....

 

By instinct (or laziness) man is a conservative animal..Dont you find yourself taking the same walk around the same park or going to the same gin mill? If l do l act upon it..there's too much of the "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" attitude with the military...Yet Napoleon said something to the effect that an army ought to change its t tactics every twenty five years...Apparently during the US Civil War and during WW1 (nobody on the Allied side) rememberd that..

 

Being conservative isn't a bad thing per se. Digging in your heels to new ideas just because they are new is. And "reformers" with their heads stuck in their ivory towers can, indeed, be just as dangerous, if nor more so. I commend to your attention Arthur C. Clarke's wonderful short story, "Superiority".

 

Indeed, l consider myself a Conservative, but being conservative (or a "reformer "for its own sake makes no sense at all..Above all things (and l trust we are still speaking of military matters) , I'm a pragmatist : that which works and works well is good..

 

K.u.K army experimented with similar contraptions as on the pic. Needles to say that they were not sutible for mouteinus terrain of Soška fronta ( Isonzo front).

 

Tso, do you have any pictures of these K,U,K. contraptions?