Post by ***@aol.comPost by Bob HarperPost by John FowlerI can't help but thinking that Trump was right about World War I.
A good friend whose brother went to West Point and retired as a General
told him that cadets spent 6 weeks studying the campaigns of Lee and
Stonewall Jackson, and only 1 week on WWI. Probably the worst
generalship ever.
Bob Harper
I would say that once the forces were joined in Europe in WWI, the relatively cramped physical nature of the battlefield plus the rise in number of combatants (alf of which led to severe restrictions on maneuver), and the vast increase in the firepower of non-individual weapons (i.e. machine guns, mortars, and artillery) compared to what was available in the Civil War would have rendered the sorts of campaigns that Lee and Jackson had mounted virtually untenable. One still wonders, though, what Lee would have done in place of Haig, Foch et al.
You're right, of course, about the far greater lethality of WWI
technology. I suspect Lee and Jackson would have better appreciated the
necessity of maneuver and wold have done much more to prevent the
establishment of the continuous line of trenches from the Swiss border
to the sea. Whether they could have done so we don't know. In any case,
they couldn't have done any worse.
Bob Harper