William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[carl]

:O geesh Carl--that's like saying the Captain of the Hunley was just as good a submariner s the captain of an Ohio class boomer (to paraphrase you).

Good riposte! It made me laugh out loud.

Had such technology been available to him, I suspect Grant would have had a much larger TOC. BTW, Grant also did not have UAVs, close air sport aircraft like A-10s and F-15Es, any kind of motorized or mechanized transport or armored fighting vehicles, machine guns, grenade launchers. wireless communications (unless you count carrier pigeons as such) or any technical surveillance means. When all you have to manage are men armed with muskets and early forms of carbines, His largest field artillery was smaller than the standard artillery used today with the 20 pound Parrot rifle being about Grant's largest field piece (I discount his siege train artillery.)

Maybe he would have. I suspect not, at least not all of it, maybe even not most of it. He was a very plain just the basics kind of guy I've read. From what I've read an awful lot of what we use is there only because it is shiny and new, not so much because it is useful.

I think you very much underestimate the complexity of running those old armies. The Union Army was very large so you had all the complexities that go with feeding, clothing, paying, providing medical care hundreds of thousands of men in any era. Plus you had horses back then, tens of thousands of them. If you ever stopp and think what it takes to fully train and fight a cavalry unit, it is quite complicated. So I think it quite unwise to think that because the didn't have to sling trons, those guys had it simple.

Those armies did have motorized transport, steamers, both river and ocean going, and railroads.

Modern ASW is not much about ship to ship fighting either, except in movies like the Hunt for Red October And, I submit we haven't seen serious naval fleet surface fighting since the WWI Battle of Jutland and with good reason. Those fleets cost way to much to put in harm's way any more than just a few ships in a raiding party (like Bismarck and Prinz Eugen and remember that Bismarck was basically turned into a sitting duck by a torpedo dropped by a between-the-wars-vintage biplane: a Fairey Swordfish, AKA Stringbag.) Go ahead and throw Coral Sea or Leyte Gulf at me as counter examples--then tell me just how many ships were sunk by surface gunfire. During the Leyte battles, Surigao Strait represented the closest thing to a stand up fight between surface ships as far as I know. The rest of the action was largely aircraft and submarines or destroyers using torpedoes. Sure Yamato sank a retreating escort carrier too, IIRC.
BTW, I'm not sure what the point about the horrors of dying at sea during WWII are meant to portray in the contact of this thread. Folks in a land forces Rear HQ that gets hit with napalm or VX will die just as terribly.

First off, you're wrong about that last serious surface actions being Jutland. They didn't call it Iron Bottom Sound for nothing, and many of those ships were sunk in a long series of night surface actions.

But that isn't really important. The point was we haven't seen serious naval fighting since WWII.

As far as ship to ship action goes, I doubt we've seen that last of that by a long shot. I understand sinking subs will mainly be the job of other sube, a ship to ship action. And if a surface combatant shoots an Asroc type weapon at a sub or a sub shoots anything at a surface ship that is a ship to ship action. (Fuchs says airplanes aren't that good at ASW anymore. If he is right then ASW will be mostly ship to ship. I think he said that.)

Big time naval fighting doesn't come around very often as you say. It has been 70 years since WWII and it was about 100 years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and WWI or 90 if you count the Russo-Japanese War. But it does come around. And often it doesn't matter if you want to keep the ships out harm's way. Harm's way tends to seek them out.

I always bring up what actual sea fighting entails for the sailors because people often just see the machines. There it is. Oops it sunk. People are on those things and they have experiences. That matters.

Now it is time for my smart aleck remark of the afternoon. The historical casualty rate in land forces rear HQs hasn't been so high as to make people in the infantry count their lucky stars that they didn't have the misfortune to be posted back at D-Main.