WWII H2H

[Joseph Svinth]

For a very nice historical discussion of Fairbairn, Sykes, etc. (I downloaded a copy, thank you very much), visit http://www.bladeforums.com/ubb/Forum35/HTML/000301.html

[Neil Hawkins]

I'm still digesting this, but I've never seen so much info in one place.

Neil

[FastEd]

I have a question,
Has there been any work done on tracing the development of armed and unarmed H2H military tactics developed from WW1 combat experence? Having looked at the link Joe provided I will post this question over there as well.


[Edited by FastEd on 08-13-2000 at 07:47 PM]

[Joseph Svinth]

Yes and no. Based on their WWI experience, the Russians put increased emphasis on snipers. The Germans also continued emphasizing snipers (the winner of a bayonet fight is he with one more bullet in his magazine, to quote Lt. Col. Erwin Rommel), but also increased the numbers of light machine guns and flame throwers assigned to line companies. Live-fire exercises were then undertaken in first Paraguay, then China, and finally Spain. The British resumed emphasis on 1000-yard bulls-eyes, which helped in India (and elsewhere, actually). For its part, the US Army started playing with BARs -- Tommy guns didn't have the range and weighed nearly as much as a BAR -- but it was only haphazard because there was no money for training, only garrison operations.

At a larger scale, lessons learned from WWI include the Russians deciding that massed artillery was good; the Germans adding tanks to the von Hutier sturmtruppen tactics to create Blitzkrieg; and the Americans and British putting serious thought to mechanized logistics. (The Germans had mechanized assault forces, but their supply lines were mostly horse-drawn. Thus the threat of anthrax during that war -- animals are far more susceptible to death from anthrax than people.) So yes, enormous thought was given to lessons learned, but it was to things other than H2H.

Personally I think Captain Smith's 1920 book is as good as any US military text I've seen, but of course it was ignored. Those pesky budget cutbacks, again; remember, by 1920, the only thing the US Army was used for was garrisoning the Philippines and busting up veteran's marches in Washington DC. By the time anyone started thinking about rearming -- circa 1938, for most purposes -- AJ Biddle, whose cousin was Attorney General under FDR, was about the only voice for H2H in the US, and as far as most folks were concerned, he was a bit dotty. (Even his daughter, Cordelia Drexel Biddle thought so; see her book "My Philadelphia Father" (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1955). Brian Keith played Biddle in the Disney film, if that gives you a clue to his character. And yes, it was a Sunday comic in 1966, too.)

For actual improved between the wars H2H, only the Japanese did anything serious -- both Japanese military boxing ("character-building") and Toyama Ryu battojutsu date to the 1920s.

If interested in such things, also check "Kronos" and "Journal of Non-Lethal Combat" at http://ejmas.com . I am posting stuff on this topic, and have more, but only type just so fast...

[Edited by Joseph Svinth on 08-14-2000 at 05:08 AM]

[Joseph Svinth]

Though there doesn't seem to be much H2H material here -- the keyword "bayonet" mostly turns up something to the effect of "bayonet charges against machine guns resulted in costly losses" -- but a nice WWI site is http://www.worldwar1.com . For pictures of how bayonet charges worked, the movie "Galipolli" is great; as they sing in "Waltzing Matilda":

How well I remember that terrible day
How the blood stained the sand and the water
And how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter

And that was fighting Turks, who under Ataturk greatly preferred Maxim machine guns and Krupp artillery to bayonets. (Stories about Turks loving bayonets in Korea is propaganda. Like everybody else on the UN side, the Turks' favorite defenses against Chinese and North Korean human waves included Quad-.50s on White halftracks. I know, there were occasional bayonet fights, but out of the million or so Chinese killed, the napalm, 105s, and machine guns got a lot more than the pointy things and bare knuckles.)

Now, that said, in 1870 a French officer named Charles Ardant du Picq published "Battle Studies." The theme of this book was that sufficient elan and a bayonet could carry the day against any obstacle. Now, Ardant du Picq was killed during the Franco-Prussian War, which France lost, and so never had a chance to revise the book. But, as the French were then training the Japanese Army, it seems to have influenced Japanese military pedagogy of the late nineteenth century. In the West, the Spanish American and South African Wars suggested that the future lay in aimed riflery, but then the Japanese had great success with human wave attacks on the Russians at Port Arthur, and this led to revisions in thought in Britain, America, and France. (But not Germany -- while the British and French trained bayonet fighters, the Germans trained snipers to use telescopic sights on specially fitted Mauser rifles. :o)

Although the foregoing is presently hypothesis, it should be demonstrable through research in the National Archives. For example, Captain Peyton C. March was at Port Arthur as an observer on the Japanese side, and upon returning to the US in 1905, he was almost instantly made part of the Army's Sword and Bayonet Committee. His attitude was that the training in combatives was good for improving self-confidence so recommended that the Army encourage troops to wrestle and box. So what, you say? Well, in March 1918, General March was appointed chief of staff, US Army, a post he held until January 1921...



[Edited by Joseph Svinth on 08-17-2000 at 05:56 AM]