2003-01-24 - 2:37 p.m.

I Love Military History

On the plus side, this is the most sleep I've gotten during the work week in a long time. On the down side, I'm realizing that given the way my life is right now, I can only get that sort of sleep by ruthlessly purging everything else out of my week. I get up, I work from home for an hour or three, I go to work, I go to Julie's, I come home, I watch 1-2 hours of TV so as to keep up on the shows I watch, I go to sleep. No working out. No pure reading. (I can read while I watch TV, but only if the subject matter is such that I can read a page or two and then cut back.) It remains to be seen how long I can make that sort of thing last. I'm not super optimistic.

I tell myself that things will get better once I'm living with Julie and Liralyn. In theory, if I'm always available to play, I'm totally free to do other stuff when the shortie doesn't want to play with me. In practice it's difficult to know how that will work out.

I'm currently reading a book called The GI Offensive In Europe, which tries to rebut the claim (popular among military historians) that the US Army in WWII was a relatively poor fighting force that defeated the Germans through sheer mass. So far I don't think the author is getting the job done. Mostly he's shown that the potential to do a much better job was there, had the top brass been able to take advantage of it.

Nobody can really prove anything because soldiers never fight fair. You can prove that X number of Germans caused Y number of US casualties, and A number of US soldiers caused B number of German casualties, and Y/X > B/A. But then people start arguing about attacker vs defender, and veteran vs green units, and fully supplied units against units at the end of their rope, and in the end you can prove whatever you want by picking the right data. In the end I still hold to the "Wehrmach uber alles" view of combat efficiency, because you can't ignore the implications and influence of German doctrine on post-war armies. If the US Army really did such a good job, why did it adopt so much German doctrine after the war?

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