Talk:John Mosier

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BEST HISTORIAN AUTHOR!!!!

I can't believe anyone takes his work seriously. it's absolute crap. DMorpheus 14:20, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I strongly agree with you DMorpheus, Mr. John Mosier is just an amateur, in all his books he tries to mezmerise the readers, publishing strange and biased opinions and most dangerous, lies, about the British, French, and German armies. Mosier is just an chauvinist american that believe that all non-american armies are loosers. He sees the World Wars as a conflict in wich without United States all combatants suffer heavy losses and get no gains, until the U.S army enter the conflict.

It´s really anoying, by far the worst ¨Historian¨.He and Steven Zaloga are really a bunch of american chauvinist. Best wishes Miguel —Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.62.146.245 (talk) 16:04, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Please. Steve Zaloga is a widely respected author and deserves his solid reputation. He has little in common with Mosier who should stick to teaching english. Regards, DMorpheus (talk) 15:33, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I am very impressed with Mosier's research and fresh perspective. His simple reliance on empirical evidence, such as calculating the distance of the German advance at Verdun by mapping the shell-holes and calculating the maximum distance they could have traveled, is highly reminiscent of Hans Delbrück's methods. The simple fact is that the German's have a talent for war, while the British do not, and it goads Anglophiles to have the evidence presented so plainly. Dutchman Schultz (talk) 02:15, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

The fact remains, however, that he simply asserts the superiority of the American troops over all others, without explaining what made them so superior. The thought occurs that he simply disregards the comparable late-war successes of France and Britain, once German morale had begun to collapse; the Second Battle of the Marne and the Hundred Days Offensive provide examples for this. Textor (talk) 07:50, 30 September 2010 (UTC)

Precisely - and for those who care to look there are plenty of accounts of poor American planning and tactics in the Argonne, just as there were for the British at the Somme two years earlier - it's what happens when you build a huge organisation from a tiny peacetime one. Mosier's work gives the impression of "research" to those not familiar with the subject, because he is picking "sources" which agree with his warped theories. He simply sneers at facts which don't suit him, like the fact that the British had got their tactics together by 1918 and were carrying the main burden of the offensive in that autumn. Britain and the USA were probably roughly equal as world powers in 1918 - the Americans lent a hand in the Allied victory. Even by 1945 Britain was still number three in the world and a key player in the European war. It wasn't like today when the USA is a global hyperpower and Britain barely qualifies for a seat on the top table.

World War One is still an emotive subject, given the immense casualties taken by the Western Allies, unlike WW2 where the Soviets were doing the brunt of the land fighting. The pro-Haig tone of much British historical writing has only recently driven out the Butchers'n'Bunglers mythology which held sway until a decade or so ago. What is really sad is that there is still, a decade later, a minor cottage industry on Amazon of readers, mostly American, and most of whom clearly don't have enough depth of reading in the subject to distinguish fact from nonsense, pumping out rave reviews of "Myth of the Great War".Paulturtle (talk) 13:58, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

I really have to wonder if any of you British chauvinist actually read the book? Mosier's main thesis is that GERMAN military methods in the Great War were far in advance of Allied tactics, which he then goes on to prove empirically. Only one chapter deals with the limited success of American tactics. Dutchman Schultz (talk) 16:23, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Of course I have read the book, and jolly bad it was too. I seldom make comments on books I have not read. German superiority? Well, to some extent, although not the extent he claims (I remember his claims that the Germans "weren't really defeated" at the First Marne, or that they "won" at Verdun). But the final chapters of the book go completely haywire in his assertions that the Britsh (incl Canadians and Australians, one presumes) continued to display unrelieved incompetence while the inexperienced American forces were miraculously gifted with tactical brilliance. Complete nonsense, and only sustainable by very selective quotation of sources. Selection of evidence is not the same as proving something empirically. You won't find many serious historians who give Mosier much credence.Paulturtle (talk) 20:09, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

It's pretty obvious that the only way you are going to discredit Mosier is by misrepresenting him.

1] The Germans weren't really defeated at the Marne because that was a mere skirmish at the end of a long campaign that the Germans DID win. French armies attempting to enter Alsace were thrown back, the vast bulk of Belgium occupied, hundreds of square miles of France occupied, and only THEN did the German armies run out of steam and make a tactical retreat to positions they were able to hold with impunity for the next four years. What kind of "victory" is that for France?

2] Mosier demonstrates that German accounts of Verdun were correct by actually taking a census of military cemeteries. While many bodies were lost, these cemeteries offer a representative sample of casualties and confirm the German claim of a two to one advantage in casualties. The German plan was to cripple the French by such losses and, as the French army DID collapse in the following spring, this plan proved to be a success.

3] Mosier's point was never that American troops swept all before them, but rather that those Americans who were trained by the French (to use, say machine guns and grenades, and to keep in small groups) significantly out performed those trained in antiquated Brittish methods (to use the bayonet and advance in parade order).

Please, attack what the book says if you will, but don't waste our time with accusations against things Mosier didn't say in the first place. Dutchman Schultz (talk) 21:16, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Whether it was Mosier who made these assertions or you, at least two of them are historically incorrect:

- it was the bloody failure of the Nivelle Offensive in 1917 that let to the mutinies in the French Army. At the Battle of Verdun, the French were ultimately successful in stopping the German offensive, though at a terrible price. They even began a successful counterattack in October 1916.

-The German losses at Verdun were lower than those of the French, which is certainly an achievement by WW1 standards, given that they were the attackers. But the "crippling" was not as one-sided as intended, because Germany could not afford these loses, whereas France (and Britain) would soon be reinforced by the Americans entering the war. Textor (talk) 18:34, 12 April 2011 (UTC)

Sure, the Nivelle Offensive precipitated the collapse of the French Army. And you think the losses at Verdun had NOTHING to do with that? French losses were considerable in 1914, but that didn't prevent them from launching idiotic offensives in 1915. Losses in these offensives were catastrophic, yet they were planning more insane offensives in 1916 before the Germans bled them white at Verdun. And then, when they repeat their mystakes in 1917 — and fall to pieces! — that is somehow NOT the result of the Germans chewing them to pieces the previous year?

Could the Germans "afford" the losses at Verdun? Yes, as they were half of French losses, yes, as they were whipping the Russians at the same time, yes, as the British were slaughtering themselves on the Somme, yes, if Wilson had kept his 1916 election promises of keeping America out of the war.Dutchman Schultz (talk) 08:56, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

You keep repeating the same mistaken arguments. 1. The French considered Verdun a victory, in spite of their losses. It did not affect their morale anywhere near as badly as the later Nivelle offensive did. 2. The German losses were not merely "half the French losses", but more like 80%. And the Germans could not afford even these, because they were not just fighting the French, but also the British, Russians, and Italians. The loss figures are stated in the Battle of Verdun article. Ignoring other articles in the Wikipedia is not a good idea when you want to contribute, or rewrite existing ones. Textor (talk) 12:01, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

You keep talking opinion and I keep talking fact. Despite what the precious Wikipedia article on Verdun says, Mosier actually did a census of military cemeteries and PROVED the German claim of suffering only half the French losses. Please address this FACT instead of parroting Allied propaganda. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dutchman Schultz (talk • contribs) 19:10, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Post by Martin Dekom, Jul 2011 I don't claim any true scholarship on WWI above the potzer grade. The basic British revisionism is that the Americans arrived just in time to watch them beat Germany and clap. However, it is impossible to rectify this with 116k US KIA in largely the last 6 months of the war. I have read Mosier's work, and lately "1918: Unexpected Victory" by JH Johnson. Mosier is the inverse: that the US arrived to save the day and it was the exhausted Brit/French doing the clapping. IMHO, Mosier is more accurate than garden variety British revisionists, but does not put enough weight on the result if America had not gotten involved (on the battlefield). In 1917, Fr/Br military leaders figured the war to last well into 1920. The critical factor was the flood of US troops which compelled the Germans to bring the war to a swift conclusion. Perhaps the Allies might have won without US involvement, as the German homeland was riven with political strife (and hunger). However, the war would have certainly lasted years more, perhaps well into the 20's. In that event there was a strong possibility that the same factors would afflict the Allies, resulting in a stalemate. My best guess (as a self-described hack) is that the war would have done an expensive back and forth (as it had done), eventually resulting in Germany agreeing to restore antebellum borders (which was their offer late 1918- file under "too little, too late."). So, no one's saying Tommy couldn't fight/win. But again, the casualty numbers clearly show the knockout punch being thrown by the Americans. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.122.121.197 (talk) 13:13, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

That is basically Mosier’s argument in the latter part of the book, and where it fails is the simple fact that around half the German Army was being engaged on the British sector. It was only in the very final months of the war that the US forces had grown to equal the British and French forces in size, and they enjoyed massive superiority of numbers over the few German divisions (eventually about 30 IIRC, out of 190 or so German divisions in the West) they engaged in the Argonne. The British had higher total casualties (and the French had done that summer at the Second Marne) because they were up against a great deal more enemy firepower – indeed, if you crunch the data relative to enemy strength faced, the US casualties in the Argonne were proportionately higher, which is hardly surprising given that many of them were green troops, still learning their combat skills.

You are right that the flood of US troops was one of factors which drove the Germans to make peace – had the war dragged on into 1919 the US Army would have grown much larger. It’s as if the Germans had sued for peace in WW2 in 1943, if you like (with the effect of blockade being about the same as the effect of strategic bombing in the latter war). Whether the Allies would have won in the end without US help, well I suppose they might have done, but the summer of 1918 would have been pretty hairy without the Americans at Chateau Thierry and the bottom line is that the Allies were very glad to have the Americans lend a hand. The Americans certainly were a key factor in the Allied victory, just not the way Mosier would have us believe.

Contrary to the claims above, he does not quite claim, apart from a few sneery insinuations, that the British were still “advancing in parade ground order” and not using grenades in 1918, but he does refuse to accept the scholarship on British infantry and artillery tactics (the same tactics which were being used by most armies by then) which was already appearing by the 1990s, while expecting us to believe that the American forces emerged from their training without the teething troubles suffered by the British two years earlier. This is simply not credible. His idea of “evidence”, apart from the erroneous argument about casualties, seems to consist of John Laffin, Lloyd George’s Memoirs (“Don’t blame me for Passchendaele, I was only the Prime Minister, and if I throw enough mud you won’t notice I signed off on it”), a memo quoted out of context from Denis Winter supposedly proving that the British Army did not have enough machine guns (completely false) and a not terribly good MPhil thesis called “Doctrine and Dogma” (cost me £60 on Amazon which I could have spent on a couple of good steaks).

I appreciate that a lot of modern British writing on WW1 probably grates a bit, but it needs to be borne in mind that it is written to refute the “Lions Led by Donkeys” mythology which held sway until very recently.

He is right that the role of France is greatly underappreciated in Anglophone accounts, and there is some interesting stuff about German heavy artillery early in the war, although typically he blots his copybook by not mentioning that it was for the wrong reasons (Germany started the war with lots of high-trajectory howitzers firing HE because they were expecting to do a lot of fort-reduction, whereas British combat experience from the Boer War suggested that field guns firing shrapnel were the way forward – tactical innovations are only ever obvious in hindsight) or that by the latter stages of the war the Allies – eventually – assembled a great deal of artillery. (On a similar note, the tanks of WW1 were not a war-winning weapon – modern scholarship attributes the breakthrough at Cambrai to the predicted barrage which preceded it – but Mosier witters on irrelevantly about the Germans trying to solve the power-weight ratio, whilst omitting to mention that they only deployed about a dozen (!) tanks while the Allies built thousands and employed hundreds at Cambrai and Amiens – this sort of bias and distortion is sadly typical.)

But there are quite a lot of things seriously wrong with this book which simply put misconceptions in the minds of less well-informed reader, and to take some of the more obvious ones:

His games-playing with statistics – he simply asserts that “the best sources” claim the British took over 400,000 casualties at Third Ypres (no cite given, but it looks suspiciously like Leon Wolff’s erroneous figure, which was debunked thirty-five years ago) – actually no they don’t, and the usual figure is about 250-300,000, with German losses not much less. For German deaths he simply quotes the lowest of several sets of 1930s figures, not the consensus figures reached by almost a hundred years of scholarship. Of course the Allies took more casualties than the Germans in the west (contrary to what GHQ and the Official History tried to claim), but the worst of these were in 1914-15, and the loss ratios grew much less bad as the war dragged on and Allied artillery grew stronger. It wasn’t quite as bad as he paints it.

His claim that the Germans weren’t really defeated at the First Marne, which is refuted by any amount of contemporary evidence (see Holger Herwig’s new book on this topic) and is as silly as claiming that Lee wasn’t really defeated at Gettysburg, or that the Germans weren’t really defeated at Moscow in 1941. They knew perfectly well that they had lost their best chance to win the war. He is probably right that operationally the German Army was, man for man, superior to the Allies, but he glosses over or omits to mention the poor top-level generalship by which they deployed too many troops to Alsace-Lorraine (including Rupprecht’s disastrous attack on Nancy) and botched the Marne. To (literally) add insult to injury he claims that the tiny BEF was “routed” at Mons/Le Cateau – in fact they gave a good account of themselves before having to pull back, and he is quoting out of context a description of how morale grew a bit strained during the retreat which followed.

Verdun. This battle was within living memory until very recently, and like everything about WW1 has been raked over by scholars for nearly a century – it’s not some mediaeval battle where the evidence is so limited that it can be called into question by somebody tramping round a few cemeteries. Whether or not Falkenhayn really intended to “bleed France white” or whether he just made it up after the event remains a topic of debate. The attack certainly began well, inflicting heavier losses on the French. But Mosier completely glosses over how the German attack ran out of steam as it came under artillery fire from the left bank of the Meuse (Mort Homme etc), and how they had to widen their own attack and so dissipate their artillery superiority. He also glosses over the political crisis which overtook Germany in the summer of 1916 (Falkenhayn’s fall), to which Verdun was a major contributor along with the Somme and Brusilov.

Anyway, you’ve probably heard enough from me on this topic. I wish Mr Mosier well in his lectures on film studies, but you simply will not find people who know much about WW1 who take this book seriously (quite apart from the erroneous arguments above, I reread it last spring and I have a list of errors and inaccuracies as long as your arm). Nobody takes any of his other books seriously either, but this one seems to linger on because it tells people what they want to hear.

Paulturtle (talk) 22:16, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

I think it is telling that all these attacks upon Mosier are coming from Brits. I think it is also telling that it is the parts about the combat effectivnes of the Americans that is continually singled out for comment, then that plays a very small part in his thesis.Dutchman Schultz (talk) 23:47, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

The book is entitled "How the Germans won the battles and how the Americans saved the Allies", (as discussed at length above, both claims are somewhat exaggerated) so in fact it is a fairly key part of his thesis, even if it only takes up about a third of the text. Nor is is the case that all his critics are "Brits" as you call them. A quick google search threw up these comments by Dennis Showalter, a highly respected expert on German Military history (I assume I'm not breaking any copyright by posting them)

"In fact the German army of World War I was nothing like the tempered and perfected instrument of Mosier’s text. Mosier’s notion of Verdun as a German victory was not likely to be found in the ranks— or the headquarters—of the divisions and corps who fought there. Nor were the Somme and Passchendaele anything but killing grounds for the German army as well as the British Expeditionary Force. Mosier’s argument that the German retreat in 1918 was essentially a voluntary withdrawal rather than a consequence of Allied offensives is seriously overstated. The operational military problems posed by the Great War were general. The Germans had no secret recipe. What superiority they demonstrated in particular cases was relative rather than absolute. To misunderstand those points is to misunderstand the nature of the war . . . . "

Anyway, this is supposed to be a discussion about how to improve the article, so we don't want to bore everyone. Perhaps you should do a bit more reading before leaping to make ad hominem attacks, as you have done several times on this page.Paulturtle (talk) 16:57, 31 July 2011 (UTC)

Posted by Martin Dekom martin.dekom@gmail.com I could not find your email through Wiki and, being self-aggrandizing, I must be heard! The proper refutation of the "Lions led by donkeys" would be only to change it to the singular: "Lions led by a donkey." I just read Haig's lengthy (snore) editorial in The London Gazette, Apr '19. There's no reason to go through point by point, but let's just say I'm sure a lot of British revisionists wish he hadn't written it. It makes clear he purposefully engaged in a war of attrition. On other points, agreed that the Yanks had their learning curve, but there is plenty of evidence that they were finer soldiers than the BEF. German accounts remark how the Americans would not surrender and had to be blown out of dugouts. They were used to Allied soldiers giving up by the dozen. I don't blame Tommy (or Francois) on this point, as 4 years of mud and blood would wear out any man. As well, even the British gave the Germans their props- in "Goodbye to All That", he explicitly says "the German had proved to be the best fighting man in Europe." On your comment about "why" the Germans had better arty at the start of the war- it's immaterial. By dumb luck or not, they saw its advantaged and exploited it. As for the loss ratios improving for the Allies after 1914- ok, true: they went from "Atrocious" to merely "Unbelievable." ;) Bot Mosier does have a problem with the concept of German retreat- that it was purely strategic. But the strategy of all war is to advance...On a similar note, you mention the BEF wasn't routed at Mons, that they gave a good accounting before they had to retreat. Which is to say they were brave in a battle which in fact became a rout. Likewise with your comment about 3rd Ypres being...not as onesided. At the battlefield itself, its telling that the official commentaries do not paint (any # Ypres) as Britain covering itself in glory. Really the best thing for the BEF would have been for Haig to have a heart attack and let someone less ossified take control. He was their Bob Dole.

Looking at the numbers in 1918, it really doesn't matter when the AEF equaled the BEF. Even at half the strength, it would have been a total gamechanger- throwing in hundreds of thousands of better fed, better armed, highly motivated troops. Lastly, your comment that the problems were general. Clearly the Germans were well ahead of the Allies on the learning curve at the beginning (arty) and end (storm troops). They lost not because of a lack of military acumen but because the Allies (w the US) were outproducing them, in men, guns, rations, everything. So your comment "what superiority (the Germans) demonstrated was relative rather than absolute" well, that's all it needed to be, until the US got involved. If you and I are being chased by a bear, I don't need to be an Olympic sprinter, I just need to be faster than you!

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