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2006-01-06 -Short Attention Span Theater-
Napoleon's army was laid low by lice: research
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Posted by Seafarious 2006-01-06 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11131 views since 2007-05-07]  Top

#1 I maintain General Winter deserves more credit than Lieutenant Louse. The bacteria the lice transmitted may have administered the final blow, but it was the cold and hunger that made them vulnerable to it--much like AIDS weakens a patient's immune system, but it's a simple cold or infection that is the actual cause of death.
Posted by Dar">Dar  2006-01-06 02:39||   2006-01-06 02:39|| Front Page Top

#2 Lice were endemic until the advent of easily washable cotton clothes. A development that is still linquistically recorded in Australia where cotton goods are called 'Manchester'.
Posted by phil_b">phil_b  2006-01-06 02:51|| http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]">[http://autonomousoperation.blogspot.com/]  2006-01-06 02:51|| Front Page Top

#3 
An important factor in those preindustrial times was the mere cost and thus scarcity of clothes: in contemporary terms you would have shirts and trousers (the ordinary variety not luxury ones) costing 500 $. Compound this with the fact that peoiple had far fewer excess money (ie after deducing for food) than nowadays and it is easy to deduce that people had very few clothes so they couldn't change interior clothes every day. You wouldn't want to stay downwind of them.

In addition the soldiers of Grande Armee had no adequate clothes for the Russian winter (not sure but I think many still had their summer uniforms) so they wore their regular clothes and their change clothes one over the other. And when one of them died his comrades would disvest him and share his clothes... and his lice.

So yes in the end it was the cold who brought down the Grande Armee.
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-01-06 03:41||   2006-01-06 03:41|| Front Page Top

#4 fleeing Napoleonic soldiers


No pun intended I'm sure.
Posted by Besoeker 2006-01-06 08:40||   2006-01-06 08:40|| Front Page Top

#5 There is a story that one contributory cause was that the Grand Armee had tin buttons on their great coats. Tin becomes non-metallic and brittle at something like -20, so they couldn't close their coats.

I don't know if this is true or not.
Posted by Jackal">Jackal  2006-01-06 09:02|| home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]">[home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]  2006-01-06 09:02|| Front Page Top

#6 What a lousy way to die.
Posted by Mike 2006-01-06 09:13||   2006-01-06 09:13|| Front Page Top

#7 Some idiot has found funny to make a pun about fleeing Napoleonic soldiers.

Lets just remind that at Auerstadt where Davout not Napoleon was in commanded they crushed a Prussian army three times their own. And that the Prussian soldiers were better for setting fire to military hospitals (with the wounded inside), stealing from allied wounded soldiers (like experienced by the British at Waterloo) and of course raping than at fighting: Auesrtadt was not an isolated incident where a heavily outnumbered French Army crushed them and in the aftermath of Iena a fortified force of 6,000 Prussians surrendered to a few dozens French cavalrymen. And that Prussians were the best of the German soldiers.

So please avoid making fun of Napoleonic armies. It would be like disparaging the USMC due to Lee Harvey Oswald or the Okinawa rapers.
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-01-06 09:53||   2006-01-06 09:53|| Front Page Top

#8  What a lousy way to die

Mike thanks for the groaner you really loused up this thread.

/couldn't hep it JFM
Posted by RD 2006-01-06 11:08||   2006-01-06 11:08|| Front Page Top

#9 Much like the French posters on our board, I too am getting tired of the “French are cowards” meme. This isn’t because I’m French. It’s because it’s not accurate. Consider the following quote taken from the 1943 G.I. Roundtable pamphlet (EM 40) entitled Will the French Republic Live Again?

“The war of 1914–18 was a terrible blow for France. Over 1,300,000 Frenchmen were killed and another 4,000,000 wounded, many of them so that they could never again lead normal lives. It was a per capita loss much greater than any other nation suffered. This enormous destruction of young manhood was doubly tragic for the future of France because it came on top of a birth rate already hardly sufficient to make up for deaths.

“France, likewise, suffered more destruction of property than any other country in the last war. A broad area in the east and north was left in shambles. French industry was disorganized, its markets disrupted, and the nations to which France had made loans before 1914, particularly Russia, were bankrupt. To top it off, the crushing national debt incurred to fight the war and reconstruct the country forced devaluation of the currency so that by 1938 the owners of insurance policies, bonds, bank accounts, and mortgages had seen much of their wealth wiped out.

“All this meant that France was bled white in both human and material resources. Many Frenchmen lost confidence in themselves and their institutions. Influential elements in the population lacked the will to carry on the struggle for national existence, and even high officers of the army openly stated after 1920 that France could never survive another war like the last one.

“It was hardly surprising, therefore, that a kind of logical pacifism spread throughout the country. It received official encouragement from the public schools and the ministry of education, and found popular support in all corners of the nation. A feeling of revulsion from war and a surging desire for lasting peace were common to all Europe and all the world after 1918, but nowhere were they stronger than in France. The fact that nearly every French family counted one or even more of its members among the dead or wounded was, of course, a powerful argument against further war. But more than that, the people recognized that France simply could not afford the costly sacrifices of another such struggle.”

Ok, our grandfathers knew that there were legitimate reasons why French culture and politics trended toward pacifism. World War Two obviously exacerbated these existing trends, which have continued into modern times. Various choleric quotes from Patton aside, the Greatest Generation didn’t seem to hold it against them, so why should I? I’m sure as hell not a better man than Grandad was. Neither are you.

Now, this doesn’t excuse stuff like the train story from yesterday. That was definitely an example of group cowardice, though I refuse to paint a culture of millions with a brush dipped into the pot of a few hundred people. Incidents like these DO point to a very real need for the French people to look to their past, reexamine their present, and cast aside the shackles of political correctness that now bind them from cradle to grave. There are things worth fighting for, suffering for, and - if need be - dying for.
Posted by Secret Master 2006-01-06 12:31||   2006-01-06 12:31|| Front Page Top

#10 I agree that the French-bashing is getting pretty old. I am no fan of the current French government by any means, but right-thinking French peoples like JFM need our support, not our contempt!

SM--I'm getting a kick out of those WWII pamphlets too. The one about re-educating the Germans after the war has a great summary of German history and unification that I found to be a great resource. I'll have to look at the French one.

Side note--I remembered seeing a great graphical representation showing the progress of Napoleon's Russian campaign and the whittling away of his army in Edward Tufte's book "Visual Explanations". I wasn't able to find a nice, simple JPG of it, but I did find the chart on page 9 of this PDF file. This is a great example of "a picture is worth 1,000 words".
Posted by Dar">Dar  2006-01-06 12:59||   2006-01-06 12:59|| Front Page Top

#11 Posted too soon. Here's a PNG of the chart.
Posted by Dar">Dar  2006-01-06 13:09||   2006-01-06 13:09|| Front Page Top

#12 Dar - I'll go read the German one.
Posted by Secret Master 2006-01-06 13:18||   2006-01-06 13:18|| Front Page Top

#13 Just read the French and the Chinese pamphlets--I really like the synopsis of not only national history but also contemporary history in these.

I knew Japan and China had been at war well before Pearl Harbor, but I did not know about the phases and escalations of fighting or the porous nature of the front before reading it on the site.

The most surprising item though was that the "Rape of Nanking", while horiffic, occupied the Japanese troops long enough for the Chinese army to retreat, reconsolidate, and avert a major defeat. It's as if the city unwittingly sacrificed itself for the good of the country.
Posted by Dar">Dar  2006-01-06 16:20||   2006-01-06 16:20|| Front Page Top

#14 I was and am reeally upset about that comment. Those guys of the Grande Armee had spent twenty years kicking asses around all of Europe and they were cowards? Napoleon and not only him but Pichegru, Lannes, Morau, Davout had managed to win dozens of battles while leading bunch of cowards? Holy ghost I knew they were good but not that good!

And now ladies and gentlemen I will tell you why the French crumbled in 1940. Because the ELITE (that same elite who has produced a Chirac) failed them. It was not the French foot citizen who decided not to crush Germany when it occupied Rhenania. It was not the French soldier who decided that the tank would have a limited role. It was not the French soldier who decided that the Ardennes were unpassable and thus let the area in front of them ungarrisoned. It was not the French soldier who, once the German tanks had passed through the Ardennes gap, not to counterattack the weakly defended interval between the German tanks and infantry a thing who would have saved the French army and, probably trapped the German tanks in a pocket with the sea at their backs. Instead the French troop was exhausted in a series of marchs with orders from above stopping it whenever they met any resistance whatever light and ordered to break contact and try elsewhere. Precious days were lost, days with very little rest and sleep for the troop and days allowing the Germans to consolidate. It was also not the French soldier who decided to have only a meager reserve who was consumed in days (Generalship 101: Ever keep a reserve, when you engage it pull troops from another part of the front)

But stupidity in the leading circles also extended to war preparation: from the decision to select Gamelin as General in chief (more for its lack of religion than for merits), expending huge sums of money in the Navy (one of the strongest in French history but useless against land-locked Germany) instead of in tanks and planes, the fact that most French fighter planes had no radios and thus were easy prey for the group radio-coordinating Germans. And the uniforms! Nearly as pathetic as the infamous red trousers of early WWI. I have a burning memory of two photos in the same book. One is of two German soldiers at Sedan railway station: one of them is bending sideways to pick something on the soil, they have rolled sleeves and their uniform gives a definite impression of freedom of movement. A few pages a apart a French soldier is surrendering. No jokes, the poor guy looks exhausted and unhappy. His uniform is very cumbersome and defitely hinders him. A death trap if you have to assault a machine gun or if you are being sniped. It is looks like he has a winter uniform (but the summer uniform was about as restrictive for movement and quite hot). For God's sake! who could be idiot enough to design such silly uniforms in the era of the machine gun! who had sent him to battle in winter uniform in May, in this exceptionally hot and sunny May who was May 1940!!! And this guy had sweated himself to exhaustion for hundreds of miles while the French high command had displaced the pawn of his unit for all of North France.

So, make good use of the ammo I give you about the stupidity of the French elites (those same people who speak of stupid Americans) and please avoid jokes about the 1940 French foot soldier who didn't deserve them. And while accsuing the 1940 soldier of cowardice can be dismissed as ignorance it And it borders racism to accuse of cowardice all the French soldiers, including those who fell at Verdun, the Napoleonic soldiers or the people of the island of Sein (after hearing de< Gaulle's call to arms all males between 18 and 60 piled in fisher ships and sailed to England to continue the war)
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-01-06 16:21||   2006-01-06 16:21|| Front Page Top

#15 SM quote: The war of 1914–18 was a terrible blow for France. Over 1,300,000 Frenchmen were killed and another 4,000,000 wounded, many of them so that they could never again lead normal lives. It was a per capita loss much greater than any other nation suffered. This enormous destruction of young manhood was doubly tragic for the future of France because it came on top of a birth rate already hardly sufficient to make up for deaths.

I think the damage to French power goes beyond the raw numbers. France lost her best and brightest in that war. There is a certain truth to the statement by some veterans that most of a war's heros never come back. The cream of French youth was wiped out, and perhaps lesser men were left to fill the void.

Having said that, however, WWI does not seem to have affected the Germans, who lost 1.8m military dead. By the 1930's, Germany had recovered sufficiently to simultaneously take on most of the powers it had fought in WWI more or less on its own. Why did France lose heart where Germany did not? Note that during the Civil War, the US lost an equivalent percentage of its population as France's WWII dead, but the US did not lose heart and become neutered in international affairs.

My feeling is that the problem with Europe as a whole is the relentless expansion of the welfare state, which leaves little funding available for defense matters. If the West's traditional enemies ever get their act together by adopting hands-off economic policies, we are going to see, around the world, a resurgence of geopolitical threats that we won't have the financial means to counter. China is perhaps just the tip of the iceberg. Note that while India is a democracy, it deals with territorial issues the old-fashioned way, by sending troops. China waited 100 years for the British lease on Hong Kong to expire. Indian troops invaded Goa. Note also that Indian troops invaded east Pakistan and helped it secede from Pakistan during a period of contention.
Posted by Zhang Fei 2006-01-06 16:29|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com]  2006-01-06 16:29|| Front Page Top

#16 Why did France lose heart where Germany did not?

There are several factors which played into it. The Germans had a very military and authoritarian culture whose basic temperament recoiled at democracy and embraced war as a socially positive force. WWI had been fought mainly on French soil. The whole country was devastated.... just in time for the Great Depression. The Germans were enthusiastically reproducing while the French fell into a kind of cultural depression and basically stopped breeding.

France was a historical world power that had fallen down. Germany was a recent world power was rising up.
Posted by Secret Master 2006-01-06 16:54||   2006-01-06 16:54|| Front Page Top

#17 I would also like to point out that under both Napoleon and Louis the Sun King France was THE world superpower, with England coming up second best for a while. At the time we Americans were somewhat less important than, say, the Swedish. So, while friends may poke fun at friends, friends to not deliberately insult friends. Does anyone doubt that JFM is one of us? No?

Then let’s not insult the man’s country. Instead, let’s help him take it back!
Posted by Secret Master 2006-01-06 17:15||   2006-01-06 17:15|| Front Page Top

#18 
If the French want to prove that they are not cowards, they can start today. French riots? Middle East? Ivory Coast? Kosovo? Iran? Iraq? I'm willing to be convinced.
Posted by Master of Obvious 2006-01-06 17:52||   2006-01-06 17:52|| Front Page Top

#19 The main reason for France's decline during the XIXth century was... the potato. In previous centuries France had been the demographic super-power in Europe because it was the only one whose climate and soil allowed to grow huge quantities of wheat (other cereals like barley have severe nutritional deficienci) eand feed a numerous population. Then the potato was introduced and suddenly Germany's capacity for producing food and feeding people was increased ten fold (most of it was unsuitable for wheat but not for potato). Furthermore steam ships allowed to import wheat and meat from Argentina or America so being able to feed its people from own agriculture (like FRance did) lost of its importance.

Add to this the ossification of the French Army where the Napoleonic model in which soldiers easily became officers and at times generals was repaced by an aristocrtic one where officers acted like seigneurs toward serfs ie soldiers and NCOs while the officer corps closed itself from NCOs and soldiers. In the time where the evolution tactics required more and more decsisons being taken at NCO and even soldier level the French Army was taking away responsabilities, status and carreer opportunities from them.
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-01-06 17:54||   2006-01-06 17:54|| Front Page Top

#20 f the French want to prove that they are not cowards, they can start today. French riots? Middle East? Ivory Coast? Kosovo? Iran? Iraq? I'm willing to be convinced.

I think they have become cowards, even in more mundane matters like the gang who attacked a train. But I don't like their forefathers being put in the same bag.
Posted by JFM">JFM  2006-01-06 17:57||   2006-01-06 17:57|| Front Page Top

#21 Just a note to JFM and A5089 -- when I posted this article I thought the *louse* aspect was more interesting than the *France* aspect. I certainly didn't post it for another opportunity to offend France's honor. I'm grateful to both of you for your contributions and look forward to your words and ideas. Thanks.
Posted by Seafarious">Seafarious  2006-01-06 17:58||   2006-01-06 17:58|| Front Page Top

#22 No more about the bloody French whores, and I'm not talking about the ranker (common soldier), but the UN diplo-politico fagets! We're in the mess we are in today partly due to French and Russian... let me use the word intransegence, (complicity would probably be more appropriate) following the first Gulf War. I've watched them delay and back away from the blindingly obvious during Iraqi on-site inspections too many times. Their timidity, stalling, and gamesmanship with the inspection regime was maddening. The underlying motiviations have only recently surfaced. Trust the bastards at your own bloody peril.
Posted by Besoeker 2006-01-06 18:08||   2006-01-06 18:08|| Front Page Top

#23 WWI does not seem to have affected the Germans, who lost 1.8m military dead.

They were very much affected by post-war economics, however. Images of suitcases filled with money to buy a loaf of bread, come to mind. I don't recall such a thing happening in France.

Why did France lose heart where Germany did not?

That's easy. It's because the Germans lost the war. There's nothing like war reparations, the perception of an unfair treaty (Versailles), and post-war depression to bring about nationalistic fervour. Throw in someone like Hitler...and off Germany went.
Posted by Rafael 2006-01-06 18:58||   2006-01-06 18:58|| Front Page Top

#24 There is a story that one contributory cause was that the Grand Armee had tin buttons on their great coats. Tin becomes non-metallic and brittle at something like -20, so they couldn't close their coats.

I have heard this as well. Here is an excerpt regarding this:

http://www.openscience.org/blog/?p=68

The title, “Napoleon’s Buttons” brings up the possibly apocryphal explanation that the tin buttons used by the Grande Armée to fasten their uniforms underwent a phase transition in the cold. Below around 13.2 °C shiny metallic (b-tin) changes into white, crumbly a-tin. b-tin is silvery-white shiny and has a tetragonal structure, while a-tin has a cubic structure.

Dar, thank you for posting a link to Charles Joseph Minard's histogram of Napoleon's march. It surely must rate with Harold Beck's London Tube diagram as among the finest stylized representations of condensed information in history.
Posted by Zenster 2006-01-06 19:13||   2006-01-06 19:13|| Front Page Top

#25 In 1940, it's not that the French were cowards, but that they had poor tactics and were incompetent operationally and were beaten in a fight. They fought as well as they could, but that wasn't enough. Prioux's corps fought the Germans to a bloody standstill in Belgium, but the poor performance of the "B" class divisions (manned by reservists without modern AA and AT weapons) against three panzer corps made their position hopeless.

Remember how the Russians were whipped in the summer of 1941 and how many surrendered. Does anyone call them cowardly? What if France had been able to retreat to Portugal and organize a defense there?

I think the strength of the Communists (slavishly following Stalin) undermined the will to resist, too.
Posted by Jackal">Jackal  2006-01-06 19:17|| home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]">[home.earthlink.net/~sleepyjackal/index.html]  2006-01-06 19:17|| Front Page Top

#26 The efforts of JFM and A5089 notwithstanding, France, the nation state, is not now an ally of the United States and may well be actively working to undermine its policies. It is unlikely that it will get an even break in any discussion amongst Americans. This may not be fair to each French individual, but life is not fair.
Posted by Nimble Spemble 2006-01-06 20:32||   2006-01-06 20:32|| Front Page Top

#27 NS: The efforts of JFM and A5089 notwithstanding, France, the nation state, is not now an ally of the United States and may well be actively working to undermine its policies. It is unlikely that it will get an even break in any discussion amongst Americans. This may not be fair to each French individual, but life is not fair.

I think it is possible to get too carried away about the French. France isn't China. It's not Russia, which is actively proliferating to Iran. It isn't even India, which spent much of the Cold War taking positions contrary to American interests, including supporting Japanese war criminals against the US in the aftermath of WWII, supporting the Chinese against the US during the Korean War and supporting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. France fought on our side during the Korean War, did its part in fighting communism in Southeast Asia via the First Indochinese War (the Second Indochinese War is what we call the Vietnam War) and was with us during Desert Storm.

France also almost took Nasser out - via the Suez Canal invasion - in 1956, but Eisenhower screwed them by intervening (financially) on Nasser's side. By the way, we have Eisenhower to thank for setting a precedent for the nationalization (i.e. theft) of the foreign assets of Western companies by Third World countries.
Posted by Zhang Fei 2006-01-06 21:28|| http://timurileng.blogspot.com]">[http://timurileng.blogspot.com]  2006-01-06 21:28|| Front Page Top

07:33 Muhamhead Screwed My Pig Allah
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