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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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Hmm. What does the counter-training for this look like?

"Just ignore them and shell the village yourself with your numerically superior artillery" seems to be the Russian approach -- remains to be seen how well this works (and it's certainly not winning any popularity contests), but tends to explain all the news we hear about this or that farm town "changing hands" near a relatively static front.

The general principle was that once you seized a resistance line, dig your own foxholes and prepare for immediate counter-attacks. Using German trenches/fortifications was risky because they were usually pre-sighted for artillery and booby-trapped. This might seem like an obvious concept but in the exhilaration of battle when the enemy has seemingly broken it was not second nature to soldiers, and the tendency to get caught out by German mortar/artillery fire was common among replacements. What could really blunt the effectiveness of German counterattacks was having forward artillery observers; the firepower that American or Commonwealth troops could call on at the company and platoon level was in another universe entirely from what the Germans had on offer (German soldiers often grumbled that fighting the western Allies was a "rich man's war"), and the western allies had already mapped out range tables for the whole of France before landing in Normandy. This had been recognized as important in late WWI due to the similar need for breaking up German counterattacks.