A reason to be cautious about anticipating attrition as the shape of future war is the danger of a “defeat in detail”. By failing to match mass against mass, your enemy has the chance to utterly destroy a part of your force. This offers the chance not only to shift the balance of force, but to subsequently overwhelm other elements caught off-guard by the initial defeat. In this way, one force may defeat another of comparable or even superior strength without the bloody cost typical of the clash of mass meeting mass. Prioritizing preparations for attritional struggle may allow your enemy to gain the seemingly small advantages that cascade into a defeat in detail.
As mentioned, for Clausewitz, the defeat of Prussia in the war of the Fourth Coalition was the template, but the more contemporary archetype is the Fall of France in WW2. French command and control was oriented towards a lengthy war of attrition and proved unable to react quickly enough to the German breakthrough at Sedan. Counterattacks were therefore only undertaken on the local level and without coordination. Despite German vulnerability, they were able to defeat the piecemeal commitment of superior forces and ultimately collapse Allied defenses.
The initial German breakthrough was made possible by local air superiority, enabled by the same principle. This was achieved despite an overall superiority by the Allies in aircraft (even when counting only modern planes) because the Allies kept many planes in reserve, anticipating a long war. By the time they realized the significance of the German concentration, the Germans had been able to move forward anti-aircraft guns and it was too late to destroy the bridgeheads over the Meuse (despite the desperate kamikaze-like efforts of a stricken bomber).
The case of France in 1940 gives a clear example of why a defeat in detail has been so feared. French strategy was premised on winning a lengthy war — the initial battle was assumed to be no more conclusive than the Battle of Frontiers had been in 1914 [Wiki]. The exact error of the French is unlikely to be replicated, but the nature of the mistake remains a universal peril. Dismissing the likelihood of an early decision and preparing for a “later” that never comes is the reciprocal mistake of assuming an early decision is inevitable (which can be identified with the “Cult of the Offensive” that preceded WWI).
Kiran Pfitzner, “In Defense of Taiwan: Attrition or Annihilation”, Dead Carl and You, 2025-05-14.
August 19, 2025
QotD: The fall of France: mass and defeat in detail
August 18, 2025
How One Treaty Split The World In Two – W2W 40
TimeGhost History
Published 17 Aug 2025After WWII, Britain and France face the decline of their empires and the looming Soviet threat. Desperate for security, they forge the Dunkirk and Brussels Pacts, but quickly realize they need American support. As old alliances shatter and Germany becomes the front line, the world divides into two camps with the formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Secret deals, rearmament, and the fear of communist tanks rolling across Europe set the stage for decades of Cold War rivalry.
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August 17, 2025
Battle of Norway, 1940
Real Time History
Published 7 Mar 2025The Battle of Norway in Spring 1940 cemented the reputation of the daring and invincible German war machine under Adolf Hitler. But while Denmark and Norway were successfully occupied by Germany, the campaign came at a heavy cost. This was especially true for the German Kriegsmarine which lost a significant amount of warships including the Blücher — losses that essentially crippled them for the remainder of the war.
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August 16, 2025
The First Poison Gas Attack of WW1: 2nd Battle of Ypres 1915
The Great War
Published 15 Aug 2025By April 1915, the Western Front was mired in trench warfare. Germany’s new Chief of Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, didn’t think his army could break the deadlock, and Germany needed to help struggling Austro-Hungarian forces in the East. Before the Germans turned against Russia though, they decided to attack in the West to keep the Allies off balance. They chose to strike at the vulnerable Ypres Salient – and they would support the coming offensive with a weapon their enemies had never seen.
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August 14, 2025
D-Day’s Flat Pack Ports OR Lord HT Gets Cross with The Fat Electrician
HardThrasher
Published 13 Aug 2025In which we use the @the_fat_electrician as an excuse to talk about the Mulberry Harbours, make a specific threat to a building in the United States and get to oogle at giant bits of floating concrete.
Primary Source – Codename Mulberry – Guy Hartcup, Pen & Sword Military. Kindle Edition 2014 (org. 1977)
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August 12, 2025
German-Soviet Invasion of Poland 1939
Real Time History
Published 8 Aug 2025Germany and the Soviet Union both regarded the Polish state as a creation of the post-WW1 system, and both had claims on Polish territory. In the summer of 1939, Adolf Hitler decided to invade Poland in a fait acompli against the Allies. In a secret agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union they agreed on dividing up the Polish state and Eastern Europe.
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August 8, 2025
Germany’s Darkest Night Yet? – Rise of Hitler 21 – September 1931
World War Two
Published 7 Aug, 2025September 1931: Berlin descends into chaos as Nazis unleash a violent pogrom on Jewish New Year — while the police stand by. The scandal of the Kurfürstendamm riot rocks Germany, but the month’s headlines don’t stop there: Hitler’s niece is found dead under mysterious circumstances, France’s leaders visit Berlin to a frosty reception, and Japanese troops invade Manchuria. Extremists surge at the polls as democracy teeters — can the Republic survive?
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August 4, 2025
Day Ten – German Victory in the Battle of France – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 3 Aug 2025May 19, 1940. Ten days into Fall Gelb, Guderian’s panzers thunder toward the Channel, poised to slam a steel ring around nearly half a million Allied troops. In Paris, Paul Reynaud ousts Daladier and Gamelin, calling back Marshal Pétain and General Weygand as France’s last throw of the dice. The pocket is almost shut, yet the story is far from over. Is there time for one more twist? Keep watching as we follow the fight to its end and discuss the aftermath of this campaign.
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July 27, 2025
Day Nine – Hitler’s Halt Order and Tragedy at La Ferté – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 26 Jul 2025May 18, 1940. Our coverage of the German blitzkrieg in France continues. Today, we take a break from the panzers for a spot of old-fashioned siege warfare. At Ouvrage La Ferté, a small garrison of French troops makes a doomed last stand against overwhelming German firepower. We follow their final hours, the decisions that sealed their fate, and what their sacrifice meant for the collapsing French front.
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QotD: London coffeehouses and Paris salons of the Ancien Régime
Despite the libelles circulating in Paris, the Bourbon monarchy was still relatively protected compared with the hurly-burly across the channel in London, where coffeehouses buzzed with political innuendo and intrigue. Some French philosophes, it is true, attempted to replicate London’s coffeehouse culture at Parisian cafés, such as the Procope on the Left Bank. (Voltaire frequented the place, where he liked to add chocolate to his coffee.) Other regulars at the Procope — named after the Byzantine writer Procopius, famous for his Secret History — were Rousseau, Danton, and Robespierre, as well as Americans Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
The Parisian equivalent of the coffeehouse was the salon, which differed from London coffeehouses in both ambience and function. Whereas London coffeehouses were boisterously public, salons were essentially closed spaces, usually held in private homes. Most were by invitation only. Many were hosted by women, usually titled or wealthy ladies with an interest in culture and politics — such as Madame de Rambouillet, Madame Necker, Madame Geoffrin, and Mademoiselle Lespinasse. There was also the Marquise du Deffand, a friend to Voltaire and the English man of letters Horace Walpole, to whom she bequeathed not only her papers, but also her pet dog, Tonton.
As access to these rarefied spaces increasingly became a symbol of social success, admission got more tightly controlled. (Madame Geoffrin expelled Diderot from her salon because she found his conversation “quite beyond control”.) Still, those who frequented salons represented a great diversity within the elites — from rising young writers and established authors to powerful politicians and eccentric aristocrats. The tacit rule was, as in London coffeehouses, that wit was more important than rank. Many great French writers launched their careers thanks to their admittance. One was the philosopher Montesquieu, who found success at the salon of Madame Lambert.
Matthew Fraser, “Marie Antoinette: Figure of Myth, Magnet for Lies”, Quillette, 2020-06-24.
July 26, 2025
The unaffordable luxury of a second-best army
At History Does You, Secretary of Defense Rock considers the downfall of Prussia’s vaunted army at the hands of Napoleon in a blink-of-the-eye campaign in 1806:
“Prussian wounded and stragglers leaving battle [after the battles of Jena and Auerstadt]. The mortally wounded Duke of Brunswick is the prominent figure in the painting.”
Painting by Richard Knötel (1857–1914) via Wikimedia Commons.
A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job.1
– Carl von Clausewitz on Prussia in 1806In the autumn of 1806, the Kingdom of Prussia, “The Iron Kingdom”, suffered one of the most rapid and humiliating military defeats in modern European history.2 The twin battles of Jena and Auerstedt shattered not only its army but the myth of invincibility that had surrounded the legacy of Frederick the Great. For the young Carl von Clausewitz, then a junior officer in the collapsing Prussian forces, this moment marked a personal and national catastrophe that would shape his life’s work. Clausewitz would come to see the defeat not simply as a failure of generalship or tactics, but as the exposure of a more profound institutional and societal crisis; one in which a state had grown complacent, a military rendered obsolete, and a society stripped of civic vitality falling apart during “the most decisive conflict in which they would ever have to fight”.3 In that collapse and Clausewitz’s later reflections, one finds an unsettling parallel to present-day America, a powerful nation outwardly strong, yet increasingly vulnerable to the same internal rot.
Prussia’s disaster in 1806 was the formative experience for the author of On War. How the armies of Frederick the Great and the state that he painstakingly built collapsed like a house of cards was a question that bothered Clausewitz for many years.4 It was a comprehensive disintegration of a system that had, since the mid-eighteenth century, claimed a position of prominence in European military affairs based on its discipline, linear tactics, and centralized command. Yet by the turn of the nineteenth century, these very strengths had calcified into weaknesses. Clausewitz foresaw disaster. Even as a young lieutenant, he was already warning of the Prussian army’s growing detachment from reality. In his early writings, he criticized military exercises as highly scripted performances, lacking genuine tactical challenge, unpredictability, and creativity.5 The number of steps marched in a minute of the cadence, what awards should be placed on a uniform, how a rifle should be cleaned for parade, all of this he feared, was cultivating a “lassitude of tradition and detail”.6 Clausewitz understood that rehearsing war under artificial constraints produced not readiness but ritual. Even though he later wrote, “no general can accustom an army to war”, he worried, presciently, that when confronted by a real enemy operating under real conditions, the army would collapse, and in 1806, it did.7
Whatever reservations he may have held, Clausewitz fulfilled his duty. He led a battalion of grenadiers at the battle of Auerstedt and managed to withdraw with most of his men intact in the chaotic aftermath of defeat. His escape was short-lived; however, he was captured on October 28, 1806, and subsequently marched into captivity in France, where he would spend the next year as a prisoner.8 Napoleon’s campaigns revealed that war had been transformed: faster, larger, and fundamentally political. Clausewitz wrote, “War was returned to the people, who to some extent had been separated from it by the professional standing armies; war cast off its shackles and crossed the bounds of what had once seemed possible”.9 The levée en masse and the corps system shattered the static paradigms of eighteenth-century warfare. Yet the Prussian high command, clinging to the geometries of the past, failed to respond with imagination or speed with any kind of seriousness.
Clausewitz’s later concept of friction — the unpredictable resistance that disrupts even the best plans — emerged directly from this experience.10 The Prussian army collapsed not for lack of courage, but because its institutional mindset could not withstand the volatility of an age that demanded adaptability, political intelligence, and creative command.
1. Carl von Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Paret and Daniel Moran (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 32.
2. Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006).
3. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 81.
4. Frederick the Great ruled from 1740-1786 and is usually credited as turning Prussia from a regional power to a continental power.
5. Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 92-93.
6. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 36.
7. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 122.
8. Partet, 126.
9. Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings, 287.
10. Clausewitz discusses this concept in Chapter 7 in On War, 119-121.
July 20, 2025
Day Eight – Can Charles de Gaulle Save France? – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 19 Jul 2025Ten Days in Sedan continues as our WW2 Blitzkrieg documentary follows the first serious counterblow against the German spearhead. Colonel Charles de Gaulle leads the 4th Armoured Division in an attack against the German flank. De Gaulle’s units are understrength and his assault is improvised but he catches Heinz Guderian by complete surprise. Is this just a fleeting gesture of defiance, or a new kind of French resistance?
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July 15, 2025
Why France Couldn’t Crush the Viet Minh – W2W 36
TimeGhost History
Published 13 Jul 2025Why couldn’t France crush the Viet Minh after war broke out in Vietnam? In this episode we dive into the brutal opening years of the First Indochina War, from the outbreak of violence in Hanoi in December 1946 to France’s failed military campaigns and the rise of Vietnamese resistance.
Despite having superior weapons, colonial experience, and Foreign Legion reinforcements, France failed to defeat Ho Chi Minh’s forces. We explore why early offensives like Operation Léa and Ceinture fell short, how the Viet Minh’s rural strategy kept them alive, and why French hopes of ending the war quickly vanished.
As Mao Zedong’s Communist China consolidates power just across the border, the Viet Minh gain strength, support, and a long-term advantage that France simply cannot match.
This video is part of War 2 War, our Cold War history series covering the decade after WW2, a time of seismic global transformation.
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July 14, 2025
Day Seven – Ghost Division! – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 13 Jul 2025May 16 1940: Our WW2 Blitzkrieg documentary, Ten Days in Sedan, continues as Winston Churchill arrives in Paris. The Prime Minister still has hope but he’s shocked to see the French burning documents and preparing to evacuate. Meanwhile French and German tanks slug it out in Stonne, Guderian reaches Montcornet, and Rommel leads his Ghost Division far behind French lines.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:58 Recap
01:38 Stonne
03:05 Panzers Drive West
07:02 New French Plan
12:23 Rundstedt’s Halt Order
16:06 Ghost Division
21:53 Churchill in Paris
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July 11, 2025
Why Didn’t France and Britain Stop Germany’s Secret Rearmament? – Out of the Bullpen 001
World War Two
Published 10 Jul 2025In this special “Out of the Bullpen” episode, we answer your burning questions about Weimar Germany’s most turbulent years. From clandestine military pacts with the Soviets to the creative ways Germany sidestepped Versailles, we dig into aspects which shaped a republic on the brink.
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