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December 2010 Main Page Mexican-American War Mark II
A big bunch of AH Challenges this time. Soviet-Japanese War in 1939
Comments Section Point Of Divergence is an amateur press magazine and also a forum for discussing AH and AH-related ideas. Here is my comment section. |
The
Nature of Blitzkrieg: The thing to understand about
blitzkrieg is that
success or failure is very much a matter of the terrain, the ratio of
firepower to the length of the front and the amount of space the
country using it has to cover before they get to vital things that
their enemy has to defend.
Poland was easy for the Germans. They had it nearly surrounded once they moved troops into Czechoslovakia and the Soviets sided with them. The terrain was mostly open, with few fixed Polish defenses. The Poles didn't have enough divisions to cover the front with enough power to stop breakthroughs, didn't have enough reserves to deal with the breakthroughs once they happened, and foolishly heeded Allied advice to delay mobilization, which meant that when the war started they weren't fully mobilized and had far fewer men in their fighting positions than they should (about a quarter of Polish troops were actually mobilized and moved where they needed to be, though a higher proportion were mobilized--ie armed and formed into units but not necessarily at the portion of the defensive lines where the brass wanted them). So, Poland was easy. France could have and should have been hard for the Germans. The geography and the French defenses (Maginot line) channels invaders into a limited space, and the French could put a lot of divisions with a lot of firepower into that limited space. The French made two mistakes that defeated them. First, they got greedy. The French view of the war in the west visualized two stages: an initial war of fast movement as the Allies and the Germans raced to grab as much of the low countries as they could, followed by a slow, grinding set of offensives--not really a replay of World War I, but in many ways similar in terms of tempo. The French put all of the divisions that would have been their best answer to the blitzkrieg (their 3 DLMs--a kind of light armored division) and most of their 'active' divisions into the race to grab as much of the low countries as possible. That's understandable. The French figured that what they didn't grab early they would pay for with blood later. So they pushed deeper into the low countries than it was safe to push. Second, and related, they moved seven of their best, most mobile divisions out of central reserve (about half of their reserve) and sent them in a dash all the way through Belgium. Those divisions would have been useful where they ended up if Germany had put their main effort to the north instead of just a feint there. In other words, the Germans out-generalled the French. They ended up matching their best divisions against the worst French divisions--a bunch of poorly-trained, out of shape, thirty-something year old reservists for the most part. Blitzkrieg may or may not have worked against the cream of the French army. It would have been interesting to see how the panzers would have done if they had gone up against all three of the French DLMs working as a unit, or even against French active divisions with time to dig in and register their artillery. The eastern front was long enough that whoever had a predominance in mobile forces was usually doing to find some weak spot, but the distances to crucial areas that the enemy had to defend was so great that there was simply no way to win the war without a multi-year campaign. The Soviet road and rail networks were also primitive, which made the distances to cover effectively longer. American Indians and Disease: What Role Did Genes Play? Genetic resistance was probably a relatively minor factor in the difference between European resistance to disease and American Indian resistance to them in most cases. Smallpox tended to kill around 40-50% of people who got it, while several others among the big killers typically got 30-40%. That was true of Europeans as well as pretty much everyone else. There were differences at the margins, but European populations where no one was immune could get hit hard (Iceland-smallpox, 40-50% dead, for example). The big differences between Europeans and Indians were that (a) Europeans for the most part got smallpox and most of the other major crowd diseases early in life. They died in heaps as little kids, but most adults were immune. (b) As a result of (a), even when adult Europeans got smallpox, measles, etc, got smallpox they rarely all or almost all got sick at the same time, which meant that they had people to care for them, feed them and do any necessary work. Indian epidemics tended to include deaths from starvation/dehydration/hypothermia because everybody in the community was sick. (c) Diseases tended to develop more deadly strains when they got among Indian populations because they could. In Europe, if a strain of say smallpox was too deadly it killed off its host before it could jump to another host because most people were immune. Among Indian populations, no one was immune so running out of hosts wasn't a problem for the disease in the short term and the more deadly strains tended to become more common. There were some genetic and cultural things that made the Indians worse off. (a) Indian populations tended to be more genetically alike at the village level, which meant that a disease that adapted to one body was more adapted to the next victim. It's possible (though I've never seen it studied) that part of the reason the Navaho population grew from about 4000 to 210,000 was that they incorporated a fair sized number of Pueblo Indians of an entirely different blood group, ending up with a lot of genetic diversity. (b) Indian diets among the larger and more settled populations were generally barely adequate nutritionally, and in times of stress--pregnancy or fighting off a disease, they tipped into deficiency. Large Indian populations outside the Great Plains and the Andes tended to live on a diet of mainly corn and beans with little animal-based nutrition--few or no domestic animals and a large enough populations to make game animals locally scarce. Where genetics really did make a difference was with malaria, but the advantages were more to Africans than for Europeans. BTW, that's important because were malaria became a factor Indian cultures tended to get smashed even more flat than usual. Malaria spread pretty widely in the America Southeast and persisted until the 1900s. Surviving cultures tended to be centered around mountainous or dry areas, places that were kind of backwaters normally. How Could More Indians Have Survived? If smallpox vaccination was discovered earlier that might have helped. There was usually someone with a short-term interest in keeping the Indians in play--French from the 1680s to the 1760s, the British from 1775 through the late 1800s. Or I suppose you could have some sect like the Quakers decide that it was a mission from God to give the Indians vaccines. Another possibility: The southern Indians could have sided with the US to a greater extent in the American Revolution and War of 1812. Indians had a dilemma. If they tried to remain friendly to the US, the US or at least groups of settlers, tended to screw them over. On the other hand, if they killed settlers and especially if they sided with hostile foreign powers in a war, they got screwed over even worse, and with some justification. The US was not going to allow separate ethnic groups with a history of siding with it's enemies to stay in the middle of settled areas of the country. Another thing that might have helped: Indians in Indian Territory staying out of the US Civil War. They had no business taking sides in that, though staying out is easier said than done. Hmmm. What if Indian territory had been something other than Oklahoma? Settle the five civilized tribes in Kansas and make Oklahoma a slave state? Maybe no bloody Kansas and maybe even no Civil War. I don't know enough about the politics of that era to know if that was feasible. It might have helped the California Indians considerably if the Spanish missions there had failed early on. Indians died in heaps in those missions and the Spanish kept bringing more in to replenish the populations. On the other hand, I don't know if California would have remained in the hands of the Indians much longer anyway. The missions were a reaction to signs of Russian and British interest in the area. And it's also an open question as to how the Indians would have fared if they had gone from little contact with Europeans straight to American settlers showing up. I suppose you could have the British, French, and Russians all showing up to compete for the Beaver trade in the late 1700s and the Spanish reacting by trying to assert their authority. The Indians could be useful as military allies for a while and learn a bit more about how to defend themselves. My take, and this wasn't the most pleasant thing for me to figure out, was that if you're going to be realistic it would take a lot of years for Indians to get to anything like the level of the Europeans even as far back as pre-Roman times. Civilizations progress in fairly predictable manners based on the resources (natural resources, domestic plants and animals) available to them and technological innovations build fairly predictably on previous technology. Based on that, by the 21st century American Indians would probably be in the bronze age in a wide swatch extending from Chile to the Southeast United States, and maybe as far as the Iroquois areas. There might or might not be a secondary center of fairly high culture in California through the Pacific Northwest. They would still be susceptible to European diseases, and thousands of years behind Europeans technologically. American Indians were just as smart as Europeans and just as capable of innovation. They just had less to work with. Yes, MesoAmerica would keep advancing at it's own pace. Unfortunately, that pace was significantly slower than the pace of Europe, and especially that of Europe with borrowing from India, China, the Middle East, and to a lesser extent Africa. As a couple of others have said, the New World was falling further behind the old one as time went on. That might have changed to some extent when Peru came in more sustained contact with MesoAmerica, but at best they probably fall behind at a slower rate. The Old World just had more resources--more easy to domesticate plants and animals, more room--over twice the land mass if my back of the envelope calcs are correct, to support bigger populations. According to one study of Mexican Indian populations, the Mexican Indians had roughly the equivalent of a black death roughly every 20-25 years for something approaching 150 years before the populations finally stabilized. It took that long to develop a disease-hardened population. The population ended up at maybe 10% of where it started, depending on how many people the very first epidemic killed. Virgin soil diseases are a huge problem. Diseases that kill Europeans don't mean that Native Americans don't die. At best it means mutual dark ages with populations on both sides taking the hit. Indians would probably remain behind on the disease front because many European diseases either had old world primate ancestors or were from large herd animals. Diseases adapted to herds tended to adapt to humans when the herds were domesticated. Few animals to domesticate = fewer potential diseases.
Posted on Jan 3, 2012.
More Stuff For POD Members Only What you see here is a truncated on-line version of a larger zine that I contribute to POD, the alternate history APA. POD members get to look forward to more fun stuff.
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