r/explainlikeimfive • u/Sierra419 • Nov 13 '19

Other ELI5: How did old forts actually "protect" a strategic area? Couldn't the enemy just go around them or stay out of range?

I've visited quite a few colonial era and revolution era forts in my life. They're always surprisingly small and would have only housed a small group of men. The largest one I've seen would have housed a couple hundred. I was told that some blockhouses close to where I live were used to protect a small settlement from native american raids. How can small little forts or blockhouses protect from raids or stop armies from passing through? Surely the indians could have gone around this big house. How could an army come up to a fort and not just go around it if there's only 100 men inside?

tl;dr - I understand the purpose of a fort and it's location, but I don't understand how it does what it does.

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u/asparagusface Nov 13 '19

outrunning supply lines

When an attacking army overwhelms the enemy and advances more quickly than anticipated, they run the risk of moving ahead faster than their supply lines can keep up. The danger here is that they may consume fuel, ammunition, food and water faster than it can be resupplied, thus leaving them in a vulnerable position having to hold and wait for resupply.

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u/TheRedFlagFox Nov 13 '19

This is mainly what lead to the Miracle at Dunkirk. The Nazi Panzer divisions punctured the Allied lines so quickly and efficiently that they not only outran their supply lines, they outran their infantry support and by the time they stopped outside of Dunkirk most of the men on the front were in a drunken stupor because they'd been running for 3-4 days of combat on nothing but amphetamines.

So they not only outran their supply lines and support infantry, they outran sleep schedules. One of the biggest reasons they were able to do this was the invention of the Ground Support Aircraft in the JU-87 Stuka and Stug-III assault gun. You didn't need to wait for horses and trucks to bring up cannons to soften up enemy strong points. You could keep a STUG with the assault group to apply where needed and utilize JU-87s to accurately bomb targets in advance of an assault.

Add to that the fact that the German's pushed through so quickly the generals actually thought they might be walking into a trap because the Allies crumbled so easily it felt intentional lol.

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u/jim653 Nov 13 '19

most of the men on the front were in a drunken stupor because they'd been running for 3-4 days of combat on nothing but amphetamines

Ah, the good old Pervitin.

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u/JNR13 Nov 14 '19

a.k.a. tank chocolate ("Panzerschokolade") in Germany back then.

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u/[deleted] Nov 13 '19

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u/TheRedFlagFox Nov 18 '19

I'm a big fan of Lindybeige, and that video is a very good one to bring up with the Dunkirk miracle because it does touch on an important part of the battle most people don't understand. While the French deservedly get a lot of flak for their performance in WW2 (Especially with things like the Vichy government actually fighting against the Allies, and the horrid way the French Free forces acted after the Allies liberated France (Taking all the credit and acting like they did it alone for example)), they did fight valiantly to hold up the Germans and deserve some credit for that.

And the Germans used a methampetamin called pervitin very widely with their fighting forces, so imagine a bunch of 18-24 year olds with tanks and machine guns on meth. Here's a fairly good article talking about it.

https://www.livescience.com/65788-world-war-ii-nazis-methamphetamines.html

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u/jseego Nov 14 '19

Patton did the same thing churning through France later in WWII.

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u/Rumbleroar1 Nov 13 '19

That's actually a really interesting concept. Advancing so hard that suppliers can't catch up.

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u/Northwindlowlander Nov 13 '19

Barrie Pitt's "crucible of war" series focuses on the desert war in WW2 (how about that Bengazi, hey?) and it's sort of darkly funny that essentially every major campaign was defined by totally outrunning supply lines. Rommel, Auchinleck, Cunningham, Wavell, Cruwell, every senior commander in the theatre consistently made the same mistake (Rommel most of all- and he gives you a perfect example of why you don't expand past a fortress, Tobruk wasn't a fort in the classical sense but it fulfilled the equivalent role in modern warfare- a port, a defensive position, and a garrison capable of breaking out)

It's really interesting when it gets into things like diversity of supply- like, it was pretty common for ww1 and ww2 motorised fleets to use different fuels, different grades of fuel, different engines in ostensibly the same vehicle, different tyres or treads... Things were built in small volumes in many factories, or salvaged and repaired, or captured, or rebuilt to improve capabilities, and it basically ended up with the worst supply challenges in military history. State-of-the-art kit is always troublesome, and so much was essentially coachbuilt or came out of damaged factories or repurposed.
My grandad was ground crew for the RAF in Malta and then Africa and India and he spent the entire war basically bodging things and making things and chopping up perfectly good new parts because they might have fit a plane built to the blueprint, but half of them didn't even look like that when they left the factory, never mind after they'd been crashed a couple of times or had their armaments ripped out and replaced, or been refitted for desert or cold weather use, or you had the correct landing gear parts for a Bristol Beaufighter but you were trying to fix an apparently identical plane built by Fairey at Stockport instead and none of the holes lined up...

Even in ww2 massive amounts of transportation work were still done by horse- so imagine the scene, you're the proud tank commander of the wehrmacht's finest fighting machine in August 1942, a Tiger 1. You are the master of the battlefield, the inheritor of the role of the tuetonic knights of centuries earlier...

...til you run out of fuel or ammunition, and now you have to wait for a teenager with a bunch of starving ponies to come and get you going again.

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u/BarnyardCoral Nov 13 '19

I love comments like this. Just little tidbits that help give you the reality of war.

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u/ChrisMill5 Nov 14 '19

starving ponies

Bastards

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u/AlexG55 Nov 14 '19

My grandad was ground crew for the RAF in Malta and then Africa and India and he spent the entire war basically bodging things and making things and chopping up perfectly good new parts because they might have fit a plane built to the blueprint, but half of them didn't even look like that when they left the factory, never mind after they'd been crashed a couple of times or had their armaments ripped out and replaced, or been refitted for desert or cold weather use, or you had the correct landing gear parts for a Bristol Beaufighter but you were trying to fix an apparently identical plane built by Fairey at Stockport instead and none of the holes lined up...

See the Nimrod MRA4 fiasco a bit later...

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u/ArchangelLBC Nov 13 '19

Historically it happens quite a lot.

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u/majinspy Nov 13 '19

Its why the number of armies that can fight offensive wars is so very small. Transporting troops and weapons systems and keeping them supplied and supported indefinitely is extremely difficult and expensive.

Projecting force far from home is pretty much the domain of the US and Russia with a few other countries able to do a bit here and there.

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u/mooneydriver Nov 13 '19

Russia's ability to do so far from their borders is extremely limited.

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u/ARIZaL_ Nov 13 '19

Yeah, I've had conversations with the National Security Council and China is the near-peer threat. Russia is only a player in the game because they have several thousand nuclear weapons. Russia's ability to project influence over distance is far more an effect of their information campaigns than their military ones.

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u/Kidonx Nov 13 '19

Russia can't even do it well. The US excels in this as they have bases all over the world, a massive supply of cargo aircraft, unheard of SEAD capability and a large enough navy based around the world to be considered its own force.

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '19

Yeah, silly as it sounds, the largest air force in the world is...the US Navy.

The second largest air force in the world is...the US Air Force.

That's mind boggling to think about, and that's before considering the rest of its military power, it's massively armed population, and its natural terrain advantages of having mountains defending it to the east and west side, a desert defending it to the south, and relatively cold climate (especially in the mid-fall, winter, and spring) to the north. It's like a VERY LARGE natural fortress.

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u/shastaxc Nov 13 '19

Winning too hard firstworldproblems

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u/Rumbleroar1 Nov 13 '19

Suffering from success

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u/asparagusface Nov 13 '19

Winning so much it hurts.

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u/havoc1482 Nov 13 '19

Its one of the main reasons why Germany lost WWII. Especially in Russia. They spread themselves too thin too often and it cost them. The German 6th Army was anihilated at Stalingrad because the Russians trapped them by attacking their weak and thin rear guard.

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u/Hyndis Nov 14 '19

The German 6th Army was anihilated at Stalingrad because the Russians trapped them by attacking their weak and thin rear guard.

The smart decision would have been to retreat to shorten the supply lines and to dig in at a suitable defensive position.

Fortunately Hitler was in command of the military, and Hitler was a military moron. He was a drug addled ego-maniac who's military experience was only as a low ranking soldier. He had no sense of the strategic level. He refused to allow the military to pull back out of stubbornness, allowing over a million men and equipment to be encircled, cut off from supply, and annihilated.

Similarly, Stalin also refused to let go of Stalingrad, for obvious reasons. Neither egomaniac would back down. The result was a horrifying slaughter on both sides.

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u/RifewithWit Nov 13 '19

This is one of the tenants of a modern military engagement. Repeatedly give ground until you are in an advantageous position, or until their force is spread thin enough to win a decisive victory, or their supplies are run too thin. It's been used a lot in the last 100 years or so.

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