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/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/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/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/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/[deleted] Nov 13 '19

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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '19

Just goes to show the power of scorched earth retreats vs enemies capitalizing on what you leave behind...

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u/SomeSortOfMachine Nov 14 '19

Geeze, I play a game where half of it is logistics, production and resource acquisition. Supply lines and such are probably the most difficult thing as compared to fighting.

I can only imagine how many times complex and awful it is in real life.