Ottomans hold their won in the Balkan War

I don't think you understand logistics. Trying to mass a large army with a single, single-track rail line is not possible. There are only so many trains you can run along the line (and back). It just doesn't work that way. Once you have entrained people, you have to detrain them and reorganize. You could make a trip from Paris to Vladivostock in 15 to 16 days, but ty sending an army of 400,000 troops that quickly in the middle of a war. Won't happen. Otherwise, how did the Russians lose the Russo-Japanese War? They should have been able to mass their gigantic army and crush the small Japanese one.

An armistice was declared just two months after the war began. After that, the Ottomans were hemmed in on a front only 20 miles across - there are only so many troops you can use along a front so small.

Again, you really need to read about the war before making these sweeping pronouncements, and I don't mean the Wikipedia article.

There are difficulties with rail, but it says more about the disorganisation of Ottoman rail than anything else.

By 1904 it was possible to travel by rail from Paris to Vladivostock in 15 or 16 days. Now you might say thats a special case but rail was not slow by design.

If the Ottomans were largely defeated in the first month, their defeat was not total untill the fall of Edirne. Had they routed the Bulgarians it seems likely they could have proceeded to overturn all the victories of the League one by one.

The siege of that city took three to four months. The Ottomans should have been capable of mustering a sizable force to relieve the city in that time.

It seems difficult to justify claims it couldn't be done. The fact it couldn't be done in my view points to Ottoman incompetence and disorganisation. This isn't some stab against the 'sick man of Europe' but merely an observation.
 
Anybody want to plot out how the war would go if the Ottomans followed Abdul's advice?

All I can think of is that the Balkan coalition might win the early victories against the surprised and outnumbered Ottoman garrisons, but if the Ottomans can hold the line long enough to organize, the Balkan states might get the same treatment the Japanese got in WWII.

Esat Pasha held out for the entire war in Albania with just one army corps (not coincidentally the same one assigned to defend Gallipoli in the war). Given the way offensives against prepared defenses failed so spectacularly, the Balkan forces would have just battered themselves uselessly against defenses and the Ottomans would have massed a huge force in Thrace, crushed Bulgaria, then made short work of Serbia and Greece which had fairly small armies.

The Ottomans were just as infected as everyone else with the doctrine of offense, and it proved their undoing.
 
Dude. They didn't have four months. Why do you keep saying that? And once that much time had passed, they did mass a large army and marched it straight through the Bulgarian lines and took back all of Thrace and Edirne.

Then why did they agree to peace in the first time?
I agree that only so much troops can be used along a 20mile front a la Thermopylae. But that's why I suggest a landing-in-force somewhere in Thrace, at the same time as an attempt at breaking out from Chataldja.
 
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