But the French approach was based on a theory of infantry attack which would have applied just about anywhere else but the highly dense machine-gun-equipped Western Front. (Zulu infantry with high morale got through the killing zone of the British at Isandlwhana,
And the Zulu lost that war.
Japanese troops with high morale got through the killing zone of the Russians in the Far East in 1905,
The Japanese did better than the Zulu, no question. But had the war gone on longer, they would have lost on land. The big problem for the Russians was an incredibly long logistical tail overland from Europe through Siberia. That was a bigger problem than morale.
and a 1914-style French-style charge against the Union at Gettysburg would have won the battle in an incredible hurry, as the rate of fire of a Mauser-equipped German rifleman is about thirty times that of a Union rifleman even before allowing for relative range and accuracy - and that's not counting the change between machine guns and no machine guns).
That's..... Interesting. Seriously. I don't have any response to this, positive or negative, simply because I have never conceived it in those terms. I'm sure that some of our military specialists might have an interesting discussion about that tactical approach.
I would suggest, however, that even if that approach did succeed, that it would have resulted in horrific Confederate casualties. Gettysburg would be the new byword for Pyrhic.
And the French morale collapsed completely in 1940 and didn't recover.
The French hadn't recovered at all from the demographic purge and the cultural fallout of WWI, so their morale was a pretty flimsy thing back then. They were overmatched, outflanked and overrun in every possible way in 1940.
It's hard to imagine the Union, with superior numbers, superior weapons, and the experience of long protracted battle being vulnerable to the same sort of collapse.
While it's not always the case that a defeat leads to lowered morale,
Thank you for that concession.
it's also not never the case
True. But then the big issue is that if we acknowledge things can go either way, what's the argument to say that it would go a particular way? Unless you can provide statistical evidence, or a set of applicable similar case histories, or an underlying theory to explain when defeat lowers morale and when it hardens morale, you can't really rely on the assertion. It's on the level of wishful thinking. Might happen, might not, but there's no reason to say it will.
and confidence and morale go a long way to explaining why the consistently outnumbered Army of Northern Virginia was fighting a major battle sixty miles north of Washington two years into the war.[/QUOTE
Well, it goes some way. Inept union leadership, slow mobilisation, the fact that the Confederacy recruited most of the war staff, initiative, and an astonishing string of luck all played a part.]