synarchy movement of empire book ii - Pierre Beaudry's Galactic ...

military, {artillery} was a rear echelon power, dependent on the infantry
which was making the assault on the front line. De Gaulle had deliberately
chosen that expression to identify his idea because he knew it would act like
a grenade dropped inside of a foxhole the old general staff. In Petain's mind,
the idea of {assault artillery} was a contradiction in terms: it was the
equivalent of inverting the traditional roles of artillery and infantry, that is,
putting the infantry in the rear and the artillery on the front lines. The whole
thing was back assward.
As a result, for Petain, artillery could never represent an assault
capability. For him artillery was a means of supporting the infantry and
shooting only when the infantry identified the targets for them to clear out.
Artillery, from that standpoint, had the exclusive role of being an infantry
support unit. However, Petain's silly tactical inverted relationship between
infantry and artillery came from his pessimistic view that artillery was a
defensive firepower. It was more a means to stop the enemy advance, than a
means of advancing onto the enemy. The Maginot Line was filled with
artillery power. Both Generals Foch and Weygand had this same axiomatic
weakness as Petain.
There was, however, one old general with a young mind, General
Jean-Baptiste Estienne, known as {the father of the tank}, who thought that
if tanks were to team up with planes, this would revolutionize warfare. Tank
commander Charles de Gaulle proved that General Estienne was right. In
1934, following the lead of Estienne, de Gaulle advocated the creation of an
independent armored mechanized force of 100,000 men, 4,000 tanks, and
8,000 trucks advancing day or night at a pace of 5o kilometers a day through
enemy territory. This was the idea of the mechanized {assault artillery}.
The Commander of the German armies under Hindenburg, General
Ludendorff, wrote in his memoires of the great defeat of his army by the
French tank attack on August 8, 1918. Ludendorff called it "the Black Day
of the German Army in this war." He wrote: "The British and French
attacked between Albert and Moreuil with strong forces of tanks, in which
they alone were superior. They broke through deeply in our front. Our
divisions were completely overrun… The employment of tanks in massive
quantities proved to be our worst enemy. The eight of August brought the
end of our capacity to fight on." Thus, it was Estienne and de Gaulle's tank
strategic warfare, which made the decisive victory of World War I!
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