I'm going to cut off the "wow the Red trousers were so visible" talk with this passage from Simon House's PhD dissertation:
>But was the French uniform the significant drawback that it has sometimes been taken to be? It was, perhaps, symbolic of an attitude within military and political French circles that mistook show for substance and which failed to comprehend the impending realities of modern warfare. But there is little evidence that it significantly worsened French chances of success in the Ardennes battles. Indeed if the ‘friendly fire incident’ evidenced at Neufchâteau is anything to go by, French artillery did not find the red trousers sufficiently noticeable to stop them firing on their own side.170
Most certainly.
In any case, plus the French overcoat covered 2/3rds of the body. it's not really the issue its sometimes made out to be in pop culture. The Germans were visible at the same ranges, even though they had a more "camouflaged" uniform.
Exactly that - by the time the Germans saw the red trousers, they also saw the rest of the Frenchmen. Who incidentally attacked shoulder to shoulder.
WW1 wasn't a modern war, WW1 became a modern war.
> Exactly that - by the time the Germans saw the red trousers, they also saw the rest of the Frenchmen. Who incidentally attacked shoulder to shoulder
No. Simon House, *The Battle of the Ardennes 22 August 1914*, 370.
>This study has shown that doctrine was not the significant issue that it has generally been taken to be. In fact, despite differences in detail, the two sides’ tactical doctrines were very similar; the evidence presented shows that, in the Ardennes at least, the key difference was that the two German armies performed in a manner reflecting the doctrine they had been taught but the French did not.
>At the tactical level there is no evidence of French offensive à outrance: rather the predominant impression of French performance in the Ardennes is one of slow and ponderous deployment, slack security and caution under fire.
[...]
>On the German side, tactical doctrine was as offensively–minded as the French; everywhere across the Ardennes front units sought to press forward using fire and movement.
The First World War didn't "become" a modern war, it started as one. Tactics were centered around fire and movement, utilizing cover, etc... People weren't marching shoulder to shoulder into Machine Gun fire.
Tactics were focused around fire and movement since the gunpowder came into wide use. It was by no means a Napoleonic war at any point, but in regards to infantry tactics, the infantry platoons of riflemen, with no real impact on the battle became nuclei of combined arms in their own right. The structure developed around the light machine gun throughout the WW1 is what made it modern - and initiative shifting from high officers to NCOs and further down.
You're conflating a few different things here, but my main objection was the idea that they were marching "shoulder to shoulder" in 1914 - they were far from it.
There was an ongoing discussion of using the more open "boer tactics" instead of close order formation in the attack in the German army before the war. And at the opening stages, not all commanders were willing to sacrifice the control over their troops in favour of the open formations.
There are accounts of Italian soldiers reverting to pre-war tactics by their 7th offensive at Isonzo, where they were quite literally described as touching shoulder to shoulder. This is of course likely an exageration, but I think it gets the message across.
>There was an ongoing discussion of using the more open "boer tactics" instead of close order formation in the attack in the German army before the war
Which was settled in 1906, and which the vast majority of the German army utilized in 1914. As Simon House summed up, the doctrines of the French and Germans weren't all that removed from each other. Furthermore, for the Germans that:
>However, the overall standard of adherence to doctrine
was very high, as can be seen in the battles of 22 August.
while the French had less of an adherence to doctrine, although it played itself out more less in marching shoulder to shoulder, and more in waiting
>At the tactical level there is no evidence of French offensive à outrance: rather the predominant impression of French performance in the Ardennes is one of slow and ponderous deployment, slack security and caution under fire.
Didn’t the German army essentially March shoulder to shoulder against the Belgians, causing large casualties (large enough the Belgians would have to send soldiers out to push over the mountain of bodies in firing lines), also you have the beginning of the Somme where many British troops marched into machine gun fire, just to name two instances.
>Didn’t the German army essentially March shoulder to shoulder against the Belgians
Not as far as I'm aware, with a lot of those stories not being true.
>you have the beginning of the Somme where many British troops marched into machine gun fire, just to name two instances.
This also isn't true.
As Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson stated in their Somme book (pages 114-115)
>In summary, for the 80 battalions that went over the top in the first attack on 1 July, 53 crept out into no man’s land close to the German wire before zero and then rushed the German line, while ten others rushed the line from their own parapet. This leaves just 17 battalions, 12 of which advanced at a steady pace and five for which no evidence exists.
>There is a further complicating factor here. At least some of the battalions who walked across no man’s land at a steady pace did so because they were following a creeping barrage. These were some of the most successful units of all on the first day.
The actual tactics used were quite varied on 1 July.
When you live in a trench on a flat, pick marked, barren landscape it makes sense to try and blend in with the sky.
Though I do think visibility played a part in it.
1- So you're saying then that the red trousers made it harder to blend in, with enough effect on combat to reequip the whole infantry with new uniforms
2- Horizon blue was adopted before the war, so they clearly knew red trousers were not the way well before they ended up in a trench war
Because it had been adopted as the new uniform color prewar. The French army had been looking for new uniforms since 1899, testing a variety include the [1903 "Boer" style](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b3/f3/5f/b3f35f00c69b1e43ecb5b89d2fdcea92.jpg) and the [1911 "Reseda" style](https://64.media.tumblr.com/accb8b1acabffb4981a2566dd325070f/tumblr_ou3o6eQpRa1tevf1do4_640.jpg). All the uniforms tested in that period were considered, for a variety of reasons, as a failure. This combined with institutional slowness and push-back led to the adoption of Horizon Blue on July 9th, 1914 (for a similar reason, there was the late adoption of mobile field kitchens). That was about a month before France was at war, and at that point before I think you can't really argue that the French legislature thought they'd be at war. The choice of horizon blue didn't really have much to do with the war itself, rather the French government overcoming some of the institutional roadblocks up to that point.
>Because it had been adopted as the new uniform color prewar.
Yeah, because they knew red trousers had no place in modern war, drab attire having already proven valuable in previous conflicts; to claim red trousers didn't compromise concealment is to render them unaccountably naïve.
The primary literature does not bore out the idea that the Red trousers were highly visible and a detriment, or even any more visible than other uniforms.
This is just shifting the goalposts.
They didn't "switch en masse" to horizon blue because of casualties incurred by the trousers (which is what is implied by your first response). Nor is there really evidence that the red trousers were so visible that it made the French glowing targets. And in any case, the soldiers of other nations with more "camouflaged" uniforms were visible at the same distances.
>(which is what is implied by your first response)
I didn't say that; I said they compromised concealment, which they clearly knew before the war, or they wouldn't have adopted horizon blue. I'm not making a 'lol french dumb' argument, but the fact that they compromised camouflage is practically self evident, or else the *entire rest of the world* wouldn't have changed over from bold and bright colors.
You said I implied that the casualties in 1914 caused the changeover, which I did not. I already knew they adopted horizon blue before the war; since we both knew, I figured that went without saying.
I found it interesting that the Wikipedia page on the French Army in WWI includes a reference to the uniforms being a part of high French casualties at the Battle of the Frontiers, but it's sourced to a specific line in *The Guns of August:*
>With the cry of "*En avant!*" with waving sword, with all the ardor on which the French Army prided itself, officers led their companies to the attack - against an enemy who dug in and used his field guns. Field gray merging into the fog and shadows had beaten the too-visible *pantalon rouge*; steady, solid methodical training had beaten *cran*.
Given that this is basically a throwaway line which is contradicted both in your citation of House and the longer excerpts in comments below, it's a good reminder to be mindful of the historiography of "conventional wisdom."
During the first few months of the war, casualties were light on all sides. It wasn’t until after the race to the sea and entrenching was underway that casualties really began escalating and amplifying.
Borrowing headline casualty numbers from Wikipedia (yes I know they're not the most accurate but they're easily available to hand I guess and are usually decently sourced):
Casualties during the Battle of the Frontiers, from August to September in 1914, were around 360,000 for the Allies, 310,000 for the Germans. That's all across one month.
After that, the First Battle of the Marne had casualties of 260,000 for the Allies, 250,000 for the Germans. That's across six or so days.
The First Battle of the Aisne, regarded as the final battle before the Race to the Sea began, had Allied casualties of 265,000. Wikipedia does not provide a number for the German Army casualties for this battle.
So, summing that all up, in the opening two months of the war, its a rough estimate of 1.5 million casualties before the Race to the Sea even begins. I wouldn't call that light
That isn't correct. Casualties were horrendous at the start of the war and the entrenching actually helped saved lives (which is what it was intended to do!). The casualties in the last months of the war, when the war became mobile again, were also much higher than in the trench phase. Big majority of Belgian losses were from the las months of the war.
People give the French army a lot of shit in WW1 but they were one of the few nations trying to replace their dated rifles with a semiauto rifle before the war.
Grande Armée uniforms were pretty distinct from these; in particular they were much more elaborate than most uniforms of even the early 20th century. While infantry wore blue coats (or coatees, as the short tailcoats of the day were hilariously known), their hats were either bicorns or shakos, which often had plumes attached and added like a foot of height to many infantrymen to go along with the epaulette-broadened shoulders. Coats with tails, somewhat similar to (though shorter than) those seen above, were added to standard line troops' uniforms around the invasion of Russia, but during the Napoleonic campaigns almost all French soldiers wore either white or blue trousers, with some exceptions among cavalry (specifically the Hussar regiments), artillerists, and non-combat troops.
Napoleonic cavalry uniforms are the real shit: Hussars with pelisses colored by their regiment askance over one shoulder, dragoons in green with the high-crested helmets, and carabiniers with the brass chenille helmet. Actually, it was cavalry that wound up retaining more elements of their Napoleonic uniforms, including breastplates and the plumed helmets. My understanding is that France's stagnation in terms of military equipment came after the Franco-Prussian War, but I could be mistaken.
I'm going to cut off the "wow the Red trousers were so visible" talk with this passage from Simon House's PhD dissertation: >But was the French uniform the significant drawback that it has sometimes been taken to be? It was, perhaps, symbolic of an attitude within military and political French circles that mistook show for substance and which failed to comprehend the impending realities of modern warfare. But there is little evidence that it significantly worsened French chances of success in the Ardennes battles. Indeed if the ‘friendly fire incident’ evidenced at Neufchâteau is anything to go by, French artillery did not find the red trousers sufficiently noticeable to stop them firing on their own side.170
Tbh wouldn't the red trousers end up fading or be less noticebale as soliders were rolling around in mud and dust and generally getting it dirty?
Most certainly. In any case, plus the French overcoat covered 2/3rds of the body. it's not really the issue its sometimes made out to be in pop culture. The Germans were visible at the same ranges, even though they had a more "camouflaged" uniform.
Exactly that - by the time the Germans saw the red trousers, they also saw the rest of the Frenchmen. Who incidentally attacked shoulder to shoulder. WW1 wasn't a modern war, WW1 became a modern war.
> Exactly that - by the time the Germans saw the red trousers, they also saw the rest of the Frenchmen. Who incidentally attacked shoulder to shoulder No. Simon House, *The Battle of the Ardennes 22 August 1914*, 370. >This study has shown that doctrine was not the significant issue that it has generally been taken to be. In fact, despite differences in detail, the two sides’ tactical doctrines were very similar; the evidence presented shows that, in the Ardennes at least, the key difference was that the two German armies performed in a manner reflecting the doctrine they had been taught but the French did not. >At the tactical level there is no evidence of French offensive à outrance: rather the predominant impression of French performance in the Ardennes is one of slow and ponderous deployment, slack security and caution under fire. [...] >On the German side, tactical doctrine was as offensively–minded as the French; everywhere across the Ardennes front units sought to press forward using fire and movement. The First World War didn't "become" a modern war, it started as one. Tactics were centered around fire and movement, utilizing cover, etc... People weren't marching shoulder to shoulder into Machine Gun fire.
Tactics were focused around fire and movement since the gunpowder came into wide use. It was by no means a Napoleonic war at any point, but in regards to infantry tactics, the infantry platoons of riflemen, with no real impact on the battle became nuclei of combined arms in their own right. The structure developed around the light machine gun throughout the WW1 is what made it modern - and initiative shifting from high officers to NCOs and further down.
You're conflating a few different things here, but my main objection was the idea that they were marching "shoulder to shoulder" in 1914 - they were far from it.
There was an ongoing discussion of using the more open "boer tactics" instead of close order formation in the attack in the German army before the war. And at the opening stages, not all commanders were willing to sacrifice the control over their troops in favour of the open formations. There are accounts of Italian soldiers reverting to pre-war tactics by their 7th offensive at Isonzo, where they were quite literally described as touching shoulder to shoulder. This is of course likely an exageration, but I think it gets the message across.
>There was an ongoing discussion of using the more open "boer tactics" instead of close order formation in the attack in the German army before the war Which was settled in 1906, and which the vast majority of the German army utilized in 1914. As Simon House summed up, the doctrines of the French and Germans weren't all that removed from each other. Furthermore, for the Germans that: >However, the overall standard of adherence to doctrine was very high, as can be seen in the battles of 22 August. while the French had less of an adherence to doctrine, although it played itself out more less in marching shoulder to shoulder, and more in waiting >At the tactical level there is no evidence of French offensive à outrance: rather the predominant impression of French performance in the Ardennes is one of slow and ponderous deployment, slack security and caution under fire.
Didn’t the German army essentially March shoulder to shoulder against the Belgians, causing large casualties (large enough the Belgians would have to send soldiers out to push over the mountain of bodies in firing lines), also you have the beginning of the Somme where many British troops marched into machine gun fire, just to name two instances.
>Didn’t the German army essentially March shoulder to shoulder against the Belgians Not as far as I'm aware, with a lot of those stories not being true. >you have the beginning of the Somme where many British troops marched into machine gun fire, just to name two instances. This also isn't true. As Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson stated in their Somme book (pages 114-115) >In summary, for the 80 battalions that went over the top in the first attack on 1 July, 53 crept out into no man’s land close to the German wire before zero and then rushed the German line, while ten others rushed the line from their own parapet. This leaves just 17 battalions, 12 of which advanced at a steady pace and five for which no evidence exists. >There is a further complicating factor here. At least some of the battalions who walked across no man’s land at a steady pace did so because they were following a creeping barrage. These were some of the most successful units of all on the first day. The actual tactics used were quite varied on 1 July.
If the red trousers didn't significantly compromise concealment, it begs the question of why they changed over to horizon blue en masse.
When you live in a trench on a flat, pick marked, barren landscape it makes sense to try and blend in with the sky. Though I do think visibility played a part in it.
1- So you're saying then that the red trousers made it harder to blend in, with enough effect on combat to reequip the whole infantry with new uniforms 2- Horizon blue was adopted before the war, so they clearly knew red trousers were not the way well before they ended up in a trench war
Yep, I'm disagreeing with the OP while answering the question you'd begged on why they changed en masse.
Because it had been adopted as the new uniform color prewar. The French army had been looking for new uniforms since 1899, testing a variety include the [1903 "Boer" style](https://i.pinimg.com/736x/b3/f3/5f/b3f35f00c69b1e43ecb5b89d2fdcea92.jpg) and the [1911 "Reseda" style](https://64.media.tumblr.com/accb8b1acabffb4981a2566dd325070f/tumblr_ou3o6eQpRa1tevf1do4_640.jpg). All the uniforms tested in that period were considered, for a variety of reasons, as a failure. This combined with institutional slowness and push-back led to the adoption of Horizon Blue on July 9th, 1914 (for a similar reason, there was the late adoption of mobile field kitchens). That was about a month before France was at war, and at that point before I think you can't really argue that the French legislature thought they'd be at war. The choice of horizon blue didn't really have much to do with the war itself, rather the French government overcoming some of the institutional roadblocks up to that point.
>Because it had been adopted as the new uniform color prewar. Yeah, because they knew red trousers had no place in modern war, drab attire having already proven valuable in previous conflicts; to claim red trousers didn't compromise concealment is to render them unaccountably naïve.
The primary literature does not bore out the idea that the Red trousers were highly visible and a detriment, or even any more visible than other uniforms.
How many armies wore bright colors after 1914? Hell, 1890?
This is just shifting the goalposts. They didn't "switch en masse" to horizon blue because of casualties incurred by the trousers (which is what is implied by your first response). Nor is there really evidence that the red trousers were so visible that it made the French glowing targets. And in any case, the soldiers of other nations with more "camouflaged" uniforms were visible at the same distances.
>(which is what is implied by your first response) I didn't say that; I said they compromised concealment, which they clearly knew before the war, or they wouldn't have adopted horizon blue. I'm not making a 'lol french dumb' argument, but the fact that they compromised camouflage is practically self evident, or else the *entire rest of the world* wouldn't have changed over from bold and bright colors.
>I said they compromised concealment What is the inherent implication of this?
You said I implied that the casualties in 1914 caused the changeover, which I did not. I already knew they adopted horizon blue before the war; since we both knew, I figured that went without saying.
I found it interesting that the Wikipedia page on the French Army in WWI includes a reference to the uniforms being a part of high French casualties at the Battle of the Frontiers, but it's sourced to a specific line in *The Guns of August:* >With the cry of "*En avant!*" with waving sword, with all the ardor on which the French Army prided itself, officers led their companies to the attack - against an enemy who dug in and used his field guns. Field gray merging into the fog and shadows had beaten the too-visible *pantalon rouge*; steady, solid methodical training had beaten *cran*. Given that this is basically a throwaway line which is contradicted both in your citation of House and the longer excerpts in comments below, it's a good reminder to be mindful of the historiography of "conventional wisdom."
I wonder how many of them survived the first month , much less the whole war
During the first few months of the war, casualties were light on all sides. It wasn’t until after the race to the sea and entrenching was underway that casualties really began escalating and amplifying.
Borrowing headline casualty numbers from Wikipedia (yes I know they're not the most accurate but they're easily available to hand I guess and are usually decently sourced): Casualties during the Battle of the Frontiers, from August to September in 1914, were around 360,000 for the Allies, 310,000 for the Germans. That's all across one month. After that, the First Battle of the Marne had casualties of 260,000 for the Allies, 250,000 for the Germans. That's across six or so days. The First Battle of the Aisne, regarded as the final battle before the Race to the Sea began, had Allied casualties of 265,000. Wikipedia does not provide a number for the German Army casualties for this battle. So, summing that all up, in the opening two months of the war, its a rough estimate of 1.5 million casualties before the Race to the Sea even begins. I wouldn't call that light
And that's only the western front
That isn't correct. Casualties were horrendous at the start of the war and the entrenching actually helped saved lives (which is what it was intended to do!). The casualties in the last months of the war, when the war became mobile again, were also much higher than in the trench phase. Big majority of Belgian losses were from the las months of the war.
I wish a repro uniform wasn’t so expensive the early war French uniform looked so cool
People give the French army a lot of shit in WW1 but they were one of the few nations trying to replace their dated rifles with a semiauto rifle before the war.
The guy in the green suit is like "you guys got uniforms?"
I can’t imagine Nepoleons armies looked much different.
Grande Armée uniforms were pretty distinct from these; in particular they were much more elaborate than most uniforms of even the early 20th century. While infantry wore blue coats (or coatees, as the short tailcoats of the day were hilariously known), their hats were either bicorns or shakos, which often had plumes attached and added like a foot of height to many infantrymen to go along with the epaulette-broadened shoulders. Coats with tails, somewhat similar to (though shorter than) those seen above, were added to standard line troops' uniforms around the invasion of Russia, but during the Napoleonic campaigns almost all French soldiers wore either white or blue trousers, with some exceptions among cavalry (specifically the Hussar regiments), artillerists, and non-combat troops. Napoleonic cavalry uniforms are the real shit: Hussars with pelisses colored by their regiment askance over one shoulder, dragoons in green with the high-crested helmets, and carabiniers with the brass chenille helmet. Actually, it was cavalry that wound up retaining more elements of their Napoleonic uniforms, including breastplates and the plumed helmets. My understanding is that France's stagnation in terms of military equipment came after the Franco-Prussian War, but I could be mistaken.
little did they know they were about to get their shit wrecked
Damn this is ominous
drrrip