Comments by "Zetectic" (@zetectic7968) on "Imperial War Museums" channel.

In short, the blind leading the blind. Looking back from Waterloo neither the Army or Navy had distinguished itself during "Pax Britannica". The later had no significant engagements.Meanwhile the Army had failed in Crimea, Afghanistan, not exactly covered itself in glory during the Zulu & Boer wars and was hobbled still by the class system. The planning was atrocious, no accurate or recent maps of the peninsular. The simple lack of water for the troops expected to only have less than 2 pints of water a day to drink, wash & shave. Diseased caused far too many casualties. Communication was appalling and not mentioned the Britannic acting a hospital ship that sank rapidly with great loss of life suspected of hitting a mine. Gallipoli highlighted the major problem of British generalship that failure was reinforced and success was not exploited.
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Good to see the Bristol fighter. My maternal grandfather was a mechanic on them at Boscombe Down. He was fortunate having been gassed at Ypres during 1916 & left totally blind for over 6 weeks & invalided back to Blighty. The army wanted to send him back to the front but with a bit of help from his brother he managed to get a transfer to the RFC
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Very interesting. As a boy I had a toy model of the TSR2 about 12 inches long. It looked odd but I was happy to have it. I recall that the engines went on to be used for Concorde. Politician often cancel good projects due to cost but then will throw money for too long at a failure e.g. the Tigerfish torpedo and the army portable radio ( forgotten the name but after 10-15 years still a load of rubbish)
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What is wrong with the narrator! Using American English calling Percival a Loo-tenant General.
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There is no R in Scapa Flow and don't mispronounce Lieutenant like an American.
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@MichaelHill-we7vt Your first statement is not correct. European countries including UK had sent observers to the US civil war and saw siege works, trenches, barb wire & use of artillery. Sadly the British and other concluded that it was not applicable to Europe. There is also the decision to limit the number of machine guns provided compare to say the Germans who had about 6 times as many. The idee fix of the British commanders was war of movement and the importance of cavalry. It wasn't until late 1916 that tactics started to change. You also overlook the fact that the British army nearly mutinied in 1917 like the French Army did due to the slaughter. One last point, there was a great deal of resistence to the ideas of how best to use tanks developed by Major-General JFC Fuller (and that carried on into the start of WW2)
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@Caratacus By trying to be clever you entirely missed my point so I will repeat it. The RN went into WW1 with Dreadnoughts and Nelsonian tactics. The Army had not distinguished itself in any war after Waterloo because it was still largely class based rather than promoting officers who knew how to fight They had learnt very little from the US Civil war or the Franco-Prussian, thus were deficient in both machine guns and good artillery plus thought calvary was very good due to the prestige of the regiments. Peace may be good for the economy but left the UK entirely unprepared for WW1 and lead to 2 years of learning hard, bloody lessons.
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@Caratacus No, you trot out the tired old saws! The purchase of commission in the Army had only been abolished in 1871. That was still a reason we fought the Colonial wars so badly. The RN did a poor job in WW1 as it refused to develop the submarine arm, was very reluctant to adopt the convoy system (there was still resistance at the start of WW2). Your unwillingness to accept that there were huge problems in the British military as a result of Pax Britannica underlines my point.
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@Caratacus I see you are a fool only interested in your own opinion. 2 Afghan wars!
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@Caratacus I never said it was so your point is pointless
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