with apologies to the History Channel...man, moment & machine?

For the most part I am not a huge fan of the History Channel. Too much of their effort is slip-shod, rife with inaccuracies, and done for political purposes. For example, their writing on the Ides of March had Julius Caesar doing something in 63 BC, then 2 years later in 64 BC going to thus and such a place. Okay...first off, 63+1 is 65, not 64. Second...in BC you count DOWN, not up. BC, 2 years after 63BC would be 61BC. That is something every historian knows whether they use the traditional BC/AD or the anti-religious BCE/ACE (before common era/after common era) that BC the numbers get smaller and AD they get larger. That is just an easy, recent example of the slip-shod, half-way effor they put into their work. So many times I tried to watch one of their programs only to have it start out with a key fact...that they got wrong.

With that said, there have been a few programs I enjoyed. There was one I saw a few years ago that had live black and white footage of a tank battle between a US tank and a German tank. It was kind of cool watching a tank drive through a wall...

Anyway, they have a program titled "Man, Moment, Machine." It came after I lost the last vestiges of respect I had for the channel so I have not ever actually watched one of those episodes but I imagine it has to do with those moments of history when the right man came along at just the right time to develop the correct machine. Ironically, several books I have read recently fall into this theme. Also coincidentally, many of those books revolved around World War II.

One of the most interesting was a comparison of Rommel and Patton. It postulated the idea they were among the first and most effective people to figure out how new technologies...specifically tanks...fundamentally altered the nature of warfare. Whereas World War I was a battle of trenches with thousands of casualties being fought to win a hundred yards or so, World War II was much more mobile. The advent of the tank allowed sweeping advances of hundreds of miles in mere days, of some days where 50 miles or more were over run.

At the same time, other new technologies were also in development. The obvious one would be the nuclear bomb but others were in effect...bigger guns on smaller carriages, jet engines, the V2 rockets, more effective submarines to name just a few. So how much did the technology matter?

That is a better question than it might seem. Most scholars agree the German tanks were better, their planes were better, etc...they had better equipment on average than the Allies, they ran short in capacity and manpower. So how much of history is dominated by the superior technology as opposed to the people in charge of said technology?

Another fine example from the war. Rommel, by all accounts, had such a firm grasp of the potentials of tank warfare that he ran circles around his British opponents. Yet men constantly being outmaneuvered, outfought, and out shot by an outnumbered, under equipped opponent somehow fought him to a standstill that had little to do with their numerical superiority. Yet it was technology that made the difference.

It was largely British use of the code-breaking ULTRA that defeated Rommel. Had they not had the ability to know where and when he was going as soon as his generals his flanking movements quite possibly could have swept the British out of Tobruk and it is entirely conceivable out of Egypt and all of Africa. That would have reduced it to a one front war...Germany and Russia...and perhaps been enough to keep the Allies out of Europe long enough for that to matter.

But it was not just the technology...it was the people USING it that mattered. The little known story of "FDR's 12 Apostles" who, acting as vice-consuls, somehow managed to become top-flight, effective spies and essentially made the eventual Allied invasion of Africa possible despite having often times outmoded equipment, little to no training, and not enough support. How were they successful?

Much the same could be said of the French underground resistance. Their trade craft was weak, their equipment outmoded...yet they were effective.

In other words, having superior equipment is nice but not decisive. Having superior personnel, whether just in numbers, just in quality, or both...is nice but not decisive. Combining the right person with the right technology, even if that technology is not as good as the tech held by the opponents...that is pure magic.