Battle

Characteristics of the battles

The military historian British Sir John Keegan suggested that an ideal definition of the battle was “something which intervenes between two Armée S driving with the moral destruction then physical with one or the other of them”, although one can only seldom summarize so simply the causes and consequence of a battle.

The goal of a battle is to reach a decisive point, which is ideally the victory, but the strategy and the circumstances often require a compromise. A camp obtains the victory when its adversary goes, is found dispersed, forced to flee or is made useless militarily for the continuation of the engagements. However, a battle can end in a Pyrrhic victory who ends up giving favor to the “losing” camp. A battle can be also transformed into dead end, without leading to a decisive result for a camp

Before the 20th century, the majority of the battles were of short duration, the majority during one day or less (battles of Gettysburg or Leipzig being in that exceptional, having lasted each one 3 days.) That was mainly with the difficulty in supplying an army on the Battle field. The typical means to prolong a battle was to resort to the Poliorcétique, i.e. with the techniques of seat. The improvements on the level of the Transport S and the installation of the wars of Tranchée, which are of the same nature that the seats, make that the duration of the battles extends over weeks to see months, particularly during the First World War. However, lasting of so long battles the regular rotation of the units makes that the periods of intensive combat to which each Soldat was subjected tend to remain short.

The battles can be with small scales, implying only one handle of combatants, for example two Escouade S, until battles on the implying level of whole armies of the hundreds of thousands of individuals. The space which a battle takes depends on the armament of its combatants. Before the invention of the Artillery and Aircraft S, the battles were held between two camps being held with range of sight one of the other, when it was not directly with the contact. The depth of the battle fields extended in the modern war with the units from support remaining for back (medical resources, artillery, units, etc) exceeding of number now the troops engaged on the frontline.

The battles, in a general way, make up of multitudes of individual combat and the combatant are informed generally only one limited part of the events. The soldier of Infanterie can have little elements allowing him to know if it takes part in a minor raid or a major offensive, or to anticipate the future course of the battle, and thus little of the soldiers in first line the first day of the Bataille of the Sum, on July 1st 1916, could have anticipated that they would always take part in the same battle five months later. Contrary, some of the Alliés soldiers who had just inflicted a defeat with the France with the Bataille of Waterloo fully expected to have to fight the following day again.

Types of battles

By committed forces

Terrestrial, naval, air (Battle of England), Naval Aviation, Aéroterrestre, combined operations such as the Battle of Normandy, battles of cavalry, artillery

By the Tactical employed and the had aims

Battle of seat, rupture, wear, surrounding, envelopment (Bataille of Cannes), of destruction, ambush (Roncevaux), unloading

By the exit

Decisive battle, battles

By the importance of the committed forces

Battle, combat, engagement, fixing, knack, skirmish

Denomination of the battles

See too

battle

List of the battles

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