Talk:Siege of Petersburg

World War I parallel

Unfortunately, this is one of the battles, along with Gettysburg, from which WWI commanders should have learned but did not. Gettysburg showed the power of a defense to withstand frontal attacks.

The Battle of the Crater, however, is significant in several ways, but, in part, I think of it as an indicator of the failure of imagination following use of chemical weapons at Second Ypres or tanks at Cambrai. I'm not suggesting that there were not incredibly bad decisions about which exploitation force to use at the Crater, and racism played a role. Oddly enough, though, there was at least an awareness that there might be a breach through which a trained unit could penetrate, probably less so than in WWI.

Howard C. Berkowitz 11:08, 29 July 2008 (CDT)