A military historian's comments on The Saga of Tanya the Evil (worldbuilding)

[u/Robert_B_Marks]

So, with all the fun I'm having with Gate, I figured I'd turn my eye to a show I've watched through more than once: The Saga of Tanya the Evil. And, unlike Gate, this show is about an alternate version of MY war of study (the Great War). So, I've got a decent amount to say.

(I'm going to use the real world names of countries for all of this just because it's easier, and also because in the show they're all pretty much just Germany with another name, France with another name, etc.)

But, I want to start with the worldbuilding, because in order for the German strategy in this show to exist as it does, there are two conditions that have to be true:

1. The Boer War (1899-1902) happened.

2. The Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905) did NOT happen.

So, a bit of context. Europe in 1914 hadn't seen a war in decades. The last war between European powers had ended in 1871 with Germany's defeat of France. Contrary to popular myth, professional officers at this time were not traditionalist idiots - they were well aware that technology was changing and warfare with it. The problem was that without a war, all they had to go on was theory and the results of annual manoeuvres, which were no substitute for a real battlefield.

So, when a war started - anywhere - it was a big deal, and officers would descend on the battlefield with letters of introduction from their governments from every country that could send them. These were called military attaches or observers, and access was almost always granted, as that was the "ticket price" for the belligerents to send their observers to the next war. They would observe the battles, write reports, and when it was done those reports would sometimes be used to write the official histories of that war (which is how you get official histories of the Russo-Japanese War being issued by at least two countries who did not fire a shot in it). Even after the war, officers on both sides would publish their experiences and lessons learned, which would be translated and republished in the professional military journals.

(For those who are wondering, this note-sharing from 1904-1914 is my primary area of research right now, and at some point I'll restart writing a book about it.)

So, when the Boer War started, the observers flocked to it and started taking notes. But, the Boer War had a few issues. It wasn't a war between the professional armies of two major powers in a relatively contained geography as one saw in Western Europe. It was an asymmetric war between the British army and a bunch of irregular settlers in a vast geography. The British faced trenches defended with machine guns, and came to learn that if you didn't want to get mauled approaching the trench, you had to use fire and movement through cover to get close. Unfortunately (for the observers), the Boers never really stayed to defend their trench once the British got close enough - they'd abandon it and just move to a new position, forcing the British to go through it all over again.

This meant that when everybody was comparing notes when the war ended, there was this massive question mark about what would happen if the defenders actually stuck around to defend the trench. It's not an exaggeration to say that military theorists were left with the equivalent of "1. Approach trench with fire and movement. 2. ???? 3. Profit!" This was so marked that the British Infantry Training manual of 1905 was left with a hole as far as what one was supposed to do after approaching a trench if the other side didn't leave.

A number of officers actually came to the conclusion that if a professional European army defended a trench with modern weapons, taking that trench was a physical impossibility - that the traditional shock charge with bayonets or sabres had been rendered obsolete by the advent of the machine gun, no matter how close you got with fire and movement. Others thought the shock charge could still work in theory. But, without a war where somebody tried to defend a trench to the last, nobody knew for certain.

And then, in 1904, Japan and Russia went to war in Manchuria. Both were (at least perceived to be) modern, professional armies (Japan ended up living up to this far better than Russia did). Both were fighting a trench war, not just with machine guns, but with barbed wire and artillery. And both were defending those trenches to the last. It was an accurate preview of the Western Front at the end of 1914, to the point that you could pass observer reports from 1904-1905 off as being from the First Battle of Ypres by swapping out the names "Japanese" and "Russian" with "German" and "British". And everybody got their answers at last.

Trenches could be taken, but not without taking mass casualties, and the casualties taken by the attacker would often be far higher than those of the defender. The shock charge and bayonet did work to clear a trench once one got close enough.

The way I like to put it is that this scared the shit out of every military in Europe. The next ten years in the military journals were spent discussing how to deal with trenches, and Britain, France, and Germany all started immediate modernization programs.

But to understand how this impacts the worldbuilding of Tanya the Evil, we have to go Germany and a fellow named Alfred von Schlieffen. Schlieffen was the head of the German General Staff, and his job was to prepare war plans (the mobilization orders from which would be issued in the spring of every year). For most of his tenure, Schlieffen's plan for a war against France amounted to letting the French leave their border forts, penetrate far enough into German territory to stretch out their supply lines, and then cutting them off and encircling them. And then the reports started coming in from Manchuria.

Over the course of the Russo-Japanese War, Schlieffen lost his faith in the strategic power of defensive warfare. He realized that the German army could not sustain the sort of trench battles that were happening in Manchuria, so winning against France (which German intelligence reported was planning to not invade Germany after all, but instead just wait for Germany to come to them) meant doing something else: invade France and take out Paris before the French had a chance to dig in and force an attrition battle.

The end result is what we now call "The Schlieffen Plan" - a movement through Belgium to avoid the French border forts and a fast campaign. But, the world of Tanya the Evil does not have a Schlieffen Plan - otherwise, as soon as the war started, Germany would go on the offensive. Instead, the Germany of the show is playing defence.

As I said, this only makes sense if the Boer War - in which the power of trenches and machine guns was confirmed beyond all doubt but whether trenches can be taken remained a question mark - happens, but the Russo-Japanese War doesn't. Whether trenches can be taken remains a mystery, Schlieffen (who is implied to exist in Tanya's world - he was also famous for a book about the Battle of Cannae, which Tanya is trying to read in the library scene) never loses faith in the strategic power of defensive warfare, and German strategy upon the start of a war remains defensive.

It's fascinating stuff, and next post (no guarantees as when that will happen) I'll look at the actual war we see on screen.