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A military historian’s comments on Tanya the Evil, Season 2, Episode 6 (Spoilers)

The twenty-four hour limit has just passed, so here we go!

First, the usual intro: I am a trained military historian – I hold a Master of Arts in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada with a defended thesis on the development of British Cavalry Doctrine, and I recently published some of my research in a new introduction to my little publishing company's edition of Schlieffen's Cannae (due to self promotion rules, I can't provide the link here, but if you're interested in it, PM me and I'll send it to you).

What I'm going to look at is how well this episode passes the "sniff test" for how a world war works. And here we get to our standard disclaimer: Tanya's world is not our world, her world war is not either of ours. Something happening in Tanya's war that didn't happen in ours (or vice versa) is NOT by itself cause for criticism.

And let's begin…

Using a general as a decoy

We see Zettour use himself as a decoy, on the grounds that since he's a high value target, the enemy will shift their assault towards him. I'm not sure any commander in their right mind in our world would have done it quite this way, but this isn't our world, so this passes the sniff test.

And, there is a history of using commanders as decoys. The one that comes immediately to mind is General George Patton in WW2, where prior to D-Day an entire phony invasion force was built around him, with bogus communications and even inflatable tanks. The goal was to convince the Germans that the Allies would be landing at Calais, and having Patton make public appearances helped sell the ruse.

And even high value targets have been used as decoys in military history. Another WW2 example, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, had the Japanese aircraft carriers (which by this time were empty of planes) used to decoy Admiral Halsey's air support away from Leyte on a wild goose chase. The end result was the world's last battleship-on-battleship battle.

So, what Zettour does probably crosses the line into utter insanity, but it IS something that could happen in a world war.

Assuming that Tanya will figure out the new plan

Adding to Zettour's recklessness, we see him set out with the assumption that Tanya will put together the clues and figure out what he wants and what needs to be done. And, this passes the sniff test. It was also a major issue in the German Army right up to the end of WW2 that helped lose it two world wars.

It all comes down to Moltke the Elder, who realized that battlefields were getting large and complex enough that orders given by command could be obsolete by the time they arrived. Moltke's answer to this was to forget trying to control the strategic side in any serious way at all – instead, armies would be given very general orders ("go to location X by this route and break through"), with the understanding that once the army got there and broke through, everybody would figure out what to do next.

This was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it made the German army extremely flexible on the tactical level. On the other hand, Germany entered both world wars without even a concept of grand strategy. And this could work very well (as it does with Tanya here), or it could work very badly (the entire advance to the Marne in 1914 is less a cohesive German army advancing in a plan as it is several German armies advancing while sharing the same operational areas and occasionally the same goals, but not often – it's EXTREMELY entertaining reading for many of the wrong reasons).

Air units buggering off to do something else

Sadly what we see here with the Unified mage unit just deciding to leave the operation and chase something else passes the sniff test with flying colours. Inter-service rivalry was (and is) a very real thing. It could be extreme as the Luftwaffe treating the Kriegsmarine like the enemy and deciding not to give the Bismarck any air support, or it could be as low level as fighter escorts deciding that chasing the enemy fighters was more interesting than actually escorting the bombers (a big problem during the strategic bombing campaign in WW2). One of the problems the Allies had in the preparations for D-Day was that Arthur "Bomber" Harris, commander of Bomber Command, had become obsessed with bombing Berlin, and was outright refusing to task any bombers to actual strategic targets like French railway junctions (as I recall, Churchill managed to force a compromise).

So, the Unified Task Force mages just buggering off in the middle of the battle to do something else? It fits.

Tanya's bayonet charge

Failing to deal with the Federation mages using her normal bag of tricks, we see Tanya resort to a good, old fashioned bayonet charge. And this passes the sniff test.

As much as some theorists like to argue that things like trenches and machine guns made the shock charge obsolete, reality has never agreed with this. There has always been value in being able to stick a long knife to your rifle and turn it into a spear for poking enemies in front of you.

In WW1, the main weapons used to clear trenches by the British Army were bayonets and grenades. The tendency of soldiers to resort to them (which makes a LOT of sense once you see all the twists and turns in a real WW1 trench system) became so common that the British army found itself re-issuing a number of bayonet training manuals, along with a reminder that rifles can shoot too. WW2 saw fewer bayonet charges, but they did happen (as I recall, my fellow Canadians carried out at least one charge in Sicily in 1943).

So, Tanya doing one? Absolutely a thing that could happen.

…and that's all that comes to mind for now…looking forward to the next episode.