Lost in a Rabbit Hole
The reason for my failure to post
By all rights, the past week should have been an especially productive one. After all, it began with a two-day holiday from my day job. However, instead to filling the pages of The Tactical Notebook with all sorts of hoplophile goodness, I fell prey to the great occupational hazard of the historian. That is, I chased the Research Rabbit into its lair, and stayed there until I had solved the conundrum that it used to distract me from my duty.
That’s the bad news. Happily, the first fruits of this digression will soon appear in the pages of this newsletter. Better yet, the skills I developed, and the knowledge I gained, in the course of this great distraction should pay dividends in the years to come. Best of all, I am reminded of that the purpose of The Tactical Notebook lies less in the construction of narratives than in the discovery, interpretation, and presentation of information that readers cannot obtain otherwise, at least without the expenditure of a great deal of time, trouble, or treasure.
Speaking of information readers cannot obtain, would you happen to have any detail on how the various WW1 German supporting arms converted from peacetime structure to wartime abteilungen? Specifically, the Telegraph-Bataillon, Flieger-Bataillon and Lufschiffer-Bataillon all seem to have had a normal structure of battalion + 3-5 companies in peacetime, but broke down into several abteilungen of different sizes for war duty. Was each abteilung just created ad-hoc from whatever personnel were at hand, or was there some more ordered process? I'm assuming that reserves would be recalled to the battalion first, and then used to fill out any vacancies in the abteilungen.