What effect did officers being gentlemen and having higher moral standards than the men they command have on militaries?
Did it actually mean anything or was it just aristocratic nonsense?
What effect did officers being gentlemen and having higher moral standards than the men they command have on militaries?
It wasn't their aristocratic behavior that was the result, that's the effect. The cause is that wealthy landowners had education and their aristocrat behavior was just how wealthy educated people behaved at the time.
The class disparity continued for a long period because the officer corps continued to pull from wealthy educated families and it wasn't until this changed leading up to WW1 that we see it fall away; mostly because of the decline in that oligarchial class, but also the movement of militaries to a less top down format as WW1 proved that structure was outdated and detrimental to the modern NCO corps and meritocratic/management style of officership
Would you say the oligarchal tradition was better than the "doesn't care about the military but needed to pay for college" officer class that replaced them?
You need to go to college to be an officer
Look at the Arabs to see how well oligarchal tradition works in modern war.
They got rekt by israelites straight outta concentration camps and then by the kids of those israelites, they got rekt by African tribesmen on Toyotas and finally they got absolutely dumped on by kids who just want to to go college in 1991.
being gentlemen doesn't automatically give someone higher moral standards.
According to some accounts, a good officer was the difference between a Red Army unit behaving, or raping and pillaging the locals of a village. That they were dispatched to defend.
That just sounds like regular red army behavior though
Good thing germans weren't obliged to trial their criminals during Barbarossa and got lots of media after war on their side, otherwise we wouldn't have so many wehraboos
I'm pretty sure back then gentlemen was codeword for 'a member of the aristocracy'.
It wasn't just codeword, it literally did mean that. If someone then asked you if you were gentle, they aren't asking if you're tender or kind or careful, they're asking if you're of noble blood (so always say yes to that question if you're a time traveler). Gentleman just means nobleman. The shift in it's meaning goes hand in hand with the word villain, coming from villein, which means villager. People believed that higher-classed people were not just better mannered but generally of a higher moral standing than the poors. Same reason why the word noble means what it does now too, nobility was intrinsically linked to goodness and being a poor was intrinsically linked to wickedness. There may be some merit to that, because if you're a poor you may be willing to kill and steal to become rich, whereas someone already rich was likely raised well from a young age and was taught how to be a good person, and wouldn't be wanting because they already have stuff. That was probably their line of thinking at least, this terminology didn't really translate to prior periods but it's partly where they got it from. The closest of antiquity would be thoughts on kings. Many of the ancients typically had an automatic association with "the king is good" and bad kings were the exceptions to that rule, usually personally vilified and called out by name whereas the term king was associated with good things. This also makes some sense, kings would have to listen to their subjects and take their needs into consideration if they didn't want to be replaced by force.
It was due to the tech of the time. The modern phenomenon of middle-class and upper-middle-class soldiers didn't exist in the musket era because soldiering was extremely low-skill and high-casualty then. They conscripted criminals and losers instead with a officer to steer the mass.
>having higher moral standards
>aristocracy
Read some diaries from the time period.
It existed back then, the middle and upper-middle class soldiers would be the junior officers in commission systems. Being an officer pre-20th century was just as much a socioeconomic consideration as it was a career.
>Read some diaries from the time period.
illuminate us
>nobility
>high moral standards
The peasantry has almost always been more moral then the degen aristocracy
the reason why Europe is so shit today is the abandonment of the aristocratic class and the French Revolution
Reactionnary meme. The aristocratic class wasn't founded on virtue but on the military function. Elvolution of warfare made it obsolete long before the revolution, and republican and revolutionary armies thrashing the emperor and kings of Europe for 20 years proved it tyo everyone.
Then during the XIXth century the aristocracy melted with the high bourgeoisie and that was over.
>The aristocratic class wasn't founded on virtue but on the military function
wrong
>Elvolution of warfare made it obsolete long before the revolution
wrong
the truth is hard to accept sometimes
cope
Ah give it a rest already, will ya?
Lmao read Xenophon on Cyrus instead of French aristocope before making an argument
>aristocratic nonsense
Merely this and continues as such.
Has gotten worse as the quality of college education has declined.
>having higher moral standards
This isn't a given. Young aristocratic men were the officer class because they were the only reasonably well educated class, as well as the rampant nepotism and corruption that was present in all areas of government at the time, which to participate in you needed to have money and connections.
Not a thing. At least as far as the English Navy was concerned as of the 18th century. While most captains and warrant officers were from the landed gentry, they were usually the poor or the dead enders. The Navy offered possibilities to the sons of poor nobles, and second or third sons who stood to inherit nothing. They also tended to be not particularly well educated. Certainly better than the regular seamen and landsman, but they weren't philosophers or scientists or artists, or any other lionized ideal you may have of them. Those folks were the overwhelming minority, and usually the result of late bloomers as it were. Children who were went through an intensive education before being sent off to the Navy. That said, by the end of the 18th centuries virtually every officer learned how to read and write fairly well, and might have known more than one language. The reason was that the Admiralty expected them to represent the navy as gentlemen and not masters in charge of ships full of hooligans.
As for how this reflected on the men, the men were outrageously seditious and prone to levels of noncompliance that would leave a modern day naval officer absolutely stupefied. And this was because many men were there against their will, were being forced to endure some truly terrible conditions (as much as the Admiralty tried to alleviate them there was certain things they could do little about), and rank really only mattered to the officers. Men who had a problem with the lieutenant assigned to their division on the ship could just go talk to the captain, and the captain was used to this. If they had an issue with the captain, they would just go talk to an admiral. The dock admirals of harbors and stations under British control were used to whole gangs of men waiting outside of their office in the morning to complain to them directly, and should that fail they would go straight to the Admiralty.
In fact so many men went to the Navy's HQ that there was at least one scribe whose full time job was to take down a record of each individual man's complaint (remember, these dudes were almost universally illiterate) and present it to the Admiralty court for review. Yeah, that's how little chain of command mattered.
As for how commanders and their officers got anything done. They did it by being fair to the men and trying to convince the men to do their work than rigorously enforce order. Captains who were fair and kind had the best crews simply because they had the pick of the best people for their crew. Likewise, the men understood that the captain could be extremely brutal and unfair should he wished. So, they would do their work at a bare minimum due to the repercussions of not doing so, or for committing "mutiny" (this could be something so simple as slapping an officer). They knew once a ship was decommissioned that all bets were off and they could, and would hunt down officers who treated them poorly.
So, tl;dr - The average person on a boat didn't give two shits about rank and had to be convinced to do what they were told.
>They also tended to be not particularly well educated.
This. Noble education, even to the level of kings, was quite unintellectual, it basically consisted in horsemanship and good manners. Iintellectual education was rather a bourgeois value that spreaded to the entirety of society somwhere in the XIXth century.
Nevertheless, they were much more literate and more instructable than the classes below them, also the expectation of leadership was drummed in to them from an early age; they were ordering around servants from a very young age.
Ordering around servants is nothing like ordering around seamen. One of them has to do what you say, and is some cuckold. The other belongs to a fraternity of hundreds of men in the same small spit of wood, men who didn't give two shits that you were some Lord's son. Men whose respect you had to tirelessly earn by leading through example, and they would still sue the shit out of you if they didn't like you, or stab you if they hated you.
But ordering servants around is a similar skill, you can be a prick and get snot in your soup, or you can make your servants feel like a part of a team or family, and the household runs well. Bossing men is a skill that was recognised by aristos, and a lot of them did it well.
>ITT: OP tries and fails to defend his thinly-veiled bootlicking fetish by framing it as a rightful return to tradition
weird projection
>some rich inbred moron
>having higher moral standards
lol
lmao even
Let's just agree that there is a difference between pretending and preaching to be moral and upstanding, and actually being it.