Talk:Battle of Rossbach

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[edit] possible addition

this seems a well written page, and I was wondering wether or not an anon. contemporary popular rhyme about the battle can be added. I found the rhyme in the book History in Quotations by M.J. Cohen and John Major (on page 471) it goes as follows:

And our great king Frederick comes,

and slaps his woollen breeches.

Off sprints the Kaiser's army then,

E'en faster than the Frenchies.

--Jadger 03:29, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "operativ"

In the last section there is the sentence "Frederick had accidentally discovered operational maneuvers...," which I think is as good a translation as any for the German term "operativ," which appears to have no direct translation into English. However, the term might best be kept in its original German in order to highlight the concept. Other German military terms which have found their way into English without translation include "Schwerpunkt" and "Kesselschlacht."

In his book Six Armies in Normandy, historian John Keegan says, "[l]ying somewhere between 'strategic' and 'tactical,' it ["operativ"] describes the process of transforming paper plans into battlefield practice, against the tactical pressures of time which the strategist does not know, and has been regarded by the German army as the most difficult of the commander's arts since it was isolated by the great von Moltke in the 1860s."

Since the concept seems to be uniquely German without a regularly used term in English, I suggest that the term "operational maneuvers" be replaced with "operativ," and a new entry for "operativ" should be created to describe this concept. -- Sofa King, Monday, 2006-12-11 T 03:37 UTC