Talk:Battle for Brittany

Infobox help request

Cant get the infobox to work. this is what I have. please assist.

Battle for Brittany
Part of the Western Front of World War II
Date August -September 1944 Location North Western France Result Allied victory
Belligerents
Allies United States France	Axis Germany
Commanders and leaders
General Middleton General Walker Raymond Chomel Albert Eon	General Fahrmbacher General Andreas von Aulock General Hans Junck
Strength

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Caracal Rooikat (talk • contribs) 12:35, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Caracal Rooikat: Your markup was missing the closing }}. I inserted it. Talk page guidelines say that one should ordinarily not edit another user's talk page comments, and I did that anyway. I also removed some stray <small> and </small> markup that didn't belong. I hope that all of this is OK in this case. —Anomalocaris (talk) 18:41, 27 January 2022 (UTC)

Capitalisation of "battle" in "battle for Brittany"

The initial letter of the title is only capitalised in running text if it would normally be capitalised. Per MOS:CAPS: Wikipedia avoids unnecessary capitalization. In English, capitalization is primarily needed for proper names, acronyms, and for the first letter of a sentence. Wikipedia relies on sources to determine what is conventionally capitalized; only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. Per MOS:CAPS, the burden is to show that capitalisation is necessary in accordance with the criteria of MOS:CAPS. Looking sources here here and here, it appears to fall well short of the high threshold set by MOS:CAPS. Cinderella157 (talk) 11:33, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

The same misreading which shifts the burden of proof to those who oppose your edits? MOS:MILTERMS is clear that "Where there is uncertainty as to whether a term is generally accepted, consensus should be reached on the talk page." (a consensus which does not exist yet); and goes against WP:CONACHIEVE (which is a policy and says essentially the same thing as BRD, i.e. when your bold edits get reverted then you need to get consensus through discussion, not pretend that you can shift the burden of proof to the others). I've reverted again, because, given the sources Mathglot presents in their edit summary, I'm entirely unconvinced that the above sampling is entirely accurate... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 18:26, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

The one thing that is clear to me so far, is that the term "Battle for Brittany" (capitalized or not) is used infrequently in the literature. For example: even though Battle of Normandy is only a secondary term for "Operation Overlord", nevertheless "Battle of Normandy" far outpaces "[Bb]attle for Brittany". An "intitle:" keyword search in Google books returns nothing for "battle for brittany", so to the extent the term is used at all, it's apparently not sufficiently widespread for authors to include it in a book title (whereas searching books for intitle:battle of normandy returns numerous books with that in the title (some with for instead of of)).

In addition, there is the matter of the preposition: of, or for? I acknowledge that this is mostly o/t for this discussion about capitalization of "battle for brittany", nevertheless, if it turns out that the "for" version of the title has so little data that we cannot resolve the question of capitalization with any confidence, then we should look to other formulations, such as "battle of brittany" for clues. In the case of of, this ngrams chart doesn't have a ton of data, but more than the for case, and points to cap 'B' as being somewhat more frequent, although they have changed places in the 1970s; whether this passes the threshold of significance is not clear to me; more searches may be needed.

If the data is too sparse in this avenue of investigation, other clues may be gleaned from WP:CONSISTENT: how do other battle articles, other WWII battles, other WWII battles in France capitalize their articles on "[bB]attle (of | for) FOO"?

I don't yet have a conclusion or definite opinion on which way it should be, but my hunch is that there won't be enough data to make a firm conclusion based on the direct evidence, and we may end up needing to consider other factors in order to reach a consensus. Mathglot (talk) 19:24, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Mathglot, the pertinant question for this thread is the capitalisation of "battle for Brittany". It is a descriptive noun phrase and therefore not intrinsically a proper name. MOS:CAPS would only have us capitalise when "necessary". MOS:CAPS sets a source based WP:BURDEN. The guideline represents the broad community consensus on this matter. We are guided that only words and phrases that are consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources are capitalized in Wikipedia. Reasonable searches have been made to determine usage. As an aside, the corpus for Google ngrams is Google books. The Google ngrams reports no results for the capitalised form. This doesn't necessarily mean that no results exist but that they do not reach the reporting threshold set by ngrams. If there are few results for the for the search term and a small proportion for the capitalised form, we cannot say that it is consistently capitalized in a substantial majority of independent, reliable sources? Cinderella157 (talk) 09:07, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Yes, that is the pertinent question for this thread, and your comments are persuasive. However at this point, I'm seeing this as the mosquito in the room, and I'm more concerned with the elephant (next section). At this point, I don't think it's worth spending too much more effort discussing the capitalization issue, until the discussion below settles down. If nothing comes of it after some time, ping me here again, and I'll probably support your proposal here. Mathglot (talk) 17:15, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Standalone article?

While we worry about the speck of sawdust in the eye that is the topic of the section above, I'm wondering if we are missing the roof beam that is the question of whether this article should be a stand-alone article at all. This question occurred to me as a side-effect of the minor capitalization question in the section above: when I searched for books entitled "Battle for Brittany" (in Google, and in WorldCat) I found zero relevant results. That made me wonder if "Battle of Brittany" is really a thing, historiographically speaking. I'm not questioning the reliability of sources in this article or whether the events covered in it deserve mention somewhere in the encyclopedia; only whether they deserve being grouped in the way they are here, and labeled with this title.

As a next step, I'm going to check some major histories of WWII and France during the war years (probably starting with Ambrose, Keegan, Julian Jackson, and Gerhard Weinberg, if I can gain access), to see if they have a chapter with the title "Battle for Brittany" or not, and whether there are index entries for it. If not, then it might be that we should not have an article with this title, as we should generally follow the historiographical terms that historians employ to frame and cover a period or a topic, just like we mimic their periodizations and we now say things like "Late Antiquity" and not "Post-Roman Transition" or some other term of our own invention. Do historians generally group and refer to the events in this article as the "battle for Brittany"? This isn't clear to me, and I'm going to try to find out, and invite your research and comments. Pinging @RandomCanadian, Robinvp11, Keith-264, Rjensen, TheVirginiaHistorian, The Four Deuces, Robert McClenon, GraemeLeggett, and Alansplodge: whose comments and opinions on related topics I respect. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 21:47, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

And article creator, Caracal Rooikat as well. Mathglot (talk) 23:50, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Investigation so far show no chapters, no index entries, and where available, no mentions of "battle for Brittany" in full-text searches in these five volumes:

• France During World War II: From Defeat to Liberation Christofferson 10 "Brittany"; 0 'Battle for/of Brittany'
• The Second World War: A Complete History Gilbert, Martin (1989)
  • Brittany = 10 results;
  • "battle for Brittany" = 0 results
• France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 Jackson, Julian (2001 (1993))
  • Brittany = 10 results (full-text search);
  • "battle for Brittany" = 0 results (full-text quoted search)
• France; The Tragic Years 1939-1947 Huddleston, Sisley (1955) full-text searches:
  • Brittany 1 result (p. n75)
  • "battle for Brittany" = 0 results
• A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II Weinberg (1995) 2 "Brittany", 0 "Battle for Brittany"
• Full-text search of Internet Archive corpus for "battle for Brittany" = 24 results; books like "Hundred Years War", "The Phenomenon of Welshness", "Songs of the Cascade" (in poem: "The Deaths of Tristam and Iseult"), "Scale Models" of July 1970 (a legit reference on page 628), "Street Legal: the Betrayal"; "1492: the Decline of Medievalism and the Rise of the Modern Age"; and so on.

My conclusion is that the term "battle for Brittany" is not commonly used by historians or other authors to refer to events in France in 1944. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:37, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps we could move the article to Liberation of Brittany (which does have support in reliable sources; e.g., GBooks; iArchive) and refactor it as a parent article in WP:Summary style, with brief parent sections pointing to child articles Liberation of Rennes, Battle of Saint-Malo, Battle for Brest, Atlantic pockets and Saint-Nazaire pocket. That would solve the problem of the current problematic title. Mathglot (talk) 01:21, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Keep it's a major military battle with plenty of solid reliable books in coverage (I added a bibliography). The books cited above are political history and this is military history, with different experts. Rjensen (talk) 01:40, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Rjensen, thanks for your comment and adding those sources. What would you call the article, then? No books have the title "Battle for Brittany" that I can find (or even a chapter called that). In my searches, I came across formulations like "Battle for Cotentin Peninsula and Brittany", "Brittany Offensive", and things like that. If there is a "usual" name for it, in your experience, what is it? (For those who don't know, Rjensen is a professional historian.) Thanks Mathglot (talk) 04:50, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

the best scholarly coverage is Ganz, A. Harding. "Questionable Objective: The Brittany Ports, 1944." Journal of Military History 59.1 (1995): 77-95. The lack of attention = because Allies fails to get those ports. Patton was very angry that so much effort was wasted to get the ports. Another title might be Battle for Brittany Ports Rjensen (talk) 09:04, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

I think the content is useful but the article scope needs to be broadened; the most important part of this should be the Background (currently two lines). It's more significant to understand what was driving it (logistics) and why the failure mattered because it (arguably) relates to the Battle of the Scheldt and the strategic objective behind the Battle of the Bulge (which I know was to capture Antwerp, not Brittany :)). Maybe Battle for the French Ports? Or something.Robinvp11 (talk) 16:54, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

Either Battle for Brittany ports, as Rjensen suggests above, or with a broader scope, Battle for French ports would work, or perhaps Battle for Atlantic ports (or "French Atlantic ports"), with the implied connection to Atlantic pockets, or Battle of the Atlantic, of which it arguably was part, or at least strategically related. With any of those names, it could be organized as a child article of Battle of the Atlantic. Mathglot (talk) 17:11, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

These are important and weighty questions, indeed. But to get back to the "speck", can we agree to lowercase "battle" for all such when used in text? Dicklyon (talk) 04:08, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

There's a large literature on the Brittany campaign, which is likely the better name for the article. Nick-D (talk) 10:02, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Allied victory, German victory

the infobox says "Result Allied victory" -- no it was a German victory. None of the ports were captured and the Allies had to use improvised floating ports to unload a HUGE amount of supplies. Rjensen (talk) 09:14, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Agreed; the Allies didn't gain control of the Atlantic pockets until V-E Day, or just before or after, as I recall. I've switched the Infobox to "German victory". Mathglot (talk) 16:59, 7 May 2022 (UTC)

What references state that this was a German victory? Those I've seen note that the Germans wasted large forces in Brittany (an entire parachute division at Brest alone, for instance) and the Allies were able to contain the Atlantic Pockets with ease. The ports in Brittany turned out to not be needed. Historians generally conclude that the Allies should have stayed out of Brittany as their goals were unachievable and the peninsula could have been sealed off with less loss of life, but none say that it was a German victory. Nick-D (talk) 22:35, 18 May 2022 (UTC)