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The Battle of Hoth: Vader the Invader
JustOK writes "Darth Vader did a lot of bad things and did a lot of things badly; the Battle of Hoth was of both types. The Empire's attempt to capture Echo Base, while successful, was still a horrible failure. Sure, the Empire overran the ground defenses and captured the base, but most of the Rebels escaped. Luke, Leia and Han all got away. The Rebels had a poorly-laid-out ground defense, and a planetary shield that can't keep an invader out while complicating their own escape. This article at Wired takes us through all the missteps in the battle."
nuff said
Silence is a state of mime.
Also, the article asks why Vader didn't bomb out the base. One explanation is that he senses Luke is inside and it's his duty to turn Luke over to the Emperor. Another explanation is that they're dug in too far and they don't have the bunker busting utilities on the ATATs and ATSTs.
He flies into an asteroid belt — which somehow the Imperial Fleet had failed to account for when planning its hasty “blockade” — and the Falcon has defied the odds.
I would have guessed that since the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid belt are so low (as threepio notes) that the blockade used that as a natural barrier like you would a mountain or sea in an earthly battle. When they flew into it, nobody was expecting them to opt to be blown up in an asteroid belt and they reluctantly gave chase.
Yeah, I know, I'm the life at parties and this is all done tongue in cheek but I could probably come up with apologetic responses. I'm actually really glad that Lucas didn't decide to have meaningless strategic dialogue of Tom Clancy proportions so that we could all follow why every little thing was happening. I've read fantasy books by authors with military backgrounds and the battles get tedious -- though very informative.
My work here is dung.
Exactly this.
The shield prevented orbital bombardment, which is an automatic loss condition given the rebels cannot repel the empire fleet at Hoth. (I'd guess not enough time to recall their entire fleet from other locations)
Their strategy at Hoth looked to be simply to buy enough time against a ground invasion so their ships could leave the atmosphere and jump to hyperspace. (Presumably this is easy enough to do while being covered by the ion canon)
The Rebels seemed to know all this in advance, had planned ahead, and executed their escape plan almost calmly. They didn't even seems surprised when the empire eventually did find them.
Vader's motivations don't seem questionable either, because being a Jedi knight himself, he probably thinks the fate of the rebel fleet/base is completely inconsequential compared to the capture/conversion of Luke and Leia (and company). Which is why he goes in himself.
Vader didn't want to eliminate this particular Rebel Base, he wanted to deal with the whole alliance, and the Emperor had a plan for that, his fully operational Death Star which was a honeypot meant to suck in the Rebels yet again, but this time with surprise on their side.
And most of those authors with military backgrounds just sound like pompous asses in my experience. Armchair generals declaring their own vacuous superiority instead.
I don't know why they call it Hoth, they should call it "Coldth"
I think what the author is missing is that Vader may have wanted to take the base intact, probably to recover information on remaining resistance cells elsewhere. Nuking the base from orbit was never his plan.
He actually succeeded in prompting an evacuation of the base; his only failure was in assuming that the star destroyers could handle the mop-up operation and prevent ships from escaping the system. Either he didn't anticipate the presence of the ion cannon, or he gravely overestimated his forces' competency in that regard (personally the fact that one ion cannon so easily facilitated their escape always seemed like a bit of a stretch).
In any case it seems like the rebels always planned to use the ion cannon to cover their escape path, so the issue of the shield creating a "chokepoint" was probably moot.
It's well known that Admiral Ozzel came out of hyperpsace too close to the system and cost them the element of surprise. He's as clumsy as he is stupid....
Stuff that mattered in 1980...
The real point of this is how a good story doesn't need to be consistent or even especially believable, if it's told well. The characters in Empire are vivid, the story is strong, and the direction is fantastic. The goal isn't to write a plot so airtight it can't be nitpicked apart, it's to get the audience so caught up that they don't bother with any nitpicking.
That said, this article picked some very entertaining nits.
or the existence of Darth Vader.
I hope he does not find you lack of faith disturbing, for your sake. Lord Vader is not as forgiving as I am.
Except that a popular but absolutely mediocre general like Douglas MacArthur pulled the trick of a lifetime with the Inchon landing...
That wasn't exactly a mediocre move, was it? Some people point out that he relied on some previous staff work, but staffs exist to plan for every possible contingency, and MacArthur found this solution and implemented it. I must grant, however, that even a mediocre general may display an occasional flash of brilliance. In addition, his success also contained the seed of eventual failure. Once the Inchon Landing succeeded and MacArthur kept on rolling, the Chinese saw a general coming toward their borders at the head of a powerful army who was on record calling for the Communist government's eradication (he frequently called for "unleashing" Chiang Kai-Shek) and who advocated the use of nuclear bombs against China. It was not at all clear to them (nor to me) that he would have stopped at the border. It's damn hard to stop a popular and victorious general—as one biographer points out, the man was effectively the U.S. viceroy in Asia. The Chinese reaction was pretty predictable.
My respect for MacArthur doesn't arise so much from his generalship (as you imply, he did much that can be faulted), but for his administration of Japan. I think he was probably a much better administrator than he was a strategist. It seems that he understood the Japanese well enough to grasp that leaving the emperor in power and positioning himself as a Shogun would play well with Japanese culture and practices. They were used to having a figurehead emperor and a military dictator. MacArthur provided both. And he did it so well that he was able to administer Japan with no resistance at all.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Even an incompetent reporter should know that a planetary shield protects against orbital bombardment from capital ships and is not a kinetic barrier to ship movement. It's exactly this lack of diligence in reporting that we were protected from by the previous regime, and I for one, miss the grav-trains running on time.
I think the author is missing the point about Vader's motives. The article said:
The author assumes that Vader actually cared about winning whatever military objectives the Empire had. I don't think he did. In Episode V, Vader wanted only one thing: to get Luke Skywalker. I imagine that after the Death Star was destroyed and there was a big ceremony highlighting to everyone in the Rebel Alliance that Luke was the hero, word got to the Empire (and Vader) that someone named Skywalker was involved. Vader may have claimed that the name had no meaning for him, but it certainly did. So that's why he went down to the base. He didn't trust the stormtroopers to be able to capture Luke; he was going to do it himself.
In Episode IV, Vader seemed to be nominally to be a team player (at least he stopped choking that guy in the conference room) and willing to take orders. By the time Episode V rolled around, Vader was off the leash. All he wanted was to get Luke to turn him into his Sith Apprentice and everything else (stormtroopers, admirals, star destroyers, what have you) was just fodder. So although I enjoyed the article, I don't think Vader's tactics weren't because of poor planning or insight. If every Rebel escaped and every Imperial died, it wouldn't matter to him if he captured Luke.
It other words: it's not that I'm a bad driver. It's that I needed to get to the airport to make my flight and that now-dented car was a rental.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Let's not forget...
Hiding the base on Hoth was Luke Skywalker's one major leadership decision.
The base was discovered and attacked before even becoming fully operational. Although the rebels themselves escaped, there would have been a massive loss of costly and difficult to replace military hardware.
Skywalker did at least have the sense not to show his face again except for personal rescue attempts in The Empire Strikes Back and then not to even attempt to participate in the actual rebellion until after the strategic decisions had already been finalized in The Return of the Jedi.
The Rebels had a poorly-laid-out ground defense, and a planetary shield that can't keep an invader out while complicating their own escape.
But they didn't really have a planetary shield. It was merely a shield over Echo Base. With highly limited resources and a shoestring budget, it was better than nothing. Don't forget, this was not a well funded, professional army, it was a ragtag group of rebels on the run.
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It was damn cold. The good guys got away, as expected.
the Empire ground forces landed beyond the energy shield - that's from dialogue, not speculation.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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