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Cessna posted:
An old family friend (who I think I mentioned in thread before) was a PT boat crewman in WW2. His son was in tanks in Vietnam and got all kinds of hosed up when they ran over a mine. I don’t know how common it was, how bad the casualty rates were etc but it certainly was a thing.
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Jun 30, 2023 15:03
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Iirc tank crew casualty rates were way higher than average in WW2. Wonder how they were in the post-WW2 conventional wars, though.
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Jun 30, 2023 16:32
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Cessna posted:You're never going to find a single tank blundering down a road. A number of videos from Syria and Ukraine suggest otherwise
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Jun 30, 2023 17:35
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Scratch Monkey posted:A number of videos from Syria and Ukraine suggest otherwise You're never going to find a competently run tank running down the road alone. I know that sounds like some sort of "no true Scotsman" thing, but it's really basic, the sort of thing that is drummed into your head from day one of armor school. You NEVER work alone. I'm sure you can find exceptions - maybe the other tanks in the section were knocked out, maybe their crews and command are inept - but it's the sort of thing you avoid at all costs, and take drastic steps to fix. It's certainly not the sort of thing you do intentionally. Cessna fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 30, 2023 18:02
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Dance Officer posted:Iirc tank crew casualty rates were way higher than average in WW2. Wonder how they were in the post-WW2 conventional wars, though. Tank crew casualties are way lower than many other branches, e.g. infantry.
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Jun 30, 2023 18:27
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Vietnam might have been skewed if the tanks were mostly periodically driving out between firebases or to particular outposts and back. I know a lot of tank 'losses' historically were because it threw a track or got winged by a big shot and the crew ditched out.
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Jun 30, 2023 18:30
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You have limited options when your superior commander (likely infantry) considers tanks to be essentially invincible and wants one to "go over there *waves hand vaguely*" to "check things out".
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Jun 30, 2023 18:42
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Ensign Expendable posted:You have limited options when your superior commander (likely infantry) considers tanks to be essentially invincible and wants one to "go over there *waves hand vaguely*" to "check things out". I always thought of that kind of mindset as being "videogame brain", where tanks are often the supreme ground-based combat unit, basically the end of a line that starts with a guy with a club. Same job as any other ground unit, better stats. It's kind of grimly funny to hear that even people who really ought to know better still fall into that mindset.
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Jun 30, 2023 18:56
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Greggster posted:What was life like for tank crews in Vietnam? For North Vietnamese tankers, possibly a mix of boring and horrifying. I watched a long, German documentary about the Vietnam War years ago, and they commented that the Vietcong was forced to keep most of their tanks in reserve for most of the war, since the US would have loved them coming out into the open. There was a quiet phase after the US retreated, where the VC-commanders couldn't believe the US would actually be this stupid, but when the bomber fleets didn't come back, North Vietnam finally unleashed their tanks and crushed South Vietnam in short order. But before that? Lots of hiding, I assume. (Sadly I can't remember if the documentary mentioned if the US was aware of how many tanks North Vietnam had, or how often the US managed to catch some in the open.)
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Jun 30, 2023 19:16
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Cessna posted:You're never going to find a competently run tank running down the road alone. I remember The Chieftain railing about the whole "it took 5 Shermans to defeat 1 Tiger" thing by saying, no poo poo, there's 5 Shermans in a platoon, 5 is gonna be the minimum number of Shermans for basically any task.
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Jun 30, 2023 19:35
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MikeCrotch posted:I remember The Chieftain railing about the whole "it took 5 Shermans to defeat 1 Tiger" thing by saying, no poo poo, there's 5 Shermans in a platoon, 5 is gonna be the minimum number of Shermans for basically any task. Yep. US Tanks sort of work in two sections of two, four to a platoon. (This is how you can do things like bounding overwatch with a single platoon.) That platoon of four sticks together, but moves in pairs when things are tactical. * Pre- 1992 / the adoption of M-1s the USMC used a platoon of five - a "Heavy" section of three under the platoon commander of three and a "Light" section of two under the platoon sergeant. I don't know when the Army switched from 5 to 4 per platoon.
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Jun 30, 2023 22:51
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The NVA use of armor began in 1970 or so, but the first major offensive that featured it heavily was the Easter offensive in 1972, and the NVA armor took horrendous losses- it was uncoordinated, the US and ARVN had been tipped off about the threat when tanks proved to be dangerous in the Lam Son 719 operation in 1971 so they were much more ready for them. The NVA spent the next couple of years working on training on how to use tanks in combined arms and they did a lot better in 1975, but it was still hardly perfect.
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Jun 30, 2023 23:16
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Greggster posted:What was life like for tank crews in Vietnam? The infantry would often not actually patrol all the time at all. Cessna already answered the tank question but the intensity of the activity of the soldier was often much lower than you’d first imagine. Lot of it was guard duty at base and various oddball assignments like sorting mail or helping to fix vehicles. The GI might walk on patrol a few times a week, and for one 12 or 24 hour period sit on Quick Reaction Force Duty awaiting someone else to get in trouble. The firebases would see also weekend or week long tours where once it is over you just fly or walk back to a larger airbase and those would be basically impregnable fortresses or deep in the South without much of any threat or action. It’s similar to how the turbo war WW2 Eastern Front might see a mega hard offensive for a few weeks, and then there’d be a month long period of guard duty and camping out with zero action.
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Jul 1, 2023 12:05
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Are there any good books about Vietcong or North Vietnamese side of things? Books that go to grassroots level, like how normal infantry soldiers did things and exploration of their experiences?
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Jul 1, 2023 12:57
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There's this group: https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-33408096 Only skimmed it, so I'm not sure if you can find their full findings online..
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Jul 1, 2023 14:24
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Glah posted:Are there any good books about Vietcong or North Vietnamese side of things? Books that go to grassroots level, like how normal infantry soldiers did things and exploration of their experiences? A Vietcong memoir by Truong Nhu Tang. A bit of an elite view from the upper ranks but it’s a classic and has a pretty honest take on what was good about the movement and what was hosed.
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Jul 1, 2023 14:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:A Vietcong memoir by Truong Nhu Tang. A bit of an elite view from the upper ranks but it’s a classic and has a pretty honest take on what was good about the movement and what was hosed. Would it be asking a bit much to ask for a quick précis on what was good and what was hosed?
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Jul 1, 2023 17:11
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Tomn posted:Would it be asking a bit much to ask for a quick précis on what was good and what was hosed? Super tldr is that the colonial system was bullshit and it was an honest attempt to kick foreigners out and do something better. poo poo got kinda hosed towards the end as the government became ever more autocratic and a lot of dumb rivalries and grudges started playing out. Just the standard crap you see where some members of the revolution start feathering their own nest and using eg the secret police to gently caress with people they don’t like. At the end of the day it wasn’t exactly a democratic system and that gave a lot of opportunities for bad actors to screw things up. Not that democracy by itself prevents that, but it’s still easier when you can carve out your own fiefdom and don’t need to worry about elections. Dude started as a fighter early on (anti-French stuff) rose to be the VC Minister of Justice, ended up a refugee on a boat. Highest level VC official to defect to the west, foreign educated. A very interesting perspective from a man who was all in on the anti-colonialist struggle and then grew very disillusioned after the peace.
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Jul 1, 2023 17:57
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I just found some old Nazi general fanboy postcard. Normal picture postcards, but with a signed photo of a Wehrmacht general as the picture. The series line is "Der Führer und seine Generale des Heeres". Some of them were used, by my grandfather writing home while he was occupying Belgium in 41. It just sounds crazy, did any other militaries do that, ever?
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Jul 1, 2023 19:00
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I had a set of Desert Storm baseball cards. Deeply embarrassing now, but I was 10.
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Jul 1, 2023 19:10
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FuturePastNow posted:I had a set of Desert Storm baseball cards. Deeply embarrassing now, but I was 10. I have a gw2 card deck
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Jul 1, 2023 19:33
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VictualSquid posted:I just found some old Nazi general fanboy postcard. Normal picture postcards, but with a signed photo of a Wehrmacht general as the picture. What, haven't you heard of the Nazi card before? Those are invaluable in Internet debates!
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Jul 1, 2023 20:08
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Nenonen posted:What, haven't you heard of the Nazi card before? Those are invaluable in Internet debates! that's not what they mean by n-word pass
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Jul 1, 2023 20:18
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The nazi flag looks so evil. Is that entirely a product of how we’ve come to perceive what it represents, or was it originally designed to… inspire terror? Would a German in 1937 see the harsh red/white/black and think of it as something visually pleasant?
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Jul 3, 2023 04:02
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Koramei posted:The nazi flag looks so evil. Is that entirely a product of how we’ve come to perceive what it represents, or was it originally designed to… inspire terror? Would a German in 1937 see the harsh red/white/black and think of it as something visually pleasant? Red White and Black are are the colors of the Imperial German flag, and wouldn't have had any specifically bad associations at the time. Meanwhile, the swastika was an ancient (and fairly universal) symbol (usually meaning protection) before the Nazis got their hands on it. The negative reaction you're feeling is almost certainly just a case of "what it represents", few symbols generate that kind of loathing sans meaning.
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Jul 3, 2023 04:55
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from the waffle images thread:  that was printed in 1900
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Jul 3, 2023 05:16
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Gnoman posted:Red White and Black are are the colors of the Imperial German flag, and wouldn't have had any specifically bad associations at the time. Meanwhile, the swastika was an ancient (and fairly universal) symbol (usually meaning protection) before the Nazis got their hands on it. The negative reaction you're feeling is almost certainly just a case of "what it represents", few symbols generate that kind of loathing sans meaning. I dunno, we don't get the same feeling with the imperial Japanese flag. I think to an extent the Nazi flag was intended to be somewhat intimidating. Even now you can clearly see when graphic designers are trying to evoke the Nazi flag for sci-fi bad guys - there's a clear and distinctive aesthetic to it. And you know, it was literally designed by Hitler himself to represent anti semitism. Graphic design ist mein passion! Fangz fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Jul 3, 2023 |
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Jul 3, 2023 10:16
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I can assure you that the population of China and many of the other Asian countries that faced brutal occupation and mistreatment have the same reaction to the Imperial Japanese flag as most Europeans and North Americans do to the Nazi flag.
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Jul 3, 2023 10:28
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ChubbyChecker posted:from the waffle images thread: I almost started believing in these prophecies, but then they claimed that everyone will walk 10 miles. Hopefully you didn't leave your day job, Nostradamus.
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Jul 3, 2023 11:40
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SerthVarnee posted:I can assure you that the population of China and many of the other Asian countries that faced brutal occupation and mistreatment have the same reaction to the Imperial Japanese flag as most Europeans and North Americans do to the Nazi flag. This. I've heard several stories from people from Asian countries having visceral reactions when seeing rising sun flags in real life or in children's cartoons. One Chinese woman I'm acquainted with said that the first time she saw a big Imperial flag in real life, being flown at a WW2 memorial in Japan, she felt like she'd just seen the boogeyman walk across the stage and wave to her.
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Jul 3, 2023 12:25
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Yeah the Imperial Japanese flag is very much a agh gently caress no thing in places where the IJA/IJN dropped by. It's always weird to me how nobody said anything to the main in Big Trouble In Little China (It's a weird film of it's time I know, but still) but I am curious if a Japanese Navy ship has to stop by in the modern ports of those nations do they replace it with a more neutral flag?
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Jul 3, 2023 12:55
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Fangz posted:I dunno, we don't get the same feeling with the imperial Japanese flag. They use the Nazi flag, wear Hugo Boss, and deploy stormtroopers because nazi are the stock western bad guys. Shops in Asia selling big ol swastika shirts don’t seem to evoke primal fear. https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2016/12/27/asia/taiwan-nazi-school-asia/index.html Alternatively, consider that red, white, blue, stars, and Saint Andrew’s Cross are all over the place, and yet
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Jul 3, 2023 13:03
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Ok, this got me doing some cursory wtf googling because I was genuinely unaware that they still used the old naval ensign and I found this loving  website dedicated to:''quote:このサイトは旭日旗を正しく理解して貰う為に用意しました。 Leaving the naked URL because it's funny too: http://risingsunflag.com/  Like, dudes, this isn't the own you think it is. I mean, yeah, the Iron Cross is an Imperial (and previous) thing and I can even nerd out with you all about how the Nazis even changed the cross with the Balkenkreuz (although it's a WW1 innovation, but one that got picked up by the Nazis in '35 specifically because of it's "front fighter" connotations which was big with them), but the reality is that when people watch old news reel movies of horrible atrocities and mass murder, it's not happening under the symbol that the Luftwaffe uses on their fighters today. Unlike the rising sun which, you know, there are living people who watched their families be murdered while it flapped away in the background. And as a side note, it's worth pointing out that there absolutely WERE atrocities and even straight up genocides committed under Imperial Germany (the Herero say hello), and there are corners of the world where I imagine Imperial German iconography is still a sore point. Anyways, I know this is low hanging fruit but just wanted to share the presumably Japanese ultranationalist website I found with my morning coffee.
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Jul 3, 2023 13:06
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:They use the Nazi flag, wear Hugo Boss, and deploy stormtroopers because nazi are the stock western bad guys. Shops in Asia selling big ol swastika shirts don’t seem to evoke primal fear. Yes, cultural context matters and for various reasons people in Asia don't react as viscerally as Europeans and Americans to swastikas. But the point being discussed is that people in Asia DO react rather viscerally to Imperial Japanese iconography for much the same reason. Which, it should be noted, your average European or American doesn't. If I flew a Japanese naval ensign on my front lawn here in the US people would think I'm a weirdo (barring the S. Asian / Asian first gen immigrants in the area, they'd probably think I was a fuckhead). If I flew a swastika people would start from the basic assumption that I'm a world class shithead. It's a symbol that got pretty well dragged through the mud as far as their neighbors are concerned, and keeping it in circulation would be like the Germans keeping a lot of the symbols that were prominent 1933-1945.
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Jul 3, 2023 13:11
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Missed this a while back:Gnoman posted:Red White and Black are are the colors of the Imperial German flag, and wouldn't have had any specifically bad associations at the time. Meanwhile, the swastika was an ancient (and fairly universal) symbol (usually meaning protection) before the Nazis got their hands on it. The negative reaction you're feeling is almost certainly just a case of "what it represents", few symbols generate that kind of loathing sans meaning. You're correct that red/white/black was the colors of the Imperial German flag, but it had specifically right-wing connotations in the 30s. I have an effort post on this elsewhere that I'll try to dig up, but the tl;dr is that going back to at lest the middle of the 19th century red/white/black was the colors of the monarchist/conservative right and red/gold/black was the colors of (very loosely) the liberal, democratic left. When the Weimar Republic was founded they very consciously adopted the flag of the 1848 revolutionaries as opposed to the Prussian-derived flag, and Hitler equally self-consciously switched back. It's not just the colors - he changed the German national flag to a red/black/white tricolor in 1933, there's a pic somewhere of it hanging at a SF Consulate party next to the Nazi flag. This is also why both the East and West German successor states went with variations on the black/gold/red. This is ALSO why modern day right wing shitheads in Germany lean on Imperial imagery. I mean, you've got Hitler in the mix obviously, but the point is that the hitler poo poo was a contribution to the ongoing history of what these colors represent in German politics rather than their origin.
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Jul 3, 2023 13:39
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Here, found it, the style is a bit more shitposty than what I usually do here because that's the tone of the other thread: It was kicked off by a discussion of neo-nazis and other right wing dipshits leaning into Imperial German imagery. Cyrano4747 posted:They also lean into the old Imperial-era red/white/black too, and looking for examples for that turned up this picture too amazing not to share: Cyrano4747 posted:Since I'm in the flag groove and it's kind of applicable to here what with German history and how the flags are used, here's a bit of history on the German flags and how they represent the dueling political ideals you find in Germany in the 19th and 20th century. Cyrano4747 posted:So why the flag based history lesson?
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Jul 3, 2023 13:44
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Really appreciate the posts, those are super informative! Beyond just the political statement of it though, I’m really curious about the feelings it might have meant to inspire. You famously get in fascist art for instance the “patriotic family” stuff showing ultra traditionalist families in a way that looks pretty repulsive to us now but was to my understanding meant to inspire warm fuzzy feelings in their nazi target audience at the time. Was the flag, before our modern cultural baggage, meant to be similar? Did they imagine a world in 1950 or whatever where a rosy cheeked German child would walk through the streets of a post-war Berlin and feel their heart flutter with national pride looking at all the hideous swastika adorned bunting with a smile and a tear in their eye in the same way we might for the Stars and Stripes in the USA? Or was it always supposed to be kind of intimidating? I guess as a provocative statement from the get go there’s gonna be that to it to an extent no matter what, but I wonder if they were thinking there’d be more besides. Did they envisage a post-war world where there’d always be a layer of intimidation?
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Jul 3, 2023 14:09
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Koramei posted:Really appreciate the posts, those are super informative! To the best of my knowledge, not really. For that matter those feelings were never intended to be conveyed by the American flag, and the US flag often inspires a pretty different set of feelings in, say, native communities. There's certainly a degree of intent in designing symbols, but usually it boils down to the heraldry and what they say the colors represent. But at the end of the day context gives symbols meaning and emotional weight.
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Jul 3, 2023 14:18
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I concur with Cyrano that all of the feelings you're associating with these flags are learned responses. As an anecdote, when I was working on my videogame (which is about sailing around the world and fighting tyranny), at one point I needed to add flags to the ships, along with the ability to customize them. My first implementation used real-world flags, because those were easily available and made sense...but looking at the US national flag flying from one of my ships was deeply uncomfortable to me. I've learned a lot about American politics and how the American flag has historically been used as a symbol for all kinds of unpleasant things. I didn't want to be pulling those associations into a game that I wanted to resonate with people from any background. So I set about making alternate flags, with the goal being that they should clearly represent real-world countries, without actually being those countries' flags. ...and the one I made for Japan was an altered version of the Rising Sun flag. Because it was a Japan-associated flag that I knew about, and while I was broadly aware that atrocities had taken place in China during the Imperial Japan era, I hadn't connected the dots that that made the Rising Sun a problematic symbol. Fortunately, I found people who know a lot more about vexillography than I do. I ended up paying them to make much better flags than I could have made on my own. For the sake of example, here's a few:    
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Jul 3, 2023 14:55
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The angular, high contrast properties of the flag (and its origins as a political party flag) just seems quite distinct from other flags. I suppose maybe that sort of thing was more normal at the time. Wiki alerts me to the existence of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Swastikas And more lolworthy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Savings_Movement I guess the use of the swastika in commercial art at the time does persuade me that it wasn't so big of a deal.
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Jul 3, 2023 15:33
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