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What was the typical delay between an event occuring at the front and it appearing in a newsreel in the US?
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Aug 15, 2023 02:18
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Urcinius posted:Can I interest anyone in a game of guess the carrier? Below I’ve quoted a carrier’s War History written by its command staff over the course of World War 2. For this game, I’ve lightly edited out specific references. Based purely on service dates, I'm guessing Boxer.
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Aug 15, 2023 02:41
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Based purely on service dates, I'm guessing Boxer. A fine guess! But Boxer was still very much in the Atlantic during this period of the quoted war history.
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Aug 15, 2023 02:59
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Here's some recap to my D-Day 75th trip:Vahakyla posted:In 2019, I got to go as a paratrooper to the 75th Anniversary D-Day, and jump into Iron Mike dropzone in Sainte-Mère-Église.
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Aug 15, 2023 03:34
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Urcinius posted:A fine guess! But Boxer was still very much in the Atlantic during this period of the quoted war history. Looks like Shangri-La?
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Aug 15, 2023 03:43
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:Looks like Shangri-La? Correct! For anyone curious, Shangri-La was proud of its 6,315 landings by 1 April 1945. The war history can be enjoyed on the National Archives catalog, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/77686527?objectPage=73 Shangri-La was replaced by Bon Homme Richard for April and May 1945 until Saratoga completed its repairs. Good job zeroing in quickly on the Essex-class!
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Aug 15, 2023 04:07
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The only ship named after a presidential joke. 
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Aug 15, 2023 04:21
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You don't count Ford?
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Aug 15, 2023 04:24
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Urcinius posted:Correct! For anyone curious, Shangri-La was proud of its 6,315 landings by 1 April 1945. The war history can be enjoyed on the National Archives catalog, https://catalog.archives.gov/id/77686527?objectPage=73 I can't speak for anyone else, but to me, "fight going our way" meant '44 or '45 and the TF58 Tokyo strike narrowed it to '45 only, so from there it was really a matter of looking for carriers that commissioned in the months leading up to February '45. It's too late for an Independence, let alone any of the prewar ships. Zorak of Michigan posted:You don't count Ford? Joke by versus joke of a president?
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Aug 15, 2023 04:35
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Vahakyla posted:Here's some recap to my D-Day 75th trip: 
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Aug 15, 2023 07:46
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Greggster posted:I've always wondered, how did the Soviet Union prepare for future conflict against imperial Japan? The bulk of the preparation was for the liberation of Manchuria and Korea. Whether this (which meant completely cutting off most steel, coal, and food, as well as rolling up large amounts of surviving forces--the Kwantung Army was in the process of partially redeploying to the home islands, but this had not yet completed) was sufficient to cause a surrender alone is the topic of this thread around every six weeks, though as usual I'll note that the Japanese consensus is that it was. There was fighting in the Kurils both before and after surrender, and their garrisons were about equal in scale to what was reserved for the defense of Hokkaido--and as Randomcheese3 noted, this was near-entirely off the back of Project Hula, any indigenous capacity being used instead to support the Korean thrust. My own read is that a landing in Hokkaido with what was available would have been a likely but not a sure thing, as a defense could potentially have been concentrated to meet each of the staggered landings, supplied over land, and more easily reinforced across the protected strait from Aomori, unlike in the Kurils where the garrison was split at opposite ends of the island chain and cut off from the mainland by open sea. In any case, it was judged some combination of too costly militarily and diplomatically, post-surrender, for what they would produce. I do not think "more Siberia, but on an island" was highly valued by Soviet leadership, and this was in the context of having already agreed to emergency American requests to halt at the 38th in Korea. Any speculation about landings in Tohoku following Hokkaido, which is where the mass casualties would have come from, is entirely dependent on decisions that were never made, and does not appear to have had any sort of solid Soviet planning. There's, uh, not much north of the Tokyo exurbs worth defending if you actually are playing some triply-cursed wargame where you're scored on how many casualties you inflict before the final provisional Daihonei headquarters in a mine in Nagano is overrun, but that wouldn't have been the mindset of any of the people involved.
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Aug 15, 2023 10:40
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ilmucche posted:I'm sorry what? This Canadian beauty:  It was...less than appreciated. The idea was that the soldiers could gain some extra protection from the shovel they had to carry anyways. The reality was that their shovel now had a large hole in it that made it very lovely for the job of shoveling things, the shield wasn't thick enough to meaningfully protect the soldier while fighting, the stupid thing was very cumbersome, requiring you to expose yourself even more in order to use it and the metal plate had a tendency to attract enemy fire since it stands out a good deal more than a dude lying prone with a mostly brown rifle. The designer was of course very offended when he got this feedback. Edit: welp, beaten repeatedly on the previous page. Oh well. SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 11:48
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I appreciate the image though, never seen it displayed like that.
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Aug 15, 2023 12:54
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gohuskies posted:Not only was US anti-air and CAP better in 1944 and 45, but the Japanese pilots were worse. A kamikaze doesn't do that much more damage than just dropping a bomb does - the difference is, it was easier for a poorly trained pilot to hit with a kamikaze than with a bomb or torpedo. Hiryu's counterattacks were incredibly efficient for how few planes took part in either compared to the American attacks. Those pilots were top notch.
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Aug 15, 2023 13:04
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Tomn posted:So this is a wild counterfactual but I'm kinda curious now - if there weren't any effective countermeasures against kamikaze, then if Japan or any other country had lost its mind and decided to go all-in with kamikazes as a tactic and strategy even pre-war, building its entire air arm around the concept of human-piloted cruise missiles including presumably specifically designed aircraft for such purposes, how effective and efficient would that have been? Like, leaving aside the question of morality, morale, and whether the civilian population or foreign governments would accept it, is a dedicated kamikaze a better logistical, industrial, and trained manpower trade than a well-trained bomber in the context of the technological constraints of WW2? No. It's just not as economical as a bomber, not even close. A Kamikaze AT BEST hits one target once at the cost of a plane. A bomber hits targets over and over and over.
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Aug 15, 2023 15:13
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Cessna posted:No. It's just not as economical as a bomber, not even close. They were working on that with the Ohka bomb, basically taking out the part where you use a valuable airplane for a kamakazie. Kind of a new production version of jurry rigging a 250 kilo bomb onto a training or obsolete aircraft that's probably headed for the scrap yard anyway. Taken from an utterly detached, 10,000 feet in the air view the whole kamakazie thing is a pretty interesting solution to the question of how to have PGMs in an era before computers got small enough to really make true PGMs work out. Yes, yes, there was the Fritz X and that one USN project, but those were bleeding edge and were basically remote controlled drones rather than true fire and forget PGMs. The solution of sticking a human inside to be the guidance system is (obviously) loving monstrous, and doubly so when you get into how you convince people to do that and just how profoundly gross that gets, but in a very WH40k way of just looking at your available resources and effect on target it's an interesting approach.
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Aug 15, 2023 15:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:The solution of sticking a human inside to be the guidance system is (obviously) loving monstrous, and doubly so when you get into how you convince people to do that and just how profoundly gross that gets, but in a very WH40k way of just looking at your available resources and effect on target it's an interesting approach. Hell, look at Aphrodite; even when you have the guy working the controls right near the “missile” looking it in all the, they success rate was near-zero and fratricide was significant (parachutes not opening, other planes being caught in the blast, the whole Kennedy thing…).
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Aug 15, 2023 15:44
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You also have to consider that anti-shipping strikes isn't all a plane is expected to do.
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Aug 15, 2023 15:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:They were working on that with the Ohka bomb, basically taking out the part where you use a valuable airplane for a kamakazie. Kind of a new production version of jurry rigging a 250 kilo bomb onto a training or obsolete aircraft that's probably headed for the scrap yard anyway. I think part of the problem is that we're looking at an aircraft carrier as something that is intended to attack other aircraft carriers - high value targets that can be hit and wrecked with a precision strike. Consider - aircraft carriers only engaged other carriers five (5) times in the entire Pacific War.* The vast majority of an aircraft carrier's work was spent doing other things, like sending bombers to attack land bases, scouting, protecting or threatening shipping, etc. Okha-style one-shot weapons just don't work for these jobs given the realities of WWII. Are you going to attack a land airbase with Okhas? Once you've launched that strike, then what, where's the next strike coming from? Are you going to use Okhas as patrol planes? How are you going to "cover" an amphibious landing with Okhas? And even attacking carriers was the norm, having your "alpha strike" be a one-shot deal would be disastrous. Consider how many times planes were sent out after the wrong target or didn't locate the enemy; every one of those would have been a disaster with no chance to recover the planes and strike again. * Coral Sea, Eastern Solomons, Leyte, Midway, Santa Cruz
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Aug 15, 2023 16:18
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Cessna posted:I think part of the problem is that we're looking at an aircraft carrier as something that is intended to attack other aircraft carriers - high value targets that can be hit and wrecked with a precision strike. Sure, but talking about kamikazes and carrier ops are kind of two different things. The Kamakazie operations didn't really get into swing until the summer of 1944, and I don't believe that they were ever launched from carriers (correct me if I'm wrong on that). I would argue that they were never intended to be a replacement or even supplement for naval-based aviation, what they were really more analogous to is modern day shore based ASMs. Something like the Okha isn't a replacement for conventional aircraft at all, it's just a new type of guided munition. If your core problem is that you lack trained pilots but still need a shore-based way to threaten enemy fleets, it (and the more typical repurposed airplane as a kamikaze) is a solution. All of those things you're saying you cant do with an Okha are also things you can't do with a swarm of barely trained pilots anyways - that just leads to the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Your typical kamakazie squadron flying conventional aircraft are equally unable to recon, patrol, or cover a landing beach just because their pilots are basically untrained. They're not airplanes, really, they're airplanes repurposed as PGMs. The Kaiten is another good example of this dynamic. It's a kamakazie torpedo. The solution it's solving is fundamentally "how do we create a guided torpedo with 1945 tech." It's never going to be a patrol ship or something you conduct recon with or something you use to pick up downed fliers or insert commandos or any of the other things a sub can do, but that's because it's not a submarine: it's a PGM that's using a person as the guidance system. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 16:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:Something like the Okha isn't a replacement for conventional aircraft at all, But that was the posed question, here: Tomn posted:So this is a wild counterfactual but I'm kinda curious now - if there weren't any effective countermeasures against kamikaze, then if Japan or any other country had lost its mind and decided to go all-in with kamikazes as a tactic and strategy even pre-war, building its entire air arm around the concept of human-piloted cruise missiles including presumably specifically designed aircraft for such purposes, how effective and efficient would that have been? Like, leaving aside the question of morality, morale, and whether the civilian population or foreign governments would accept it, is a dedicated kamikaze a better logistical, industrial, and trained manpower trade than a well-trained bomber in the context of the technological constraints of WW2? That's what I was responding to, and using your statement as a refinement of that question because you brought up the Okha.
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Aug 15, 2023 16:53
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Cessna posted:A Kamikaze AT BEST hits one target once at the cost of a plane. By the end of the war American air defenses were so good that arguably Kamikaze strikes were more efficient than conventional strikes, at least that's the way Norman Friedman describes the situation in his book on carrier fighters.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:38
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Did BF Skinners pigeon guidance system work? Use that.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:41
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Cessna posted:But that was the posed question, here: Oh ok, my bad. I missed the part where this was an all-in thing on the pre war. Yeah as a conventional weapon it's extremely limited, in the same reasons why going all-in on only guided missiles would be silly today. It's fine if your strategic and tactical needs are limited to territorial defense or maybe attacking things very close by (see: Taiwan) but doesn't work if you want to conduct conventional operations beyond your borders. edit: also I would argue that you require the threat of an existential conflict in the losing phases to make that kind of program palatable at all. I can't imagine how a pre-war japanese society would react to just blithely training squadrons of suicide pilots to be on standby during peacetime. See also: the Volkssturm. If Hitler had started the war in 1939 by throwing untrained and ill-equipped 12 year olds at the Polish army he probably would have had a significant domestic problem, even if the rest of the campaign goes well. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 17:44
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:By the end of the war American air defenses were so good that arguably Kamikaze strikes were more efficient than conventional strikes, at least that's the way Norman Friedman describes the situation in his book on carrier fighters. Again, that wasn't the question.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:Sure, but talking about kamikazes and carrier ops are kind of two different things. The Kamakazie operations didn't really get into swing until the summer of 1944, and I don't believe that they were ever launched from carriers (correct me if I'm wrong on that). I would argue that they were never intended to be a replacement or even supplement for naval-based aviation, what they were really more analogous to is modern day shore based ASMs. "Kamakazie" sounds like one of those annoyingly re-spelled modern girls' names. It'd fit right in with Mackenzeigh and Psamantha.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:"Kamakazie" sounds like one of those annoyingly re-spelled modern girls' names. *shrug* I'm a terrible speller at the best of times and when I'm doing a quick poo poo post and my browser is throwing squiggly lines under a non-english word I tend not to worry too much about it. Also gently caress you for introducing me to the concept of Psamantha. Goddamn. Please tell me that's something that leapt from your sick, twisted mind and not something you've found in the wild.
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Aug 15, 2023 17:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:*shrug* I'm a terrible speller at the best of times and when I'm doing a quick poo poo post and my browser is throwing squiggly lines under a non-english word I tend not to worry too much about it. I'm an awful speller and not attaching any moral judgement to that. I would not fare well in that war and won't start it. I just found that particular spelling amusing. And no. No, I did not make up "Psamantha". The eldritch depths of my psyche can not compete with the dystopian horror we live in.
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Aug 15, 2023 18:03
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Oh. Oh, no. That's just terrible.
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Aug 15, 2023 18:22
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I googled Psamantha and found this:quote:My kids used to have friends in school whose names were Neptune, Galaxy, and Uranus. All girls.
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Aug 15, 2023 18:24
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Quackles posted:I googled Psamantha and found this: Christ, there are so many astronomical names that are also greek/roman mythology, finding 3 good ones would be trivial
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Aug 15, 2023 18:33
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Yura, Nep, and Lax as nicknames go at least all sounds decent.
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Aug 15, 2023 20:14
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Raenir Salazar posted:Yura, Nep, and Lax as nicknames go at least all sounds decent. No, no they don't. Also: Milhist thread: Poor Uranus got it the worst.
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Aug 15, 2023 20:23
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It was one of the crucial points in the battle of Stalingrad, no way is it the worst!
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Aug 15, 2023 20:31
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I was at an anime convention and there was a dude who was selling fake bullets (I dunno what the term is, they could be chambered but lacked gunpowder to be fired?) and it was funny seeing how many I could correctly name which gun they were for based off of all the tiktok gun reloading asmr videos ive been watching lately. We also had a nice chat about forgotten weapons and other milhist youtube channels. I was definitely tempted to buy something but I'm still clearing out my current hoard of junk I don't need. 
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Aug 15, 2023 21:42
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Cessna posted:Oh. Oh, no. It's a real Tragedeigh.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:46
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madeintaipei posted:It's a real Tragedeigh. Boo this man
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Aug 15, 2023 21:52
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There's a short story by Asimov, The Feeling of Power, about a future where people have become so reliant on computers that they've forgotten how to do basic math. An amateur rediscovers arithmetic, and shows it to the military, who realize that they can launch guided missiles with an inexpensive human pilot instead of blowing up an irreplaceable computer every time.Raenir Salazar posted:(I dunno what the term is, they could be chambered but lacked gunpowder to be fired?) Dummy bullets.
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Aug 15, 2023 23:53
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Chamale posted:Dummy bullets. I'd always heard "inert", but maybe that's only for explosive shells?
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Aug 15, 2023 23:57
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I wonder how many flight sims have the One Judy that Somehow Sunk the Princeton without slamming into it as a mission.
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Aug 15, 2023 23:57
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