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InspectorBloor posted:Yup. Thucydides is quite an impressive guy. Much can be learned from this one. His description of the plague in Athens is gutwrenching. Collecting all the stories and getting into the different perspectives that he tried to cover, he surely did alot of interviews with witnesses. A daunting task. Maybe that's what makes up the quality of his work. Polybius isn't bad either. His structurization of events and causes and the interconnections on a larger scale that he makes out is quite impressive, given the means of that time. Those guys surely had a very organized mind and did alot of talking to the guys who've been around the heat. Are you being sarcastic? Of course they're a treasure. But you also need to go further than their writings. You need to look at other documents from the time periods, you need to dig up artifacts and see if they can tell you something. You need to study a lot of things to come up with the best picture of what happened. I was arguing that the most important thing in history is the research, the veracity of the claims, not the rhetoric employed in writing the books.
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May 23, 2013 00:09
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Don't you like it when I agree with you? I don't think anyone here will think that the dialogues and speeches that you read in the classics are transcripts or historians be content with getting told that this or that is a fact, because writer A told us so. Dividing everything up in separate genres (scientific literature / recreational literature / etc.) is a relatively new thing. Why do these guys shine? Because they employed these criterias that you mentioned to a reasonable extent. That's what I wanted to point out. Also, Polybius et al. needs to be read more often. They're fun.
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May 23, 2013 17:06
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So I was reading the wikipedia article about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, when "To that end, in order to slow Japan's declining fortunes in the war, the Soviets may even have provided the Japanese with limited intelligence in the Pacific theater.[citation needed]" kind of jumped up and slapped me in the face. Is there any meat to that?
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May 23, 2013 21:36
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Did the japanese deploy radar in a chain home style? And did they use heavy aa to protect citys. Wouldnt that have been effective versus low level b29 raids?
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May 23, 2013 23:34
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Ron Jeremy posted:So I was reading the wikipedia article about the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, when "To that end, in order to slow Japan's declining fortunes in the war, the Soviets may even have provided the Japanese with limited intelligence in the Pacific theater.[citation needed]" kind of jumped up and slapped me in the face. Is there any meat to that? [Citation needed], indeed. I'm skeptical that the Japanese would have accepted Soviet intelligence at face value. "Our long-time enemy who is probably going to invade us soon is giving us free intel, why yes, let's believe every word of this." That seems like an...improbable reaction.
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May 23, 2013 23:41
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Bacarruda posted:[Citation needed], indeed. I'm skeptical that the Japanese would have accepted Soviet intelligence at face value. At that point in the war the Japanese government had convinced itself that they and the Soviets were best buddies and that the Soviets were helping them to negotiate a favourable peace with the Allies. Stalin's reaction to this approach was to immediately inform the Allies, who responded "Whatever, it's not happening but feel free to humour them as much as you want". Which the Soviets did, right up until the day they launched August Storm. I don't think the Soviets fed the Japanese anything important but they were certainly chatting for months before the end of the war and stringing them along enough that the declaration of war was a total shock.
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May 24, 2013 00:04
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Bacarruda posted:[Citation needed], indeed. I'm skeptical that the Japanese would have accepted Soviet intelligence at face value. The Japanese kinda didn't believe the Soviets were going to turn on them until they did, though. Still, this is overall implausible, not least because it's difficult to see what Allied intelligence the Soviets could possibly offer the Japanese. And besides, the Soviets wanted the Japanese contained - or else the US would be forced to divert forces away from the European theatre.
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May 24, 2013 00:07
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Fangz posted:And besides, the Soviets wanted the Japanese contained - or else the US would be forced to divert forces away from the European theatre. But after May 1945? At any rate, without attribution or even a hunch there isn't anything to discuss. It could be coming from Viktor Suvorov or some other less trustworthy source.
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May 24, 2013 00:12
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I think the Japanese surprise was more a matter of Soviet proficiency with military deception than an outcome of diplomatic machination. The Soviets had been party to the Yalta declaration demanding unconditional surrender from Japan, they'd announced their intention to annul their neutrality pact with Japan, and they withdrew their embassies well in advance of the invasion. The Japanese could scarcely have missed these aggressive gestures. They were caught by surprise because they didn't believe that the Soviets would be able to conceal their redeployment for an offensive. The Japanese knew that the Soviets were going to attack them at some point, but they expected to detect the preparations and then have a month or more to get ready and figure out what to do, before the Soviet attack was ready to jump off. As it turned out, the Soviets were able to make their own preparations in secret, so Japanese had no warning at all.
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May 24, 2013 00:37
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It helps when the entire Japanese force in Manchuria was already in complete disarray because they were in the process of being transferred to the home islands.
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May 24, 2013 02:05
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re: all the Soviet-Japanese stuff, interesting. Wonder where the intel-leaking rumor came from in the first place. vuk83 posted:Did the japanese deploy radar in a chain home style? And did they use heavy aa to protect citys. Wouldnt that have been effective versus low level b29 raids? To answer your first question, yes, some radar was deployed by the Japanese. However, it was largely obsolete and poorly deployed. The corrosive rivalry between Army and Navy further undermined Japanese radar use. There are even cases of army radar stations refusing to pass along information to navy air defense units about incoming American raids! For these reasons, and many, many others, Japanese air defense was largely ineffective during the war. This is not to say that Japanese flak and fighters did not down American aircraft. They did. The losses they did inflict did encourage USAAF planners to shift to nighttime raids. It's stil worth pointing out that, even when you consider all USAAF and USN sorties, Japanese Home Island air defenses had only inflicted 0.5% casualties on the raiders. And when you compare Japan's 1945 system to the sophistication of British defenses circa 1940, the German Kammhuber Line, and the US Navy's "Big Blue Blanket" defense system, it's clear just how obsolete and inadequate it was. To answer your second question, yes, heavy AA was used to protect key installations (and the urban areas around them). 75mm and 120mm guns were the most frequently used. By the end of the war, the Japanese had protoyped a 150mm gunwhich could reach B-29s at 20,000ft, though only a handful of these were ever deployed. Submarines smuggled the plans of the German 88mm flak, but Japan's battered industry never put it into productions As for your third point, light AA countering night raids wouldn't have been (and wasn't) effective. It's an issue of fire control. Hitting low-flying targets at night is extremely difficult. You can't see your target and your engagement window is very small. One option is to simply have every light AA gun you have point into the sky and fire, which is how Iraqi AA tried to engage F-117s during the First Gulf (spoiler: it didn't work). Japan had nowhere near enough light AA or ammo to make this work. The other option is to have a sophisticated AA system with radar directors laying your guns. This how the US Navy handled some shipboard AA guns, and to my knowledge, it worked well against night kamikaze attacks. Japan didn't have the technical expertise or the resources to pull this off. If you're interested in reading more, the archives of the post-war US Strategic Bombing Survey are available online. This interview with an Japanese air defense commander is particularly worth reading. Portions of James Crabtree's "On Air Defense" are also on Google Books. Dry, but informative. And a list of Japanese radar systems from the Combined Fleet guys. Bacarruda fucked around with this message at 02:41 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 02:39
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Thank you. That was informative.
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May 24, 2013 02:43
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SeanBeansShako posted:Pretty much. I'm not an expert but the I'm only aware of a couple books- http://www.amazon.com/Thermidorean-...ry%2C+1794-1799 http://www.amazon.com/Thermidorians...ory%2C+lefebvre http://www.amazon.com/France-under-...r+the+directory None of them are terribly recent however.
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May 24, 2013 03:56
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Lefebvre's The Coming of the French Revolution was pretty good. If his other work's up to the same standard it should be useful.
Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 04:06 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 04:00
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Mans posted:A professor just hinted at me that i should go do my masters at his Military History degree. He says a job is almost guaranteed due to the low amount of people who take such a degree and how i could find a spot in a N.A.T.O. or national army related group. the JJ posted:The SAL would be a good place to start. Hegel AJ SMoke or whatever her name is MilHist I think. I'm getting what is officially a degree in "History," although my focus is on a military history topic. It's a PhD program and right now I'm fully funded. (I was not fully funded my first year, but I had a partial fellowship and the program was prestigious enough that I went anyway.) 1. Is the program funded? Do not go if they will not pay you. Tons of terminal MA programs have sprouted up recently and they all have the sole purpose of taking your money while swindling you about following your dreams or something. Do not be fooled. Dreams are bullshit; this is your job. Pointe d'argent, pointe de grad students. 2. How old is the program? Is it prestigious? Do others recognize it? Will you be able to network? 3. Why an MA? You will be able to teach if you get a PhD--and many places do not want you to teach there with only a master's. What, specifically, would you want to do "at N.A.T.O or national army related group"? What are the qualifications of the people working there now? 4. The mention of "low enrollment" bothers me, since one of the reasons you go to famous/good schools is so you can work with large numbers of famous/good people. Smart people are only smart if they have smart people to talk to. I've been the only person who knows anything in my immediate vicinity, and it blows. You never know if you're onto something good if you have nobody to bounce it off of. 5. I prefer history degrees to specifically military history degrees because you'd get to hang out with people who know things about the period you're interested in as a whole. My principal advisor made a name for himself writing a social history/historical anthropology of early modern German peasants, in two volumes. (It's just as interesting as it sounds, which is "very," since I'm a giant nerd.  ) I am learning a lot about how to think about groups of people from him. (And at least one of his other protegees did his dissertation on a military history topic, so it's not like this is unusual.) My secondary advisor is the military historian.6. If you go to SAL, you should let Eggplant Wizard yell at you about terrible life choices for a while, it's good for the soul. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 04:12 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 04:02
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Thanks for those suggestions, will starting hunting for them.
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May 24, 2013 05:43
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I think Mans is in Europe and some things work a bit differently here.
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May 24, 2013 06:51
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Koesj posted:I think Mans is in Europe and some things work a bit differently here. 2, 4, and 5 still apply though.
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May 24, 2013 06:55
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Where in Europe?
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May 24, 2013 10:32
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The part of Spain commonly known as Portugal.
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May 24, 2013 14:51
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HEGEL SMOKE A J posted:bewaaare The degree is fairly new and it seems my "adviser" was more keen on having people to fill his newly created Master degree up to make it look good than having an actual interest in us having a future. In terms of prestige it's based on the oldest and most prestigious (at least one of) college of Lisbon and it has connections to both military, naval and airforce archives, museums and bases to allow us to diversify our studies. But again, unless i was in a military role i wouldn't have much future in this career. Rodrigo Diaz posted:The part of Spain commonly known as Portugal. I've decided not to go down this route. While i know the prospects of someone "investing" in history aren't very high to begin with they wouldn't become any better with this degree. Oh well. I'll guess i'll keep studying military history as a hobby  How much national military equipment did\do small industrial nations produce as an attempt at creating a national military equipment that doesn't depend on foreign imports? Portugal had the case of the APC "Chaimite" during the colonial war. I know Austria and Czech Republic have a considerable military production industry, but what about nations like Spain, Greece or South American countries? I assume nowadays it's much cheaper to get foreign obsolete equipment from the Cold War and modernize it locally than to have an industry to produce national weaponry. I'm not talking about foreign nations buying permissions to build Leopards or M-16s, i'm talking about "native" weapon development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravia_Chaimite
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May 24, 2013 23:27
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Mans posted:The degree is fairly new and it seems my "adviser" was more keen on having people to fill his newly created Master degree up to make it look good than having an actual interest in us having a future...He also said we would do a lot of study of southern Spain...Unfortunately, these kind of trips would come out of my own pocket. (And, at least in the US, the prestige of the university is sometimes only tangentially related to the prestige and reputation of the program. So it wouldn't matter how fantastic the university of Lisbon is if this MA program is bullshit. But, as you said, it's not suitable for your background anyway, so that's that.)
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May 24, 2013 23:32
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Mans posted:How much national military equipment did\do small industrial nations produce as an attempt at creating a national military equipment that doesn't depend on foreign imports? Portugal had the case of the APC "Chaimite" during the colonial war. I know Austria and Czech Republic have a considerable military production industry, but what about nations like Spain, Greece or South American countries? I assume nowadays it's much cheaper to get foreign obsolete equipment from the Cold War and modernize it locally than to have an industry to produce national weaponry. I'm not talking about foreign nations buying permissions to build Leopards or M-16s, i'm talking about "native" weapon development. Sweden produced a large portion of its military equipment domestically from WW2 onwards, including combat aircraft, surface vessels, submarines, main battle tanks, APCs and IFVs, anti-shipping, anti-tank and anti-air missiles, howitzers, self-propelled artillery - you name it. A lot of this equipment has been widely exported, such as the Carl Gustav recoilless rifle, the AT4 anti-tank launcher, the RBS70 anti-air missile, the CV90 family of IFVs and the JAS 39 Gripen multirole fighter. Alekanderu fucked around with this message at 00:08 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 00:00
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It sorta terrifies me that all these peacenik socialist Yuropean countries have huge reputations for being arms dealing war profiteers.
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May 25, 2013 00:04
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Phobophilia posted:It sorta terrifies me that all these peacenik socialist Yuropean countries have huge reputations for being arms dealing war profiteers. You'd be talking about the historic USSR then? Don't worry its all in the past...
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May 25, 2013 00:48
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Phobophilia posted:It sorta terrifies me that all these peacenik socialist Yuropean countries have huge reputations for being arms dealing war profiteers. France has quite happily sold arms to Iraq, Israel, and Argentina (while Argentina was in the middle of a war with Great Britain, I might add). Britain's home to one of the largest aerospace and military contracting industries on earth, warships, planes, etc. all come out of there. Bulgaria and former Czechoslovakia had huge arms production facilities during the Cold War and simply kept making arms. Most of the countries haven't fought a full-scale war since 1945, but they're quite happy to give you guns to fight yours. Small arms trafficking is a huge problem that gets nowhere near enough attention, especially since it's a huge destabilizing force in the developing world.
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May 25, 2013 04:00
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Bacarruda posted:re: all the Soviet-Japanese stuff, interesting. Wonder where the intel-leaking rumor came from in the first place.  Germany had organized training for the kids and old men in Germany at the time
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May 25, 2013 06:01
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General China posted:You'd be talking about the historic USSR then? Since you've posted here long enough I know you're no longer being intentionally dense, so let me lay it out for you. He means the Germans (Rheinmetall et al), French (GIAT/Nexter & co.), British (BAE and pals), Swedes (Bofors, etc.) and others. All of the named countries do things like signing the Convention on Cluster Munitions but nevertheless have companies that perform ethically questionable sales and still produce cluster munitions like the SMArt artillery round (Rheinmetall) and the BONUS round (Nexter/Bofors). Of course, there's also the issue that the EU part of NATO (barring the Danes and Baltic countries) increasingly fob off military responsibilities to the US, to the point that when NATO goes to war with someone, like Libya for example, the US has to supply the other countries with necessary munitions.
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May 25, 2013 08:14
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Since you've posted here long enough I know you're no longer being intentionally dense, so let me lay it out for you. Well the US is insistent to have a massive military so why wouldn't European countries cut down their own armies when the US guarantees that it will help them anyway? If the US doesn't like it maybe they should cut down on their own military and stop subsidizing other NATO countries.
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May 25, 2013 09:57
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Lord Tywin posted:Well the US is insistent to have a massive military so why wouldn't European countries cut down their own armies when the US guarantees that it will help them anyway? If the US doesn't like it maybe they should cut down on their own military and stop subsidizing other NATO countries. So...its the United States' fault that the Europeans decided to intervene in Libya without proper preparations or the capacity to do so?
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May 25, 2013 10:17
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Veins McGee posted:So...its the United States' fault that the Europeans decided to intervene in Libya without proper preparations or the capacity to do so? We're just that cool.
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May 25, 2013 10:21
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Of course, there's also the issue that the EU part of NATO (barring the Danes and Baltic countries) increasingly fob off military responsibilities to the US, to the point that when NATO goes to war with someone, like Libya for example, the US has to supply the other countries with necessary munitions. I had heard something about this before, but I honestly thought it was pro US propaganda.  Good to know there's actually some substance behind that claim.
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May 25, 2013 14:55
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Out of curiosity is there anything stopping Russia from joining Nato if Russia had the desire to do so?
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May 25, 2013 15:46
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KildarX posted:Out of curiosity is there anything stopping Russia from joining Nato if Russia had the desire to do so? Only the fact that NATO was founded (and to an extent continues to exist) to prevent a Russian led invasion of Europe.
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May 25, 2013 16:13
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Saint Guinness posted:Only the fact that NATO was founded (and to an extent continues to exist) to prevent a Russian led invasion of Europe. Not that tall of an order to ignore this if we lived in some kind of counterfactual kumbaya world.
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May 25, 2013 16:34
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KildarX posted:Out of curiosity is there anything stopping Russia from joining Nato if Russia had the desire to do so? Current disputes between Russia and Georgia would be one, not that all NATO countries are the best of friends but at least there was a common threat to prompt cooperation between Greece and Turkey. It would be pretty funny imagining Danish and Portuguese soldiers fighting in Amur against the Chinese in some future war, though.
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May 25, 2013 16:41
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Well, that is pretty much the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. So read that if you want to hear about how Russia could join NATO to hold off the Asiatic hordes.
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May 25, 2013 17:15
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Does Clancy even write his own books anymore?
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May 25, 2013 17:45
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Does Clancy even write his own books anymore? After the last couple, I've started doing something similar; letting other people read them, and then tell me about them later.
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May 25, 2013 17:47
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Does Clancy even write his own books anymore? I'm sure he has software that can do it. Just plug in [latest Fox News threat] and [bland American name] and it writes itself, downloading necessary details from military databases and Glen Beck's conspiracy theories.
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May 25, 2013 17:53
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