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Dukket posted:Hello Military History thread! Does any one have suggestions of books on Italy's various campaigns during WWII? Bumping this from the last page. I'm just generally interested in their offensive campaigns (as opposed to allied the invasion of Italy)
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Dec 24, 2013 02:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:You're assuming that the French looked at those heights and went "yup, the Vietnamese will be able to haul guns over there" HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 24, 2013 03:00
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Northern Italy, early 1500s, when they start getting short, mathy, and filled with dirt. I think Siena's the first. It was a gradual movement of features being introduced as fortifications were introduced. IIRC Siena was one of the first to have the combination of the major features...and is also famous for going completely bankrupt by a massive spending spree to update basically every fortification in the city-state. Gonzaga did a much better job, focusing on Mantua and Casale, and survived Charles V's rampage toward Rome. Fake edit: Just double checked, and Siena tried to super-fortify SEVENTEEN cities.
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Dec 24, 2013 04:03
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Northern Italy, early 1500s, when they start getting short, mathy, and filled with dirt. I think Siena's the first. I was travelling with an Ancient and Midieval History student at the time too.... 
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Dec 24, 2013 05:17
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I've been in a napoleonic phase , and in conclusion: Napoleon was cool The imperial guard was cool The french had some catchy tunes to hype themselves so they could murder people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y90yWxwZ_wA This one is much better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75RUPdkyqp0 the Battle of waterloo movie has some hilariously bad moments like when Napoleon finds out about the forced retreat of the guard , and many awesome ones ,like the guard moving forward. I wonder if in a few centuries people will listen to let the bodies hit the floor in the same way. hump day bitches! fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 24, 2013 05:28
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Was Napoleon as much of a tactical genius as popular culture leads me to believe? I don't know much about him at all, aside from him getting closer to Moscow than Hitler did before turning around and loving off home.
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Dec 24, 2013 07:05
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Slavvy posted:I don't know much about him at all, aside from him getting closer to Moscow than Hitler did before turning around and loving off home. Napoleon actually captured Moscow and discovered much as Hitler would have that holding Moscow is not the end all of a war in Russia. Also it was less turning around and loving off then "welp my army froze/starved/fought to death, time to bail."
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Dec 24, 2013 07:27
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Slavvy posted:Was Napoleon as much of a tactical genius as popular culture leads me to believe? I don't know much about him at all, aside from him getting closer to Moscow than Hitler did before turning around and loving off home.
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Dec 24, 2013 09:45
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Arquinsiel posted:I totally did not notice Siena's modern fortifications at all. There were loads of bits of old D&D "city wall" style buildings that people had ignored and built around, over and in, but I didn't spot any sort of star-fort stuff.  Behold the wave of the future. Godholio posted:IIRC Siena was one of the first to have the combination of the major features...and is also famous for going completely bankrupt by a massive spending spree to update basically every fortification in the city-state....  But yeah, turns out I was wrong on the chronology and there's a bunch of stuff before Siena, which just put everything together. Thanks. Edit: I'm looking for really early examples of modern fortifications on the Internet, and found some good pictures: Here's the so-called Forta Michelangelo in Civitavecchia. Commissioned by Julius II, finished in 1535 (by which time it's already out of date), this thing is round as hell--but look at its low, squat height and the great thickness of its walls. It's a brick...house.    This is a fortification overlooking the town of Sarzana. This one's super famous because, like Forta Michelangelo, it's clearly transitional. But look at the angle of the bottom part of the wall, the batter. Things are starting to happen... http://goitaly.about.com/od/castlesinitaly/ig/Sarzanello-Castle-Pictures/    And look at this. It's a bastion! And it's triangular!  Here's an article on it. http://www.fsgfort.com/uploads/pdfs/Public/Harris%20F37%20Pb.pdf Edit 2: Given the complexity of this development, it's inaccurate to say that there is a single instant when fortifications stopped being medieval and became modern. But if you want one, like if you want to date modern fortifications down to the day, it's: quote:[during] the defense of Pisa in 1500 against a combined Florentine and French army. With the original medieval fortifications beginning to crumble to French cannon fire, the Pisans constructed an earthen rampart behind the threatened sector. It was discovered that the sloping earthen rampart could be defended against escalade and was also much more resistant to cannon fire than the curtain wall it had replaced. Although, as early as 1410 the military theorist Christine de Pisan (and I guess she's famous for other reasons too or something?  ) was writing about how you should make the walls lower/thicker and put cannon on top of them. I think she invented this idea, actually.
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 24, 2013 12:18
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cheerfullydrab posted:He was more of a strategic genius than a tactical genius. He was pretty awesome, having an army of pretty good generals and the most experienced soldiers (up until 1812) helped a lot for him too. The Napoleonic Wars are pretty rad, my favourite military era in the scheme of things. Crazy violent parade battlefields a huge diverse list of players on both sides (My favourite: The Russian General called Barclay De Tolly! that name goddamn!) and of course the insane numbers used in the fighting.
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Dec 24, 2013 12:32
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SeanBeansShako posted:He was pretty awesome, having an army of pretty good generals and the most experienced soldiers (up until 1812) helped a lot for him too.
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Dec 24, 2013 12:36
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Good lord, I just caught myself trying to trace the lines of enfilading fire from the sides of a Christmas star I was looking at. I need to get out of this building and walk around in the fresh air and sunlight. Merry Christmas, all.
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Dec 24, 2013 14:03
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Good lord, I just caught myself trying to trace the lines of enfilading fire from the sides of a Christmas star I was looking at. I need to get out of this building and walk around in the fresh air and sunlight. A Christmas star will never be effective given that Santa and his reindeer corps enjoy air superiority, and have unparalleled bombardment and paratroop airdrop capabilities. The nation's defences have fallen woefully behind the times. Merry Christmas.
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Dec 24, 2013 14:22
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Was there ever any possibility of Napoleon being integrated into the overall scheme of European politics or was he and Imperial France always an outsider/threat that other countries were actively trying to destroy or recovering for their next opportunity to destroy?
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Dec 24, 2013 14:54
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He was quite successful in inspiring / supporting allied regimes in Central Europe. He also managed to pull off some international political projects such as the civic code, and I think at one point he had a good enough shot at maintaining a fragile status quo with Alexander. So perhaps had he not wasted lots of resources on pet projects and propping up personal acquaintaces in Southern Europe, I guess his position could have been much more tenable in the long term perspective.
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Dec 24, 2013 15:04
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It is interesting how is Nephew more or less tried to follow in his foot steps with both diplomacy and war too (It didn't work out as good though, he needed somebody like this guy).
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Dec 24, 2013 15:47
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Rodya Raskolnikov posted:Was there ever any possibility of Napoleon being integrated into the overall scheme of European politics or was he and Imperial France always an outsider/threat that other countries were actively trying to destroy or recovering for their next opportunity to destroy? The way I understand it, Britain's foreign policy has always revolved around playing the Continental powers off against each other. Napoleonic France was the strongest power on the continent, so England throws in against.
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Dec 24, 2013 15:53
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Also gently caress yeah, Alan Turing finally got his pardon. A bit late for his family though  .DasReich posted:The way I understand it, Britain's foreign policy has always revolved around playing the Continental powers off against each other. Napoleonic France was the strongest power on the continent, so England throws in against. As long as the British were around, the Napoleonic French were never going to see a true peace. SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 24, 2013 15:57
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WWI soldier posted:At present we are cooking our Christmas Dinner! so will finish this letter later. Dinner is over! and well we enjoyed it. Our dinner party started off with fried bacon and dip-bread: followed by hot Xmas Pudding. I had a mascot in my piece. Next item on the menu was muscatels and almonds, oranges, bananas, chocolate etc followed by cocoa and smokes. You can guess we thought of the dinners at home. Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans: a party of them came 1/2way over to us so several of us went out to them. I exchanged one of my balaclavas for a hat. I've also got a button off one of their tunics. We also exchanged smokes etc. and had a decent chat. They say they won't fire tomorrow if we don't so I suppose we shall get a bit of a holiday - perhaps. After exchanging autographs and them wishing us a Happy New Year we departed and came back and had our dinner. We can hardly believe that we've been firing at them for the last week or two - it all seems so strange.  More WWI Christmas letters here: http://www.christmastruce.co.uk/letters.html Merry Christmas!
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Dec 24, 2013 16:00
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a travelling HEGEL posted:But if you want one, like if you want to date modern fortifications down to the day, it's: quote:1500 loving even Well that's convenient. And Merry Christmas Eve everybody!  99 years ago now. That really weirds me out.
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Dec 24, 2013 16:21
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Exchanged autographs? "Hey honey, you wont belive what I got today, a Hitler rookie card!"
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Dec 24, 2013 16:34
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 Merry Christmas to all war nerds! 
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Dec 24, 2013 16:40
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The 1914 Christmas story always bums me out - for a day, there was a bright spot of hope, then it all went to poo poo.
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Dec 24, 2013 16:41
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Fangz posted:A Christmas star will never be effective given that Santa and his reindeer corps enjoy air superiority, and have unparalleled bombardment and paratroop airdrop capabilities. The nation's defences have fallen woefully behind the times.
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Dec 24, 2013 17:14
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Who would win, Santa or an army of Napoleonic Mongols, led by Gay Black Hitler, with a company of Tank Destroyers in support?
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Dec 24, 2013 17:23
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Depends, is Santa in a castle or a fort? This is important!
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Dec 24, 2013 17:27
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So I went to the Met yesterday, and they have a massive exhibit on arms and armor from around the world, and as an early Christmas present I'm going to try to post pictures from my visit. Problem is, there are over 300 pictures all told because I took photos of everything there, and I have no idea how I can share an album that big. Should I just put the best of them in an album on Imgur or something?
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Dec 24, 2013 17:32
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 My sister just gave me this  I've never been so excited for a gift!Merry Christmas MilHist thread!
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Dec 24, 2013 17:32
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Fangz posted:Who would win, Santa or an army of Napoleonic Mongols, led by Gay Black Hitler, with a company of Tank Destroyers in support? That's a question for which we may never find an answer. What we do know, however, is whether Gay Stalin & Gay Superman would defeat Supersayan Hitler. http://storyprovider.blogspot.cz/2012/06/supperman-and-stalin-love-story.html Now also in audio form: http://thefpl.us/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=88:episode-55-the-ship-vas-crash-like-boom&catid=1:podcasts
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Dec 24, 2013 17:34
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How often does that happen where soldiers just stop fighting and party for a while? I know about the Christmas truce, and I know that it happened some during the Spanish Civil War, but is there anything else?
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Dec 24, 2013 17:38
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Arquinsiel posted:I totally did not notice Siena's modern fortifications at all. There were loads of bits of old D&D "city wall" style buildings that people had ignored and built around, over and in, but I didn't spot any sort of star-fort stuff. For instance, I took a paleography class last year, which stopped in the 1500s. There are no early modern paleography textbooks. I read medieval/late medieval textbooks and practiced on my own. In my university, the last...two? years' worth of entering first-years contained a grand total of one early modernist, a British dude who wanted to study Machiavelli and Renaissance Italian intellectual history. And this is after the early Enlightenment became a trendy topic. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 24, 2013 17:39
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Don't forget all the adorable cooperation there was between the two opposing sides on the other Christmases of WWI, by which I mean the high command on both sides ordering lots of artillery barrages on Christmas/Christmas Eve to avoid a repeat of 1914.
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Dec 24, 2013 18:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:How often does that happen where soldiers just stop fighting and party for a while? I know about the Christmas truce, and I know that it happened some during the Spanish Civil War, but is there anything else? During the phoney war the French and German troops allowed the other side to relax and play soccer in open fields without fear of being attacked and things like that. The same thing happened to a far more limited extent during the the pre-Battle of the Bulge western front in late 1944.
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Dec 24, 2013 18:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:How often does that happen where soldiers just stop fighting and party for a while? I know about the Christmas truce, and I know that it happened some during the Spanish Civil War, but is there anything else? It was known to happen during the American Civil War, especially early on in the war.
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Dec 24, 2013 18:53
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^^^^ At the lowest levels WWI on the western front was actually a reasonably civilised affair outside of actual offensives. There are quite a few diaries and the like that describe how people would deliberately land mortar shells all around but never in a trench, with the understanding that the shells coming back would do the same. I wish I could find the article on it at the moment, but I've seen claims of joint hunting parties going after deer in no-man's land and sharing the meat afterwards. a travelling HEGEL posted:The Early Modern is understudied. Despite the part where in many universities we're lumped in with the medievalists in "Medieval And Early Modern Study Groups" or whatever (since there are almost never enough of us to justify our own groups or clusters), there's a good chance s/he's never heard about any of this. And s/he'd almost certainly never have been required to study this period for exams or anything.
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Dec 24, 2013 18:54
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Arquinsiel posted:It was her idea to go to Siena in the first place. Given that I later became interested in history myself I suspect she wasn't so much actually interested in it specifically so much as the idea of getting a "useless" arts degree appealed to her proto-hipster sensibilities (she was literally a hipster before everyone else was doing it....). In the first place, this isn't useless at all, and in the second place, would she then be like the...ultrahipster?
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Dec 24, 2013 19:21
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Oh dear. The ur-hipster. Dukket posted:Bumping this from the last page. I'm just generally interested in their offensive campaigns (as opposed to allied the invasion of Italy) From the last thread. Bacarruda posted:The Italians have the rare distinction of having fought on both sides of the war. First for the Axis Power, then joining the Allied side as a "co-belligerent." Prior to the outbreak of war, Italy had embarked on a series of colonial adventures, the most notable being their invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The invasion of Ethiopia and the international community's inability to stop it also seriously undermined the League of Nation's already damaged credibility, and is a commonly cited reason for why the League fell apart shortly afterwards.
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Dec 24, 2013 20:40
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Bacarruda posted:The ur-hipster. Some of these guys were Sicilians, and there's a kind-of memorial in Taormina to one of them which is in a beautiful park that is weirdly (thankfully) free of tourists. Here's the pictures I took:     and if anyone wants to struggle through the bad translation to english or german:  There was also this monument to the Taorminese who had died in the two world wars: 
Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Dec 24, 2013 |
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Dec 24, 2013 21:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:How often does that happen where soldiers just stop fighting and party for a while? I know about the Christmas truce, and I know that it happened some during the Spanish Civil War, but is there anything else? I don't know how much this actually happened, but every Korean film I've seen dealing with the Korean War seems to portray this so I'm assuming there is some historical basis behind it. It makes sense too considering a lot of people there hadn't been divided between the countries for that long.
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Dec 24, 2013 21:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:How often does that happen where soldiers just stop fighting and party for a while? I know about the Christmas truce, and I know that it happened some during the Spanish Civil War, but is there anything else? It seems surprisingly common. Even more common seem to be wink-wink nudge-nudge arrangements between soldiers where they fake fight. I worked with a guy from Taiwan, who had served in their military while they were officially, but not really, at war with China. He said the Chinese would shell them at the exact same time every afternoon. It was something like at 2:55 they would go into the cave that served as a bunker and at 3:15 they'd come back out. He did have a friend killed by an unexpected shelling, however (he heard it coming and hit the ground and his buddy... didn't). So it wasn't always predictable. In his memoirs, US Grant told a story of going for a ride to inspect his lines when he took over command at Chattanooga. Or, at least, what he thought were his lines, because he rode right up to a Confederate soldier. Grant writes that they chatted politely, then he just rode on.
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Dec 24, 2013 22:15
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