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Psion posted:Time to book tickets to Pensacola. Yeah, I can't recommend the museum enough. Let's see, on the list of historical airframes... - The aforementioned SBD - The NC-4 flying boat that was the first aircraft to cross the Atlantic - Que Sera Sera, C-47/R4D that was the first aircraft to land at the South Pole - Truculent Turtle, the P2V that flew nonstop from Perth to Columbus, setting a record for longest unrefueled flight - The Coronado that flew Chester Nimitz and his staff to the surrender ceremonies in Tokyo Bay - A Stearman that George H.W. Bush flew in training - F-14 that flew the last USN Tomcat combat sortie - A-1H that flew the last USN Skyraider combat sortie - A MiG Killer Phantom - The O-1 that a South Vietnamese pilot used to make an unarrested landing on the Midway to get him and his entire family (wife and 5 kids) out of the country before it fell - S-3 that Dubya landed on the Abe Lincoln to declare Mission Accomplished - A-4 and Hornets that flew with the Blue Angels - The last A3D owned by the Navy - The first EA-6B built from scratch - The L-8 "ghost ship" gondola And that's not counting that most of the airplanes in the museum were flown operationally (not just sat stateside at some training depot for the war or whatever) and many of them have combat time.
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Jan 27, 2014 21:50
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And as an added bonus, I bet airfare is cheaper than flying into Dayton. Or the airports surrounding Dayton. Thanks for nothing, Air Force.
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Jan 27, 2014 22:03
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iyaayas01 posted:- S-3 that Dubya landed on the Abe Lincoln to declare Mission Accomplished Do they have the banner too?
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Jan 27, 2014 22:06
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iyaayas01 posted:Yeah, I can't recommend the museum enough. Let's see, on the list of historical airframes... And you can put your greasy little nose prints all over them. Almost nothing is roped off, and an explicit ok-to-touch policy. (don't screw this up) If anybody wants to arrange a Dayton field trip spring/summer (preferably some friday when we can take the restoration hangar tour), who is not me, I'd probably drive out to hang out and look at airplanes for a day.
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Jan 27, 2014 22:07
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Kinda surprised that O-1 made it back and didn't get shoved overboard in all the commotion. Edit: I guess they had cleared off all those Hueys to make room for it already so might as well keep it around.
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Jan 27, 2014 22:13
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Slo-Tek posted:And you can put your greasy little nose prints all over them. Almost nothing is roped off, and an explicit ok-to-touch policy. (don't screw this up) Yuuuuup. The fact that I can put my hands on an airframe that was physically present at both Pearl Harbor and Midway is still mind blowing to me. Forgot to mention, they also have the KC-130 that landed on the Forrestal. priznat posted:Kinda surprised that O-1 made it back and didn't get shoved overboard in all the commotion. That's one of the cool things about the museum, it's pretty well known (and has been for a while) so Naval Aviation units/personnel will actively seek to make donations for historically significant aircraft. The aircraft wasn't pushed over the side initially because like you said they had already cleared the deck for it to land. Once the Midway got to Guam a Supply Corps O-6 who was in charge of the logistics/warehouse type functions at the Naval Station there recognized how historic that aircraft was and used his shipping authority to have it boxed up and shipped directly to Pensacola. As a more recent example of this, they have a bunch of wood from a pavilion that a USMC helo unit used in Iraq, it is covered with squadron insignias from different units over the years. They also have a big board from a unit that was at BIAP (I think) that had everyone from the unit's signature on it. When the drawdown happened they made the extra effort to have that stuff shipped to Pensacola.
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Jan 27, 2014 22:20
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Fearless posted:I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the post-war Legion had a lot of former Wehrmacht and SS members in it, though I can't verify that to a certainty. Cyrano4747 posted:Dien Bien Phu was basically the last hurrah of the Waffen SS.
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Jan 27, 2014 23:04
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Dont forget the Cubi Bar Cafe, which is essentially all the wallhangings, memorabilia, helmets, etc, from the Cubi Point NAS Officers club, stripped into boxes in 1992, and then rebuilt in Pensacola.
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Jan 27, 2014 23:40
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Holy poo poo, looks like I found out what to do with some of my vacation time this year, and I was just trying to figure that out this morning. I always swore that I had no reason or desire to ever go back to Florida but drat, that museum just sounds way too cool to miss. Also would be down for an Ohio museum trip if it happens, that ones even closer 
Terrible Robot fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 00:13
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Terrible Robot posted:Holy poo poo, looks like I found out what to do with some of my vacation time this year, and I was just trying to figure that out this morning. I always swore that I had no reason or desire to ever go back to Florida but drat, that museum just sounds way too cool to miss. Build in a trip to McGuires while you're there. Another thing that is impossible to regret.
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Jan 28, 2014 00:16
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Dien Bien Phu Chat: Everyone read Hell in a Very Small Place.
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Jan 28, 2014 00:27
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Beardless posted:No, we've definitely got Nazi propaganda to thank for it. I mean, that movie probably didn't help, but people were talking about this bullshit long before 1959. Yeah, you're prolly right, but the minute Wajda actually included the scene in the movie probably sealed it for good. I mean, if not for that, you could probably shut people talking about that up by just saying 'it's Nazi/Soviet propaganda', but when The Polish historic filmmaker - who Wajda definitely is - includes that poo poo in his movie...
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Jan 28, 2014 00:53
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Going into the Russian/American 5th gen chat some more, nothing the Russians build is going to be a threat to NATO nations for decades to come for a few simple reasons. The first is that any front line fighter that's bleeding edge technology won't be exported at first or will be neutered in the electronics department if it is, and we ain't going to war with Russia, so who cares if the PAK-FA is better than the Raptor on paper? If we face one soon after it's a flying production model it won't be the same one the Russians use. Secondly, logistics. Even Russia can't field the PAK-FA from a foreign field, let alone client states. It's defensive only in reality, and it has about one day of normal flying in a combat zone before NATO strike packages are dismantling their C&C and airfields with B-2's and Tomahawks. Hard to be effective in A2A combat without any ground control, especially when your air force has been built for decades around a doctrine with rock solid centralized command. Third, and this is the biggie, pilot experience. NATO pilots fly far more training sorties then any Russian client state, and most likely more than the Russians themselves. Just to make it even more unfair, NATO air assets, especially American ones, have a bulk of honest to God combat experience in the last 30 years Russian and client crews simply don't have. You had some light CAS work in the Caucasus and a bit of full spectrum poo poo in Georgia, but that's it. They took a bit of a smacking in Georgia, too. So yeah, the PAK-FA is at least a 4.5 gen fighter, probably even a full 5th gen. It may even be better one on one than the Raptor, who knows. Unfortunately one versus one is not how modern air combat takes place, and in almost every scenario I can imagine short of the opening salvos of World War III with it being in the hands of legit Russian crews, the PAK-FA will end up getting savaged by NATO due to the almost criminally incompetent and underfunded crews that would be using it in the future. It's gonna be awesome to see it for sale in Dubai and on display at MAKS, though! Seizure Meat fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 01:11
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Smiling Jack posted:Dien Bien Phu Chat: It's worth noting (especially for those that think American politics are nuts) that the Dien Bien Phu fallout in France at least partially led to a coup d'etat, the fall of the Fourth Republic, detonating an atomic bomb on a colony in the middle of a revolutionary war, and another (failed, that time) coup d'etat, among other silliness.
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Jan 28, 2014 01:19
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Indirectly it kinda sorta ended up with France pulling out of NATO, didn't it?
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Jan 28, 2014 01:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:Disclaimer: I have not read that book you're talking about and have no real clue what his argument is beyond what you're saying it is. As such the following is worth next to nothing. It's just my lunchtime take on the general issue. I'm also not a military specialist, although I did do military history as a sub-field during my coursework, so I'm kind of half-qualified to talk about the field. Truth be told I haven't read the book for about a decade so I won't attempt to put forth his argument in more detail when I really need to re-read and refresh. I can see your points regarding the copying of the general staff methodology and the benefit Germany may have had with re-building post-WW1 as being valid. As you said, with the caveat being that it's not your area of expertise. I'll try and add the book I referenced to my reading list and maybe I can get to it in the next month or two and at least have some interesting points to bring back to the discussion.
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Jan 28, 2014 02:13
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Also the German army, in the stages of the war we're talking about, put a lot of emphasis on local commanders being able to make decisions based on the conditions they were faced with. This went down to the small unit level and gave the Germans a flexibility to deal with the fluid battlefield conditions. This partly is due to what Cyrano posted earlier, that the allied forces often had commanders in place that followed the more rigid command structures inherited from their First World War general staff experiences, where the German general staff, although also largely composed of officers with First World War experience, were generally junior officers at the time who saw first hand the effectiveness of the Sturmtrupp tactics. This flexibility was eroded as the war dragged on and the attrition and lack of training of replacements along with the more rigid and meddling stance of the OKW hamstrung the local commanders and did not allow them to make decisions based on local conditions.
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Jan 28, 2014 03:58
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mikerock posted:Also the German army, in the stages of the war we're talking about, put a lot of emphasis on local commanders being able to make decisions based on the conditions they were faced with. This went down to the small unit level and gave the Germans a flexibility to deal with the fluid battlefield conditions. This partly is due to what Cyrano posted earlier, that the allied forces often had commanders in place that followed the more rigid command structures inherited from their First World War general staff experiences, where the German general staff, although also largely composed of officers with First World War experience, were generally junior officers at the time who saw first hand the effectiveness of the Sturmtrupp tactics. This flexibility was eroded as the war dragged on and the attrition and lack of training of replacements along with the more rigid and meddling stance of the OKW hamstrung the local commanders and did not allow them to make decisions based on local conditions. I came REALLY close to sticking a paragraph about Auftragstaktik (mission oriented tactics) in there because it's another great example of something the Prussians developed that everyone else was also using. It has a long, long history in the German military but you also can't say that they were the only ones employing it. It also only ever broke down in Germany at the command level, and that had less to do with OKW micromanaging local commanders and more to do with Hitler micromanaging local commanders. Which makes perfect sense, as all those OKW guys had been fed that doctrine from their first days as junior lieutenants, while Hitler had only ever experienced war as a junior enlisted man and had gently caress all appreciation of command structure or why it was an important thing. As a side note, it's also one of the things that makes Ambrose's arguments in Citizen Soldiers (and a lot of his other works to boot) so laughably bullshit on their face. (Before anyone asks, I'm actually a pretty big Ambrose fan, but more for his work in the public realm. He was a pretty good story teller and did a lot to raise some level of awareness and excitement about history in general and should be applauded for that, but man was he poo poo as an actual historian).
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Jan 28, 2014 04:17
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Cyrano4747 posted:This did not go unnoticed or unheeded by the rest of the western world and pretty much every country that's worth talking about emulated it to some degree or another by the outbreak of World War 1. By WW2 it was about as notable as the spitzer tipped bullet. The one major exception to this is the US. We still aren't technically on a general staff system. Yes we have the JCS but if you look at it compared to the staff structures of most European armies there are some big differences in how much of their career officers spend in staff positions. I'm fuzzy on the finer details on that little bit of trivia so anyone who knows more about this feel free to correct or amend as you will. The Prussians whooping nine kinds of poo poo out of the French during the Franco-Prussian War had a fair bit to do with the spread of the general staff system. It was a real upset from the point of view of basically everyone not wearing monocles and snarfing sausages and led to international ripples like the Japanese dumping their French military advisors for Prussian ones and everyone giving the Germans a second look. Ed. Franco-Prussian War was a Pretty Big Deal for a bunch of reasons, he understated.
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Jan 28, 2014 04:28
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Anything past fall 1942 and the OKW was essentially just funneling Hitler's commands down the line and had ceded any control of any meaningful operational planning to GROFAZ
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Jan 28, 2014 04:30
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Snowdens Secret posted:It's worth noting (especially for those that think American politics are nuts) that the Dien Bien Phu fallout in France at least partially led to a coup d'etat, the fall of the Fourth Republic, detonating an atomic bomb on a colony in the middle of a revolutionary war, and another (failed, that time) coup d'etat, among other silliness. Wait, what?
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Jan 28, 2014 05:01
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ProfessorCurly posted:Wait, what? Algeria.
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Jan 28, 2014 05:03
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ProfessorCurly posted:Wait, what? They didn't actually bomb anybody in their colonies, exactly, but they conducted atomic testing in the Algerian desert.
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Jan 28, 2014 05:05
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The best part is their test in Algeria broke the de facto test ban that was in place and the Soviets conducted their own round of above ground testing shortly afterwards. In a second French test in Algeria, nuclear material contaminated 9 soldiers heavily because a shaft was improperly sealed. Another 100 or so were lightly contaminated, including the Minister of Defense, Pierre Messmer. Thanks, France! 
Seizure Meat fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 05:15
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So what actually happened in Georgia, re: The Smacking? My uninformed impression was that Georgia got mostly steamrolled.
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Jan 28, 2014 05:33
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Several SU-25s got knocked out by anti-aircraft fire and the Russians even lost a TU-22M Backfire. Georgia claims at least 10 shoot downs, though that may be a touch high. Edit: Further poking hasn't really popped up much more reliable info. From what I can find Russia officially claimed 4 aircraft losses overall. BBC had a report that A) that number was higher and B) Half the losses were from their own Army. But that was not confirmed that I could find. Alaan fucked around with this message at 05:46 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 05:39
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I thought this (144pp pdf) was a particularly good account of the 2008 conflict. Done by a Moscow based NGO, and with a foreword and seal of approval by David Glantz, no less.
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Jan 28, 2014 06:10
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hooray4hawksbills posted:So what actually happened in Georgia, re: The Smacking? My uninformed impression was that Georgia got mostly steamrolled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gf5jnajTKJI
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Jan 28, 2014 06:38
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Alaan posted:Several SU-25s got knocked out by anti-aircraft fire and the Russians even lost a TU-22M Backfire. Georgia claims at least 10 shoot downs, though that may be a touch high. I can only imagine the shitstorm it would cause if a USAF general had managed to get a B52 shot down because of poor recon beforehand.
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Jan 28, 2014 07:00
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ArchangeI posted:I can only imagine the shitstorm it would cause if a USAF general had managed to get a B52 shot down because of poor recon beforehand. You were saying. But yes that'd seem almost unimaginable nowadays.
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Jan 28, 2014 07:17
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Servicio en Espanol posted:The Prussians whooping nine kinds of poo poo out of the French during the Franco-Prussian War had a fair bit to do with the spread of the general staff system. It was a real upset from the point of view of basically everyone not wearing monocles and snarfing sausages and led to international ripples like the Japanese dumping their French military advisors for Prussian ones and everyone giving the Germans a second look. I agree. However, the triumph of the Prussians over the French was generally a mobile war fought with mid 19th century weapons and Napoleonic tactics. The real lessons of industrialised warfare were to be learned in the US Civil War which was largely dismissed as a amateurish by European observers. The lessons: Firearms technology had made accurate fire available to every trained fighting soldier, and industrialised nations had the ability to outfit millions of soldiers. This turned strategic considerations away from out outmaneuvering on the grand scale in set piece field battles. Instead it introduced the idea of the strategic goal to be the war of attrition and reduced the set-piece battle to the operation level. Even more profound is that the "total war" concept which included attacking the industrial base of the enemy was introduced. Edit: Imgur is not working for me but there is a great photo taken from the French side of the battle at Sedan in 1870, it shows the Prussian soldiers advancing in orderly ranks and taking casualties against accurate rifle fire. They had not learned the lesson that accurate rifle fire required a rethinking of offensive tactics. Here it is on wikipedia http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/86/Moncelle01091870.jpg mikerock fucked around with this message at 07:55 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 07:48
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Sorry for the derail strategic tactical evolution is a rabbit hole I couldn't resist
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Jan 28, 2014 08:01
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hooray4hawksbills posted:So what actually happened in Georgia, re: The Smacking? My uninformed impression was that Georgia got mostly steamrolled. It was answered already, but yeah, nothing too bad considering. The thing is though, from a Western perspective they lost way too much. The F-15 that went down in Libya during the NATO intervention was the head of the news cycle for two days IIRC, and that just crashed, wasn't a combat loss. The losses were to be expected in an air war against a modern foe, it's just that people in the NATO nations aren't used to our planes going down like that, usually because they defeat Russian jets or AA.
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Jan 28, 2014 08:53
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Snowdens Secret posted:It's worth noting (especially for those that think American politics are nuts) that the Dien Bien Phu fallout in France at least partially led to a coup d'etat, the fall of the Fourth Republic, detonating an atomic bomb on a colony in the middle of a revolutionary war, and another (failed, that time) coup d'etat, among other silliness. I thought the Algerian Civil War had more to do with the coup attempt in 1961 than Dien Bien Phu(at this point, 7 years in the past).
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Jan 28, 2014 08:58
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mikerock posted:Here it is on wikipedia  Not really cold war, but are there more photos of that era of combat that show the actual combat? I've always been disappointed there are so many photos of the American Civil War, but few photos of actual combat. Lot of historians that paint very good pictures in words, but still hard to envision. Best I've seen was one taken from Antietem, but it's hard to make out much of anything in it.e: looking again, there's a lack of smoke or motion blur. I think that photo was staged 
grover fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 11:58
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iyaayas01 posted:That's one of the cool things about the museum, it's pretty well known (and has been for a while) so Naval Aviation units/personnel will actively seek to make donations for historically significant aircraft. The aircraft wasn't pushed over the side initially because like you said they had already cleared the deck for it to land. Once the Midway got to Guam a Supply Corps O-6 who was in charge of the logistics/warehouse type functions at the Naval Station there recognized how historic that aircraft was and used his shipping authority to have it boxed up and shipped directly to Pensacola. I had never heard anything about Major Buang and that O-1. What a fantastic story, thanks.
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Jan 28, 2014 16:32
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mikerock posted:
It isn't so much that they hadn't learned that it's a bad idea to march into accurate rifle fire, it's that they honestly thought the best way to minimize losses was to engage as quickly and decisively as possible with support from heavy field guns, smash the enemy's lines, and drive them into retreat. They flat out knew that the first couple of waves were going to incur absolutely ghastly losses, but they figured that the wars themselves would be much shorter in duration, and that victory really hinged on who was able to rush more men to the front in the crucial opening days and weeks. The conflicts surrounding german unification pretty much supported this view, which was developed in the first place mostly through observation of the Crimean War. While the Crimea was a slogging, bloody affair a lot of people were deeply impressed by the roll that rails and telegraph played in its execution and extrapolated their importance a bit too far. This is a lot of what turned WW1 into the bloodbath it was. Everyone expected a short, intense war of maneuver but then it bogged down and turned into the mess it was by the Spring of 1915. edit: people really vastly understate the importance of the Crimea in how mid-century Europeans thought about war. It was the most heavily reported war yet to date as far as newspaper coverage went, and the first one in Europe to incorporate a lot of the modern improvements that we also see in the US Civil War. gently caress, half the early Confederate Army was basically armed with Crimean War surplus. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:01 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 16:59
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In regards to the museum at Pensacola, my aunt's father is retired Navy, and gives tours there fairly regularly. If anyone wants to try and meet up and get a tour with him, let me know. Also, the aircraft pavilion at the USS Alabama park is about an hour away, and has an A-12 on display, among other things.
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Jan 28, 2014 18:23
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n0tqu1tesane posted:In regards to the museum at Pensacola, my aunt's father is retired Navy, and gives tours there fairly regularly. If anyone wants to try and meet up and get a tour with him, let me know. That was the other thing about the NNAM: it's filled with docents. They're all older guys, some of them in their eighties and nineties. They're all veterans, many of them combat veterans. Chat them up, its absolutely worth your time.
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Jan 28, 2014 19:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:Which makes perfect sense, as all those OKW guys had been fed that doctrine from their first days as junior lieutenants, while Hitler had only ever experienced war as a junior enlisted man and had gently caress all appreciation of command structure or why it was an important thing. Another problem with his "military leadership" (besides his perspective from WWI), was the manner in which he gave instructions at the beginning and the end of the war. Apparently at the beginning of the war he would give orders like, "advance to this point through this general area" while pointing to a map that showed all of Western Europe. While later in the war he would give orders like, "advance to this point through this general area" while pointing to a map showing terrain elevation in increments of 10m and individual city streets. Initially the General staff would have a "rough" objective, and it was up to them to meet it. This gave them a lot of freedom to use the tactics and units they saw fit, and this also allowed for the freedom of lower level staff officers, all the way down to squad leaders to alter routes, exploit terrain, and generally read the situation and act accordingly. Apparently by the time we get to the Soviets knocking on Prussia's door, Hitler was interfering at the tactical level, in some cases giving orders to individual companies to take an exact position on one of his maps (regardless of the fact that 50m back there was a defendable ridge, or that their defensive line had a stream/river 10m behind it and a bluff towering over top of it).
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