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Ensign Expendable posted:Defense in depth. A force that penetrated expects your rear echelons to be relatively easy to ravage. Infantry is on march, guns are not deployed, reserve artillery isn't dialed in, etc. If that force gets stuck on another line of defense, and you can spare some forces from the front line to pincer them, they're not going to do so well. You'll really need that operational depth though, something which NATO felt it sorely lacked in trying to come up with plans against Deep Battle 2.0, and it's not something the Germans had much of during the late war period either.
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Feb 11, 2014 23:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:Bomber Command isn't Hollywood enough, sorry - whereas you can show a hundred Forts flying wing-tip to wing-tip, Lancs were too far apart in a stream and it would be too dark to see anything even if they were closer. Whereas you can show some kind of gee-shucks farmboy citizen soldier camaraderie in a B-17 crew, the strict separation of officers versus enlisted men in the RAF would be a difficult thing to depict wholesomely to say the least. I trust that Peter Jackson will go ahead with producing his remake of Dam Busters as soon as the Midget films are done. Wrap it up, B17ailures! Rockopolis posted:So, is there a strategy to counter Deep Battle? AirLand Battle! 
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Feb 11, 2014 23:54
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Trench_Rat posted:speaking of B-17's there is a new movie coming out aslo HBO is working on a mini series based on Masters of Air I know it's just stand-in for the trailer but the use of the screams from SPR's opening made me chuckle
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Feb 11, 2014 23:55
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Ensign Expendable posted:Defense in depth. A force that penetrated expects your rear echelons to be relatively easy to ravage. Infantry is on march, guns are not deployed, reserve artillery isn't dialed in, etc. If that force gets stuck on another line of defense, and you can spare some forces from the front line to pincer them, they're not going to do so well. I don't think so. Late war Deep Battle evolved as a response to defense in depth. Hence the whole emphasis on wide frontages, strong second echelons, not pushing forward until a sufficiently wide breakthrough is achieved etc. Both sides on the Eastern front got pretty good at defense in depth, which made several early attacks end in the spearheads getting encircled.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:16
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Really the best counter to deep battle is not be fooled into thinking the main offensive will come 400 miles south of the real one.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:38
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PittTheElder posted:You could probably get away with it. Isn't Downton Abbey just class divisions all over the place? I imagine you could pitch that sort of thing to an American TV exec now. It wouldn't be a class division; the majority of English pilots went to state schools.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:41
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The cloud of fighters was terrible but the two fortresses colliding in air and for a few seconds flying stacked was great.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:50
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Really the best counter to deep battle is not be fooled into thinking the main offensive will come 400 miles south of the real one. Obdicut posted:It wouldn't be a class division; the majority of English pilots went to state schools.
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Feb 12, 2014 00:52
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Lamadrid posted:The cloud of fighters was terrible but the two fortresses colliding in air and for a few seconds flying stacked was great. Eh, stuff like that gets really old really quickly in war movies. When you start to have over-the-top violence for the sake of violence you start to have the movies be less about 'War is terrible' and more about 'Check out this War Snuff!' It's why I've always felt that the 2nd episode of Band of Brothers was the weakest of them. The whole section of guys getting blown up and all in the planes just came across as overdone. If you want to express how horrible it was, have the survivors come across dead paratroopers or mangled gliders with little or no idea as to what happened to them. That's real and depressing, not gore porn. Edit: For example in that clip as soon as I saw that first B-17 lose a wing I was wondering which other plane it would crash into.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:00
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Arquinsiel posted:Not true. I've seen figures as low as one in ten, which is still high as a proportion of population but nowhere close to a majority. Most of the personal accounts I've read have been from random dudes who volunteered to avoid being in the infantry too, but anecdotal etc. Can you cite your sources, please? http://www.raf.mod.uk/history/whowerethefew.cfm One third weren't even officers. About 20% were foreigners. Leaving out those who were foreigners, I'm assuming you're not going to argue any of those 33% of saergents were Etonians et al. What is true, obviously, is that being upper-class made you much, much, much more likely to be selected as a pilot, and that those who became pilots who weren't educated at "public" school were educated at technical colleges and provincial universities, it wasn't a bunch of cockneys and costermongers getting into the pilot's seat. The book The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force 1939-1945, although I don't have it with me, as well as RAF official history on sergeant-pilots, is where I'm drawing my info from.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:07
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Arquinsiel posted:The best counter to anything is knowing it's coming and being prepared already.... To that effect, by 1944 Germans had learned to usually recognize the signs of an oncoming Soviet assault, and knowing fully well that the first defense line would be obliterated by heavy artillery and air attacks and then overrun by tanks, they would preserve forces by quietly withdrawing to the next defense line at last minute, only leaving a few manned machineguns in place to keep appearances. Russians would then spend all those munitions on a mostly empty line and run into a fully manned second line, and be forced to wait several weeks for heavy artillery ammo reserves to build up again or bloody their rifle divisions by assaulting a defense line without proper preparation. Soon however Russians caught on to this and took the practise of infiltrating and taking over such lightly manned defense lines without artillery preparation.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:14
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Obdicut posted:Can you cite your sources, please? That said, I just realised that I've conflated "state" with "public" in your post, and we're possibly arguing the same thing.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:15
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Arquinsiel posted:The best counter to anything is knowing it's coming and being prepared already.... Playing rock/paper/scissors in my head with "make THIS the point of breakthrough, no matter how strong it is" vs. "keep punching and then the weakness will be our breakthrough", I realized that they're both ways of attacking against a more or less static front and one wasn't designed to counter the other. This should be an easy question to answer, but I can't: Are there any modern examples where one planned offensive went head-on into another? To clarify, I don't mean feinting and flanking along an established line, I mean two attacks that were meant to be breakthroughs themselves, running head-on into the other? e: like the German offensive that started the Battle of the Bulge being met by a hypothetical Allied thrust at about the same time and place. hogmartin fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 01:18
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Arquinsiel posted:Well the most recent one I've been reading it this in which the author is "of officer potential" despite not having attended a public school and is then offered a six-month course at university as part of his training. He does come off as being rather upper class though, even not having attended public school. TO be clear, what I'm saying: Most British pilots did not go to 'public' schools like Eton, but instead went to state-funded schools. This includes the 33%-ish of pilots who were not officers, and a proportion of the officer-pilots. Most of these non-'public'-educated pilots were staunchly middle class or upper middle class, not lower-class, and class divisions were still massive between pilots and ground crew. Did you mean that only one out of ten pilots were actually 'public school boys', with 'public' again in the British sense, meaning Eton and other schools we'd call 'private' in the US?
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Feb 12, 2014 01:26
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SeanBeansShako posted:I feel sorry for the poor salvage crews that had to check to see if a badly damaged tank could be salvaged to some degree, especially if all the crew met a horrible end. My grandfather was a staff sergeant in Europe, and cleaning out Shermans was the worst part of his job. Justified or not, he hated the Sherman and blamed the US for some of the crew's deaths.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:32
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Obdicut posted:TO be clear, what I'm saying: Most British pilots did not go to 'public' schools like Eton, but instead went to state-funded schools. This includes the 33%-ish of pilots who were not officers, and a proportion of the officer-pilots. Most of these non-'public'-educated pilots were staunchly middle class or upper middle class, not lower-class, and class divisions were still massive between pilots and ground crew.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:37
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Arquinsiel posted:Yup. Totally my mistake there, sorry man. No problem, just glad the interesting fact I learned remains a fact. Anyone have nominations for "Craziest British Officer of WWII?" I nominate Alfred Wintle, who went on a hunger strike to get his Vichy French jailers to polish up their appearances.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:43
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Obdicut posted:No problem, just glad the interesting fact I learned remains a fact. Depends on what end of the crazy spectrum, but I nominate F. Spencer Chapman.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:46
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Obdicut posted:Anyone have nominations for "Craziest British Officer of WWII?" I nominate Alfred Wintle, who went on a hunger strike to get his Vichy French jailers to polish up their appearances. At the risk of stating the painfully obvious answer, there's always Jack Churchill.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:47
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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I can't remember his exact name, but there was a Paratrooper Officer during the battle of Arnhem strutting around with an Umbrella and bowler hat. Just the thought of this man crab walking around cover and in the basements of some of the buildings during the height of the fighting with those items is just crazy.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:47
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hogmartin posted:Depends on what end of the crazy spectrum, but I nominate F. Spencer Chapman. Cool, I'd never heard of him. Sounds like a warlike Muir. Really interesting.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:49
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^^^^ He wrote The Jungle is Neutral, which was recommended up thread. SeanBeansShako posted:I can't remember his exact name, but there was a Paratrooper Officer during the battle of Arnhem strutting around with an Umbrella and bowler hat.
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Feb 12, 2014 01:54
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Obdicut posted:Cool, I'd never heard of him. Sounds like a warlike Muir. Really interesting. There's a Let's Read somewhere in the TFR archives of his memoir of his time in Malaya, "The Jungle is Neutral". Seriously, check out that thread or grab a copy of the book, you won't be disappointed for lack of  
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Feb 12, 2014 01:56
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Taerkar posted:It's why I've always felt that the 2nd episode of Band of Brothers was the weakest of them. The whole section of guys getting blown up and all in the planes just came across as overdone. That's exactly what happened in that episode, somebody cut down a strangled paratrooper to take his stuff. quote:Edit: For example in that clip as soon as I saw that first B-17 lose a wing I was wondering which other plane it would crash into. I'm having a lot of trouble tracking it down, but I have a distinct memory of reading about a B-17 or B-24 colliding into the belly of another plane, and the pilots managing to crash land the monstrous tandem bomber. Does anybody else remember something like that?
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Feb 12, 2014 02:16
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I have definitely heard that story, but sadly have no better recollection of details. e: Nothing quite so large as that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1940_Brocklesby_mid-air_collision e2: There's also this, which is 2 B-17s colliding over Germany, but they didn't so much land as they did crash in a controlled manor. It also happens to feature a trapped ball turret gunner, who does not receive a happy ending. No references, but no spectacular claims either. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 02:18
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Hmm, I was sure that it was an American bomber, so I dug around some more and I think I found it. http://www.100thbg.com/mainpages/crews/crews5/rojohn.htm It seems to be documented, so I'll just leave it here in case anybody wants to read it.
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Feb 12, 2014 02:34
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On the topic of Blitzkrieg/Deep Battle, did the Americans and British have any kind of overarching equivalents on the strategic/operational level? I have a vague awareness that the Americans had well integrated artillery support and that the prevalence of radios made army coordination easier, but I can't tell how much of that is hearsay and how much has merit. Or is this sign as true as it sounds: 
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Feb 12, 2014 03:07
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The US Army went into the war with vague notions armored breakthroughs with infantry holding ground, but it never really proved inadequate. I can't speak to the British Army, but the US never really had a crisis that forced any drastic changes the way the Germans and Soviets did. Things did change during the war of course, and there were a lot of operational and tactical innovations, but major changes happened after the war rather than during it. For example, US tanks were deployed both in independent tank battalions and as part of armored divisions. The independent tank battalions got parceled out to infantry divisions and then were spread out to provide armored support. It took until well into 1944 for the Army to stop rotating these battalions around so they could train with their respective divisions and learn to coordinate activities. Having armor on hand proved to be very helpful for the infantry as their fire support was invaluable, even in cities(where they could dominate the wider streets). The US Armored divisions were a lot better in this regard, as the armored infantry worked much more closely with their tank support. The armored infantry also had another significant advantage: since their transport was integral and wouldn't be stripped to meet other demands, they could carry more heavy weaponry than equivalent rifle platoons. They rarely got the chance to take part in breakthrough combat, but when they did the armored divisional organization really shone. After the war, the US configured all of its divisions more along the line of US armored divisions, with armor and infantry mixed in, so there was development, it's just nothing radically changed.
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Feb 12, 2014 04:04
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Yeah but where do the tank destroyers factor in
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Feb 12, 2014 04:12
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It also seems like the US had such enormous material, numerical and logistics advantages, not to mention fighting in the 'soft' theatres (compared to the eastern front) that there was never any enormous, crushing pressure to develop new doctrine.
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Feb 12, 2014 04:26
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Panzeh posted:...It took until well into 1944 for the Army to stop rotating these battalions around so they could train with their respective divisions and learn to coordinate activities... Speaking of which, I've heard that the US policy was to rotate divisions out of theatre as little as possible, and instead send reinforcements to them peicemeal. This has the serious disadvantage of not giving the new guys much time to train with and gain the knowledge of the seasoned troops, but required less raw manpower, since divisions were rarely sitting idle. The reason given was that there was such a demand for manpower at home, which was important since logistics win war, but there was also a lot of lobbying from capitalist types who needed men around to make bank. Any truth to all that?
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Feb 12, 2014 04:32
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Slavvy posted:It also seems like the US had such enormous material, numerical and logistics advantages, not to mention fighting in the 'soft' theatres (compared to the eastern front) that there was never any enormous, crushing pressure to develop new doctrine. I don't think that the advantages were nearly as decisive in operational affairs as one might imagine. There were still a lot of material difficulties and the US army broadly improved over the years as a fighting force in skill as much as anything else. But I don't think the US or the UK ever really had an existential crisis that demanded they make changes to their entire way of fighting or organization.
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Feb 12, 2014 04:34
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I thought Dunkirk caused a complete rethink as to how the british did things?
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Feb 12, 2014 04:37
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PittTheElder posted:Speaking of which, I've heard that the US policy was to rotate divisions out of theatre as little as possible, and instead send reinforcements to them peicemeal. This has the serious disadvantage of not giving the new guys much time to train with and gain the knowledge of the seasoned troops, but required less raw manpower, since divisions were rarely sitting idle. The reason given was that there was such a demand for manpower at home, which was important since logistics win war, but there was also a lot of lobbying from capitalist types who needed men around to make bank. The US had to man the largest navy and merchant marine in the world, as well as the largest air force. On top of that, they also had to man the largest war industry in the world. This led to the Army and especially the infantry getting basically the worst manpower available. Manpower in the Army was far from infinite and the US replacement system was a response to that. That all being said, the replacement system was in fact something that changed after the war. It's also important to understand that the US fielded 90 divisions total, so there really weren't a lot to go around. Slavvy posted:I thought Dunkirk caused a complete rethink as to how the british did things? I usually think of organizational changes as a way to tell when big changes are happening, but fundamentally nothing really changed. While changes happened, it was nothing too terribly radical, and I don't think the British staff saw Dunkirk as a great failure of the British doctrine. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 04:37
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hogmartin posted:Playing rock/paper/scissors in my head with "make THIS the point of breakthrough, no matter how strong it is" vs. "keep punching and then the weakness will be our breakthrough", I realized that they're both ways of attacking against a more or less static front and one wasn't designed to counter the other. This should be an easy question to answer, but I can't: Are there any modern examples where one planned offensive went head-on into another? Maybe the Battle of Arracourt? Armored Thunderbolt, Zaloga posted:... Hitler still expected that his panzer forces could win great encirclement battles in the west as they had so often on the Eastern Front, especially against the green and soft American troops. Not surprisingly, he selected veterans from the Eastern front to conduct his planned panzer offensive in Lorraine. A violent panzer attack against Patton's Third Army was both he most necessary and the most promising action ... By the time the Lorraine panzer counterattack finally started a week late on September 18, it was a pale shadow of the original plan, with only a fraction of its intended power ... The initial skirmishing around Luneville on September 18 was so disjointed that Patton had no idea his forces were under attack, and the plans for the next day were for a continuation of operations toward the German border. This led to a rear type of tank-versus-tank encounter, seldom experienced by the US Army in the ETO: a classic meeting engagement in which both sides were offensively oriented and neither side had any defensive advantage ...
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Feb 12, 2014 04:39
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PittTheElder posted:Speaking of which, I've heard that the US policy was to rotate divisions out of theatre as little as possible, and instead send reinforcements to them peicemeal. This has the serious disadvantage of not giving the new guys much time to train with and gain the knowledge of the seasoned troops, but required less raw manpower, since divisions were rarely sitting idle. The reason given was that there was such a demand for manpower at home, which was important since logistics win war, but there was also a lot of lobbying from capitalist types who needed men around to make bank. The short answer to that point is yes. quote:Simply put, once a soldier was separated from his unit by wounds or illness, there was little chance of him returning to that unit. Instead, he was sent to a replacement depot, a repple-depple* in Army slang. From the depot he would then be reassigned as needed to whatever unit had a shortfall in his particular MOS (military occupation specialty). This meant that a soldier could spend months of training, forming close bonds with comrades, the basis for unit cohesion, and then in his first day of combat could be separated from them, never to fight with them again. This system of individual replacement caused many soldiers to disguise illness and wounds so they could stay with their units. Other soldiers, in hospital, went AWOL (absent-without-leave) so as to rejoin their units. It wasn't until 1945 that the individual replacement system was modified to allow a majority of sick and wounded soldiers to rejoin their unit after recovering. quote:Unlike the German military, which replaced entire decimated units with similarly trained units, the Americans deemed it logistically difficult to transport across oceans the equipment which would be necessary to arm an entire replacement unit. Instead, the American Army strategy was to create replacement depots, called “repple-depples”* by the GIs. These depots were located near the battle fronts, so that individual soldiers could be sent by generals to companies and battalions to replace the men lost. Even early in the war, the number of replacements was high. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replacement_depot *The weirdness here is that I'm pretty sure the first time I ever saw the phrase "repple-depple" was in Starship Troopers. http://books.google.com/books?id=1l...20cadre&f=false
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Feb 12, 2014 04:51
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Yeah but where do the tank destroyers factor in Not to belabor this at all, but something I've always wondered is why weren't the M36's deployed earlier. As I understand it there were good numbers of those floating around, even before Normandy. A similar technical question, were the tank destroyers equipped with the same vertical stabilizer system that the proper tanks were and if so did anyone get use out of it?
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Feb 12, 2014 05:00
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quote:Dr. Gay Hitler, son of George Washington Hitler, was a local dentist, serving our community from 1922 through 1946 from his office on West Main Street. drat if only he was black this thread would have so many questions answered! From the D&D picture thread. http://www.circlevilletoday.com/news/hitlers-were-county-pioneers/article_2a6487b2-a34a-55f4-83f4-dfcf116d15d5.html?mode=jqm
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Feb 12, 2014 05:58
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ProfessorCurly posted:Not to belabor this at all, but something I've always wondered is why weren't the M36's deployed earlier. As I understand it there were good numbers of those floating around, even before Normandy. A similar technical question, were the tank destroyers equipped with the same vertical stabilizer system that the proper tanks were and if so did anyone get use out of it? Not sure about the stabilizers (I don't think tank destroyers were mounted with stabilizers, though I could be wrong), but I can answer your first question pretty easily off the top of my head. It was widely believed by many of the Army's upper brass in the months leading up to the invasion that US anti-tank capabilities were more than sufficient against the Panzer IV, which was believed to still be the primary German AFV. While newer German AFVs were known about, it was believed that they were merely specialist vehicles like the Tiger and wouldn't be encountered in great numbers. What the Army was concerned about, however, was the stretch of fortifications along the German border known as the Siegfried Line. Thus, vehicles like the M36 Tank Destroyer and the M4A3E2 "Jumbo" assault tank (An extremely uparmored Sherman) were developed for the army to use in assaulting those fortifications. Of course, as it turned out the Army's anti-tank capabilities were far less capable than they had realized, and as such the Jumbo, the M36, and a few other vehicles ended up getting deployed as soon as they were available, and were in high demand throughout the War. I don't think either of these vehicles were available before Normandy, however. You may be thinking of the 76mm armed variant of the M4 Sherman, which began arriving in England in May of 1944 but weren't deployed until Operation Cobra in July, again due to the Army's hubris regarding its anti-tank capabilities.
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Feb 12, 2014 09:41
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Re: Blitzkrieg, it's worth noting that Blitzkrieg as a doctrine is to some degree a later invention. The reality is somewhat more complex. A good case study is what happened before the Germans invaded France: Halder had planned a throughly conventional offensive (that he actually had no confidence in) but since the plans got lost when a courier by mistake landed in Belgium, Manstein and Guderian got an opportunity to make an alternate one more along the lines of how they felt armor should be used. And when the attack kicked off, the French pretty much kept marching into Belgium while the main German thrust hit them in the northeast, where they weren't. Post-war, the unbeatable Blitzkrieg was a way of explaining why the Germans whupped the allies so badly when in fact the French high command being utterly poo poo at their job had as least as much to do with it than the great plan Manstein and Guderian came up with.
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Feb 12, 2014 10:10
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