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It seems like I'm always doing this at this point, but I'd like to note that Guderian and Manstein were probably the only two people in the world who looked at the Ardennes and thought "that's where we should launch an armored offensive from". You can't really fault the French High Command for that. Not responding properly, yes, but pretty much no one foresaw that attack. Four years later, the offensive launched at the same spot failed for the same reasons it should have failed in 1940: running an armored offensive through a forested area with very few roads is loving stupid (but I like that apparently Eisenhower and Bradley looked at the map, decided that an attack through the Ardennes from the German side would, indeed, be loving stupid and almost committed the same mistake as the French HQ did in 1940).
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Feb 12, 2014 13:27
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ArchangeI posted:It seems like I'm always doing this at this point, but I'd like to note that Guderian and Manstein were probably the only two people in the world who looked at the Ardennes and thought "that's where we should launch an armored offensive from". You can't really fault the French High Command for that. Not responding properly, yes, but pretty much no one foresaw that attack. Four years later, the offensive launched at the same spot failed for the same reasons it should have failed in 1940: running an armored offensive through a forested area with very few roads in the middle of Winter is loving stupid (but I like that apparently Eisenhower and Bradley looked at the map, decided that an attack through the Ardennes from the German side would, indeed, be loving stupid and almost committed the same mistake as the French HQ did in 1940). Fixed for you.
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Feb 12, 2014 13:33
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As far as I remember, the French did forsee the danger of an attack through the Ardennes. However, it was ruled as unlikely at the time, because attacking through the Ardennes was risky. Ike and Bradley were caught by surprise because since the breakout from Normandy, the German army had been completely incapable of even putting together a defense worth the name, so a major counteroffensive was not on anyone's mind. The partial German rebound in the west was surprising, since quite a lot of people thought that the Allies would have been in Berlin by Christmas. Instead it turned into a bloody slog that lasted until April 1945, when German resistance in the west started to collapse.
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Feb 12, 2014 13:52
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ArchangeI posted:It seems like I'm always doing this at this point, but I'd like to note that Guderian and Manstein were probably the only two people in the world who looked at the Ardennes and thought "that's where we should launch an armored offensive from". It's more a matter of "where the enemy is least prepared for an armoured offensive". Soviets liked to do the same by launching mechanized assaults across marshlands that Germans had deemed uncrossable.
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Feb 12, 2014 14:18
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Taerkar posted: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!' This post really rung true to me just now after seeing trailers for that Stalingrad movie on YouTube.
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Feb 12, 2014 19:18
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SeanBeansShako posted:This post really rung true to me just now after seeing trailers for that Stalingrad movie on YouTube.
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Feb 12, 2014 19:28
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Arquinsiel posted:Which one? I keep wanting to watch the old German one but I can't find a version with English subtitles. A Russian one was released last year. That's what he's talking about.
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Feb 12, 2014 19:33
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:That's exactly what happened in that episode, somebody cut down a strangled paratrooper to take his stuff. I'm not saying that I didn't like the episode, but rather just the part of it in the air. Don't show things where the viewer of the event would be dead as well. Just show the plane burst into flame and go down, show another one take a hit and lag behind. It's up to the viewer to figure out what might have happened. In a way it plays to probably one of the greatest fears of most people, the fear of becoming forgotten. quote: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? I remember something along those lines, but nothing too specific. A scene like that has gone from shocking to routine, which greatly reduces the impact of it. Sure, bombers blew up suddenly when the bombs were set off while still in the bomb bay. But that was far rarer than just a plane slowly falling behind or taking a final dive.
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Feb 12, 2014 19:59
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:A Russian one was released last year. That's what he's talking about. Is it that one with the dumb trailer of soldiers protecting some woman who miraculously hasn't starved to death as a civilian in Stalingrad? e: holy poo poo this movie looks dumb but at least the tanks aren't CoH movie bad. Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 20:04
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Is it that one with the dumb trailer of soldiers protecting some woman who miraculously hasn't starved to death as a civilian in Stalingrad? Understandably, Russians in general view the GPW much, much more seriously than most westerners do WW2. The downside of this is that a lot of things in documentaries or films get glossed over, because of public outcry if something shows too many Russians getting shot in a battle scene etc. I recently watched an English translated Russian documentary called Soviet Storm and despite having some seriously questionable statistics in it (glossing over one thing or another) it still got massive amounts of poo poo for being unpatriotic when talking about things like the Rzhev meat grinder (which it still underplayed when compared to some sources). If I didn't already know about a lot of the battles in the war, it'd have been quite hard to understand what had actually happened in some scenes. For example, any battle scene would always show Russians heroically killing Germans, or Panzer IIIs blowing up spontaneously, while the narrator talked about the encirclement of Kiev - of which one pocket of successful but futile Russian resistance was given the majority of talk time. It's something to watch out for when watching Russian stuff, it's very difficult to condemn it from a western perspective simply because of how terrible it was for the population, and American shows love pulling the same poo poo regularly (see that goddamn b-17 trailer).
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Feb 12, 2014 20:35
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You just got to love Wikipedia at times. Not the Belov I was looking for, either.  Out of interest however I checked if there was a Russian Wikipedia article on this guy (none was linked), and sure enough he was cited for personally killing six Germans in a trench hand to hand fight and then with his platoon repulsing five counter-attack attempts. "Significance includes supporting USSR in the fight against Nazism", indeed...
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Feb 12, 2014 22:58
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Nenonen posted:You just got to love Wikipedia at times. Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Belov_%28canoer%29 Wikipedia's notability criteria are hilarious.
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Feb 12, 2014 23:07
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Acebuckeye13 posted:The issue isn't that the ball turret can't be retracted, but that the turret needs to be able to point in the right direction for the gunner to actually get out. If the turret is jammed, the gunner has no way of getting out, and if the B-17 has to make a wheels-up landing (Or if a B-24 had to make a landing at all, since it didn't have the ground clearance to make a landing with the ball-turret down.) To determine how often it actually happened is probably impossible, but I'm sure that scenario occurred at least a few times. B-17's turret could be hand-cranked in case of emergency, and it could also be jettisoned - which wasn't very rare either. The story has all the makings of an urban legend. It's dramatic, full of "even the machines they were using could be deathtraps!" flair and, above all, repeated almost verbatim in dozens of speeches and accounts without ever identifying key elements that would work towards verification. It is highly apocryphal. It also requires an extraordinary set of circumstances (the ball turret gears must be jammed in such a position a rescue attempt cannot be made, gunner must be alive despite above-mentioned damage, the pilots must not have enough time to jettison the turret which was standard operating procedure if trying to make a belly landing since the turret would probably render the entire airframe unoperational if attached when crash-landing, the landing gear must be damaged as well, there's a question of time frame since the gunner must have been trapped well before landing, which brings into question why not simply jettison the turret and let the gunner exit the turret while it's falling etc.). It would probably have been recorded if it had happened, but as I said before: The best and most solid investigative line came from Rooney, who wasn't very reliable, and who could only pinpoint a certain date and flight, which was obviously wrong one. That was the best shot of "the scenario surely occurred at least a few times", which, again, rings my sceptometer. Is that not enough to explain why the story is suspicious? Well, there's more. In 1944 this incident was described in a wartime film, Wing and a Prayer. Elements of the story appear in 1945 short poem Death of a Ball Turret Gunner. And Amazing Stories had a semifantastical take on the same story as well in Steven Spielberg's 1985 episode "The Mission". While no actual verification of even a single accident's date, location or victims has been made. Yup.
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Feb 12, 2014 23:11
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Arquinsiel posted:Which one? I keep wanting to watch the old German one but I can't find a version with English subtitles. I think it's this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOQnAsHLg5M I can recognize some spots in the trailer from Red Orchestra 2 maps. The inclusion of women civilians as a plot point strikes me as potentially overdramatic, but it's not nearly as mentally jarring as aircrews being able to carry on conversation inside a B-17, being able to walk around for an extended period of time without oxygen masks, or having to face the Zerg's Messerschmitt Brood.
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Feb 12, 2014 23:31
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El Perkele posted:...there's a question of time frame since the gunner must have been trapped well before landing, which brings into question why not simply jettison the turret and let the gunner exit the turret while it's falling etc.). wikipedia posted:For both aircraft types [mounting Sperry Ball Turrets], there was no room inside for a parachute, which was left in the cabin above the turret. A few gunners wore a chest parachute. I'm with you in that this might very well be apocryphal, but I don't think any gunner was going to have a good day if he was in the turret when it was dropped. Even with a parachute, the thing would be pitching and rolling as it fell, I wouldn't put very high odds on them being able to exit successfully.
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Feb 12, 2014 23:42
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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El Perkele posted:
Well I remembered a similar story but not exactly with a British bomber, RCAF crew and a trapped rear gunner instead of a ball gunner, where oddly enough the gunner survived while the plane crashed and was on fire after the crew ditched. Citation
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Feb 12, 2014 23:56
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PittTheElder posted:I'm with you in that this might very well be apocryphal, but I don't think any gunner was going to have a good day if he was in the turret when it was dropped. Even with a parachute, the thing would be pitching and rolling as it fell, I wouldn't put very high odds on them being able to exit successfully. Ugh  One of the stories (maybe real, maybe fiction) about ball gunners even had a part where they tried to get the gunner a parachute, but the hole was too small and the parachute ripped apart or something.. Dunno why I just kinda ignored it.
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Feb 13, 2014 00:11
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El Perkele posted:which brings into question why not simply jettison the turret and let the gunner exit the turret while it's falling etc.). gradenko_2000 posted:I think it's this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOQnAsHLg5M
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Feb 13, 2014 00:32
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Arquinsiel posted:I like that literally every movie or game about Stalingrad has that same statue fountain in it. It's like they had it on every street intersection, or that was the agreed place that both sides would come to for a fight after school.
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Feb 13, 2014 00:38
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Arquinsiel posted:I like that literally every movie or game about Stalingrad has that same statue fountain in it. It's like they had it on every street intersection, or that was the agreed place that both sides would come to for a fight after school. Guess what, they reinstalled the fountain last year, and bam - the December terrorist attacks hit the railway station next to it. The thing is cursed, I tell ya.
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Feb 13, 2014 00:43
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It is pretty much a famous Landmark when it comes to Stalingrad. I remember it getting a bit in The World At War.
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Feb 13, 2014 00:43
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It was also the cover of the original edition of Enemy at the Gates. The book.
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Feb 13, 2014 00:49
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I wonder if there's any Stalingrad movie that mentions the Romanians that got caught up in the pocket. After a while they ran out of artillery shells, then the Germans just decided not to feed them any more.
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Feb 13, 2014 01:51
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Acebuckeye13 posted: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. It's a figure I pulled from Zaloga's "M10 and M36 Tank Destroyers," if its accurate there were 125 M36's complete by the end of May 1944, and another 120 were completed in the month of June. A quote: "In May 1944, Army Ground Forces asked the head of the European Theater of Operations US Army (ETOUSA) if they wanted the new M36 tank destroyers, and they were told that there was no need as the M10 was believed to be entirely adequate." Just something I thought was interesting, I suppose a logistics question? At any given time there seemed to be a lot of these floating around, they just don't seem to get into combat.
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Feb 13, 2014 03:52
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The two key phrases there being 'May 1944' and 'believed to be.' Ask that guy again in August and I'd bet he would have a different answer.
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Feb 13, 2014 04:03
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Raskolnikov38 posted:The two key phrases there being 'May 1944' and 'believed to be.' Ask that guy again in August and I'd bet he would have a different answer.
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Feb 13, 2014 04:16
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Arquinsiel posted:Kind of makes me wonder how the M10 performed in Italy then. Pretty well, to be honest. There was one M10 Ace at the Battle of Salerno, Sgt Edwin Yosts. He took out 5 Panzer IV's, severely blunting the German counter-attack at the beachhead. They were also quite effective at Anzio, and the 601st savaged the German panzers that tried to force the stalemate in their favor in late February/early March 1944, even the new heavy German armor. http://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs/601st_TD_Feb_44_Ops_Summary_Opt.pdf http://tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs/601st_TD_Mar_44_Ops_Summary_Opt.pdf I'm not sure how accurate the destroyed numbers are, but they have claimed 42 destroyed enemy tanks and SPG's while suffering the destruction of 1 M10, although there are a fairly large number of casualties. But mostly the M10's were used as direct/indirect artillery support in Italy, because with a few exceptions there were never massed/any panzers to fight but they weren't about to let all these guns go to waste. They eventually began to wear the barrels out of the 3-inch guns, and the crews had to be trained in barrel replacement.
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Feb 13, 2014 05:04
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The terrain in Italy isn't well suited for armored warfare, especially overweight big cars like the Panther and Tiger. The old 3" gun was quite good against Pz IV's and StuGs.
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Feb 13, 2014 05:13
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For extra laughs, read about the combat performance of Ferdinands in Italy.
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Feb 13, 2014 06:03
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Ensign Expendable posted:For extra laughs, read about the combat performance of Ferdinands in Italy. Wait there were Ferdinands that survived Kursk?
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Feb 13, 2014 07:05
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Glorgnole posted:Who was the archaeologist and where can I read more about the state boundaries of pre-columbian civilizations? This is really interesting to me right now for some reason. Unfortunately I didn't keep on notes on the presentation, and can't find any details searching online. So to make it up to you, here's a a few pictures of the "monumental fortress and ceremonial center" La Quemada, located in the central Mexican region of Zacatecas.  Located along a trade route between Mesoamerica and the more arid regions of northern Mexico, La Quemada was inhabited from 6th century to the 13th, although some resources use an end date of the 10th century.  La Quemada was built in several stages, with oldest being ceremonial or simply practical. However in the 9th century the design becomes increasingly defensive, with 800 meters of wall built 4 meters high and 3 meters thick, and two of three staircases traversing the stone terraces are removed.  At the site there is evidence of repeated fires and an enormous number of human remains, many in ritual contexts but also scattered about at just about every excavation. The name means "The burnt" in Spanish, and it has been theorized La Quemada was abandoned in the aftermath of a catastrophic defeat and sack, or several successive sacks.  Just exactly who lived here their relation to neighboring civilizations is uncertain. They left no records of their own, although the city has been identified with locations in Aztec myths.
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Feb 13, 2014 07:16
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Wait there were Ferdinands that survived Kursk? Wikipedia says that they were used up to the Battle of the Dnieper in Aug-Sep 1943. If you still count the post-Kurst modified "Elefants", then these vehicles fought all the way to the bitter end at Zossen.
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Feb 13, 2014 09:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:Wikipedia says that they were used up to the Battle of the Dnieper in Aug-Sep 1943. If you still count the post-Kurst modified "Elefants", then these vehicles fought all the way to the bitter end at Zossen. There's a series on Netflix about a bunch of guys who restore tanks, one of which is an Elefant. They find out that a piece of shrapnel jammed one of its tracks, effectively immobilizing it, which basically spelt its doom. Another episode has them restoring some model of Centurion for a British museum, and another has them restoring/fixing a Chaffee for some Italian tank collector in California who apparently keeps dozens of tanks in working order to parade them around every year.
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Feb 13, 2014 13:21
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Roughly how many second world war tanks and weapons are there squirreled away for a rainy day? I seem to recall Russia has a lot of bolt action rifles immersed in oil somewhere to preserve them.
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Feb 13, 2014 13:46
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Bitter Mushroom posted:Roughly how many second world war tanks and weapons are there squirreled away for a rainy day? I seem to recall Russia has a lot of bolt action rifles immersed in oil somewhere to preserve them. Not anymore, TFR bought them all. Russian Capture Kar98ks and Mosins of various breeds are very common and very cheap in America. Rumour has it, the Russians are sitting on warehouses full of oiled up Lend-Lease 1911s and Thompsons too, but nobody can agree on an import arrangement. If you're looking for usable WWII weapons, look no further than North Korea.
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Feb 13, 2014 14:55
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How rainy must your day be to bring out guns from another era?
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Feb 13, 2014 15:01
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Ensign Expendable posted:Not anymore, TFR bought them all. Russian Capture Kar98ks and Mosins of various breeds are very common and very cheap in America. Rumour has it, the Russians are sitting on warehouses full of oiled up Lend-Lease 1911s and Thompsons too, but nobody can agree on an import arrangement. The Cabela's across the street from where I work regularly puts up racks full of old bolt rifles. Almost bought some sillyass rifle with a ring pull bolt, but thought better of it seeing as though the only place I'd be able to fire it is like an hour away and there's only like 4 months out of the year where it'd be warm enough for me to give the most fleeting fraction of a gently caress to drive an hour to pay a bunch of money to bang away with a rifle that probably needs a new barrel anyway.
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Feb 13, 2014 15:06
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That silly-rear end rifle is probably a Swiss K31 and owns hardcore. The stock on those things are more beat up than the barrels, since they were used for more parading than fighting.
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Feb 13, 2014 15:10
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Ensign Expendable posted:That silly-rear end rifle is probably a Swiss K31 and owns hardcore. The stock on those things are more beat up than the barrels, since they were used for more parading than fighting. Stock seemed to have some abrading on the corner of the butt but it was otherwise in good shape.
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Feb 13, 2014 15:13
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The Entire Universe posted:The Cabela's across the street from where I work regularly puts up racks full of old bolt rifles. Almost bought some sillyass rifle with a ring pull bolt, but thought better of it seeing as though the only place I'd be able to fire it is like an hour away and there's only like 4 months out of the year where it'd be warm enough for me to give the most fleeting fraction of a gently caress to drive an hour to pay a bunch of money to bang away with a rifle that probably needs a new barrel anyway. That's not a ring pull. It would have been funny I'd you had tried to use it as such and broken the rifle though. If it was a k31 you passed up one of the most accurate c&r rifles around. A lot of c&r rifles don't need a new barrel, and indeed attaching a new one is usually more trouble than it's worth. I have an M91 with the tsar's eagle on it, as well as Finnish markings. It's beat up but the rifling is still strong, if pitted.
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Feb 13, 2014 15:18
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