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iyaayas01 posted:
I actually read Palace Cobra a long time ago, because I have a giant boner for the F4 Phantom II. Such a beautiful plane. I'm looking to volunteer with the Collings Foundation in TX just so I can work on/near one that flies. Thanks for the recommendations all, and keep 'em coming, I have a lot of Amazon credit to spend from that settlement.  .
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Apr 20, 2014 23:11
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Davin Valkri posted:I guess Douhet was stuck on the "literally ANYTHING is better than trench warfare" bit that (by my understanding) informed strategic bombing as a whole? Correct. His thinking was "if we do that and kill a bunch of civilians while destroying a couple cities but convince the population to tell their leaders that the war isn't worth it, it will still be better in the long run compared to a WWI style meat grinder. Also it is impossible to intercept bombers so you should build more and faster ones than your enemies because you need to bomb them more rapidly than they are bombing you." Unfortunately for his ideas, like I said, even setting aside the morality WWII showed pretty effectively that terror bombing of civilian populations doesn't work...even when the US basically had air supremacy over the entire nation of Japan and proceeded to firebomb the poo poo out of the entire country the population was still completely willing to fight on. Also the bomber will very clearly not always get through. e: Also his estimates for munitions were hilariously optimistic...he was thinking that something around 300 tons of bombs spread across a couple of cities would all that would be required to subjugate a medium sized European nation. The Allied air forces dropped over 2.5 million tons of bombs on Europe and failed to have a direct unilateral impact on the war. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 23:18
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Another flaw in the "Strategic Bombing will cause their war machine to grind to a hault" line of thinking was that it's easy to knock the roof off a factory, but difficult to put one out of commission. Lets say you're going to take out that ball-bearing factory on the outskirts of Berlin. You amass 300 bombers, fuel and load them up, get them in the air, have their escorts fly cover, lose a few to flak and fighters, and drop your load of HE on the factory. You turn home, lose a few more bombers to fighters and flak and maybe one on landing because nobody noticed the one main tire was holed. You just spent a shitload of money paying people to arm, fuel, load, fly and escort those bombers. You burned a hell of a lot of gas, dropped some expensive bombs, and lost some good men and machines. Albert Speer tells Hitler the factory will be back up to 50% productivity in 3 days, and 100% in a week. They get a bunch of Poles, Jews and Russian prisoners to clear out the road to that factory. They either tear out the roof or prop it up and pick up all the litter and re-string the electrical lines to the factory. By day one the road there is cleared, there is electricity, and they've found that 80% of the lathes, mills, and other machines are in working order. By day two they have the rest of them either replaced or fixed and start slowly cranking out ball-bearings at a trickle. By day three 50% of the factory is still missing a roof, but production is steadily increasing. Those machines that make a factory work are surprisingly tough. They're made of steel and iron and nothing short of a direct hit from an HE bomb is going to destroy them. The factory itself is just a couple of walls with some corrugated metal to keep the rain out. Considering they don't really care how many slave labourers die from pneumonia or dangerous working conditions, the allies just wasted more resources trying to knock the factory out than the Germans spent getting it back up and running. Production was knocked back a few days, but I'm sure the SS will motivate them to make up for lost time. Now you could say, "the allies had orders of magnitude more resources to waste, so this was a valid strategy", but you also have to look at production numbers in Nazi Germany. By 1945, BF-109 monthly production rates were almost 2x what they were in 1943, and only coming up 3,000 of the 14,000+ made in 1944. I think I'll stop before this becomes a whole other thing.
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Apr 20, 2014 23:44
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iyaayas01 posted:Correct. His thinking was "if we do that and kill a bunch of civilians while destroying a couple cities but convince the population to tell their leaders that the war isn't worth it, it will still be better in the long run compared to a WWI style meat grinder. Also it is impossible to intercept bombers so you should build more and faster ones than your enemies because you need to bomb them more rapidly than they are bombing you." Unfortunately for his ideas, like I said, even setting aside the morality WWII showed pretty effectively that terror bombing of civilian populations doesn't work... This is true, but if you read him less as a "how to" on WW2-style strategic bombing as an economic and political/terror tool, and more as an early treatise on MAD doctrine it's loving prophetic. Read the above quoted bit but mentally replace the bombers with missiles and the chemical/HE/incendiary cocktail with nuclear. It could be argued that his problem was that he was thinking about the theoretical application of extreme force from great distance with relative immediate results on world politics, but in a world where that wouldn't really be technically feasible for another 60 years. Blistex posted:
This is all true, but the classic counter argument is that there exists an incredible, undeniable pressure to protect those civilian centers, which forces your interceptors into the air to be destroyed. With those machines destroyed and, more importantly, the pilots dead you are free to use tactical air to actually effect positive change on the battlefield. Same argument works for AAA defenses - you can't have fully permissive airspace on day 7 if you don't get the radar/launchers/etc on day 1, and you need to do something to force them to show their hand and reveal their positions.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:02
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Blistex posted:Now you could say, "the allies had orders of magnitude more resources to waste, so this was a valid strategy", but you also have to look at production numbers in Nazi Germany. By 1945, BF-109 monthly production rates were almost 2x what they were in 1943, and only coming up 3,000 of the 14,000+ made in 1944. It's a thing that's come up in this thread repeatedly, and there are good points for the arguments it's ineffective directly, strategically. At the same time the Germans expended considerable resources defending those ball bearing factories / trying to shoot down the bombers, manpower and equipment that were unavailable for repelling advancing ground troops. You get to a point where they're building absurdly expensive buried submarine pens and factories in mountains to hide them from Allied bombs. There's also the point that the Nazis were still building BF-109s in 1945, at which point they were well obsolete; part of that was because prototypes, tooling and in IIRC in some cases entire development teams for newer, better planes kept getting bombed to pieces. The argument that it fails to remove the martial spirit of the people, as evinced by the Japanese, ignores that by the time of the firebombings the martial ability of the people had dwindled to almost nothing, because they were out of planes, ships, equipment and fuel. Part of that was because of overspending of such resources in the Pacific, but part of it was US bombing of the factories and refineries needed for resupply (refineries in particular do not just pop back to life three days later.) This leads to the tales of Japanese planning to defend the home isles with bamboo spears, which brings out another point: the Japanese people were nuts and were willing to continue a war even to extinction, or to end it entirely, on the word of their Emperor. And the military higher-ups were so batshit that they were willing to whack their own emperor in the waning days of the war just to keep that word of peace from getting out. Which perhaps makes the WWII Japanese poor examples for predicting the behavior of a more Western-style democratic nation.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:02
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Snowdens Secret posted:Which perhaps makes the WWII Japanese poor examples for predicting the behavior of a more Western-style democratic nation. Granted the US has never had to bomb the poo poo out of a western-style democratic nation, unless I'm forgetting something somewhere.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:12
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Snowdens Secret posted:Which perhaps makes the WWII Japanese poor examples for predicting the behavior of a more Western-style democratic nation. One of the most tragic mistakes people make about history isn't that hackneyed line about repeating the past because its lessons were forgotten. No, the real mistake is usually people thinking that history is a predictive discipline. In reality no matter how analogous or seemingly on-point the comparison there are always complexities to individual contexts that render the comparisons superficial at best.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:13
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wdarkk posted:Granted the US has never had to bomb the poo poo out of a western-style democratic nation, unless I'm forgetting something somewhere. Nazi Germany actually is pretty close in all the ways that matter. Leadership, decision making, and its direct relationship to the "common will" or whatever you want to call it is so completely hosed in wartime for most democracies that they might as well be lumped together as temporary despotic oligarchies at best. edit: poo poo, the western/non-western distinction isn't even all that important, really. It's more an issue of whether you'er going toe to toe with a peer nation or if you're involved in an asymmetric confrontation.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:16
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wdarkk posted:Granted the US has never had to bomb the poo poo out of a western-style democratic nation, unless I'm forgetting something somewhere. Germany doesn't count? Or do you mean in the Cold War+ era?
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Apr 21, 2014 00:17
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Godholio posted:Germany doesn't count? Or do you mean in the Cold War+ era? I don't normally think of Nazi Germany as a western-style democracy but then again with all the WW2 control regimes it's a bit closer.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:21
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Snowdens Secret posted:This leads to the tales of Japanese planning to defend the home isles with bamboo spears, which brings out another point: the Japanese people were nuts and were willing to continue a war even to extinction, or to end it entirely, on the word of their Emperor. And the military higher-ups were so batshit that they were willing to whack their own emperor in the waning days of the war just to keep that word of peace from getting out. Which perhaps makes the WWII Japanese poor examples for predicting the behavior of a more Western-style democratic nation. American Civil War?
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Apr 21, 2014 00:25
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Is it really true that the Japanese people were totally into continuing the war? It seems like if the government has already mobilized the nation's manpower and resources to the greatest extent possible, and already fought to exhaustion, there'd simply be no means for the remaining civilians to effectively say "no, we're not putting up with this anymore, please don't put me in the bamboo spear militia to be target practice for Americans." Especially when you factor in pervasive censorship and a loyal secret police force. Honestly World War II makes it look to me like a sufficiently ruthless and well organized authoritarian state at war does not have to give a gently caress about whether its people want to fight, because an outside threat will ensure a baseline of support sufficient enough to coerce the rest into fighting to the death.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:27
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Pornographic Memory posted:World War II makes it look to me like a sufficiently ruthless and well organized authoritarian state at war does not have to give a gently caress about whether its people want to fight, because an outside threat will ensure a baseline of support sufficient enough to coerce the rest into fighting to the death. Counterexample: the notable lack of East Prussian villages fighting to the last grandmother against the advancing Red Army. That said, I honestly have no loving clue what would have gone on re: civilian resistance in an invasion of the home islands. Saipan and Okinawa are both problematic for making that call for various reasons and both show plenty of evidence for both the total annihilation and more normal surrender/occupation scenarios. A lot of the wartime bamboo spears stuff is also really, really clouded by propaganda and racism coming from both ends of the conflict and further mangled by a post-war necessity to rationalize and defend the use of the A-Bomb.
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Apr 21, 2014 00:34
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Cyrano4747 posted:Counterexample: the notable lack of East Prussian villages fighting to the last grandmother against the advancing Red Army. How do the mass suicides in 1945 play into all of this? Is this the product of effective state propaganda, mass hysteria, or what? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicides_in_1945_Nazi_Germany
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Apr 21, 2014 01:03
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On the current thread of discussion, 69 years ago today the 1st Belorussian front began shelling Berlin proper, signaling the start of the final push by the Red Army to take Berlin. I'm hoping to get over that way later this year. There are still flak tower related sights to see, right?
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Apr 21, 2014 01:33
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Bacarruda posted:How do the mass suicides in 1945 play into all of this? Is this the product of effective state propaganda, mass hysteria, or what? It's a notable statistical jump and one that's interesting to look at the various motivations people might have had for it, but it doesn't even come close to the sort of "bamboo spears to the last man" argument that people make about the Japanese. As for why people did it? Huge poo poo ton of reasons, covering most of the traditional reasons people kill themselves. Fear of political reprisal by the victorious powers was a huge one, especially for people who had a position in the military and government. If you're a state-level big man in the SA with a reputation for loving up communists that goes back to the street fighting years under Weimar you're probably not looking too forward to the Soviets or the KPD getting their hands on you. You're also looking at a bunch of people who are seeing their country completely fall to poo poo and have been fed a steady stream of propaganda for the last 5 years about what the exact results of losing the war are going to be. Plus, let's not ignore the simple power of despair - someone who's just had his whole family blown to pieces in their living room while he's working the night shift at the proverbial ball bearing plant isn't exactly going to be in the best mind set. That said, even though it was a thing that happened, it wasn't a society altering event or anything. 7,000 reported in Berlin in 1945? Yeah, that's really abnormally high, and yeah we can expect that's a significantly under-reported figure, but this is also a six month figure. Not all of those are people eating a pistol an hour ahead of the Soviet Guards marching into their block. Also, take that in the context of the events of 1945 in general. The ~1 month operation to take Berlin and the areas around it is estimated to have killed 125,000 German civilians through all causes. edit: that Wikipedia article is also a great example of why Wikipedia is poo poo for a lot of things: it's basically based on a completely uncritical reading of a single monograph on that subject and makes some very strong assertions based on single 2nd hand quotes. Example: quote:The Catholic psychiatrist Erich Menninger-Lerchenthal noted the existence of "organised mass suicide on a large scale which had previously not occurred in the history of Europe . . . there are suicides which do not have anything to do with mental illness or some moral and intellectual deviance, but predominantly with the continuity of a heavy political defeat and the fear of being held responsible" This is just presented as raw, pure fact rather than the conjecture of a single psychiatrist. Was this totally unprecedented and un-noted in the history of Europe? I loving doubt it, the history of Europe is long and it's had a lot of political turmoil and regime changes where people probably didn't want to be held accountable for lovely things they'd done. tl;dr - it was a thing but nothing that reshaped society or anything like that. Certainly nothing on the scale of the "fighting/suicide to the last man and child" that was conjectured by the US army as a potential consequence of invading Japan. Also, that wikipedia article sucks. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 01:41
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I'm reading Beevor's Fall of Berlin 1945 right now and the picture he paints of absolute dysfunction in Germany is pretty crazy. Also the incredible shittiness of getting captured/occupied/raped by the Red Armt.
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Apr 21, 2014 01:44
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Here's at least the official (from both sides) idea of how an invasion of a non-atombombed Japan was supposed to go down: http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/arens/chap4.htm All of this becomes relevant again when you're discussing whether a limited / headshotting nuclear first strike could be negotiated down from, and the policies of semi- or fully-automated massive retaliation were efforts to make sure the question didn't come up. This article covers some of the debate on that in the India / Pakistan conflict: http://krepon.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/4099/massive-retaliation-2 quote:India, perhaps more than any other state possessing nuclear weapons, might actually have its nuclear doctrine put to the test. One possibility is if, in a limited war, a weapon detonates when struck by conventional means because it lacks adequate safety mechanisms. Another is a breakdown of command and control in the fog of war. A third is if Pakistani military authorities use a detonation to demand stoppage of an Indian advance. That website also has surprisingly good discussion in the comments.
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Apr 21, 2014 01:54
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Snowdens Secret posted:That website also has surprisingly good discussion in the comments. Arms Control Wonk is one of those rare corners of the internet where the people reading are at least as smart, if not smarter, than the people writing, and the discourse stays at a high level. From those comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyPwJrPQO3g And this.
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Apr 21, 2014 02:38
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Snowdens Secret posted:It's a thing that's come up in this thread repeatedly, and there are good points for the arguments it's ineffective directly, strategically. At the same time the Germans expended considerable resources defending those ball bearing factories / trying to shoot down the bombers, manpower and equipment that were unavailable for repelling advancing ground troops. You get to a point where they're building absurdly expensive buried submarine pens and factories in mountains to hide them from Allied bombs. I don't have the figures, but during my Uni days we had a debate about this and one of the figures that I found basically translated into, "the amount of AA guns deployed to stop allied bombing had enough steel to create enough tanks for an honest-to-goodness army with the men running them more than enough to man it. Also the aircraft that could have been moved to the Eastern front could have given the Soviets a serious issue with being able to make effective assaults due to increased bombing and harassing from the air. My group drew up a few scenarios and it was amazing how many more subs, tanks, planes, etc. could have been made if they didn't have to defend Fortress Europe. I think that the men and materiel drain you mentioned was far more effective than any bombing that took place. Snowdens Secret posted:There's also the point that the Nazis were still building BF-109s in 1945, at which point they were well obsolete; part of that was because prototypes, tooling and in IIRC in some cases entire development teams for newer, better planes kept getting bombed to pieces. Now I take offence to this!  P-51 pilots even said a good pilot in a 109 could make a mustang pilot look foolish when things started to get hairy. Then again, if you're sticking to boom and zoom, I'd be inclined to side with the Mustang, assuming he's not against a 109K.
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Apr 21, 2014 02:38
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Blistex posted:I don't have the figures, but during my Uni days we had a debate about this and one of the figures that I found basically translated into, "the amount of AA guns deployed to stop allied bombing had enough steel to create enough tanks for an honest-to-goodness army with the men running them more than enough to man it. Also the aircraft that could have been moved to the Eastern front could have given the Soviets a serious issue with being able to make effective assaults due to increased bombing and harassing from the air. My group drew up a few scenarios and it was amazing how many more subs, tanks, planes, etc. could have been made if they didn't have to defend Fortress Europe. I think that the men and materiel drain you mentioned was far more effective than any bombing that took place. I TA'd for a guy who ran a similar argument in one of his lectures. I forget the exact figures, but it was something on the order of a million men in AAA related activities alone. Even if you just boiled it down to "give every one of those guys a K98k and throw him at the Red Army" poo poo starts to look really different. Of course, a lot of those guys DID end up handed K98ks (or, more frequently, re-deploying their 88s as artillery and AT along with getting handed K98ks) which goes a loving long way to explaining how and why the Soviets still had a fight on their hands as they marched west after hitting the old Prussian border. In reality it was a kind of de facto reserve army even after Army Group Center shat the bed and things started rolling downhill fast.
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Apr 21, 2014 02:59
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iyaayas01 posted:From those comments: I was going to link that one at one point, along with this one: E: already blocked Snowdens Secret fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 03:42
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Blistex posted:Now you could say, "the allies had orders of magnitude more resources to waste, so this was a valid strategy", but you also have to look at production numbers in Nazi Germany. By 1945, BF-109 monthly production rates were almost 2x what they were in 1943, and only coming up 3,000 of the 14,000+ made in 1944. Keep in mind though that production numbers in Nazi Germany were also really screwy because of how their factory production worked. Various things would get (unreasonably) high priority so that increase in production may and probably did come at the cost of something else going down. And of course German production methods were rather obsolete at the time anyways.
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Apr 21, 2014 03:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:I TA'd for a guy who ran a similar argument in one of his lectures. I forget the exact figures, but it was something on the order of a million men in AAA related activities alone. I agree, air defense sucks personnel, personnel that would have been very handy on the Eastern Front. But a non-insubstantial amount of the personnel manning German air defenses couldn't have transitioned into front-line (or even support) personnel. There are a bunch of women serving in the Luftwaffe Auxiliary and by 1943 there's kids acting as flakhelferin. Still even if only have of your flak crews are combat ready, that's 500,000 extra warm bodies to throw at Stalin.
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Apr 21, 2014 04:48
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Taerkar posted:Keep in mind though that production numbers in Nazi Germany were also really screwy because of how their factory production worked. Various things would get (unreasonably) high priority so that increase in production may and probably did come at the cost of something else going down. I think it's safe to say that everything that was happening in Germany was aiding in its downfall, and no one factor was the determining one. . . unless that factor was, "not enough of everything". Our professor had us debate for a full week on the factors that caused the downfall of Germany (the course was "The Hitler State") and at the end of it he finally asked, "which ones were right and which ones were wrong?". Knowing someone who had taken the course the previous year I knew the answer and said, "All of them and none of them". To which he replied, "who told you? That was supposed to be my line!" Then we went to the Uni pub on him.
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Apr 21, 2014 05:05
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Cyrano4747 posted:I TA'd for a guy who ran a similar argument in one of his lectures. I forget the exact figures, but it was something on the order of a million men in AAA related activities alone. That brings up the question, if the Germans had not been devoting AA guns and fighters to prevent Allied bombing, how much more effective would allied bombing have been? I'm thinking it really did stick them between a rock and a hard place.
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Apr 21, 2014 06:45
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Mortabis posted:That brings up the question, if the Germans had not been devoting AA guns and fighters to prevent Allied bombing, how much more effective would allied bombing have been? I'm thinking it really did stick them between a rock and a hard place. Is there any way the Germans could have feasibly not devoted fighters and AA? I mean it's a dictatorship of the highest order and all, but still, "we're not going to defend our cities from all those bombers" seems like a hard thing to sell.
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Apr 21, 2014 07:00
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Is that a serious question? Look at Dresden and Köln and that was with defences. Then expand to all of Fortress Europe but worse, allow the Allies to drop pamphlets, paratroopers and supplies with immunity, add in a Dambusters for good measure; an then think about the original question again.
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Apr 21, 2014 10:18
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wdarkk posted:Is there any way the Germans could have feasibly not devoted fighters and AA? I mean it's a dictatorship of the highest order and all, but still, "we're not going to defend our cities from all those bombers" seems like a hard thing to sell. I think the counter-factual is more about "What if the allies didn't try an extensive bombing campaign, freeing the germans to use those resources elsewhere" rather than "What if the germans just didn't defend themselves?"
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Apr 21, 2014 13:34
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A post in DIY about storing Incendiary Grenades near military servers and encryption equipment got me thinking. What are the tools available to crew members of surveillance and AWACS aircraft like the EP-3 ARIES and E-3 Sentry for denying the enemy useful info or hardware should the plane fall in their hands? Do they have a big magnet for the hard drives and a hammer for the equipment, or are there "scuttling" type mechanisms that render all info and equipment useless? OR is this just glossed over because, "Nothing like the Hainan Island incident will ever happen again. . . we hope."? If I recall the crew of the EP-3 that had to land in China were busting up stuff for nearly 20 minutes and still didn't completely finish the job. Did that incident result in some manner of changes in procedures or demolition methods?
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Apr 21, 2014 13:55
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Dietrich posted:"What if the germans just didn't defend themselves?" The fools have played into our hands! Gentlemen commence Operation "Rope a dope"
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Apr 21, 2014 14:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:I TA'd for a guy who ran a similar argument in one of his lectures. I forget the exact figures, but it was something on the order of a million men in AAA related activities alone. This kind of theorycraft seems really dodgy to me, although I am admittedly not even remotely an expert. When looking at all the second and third order effects of giving up on AAA, I can't help but imagine that suddenly all the supply lines and production facilities feeding/arming/fueling the Army, much less 500,000 extra guys, would get absolutely hammered by much more precise strikes in a way not seen in WWII.
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Apr 21, 2014 14:35
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Blistex posted:What are the tools available to crew members of surveillance and AWACS aircraft like the EP-3 ARIES and E-3 Sentry for denying the enemy useful info or hardware should the plane fall in their hands? Do they have a big magnet for the hard drives and a hammer for the equipment, or are there "scuttling" type mechanisms that render all info and equipment useless? OR is this just glossed over because, "Nothing like the Hainan Island incident will ever happen again. . . we hope."? If I recall the crew of the EP-3 that had to land in China were busting up stuff for nearly 20 minutes and still didn't completely finish the job. Did that incident result in some manner of changes in procedures or demolition methods? Good thought, comrade: I too would like to know how the American dogs safeguard their cryptographic equipment. Seriously, anyone who knows is not going to tell you.
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Apr 21, 2014 15:05
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Dead Reckoning posted:Seriously, anyone who knows is not going to tell you. A magical binary compound of termite on each piece of equipment that the pilot can activate with a rapid bank or dive? Some sort of magical aviation sea strainer that a crew member can open up to scuttle the plane while airborne? (Based on history, I'm going to guess some prayers, a fire ax, and maybe some sort of weighted bag, but I so hope I'm wrong). Actual thread content: If you are within any decent drive, everyone reading this thread owes it to themselves to go to the USAF museum at Wright Patterson. I hadn't been there in 25 years and was surprised at how they managed to cram even more stuff in there. If you don't know a ton about planes, it's not the best museum, since the exhibit writeups are a bit lacking, but if you already know what stuff is, it's way cool to just see shitloads of planes on display there. The cold war exhibit is amazing just for letting you see how many planes were put into active service year after year as major advances in design came online. And then you can see everything stop as soon as we figured out the ICBM. lovely as MAD is, it must have been cool as poo poo to be in aerospace from like 1938-1965 and just spend as much money as you wanted on whatever insanity your little mind could come up with. As an added bonus, the hangars are so goddamn big that they completely distort the size of things. My little museum has a P-51 hanging in the corner, and it looks huge here. There's one parked in the WWII exhibit there that looks positively little because it's sitting across from some weird Junkers bomber. There's enough planes in there that even the B-29 looks kinda little until you are right under it. Two of us were looking for a P-38 and walked right past it because it was nestled in under some other planes.
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Apr 21, 2014 15:24
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nevermind, redundant. Have an image of the General Electric test fleet at Edwards, circa 1960.  Loving the Caravelle. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 15:47
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Blistex posted:I think it's safe to say that everything that was happening in Germany was aiding in its downfall, and no one factor was the determining one. . . unless that factor was, "not enough of everything". Our professor had us debate for a full week on the factors that caused the downfall of Germany (the course was "The Hitler State") and at the end of it he finally asked, "which ones were right and which ones were wrong?". Knowing someone who had taken the course the previous year I knew the answer and said, "All of them and none of them". To which he replied, "who told you? That was supposed to be my line!" Then we went to the Uni pub on him. I'm a bit late to this discussion, but - When it comes to strategic bombing to the end of WW2, there were two theories at work: 1. The "strategic bombing thesis." This was the idea that you could break the will of the people by bombing them into submission. This idea seems to have been around since the days of the Zeppelin bombers ( :sperg: ) and was completely disproven in WW2. No matter who was being attacked, the effect was literally the opposite. It united the people being bombed, and increased, not decreased their determination to fight. In WW2, you can count most of the Allied Night Attacks against Germany and the firebombing of Japan in this category. 2. The thesis that you could destroy the enemy's industry, and thus, his ability to fight. This was largely proven in WW2. The American daytime raids were these, as were the Allied nighttime raids, once they had targeting radar (and thus, the ability to target specific installations.) If you read about specific Nazi weapons programs in world war 2, one that the later ones all have in common is that they were delayed or impeded by allied attacks. The He 219 for example (once again, :sperg: ) was never rolled out in the projected numbers, precisely because of strategic bombers blowing the poo poo out of production facilities. So too with tanks: in the summer of '44, the USAAF blew up the main King Tiger production plant, aborting some 600 King Tiger Tanks in various stages of completion. (To put that in perspective, only some 400 King tigers were ever fielded by the Germans in WW2.) Then you have the fact that by September of '44, the Nazis had lost something like 95% of their oil production, thanks to a dedicated bombing campaign that targeted their natural and synthetic oil refineries. Albert Speer, Nazi minister of armaments, is pretty drat explicit as describing this as a deathblow to the German war effort. It is true the military production did increase, but that doesn't refute our #2 thesis. Speer was a whole order of magnitude smarter than other senior Nazis, and the Germans only very slowly moved to a total war economy, so there was lots of slack for him to rationalize. That said, it is worth saying that some forms of industrial production can be shockingly durable. The T-34 factory in Leningrad, for example, was producing tanks that went directly into combat after shells tore off the factory roof. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Apr 21, 2014 |
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Apr 21, 2014 16:21
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Aside from the drains on resources (AA shells were the biggest single factor in my opinion) the fact that the Germans couldn't build a factory like Willow Run was a huge advantage for the Allies. The Germans did a respectable job outsourcing production to smaller facilities but the efficiencies gained from having massive single-source factories were enormous.
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Apr 21, 2014 16:29
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T-34s driving straight from the factory into battle in Leningrad and Stalingrad gives me mental images of a Command & Conquer match and it's kinda awesome. I mean, in a distant sort of way, obviously it sucked for anyone who was there.
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Apr 21, 2014 16:30
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Outside Dawg posted:A brief search turned up this; http://defensetech.org/2012/05/29/17340/ NATO reporting name "Shark Vulva" 
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Apr 21, 2014 16:43
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Blistex posted:A post in DIY about storing Incendiary Grenades near military servers and encryption equipment got me thinking. There are procedures in place. It's probably different for different airframes because we all carry different poo poo. As mentioned, that's a bad question. I would totally use a crash axe to smash a scope though.
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Apr 21, 2014 17:21
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