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Fangz posted:It's easy to understand manoeuvre if you have command of a small elite mounted force, don't have to capture and hold territory, and aren't trying to destroy sizeable chunks of the opponent's manpower. Forrest, apart from his propaganda value, generally just does not (to me) really seem to have mattered all that much. Tying down multiple corps' worth of garrisons spread out through Tennessee and environs is quite valuable. You don't have to destroy the manpower if it is sitting in blockhouses, hundreds of miles from the lines.
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Jun 19, 2014 15:23
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Fangz posted:It's easy to understand manoeuvre if you have command of a small elite mounted force, don't have to capture and hold territory, and aren't trying to destroy sizeable chunks of the opponent's manpower. Forrest, apart from his propaganda value, generally just does not (to me) really seem to have mattered all that much. Well, Forrest was more than just a raider. Lots of guys were successful raiding (and this did have significant effects on major campaigns), but only a couple of cavalrymen on either side really effectively employed their forces as anything other than recon/raiding elements...Sheridan, Hampton, and Forrest are about it. Forrest in particular managed to occupy literally a field army's worth of men through Tennessee and Kentucky during a very critical part of the war, and he did so with a tiny fraction of the manpower that was arrayed against him. It didn't "matter" much in the end I guess but it is certainly noteworthy. I think what you're describing applies more to guys like Mosby and Morgan. bewbies fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 15:25
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I think it's easy to undervalue how valuable the raids, especially when attempting to target infrastructure, were during the war. I think there were more than a few campaigns that had Vicksburg as their aim that were almost completely scuppered not because the Union was defeated in an out-and-out fight, but simply because their base of supplies got raided or their line of communications were cut (especially if they were relying on railroads, or, to a lesser extent, the campaigns down the Mississippi and the semi-frequent raids by confederate boats hiding in creeks and tributaries that hindered Grant once he went down). This also builds into the purely economic form of warfare that took place during the time, which culminated in the march to the sea and the blockade, with the latter pretty much ensuring the Confederacy could never win and the former arguably ending the war that much sooner.
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Jun 19, 2014 16:34
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The other thing to recall about Forrest was that he earned his reputation in large part by beating the poo poo out of much larger forces sent specifically to hunt him down. The culmination of which being the battle of Brice's Crossroads where Forrest and 3,500 men routed 8,500 men under Sturgis. It wasn't until the waning days of the war when Wilson rode right over the last of Forrest's men that one could say that Forrest was really beaten in a battle he commanded. The guy was very good at what he did. However, much of what he did was atrocious. We shouldn't forget the massacre at Fort Pillow where African-American and Union loyal Tennessee men were murdered after they surrendered to Forrest. Nor should we forget that one of Forrest's nicknames was "The Wizard in the Saddle" and he's the reason the leader of the KKK is called the Grand Wizard. Indeed, Forrest was the very first Grand Wizard. It is questionable whether the organization would have been as influential and long lasting had he not lent his considerable prestige to its inception. So regardless of his distancing from them later, he's still the guy who lit the match that grew into a white hooded conflagration. And, as mentioned by others, the guy literally bought and sold people for profit before the war. It's hard to overlook that. Finally we should consider that while Forrest was a marvelous tactician, he was no great shakes as a strategist. He tended to hit whatever was in front of him, even when his efforts would have been better used somewhere else. Take Brice's Crossroads, Forrest's greatest victory. Sherman sent Sturgis after Forrest explicitly because Sherman's supply line to Tennessee was vulnerable and enough damage done to it could halt or reverse his advance on Atlanta. Rather than avoiding Sturgis and going after Sherman's exposed jugular, Forrest beat the poo poo out of Sturgus, then chased his sorry rear end all the way back to Memphis. Which, great, netted Forrest more prisoners1 and loot and wrecked Sturgis's army and career, but was also the wrong direction from Sherman's supply line. For all that Sturgis was disgraced and his army destroyed, he'd actually succeeded in his mission. Forrest never got near Sherman's railroad lines when the crucial battles for Atlanta were being fought, making Brice's pretty much an empty victory. So yeah, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Excellent cavalry officer, innovative tactician, mediocre strategist, vile human being. 11 = And more accusations of the murder of African American troops he captured.
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Jun 19, 2014 17:06
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Raskolnikov38 posted:A lot like WW1 actually. The British even designed/built this monstrosity as late 1940 assuming that trench warfare was still going to be a thing. Late to the party, but quote:The Tank, Heavy, TOG II was a prototype British tank design produced in the early part of the Second World War in case the battlefields of northern France turned into a morass of mud, trenches and craters as had happened during the First World War. Yeah, don't think that one's gonna pan out. Someone wanna teach the Brits about mud and tanks again?
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Jun 19, 2014 17:17
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SocketWrench posted:Yeah, don't think that one's gonna pan out. Someone wanna teach the Brits about mud and tanks again? Large tanks with big power plants are the solution to mud. The TOG2 is 2.5 times heavier than the Mark V, but it's powerplant is 3.5 times larger. That gives it significantly more torque, and its weight gives the tracks incredible traction. It's all about the power to weight ratio and the TOG2 had 7.5 hp/tn versus the Mark V's 5.2 hp/tn. To compare, a modern British Challenger 2 has 19.2 hp/tn, while the American turbine-powered M1 Abrams has 24.5 hp/tn. Kaal fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 17:27
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Yeah, don't forget also the use of diesel-electric transmission, and the big, wide tracks.
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Jun 19, 2014 17:34
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Kaal posted:Large tanks with big power plants are the solution to mud. The TOG2 is 2.5 times heavier than the Mark V, but it's powerplant is 3.5 times larger. That gives it significantly more torque, and its weight gives the tracks incredible traction. It's all about the power to weight ratio and the TOG2 had 7.5 hp/tn versus the Mark V's 5.2 hp/tn. To compare, a modern British Challenger 2 has 19.2 hp/tn, while the American turbine-powered M1 Abrams has 24.5 hp/tn. I also wonder what the down-pressure was. Those tracks look really loving wide, even taking into account just how huge the whole thing is. No numbers or anything, but I'm willing to bet that it applied less pressure per square inch than a Sherman.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:15
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Cyrano4747 posted:I also wonder what the down-pressure was. Those tracks look really loving wide, even taking into account just how huge the whole thing is. No numbers or anything, but I'm willing to bet that it applied less pressure per square inch than a Sherman. Sadly the war didn't work out the way its designers thought and "Big as a house and slightly less mobile" didn't turn out to be the best form factor for armor.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:I also wonder what the down-pressure was. Those tracks look really loving wide, even taking into account just how huge the whole thing is. No numbers or anything, but I'm willing to bet that it applied less pressure per square inch than a Sherman. The Tiger 1E applied less pressure per square inch than the Sherman. When its suspension wasn't broken down at least.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:27
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Honestly given the size and height of the hull, I don't see this working out well as it becomes nothing but a glorified plow that digs its own gun emplacement. It's not like they're just gonna drive through a few yards of mud here, we're talking miles of mud by WWII along with other terrain issues. Not to mention weighing nearly twice that of a Tiger I, there's no way it was going anywhere beyond a river. Basically all it is is a rolling pillbox that digs it's own placements while being a hell of an artillery target
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Jun 19, 2014 19:33
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jng2058 posted:
Is that a common theme amongst notable cavalry commanders? Weren't Prince Rupert, Pappenheim, and to an extent Patton(if you can consider him a cavalry officer) like that? I believe Cromwell wasn't, but I'm not sure how cavalry-centric he was.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:49
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Murat wasn't the brighest bulb in reguards to that as well. How he handled the Russian retreat from Vilnius, ugh.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:58
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tweekinator posted:Is that a common theme amongst notable cavalry commanders? Weren't Prince Rupert, Pappenheim, and to an extent Patton(if you can consider him a cavalry officer) like that? I believe Cromwell wasn't, but I'm not sure how cavalry-centric he was. Well, it seems like Alexander the Great and the better generals of the Mongol Empire were pretty good at leveraging their cavalry to accomplish strategic objectives.
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Jun 19, 2014 19:58
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Fangz posted:Well, it seems like Alexander the Great and the better generals of the Mongol Empire were pretty good at leveraging their cavalry to accomplish strategic objectives. I guess that shows me for not thinking back far enough.
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Jun 19, 2014 20:10
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tweekinator posted:Is that a common theme amongst notable cavalry commanders? Weren't Prince Rupert, Pappenheim, and to an extent Patton(if you can consider him a cavalry officer) like that? I believe Cromwell wasn't, but I'm not sure how cavalry-centric he was. Edit: There are personality traits that seem to recur among these people, if that's what you're asking.
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Jun 19, 2014 20:30
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Mannerheim was a Russian cavalry commander who racked a pretty good reputation as Finnish CinC. Even if the army that he commanded amounted to something that Zhukov would sacrifice in a feigned attack...
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Jun 19, 2014 21:21
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tweekinator posted:I guess that shows me for not thinking back far enough. I dunno, if you break down tactical and strategic a little more flexibly you can look at Alex as winning a poo poo load of tactical wins that happened to be strategic wins without ever really having a strategic goal outside of 'nice place, I'll take it.' Maybe if he'd lived longer to set his Greco-Persian hybrid thing in place... well, we'll never know.
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Jun 19, 2014 23:31
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In honor of yesterday's events in Brazil, can someone elaborate on the current understanding of Spanish decline in the early modern period? My entirely unresearched understanding is 1) Get rich as hell off of New World gold and silver. 2) Spend pretty much all of it fighting the Turks, the Dutch, the English, the French, etc etc. 3) While this is going on, destroy Spain's domestic real economy through a combination of apathy, corruption, and incompetence. Is this one of those narratives that has been replaced by a more nuanced understanding that takes more than three sentences to explain?
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Jun 20, 2014 00:25
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Tekopo posted:to a lesser extent, the campaigns down the Mississippi and the semi-frequent raids by confederate boats hiding in creeks and tributaries that hindered Grant once he went down). I have never heard about this and I love freshwater naval battles, even if they are just raids. Got anything interesting to say on it?
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Jun 20, 2014 02:04
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P-Mack posted:In honor of yesterday's events in Brazil, can someone elaborate on the current understanding of Spanish decline in the early modern period? My entirely unresearched understanding is Wasn't there also a part where they dropped the value of gold and silver to the point where they were screwing themselves over?
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Jun 20, 2014 02:23
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I doubt it. Even though the importation of all that gold and silver caused massive inflation, that inflation would have been hitting everybody else to the same degree I think.
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Jun 20, 2014 03:19
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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wdarkk posted:Wasn't there also a part where they dropped the value of gold and silver to the point where they were screwing themselves over? According to wikipedia inflation in Europe at the time ran about 1 to 1.5%, I don't know how bad that is in pre-fiat money terms. I've always heard it given as a textbook example of inflation, but textbooks are terrible and I don't trust anything they say. I can see how it led to import substitution, but I don't see how that by itself would discourage economic investment unless there were other factors at play. Why was there no Spanish merchant middle class that arose to soak up the money being dumped into the country? Price levels rose in other countries without inhibiting them from developing economically. There's a link of some kind between the importation of gold and the failure to develop manufacturing, but I guess the crux of my question is whether that link is necessarily causal or if the free money simply helped the state turn a blind eye to an economic system that had problems for other reasons (like expelling the jews and moriscos, let's say). I also wonder if without New World bullion, if the overall growing European economy would have been hit with deflationary problems instead. I read Mann's 1493 a while back and there was a lot of interesting stuff on how China was desperate to get silver from the Spanish to deal with recurring monetary crises, which it had previously tried to solve with paper money. (How do gold bugs still exist with all of this history?)
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Jun 20, 2014 03:38
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P-Mack posted:In honor of yesterday's events in Brazil, can someone elaborate on the current understanding of Spanish decline in the early modern period? My entirely unresearched understanding is Not exactly. What you're talking about here is a simplified narrative that tends to be pushed forward at a pop-history or maybe high school level. So it hasn't been replaced by a more nuanced understand, exactly. The more nuanced understanding has been around a long time at a higher grade level, so to speak. In order: quote:1) Get rich as hell off of New World gold and silver. Another part of it is that ships laden with precious metals are an easily understood symbol of money coming in, but taxes and duties on trade are just as if not more important. Spain's wealth exploded partly because of the New World colonies but perhaps more significantly because the King of Spain inherited a bunch of very wealthy territories. Cliff's Notes version, as a result of intermarriage and fortuitous circumstances, one man named Charles Habsburg inherited half of Europe including Spain right around the time that "Spain" began its ascendancy in the New World and in Europe. There's a real opportunity to get lost in the weeds on this topic because Charles V is one of the most important white guys of the past 1000 years if not longer, but I'll skip it for now. For one lifetime Spain was actually part of an enormous inherited empire that included a lot of Europe, including most of the best bits like the Netherlands and so on. In the modern period where we look at states as entities people look back on Spain at this time as a powerful country, but really it's part of a collection of titles. Anyway, after Charles got sick of being The Man he abdicated and split up his possessions into Spanish and Austrian halves. Spain got Spain (duh), Portugal, the better parts of Italy, and the Netherlands. A big chunk of the revenue for Spain came from the Dutch and Italian possessions. quote:2) Spend pretty much all of it fighting the Turks, the Dutch, the English, the French, etc etc. The English make much of defeating the Spanish Armada and you'll even read them claiming that it was the death knell of Spanish hegemony. In actuality the Spanish turned around and built a new fleet better than the one they'd lost. What really killed them was losing Portugal and the Netherlands, which was very damaging to their income, at the same time that they had to fight repeated, extremely expensive wars against France. It was the wars with France that finally bankrupted Spain. quote:3) While this is going on, destroy Spain's domestic real economy through a combination of apathy, corruption, and incompetence. In addition, there was a general demographic decline across basically the entire planet during the 17th century, and Spain was particularly hard hit. The population decline and concomitant loss of tax base coincided with the further loss of extensive lucrative territories in Portugal and the Netherlands, and continuous expensive wars against France. In sum, I think people generally want to look at history and be able to pick out particular causes for things that happen, preferably involving human agency. Spain must have declined because somebody hosed up, right? That's not always the case, though. Sometimes underlying conditions come together and other times they come apart. The above is a pretty rough introductory summary thing, if you had questions I could probably go on.
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Jun 20, 2014 03:56
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HEY GAL posted:Edit: There are personality traits that seem to recur among these people, if that's what you're asking. Some combination of rural landed gentry arrogance, fighter jock testosterone, and pure elan?
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Jun 20, 2014 04:10
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Frostwerks posted:I have never heard about this and I love freshwater naval battles, even if they are just raids. Got anything interesting to say on it?
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Jun 20, 2014 04:23
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P-Mack posted:According to wikipedia inflation in Europe at the time ran about 1 to 1.5%, I don't know how bad that is in pre-fiat money terms. I've always heard it given as a textbook example of inflation, but textbooks are terrible and I don't trust anything they say. I can see how it led to import substitution, but I don't see how that by itself would discourage economic investment unless there were other factors at play. Why was there no Spanish merchant middle class that arose to soak up the money being dumped into the country? On a tablet so this will be quick but 1493 is a pretty cracked out book with major problems and Spain hosed over their merchant proto middle class pretty hard with the Jewish expulsions plus a lot of awful taxation policy. I'll drop a couple decent books on the development of early mod eons once I can find my old comps notes, that is way out of my normal field. Also it kinda fucks monetary supply and prices up when savings are largely based in Capitol assets and hard currency and then you flood the local Econ with easy cash. Also the Spanish governing class was insanely inefficient and absorbed a lot of that wealth in ways that didn't exactly benefit the state
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Jun 20, 2014 04:41
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EvanSchenck posted:Not exactly. What you're talking about here is a simplified narrative that tends to be pushed forward at a pop-history or maybe high school level. So it hasn't been replaced by a more nuanced understand, exactly. The more nuanced understanding has been around a long time at a higher grade level, so to speak. Thank you for the effort post, in case you couldn't tell I never took a class on the subject past high school, so I knew I was wrong and was curious to know exactly how. I guess the part I'm most curious about was why Spain would have been harder hit by demographic decline then the rest of Europe. Was it purely a matter of geography and climate, or were there other factors involved? Also, could you expand a little more regarding how the tax system worked and how did it react (or not react, as the case may be) to the changing demographic circumstances?
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Jun 20, 2014 04:48
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Cyrano4747 posted:On a tablet so this will be quick but 1493 is a pretty cracked out book with major problems and Spain hosed over their merchant proto middle class pretty hard with the Jewish expulsions plus a lot of awful taxation policy. I'll drop a couple decent books on the development of early mod eons once I can find my old comps notes, that is way out of my normal field. Also it kinda fucks monetary supply and prices up when savings are largely based in Capitol assets and hard currency and then you flood the local Econ with easy cash. Also the Spanish governing class was insanely inefficient and absorbed a lot of that wealth in ways that didn't exactly benefit the state Thanks. I'd be curious what was so wrong with 1493, but I wouldn't be surprised given how many different areas the book covered that there are problems. Anything you have on taxes I'd love to see. I'm not sure why you're describing an increase in money supply as a problem for savings in capital assets, I thought being an inflation hedge was part of the upside of holding capital assets?
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Jun 20, 2014 05:03
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I'd also appreciate an explanation of some issues with 1493, since I'm reading through it right now. I'm not sure if 1491 also has similar problems, but it seemed like a stronger book whereas 1493 reads like a cash-in that covers a huge array of topics with not much focus or depth.
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Jun 20, 2014 05:13
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Pornographic Memory posted:I'd also appreciate an explanation of some issues with 1493, since I'm reading through it right now. I'm not sure if 1491 also has similar problems, but it seemed like a stronger book whereas 1493 reads like a cash-in that covers a huge array of topics with not much focus or depth. What specific things came to mind?
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Jun 20, 2014 05:15
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Gah late night brain fart. Read 1493 brain parsed it as 1421. Even typed the drat title out. :ssad downs
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Jun 20, 2014 05:22
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P-Mack posted:Thank you for the effort post, in case you couldn't tell I never took a class on the subject past high school, so I knew I was wrong and was curious to know exactly how. I guess the part I'm most curious about was why Spain would have been harder hit by demographic decline then the rest of Europe. Was it purely a matter of geography and climate, or were there other factors involved? It's honestly beyond my expertise. What I know about the 17th century crisis is that human societies in pretty much every region of the planet appear to have been under serious stress at around the same time, and some of them were worse off than others, Spain among them. Sometimes its easier to say what happened rather than why. quote:Also, could you expand a little more regarding how the tax system worked and how did it react (or not react, as the case may be) to the changing demographic circumstances? In most of the world up through the modern, post-French Revolution period or so, governments collected taxes pretty haphazardly. Basically a person with the right connections or a lot of money could beg or buy a position as a tax collector, which made him responsible for going out and collecting a certain amount of money in poll taxes from his designated territory. Pretty much just a tax per person for being alive where the tax farmer could see you. Any extra beyond his estimated obligation, the tax farmer got to keep, which was why people wanted the job. In an emergency it was conceivable to just do a straight confiscation, which is what the Castilian crown did in the Inquisition; they just took the Jews' stuff in the process of expelling them. As to how that system reacted to demographic change, not very well. The apparatus of the modern state as we know it, with stuff like professional officials, statistics, regular censuses, archives, etc. etc. is all pretty new within the past 200-250 years or so. Social sciences like economics can trace their antecedents to about the same time frame. By the renaissance period rulers understood the utility of conducting censuses but they couldn't do it regularly, and record-keeping and information-gathering were inconsistent as well. If you were a king the first you would hear about a problem would probably be news that there was a cholera epidemic and then your tax farmer in the area would say that he couldn't make his nut this year because half the people in his district died. Revenue flow of a more regular and substantial nature for monarchs usually came from customs duties, excise taxes, royal monopolies, and so forth. For example the king might get a fixed amount of money every time certain goods are sold at market, like he gets a piece of every sack of wool traded in London. Or the king has the exclusive right to sell salt, and he can grant that monopoly to merchants for a percentage of their ongoing profits. That kind of thing. Those sorts of taxes are based on transactions so they're easier to collect and they also scale with economic activity. I think the big example of this was that the King of France held the monopoly on sugar trade out of Haiti, and that alone accounted for some huge percentage of total revenue, like half. Anyway if there was a decline in economic activity, perhaps due to population decline, revenue would decline in kind. Incidentally this is why the Netherlands and Italy were so important to the Spanish Empire; as hotbeds of trade and manufactures they represented a lot of taxable economic activity. Anyway, you can probably see that one big problem with how this sort of tax system works is that it taxes producers. Clergy and nobility were invariably exempted from poll taxes, and they didn't do much trading so they didn't have to pay duty on anything, so they held most of the wealth, collected income from rents, and paid no taxes. If you were a kingdom that was, say, involved in endless wars against most of the continent, you could very well wind up strangling the people who make the economy work.
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Jun 20, 2014 05:33
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EvanSchenck posted:It's honestly beyond my expertise. What I know about the 17th century crisis is that human societies in pretty much every region of the planet appear to have been under serious stress at around the same time, and some of them were worse off than others, Spain among them. Sometimes its easier to say what happened rather than why. Phobophilia posted:Some combination of rural landed gentry arrogance, fighter jock testosterone, and pure elan? HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Jun 20, 2014 |
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Jun 20, 2014 09:02
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EvanSchenck posted:Effort. There's also the New World -> Asia flow that starts up in there. A lot of silver ended up wicked off to Manila and from there the Pacific/Chinese economy. Mostly the Chinese economy because holy poo poo that's a huge number of people using silver currency to keep their economy rolling. I mean, drat. I mean, sure, Potosi is this ginormous fountain of precious metal but China was an even larger pull factor on it, Europe just made a shitton working the friction on that flow.
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Jun 20, 2014 10:17
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Going to another reenactment this weekend--cya, shitlords, I'll be helping take a fortress for Gustavus Adolphus.
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Jun 20, 2014 10:52
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EvanSchenck, effortposting like that is what makes this forum worth the bux. I have a question though, why was France so successful in the period from the end of the Hundred Year's War to the French Revolution? Obviously that's a very large stretch of time so I imagine it's a question without a simple or single answer if it's even the right question to ask at all. However, as far as I know France fought expensive wars against strong rivals time and time again and yet remained a powerful and influential country.
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Jun 20, 2014 11:13
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HEY GAL posted:Going to another reenactment this weekend--cya, shitlords, I'll be helping take a fortress for Gustavus Adolphus. Turncoat.
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Jun 20, 2014 11:38
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Hogge Wild posted:Turncoat. You know speaking of, working for the enemy either openly or through espionage in my mind was always associated with a death sentence. Is my assumption correct, and if so, has that always been the case? I understand during the Cold War there were prisoner transfers, and these days lots of places these days frown on capital punishment but were there other examples?
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Jun 20, 2014 12:24
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I remember a goon posted his father's Vietnam War memoirs way back, around 2006-2007. Does anyone remember that?
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Jun 20, 2014 12:26
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