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Wasn't one of the requirements for being a knight in some service or other that you could mount a horse at a run in full plate mail? I think I remember that from the 'ask me about medieval combat' thread. That guy debunked a lot of the 'heavy armour' myths. Basically all the common sense things you think nowadays like "how can you fight if you can't even move?" occurred to the people who were actually making the armour at the time as well, and mobility was just as prized as protection.
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Jun 30, 2014 10:20
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HEY GAL posted:That's one of the reasons it never happened. You can't fight if you can't move or if you endanger yourself when you try. Blackwaterxe/xe/whatever is/was like the most inept mercenary army of all time. vyelkin posted:Wasn't one of the requirements for being a knight in some service or other that you could mount a horse at a run in full plate mail? I think I remember that from the 'ask me about medieval combat' thread. That guy debunked a lot of the 'heavy armour' myths. Basically all the common sense things you think nowadays like "how can you fight if you can't even move?" occurred to the people who were actually making the armour at the time as well, and mobility was just as prized as protection. I wonder when people started thinking armour made you an immobile lump? Is it a TV/movie created thing or does it go back further?
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Jun 30, 2014 10:33
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Slavvy posted:I wonder when people started thinking armour made you an immobile lump? Is it a TV/movie created thing or does it go back further? I'm pretty sure the original source of the "amazingly heavy armor" myths came from people looking at show armor (not designed for actual use) or tournament armor (specifically focused on hyperprotection at the expense of mobility) and assuming that they were standard battle armor. I wouldn't be surprised if the myth specifically began to develop during the Enlightenment or Victorian eras, when people were big on congratulating themselves over how much smarter they were than medieval dimwits.
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Jun 30, 2014 10:42
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Here's an example for heavy armor from the period that Hegel studies Since the threat from firearms increases, the suits got heavier and heavier, so that platemakers had to look for ways to make suits lighter. You can see many suits from this period that don't have protection below the knee. If the size and shape of these suits tells anything, then it's that the people who wore them were pretty fit and well built. You can imagine flimsy victorian scholars trying these suits on and then proclaiming that it is impossible to move, let alone fight in these things.
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Jun 30, 2014 11:49
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Professional warriors/warfighters whatever the gently caress you want to call them have generally tended to be in good shape and hard as heck, no matter what the era.
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Jun 30, 2014 11:56
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HEY GAL posted:No real armor needs a crane, dude, that's a myth from the 19th century. Someone posted a video of a pair of Swiss (???) guys in armor whaling on each other in the Medieval Military History thread and they moved slower but it wasn't ponderous. I think Henry IV could do backflips in full harness.
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Jun 30, 2014 12:22
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I am almost done watching the Rutger Hauer/Jennifer Jason Leigh movie Flesh and Blood, which someone in this thread recommended. It's bizarre and I have no idea what the gently caress is going on. It's like Game of Thrones if GoT was made in 1985.
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Jun 30, 2014 13:41
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I absolutely love that movie, have for years, and I hope I recommended it. edit: nope 
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Jun 30, 2014 13:56
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My memory of Flesh and Blood was better than the movie actually was. It was smart to cast Rutger Hauer for that role, he fits right in.
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Jun 30, 2014 14:00
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HEY GAL posted:No real armor needs a crane, dude, that's a myth from the 19th century. Someone posted a video of a pair of Swiss (???) guys in armor whaling on each other in the Medieval Military History thread and they moved slower but it wasn't ponderous. I think Henry IV could do backflips in full harness. NoHitCharlie gave me a link to this video of a university lecture that basically debunks all the lovely steretypes and bad press Medieval armour has been getting due to pop culture and other terrible things. It is quite good and worth a watch. That crane thing is so incredibly dumb and gently caress the idiot who put it in a movie.
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Jun 30, 2014 14:02
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PittTheElder posted:I've always been politically unsure about McClennan as well. It always sounds like he never wanted to win decisively in the first place. Though of course that's my view as someone who doesn't know all that much about the ACW or mid-19th century America. If the political argument against McClellan is overblown, somebody please enlighten me. This isn't far off. McClellan thought of himself as very sympathetic and understanding of the south (cause he met some of them at West Point), and he was a pretty firm believer that the CSA could be simply dissuaded from continuing the fight just by the US brandishing a large army and maybe having a couple of minor scraps. When you couple that general strategy with his extreme distaste of casualties in his army you can see how the overly cautious thing emerged pretty clearly. I'm not sure if it is fair to say he "didn't want to win" but it is certainly possible to argue that he wanted to win with as little fighting as could possibly be managed. The irony of course is that had the US had a more aggressive chief earlier on in the war then they probably could have ended things more quickly and thus saved a ton of lives.
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Jun 30, 2014 19:44
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Professional warriors/warfighters whatever the gently caress you want to call them have generally tended to be in good shape and hard as heck, no matter what the era.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:19
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What's a good book to read about Japan's Sengoku-Jidai era? I'm interested in this time period but all I know comes from videogames and animes (which probably carry inaccuracies).
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Jun 30, 2014 21:34
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HEY GAL posted:Eh, everyone in the Wittstock mass grave had some sort of chronic illness and most of them still suffered the effects of malnutrition in youth. How unusual would such illness and malnutrition be in the population those soldiers come from? I'm pretty sure that 1636 wasn't a healthy time to be in Germany, and by that point wouldn't some of the population have war-caused malnutrition in their youth?
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Jun 30, 2014 22:50
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I wish this thread talked about American Civil War generals more often 
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Jun 30, 2014 23:47
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Earlier in this thread somebody mentioned how the USSR was able to raise divisions very quickly to replace losses in Barbarossa. My question is: How did they mobilize so quickly and in such numbers? Was it expected by any of the European powers, or even the USSR themselves, that the USSR had such manpower in depth? Because it seems we tend to judge the Nazis as crazy for tangling with the USSR, but surely they wouldn't have invaded if they knew the USSR was so numerous as to be essentially unbeatable.
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Jun 30, 2014 23:49
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Vegetable posted:surely they wouldn't have invaded if they knew the USSR was so numerous as to be essentially unbeatable. They would. They were still in the "untermenschen hate him - a single Guderian discovered a weird trick to bring empires to knees!" phase. Besides, the idea was that the longer USSR was left alone, the stronger it got.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:02
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xthetenth posted:How unusual would such illness and malnutrition be in the population those soldiers come from? I'm pretty sure that 1636 wasn't a healthy time to be in Germany, and by that point wouldn't some of the population have war-caused malnutrition in their youth? Up until mechanized agriculture became a thing, practically everyone experienced times of food shortages. It is seriously amazing what the last 200 years have meant in terms of stability of food supplies in industrialized countries. Consider this: During Early Modern Times, a farmer could reasonably expect to harvest three grains for every grain sown (modern cereals get 10 per). So you need to keep about one third of your harvest around for seeding next year, one third for personal consumption during winter, one third to sell for essential supplies. Then the next harvest fails. Keep in mind that this was a time of climate cooling, so summers were wetter and winters harsher. the 30YW only managed to somehow make it worse, which is quite an achievement. Early Modern sources are full of accounts of people overfeeding themselves to the point of death because they could never be sure they got anything to eat during winter. So when there was food, you loving ate it. Often enough, there wasn't.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:14
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Yaws posted:I wish this thread talked about American Civil War generals more often I loved reading Sherman, because he didn't really beat around the bush when it came to pointing out that half the general staff were loving useless. He liked Lincoln and he loved Grant, and he had some good things to say about some of his field officers, but that man had a barbed tongue for the ones that weren't up to par. He was pretty funny too, I remember he had this ongoing joke for a while about this idiot commander who had arrived from the East and thought climbing a tree was the height of military intelligence. It's like: "No, my men march like 20 miles a day and fight when they stop. Get out in the field for some real recon and stop being a coward". Kaal fucked around with this message at 00:27 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 00:23
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JaucheCharly posted:My memory of Flesh and Blood was better than the movie actually was. It was smart to cast Rutger Hauer for that role, he fits right in. Is it that one where he turns into the werewolf.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:32
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No wait, that was Bladerunner.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:33
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My favorite Sherman moment is at the very beginning of the war he goes to get a commision and is offered a generalship but turns it down and is made a colonel. He bumps into someone he knows previously that went a got whatever the bottom rank of general was and is amazed that Sherman turned down being general noting "you're twice the general I am" to which Sherman replies, "don't I know it." Also  at one of McClellan's nicknames being the 'the young Napoleon'
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Jul 1, 2014 00:39
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Vegetable posted:Because it seems we tend to judge the Nazis as crazy for tangling with the USSR, but surely they wouldn't have invaded if they knew the USSR was so numerous as to be essentially unbeatable. Those numbers were known, but what good would hastily trained recruits do against a veteran army after the standing army was destroyed in Poland and Belarus? The same as the demoralized Russian army could do in 1917, everyone thought: get pushed aside or surrender. Yet it turns out, they could act as successive speed bumps until the perfect combination of accumulated Soviet reserves, German fatigue & awful logistics and optimal weather for a counter offensive were met. But we don't actually deem Hitler crazy just because he took the odds with Russia. At that point Hitler was like a gambling addict that just couldn't let go, nor was he winning big enough that he could afford to stop playing at that point so he put it all on red.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:43
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Vegetable posted:Earlier in this thread somebody mentioned how the USSR was able to raise divisions very quickly to replace losses in Barbarossa. My question is: How did they mobilize so quickly and in such numbers? Was it expected by any of the European powers, or even the USSR themselves, that the USSR had such manpower in depth? Because it seems we tend to judge the Nazis as crazy for tangling with the USSR, but surely they wouldn't have invaded if they knew the USSR was so numerous as to be essentially unbeatable. I bet smashing Russia looked totally doable.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:52
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Tomn posted:I'm pretty sure the original source of the "amazingly heavy armor" myths came from people looking at show armor (not designed for actual use) or tournament armor (specifically focused on hyperprotection at the expense of mobility) and assuming that they were standard battle armor. I wouldn't be surprised if the myth specifically began to develop during the Enlightenment or Victorian eras, when people were big on congratulating themselves over how much smarter they were than medieval dimwits. This also led indirectly to the idea that the katana is vastly superior to any European sword. Because firearms were introduced to Japan rather than innovated, swords were seen as a symbol of Japan's glorious military tradition while Western pop culture viewed swords as unwieldy relics. World War II and the subsequent occupation showed American soldiers how a sword is still a sharp deadly weapon, and the idea spread around that Japanese swords specifically were better than anything produced in Europe.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:08
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Vegetable posted:Earlier in this thread somebody mentioned how the USSR was able to raise divisions very quickly to replace losses in Barbarossa. My question is: How did they mobilize so quickly and in such numbers? Was it expected by any of the European powers, or even the USSR themselves, that the USSR had such manpower in depth? Because it seems we tend to judge the Nazis as crazy for tangling with the USSR, but surely they wouldn't have invaded if they knew the USSR was so numerous as to be essentially unbeatable. The entire Soviet society was built in a way that would enable such a massive mobilization. Automotive factories could shift to produce tankettes, the idea of tens of thousands "second echelon" tanks built up from truck and tractors was tossed around until the late 1930s. There is even a joke about how someone tried to change the diameter of pasta and was imprisoned for attempting to sabotage the defenses of the country, since all the pasta factories were precisely set up to the millimeter to switch to 7.62 caliber ammunition if a war started.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:46
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Vegetable posted:Earlier in this thread somebody mentioned how the USSR was able to raise divisions very quickly to replace losses in Barbarossa. My question is: How did they mobilize so quickly and in such numbers? Was it expected by any of the European powers, or even the USSR themselves, that the USSR had such manpower in depth? Because it seems we tend to judge the Nazis as crazy for tangling with the USSR, but surely they wouldn't have invaded if they knew the USSR was so numerous as to be essentially unbeatable. I'd think that any large, bureaucratic state that practices universal conscription on a scale large enough to maintain a millions-strong army would be able to draw huge numbers of men into the armed forces pretty quickly. That means that you have a system already in place to keep track of and reach large numbers of people to bring them into the army every year, and men who had already served their term of conscription would still be reservists subject to call up at short notice for some time afterwards. I think the real shock to the Nazis was less that the Soviet Union had so much manpower at their disposal - the real shocker was more that the Soviet state could suffer such catastrophic losses of territory and manpower, and not suffer some sort of political collapse like Tsarist Russia did. edit: and to add on to what Ensign Expendable said, keep in mind that in the interwar period the USSR was an international pariah state that was more or less expecting that, at some point, would have to fight a massive war of national survival. Granted, WWII didn't exactly get off to the sort of start they had envisioned, but they had been stockpiling arms, building up defense industries, propagandizing to the people, and building up their armed forces for almost two decades to this end (with some setbacks like the purges) by the time the Germans invaded. Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 01:56
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:This also led indirectly to the idea that the katana is vastly superior to any European sword. Because firearms were introduced to Japan rather than innovated, swords were seen as a symbol of Japan's glorious military tradition while Western pop culture viewed swords as unwieldy relics. World War II and the subsequent occupation showed American soldiers how a sword is still a sharp deadly weapon, and the idea spread around that Japanese swords specifically were better than anything produced in Europe. Cavalry et. al. were still in service for quite a while. I don't think the idea that 'steel sharp cutty ow' had quite disappeared from memory that quickly.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:57
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Pornographic Memory posted:That means that you have a system already in place to keep track of and reach large numbers of people to bring them into the army every year, and men who had already served their term of conscription would still be reservists subject to call up at short notice for some time afterwards. Do...do you not?
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Jul 1, 2014 02:02
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I always thought the fascination with oriental martial traditions was due to an extension of orientalism, coupled with losses in European martial traditions.
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Jul 1, 2014 02:05
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the JJ posted:Cavalry et. al. were still in service for quite a while. I don't think the idea that 'steel sharp cutty ow' had quite disappeared from memory that quickly. People who knew more than nothing about the military understood that, but the pop culture had an idea that medieval swords all weighed 20 pounds and were more useful as bludgeons than as blades. Hypha posted:I always thought the fascination with oriental martial traditions was due to an extension of orientalism, coupled with losses in European martial traditions. Right, that's what I'm saying. With a special emphasis on Japan because of their extensive use of the martial tradition in World War II propaganda and the occupation.
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Jul 1, 2014 02:06
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Ensign Expendable posted:Do...do you not? He's probably an American where we have never done that.
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Jul 1, 2014 02:14
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Yes I'm an American. Incidentally is there any special reason that we call it "the draft" and not "conscription"? Is it because it sounds too European (aka is a big word)?
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Jul 1, 2014 02:29
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Oh, well that explains it. Yeah, in the USSR (and now CIS), military service, post-service reserve participation, and registering your current address (for all durations greater than some number of days) are all very routine things.
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Jul 1, 2014 02:34
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Ensign Expendable posted:Oh, well that explains it. Yeah, in the USSR (and now CIS), military service, post-service reserve participation, and registering your current address (for all durations greater than some number of days) are all very routine things. They are also all reasons why EE isn't living or visiting in Russia  not that there aren't many better reasons not to Raskolnikov38 fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 02:47
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Raskolnikov38 posted:He's probably an American where we have never done that. ...since the draft ended. And you still have to register for the draft ("Selective Service") as a male, although you don't have to actively participate or keep your address up to date (of course, the IRS probably knows where to find you).
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Jul 1, 2014 02:57
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ulmont posted:...since the draft ended. And you still have to register for the draft ("Selective Service") as a male, although you don't have to actively participate or keep your address up to date (of course, the IRS probably knows where to find you). But they're talking about the USSR during peacetime, training reservists for later use during a war. Selective service and the draft don't have compulsory military training, you just have to register.
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Jul 1, 2014 03:09
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Pornographic Memory posted:I think the real shock to the Nazis was less that the Soviet Union had so much manpower at their disposal - the real shocker was more that the Soviet state could suffer such catastrophic losses of territory and manpower, and not suffer some sort of political collapse like Tsarist Russia did. I realize this is probably getting into gay black Hitler territory in terms of how unanswerable it is, but this statement made me curious - was Stalin's totalitarian and autocratic style of leadership an important factor in the Soviet Union not falling apart politically in the early days of Barbarossa? Did it hold together primarily because Stalin was willing to fight and nobody was really willing to cross Stalin directly, or was the Soviet Union likely to have held together, regrouped and hit back anyways, Stalin or no Stalin?
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Jul 1, 2014 04:58
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Take it as you will but Stalin when told of the invasion had a multiday breakdown and when finally approached by political and military leaders looked as if he was sure they were there to kill him. They instead begged him to come back and lead.
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Jul 1, 2014 05:16
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I can't see, say, Andropov or Brezhnev leading the Red Army to victory. As faulty as his conduct was, I'd say that Stalin was the only one that could have done it. I mean, barring some kind of ridiculous Tukhachevsky prison break and subsequent coup pre-war.
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Jul 1, 2014 05:28
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