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Can someone post links to some hard statistics in here, before we all just drift around in circles discussing things someone heard once?
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Jul 19, 2014 18:31
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RE: WWI chat, the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation has a joint project with some German organisation to put all captured German documents relevant to the war online at http://tsamo.org The site is in German and Russian, and the documents are obviously all German. I figured some of you might be into this sort of thing.
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Jul 19, 2014 19:04
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Well if anyone who is fluent in German or Russian finds anything, post it here. I'm looking forward to whatever is found with it already.
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Jul 19, 2014 19:07
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Googling some:quote:Source is " 1914, Glory Departing", by Edward Owen. He gives the following as BEF casualties in 1914: quote:In Robert Graves auto-biography 'Good-Bye to All That', (he served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, an Old Contemptibles unit that served at Mons), I remember a passage where he states the regiment had only 1 NCO and a few drivers left by late in the war from the original unit. quote:At the end of this http://www.hertfordshire-genealogy.c...n-scottish.htm it mentions the 1st London Scottish only had 3 originals left in November 1918 who had been at Messines.
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Jul 19, 2014 19:28
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Pimpmust posted:Googling some: (2) Yikes.
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Jul 19, 2014 19:30
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e;f, bHEY GAL posted:Can someone post links to some hard statistics in here, before we all just drift around in circles discussing things someone heard once? 90% for the BEF in 1914 comes originally from Edmonds's Official History. They started with some 90,000 blokes and then sustained a shade over 85,000 casualties, with over 50,000 of them at First Ypres. The first two volumes of the OH cover Mons to the Aisne and then to the end of First Ypres, and it's a pain in the arse to dig anything out the copies available on archive.org - I can find casualties for First Ypres on page 466 of Volume 2, but I'm buggered if I can ferret out the casualty lists in Volume 1. There's some slightly different calculations out there, but you're arguing tuppence from a tenner. Something that's important to consider here concerning why such a high percentage of men became casualties at some point is that the back end of First Ypres was one of those moments where everyone gets a rifle and goes up the line. Cavalrymen, engineers, drivers, drummers, quartermasters, cooks, orderlies, the lot. There were points where even gunners were forced to leave their guns (something that usually happened slightly less often than the Pope might declare himself a Hindu) and plug a gap in the line. And if they were very lucky, they didn't even have to dig a hole for themselves when they got there... Even headquarters staff couldn't rely on being safe. Prior to First Ypres, a lot of staff wallahs installed themselves in a chateau near Hooge (it was chosen when the idea was that the front line would be somewhere east of Rouleurs/Menin), had a big meeting to deal with the line being breached at Gheluvelt, a German recon aircraft spotted all the staff cars lined up neatly outside, and very soon after that, some frightfully rude gunner dropped a few shells on the chateau, with predictable effects.
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Jul 19, 2014 19:37
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I can hear your post in my head. 
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Jul 19, 2014 19:41
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Ensign Expendable posted:RE: WWI chat, the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation has a joint project with some German organisation to put all captured German documents relevant to the war online at http://tsamo.org After blundering around clicking random parts of blinking and sliding flash animation featuring barbaric moon-scribbles, here is the link to the German language home page. Also, thanks EE, dutifully added to my giant bag 'o potential sources for the next project. Goddamn do I ever love digitalization initiatives. edit: wow, they're doing a pretty good job of tagging the documents with usable metadata and making that searchable. I just pulled up every document they had from folios that started in 1914, for example.
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Jul 19, 2014 20:43
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xthetenth posted:How did the economy of getting gunpowder supplies work during the early period of guns equipping a decent fraction of armies? How hard was it to stay in supplies of it, what lengths did rulers go to make sure of a steady supply and how valuable were the skills to make it? Sweden had salpeter tax for farmers. Making salpeter wasn't complex, but it was hard and extremely dirty work. Instructions from http://www.ehow.com/how_4474900_make-saltpeter.html:
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Jul 19, 2014 21:01
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HEY GAL posted:I mean, the reason Corvisier could write such a fantastic book is because of those 18th century French records. Like--he can track which side of the body people are wounded on from year to year and note a change, since the military hospitals mentioned it. (People are wounded on both sides of the body equally in the late 17th century and very very early 18th century, but the proportion of wounds on the right side increases at the beginning of the 18th century. Conclusion: the space between soldiers shrank until you got to the well known 18th century close order.) Which book is this? And how do wounds on the right side indicate close order, I'd think a guy with a gun would have his left side toward the enemy, is there something I'm totally missing?
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Jul 19, 2014 21:13
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xthetenth posted:Which book is this? And how do wounds on the right side indicate close order, I'd think a guy with a gun would have his left side toward the enemy, is there something I'm totally missing? Oof, now I'm not sure whether I got it right to begin with and I can't double check. poo poo. It could have been the left side.
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Jul 19, 2014 21:24
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What are some good places to look for information on military aviation services in WWI? I'm more interested in the nuts and bolts of how the things were set up, who staffed them, and just general logistics and organizational matters rather than the stories of Col. Rex Buckthrust downing four huns in one sortie, but I don't have much about the former on-hand.
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Jul 20, 2014 17:47
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Every time I look at this book cover it hurts my head: It's not even the right millenium...
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Jul 20, 2014 21:23
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Terrifying Effigies posted:Every time I look at this book cover it hurts my head: That looks about 400 years too early. Also about 1000 miles too far east of the topic. Who would have been like "Crusades? Eh, close enough."
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Jul 21, 2014 05:40
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Publishers straight give no fucks beyond it looking attractive enough to not be detrimental to sales and frequently the authors have little say in a lot of the final layout stuff. This can get better or worse depending on if it's a small run of a niche text mostly bound for libraries etc or if it might actually see a bookstore.
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Jul 21, 2014 06:46
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FAUXTON posted:That looks about 400 years too early. Not that far east, just the Channel. (It depicts the Battle of Tours.)
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Jul 21, 2014 10:50
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HEY GAL posted:Not that far east, just the Channel. (It depicts the Battle of Tours.) Yeah, which is why Charles Martel is front and center waving around a...well, it's not really close, but artistic liberties...Francisca axe. And it's not like they didn't have a more appropriate picture for the UK printing - probably because it would be similar to having Spanish conquistadors on the cover of a book about Antietam in the US:  I've seen plenty of crappy publisher-selected covers on history books before but that one is just so amazingly off base. Any other terrible offenders out there?
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Jul 21, 2014 12:05
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Terrifying Effigies posted:And it's not like they didn't have a more appropriate picture for the UK printing - probably because it would be similar to having Spanish conquistadors on the cover of a book about Antietam in the US:  
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Jul 21, 2014 16:08
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*standing ovation*
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Jul 21, 2014 16:17
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Jul 21, 2014 18:30
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I can kinda see what they're going for there, unless the guy doing the cover is just *that* stupid.
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Jul 21, 2014 18:32
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StashAugustine posted:I can kinda see what they're going for there, unless the guy doing the cover is just *that* stupid.
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Jul 21, 2014 18:41
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  It's a thing.
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Jul 21, 2014 18:48
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The Merry Marauder posted:
I know about this because my friend took a classical drama class and they had to read this edition of the Bacchae. 
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Jul 21, 2014 18:51
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Oh, dear. I suppose an aborted fetus or dismembered cattle would be outré.
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Jul 21, 2014 19:01
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The Merry Marauder posted:
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Jul 21, 2014 23:25
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Arquinsiel posted:The first one does kind of make sense in a "how the gently caress do I get home?" kind of way, and the second.... well the Aeneid is pretty wordy. Which wouldn't be so bad if that picture wasn't of the Vietnam War Memorial in DC of all things.
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Jul 22, 2014 00:00
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Which wouldn't be so bad if that picture wasn't of the Vietnam War Memorial in DC of all things. Edit: Bringing this back to military history, this: reminded me of the scene in Paradisio where Dante looks down at the entire earth like "a little threshing floor which makes us so fierce, from hills to river mouths." Which is the same expression as this: quote:You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch." HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Jul 22, 2014 |
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Jul 22, 2014 01:02
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So for someone who is interested in military history what are some must see places in Prague?
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Jul 22, 2014 19:20
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Lord Tywin posted:So for someone who is interested in military history what are some must see places in Prague? If you're into the modern stuff, you can check out these museums. The entrance is totally free. The battlefield at the White mountain is also easily accessible, but I don't think there's that much to see there. If you can travel a little and want to see something that is unique to the Czech lands, then you should consider taking a bus to Тábor and visiting the hussite museum there.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:38
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Close by is also Terezín (Theresienstadt), if you want to see a Napoleonic era fortress turned into Nazi concentration camp. Also, Gavrilo Princip died there in 1918. It's not a major attraction and when I visited a decade ago it wasn't in a good condition, but it's there.
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Jul 22, 2014 19:49
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I actually really like this cover. It links the most famous amphibious operation in history (the Trojan War) with what is arguably the second most famous one (D-Day). War. War never changes.
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Jul 23, 2014 00:59
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I do like these modern covers.
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Jul 23, 2014 01:08
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Yeah that cover is neat.
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Jul 23, 2014 04:09
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So, World War II question here (Not about tank destroyers!) Was it ever thought to convert bombers into early "gunships" by removing bombs and instead focusing on adding more guns? A quick look on Wiki gives me this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YB-40_Flying_Fortress ) but I'd like some more detail: How effective were they? Did other countries attempt a similar idea?
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Jul 23, 2014 04:50
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The Bristol Beaufighter might fit the bill, sort of. It was a development of the Bristol Beaufort torpedo bomber, but ended up totally replacing it and generally being  as gently caress.
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Jul 23, 2014 05:32
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Look at the evolution of the b25. Starts off a retry normal medium bomber dropping bunches of bombs from internal storage, ends up a gun and cannon based anti shipping monster with a loving crazy number of barrels projecting from the nose. Same rough deal with the ju88 . Medium bomber -> cannon hauling tank killer. I've also seen photos of crazy poo poo the soviets did. Some medium bomber, I think a pe2 or pe3 , with a gently caress load of ppsh 41 SMGs jury rigged in a rack to fire at an angle out the bomb bay. For strafing infantry, I guess.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:31
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If I remember right, a lot of the reason for the 75mm on the US mediums was to try to outrange AA emplacements, and the rockets they later wound up carrying supplanted them to some degree along with skip bombing against ships. Still had an absolute ton of .50s though. Stuff like B-25Js carrying between 12 and 18 machine guns.
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Jul 23, 2014 06:59
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There was a gradual shift from bombs to rockets and strafing as the war grew on and dive bombing's vulnerability to AA and fighters became more apparent (and level bombing wasn't accurate enough for ground support/CAS)
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Jul 23, 2014 07:03
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Nckdictator posted:So, World War II question here (Not about tank destroyers!) The Japanese had a gunship version of the Betty in the airwar over China to escort the other bombers. quote:G6M1 Japanese Navy Long Range Heavy Fighter Type 1
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Jul 23, 2014 08:34
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