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Japan had the twin problems of not having a good supply of technically skilled recruits, making training harder and more expensive, and not having a reliably large supply of guys making a career out of the navy, most people just going in for a short period and leaving. So they didn't have the strong core of NCOs with well developed technical skills, a lot of things that US NCOs could and did handle were the province of officers in the IJN, so things like damage control were limited specialties. So between that and an not doing things like analyzing wounds to see that having the damage control crews prone, a huge fraction of the competent damage control guys died right as they became needed. Meanwhile in the US basically everyone in shouting range of an NCO is a useful damage control crewman, so ships can absorb huge damage once they figure out stuff like how to prevent vapor buildups in carriers.
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Jul 27, 2014 07:08
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xthetenth posted:Japan had the twin problems of not having a good supply of technically skilled recruits, making training harder and more expensive, and not having a reliably large supply of guys making a career out of the navy, most people just going in for a short period and leaving. Wait, so how exactly did the IJN have a lack of good career seamen? That seems to be exactly the opposite of what you would expect from an island nation. The UK has a long history of idolizing good sailors, for example. What policies/history stopped them from building up a good career officer corps in the navy; from my small knowledge of Japan pre-WWII, I am assuming backbiting from the Japanese army?
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Jul 27, 2014 08:13
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Internal war during the sengoku period and then the enforced isolationism of the sakoku period? The UK had a history of naval-based colonialism which Japan just didn't have.
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Jul 27, 2014 08:27
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What Japan had was blind obedience among seamen and lower officers, and somewhat half-decent or at least largely competent leadership. This hosed up sapling grew into the really hosed up tree that was the WWII IJN. They sort of beat the poo poo out of their biggest naval foe 30 years prior and were the biggest badasses on a block full of little-leaguers before 12/7/41.
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Jul 27, 2014 09:22
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Dunno if there are any WW1 buffs in here but my friend made a video about the start of the war and the subsequent destruction of the french forces... It's his first video. I knew nothing about it and i found it interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKLW2-kqmH8 reposted from the ww2 thread. Give him some feedback if its your thing, he wants to make more.
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Jul 27, 2014 14:20
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Rocksicles posted:Dunno if there are any WW1 buffs in here but my friend made a video about the start of the war and the subsequent destruction of the french forces... It's his first video. I knew nothing about it and i found it interesting. This is a really fantastic slideshow.
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Jul 27, 2014 17:10
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Rocksicles posted:Dunno if there are any WW1 buffs in here but my friend made a video about the start of the war and the subsequent destruction of the french forces... It's his first video. I knew nothing about it and i found it interesting. The war really wasn't all that inevitable once mobilization began. It likely could have been stopped, but the various governments preferred war to concessions required for peace. Also, a lot of the artillery footage is used again, and again, and again. I don't need to see the same gun fire eight times in a 25 minute video. It's just way too long in general. Finally, the whole thing seems very biased towards the entente perspective. There's almost no mention if what the Germans were trying to accomplish in their offensive, beyond the casualties they inflicted on the French and Belgians.
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Jul 27, 2014 18:25
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Slaan posted:Wait, so how exactly did the IJN have a lack of good career seamen? That seems to be exactly the opposite of what you would expect from an island nation. The UK has a long history of idolizing good sailors, for example. What policies/history stopped them from building up a good career officer corps in the navy; from my small knowledge of Japan pre-WWII, I am assuming backbiting from the Japanese army? Rather than taking an approach like the US, with a professional core backed up by a much larger reserve, they tried to rely on a small highly trained cadre of career officers and men. For example, admission to the Naval Academy was kept very tight because men who graduated were practically guaranteed to become captains. So during the '30s, when the Japanese Navy kept expanding, there was a shortfall of officers since it took roughly 10 years to develop a truly competent lieutenant and 20 for a commander by their estimation. In 1941, the IJN went into combat an estimated two thousand or more combat and engineering officers short. This meant that they couldn't properly replace midlevel officers period and were pressing junior officers and warrant officers into their jobs, and lower level officers were getting diluted by the end of the war. As far as NCOs and enlisted men goes, the biggest problem there was making quality goals. Numberswise they were always fine because they could conscript when needed. However, conscripts served for three years instead of volunteers' five, which made it harder to train them to a proper standard. Conscription was run by the army, which meant that the army got the choice of the manpower, and the Army even conscripted civilian employees of the Navy. The length of time in service was a major factor for the Japanese, especially given their fixation on quality, so officers were given much more technical training than enlisted men. The IJN had a higher proportion of officers on ships because of this. Damage control was a specialist role for engineering officers and men, which meant that a small fraction of the men were qualified. For example, on the Kaga, the highest ranking men with damage control knowledge were lieutenants. Considering that they're the lowest ranking men with full knowledge of the subject, that's a very small pool, and helps explain the huge losses taken on Kaga. Most of that's from Kaigun, with a bit from Shattered Sword.
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Jul 27, 2014 19:10
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PittTheElder posted:The war really wasn't all that inevitable once mobilization began. It likely could have been stopped, but the various governments preferred war to concessions required for peace. Doubtful. The mobilization plans were so finely tuned that halting it at any point would mean almost certain defeat. So the only way a sane government would halt their mobilization was if they were absolutely 110% sure the other side did so, too. That was just not happening in the political reality of August 1914.
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Jul 27, 2014 19:14
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Right now, I’m reading a lot about WW2, and plan to start soon on Africa and Asia during the war. What books should I add to my list? Currently reading: Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 Ruth Gruber, Haven To Read: Rick Atkinson, Liberation Trilogy Tony Le Tissier, With Our Backs to Berlin Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich Already read: Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege Wibke Bruhns, My Father’s Country Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts
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Jul 27, 2014 20:49
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For a good view of the average Red Army Soldier's view of the war, I'd recomment "Thru The Maelstrom" by Boris Gorbachevski. Starts at the battle of Rzgev, goes all the way thru the liberation of the Sudatenland. I also JUST caught up with this thread. HEY GAL you're a treasure, never stop. I just spent the last two weeks pawing thru museums in London and Paris looking at stuff. If anyone's ever in London and wants to see a simply absurd collection of medieval and early modern period armour and weaponry from all over Europe and the Ottoman empire, I heartily recommend the Wallace Collection. They even have one of those helmets from that weird German style of jousting you guys were talking about forever ago. MA-Horus fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 22:19
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MA-Horus posted:I also JUST caught up with this thread. HEY GAL you're a treasure, never stop. I was at a reenactment this weekend, and pro tip: if you're at "shoulder pike" and they make you stop without making you put it up, you can push it just a little bit forward until it rests on the ground, lean against it, and fall asleep standing up that way. Strabo posted:The battlefield at the White mountain is also easily accessible, but I don't think there's that much to see there. 
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 22:33
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ArchangeI posted:Doubtful. The mobilization plans were so finely tuned that halting it at any point would mean almost certain defeat. So the only way a sane government would halt their mobilization was if they were absolutely 110% sure the other side did so, too. That was just not happening in the political reality of August 1914. This is true, but his larger criticism of that film still stands. From what I recall the situation was presented in the slideshow as one of tight time tables essentially causing both sides to blunder into the war without really intending to or knowing what they were doing. This is essentially the old, very flattened argument that the Serbian crisis set in motion events that couldn't be stopped, triggering a domino-style sequence of events that was perfectly inevitable. War was obviously coming once mobilization began in ernest, but there was a lot of diplomacy between Franz Ferdinand and breaking out the railway timetables, and a lot of European governments trying to figure out what they wanted out of the crisis. tl;dr - Basically the Fischer thesis.
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Jul 27, 2014 23:13
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Does Fischer's thesis still hold up after 40 years of further academic study? As far as I can tell his book is out of print.
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Jul 27, 2014 23:39
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EMcTrap posted:Right now, I’m reading a lot about WW2, and plan to start soon on Africa and Asia during the war. What books should I add to my list?
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Jul 28, 2014 06:40
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The Liberation trilogy I thought was excellent for the Torch landings all the way to the final surrender of Tunis, but what's a good book for North Africa before that? Something from the first Italian-British engagements until the post-El Alamein pursuit
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Jul 28, 2014 06:54
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Jul 28, 2014 08:41
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You make a good point.
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Jul 28, 2014 10:39
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Arquinsiel posted:Robert Kershaw's It Never Snows In September is, as far as I can tell, the only book on Market Garden from the German perspective and is hugely enlightening as to why things went wrong for the allies. Patrick Delaforce does some interesting stuff on his own 3rd Battalion of the RTR (which is basically a primary source, transcribing another primary source) and some books on the 4th and 5th RTR that I haven't managed to read yet. Guderian's books are easily found and are worth reading for the buildup to and conduct of the war. Take the post-war works with a pinch of salt though, he has a knack of making it look like nobody ever really wanted war but Hitler was mean and made them. Thank you, I'm gonna have to find that book. I'm tired of the "Montgomery was a boob, that's why" stories
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Jul 28, 2014 16:15
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SocketWrench posted:Thank you, I'm gonna have to find that book. I'm tired of the "Montgomery was a boob, that's why" stories
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Jul 28, 2014 16:39
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SocketWrench posted:Thank you, I'm gonna have to find that book. I'm tired of the "Montgomery was a boob, that's why" stories He was a boob though.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:15
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Arquinsiel posted:I can't remember the guy's name, but I have a book by some prolific amateur historian on the campaigns to reach the rhine which was basically "gently caress Patton, dude extended the war by six months!" floating around somewhere. I'll try remember to post here again if I find it. I dunno, it feels like everyone wants to think that the way the war was going, that the Allies should have been across the Rhine in 1944, carrying offensives into Germany, but I don't feel like any campaign could have carried on there for very long. The allied forces operated on a shoestring at that point and needed to stop or at least slow down to catch their breath.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:29
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Panzeh posted:I dunno, it feels like everyone wants to think that the way the war was going, that the Allies should have been across the Rhine in 1944, carrying offensives into Germany, but I don't feel like any campaign could have carried on there for very long. The allied forces operated on a shoestring at that point and needed to stop or at least slow down to catch their breath.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:40
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The logitical bottleneck meant that victory in 44 was high impossible, save for a complete collapse of German resistance akin the WWI-era Russia.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:45
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Tekopo posted:Internal war during the sengoku period and then the enforced isolationism of the sakoku period? The UK had a history of naval-based colonialism which Japan just didn't have. This is definitely a big part of it. As an island nation they have historically had a fair share of fishermen and other sailing occupations but not a naval tradition like the UK. Their approach to naval combat was treating it as a floating land battle. Ships were big floating wooden castles (Some even had audience chambers and other facilities) and boarding actions were the tactic of the day. It's fascinating and ironic because Britain was a big inspiration to Japan since they were both island nations and Japan saw Britain as the little island that could, so therefore it must be possible for them to achieve such heights of power too. As far as I can tell, island nations having a strong naval tradition isn't really the norm but that isn't exactly my field. China is kind of in the same boat as Japan. The potential is there with lots of sailing and fishing on the coasts but their military never really got into the sort of things the UK did. Well, China was big on the navy but tended to operate on their rivers rather than the ocean. The huge ships Zheng He had are a testament to the designers and builders as well as the crews but they're very different compared to a river navy.
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Jul 28, 2014 17:47
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Japan was also really uneven in terms of modernization, even into WWII. If I remember right, the prototype Zero, one of the better fighters of its day, was delivered to the airfield for testing by ox cart (not to be confused with oxcart, a much cooler option).
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Jul 28, 2014 18:05
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xthetenth posted:Rather than taking an approach like the US, with a professional core backed up by a much larger reserve, they tried to rely on a small highly trained cadre of career officers and men. For example, admission to the Naval Academy was kept very tight because men who graduated were practically guaranteed to become captains. So during the '30s, when the Japanese Navy kept expanding, there was a shortfall of officers since it took roughly 10 years to develop a truly competent lieutenant and 20 for a commander by their estimation. In 1941, the IJN went into combat an estimated two thousand or more combat and engineering officers short. This meant that they couldn't properly replace midlevel officers period and were pressing junior officers and warrant officers into their jobs, and lower level officers were getting diluted by the end of the war. You know, with such a small and dedicated training program, it seems like there might be some consequences morale-wise - whenever you lose one of the Academy graduates, you're not just losing a skilled and experienced officer, you're losing a member of a very small and close-knit community, someone you've known for decades and accepted as the elite of the elite. I realize it's kind of a hard thing to quantify or prove, but have there been any studies on the psychological impact of attrition on the Japanese Academy-trained officer corps?
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Jul 28, 2014 18:36
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xthetenth posted:Japan was also really uneven in terms of modernization, even into WWII. If I remember right, the prototype Zero, one of the better fighters of its day, was delivered to the airfield for testing by ox cart (not to be confused with oxcart, a much cooler option). I think a lot of belligerents were like that if they had limited resources. Why replace the ox if you need the engine/metal for a plane or tank? Besides, halftracks ain't gonna gently caress and make baby halftracks.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:04
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Arquinsiel posted:I can't remember the guy's name, but I have a book by some prolific amateur historian on the campaigns to reach the rhine which was basically "gently caress Patton, dude extended the war by six months!" floating around somewhere. I'll try remember to post here again if I find it. I found it amusing that when I read Beevor's book on Normandy, he basically skewered the British for going on with repeated futile attacks around Caen and portrayed Patton as one of the few sensible Allied generals. Which is pretty accurate, but Patton gets a bad rap.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:13
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xthetenth posted:Japan was also really uneven in terms of modernization, even into WWII. If I remember right, the prototype Zero, one of the better fighters of its day, was delivered to the airfield for testing by ox cart (not to be confused with oxcart, a much cooler option). It really just depended on a given nation's access to cheap oil at the time; it's easy to mechanize everything when you're the massive industrial powerhouse that is the United States, less so when you're tiny-rear end Germany. WWII is glamorized as the first truly modern war, but people forget that the German push during Barbarossa was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of draft horses hauling artillery and other supplies. More mechanically reliable than a truck and works as emergency food when you inevitably find yourself encircled at Stalingrad by a million angry Soviets.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:14
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3 posted:It really just depended on a given nation's access to cheap oil at the time; it's easy to mechanize everything when you're the massive industrial powerhouse that is the United States, less so when you're tiny-rear end Germany. WWII is glamorized as the first truly modern war, but people forget that the German push during Barbarossa was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of draft horses hauling artillery and other supplies. More mechanically reliable than a truck and works as emergency food when you inevitably find yourself encircled at Stalingrad by a million angry Soviets. This, and also that the Germans actually outnumbered Soviet forces during the initial invasion. Video games have done a pretty terrible thing for the West's understanding of how that whole thing went down I think.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:26
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PittTheElder posted:This, and also that the Germans actually outnumbered Soviet forces during the initial invasion. Video games have done a pretty terrible thing for the West's understanding of how that whole thing went down I think.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:31
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You're right, and you know, I always forget about the Cold War, aside from the wonderful gift it gave us in the Apollo Program, and space stuff in general.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:36
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I found it amusing that when I read Beevor's book on Normandy, he basically skewered the British for going on with repeated futile attacks around Caen and portrayed Patton as one of the few sensible Allied generals. Which is pretty accurate, but Patton gets a bad rap.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:37
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Everything I've seen in this thread is that Patton was a dangerous insane person barely kept in check by the command structure, without which he'd have just dumped soldiers and materiel into meatgrinder fights until the other guys ran out of ammo.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:50
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Arquinsiel posted:Honestly that doesn't match my understanding of the Caen situation or of Patton as a general at all, but I've got nothing to back up my opinion but a well-worn armchair. If you want to call tying up 70% of the German units in the area so the American armies could go around to the south and outflank them leading into the Falaise Kessel that effectively destroyed the German military on the Western Front and caused a desperate scramble to find enough men to mount any form of defence "futile" then go right ahead, but it's a tough sell. It's been a while since I read it, but Beevor was talking about attacks like Goodwood and such on the operational level. They certainly did tie the Germans down in place, but there were likely better and less costly ways to do it. I'll have to dig the book out of storage to see exactly what he says.
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Jul 28, 2014 20:51
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Arquinsiel posted:Honestly that doesn't match my understanding of the Caen situation or of Patton as a general at all, but I've got nothing to back up my opinion but a well-worn armchair. If you want to call tying up 70% of the German units in the area so the American armies could go around to the south and outflank them leading into the Falaise Kessel that effectively destroyed the German military on the Western Front and caused a desperate scramble to find enough men to mount any form of defence "futile" then go right ahead, but it's a tough sell. Much of that came from geography - the region around Caen was more of a tank country so Germans had to pay special care not to let the Allies exploit that venue and cut off all the German forces west of Caen. The American sector was more clogged by nature, so having basically no reserves available it's understandable they went on cheap in the bocage sector. I think the proper question is, would it have made any difference if Bradley had been in charge of the Caen operation while Montgomery went for Cotentin peninsula? Monty hosed up the initial exploit phase pretty bad, but there's no reason to believe that US forces would have done it any better I think. But at least there'd be a proper theater for tank destroyers to prove themselves against King Tigers!
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Jul 28, 2014 21:01
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I found it amusing that when I read Beevor's book on Normandy, he basically skewered the British for going on with repeated futile attacks around Caen and portrayed Patton as one of the few sensible Allied generals. Which is pretty accurate, but Patton gets a bad rap. To be honest I felt like he had a sort of running anti-British bias throughout the book. I don't know, maybe it's true, and maybe as a Brit himself he just has easier access to research or knows more about British conduct for whatever reason so he's just being truthful and it just happens the Brits really were overcautious fuckups, but like when talking about the effectiveness of fighter-bombers he specifically calls out RAF Typhoon pilots for wildly over-claiming tank kills from their rockets. Which is true, but it's also a common pattern for air crews to overreport damage on ground targets across all nations and types of planes. He also let Monty have it with both barrels too if I remember right but that's a pretty common thing. Maybe "bias" is the wrong word, but he definitely was very critical of the Brits all around it seemed like whereas American forces and generals seemed to get a much more even handed treatment.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:06
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FAUXTON posted:I think a lot of belligerents were like that if they had limited resources. Why replace the ox if you need the engine/metal for a plane or tank? Besides, halftracks ain't gonna gently caress and make baby halftracks.  The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask / Tell > Ask Us About Military History: halftracks ain't gonna gently caress and make baby halftracks
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Jul 28, 2014 21:30
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Pornographic Memory posted:To be honest I felt like he had a sort of running anti-British bias throughout the book. I don't know, maybe it's true, and maybe as a Brit himself he just has easier access to research or knows more about British conduct for whatever reason so he's just being truthful and it just happens the Brits really were overcautious fuckups, but like when talking about the effectiveness of fighter-bombers he specifically calls out RAF Typhoon pilots for wildly over-claiming tank kills from their rockets. Which is true, but it's also a common pattern for air crews to overreport damage on ground targets across all nations and types of planes. He also let Monty have it with both barrels too if I remember right but that's a pretty common thing. Maybe "bias" is the wrong word, but he definitely was very critical of the Brits all around it seemed like whereas American forces and generals seemed to get a much more even handed treatment. I have a suspicion that as a historian Beevor gets totally fed up with Monty repeatedly making grand claims in public about his objectives while privately acting as if his objectives are much more modest, making it really difficult to work out if he really did expect a breakout around Caen and later justified the failure by how it tied down the Germans, or whether his aim all along was to force attrition around Caen but needed to claim he was expecting a substantial breakout for morale purposes. On the issue of whether Patton or Bradley was right about the need for a broad-scale or narrow offensive - that's something I'm wary about having opinions from an armchair about. Conventional wisdom is always 'spearhead, dummy', but then Bradley was in a beachhead situation where he needed space everywhere in order to do anything.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:44
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