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PittTheElder posted:It must. Although I imagine you have to be a little bit crazy to begin with to try and carry on the fight for more than a decade. It must have been heartbreaking for Onoda to learn that he had friends that had died literally for nothing, and perhaps killed for nothing as well.
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Jul 29, 2014 01:30
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Are there any good books on the Malta campaign.
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Jul 29, 2014 02:01
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StashAugustine posted:How good were the Romans at it? They were pretty great about throwing up forts for defenses. In terms of the camps, they dug latrine pits at every camp, most likely downwind and by the walls, and any slovenly soldier would be punished. Romans in general were far more cleanly then various other societies before and after them (obviously others matched or surpassed them). The major points are the baths they built in any city they could, and their adherence to cleanliness in general. Socially they looked down on unwashed and smelly barbarians (literally everyone not Roman/Greek/a few other select groups) and took pride in being clean and physically fit. Major Roman cities had running water where the public relived themselves, complete with little channel by your feet to dip a sponge in to wipe yourself, and then rinse it off. They had no idea what germ theory was, but they noticed doctors who kept everything clean tended to have patients live longer. They were not sterilizing things, but they at least knew to wash their hands and equipment at some point, and tried to keep clean surroundings. Roman medicine was not surpassed in many areas until the 1500's and 1800's. In term of fixing wounded people, they got about as good as you could at it without germ theory and things like antibiotics. Legionaries and gladiators got excellent wound care, and skeletons have been found with tons of healed injuries, like stuff that went down to the bone. You were still screwed if you got cancer or various other diseases though.
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Jul 29, 2014 02:08
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Anybody read Battle of Surigao Strait by Anthony Tully?
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Jul 29, 2014 03:57
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Someone in GBS posted a link to a bunch of (American) WWI music https://soundcloud.com/#bobertfishbone/sets/the-yanks-are-at-it-again
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Jul 29, 2014 05:53
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Raskolnikov38 posted:He was a boob though. That may be, but I tire of hearing "that's why it didn't work, the end". I mean it was an edgy plan that asked a bit too much, it's just there were a number of issues the allies didn't take into account or show much concern over. For starters the time taken to build up for it gave the Germans some time to reorganize a bit.
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Jul 29, 2014 08:51
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Frostwerks posted:Are there any good books on the Malta campaign. Which part? Operation Pedestal is a bit of a hobby horse of mine so I can give you a long reading list. For general stuff, I'd say James Holland's Fortress Malta and Richard Woodman's Malta Convoys are a good place to start. If I'm remembering the titles correctly.
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Jul 29, 2014 10:02
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Can anyone recommend any good books about the condottieri of Renaissance Italy? General overview of how they tended to operate and the like?
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Jul 29, 2014 12:25
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brozozo posted:Anybody read Battle of Surigao Strait by Anthony Tully? It's been several years since I read it, but I recall it being something if a disappointment compared to Shattered Sword. That said, if you are interested in that particular battle it's probably your best choice.
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Jul 29, 2014 15:17
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Tomn posted:Can anyone recommend any good books about the condottieri of Renaissance Italy? General overview of how they tended to operate and the like? War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450-1620 Edit: Do not read Machavelli on this, dude was a huge nerd with a hardon for the citizen armies of the classics and he belonged to a city state that was really bad at logistics and utilization of mercenaries anyway. His opinions are bad and when he tried to lead a little militia at one point he got spanked. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 16:16
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Going back a few posts but I would like to reiterate that the A6M was prohibitively the best fighter aircraft in the world from 1940 to mid 1943 and was an absolutely astonishing technical achievement.
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Jul 29, 2014 16:26
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I stumbled upon a pretty good docu on 'The Russian War'; the mutiny of Georgian soldiers in German service stationed at the Dutch island of Texel at the end of WWII. It's well worth a watch if you are into the little knowns conflicts of the war. http://vimeo.com/82041858 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_uprising_on_Texel
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Jul 29, 2014 18:53
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PittTheElder posted:It must. Although I imagine you have to be a little bit crazy to begin with to try and carry on the fight for more than a decade. It must have been heartbreaking for Onoda to learn that he had friends that had died literally for nothing, and perhaps killed for nothing as well. I read onoodas book a few years ago and if I recall correctly he had his rifle, a few grenades, and some ammunition. Mostly I think his and the other holdouts' priority was subsistence. Some times they would burn rice stores and the police would shoot at them but they weren't setting up ambushes or conducting raids.
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Jul 29, 2014 19:06
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Shimrra Jamaane posted: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. I know this is from a few pages ago, before Patton/Monty chat, but I've been a bit indisposed the last few days. To answer your question, absolutely. It caused a giant controversy at the time, and he spent basically the rest of his academic career defending it and writing other books with the basic goal of illustrating all the ways that the Imperial German military establishment had some pretty concrete goals re: expanding German power and influence in Europe and abroad. The idea that the Germans really did have an aggressive foreign policy and really did own a substantial chunk of the blame for WW1 was explosive as all hell. Now, like every other historical interpretation you will find people who disagree with it and write counter to it. There have been responses to it over the years but none have really managed to discredit it. At best you could say that our understanding of the pre-war and early-war aims of the Hollweg government has been significantly nuanced in the decades afterwards and there remain pockets that remain committed - usually for political reasons - to a narrative that places Germany as an unfortunate victim of early 20th century history rather than an active agent in that history. A lot of his later work also had very real implications for how we understand the policies and goals of the Third Reich, as a number of the documents he uncovered and the interior discussions he revealed showed an abundance of policies and aspirations that very closely mirrored what happened 30 years later. This is problematic for people who argue that the Nazi period represented a distinct break in "normal" German history, in that it shows clear institutional and governmental connections between Nazi and Imperial policies and aims. There are more recent historians who have built upon this significantly - see Liulevicius and Hull as a pair of particularly notable examples of that. One thing I will add is that you can't always assess a historical work simply by its age. Some ideas become dated or shown to be flat out wrong months after publication, others become classics that loom over the historiography for decades upon decades. History isn't a field like science or mathematics where newer research generally renders older understandings obsolete, but an ongoing discussion where ever-imperfect understandings are nuanced and improved upon, but ultimately a perfect consensus isn't really possible. It's an interpretive field, and this is both what makes it so challenging but also so exciting. edit: Since I mentioned them, and since we're kicking off the WW1 centennial stuff, Hull's Absolute Destruction is a really good read on the development of and state of the German military before WW1 and how it affected certain policies during the war, and Liulevicius's War Land on the Eastern Fron is probably the best book on German occupation policy and long-term goals in the east during WW1 that I've read. Admittedly that's a pretty goddamned small field, but it's one that really needs to be addressed more thoroughly. We've concentrated on the western front for way, way too long. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 19:18
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space pope posted:I read onoodas book a few years ago and if I recall correctly he had his rifle, a few grenades, and some ammunition. Mostly I think his and the other holdouts' priority was subsistence. Some times they would burn rice stores and the police would shoot at them but they weren't setting up ambushes or conducting raids.
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Jul 29, 2014 19:22
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: Since I mentioned them, and since we're kicking off the WW1 centennial stuff, Hull's Absolute Destruction is a really good read on the development of and state of the German military before WW1 and how it affected certain policies during the war, and Liulevicius's War Land on the Eastern Fron is probably the best book on German occupation policy and long-term goals in the east during WW1 that I've read. Admittedly that's a pretty goddamned small field, but it's one that really needs to be addressed more thoroughly. We've concentrated on the western front for way, way too long. I'd also like to throw in a recommendation for Norman Stone's The Eastern Front 1914-1917. He puts the Eastern Front under a microscope, debunks a lot of myths about the Russian Army (less about materiel deficiency, more about administrative incompetence) and fills in many gaps that's left by the traditional discussion of Tannenberg skipping right ahead to the Brusilov Offensive. The chapters on the Austro-Hungarian Army are especially delicious for how goddamn dysfunctional it was, along with Stavka and the almost class-based divide of the Russian front/army commands.
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Jul 29, 2014 19:36
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Oh, I almost forgot. I'm not sure why someone thought Fischer's Germany's War Aims in the first world war was out of print. There's an amazon link for you, that sucker's one of those books that's pretty much in perpetual print. It's such a staple of modern German historiography that I doubt it will ever go out of print as long as there remain grad students to assign it to. It's also a damned good read.
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Jul 29, 2014 19:43
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bewbies posted:Going back a few posts but I would like to reiterate that the A6M was prohibitively the best fighter aircraft in the world from 1940 to mid 1943 and was an absolutely astonishing technical achievement. I would agree with that fact, with a caveat. The Zero was a fantastic fighter and had excellent firepower, amazing endurance and was possibly the best maneuvering fighter of the war... But at the expense of any sort of protection whatsoever. They had an unfortunate habit of turning into raging fireballs when hit incendiary ammo due to the lack of self-sealing tanks. On the flip side, there are stories of Zeroes literally emptying their guns into defenseless F4Fs and still not taking them down. The Zero was very much a pilot's fighter, but without much thought given to the pilot himself.
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Jul 29, 2014 19:56
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And given Japan's inability to replace pilot losses, that seems to have been a big sacrifice indeed.
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Jul 29, 2014 19:58
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Also terrible radios/no radios at all. In fact I suspect there's studies out there showing how in WW2 how many radios you had was a strong indicator of how well your army would perform.
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Jul 29, 2014 20:02
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Alchenar posted:Also terrible radios/no radios at all. How well off was the WWII Red Army for radios? I think I read somewhere that even when they were going on the attack with Bagration and the like, they were always short and reliant on lend-lease for those.
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Jul 29, 2014 20:07
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MA-Horus posted:I would agree with that fact, with a caveat. The Zero was a fantastic fighter and had excellent firepower, amazing endurance and was possibly the best maneuvering fighter of the war... American fighters were much tougher, in general, and were able to absorb a lot of battle damage. Still, if you put an equal pilot in an equal fight between an F4F and an A6M2, the guy in the Grumman is gonna die a lot. What other measures of superiority do you suggest? There's Saburo Sakai's story about emptying his 7.7mms in to a F4F, which seems to be the genesis of the "empties guns in to defenceless F4F which does not go down" story. Saburo Sakai posted:I had full confidence in my ability to destroy the Grumman and decided to finish off the enemy fighter with only my 7.7 mm machine guns. I turned the 20 mm cannon switch to the 'off' position and closed in. For some strange reason, even after I had poured about five or six hundred rounds of ammunition directly into the Grumman, the airplane did not fall, but kept on flying. However, he deliberately didn't use his 20mm cannons, which was kind of stupid. 120 rounds of Type 99 would probably have done the job.
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Jul 29, 2014 20:26
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MA-Horus posted:I would agree with that fact, with a caveat. The Zero was a fantastic fighter and had excellent firepower, amazing endurance and was possibly the best maneuvering fighter of the war... I would argue that being unable to shoot down a defenseless Wildcat meant that the Zero was, in fact, undergunned. Two 20mm cannons are nice, but they had very limited ammunition available, and the two 7.7 mm MGs just weren't enough for a fighter of 1942. Of course, the primary IJAAF fighter at the start of the war had only two 7.7mm MGs, so there is that. I think overall the Wildcat was the better fighter.
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Jul 29, 2014 20:30
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ArchangeI posted:I would argue that being unable to shoot down a defenseless Wildcat meant that the Zero was, in fact, undergunned. Two 20mm cannons are nice, but they had very limited ammunition available, and the two 7.7 mm MGs just weren't enough for a fighter of 1942. Of course, the primary IJAAF fighter at the start of the war had only two 7.7mm MGs, so there is that. I think overall the Wildcat was the better fighter. The Type 99 cannon was a fantastic weapon (the best of its type in 1940 and still potent in 1945) and 60 rounds was a pretty standard ammo loadout for the time period. The Zero's armament was better than the 109E, Spitfire I, Hurricane I, any Russian plane, and arguably any American plane depending on what kind of target you were engaging. As for the Wildcat, if the only thing that you can do is to fly around in a lazy circle or weave because your opponent has an advantage in every respect outside of your aircraft's ability to take punishment you've got a serious problem.
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Jul 29, 2014 20:44
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^^^ in fairness, the ME-109E-3 was the primary production version, and it was armed almost identically to the A6M2.ArchangeI posted:I would argue that being unable to shoot down a defenseless Wildcat meant that the Zero was, in fact, undergunned. Two 20mm cannons are nice, but they had very limited ammunition available, and the two 7.7 mm MGs just weren't enough for a fighter of 1942. Of course, the primary IJAAF fighter at the start of the war had only two 7.7mm MGs, so there is that. I think overall the Wildcat was the better fighter. One time, when one guy CHOSE to only use the 7.7s, he couldn't shoot down a Wildcat. As to the Wildcat being a better fighter, zero people in the entire pilot community in the Pacific theater in 1942 would have agreed with you. There were certain individual things that the Wildcat could do better, but if you had given the USN and USMC F4F pilots the opportunity to swap for A6M2s, they would have. Pretty much every 20mm cannon of the early-mid war was limited to 60 rpg. The HS.404, the MG FF were both limited to drums of 60. KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 20:49 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 20:44
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It's not like fighter planes had HP or something which is depleted by being shot at. If a Wildcat is being riddled with hundreds of 7.7mm bullets, whether it goes down or not is mainly a matter of luck. A single incident can't really be extrapolated into anything in particular. I mean, the rest of the quote is: quote:I had full confidence in my ability to destroy the Grumman and decided to finish off the enemy fighter with only my 7.7 mm machine guns. I turned the 20 mm cannon switch to the 'off' position and closed in. For some strange reason, even after I had poured about five or six hundred rounds of ammunition directly into the Grumman, the airplane did not fall, but kept on flying. I thought this very odd — it had never happened before — and closed the distance between the two airplanes until I could almost reach out and touch the Grumman. To my surprise, the Grumman's rudder and tail were torn to shreds, looking like an old torn piece of rag. With his plane in such condition, no wonder the pilot was unable to continue fighting! A Zero which had taken that many bullets would have been a ball of fire by now. The ruggedness of the Wildcat was, in this anecdote, significant in that it did not catch fire. But the bullets did succeed in inflicting catastrophic damage to the plane. The fact that the plane was merely disabled, instead of destroyed would seem to be mainly a matter of good fortune. And as the pilot says, this was an unusual instance. Fangz fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 20:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:I know this is from a few pages ago, before Patton/Monty chat, but I've been a bit indisposed the last few days. Is Liulevicius's The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present good too?
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Jul 29, 2014 20:58
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Most aircraft actually had rather low ammo counts. It's one of the reasons why the US stuck with .50 cals for so long
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Jul 29, 2014 20:59
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A WWII fighter can take a staggering amount of damage and keep flying, it's not about the number of bullets but whether they hit something vital. Shooting a few hundred 7.7 mm bullets at a plane gives you a great chance of hitting the pilot, or severing an important line, or wrecking the engine. Obviously with fewer bullets there's a lower chance that this happens, but if a lucky shot hits the F4F's control system it doesn't matter if that was the 1st shot or the 500th. Of course, 20mm shells are a different monster, they can do enough damage to tear a wing off, and produce shrapnel that is much more likely to destroy crucial parts of the aircraft.
Chamale fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 21:04
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Is Liulevicius's The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present good too? Don't know, haven't read it myself. That said, he's a solid historian who does good work so I would give it the benefit of the doubt.
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Jul 29, 2014 21:08
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:A WWII fighter can take a staggering amount of damage and keep flying, it's not about the number of bullets but whether they hit something vital. Shooting a few hundred 7.7 mm bullets at a plane gives you a great chance of hitting the pilot, or severing an important line, or wrecking the engine. Obviously with fewer bullets there's a lower chance that this happens, but if a lucky shot hits the F4F's control system it doesn't matter if that way the 1st shot or the 500th. Of course, 20mm shells are a different monster, they can do enough damage to tear a wing off, and produce shrapnel that is much more likely to destroy crucial parts of the aircraft. Reading into it, in fact, it seems like investigation of the wreck of that Wildcat shows that the reason this plane in particular was 'defenceless' was because a lucky 7.7mm bullet managed to damage the firing mechanism of the Wildcat's machine guns.
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Jul 29, 2014 21:12
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Davin Valkri posted:How well off was the WWII Red Army for radios? I think I read somewhere that even when they were going on the attack with Bagration and the like, they were always short and reliant on lend-lease for those. It wasn't "short" on radios as much as radios weren't a priority. Having radios for platoon commanders and up, for instance (so in practice, ~40% of tanks produced) was seen as a perfectly fine thing to have. Radio production ramped up, but having a radio on rank and file tanks was a luxury until Kursk, according to veteran interviews. I have no hard stats on radio equipment aside from 1941, though.
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Jul 29, 2014 22:51
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Saburo Sakai posted:Saburo Sakai  I remember reading his book in highschool and having it completely change my view of WWII and how the people fighting for the Axis were generally ordinary blokes too.Although it was kinda weird for me at the time how he married his second cousin or something. Its kinda shocking how he survived the entire war. I'd watch the hell out of a movie based on him.
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Jul 29, 2014 23:15
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I just heard that America's nuclear silos still use old fashioned floppies, and I was wondering how often military systems are normally upgraded?
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Jul 30, 2014 01:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:I just heard that America's nuclear silos still use old fashioned floppies, and I was wondering how often military systems are normally upgraded? I too watched Last Week Tonight! The short answer is that military procurement is a giant clusterfuck because of the various conflicting political, military, and technological considerations. It's not as easy as "there is this awesome off-the-shelf civilian technology X, we should use it" as you have to be careful that your system is secure, reliable, and idiot proof. With something as hyper-sensitive as the software for an ICBM silo there are all sorts of crazy security concerns, and upgrades are going to be made very conservatively indeed. And really, at the end of the day, what does it matter if the launch codes are fed in via a 5.25 floppy instead of a USB as long as the missile goes up only when you tell it to and comes down where you want it to? With things that see use in less forgiving environments than relatively stable and cushy silo interiors (say, ships, airplanes, crap carried by infantrymen god knows where) there are also significant durability/reliability concerns. This goes for both the item itself, plus any associated software if we're talking about something that uses a computer at all. Then you also get into the logistical end of things. Does the new system need a new or different diagnostic tool or software to maintain and repair it? How much re-training is required of the crews after the upgrade? Etc. I think a lot of people would be surprised how relatively primitive military computing can be compared to what's out there on the cutting edge of the civilian market. THen again, if your new iPhone locks up and dies it's an inconvenience at worst, not a life or death situation. this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of this issue, of course, and I'm sure some people with more specific familiarity with it will be along soon to correct my over-simplifications.
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Jul 30, 2014 01:27
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SlothfulCobra posted:I just heard that America's nuclear silos still use old fashioned floppies, and I was wondering how often military systems are normally upgraded? I'm at this very moment working on a drop-in replacement for a military GPS receiver that's old enough to not use IEEE754 format numbers (standardized in 1985), so I'm guessing not very often.
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Jul 30, 2014 01:39
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The Space Shuttle (I know it retired a few years ago) used computer systems from the 80s. God that gloried aero-glider was a piece of poo poo.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:09
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The Space Shuttle (I know it retired a few years ago) used computer systems from the 80s. Intel 80386's, which isn't necessarily bad thing, as the older circuitry is less likely to get faults caused by cosmic rays while in orbit.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:32
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:The Space Shuttle (I know it retired a few years ago) used computer systems from the 80s. Ah, but those computers, and the software that ran them were known for being rock-solid reliable. I think the Shuttle operating software won several software industry awards for basically being perfectly bug-free. As for fighter chat, most air forces learned relatively early that low-caliber MGs were essentially useless. German bombers would regularly return to base with hundreds of .303 holes in them, and the crew. The response was to accelerate work on fitting the 20mm Hispano suiza cannons to the Spitfire. Or, in the case of the Hurricane, adding four more guns, for a total of 12 .303s. By war's end you had the ME262 with 4 30mm cannons that could drop a b17 with a single hit, and the F86 sabre kept 8 .50s well into the 50s as primary armament. Oh, and in what area could the F4F outperform the Zero? The dive. The wildcat hit the deck faster than Miley at the MTV Music awards.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:43
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MA-Horus posted:Ah, but those computers, and the software that ran them were known for being rock-solid reliable. I think the Shuttle operating software won several software industry awards for basically being perfectly bug-free. Yeah it was extremely well-built. As I understand it, they eventually replaced some of the control surfaces with touch-screen displays (for maintenance reasons, I believe) but they didn't want to change any of the underlying systems so the LCDs were just digital depictions of the buttons and toggles they replaced.
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Jul 30, 2014 02:47
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