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Panzeh posted:While rifled guns were a significant advantage in terms of accuracy, a lot of the accuracy issues involved with smoothbore muskets had to do with low quality weapons, drills that did not allow for aiming, and the lack of sight aperatures on the weapons. Men taking aimed shots even with smoothbore muskets could hit targets with some degree of accuracy. This is why the French use of light infantry worked in the Napoleonic Wars. I wonder if the shift from "volley, then fire forward as fast as possible and watch out for the horses" to "aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire" augmented the increase in effectiveness due to rifled guns.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:24
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Fangz posted:What do you do when your gun misfires in such a situation? bewbies posted:Reloading a modern assault rifle is a really simple process and people have a tough time doing it under fire...I can't imagine how poor the "successful firearm operation rate" wasa amongst conscript armies using weapons that had a 12 step long reload process. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:But without live ammunition because god drat son that shits expensive and the King needs some new bling. Taerkar posted:Wouldn't there also be an issue with inconsistencies in the overall shot as well? The musket ball may be a bit misshapen... Each musketeer gets a pound of powder and a pound of lead a while before they think a fight's going to go down. Very often, you cast that yourself. At the Luetzen battlefield site, archaeologists found partially cast balls, where you could still clearly see the window frame wire they once had been. Edit: On a related note, period specifications always mention how many bullets you usually get per pound of lead, not the measurement of those bullets. This is because the specifications are written by and for the people who get the lead and transport it. Most muskets in this time get twelve bullets to the pound, some are smaller so they get more. Edit 2: KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:"The drills that did not allow for aiming" were a function of the reality of the battlefield. People forget, in general, how god drat smoky a Napoleonic battlefield was. After the first few shots in calm or light winds, your position is so obscured by smoke that you can't see poo poo that's 40 yds away. Why would you train your average line infantryman to take the time to aim his firearm at a specific target? And why would you build smoothbore weapons with tighter tolerances that could lead to increased accuracy at extreme ranges when it will lower your rate of fire? HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 17:08
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HEY GAL posted:Of course...since you probably make it yourself. Yeah, I can definitely see that up until at least the Napoleonic era, but once they started to get more creative with the shots it would probably have to be pre-made. But I suspect that the QA for that sort of stuff was lacking at best.
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Aug 28, 2014 17:54
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Taerkar posted:Yeah, I can definitely see that up until at least the Napoleonic era, but once they started to get more creative with the shots it would probably have to be pre-made. But I suspect that the QA for that sort of stuff was lacking at best.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:00
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Taerkar posted:Yeah, I can definitely see that up until at least the Napoleonic era, but once they started to get more creative with the shots it would probably have to be pre-made. But I suspect that the QA for that sort of stuff was lacking at best. The British Tower of London proofing system was kind of interesting in that it was an early example of distributed component manufacturing that was contracted out separately from the original designer. I'd say on balance it was successful in that it allowed production of additional materiel but it did require a whole lot of QC and a lot of poo poo was delivered substandard or inop, especially in the Napoleonic era.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:09
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HEY GAL posted:Oh no, it's pre-made very shortly after my period. On the other hand the basic practice of hand casting for personal use continued well into the modern period. A lot of American Civil War soldiers carried their own bullet molds, while at the same time the government was issuing pre-manufactured paper cartridges.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:15
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Yeah, I remember seeing bullet molds for soldiers at various Civil War battlefields, ranging from single ball molds to ones that could do well over a dozen at a time.
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Aug 28, 2014 18:19
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I'm not sure if this quite falls into the domain of military history, but I'm not sure where else to ask -- Hegel, you linked, a while back I believe, Theweleit's "Male Fantasies". I purchased this book and loved it, and now I'm wondering if there is anything else like it? I'm interested in, I'm not sure how to phrase it, "soldier identities", as well as analysis of gender, theories and fictions of masculinity, and how these would affect soldiers. I've seen on Amazon Joanna Bourke's "Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War", which sounds a lot like what I'm looking for. Can anyone recommend this work? It's rather expensive to purchase blindly. Is there a better work to start with in this vein?
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Aug 28, 2014 20:49
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shallowj posted:I'm not sure if this quite falls into the domain of military history, but I'm not sure where else to ask -- I haven't read it. But if you're looking for an inexpensive way to learn more about masculinity/the state/the body/weird mental poo poo from the military history perspective, look for things by Peter Gay and George Mosse, which are both good, even if Mosse seems a little beginnery in retrospect (which is unfair--he helped invent this line of thinking). These authors get assigned a lot in college, which means cheap used versions of their books are all over the Internet. If you want something that isn't wholly about gender but is about the perception of one's self through the state in an extremely hosed up context, try The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany. Also, Theweleit's book is in two volumes, so you should make sure you got both! Edit: Read this, and the other books in that trilogy, if you want to get real weird. Edit 2: Possibly you might also like Dialectic of Enlightenment, but it isn't explicitly about military matters. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 21:05
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It's a bit pricier (well, not for a historical monograph, but compared to a your average book) at around $30 but Hagemann & Schüller's "Home / Front: The Military, War, and Gender in 20th. Century Germany" is a pretty good edited volume on exactly those issues from the German perspective. A lot of the more theoretical stuff will hold water for other national cases as well. edit: It's a pretty no-bullshit historical monograph, and one that was edited by and had significant chunks written by Germans. I say this because monographs tend to be dense reading and Germans, especially Germans writing in English, have a certain tendency towards an academic dryness that can be off-putting if you're not really into the subject. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Aug 28, 2014 |
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Aug 28, 2014 21:19
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Cyrano4747 posted:edit: It's a pretty no-bullshit historical monograph, and one that was edited by and had significant chunks written by Germans. I say this because monographs tend to be dense reading and Germans, especially Germans writing in English, have a certain tendency towards an academic dryness that can be off-putting if you're not really into the subject. You people just can't handle our efficient way of writing 
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Aug 28, 2014 21:52
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Hmm, a thought. I've read how WWI and WWII were two of the big things that pushed women's rights in the UK, with the introduction of women into the workforce across a wide range of industries. Now, how did it turn out in the other countries involved in the war? I suppose in the USSR, there would have been a similar effect. But didn't the Nazis purposefully keep women out of it? How did that pan out?
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Aug 28, 2014 22:07
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Fangz posted:But didn't the Nazis purposefully keep women out of it? How did that pan out? Well Nazi Germany isn't around today is it? But yes the nazis specifically went out of their way to keep women out of factories as they thought a woman's duty was to produce more Aryans. This is part of the reason why they resorted to having slave labor make valuable things like V2 rockets that could be sabotaged.
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Aug 28, 2014 22:37
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Well Nazi Germany isn't around today is it? Eh, it's not quite as simple as that. There were tons of organizations for the patriotic Nazi lady and a great number of them involved tasks that could get them surprisingly near combat. Most of the major branches had female auxiliaries who handled non-combat duties, for example. The immediate post-war era also inadvertently had much the same effect on pushing women's rights in Germany as the war did in England & the US. Lots of dead or missing husbands/fathers meant a huge number of single moms who needed to put food on the table and the wide-spread (albeit VERY short-term) gutting of all manner of professions via the denazification process opened up a lot of positions in a hurry. This is actually kind of ironic, because this is the very moment when women in the US, England, etc. were facing the expectation that they would give up that temporary war job and return to their domestic duties now that the men were coming home. Plus, you also have to look at the experiences of WW1 and what things were like in the inter-war years. Weimar Germany, at least in the major cities, was pretty damned progressive by the standards of the time as far as women in the work place and higher education went. During World War 1 women became immensely important in domestic politics because of the jobs they were taking in the factories and their willingness to protest or strike over the food shortages. Women in Berlin in particular were a non-stop pain in the Kaiser's rear end to the point where the civil unrest that they caused in Berlin was one of the major contributing factors to the government falling apart the way it did in late 1918. Belinda Davis has a great book about women's political role in WW1 Berlin - "Home Fires Burning." The total disaster that was the Imperial German handling of all those protesting women was a huuuuuuuuge part of why the Nazis never put their economy on a true war footing and did everything possible to keep women out of the factories.
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Aug 28, 2014 22:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's a bit pricier (well, not for a historical monograph, but compared to a your average book) at around $30 but Hagemann & Schüller's "Home / Front: The Military, War, and Gender in 20th. Century Germany" is a pretty good edited volume on exactly those issues from the German perspective. A lot of the more theoretical stuff will hold water for other national cases as well. I suddenly feel a whole lot better about randomly picking this up in Henry Pordes for about a fiver a couple of months ago! They had a whole stack of them, too. If they've still got them at that price, it probably works out cheaper to get someone to pick it up there and have it sent over... (Read the first quarter, put it aside to read something else, never got back to it. First one was pretty interesting, though, and skimming it again there's plenty of stuff that's directly relevant.)
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Aug 28, 2014 23:03
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Fangz posted:Hmm, a thought. I've read how WWI and WWII were two of the big things that pushed women's rights in the UK, with the introduction of women into the workforce across a wide range of industries. Now, how did it turn out in the other countries involved in the war? The USSR also encouraged re-population, handing out significant subsidies to mothers, as well as awards. Motherhood Medals for 5 and 6, Glorious Mother orders for 7-9, and finally capping out at Heroic Mother for 10+.
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Aug 28, 2014 23:07
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The Nazi assistant air service (basically pilots who flew aircraft from factories to the frontline units so that the actual air force troops could focus on fighting) employed women, and it definitely involved getting in harm's way. One of its officers, Beate Uhse, was a very skilled pilot who flew Stukas, Fw190s, Me-109s and even Me-262s, frequently encountering Allied fighters and getting away without a scratch. After the war, when as a former Luftwaffe pilot she wasn't allowed to fly, she took a career in sexual education and eventually founded the world's first sex shop.
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Aug 28, 2014 23:09
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Tevery Best posted:The Nazi assistant air service (basically pilots who flew aircraft from factories to the frontline units so that the actual air force troops could focus on fighting) employed women, and it definitely involved getting in harm's way. One of its officers, Beate Uhse, was a very skilled pilot who flew Stukas, Fw190s, Me-109s and even Me-262s, frequently encountering Allied fighters and getting away without a scratch. After the war, when as a former Luftwaffe pilot she wasn't allowed to fly, she took a career in sexual education and eventually founded the world's first sex shop. Oh god there's a vibrator joke in here somewhere, but it just isn't coming.
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Aug 28, 2014 23:12
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I think that means you're using it wrong, toots. I'm sorry.
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Aug 28, 2014 23:23
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Tevery Best posted:The Nazi assistant air service (basically pilots who flew aircraft from factories to the frontline units so that the actual air force troops could focus on fighting) employed women, and it definitely involved getting in harm's way. One of its officers, Beate Uhse, was a very skilled pilot who flew Stukas, Fw190s, Me-109s and even Me-262s, frequently encountering Allied fighters and getting away without a scratch. After the war, when as a former Luftwaffe pilot she wasn't allowed to fly, she took a career in sexual education and eventually founded the world's first sex shop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Shilling%27s_orifice
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Aug 28, 2014 23:31
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HEY GAL posted:Oh god there's a vibrator joke in here somewhere, but it just isn't coming. Joystick enthusiast.
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Aug 29, 2014 00:39
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100 Years Ago: In command of the French Army, General Joffre has finally found somewhere he thinks he can make a stand, on the line of the River Oise. In order to do this he needs to buy some more time to get his forces into position, so the 5th Army is ordered to launch a delaying action on the German 2nd Army, which has just arrived in St Quentin in search of the BEF. However, bad luck strikes; a French officer has been captured the previous day while in possession of a full and detailed set of orders for tomorrow's offensive, and German intelligence is not slow to act on information received. Around St Quentin itself, the French make very little headway and take serious casualties; however, units north of Guise meet with more success and force the Germans in that area to fall back to the north. Fighting goes on all day, and again the advance is stopped while they deal with the latest speed-bump. Job done, Joffre orders the retreat over the Oise and destruction of the bridges. The Germans attempt a half-arsed pursuit in the morning, but the Gauls successfully disengage and are allowed to go. Again, more time has been bought, and the BEF also benefits from an opportunity to take a short rest before continuing southwards. Now Joffre tries to persuade John French to join him in his stand at the northern reaches of the Oise. French flatly refuses him. The gap between II Corps and the 5th Army has almost been closed, but they're still out of touch with I Corps by some seven miles. All the men are still completely knackered, hungry and badly supplied. He's also well aware that his force has spent the past week frantically trying to catch up with the 5th Army, and he doesn't trust that General Lanrezac will not leave him in the same position again when things get hairy (French and Lanrezac have had personality clashes during the last ten days). So he insists that he must be allowed to withdraw the BEF completely from the fighting for rest, resupply and reinforcement. (Whether this all was a reasonable reaction to the situation is, of course, a Matter of Some Debate, but hopefully it isn't totally inexplicable.) With some success, Joffre is rapidly scraping together a 6th Army to reinforce his left flank and, if necessary, replace the BEF in the line. However, there's now no way it can be done at the upper Oise in time to give any kind of battle. The BEF has just spent a week retreating to stay in touch with the French Army; and now Joffre's only option is to retreat his army to keep in touch with the BEF. He desperately needs somewhere else to turn and give battle, but he's starting to run out of country and natural features to do it in. The Oise runs almost due south-west from St Quentin, until it becomes a tributary of a larger river at a small town you've probably never heard of, called Conflans-Sainte-Honorine. You probably have heard of the river that the Oise flows into, though. It's called the Seine. Conflans is about 25 miles west of the Champs-Elysees.
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Aug 29, 2014 10:46
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Does anyone have any good words to say for John French? The impression I have of him seems overwhelmingly negative.
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Aug 29, 2014 12:08
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Fangz posted:Does anyone have any good words to say for John French? The impression I have of him seems overwhelmingly negative. Look back about ten pages. We had a discussion about him not too long ago.
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Aug 29, 2014 14:00
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Okay, here's another thought about French and his reputation. There are two major perspectives on British generalship in the war: are they the lion-muzzling donkeys of legend, or good men trying to do the best they could in a completely unprecedented and unforseeable situation? Here's the thing. It actually benefits both sides of this argument to paint French in as poor a light as possible. Sure, if you're a "donkeys" person, the logic here is obvious. French was the first Chief, French was a donkey, no surprises there because every man jack of them from Allenby to Wilson were donkeys. But why does the "good men" side also benefit from bagging on French? Well, because there were two Chiefs. If you're on the "good men" side, you probably got there via the thought that Haig (and his now-legendary drinks cabinet) is far too harshly treated by the popular imagination (which is an intellectually defensible position), and the tendency becomes to start digging trenches to defend Haig, to remind people that after all, he was in charge when the war was won. It's kind of hard to argue the "good men" viewpoint without being able to paint Haig as a good man, and if you can paint the winning Chief as a good man, everyone under him looks better by association. If you don't, everyone under him looks like a dickhead for following his orders and refusing to cooperate in the subsequent plots to replace him, and you have to keep explaining away why they didn't. Haig now becomes the Verdun of the argument; it would be politically unacceptable to lose him, so no matter what the cost, you have to keep defending him. One of the obvious ways to do this is to make him look better by comparison to others. Who's the most obvious person to compare him to? His predecessor as Chief. In 1915, Haig pulled a political power play after the Battle of Loos to get French sacked and himself installed in the big chair. This is inarguable. Haig openly admits to nobbling his superior in his letters and diaries. It now becomes imperative to make French look like a bungler who Haig was duty-bound to remove, for the good of the BEF, the country and the Empire. If this isn't the case, Haig now looks like a grasping, ambitious careerist who callously and dishonourably betrayed a good man for his own personal ends. So you blame French for the failure at Loos, and then for the rest of 1915, and it only strengthens your case if you start to portray 1914 through that same lens. It benefits nobody to stand up for French, although from my perspective he's only slightly less defensible than Haig, and so nobody ever makes a case for him in the way that people line up to defend Haig.
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Aug 29, 2014 14:10
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FAUXTON posted:I wonder if the shift from "volley, then fire forward as fast as possible and watch out for the horses" to "aim, fire, aim, fire, aim, fire" augmented the increase in effectiveness due to rifled guns. In the mid to late 1800's firearm innovations really started piling up fast. You went from muskets being the common tool to the rifle, repeating firearms and the cartridge and smokeless powder all suddenly becoming things in relatively (In the grand scheme of things) short order. Tactics were very fluid around this time. But yeah the end of volley was largely due to the rifle.
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Aug 29, 2014 14:11
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I think it was more due to repeating arms and the invention of smokeless powder than rifling. Volley fire was still used in Crimea, the ACW and the Franco-Prussia war to good effect. Keep in mind that it isn't unaimed fire, just coordinated. e:clarity
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Aug 29, 2014 14:14
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The civil war is where you really see a lot of these tactical changes taking place. You see early trenches and field fortifications starting to crop up and some of the most iconic battles and blunders involve less "Standing in lines to shoot eachother" and more "Well they got onto that small ridge, we have to charge up there at a full run because we'd get slaughtered if we marched in". Yeah you still see some of the old line of thinking, but you also see a lot of generals noticing that that stuff largely gets you a big casualty bill. I'd say rifles phased out the volley and repeating rifles are what killed marching and fighting in organized blocks.
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Aug 29, 2014 14:24
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Rhymenoserous posted:I'd say rifles phased out the volley and repeating rifles are what killed marching and fighting in organized blocks. I'd say it's more crucially the combination of smokeless ammunition and bolt-action mechanisms that made the volley redundant and explosive-shell artillery killed marching about in column, while it took until WW1 for machine-guns to kill the attack in-line.
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Aug 29, 2014 14:46
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Thank you Cyrano & Hegel for the recommendations! I have one other question: Hegel, you've mentioned that executioners were viewed with superstition, and had magical powers attributed to them, and you linked to "Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany". Would military executioners suffer from the same persecution/discrimination as civil executioners? Were they one & the same? Who *became* a military executioner in the early modern period, did they simply conscript the local hangman? Also, would the hangman take part in battles?
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Aug 29, 2014 15:08
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Alchenar posted:I'd say it's more crucially the combination of smokeless ammunition and bolt-action mechanisms that made the volley redundant and explosive-shell artillery killed marching about in column, while it took until WW1 for machine-guns to kill the attack in-line. The last gasp of volley fire was as an area-denial technique before a mix of radio communications with the rear and man-portable mortars up front made tactically on-demand artillery a thing, and before LMGs became wide spread for basic light-weight suppression. Right up until WW1 you see volley sights on a few countries' guns (most famously the British SMLE) that were graduated out to multiple kilometers. Hell, the defaut "roller-coaster" style rear sight on the G98 goes out to something like 3500 meters. The basic idea was that infantry formations operating in open terrain could fire by volley at other formations that were far beyond the range that a human could effectively aim at a point target, but well within the killing radius of a rifle cartridge. You're not going to hit much of anything, but a company of guys firing en masse against another company of guys might clip one or two and - more importantly - deny them easy, unbothered access to wherever they are for whatever reason they're there. Good for denying easy road access to moving troops, etc. The last major war that I can think of where this was a real issue was the Boer War, as S. Africa had ideal terrain for those kind of tactics in a lot of places and both sides ran pretty light on heavy weapons. One of the big reasons that the brits were trying to replace the Enfield right before WW1 broke out was the disappointing performance at extreme range of the .303 Brit cartridge compared to the mix of 8mm and 7mm Mauser that the Boers were using.
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Aug 29, 2014 15:11
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Is there an accepted consensus regarding Falkenhayn's plan for Verdun as either a deliberate battle for attrition, or just the Germans continually throwing good money after bad?
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Aug 29, 2014 15:19
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Rhymenoserous posted:The civil war is where you really see a lot of these tactical changes taking place. You see early trenches and field fortifications starting to crop up and some of the most iconic battles and blunders involve less "Standing in lines to shoot eachother" and more "Well they got onto that small ridge, we have to charge up there at a full run because we'd get slaughtered if we marched in". Yeah you still see some of the old line of thinking, but you also see a lot of generals noticing that that stuff largely gets you a big casualty bill. Trenches and field fortifications were common well before the ACW. The only thing really different from an infantry company perspective in the ACW versus the Napoleonic Wars was the range of engagement.
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Aug 29, 2014 15:24
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shallowj posted:Would military executioners suffer from the same persecution/discrimination as civil executioners? Were they one & the same? Who *became* a military executioner in the early modern period, did they simply conscript the local hangman? Also, would the hangman take part in battles? Landsknecht Fendels had executioners, but I don't think they were "dishonorable," since to be a soldier is to be honorable almost by definition. (Landskncht Fendels also used to punish some crimes by having the entire Fendel stand in two rows, pikes charged, and make the condemned run a gauntlet. Communal life, communal punishment.) By my period, I'm no longer sure whether or not you'd contract out to the nearest executioner. I've read trials where the accused ends up being sentenced to death and they mention an executioner but not where he comes from or who he is. Each regiment and company does have legal officials though--there is a regimental provost, a company provost, a regimental schultheiss, and a company schultheiss (those are the guys who write most of the documents I read). One of the Fendrich's duties is to administer minor justice among the common soldiers. These people have more legal officials per capita than most civilians. And these regiments are independent legal entities; like a number of other corporate bodies such as universities they can try their own members, but unlike many of them they even have the right of blood-court, or "high justice," which means they can sentence people to death. (Since this is an important mark of sovereignty in the Empire, you could make the argument that mercenary regiments are, in certain ways, state-like. They are at least as state-like as many other political entities within the Empire.) I have never seen an executioner listed on a muster roll, but I haven't seen very many and that's at the company level. I remember seeing a list of regimental level officers and officials in a book I do not currently have access to, but I don't remember the exact breakdown. The provost detains criminals, helps with the trial, and administers corporal punishment including torture. Does he execute people? I don't know, but he's "honorable." I do know, however, that the provost's assistant, the "steckenknecht," is "dishonorable"--his name goes at the very end of the muster roll, squeezed into a margin usually, and if he wants to become a soldier there's a little ritual he has to go through before he's suitable.
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Aug 29, 2014 15:56
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Trenches and field fortifications were common well before the ACW. The only thing really different from an infantry company perspective in the ACW versus the Napoleonic Wars was the range of engagement. Didn't Crimea also have trenches?
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Aug 29, 2014 16:04
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Taerkar posted:Didn't Crimea also have trenches?
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Aug 29, 2014 16:07
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Caesar's armies likely built trenches. They sure as hell built walls and earthworks. Regarding rifles- it's funny that needleguns were around for 15 years or so prior to the ACW and America even investigated their issuance in the war against the confederacy, but determined it was too complicated for field use. Compared to Springfield muskets, that is 
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Aug 29, 2014 16:16
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FAUXTON posted:Caesar's armies likely built trenches. They sure as hell built walls and earthworks. Wasn't it the same for early versions of breach loaded artillery? I'd like to read about how smoothbore field pieces evolved into the much more deadly WW1 howitzers either way. That'd be interesting.
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Aug 29, 2014 16:29
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^Artillery I'm not sure, I know the Whitworth popped up but was expensive and the ammo wasn't exactly well likedFAUXTON posted:Caesar's armies likely built trenches. They sure as hell built walls and earthworks. Well, they were, among other deficiencies such as gas leaks and problems with the cartridges themselves, plus that old chestnut about the upper officers thinking men would waste ammo when they could make faster, easier reloads. Loading a muzzleloader teaches you respect and to value your shot  Repeaters did see combat though and showed their value such as the Berdan Sharpshooters and Wilder's Lightning Rifles. But the idea at the time was repeaters were expensive to make, expensive to supply, and a waste of ammo. SocketWrench fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Aug 29, 2014 |
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Aug 29, 2014 16:32
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SeanBeansShako posted:Wasn't it the same for early versions of breach loaded artillery? The chamber looks like a beer mug and you load it, then chock it in. If you prep enough of them the gun is super fast. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breech-loading_swivel_gun
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Aug 29, 2014 16:43
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