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  • Locked thread
Slim Jim Pickens
Jan 16, 2012

Slavvy posted:

What was the state of naval warfare during the crusader era? In my mind I picture the galleys and triremes and such from ancient times, and then a massive blank for a dozen centuries, and then suddenly it's the age of sail. What did the ships look like? What was combat like? Did anyone on the receiving end of a crusade ever try to oppose them at sea (if this was even possible)?

The Mediterranean powers used good ol' galleys and oars until the 18th century. During the crusades, the Byzantines and Venetians were top dog and they arranged deals to supply crusaders by ship like every crusade. afaik the Ayyubids couldn't build the ships, or couldn't match their fleets in battle. The landlocked Turkish states obviously could do nothing.

I can't tell you what naval combat was like in the mid-middle ages. The Byzantines of course, lit ships on fire as a matter of course, and there was plenty of boarding action, but I've got nothing else. By Lepanto, both Europeans and Turks had cannons on their ships, but even in 1571 they were being rowed along by oarsmen.


Long after the crusades, the Med became a battleground between the East and West, Muslim and Christian, so on and so on. But really there are lots of petty squabbles and rampant piracy that produces a lot of naval action. There's the crowd favourite Spain in the far corner that makes boats to ship gold and spends gold to make boats, eternal Venice that is still filthy rich and utterly dependent on its navy, the rest of the Italian bunch; Genoa, Tuscany, Naples and Sicily; the Pope himself, an expansionist France, the ever-terrifying Ottomans and their privateer horde in Barbarossa, the loose North African corsairs of the Barbary coast, and finally the Maltese knights, descended from Hospitaller crusaders that had been chased across the Mediterranean by the Turks,

Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Sep 18, 2014

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Trin Tragula
Apr 22, 2005

100 Years Ago

OK, so if I'd come into this with a proper plan for "OK, let's do the war day-by-day" instead of bumblefucking into it by accident, then I'd have started on August 1 and covered most of this poo poo properly. Time to catch up!

(Speaking of things getting away from me, this was supposed to be two paragraphs for each situation! Ah well, I'm having fun.)

At the outbreak of war, France proceeded with Plan XVII, advancing into Alsace and Lorraine, where the Germans gave them a series of rather nasty kickings (often involving red-trousered infantry advancing in close order over open ground, to the point where each German shell was killing ten or twenty poilus at a time); first at Mulhouse and Lorraine, then the Ardennes and Charleroi. This would have been all well and good, except then the Schlieffen plan revealed itself, their left wing had to retire, and in time so too did everyone else. (Mulhouse, Lorraine, the Ardennes, Charleroi and Mons are together known as the Battle of the Frontiers, as in the Franco-German frontiers.)

Fortunately the French had planned a backstop for unforseen circumstances, and they maintained the possibility of, together with the BEF and the Belgian army, being able to defend a line running between a series of large forts, prepared positions, and fortified towns (the terrain near the frontier is generally extremely hilly, and outright mountainous in places). Ideally this line would have run something like (from south to north) Belfort, Epinal, Nancy, Luxembourg City, Liege, Antwerp; the line now being occupied in most places conforms to a fallback line that turns east instead of north from Nancy, then running Toul, Verdun, Reims. (Again, in theory they could then have linked up with Maubeuge and Lille to the north, but two armies' worth of poo poo happened there.) The Germans had a similar line in their own territory, running along the River Rhine (there are many reasons why the most popular German soldiers' song of the period was The Watch on the Rhine) from Mulhouse to Koln.

So, the Belfort-Verdun line is roughly where the majority of the French army has ended up retiring to as their left flank is advancing swiftly to the rear, and the situation for them has been greatly improved after the recent offensive. If the Germans had been able to hold the line of the Marne, that would have left them in position to encircle the rest of the French army, and now we're back into counterfactuals again. Suffice it to say that the Fourth Army has, at the close of the Marne, installed itself firmly in Reims and everyone is now digging in. Let us again resort to terrible (and somewhat abstract) MSPaint drawings to illustrate the situation.



(And yes, it is a huge pain in the arse when you're learning about this stuff to remember and differentiate between the Marne, the Meuse, the Meurthe and the Moselle, just one of many reasons for English speakers to concentrate on the activities of the BEF instead of the French Army.)

Zee Germans occupy everything north and east of the dark red line. There are very few defensible points in France west of the Meuse, and of course none of them have anything like the strength of the fortress towns. The ground flattens considerably, and the only real places to defend are the rivers. There's the Marne, and then the Seine, and then the Germans are in position to encircle Paris from the south-east. The only thing the French have on their side here is distance; Nancy to Paris is about 230 miles, as the soldier marches. Holding onto this line is absolutely critical.

It should also be obvious that Verdun is the keystone of the entire situation, located right on the corner where the line stops running east-west and begins to run north-south. The Germans have already tried to punch a hole in the line south of Verdun in early September, and came || that close to succeeding and splitting the French Army in two (the attacking troops were withdrawn and sent to the west when the scale of the Marne became apparent). The modern defences there date back to a 17th-century citadel built by the famous engineer and Marshal of France, Vauban; they had been continually expanded and updated since then. Never mind anything anyone tells you about it being a prestigious or iconic town, or a source of French national pride; in cold-hearted military terms, it's probably the most important strategic location in France.

This all is Problem 1 occupying the German General Staff. With an eye on lessons learned, plans are laid for another offensive south of Verdun into the gap between the Second and Third Armies. There is still plenty of high ground around Verdun to be captured, occupied and fortified. All the main roads, and all the railways that serve Verdun, depart from the town running south. If they can be cut off, the fortress will be left in an exposed salient, and the remaining roads (mostly dirt tracks) can be interdicted by artillery firing from the heights.

:siren: INTERLUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt7xJdKfIMM INTERLUDE :siren:

That song was written about now and recorded at the start of October by the music-hall singer Mark Sheridan; it was soon all over the country, and you should probably go listen to it. I'll wait.

Back with us? Good. So, what the hell is it all talking about?

The first phase of the Schlieffen Plan involved bringing overwhelming force to bear on the Belgian forts of Liege and Namur. Liege fell on the 16th of August, Brussels on the 20th, and Namur on the 24th; of course, the BEF arrived at Mons on the 21st, time having been bought for them by the resilience of the Belgian defences. The Belgian army then withdrew into the National Redoubt at Antwerp, which the Germans were quite happy to see them do. As long as they stayed bottled up there, they couldn't be causing trouble anywhere else. The plan called for Antwerp to be contained by a minimal force while the bulk of the army strolled off to encircle Paris, and of course we know how that story ends. The Belgians had sortied from Antwerp on the 9th of September and been a minor pain in the arse, nothing to really distract from the Marne, and then withdrew back to their positions after a few days' energetic fighting.

But the grand plan has failed, and now Antwerp is Problem 2. It must be dealt with as soon as possible in order to prevent the troops inside interfering with the flanking operations that are being planned west of the Aisne (Problem 3). It will also free up men to move along the coast and seize the Channel ports; irrelevant when you're about to encircle the entire French army in the field, considerably more relevant now. There are a lot of things on the German plate right now, and only so many hands to eat with.

Meanwhile, there is a strong current of opinion both at the War Office and at BEF GHQ that, since war had been declared to defend Belgian neutrality, it would be good for them now to give as much aid to Belgium as possible (the words "plucky" and "little" often arise here). Moving the BEF north, back to the French left flank, would allow it to act more independently and in its originally-envisaged role; it's currently sandwiched between Manoury's Sixth Army and d'Esperey's Fifth, and even if they were minded to do anything other than dig, any kind of operation would not be possible without extensive French co-operation.

However, extracting the BEF from its current position is far, far easier said than done...

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

jng2058 posted:

To be fair, though, that one bomb landed in the middle of a flight deck full of refueling and re-arming planes. Lots of poo poo that went boom, in other words. The Yorktown had clear decks when she was hit. Yes, American damage control was much better than the Japanese, but as they say, timing is everything.

This is one of the popular notions dispelled by _Shattered Sword_. The bomb that killed Akagi landed on the middle elevator, penetrated to the upper hangar deck, and exploded there in the middle of the armed and fueled torpedo planes that were about to be spotted for their strike. This also removed the fireproof curtains separating the elevator well from the hangar.

FAUXTON
Jun 2, 2005

spero che tu stia bene

Phanatic posted:

This is one of the popular notions dispelled by _Shattered Sword_. The bomb that killed Akagi landed on the middle elevator, penetrated to the upper hangar deck, and exploded there in the middle of the armed and fueled torpedo planes that were about to be spotted for their strike. This also removed the fireproof curtains separating the elevator well from the hangar.

It also smashed the poo poo out of the elevator, possibly covering any fire underneath with a bunch of wreckage.

Anyway, luck happened a whole lot at Midway, but between damage control training and ship design alone, Japan could have probably salvaged 1-2 carriers.
They had intelligence bad luck, too, apparently one scout didn't fly his route correctly at a crucial point and therefore didn't detect the USN group at the point he would have overflown, preventing the IJN group responsible for the area from getting ready early enough or attacking early enough, etc.

The timing aspect of readiness was also complicated by Japanese ship design, so you could devolve it back to design and training flaws. Command had their own problems, but then you get into a question of culture and I don't want to go there.

xthetenth
Dec 30, 2012

Mario wasn't sure if this Jeb guy was a good influence on Yoshi.

FAUXTON posted:

It also smashed the poo poo out of the elevator, possibly covering any fire underneath with a bunch of wreckage.

Anyway, luck happened a whole lot at Midway, but between damage control training and ship design alone, Japan could have probably salvaged 1-2 carriers.
They had intelligence bad luck, too, apparently one scout didn't fly his route correctly at a crucial point and therefore didn't detect the USN group at the point he would have overflown, preventing the IJN group responsible for the area from getting ready early enough or attacking early enough, etc.

The timing aspect of readiness was also complicated by Japanese ship design, so you could devolve it back to design and training flaws. Command had their own problems, but then you get into a question of culture and I don't want to go there.

Didn't that scout plane end up finding the us carriers on its outbound leg earlier than it should have?

As far as ship design goes, if they had compartmentalized mains, portable pumps, fuel tanks with some measure of insulation from shock to the hull and a greater devolution of damage control training, that probably makes three or four carriers not sink or take more time and materiel to sink.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

xthetenth posted:

As far as ship design goes, if they had compartmentalized mains, portable pumps, fuel tanks with some measure of insulation from shock to the hull and a greater devolution of damage control training, that probably makes three or four carriers not sink or take more time and materiel to sink.

And if the US had spent less time loving around with heavy cruisers we could have gone into the war with more flat tops than we had.

And if Hitler had just ignored surface fleets and dumped it all into the U-Boots maybe England gets slightly more inconvenienced in 1939-41.

And if Stalin hadn't been a paranoid nutjob maybe the Red Army could have had some effective leadership.

And if Mussolini had been a homosexual Ethiopian . . .

HEY GUNS
Oct 11, 2012

FOPTIMUS PRIME
We've actually got a fairly decent picture of the Thirty Years' War without foreign involvement, the Jülich-Cleves Crisis. Henry IV wanted to intervene to a greater extent than he was doing, and then he got murdered.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Ask Us About Military History: If Mussolini had been a homosexual Ethiopian . . .

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

And on that note my favorite piece of :nws: WW2 propaganda:

http://imgur.com/OVb77FZ

StashAugustine
Mar 24, 2013

Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

What's the translation?

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

StashAugustine posted:

What's the translation?

2nd line of each is in English.

It goes (top to bottom) Italian/English/French.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
IIRC the scout plane that failed to spot the American TFs wouldn't really have changed much in the battle, because by the time Nagumo would have been notified he would have already been knee-deep in the land-based targeting strike against Midway. Anything the Japanese would or could have done to change the outcome of the battle would need a point of divergence no later than something like 3 or 4 AM.

One thing I picked up from John Parshall from a panel on Midway-as-alternate-History was that recent studies suggest that Japanese intelligence may have lead Nagumo to believe that the only planes stationed at Midway were Army aviation, specifically large multi-engined bombers.

That may have influenced his thinking some because some of the attacks launched from Midway were with single-engined planes, so he may have believed those were from carriers, which in turn means that as soon as he fends off the attacks he'd think that the carriers would either have no airpower left of their own or could be caught recovering/refitting aircraft.

xthetenth
Dec 30, 2012

Mario wasn't sure if this Jeb guy was a good influence on Yoshi.

Cyrano4747 posted:

And if the US had spent less time loving around with heavy cruisers we could have gone into the war with more flat tops than we had.

And if Hitler had just ignored surface fleets and dumped it all into the U-Boots maybe England gets slightly more inconvenienced in 1939-41.

And if Stalin hadn't been a paranoid nutjob maybe the Red Army could have had some effective leadership.

And if Mussolini had been a homosexual Ethiopian . . .

That wasn't intended as an alt-hist can of worms as much as a means of describing and comparing the major differences between US and Japanese carriers. There's multiple significant differences in design and practice that cost them ships. There's not much on the US ships that wasn't part of a tradeoff for important things.

MA-Horus
Dec 3, 2006

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.

And don't forget that Saratoga and Lexington were both built off of Battlecruiser hulls as well. Those ships could take a goddamn PUNCH, as shots Able and Baker at Bikini showed. Well, Able did at least. Set her flight deck on fire (because it was made of teak, loving classy)

Baker threw a 36000 ton carrier of the water, broke her back, punched in the keel and stove in the flight-deck.

MA-Horus fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Sep 18, 2014

FAUXTON
Jun 2, 2005

spero che tu stia bene

xthetenth posted:

Didn't that scout plane end up finding the us carriers on its outbound leg earlier than it should have?

Rereading it, yes, you're right. I'd mixed it up with other flights that found nothing and the attention paid to how that scout seemingly had no reason to be where he was. Also the apparent delay in reaction to the reported sighting.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

How did naval scout pilots report the location of stuff they had seen anyway? Was there a hefty amount of noting compass bearings and flight times?

Jaguars!
Jul 31, 2012


PittTheElder posted:

How did naval scout pilots report the location of stuff they had seen anyway? Was there a hefty amount of noting compass bearings and flight times?

yes, traditional nav methods were pretty much the only method at the time. Larger aircraft usually had an astrodome to allow someone to use a sextant which would be more reliable than dead reckoning. And also legendarily hard as hell in a moving, shaking, noisy aircraft.

Vincent Van Goatse
Nov 8, 2006

Enjoy every sandwich.

Smellrose

Cyrano4747 posted:

And if the US had spent less time loving around with heavy cruisers we could have gone into the war with more flat tops than we had.

Actually we wouldn't have, since up until the late 1930s we were still abiding by the Washington and London Treaties which put an absolute limit on total carrier tonnage. There was talk of building hybrid "flight deck cruisers" (think of a Kiev but with guns instead of missiles) but that went nowhere because it was obvious it would be an inferior design (witness Ise and Hyuga and how useful they were to Japan).

Anyway, here's a lovely little burn on Liddell Hart by another famous author who I'll leave anonymous for now. I bolded the important bit.

Review of "The British Way in Warfare" by B. H. Liddell Hart posted:

This collection of revised and reprinted essays written from about 1932 onwards, is largely a history of the development of the British army in the years between the two wars. Its opening chapters, however, contain a survey of Britain's "traditional grand strategy" which is the most interesting and provocative part of the book and the most important at this moment. The battle for mechanization has been won, at any rate on paper, but the controversy over the Second Front is still raging, and Captain Liddell Hart's theories are extremely relevant to it.

What is the "traditional strategy" which we have abandoned and which Captain Liddell Hart implies that we should return to? Briefly, the strategy of indirect attack and limited aims. It was practised with great success in Britain’s predatory wars of the eighteenth century and only dropped in the decade before 1914, when Britain entered into an all-in alliance with France. Its technique is essentially commercial. You attack your enemy chiefly by means of blockade, privateering, and sea-borne "commando" raids. You avoid raising a mass army and leave the land fighting as far as possible to continental allies whom you keep going by means of subsidies. While your allies are doing your fighting for you you capture your enemy’s overseas trade and occupy his outlying colonies. At the first suitable moment you make peace, either retaining the territories you have captured or using them as bargaining counters. This was, in fact, Britain’s characteristic strategy for something like two hundred years, and the term perfide Albion was thoroughly justified except in so far as the behaviour of other States was morally similar. The wars of the eighteenth century were waged in a spirit so mercenary that the normal process is reversed, and they seem more "ideological" to posterity than they did to the people who fought in them. But in any case the “limited aims” strategy is not likely to be successful unless you are willing to betray your allies whenever it pays to do so.

In 1914-18, as is well known, we broke with our past, subordinated our strategy to that of an ally, and lost a million dead. Commenting on this Captain Liddell Hart says: "I can find in the conditions of the war no satisfying explanation of our change. . . . No fundamental cause for a change of historic policy seems to appear. Hence one is inclined to find it in a change of fashion — in the military mode of thought inspired by Clausewitz." Clausewitz is the evil genius of military thought. He taught, or is supposed to have taught, that the proper strategy is to attack your strongest enemy, that nothing is solved except by battle, and that "blood is the price of victory". Fascinated by this theory, Britain "made her navy a subsidiary weapon, and grasped the glittering sword of continental manufacture".

Now there is something unsatisfactory in tracing an historical change to an individual theorist, because a theory does not gain ground unless material conditions favour it. If Britain ceased, at any rate for four years, from being perfide Albion, there were deeper reasons than Sir Henry Wilson’s tie-up with the French General Staff. To begin with it is very doubtful whether our "traditional" strategy is workable any longer. In the past it really depended on the balance of power, more and more precarious from 1870 onwards, and on geographical advantages which modern technical developments have lessened. After 1890 Britain was no longer the only naval power, and moreover the whole scope of naval warfare had diminished. With the abandonment of sail navies became less mobile, the inland seas were inaccessible after the invention of the marine mine, and blockade lost part of its power owing to the science of substitutes and the mechanization of agriculture. After the rise of modern Germany it was hardly possible for us to dispense with European alliances, and one of the things allies are apt to insist on is that you do your fair share of the fighting. Money subsidies have no meaning when war involves the total effort of every belligerent nation.

The real shortcoming of these stimulating essays, however, lies in Captain Liddell Hart's unwillingness to admit that war has changed its character. "Limited aims" strategy implies that your enemy is very much the same kind of person as yourself; you want to get the better of him, but it is not necessary for your safety to annihilate him or even to interfere with his internal politics. These conditions existed in the eighteenth century and even in the later phases of the Napoleonic wars, but have disappeared in the atomized world in which we are now living. Writing in 1932 or thereabouts, Captain Liddell Hart is able to say, "Has there ever been such a thing as absolute war since nations ceased to exterminate or enslave the defeated?" The trouble is that they haven’t ceased. Slavery, which seemed as remote as cannibalism in 1932, is visibly returning in 1942, and in such circumstances it is impossible to wage the old style of limited profit-making war, intent only on "safeguarding British interests" and making peace at the first opportune moment. As Mussolini has truly said, democracy and totalitarianism cannot exist side by side. It is a curious fact, not much remarked on, that in the present war Britain has, up to date, waged the kind of war that Captain Liddell Hart advocates. We have fought no large-scale continental campaign, we have used up one ally after another, and we have acquired territories far larger and, potentially, far richer than those we have lost. Yet neither Captain Liddell Hart nor anyone else would argue from this that the war has gone well for us. Nobody advocates that we should simply wipe up the remaining French and Italian colonies and then make a negotiated peace with Germany because even the most ignorant person sees that such a peace would not be final. Our survival depends on the destruction of the present German political system, which implies the destruction of the German army. It is difficult not to feel that Clausewitz was right in teaching that "you must concentrate against the main enemy, who must be overthrown first", and that "the armed forces form the true objective", at least in any war where there is a genuine ideological issue.


To some extent Captain Liddell Hart's tactical theories are separable from his strategic ones, and here his prophecies have been all too well justified by events. No military writer in our time has done more to enlighten public opinion. But his justified war with the Blimps has perhaps overcoloured his judgement. The people who scoffed at mechanization and still labour to reduce military training to a routine of barking and stamping are also in favour of mass armies, frontal attacks, bayonet charges and, in general, meaningless bloodshed. Disgusted by the spectacle of Passchendaele, Captain Liddell Hart seems to have ended by believing that wars can be won on the defensive or without fighting — and even, indeed, that a war is better half-won than won outright. That holds good only when your enemy thinks likewise, a state of affairs which disappeared when Europe ceased to be ruled by an aristocracy.

Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Sep 19, 2014

FAUXTON
Jun 2, 2005

spero che tu stia bene

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

Anyway, here's a lovely little burn on Liddell Hart by another famous author who I'll leave anonymous for now. I bolded the important bit.

Sounds like some poo poo Churchill would say.

E: :suicide: I was close.

FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Sep 19, 2014

Trin Tragula
Apr 22, 2005

100 Years Ago

The Germans open the Battle of Flirey, striking out in force south of Verdun along (by comparison to the scale of previous attacks) a narrow front. The line currently runs along the flat plain between the Meuse and the eastern rivers, and despite the past week's digging, it's easily breached.

Meanwhile, in Africa, the German cruiser Konigsberg is loitering up the River Rufiji in Tanganyika (then part of German East Africa) to take on coal when the captain receives intelligence that one of the British cruisers currently looking for him is docking at Zanzibar (a British possession). He orders his ship out of the river to raid the port. (There's more to come about the early going in Africa once I get a chance for some reading.)

vuk83
Oct 9, 2012
How where the different armys in ww1 organized? Especially the germans. How was conscription and recruiting handled. I know a bit about the brits with their regimental system and pals battalions and so on, but what about the rest.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

I could be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure most of Europe had standardized on the regimental system going back to the decades before Napoleon. I know from how Germans marked equipment dating to the 1870s at least that they employed regiments as an organizational layer.

Also, early morning quick-posting, but if poo poo like the formation and fate of the Pals Battalions interests you, google "Kindermord bei Ypren" - it plays a similar role in German public memory as the Pals do in English. One important thing to note if comparing the English and the Germans, however, is that the Germans had a full conscription system for peacetime where people would rotate into the military, do their couple of years, and then be rotated out to the Landswehr, a national-guard type formation where you chilled your heels until you were old enough that you weren't eligible for military service. The English relied on a volunteer system so, events like the Kindermord notwithstanding, their formations skewed a bit younger to start with.

Teriyaki Hairpiece
Dec 29, 2006

I'm nae the voice o' the darkened thistle, but th' darkened thistle cannae bear the sight o' our Bonnie Prince Bernie nae mair.

Taerkar posted:

The sad truth is that for the first part of the war the Allies basically out-incompetenced them.
In WW2 everybody was drunk and on amphetamines all the time and not getting very much sleep and generally stressed out. Not a good recipe for rational decision making.

PittTheElder
Feb 13, 2012

:geno: Yes, it's like a lava lamp.

Trin Tragula posted:

100 Years Ago

The Germans open the Battle of Flirey, striking out in force south of Verdun along (by comparison to the scale of previous attacks) a narrow front. The line currently runs along the flat plain between the Meuse and the eastern rivers, and despite the past week's digging, it's easily breached.

Meanwhile, in Africa, the German cruiser Konigsberg is loitering up the River Rufiji in Tanganyika (then part of German East Africa) to take on coal when the captain receives intelligence that one of the British cruisers currently looking for him is docking at Zanzibar (a British possession). He orders his ship out of the river to raid the port. (There's more to come about the early going in Africa once I get a chance for some reading.)

:allears:

Don Gato
Apr 28, 2013

Actually a bipedal cat.
Grimey Drawer
Going back to Imperial Japan, I read somewhere a long rear end time ago that the Japanese civilian government barely knew what the military was doing and could barely control them anyway, so poo poo like the Kwantung Army invading China wasn't authorized from the top but was done by a general much lower down and the higher ups just went along with it because otherwise they would lose face. Is this true or was it completely off base? Because that sounds like an absolutely wonderful way to run your country, the head doesn't know what the hands are doing, the right hand is actively plotting to murder the left hand and the left hand has just punched the nearest man.

wdarkk
Oct 26, 2007

Friends: Protected
World: Saved
Crablettes: Eaten
Actually it was a colonel.

And yeah it was super-dysfunctional.

SocketWrench
Jul 8, 2012

by Fritz the Horse

Trin Tragula posted:

100 Years Ago

The Germans open the Battle of Flirey, striking out in force south of Verdun along (by comparison to the scale of previous attacks) a narrow front. The line currently runs along the flat plain between the Meuse and the eastern rivers, and despite the past week's digging, it's easily breached.

Meanwhile, in Africa, the German cruiser Konigsberg is loitering up the River Rufiji in Tanganyika (then part of German East Africa) to take on coal when the captain receives intelligence that one of the British cruisers currently looking for him is docking at Zanzibar (a British possession). He orders his ship out of the river to raid the port. (There's more to come about the early going in Africa once I get a chance for some reading.)

Read up on the Konigsberg. There's an interesting story of British persistence through failure over something smaller than they dumped resources for and the Germans playing them for it.

Trin Tragula
Apr 22, 2005

100 Years Ago

In Africa, Konigsberg strolls past the tug attempting to picket the mouth of Zanzibar Harbour without so much as a by-your-leave and goes hunting cruisers (this is not exactly U-47 at Scapa Flow). She catches HMS Pegasus at anchor and engages at 7,000 yards. Pegasus entered service in 1897, Konigsberg in 1905; in the context of the arms race, that's an absolute eternity. The ensuing engagement is rather like sitting on a canal narrowboat and coming after someone on the towpath with a boxing glove on the end of a bargepole; Pegasus has no hope of fighting back and is sent to the bottom. Konigsberg takes pot shots at the shore wireless station and then the picket before departing.

Meanwhile, the French army retires from Flirey village and makes for the heights of St Mihiel on the Meuse, desperately calling for reinforcements. The railway line to Verdun is about to be cut.

Meanwhile meanwhile, on the Aisne, it's Sunday, and the colonel of the 1st Rifle Brigade discovers that his battalion strength includes a chaplain, one, giving Christian services, for the use of. So he leaves a couple of sentries in the fire trench and holds a church parade for everyone else.

This is not as questionable an order as it might seem. They're perfectly safe, because a few hundred yards away, the enemy is doing exactly the same thing. Being German and therefore inclined to do things properly, they've brought up a brass band to play a selection of patriotic airs. And what better tune to start with than one of the songs that has a claim to being Germany's national anthem? It goes like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoUrpmnaZVo

This does not go down well with the blokes, who can hear the band perfectly well. They immediately break ranks, rush into the fire trench, and begin throwing anything that comes to hand smaller than a corporal at the insolent Boches. When they run out of tin cans and other such military detritus, they throw stones. When they run out of stones, they literally start throwing the trench itself at the Germans, ripping clods of earth out of the walls. (Sadly, nobody appears to have provided them with a kitchen sink.)

Officers absolutely refuse to allow them to open fire, or to charge. So they all stand to in the fire trench and retaliate in the only way left; singing God Save the King as loudly as possible, to the accompaniment of the Germans' own brass band, which appears to be playing the special twenty-verse Club Remix of the anthem, and they don't stop when the Germans change the record.

(It wasn't uncommon when the concept of national anthems was first being invented for any state that suddenly found itself in need of one to just borrow God Save the King for a few years until they could find their own. I believe that Liechtenstein is still looking behind the sofa for one.)

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

:allears: Please do not stop posting until 2019.

CoolCab
Apr 17, 2005

glem

Trin Tragula posted:

100 Years Ago
The ensuing engagement is rather like sitting on a canal narrowboat and coming after someone on the towpath with a boxing glove on the end of a bargepole; Pegasus has no hope of fighting back and is sent to the bottom.

...

This is not as questionable an order as it might seem. They're perfectly safe, because a few hundred yards away, the enemy is doing exactly the same thing. Being German and therefore inclined to do things properly, they've brought up a brass band to play a selection of patriotic airs. And what better tune to start with than one of the songs that has a claim to being Germany's national anthem? It goes like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoUrpmnaZVo

This does not go down well with the blokes, who can hear the band perfectly well. They immediately break ranks, rush into the fire trench, and begin throwing anything that comes to hand smaller than a corporal at the insolent Boches. When they run out of tin cans and other such military detritus, they throw stones. When they run out of stones, they literally start throwing the trench itself at the Germans, ripping clods of earth out of the walls. (Sadly, nobody appears to have provided them with a kitchen sink.)


(It wasn't uncommon when the concept of national anthems was first being invented for any state that suddenly found itself in need of one to just borrow God Save the King for a few years until they could find their own. I believe that Liechtenstein is still looking behind the sofa for one.)

Holy poo poo that's funny :toot:

Ensign Expendable
Nov 11, 2008

Lager beer is proof that god loves us
Pillbug

Siivola posted:

:allears: Please do not stop posting until 2019.

But then someone has to do the Russian Civil War!

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

Ensign Expendable posted:

But then someone has to do the Russian Civil War!

Russian Civil War centennial will be celebrated with a live fire reenactment in Ukraine. (I really could see anarchists forming their own armed faction in eastern Ukraine but I'm not imaginative enough to see how Siberia could end up in Czech army's hands.)

Raskolnikov38
Mar 3, 2007

We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold
Oh god like anarchists aren't insufferable enough already without having a makhno 2.0.

Trin Tragula
Apr 22, 2005

100 Years Ago

On the Western Front, the German advance on St Mihiel continues, and the Allies begin redeployment in earnest; both sides are already starting to send advance units west of the River Oise. In the category of "possibly-apocryphal stories that I would like to be true", we find the following conversation on the Aisne. It's attributed to Lt-Col Serocold, commanding the 2nd King's Royal Rifles, and a staff captain on a visit to the trenches.

Serocold: "We'll be out of this any day now."
Captain: "Really, sir? What makes you think that?"
Serocold: "Because for the first time since this damned war started we've constructed a decent dry shelter for ourselves. As soon as we make ourselves cosy, we move."

He's not wrong. Not only is the BEF to move out of the line and head north, handing over its positions to the French, but it is also highly desirable that they should do so without Zee Germans noticing what's going on under their noses and trying to interfere. All troop movements, handovers of positions, and associated actions that might occur within range of German aircraft, will therefore be done at night. It doesn't take a military genius to spot the vast potential for gently caress-up contained in those orders.

Meanwhile, Konigsberg returns to her temporary base up the Rufiji with a tricky problem. The ship is having severe engine difficulties, but can't put in at Dar-es-Salaam for repairs because the port there is currently being blockaded; again, we'll catch up once I can do the reading. The eventual solution arrived at is, to say the least, rather arresting.

Agean90
Jun 28, 2008


I want to see a movie about the Konigsberg now. Its pretty much the plot to an action movie as is.

ninjahedgehog
Feb 17, 2011

It's time to kick the tires and light the fires, Big Bird.


Taerkar posted:

Ship and sub-launched torpedoes are a very different beast from aerial torpedoes though, aren't they? I think I remember reading ones that while the hit rate of the ship-launched torpedoes by the Japanese were bad, the aerial ones were absolutely terrible. Of course for the US side the early torpedoes were extra terrible.

Somewhere in this thread there's a couple of effortposts about just how absolutely lovely the early American torpedoes were, to the point where the author is seriously wondering how the designers weren't all tried for treason. Does anyone have links/be willing to repost?

AceRimmer
Mar 18, 2009

ninjahedgehog posted:

Somewhere in this thread there's a couple of effortposts about just how absolutely lovely the early American torpedoes were, to the point where the author is seriously wondering how the designers weren't all tried for treason. Does anyone have links/be willing to repost?
Hellions of the Deep: The Development of American Torpedoes in World War II
You want to look at Chapter 6. The Google Books preview includes all but the illustrations and a few pages towards the end of the chapter, but summarizes the early war situation pretty well.

Power Khan
Aug 20, 2011

by Fritz the Horse
A friend on mine posted this a while ago, it's a list of ordnance, weapons and tools left by the Ottomans after the defeat near Vienna in 1683. Taken from

Valcaren, John Peter. A Relation or Diary of the Siege of Vienna. London: Wm. Nott and George Wells, 1684.

Cacavelas, Jeremias. The Siege of Vienna by the Turks in 1683. Translated by F. H. Marshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1925.

Before you ask, a Kental (Quintal) = 100 kg.





Lots of stuff, right? I want to see the what such an army needs to be fed. Lots of kebab.

Slavvy
Dec 11, 2012

What's the difference between iron and brass hand grenades?

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Arrath
Apr 14, 2011


Slavvy posted:

What's the difference between iron and brass hand grenades?

Different fragmentation characteristics I'd imagine, though I can't venture as to say what the difference actually is.

Also, overall weight, charge weight, throwing distance.

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