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Ofaloaf posted:As I understand it, helmets fell out of practice well before WWI, and then got reintroduced as part of the standard kit during the Great War. Were these early 20th century tin hats hammered out willy-nilly after somebody said "oh poo poo, indirect fire, let's get some helmets" or had people been designing and agitating for helmets for infantrymen throughout the Victorian era and just no one really bothered to adopt them? Are there modern helmet designs that predate the Brodie and Adrian helmets? Modern helmets came about because of the threat of shrapnel hitting people in the head. Without modern artillery and entrenching practice that evolved during the war, there's not that much reason to think that protecting the head from shrapnel from above would make such a difference.
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Sep 25, 2014 03:20
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the JJ posted:This debate happened earlier in thread, some people leaning toward incompetent, others towards a unspectacular but not incompetent leader dealing with a bad hand. Overall, reading one book and formulating off that can be dangerous. Historians they'd to go back and forth on a lot of issues as new evidence and interpretation comes out. I've read The World Undone too and I still think French is a jackass  Seriously though, yeah, we've had this discussion before and the size and (national?) importance of the BEF and his sometimes-contradictory orders serves as a backdrop to what he did.
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Sep 25, 2014 06:34
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Ofaloaf posted:As I understand it, helmets fell out of practice well before WWI, and then got reintroduced as part of the standard kit during the Great War. Were these early 20th century tin hats hammered out willy-nilly after somebody said "oh poo poo, indirect fire, let's get some helmets" or had people been designing and agitating for helmets for infantrymen throughout the Victorian era and just no one really bothered to adopt them? Are there modern helmet designs that predate the Brodie and Adrian helmets? WWI was the first war where you were very likely to have battle field crap fall on top of you. That prevents stuff like rocks or metal fragments from getting tossed onto people's heads and etching a hovel for bacterium to fester. A man with a musket is going to shoot you in the chest from not very far away, making armour a waste. With trenches, and artillery being the main killer, a soldiers head becomes the only target. It's cheap to make little steel bowls, and if undeniably saved lives. Having anything between your skull and a hot fragment was a plus. There's the story about helmets increasing rates of wounding threefold (From preventing outright death), but I can't place the veracity.
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Sep 25, 2014 06:59
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Some thoughts on why people queue out of the door and down the street to defend Haig, but nobody ever tries to do the same thing for French, even though at least some of the same arguments used for Haig would seem also to apply for French. Something else that I've been meaning to build into 100 Years Ago but haven't found the space yet is how popular he appears to have been with the blokes; there's quite a few stories of him appearing somewhere and whatever it is he was doing went down rather well, whereas the canonical "Haig visits the blokes" story is probably the one where he stands in front of a soldier for a few moments, tongue-tied, then asks him "And where did you start the war?", and the cheeky little bugger says, slightly offended, "I did not start the war, sir!" Haven't seen it with an actual attribution, but those kinds of stories tend not to attach to someone unless they're believable.
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Sep 25, 2014 07:37
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Any recommendations for historical podcasts? I'm listening to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History and am finishing up Mike Duncan's Revolutions.
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Sep 25, 2014 07:40
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Turkson posted:Any recommendations for historical podcasts? Mike Duncan's history of Rome (awesome) followed by the not Mike Duncan's History of Byzantium (unfinished but I wanted more and its not bad).
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Sep 25, 2014 07:43
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http://www.pritzkermilitary.org/whats_on/programming-overview/ The Pritzker Military Library podcast is very Americentric, but otherwise puts out lots and lots of Mil-Hist related content. They have this excellent piece on Nomonhan/Khalkin Gol, another where Jonathan Parshall (Shattered Sword) and John Lundstrom (The First Team) talk about alt-history outcomes for Midway and lots of veteran interviews. The last one I listened to was Gen. John Allen giving a talk about leadership principles - it was a hell of a thing to find out a week later that he was the newly appointed guy in charge of the current offensive in the MidEast.
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Sep 25, 2014 08:12
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:WWI was the first war where you were very likely to have battle field crap fall on top of you. That prevents stuff like rocks or metal fragments from getting tossed onto people's heads and etching a hovel for bacterium to fester. A man with a musket is going to shoot you in the chest from not very far away, making armour a waste. I remember reading somewhere GIs in WWII were concerned with the myth having your helmet strapped on would cause worse injury/death from explosions nearby such as grenades. I had a "Tommy" helmet at one point from that era, they used elastic vs leather or heavy canvas like the others. Bitch to keep that sucker on though
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Sep 25, 2014 10:17
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I also heard of that myth. Apparently the GIs believed that if they were caught in an explosion the strapped on helmet would pull on their chins hard enough to decapitate them
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Sep 25, 2014 10:38
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gradenko_2000 posted:I also heard of that myth. Apparently the GIs believed that if they were caught in an explosion the strapped on helmet would pull on their chins hard enough to decapitate them I've read conflicting things about that myth. An alternative explanation I've seen is that it's a legend that grew up to explain why GI's don't have their chin straps on in all the war photos you see, when the real reason is that the thing's a bit uncomfortable and they only put it on when they were actually going in to action.
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Sep 25, 2014 11:01
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:WWI was the first war where you were very likely to have battle field crap fall on top of you. That prevents stuff like rocks or metal fragments from getting tossed onto people's heads and etching a hovel for bacterium to fester. A man with a musket is going to shoot you in the chest from not very far away, making armour a waste. There'd been decades of development, experience, and clear signs that that sort of thing would be necessary. Surely somebody saw Petersburg, or Plevna, or Kimberley, or any other number of sieges and near-sieges around static-ish lines and thought "goddamn a lot of people are being conked in the head".
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Sep 25, 2014 11:33
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I think people noticed it a lot more when they got more people who got it in the head that before to be fair. Remember, WW1 was the first war where it was suddenly a lot more easier for a soldier to die of violence on campaign than of disease. Also, new weapons development and modern factory produced gear also changed things a bit from the mid to late 19th century way of things. You got a lot more modern firing faster artillery spraying concentrated bursts of the stuff all over the place while soldiers still scurry about in light bunches out of cover. It really was a hodge podge of old thinking and assumptions with crazy shiny deadly new technology and tactics still being worked on. Lack of helmets is not the only thing, but remember also at the start horses still pulled the guns and some of the supplies, the scouting pilots of the early air arms only had a pistol to defend themselves against other pilots and runners on bikes were used instead of radios. A lot of dead dudes and time in a war changes things fast. Look at the early American Civil War and then towards the end for another example. SeanBeansShako fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 13:22
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SeanBeansShako posted:I think people noticed it a lot more when they got more people who got it in the head that before to be fair. poo poo, horses pulled the guns through World War II, you really can't hold that one against.
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Sep 25, 2014 13:29
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It's also the first war in which trenches were the norm on the battlefield as opposed to just sieges, the first war in which mortars were commonly used and the first war in which regular harassing fire by artillery was a thing. You have to remember that the armaments crisis of 1914-15 on both sides is indicative of a use of ordinance that was an order of magnitude greater than anything that had been before, across a much wider range of field pieces. The fact that things like trenches and indirect fire existed in one form or another for a century and more before WW1 isn't really of relevance to how they were used in WW1.
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Sep 25, 2014 13:30
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:poo poo, horses pulled the guns through World War II, you really can't hold that one against. Poor buggers, never catching a break  .
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Sep 25, 2014 13:30
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Turkson posted:Any recommendations for historical podcasts? BBC's History of the World in 100 Objects is loving amazing. Also, RE: helmet chat - One of the things you can't forget is the industrial history side of things. Sheet-metal stamping only becomes wide-spread for the production of metal items in the 1890s. I'll try to dig a picture out of my harddrive somewhere, but they've got a wonderful display at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin on the stages in manufacturing a Stahlhelm. - if memory serves it's something like 8 or 9 separate strikes with a stamping machine. Prior to the wide-spread availability of that kind of machine for mass-producing the helmets cheaply it was probably just cost-prohibitive to give every guy out there a metal hat. The fact that they kept trying various types of boiled leather etc. in the mid-19th century if anything gives an indication that they were probably aware of the issue, but just couldn't find a way to do it cheaply enough. As for why no replacement between the 1890s and 1914, simple lack of need in that relatively short window of time. You can get a major new thing adopted on a wide scale over the course of 50 years in the military as individuals age out and are replaced by younger guys, but the same ones who knew in 1885 that it was too expensive to make metal hats a standard issue item were probably the same guys running the various ordinance dept's etc. in 1910. edit: found it, 10 different stamps to make it 
Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 14:22
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Turkson posted:Any recommendations for historical podcasts? Radio 4's In Our Time is usually pretty good, though the host has a tendency to talk over the participants, presumably to keep things moving. One of its big plusses though is that it always features academics as guests, including some fairly big names in their field. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2Dw1c7rxs6DmyK0pMRwpMq1/in-our-time-archive
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Sep 25, 2014 16:22
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Alchenar posted:It's also the first war in which trenches were the norm on the battlefield as opposed to just sieges, the first war in which mortars were commonly used and the first war in which regular harassing fire by artillery was a thing. You have to remember that the armaments crisis of 1914-15 on both sides is indicative of a use of ordinance that was an order of magnitude greater than anything that had been before, across a much wider range of field pieces. The fact that things like trenches and indirect fire existed in one form or another for a century and more before WW1 isn't really of relevance to how they were used in WW1. If you compare WW1 artillery to artillery before it, it's like night and day. It's not that indirect fire didn't exist during the Napoleonic, Crimean, and American Civil Wars, it's that it was nowhere near as effective as it would be in WW1. Countries still kept huge stocks of guns meant solely to be fired over open sights, because that's how most artillery was used before the war.
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Sep 25, 2014 16:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:BBC's History of the World in 100 Objects is loving amazing. You know what's funny? After the war, they made noodle sieves out of the surplus of Stahlhelme. My grandma had one like this. http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/landsberg/Vom-Stahlhelm-zum-Nudelsieb-id27224047.html
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Sep 25, 2014 17:16
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Ofaloaf posted:But there was half a century of entrenchment and indirect fire being A Thing well before Gavrilo Princip ever decided to take a sullen walk in Sarajevo. Shrapnel had been used during the Napoleonic wars, trenches were employed to dramatic effect in the Crimean War and American Civil War, indirect fire started becoming a thing around the same time and was further refined over the next decades, sieges were clearly more awful during the Franco-Prussian and Russo-Turkish wars, Port Arthur was bloody as gently caress during the Russo-Japanese War, and so on. You don't keep big stocks of equipment around "just in case" you need them. Stuff like siege mortars which are essential and not very numerous are just dragged out when you have to pound a city, but helmets for 10,000+ people? And if you make the soldiers wear steel helmets on campaign, you're spending money on something that doesn't actually give them any benefits. The fact that stamping machines didn't exist is just one more strike against them. Cyrano4747 posted:One of the things you can't forget is the industrial history side of things. Sheet-metal stamping only becomes wide-spread for the production of metal items in the 1890s. I'll try to dig a picture out of my harddrive somewhere, but they've got a wonderful display at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin on the stages in manufacturing a Stahlhelm. - if memory serves it's something like 8 or 9 separate strikes with a stamping machine. Prior to the wide-spread availability of that kind of machine for mass-producing the helmets cheaply it was probably just cost-prohibitive to give every guy out there a metal hat. The fact that they kept trying various types of boiled leather etc. in the mid-19th century if anything gives an indication that they were probably aware of the issue, but just couldn't find a way to do it cheaply enough. In true French fashion, the Adrian helmet took something like 50 steps to manufacture, adding dongles and crests that made the helmet weaker. And the Brodie helmet looks like it could be made from a single stamp.
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Sep 25, 2014 17:19
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Remember too soldiers can be pretty wasteful at times, including the times when the war or battle isn't going their way and they want to get the gently caress out. I recall reading how the French soldier in the Franco Prussian War had a habit of discarding their newer style Kepi head gear for the older more comfortable forage caps much to the irritation of the French Quarter Masters.
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Sep 25, 2014 17:41
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All this talk about helmet design and manufacturing led me to learning that asbestos was used in the gas masks and helmets. As if the war wasn't dangerous enough, the protective gear was also detrimental to a soldiers overall well being.
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Sep 25, 2014 17:42
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Deverse posted:All this talk about helmet design and manufacturing led me to learning that asbestos was used in the gas masks and helmets. As if the war wasn't dangerous enough, the protective gear was also detrimental to a soldiers overall well being. Given the options between the nastiest early 20th century gas mask filter and mustard gas I'm going with the thing that will give me lung cancer in 20 years rather than the thing that will melt my lungs in the next 20 seconds. Even if they were aware of the long term health consequences I can't imagine the guys in the trenches would have even begun to give a poo poo.
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Sep 25, 2014 18:06
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The heart and liver cancer would have gotten those guys first, they drunk and smoke a lot.
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Sep 25, 2014 18:09
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SeanBeansShako posted:The heart and liver cancer would have gotten those guys first, they drunk and smoke a lot. quote:smoking and asbestos exposure collectively can increase the risk of asbestos-related diseases up to 90 percent Nenonen fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 18:15
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SeanBeansShako posted:Remember too soldiers can be pretty wasteful at times, including the times when the war or battle isn't going their way and they want to get the gently caress out. Saw an article once about what pieces of gear went missing the most in the Finnish army during WW2. Pretty much everyone was in the habit of throwing away their gas masks and bayonets.
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Sep 25, 2014 18:20
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Has anyone here been in the military? We had one day where we had to put on gasmask and light protection and do poo poo and sports in a room full of irritant gas. I have never before and after experienced claustrophobia until that day.
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Sep 25, 2014 18:57
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Kemper Boyd posted:Saw an article once about what pieces of gear went missing the most in the Finnish army during WW2. Pretty much everyone was in the habit of throwing away their gas masks and bayonets. JaucheCharly posted:Has anyone here been in the military? We had one day where we had to put on gasmask and light protection and do poo poo and sports in a room full of irritant gas. I have never before and after experienced claustrophobia until that day. I can relate with veterans. Gas mask is still part of the kit and sure as hell I didn't like carrying it with me as a conscript. For some reason my platoon didn't go through the CS gas exposure thing that most others did in the boot camp (going into the tent wearing the gas mask, then having to take it off and get out) and I didn't mind. Gas masks were supposed to be taken with you to forest exercises but I never did. Then at the end of service in the final military exercise ("loppusota") when again I had left the mask to barracks at one point we were given the gas warning. Oops! Lucky for me FDF is cheap and what ever mosquito poison they had prepared for us, there wasn't enough of it or winds blew the wrong way.
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Sep 25, 2014 19:13
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JaucheCharly posted:Has anyone here been in the military? We had one day where we had to put on gasmask and light protection and do poo poo and sports in a room full of irritant gas. I have never before and after experienced claustrophobia until that day. I was. We had to do this stuff in training on a regular basis, up to the final test to get through basic training. Trying to get my ABC-gloves, ABC-mask and the light ABC-mantle out of your ABC-package and fit into it in less then 17 seconds was the hardest part for me in that test. The first thing was the mask and it had to fit in less then 7 seconds, or I would've failed. (ABC stands for Atomare, Biologische und Chemische Kampfstoffe. I think the English version would be NBC or something.) Edit: Luckily we didn't train with actual gas, because we were just conscripts and it would have been a waste from the viewpoint of the Bundeswehr.
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Sep 25, 2014 19:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:Given the options between the nastiest early 20th century gas mask filter and mustard gas I'm going with the thing that will give me lung cancer in 20 years rather than the thing that will melt my lungs in the next 20 seconds. I was by no means criticizing the designers and I totally agree I would have 10 times out of 10 used the gear given me in that situation.
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Sep 25, 2014 19:30
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The masks suck rear end (not that I'd ever dump them after that experience in the room). We also had shooting excercises with them (US masks from the 70s or something. Like all our gear) and at least for me it was completely impossible to look through the optics of the Stg77. It was a weird optical effect that made aiming impossible. Try shooting with the Stg's ironsights on 300m. Getting the mask to seal fast and that flimsy light protection we had (which is comparable to those simple large plastic bags for trash with holes for feet and hands cut out) was a really sobering experience. Especially when you wash each other down afterwards, that stuff is always there and you feel it burn. How would any serious war gas not kill or injure you like that? There's just no way that you don't get it on you before or after. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 19:32
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Coming from a country that regularly says "the army is full, we're not taking any more people for a decade or so" this conversation is just so far outside my realm of experience that I'm totally  about it.
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Sep 25, 2014 19:41
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SeanBeansShako posted:It really was a hodge podge of old thinking and assumptions with crazy shiny deadly new technology and tactics still being worked on. Lack of helmets is not the only thing, but remember also at the start horses still pulled the guns and some of the supplies, the scouting pilots of the early air arms only had a pistol to defend themselves against other pilots and runners on bikes were used instead of radios. The French still had a few active regiments of these guys:  for the first few weeks of the war. Still blows my mind every time I see a Napoleonic soldier wondering around 1914 Paris.
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Sep 25, 2014 19:47
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How did cavalry units do in the western front after the front stabilized? Also did Germany send their cavalry to east or did they keep cavalry reserves in the west for the inevitable breakthrough and exploit? (or did they grind their mounts into Mettwurst as the blockade started taking its toll)
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Sep 25, 2014 19:56
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Arquinsiel posted:Coming from a country that regularly says "the army is full, we're not taking any more people for a decade or so" this conversation is just so far outside my realm of experience that I'm totally What country is that? Because wow...
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Sep 25, 2014 20:03
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Nenonen posted:How did cavalry units do in the western front after the front stabilized? Also did Germany send their cavalry to east or did they keep cavalry reserves in the west for the inevitable breakthrough and exploit? The Germans generally stopped deploying (and reconstituting) their cavalry units, except in the East, and there they were used generally as mobile infantry in what could be considered a dragoon role. Due to a failure of design, Austrian saddles were worthless and thus the Austrian cavalry was worthless. Horses were generally more valuable as logistics resources than as cavalry, even in the east. A shitload of horses died Germany / Austria Hungary due to the blockade, which I assume means they were eaten.
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Sep 25, 2014 20:19
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Doing anything at all in MOPP kit is extremely difficult. I've had to spend a few days in the old-style MOPP kit the Canadian Forces issued. Any sort of physical activity is significantly more difficult because of reduced airflow thru the respirator Decontamination after pissing or crapping is HORRIBLE. Eating is so difficult that it's almost better not to. Basically the idea of living and fighting in an CBRN battlefield as Infantry is a pipe dream. You get hit in that sort of environment there's no point doing casevac, you're already dead. (Every year for Canadian Forces Reservists you have to do CBRN refresher training in the "Gas Hut", basically a room filled with CS gas. You have to pull your mask off, decontaminate, put it back on, and seal it...but because your face has faux-decontamination crap all over it, the mask never seals right, so you start sucking in CS, which makes you cough, and you don't have enough air already coming thru the respirator. The real rear end in a top hat instructor will tell you to take off the mask at the end of the exercise and take a deep breath...and then you're running for the door while trying not to puke. Probably one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life.)
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Sep 25, 2014 20:26
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Communist Zombie posted:What country is that? Because wow...
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Sep 25, 2014 20:42
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Due to a failure of design, Austrian saddles were worthless and thus the Austrian cavalry was worthless. WHAT  How does a military adopt a saddle that doesn't work? It seems like it would be a pretty well understood technology for, well, a very very long time before that point.
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Sep 25, 2014 21:34
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Alchenar posted:It's also the first war in which trenches were the norm on the battlefield as opposed to just sieges...The fact that things like trenches and indirect fire existed in one form or another for a century and more before WW1 isn't really of relevance to how they were used in WW1. Trenches on the battlefield have a much longer history than is commonly assumed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Trench#Muslim_defense
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