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PittTheElder posted:On a related note to ransom, how common was the concept of parole? It seems bizarre in the modern context that you'd just let a bunch of guys go in exchange for a promise not to take up arms against them again, but I'm guessing early modern states didn't really have any means to take care of these guys if they didn't release them? Was the promise not to take up arms again taken seriously by everyone? I don't have evidence, but I assume neutralizing the enemy in the sector was way more important than killing/imprisoning everybody, and light terms made surrender more likely.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:07
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Baron Porkface posted:I don't have evidence, but I assume neutralizing the enemy in the sector was way more important than killing/imprisoning everybody, and light terms made surrender more likely. That, and there was a non-zero chance that you would get captured in a later conflict, and any army that got a rep for murdering prisoners probably wouldn't be treated well when they were at a disadvantage.
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Oct 14, 2014 21:43
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Here's a slightly unexpected connection between contemporary hand writing and recent military history: number seven. Above you have two standards of drawing a seven by hand. The difference is that the one on the left is a simple 7 while the one on the right has a horizontal line What makes this significant right now is that the Finnish ministry of education recently changed its recommendation back to
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Oct 14, 2014 22:38
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100 Years Ago It's surely ironic that 7th Division arrives at its latest billets in the middle of a particularly foul torrential rainstorm. They'll only be in the Belgian town for a day or so, then they're off towards Rouleurs and Ghent to evict those pesky Boche squatters. So why bother to learn how to pronounce the name "Ypres" properly? It's not like they're going to need it again. Meanwhile, 3rd Division is preparing a two-pronged advance up each side of the La Bassee Canal. Their commander is a conscientious man, and General Hamilton decides to travel up to Bethune in order to see the situation at the sharp end for himself. Almost as soon as he has dismounted from his horse, a shell lands nearby. Hamilton has already survived one hairy moment, when a shell almost landed on his head at Le Cateau and then declined to explode. This one is not so accomodating, and he is killed with a single fragment of shrapnel through the forehead. He is the first of 232 British generals who will become casualties; 78 of them dead. (This dwarfs the number of British generals' casualties from WWII, and hopefully shows that the men of this period didn't all sit in their chateaux swilling claret like General Melchett. If you're still in need an insulting comparison, you might think of General Mireau from Paths of Glory, strolling down the trench.)
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Oct 14, 2014 23:02
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Nenonen posted:Here's a slightly unexpected connection between contemporary hand writing and recent military history: number seven. I wonder if they do the same thing with z and 
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Oct 15, 2014 01:37
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Ensign Expendable posted:I wonder if they do the same thing with z and The great purge was merely a comical mixup resulting from comrade Stalin's poor handwriting 
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Oct 15, 2014 01:39
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Nenonen posted:improve artillery doctrine from the worthless Russian WW1 era origins I don't know anything about the Russian WW1 artillery doctrine, could you elaborate? Ensign Expendable posted:I wonder if they do the same thing with z and Yes, it's also coming back to
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Oct 15, 2014 01:47
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Ensign Expendable posted:I wonder if they do the same thing with z and 
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 01:54 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 01:51
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It's pencil. Pro-note for non-russian speakers looking at soviet documents, if it's written in blue pencil, Stalin wrote it.
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Oct 15, 2014 01:54
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Raskolnikov38 posted:It's pencil. Pro-note for non-russian speakers looking at soviet documents, if it's written in blue pencil, Stalin wrote it.
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Oct 15, 2014 01:54
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Raskolnikov38 posted:It's pencil. Pro-note for non-russian speakers looking at soviet documents, if it's written in blue pencil, Stalin wrote it. Did he draw little hearts too?
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Oct 15, 2014 01:55
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Raskolnikov38 posted:It's pencil. Pro-note for non-russian speakers looking at soviet documents, if it's written in blue pencil, Stalin wrote it. I believe Hitler was a red pencil guy.
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Oct 15, 2014 02:05
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Mussolini wrote in crayon.
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Oct 15, 2014 02:13
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Hitler dictated.
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Oct 15, 2014 02:17
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Frostwerks posted:Hitler dictated. 
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Oct 15, 2014 02:27
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HEY GAL posted:That's adorable. Stalin's blue pencil came from his background as an editor. He would make little comments in blue pencil, which would not be reproduced in black and white photographs. http://chronicle.com/article/Stalins-Blue-Pencil/142109/ quote:Djugashvili (later Stalin) was a ruthless person, and a serious editor. The Soviet historian Mikhail Gefter has written about coming across a manuscript on the German statesman Otto von Bismarck edited by Stalin's own hand. The marked-up copy dated from 1940, when the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany. Knowing that Stalin had been responsible for so much death and suffering, Gefter searched "for traces of those horrible things in the book." He found none. What he saw instead was "reasonable editing, pointing to quite a good taste and an understanding of history."
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Oct 15, 2014 02:42
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Raskolnikov38 posted:It's pencil. Pro-note for non-russian speakers looking at soviet documents, if it's written in blue pencil, Stalin wrote it. Stalin used both blue and red pencil, and this wasn't one of his notes. Blue chemical pencils were very common in the USSR as a cost-effective pen substitute. HEY GAL posted:Oh, the ink/pencil in your sources has survived? (And it wasn't made of material that burns through the paper if left alone long enough?) Cute. It's all fun and games until you get the scribbles in 7H pencil on gray cigar paper copied at TsAMO by an ancient Xerox operated by an even more ancient grumpy woman. Fangz posted:Stalin's blue pencil came from his background as an editor. He would make little comments in blue pencil, which would not be reproduced in black and white photographs. A bunch of Stalin's library with his edits and notes intact has actually been scanned and put online, but you filthy capitalists cannot get to it because access from outside of Russia and Belarus has been sold to Yale University Press. Edit: oh, and sometimes the glue dries in photo albums, they fall out, and peasant conscripts do their best to put them back together.  Thanks, guys. Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 02:52 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 02:44
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Ensign Expendable posted:Edit: oh, and sometimes the glue dries in photo albums, they fall out, and peasant conscripts do their best to put them back together.
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Oct 15, 2014 03:17
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Hey Cyrano, this might interest you, the archive of the Soviet occupational force in Germany has been digitized. Except it's been digitized into the world's shittiest system known to man, even worse than sovdoc somehow. At least this one hasn't been sold off to Yale yet. Unfortunately it takes a loving fortnight to actually figure out how to use the interface and about as long to actually load a document. Also it's in Russian. Naturally I will be combing through the tank related bits, but if there's anything you want me to search for, let me know.
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Oct 15, 2014 04:53
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HEY GAL posted:Oh, the ink/pencil in your sources has survived? (And it wasn't made of material that burns through the paper if left alone long enough?) Cute. Hegel, for future reference please trigger warning all mentions of onionskin and/or whatever the Renaissance Kraut version was called. Exhibit A for why:  This one is only semi-comprehensible without eyestrain because I stuck a blank sheet of white paper underneath before I photographed it, then spent a long time loving around with it in Photoshop. Still not as bad, however, as handwritten letters where the paper was so thin both sides overlay each other when photographed that are only available as microfilm copies. StashAugustine posted:When did that get bought? Not soon enough, is the only correct answer. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Oct 15, 2014 |
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Oct 15, 2014 05:21
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loving amazing. These blundering morons managed to only serve the first page of any document requested, and the controls to see the rest that are vaguely alluded to in the documentation don't show up.
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Oct 15, 2014 05:46
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Raenir Salazar posted:They also did the Punic Wars Key fact I took away from reading about the Punic wars. Goddamit, Carthaginians, get some more goddamn names. 50% of you bastards are called Hanno or Hasdrubal, and the rest all have some similar sounding 'H' name.
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Oct 15, 2014 13:08
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Hegel, for future reference please trigger warning all mentions of onionskin and/or whatever the Renaissance Kraut version was called. But even when it isn't thin, sometimes the ink on one side will burn through the other. No doubt it was really super black when the dude made it, no doubt he was proud as hell.
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Oct 15, 2014 13:25
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Ensign Expendable posted:Hey Cyrano, this might interest you, the archive of the Soviet occupational force in Germany has been digitized. Except it's been digitized into the world's shittiest system known to man, even worse than sovdoc somehow. At least this one hasn't been sold off to Yale yet. Unfortunately it takes a loving fortnight to actually figure out how to use the interface and about as long to actually load a document. Also it's in Russian. Naturally I will be combing through the tank related bits, but if there's anything you want me to search for, let me know.  They digitized the SVA/SMA archives? Are we talking just the occupation-zone level stuff (so, SMAD/SVAG) or the state level stuff as well (SMA-Thüringen, SMA-Sachsen, etc)? If you come across anything talking directly about education, especially administrative policy re: education toss a proverbial sticky note on it for me. Also, email me a link to that database, I can brush off my loving horrific Russian for that. It wouldn't be the first time I had to dick with search terms in Russian  Username at gmail will wind its way to my real email eventually.Honestly I'm half glad it's only just now opening. Two years ago and it would have forced me to expand on my dissertation a lot.
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Oct 15, 2014 19:12
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HEY GAL posted:(Well, the red and brown waxes are. Green wax is always crumbly and lovely by the time I look at it, because green dyes are weird, chemically. It's also difficult to make green dye for fabric or green ink for magazine printing.) If you're willing to settle for pigment rather than dye, arsenic works a treat! 
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Oct 15, 2014 19:22
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Oh, also, if we're going to be telling war stories from the archives. . . ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Hegel, for future reference please trigger warning all mentions of onionskin and/or whatever the Renaissance Kraut version was called. So you know how the Germans basically had their country bombed, burned down, and then the smoking broken rocks rolled over by a bunch of angry Russians looking for women and pocketwatches and drunk Americans content to just steal anything that was smaller than a cathedral? Yeah, so a couple months after that bit of ~*~drama~*~ they did the German thing and started trying to reconstitute some kind of civil society. Like all good Germans they decided they needed to keep records. Only, you know, there's a major shortage of loving EVERYTHING and for some reason people are still mad at them and none too eager to give them much in the way of direct aid. Enter the lowest quality transfer paper you have ever seen (we're talking visible wood fiber - it has the feel of nice two-ply toilette paper where that the layers have been separated into individual sheets) being typed on with the most hilarious mix of (usually broken) typewriters ever. You can frequently track which office something came out of because of the specific ways in which the typewriter was broken. Like, maybe this person has a Nazi era one but the esset and the "L" key appear to be missing, so you get a lot of inventive uses of the ! (including !_ where capitalization is needed) and double-s words spelled with the SS sig rune key. Then the one responding to that might be an old imperial era typewriter that's in fraktur with a whole other set of mechanical issues. If you're lucky enough to have the original documents you get to see hilarious re-using of scrap paper, like the minutes of ministerial meetings on the backs of out of date racial questionnaires.
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Oct 15, 2014 19:27
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Right, so a couple of weeks ago, someone said:Spacewolf posted:Trin, if you could compile these posts into one great big thing of awesomeness, that would be glorious? To which I now heartily say: gently caress you. Because that made me think, and then some things happened, and I've spent most of the last two weeks reworking all the posts I've made in the last two months. Which was fun, and didn't at all eat up a load of spare time I was looking forward to having. So now the website I've built and populated should be just about ready for primetime, and here we go. The homepage is here, and if anyone wants to go back to square one and see what's changed, this is currently the first daily post, from August 23rd. 100 Years Ago Steady Allied advances towards La Bassee and Armentieres, the Germans have trouble in Poland, and the Daily Telegraph talks utter bollocks. Click click!
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Oct 15, 2014 21:03
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Trin Tragula posted:Right, so a couple of weeks ago, someone said: This is awesome. Thanks for taking the time to put it all together.
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Oct 15, 2014 21:09
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Trin Tragula posted:Right, so a couple of weeks ago, someone said: Marry me. So are you still updating the thread or should I just check your site every morning with my first cigarette? (...don't judge how I start my day...)
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Oct 15, 2014 21:51
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Trin Tragula posted:Cool stuff Thanks dude these have been amazing so far.
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Oct 15, 2014 22:58
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Dammit, you've added a page I need to read every day now for the next 4 years! Great work, it will go next to my reading of WW2 Today. I would ask that you make the intro's to the posts bigger, probably to paragraph size.
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Oct 15, 2014 23:01
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Cyrano4747 posted:
http://svag.garf.su/SVAG/Login.aspx They have the following collections (I probably got some place names wrong): SVAG Center USVA Brandenburg USVA Saxony-Angalt USVA Saxony USVA Thuringen USVA Meklenburg Primary party organizations Komsomol GSOVG rear commander SVAG central liquidation commission Tegliche Rundschau publisher Sovetskoye Slovo publisher Soviet mens and womens high schools House of Soviet Culture in Berlin SVAG Central Club Special trade office Allied control in Germany Warnings: 1. The page will fail to load on some computers/browsers for seemingly no reason. I literally had two laptops with the same version of Chrome side by side, one worked, the other did not. It works on my phone, but not on either computer I have at home. Go figure. 2. Don't press Enter on the login screen. It will tell you your password is wrong. Click the top button instead. 3. The site pretends like the interface can be in English, but I see no way this can be achieved. 4. In order to read past the first page of a document, open it in a new window and append &page# to the URL, where # is the page number you want.
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Oct 15, 2014 23:44
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Trin Tragula posted:To which I now heartily say: gently caress you. Thanks Trig! I am actually grateful.
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Oct 16, 2014 01:17
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I'm still reading about the Battle of Britain. James Holland is writing from a British POV. As he sees it, the German armed forces were full of competent and indeed brilliant people at middle management (Rommel, Guderian, Erhard Milch), and but for the utter incompetence, and divide-and-conquer philosophy, of Goering, Hitler, and their spittle-lickers would certainly have destroyed France and the British Expeditionary Forces in 1940. In particular, Holland thinks that if Goering, instead of dividing and subdividing authority in the Luftwaffe, had insisted that the senior officers in the Luftwaffe collaborate, the Battle of Britain would have been over before it began. Is that the scholarly consensus? Question 2: Is there a preferred opinion on why Lord Halifax decided not to accept the Prime Ministership when it was lying before him on a solid-gold platter?
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Oct 16, 2014 01:43
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Meanwhile... 
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Oct 16, 2014 01:59
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Question 2: Is there a preferred opinion on why Lord Halifax decided not to accept the Prime Ministership when it was lying before him on a solid-gold platter? By 1940 it was bad form to have a PM from the House of Lords instead of from the Commons. Also Churchill.
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Oct 16, 2014 02:11
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Arsenic Lupin posted:
I truly hate that phrase. First off, it's probably best to speak of "dominant interpretation" rather than any kind of consensus when talking about anything involving history, period. Second, it's impossible to reach any kind of consensus on counterfactuals because you're basically just intellectually masturbating over might-have-beens. If Göring hadn't been an overweight opium addict he might have concentrated on destroying all French port facilities between Rouen and Calais, making the Dunkirk evac impossible and forcing a British surrender in 1940. Or he might have actually had something better to do in the 20s than hang out with a bunch of loser, pissed off, bitter vets and spent the 30s going on awesome globe trotting adventures with his BFF Chuck Lindbergh. Who knows? One interpretation is as good as another because at that point we're basically just writing history-themed fanfic.
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Oct 16, 2014 02:18
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Fair enough. Let me put it another way. I am not asking "would the green toys beat the yellow toys". I am asking, "Looking purely at the professional military and equipment, is the German army noticeably superior to the French and English armies and equipment?" Was it a lopsided matchup that the British were very lucky to escape, or was it an even matchup where the least incompetent side won?
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Oct 16, 2014 02:43
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Given the choice between the two, the latter.
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Oct 16, 2014 02:45
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The room of a French lieutenant who died in World War 1 has been preserved until the present day. http://www.mindfood.com/article/wwi-french-soldiers-room-untouched-96-years-after-death/ Are those library books on his shelf? I can see the stickers.
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Oct 16, 2014 03:01
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