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If you like watching films which you don't understand then you'll love this: a Soviet 1945 documentary about the same battle (with Finnish subtitles). It's as propagandistic and inaccurate as you might expect, eg. Soviet troops penetrate Mannerheim line even though it didn't exist in 1944 and the fighting in Viipuri is depicted as being bitter Stalingradesque street fighting despite the green Finnish 20th Brigade's line actually routing before the battle had started in earnest (it's telling that only 19 Finnish soldiers died in Viipuri). But the footage is excellent - Russian engineers building bridges, T-34s supported by infantry rolling through Viipuri, and even such exotic sights as a L&L Churchill or an old BA-10 armoured car which I had thought were all replaced by BA-64 by the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcqUCxSyPFw
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Dec 14, 2014 12:34
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JcDent posted:Basically this I believe this might be one of the most awkward looking to handle pistols I have ever seen. How do you hold it, let alone fire it or keep it on your person?
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Dec 14, 2014 13:02
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SeanBeansShako posted:I believe this might be one of the most awkward looking to handle pistols I have ever seen. How do you hold it, let alone fire it or keep it on your person? As far as I can tell, it looks like that's an upgunned version of a katar, and would be held like so:  Presumably it'd be carried around however one carries a katar around. I'll be buggered if I can figure out where the triggers are on those things, though - it looks like the little nubbins next to the grip opposite the barrels might be the triggers, but there seems to be a pretty high risk of accidentally firing the thing just from trying to hold it if so.
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Dec 14, 2014 13:15
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Tomn posted:Presumably it'd be carried around however one carries a katar around. I'll be buggered if I can figure out where the triggers are on those things, though - it looks like the little nubbins next to the grip opposite the barrels might be the triggers, but there seems to be a pretty high risk of accidentally firing the thing just from trying to hold it if so. Yeah those have to be the triggers. Presumably you would only cock it just before you needed to (which I assume was never - it looks more like bling bling than a real weapon).
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Dec 14, 2014 13:25
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JaucheCharly posted:I watched the whole movie and had no idea what was going, other that the guys with the funny language were falling back and that there's constantly ambushes. The tank stuff seems pretty well made too, comparably. Those are at least for the most part real StuGs and T-34. Finland has a bunch of them in running shape.
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Dec 14, 2014 14:08
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It was weird as hell to watch the Finnish Independence day parade on the telly, and bringing up the rear was an original StuG with a bunch of re-enactors jogging alongside. And after them, a bunch of cavalry re-enactors from even further back.
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Dec 14, 2014 14:32
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Siivola posted:It was weird as hell to watch the Finnish Independence day parade on the telly, and bringing up the rear was an original StuG with a bunch of re-enactors jogging alongside. And after them, a bunch of cavalry re-enactors from even further back. This is from Mannerheim's birthday party this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smfAnVEku_k Landsverk Anti II, Vickers 6-ton, StuG III, T-34/85 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INBtoF9l0bo It was a sweaty, sunny day and several veterans had to be carried away from the parade field. I just felt sorry for the conscripts having to ride those heavy old army bicycles carrying heavy old battle rifles and wearing heavy old m/36 uniforms.
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Dec 14, 2014 15:07
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Kemper Boyd posted:Those are at least for the most part real StuGs and T-34. Finland has a bunch of them in running shape. There's even KV-1s. The woods also look pretty nice. In summer. SeanBeansShako posted:I believe this might be one of the most awkward looking to handle pistols I have ever seen. How do you hold it, let alone fire it or keep it on your person? Mughal weaponry is strange. They have some really weird stuff that's exceptional craftsmanship, but completely overdesigned.
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Dec 14, 2014 17:17
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We all hear about the crazy stuff the Germans and Japanese built (or wanted to build) all the time, but what about the Allies? What unbelievably huge things were on their drawing boards that never made it to production? Off the top of my head Churchill wanted to make an aircraft carrier out of an iceberg, and there was a Montana-class Battleship design that was supposed to be too big to fit through the Panama Canal (but was still just a little under the Yamato's displacement).
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Dec 14, 2014 18:38
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Hughes H-4 Hercules was issued in 1942 as a means of completely avoiding German submarines. It would have been able to deliver 750 soldiers or two Sherman tanks from America to Europe on one go - so actually it was a good idea, it just wasn't realistic at that time. The plane made one short flight in 1947 and was Nenonen fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 18:56
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gradenko_2000 posted:We all hear about the crazy stuff the Germans and Japanese built (or wanted to build) all the time, but what about the Allies? What unbelievably huge things were on their drawing boards that never made it to production? Pykrete, specifically - a mixture of ice and sawdust that was as strong as concrete and floated on water as long as you kept it cold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk The idea wasn't so much an aircraft carrier in the usual sense, but more of a floating island in the North Atlantic to be used for staging and refueling aircraft on their way from North America to Europe. It got quite far along in the planning stages, to the point of testing scale models in the US and Canada. Eventually normal aircraft carriers proved sufficient for air power and long-range aircraft could make the flight nonstop, plus the Azores became available as a land base for U-boat hunting. The need for the floating island gradually disappeared and the project was abandoned.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:05
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Nenonen posted:If you like watching films which you don't understand then you'll love this: a Soviet 1945 documentary about the same battle (with Finnish subtitles). It's as propagandistic and inaccurate as you might expect, eg. Soviet troops penetrate Mannerheim line even though it didn't exist in 1944 and the fighting in Viipuri is depicted as being bitter Stalingradesque street fighting despite the green Finnish 20th Brigade's line actually routing before the battle had started in earnest (it's telling that only 19 Finnish soldiers died in Viipuri). But the footage is excellent - Russian engineers building bridges, T-34s supported by infantry rolling through Viipuri, and even such exotic sights as a L&L Churchill or an old BA-10 armoured car which I had thought were all replaced by BA-64 by the time. Leningrad Front was a hilarious mishmash of old and new vehicles. Hell, they even had BT-2s running around, and ridiculous homebrewed devices like a T-26 with a 76 mm regimental gun or the even more ancient 37 mm tank gun in a three wall turret. There were also 45 mm tank guns on improvised towed mounts, but they are not as interesting.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:We all hear about the crazy stuff the Germans and Japanese built (or wanted to build) all the time, but what about the Allies? What unbelievably huge things were on their drawing boards that never made it to production? Technically speaking, the A-Bomb was an unbelievably huge project (in many senses of the term!) that had a debatable impact on the progress of the war overall. The only difference was that it DID make it to production!  Also on the subject of "silly-huge Allied projects that actually made it into production," there's the Mulberry Harbors - gigantic artificial harbors intended to supply the Invasion of France in the event that they couldn't capture a proper deep-water harbor early on. From what I understand two of them were eventually deployed to support the Normandy landings - one of them was wrecked in a storm, but the other one served rather successfully well past its intended use date. There's also the Auxiliary Repair Docks - floating drydocks that could be towed to wherever they were needed, which is as much of an achievement as it sounds. You might say that the difference between Allied (or at least American) superprojects and Axis superprojects is that the Allies could actually AFFORD their crazy ideas - and that their superprojects had a tendency to be more practical. The ones that made it off the drawing board, at least. Edit: Also, it's not strictly a WWII thing, but at one point around WW1 a US Senator got fed up with the Navy asking for a slightly bigger designs every year and requested that they design "maximum battleships" - the biggest possible battleship the Navy could use so that they could get their toys and have done with it. The Washington Naval Treaty scuppered any chance of making them reality, though I don't think the Navy was really that enthusiastic about them anyways. Tomn fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 19:19
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The US tried to have "bat-bombs" and "pigeon-guided missles" (the latter dreamed up by BF Skinner) during the war. When those didn't work, they came up with remote-controlled b-17s to use as guided missiles. I think Joseph Kennedy was killed in an accident in one of those flights. But you can tell the US had industrial capacity to spare when they came up with the plan of using bombers as cruise missiles.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:33
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The biggest difference is that in authoritarian regimes it's a lot harder to tell your superior that his idea/plan is retarded, so you wind up with a lot of quirky or borderline useless poo poo going on. This authoritarianism was a weakness for the Axis in general - it is widely agreed by intelligence historians, for example, that Nazi intelligence was permanently hampered by the fact that it was always risky to come bearing unwanted bad tidings. That and Canaris was batting for the other side. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 19:46
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At least in terms of unworkable superheavy tanks, everyone managed to learn it the hard way. The Soviets had a whole host of crazy KV-based projects that pretty much all failed to get anywhere, the Brits were tooling around with the Assault Tank line that ended with the Tortoise (and let's not forget good ol' TOG) and the US was fiddling around with stuff like the T29 and it's brethren and the T95 project.
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Dec 14, 2014 19:57
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Bouncing bombs, mini-subs, a mechanical computing device that can brute-force 'uncrackable' codes. We did okay for our secret weapons.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:07
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Disinterested posted:The biggest difference is that in authoritarian regimes it's a lot harder to tell your superior that his idea/plan is retarded, so you wind up with a lot of quirky or borderline useless poo poo going on. This authoritarianism was a weakness for the Axis in general - it is widely agreed by intelligence historians, for example, that Nazi intelligence was permanently hampered by the fact that it was always risky to come bearing unwanted bad tidings. All armies are authoritarian regimes (except for Red Army which was democratic!). Now, Hitler was a pain to his generals far beyond Churchill, but that's just Churchill being a lazy old drunk. He could have done better.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:19
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Disinterested posted:The biggest difference is that in authoritarian regimes it's a lot harder to tell your superior that his idea/plan is retarded, so you wind up with a lot of quirky or borderline useless poo poo going on. This authoritarianism was a weakness for the Axis in general - it is widely agreed by intelligence historians, for example, that Nazi intelligence was permanently hampered by the fact that it was always risky to come bearing unwanted bad tidings. Stalin only came up with one tank design, the KV-7. It was built and trialled, turned out it was useless and stupid. He then revised his plan to use two 76 mm guns instead of one 76 mm gun and two 45 mm guns, and it was still stupid as gently caress, so the project got canned and nobody was shot over it. However, the experience gained in the project allowed the much more useful SU-152 to be designed in a grand total of two weeks. As for giant and impractical Soviet tank projects, the success of the KV-1 resulted in three more competing projects that would have competed for the title of the Red Army's heavy tank in 1942: KV-3, KV-4, and KV-5. It's still unknown what the latter two would have looked like, but they would certainly be ridiculously heavy (north of 100 tons for post proposals) and feature a 107 mm gun with a 45 mm gun in a secondary turret. The KV-3 was much more reasonable 70 tons and only had one turret. Furthermore, it was actually built for a specific purpose: immunity to the FlaK 36 at any range. Then there was a pile of projects (various variants indexed 150 and 220, and the KV-6) that were pretty much like the regular KV-1, but with a bit more armour, slightly different turret, and in one case, an 85 mm gun. Not all that interesting compared to the hundred ton KV monsters. When the war started, all these projects were rapidly re-evaluated and cancelled. The only working 220 was sent to the front with a regular KV-1 turret. Every other project died except for the KV-3, the hull of which bounced around between factories before the project was finally officially cancelled in 1942.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:19
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If you can believe it the B-29 was the most expensive program of the entire war; depending on how you assess costs it was as much as the Manhattan project and the V2 put together. Now, certainly it produced an incredible weapon system that the US got a ton of utility out of but...that's a lot of money for 3,000-odd planes who mainly focused on terror bombing a mostly defeated opponent.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:26
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HEY GAL posted:
Right, the script was obviously written by total fanboys. It plays out as the auto-biography of a really famous person where it's assumed you're already familiar with the outline. "Here is Lincoln delivering the Gettysberg address, here he is releasing the emancipation declaration, why yes he would like to take his mind of his troubles with a trip to the theatre" etc. Trouble is, if like myself you weren't familiar with the books the whole thing was an incoherent mess.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:27
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Nenonen posted:All armies are authoritarian regimes (except for Red Army which was democratic!). Now, Hitler was a pain to his generals far beyond Churchill, but that's just Churchill being a lazy old drunk. He could have done better. We're talking really about political interference and also the culture of the services in a specific time. It was extremely difficult to register dissent in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Churchill could be a clown, but he also had moments of clarity, and serial dissenters weren't liquidated or put totally out to pasture in quite the same way. quote:Stalin only came up with one tank design, the KV-7. It was built and trialled, turned out it was useless and stupid. I get the impression that Stalin was a much more self-aware individual than Hitler. But the Soviet intelligence apparatus consistently displayed problems throughout its life for the reasons I outlined, and a lot of that is to do with the tone set from above: people didn't like to be in conflict with Stalin. There would have been way less chance of ridiculous and unworkable weapons being created in the British or American military-industrial complexes because more people would have been willing to tell whoever was pushing the project that it was a retarded idea. It is an advantage of openness. bewbies posted:If you can believe it the B-29 was the most expensive program of the entire war; depending on how you assess costs it was as much as the Manhattan project and the V2 put together. The US got more than enough use out of them. The US wasn't just arming for WW2 at that point, but potential wars with the USSR. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 20:34
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Stalin was self-aware enough to know that he'd be able to get all the credit after the war, but only if he won. Churchill fancied himself a military genius but ultimately he was a democratic leader who wouldn't survive a scandal over his ability to direct the war and Alan Brooke was willing to shout him down over his mad plans. Hitler was neither self-aware nor had anyone who would shout him down, so he ended up with company-level maps spread out everywhere trying to direct troop movements down to the platoon level.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:44
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Hitler would have loved Men of War. He could have even changed the hats the soldiers were wearing in real time.
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Dec 14, 2014 20:57
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100 Years Ago Possibly the dullest day of the war so far, with only the start of the withdrawal from Belgrade. If in doubt, dive into a book and pull out someone's account of what they were doing about now, so I'm mostly deferring to Private Haine, currently earning his five francs a week by humping sandbags up the line. The paper's got another Kipling article on the training of Kitchener's Army, and I'm still inordinately amused by adverts for patent medicine.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:17
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Disinterested posted:The US got more than enough use out of them. The US wasn't just arming for WW2 at that point, but potential wars with the USSR. The US had a back-up plan in case the B29 failed, too. It was called the B32. It saw very limited use at the very end of the war. The B-29 had a lot of issues when it came into service as well. if you want to look at goofy designs, look at the designs of tanks that the Bureau of Ordnance put out from 1942-1944. Huge interiors, double front and rear hull machine guns, all the armor and armament of a KV-1 with almost twice the weight.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:We all hear about the crazy stuff the Germans and Japanese built (or wanted to build) all the time, but what about the Allies? What unbelievably huge things were on their drawing boards that never made it to production? Well, there was the B-36, which was actually considered but spent most of the war on the back burner because it was mostly an insurance policy for Britain falling.  Yes that is a B-29. There's the XTB2F which was designed as a carrier bomber multirole thing. By the time they cancelled it it was about the size of a Mitchell, armed with a 75mm and 6 .50 guns firing forward, a dorsal and ball turret both with a pair of .50s and an empty weight of right around 25,000 pounds to carry two torpedoes or 8,000 pounds of other weapons.  The big problem with Allied wonder weapons is that they tended to get actually made and become a key part of they way post-war militaries worked. Things like proximity fuzes and good radar fire control were a huge deal and very important to the way the Pacific played out, but they're not History channel could've beens where people breathlessly talk about best-case estimates as if that would be the systems' real life performance, they simply were. And some stuff just doesn't get mentioned. The biggest coolest thing I can think of that the US almost got into the fight is this crazy example of futuretech:   Yes that is WWII era AWACS which would've been ready for the invasion of Japan. The second is a schematic of the carrier version which debuted with the TBM-3W, which wasn't able to fit any facilities for crew, so instead it would transmit a tv feed down to the carrier, and they would have a radar view from above the fleet to work with. The PB-1W had some room for crew onboard although the people who fly AWACS now would cry at how small a complement it was.
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Dec 14, 2014 21:57
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On the topic of movies, it is been a while but Iluminados por el fuego was really well received. I will rewatch it but it is about the Falklands War so it should be interesting for those tired of WW2 movies. Wasn't The Lost batallion decent too? Also my american history teacher is recommending Gods and Generals (the movie) as a primer in ACW stuff. It, uh, does not look promising.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:21
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Disinterested posted:Hitler would have loved Men of War. He could have even changed the hats the soldiers were wearing in real time. It's pretty great, I made sure to snag any cool looking officer's hat I could get my hands on during a mission, and ended up commanding the most colourful force possible by the end of each level, especially during the partisan one.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:29
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Azran posted:Also my american history teacher is recommending Gods and Generals (the movie) as a primer in ACW stuff. It, uh, does not look promising.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:29
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For actual Allied Wonder Weapons, the closest thing that comes to mind are the Tall Boy/Grand Slam bombs. These were 12,000 lbs or 22,000 lbs bunker busting bombs that were designed to penetrate deep into the ground and destroy the target with seismic shockwaves or by having the building collapse into the crater created. It took a month for the explosive filling to cool aftering being poured, and the bombs were so expensive that if the pilots couldn't positively identify the target, they were instructed to land with the bombs intact rather than jettisoning them into the sea. 617 Squadron "Dambusters" had a fair degree of success using these bombs against super-hardened targets like submarine pens, the Watten bunker, and railway tunnels. So yeah, 22,000 lbs handmade bombs that break the soundbarrier and destroy targets with seismic shocks are pretty drat wonder-weapony. But they also made sense, given the existence of elite units like 617 squadron, Allied heavy bombers, and hardened high value targets. Hitler probably would've demanded a jet dive bomber to carry the Nazi rocket-propelled Grand Slam equivalent.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:33
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this is probably a hilariously noob-level question, but what's the earliest known conflict in human history one could arguably call a war?
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Dec 14, 2014 22:39
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Tollymain posted:this is probably a hilariously noob-level question, but what's the earliest known conflict in human history one could arguably call a war? http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/gabrmetz/gabr0004.htm
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Dec 14, 2014 22:52
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Azran posted:On the topic of movies, it is been a while but Iluminados por el fuego was really well received. I will rewatch it but it is about the Falklands War so it should be interesting for those tired of WW2 movies. Gods and Generals isn't so good for the Grognardy stuff, but it gives a decent feel for some key individuals. You'd be better off with a couple of good books. I'm not sure there really is a definitive American Civil War film that hasn't got one or another big flaw, unfortunately.
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Dec 14, 2014 22:52
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I need a good English language book about the Russian front in WWII.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:53
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The Swedish navy had some success with finding submarines using trained seals during WW2.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:56
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Ken Burn's The Civil War is five movies worth of great ACW 'film'.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:56
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Ken Burn's The Civil War is five movies worth of great ACW 'film'.
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Dec 14, 2014 23:57
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On this note, what are some good podcasts? I've listened to Dan Carlin's Mongols and WW1 series, what else to recommend?
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Dec 15, 2014 00:02
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China History by Laszlo Montgomery, and BBC Radio series' In Our Time and History of the World in 100 Objects. watch in our time when you are not liable to fall asleep from the most ponderous voice ever
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Dec 15, 2014 00:06
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