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Ensign Expendable posted:Experience showed that the ball mounted gun was hard enough to aim that it was only useful for suppressive fire. With the elimination of the radio operator position, there was no one left to do even that, so the designers figured that spitting some tracers in the vague direction of infantry was good enough. So was the lack of a radio operator what spurred the deletion of bow MG's globally, or was it their relative uselessness?
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Jan 13, 2015 18:58
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Hogge Wild posted:Has British government apologized the bombing of Dresden? Has British government apologized the bombing of Liinahamari???  
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Jan 13, 2015 18:59
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Hogge Wild posted:Has British government apologized the bombing of Dresden? I was using it merely hypothetically in that context. The answer is no, although it is a hotly debated topic. Partly there is probably reluctance because some commentators who are highly critical of the bombings, like Grayling, don't regard the bombings as a war crime. He does think that the pilots should have refused to follow the orders to do the bombings. There is even a minor German tradition of support for the bombings (which appears also in Thomas Mann). It wouldn't be surprising if there was one someday soonish, but there is institutional resistance from people like the RAF. A lot of people in the UK regard it as being at the very least an extremely excessive use of force - it is not an event that people think about uncritically, or which is ignored. Nenonen posted:Has British government apologized the bombing of Liinahamari??? You, on the other hand, may be waiting forever. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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Jan 13, 2015 19:04
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Nenonen posted:Also the protruding bow MG. It's for when some rear end in a top hat cuts you off in the motor pool.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:07
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Disinterested posted:I was using it merely hypothetically in that context. The answer is no, although it is a hotly debated topic. Partly there is probably reluctance because some commentators who are highly critical of the bombings, like Grayling, don't regard the bombings as a war crime. He does think that the pilots should have refused to follow the orders to do the bombings. There is even a minor German tradition of support for the bombings (which appears also in Thomas Mann). Dresden ought to be considered a war crime but it is a case of criminally excessive force and lack of care for collateral damage to civilians, as opposed to, say, the Rape of Nanking. It's tough to make a comparison of the two because you inevitably end up having to argue that they're both war crimes and you're not trying to excuse one with the other.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:11
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Splode posted:I guess if you're infantry without any AT weapons it doesn't matter whether or not the tank bearing down on you is forty years old. The M1 is pushing 35.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:13
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FAUXTON posted:Dresden ought to be considered a war crime but it is a case of criminally excessive force and lack of care for collateral damage to civilians, as opposed to, say, the Rape of Nanking. It's tough to make a comparison of the two because you inevitably end up having to argue that they're both war crimes and you're not trying to excuse one with the other. I'm sort of of the opinion that it's not my business to say whether it's a war crime, and in a way that's the wrong question. War criminality is a technical legal question. I think morally it can be shown to have been wrong, as well as poorly executed, and largely motivated by the wrong concerns (to appease Stalin, to use the bomber force for its designed goal, for revenge) and stubbornness (insistence that the bomber fleet couldn't be used against tactical and logistical targets - it could). Also Dresden's bombing has become a major talking point for the far right, complicating the issue. They heavily inflate the death figures (from like 25,000 to 250-500,000) and use the Dresden case as an example of equivalence between Nazi crimes (which they often deny - another retarded form of apologism!) and Allied crimes. That probably doesn't help. It also doesn't help that the air force, and particularly bomber command, had an extremely rough and bloody war. I don't think official apologies should be made a touchstone of the relationship a culture or its academy has to a historical event. Britain historically interrogates the bombing of Dresden in a serious way societally and particularly in the academy - and always has. Churchill often lurched into depression at the barbarity of the bombings even at the time. Newspaper articles routinely are published that debate the issue ('was it necessary?' 'was it immoral?' 'is it a crime?' etc.) At the level of culture and academics, the question is interrogated more closely than the Japanese right winger model of stuffing your fingers in your ears and saying 'la la la'.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:20
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Slavvy posted:So was the lack of a radio operator what spurred the deletion of bow MG's globally, or was it their relative uselessness? Keeping in mind that during WW2 infantry anti-tank combat had moved from close assaulting tanks with molotovs to rocket launchers fired from a safe distance, and at the same time tank mobility had greatly improved (yet thanks to stabilizers they could maintain somewhat accurate fire while moving) so main battle tanks could run circles around infantry while still fighting, I'd say the bow machinegun just had become obsolete. Removing them also eliminated one potential weak point in glacis armour.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:24
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I'm inclined to think there's merit in the point Max hastings makes that allied war crimes were committed as means to the end of the war, whereas axis war crimes were an end in themselves. On that basis there's a clear reason for differentiating between the two.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:30
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Disinterested posted:I'm sort of of the opinion that it's not my business to say whether it's a war crime, and in a way that's the wrong question. War criminality is a technical legal question. I think morally it can be shown to have been wrong, as well as poorly executed, and largely motivated by the wrong concerns (to appease Stalin, to use the bomber force for its designed goal, for revenge) and stubbornness (insistence that the bomber fleet couldn't be used against tactical and logistical targets - it could). Whether or not it is a war crime doesn't govern whether it merits an apology, but yeah Dresden is a hard topic to research because you end up running into asking whether or not the things you're reading are playing it up to paper over the Holocaust. The fact that it raised public questions in a time where it was largely OK to dehumanize "the enemy" sort of speaks to the barbarity of that incident and of strategic firebombing as a whole. The description of the tactic really nails that part home - you're not busting trains and railroads, you're bombing the roofs off to expose timber, break water conduits, and make firefighting/first aid difficult to deliver, then dropping incendiaries. Over time the views of these things change, and it'll probably be the subject of a government apology at some point, the same as the atomic bombs and with any luck poo poo like Nanking and Okinawa and Bataan, etc.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:31
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In what different ways were the tank turrets rotated? Were the German WWII anti-tank, anti-ship and anti-air missiles any good, and how much did they affect other countries' later missiles? Were they all invented by Germans?
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Jan 13, 2015 19:33
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Rhymenoserous posted:The M1 is pushing 35. The original design is, but they still make the tanks and it's been pretty heavily upgraded since they debuted. Unless you're argument hinges on anyone still using first-built M1s with the British 105mm rifled gun. Slavvy posted:So was the lack of a radio operator what spurred the deletion of bow MG's globally, or was it their relative uselessness? There were probably a number of factors that went into their obsolescence. First factor was almost undoubtedly the crew requirement-For everybody during the cold war, there was a big drive to try and reduce the size of tank crews to A) Increase the number of tanks you could field with a given number of personnel and B) Decrease the number of people killed if a tank got knocked out, amongst other things. Since the only job the "Assistant Driver" had on US tank crews was to fire the bow MG, his position is gonna be the first one cut, likewise on Soviet crews when the radio operator position was just given to the tank commander. There's also the question of protection. I could be wrong on this, but when you're making a piece of armor plate, the addition of any holes for things like the bow machine-gun is going to weaken the overall strength of the plate significantly. Add that to the necessary compromises you have to make when trying to make a tank NBC resistant, and the bow machine gun could very well be a detriment to the tank's design. Finally, it just comes down to redundancy. Most tanks are already going to have three anti-infantry weapons-HE from the main gun, a machine-gun mounted co-axially to the main gun, and a gun on top for use by the tank commander, and all of them can be fired from any direction around the tank. Adding a whole other machine gun on the hull of the tank that can only fire in a very narrow arc directly forward isn't exactly going to significantly increase the tank's killing power, and the costs of doing so (The two points above) make it a drawback more than anything else. At least, that's my impression of why they went away.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:41
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Slavvy posted:So was the lack of a radio operator what spurred the deletion of bow MG's globally, or was it their relative uselessness? It was a combination of factors. They were relatively useless, but not completely useless, and were kept in the T-34-85 despite the radio moving up to the commander. They were already eliminated in the T-43 though, since the idea was to drastically increase the level of protection, so they were left out in the radical redesign that was the T-44. Nenonen posted:Keeping in mind that during WW2 infantry anti-tank combat had moved from close assaulting tanks with molotovs to rocket launchers fired from a safe distance, and at the same time tank mobility had greatly improved (yet thanks to stabilizers they could maintain somewhat accurate fire while moving) so main battle tanks could run circles around infantry while still fighting, I'd say the bow machinegun just had become obsolete. Removing them also eliminated one potential weak point in glacis armour. Panzerfausts had a range of 60 meters, I wouldn't call that a safe distance. In Soviet experience, they were only a danger in urban combat, and you had to have a squad of guys sitting on top of the tank looking in every direction to be able to suppress anyone trying to shoot the tank, at which point an MG in the hull doesn't do you any good. The Sherman's AA MG proved itself very useful in this scenario, though. Acebuckeye13 posted:The original design is, but they still make the tanks and it's been pretty heavily upgraded since they debuted. Unless you're argument hinges on anyone still using first-built M1s with the British 105mm rifled gun. The Soviets weren't motivated by saving people, but rather by saving size. A mechanical loader needs a lot less space than a human loader, making the tank a smaller target, reducing the odds of it being hit and destroyed. As for NBC sealed gun mounts, those are used on BTRs, so that wasn't really the problem.
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Jan 13, 2015 19:54
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Alchenar posted:I'm inclined to think there's merit in the point Max hastings makes that allied war crimes were committed as means to the end of the war, whereas axis war crimes were an end in themselves. On that basis there's a clear reason for differentiating between the two. That's always been my take on it. The allies' crimes that are always pointed to are war related operations such as bombings whereas the Germans and Japanese were just killing civilians had no military related purpose.
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Jan 13, 2015 20:06
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To play the devil's advocate: How does that differ from the german rationale of eliminating the russian and polish jews as supposed carriers of "Partisanentum" or the plan to starve the "surplus" locals to help the war effort? Sorry, but that's a war related purpose for us. Do you think incinerating a city and the civilians inside just goes if you slap a sticker with "war related operations" on it? Literally anything in the east is already layed out in the planning of Barbarossa, from the treatment of the jews, to the treatment of the russian pows and the civilian population. You can also look up the "Grüne Mappe" and read what they planed so that they might still win the war with the invasion of Britain out of reach. It's grotesque and the jews weren't even the main target, but there you go, it's all under the mantle of military operations. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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Jan 13, 2015 20:26
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JaucheCharly posted:To play the devil's advocate: How does that differ from the german rationale of eliminating the russian and polish jews as supposed carriers of "Partisanentum" or the plan to starve the "surplus" locals to help the war effort? Sorry, but that's a war related purpose for us. Well, the Germans thought a lot of the Jew-killing was war-related, because they thought they were participating in a war against Judeo-bolsheivism, innaugurated by Jews, and that some of the failures in the war and the previous one that necessitated were caused by Jews. So to some extent you have to look at how reasonable the belief that the attacks were war related really were, as well as how effective. Most of these German measures actually hurt the German war effort, by using materiel and men for exterminations and encouraging partisan activity and sabotage. The Allied strategy of strategic bombing didn't hasten the end of the war much, but they certainly didn't increase the chance of losing it or make it take longer. Their scale, in terms of lives lost in Germany, was also comparatively small. Some people, like Thomas Mann, saw the destruction of the cities as (a) karmic and (b) a sort of necessary disproof of Nazism, something that make it totally clear that fascism meant total destruction and that there could be no uncertainty about who had lost this time. The area bombing was certainly not done just for war reasons, it was also done to mollify Stalin, to demonstrate the power of the air force, and to test its capability - much like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are not good reasons.
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Jan 13, 2015 20:33
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I honestly just ignore the perspectives of each side and just look it at thusly, bombing cities directly attacks the nazis' ability to wage war. Setting up extermination camps and using soldiers to shoot Jewish civilians is pretty clearly wasting time and resources that could go to boosting the fighting ability of the wehrmacht.
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Jan 13, 2015 20:40
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On the other hand, putting various undesirables into slave labour camps and having them produce materiel is at least nominally helpful to the war effort.
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Jan 13, 2015 20:43
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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It's remarkable how this war erradicated boundaries, or shall we say WW1?Raskolnikov38 posted:I honestly just ignore the perspectives of each side and just look it at thusly, bombing cities directly attacks the nazis' ability to wage war. Setting up extermination camps and using soldiers to shoot Jewish civilians is pretty clearly wasting time and resources that could go to boosting the fighting ability of the wehrmacht. Dedicated extermination camps are the way for the people unfit to work, it's a bit more complicated. The earlier holocaust by bullets is done and planned in the mantle of fighting partisans, you can look at the number of people that were in the Einsatzgruppen, Einsatz- and Sonderkommandos. It's just a few guys that do the shooting. I'll just paste this from wikipedia: Beispiel der Personalstärke einer Einsatzgruppe (hier EGr A) Geheime Staatspolizei: 89 (9,0 %) Kriminalpolizei: 41 (4,1 %) Ordnungspolizei: 133 (13,4 %) Sicherheitsdienst: 35 (3,5 %) Waffen-SS: 340 (34 %) Hilfspolizei: 87 (8,8 %) Kradfahrer: 172 Dolmetscher: 51 Fernschreibkräfte: 3 Funker: 8 Verwaltung: 18 Weibliche Beschäftigte: 13 Summe: 990 Scary poo poo. Take out the administrative and logistic dudes and you have a few hundred people that killed like 249k people by the end of 1941 for Einsatzgruppe A. If you consider the worldview, and look at how things are planned it is rational, however weird that might sound. It might be the newest fad to paint the nazis as giant fuckups, but don't buy into that too much. The bureaucracy and organisational capabilities of a modern state and military isn't something that you can brush off. Power Khan fucked around with this message at 21:11 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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Jan 13, 2015 20:51
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Hogge Wild posted:Were the German WWII anti-tank, anti-ship and anti-air missiles any good, and how much did they affect other countries' later missiles? Were they all invented by Germans? The anti tank missile (the X-7) worked reasonably well in testing and probably would have been effective in combat; the French and US used copies of it for many years afterwards. The Fritz X (glide bomb) and the Hs-293 (anti ship missile) were both pretty effective throughout their service lives. Allied countermeasures were better though; I'll go so far as to say that this was a key enabler for the Allies at Normandy. The X-4 air to air missile worked at least in theory but it had some major operational issues: the pilot had to fly the missile as well as his plane, and in a sky full of Allied planes this wasn't a terribly good idea. As far as I know the X-4 didn't make any serious contributions to postwar research. The Allies had their own guided munitions programs; the Azon, GB-4/8 and the Gargoyle were all basically the same idea as the Fritz X. The Bat was, I think, the first munition with an active radar and was arguably the most advanced munition of the war. It was moderately effective in limited combat.
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Jan 13, 2015 20:58
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Ensign Expendable posted:Panzerfausts had a range of 60 meters, I wouldn't call that a safe distance. In Soviet experience, they were only a danger in urban combat, and you had to have a squad of guys sitting on top of the tank looking in every direction to be able to suppress anyone trying to shoot the tank, at which point an MG in the hull doesn't do you any good. The Sherman's AA MG proved itself very useful in this scenario, though. Bazooka/Panzerschreck (and post-war models of the same basic design like RPG-2) could be fired 100-200m, as could late models of Panzerfaust, and other late/post war light recoilless rifles like Carl Gustav. This is far enough to be safe against bow machine gun, unstabilized coax or tank riders.
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Jan 13, 2015 21:00
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Ensign Expendable posted:Panzerfausts had a range of 60 meters, I wouldn't call that a safe distance. In Soviet experience, they were only a danger in urban combat, and you had to have a squad of guys sitting on top of the tank looking in every direction to be able to suppress anyone trying to shoot the tank, at which point an MG in the hull doesn't do you any good. The Sherman's AA MG proved itself very useful in this scenario, though. Panzerschreck and later Panzerfaust models went up to 150-200 meters, though. And the Püppchen could do 350+ meters, though that was a small crew-served weapon.
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Jan 13, 2015 21:01
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Anyone here familiar with Fritz Gause? A book I just got is leaning pretty heavily on his Die Russen in Ostpreußen 1914/15, and a glance at his poorly-written Wikipedia page is making me a bit twitchy, as an apparent Nazi sympathiser writing (in 1931) some seriously heavy accounts of Russian atrocities in Prussia... 100 Years Ago The First Battle of Champagne goes on official hiatus, but don't worry, there'll soon be a letter-writing campaign for GQC to bring it back. The French Army starts trying to figure out how it is they can spend the better part of a month attacking with all the elan they can muster, and achieve a mean forward velocity of approximately π metres per hour. Bearing in mind that No Man's Land is usually about 100-150 metres wide, this is less than ideal, even once someone invents the creeping barrage. (If they keep that rate of advance up, they'll be marching triumphantly into Berlin in early summer 1947.) We've also got Ottomans coming across the Sinai towards the Suez Canal, Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck plotting something in Africa, yet another amusing advert for patent medicine, and someone with nothing better to do has written to the War Office to ask them why it is that Highland battalions have been seen going off to war while wearing plain khaki kilts instead of their proper Regimental tartans  (Yes, there are blokes swimming around the trenches in Flanders in winter wearing kilts. Trench foot is not the concern...)
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Jan 13, 2015 21:37
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Disinterested posted:I was using it merely hypothetically in that context. The answer is no, although it is a hotly debated topic. Partly there is probably reluctance because some commentators who are highly critical of the bombings, like Grayling, don't regard the bombings as a war crime. He does think that the pilots should have refused to follow the orders to do the bombings Wait, that makes no sense. I know that today officers are taught about refusing orders to commit war crimes. I'm not sure the point was as clear back then. Either way, though, how does an officer legally refuse to follow an order that he doesn't think is a war crime? A Lancaster is no place for civil disobedience.
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Jan 13, 2015 23:18
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Wait, that makes no sense. I know that today officers are taught about refusing orders to commit war crimes. I'm not sure the point was as clear back then. Either way, though, how does an officer legally refuse to follow an order that he doesn't think is a war crime? A Lancaster is no place for civil disobedience. Drop your bombs off target.
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Jan 13, 2015 23:24
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Nenonen posted:Bazooka/Panzerschreck (and post-war models of the same basic design like RPG-2) could be fired 100-200m, as could late models of Panzerfaust, and other late/post war light recoilless rifles like Carl Gustav. This is far enough to be safe against bow machine gun, unstabilized coax or tank riders. I thought those 200 meter ones were legendarily rare. From every Soviet operational research doc I've read, opening fire with an infantry squad at 100 metres was said to be an effective deterrent. One guy (Chuikov IIRC, I can look it up) flat out stated that the Panzerfaust with a range of 60-100 meters "is not and cannot be an effective anti-tank weapon". Post war and Korean war weapons were a whole different ball game, I'd say that you would be able to use those from relative safety.
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Jan 13, 2015 23:28
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Zorak of Michigan posted:Wait, that makes no sense. I know that today officers are taught about refusing orders to commit war crimes. I'm not sure the point was as clear back then. Either way, though, how does an officer legally refuse to follow an order that he doesn't think is a war crime? A Lancaster is no place for civil disobedience. That is a major argument made against that otherwise quite good book, which I am inclined to agree with. You can watch a lengthy debate on the book (if you aren't repulsed by the sight of Christopher Hitchens, as some are) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4eRRcxUwUw Hitchens does a good job at times of being a devil's advocate in favour of the bombing, as well as being more critical, at moments, than Grayling is about the bombing too (in the context of proto-cold war politics). Disinterested fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Jan 14, 2015 00:00
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Hogge Wild posted:Has British government apologized the bombing of Dresden? There's a connection between us now, I guess Edit: Googling whether the British apologized or not, I did find this article, which said that the Queen visited Dresden in '04. There was no official apology during that visit. The comments are so sad. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Jan 14, 2015 00:13
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HEY GAL posted:I'm not sure about that, but the project to restore the Frauenkirche had several British figures on its board. The (reproduction of the) golden cross atop the cupola was funded by the British people and the British royal house, made by a smith whose father was involved in the bombing, and donated by the RAF's patron church. Nice.
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Jan 14, 2015 00:17
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Ensign Expendable posted:The Soviets weren't motivated by saving people, but rather by saving size. A mechanical loader needs a lot less space than a human loader, making the tank a smaller target, reducing the odds of it being hit and destroyed. It's not just the size of the tank that gets reduced, but the amount of weight additional armor adds. The less interior space, the more economical it is to add more armor. This is why it is nearly impossible to effectively armor IFVs against serious anti-tank weapons. The T-72 had really good protection for a tank of its weight(the modern MBTs that you see like the Leo2 and M1 are almost twice as heavy).
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Jan 14, 2015 00:23
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Incidentally, I have absolutely no idea how the stuff I study survived. The Hauptstaatsarchiv itself is a fragmentary building, you can see the exact spot on the wall where the old building ends. But the collection (at least the 17th century militaria) is pristine and loving massive. I know a lot of art spent the war at Festung Koenigstein, which has massive walls and no modern relevance whatsoever, but I'm not sure about the archives. I'm trying to find out more about the regiment I'm studying, and all Spanish government documents from Milan after 1624 are just gone, due to Allied bombing in 1943. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Jan 14, 2015 |
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Jan 14, 2015 00:26
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Hogge Wild posted:Nice.
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Jan 14, 2015 01:02
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Fangz posted:Drop your bombs off target. Waaaaay easier said than done, dude.
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Jan 14, 2015 01:05
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Waaaaay easier said than done, dude. Well during a lot of raids it is pretty easy to do because that's what everyone's doing.
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Jan 14, 2015 01:17
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Hogge Wild posted:In what different ways were the tank turrets rotated? WW2 British and Russian - electric motors German - hydraulics driven by the main engine (didn't work if the engine was off, and only went full speed if the driver was flooring it) American - electrically-driven hydraulics Japanese - hand cranks and bicycle pedals tanks with powered turrets also had manual controls for fine aiming and emergency backup. http://weaponsman.com/?p=19716
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Jan 14, 2015 01:50
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xthetenth posted:Well during a lot of raids it is pretty easy to do because that's what everyone's doing. I seem to recall that over 95% of bombs dropped in WW2 hit the country they were aiming for, that's not too bad, right?
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Jan 14, 2015 02:25
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JaucheCharly posted:Do you think incinerating a city and the civilians inside just goes if you slap a sticker with "war related operations" on it?  Alchenar posted:I'm inclined to think there's merit in the point Max hastings makes that allied war crimes were committed as means to the end of the war, whereas axis war crimes were an end in themselves. On that basis there's a clear reason for differentiating between the two.  Raskolnikov38 posted:That's always been my take on it. The allies' crimes that are always pointed to are war related operations such as bombings whereas the Germans and Japanese were just killing civilians had no military related purpose.  PittTheElder posted:On the other hand, putting various undesirables into slave labour camps and having them produce materiel is at least nominally helpful to the war effort.  Raskolnikov38 posted:Setting up extermination camps and using soldiers to shoot Jewish civilians is pretty clearly wasting time and resources that could go to boosting the fighting ability of the wehrmacht.  Disinterested posted:The area bombing was certainly not done just for war reasons, it was also done to mollify Stalin  sullat posted:I seem to recall that over 95% of bombs dropped in WW2 hit the country they were aiming for, that's not too bad, right? 
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Jan 14, 2015 03:37
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xthetenth posted:Well during a lot of raids it is pretty easy to do because that's what everyone's doing. Not when we're talking about area bombing an entire city like during the attack on Dresden.
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Jan 14, 2015 03:56
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Animal posted:He was quite racist at first, as were many Argentinians of the time. But he must have had a change of heart. During the Cuban revolution he took a black pupil and fought amongst blacks, later he married an indigenous woman, made changes in Cuban society for integration, had a black bodyguard, and later led a black guerrilla in Africa. In fact, that's all I remember from the book. Dude was a horndog. Raskolnikov38 posted:I honestly just ignore the perspectives of each side and just look it at thusly, bombing cities directly attacks the nazis' ability to wage war. Setting up extermination camps and using soldiers to shoot Jewish civilians is pretty clearly wasting time and resources that could go to boosting the fighting ability of the wehrmacht.
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Jan 14, 2015 04:31
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 I don't get what the point of this post is outside of juxtaposing discussion of war with national leaders of warring countries in order to make some kind of point about how we can't talk about war without making sure everyone knows how much all present think war is bad, as though anyone interested in military history thinks war is anything but the fires and ravages of hell loosed upon the unassuming earthbound mortals with the piss-poor luck to live in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong government. So, here's Hitler eating watermelon.
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Jan 14, 2015 04:36
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