MothraAttack posted:Any recommendations out there for a good survey history of the Pacific theater and/or Japan in WWII? Eri Hotta's Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy is one of the few summaries out there of Japanese internal politics leading up to Pearl Harbor. Grand Theft Autobot posted:Honesty, Nimitz ought to have been happy that they were caught by surprise. If the USN had sortied out of harbor at the first detection of the IJN strike force's approach, there would have been 8 battleships sunk for good in deep water instead of 4 raised from the harbor, and probably 30-40k sailors dead instead of 3k. That's unlikely. Most of the battleships that sank historically were well below Material Condition Z, the level bombers that did most of the damage against the inboard battleships would have been as useless as they were in open-sea battles later in the war, the majority of the damage was done by the first wave before effective AA fire could be brought to bear, the fleet submarines wouldn't suddenly become competent, they'd still have Genda's secondary goal of attacking airfields and C&C centers to divert Shokaku and Zuikaku's planes, and the issues in Japanese air doctrine that led to the handful of American fighters that did get up achieving disproportionate levels of damage wouldn't have disappeared against a sortied Pacific Fleet. Admittedly, they wouldn't have fired torpedoes against mobile drydocks and target ships in this situation, but they'd also be up against stronger opposition more likely to degrade their abilities. The only real wildcard is whether Japanese SEAD tactics would have been useful against the American battleships.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:26
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So it's like, on the one hand if a battleship were to go down in open seas it probably would have been a total write-off, but on the other hand if a battleship actually was out there in the open seas it ostensibly would have had men at battlestations firing off their AA guns and it could maneuver to avoid bombs and torps?
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Jan 22, 2015 20:31
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I don't think battleships could manoeuvre to avoid bombs and torps, that's why carriers rendered them obsolete.
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Jan 22, 2015 20:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:So it's like, on the one hand if a battleship were to go down in open seas it probably would have been a total write-off, but on the other hand if a battleship actually was out there in the open seas it ostensibly would have had men at battlestations firing off their AA guns and it could maneuver to avoid bombs and torps? Battleships tended to do alright in open ocean. They were hard to hit and very, very tough, not really the sitting ducks that they're sometimes characterized as. Off the top of my head I think that only Yamato and Musashi were sunk in open ocean by carrier-based aircraft, and both required hundreds of sorties by aircraft operating with complete air supremacy. Prince of Wales, Repulse, and Roma were sunk by land-based aircraft in open ocean (PoW and Repulse had no air cover, Roma was sunk by guided bombs). I could be missing something but I think every other battleship sunk by aircraft was done in while moored or run aground or otherwise incapacitated. edit - You can maybe include Hiei in this though she'd be crippled by naval gunfire prior to any aircraft being around. bewbies fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 20:47
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tooterfish posted:I don't think battleships could manoeuvre to avoid bombs and torps, that's why carriers rendered them obsolete. Level bombing was of marginal use in WW2 naval battles because you could just zig and zag against high-level bombs and dodge them, even with a carrier as slow as Akagi or Kaga. Low-level bombing rendered you very vulnerable to AA fire. So dive-bombing and torpedo planes were implemented because they couldn't be dodged as easily. (Torpedo planes still had major issues with accuracy, of course.) Carriers also rendered battleships obsolete more because they could project power over a wider area than battleships could, and less because battleships were suddenly vulnerable to bombs and torpedoes. bewbies posted:Battleships tended to do alright in open ocean. They were hard to hit and very, very tough, not really the sitting ducks that they're sometimes characterized as. Off the top of my head I think that only Yamato and Musashi were sunk in open ocean by carrier-based aircraft, and both required hundreds of sorties by aircraft operating with complete air supremacy. Prince of Wales, Repulse, and Roma were sunk by land-based aircraft in open ocean (PoW and Repulse had no air cover, Roma was sunk by guided bombs). I could be missing something but I think every other battleship sunk by aircraft was done in while moored or run aground or otherwise incapacitated. I guess you could probably include Bismarck, too, since she was effectively crippled by air-launched torpedoes. Of course, she was deliberately scuttled by her crew anyways. Effectronica fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jan 22, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 20:55
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Bismarck was a total write-off well before the order came to scuttle her. However, most battleships didn't have catastrophically bad sterns like her, so there's that. Other than PoW, which got a nasty unlucky hit to the screws from a massive attack with only two battleships' AA suites protecting her, none of the battleships sunk by air were modern designs. None of those ships were well protected either. An all out battle line would be bigger and more impressive than the carrier fleets, and carriers have serious glass jaws. The problem facing the US battleships was less defensive than offensive. How would they compel the Japanese to give battle? And if they lost out in the carrier fight, could they preserve enough strength to prevent a surface disaster? What ended the battleship is that when fleets had carriers, they did the majority of the fighting, and usually the side that won the carrier duel won, period. It took a fleet chained to an objective to let battleships see marginal use, and everybody knew which way the winds were blowing after the big four carrier battles. Once that happened people started figuring they had enough already, and later they decided they were obsolete.
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Jan 22, 2015 21:55
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tooterfish posted:I don't think battleships could manoeuvre to avoid bombs and torps, that's why carriers rendered them obsolete. This was WW2 levels of technology we're talking about. Basically everything was dumb fire. Plus battleships are a lot faster than you think. They also weren't dodging so much as zipping around in patterns that were hard to predict. With any type of dumb fire munition you need to put it where you think the target will be and hope it will be there. For high atmosphere bombers this was an issue because fancy things like electronic targeting systems just hadn't been invented yet. Generally speaking this was human eyes targeting poo poo manually. Aside from that explosives technology has gotten a gently caress load better. Not only are the weapons way more destructive now but easier to guide. Many can lock on a target and guide themselves. If memory serves it was highly destructive, seeking munitions that hosed up battleships. It doesn't matter how fast you are or how much you zig and zag if the torpedo can just follow you.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:01
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tooterfish posted:I don't think battleships could manoeuvre to avoid bombs and torps, that's why carriers rendered them obsolete. High level bombing in particular was super easy to avoid while at sea; high level bombers of the era could barely hit land targets.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:09
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:High level bombing in particular was super easy to avoid while at sea; high level bombers of the era could barely hit land targets. Yeah, with WW2 high-level bombing, getting most of your payload within the same city was a challenge, and even then bombers were still much more effective at razing cities from lower altitudes.
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Jan 22, 2015 22:55
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Yeah, with WW2 high-level bombing, getting most of your payload within the same city was a challenge, and even then bombers were still much more effective at razing cities from lower altitudes. Wasn't most high-level bombing in WW2 more geared toward carpet bombing on indiscriminate rampages? There are a poo poo load of pictures of cities that were literally just plain flattened because "gently caress you, other country."
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Jan 22, 2015 23:05
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Wasn't most high-level bombing in WW2 more geared toward carpet bombing on indiscriminate rampages? There are a poo poo load of pictures of cities that were literally just plain flattened because "gently caress you, other country." A lot of sorties would ostensibly have specific targets, but in practice the only way to have any reasonable chance of hitting a specific factory or whatever with the technology of the time was just to drop massive fuckloads of bombs in the general area it was located and flatten everything for several miles in every direction. This was a time before electronic targeting or guided munitions, so carpet-bombing was basically the only thing high-level bombers could do.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:20
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Wasn't most high-level bombing in WW2 more geared toward carpet bombing on indiscriminate rampages? There are a poo poo load of pictures of cities that were literally just plain flattened because "gently caress you, other country." The USAAF tried to do precision bombing (It was the entire reason why they kept up daylight raids long after the British went to night bombing), but with the technology available it just wasn't possible. Eventually they resorted to sending up so many bombers that somebody was guaranteed to hit the target, with the by-product of also flattening everything within a half-mile radius.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:22
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But there were of course particular raids (Hamburg, Dresden) where the objective was ostensibly to destroy the industrial output of a city, but the method chosen was "lets destroy as much of it as possible." That's where you get the terrific firebombings and the images of levelled German cities you're imagining. Is that actually fair play in a war? Damned if I know.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:33
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"Dehousing"
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Jan 22, 2015 23:43
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I'm pretty sure by the end of the war they'd settled on turning the cities themselves into firestorms as the most effective way to break factories.
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Jan 22, 2015 23:59
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I guess it would depend on the pinpoint need, like if you needed to gently caress up some tanks or a train you'd send some Thunderbolts or Havocs, but if you needed to gently caress up an airfield or a railyard you'd send Mitchells or B-17s. There wasn't really a way to pinpoint enough ordnance to do the job of busting an installation so you'd send a fuckload of bombers in under the assumption that you'd be flattening the railyard if you flattened the city surrounding it.
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Jan 24, 2015 06:40
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No, if you could you'd still send Thunderbolts. But at low altitude and low airspeed they'd get wrecked by AAA, so you send the more survivable high level bombers instead.
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Jan 24, 2015 07:38
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I take ofeense to the thread title i mean our country is still so great ew got at least 20 million illegalas that want to be here
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Jan 24, 2015 07:59
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So I've been on a bit of Vietnam kick lately, and having rewatched Vietnam The Ten Thousand Day War recently I've had my eye out for other Vietnam War documentaries and saw on Netflix they had Vietnam in HD, the documentary from the History Channel from a few years ago . So I gave it a watch and I have to say it was really kind of crap. It was like basic High School text book about Vietnam. They mentioned the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, but not how it turned out later it was made to be worse than it was so we could get a Casus Belli to really get involved. It talked up apt all the horrible things that Communists, the VC and NVA did but not once mentioned war crimes committed by the US and its allies on Vietnam. Hell they left out the coup after coup Vietnam went through abs it was presented almost like it was a functional democracy. I could maybe understand that since they were copying Ken Burns The War (only on Vietnam and with less time )you want to focus on the people who are interviewing who were there but to leave out so much is to really misrepresent the entire war abs reinforce this Notion that our was the civilian leadership that tired one arm behind the backs of our fighting men that totally could have won this war if they had done the common sense thing (like bomb North Vietnam more and invade Laos and Cambodia). Did anyone else watch this? Am I being over critical? Though on the Vietnam front I recently picked up Vietnam Declassified, the history of the CIA and COIN Strategy in Vietnam. I can't remember if it was in this thread or over in the history book thread in the Book Barn where Someone recommend it. I hope it's good, I'm working through Before The Storm right now and want to get through Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge before starting another history book.
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Jan 24, 2015 10:48
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KomradeX posted:So I've been on a bit of Vietnam kick lately, and having rewatched Vietnam The Ten Thousand Day War recently I've had my eye out for other Vietnam War documentaries and saw on Netflix they had Vietnam in HD, the documentary from the History Channel from a few years ago . So I gave it a watch and I have to say it was really kind of crap. Welcome to the History Channel!  Seriously, even on those rare occasions when they do make a program that is actually about history, expecting it to be nuanced or insightful or not targeted to the absolute lowest common denominator is expecting way too much. I don't think they've made anything that really went beyond basic high-school level history knowledge since the late 1990s, and I'm not sure if they ever made anything that wasn't completely, 100% uncritical of the United States and everything it has ever done or considered ever.
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Jan 24, 2015 17:10
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KomradeX posted:So I've been on a bit of Vietnam kick lately, and having rewatched Vietnam The Ten Thousand Day War recently I've had my eye out for other Vietnam War documentaries and saw on Netflix they had Vietnam in HD, the documentary from the History Channel from a few years ago . So I gave it a watch and I have to say it was really kind of crap. The tough thing about Vietnam is the politics of that war on all sides were so complex, and so many people with such strong biases are still alive, that we're simply....too close to it right now to really effectively analyze it from an historical perspective. The ACW is somewhat similar in the complexities in its background and it took us nearly a century (in my opinion) before we really started to get things "right". I suspect Vietnam and probably the GWOT will be similar. That being said there are three documentaries that I highly recommend. The first is Hearts and Minds, which was made during the war and as such has a very near-term perspective. It is often held up as one of the best documentaries ever made, and rightly so in my opinion. It has a pretty strong anti-war/anti-US bias but I get the impression that's kind of what you're looking for. The second is Dear America, Letters Home From Vietnam, which is one of the better movies of this type ("soldiers' perspective") that I've seen. It doesn't really take a political stance and isn't terribly informative about the war in general but I think it captures a point in time (the late 1980s) when the US was just starting to try to come to terms with what had happened in Vietnam and in that respect it is very interesting. The best political/strategic overview of the war is, in my opinion, still prohibitively Vietnam: A Television History. Stanley Karnow's book was released as a companion to the TV show and is my favorite work on the war, period. Both take an American perspective but both focus pretty heavily on Vietnamese politics and the Vietnamese people which makes them pretty different from most western works on the war.
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Jan 24, 2015 17:55
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A century after the American Civil War kids were learning the "Lost Cause" version of history throughout much of the United States. Hell, they still are 150 years after the war. We were closer to getting that right in the 20 or so years that immediately followed the war than we ever have been since.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:12
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PittTheElder posted:High level bombing in particular was super easy to avoid while at sea; high level bombers of the era could barely hit land targets.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:31
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tooterfish posted:Carriers only operated dive and torpedo bombers though, so I'm not sure how this is relevant? No they didn't. The Japanese B5M Kate could be operated as both a high-level bomber and a torpedo bomber.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:41
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Effectronica posted:No they didn't. The Japanese B5M Kate could be operated as both a high-level bomber and a torpedo bomber. It's still not particularly relevant. Carriers didn't render battleships obsolete because one Japanese aircraft could operate as a high level bomber.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:44
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Modern Day Hercules posted:It's still not particularly relevant. Carriers didn't render battleships obsolete because one Japanese aircraft could operate as a high level bomber. Ships don't operate exclusively against other ships. Hope this helps.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:47
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Modern Day Hercules posted:It's still not particularly relevant. Carriers didn't render battleships obsolete because one Japanese aircraft could operate as a high level bomber. I don't know what you think you're responding to, but carriers could operate level bombers and every combatant's torpedo bombers could be operated as such. They didn't because they sucked balls for everything but operations against ashore or docked targets, where they merely sucked. The Kate is just an example because they managed to sink the Arizona with level bombing.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:48
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Malleum posted:Ships don't operate exclusively against other ships. Hope this helps. How does that have any goddamn thing to do with why battleships failed against carriers? EDIT: I don't know what it is, but you goons don't seem to be able to follow a discussion. You just look at the last post in a line and latch onto any irrelevant inaccuracy and hammer out a post correcting it without ever taking time to consider whether that inaccuracy actually had anything to do with the discussion at hand. Modern Day Hercules fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 18:51
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It was my mistake. Is it fair to say that generally, high level bombing is not a tactic carriers used against other ships though?
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Jan 24, 2015 18:53
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tooterfish posted:It was my mistake. Is it fair to say that generally, high level bombing is not a tactic carriers used against other ships though? Yeah, but that was something came about as a result of experience. People like Mitsuo Fuchida still believed that horizontal bombing was useful as a mission until the war started.
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Jan 24, 2015 18:56
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tooterfish posted:Carriers only operated dive and torpedo bombers though, so I'm not sure how this is relevant? Posts before mine were talking about level bombing, I just wanted to point out how bad they really were at hitting a target. The point about manoeuvering is still valid, it was a standard and effective way of defending against attacks from aircraft of all types. It might be easy for dive and torpedo bombers to hit a turning target in isolation, but when they're throwing tons of AAA around and enemy fighters are trying to shoot you down, that would necessarily get much harder.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:01
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It's worth noting that level bombing has become primarily focused on psychological warfare, like the MOAB, and destruction of targets is preferably done with 'precision' attacks like guided bombs, missiles, and strike fighters. Even the MOP bunker-buster is a guided bomb. It's arguable that this has been the effective case since Vietnam, and the development of better guidance systems has only made it more obvious. After all, strategic bombing was disruptive but poo poo at doing long-term industrial damage.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:04
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A battleship moving and maneuvering at anywhere between 27 to 30+ knots still has a fair chance of avoiding dive bombers and torpedoes. Certainly more than one simply sitting pierside, which was the contrast I was originally trying to present.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:32
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gradenko_2000 posted:A battleship moving and maneuvering at anywhere between 27 to 30+ knots still has a fair chance of avoiding dive bombers and torpedoes. Certainly more than one simply sitting pierside, which was the contrast I was originally trying to present. B-17s with huge payloads found it impossible to hit ships with level bombing tactics. This is why there were two-engined bombers that carried torpedoes which were much more effective in anti-ship operations. US Catalinas conducted anti-ship operations somewhat effectively, too, but battleships are hard to sink. The main problem with battleships is that they had difficulty getting in to engage enemy ships. The Japanese after Midway made a feeble attempt to try to chase down the US carriers with their surface forces but lost a cruiser for the trouble. And, yeah, even torpedo attacks missed a lot. It is very difficult to keep one's nerve flying low and slow in the face of AA fire and judge the range and angle correctly. Anti-aircraft fire on warships was no joke.
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Jan 24, 2015 19:44
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There were a handful of examples where level bombers hit maneuvering ships from altitude. Prince of Wales finished off by as such, though after it had been hit by a torpedo. There were two big problems with level-bombing a battleship: the first was hitting it (duh), the second was that a 500 or 1000 lbs AP bomb, though they were aided by a high angle of attack, had a fraction of the power of a big ship's AP round, which weighed somewhere between two and five times as much, traveled far faster, and had a lot more penetrative power. These were the things that battleships were protected against. As such, the vast majority of bomb hits on battleships, especially against the modern designs, could only cause superficial damage. Those things were tough as hell. Like...really tough. Generally speaking, sinking a battleship required torpedoes, unless it was an older design (Marat, Arizona) or you used guided bombs (Roma). Best example: the British attacked Tirpitz, almost entirely when moored, somewhere between 25 and 30 times and hit her dozens of times with smaller bombs, none of which accomplished much of anything. It wasn't until they went full  on it and dropped specialized giant bombs that they finally sank it.
bewbies fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 23:39
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Hadn't the PoW been hit in the screws and disemboweled herself before the level bombs hit?
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Jan 25, 2015 00:32
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Modern Day Hercules posted:We were closer to getting that right in the 20 or so years that immediately followed the war than we ever have been since. Hayes was a bad person.
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Jan 25, 2015 09:45
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Mister Bates posted:Welcome to the History Channel! Yeah, I had stopped watching the History Channel back when Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars and Ancient Aliens became a big thing so I guess I had forgotten how crap they were.I was just hoping that maybe something about actual history wouldn't have been complete crap. Since Vietnam the 10,000 Day War was such a great documentary series,( hell I use to watch it on the History Channel)and thats from 1980, so you would think something from 30 years later would aspire to be as good as that was. But well I guess that was before all those Back to 'Nam movies from the 80s and everyone's attitude changed. Though I have been looking for some books that really talk about the resurgence of Vietnam revisionism in pop culture and the popularity of the stabbed in the back myths that have sprung up since than, so if anyone knows of anything, my amazon cart could always use more things in it.
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Jan 26, 2015 02:42
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I doubt you'll actually find much revisionism regarding Vietnam because of its stunning parallels to Iraq and the fact that a lot of the revisionists helped cause Iraq.
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Jan 26, 2015 02:47
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computer parts posted:I doubt you'll actually find much revisionism regarding Vietnam because of its stunning parallels to Iraq and the fact that a lot of the revisionists helped cause Iraq. Once the revisionists finish work on Iraq (and how it was won by Bush but lost by Obama, or whatever the story is going to be), no doubt they'll return to Vietnam and how good ol' American boys were stabbed in the back by hippies.
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Jan 26, 2015 02:53
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