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Fangz posted:I've already talked about the massive problems with this study, but I'll say it again. That report is about *missile casualties in June-August 1944*. It analyses the proportion of people who were found wounded or dead when planes come home from missions. I'm not sure if "massive problems" is really the right phrase to use here. It is titled "battle casualties", and it is a pretty good overview of the primary casualty-causing mechanism these crews were facing. I don't see any particularly compelling reason why these numbers wouldn't apply to both planes that made it home and planes that did not. quote:2. Missile casualties are a small minority of overall casualties. This seems very unlikely to me, I'd like to see your source. You may be correct though that it was more difficult to get out of a ball turret in the event the plane is out of control but I've never seen any hard data on this, only anecdotes.
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Feb 23, 2015 17:14
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bewbies posted:I'm not sure if "massive problems" is really the right phrase to use here. It is titled "battle casualties", and it is a pretty good overview of the primary casualty-causing mechanism these crews were facing. I don't see any particularly compelling reason why these numbers wouldn't apply to both planes that made it home and planes that did not. From the report: quote:Losses Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:22 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 17:19
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Fangz posted:From the report: I suppose I'm lumping in casualties that result from planes being shot down as "missile casualties", you can think of it differently if you want to I guess. In any case, as I said, there's no reason to assume that the relative vulnerability of the crew positions are any different depending whether or not the plane is shot down.
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Feb 23, 2015 17:22
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bewbies posted:I suppose I'm lumping in casualties that result from planes being shot down as "missile casualties", you can think of it differently if you want to I guess. You might be lumping in, but the report has a very clear definition. We are ultimately looking at something like only 10-20% of the overall casualties for a very specific period. I don't think it's reasonable at all to assume all members of the crew on a burning B-17 are equally likely to successfully bail out, and we know that only around 50% of them successfully do so. If you think it's equally likely to be say, the guys in the fuselage who are already wearing their parachutes, as the guy in the ball turret who has to rotate the turret to a downwards position, squeeze out and put on a parachute... then I don't think that's credible. Another site gives quote:Mortality rate, Avg, B-17 Crewman, 1943: 30% These numbers are unsourced, but I think potentially fully consistent with the other study, given that study's shortcomings. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 17:29
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100 Years Ago The French Army is preparing to go to Gallipoli. Well, to be more precise, those odds and sods that General Joffre hasn't yet got his hands on are preparing to go. Depending on how you add the numbers up, they probably took more casualties than the ANZACs! Planning continues for Neuve Chapelle, General Cadorna begins teaching proper doctrine to his subordinates, and whoever posts the Telegraph every day is offering us a start for a bingo card. quote:There are times where if you were so minded a regular reader could create a set of bingo-style cards on reports on the paper (latest story of German army atrocity, appalling German piracy, disgraceful German air raid, glorious Allied air raid, Russian heroism causing vast losses to the Germans, British gallantry, article on battle several months earlier from a new eyewitness report, hard times for German civilians) and see how many they can tick off. At least one person working for the Telegraph hasn't been caught by the shrapnel from Peter Oborne's bunker-buster.
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Feb 23, 2015 17:33
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sullat posted:I thought that was Eisenhower's deal, not De Gaulle? I mean, he definitely loved to mess with allied plans to achieve Kanine posted:So wait, in Vichy France, were there actual French soldiers fighting anywhere for the Axis, or was the French military dissolved and replaced with other troops? Vichy France doesn't really do a lot of fighting, but the Vichy army was a cut-down version of the former French military. The French navy basically interned itself wherever a particular squadron happened to be at the time of the armistice. The carrier Bearn spent the war relaxing at Martinique, while at Dakar and Mers-el-Kebir, the British famously tried to destroy them at harbour. You can see for yourself the kind of composition the French colonial forces had in the OOB for the syrian campaign. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria-Lebanon_Campaign_order_of_battle#Vichy_French_Forces There is only one regiment from Metropolitan (European) France. Spahi and Senegalese tirailleurs regiments were all recruited from colonial subjects. North African Tirailleurs are more mixed, they're more mechanized units, but they're still largely recruited from the native population. Chasseurs were French settlers. Every one of these formations had French officers.
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Feb 23, 2015 18:00
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The Syrian campaign is quite interesting because the Allies attempted to keep quiet how hard the Vichy French forces in Syria actually fought mostly due to propaganda reasons. Added to that, it was a campaign that both the British and the French wanted to forget about when the war was over, so it never really got much attention post-war.
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Feb 23, 2015 18:03
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JcDent posted:Some strange questions that I have a hard time putting to words. Let's start easy: Honestly, I think the bad is primarily this: quote:The Sperry ball turret was very small in order to reduce drag, and was typically operated by the shortest man of the crew. To enter the turret, the turret was moved until the guns were pointed straight down. The gunner placed his feet in the heel rests and then crouched down into a fetal position. He would then put on a safety strap, close and lock the turret door. The gunner sat in the turret with his back and head against the rear wall, his hips at the bottom, and his legs held in mid-air by two footrests on the front wall. This left him positioned with his eyes roughly level with the pair of light-barrel Browning AN/M2 .50 caliber machine guns which extended through the entire turret, and located to either side of the gunner. Now think about sitting like that for eight to ten loving hours without being able to move.
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Feb 23, 2015 19:04
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Honestly, I think the bad is primarily this: I'd imagine actually firing two large-calibre machine guns in a tiny enclosed space right next to your head would be distinctly unpleasant as well. Even with hearing protection I could see that giving you one hell of a headache.
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Feb 23, 2015 19:22
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The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. Randall Jarrell
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Feb 23, 2015 19:27
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Honestly, I think the bad is primarily this: Well if it's anything like the games I've played I would just spin in circles the entire time.
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Feb 23, 2015 19:29
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Never mind, beaten.
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Feb 23, 2015 19:49
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For RAF Bomber Command this book is a decent place to start and a fun read. Very pop history though.bewbies posted:In any case, as I said, there's no reason to assume that the relative vulnerability of the crew positions are any different depending whether or not the plane is shot down.
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Feb 23, 2015 20:53
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Related: how many authors did the strategic bombing campaigns produce? At a hazy guess, I remember Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter Miller (he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fairly well-respected sci-fi novel from the sixties). There's bound to be more, but they're slipping my mind.
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Feb 23, 2015 21:26
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Dahl was a Gladiator and Hurricane pilot before being invalided from active flying duty and moving into an instructor position in 1941. All of his combat was in the Mediterranean theatre.
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Feb 23, 2015 21:35
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Related: how many authors did the strategic bombing campaigns produce? At a hazy guess, I remember Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter Miller (he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fairly well-respected sci-fi novel from the sixties). There's bound to be more, but they're slipping my mind. Kurt Vonnegut was in the infantry, unless you are including getting bombed as a part of the campaign, he doesn't apply either.
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Feb 23, 2015 22:03
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Related: how many authors did the strategic bombing campaigns produce? At a hazy guess, I remember Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter Miller (he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fairly well-respected sci-fi novel from the sixties). There's bound to be more, but they're slipping my mind. Vonnegut was in the infantry. He was part of the university-going OCS cohort that got completely buttfucked by the Army during the '44 manpower shortage. Rather than finish college and go in as an officer, he (and thousands like him) got drafted straight into the Army as enlisted (usually infantry) replacements for the combat casualties that had been suffered in the drive through france. Pretty much immediately after he got to the front his unit got overrun during the Battle of the Bulge and he spent the rest of the war as a POW, most famously getting to observe the firebombing of Dresden from the receiving end.
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Feb 23, 2015 22:10
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Related: how many authors did the strategic bombing campaigns produce? At a hazy guess, I remember Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter Miller (he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fairly well-respected sci-fi novel from the sixties). There's bound to be more, but they're slipping my mind. The Jewish author Victor Klemperer survived because of strategic bombing interrupting his train to Auschwitz. Geoffrey Barraclough, a famous scholar of medieval Germany, was famously driven half-mad by the fact he worked as an expert for the RAF picking targets for strategic bombing. His life's work of scholarship on medieval Germany is a sort of insane penance for that aspect of his youth. Jimmy Stewart was a highly accomplished USAAF bomber officer.
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Feb 23, 2015 22:24
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Speaking of, why does the Mediterranean theatre tend to be not talked about as much as other theatres? Was it really not that important in the big picture?
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Feb 23, 2015 22:32
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Related: how many authors did the strategic bombing campaigns produce? At a hazy guess, I remember Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter Miller (he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fairly well-respected sci-fi novel from the sixties). There's bound to be more, but they're slipping my mind. Joseph Heller (Catch-22).
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Feb 23, 2015 22:34
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Going Solo, Dahl's autobigraphy detailing his wartime flying, was an incredibly important book to me when I was a child, I must say. Really a story from a different time - a young man just randomly going out to east Africa to work for Shell, living with servants attending to him and driving around drumming up business; pressed in to service as an infantry officer on the outbreak of war and charged with rounding up German colonists, then joins the RAF despite being much too tall, crashes his aircraft when assigned his first combat billet because of an orders/navigation error and him running out of petrol, barely survives, then fights in Greece until his squadron is forced in to retreat the moment the Germans turn up. This man fought alongside him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmaduke_Pattle
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Feb 23, 2015 22:40
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Eej posted:Speaking of, why does the Mediterranean theatre tend to be not talked about as much as other theatres? Was it really not that important in the big picture? It gets talked about plenty? Rommel is big and famous, and most of his accomplishments happened in North Africa. British academia disproportionately focused on the Med, probably because it was the theater where the British had the greatest influence. For the Allies, the Mediterranean is the only place where large-scale fighting occured for most of the war. But after 1944 it quickly became ignored, because the fight in Italy was slow and grueling. Mark Clark semi-famously lost his poo poo over capturing Rome on June 4th, which righteously angered the rest of the Allied army who were still fighting Germans. Naturally, it was all forgotten because D-day only came 2 days later. Within the big picture, the Mediterranean was trifling, but not worthless. Despite popular image, Rommel never had a chance of conquering the Middle East, overwhelming Allied naval and air superiority meant that the Mediterranean operations were "safe", and did a lot to breed competency from the pre-war officer corps. The Soviets were pretty disparaging about the theater. The German forces fighting at El Alamein were less than a 10th of those that fought at Moscow, and they knew it.
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Feb 23, 2015 23:06
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Related: how many authors did the strategic bombing campaigns produce? At a hazy guess, I remember Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter Miller (he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fairly well-respected sci-fi novel from the sixties). There's bound to be more, but they're slipping my mind. Have you heard of a fellow named Joseph Heller? E: beaten like Major Major Major at a basketball game.
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Feb 24, 2015 00:08
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if the Manhattan project had been a failure what's the probability of USSR being able to take over Europe? There's plenty to read about a potential invasion of Japan but I have not come across anything regarding the beginnings of the Cold War if there was no nuclear warfare to worry about.
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Feb 24, 2015 01:34
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Depends on how gay black Hitler is.
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Feb 24, 2015 01:38
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Just looking at the stats on the strategic bombing of Japan wiki page. Pretty mind blowing the damage and death caused and that the Japanese could do very little about it. Doing some rough math it looks like in last 5 months of the war the bombing inflicted around 5000 casualties a day on the Japanese people (Roughly 2000 dead 3000 wounded). For five months! Not to mention the 8 and a half million rendered homeless over the course of the whole campaign. I don't know if these numbers include Hiroshima and Nagasaki though.
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Feb 24, 2015 01:44
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Fangz posted:Depends on how gay black Hitler is. I think it's more of a mixed-race bisexual Hitler since there were a number of points along the way where the Manhattan Project took a fortuitous turn.
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Feb 24, 2015 02:00
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Koesj posted:I think it's more of a mixed-race bisexual Hitler since there were a number of points along the way where the Manhattan Project took a fortuitous turn. The question is still regarding the Russkies invading Western Europe, which requires a few fanciful twists of history as well, like having Einstein chrono-kill Hitler or something.
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Feb 24, 2015 02:04
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sullat posted:The question is still regarding the Russkies invading Western Europe, which requires a few fanciful twists of history as well, like having Einstein chrono-kill Hitler or something. Edit: Derp, missed that this was a Command and Conquer joke. 
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Feb 24, 2015 02:05
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How capable were Soviet air defense and air force at the end of the war? If something like Unthinkable had gone down, would the Western Allies have retained the massive air superiority they held over late-war Germany?
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Feb 24, 2015 02:10
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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sullat posted:The question is still regarding the Russkies invading Western Europe, which requires a few fanciful twists of history as well, like having Einstein chrono-kill Hitler or something. Hey I didn't claim quadroon bi-curious Hitler.
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Feb 24, 2015 02:11
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Eustachy posted:if the Manhattan project had been a failure what's the probability of USSR being able to take over Europe? There's plenty to read about a potential invasion of Japan but I have not come across anything regarding the beginnings of the Cold War if there was no nuclear warfare to worry about. The Soviets could have rolled over Western Europe in a heartbeat if you took our history and just removed nukes from the equation. But it's hard to make predictions of how world history, sans nukes, would have turned out in that situation.
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Feb 24, 2015 02:11
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Soviets could have rolled over Western Europe in a heartbeat if you took our history and just removed nukes from the equation. But it's hard to make predictions of how world history, sans nukes, would have turned out in that situation. I can make one prediction, during downfall Stalin makes a poorly planned and ultimately hilarious naval invasion of Hokkaido.
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Feb 24, 2015 02:26
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Some scenes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North take place during the WW2 Syria campaign. Nothing else is set there, as far as I know. Absolutely amazing book, by the way. My favorite quote: quote:He thought of how the world organises its affairs so that civilisation every day commits crimes for which any individual would be imprisoned for life. And how people accept this either by ignoring it and calling it current affairs or politics or wars, or by making a space that has nothing to do with civilisation and calling that space their private life. And the more in that private life they break with civilisation, the more that private life becomes a secret life, the freer they feel. But it is not so. You are never free of the world; to share life is to share guilt.
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Feb 24, 2015 02:58
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PittTheElder posted:How capable were Soviet air defense and air force at the end of the war? If something like Unthinkable had gone down, would the Western Allies have retained the massive air superiority they held over late-war Germany? No. They had a massive air superiority over late-war Germany because Germany had no planes and no pilots and no way of making more of either. The soviets had the largest air force in the world at the time IIRC. It's apples and oranges though, the western allies were focused on strategic bombing while the soviets used their air force as part of combined arms operations with the army. In short: Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Soviets could have rolled over Western Europe in a heartbeat if you took our history and just removed nukes from the equation. But it's hard to make predictions of how world history, sans nukes, would have turned out in that situation.
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Feb 24, 2015 03:08
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Soviets could have rolled over Western Europe in a heartbeat if you took our history and just removed nukes from the equation. But it's hard to make predictions of how world history, sans nukes, would have turned out in that situation. While that's probably true, they didn't really think that at the time. The Soviet army of 1944-45 had a bit of a manpower crisis itself and things weren't all rosy on that side of the iron curtain for the military. Still, it was probably worse for the Western Powers.
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Feb 24, 2015 03:57
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Panzeh posted:While that's probably true, they didn't really think that at the time. The Soviet army of 1944-45 had a bit of a manpower crisis itself and things weren't all rosy on that side of the iron curtain for the military. Still, it was probably worse for the Western Powers. The US had a considerable amount of manpower they could have used but didn't, and a pretty hefty chunk of guys in the Pacific that weren't in use. Plus I don't think that WWII was a flat out demographic disaster for the US.
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Feb 24, 2015 05:41
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Slavvy posted:No. They had a massive air superiority over late-war Germany because Germany had no planes and no pilots and no way of making more of either. Germany had plenty of planes and were making plenty until the factories were overrun. Pilot skill was degraded badly by the end but raw manpower wasn't the problem. Fuel is what hosed them, both in terms of sorteeing against whomever and in terms of getting new guys enough flight time in training. And you guys have it all wrong My money is on preop trans albino hitler.
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Feb 24, 2015 06:50
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SquadronROE posted:Well if it's anything like the games I've played I would just spin in circles the entire time. War would be a lot more enjoyable if it was like Battlefield.
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Feb 24, 2015 07:07
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Meanwhile, in Magdeburg: Edit: Is Magdeburg the one thing that people who've never heard of this war have heard of? Edit 2: That poor soldier's wife though; her husband just punted one of the best chances their family had for a comfortable life for the next few months. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 07:37 on Feb 24, 2015 |
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Feb 24, 2015 07:09
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