|
I wonder if Spruance really thought that was a good idea.
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 21:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 14:35 |
|
|
Ithle01 posted:I don't know much about Cambodian history or Angkor Thom, but is it possible that they supplemented the structure with wood or other decomposable material that would've been lost? If that's the case then the city might seem a lot less defensible now than it was when it was fully inhabited. The only thing I can recall about South East Asian history is a 100-level college class wherein the professor said not much was known because the jungle tended to reclaim the predominantly wooden cities. That was a long time ago so I might just be misremembering things, but it would make sense that the city doesn't seem well defended if you look at only the parts that are made of stone. Yeah, the actual footprint of Angkor is pretty huge. http://www.livescience.com/1781-urban-sprawl-doomed-angkor-wat.html I think it was one of those places way to big to properly enclose and fortify (particularly since any army commanding the field could gently caress with their irrigation and agriculture something fierce if they really wanted to) but didn't worry so much about that since it was the biggest shitkickingest city in the local. And, so long as that was the case, they were the ones going around delivering sieges. Angkor Thom is less a fort and more a palace. A really nice palace, and probably not bad as a place to go when it all goes pear shaped, but it's not like you were ever going to get the whole city of 'just' a few hundred thousand people and food to feed them in there.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 21:36
|
|
|
the JJ posted:Yeah, the actual footprint of Angkor is pretty huge. Yeah, see what you mean. When you're over a million people in one city fortification isn't a going concern. I was just commenting on the lack of towers and things like that, stuff that may have been deemed too expensive to build and maintain if it were stone, but could be knocked together from wood and then lost over time.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 21:59
|
|
|
Nenonen posted:This is also true of many European fortresses of the modern era. Their walls may not seem hard to climb, but all types of obstacles made it difficult for an attacking force to approach in a good order while under fire. What's with the trees?
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 22:10
|
|
|
Rocko Bonaparte posted:What's with the trees? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abatis
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 22:13
|
|
|
Can anyone tell me about KMT 29th Corps and their use of swords during the Defense of the Great Wall? I heard that they become somewhat famous/infamous for fighting the Japanese with Chinese swords.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 23:06
|
|
|
cheerfullydrab posted:I wonder if Spruance really thought that was a good idea. The USN didn't know all that much about the Yamato class until after the war. Even so, 6 on 1 is pretty good odds. In terms of main guns it's 24x 16" and 36x 14" against 9x 18.1"
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 23:24
|
|
|
Handsome Ralph posted:Pages back, but figured I'd mention, the Ask Historians subreddit has been overwhelmingly good, most of the time. Please, all the real history happens on /r/polandball.  Regarding future military history, what have recent city defenses looked like? Where do you deploy troops in a city under threat, how do you supply the city, what do you do with all of the people in it? Where do the defenses actually take place? I know that, for example, in NYC while there are several military facilities within the city, all of the fortifications therein are aimed at protecting from terrorists and vandals; things like bronze-plated dragon's teeth in Wall Street, the reinforced base of NWTC. But any actual defence of the city from some threat would have to be almost entirely naval (as Washington's failure to defend the city from the British demonstrates). Is the same true for most of our coastal cities? What about landlocked cities which have been at risk? What sort of defensive structures do Israeli city planners build?
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 23:43
|
|
|
Keldoclock posted:Where do the defenses actually take place?
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 23:55
|
|
|
I'd imagine that invading troops on our soil would mean a nuclear response aimed at their homeland. Comedy answer: The entire Russian fleet in NY Harbor ala CoD:MW3.
|
|
#
?
Apr 7, 2015 23:56
|
|
|
Arrath posted:I'd imagine that invading troops on our soil would mean a nuclear response aimed at their homeland. Or Tanya blowing up their battleships.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 00:21
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago You wouldn't happen to be able to point me to where I can read that German Sapper bit in German, would you? Also 
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 00:24
|
|
|
The defense of the United States currently takes place in the bombed out ruins of their cities, about a week after they dare say anything terribly mean about America, and maybe 20-50 years before their military approaches anything like parity with the US armed forces.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 01:01
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago quote:In a moment my dagger was in his stomach, more than up to the hilt. He went down with a horrible cry, rolling in his blood in maddening pain. I put the dagger back in my boot, and took hold of the spade. Jesus loving Christ 
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 02:01
|
|
|
SeanBeansShako posted:EDIT: Wow, that is one goony looking French soldier.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 04:21
|
|
|
A WW1 reenactment without trenches is like a party without beer.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 07:13
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:A WW1 reenactment without trenches is like a party without beer. Not if it's a Summer 1914 or Russia/Austria-Hungary theater reenactment, right?
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 07:17
|
|
|
Davin Valkri posted:Not if it's a Summer 1914 or Russia/Austria-Hungary theater reenactment, right? Wasn't Austro-Hungary vs Russia just a bunch of dicking about in a forest?
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 08:25
|
|
|
OK so say two Caribbean (or in general) pirate ships are in combat and there's a boarding action. Once there's a melee fight, how are the pirates able to distinguish who is on their side versus the other ship? I know little about pirates, but would they have worn some sort of uniform or distinguishing colors, etc?
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 08:37
|
|
|
Kanine posted:OK so say two Caribbean (or in general) pirate ships are in combat and there's a boarding action. Once there's a melee fight, how are the pirates able to distinguish who is on their side versus the other ship? I know little about pirates, but would they have worn some sort of uniform or distinguishing colors, etc? Well, most of the time two pirates don't have a lot of incentive to board each other.  That said, most navies of the time didn't really use much in the way of uniforms so the problem applies no matter who's involved. I can't say definitively, but from what I understand a ship is a pretty tight-knit community, as one would expect from cramming that many people into a relatively small space. When you live together, eat together, work together, sleep together, and fight together with approximately a village's worth of people, you grow to know and recognize pretty much all of them even if you don't necessarily know much about them. So what it'd come down to, essentially, is that if you don't recognize someone he's probably a bad guy. It's also worth noting that a ship is a pretty small space to be fighting on, in any event, so often you end up with less individual duels everywhere and more of a front line of sailors pushing backwards and forwards, which again simplifies things.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 09:00
|
|
|
Crossposting from the Roman history thread:Tomn posted:Well, judging by the Defenestration of Prague, at least SOME civilians were perfectly happy to get their hands dirty (even if it didn't turn out quite the way they planned).
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 11:20
|
|
|
100 Years Ago The German Sapper comes out of the line, and trips over some cavalrymen. The Friendly Feldwebel goes in, but possibly fortunately, his account is rather less detailed. Les Eparges is about to fall, but the French also need to re-evaluate their tactics because that's about all they've achieved. Xiahou Dun posted:You wouldn't happen to be able to point me to where I can read that German Sapper bit in German, would you? The account was originally written for the New Yorker Volkszeitung and was serialised there in 1917. (It's hard to find out if it was ever published in book form because the author remains entirely anonymous and I don't know what the German title would have been.) Endman posted:Wasn't Austro-Hungary vs Russia just a bunch of dicking about in a forest? More like "a bunch of freezing to death up a mountain". The next priority after "write about July and August properly" is to write up the months of brutal, bitter fighting in the Carpathians that I've been completely ignoring for having too much else to do.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 11:34
|
|
|
Tomn posted:Crossposting from the Roman history thread: IANHG but I know for a while the historiographical narrative of the late TYW phase was that the armies are basically fighting local insurgencies more than they are each other and the local peasants are, for their part, fighting whoever's in their turf regardless of what 'side' they're on because they've long since learned that soldiers are bad news regardless of what flags they're flying.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 14:49
|
|
|
Keldoclock posted:Regarding future military history, what have recent city defenses looked like? Where do you deploy troops in a city under threat, how do you supply the city, what do you do with all of the people in it? This is kind of an interesting question. Basically, the answer is "the city is the defense": cities have a ton of inherent advantages for defenders. In the US at least we're assuming that a large portion of any future operation is going to take place in cities and that poo poo is going to be ug-ly.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 14:59
|
|
|
Squalid posted:Well there's actually a lot to be said, but the question needs to be a little more specific, warfare varied a lot during the ancient era over time and around the world. Archaeology has a lot to say about sieges just because fortifications are rather enduring structures, so there's a lot of evidence. However the answer to the question will be very different if you focus on say, classical antiquity in the Mediterranean world, Iron Age Britain, or proto-Khmer rice farmers on the Khorat plateau. Great bit of reading here. This place is now on my bucket list of places to check out!
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 17:01
|
|
|
Polikarpov posted:However if Yamato had broken through, it would have faced 6 other battleships and Morton Deyo would have gone down in history as the last Admiral to form a battle-line in combat. Who actually was this? Jellicoe & Scheer?
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 19:40
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Who actually was this? Jellicoe & Scheer? Admiral Jesse Oldendorf at the Surigao Strait on Oct 25 1944, with the battleships West Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 19:54
|
|
|
Tomn posted:Crossposting from the Roman history thread: One abbess knew enough about warfare to critique battles. But an appreciation of the Glorious Success In Arms of insert cause here does not translate into friendly feeling for the people who did it, though. Soldiers are a scourge. Most of the time this is completely understandable, sometimes it's hypocrisy--cities hate being forced to contribute money to their own defense, for instance, then get extremely shocked that their defenders are hungry and dissatisfied. One interesting thing about this war in particular is that a lot of the civilians who left written records believe they're in the middle of something really important. A lot of the time they wrote because they decided to keep a historical record. Edit: These people are all relatively educated city or town dwellers. Peasants don't appear to have any political opinions, unless not wanting to get robbed/their poo poo set on fire is a political opinion. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Apr 8, 2015 |
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 20:36
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Admiral Jesse Oldendorf at the Surigao Strait on Oct 25 1944, with the battleships West Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, California, and Pennsylvania World War Clue.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 21:19
|
|
|
bewbies posted:This is kind of an interesting question. Basically, the answer is "the city is the defense": cities have a ton of inherent advantages for defenders. In the US at least we're assuming that a large portion of any future operation is going to take place in cities and that poo poo is going to be ug-ly. I was quite fascinated with Wikipedia's account of the New York/ New Jersey campaign of the American Revolutionary War. Even 300 years apart, with the city almost unrecognizable, the fact that people fought over the future of a nation in the same places I had lived, was just striking and increased the confidence of some of my guesses; especially that, even in the late 1700s it was impossible to defend New York City without at least naval parity. Let's get away from the United States for the moment though; it's difficult to discuss, unless someone has documents of say, plans to defend San Francisco or similar from invasion (and surely they were drawn up). Are there any excellent (English or Russian preferred) resources on the Siege of Sarajevo? Or perhaps the period of twenty years before and after Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah? Surely with the ongoing military operations therein someone has translated some of Saddam Hussein's plans and assessments for defense into English. Another question for the professional historians in this thread, how long are things like said plans and assessments (both ones made by the spied upon and the spying party) usually kept secret for? Ten years? Thirty? Forever? How often are these documents lost, what happens to the regular reports (AARs etc ) that soldiers and officers write during operations? Are they usually destroyed immediately, kept in a bureaucratic organization (when is it military and when is it civic?) for a time and then destroyed, or kept and then released? I know we have access to documents like that from WWII, but I have had a very hard time finding them in any language I can read with regards to stuff that happened in the last thirty years. There's plenty of memoirs but I would prefer the original reports, emails, powerpoints, recordings of radio communications (encrypted or clear), dossiers that were given to people with some kind of task to do in such military actions, or accounts that those people gave after. There's plenty of "human story" information but I am more interested in the way modern military forces turn individual experiences into doctrine.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 21:54
|
|
|
Going by The Fluff's stories, something is classified until someone asks for it to be declassified and gets the request approved. But I guess the rule of thumb is "until it stops being relevant/embarrassing for the government", which I would wager is significantly over thirty years. There is also accessibility in archives to consider. A lot of stuff is kept on hand in whatever organization created it for a long time before being handed of to the archive, which will have to file and register it. That takes time and manpower, and you have three guesses what most archives are chronically short on. When I interned at my university's archive, one of my tasks was to file the student records of people who finished their degrees before my parents got theirs.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 23:21
|
|
|
I'm skipping ahead about 400 pages so if this has been asked and covered my apologies. What do we know about Minoan Warfare? I remember hearing about a theory that the story of Theseus and the Minotaur was a mythological accounting of Crete's dominance of the Aegean and mainland Greece. Surely they couldn't have done that without some kind of effective military?
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 23:40
|
|
|
Fun fact: the British government is still sitting on some documents to do with the Lusitania, particularly regarding the end of her final voyage and what she may or may not have been carrying in her hold.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 23:40
|
|
|
If the truth becomes known then the British will have to pay reparations for both World War 1 and World War 2.
|
|
#
?
Apr 8, 2015 23:44
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:Fun fact: the British government is still sitting on some documents to do with the Lusitania, particularly regarding the end of her final voyage and what she may or may not have been carrying in her hold.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2015 00:31
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:If the truth becomes known then the British will have to pay reparations for both World War 1 and World War 2. Turns out Belgium and Poland invited the Germans in.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2015 00:57
|
|
|
Phobophilia posted:If the truth becomes known then the British will have to pay reparations for both World War 1 and World War 2. Albion perfide!  
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2015 01:28
|
|
|
When did slings fall out of common use in warfare?
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2015 01:44
|
|
|
Keldoclock posted:Another question for the professional historians in this thread, how long are things like said plans and assessments (both ones made by the spied upon and the spying party) usually kept secret for? Ten years? Thirty? Forever? How often are these documents lost, what happens to the regular reports (AARs etc ) that soldiers and officers write during operations? Are they usually destroyed immediately, kept in a bureaucratic organization (when is it military and when is it civic?) for a time and then destroyed, or kept and then released? The short answer is It Depends (tm). Here's how it works in Russia. There are various levels of secrecy, more or less the same as in the West. The level of secrecy is retained permanently since nobody has the time to got through every conscript's personal file and make sure it has no damning state secrets in it. When you make a request for a certain document, a commission is gathered to determine if the document still contains sensitive information (past a certain date, I can't remember which, the request is granted automatically). The table of contents for any folder acts the same way. Now there is an exception, and this is the Special Folder. This is some seriously secret poo poo that is so secret, you're not allowed to even know about it. Only a handful of special folders are known to exist, associated with prominent Soviet leaders. Every so often a commission meets to determine whether or not the existence of these folders and their contents should be revealed to the world. To nobody's surprise, they don't tend to vote "yes". There are also various government/government funded initiatives to post scans of award orders, death records, and various other documents, but despite all the "new! just unclassified!" buzz around them, it's all information that someone could just go down to an archive and ask for. These are all for WWII and prior though, post-war information is largely still classified. Americans have similar initiatives that have more post-war stuff, like DTIC, GAO, and the CIA FOIA reading room. You could probably send a FOIA request and get something back, even if it's covered in black bars.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2015 01:52
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 27, 2024 14:35 |
|
|
Taerkar posted:When did slings fall out of common use in warfare? Depends. (TM) Time, place, context etc. The most recent use I can think of is molotov's launched by sling, though I can't remember from where. Syria? Balkan conflict? Something like that. e: Wiki says Finns in the Winter War, that might be what I'm thinking up.
|
|
#
?
Apr 9, 2015 03:16
|
|