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xthetenth posted:I always got the impression that Egypt was useless at anything not rehearsed ahead of time for reasons not necessarily shared with the USSR. There was a pretty big paper on this too yeah.
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Aug 26, 2015 21:47
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Cyrano4747 posted:This was an edit, but part if it pertains to what you said so I'll move it here: Sure, sure, I knew this, but I still think arguing that all heer infantry had unshakable faith in Hitlers leadership is a bit much.. I guess if the work is written specifically with clean wehrmachters in mind for readership, then it all makes sense. It's just a bit too vitriolic to me is all.
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Aug 26, 2015 21:51
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ArchangeI posted:One of the things that seems to run through all accounts of modern warfare is that everybody always uses way more ammunition than previously expected. Is it really that hard to accurately predict how many tons of ammo an artillery battery fires per day when you have accurate logs from previous wars and exercises? Or is it just that when faced with a choice between buying an extra ten thousand tons of ammo (plus storage capacity) and buying a new fighter jet, most militaries will pick the fighter jet because big pallets of ammo aren't sexy? Live is cheap, ammunition is expensive yo.
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Aug 26, 2015 22:22
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Your username is just so unfortunate
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Aug 26, 2015 22:55
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To be fair, goons going "Why is the neo-nazi saying that Nazis are bad" is amusing to read. 
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Aug 26, 2015 23:14
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Koesj posted:Ayup, but that'd call for the Red Army and Air Force communicating with each other effectively in the first place, and in a highly degraded comms environment to boot. An (at the time) USSR client state, Egypt, couldn't pull off anything of the kind, and IIRC shot down more of their own aircraft than Israeli ones in '73. I assume stuff like this is the reason the Roland went through several revisions to harden the vehicle against ECM. And why it's ammunition came with a selfdestruct in case Roland-units found themselves accidentally sending missiles up to their own aircraft. quote:Re: Cold War issues coming to light during (the buildup towards) Desert Storm: grapevine has it that UK forces had to go hat in hand to the US Army for 203mm artillery shells, after fully depleting their own stocks in Germany mind you. I think their intended ammo was strictly of the 'area X-ray and third degree burns'-illuminating kind. There was a minor scandal about our adventure in Afghanistan were something similar happened: The Bundeswehr went through enough small arms ammunition during it's stay, it started to slowly churn through our storage of Cold War ammunition. The reason was, our civilian overlords simply "forgot" to give the Bundeswehr the ressources needed to replace the ammunition used up in Afghanistan and after a certain time, there was a serious ammunition shortage and old Cold War reserves had to be opened up.
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Aug 27, 2015 00:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:This was an edit, but part if it pertains to what you said so I'll move it here: I think this is also dangerous because it leads to the whole "A few bad apples" mentality and ignores that it's rather depressingly easy for people to, if not commit acts themselves, than to condone the acts of their fellows even if normally they would be appalled by it.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:04
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Anyone who's interested in the psychology of soldiers in the Wehrmacht should read this collection of transcripts of POWs in British camps talking amongst themselves about anything and everything while they waited for the war to finish. Politics, Hitler, getting pissed, fighting the war, latrine rumours, the awful sergeant, supply problems, committing atrocities; it's all in there in some form.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:28
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Trin Tragula posted:Anyone who's interested in the psychology of soldiers in the Wehrmacht should read this collection of transcripts of POWs in British camps talking amongst themselves about anything and everything while they waited for the war to finish. Politics, Hitler, getting pissed, fighting the war, latrine rumours, the awful sergeant, supply problems, committing atrocities; it's all in there in some form. It's a good book. Obviously they couldn't take every last document/transcript and stuff it into one book so its very picky/choosy, but it does a good job as showing that fascist, racist, bigoted, you name it, attitudes were more prevalent throughout the forces than what clean Wehrmacht'ers would have you believe.
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Aug 27, 2015 01:35
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Raenir Salazar posted:There was a pretty big paper on this too yeah. I think I read something to the tune. Oh, Egypt! So, uh, what about Allied (non-USSR) war crimes? What's concensus of them geing punished vs. covering it up?
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Aug 27, 2015 07:11
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Jobbo_Fett posted:It's a good book. Obviously they couldn't take every last document/transcript and stuff it into one book so its very picky/choosy, but it does a good job as showing that fascist, racist, bigoted, you name it, attitudes were more prevalent throughout the forces than what clean Wehrmacht'ers would have you believe. I think the conclusion that book had was that it wasn't necessarily the most fascist/bigoted/Nazi people who did the worst things- most of them, given a uniform and weapons seemed to easily slip on the glove and blaze away at whoever they wanted. Near the beginning you can listen to the story of the bomber gunner who got a thrill out of shooting at refugee columns with his turret because 'why not?', like somebody playing a GTA game or something.
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Aug 27, 2015 11:57
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Every memoir of an Allied soldier I've ever read has contained some variation of the line "I didn't hate the Germans and I didn't enjoy killling them. Except for the SS, gently caress those guys".
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Aug 27, 2015 12:23
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Panzeh posted:I think the conclusion that book had was that it wasn't necessarily the most fascist/bigoted/Nazi people who did the worst things- most of them, given a uniform and weapons seemed to easily slip on the glove and blaze away at whoever they wanted. Near the beginning you can listen to the story of the bomber gunner who got a thrill out of shooting at refugee columns with his turret because 'why not?', like somebody playing a GTA game or something. Man you could just make a Full Metal Jacket comparison instead of video games.
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Aug 27, 2015 12:45
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FAUXTON posted:Not cheap or easy enough given that the ground crews were just chugging it out of the plane's assholes. Like I said some pages ago in the thread, my father who served in the Far East of the soviet union in a tank company during the early 80s told stories about having to keep the tanks running all the time until they finally stopped for the day, because they ran pure water as coolant (the crews would drink antifreeze) and if you turned off the engine and waited an hour, the tank wouldn't start. Koesj posted:Your username is just so unfortunate I love it. TheLovablePlutonis posted:Man you could just make a Full Metal Jacket comparison instead of video games. Probably more apt in this case (Although I'm sure you could reference the door gunner scenes in Spec Ops: The Line or something) but I feel like you're a bit disappointed in this guy for talking about videogames. Why the hell not man? Please don't answer that. I know what your answer is going to be (really, I do) and everyone here knows what happened the last time we tried to have THAT conversation. If you're unfamiliar with that conversation and its logical conclusion, just read about it on some other place on the internet. Now we can move on with our modern discussion of past histories without these interjections. Keldoclock fucked around with this message at 12:56 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 12:52
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Man you could just make a Full Metal Jacket comparison instead of video games. Ah yes, all those well disciplined refugees.
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Aug 27, 2015 13:15
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100 Years Ago We must do something, this is something, we must do this. Apparently there's an obscure by-law in the ANZAC regulations that insists the Light Horse be used in any particularly useless, hopeless assault. It's not quite as bad as the Nek for hopelessness in the face of enemy fire, but it's far worse in the sense of tactical pointlessness. Meanwhile, Kenneth Best continues confiscating anything that isn't nailed down in fine military style, and Louis Barthas takes up his pen again as he's unexpectedly pulled out of the quiet bit of the line that he's been occupying for the last month. Change is rarely good for a poilu; we'll see how this change ranks in days to come.
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Aug 27, 2015 13:42
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Do these generals in WWI tend to tour the front lines ever?
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Aug 27, 2015 16:38
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Koesj posted:Ground Forces in Europe: Air Defense Artillery (ADA) in ~1980 Awesome post! I had no idea that the British were so disinterested in air defense in general, it seems like that could have ended very badly for them. A couple of additional things to consider: Hawk was assigned both to Corps and was employed as a theater asset. Corps ADA was rarely used in anything other than GS, so you didn't have situations like divisions with attached Hawk batteries. There were several reasons for this, but the main one is that Hawk (and all air defense systems, really) was a lot more effective when employed as an integrated wide-area system rather than in a piecemeal fashion according to the whims of division or brigade commanders. That being said, Hawk units were surprisingly mobile: they were actually faster than tracked counterparts over anything but the worst terrain. When they were DS to divisions (say, supporting a main effort or something) it was pretty common for Hawk units to be VERY close to the FLOT. The most common TTP was to send one fire platoon forward with the division tac and leave it in passive mode, while the other fire platoon stayed with division main and in active search. As such, the rear FP could pass data to the forward FP about incoming aircraft, allowing the front FP to try an "ambush" of sorts. This was what the Kuwaitis did during the Iraqi invasion and it worked quite well. Sort of to that end, you got very into the weeds on specific vehicles as assigned to echelon, but didn't really discuss much about tactical radars and integration. The US had a fairly significant advantage in mobile air search radars throughout the Cold War, and also enjoyed a much more comprehensive data sharing capability between sensors and shooters. This is one big reason why you typcially see Soviet systems with low quality radars integrated on the launch vehicle, in contrast to US systems that relied more heavily on a centralized radar network feeding shooters target data either digitally or verbally. I don't think we'll ever know which method was more effective, but it does imply that simply comparing number of vehicles per echelon probably doesn't provide a complete picture. Finally, as to the effectiveness of tactical air defense systems in general, I'm of the broad opinion that they were pretty poor until the advent of solid state electronics and active radar interceptors. GW1 is probably the best case study available, and while they did inflict some losses, they absolutely failed in every possible respect as their assigned missions. Coalition loss rates were very low, practically every strike objective was achieved, and Iraqi air defense units at all echelons were pretty badly mauled. Granted, this was late Cold War aircraft versus early-mid Cold War SHORAD systems, but as a point of reference it still stands. All that being said, over the last 20 years or so the US has completely failed to field any useful tactical air defense capability and now we have a huge gap to deal with. The Russians meanwhile have fielded a couple of systems that, at least on paper, are very impressive. bewbies fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 16:49
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Fangz posted:Do these generals in WWI tend to tour the front lines ever? I don't want to step on Twin's narrative toes here, but Sir John French burns himself out visiting BEF hospitals. But no, the strategic commander generals rarely are at the front.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:08
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Thanks for this post! I wasn't aware of US Army Hawk doctrine, being kinda surprised they were included within those ADA units on top of its theater-level deployment in the first place. Good points also about solid state trons and decent radar, might I pose that the 'shooter' saturation on the Eastern side could have been a way to compensate for them lagging behind in their spotting?
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Aug 27, 2015 17:17
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Fangz posted:Do these generals in WWI tend to tour the front lines ever? Quite a bit, actually. 78 British officers of general rank or higher get killed during the war, mostly from artillery barrages when touring the front line. When these deaths happened I don't know, so they might occur mostly in the later stages of the war.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:33
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^^^ IIRC the distribution is kind of bathtub-shaped; snipers do a lot of damage in 1914, then Gallipoli distorts things a bit because of deaths on the beaches and then once they get ashore everyone's living under the Ottoman guns, then it slacks off into 1916 because nobody with half a brain wanted to go forward at the Somme, then in 1917 and 1918 picks up again because they have to move forward to keep up with their blokes and that puts them back out in the open again. ^^^Fangz posted:Do these generals in WWI tend to tour the front lines ever? So here's another little-known fact that I've been looking for a place to work in. So many generals (mostly brigadiers, but with the odd major-general and lieutenant-general sprinkled in) were either killed or wounded while in the trenches (over half of them due to a lucky German gunner dropping a whizz-bang in the right place) that a series of orders were issued by GHQ at regular intervals, strictly forbidding generals from going up the line in person unless absolutely necessary. We're looking at 232 general officer casualties (not counting ANZACs, Indian Army officers and the like), of whom 78 were dead. Of course, not all of them took the blindest bit of notice, and Sir John French in particular was renowned both for the amount of time he spent among the blokes, and also how good he was at talking to them. There's a whole book about British general officer casualties called Bloody Red Tabs (ho ho ho); its tone quite often drops into the worst, most obnoxious flavour of "how DARE you say MEAN THINGS about these BRAVE HEROES" revisionism, but there's some valuable myth-popping in there with it. Bottom line: generals staying away from the sharp end was not necessarily a bad thing and is very understandable once you get past "they never went up the line so they couldn't understand how difficult it was to get forward". Mind you, that's not to say "they couldn't understand how difficult it was" isn't a valid point either; I don't think it's any coincidence that John Monash was a colonel in 1915 and went forward with one of the assaulting columns at the Battle of Sari Bair, and subsequently became out of nowhere one of the best generals of the war...but, on the other hand, Sir Ian Hamilton's diary records him making plenty of visits to the trenches on Gallipoli, and that didn't do a single solitary drat thing for making him stop ordering offensives that he knew probably weren't going to work. It's a tricky one; it twists and turns like a twisty-turny thing. (I'd give this all a proper write-up now, in preparation for finding the right day to drop it into the blog, if I weren't juggling a bunch of other things.) Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 17:48
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I'll be damned; interesting. I figured French and Monash would be two guys in the thick of it. So, were German and French generals similarly disposed? I'm imagining that the Italian, Russian, and Austrian generals were a bit more remote. Also thanks Tevery Best for answering my Polish question. The trek of the Poles from Russia to Palestine sounds unbelievably epic. (TBH all the Polish leaving enemy territory to reform under the Allies sounds unbelievably epic.)
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Aug 27, 2015 18:59
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Koesj posted:might I pose that the 'shooter' saturation on the Eastern side could have been a way to compensate for them lagging behind in their spotting? I'd assume this was the case, different philosophies about how to get after the problem. One thing I have always been curious about : I know next to nothing about how the WP did airspace control, or what their ROE was for their maneuver air defense forces. They didn't tie in to any organization above their division (I don't think), so that makes me think that the regiment/division commander had the decision authority about when and what to shoot. I don't know how they did their ID processes either; if it was strictly VID then that offsets some of the advantages of having integrated radars on the systems and I don't think they had sort of electronic IFF until late in the CW. I tend to think it was probably just a "pilots take the risk if they fly into maneuver airspace unannounced"type approach but I'm not really sure.
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Aug 27, 2015 19:04
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Arquinsiel posted:^^^^ Harold knew that William was preparing an invasion, and had his forces arrayed in Southern England to keep an eye out. The unseasonably rough weather prevented William from launching his attack, and in the meantime Hardrada, with Harold's least favorite brother Tostig, landed up North. Harold rushed his army up to meet the vikings and his brother in a very quick march, surprised Harald and Tostig at Stamford bridge - they were supposed to be receiving tribute or maybe surrender from a town, possibly York iiirc, and were unprepared for battle with a force they thought was days away at best. Harold Godwinson figured that the danger of a Norman invasion was over with the onset of fall and traditionally rougher weather which would render William's invasion fleet a moot threat. As such, he left most of his forces up North and headed South. Meanwhile, the weather in the channel cleared up, William and his bros crossed over, landed at and took Pevensey three days after Stamford Bridge, and built a castle/fortifications from which he raided the surrounding area, which conveniently happened to be lands belonging Harold Godwinson. Harold heard about this on his way back to London, and scrambled to raise his troops before marching out to Hastings and (possibly) an arrow in the eye. Cotton Candidasis fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 19:04
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Tias posted:Okay, but he does go a bit beyond that point in this book, often and insistently making the point that every wehrmacht soldier on the eastern front had a quasi-religious faith in Hitler and a nihilistic conviction that a final victory must be created over the corpses of Russia - or at least, was brutalized to the point where they happily went along nazi indoctrination. Does he base this assumption on the evaluation of fieldpost? There's some works that I know of in German.
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Aug 27, 2015 19:11
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JaucheCharly posted:Does he base this assumption on the evaluation of fieldpost? There's some works that I know of in German. Yep, most of the work centers around soldiers mail, where they tweak out about apocalyptic battles of civilizations, Hitlers divinity etc.
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Aug 27, 2015 19:53
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Tias posted:Yep, most of the work centers around soldiers mail, where they tweak out about apocalyptic battles of civilizations, Hitlers divinity etc. So he centered his work around a bunch of lies? Interesting. Did he take into account most of that stuff was an attempt to impress the Gestapo-guys looking through their mail?
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Aug 27, 2015 20:00
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tweekinator posted:Harold knew that William was preparing an invasion, and had his forces arrayed in Southern England to keep an eye out. It was his levies or something wasn't it? I forget the specific term, but each village was supposed to muster a few men or whatever and Harold had them stationed along the southern coast to repel William through the entire summer; so long that people started to get pissed off. He was well aware William was coming. By the time the Normans and Hardrada actually landed it was autumn, so the levies had all gone back home to harvest and Harold was left with just his dedicated soldiers. And William had to wait just as long with his army languishing about on the other side of the channel too. It wasn't a sudden sneak invasion. edit: I might be completely misremembering/ got this from a biased source so someone should probably correct me on this, but from what I remember it was pretty much a fluke of history that William actually succeeded. If he'd landed in the summer like he'd planned, he'd have had to face a Harold with a much bigger and much less tired army (that hadn't just marched up and down England at a breakneck pace)- and even in the battle of Hastings its self Harold should have by all rights won, it's just that he didn't actually lead anyone 'cause he was so demoralized from the Papal banner/ utter exhaustion. Koramei fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 20:51
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Came back to this thread after a hiatus to find cool posts about ADA. <--- obviously this pleases me.
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Aug 27, 2015 21:09
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Koramei posted:edit: I might be completely misremembering/ got this from a biased source so someone should probably correct me on this, but from what I remember it was pretty much a fluke of history that William actually succeeded. If he'd landed in the summer like he'd planned, he'd have had to face a Harold with a much bigger and much less tired army (that hadn't just marched up and down England at a breakneck pace)- and even in the battle of Hastings its self Harold should have by all rights won, it's just that he didn't actually lead anyone 'cause he was so demoralized from the Papal banner/ utter exhaustion. William was actually in a lot of trouble as it was, he'd expected to land, fight a battle, win, and for that to allow him to sweep up to London and get himself crowned. But because Harold has been drawn north he suddenly finds himself pottering about Kent with nobody to fight and he's rapidly running out of food for his army. Had Harold waited just a bit then not only would he have had a chance to rest and consolidate his army, but the Norman army would have started falling apart.
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Aug 27, 2015 21:40
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Tias posted:Yep, most of the work centers around soldiers mail, where they tweak out about apocalyptic battles of civilizations, Hitlers divinity etc. I actually wrote a little bit about Bartov's contentions for an essay and essentially you and I are in agreement. One particular area where he overstepped, which I focused on, was with higher-level officers, who not only were typically WWI vets like Hitler himself but all-in-all of a rather different cut from the soldiers raised in the HY (which was extremely good at indoctrination). My source was the bugging reports at the Trent Park POW camp, compiled and available in English as Tapping Hitler's Generals. The most interesting aspect of this is that even pro-Nazi officers were often quick to fob off their own war crimes (such as adherence to the Commissar Order) onto the Gestapo or SS. I know that at least one of them did this even when he still expected the Germans to emerge victorious, so he clearly had a motivation beyond being on the "right side of history" per se. Some did hold to Bartov's model of viewing the war in apocalyptic terms, but many, including some of those who had fought in the Eastern Front, did not. Generalleutnant Ferdinand Heim, who commanded a panzer division at Stalingrad, gave a lecture to the other officers, many of whom had not been to the East, on fighting the Russians. While much of his commentary is couched in national-racial terms, it at least attempts to be impartial and he is quite complimentary of the Russians. He called them ‘excellent soldiers’, ‘extraordinarily quick to learn’ and commented on the Russian improvements to the ‘Blitzkrieg’, enacting outflanking ‘more slowly and carefully’ and thus more effectively. Most importantly, he did not see the Russians as ideologically uniform. Rather, he noted that some of the generals were former Tsarists, and ‘not communist at all at heart’, and that the peasants of the country didn’t know ‘much more about Bolshevism than we do’. Back to war crimes, it is also abundantly clear that some generals, namely those who had never seen the Eastern Front, may not even have been aware of the massacres until told by their fellow officers. Thus, General der Infanterie Dietrich von Choltitz confided to General der Panzertruppe Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma that he carried out the "liquidation of the Jews ... down to the very last detail". Thoma's reply is also revealing, "[General der Panzertruppe Heinz] Eberbach said yesterday again: 'Hitler has no idea that the people have been hanged.' Ha! Ha! Ha! It's a good thing that you can now produce such unimpeachable proofs." This is a rather more complicated picture than Bartov paints. There was not only nuance in how the officers perceived their enemy but how they perceived their actions in the war and the war itself. Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Aug 27, 2015 |
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Aug 27, 2015 21:44
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Koramei posted:I forget the specific term, but each village was supposed to muster a few men or whatever
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Aug 27, 2015 21:58
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Regarding air defense and gw1. What where the comparitive force ratios to a fuld gap situation. The coalition in desert storm where what ca 24 ground divisions supported by ca 2400 planes vs ca the same number of iraqi divisions supported by 500 planes. And the air campaign in desert storm was 6 months. How would that compare to a fulda gap scenario? The warpac had at least parity if not more planes than NATO. And the Warsaw pact would not sit there to be pounded on for months, they would start the ground war asap
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Aug 27, 2015 22:43
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vuk83 posted:Regarding air defense and gw1. What where the comparitive force ratios to a fuld gap situation. The coalition in desert storm where what ca 24 ground divisions supported by ca 2400 planes vs ca the same number of iraqi divisions supported by 500 planes. And the air campaign in desert storm was 6 months. How would that compare to a fulda gap scenario? The warpac had at least parity if not more planes than NATO. And the Warsaw pact would not sit there to be pounded on for months, they would start the ground war asap The 'Fulda Gap' is a river valley.
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Aug 27, 2015 23:05
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Nebakenezzer posted:I'll be damned; interesting. I figured French and Monash would be two guys in the thick of it. So, were German and French generals similarly disposed? I'm imagining that the Italian, Russian, and Austrian generals were a bit more remote. This I don't know, a combination of a lack of English-language sources and also not being in the best place to find them because I still find generals fundamentally boring. I do know that there's a bit in Herbert Sulzbach's diary at some point next year where he talks about some of the men complaining that the big nobs never come up the line to see what it's like, and as their bombardier he put forward the counter-argument that it was part of the job of a senior officer not to expose themselves to unnecessary danger.
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Aug 27, 2015 23:14
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I was reading Chuikov's Stalingrad memoir, which is actually pretty good, and he tells this great little anecdote about soldiers on a ferry boat going across the Volga at night. They're all scared shitless of what's going to happen to them on the other side of the river already, when they get totally illuminated by a flare and come under heavy artillery fire. All the soldiers are right on the edge of panic so this grizzled veteran political officer takes the light from the flare as an opportunity and decides to have mail call right then and there, which calms everybody down and gets them thinking about other things.
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Aug 28, 2015 01:02
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Nebakenezzer posted:I'll be damned; interesting. I figured French and Monash would be two guys in the thick of it. So, were German and French generals similarly disposed? I'm imagining that the Italian, Russian, and Austrian generals were a bit more remote. I don't know about the generalities, but at the very start of the war Joffre and von Moltke painted about as opposite a picture you could get of touring the front lines. Joffre hired a former Grand Prix driver as his chaffeur and had him tour around the countryside at top speed so he could visit as many of his commanders as possible. Granted, this doesn't necessarily mean 'the front line' but it's also very different to the 'staying 50 miles behind the front line drinking brandy in cheateaux' picture that gets painted of WWI generals. Moltke on the other hand stayed in his HQ in Luxebourg for the entire 1914 offensive and if i'm not mistaken didn't leave until his nervous breakdown. He basically didn't step foot in France for the entire campaign.
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Aug 28, 2015 11:56
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MikeCrotch posted:Moltke on the other hand stayed in his HQ in Luxebourg for the entire 1914 offensive and if i'm not mistaken didn't leave until his nervous breakdown. He basically didn't step foot in France for the entire campaign. But that in itself says something: Moltke had a nervous breakdown. And he wasn't the only one. These Generals far behind the front lines weren't utterly callous about the condition of their soldiers, they cared a lot and were under an enormous amount of stress.
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Aug 28, 2015 12:10
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Alchenar posted:But that in itself says something: Moltke had a nervous breakdown. And he wasn't the only one. These Generals far behind the front lines weren't utterly callous about the condition of their soldiers, they cared a lot and were under an enormous amount of stress. I think Moltke's breakdown wasn't so much because he felt so much for his soldiers but because he watched the plan he had spent years preparing unravel before his eyes while everyone, including himself, thought that he would repeat his uncle's successes in the war of 1870.
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Aug 28, 2015 12:15
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