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I have a question: what's everybody's opinion on the Dieppe raid? Thanks to "the World at War," I've bought into the idea that it was an experimental raid to see how hard this invading malarkey was, and it turns out the answer is "very." I can understand how such an experience would be formative for putting together Overlord...I'm just wondering if this lesson could have been learned with fewer captured or killed. e: linky Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 22:02
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Suspect Bucket posted:I'm all for Barthas never shutting up. Man is a goldmine. Can you imagine his grandson, asking him wide-eyed what he did in the war? Boy got a lecture he never recovered from.
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Sep 30, 2015 22:08
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ArchangeI posted:Can you imagine his grandson, asking him wide-eyed what he did in the war? Boy got a lecture he never recovered from. Funny you should say this; there's an anecdote in the afterword... quote:Then the anecdote, told me by Abel Barthas, elder son of Louis: “One evening, after school, I had to write a history lesson, a description in a few lines of the work of Adolphe Thiers, under the heading ‘Thiers, liberator of our territory.’ My father told me, ‘Wait, I’ll give you the description myself.’ And he wrote: ‘Thiers, hangman of the Commune, assassin of the working class.’ I was shaking on my way to school, the next day. The teacher took my notebook, turned red, then pale; he closed it, and didn’t mention it again.” Abel was eight years old in 1914. This anecdote would therefore have taken place a little before the First World War. 
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Sep 30, 2015 22:18
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barthas owns
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Sep 30, 2015 22:41
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ArchangeI posted:Can you imagine his grandson, asking him wide-eyed what he did in the war? Boy got a lecture he never recovered from. IIRC, the grandson was a history teacher, and one day decided to bring grand pere's old diaries into class so the kids could read about the trenches themselves.
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Sep 30, 2015 22:55
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Nebakenezzer posted:I have a question: what's everybody's opinion on the Dieppe raid? Thanks to "the World at War," I've bought into the idea that it was an experimental raid to see how hard this invading malarkey was, and it turns out the answer is "very." I can understand how such an experience would be formative for putting together Overlord...I'm just wondering if this lesson could have been learned with fewer captured or killed. Far more was learned off the back of the various opposed amphibious operations in Sicily and Italy (things like 'don't let the Navy shoot down all the paratrooper transports' and 'get the gently caress inland on day 1 or you won't have enough space to ever break out of your bridgehead')
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Sep 30, 2015 23:07
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I kind of amused and saddened that the respect for the common French soldier seemed so low at the turn of the 20th century, I'm guessing this is one of the after effects of the Franco Prussian War?
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Sep 30, 2015 23:17
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Is it this one? This one.  Also, a bunch of actual camoed-up Soviet vehicles from photos and manuals not some artist's fantasies:     This one is my favourite, as it shows off the wide variety of winter camouflage patterns.  Also you can find some manuals that don't have photos associated with them on my blog under the camouflage tag.
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Sep 30, 2015 23:51
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The front right truck is "Winter Camo by Mrs. Brown's 2nd Grade Class"
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Sep 30, 2015 23:59
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Nebakenezzer posted:I have a question: what's everybody's opinion on the Dieppe raid? Thanks to "the World at War," I've bought into the idea that it was an experimental raid to see how hard this invading malarkey was, and it turns out the answer is "very." I can understand how such an experience would be formative for putting together Overlord...I'm just wondering if this lesson could have been learned with fewer captured or killed. I've heard remarks from people that the main lesson learnt was 'don't attack a massively fortified port head on and during the day', so maybe not terribly useful in the grand scheme of things. Like people said, Italy and Sicily were much more influential. The lessons learned from the landings in Italy would have been useful for the Germans too, in particular; - You don't want to defend hard on the beaches since you will get smashed to gently caress by naval gunfire - The invasion force is not at its most weakest when coming ashore. It's at it most weakest when marshalling for the breakout after landing, so you want to hold things back for a massive counterattack late in the day. Von Runstedt said all of this but was ignored because Rommel was in charge, and Rommel said they were going to defend on the beaches and throw the Allies back into the sea. D-Day would have been a lot different if someone other than Rommel had been put in charge of the Atlantic wall defences, especially after everyone saw just how much trouble the US had getting out of the beachhead as it was.
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Oct 1, 2015 00:20
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What's up with the tyre tread pattern thing they've got going on there? What is it meant to look like/blend in with? MikeCrotch posted:D-Day would have been a lot different if someone other than Rommel had been put in charge of the Atlantic wall defences, especially after everyone saw just how much trouble the US had getting out of the beachhead as it was. Lets say that happens (yes, I realise that if they were competent they wouldn't be the Nazis) and the worst case scenario happens: the allies get crushed and pull back into the channel. Was there a contingency plan of some sort or were they just going to shrug and let the soviets deal with it?
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Oct 1, 2015 00:29
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SeanBeansShako posted:I kind of amused and saddened that the respect for the common French soldier seemed so low at the turn of the 20th century, I'm guessing this is one of the after effects of the Franco Prussian War? Really their experience is not substantially different to any conscript army in a 20th century war in anything other than the specific context. Professional officers tend to give no fucks about the welfare of conscripts and this problem gets magnified several times over when there isn't a professional NCO group large enough to bridge the gap between the two.
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Oct 1, 2015 00:40
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MikeCrotch posted:I've heard remarks from people that the main lesson learnt was 'don't attack a massively fortified port head on and during the day', so maybe not terribly useful in the grand scheme of things. Like people said, Italy and Sicily were much more influential. IMHO opinion Rommel had it right, you can't fight a battle of maneuver against a beachhead without air superiority or at least contested air space (which the Germans decidedly did not have in France 1944), and attacking into the beaches after the landing means you still have to fight into the range of naval gunfire. To say nothing of attacking into the Bocage.
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Oct 1, 2015 00:46
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HEY GAL posted:Edit: The Spanish at Nördlingen were so seasoned that when they saw Swedish cannonballs coming at them they all knelt down, which is pretty cool. (They're so slow you can see them in flight.) I remember seeing something illustrate the same during the Charge of the Light Brigade. Cannons firing directly at the advancing cavalry meant that said cavalry could actually dodge them reasonably successfully, or at least the dudes in front.
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Oct 1, 2015 00:57
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Slavvy posted:What's up with the tyre tread pattern thing they've got going on there? What is it meant to look like/blend in with? Anything. It would've been green and white, which are going to be the two main colours you'll see in the backdrop of a winter forest at snowy latitudes, and it serves to break up the silhouette; camoflage isn't just about "looking like" specific things and appearing to be part of the surroundings, it's also very much about not looking like a specific thing people are alert to. If people "see" two weird white shapes (because the tyre-track has blended with the tree behind) the brain's more likely to go "Some weird rocks" and move on. EDIT: It's almost certainly happened to you at some point, but think about times when you've been looking straight at a thing like a tortoiseshell cat in some grass or something, and abruptly when it's moved you realise it's there, because before your brain was only processing "bits of weird brown and black". In this respect, being a solid block of tank-shaped white is actually fairly poor camoflage. My question, and it's almost certainly been asked in the past 600 pages but I'm only on page... 14 by honest means, but: Was the war in Vietnam winnable in a realistic sense? Was there anything that could've been done with the best planning and military leadership around, or was it always going to be a meatgrinder that would eventually lose steam and fold? spectralent fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Oct 1, 2015 |
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Oct 1, 2015 01:20
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spectralent posted:Was the war in Vietnam winnable in a realistic sense? Was there anything that could've been done with the best planning and military leadership around, or was it always going to be a meatgrinder that would eventually lose steam and fold? Bomb North Vietnam until it was a smoldering ruin where even the citizenry are no longer able to wage war due to no longer existing. Or does that not count? Vietnam was the US supporting a pretty unpopular and lovely government in its own civil war, in which the enemy was predominately people fighting for an ideological cause or because their own homes were at risk. An ideal Vietnam probably would have been like Operation Enduring Freedom with more trees.
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Oct 1, 2015 01:33
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Frostwerks posted:Just because you suck on things instinctively doesn't make it a snorkel. I'm sorry, its just that my snorkel is so big my girlfriend calls it her "deep wading gear" Slavvy posted:What's up with the tyre tread pattern thing they've got going on there? What is it meant to look like/blend in with? Breaks up the pattern, thus making it harder to discern over long distances.
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Oct 1, 2015 01:34
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An "ideal Vietnam" would not be going to war in Vietnam.
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Oct 1, 2015 01:37
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spectralent posted:Was the war in Vietnam winnable in a realistic sense? Was there anything that could've been done with the best planning and military leadership around, or was it always going to be a meatgrinder that would eventually lose steam and fold? Vietnam was won in a military sense, but lost in a political sense because the American public was fundamentally uncomfortable with propping up a bloody dictatorship. There simply wasn't the ideological motivation to fight, which means either the US needed to conclude the fight very quickly (a decapitation strike on Ho Chi Minh and the rest of the Viet Cong leadership, or widespread destruction of the North Vietnamese military and will to fight) or improve the political situation by changing the South Vietnamese leadership. The lack of good intelligence or precision weapons meant the only realistic way of concluding the fight quickly would have involved nuclear weapons, while changing the political situation was nonviable given the Cold War realities. Going Colonel Kurtz on the the Viet Cong wasn't domestically tenable, and whether or not a terror war would have worked was a completely moot point since it wouldn't happen. A WWII-style total war might have seen more success, but that invited spiraling the conflict into a larger conflict with China and the Soviet Union. Vietnamization was the best option for actually winning a victory, but the American experience in Vietnam, Iraq, and many other countries have shown how difficult it is to materially improve a weak national military. That being said, there's certainly a scorched-Earth argument that by completely devastating Vietnam, America deterred other nations from undertaking similar communist revolutions - thus achieving America's core interest in upholding Containment Theory. By the time America had finished, the burning husk of Vietnam added nothing to the communist sphere of influence. A costly strategic victory, perhaps, but a victory all the same. But clearly the outcome of the conflict is too complex to paint in the black and white terms of victory or defeat. Kaal fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Oct 1, 2015 |
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Oct 1, 2015 01:42
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Dieppe, if anything, was useful in that it demonstrated the capabilities of the Commando units to simultaneously hold the flanks of a landing and push inland to deal with gun positions. It didn't hurt too badly as a test for landing tanks either, and showed nicely what kinds of problems they would face later. Bear in mind that the Sicily landings were a year or so later, so they knew from Dieppe that pebble beaches weren't actually better than sand at all.chitoryu12 posted:An ideal Vietnam probably would have been like Operation Enduring Freedom with more trees.
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Oct 1, 2015 01:47
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(I realise several people responded but this one stood out for succinctness)Endman posted:An "ideal Vietnam" would not be going to war in Vietnam. This was kind of what I'd felt the more I'd read about it; it seemed like the whole thing was a bad idea from the beginning.
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Oct 1, 2015 01:54
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Slavvy posted:What's up with the tyre tread pattern thing they've got going on there? What is it meant to look like/blend in with? A lightly snowed area, like snow blowing on top of a rock or something. Also, silly me, I forgot the best camouflage pattern of them all! 
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Oct 1, 2015 01:57
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Ensign Expendable posted:A lightly snowed area, like snow blowing on top of a rock or something. Is that a prop from Morozko?
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Oct 1, 2015 02:38
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Kaal posted:That being said, there's certainly a scorched-Earth argument that by completely devastating Vietnam, America deterred other nations from undertaking similar communist revolutions - thus achieving America's core interest in upholding Containment Theory. By the time America had finished, the burning husk of Vietnam added nothing to the communist sphere of influence. A costly strategic victory, perhaps, but a victory all the same. But clearly the outcome of the conflict is too complex to paint in the black and white terms of victory or defeat. Is that some crazy post-war justification by Kissinger or Nixon? Because it sounds crazy. There were still communist revolutions or insurgencies in Africa, other parts of SE Asia, and Central America. The insurgency in S. Vietnam was so strong because of the backing from N. Vietnam, so very few of the other attempts succeeded, but that was because Vietnam was a totally different situation than later revolutions. In hindsight, I suppose you could say that Vietnam was the high-water mark, since no other country managed to switch to Communism afterwards (except briefly in Nicaragua and Afghanistan), but that doesn't mean that the apocalyptic devastation of Vietnam is to credit for that.
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Oct 1, 2015 02:47
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Is that a prop from Morozko? It's a gritty reboot to appeal to today's youth audiences.
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Oct 1, 2015 02:49
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Ensign Expendable posted:A lightly snowed area, like snow blowing on top of a rock or something. the day we stopped folk-art-decorating common objects was a dark one
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Oct 1, 2015 03:11
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spectralent posted:This was kind of what I'd felt the more I'd read about it; it seemed like the whole thing was a bad idea from the beginning. The entire purpose for the war was political. South Vietnam was a really lovely and oppressive government that was really unpopular, but it was a republic facing a communist invasion and thus the United States was automatically on its side. It wasn't even an American war at first, just advisers and special forces operations. The Gulf of Tonkin incident provided an excuse to start actively bombing Vietnam, then the attacks on American air bases was the excuse needed to send thousands of troops in. The thing is, you can't really defeat an enemy that's driven by the need to defend their homes from invaders without totally wiping them out. Most of the Viet Cong didn't give two shits about the communist party's ideology and didn't exactly have a comprehensive understanding of the politics that led to the war. They viewed it as basically a continuation of the colonial wars and struggle for independence that they or their parents and grandparents had been a part of before. You can't simply push someone out of territory when that territory is where they live, and the situation was ripe for a civilian insurgency that could continue the war of attrition without the regular NVA troops participating. The best way to win that war would have been the unfavorable one: indiscriminate slaughter and bombing until there's nobody left to fight and/or no weapons left to fight with, which risked dragging China into it. Even if the US "won" the war, toppling Ho Chi Minh and occupying a now unified Vietnam, it would have done little to address the insurgency problem or improved stability.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:14
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chitoryu12 posted:The best way to win that war would have been the unfavorable one: indiscriminate slaughter and bombing until there's nobody left to fight and/or no weapons left to fight with, which risked dragging China into it. The free fire zones were thoroughly devastated by US bombing, sending enormous amounts of the population toward the urban centers and impoverishing the rural farmers in many zones. This did not end NLF activity in these areas. Irregulars, not particularly attached to any one place are way better at avoiding aerial bombardment and that kind of slaughter than civilians, who are culturally and economically connected to a particular area. Also the problem with bombing North Vietnam more is that it's extremely debatable how much of an effect that would've had- North Vietnam was a conduit, not an industrial center- there's nothing the US could've bombed that wasn't reparable in short order.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:52
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chitoryu12 posted:The entire purpose for the war was political. South Vietnam was a really lovely and oppressive government that was really unpopular, but it was a republic facing a communist invasion and thus the United States was automatically on its side. It wasn't even an American war at first, just advisers and special forces operations. The Gulf of Tonkin incident provided an excuse to start actively bombing Vietnam, then the attacks on American air bases was the excuse needed to send thousands of troops in. There was a brief period, 20 days in 1945, where the Vietnam War likely could have been avoided by simply preventing the French from retaking the colony. Now, that would have proved disastrous to maintaining the relationships that led to NATO. In either case, the US was involved in Vietnam well before 1961 and advisors/sf operations. Look at the amount of material aide and expertise offered to the French during the mid 50s.
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Oct 1, 2015 03:54
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SeanBeansShako posted:I kind of amused and saddened that the respect for the common French soldier seemed so low at the turn of the 20th century, I'm guessing this is one of the after effects of the Franco Prussian War? You .... could say that, but it's probably not in the way you picture it. The Commune old Barthas is referencing is the Paris Commune, one of the early cornerstones of the communist movement, who had a strong following among the French working class. The rise of said Commune was a direct result of the loss of the Prussian war, but the real influence was the retaking of Paris by the French army, an intensely bloody and bitter affair. By the time of WWI the French armed forces have a fairly long tradition of being used as a blunt instrument to quell such things, (not just Communists, mind). As such the officers had to be reliable people, so they trend strongly towards the old school Monarchists and traditionalists, while a lot of the working class common soldiers were Republicains and Socialists/Communists. With the Dreyfus Affair and it's repercussions driving an even deeper divide between the left wing Republicains and the conservative, Catholic right wing in the years between WWI, it's not hard to see why the tensions ran high, and that's before the whole trenches and barbed wire thing. And that's not going into the tensions between the now left-wing Republicain government and the Army, who was now considered unreliable and potentially dangerous to the continuation of the Third Republic.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:03
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MassivelyBuckNegro posted:There was a brief period, 20 days in 1945, where the Vietnam War likely could have been avoided by simply preventing the French from retaking the colony. Now, that would have proved disastrous to maintaining the relationships that led to NATO. This. Ex post facto, the US should have realized that Ho was as much a Vietnamese nationalist as he was a communist and he had no particular love for the USSR. Had we supported him (as we promised) after WWII he would have been a very useful ally in southeast Asia and he probably would have been just as irritating to the Soviets as Tito was. I can't blame the US for siding with the French as that relationship was pretty much the cornerstone of the Marshall Plan but it would have saved a lot of buttpain later on had we managed to work things out with both sides.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:04
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Considering that Ho Chi Minh was friendly to the United States in 1945 that we assisted him in fighting the Japanese in World War 2 things would have been better if we had just supported him in the first place.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:05
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bewbies posted:This. Ho probably would've been a more loyal ally than France, to be honest, considering France's actions later on. Unfortunately the US spent much of the early Cold War with important services run by lunatics.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:11
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Panzeh posted:Ho probably would've been a more loyal ally than France, to be honest, considering France's actions later on. Why limit that to the early Cold War? Seems like most of the Cold War that was the case.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:20
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sullat posted:Why limit that to the early Cold War? Seems like most of the Cold War that was the case. Touche, sir, touche.
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Oct 1, 2015 04:36
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one thing we learned from vietnam was that "these Ho's ain't loyal"
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Oct 1, 2015 04:43
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Ngos before Hos
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Oct 1, 2015 05:21
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Nahh the definitive cold war one is U Mad.
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Oct 1, 2015 05:38
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"first the Regulars, then the Territorials, then the first parts of Kitchener's Army, then the great mass of it" I want to know what are differences - from the name to training - of these conscription waves. Original BEF is often described as "destroyed" or "wasted" - how many of them did survive the war? HEY GAL posted:the day we stopped folk-art-decorating common objects was a dark one The day we stop calling AA guns "common objects" is a dark one 
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Oct 1, 2015 06:07
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Koesj posted:Nahh the definitive cold war one is U Mad. Ultimate Mutually Assured Destruction.
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Oct 1, 2015 06:59
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