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Alekanderu posted:I wonder how much further this anti-Wehraboo backlash will keep going. Apparently, according to a significant fraction of this thread, the Germans were fantastically lucky incompetent morons who somehow miraculously managed to stumble their way through Europe for the only reason that their opponents were propeller hat wearing buffoons who were too busy slipping on banana peels and getting knocked over comically to oppose them. There were quite a few things the German military was good at, but the main focus of Wehraboos is upon the equipment and vehicles of the German War Machine, which ranged from pretty good (Some of their prop fighters) to the laughably terrible ideas (Maus, runaway design issues for tanks in general), or the belief that their units were just that much better than everyone else and the allies only won by 'cheating' with superior numbers. The German army had a rather fantastic cadre system for its line units, almost a complete opposite of the 'Fly until you Die' approach of the Luftwaffe.
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Oct 11, 2015 16:14
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The Nazis were fantastically lucky though.
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Oct 11, 2015 16:26
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Fangz posted:The Nazis were fantastically lucky though. In France? Yes. In the rest of their wars? Not particularly.
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Oct 11, 2015 16:29
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TBH it's really people's lack of ability to understand a position between the Wehraboo and 'literally incompetent all the time at every level.' poo poo's nuanced, yo
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Oct 11, 2015 17:01
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nothing to seehere posted:In France? Yes. In the rest of their wars? Not particularly. Eh, their early successes are attributable to more or less a basket of the same issues, france include. A lot of it came down to poor decisions on the part of their opposing numbers. It wasn't so much that they got lucky in France as it was that the French generalship was really uninspired and made some big errors. Same thing in Russia - even the Germans didn't expect to advance as far and fast as they did in '41 and a lot of that comes down to some really terrible decisions made by the leadership of the Red Army. Norway was a mess for everyone involved and the Germans basically won because their supply chain was a lot shorter and more manageable than the British.
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Oct 11, 2015 17:05
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Their early successes have a lot to do with having a military that was ready to fight, and just not making big mistakes. They weren't supermen with future tech fighting the most brilliant campaign ever, but they had units ready to fight the campaigns they planned to and actually did fight, and they didn't make many mistakes on the operational level and lower. Over all, it's a good performance that was given huge vulnerabilities to exploit, and it did so competently. However, the structural flaws of their state caused progressively larger problems and they didn't adapt to the second stage of the war as well. Once a high operational tempo and exploiting mistakes the enemy wasn't making nearly as often weren't sufficient for quick victory, other armies started doing better than them. Now procurement was another story. Prewar they had a lot of good gear, probably enough that they were the best equipped overall. Once the Nazis really get ruining everything, they still have some exceptional stuff and good stuff, but so does everyone else, and they're using a much greater share of their production on conceptually flawed stuff than other armies. Note that it's entirely possible for capable officers to make mistakes, it's an awfully short list of generals who didn't. However, the other side of the coin is that a discussion of failures isn't automatically an argument that they're the worst ever and incompetent at everything. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Oct 11, 2015 |
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Oct 11, 2015 17:24
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Overall, they did quite well, considering they had to drag Hitler and Mussolini with them. Being good at making speeches to naked men in speedos doesn't make you expert tank designer... or expert in war in general. Did any allied power need to run tank designs through the president? Has running such ideas through whatever is the chief poombah ever gone well?
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Oct 11, 2015 17:46
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gustavus adolphus designed the Vasa himself quite unbalanced, sank a thousand yards into her maiden voyage 
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Oct 11, 2015 17:50
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HEY GAL posted:gustavus adolphus designed the Vasa himself I know, I've been to the museum.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:16
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JcDent posted:Being good at making speeches to naked men in speedos doesn't make you expert tank designer... or expert in war in general. That's what you get with a cult of personality, and a lot of political in-fighting between companies and/or military leaders. Everything has its ups and downs but getting hung up on them and always bringing it up kills any sort of constructive conversations about them and other equipment. Speaking of the MG-42, I've never had the luxury of holding one but my MG-34 weighs about the same and is a little annoying to take down or swap barrels but I still think its a great gun.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:21
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Alekanderu posted:I wonder how much further this anti-Wehraboo backlash will keep going. Apparently, according to a significant fraction of this thread, the Germans were fantastically lucky incompetent morons who somehow miraculously managed to stumble their way through Europe for the only reason that their opponents were propeller hat wearing buffoons who were too busy slipping on banana peels and getting knocked over comically to oppose them. The Germans had some excellent weapon designs. It's just that everyone obsesses over the retarded wunderwaffen and big cats, wheras the real good poo poo is stuff like the StuG that doesn't even get a fraction of the PR that Tigers get, despite being a hell of a lot more useful.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:31
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Hogge Wild posted:could you give some examples of the latter That huge Porsche TD being rolled out at Kursk is one. Another is the Battle of Britain, congrats on sending fighter escorts with barely enough fuel remaining after the trip to handle interceptors, and medium bombers to fulfill what should have been a heavy/strategic bomber role.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:32
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HEY GAL posted:gustavus adolphus designed the Vasa himself I still don't get how nobody thought a ship that was obviously unbalanced was a bad thing to sail. I swear somebody told a story about how a group of people with no education in engineering realised it was unbalanced and nobody paid attention to it. And I imagine great speech making won't make your men fight better man to man, but it adds to the mystique built around you and your culture. We remember speeches made by ancient generals and I think that's what they cared about.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:35
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Ensign Expendable posted:The Germans had some excellent weapon designs. It's just that everyone obsesses over the retarded wunderwaffen and big cats, wheras the real good poo poo is stuff like the StuG that doesn't even get a fraction of the PR that Tigers get, despite being a hell of a lot more useful. There's a pretty simple reason why a lot of the stuff that gets the most attention is the worst stuff. It's because the vast majority of middling to bad materiel the Nazis got made was expressly designed to appeal to armchair generals, and thus by way of tautology, it appeals to armchair generals.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:41
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FAUXTON posted:That huge Porsche TD being rolled out at Kursk is one. Its argued that the fighters would've been better used independently rather than sticking them as escorts. Then you've got the Bf-110 which was misused a lot. Heavy/Strat bombers as an arm of the Luftwaffe was canned when General Wever died in a plane accident. Then you've got the constantly changing objectives/strategic aims of the Luftwaffe during the BoB...
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Oct 11, 2015 18:44
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xthetenth posted:There's a pretty simple reason why a lot of the stuff that gets the most attention is the worst stuff. It's because the vast majority of middling to bad materiel the Nazis got made was expressly designed to appeal to armchair generals, and thus by way of tautology, it appeals to armchair generals. But I'm an armchair general and I like Stugs and MG42s and jerrycans a lot more than Panzer 5s and 6s. 
Davin Valkri fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Oct 11, 2015 |
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Oct 11, 2015 18:46
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HEY GAL posted:edit 3: in a world where you can become a respected general without having taken part in a single pitched battle, Tilly fought something like fifty eight in his life and only lost three. In addition to "Father Tilly" or "Father Jean" I've also heard "Der Unerschrockener Feldmarschall" as a name for him: "The Undaunted Field Marshall" That's amazing! How many other people can claim to have even fought in 50+ pitched battles? Tilly only lived to 73 so that's an average of about one major battle every year of his adult life. That's crazy.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:47
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xthetenth posted:There's a pretty simple reason why a lot of the stuff that gets the most attention is the worst stuff. It's because the vast majority of middling to bad materiel the Nazis got made was expressly designed to appeal to armchair generals, and thus by way of tautology, it appeals to armchair generals. It also doesn't hurt that all that poo poo was the same thing that Allied news directed at civilians, and post war material designed for civilians as well, was all agog at exactly those things. No one was publishing breathless accounts of valiant GIs assaulting PzIVs in Sicily, but you drat better believe that everyone knew what a Tiger tank was, at least conceptually. Same thing with the V- Weapons. Over all a terrible waste of resources, but it made for some great headlines and newsreels when they started slamming into London. Meanwhile no one really talks about the Germans' excellent light mortars because that's not what the movie stars were throwing hand grenades at in 40s-60s war movies. This works both ways, incidentally. The Luger was a far more reliable pistol than the modern common image of it would have, but a combination of people being used to beat up examples and the way American firearms publications worked in the early 20th century has given it an undeserved reputation for finickiness.
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Oct 11, 2015 18:52
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What about allied equipment that's perceived as being really fantastic but is actually pretty crap? Is there such a thing?
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Oct 11, 2015 19:01
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Slavvy posted:What about allied equipment that's perceived as being really fantastic but is actually pretty crap? Is there such a thing? I was pretty surprised to hear that the famous T34 actually had pretty bad reliability, because the Soviets figured that a tank doesn't actually have to drive from Moscow to Berlin, it just has to drive to the front line where it will probably be lost within an hour of entering combat anyway.
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Oct 11, 2015 19:36
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JcDent posted:Did any allied power need to run tank designs through the president? Has running such ideas through whatever is the chief poombah ever gone well? Oh! Oh! I just remembered, in the US pre-war WW2 times the Cavalry arm was forbidden by law to possess tanks.
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Oct 11, 2015 19:42
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ArchangeI posted:I was pretty surprised to hear that the famous T34 actually had pretty bad reliability, because the Soviets figured that a tank doesn't actually have to drive from Moscow to Berlin, it just has to drive to the front line where it will probably be lost within an hour of entering combat anyway. This was new to me too, but didn't they manage to fix most of the problems in 2 years or something?
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Oct 11, 2015 19:44
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Davin Valkri posted:But I'm an armchair general and I like Stugs and MG42s and jerrycans a lot more than Panzer 5s and 6s. StuG lyfe, brotha! ArchangeI posted:I was pretty surprised to hear that the famous T34 actually had pretty bad reliability, because the Soviets figured that a tank doesn't actually have to drive from Moscow to Berlin, it just has to drive to the front line where it will probably be lost within an hour of entering combat anyway. No, but you see, that's actually genius, because it simplifies the design, material requirements and supply chains! And probably enough of the crew survives for the next round! Jobbo_Fett posted:Oh! Oh! I just remembered, in the US pre-war WW2 times the Cavalry arm was forbidden by law to possess tanks. Not like they had any at hand, yeah? Cyrano4747 posted:Meanwhile no one really talks about the Germans' excellent light mortars because that's not what the movie stars were throwing hand grenades at in 40s-60s war movies. It's really hard to get people excited over things like... set up time? Ease of transport? It's a light mortar, so it sure as poo poo isn't range or boom. That said: has anyone ever thought of a belt fed mortar, or does it only exist in that one phrase about people banging?
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Oct 11, 2015 19:47
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Slavvy posted:What about allied equipment that's perceived as being really fantastic but is actually pretty crap? Is there such a thing? BAR
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Oct 11, 2015 19:49
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Slavvy posted:What about allied equipment that's perceived as being really fantastic but is actually pretty crap? Is there such a thing? Norden bombsights?
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Oct 11, 2015 19:50
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ArchangeI posted:I was pretty surprised to hear that the famous T34 actually had pretty bad reliability, because the Soviets figured that a tank doesn't actually have to drive from Moscow to Berlin, it just has to drive to the front line where it will probably be lost within an hour of entering combat anyway. The initial production ones driven by untrained conscripts maybe, but by 1945 you could squeeze 300 hours out of the engine or 2500-3000 km out of the suspension.
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Oct 11, 2015 19:51
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Hogge Wild posted:This was new to me too, but didn't they manage to fix most of the problems in 2 years or something? I recall at least one report stating that the T-34's turret drive was frequently overloaded and it would regularly shoot sparks and/or die. Gotta start turning that turret around manually! Some T-34's during the opening stages of Barbarossa had extra transmissions on their rear deck because they knew they'd break down.
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Oct 11, 2015 19:58
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JcDent posted:Not like they had any at hand, yeah? Except all those designs and models produced in the mid-30's 
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Oct 11, 2015 20:00
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Ensign Expendable posted:The initial production ones driven by untrained conscripts maybe, but by 1945 you could squeeze 300 hours out of the engine or 2500-3000 km out of the suspension. After 5 years of refinement it should be expected that it got better, but it had its fair share of issues.
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Oct 11, 2015 20:08
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Jobbo_Fett posted:After 5 years of refinement it should be expected that it got better, but it had its fair share of issues. You start seeing 200+ engine-hours and 1500-2000 km of travel in documents around 1942-43, I wouldn't say that it took five years. Jobbo_Fett posted:Some T-34's during the opening stages of Barbarossa had extra transmissions on their rear deck because they knew they'd break down. Those are KVs, not T-34s. The T-34's weak spot was the engine, not the transmission. Jobbo_Fett posted:I recall at least one report stating that the T-34's turret drive was frequently overloaded and it would regularly shoot sparks and/or die. Gotta start turning that turret around manually! That report was from Aberdeen, right? They were sent a single refurbished T-34. The British, who received a new tank for evaluation, did not discover this problem.
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Oct 11, 2015 20:27
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Slavvy posted:What about allied equipment that's perceived as being really fantastic but is actually pretty crap? Is there such a thing? I'll always say "all the heavy bombers". The F6F, P-38, and B-25 were pretty uninspiring too, relative to their historical statuses. I'd say the Spitfire too but I'll immediately retract for fear of a jolly old chap hitting me with a pint glass.
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Oct 11, 2015 20:28
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Oh! Oh! I just remembered, in the US pre-war WW2 times the Cavalry arm was forbidden by law to possess tanks. Okay you have got to get deeper and tell us why. No. don't leave us hanging!
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Oct 11, 2015 20:29
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SeanBeansShako posted:Okay you have got to get deeper and tell us why. No. don't leave us hanging! The National Defense Act of 1920 stated that tank development was reserved for infantry support, which meant the Cavalry couldn't develop their own or even have tanks to begin with. They got around it eventually by calling their tank a "Combat Car". Edit: "Eventually" being 1935-1937 when they started producing and using M1 Combat Cars
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Oct 11, 2015 20:51
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bewbies posted:I'll always say "all the heavy bombers". The F6F, P-38, and B-25 were pretty uninspiring too, relative to their historical statuses. I'd say the Spitfire too but I'll immediately retract for fear of a jolly old chap hitting me with a pint glass. I'd love to hear you defend those three choices. I can also contribute a bit: the B-24 and the Lancaster were designed to carry lots and lots of bombs, but had really lovely provisions for the forward crew to escape when crashing. So lots of people died that probably would have survived had they been flying a B-17/Halifax III. Trying to find over-hyped allied arms is actually sort of challenging. (It's sort of challenging in general, since you have the design itself, and where they fit into history. The Flower class corvettes were really awful if you compare them to any naval ship - but that's not really how we judge them, since they were meant to be a escort vessel that could be built by any civilian shipyard, and be an effective U-boat killer.) I wanna say the HMS Hood? If we're talking about blunders, sending the Repulse and the Prince of Wales to halt the Japanese without any air cover was a big one. Actually, pretty much all of the British attempts to defend against the Japanese in SE Asia were not terribly bright in retrospect.
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Oct 11, 2015 21:44
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Nebakenezzer posted:Trying to find over-hyped allied arms is actually sort of challenging. I'm willing to go to bat against the Hawker Hurricane. Lacking fuel injection in its early examples and an airframe that couldn't be constantly upgraded like the Spitfire. It was eventually relegated to the Ground Attack role or launched from ships. The fuel injection issue wasn't fully fixed until Spring 1941. That said, it played an important role during the war but it was replaced by much better aircraft to perform its original, and acquired duties.
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Oct 11, 2015 22:04
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Ensign Expendable posted:You start seeing 200+ engine-hours and 1500-2000 km of travel in documents around 1942-43, I wouldn't say that it took five years. Do you have to service the engine completely or swap it out after that time?
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Oct 11, 2015 22:17
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The thing about american failures is that if they were spectacular enough they never left the US. We had some pretty good super-project boondoggles that didn't cripple the war effort purely because the US economy was a goddamned beast. The B29 has already been mentioned a few pages ago (does anyone really think it was more valuable than the A-Bomb?), but our entire modern BB program could probably fall under that category as well. From a cost : benefit standpoint the North Carolina and the Missouri classes were a goddamned huge waste of money and probably could have been replaced with a poo poo load of barges with rocket batteries on them for bombardment support and tons of AAA-centric DDs for fleet support. We were also pretty hampered by our lack of a true LMG. The BAR had way too small of a magazine for a base of fire weapon and was insanely heavy to boot. It was a relic from the WW1 ideas about "automatic rifles." The M1919 was designed more as a emplaced weapon and was in a kind of strange gray zone of a "light heavy MG." Our small arms in general were adequate to good, but were also almost always designs that were cutting edge ideas at the end of WW1 or in the 20s and which, while still good, weren't anything like the be all and end all by 1941. We've already discussed the Thompson and the fact that it was insanely expensive and crazy overbuilt for a SMG in the 40s. The Garand was one of the best rifles of the war purely because it was the only semi-automatic that was a general issue weapon. It used an en-bloc clip system that was a bizarre throw back to gun designs of half a century earlier. It's not like magazines were unknown at this time either - the 1911, BAR, and Thompson were all magazine fed rifles. There are other minor issues as well ( e.g. bolt design that makes it hard to mount optics acceptably, op rod that is crazy huge and wraps around the gun in a bizarre way that requires it to be bent JUST SO or the gun will malfunction). Really, the semi-auto designs that came out of Germany and Russia in the 30s and early 40s were either the equal to or superior to the Garand from a design standpoint. What saved the Garand's bacon was that it didn't need any shortcuts made in its manufacture due to wartime bullshit and we produced enough of them to put one in every rifleman's hands. Again, it wasn't a bad rifle, hell it was a very good rifle, but it was an oddball design that had some very real limitations. Then you can look into the American versions of Germany's dead end superweapons. We had a couple of crazy SPG designs that were intended for cracking bunkers in Germany and Japan that went nowhere, and a couple of insanely large caliber mortars that were intended for blowing away beach defenses for the invasion of Japan. Really, though, none of that matters much. At the end of the day you could have given the US German equipment, the Germans US equipment, the Russians British equipment, and the British Russian equipment and it all would have come out the same way. Equipment can give some nice local advantages in the right situations, but on a strategic scale what matters way more is getting as many good enough weapons in the hands of as many decent enough soldiers commanded by as many OK-ish generals as possible.
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Oct 11, 2015 22:19
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Frostwerks posted:Was your username grabbed from one of the LF name threads? Cause its really good and they had some really, really funny names. Nope, I got inspired by a Kyoon SAS thread when I re-regged.
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Oct 11, 2015 22:20
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Nebakenezzer posted:I'd love to hear you defend those three choices. I can also contribute a bit: the B-24 and the Lancaster were designed to carry lots and lots of bombs, but had really lovely provisions for the forward crew to escape when crashing. So lots of people died that probably would have survived had they been flying a B-17/Halifax III. I wouldnt agree with the HMS hood, i think it gets rather a worse rap than it actually deserves. It was very famous at the time as the pride of the RN but in retrospect it hasnt been judged all that kindly given its ignominous end. Slavvy posted:What about allied equipment that's perceived as being really fantastic but is actually pretty crap? Is there such a thing? I would go with the swordfish bomber, it will be forever immortalised by Taranto and Bismarck but they were really bad planes: open cockpit, poor range, flimsy as hell and slow, they had their uses (such as on the merchant escort carriers) but they were very much inferior to any other serving torpedo plane.
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Oct 11, 2015 22:31
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Gliders were pretty hilarious.
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Oct 11, 2015 22:37
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