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SpitztheGreat posted:I have never understood how Germany never figured out that their code had been broken, or never really made a serious attempt at strengthening it "just in case". I know that they added a fourth wheel to Enigma, but they hardly used it and the Allies just continued on reading their codes. I know that the Allies took great pains to hide the fact that they had broken the code, but still, you would think that eventually the Germans would become suspicious since the Allies always seemed to have the jump on them for major campaigns. Because Germany's intelligence service was a pathetic joke. It got completely neutered by political shenannigans.
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Dec 26, 2015 05:54
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SpitztheGreat posted:I have never understood how Germany never figured out that their code had been broken, or never really made a serious attempt at strengthening it "just in case". I know that they added a fourth wheel to Enigma, but they hardly used it and the Allies just continued on reading their codes. I know that the Allies took great pains to hide the fact that they had broken the code, but still, you would think that eventually the Germans would become suspicious since the Allies always seemed to have the jump on them for major campaigns. As -Troika- pointed out, the German intelligence services were less-than-stellar. The Allies would have had a very difficult time breaking the Enigma if they only ever had the intercepted messages to work with, but they
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Dec 26, 2015 06:32
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SpRahl posted:So aside from The World at War which has been mentioned does anyone know of some other good WW2 documentaries? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0996994/ Ken Burns The War I really enjoyed this, it takes a look at the War from the perspective of five families and keeps a good balance between a documentary-style and the re-telling of individual fates. Baudolino posted:We should be happy that ww2 happened. Because it flushed the lion`s share of fascist tendendcies in europe. If it for some reason never happened pretty much every goverment in europe would be doing the whole national-socialists thing. After the horror of WWII one would expect that the logical consequence is "Never again", and yet we see a resurgence of fascist and neo-nazi organizations here in Europe. Among the worst is the Génération Identitaire, who follow an ideology which takes bits and pieces out of the fascist "Blut und Boden" (Blood and Soil) doctrine. But I'm even more worried about the events in Hungary and Poland. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 06:41
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Almost as important as Enigma being broken, there was the aspect of Dönitz being a huge idiot about communicating with his subs in general, since he tended to demand reports from them a lot which made them far easier to find.
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Dec 26, 2015 11:19
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Kemper Boyd posted:Almost as important as Enigma being broken, there was the aspect of Dönitz being a huge idiot about communicating with his subs in general, since he tended to demand reports from them a lot which made them far easier to find. Also made it way easier to figure out the Enigma settings since we were basically constantly getting messages with things like known placenames and whatnot in them.
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Dec 26, 2015 17:03
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I'd say the Enigma was socially engineered as much as it was cryptoanalyzed (if one would even distinguish one from the other). Things like the opening calibration characters being AAAA or the rotor settings being just one or two characters off of the previous settings because people EDIT: Or beginning every message with HH for Heil Hitler. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Dec 26, 2015 |
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Dec 26, 2015 17:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:EDIT: Or beginning every message with HH for Heil Hitler. Of all the idiotic, ideologically blinded terrible decisions I've ever heard of the Nazis making, this may be the stupidest.
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Dec 26, 2015 18:03
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Didn't German subs have like, a 95% death ratio? Virtually every German who put a foot inside a German sub never came back.
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Dec 26, 2015 20:43
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-Troika- posted:Because Germany's intelligence service was a pathetic joke. It got completely neutered by political shenannigans. And the head of military intelligence being a traitor probably didn't help, though I don't know if there is an exact amount of Admiral Canaris's shenanigans.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:19
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Mans posted:Didn't German subs have like, a 95% death ratio? Virtually every German who put a foot inside a German sub never came back. IIRC it was a slightly less suicidal 70%.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:35
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Mans posted:Didn't German subs have like, a 95% death ratio? Virtually every German who put a foot inside a German sub never came back. The 95%+ death ratio I'm familiar with is in the category of "airmen who started the war in the Luftwaffe", as specific as that may sound.
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Dec 26, 2015 21:38
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RAF Bomber Command had a death rate over 44%. I guess being in a big metal tube was a bad way to spend the war.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:42
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Raskolnikov38 posted:IIRC it was a slightly less suicidal 70%. gradenko_2000 posted:The 95%+ death ratio I'm familiar with is in the category of "airmen who started the war in the Luftwaffe", as specific as that may sound. It's really distasteful, and even kinda ungrateful, how both the Germans and Japanese just squeezed the hell out of their airmen until they literally got killed\maimed\captured. Doing better was just delaying the inevitable, no rest for the wicked.
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Dec 26, 2015 22:57
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Hammerstein posted:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0996994/ Poland and Hungary can`t do much harm outside their own borders tough. While the European far-rigth is somewhat strengthened these days the neo-nazi and neo-fascists remain isolated and politcally impotent. Everyone was afraid of the big bad Le Pen but what happened? FN has not got a single region to their name. The lesson still holds. And if don`t then we all desvere what`s coming anyway as it surely must be god`s will.
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Dec 27, 2015 01:05
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Mans posted:Was that higher or lower than the Japanese underwater tin cans? I'm having a hard time coming up with any concrete numbers on Japanese submarine losses during the war, but from what I can tell it was probably actually pretty minimal. They had all sorts of nifty designs, but they didn't really use them to anything near the extent of the Germans or Americans. Odds are they probably didn't lose very many since they were so focused on fleet to fleet engagements. Some one correct me if I'm horribly off the mark here 
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Dec 27, 2015 01:12
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In Weinberg's A World At Arms he says the Edit: I just double checked the textbook I had stored away and it was actually American and German submarines that initially went into the war with defective torpedoes. Japan's worked, but they still used their subs against other fleets and didn't go after merchant fleets. My bad! Rand alPaul fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 27, 2015 01:34
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I don't know about defective torpedoes, but you're correct that Japanese submarine doctrine was different: the grand strategy intended to use them in conjunction with land-based bombers and carrier-based bombers to sting and prick and harry the American fleet as they sailed across to Pacific to relieve the Philippines and parts west of Pearl Harbor, such that by the time the American fleet was in range of the Japanese fleet and they were about to enter the Decisive Battle, 20% of the American fleet would have been sunk. This 20% attrition rate would have reduced the American numbers enough so they'd have rough parity with the Japanese, and then superior night training would take care of the rest.
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Dec 27, 2015 02:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't know about defective torpedoes, but you're correct that Japanese submarine doctrine was different: the grand strategy intended to use them in conjunction with land-based bombers and carrier-based bombers to sting and prick and harry the American fleet as they sailed across to Pacific to relieve the Philippines and parts west of Pearl Harbor, such that by the time the American fleet was in range of the Japanese fleet and they were about to enter the Decisive Battle, 20% of the American fleet would have been sunk. Yeah I was incorrect about the defective torpedoes for Japan, but you're totally correct in how they wanted to use subs. Also upon rechecking sources I read that submarine commanders in the Imperial Navy saw no honor in sinking merchant vessels and wanted to go after enemy fleets instead, which is ironic because by the end of the war they became nothing more than glorified merchants supplying detachments cut off by island hopping  Holy poo poo, just found this website highlighting defective American torpedoes. In 1942, "the Asiatic submarines made 136 attacks, firing 300 torpedoes in the first four months sinking only ten ships." That's appalling. Rand alPaul fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Dec 27, 2015 |
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Dec 27, 2015 02:51
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-Troika- posted:Because Germany's intelligence service was a pathetic joke. It got completely neutered by political shenannigans. The exact kind of people you want in your secret squirrel service are the same kind of people who would overthrow you.
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Dec 27, 2015 03:47
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Trench_Rat posted:was japanese damage control as bad as documnetaries has led me to belive? By the end of the war, it's pretty safe to say that the difference between USN and IJN damage control was incomparable. On the one end of the spectrum, you have the aforementioned Taiho, where the initial hit was entirely survivable but incompetent DC turned the ship into a literal floating fuel-air bomb. On the other side you've got the Bunker Hill, which took two Kamikaze hits that killed over 600 men but managed to not only stay afloat, but remain in service until after the war. As to why Japanese DC was so comparatively poor, there's a few reasons. The first (And probably most critical) one was training. In the US Navy, every sailor was trained on what to do and how to respond in the case of attack, and general DC training and knowledge would be disseminated across a ship's crew. By contrast, Japanese ships relied on a cadre of specially trained officers to organize and lead DC efforts, which could lead to disastrous results if these officers were themselves killed or wounded early on in the attack. The other main reason was the design of the ships themselves. US carriers in particular were built with a number of features that greatly enhanced their DC capabilities, such as having open hanger decks-in the case of a fire, torpedoes, bombs, and even fueled and loaded aircraft could simply be pushed off of the carrier into the ocean to prevent secondary explosions, and escorting ships could even pull up alongside and use their firehoses to help douse the flames. Top those design features off with numerous redundant systems, the aforementioned widely trained crew, and you end up with a surprisingly resilient ship. Japanese carriers lacked many of these features, as evidenced by the fate of the Akagi during the Battle of Midway-the ship was only hit by a single bomb and shaken by a pair of near-misses, but the initial hits knocked out the ship's water mains and other features that could have helped to contain the fires before they spread out of control. Really, the thing about DC is that it has to be an institutional effort-sailors have to be trained and ships have to be designed with DC in mind, otherwise even minor incidents can turn into absolute disasters. Even the US Navy wasn't immune to this-in 1967, the USS Forrestal suffered from a devastating fire that was partially made worse by the specially-trained DC team getting killed within the first few minutes of the disaster. For the US Navy before and during World War II, DC was a priority. For Japan, it wasn't, to their tremendous cost.
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Dec 27, 2015 04:38
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SpitztheGreat posted:I have never understood how Germany never figured out that their code had been broken, or never really made a serious attempt at strengthening it "just in case". I know that they added a fourth wheel to Enigma, but they hardly used it and the Allies just continued on reading their codes. I know that the Allies took great pains to hide the fact that they had broken the code, but still, you would think that eventually the Germans would become suspicious since the Allies always seemed to have the jump on them for major campaigns. Everyone assumed their codes were impregnable until it became blindingly obvious they weren't, the Allies included.
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Dec 27, 2015 04:39
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Rand alPaul posted:Holy poo poo, just found this website highlighting defective American torpedoes. In 1942, "the Asiatic submarines made 136 attacks, firing 300 torpedoes in the first four months sinking only ten ships." That's appalling. It really is difficult to overstate how atrocious American torpedoes were, and also how long it took to convince the establishment that were defective. At least Donitz got his fixed after Norway.
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Dec 27, 2015 04:44
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Acebuckeye13 posted:By the end of the war, it's pretty safe to say that the difference between USN and IJN damage control was incomparable. On the one end of the spectrum, you have the aforementioned Taiho, where the initial hit was entirely survivable but incompetent DC turned the ship into a literal floating fuel-air bomb. On the other side you've got the Bunker Hill, which took two Kamikaze hits that killed over 600 men but managed to not only stay afloat, but remain in service until after the war. A great caveat of this as well is how it has carried into the modern era somewhat in the US Navy. Having foregone any of the armor of those past eras, they've definitely retained a lot of these DC tenants. Hell, I did two deployments as a Marine working on APCs on Navy ships and they even gave us a crash course in their DC training both times. I guess nowadays, when none of our ships have any of the armor of old to rely on, damage control is one of the most important parts of keeping the ship afloat during combat. Well, probably second most important. Not getting hit in the first place is probably the most important.
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Dec 27, 2015 04:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:It really is difficult to overstate how atrocious American torpedoes were, and also how long it took to convince the establishment that were defective. At least Donitz got his fixed after Norway. I knew they were bad, I didn't know they were that bad. Feel really bad for the first dozen or so PT boat commanders who learned the hard way their attacks were in vain.
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Dec 27, 2015 05:45
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Since we just went from DC to torpedoes, I noticed this bit of irony: The nation with the worst DC and least personal responsibility, builds the world's best torpedo, which required *drum roll* compressed oxygen, which is not exactly safe to handle.
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Dec 27, 2015 09:24
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-Troika- posted:Because Germany's intelligence service was a pathetic joke. It got completely neutered by political shenannigans. The spies that were sent to Britain made so many stupid mistakes that its speculated that the guy sending them was intentionally trying to sabotage Germany's war effort.
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Dec 27, 2015 12:03
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Hammerstein posted:The nation with the worst DC and least personal responsibility, builds the world's best torpedo, which required *drum roll* compressed oxygen, which is not exactly safe to handle. Long Lance torpedoes were amazing for ever side of the war.
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Dec 27, 2015 15:49
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Rand alPaul posted:I knew they were bad, I didn't know they were that bad. Feel really bad for the first dozen or so PT boat commanders who learned the hard way their attacks were in vain. It didn't help that the mk. 14 had obstinate backers who insisted, on the strength of prewar trials that were, surprise surprise, conducted in sheltered waters under ideal conditions, that it couldn't possibly be defective detonators that were making their precious torpedoes bounce off the side of Japanese ships like paper airplanes. No, it must be operator error! Across the entire submarine fleet, and also anyone else that used it!
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Dec 27, 2015 17:10
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Alhazred posted:The spies that were sent to Britain made so many stupid mistakes that its speculated that the guy sending them was intentionally trying to sabotage Germany's war effort. Wilhelm Canaris, head of German military intelligence, was in contact with MI6 at various points during and before the war, and was part of the opposition to the Nazis in the Wehrmacht. So this is a fairly likely proposition.
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Dec 27, 2015 20:37
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Acebuckeye13 posted:[Clipped] That being said, there's a certain amount of luck involved. A carrier caught at the wrong time, and that's all she wrote. Princeton was herself hit by a singular bomb when her fueling operations were ongoing, and those fires got out of control, munitions detonated, ship sunk.
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Dec 28, 2015 07:27
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Mans posted:It's really distasteful, and even kinda ungrateful, how both the Germans and Japanese just squeezed the hell out of their airmen until they literally got killed\maimed\captured. Doing better was just delaying the inevitable, no rest for the wicked. Both Germany and Japan entered the war with the expectation that it would be a quick one, and by the time things were going badly enough that they really realized one more big push wasn't going to win the war, it was too late to make the shift because they really couldn't afford to take skilled airmen off the front lines. This manifested in other ways too - plenty of armies have been felled by not preparing for a Russian winter early enough because they thought they could smash Russia before December, and then by the time they realize they're going to need to fight in the cold it's far too late to make those kinds of preparations.
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Dec 28, 2015 18:58
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I read a theory once that one contributing factor to America's better DC was the increased American familiarity with machines and mechanical engineering, due to the better economic conditions of American sailors before they entered the Navy compared to Japanese sailors--i.e. the commonness of cars and other mechanical forms of transportation in America meant that Americans in general had a greater familiarity with how to operate and maintain machines than Japanese people did because of the decreased availability of machines in the Japanese economy. I'm not sure how much stock I put in this theory--I'd be more inclined to thing it had to do with the different training priorities that meant all American sailors had some idea of how damage control worked rather than it being a specialized role, but it might be worth mentioning just in case anyone knows more than I do about this particular theory.
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Dec 28, 2015 19:39
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gradenko_2000 posted:It really is difficult to overstate how atrocious American torpedoes were, and also how long it took to convince the establishment that were defective. At least Donitz got his fixed after Norway. I have a fuzzy memory of reading about German torpedoes being released and subsequently attacking the sub that released it. The pucker factor must have been strong.
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Dec 28, 2015 19:42
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Herv posted:I have a fuzzy memory of reading about German torpedoes being released and subsequently attacking the sub that released it. The pucker factor must have been strong. This happened with American torpedoes a couple of times I think. They would be fired and would go in a circle and hit the sub that had fired them in the first place.
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Dec 28, 2015 20:01
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Herv posted:I have a fuzzy memory of reading about German torpedoes being released and subsequently attacking the sub that released it. The pucker factor must have been strong. vyelkin posted:This happened with American torpedoes a couple of times I think. They would be fired and would go in a circle and hit the sub that had fired them in the first place. In the German instance, and I suspect the American one too, the issue was early types of acoustic guidance for the torpedoes. Worked awesome when they homed in on target ship's propellers, not so much when they detected noise from your sub first.
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Dec 28, 2015 20:08
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I seem to recall that at least one American sub in WW2 got sunk by circular running torpedos. Don't remember the mechanism that went wrong, somebody will surely be able to fill in, but i think it was due to something faulty within the torpedo's gyroscopic guidance caused several torpedoes to run in circles.
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Dec 28, 2015 21:53
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Falukorv posted:I seem to recall that at least one American sub in WW2 got sunk by circular running torpedos. Don't remember the mechanism that went wrong, somebody will surely be able to fill in, but i think it was due to something faulty within the torpedo's gyroscopic guidance caused several torpedoes to run in circles. There's multiple reasons, one of which being a sticky steering engine, you're also right there were some that would circle because of gyroscopic guidance being hosed up by the torpedo being in a flooded chamber for too long. Here's an article on the subject that talks about a bunch of different instances of this occurring. http://www.subsowespac.org/the-patrol-zone/circular-torpedo-runs.shtml
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Dec 28, 2015 22:02
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I wonder what it's like to be killed by a RL Simpsons joke.
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Dec 28, 2015 22:17
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Hammerstein posted:
I've read about two Japanese cruisers running like hell from a losing battle. *Might* have been in Shattered Sword, not sure. Anyway one Captain dumped his forward torpedoes, the other didn't. They came under air attack, both cruisers got hit in the bow. The cruiser that had dumped it's torpedoes survived the attack and escaped, the other had it's torpedoes detonate and blew the front half of the ship off. Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 00:28 on Dec 29, 2015 |
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Dec 29, 2015 00:24
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Herv posted:I have a fuzzy memory of reading about German torpedoes being released and subsequently attacking the sub that released it. The pucker factor must have been strong. You could set torpedoes to turn a certain number of degrees after being shot out so that you weren't limited to simply shooting directly ahead. This was achieved by the means of a gyroscope inside the torpedo that would detect the torp's current heading and regulate the turn by the set amount. Sometimes this gyro would fail for any number of reasons and the torp would just keep turning after being launched, possibly going all the way as to do a 360 and hit the same submarine that launched it. The other possible friendly fire incident would be early German acoustic torpedoes: they would home in on the sound of propellers, but if you, the launching submarine, are also making lots of noise, then the torpedo may well home in on you.
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Dec 29, 2015 00:35
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