Military Pictures and Youtube Thread - I'm a Tomcat guy and a homo

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Godholio: Aug 28, 2002; Does a bear split in the woods near Zheleznogorsk?

Nostalgia4Dicks posted:

Bit torn on blitzkrieg and whether it was an actual thing or just a farce officers made up when they got steam rolled by Germans that somehow stuck

Good thing it's all documented by the people involved, but nobody wants to read Guderian or Manheim. Lucky for you, I've got a 30 page paper on this.

Blitzkrieg was a tactic, not a strategy. Basically tanks were expected to exploit breakthroughs in a way that trench-bound infantry simply hadn't been able to do in WWI. This notion actually came from British and French officers, not even Germans. But von Seeckt was smart; he reorganized the military, scattered officers to all the major powers as attaches so Germany was able to learn about armor right alongside despite being about two years behind, and where Britain assigned one dude (Lt B.H. Liddell Hart, actually), he had over 500 personnel studying and pulling lessons learned from the previous war. One of the big lessons was from France in 1917: they kept their tanks pinned to the speed of the infantry advance and lost numerous opportunities to turn a small gap in the German line into a massive breakthrough. Mobility was key, even for infantry. Germany implemented small-unit tactics and organization that would be recognizable today. The overarching goal was "fire and maneuver" for both infantry and armor.

The Polish army was based on outdated French doctrine (France REALLY stagnated after WWI) that was essentially fixed point defense, and they were completely unwilling to make use of terrain to shorten their lines. They spread their positions out over an 1100 mile front rather than drawing back to one about 350 miles with rivers and other terrain that might have actually stopped the Germans. When the tanks broke through the front, Poland had basically nothing to stop them from ravaging behind the lines (the Luftwaffe was also going batshit all over Poland, which had basically no air defense).

The Maginot Line was an excellent defensive network; yeah I said it. But French doctrine following WWI was atrocious. Imagine the most static battle plan you can, then hammer it home with French arrogance and stubbornness. The centerpiece was loving artillery. "The attack is bringing fire forward. The defense is fire that stops." Pin the enemy in place and drop shells on him until he dies/surrenders. loving ridiculous. Anyway they didn't think an army could effectively maneuver through the forests of the Low Countries, so they left that area virtually undefended. If you look at a map, you'll see why this is a pretty massive risk. Germany plowed right through the loving trees without even slowing down, basically pulling an end-around against the Maginot Line and bypassing it completely. They came out of the woods with a clear and undefended look at Paris with most of the French army at least 2 days away to the southeast.

tl;dr: Blitzkrieg is a badass name for using motorized vehicles to exploit and expand minor breakthroughs and bypass poorly-placed static defenses. It's not a strategy, it's a tactic.

Godholio fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Jan 2, 2016

# ? Jan 2, 2016 18:15

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# ? Jun 6, 2024 01:59

chitoryu12: Apr 24, 2014

VikingSkull posted:

Wasn't one of the things about the Shermans the armor, or German shells? I recall reading or seeing on TV something about how a Sherman might take a round, but it'd probably go right on through. As such, you had a pretty good chance to escape a wrecked Sherman, whereas in a Panther or Tiger if it got hit you'd have a much greater chance of it going in, but then bouncing around inside and taking everyone out.

I mean, it happens in War Thunder.....

The big problem with the armor of the Panther and Tiger is that improper materials and hardening techniques would cause the armor to crack when hit by a shell even if it failed to penetrate, as well as cracks spreading from penetrating hits, whereas proper armor would simply dent. This massively reduced the armor's ability to take repeated hits and caused more spalling than usual even from non-penetrating hits, and the armor couldn't exactly be patched up easily. The cracking problem dated back to at least the Panzer III, but it's especially important to note it for the Panther and Tiger because they both have good-on-paper armor that created the myth of them being practically indestructible, or needing three or four Shermans swarming each tank just to try and get a lucky shot that penetrated. In reality, T-34s pretty commonly killed Tigers in regular combat.

I think part of it is also that many of the fanciful accounts of the Big Cats comes from non-tankers, who wouldn't really understand what they were watching or even reliably identify which vehicles they were seeing. Reading the actual journals of tankers who faced these vehicles paints a better picture. One of our own, Ensign Expendable, runs Archive Awareness, which uses historical sources like Allied testing of German vehicles to dispel many of the myths and reveal how the vehicles actually performed.

# ? Jan 2, 2016 18:36

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

If there's a way to check unit records it might be possible to verify the Tiger duels. Tigers were still kept in Schwere Panzer-Abteilung, so if you map out the location of those formations, perhaps they aren't in the American sector. The British and Canadians faced Tigers and the SS Panzer divisions from D-Day on, and if those units were trapped/out of gas/abandoned equipment at Falaise, then I don't know where the Americans would encounter them again.

As he says, a PzKpfw IV looks an awful lot like a Tiger from a typical engagement range. Much like how all artillery was an 88 or all accurate small arms fire was a sniper.

As for where these ideas come from - German memoirs published in the 60's, pop-history of the 80's and the History channel in the 90's-2000's would explain most of it.

If you read Kurt Meyer's history of 12th SS Panzer, you wouldn't know that their roadmarch to Normandy was delayed by committing atrocities along the route of march, or that more Canadians were killed in captivity than combat against that unit. However, for years these German memoirs were the only source of information about the other side.

Strange that it takes a video game company to do all this research.

They had a 4 hour talk on tanks that's also worth a watch. A lot of the leading experts and authors are there (I recognized Zaloga who writes about Soviet armour for Osprey).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oLY4FOrnjc

# ? Jan 2, 2016 20:14

Nostalgia4Dogges: Jun 18, 2004; Only emojis can express my pure, simple stupidity.

Not that I care it's all cool info but wasn't there a tank/armor thread in GIP? Didn't IDR start it? Lmbo

Godholio posted:

Blitz

Thanks for this. I thought it had more emphasis on air strikes supporting the assault?

# ? Jan 2, 2016 20:28

Godholio: Aug 28, 2002; Does a bear split in the woods near Zheleznogorsk?

Nostalgia4Dicks posted:

Not that I care it's all cool info but wasn't there a tank/armor thread in GIP? Didn't IDR start it? Lmbo

Thanks for this. I thought it had more emphasis on air strikes supporting the assault?

I glossed past it because it was rapidly turning into an effortpost, but the short answer is "sometimes." Ground and air priorities (and assets) weren't always in-line and the Luftwaffe's fundamental goal was to establish air superiority first, then provide other support; there was a lot less overlap in those phases than we see in modern militaries.

# ? Jan 2, 2016 21:43

BIG HEADLINE: Jun 13, 2006; "Stand back, Ottawan ruffian, or face my lumens!"

VikingSkull posted:

to be fair it might have been the fat guy in glasses on the Military Channel that said it

William Atwater.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 00:56

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Can't figure out how to make the embed work, but here's 1st Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery shooting 105mm HE rounds at steel targets with glorious slo-mo. Also, lol at the first-round miss in direct fire.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 01:52

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Dead Reckoning posted:

1st Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery lol at the first-round miss in direct fire.

Fuckin' 1 Horse. :canada:

# ? Jan 3, 2016 02:28

Zeroisanumber: Oct 23, 2010; Nap Ghost

Godholio posted:

Good thing it's all documented by the people involved, but nobody wants to read Guderian or Manheim. Lucky for you, I've got a 30 page paper on this.

Blitzkrieg was a tactic, not a strategy. Basically tanks were expected to exploit breakthroughs in a way that trench-bound infantry simply hadn't been able to do in WWI. This notion actually came from British and French officers, not even Germans. But von Seeckt was smart; he reorganized the military, scattered officers to all the major powers as attaches so Germany was able to learn about armor right alongside despite being about two years behind, and where Britain assigned one dude (Lt B.H. Liddell Hart, actually), he had over 500 personnel studying and pulling lessons learned from the previous war. One of the big lessons was from France in 1917: they kept their tanks pinned to the speed of the infantry advance and lost numerous opportunities to turn a small gap in the German line into a massive breakthrough. Mobility was key, even for infantry. Germany implemented small-unit tactics and organization that would be recognizable today. The overarching goal was "fire and maneuver" for both infantry and armor.

The Polish army was based on outdated French doctrine (France REALLY stagnated after WWI) that was essentially fixed point defense, and they were completely unwilling to make use of terrain to shorten their lines. They spread their positions out over an 1100 mile front rather than drawing back to one about 350 miles with rivers and other terrain that might have actually stopped the Germans. When the tanks broke through the front, Poland had basically nothing to stop them from ravaging behind the lines (the Luftwaffe was also going batshit all over Poland, which had basically no air defense).

The Maginot Line was an excellent defensive network; yeah I said it. But French doctrine following WWI was atrocious. Imagine the most static battle plan you can, then hammer it home with French arrogance and stubbornness. The centerpiece was loving artillery. "The attack is bringing fire forward. The defense is fire that stops." Pin the enemy in place and drop shells on him until he dies/surrenders. loving ridiculous. Anyway they didn't think an army could effectively maneuver through the forests of the Low Countries, so they left that area virtually undefended. If you look at a map, you'll see why this is a pretty massive risk. Germany plowed right through the loving trees without even slowing down, basically pulling an end-around against the Maginot Line and bypassing it completely. They came out of the woods with a clear and undefended look at Paris with most of the French army at least 2 days away to the southeast.

tl;dr: Blitzkrieg is a badass name for using motorized vehicles to exploit and expand minor breakthroughs and bypass poorly-placed static defenses. It's not a strategy, it's a tactic.

Wasn't the original French plan to build the Maginot Line straight through Belgium to the coast, but the Belgians told them to gently caress right off?

# ? Jan 3, 2016 06:47

chitoryu12: Apr 24, 2014

Zeroisanumber posted:

Wasn't the original French plan to build the Maginot Line straight through Belgium to the coast, but the Belgians told them to gently caress right off?

I think the French expected the Belgians to just continue the line on their end all the way to the Netherlands, but they instead took a policy of neutrality.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 07:19

Nostalgia4Dogges: Jun 18, 2004; Only emojis can express my pure, simple stupidity.

So is the WW2 French hate warranted or what? Sure they hosed up big time on things but who's to say what would have happened if they did things differently. They could have stopped the war! :downs:

# ? Jan 3, 2016 07:39

Bolow: Feb 27, 2007

Both Britain and France were pretty much incapable of launching any kind of offensive action. Both logistically and politically. World War 1 really shocked the poo poo out of people and no one wanted to repeat that.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 07:45

Dead Reckoning: Sep 13, 2011

Nostalgia4Dicks posted:

So is the WW2 French hate warranted or what? Sure they hosed up big time on things but who's to say what would have happened if they did things differently. They could have stopped the war!

Between 1939 and 1942, pretty much every army on the continent either got their teeth kicked in by the Germans, or was on their side. The only reason that the Brits didn't have it worse is because they had the Channel to retreat across.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 08:02

Nostalgia4Dogges: Jun 18, 2004; Only emojis can express my pure, simple stupidity.

Yeah I always scoffed at dumb French jokes and irrational French hate. Sure they're an arrogant bunch but they did what they could with the means that were available, IMO.

Pretty badass that 5th/6th debil dawgs still wear the French Fourragere from WW1

# ? Jan 3, 2016 08:11

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

France lost more soldiers in 1940 than America has lost in all its wars since, I believe. They fought hard but the political system collapsed, and the Germans had a clear run to Paris after Sedan.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 08:25

Godholio: Aug 28, 2002; Does a bear split in the woods near Zheleznogorsk?

Nostalgia4Dicks posted:

So is the WW2 French hate warranted or what? Sure they hosed up big time on things but who's to say what would have happened if they did things differently. They could have stopped the war!

Not really. France's problem was horrible planning, not cowardice. I think the unpopularity of the Vichy government during the occupation and the actions and support of the resistance prove that.

Edit: Also their national anthem.

quote:

Arise, children of our Nation,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny's
Bloody banner is raised, (repeat)
Do you hear, in the countryside,
The roar of those ferocious soldiers?
They're coming right into your arms
To cut the throats of your sons, your women!

It doesn't really get any friendlier.

Godholio fucked around with this message at 08:36 on Jan 3, 2016

# ? Jan 3, 2016 08:33

iyaayas01: Feb 19, 2010; Perry'd

In the most simplistic terms, what happened in 1940 is exactly what the Germans were hoping to accomplish in 1914. If the Entente hadn't prevailed at the Marne we likely would've seen a Vichy-esque government in 1915.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 08:56

Kung Fu Fist Fuck: Aug 9, 2009

yea the french lost 85000 kia in a month and a half. you dont lose those kind of numbers by surrendering as soon as you see panzers on the horizon

# ? Jan 3, 2016 09:28

MrYenko: Jun 18, 2012; #2 isn't ALWAYS bad...

Godholio posted:

Not really. France's problem was horrible planning, not cowardice.

The French military between 1918 and 1940 is example number one of planning to fight the last war, and why that's a bad loving idea.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 13:40

MikeCrotch: Nov 5, 2011; I AM UNJUSTIFIABLY PROUD OF MY SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE RECIPE

YES, IT IS AN INCREDIBLY SIMPLE DISH

NO, IT IS NOT NORMAL TO USE A PEPPERAMI INSTEAD OF MINCED MEAT

YES, THERE IS TOO MUCH SALT IN MY RECIPE

NO, I WON'T STOP SHARING IT

more like BOLLOCKnese

Kung Fu Fist gently caress posted:

yea the french lost 85000 kia in a month and a half. you dont lose those kind of numbers by surrendering as soon as you see panzers on the horizon

No, you get it by being completely encircled first and then surrendering at the sight of panzers :france:

# ? Jan 3, 2016 14:37

Seizure Meat: Jul 23, 2008; by Smythe

The fact that France didn't learn that war is fought by maneuver after WWI is damning enough, surrender monkeys or not.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 16:06

Blue Footed Booby: Oct 4, 2006; got those happy feet

Frosted Flake posted:

...

American tanks only engaged in Tiger duels 3 times.

...

Does this only include tank vs tank, as opposed to tank vs tank destroyer, anti-tank gun, or dude with a bazooka? Because I just don't believe the US only encountered three tigers. Hell, I can find more than three pictures of US troops posing for photos on tigers.

Semi related content:

A tiger requesting a tummy rub.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 16:16

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Does this only include tank vs tank, as opposed to tank vs tank destroyer, anti-tank gun, or dude with a bazooka? Because I just don't believe the US only encountered three tigers. Hell, I can find more than three pictures of US troops posing for photos on tigers.

I think it means tank-on-tank.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 17:17

Internet Wizard: Aug 9, 2009; BANDAIDS DON'T FIX BULLET HOLES

"duel" in English usually means 1-on-1, like vs like, so...

# ? Jan 3, 2016 19:13

Frosted Flake: Sep 13, 2011; Semper Shitpost Ubique

How many times did US forces encounter Tiger tanks?

quote:

When you read unit accounts, whether it�s the actual unit after action reports or the published books, everyone talks about Tiger tanks. But in looking at it in both German records and US records, I�ve only found three instances in all the fighting from Normandy to 1945 where the US encountered Tigers. And by Tigers I mean Tiger 1, the type of tank we saw in the film. I�m not talking King Tigers, the strange thing is that the US Army encountered King Tigers far more often than Tigers. That�s partly because there weren�t a lot of Tigers left by 1944, production ends in August 1944. There were not a lot of Tigers in Normandy, they were mostly in the British sector, the British saw a lot of Tigers. Part of the issue is that US tankers were notorious for identifying everything as a Tiger tank, everything from Stug III assault guns to Panzer IV and Panthers and Tigers.

There was one incident in August of 1944 where 3rd Armored division ran into three Tigers that were damaged and being pulled back on a train, they shot them up with an anti-aircraft half-track. And then there was a single Tiger company up in the Bulge that was involved in some fighting. And then there was one short set of instances in April 1945, right around the period of the film, where there was a small isolated Tiger unit that actually got engaged with one of the new US M26 Pershing tank units. They knocked out a Pershing and then in turn that Tiger was knocked out and the Pershing tanks knocked out another King Tiger over the following days. So I found three verifiable instances of Tigers encountering, or having skirmishes with US troops in 1944-45. So it was very uncommon. It definitely could have happened, there are certainly lots of gaps in the historical record both on the German side and the US side. I think the idea that the US encountered a lot of Tigers during WW2 is simply due to the tendency of the US troops to call all German tanks Tigers. It�s the same thing on the artillery side. Every time US troops are fired upon, it�s an 88, whether it�s a 75mm Pak 40 anti-tank gun, a real 88, a 105mm field howitzer, they were all called 88�s.

One of the highlights of the film for many is the use of a real Tiger tank in the filming. At that stage in the war, how many Tiger tanks would have actually been in the field?

quote:

To give you a general sense, in April of 1945 the Germans have about 90 tanks on all of the Western Front. All tanks, everything, Panthers, Panzer IV, Tigers. They had a handful of Tigers. They had about 400 other armored vehicles, assault guns, Stug III and things like that. So they had just short of 500 armored vehicles on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea all the way down to Bavaria and Southern Germany. At that point in time the United States had 11,000 tank and tank destroyers, to give you some sense of the disparity in forces.

http://tankandafvnews.com/2015/01/27/zaloga_interview/

Frosted Flake fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Jan 3, 2016

# ? Jan 3, 2016 19:36

TonySnow: Mar 24, 2008

The qualifier given is Normandy/Germany theater, the pictures you see of US soldiers with Tigers are most likely from North Africa/Sicily/Italy, where they did encounter Tigers more frequently.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 21:58

chitoryu12: Apr 24, 2014

TonySnow posted:

The qualifier given is Normandy/Germany theater, the pictures you see of US soldiers with Tigers are most likely from North Africa/Sicily/Italy, where they did encounter Tigers more frequently.

Yeah, 1944-1945 is when Germany was on its last legs and the war in Europe was basically a moot point. Tigers were much more common (though still a relative term, insomuch as a Tiger can be called "common") in other theaters, including the earlier days of the Eastern Front.

# ? Jan 3, 2016 22:02