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At the risk of starting another derail: I know that the heavy lifting to defeat Germany was done by the Soviet Union, but I'm curious about how much the finanical and materiel help from the Western allies made that possible. Would it have been impossible for the USSR to defeat Germany without it? Would it just have taken longer? Was D-Day required from a military standpoint or did the Western allies just not want the USSR to steamroll Europe?Zeroisanumber posted:The RMS Rangitiki was one of the three "Rangi" boats operated by the New Zealand Shipping Company. Both she and her sister ship Rangitata survived the war, but their fellow, the RMS Rangitane was sunk by the German raider Orion 300 miles east of New Zealand. After the war, Rangitiki served as a passenger and cargo ship before being sold to Spain in 1962 and broken up for scrap in Valencia. Please keep these up, I love these.
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Jan 15, 2016 19:12
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pthighs posted:At the risk of starting another derail: I know that the heavy lifting to defeat Germany was done by the Soviet Union, but I'm curious about how much the finanical and materiel help from the Western allies made that possible. Would it have been impossible for the USSR to defeat Germany without it? Would it just have taken longer? Lend-Lease and military/financial aid to the USSR by the US definitely shortened the war, if for no other reason than the fact that most Soviet motorized troops were driving around in US trucks and had all of their supplies delivered to them by US-made train cars. Barring some sort of counter-factual weirdness (e.g. the winter of 41 being short and mild or Hitler jumping off in May instead of June) I don't think that the Germans would've ever managed to take Moscow, much less conquer the whole of Russia. pthighs posted:Was D-Day required from a military standpoint or did the Western allies just not want the USSR to steamroll Europe? The USSR probably could've pushed all the way through Germany/France if the Allies hadn't invaded. But as another poster pointed out, the Western Allies were already planning D-Day way, way back in early-1942 when the prospects of total Soviet domination of Europe seemed very far off. pthighs posted:Please keep these up, I love these. Zeroisanumber fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 19:25
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pthighs posted:At the risk of starting another derail: I know that the heavy lifting to defeat Germany was done by the Soviet Union, but I'm curious about how much the finanical and materiel help from the Western allies made that possible. Would it have been impossible for the USSR to defeat Germany without it? Would it just have taken longer? Was D-Day required from a military standpoint or did the Western allies just not want the USSR to steamroll Europe? The most significant lend-lease help that's usually talked about is in terms of logistics. As WW2 was getting started the Red Army was still relying on horse and cart for a lot of its stuff but the USA sent over hundreds of thousands of jeeps and trucks. This improved the logistics situation a lot and gave their armies much more maneuverability, which they used to very good effect. They also got a lot of planes and thousands of tanks, but they're usually ranked as less important. Whether no lend lease would have meant a German victory I can't say, but I think it would have caused at lest some significant troubles for the Soviets which would have meant more deaths and a longer war at the very least. The USSR would have steamrolled Germany eventually but D-day helped and Stalin ending up in control of all of continental Europe would have been pretty bad.
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Jan 15, 2016 19:32
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America, with its relatively huge manufacturing ability, essentially mechanized the armies of the Allies by itself. Sure, the Soviets might have eventually beaten the Germans (and I suppose, after Stalingrad, there's an argument to be made for its absolute inevitably), but there's no way they would have been nearly as quick without the huge amount of war material that Lend-Lease provided. The US essentially armed the Allies. And people seem to forget that WW2 was a war of attrition. Sure, there's an argument to be made that German arms were superior to the Allies (eeeeeh, not particularly), but the reality is that what really won the war for the Allies was their unbelievably tremendous manufacturing capability. Just the fact that a statement like "The Japanese could've sunk every Allied surface ship in 1941 and the Allies still would've had a larger, better equipped navy than the Japanese by 1943" could even figuratively be true barely does justice to just how massive that advantage was. A Festivus Miracle fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Jan 15, 2016 |
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Jan 15, 2016 19:52
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VX-145 posted:Nothing from the grandmothers, unfortunately, although one of the great-grandparents was a Home Guard volunteer? My family history is a little obscure. On nan-chat, I only ever knew my maternal grandmother as a lovely lady with crippling arthritis and a neurological condition that interfered with her speech centres. This has always made it a bit hard for me to come to grips with the stories of her at 20 years old and able to do a full rebuild of a british army dispatch motorbike.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:19
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Poor Grey thought we were going to be paying attention to his actual LP and worry about his shock attack when little did he know that we'd be talking about Operation Sealion and whether or not the Nazis were bad guys or good at war and stuff. Poor Grey... Or, I suppose, "Pour Gray" is more appropriate.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:21
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Grey Hunter posted:
What the gently caress even happened here? They're more experienced and have better morale? hosed up if true
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Jan 15, 2016 20:30
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TildeATH posted:Poor Grey thought we were going to be paying attention to his actual LP and worry about his shock attack when little did he know that we'd be talking about Operation Sealion and whether or not the Nazis were bad guys or good at war and stuff. It's either this, or watch Space UN negotiate a technology transfer with the Future Emperor of All Mankind. And Space UN doesn't do a daily update.
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Jan 15, 2016 20:57
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Zeroisanumber posted:It's either this, or watch Space UN negotiate a technology transfer with the Future Emperor of All Mankind. And Space UN doesn't do a daily update. How dismally have we failed in Aurora this time?
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Jan 15, 2016 21:05
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Grey Hunter posted:
You are way ahead of schedule now. At Mindanao, anyway. Congratulations.
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Jan 15, 2016 22:12
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So why are we losing so many planes? Are the Americans already fielding their categorically superior fighers? I thought that would take more time to happen. And why are the Chinese being so good at fighting all of a sudden?  team overhead smash posted:The most significant lend-lease help that's usually talked about is in terms of logistics. As WW2 was getting started the Red Army was still relying on horse and cart for a lot of its stuff but the USA sent over hundreds of thousands of jeeps and trucks. This improved the logistics situation a lot and gave their armies much more maneuverability, which they used to very good effect. So did literally every army in the world that wasn't the United States, to be fair. And D-day was a request by the USSR, it wasn't a ploy to save Europe\ European bourgeoisie.
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Jan 16, 2016 00:16
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I'm a little late to Grandads.txt, but I felt like contributing. The only one of my grandfathers who fought in the war was a pilot in the forgotten theatre of Burma. He was part of 177 Squadron RAF, flying long range interdiction missions from Bangladesh to Burma, attacking Japanese railways and shipping. by all accounts, the effects of the sweeps were very effective, disrupting Japanese army supply lines, but they paid for it with fairly high attrition rates of 30-40%. If your aircraft was damaged, there was a good chance you wouldn't be able to clear the mountains on the way back into Bangladesh and would have to bail over enemy lines and meet with Japanese hospitality. There's a good write-up about the squadron's activities here: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1032&context=cmh Found some old photos:  This picture is probably from 1944, after the squadron reequipped with rocket-armed Beaufighter Mk Xs  sometimes the Japanese shot back Not from my grandfather's squadron, but an example of the long-range raids:   I do have a copy of the squadron's Christmas dinner menu though! 
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Jan 16, 2016 03:04
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team overhead smash posted:The most significant lend-lease help that's usually talked about is in terms of logistics. As WW2 was getting started the Red Army was still relying on horse and cart for a lot of its stuff but the USA sent over hundreds of thousands of jeeps and trucks. This improved the logistics situation a lot and gave their armies much more maneuverability, which they used to very good effect. Don't forget locomotives. The USSR was able to dedicate the vast majority of its domestic industry to directly producing war fighting materiel, which was a significant advantage.
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Jan 16, 2016 03:24
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Don't forget locomotives. The USSR was able to dedicate the vast majority of its domestic industry to directly producing war fighting materiel, which was a significant advantage. I remember reading somewhere that the USSR produced 20 locomotives through the entirety of the war, and received 1,200 through Lend-Lease.
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Jan 16, 2016 03:33
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The short answer is that while it's plausible that the Germans could have defeated the USSR, it's also very, very unlikely. Stalin would have had to die or be deposed, or there would have to had been a successful siege of Moscow accompanied by a collapse of Soviet logistics. Lend-lease helped the USSR considerably, but mostly in terms of shortening the war rather than preventing a German victory. Worth noting that besieging Moscow would cut the rail line from Archangelsk, where the lend-lease supplies arrived. The long answer would require a massive essay and would probably conclude by saying that although we can dream up scenarios where the USSR might lose, what the Germans achieved in the real WW2 already stretched the limits of what appeared to be possible. Mans posted:So why are we losing so many planes? Are the Americans already fielding their categorically superior fighers? I thought that would take more time to happen. The superiority of the Zero, and of midwar allied fighters for that matter, is somewhat overstated. Quantity, elevation, distance, coordination etc all play a big role in determining how well any particular sortie goes. I find that as the human player in WitP, you usually get overwhelmed by detail and micromanaging your air bases perfectly day by day is very difficult.
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Jan 16, 2016 05:53
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Fair enough, air combat in the pacific to me is basically "Zero was god until the Americans started using bait tactics + put comically large guns super thick planes"
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Jan 16, 2016 09:52
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All i know about the pacific air war I learned from aces of the pacific. Which means I guess they crashed their planes a bunch because the people making missions made them longer than the aircraft range.
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Jan 16, 2016 10:10
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TheDemon posted:Worth noting that besieging Moscow would cut the rail line from Arkhangelsk, where the lend-lease supplies arrived.  edit: nvm, discovered that the primary lend lease port switched from Arkhangelsk to Murmansk in December of 1941. AceRimmer fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 10:15
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Mans posted:Fair enough, air combat in the pacific to me is basically "Zero was god until the Americans started using bait tactics + put comically large guns super thick planes" The Zero was, at best, on par with early-war US fighters such as the F4F Wildcat (the Brewster Buffalo being the exception, as it was a pretty bad plane) - it had a serious edge in range, and a bit of a maneuvering advantage over most US types, but at the terrible cost of anemic firepower and extreme fragility. The Zero was armed with a pair of 7.7mm machine guns (close copies of the British .303) that often proved literally incapable of downing early-war Allied fighters (although they were more than adequate against the obsolete Russian biplane fighters China was using) and a pair of excellent 20mm cannon that unfortunately carried so little ammuntion that killing more than one or two aircraft was a tall order. Meanwhile, since Japan had difficulty building a decent aircraft engine, they had to compensate for very low horsepower by stripping any sort of protection (self-sealing fuel tanks, armored plates to protect the pilot, puncture-proof tires, reinforced airframes, etc.) to meet the required performance. The Zero's main early war USN opponent was the F4F Wildcat. The F4F was about 20 km/h slower than the Zero in level flight, and much less maneuverable at low speeds. However, it was quite a bit faster in a dive, was nearly as maneuverable at higher speeds (the Zero was lightly-enough built that the G-forces could easily snap the wings off if flown to the plane's full envelope near the top-end of the speed range), could take an enormous amount of punishment, and was armed with six .50 Browning Machine Guns and plenty of ammunition. While the zero required dozens of hits from their cannon to kill a Wildcat, a single bursts from the six guns of a Wildcat could shred a Zero and take it out of action. This largely negated the maneuver advantage, as a USN pilot only needed a good snapshot to win, while the IJN pilot would have to secure a sustained advantage to get a kill. That's why the Thatch Weave was so successful, as any attempt to gain advantage over one part of the mutually supporting pair opened the Zero up to a snapshot from the other. Why, then, did the Zero cause such panic and gain such a fearsome reputation? It is quite simple - the Japanese pilots had more hours in combat than most American pilots had in the air period, and the IJN was almost absurdly picky about getting only the best possible applicants for flight school.
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Jan 16, 2016 14:31
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American planes ended up being absurdly good, even the ones they didn't like and tossed to Russia were pretty drat great. They also picked up on the idea of eschewing cannons at some point and just turning their dinky machineguns into .50 cals, which was all you really needed.
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Jan 16, 2016 14:43
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Against fighters, yes. If you are concerned about bombers (like say, Germany, or Japan), then you need cannons too. Preferably cannons with more than like 120 rounds though.
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Jan 16, 2016 15:03
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Any history of Japanese airpower in WWII can be concluded with, "...but then all of their best pilots got killed and the Corsair and Hellcat showed up and welp..."
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Jan 16, 2016 15:31
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Don't forget the early Zeroes didn't have radios, while the US planes did. I'm not sure if they added them to the Zero eventually, but I remember listening to a Japanese ace giving an interview about how on really long flights after heavy fighting, they'd lose pilots to falling asleep in the cockpit and there was no way to radio them to wake them up.
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Jan 16, 2016 16:32
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Night10194 posted:Don't forget the early Zeroes didn't have radios, while the US planes did. I'm not sure if they added them to the Zero eventually, but I remember listening to a Japanese ace giving an interview about how on really long flights after heavy fighting, they'd lose pilots to falling asleep in the cockpit and there was no way to radio them to wake them up. Whatever pilot you're remembering must have been flying a different aircraft - a complete radio set was part of the design requirements for the Zero from the beginning.
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Jan 16, 2016 17:05
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Gnoman posted:Whatever pilot you're remembering must have been flying a different aircraft - a complete radio set was part of the design requirements for the Zero from the beginning. Really? My apologies. I might've misinterpreted what he was saying and he instead just meant 'if they conked out in a moving plane from exhaustion, radioing them wasn't going to be enough'. E: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JitLr5D7LSI found the interview in question. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 17:07
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They had radios, but they were exceptionally lovely IIRC.
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Jan 16, 2016 17:11
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Unless there's a translation error in the subtitles, the man specifically says "Our planes didn't have radios at the time". It could be that, since he also states that these missions were at the very limit of the Zero's impressive range, the radios were removed to save weight (and thus improve flight time). Other interviews I've read from the very beginning of the Guadalcanal campaign (one of which includes the pilot's first encounter with an F4F, including his surprise that it kept firing after he poured "several hundred" rounds from his machine guns into it, and he had to finish it off with cannon) clearly radioed orders being sent from plane to plane.
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Jan 16, 2016 17:48
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   Our subs continue to do good work.   Hmm, I might need to increase the hight on these fighters.  NOOO! Find a safe port, any port!   I'm leapfrogging troops down from Kuantan to Mersing, and the Allies take a crack at the ships carrying them.   Damage control teams report in!  Okay, this could be a lot worse, there are a few fires, but they should be able to bring them under control, we won't be launching any fighters for a time, but I think I can save her. She's about a hundred miles from Davao, where she can patch up some of the damage before returning to Japan. We probably won't see her until after her refit now.
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Jan 16, 2016 20:41
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Subs will forever troll Grey. When he's the allies, they slip his ASW and destroy him or their torpedoes go clunk. Here, well. Bad things will happen.
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Jan 16, 2016 20:49
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No! drat their Dutch hide!
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Jan 16, 2016 20:53
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Give that sub man a medal, and give those destroyer captains a slap. edit - Ammo explosion must have been fighter rounds rather than torpedo storage. Can you tell damaged ships to ditch ammo? goatface fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jan 16, 2016 |
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Jan 16, 2016 21:11
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From what I understand, Japanese damage control was pretty awful so I wouldn't put any faith in their ability to put the fires out.
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Jan 16, 2016 21:57
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Chunky Monkey posted:From what I understand, Japanese damage control was pretty awful so I wouldn't put any faith in their ability to put the fires out. It would be funny if the Ryujo's damage control team turned the ship into a floating fuel-air bomb, but I doubt this game models that particular whoopsie.
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Jan 16, 2016 22:01
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Where the gently caress did all her planes go? They ditch? They dead?
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Jan 16, 2016 22:02
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Chunky Monkey posted:From what I understand, Japanese damage control was pretty awful so I wouldn't put any faith in their ability to put the fires out.
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Jan 16, 2016 22:44
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goatface posted:Where the gently caress did all her planes go? They ditch? They dead? Things like this: 
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Jan 16, 2016 23:16
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That would make sense.
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Jan 16, 2016 23:31
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Night10194 posted:Don't forget the early Zeroes didn't have radios, while the US planes did. I'm not sure if they added them to the Zero eventually, but I remember listening to a Japanese ace giving an interview about how on really long flights after heavy fighting, they'd lose pilots to falling asleep in the cockpit and there was no way to radio them to wake them up. To be fair though, this happened to any and all pilots, especially reconnaissance pilots. There's an excerpt I need to find in the book Aces, Warriors, and Wingmen which details Canadian pilots experiences in various theatres, etc and its mentioned that a pilot not returning from a recon flight was treated as a normal part of life. You just assume they got shot down by flak or maybe crashed into the side of a mountain; if your lucky, you survive and get rescued, but even that is highly unlikely.
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Jan 16, 2016 23:50
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Actual WW2 aircraft were certainly not the romanced or video game'd thing, no. Lots of hours just soaring around looking for specks in the sky, with just as many hours sitting in the concrete slab of a pilot seat on the tarmac because someone thought there was an air raid happening.
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Jan 16, 2016 23:54
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Gamerofthegame posted:Actual WW2 aircraft were certainly not the romanced or video game'd thing, no. Lots of hours just soaring around looking for specks in the sky, with just as many hours sitting in the concrete slab of a pilot seat on the tarmac because someone thought there was an air raid happening. There's a reason why Il-2 Sturmovik 1946 is the best™ WW2 Flight Sim game. No-bullshit, 3+ hour long missions that test the endurance of the player and the plane with incredibly mundane objectives like "Drop some cargo in this general vicinity". Or just play co-op with others in a quick 10-min mission 
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Jan 16, 2016 23:57
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