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ArchangeI posted:Really makes me appreciate the procedure I had to follow when I was drafted. With more than 100 Imprisoned Conscientious Objectors going into the Houses of Parliament between 1919 and 1939, the second world war and national service systems were significantly better - Objectors were shuffled into their own Tribunals that were set up specifically to deal with them. Not that they got off light, but it was acknowledged that the people in charge of determining exemptions based on industrial need were not always the best people to judge conscience. Can I ask where you were drafted? And what happened?
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Jan 19, 2016 13:10
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lenoon posted:With more than 100 Imprisoned Conscientious Objectors going into the Houses of Parliament between 1919 and 1939, the second world war and national service systems were significantly better - Objectors were shuffled into their own Tribunals that were set up specifically to deal with them. Not that they got off light, but it was acknowledged that the people in charge of determining exemptions based on industrial need were not always the best people to judge conscience. Germany, but by the time my turn came in 2004, the German military was essentially on an opt-out system. If you didn't object, you were taken if you passed the medical. If you did object and passed the medical, you were recognized as a conscientious objector and were assigned to an alternative service (you could also volunteer to serve for 5 years as a volunteer part-time firefighter or medic), mostly working in nursing homes, hospitals and the like. While technically there was a system much like you described, with tribunals that would quiz you on your moral convictions that supposedly prevented you from serving in a combat role, they weren't convened anymore and everybody just accepted that the only person that could adequately judge whether your conscience allowed for being a soldier is you. The actual reason, of course, was that Germany had very little use for conscripted soldiers but a lot of use for people who were willing to change old people's diapers for a pittance (since objectors were paid the same as enlisted soldiers, i.e. hilariously little). In fact, when the draft was finally ended a few years ago, the discussion was almost entirely about who would do these kinds of jobs now, since they would actually have to pay people a living wage. Anyway, I failed my medical on account of being colorblind and short sighted as well as your average goon. So I didn't even have to inconvenience myself for my conscience! I'm not sure what would have happened if I had rejected service outright, i.e. refused to be classified as an objector or a soldier. I assume that the Army would eventually just have decided to let it go after a year or two of legal drama.
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Jan 19, 2016 14:27
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Hogge Wild posted:
One is for the radio, the one behind it is for the crew's belongings. If you look up pictures of Shermans, they're usually covered in all sorts of junk the crew feels like lugging around. Stowage boxes aren't a very uncommon component on tanks.
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Jan 19, 2016 14:50
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Cartoon posted:We've all heard of the Mysorean Rockets? Edit: reading is hard  But yeah, the British army used them in the Napoleonic wars. They weren't very accurate, so they ended up being retired until rocket technology advanced to the Katyusha stage 150 years later. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 15:34
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HEY GAL posted:i am typing muster rolls into spreadsheets, if that's what you mean Should you publish them at some point, an online generator would be fairly easy to do 
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Jan 19, 2016 15:38
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stolen from the gif thread:
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Jan 19, 2016 15:40
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I was going to say Sussex should have yielded, the Ki-51 came to the intersection from the right... but then I remembered they both have left handed traffic.
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Jan 19, 2016 15:43
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6GNEEi7x4c 100 Years Ago Here comes the sun, doodle doodle. And General Aylmer says "It's all right" as he takes the only decision he can take, ordering an attack on the Hanna chokepoint as soon as possible. Unfortunately, there are some terrible, terrible ironies at work here. Suffice it to say that General Townshend is a complete and total twerp who couldn't manage being besieged by a paper bag, although fortunately he's stopped short of joining the section of British Empire history reserved for the outright mass murderers. Meanwhile, French higher command is still keeping a weather eye on Verdun, and Henri Desagneaux takes care to veil his snobbery rather better than Henri de Lecluse did. (Still out there, still writing hilariously purple prose, still all but impossible to fit into a day-by-day narrative.) lenoon posted:this is not a system that functioned as it was intended to I feel obliged to make some cynical Barthasian comment along the lines of "Clearly, the tribunals knew only too well their intended function: to deliver as many unfortunates as possible into the welcoming bosom of the Army, there to worship the tenets of militarism and be saved, while the politicians in the rear could say to the craven newspapers 'See how we protect the freedoms of our citizenry even in our darkest moments!'" Nenonen posted:I was going to say Sussex should have yielded, the Ki-51 came to the intersection from the right... but then I remembered they both have left handed traffic. Oh, please. This was a maritime incident. The Brits were clearly confused because they didn't realise that Japan uses IALA System B. 
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Jan 19, 2016 16:29
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Hogge Wild posted:stolen from the gif thread: Reminds me of the print that birds leave when they hit a window.
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Jan 19, 2016 16:55
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Trin Tragula posted:
Even then, the wholesale stripping of protected industries until the government hastily issued guidelines amounting to "No, you cannot keep conscripting men in completely exempt professions", after the slow decline of the mining industry was traced to a) huge amounts of men leaving voluntarily and b)everyone else being conscripted, ended up leading to virtually complete nationalisation by 1918.
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Jan 19, 2016 17:02
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How was conscription used in WW2? All I know is Russia mobilised a massive army.
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Jan 19, 2016 17:17
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Hogge Wild posted:Weren't the cavalry also used as dragoons, ie. mounted fast infantry? Depends on what you mean. They'd fight dismounted, like infantry. But generals quickly learned you couldn't order them to attack a formed enemy line. Instead of forcing the enemy to form Napoleonic squares, they'd get shot down.
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Jan 19, 2016 17:23
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I thought the box on the firefly's turret was so the 17 pdr had space to recoil?
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Jan 19, 2016 17:23
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Suspect Bucket posted:All right, I gotta get something off my chest right here, because it annoys me. This wasn't known until horses were captured on cameras. That set of frames by Edweard Muybridge you posted was actually incredibly influential- there had been a debate beforehand on whether they lift all their legs off the ground or not and it finally settled it, for some reason it's meant to be practically impossible to tell if you just watch them in person. Easily accessible footage of slow motion horse-running wasn't available for most of the time people were painting intense cavalry charges.
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Jan 19, 2016 17:34
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Hazzard posted:How was conscription used in WW2? All I know is Russia mobilised a massive army. Soviet society was built for war. Lenin and Stalin had zero illusions about the West putting up with a powerful socialist state, so the whole gimmick of the Red Army was to mobilize faster and in greater numbers than anyone else. Army service in the 1930s was also very prestigious and was a great avenue for upward social mobility. Plus you could learn to work with technology, which was super important at a time of rapid mechanization of agriculture. Also things like skiing, survival, survival, navigation, and marksmanship were promoted among the Young Pioneers. Also there were rumours of all spaghetti factories being owned by the military and that they were convertible into making gunpowder overnight, but I don't know how true that is.
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Jan 19, 2016 17:39
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Ensign Expendable posted:Also there were rumours of all spaghetti factories being owned by the military and that they were convertible into making gunpowder overnight, but I don't know how true that is. At least if I find any 7.62x54r loaded with pasta I'll know why.
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Jan 19, 2016 17:43
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Still hilarious, though. Red army service was a little less prestigious in the non-Russian parts of the USSR, I'd think.
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Jan 19, 2016 17:44
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Hazzard posted:How was conscription used in WW2? All I know is Russia mobilised a massive army. On top of what EE said, the USSR used the same system of conscription that worked well for the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War and WWI. Pretty much all military age men were drafted at some point before the war, given a year or so of training and sent back to their jobs as part of a reserve unit. Thus when war broke out the USSR had a pool of trained soldiers to draw on when populating the army. The USSR also did learn some important lessons from WWI, notably that they expected everyone to incur horrendous casualties and that they would have to functionally replace their entire army in terms of personnel within the first few months of the war. Obviously while things didn't go exactly as planned for the Soviets, the fact that they had put in this preparation is one of the reasons they could keep up such dogged resistance in the face of an extremely rapid German advance. This lecture is a pretty good summary of the above, talking about the architect of the 'Deep Operation' G.S. Isserson and his theories which were continued by the Red Army after his death in 1931. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56N9iPjQDIU
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Jan 19, 2016 17:57
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Koramei posted:This wasn't known until horses were captured on cameras. That set of frames by Edweard Muybridge you posted was actually incredibly influential- there had been a debate beforehand on whether they lift all their legs off the ground or not and it finally settled it, for some reason it's meant to be practically impossible to tell if you just watch them in person. Easily accessible footage of slow motion horse-running wasn't available for most of the time people were painting intense cavalry charges.
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Jan 19, 2016 18:00
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JcDent posted:Still hilarious, though. The residents of the Western borderlands recovered from Poland were reluctant to serve (shock and awe), but that's all I read about this. I'm mostly talking about the mid-30s anyway, before the various, uh, problems that being important in 1937-38 brought. Or 1940. 1939 was okay, at least there was an easy campaign. Edit: actually according to my grandfather's memoirs, being a junior officer in the late 30s was pretty sweet, since you catapulted up the ranks to replace everyone that got purged and to take command of new units in the rapidly growing army. Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 18:02
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MikeCrotch posted:On top of what EE said, the USSR used the same system of conscription that worked well for the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War and WWI. Pretty much all military age men were drafted at some point before the war, given a year or so of training and sent back to their jobs as part of a reserve unit. Thus when war broke out the USSR had a pool of trained soldiers to draw on when populating the army. Didn't all combatants except UK, USA and China use this system?
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Jan 19, 2016 18:08
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Ensign Expendable posted:Also there were rumours of all spaghetti factories being owned by the military and that they were convertible into making gunpowder overnight, but I don't know how true that is. I've heard a story that the soda cans in the Moscow Olympics came from a hand grenade factory.
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Jan 19, 2016 18:12
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Ensign Expendable posted:The residents of the Western borderlands recovered from Poland were reluctant to serve (shock and awe), but that's all I read about this. I'm mostly talking about the mid-30s anyway, before the various, uh, problems that being important in 1937-38 brought. Or 1940. 1939 was okay, at least there was an easy campaign. The Red Army - pretty sweet if you don't get purged
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Jan 19, 2016 18:28
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Getting conscientious objector status in the modern United States is a huge pain made intentionally difficult and opaque. In order to get the status in the case of a draft, you need to demonstrate a long-term commitment to principle, and simply belonging to a religion like the Quakers is not sufficient. Any man registered for the selective service is deemed to have accepted that he may be drafted and may have to serve, and men are automatically registered when they file basic paperwork like getting your drivers license. Checking the little box for the selective service on your driver's license application is deemed evidence you are not truly committed to nonviolence. For this reason dedicated COs frequently cross out this section and scrawl "I am a conscientious objector" over their paperwork. It's not something I've dealt with personally, but my Quaker friends have said it's extremely challenging to insure they can avoid any future draft.
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Jan 19, 2016 18:36
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Hogge Wild posted:I've heard a story that the soda cans in the Moscow Olympics came from a hand grenade factory. Possible, soda vending machines in the USSR had reusable glasses instead of cans. At home, you could buy a reinforced glass jar with a CO2 cartridge slot and carbonate your own beverage.
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Jan 19, 2016 18:37
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BurningStone posted:Thanks for that! So you feel airpower was very important, which I find interesting. I'm even more puzzled why histories tend to leave it out. I've certainly read detailed accounts of both Stalingrad and Kursk, and I can't remember planes being mentioned. Grand Prize Winner posted:So why, in your view, was tactical air support (I'm probably using the wrong terms) so much more decisive on the Eastern front than on the other fronts? The biggest reason why it was such a big deal (in my opinion at least) is that both sides showed that their attack aircraft, if left unmolested, could absolutely maul uncovered armored formations in ways no one had really thought possible not that long before. That in turn led both sides to place very high priority on maintaining local air superiority over major ground efforts, which in turn led to the massive low altitude air battles that really characterized the air war on the eastern front. For example, the numbers of aircraft that fought at Kursk dwarfs nearly every other major air battle in history: it amounts to around four times as many as fought in the Battle of Britain, or double those that fought in the largest daylight bombing raids over Germany. The only other serious contender for "largest air operation ever" is Overlord, which wasn't really so much an air battle as it was uncontested Allied air operations for about 6 months. There were a handful of truly decisive air attacks; probably the best example was the Luftwaffe's largely uncontested attack versus the 2nd Guards Tank Corps on 7 July: they certainly didn't knock out the 50+ tanks they claimed, but ~13 squadrons of Hs-129s and Ju-87Gs brought a counteroffensive by the arguably the top formation in the Red Army to a screeching halt shortly before it would have hit the right flank of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps. Had that attack succeeded it would have put the entire German position at Kursk at serious risk. There are a handful of other such examples, and many more where attacks were contested by huge numbers of fighters. In general, like in most things, the volume and savagery of the east really makes most other theaters seem rather tame. To that end, I'm sure we're all aware of the "overclaiming" issues that were prevelant pretty much everywhere and particularly noteable with tanks (ie, "sturmoviks destroyed 300 tanks in a day", etc), but that doesn't mean that tactical air power was ineffective. By the time of Kursk both sides had their best capabilities fielded: the Germans had high velocity 30mm and 37mm AT cannons that were able to knock out any tank in the world from behind/above, and the VVS had the PTAB cluster bombs that are largely forgotten by history but were probably the single most effective airborne antitank weapon any side came up with during the war. That being said, like the western Allies, neither side was ever terribly good at actually killing tanks; they instead tended to really rip up soft support vehicles, artillery, transports and so on that the tanks needed to operate, while at the same time forcing the tanks to seek cover instead of advancing. My personal theory as to why the air war in the east is largely overlooked is, first, it wasn't particularly sexy. In fact, it was pretty thoroughly not sexy most of the time. Ugly-rear end planes like Stukas and Sturmoviks taking off in small formations from cleared-dirt airfields to go shoot up supply convoys or tank columns from low altitude isn't nearly as romantic as the 8th Air Force fighting in colossal formations of huge bombers high in the stratopshere, or nearly as heroic as beautiful Spitfires shooting up the Nazi bombers as they tried to drop their bombloads on the Queen, but it was a much more effective way of fighting (as the Western allies eventually figured out). The other reason is we don't have nearly as much information on it as we do on the west and Pacific. In example: America's Hundred Thousand is about as finely detailed and informative military history book as exists anywhere about any topic; because of works like this and others we have a pretty comprehensive overview of western air operations from beginning to end. Soviet sources have only recently been released and of course they are in some crazy moon language, so the information on their systems and operations just isn't there for us in the west, unless you're willing to comb through obscene amounts of primary source documents written in moon language. My hope is that a similar work to AHT will come out for Soviet aviation in the relatively near future and that will, maybe, spark some new interest in the air war in the east.
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Jan 19, 2016 18:58
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PTAB kills are hard to confirm since from what I've read, a cassette hitting the ground has a visual effect like hell opening up and belching out an enormous fireball, after which everything is on fire. Kind of hard to see what kind of damage you did after that.
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Jan 19, 2016 19:18
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To the question of "why is the air war in the east overlooked" I'll add the larger issue that has plagued WW2 history in general (and European 20th century history as a whole): the Cold War and the major historiographical rifts it created. Modern, academic history was largely created in 19th century Germany, America, and England and the ideological rifts of the 20th century fragmented it pretty badly. Just using Germany as an example - as it's the case that I'm most familiar with personally - you have a hard cleavage in 1945 into western and eastern bodies of literature that were far less conversant with each other than they should have been. Part of this is due to the political system in the east and the extremely politicized nature of history writing in the DDR. Similar problems can also be seen in the rest of the Warsaw Pact. In addition to that rift you have the larger source problems caused by the political rifts. This could gently caress up even relatively mundane research on things from way earlier than the 20th century. Hey Gal spends a lot of time in Dresden, for example. Her documents probably would have been much more difficult for her as an American to access in the 1970s, despite the fact that they have gently caress all to do with anything related to 20th century politics. Now, imagine you're dealing with a subject that is still politically or militarily sensitive - like combat operations in WW2 - and are trying to get to someplace even less accessible than East Germany - like Moscow. This was a huge problem for people in the west doing Russian history during the cold war. The worst of it is that while things relaxed a bit right after 1991, they've clamped back up in the last decade. I had friends in grad school working on topics in modern Russian history and their adventures with government bureaucracy, batshit archival policies, and having zero loving clue if they would ever get enough documents to produce a dissertation made my trips to Germany look as easy as ILL'ing a few books. Now take that and apply the filter of needing military documents. If you really want to get in deep on military operations in the Soviet Union your chances of getting the kind of access to documents that you would see from the German or American militaries are not good. This is part of what led to such a bias towards German efficiency in the scholarship done during this time. The Nazis' records - even the most hosed up, secret ones - were completely open to anyone who wanted to take a peek. If you were researching Market Garden or Overlord you could look at documents from both sides, but if you were interested in Kursk you were largely stuck looking at one side of the battle. This ease of access issue can have a major restricting influence on what is written. Put simply, people get their PhDs in subjects that they can successfully research and write a dissertation about. Embarking on a course of study where you may or may not have a textual base for your arguments is risky as all gently caress and it's enough of a time investment that most people are pretty careful about it. The people who I knew who had somewhat risky dissertation proposals all had a fall back plan. It doesn't stop enterprising young scholars from looking at the subject entirely, but it constricts the number who do and the actual difficulties push some of those into other projects to boot. The killer is that Russian history is still treated as somehow separate from the rest of European history. This is reflected in everything from research grants to departmental structures. The net result is that there is a pretty big gap between people working on the history of those parts of Europe that speak slavic languages, and the rest of it. This is something that I'm personally acutely aware of because I work on occupation-era Germany and have to try to straddle it to an extent, and I'm keenly aware of just how many blind spots I have when it comes to looking at the Soviet military administration. edit: this is also a gut-level thing, but I also feel like there is a real lack of good books by Russian historians being translated to English. I have no problem thinking of books on any number of subjects that were written in German and translated to English (or vice-versa for that matter) but I'm far less aware of books moving from Russian to English. I'd tentatively hold this out as another sign of how Russian scholarship isn't as integrated with the west as European and American are with each other. This wouldn't surprise me, as there was a lot of time, effort, and money spent during the Cold War to integrating West European and American academia. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 19:40
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Cyrano4747 posted:Hey Gal spends a lot of time in Dresden, for example. Her documents probably would have been much more difficult for her as an American to access in the 1970s, despite the fact that they have gently caress all to do with anything related to 20th century politics. Edit: This might have something to do with perpetuating the view English speakers have that the 30yw was "a German conflict" rather than something that extended from the Lowlands to Poland (the 30yw became imbricated in the 80yw--Pappenheim went to the Netherlands at one point) east-to-west and from the Baltic to Italy north-to-south. Edit 2: I am the first American most of the people in my reenacting company have ever met, sometimes the first American they've ever seen. This is not the case when I hang out with groups from western Germany or the Netherlands. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 19:48
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Cyrano4747 posted:
This, very much this. Ever since the archival thaw, there's been a wealth of new material published, but like... maybe three Kolomiets' books were translated? That's about it for the tanks, anyway.
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Jan 19, 2016 20:06
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HEY GAL posted:I think this might still be a thing. Some British historian called Dresden "the last great unplumbed archive" when we were talking at a conference. The sign in sheets stuck in the first page of some of the documents I looked at (I think this is a tracking system from before computers) have lots of Eastern European names on them from the 60s and 70s and guess whose names fill the archive entrance book in 2015? The ones who aren't German (or one Japanese guy) are Czechs and Poles. Meanwhile, there's a Czech guy who knows a Czech guy I know, he's studying the von Pernsteins and I need to write to him--as a historian of The Empire he knows Czech, German, Spanish, and Italian. No English, from his point of view he doesn't need it. My understanding is that this is true, too, for what it's worth; Russian historical archives in general unthawed in the 90s with the end of the Cold War and went right the gently caress back to frosty around the late 90s as the Russian government and economy got its act back together.
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Jan 19, 2016 20:31
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and our different locations and experiences are probably why cyrano4747 kept talking about "western europe" up there while i consider myself a historian of "central europe" i know that "central europe" extends into parts of poland and of course, encompasses bohemia and moravia, but i'm not sure if i extends as far west as Alsace. I would probably be far more comfortable, in terms of what I'm used to, in the Czech Republic than in Strasburg or something, though.
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Jan 19, 2016 20:35
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Not so, recent digitization efforts made the archives more accessible than ever. For example the entire German repository of the Central Archives is online, Stalin's whole personal documents collection, all GOKO decrees, a huge portion of award orders, a huge portion of operative documents, the whole file on fighting bandits post-war, all of this is scanned and indexed, not to mention the enormous amount of documents scanned by private parties and put on BitTorrent.
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Jan 19, 2016 20:38
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HEY GAL posted:and our different locations and experiences are probably why cyrano4747 kept talking about "western europe" up there while i consider myself a historian of "central europe" Usually I talk about 'Central Europe' when looking at my own work, mostly due to the fact that I make a lot of arguments for doing Cold War history that involves all of Germany. That said, for the above discussion there is a very real division between Western Europe and Eastern Europe when it comes to who could access what documents and who was reading who. The reason why Dresden is still such a relatively untapped resource is because of the political issues that put it on the wrong (at least from the perspective of German, American, British etc academics) side of the iron curtain in the Cold War. edit; I was illustrating the way historical research and discourse was fractured by the cold war, not making an argument for a particular geographical/historical understanding of the continent, if that makes sense. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 20:40
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immigration was a little surprised at me, apparently if you're not currently getting shot at/blown up in syria nobody comes to east germany HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Jan 19, 2016 |
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Jan 19, 2016 20:43
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Ensign Expendable posted:PTAB kills are hard to confirm since from what I've read, a cassette hitting the ground has a visual effect like hell opening up and belching out an enormous fireball, after which everything is on fire. Kind of hard to see what kind of damage you did after that. Pretty much; they were basically the first DPICM rounds. A squadron of IL-2s was delivering a payload roughly equal to that of a modern HIMARS battery, with very similar submunitions.
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Jan 19, 2016 21:07
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Hogge Wild posted:In addition to these reasons I think that one of the main reasons was that after the various special forces started to use them, it became cool and everyone else wanted them too.  Also the berets for special forces thing is weird, what with the commandos wearing a cap comforter rather than a beret early on etc. Ensign Expendable posted:Possible, soda vending machines in the USSR had reusable glasses instead of cans. At home, you could buy a reinforced glass jar with a CO2 cartridge slot and carbonate your own beverage.
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Jan 19, 2016 21:59
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Interesting, ours was reinforced with a wire mesh wrapped tightly around the jar.
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Jan 19, 2016 22:04
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Ensign Expendable posted:Soviet society was built for war. Lenin and Stalin had zero illusions about the West putting up with a powerful socialist state, so the whole gimmick of the Red Army was to mobilize faster and in greater numbers than anyone else. Army service in the 1930s was also very prestigious and was a great avenue for upward social mobility. Plus you could learn to work with technology, which was super important at a time of rapid mechanization of agriculture. Also things like skiing, survival, survival, navigation, and marksmanship were promoted among the Young Pioneers. Lets talk a bit more about the basics of what mobilisation actually entailed. So you are a reservist who's done his year or two of service and is now working his regular job in hicksville nowhere. How do you get to the frontline? In general terms it starts with a phone call/knock on the door/public announcement of some kind that your unit is being mobilised. This takes the form of an instruction to be at a certain place (usually the nearest railway station - although in Soviet Russia you might be lucky to get that, a lot of units marched from their form-up across half the country) at a certain time and date. Everyone assembles and you are marched to a base somewhere where hopefully there are uniforms and basic weapons for you. You are then marched/railed to the location behind the lines where your division is assembling and hopefully lots of other similar village/town sized groups are converging on that spot. Once everyone in the assembly area then you shake out into battle formation and head for the front line. (That's all extremely abbreviated and non-nation/era specific) The problem the Russians had during Barbarossa was that Divisions and Armies kept getting overrun while they were in the form-up phase. So that impressive-on-paper looking pocket of 100k troops really consists of a whole bunch of people who've been sitting around in fields waiting for the other 1/2 of their formation and all of their artillery etc to show up. It's one of the big examples of why numbers on a map can be wholly unrepresentative of the fighting condition or power of a military unit.
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Jan 19, 2016 23:51
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The fun thing about that is that the uniforms and basic weapons were likely in a warehouse in Moscow. Also the fuel. Also good luck.
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Jan 20, 2016 00:18
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