chitoryu12 posted:

Ensign Expendable's own website details exactly how well the Tiger could be penetrated by Soviet guns. There's even one specifically on the 45mm guns. Even those little pea shooters had a chance of penetrating a Tiger's sides or turret from 350 meters or less with the right ammo, so you can guess how accurate their claims about the 76.2mm guns are.

It sounds like yet another attempt to mythologize the Tiger as some kind of invincible beast that had everyone dramatically running from in terror and only failed to win the war because there weren't enough.

JcDent posted:

So they're basically pre-Heresy World Eaters in that regard: insanely motivated, suicidal, would probably fare better if they were less willing to accept casualties.

Nebakenezzer posted:

Is this some sort of Puritan formation in the glorious revolution?

Nebakenezzer posted:

Is this some sort of Puritan formation

my dad posted:

No, it means he's a nerd.

spectralent posted:

My memory is that SS Divisions were generally sufficiently fanatical that they didn't surrender very often, and often got into the business of beating and executing conscripts for cowardice and refusing to surrender or submit to capture even when it was borderline suicidal due to their undying faith that superior aryan will would see them through. So, still less impressive than the myth, but in a different way. I could be totally wrong, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the SS.

Nebakenezzer posted:

This could sometimes undermine their effectiveness as fighting units, like when the SS trained a bunch of units in the Balkans. Basically they accepted the training and equipment, only to go back and start prosecuting the same old ethnic grudges.

JcDent posted:

Yo nerds, how false is this

quote:

(These mines were particularly useful to the Red Army in the battle of Kursk (and other battles in the later half of the war) since by July 1943, the Red Army had no anti-tank gun able to successfully penetrate the front armor of a Tiger tank. The 45mm guns were nearly helpless, the 76.2mm divisional gun and the 76.2mm F-34 main guns on the T-34 tanks could only penetrate the side armor of a Tiger at close range ~300m. Only a small number of SPGs like the SU-152 "Beast Slayer" armed with 152mm heavy howitzers could effectively destroy the Tigers. For that reason, the Red Army relied heavily on anti-tank mines and laid more than 500,000 of them around Kursk)

By the way, is XMX1100 Scorpion something that could be called a commonly used modern AT mine?

Ensign Expendable posted:

This is a page from the German Tiger manual.

my dad posted:

Care to explain?

HEY GAL posted:

i goddamn love mid-20th-century aesthetics, look at that typeface and those shapes

LeadSled posted:

Mind you, Jackson was a man who enjoyed sucking on lemons and didn't add pepper to his food 'because it made his leg ache'

Fangz posted:

The British Free Corps was a complete farce.

Ensign Expendable posted:

Also your guys would love this book, it contains very many pictures of naked women and a sausage analogy

Cyrano4747 posted:

From a bit back but:


Lemons are legit tasty. Sliced lemon is my crunch-time writing snack of choice.

Also just a touch of SS talk:

If you're looking at how they were equipped it is all the gently caress over the place and you pretty much have to chart it year by year. Pre-war they were a total loving dumpster fire when it came to outfitting units. For the longest time the Wehrmacht fought tooth and nail to prevent Himmler's little private army from getting any gear, to the point where they actively obstructed them from becoming part of military contracts. The issue of rifles is really illustrative: the SS had a damned hard time getting K98ks in any numbers, which directly resulted in them doing all kinds of crazy refurb operations where they shortened WW1-era G98s into something approximating the newer design. This arms procurement clusterfuck went on for a surprisingly long time and was one of the major reasons why the SS wanted to bring entire factories under its control. If you've ever wondered why the decided to make some of Germany's fancy new semi-automatic rifles in a concentration camp part of the answer is because that was a supply chain the SS could reliably control. This gets better later on, but it's always a point of contention. It should be noted that it didn't get better in that the Heer started sharing its toys, it got better because they set up a parallel SS Procurement Office that got more and more clout to do things like get contracts for small arms shipments. Even then a lot of those were filled by factories reworking previously rejected parts, guns that were depot repaired after being hosed up in the field, etc. From what I recall only Steyr ever made runs of new rifles for the SS (not that they never got them - a number of shipments of rifles intended for the Heer were basically commandeered, which was one of the things that made the procurement pissing match all the worse).

The long and the short is that the notion that the SS were given first pick of the best poo poo is really inaccurate in a lot of ways. When they did it was generally because someone in the Party pulled strings to have equipment diverted from the Heer. Remember: their procurement system was so precarious that they wanted an industrial base apart from the Army, and took some baby steps towards getting it.

The other thing to remember is that the more fanatical SS units tended to suffer really outsized casualties. Look up the attrition rates for the SS Hitlerjugend division, which was mostly drawn from Hitler Youth volunteers. The older, 17-18 year old guys, especially those in leadership positions, not the little kids. This wasn't late war 15 year olds with panzerfaust stuff. They were absolute fanatical and got ground into paste because of it.

LostCosmonaut posted:

I was quite disappointed when the Strv 103 manual did not include gratuitous nudity (not really).

JaucheCharly posted:

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

The U.S. didn't need gratuitous nudity because we had the world's sexiest flight manuals.

Pellisworth posted:

"octopuses" - more than one octopus
"octopodes" - referring to members of the taxonomic group Octopoda
"octopi" - you're a pretentious twat, it's not even derived from Latin


I know I was agreeing!

EvanSchenck posted:

It is also based on a misunderstanding of the purpose of mines. They're not expected to inflict mass casualties, because a unit that runs into a minefield will withdraw and find a different route instead of milling around taking more casualties. They're for area denial. You can't pass through a minefield until it is cleared by engineers, which takes a very long time.

SeanBeansShako posted:

So which goon is going to look into all that history light comedy stuff coming to the History channel?

HEY GAL posted:

is any of it early modern

Cyrano4747 posted:

What is this from?

HEY GAL posted:

is any of it early modern

ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:

HEY GAL if you looked at those flight manuals I posted, imagine if Wallenstein had issued a manual of arms to his troops and had it illustrated and printed by whoever the Michaelangelo of the 17th century Holy Roman Empire was.

That's what you're looking at in those manuals.

EvanSchenck posted:

It is also based on a misunderstanding of the purpose of mines. They're not expected to inflict mass casualties, because a unit that runs into a minefield will withdraw and find a different route instead of milling around taking more casualties. They're for area denial. You can't pass through a minefield until it is cleared by engineers, which takes a very long time. This allows the defender to exert some control over enemy movement and potentially channel it to the places they'd prefer them to go. On the defensive the Soviets used mines as part of their "antitank front" tactics. The main element was concealed interlocking antitank batteries. The mines were used to deter enemy maneuver except on routes that exposed them to fire from multiple angles by different batteries.

Nebakenezzer posted:

they were fighting the people that they had been fighting against for generations anyway

my dad posted:

How did they manage to fight for generations? Was there a territorial conflict of some sort? I always get confused with all this Balkans stuff.

Nebakenezzer posted:

To be honest, dude, me too. I just toss it into a bucket of "sectarian-ethnic strife" and forget about it. A bunch of people hate each other because religion/ethnic groups, and you rumble that around for a few hundred years and you have a bunch of people who hate each other for wrongs done to their ancestors because of religious/ethnic groups.

Xerxes17 posted:

My Dad is from that area bro

Xerxes17 posted:

My Dad is from that area bro

bewbies posted:

This is an incredible read/view/whatever for anyone who has never seen it. It is just right mix of slick and nerdy and silly.

FAUXTON posted:

Namely poo poo like this:



This is page 79 of the B-29 training manual (it's linked as the word "manuals" in the post where the rest are linked). Don't try pulling your loving B-29 Superfortress inverted and rolling out of it like a loving fighter, you nimrods.