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Squalid posted:Yes, and AMISOM is still fighting a counter-insurgency, in January dozens of Kenyan were killed in one bloody engagement. The government they are fighting for represents a coalition of Somali clans and consistently rankings as the most corrupt in the world. It can't even pay the salaries of the 10,000 man National Army, and last year begged Puntland (technically an autonomous region but functionally independent) to send 3,000 men to Mudug and Galguduug to fight Islamists. I'm not sure Puntland ever bothered to comply. Here's a good short article from last week http://blog.crisisgroup.org/africa/2016/02/11/somalia-why-is-al-shabaab-still-a-potent-threat/ Thanks for the link. I'm looking forward to your post. I would not be the least bit surprised if Puntland didn't provide soldiers. My understanding is that Puntland was formed by a couple of Siad Barre's generals who asked Ethiopia for aid after their coup against him failed. Ethiopia and Somalia have been unhappy with each other for at least the last 40 years. The Southern part of the country is mostly populated (or at least significantly so) by Siad Barre's most loyal clans. Most likely Puntland and Ethiopia are pretty happy about what's going on South of their border. Besides, Puntland has it's own border disputes with Somaliland to worry about. If you don't mind a question - how much of the political divisions there are along tribal lines? I keep reading about how important they are and how the current violence is in large part a continuation of "traditional tribal feuds." I can't tell yet if that's accurate or if its being reported that way because it helps Westerners (like me) distance themselves from it.
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Feb 23, 2016 01:38
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It's weird, as I read the day by day WWI blog, I've started sort of rooting for the Germans as "the good guys" mainly just because of how lovely the French are being to their soldiers. Maybe a little also because I know that the Germans are inevitably going to lose, which makes them sort of underdogs in my eyes. Of course, I normally refrain from making moral judgements about most historical events, and I understand that WWI is really mostly a pointless waste of lives and that everybody would be better off if it ended sooner rather than later, but still.
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Feb 23, 2016 02:32
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german officers are pretty good to their dudes also i keep waiting for the point on one of their silly helmets to get stuck on something
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Feb 23, 2016 02:41
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HEY GAL posted:
German centipede
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Feb 23, 2016 03:42
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LLSix posted:Thanks for the link. I'm looking forward to your post. Oh Somalia's beef with Ethiopia goes back waaay further than 40 years. Somalis gleefully participated in Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and eventually British Somaliland in order to satisfy their own nationalistic projects. Also, all politics in Somalia are tribal politics. One reason for Somaliland's relative stability is that something like 90% of the population is Isaaq, although as I think I'll have to get into, Somalis don't really identify that strongly with their clan-family. Puntland is dominated by the Majeerteen clan. Your understanding is essentially correct, although the various Hawiye clans of the south were the ones who finally defeated Siad Barre and ended his rule, specifically the Habar Gidir and Abgaal subclans which dominated the USC, although that was after he had already been defeated in the north. Pictured: Puntland security forces deployed to the southern border in Galmudug province last year. The region is one of continuous tension and frequent skirmishes. 
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Feb 23, 2016 03:44
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Is that tank in a weird camo or is it actually rusting? 
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Feb 23, 2016 03:59
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spectralent posted:Is that tank in a weird camo or is it actually rusting? The latter
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Feb 23, 2016 04:03
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spectralent posted:Is that tank in a weird camo or is it actually rusting? IT'S A PATINA YOU HIPPIE (yes,that's rust on a tank that appears to be in use  )
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Feb 23, 2016 04:16
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FAUXTON posted:IT'S A PATINA YOU HIPPIE Why must people mistreat their tanks. 
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Feb 23, 2016 04:22
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Probably intentional by the tank commander to give people the impression that they are badly in need of rest and reorganization so that everyone will leave them alone.
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Feb 23, 2016 05:01
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Goddamn, that's like "rusting outdoors for a decade" condition. I guess they can't afford garages.
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Feb 23, 2016 06:04
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Fw-190 control surface innards Looking straight into the access panel of the Fw-190D. The cables running horizontally along the length of the photo (look for the shadows) are the control surface cables.  The rudder control rod that controls the movement of the rudder. The view is of the starboard side of the rudder.  View of the aileron control rod fitting on the innermost portion of the aileron. "The flaps of the Fw-190 were electrically actuated by a drive motor push rod connected to the flaps central attachment fitting."  Another shot of the control cables just behind the auxiliary fuel tank behind the cockpit.  Depiction of the flap position mechanism, attached to same push rod system as the flaps.   Shots of the Fw-190F cockpit, specifically the left and right rudder pedals. "The rudder pedals hang from behind the instrument panel and have push rods attached to their outside edges. These rods proceed down the fuselage sides to the rudder differential unit, then to the rudder. The pedals have the main landing gear brake system attached to the rear sides, which is activated by toe pressure on the top of the pedals.  "The elevator control torsion bar extends from the side of the control stick mounting base onto the starboard cockpit floor. This bar connected the stick to push rods and control cables in the fuselage, which led to the elevator differential unit and bell crank in the tail assembly." Apologies for the size/quality. I need to invest in a hand-scanner soon. And if you haven't seen it already, wikipedia has an article on control surfaces, with a mention of push rod (and other) control types. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_flight_control_system#Mechanical
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Feb 23, 2016 06:47
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Wait, how did the Germans manage to build their comfy bunkers with all this bombarding and attacking going about? Do they also get concrete trenches? How helpful are those in a bombardment? How did the Antante soldiers feel when they took German komfipanzerditchen? That poor, poor T-55...
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Feb 23, 2016 07:00
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HEY GAL posted:german officers are pretty good to their dudes Among other things, I imagine that if we had smartphones back in the day, we'd have an incident not unlike what would happen if the Orthodox And by an incident, I mean an entire youtube playlist. Edit: Relatedly, a thing about the Folding Cross Clip I've pondered: wouldn't it make more sense to have the cross fold towards BACK of head rather than FRONT? So that if some bodyguard has something more urgent to do, it'll clonk against the car roof and still fold appropriately if he's moving in a more-or-less forward direction, rather than bouncing the Patriarch's head in an unseemly fashion and/or straight up breaking off the cross? Seems like a very simple engineering solution. Goatse James Bond fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 07:02
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JcDent posted:Wait, how did the Germans manage to build their comfy bunkers with all this bombarding and attacking going about? Do they also get concrete trenches? How helpful are those in a bombardment?
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Feb 23, 2016 07:03
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Setting the Scene ON DECEMBER 8, 1992 Navy seals waded from the surf onto Mogadishu’s white beaches, defended only by a few dozen reporters tipped off to the assault. 1,300 marines landed at Mogadishu airport that same morning to relieve the beleaguered Pakistani garrison, and thousands more would soon occupy the southern half of Somalia. Authorized by United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 794 the soldiers had come to “to establish as soon as possible the necessary conditions for the delivery of humanitarian assistance wherever needed in Somalia,” and “ to restore peace, stability and law and order”. Operating under the aegis of the Unified Task Force (UNITAF), ultimately more than 38,000 soldiers from at least 13 nations would join what may have been the most ambitious peacekeeping project ever attempted.  Fig 1: UNITAF occupation of southern Somalia And in 1992 Somalia was in dire need of peace; a series bloody insurrections against the dictator Siad Barre had finally culminated in the collapse of his regime. Yet upon seizing the capital and driving Barre into exile, the victorious United Somali Congress (USC) immediately fell to brutal infighting, with the breakaway General Aidid battling presumptive President Ali Muhammad over control of the city. Meanwhile, The northwest, brutalized under Barre, had declared itself an independent Republic, while the northeast was under the de facto authority of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), yet another rival political faction. The war had killed tens of thousands and displaced hundreds of thousands more. Worse, a historic drought in 1992 devastated crops and herds, and millions of Somalis faced famine. It was into this chaos that American troops stepped that December, backed by a strong international mandate, with clearly defined objectives, and planning handled by General Colin Powell and Admiral David Jeremiah. On its face the mission was initiated to protect the delivery of aid and bring an end to the fighting. Yet there were deeper, more complicated ambitions pushing America boys into the chaos and dust swirling through Mogadishu’s streets. One phrase in particular repeats in the media, the “new world order.” This concept, articulated by leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush, would come to describe an idealist vision of the future, where international relations were governed by the rule of law, overseen by the United Nations, and enforced by the US for the benefit of all.  Fig 2: U.S. psyops pamphlet, 1993. Technical parking in designated lots ONLY! Despite the benevolent intentions, the peacekeepers would soon face stone-throwing mobs, political intransigence and eventually a full blown insurgency. Following a series of violent confrontations with General Aidid and his Habar Gidir clan, 18 Americans and two other peacekeepers would die in the battle of Mogadishu on October 3-4 1993, alongside hundreds of Somalis. A shocked American public was confronted with images of cheering crowds dragging the bodies of US airmen through the streets. Three days later, President Clinton announced the end of proactive US operations in Somalia. The last UN peacekeepers would withdraw in 1995, leaving the warlords to divide the country into ever smaller fiefs. Yet this was only the beginning. As Nature abhors a vacuum, the New World Order abhors anarchy. And the coming interventions will be orchestrated under far more cynical pretenses. First the proxy war between Ethiopia and its archnemesis Eritrea, America’s Shadow War against Al Qaeda, the Ethiopian occupation, and finally today’s African Union peacekeeping mission and its war against Al Shabaab. Whitehouse.gov boasts of the more than 670 million dollars spent by America fighting Al Shabaab since 2007, an effort of which most Americans are only dimly aware. But I’m getting ahead of myself. If I want you to understand what happened in 1993, first I think you’ll need a little background. Who exactly was the U.S. fighting? How does a modern state cease to function so completely? Why did the people back warlords even as they dissected the nation? To answer these questions we’ll have start by rewinding back, back to the beginning of colonial rule. Paradoxically, it will be the aspirations of Somali nationalists that set the stage for the modern conflict… A Note I’ve had a long interest in the conflict in Somalia. Yet there remains very little reading available that is both approachable and detailed. In view of the modern nature of the conflict, I think we all deserve to know just what the hell is going on. As I started writing up a brief summary, I suffered a bit of Mission Creep and what I wanted to share stretched to the entire modern history of Somalia. Making sense of the Somali Civil War requires some radical shifts in perspective and a lot of background information, so I’ve decided to make this a series of posts, hopefully I can keep it down to four or so, covering the history of modern Somalia up the the near present. I’m going to do my best to avoid political commentary, which is rightly verboten in this thread. I merely want to explain the history behind the modern conflict, even if it is not so distant. To keep this readable and not make myself too much work I won’t usually post sources except on request, but I will have everything close at hand. Mostly what’s available are dull reports by various NGOs and government offices of little interest to anyone, it’s frustratingly hard to find accounts by actual Somalis.
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Feb 23, 2016 08:55
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Post is fantastic, I will greedily read the rest.
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Feb 23, 2016 09:12
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I remember when the Nairobi westlands attack happened there were a couple of posters writing good contextual background on the kenya/somalia situation - I'll try to dig up the thread if you like as it might save you some time with the deep dark background. Looking forward to more!
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Feb 23, 2016 10:14
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Squalid posted:Setting the Scene Post all the posts, then post some more posts. You can do it!
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Feb 23, 2016 11:20
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Comstar posted:So...Verdun. 100 years ago today it all started. Was it worth it for the French? Certainly dosn't seem to be worth it for the Germans..why didn't their morale crack like the French afterwards? While the morale of the average German soldier didn't crack like the French, the failure of the Verdun offensive and the horrendous casualties sustained by the Germans at the Somme got Falkenhayn shitcanned as overall commander, paving the way for Hindenburg and Ludendorff to effectively become military dictators of the country. This led to reorganization of the front line into a more defensible position that required less men to occupy and more importantly no German offensives were conducted in the West after the lessons of 1916. The Germans only went back on the offensive after the Russians were knocked out of the war and freed up a tonne of manpower. The failure of the conventional war in the West also led the Germans down the path of restarting unrestricted U-boat warfare on 1 Feb 1917 due to the fact that the failures at Verdun and the Somme gave the proponents of submarine blockade enough ammo to win over the opposition. The average German soldiers morale might not have cracked to the level of mutiny but there sure as poo poo was a lot of fallout on the German side post Verdun. JcDent posted:Wait, how did the Germans manage to build their comfy bunkers with all this bombarding and attacking going about? Do they also get concrete trenches? How helpful are those in a bombardment? How did the Antante soldiers feel when they took German komfipanzerditchen? What Hey Gal said. The concrete bunkers and extensive trenches directly led to the failure on the first day on the Somme, since the British were counting on their 2-week constant bombardment to kill everything in the area and did not expect German defences to hold up so well. All those loving duds didn't help much either...
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Feb 23, 2016 11:33
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spectralent posted:Is that tank in a weird camo or is it actually rusting? I have a picture of a Kettenkrad in use in Somalia for some goddamn reason. Damned if I can find it though....
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Feb 23, 2016 12:20
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I haven't written much about conscientious objection for a while, so have the decidedly non-military history background to my absolute favourite conscientious objector: A Goon Objects - George Baker The story of the Absolutist COs who refused any compromise with military authority is very interesting and a great look at the intersection of civil and military authority during the First World War, but to be honest I write about it enough in generalities that it's worth just looking at one objector as a case study: George Baker. George was born in 1895, making him 21 when the Military Service Act came into power, and, as a single man working as a bank clerk this put him right into the first group of men called up as conscripts. Without dependents, a nationally important job, or powerful connections, he was, in many ways, the ideal conscript - young, unattached and fit, a potentially perfect fighting soldier. But instead, he went through the NCC, to prison, nearly went mad, helped to write an underground prison newspaper and then went back to his life as if nothing had happened. A very ordinary, very brave and above all, very goony man. Why George? He was born into a poor family in what was then the tiny hamlet of West Blatchington, near Brighton. Possibly the most English of all the English places, family backgrounds and people, he maintained throughout the war the kind of quiet, ashamed patriotism that is so very typically English: “I am, also, a patriot. I love my country, and it’s heroic poor who are the salt of it’s English earth. I delight in the rich English tongue, in the loveliness of it’s poetry and in the comeliness of it’s prose.” He’s a good man - a nice man, truly - who worries about the people around him, understands the brutal effects of poverty, sees his place in the world honestly, writes (self-confessed) terrible poetry and thinks about the “ghosts” of the lost potential of his ancestors, the sacrifices his father made to get his son an education, his grandmother as a young girl astonished by gaslights. In another decade, and with a little more family money, he would have been a foreign office civil servant, writing an ethnography when then empire forgot they’d posted him to some distant land. In another century, I think we would have been friends. It’s what he disliked that made him a Conscientious Objector. He hates the grinding poverty he sees around him, the wage disparity between rich and poor, the “white bearded old men” around the world that want to shepherd “poor Tommy and Hans and Jean into their crazy double-ditch of death”. In 1906 he “meets” a socialist friend, becomes an unconvinced and unconvincing athiest - “religion was a thing that could make men fear God, and hate one another”, and grows up. Writing from the vantage point of 1921, it’s this moment that he feels “Wormwood Scrubs had thrown its first faint shadow in the direction of the growing boy.” But George is my favourite because he’s not a grandiose man. He’s “a mushroom. A little man, a man with roots. I belonged to the people, and the people to which I belonged was the people of the very poor.” No bombast, no revolution. Our database of COs describes him well: “Socialist - unattached. Non-sectarian.” To 1916 George’s autobiography, “Soul of a Skunk” was written for his son, “that he may know what Daddy did in the Great War”. It’s surprisingly, incredibly, unashamedly honest. George as a child describes himself as a “detestable three year old”, and recounts his fears (of the sea, of his father’s office boys, coffins, death, graves) honestly, and rather unfortunately, seeing as he grows up by the sea and his father was an undertaker. He’s fond of puns - after being terrorised by Phillip, his father’s assistant, he remarks: “I told neither my father nor my mother of these ... philippics” and grows up a dreamy, introspective child, as immersed in the military culture of Edwardian England as anyone, wearing imitation uniforms and reading about famous battles (“O tempora! O mores!”). He “heartily enjoys” reading about the how the “wicked Boers were making war upon Good Queen Victoria”. At school he picks up a “prejudice against sheep”. A typical story of a working class victorian childhood - "Society, which fears the socialist, Authority, which abominates the pacifist, make of a normal child both one and the other” He dallies with atheism at school and settles down as a confirmed agnostic, hostile to the Authoritarian God of the Church of England - the “Humpty-Dumpty God” in his autobiography, but accepting of the distant, theist God, who he will never meet. He picks up a more firm socialism from reading about Kier Hardie, the class system and England’s feudal history. He has a run in with a local aristocrat over a basket of blackberries, which is “one more milestone on the road to Wormwood Scrubs”. He thinks that if politics has failed the people, it’s time to change the politics. In 1906, he reads about Philip Snowden, Liberal turned Labour MP, Socialist, Feminist and Radical. George is overwhelmed by the argument, and will, after the war, name his son after his hero. He’s sent to Grammar school on a scholarship and made constantly aware of the fact. A second class citizen on account of his family and birth, he hates the “snobs” around him, and loves latin and Shakespeare, and imagines King Lear to be about the Conservatives and Liberals versus the Labour Party. He writes “scribbles” of poetry: “He said that I might sent him jottings for the “Gossip” column of his Gazette. I was most thrilled... He printed one of the three. It contained exactly thirty words and entitled me, i suppose to a postal order of two shillings and sixpence. I was eaten up with pride. Alas! pride went before a fall; I never received the postal order” At 17 he’s working for a bank, and is, wonderfully, an edwardian version of a goon: “Midway to Wrotham on a late February night, a girl whom I overtook disconcertingly said “Good evening”. I was startled, but succeeded in stammering a “Good evening” in reply to her own. “Will you come for a walk?” she asked” What does our boy George do? “I mumbled something about a train and my need to catch it, and began to run” If only he’d been carrying a printer. By 20, he actually knows what sex is - thanks to a kind colleague who “scribbled symbols; crude sex symbols still to be seen, I believe, scratched upon the walls of the excavated Herculaneum”. He falls in love with a girl called May, and writes her reams of terrible poetry, and kisses her on her birthday. A “beautiful brown slip of a girl”, he will think of her often, despite her terrible singing and her repetition of “How Jolly!” whenever George comes out with some grand and romantic comparison to one of the great beauties of classical fiction. When the war begins, George is firmly in love, firmly a socialist and in every other sense firmly nothing at all. Like millions of others, he’s not stirred to volunteer, not because he hates war (though he does), but because he has his new bicycle, his girl, and he’s just met another, very briefly, that he will remember forever - a fiery, beautiful militant suffragette who inspires him and hardens his resolve, in a classic edwardian encounter - being insulted by the police and stoned by a mob of idiots. All this goony idyll is to be shattered, and George's politics and idealism put to the test, but for now: “In August the Old Men of Europe made their mobilizations; tore up their scraps of treaty-paper; invaded glorious little Belgium and diabolic East Prussia and began a four year massacre of Europe’s youth. I cared for none of these things. I cared for my little brown slip of a girl, the verses I made for her, the books I read for her.” lenoon fucked around with this message at 12:43 on Feb 23, 2016 |
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Feb 23, 2016 12:39
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I like George already and I am happy to hear he made it through okay. He sounds like the kind of guy who wouldn't have liked the war anyway
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Feb 23, 2016 14:16
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I think he's an example of how all that imperialism and golden age of Englishness, all the romance and poetry and daft innocence didn't have to lead to being a soldier - there's this kind of irresistible historical inevitability of the "long hot summer of 1914", where sleepy England stirred itself to war, but the same conditions and the same "ideal" of the nation of shopkeepers also produced an anti-war movement, from the very same people. I love the guy. More soon!
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Feb 23, 2016 14:23
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George sounds like a cool bloke.
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Feb 23, 2016 14:42
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100 Years Ago Day 3 at Verdun. German air superiority helps drive them forward. They're now at the point where the French offensives of 1915 stalled out, the point where the spearheads of the offensive have to gather themselves up and attack another trench system. They've learned well from last year's fighting; by day's end the second position is tottering and some stormtroopers have made it through and out the other side again. General Joffre, meanwhile, still sleeps undisturbed, and there's a horrible, horrible error at Samogneux. Meanwhile: Admiral Scheer could not have picked a better moment to ask the Kaiser if he can pretty please play with Your Majesty's toys; the British government sets up a Ministry of Blockade; Gabrielle D'Annunzio tragically crashes his plane in a landing accident and nearly puts both his eyes out; Robert Pelissier has a frustrating little tale from the Hartmannswillerkopf; E.S. Thompson goes hunting wild geese; and Louis Barthas goes on the march with icicles hanging off his beard. JcDent posted:Wait, how did the Germans manage to build their comfy bunkers with all this bombarding and attacking going about? Currently we are seeing a major offensive in the form of the Battle of Verdun; there's fighting over a front of (very roughly) 15 miles or so. The Battle of the Somme will add another 20-odd miles to that. The Western Front itself is (again, very roughly) 460 miles long. That's only about 8% of the total of the front getting the kind of hideously destructive shelling that we're seeing now. Add in known difficult spots like the Ypres salient, Vimy Ridge and the Argonne, and you've got at the absolute most 10% of the front that's going to see serious shelling on a daily basis. The vast majority of the front from about December 1914 was made up of quiet sectors. Then consider that a lot of the German shelters were built during the period 1914 to mid 1915 (for the French) or winter 1915 (for the BEF) when the enemy's guns were routinely rationed to twenty, ten, even five shells per day in order to build up stocks for a major push. They were mostly left alone to get on with digging their gigantic basement mansions. And then, even when the shell shortage problem goes away, a man digging a hole in the wall of a trench occupies a space about 3 square yards wide, if he's free with swinging his shovel. Any given artillery piece is only expected to be accurate to within 100 yards; for many of them, their barrels are starting to wear out and batteries' accuracy is suffering because of it. And very few battery commanders would send over shells at a random grid square on the off chance that someone might be digging a new shelter there, and they might be able to hit them. By all means fire at observed targets of opportunity, or carry out scheduled harrassing fire to ensure that you are as offensive as you might be; but the kind of weight of fire that's going to seriously interfere with a dugout-digging operation is never really available in any given stretch of line, unless it's in preparation for an attack.
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Feb 23, 2016 15:13
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Fw-190 control surface innards This is awesome, thanks!
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Feb 23, 2016 15:46
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Trin Tragula posted:And very few battery commanders would send over shells at a random grid square on the off chance that someone might be digging a new shelter there, and they might be able to hit them. Someone should have probably told that to General Westmoreland 
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Feb 23, 2016 16:25
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I'd just like to apologize for bursting out at you. Your made your posts shortly after I read something similarly phrased, but completely different in intent, and I ended up projecting the contents of that into your posts, and making an angry rant neither you nor this thread deserved.
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Feb 23, 2016 16:32
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George seems like a cool, non-pretentious dude. I'm glad for both the CO and Somali effortpost: what a splendid day to be a milhist fan. Back on German trenches: how tough were they? Did thy have actual concrete/rebar trenches? How big and how strong were the bunkers? How comfy? Did Germans receive significantly less bombardment casualties as the rsult?
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Feb 23, 2016 17:43
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Do you want to see a bunch of Russians firing blanks at each other in the snow? Of course you do!  http://imgur.com/a/6mQJk About half of these shots where after I got frustrated at having my view blocked by Russians/Russian trees and I skidded down on to the edge of the half-frozen river from the embankment, making me very glad that my boots are waterproof as my right foot would periodically slip back into the slush.. Also quite fortunately, the main body of the Soviet reenactors took cover on the bank of the river and right into my camera ambush  The opposition seems to have been Finns (orange armbands) and then Germans. After the big show I got a chance to shoot a blank and handle the Mosin-Nagant and SVT-40 rifles. Also got to hold, pose with, and take pictures of the PPS-43, PPSh, MG-42 and DP-27.
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Feb 23, 2016 18:29
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lenoon posted:I think he's an example of how all that imperialism and golden age of Englishness, all the romance and poetry and daft innocence didn't have to lead to being a soldier - there's this kind of irresistible historical inevitability of the "long hot summer of 1914", where sleepy England stirred itself to war, but the same conditions and the same "ideal" of the nation of shopkeepers also produced an anti-war movement, from the very same people.
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Feb 23, 2016 18:39
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my dad posted:I'd just like to apologize for bursting out at you. Your made your posts shortly after I read something similarly phrased, but completely different in intent, and I ended up projecting the contents of that into your posts, and making an angry rant neither you nor this thread deserved. no worries, dude   
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Feb 23, 2016 18:43
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The last reenactment I saw had NKVD using traitors to draw out Lithuanian partisans into a shootout at basically pointblank range, including DP mgs and a truck that partisans liberated after sticking up a Russian who was hiding under the truck at gunpoint. Then I spent the whole day fondling NATO arms.
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Feb 23, 2016 18:44
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JcDent posted:Back on German trenches: how tough were they? Did thy have actual concrete/rebar trenches? How big and how strong were the bunkers? How comfy? Did Germans receive significantly less bombardment casualties as the rsult? The trenches themselves were usually deeper, better-drained, and relatively more pleasant to live in. After tanks came along they also started making them wider; easier to hit with a mortar bomb, but wide enough that a tank would fall in and get stuck like an upturned ant. They were still doing more or less the same thing as on t'other side at trench level, just taken to a greater extreme. They were still fundamentally building with wood, sandbags, and corrugated iron, and digging traverses and reinforcing with gabions and revetments; there was just a hell of a lot more wood/sandbags/iron being used. I've not seen any reference yet to concrete in trench construction, but I'm keeping my eyes open. The dugouts were where the Germans went to town with concrete. An Entente dugout was typically about ten feet deep, invariably contained about two more people than it could comfortably hold, and in any case you'd be lucky to fit ten men down any given hole. Again if you were lucky, the wooden roof was reinforced by sandbags or corrugated iron; if not you just had the soil above. A small German dugout was one big enough to hold thirty-odd blokes, each man with his own bed (Entente soldiers often slept above ground when up the line; only the officers could bank on sleeping in a dugout), and with about as much personal space as a British soldier would get in barracks. Almost certainly you'd have electric lights. The more elaborate ones soon had heating, plumbing, washing facilities, flushing shitters. They were forty or fifty feet deep, and often with a big solid concrete roof. Officers' dugouts included periscopes so Lieutenant Schnell could see what was going on outside without having to get off his arse, and with the field-telephone waiting at his right hand. They also built shelters designed for a purpose; a barracks shelter for an infantry platoon, a regimental commander's HQ, a field-kitchen, an NCOs' mess; Entente troops tended to just dig some holes and then decide what they were for later. The German staircases usually had at least two turns on the way down, to stop enemy bombers from easily throwing hand grenades down from trench level. They soon began building two or three entrances, so if Tommy turned up at the front door they could all sneak out the back. By 1917, some trench systems had their dugouts fully inter-connected by underground tunnels (some man-made, some natural caves discovered by the miners); you could walk for miles through the most extensive arrangements without having to come above ground. And yet the Germans took about two-thirds of their casualty from artillery, just like everyone else. Why? Well, for one thing, you still need sentries in the trenches; and they take casualties just from being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Lieutenant Crappingly-Toenails gets bored and sends over a mortar volley. Likewise, when someone attacks you, you have to come out of the dugouts and you're now more vulnerable to shellfire. But more importantly, it's very likely that at some point you're going to lose a trench; and it took until 1917 for the Germans to get on board with defence in depth, so they're almost certainly going to counter-attack as soon as possible. (Why build a really nice trench if you're just going to fall back and abandon it when the enemy attacks and things get hot?) Now you need to go over the top to launch that counter-attack, and you've got no cover, and this is when the guns murder the gently caress out of people. Likewise, if it's you launching the offensive, you've got to get your men up and into No Man's Land at some point. There eventually comes a point when even the German must get out of his trench, and he gets blown the gently caress up by shellfire just as good as anyone else does. Great, you've attacked! Now you're sitting in some Godawful French trench that looks like it was dug by a barbarian with a flint-axe, and that you've just half-destroyed with your own guns. Good luck surviving the French artillery's response. Now consider the Eastern Front. Great, they can do mobile warfare if they attack right! Not so great, that means a shitload of marching and attacking over ground where the only cover from Russian shells is the cover you dig for yourself with your shovel.
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Feb 23, 2016 19:37
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I have some pics on Facebook I can upload of a recreation WW1 German pillbox at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center. It's even got an underground tunnel to walk through.
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Feb 23, 2016 19:45
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That is as informative and as pleasantly written a post as I could have hoped for 
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Feb 23, 2016 19:50
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chitoryu12 posted:I have some pics on Facebook I can upload of a recreation WW1 German pillbox at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center. It's even got an underground tunnel to walk through. I'm the completely accurate "Achtung! Please Watch Your Step" sign.
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Feb 23, 2016 19:55
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Trin Tragula posted:A small German dugout was one big enough to hold thirty-odd blokes, each man with his own bed (Entente soldiers often slept above ground when up the line; only the officers could bank on sleeping in a dugout), and with about as much personal space as a British soldier would get in barracks. Almost certainly you'd have electric lights. The more elaborate ones soon had heating, plumbing, washing facilities, flushing shitters.
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Feb 23, 2016 20:01
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Trin Tragula posted:Dugout stuff Did the better German trenches/dugouts have any effect on the rates of cases of 'shell shock'/PTSD? It seems like having a more secure and relatively more comfortable place to sleep while in the front-lines might make it a lot easier to withstand the mental stresses.
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Feb 23, 2016 20:41
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