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Libluini posted:Less grisly, but more important: The Muslim Flag of the Prophets got also captured and sold on the markets of Vienna. In pieces. Could you expand on this a bit, specifically what this flag was? I tried to do some googling but just came up with a bunch of info on crescent flags and the ISIS standard.
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Mar 22, 2016 00:30
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So that isn't the huge loving flag in Vienna's War Museum? Which one is that, then?
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Mar 22, 2016 06:17
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So I've been taking my sweet time to catch up with this thread. Like the last one, I drop in every few days to read a few pages and so it seems like a functionally limitless source of fascination. Cheers all for keeping it going. I'm reading (one of the) rounds of Fury chat on page 307 and I have a question, which hopefully won't make people roll their eyes as its not really about the film. How is it that there are so few historical tanks still in existence? I just read a bit about how the Tiger in the movie was loaned by Bovington museum and I guess that particular tank must be super rare due to not that many being built and most of the ones that were probably getting destroyed, as well I suppose as being dismantled by the victors as part of the disarmament of the the losers. But tanks like the Sherman were churned out in their thousands and were on the winning side. I get the impression that a significant proportion of the still functioning Shermans left were featured in that film, so what happened to them all? What happens to this materiel once it is considered obsolete?
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Mar 22, 2016 08:55
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ineptmule posted:So I've been taking my sweet time to catch up with this thread. Like the last one, I drop in every few days to read a few pages and so it seems like a functionally limitless source of fascination. Cheers all for keeping it going. The US dropped a bunch of tanks into the pacific. Countries using lend-lease destroyed a bunch of them so they wouldn't have to pay for them. They got shipped to other countries and blown up in wars nobody cares about. They got scrapped because that's an awful lot of metal doing nothing. Basically, nobody is going to keep a tank around, it's huge, heavy, useless, and worth something as scrap. I am not a historian and just going off half remembered things I've read in this thread, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
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Mar 22, 2016 09:01
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ineptmule posted:So I've been taking my sweet time to catch up with this thread. Like the last one, I drop in every few days to read a few pages and so it seems like a functionally limitless source of fascination. Cheers all for keeping it going. Tanks are heavy and costly to transport. When you're fighting a war, you'll bear it, but when it ended and armies started to demobilize, they were basically a million tons of scrap metal that had probably seen serious wear and tear. Even equipment that hadn't seen combat had gone through Pvt. Fuckface and the rest of enlisted. To top it all off, back in the States there were factories and storehouses brimming with pristine tanks that were already surplus. Now maybe it's easier to understand those stories you occasionally hear about boatloads of Shermans getting shoved into the ocean. Most of them probably made it back across the Atlantic though, to be immediately scrapped or to rot in a warehouse. Same story with the Soviets. A good number of tanks went on to serve in their respective armies, and later on as exports to Cold War clients. There were also civilian uses for them, at least the chassis and engine. Most people weren't interested in preserving military equipment, especially right after the war ended and it seemed like surplus markets were swimming with them. afaik there are still lots of M4s and T-34s floating around. Between the two there were almost 90,000 individual tanks produced, which means that quite a bit of them have survived through chance or collectors. Like, thousands probably.
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Mar 22, 2016 09:29
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ineptmule posted:So I've been taking my sweet time to catch up with this thread. Like the last one, I drop in every few days to read a few pages and so it seems like a functionally limitless source of fascination. Cheers all for keeping it going. Nobody in the US wanted to have to look after tens of thousands of Shermans when we'd only need a fraction of that post-war. What we didn't want to keep ourselves (that eventually got used in Korea), we'd dump off on other countries who had no interest in them beyond scrap when they were finished with them. What we kept was either turned to scrap or re-purposed as construction/farm vehicles (IIRC, there's a Canadian company that still makes vehicles based off the Sherman chassis design). Still others were just kind of dumped here and there to display outside government buildings and museums. Nobody really thought to preserve them like they would other relics, which is sort of why there are only a handful of antique naval ships still preserved. Basically, nobody really cared about the vehicles as historical pieces until WW2 started to become something we should remember. Even nowadays, though, a lot of the tank museums are outdoors and letting their collections go to hell. There have been some really dedicated private collectors out there, though.
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Mar 22, 2016 10:07
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Plan Z posted:Nobody in the US wanted to have to look after tens of thousands of Shermans when we'd only need a fraction of that post-war. What we didn't want to keep ourselves (that eventually got used in Korea), we'd dump off on other countries who had no interest in them beyond scrap when they were finished with them. What we kept was either turned to scrap or re-purposed as construction/farm vehicles (IIRC, there's a Canadian company that still makes vehicles based off the Sherman chassis design). Still others were just kind of dumped here and there to display outside government buildings and museums. Nobody really thought to preserve them like they would other relics, which is sort of why there are only a handful of antique naval ships still preserved. Whoah, I had no idea tanks were converted to civilian use as tractors et cetera. Weird. Makes sense, though. Some rough googling turned up this page. http://web.inter.nl.net/users/spoelstra/g104/ploughshare.htm Anything else of this nature? Did IL-2s and P-47s get turned into crop-dusters?
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Mar 22, 2016 10:19
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Whoah, I had no idea tanks were converted to civilian use as tractors et cetera. Weird. Makes sense, though. Some rough googling turned up this page. Not that I know of. Military planes require much more maintenance than other types of military vehicles and especially civilian planes, so I'm guessing not. I could see the possibility of non high-performance biplanes and scout planes being used in that way, but I have no idea. I do still see an inordinate amount of Matildas re-purposed as farming/construction vehicles in Australia, though: http://the.shadock.free.fr/Surviving_Matildas.pdf Funny related story. The museum that I volunteer at has one of the only original-model US M1917 tanks in the world. The owner would bring it out for parades after WW1. It was spared from a scrapping by its owner during WW2 by hiding it under a haystack. He took it back out after the war, but lost control of it during a parade and dinged up somebody's car. It got put in the museum right after that.
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Mar 22, 2016 10:41
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Whoah, I had no idea tanks were converted to civilian use as tractors et cetera. Weird. Makes sense, though. Some rough googling turned up this page. WW2 era Antonovs still fly civilian transport in North Korea, IIRC.
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Mar 22, 2016 10:46
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Tias posted:WW2 era Antonovs still fly civilian transport in North Korea, IIRC. Is this a 'ship of Theseus' thing? Because I can't imagine it having any original parts after 70 years of operation.
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Mar 22, 2016 10:53
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An-2 (the one uou probably think about) were made in Poland up until 1996, with last withdrawn from military in 2012. It was designed shortly after WW2. I've flown as a passenger in one like 10-ish years ago, it was loud but otherwise ok. It's a very sturdy design with incredibly low stall speed, below 30 knots, so even if engine dies a competent pilot can land on any piece of flat land.
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Mar 22, 2016 11:00
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The Lone Badger posted:Is this a 'ship of Theseus' thing? Because I can't imagine it having any original parts after 70 years of operation. I think they might make their own now, or at least did in the sixties. alex314 posted:An-2 (the one uou probably think about) were made in Poland up until 1996, with last withdrawn from military in 2012. It was designed shortly after WW2. I've flown as a passenger in one like 10-ish years ago, it was loud but otherwise ok. It's a very sturdy design with incredibly low stall speed, below 30 knots, so even if engine dies a competent pilot can land on any piece of flat land. Yeah, this. It's largely a workhorse engine with wood and clothen tarps for a fuselage.
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Mar 22, 2016 11:03
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I forgot about C-47s and DC-3s, so in other words I am dumb.
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Mar 22, 2016 11:21
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I guess I meant more explicitly... killy things. Transport aircraft being repurposed as civilian transport aircraft doesn't surprise me, but for some reason a tank made into an augur chassis did. A fair number of WWII destroyers ended up as research ships, right?
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Mar 22, 2016 11:26
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I'm guessing you're going to use a blowtorch to peel off every bit of armour and non-load bearing structure out of a tank so it doesn't get gallons to the mile. Which is probably fine, most of the bits close to what makes a tank move around (engine, tracks, transmission) aren't going to be much heavier than a proper tractor.
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Mar 22, 2016 11:52
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Cyrano4747 posted:Could you expand on this a bit, specifically what this flag was? I tried to do some googling but just came up with a bunch of info on crescent flags and the ISIS standard. Sancak-i Şerif This was supposed to be the personal flag of prophet Mohammed. After the first wars of the Prophet, it ended up in the empire of the Umayyads, then the following dynasty, the Abbasids got it, basically because it was still the same empire, just with different guys in charge. When Sultan Selim I. conquered Egypt, the "Noble Flag" fell into his hands. From that point onward, the Osmans put out the flag yearly at Ramadan, to show it off. The legend goes, if Islam itself or the Osmanic Empire is in true danger, the Sultan is supposed to take the flag with him to battle. And reveal it personally to everyone, so that every true Muslim will rally to the flag to defend Islam. For some reason Kara Mustafa had it with him at Vienna even though he wasn't a Sultan, then he chose to reveal it while a horde of Polish heavy cavalry was chewing through his army. Then he of course lost it because holy gently caress, those Polish guys where right over there and took the giant crescent moon as an invitation. HEY GAL posted:So that isn't the huge loving flag in Vienna's War Museum? Which one is that, then? No, that's probably it. See above. Thing is, 15 motherfucking years ago when I last read and wrote about this, I had a ton of books from the library in Hannover, including some books with Sobieski's letters translated from Polish and some witness' accounts of the time. One of these accounts tells about bits and pieces of the Prophet's Flag being sold on the market in Vienna. Considering you could buy enough saint's bones to recreate an army for every saint that ever lived, that's not really reliable though. It could be some creative people just painted crescent moons on their wash clothes and then sold them in pieces. Or someone back then found the Turkish flag on the market and it made it's way from there to the museum. Between this and me not even remembering the name of the books I borrowed for this paper I wrote 15 years ago, that's not much, I guess. Still, Kara Mustafa bringing out the holy standard just so angry Poles could ride it down must be one of the worst gently caress-ups in Muslim history. That paper was a C+, by the way. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 12:51
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It wasn't the literal standard of Mohammed, because in the fight against non-Muslims only a replica was taken to battle (which was considered to be super holy nonetheless), as this catalogue text tells me, though it also claims that even the replica was never captured by the enemy. The Turkish wiki corroborates this and says that in the 19th century the Ottoman sultans still took the original Sancak-i Serif to battle. This book claims that the Polish in fact did not capture the flag but were repulsed instead so who even knows anymore
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Mar 22, 2016 13:35
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Anything else of this nature? Did IL-2s and P-47s get turned into crop-dusters? In the US at least, pretty much every Second World War-era aircraft flying today survived because they were repurposed as transport planes, fire bombers, or (In the case of fighters) air racers. Even then, only a scarce handful of those aircraft ever went overseas, let alone saw combat-many planes were simply scrapped where they were or immediately upon their return to the US, and the only planes that survived were the ones built so late into the war that they never went overseas, and got put into inventory and later auctioned instead of getting outright scrapped. You might think of tanks as rare, but go to an air show or reenactment and you'll find they're usually not that uncommon, since the parts are common enough and the tanks were designed well enough that it's not impossible for a single person to keep one in running order. A lot of them were also kept in National Guard armories for years, so a good-sized supply was kept safe from the scrapyard Planes, though, weren't so lucky-of the 8,675 B-24 bombers produced at Willow Run, for example, only four are left.
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Mar 22, 2016 13:38
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The CEO of Wargaming sponsored an expedition to find some Spitfires that were buried in the desert since the British couldn't be bothered to ship them back.
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Mar 22, 2016 13:46
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System Metternich posted:It wasn't the literal standard of Mohammed, because in the fight against non-Muslims only a replica was taken to battle (which was considered to be super holy nonetheless), as this catalogue text tells me, though it also claims that even the replica was never captured by the enemy. The Turkish wiki corroborates this and says that in the 19th century the Ottoman sultans still took the original Sancak-i Serif to battle. This book claims that the Polish in fact did not capture the flag but were repulsed instead so who even knows anymore That book must have been dropped from some sort of alternative dimension, considering the Ottoman army did break and collapse at Vienna. The relief army's losses were a full five times lower then the Ottomans. Also, they made a couple thousand prisoners and oh yeah, Kara Mustafa could only collect some small part of his army again after about 10km of madly running away from the battlefield. Also the Tatars, at least to my old sources, weren't even in that battle, there was some sort of bad blood between Kara Mustafa and the leader of the Tatars, so they just greeted the crossing Imperial Cavalry friendly and let them go and join up with the Polish Cavalry and the infantry marching through the forests. So considering this is false, I'm more inclined to believe this is a case of Turkish revisionism. Edit: After finding some old sources again, it turns out there was more then just that one Tartar-leader who hated Kara Mustafa and I have an account of Kara Mustafa saving the flag after he saw it endangered, so that part where the attack on the flag is repulsed probably did happen. Sorry, looks like I misremembered that part! Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Mar 22, 2016 |
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Mar 22, 2016 13:51
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Ensign Expendable posted:The CEO of Wargaming sponsored an expedition to find some Spitfires that were buried in the desert since the British couldn't be bothered to ship them back. Hell, that's nothing-one of my favorite plane stories is that of Glacier Girl, an early-war P-38F that got buried under a glacier for fifty years before it was recovered.
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Mar 22, 2016 14:07
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The "pushing planes into the ocean" thing aside from being the most happy/sad dichotomy I can think of is pretty drat crazy from a modern perspective. The life expectancy for these planes and tanks was measured in days or weeks and it is absolutely bizarre to compare them to modern systems that are so heavily engineered for decades of use.
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Mar 22, 2016 14:13
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bewbies posted:The "pushing planes into the ocean" thing aside from being the most happy/sad dichotomy I can think of is pretty drat crazy from a modern perspective. The life expectancy for these planes and tanks was measured in days or weeks and it is absolutely bizarre to compare them to modern systems that are so heavily engineered for decades of use. I think they recently found a bunch of completely new carrier planes off the coast of Japan that got dumped over the side of an aircraft carrier about a week after Japan surrendered. One aspect of it was that the US had millions of soldiers kicking around all four corners of the globe, and so the priority was to begin shipping them home over something as mundane as tanks and planes and stuff. After all, we can always make more of them.
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Mar 22, 2016 14:27
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Plan Z posted:I forgot about C-47s and DC-3s, so in other words I am dumb. Fun fact, in Hubbards
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Mar 22, 2016 15:31
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bewbies posted:The "pushing planes into the ocean" thing aside from being the most happy/sad dichotomy I can think of is pretty drat crazy from a modern perspective. The life expectancy for these planes and tanks was measured in days or weeks and it is absolutely bizarre to compare them to modern systems that are so heavily engineered for decades of use. Which brings me to another question: have there ever been any studies about the environmental impact of WWII? I mean it can't have been good for the environment when the u-boats were sinking tankers by the dozens, even though those tankers were quite a bit smaller than modern ones. I'd assume the planes dumped overboard were not quite environmentally safe as we would understand the term today, either.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:00
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ArchangeI posted:Which brings me to another question: have there ever been any studies about the environmental impact of WWII? I mean it can't have been good for the environment when the u-boats were sinking tankers by the dozens, even though those tankers were quite a bit smaller than modern ones. I'd assume the planes dumped overboard were not quite environmentally safe as we would understand the term today, either. Dumping stuff in the ocean probably had the smallest environmental impact of anything related to the war.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:01
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Libluini posted:I had a ton of books from the library in Hannover, including some books with Sobieski's letters translated from Polish and some witness' accounts of the time. Was it only the boring relevant letters, or the ones sent to his wife as well?
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Mar 22, 2016 16:14
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Deteriorata posted:Dumping stuff in the ocean probably had the smallest environmental impact of anything related to the war. Smallest environmental impact, sure, but still some pretty serious potential human impact e.g. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/dangers-of-unexploded-wwii-munitions-in-north-and-baltic-seas-a-893113.html
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Mar 22, 2016 16:18
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Deteriorata posted:Dumping stuff in the ocean probably had the smallest environmental impact of anything related to the war. Yeah, if you want the environmental impact it's probably better to start by looking at the insane industrial output.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:29
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Tevery Best posted:Was it only the boring relevant letters, or the ones sent to his wife as well? If it was this one, it seems those letters were the main part. Come to think of it, were those letters (at least the official ones pertaining to matters of state) actually written in Polish originally? I remember something about official business mostly being conducted in Latin, but that may have been a different time period?
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Mar 22, 2016 16:38
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Libluini posted:Still, Kara Mustafa bringing out the holy standard just so angry Poles could ride it down must be one of the worst gently caress-ups in Muslim history. Reminds me of deciding to bring the True Cross along for Hattin.
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Mar 22, 2016 16:46
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Dandywalken posted:Anyone know if there are reliable records of fighter kill-claims for WWII? Stuff like cross-referencing claims to actual losses etc. Overclaiming was done by all participants to the extent that it's nearly impossible to come up with legitimate figures. As a example, I just finished a book about VMF-214 where the author examined US and Japanese records, and for an individual engagement it's not uncommon for both side to claim two or three enemy planes for every one that was actually downed. This is the case for the entire war, all nations. I think the only thing we can really say for sure is for the entire war, the Japanese and Germans lost more fighters than the allies did 
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Mar 22, 2016 17:02
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How did multilingual armies (Austria-Hungary? HEY GAL's guys? Belgium? China? That one guy Louis Barthas knew who didn't speak standard French? etc.) keep organized and stay on the same page? I'm less interested in any particular army or period with this, and more just on what various approaches towards making sure that orders have been understood, officers can communicate with one another, etc. have been tried over the years.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:08
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Sometimes real life intervenes. Sometimes you just gotta finish a book. Sometimes both happen at the same time. Buy the book. 100-Ish Years Ago 19th March: General Maxwell leaves Egypt and sets sail for home and the history books. He leaves behind him a hilarious attempt to supplement the available cavalry by matching a group of surly, spitting, foul-tempered, ill-smelling beasts with camels. Grigoris Balakian identifies a root cause of the gently deepening Ottoman food crisis, E.S. Thompson is having a quiet time at the Battle of Kahe, Edward Mousley's rations are down and rheumatism is up, Evelyn Southwell writes home to mater like a well-brought-up chap does; and Bernard Adams sends over some hate, demonstrating exactly why people call artillery fire by that name. 20th March: The Entente casually confiscates the island of Cephalonia for their own use, Russian preparations to assault Trebizond continue, Grigoris Balakian meets a friendly imam who's less than happy with his government, Bernard Adams is completely unable to come to terms with the last couple of days before something else happens, Edward Mousley's horse is now looking distinctly unwell, and Henri Desagneaux is hard at work in the rear near Nancy.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:10
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Trin Tragula posted:Grigoris Balakian meets a friendly imam who's less than happy with his government  Glad to see good people making some sort of a difference.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:16
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Empress Theonora posted:How did multilingual armies (Austria-Hungary? HEY GAL's guys? Belgium? China? That one guy Louis Barthas knew who didn't speak standard French? etc.) keep organized and stay on the same page? I'm less interested in any particular army or period with this, and more just on what various approaches towards making sure that orders have been understood, officers can communicate with one another, etc. have been tried over the years. AH originally had mostly German officers (or officers trained to use German), so they just taught the troops the 100-odd most used commands in German. That, uh did not work so well when the officers had to communicate anything beyond "Fix bayonets". So, after the ugly defeat in 1866, they switched it up and tried to form somewhat ethnically coherent units. Officers assigned to them had to learn the dominant language of the unit.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:26
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah, if you want the environmental impact it's probably better to start by looking at the insane industrial output. Hmm, really?  Seems like WWII is not even a blip, not compared to what came after. EDIT: This is coal: 
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Mar 22, 2016 17:30
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So, modern armies talk a lot about veterans and how they're better motivated and batter at getting shot at. What about medieval-ish? Were most knights/horsedudes and men-at-arms roughly on the same level as preparations and veterancy goes? Did anyone boast of their crack veteran spearmen and what not? Also, since it bas been pointed out that pretty videogame shields weren't that common in use, is there a way to have a rought estimate of what dominated infantry arms and armour from fall of Rome spear-shield-mail dudes to whenevrr pike-and-musket-fancy-dress dudes appear?
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Mar 22, 2016 17:30
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ArchangeI posted:AH originally had mostly German officers (or officers trained to use German), so they just taught the troops the 100-odd most used commands in German. That, uh did not work so well when the officers had to communicate anything beyond "Fix bayonets". So, after the ugly defeat in 1866, they switched it up and tried to form somewhat ethnically coherent units. Officers assigned to them had to learn the dominant language of the unit. I read that during the defense of the Brest Fortress, the Red Army units stationed there were following the "100 most frequent commands" way, but didn't have time to teach the commands to new recruits. The existing command structure dissolved pretty quickly and units formed organically based on who could talk to whom.
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Mar 22, 2016 17:33
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Kopijeger posted:If it was this one, it seems those letters were the main part. Polish. Their letters are mostly private in nature (my favourite part being where he tells her not to bathe so much because he wants to "feel the scent of a woman" in bed), and state matters were done in Polish since the early XVI century at least (note how the titles are still in Latin, but the documents themselves are not).
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Mar 22, 2016 17:51
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