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This is a bit of a contemporary question, but is there a standard armament for UN peacekeeping forces, or a reference of what it was across various peacekeeping missions?
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Mar 30, 2016 03:15
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Basically, no. You use whatever you normally have.
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Mar 30, 2016 03:42
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Anyone have any good recommendations for Documentaries about the B17 Flying Fortress?
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Mar 30, 2016 03:50
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gradenko_2000 posted:This is a bit of a contemporary question, but is there a standard armament for UN peacekeeping forces, or a reference of what it was across various peacekeeping missions? I think the idea is that UN asks for peacekeepera and then some Pakistanis get to paint BMPs white and get really concerned about blue helmets. No such thing as a standing UN army to break down your door and take your guns, no matter what uncle John says.
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Mar 30, 2016 04:51
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Is there anything good out there about the Soviet strategy in the Pacific if the balloon had gone up? The working assumption in New Zealand seems to have been that the signals intelligence sites (Waihopai, Tangimoana, and Irirangi) and maybe the military-capable airfields might have caught whatever was left over from flattening Australia, but what did the Soviets actually plan to do?
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Mar 30, 2016 07:27
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Nebakenezzer posted:In the 1970s, didn't the M60 get a new gun that could blow holes through the T-72? I remember reading that a Israeli M60 with this gun what knocked out in Syria managed to make its way to the Soviets, and they were not amused. This is why 1980s Soviet T-72s have that extra turret armor? Nah not a new gun, but new ammunition. "M111" if memory serves me correctly. Also the new turret armor that you refer to, do you mean the T-72A turret? Many T-72s also got an additional applique armor to the glacis, but not many of the export models.
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Mar 30, 2016 07:29
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Trin Tragula posted:Just wait until he finds out that the sergeant says "gently caress" sometimes! Swearing? In this mans army! That is horrid. Absolutly darn horrid!
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Mar 30, 2016 08:14
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Trin Tragula posted:"Isti miseri" Which, for clarification, looks to mean 'you wretches'. Harsh words indeed.
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Mar 30, 2016 11:07
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Panzeh posted:To be fair, when those tanks came out, they scared the US into developing the Shillelagh and MBT-70 quite heavily. It's a lot like the Bradley and the BMP. Except the Bradley didn't suck, of course.
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Mar 30, 2016 11:08
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Grey Hunter posted:Swearing? In this mans army! That is horrid. Absolutly darn horrid! What, never?
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Mar 30, 2016 15:14
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I rememer reading earlier in the thread about someone saying that they were going to do a first crusade megapost, did anything come from that? Or can someone recommend me a book with a good overview.
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Mar 30, 2016 18:25
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Lord Tywin posted:I rememer reading earlier in the thread about someone saying that they were going to do a first crusade megapost, did anything come from that? Or can someone recommend me a book with a good overview. Everything I know about the Crusades comes from a book called "A Brief History of the Crusades." It's precisely one book I've read here, but I thought it was pretty good, definitely a good intro on the topic.
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Mar 30, 2016 19:38
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Christopher Tyerman's "God's War" is a fantastic history of the crusades (at least I think it's fantastic, I'm not a scholar of the crusades or anything) and well worth a read if you can cope with its phenomenally weighty paperback version.
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Mar 30, 2016 19:57
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So, I'm reading "Mussolini's Death March" a compliation of accounts from Italian soldiers on the Eastern Front and something that stood out is how most accounts I've read so far is the emphasis on the "kindness" of the Russians. Random examples: A large group of mixed Italian and Germans are captured. The Germans are forced to strip and told to walk back to Germany, upon which their all promptly machine gunned. The Italians in contrast are simply taken to a camp. A Italian unit pulls garrison duty in a village. A soldier makes an arrangement with a local woman about trading for food. He enters the local's izba one evening to discover the woman's son there with a rifle, turns out he's a partisan. They shrug and decide to ignore each other. A Italian mechanic is taken prisoner by a Red Army unit. Needing someone to fix their trucks they force him to do it for them. They keep him along for the next few months until the ranking officer gives him a choice: put on a Red Army uniform and promise not to desert, or get turned in to a PoW camp. He decides to take the former option and ends the war with that unit and is offered to stay in the USSR and gain Soviet citizenship. He declines the offer and goes home. Has a amusing incident in which the Italian decides to rant about the evils of priests in order to suck up to his captors. The Russians more or less roll their eyes and say something like "who cares? There are good priests and bad priests. Stop badmouthing them all" How often did these sort of informal, "gentlemen's agreements" happen? I'm going to guess this was all pretty benign compared to what happend to German PoWs? Nckdictator fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 20:35
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A couple thoughts occur to me: First, the Russians may very well have drawn a distinction between the Germans and everyone else that was invading their country. I know there was a lot of propaganda whipped up specifically about how much the Germans were fuckers, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that your average Russian did a double take when presented with an Italian and that was enough to get them some moderately humane treatment. That said, the cynical historian gently caress in me immediately suspects that the accounts - even if true - may very well have been cherry picked. Italy was one part of Europe where the far left wasn't discredited by the Cold War nearly as much as it was in the rest of it. Writing about how the USSR's beef was just with the Germans (despite the fact that the Italians were the OG Fascists and were also invading Russia) would fit in nicely with that world view. Some fast googling shows that the author of the book became an anti-German partisan after Italy bowed out of the war and was invaded. Further googling shows that the are he was active in was dominated by Anarchist partisans. My gut feeling is that someone joining up with Anarchist partisans in 1944 probably swung to the left. Don't take this as authoritative, it's gut hunches and midday googling. Even so, it's a plausible reason for at least collecting those kind of stories in a consistent enough manner that it stood out to you as a theme in the book.
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Mar 30, 2016 20:59
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gently caress me quote is not edit whatever I'll put it here Also some fast googling shows that Italian POWs in Russian captivity had about the same atrocious survival rate as their German companions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_prisoners_of_war_in_the_Soviet_Union Apparently it became a hot-button topic in Italian politics with center-right parties using it to say how evil the USSR was and the Italian leftists calling all of it anti-communist propaganda.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:02
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Cyrano4747 posted:gently caress me quote is not edit whatever I'll put it here Italian POWs had it rough on both sides. After Italy surrendered many were stranded inside the Reich and interned. According to Wages of Destruction the Nazis worked 32,000 of their former allies to death. quote:Amongst the ‘Western workers’, the group that suffered most were the Italian soldiers interned by the Germans after the Italian surrender in the autumn of 1943. Of these unfortunates, no less than 32,000 were starved and worked to death over the winter of 1943— 4.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:15
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The Red Army propaganda apparatus did make a distinction between those evil fascist invaders and the minor nations that were misled or strong-armed by said evil fascist invaders and were actually good friends of Russians and Slavs (cue several examples of friendship from historical events). That said, I've never seen a leaflet like that for Italy.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:16
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100 Years Ago Not much good news today, I'm afraid. We start at the Hanna chokepoint in Mesopotamia, where we find General Gorringe struggling against transport woes and having to delay his last-ditch relief effort towards Kut. Which is no use to anyone, not least the deteriorating garrison. A German U-boat pops up in the Black Sea to torpedo a Russian hospital ship; and just to cap it all off, General Hunter-Weston returns to the story today...but what's this? Has he actually learned something from being on Gallipoli? Coo, slap me vitals, etc. Grigoris Balakian marches deserted roads through Cilicia to reach Sis; E.S. Thompson hears a spurious latrine rumour about Tanga; Maximilian Mugge is most put out by hearing people say "gently caress"; and Louis Barthas has just been warned to move from his comfortable rest billet on the lower Somme, which surely can't mean anything good. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 21:32
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I've seen at least one memoir account of crushing fleeing Italian soldiers beneath tanks so, yeah, that account seems heavily cherry picked. Of course the main defeat of Italians was during the winter of 1942-1943, and that was an exceedingly bad time to be captured if the statistics say anything.
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Mar 30, 2016 21:39
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On the other front, I seem to remember reading about Italian soldiers basically tripping over themselves to surrender to the Allies by the time they invaded Italy, on account of not really being into fascism anymore, and life in the Italian army being mostly worse than life in an allied POW camp (German soldiers seemed to be a bit more hardcore). Is there any truth to that, or did I read a pack of lies? I think I read it in a book in the school library when I was in high school (15 years ago) so...that could have been an embellishment, now that I think back about it.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:27
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The western allies treated POWs exceedingly well by WWII standards.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:31
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Another thing that occurred to me is something that holds true for all survivor accounts: they're frequently not generalizeable for the average experience of people caught in their situation precisely because they self-select for people left alive to write memoirs or give interviews. If those accounts are true it easily could be that there were a few Russians who made that distinction, but they weren't anything like the majority. If 1 in 10 POWs survives because a Russian realizes he's not a German and in the other 9 cases they all get machine gunned it's going to look like a whole poo poo load of Russians were sympathetic of Italians if those survivors accounts are all you consult. Reaching back a bit to what I was saying earlier about survivor testimony, you see this a LOT in studying the Holocaust. If all you read was survivor accounts you would think everyone had a job in the infirmary that kept them out of the bad details and that half the farmers in Poland were hiding Jews in their barns. One of the things I have to bring up to my students every time I teach that class is that the accounts sound implausible and filled with insane coincidences and strokes of good luck because they are - we're reading about the one in a thousand who had things turn out exactly right. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 22:31
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Yeah, this should also be remembered for 'our tank was shot 10 times and didn't explode' stories.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:34
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Nckdictator posted:So, I'm reading "Mussolini's Death March" a compliation of accounts from Italian soldiers on the Eastern Front and something that stood out is how most accounts I've read so far emphasis the "kindness" of the Russians. Random examples: Cyrano brought up any misgivings I would have vis a vis the author's backgrounds and intentions. Call me overly-optimistic, but i believe most people out there are decent. Your average person isn't a piece of garbage. That's why you hear of German soldiers and civilians showing humanity and compassion. After all, Hitler didn't exactly have majority approval going for him. This isn't to propagate things like the "Clean Wehrmacht myth" or to say that non-intervention is okay, but your average modern person doesn't have the cruelty in them to inflict awful crimes. Which is why there were political units like the SS or NKVD to make sure the message was overall being kept to.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:39
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Fangz posted:The western allies treated POWs exceedingly well by WWII standards. Is it true that the main policy was "ship to loosely guarded camp in North America, good luck escaping now"? I know there's a few old POW camps here in Alberta (our University field station is built on the grounds of one of them), nestled in the Canadian Rockies seems a pretty decent way to live out the war. Of course I don't think many of those guys were repatriated until 1949 or something? Plan Z posted:Cyrano brought up any misgivings I would have vis a vis the author's backgrounds and intentions. Pretty sure everything about the experience of WW2 (and the rest of them really) reveals that this absolutely is not the case. War is a hell of a drug, and the trauma of it will gently caress with your brain in surprising ways.
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Mar 30, 2016 22:52
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Nckdictator posted:How often did these sort of informal, "gentlemen's agreements" happen? Trin Tragula posted:Maximilian Mugge is most put out by hearing people say "gently caress" There's a fairly large gap between (by way of comparison) proper literary Russian that a well educated intelligentsia / middle class family may speak, and "street" Russian or мат. Talking to working class folk who loving бля can't loving бля stop loving бля using the word "бля" after every other loving бля word can get loving бля irritating. Xander77 fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 22:53
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PittTheElder posted:Pretty sure everything about the experience of WW2 (and the rest of them really) reveals that this absolutely is not the case. War is a hell of a drug, and the trauma of it will gently caress with your brain in surprising ways. I guess in my mind it went more like "They didn't always like what they were doing or were aware of the larger picture." It's much more complicated than my original statement, which is why I hovered over "Submit Reply" for a very long time. I was re-reading about Operation Torch recently, and a tank destroyer unit in particular was talking about being strafed by friendly Mustangs and Spitfires for several days on end, presumably because all of the M3 GMCs looked like German halftracks. One thing I've always been curious about how often air crews were ever confronted about specific issues of friendly fire in terms of either debriefs or even punishment like court-martials. I imagine it could really mess someone up. I'm guessing if it happened, it was only in extreme cases as keeping crew numbers up was probably very difficult, but it's something I've been really curious about even since I was little.
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Mar 30, 2016 23:19
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Not sure how much the author has edited each individual's account but that would make sense. A few more things I noticed in the accounts: All of the soldiers interviewed -without exception- claim they never were Fascists. I'm not sure how much this was postwar rear end-covering, the fact that hardcore fascists were allegedly singled out for rough treatment in the camps or simply died on the battlefield, or a indication the the author interviewed those based on political inclination. A few of the interviewees describe attacking and heckling PCI members upon their return to Italy along with attempting to tear down various pro-Soviet banners. Deaths in the PoW camps for the most part seem to things like "Luigi starved , Mario died of typhus, Benito worked to death in the salt mines, and Giovanni died of dysentery" rather then "Commissar Ivan lined 500 of us against a wall and shot us" Not that that makes much difference to the dead. Some describe encountering "Russian political prisoners" on their way to Siberia, their universally claimed to be in even worse shape then the Italians. Italian prewar exiles are sent to the camps to gives lectures on Communism. The PoW's react to these guys in different. Some of the exiles are hated and despised, while others are described as "good men". If an Italian interviewee and German surrender together there's a 99% chance the German will be killed out of hand. Related to that blonde-haired Italians are sometimes mistaken for Germans and treated the same way by frontline captors. Italians, Hungarians, and Romanians are all kept in the same camps, while Germans are kept in separate camps. It's pretty interesting trying to read between the lines on these accounts here. Nckdictator fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Mar 30, 2016 |
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Mar 30, 2016 23:20
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Plan Z posted:I guess in my mind it went more like "They didn't always like what they were doing or were aware of the larger picture." It's much more complicated than my original statement, which is why I hovered over "Submit Reply" for a very long time. Be that as it may, it should still be emphasized that there are reams of scholarship out there that points to the fact that your ordinary dude off the street is fully capable of committing genocidal war crimes if he's in the right place at the right (wrong) time. I'm not just talking about some dude who's been in combat for six months straight going apeshit and machine gunning civilians in a bunker or raping the gently caress out of the first woman he finds, I'm talking about participating in premeditated rounding up and slaughter. Think Eastern European killing actions against Jews. For a good, very readable primer on this check out Chris Browning's "Ordinary Men."
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Mar 31, 2016 00:29
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Just found my Grandfather's Naval Pay & Identity book, would anyone here in the thread be interested in pictures? He served in the RN and was from the British Protectorate of Somalia. They're very fragile and it's nice to go through this stuff at least. 
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Mar 31, 2016 00:34
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The saving grace of the AIRPOWER/Cold War thread in TFR is that if it gets really stupid, it resets itself with a shitload of airplane/cold war pictures that are badass and  Also I'd wager at least 1/3 of the "OPSEC but you're wrong" posts are aimed at people who are either totally loving nuts or are so convinced of their own political agenda one way or the other that they have really weird theories about physics and weapons as a result. Also it indirectly got me my avatar, so I can never hate.
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Mar 31, 2016 00:49
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Cyrano4747 posted:Be that as it may, it should still be emphasized that there are reams of scholarship out there that points to the fact that your ordinary dude off the street is fully capable of committing genocidal war crimes if he's in the right place at the right (wrong) time. I'm not just talking about some dude who's been in combat for six months straight going apeshit and machine gunning civilians in a bunker or raping the gently caress out of the first woman he finds, I'm talking about participating in premeditated rounding up and slaughter. Think Eastern European killing actions against Jews. The only good part of that is that the same dudes who murdered their way across Eastern Europe were apparently pretty capable of switching it off and seamlessly reintegrate into civil society after the war.
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Mar 31, 2016 00:49
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Xander77 posted:Do you live in something like a classless society? Yer actual Queen sitting down in front of yer actual Lords in the 21st century. quote:Or at least one in which "fancy" speaking is no longer something taught to the upper classes? This is actually a very interesting point, if you're interested in that sort of thing. You can divide English society into three lumps (the fault lines are blurrier now than they were in 1916 but they're still there); upper class at the top, working class at the bottom, middle class in the middle. The upper class and working class share one important attribute; they know exactly where they are in the scale and don't worry about it all that much. The middle class, on the other hand, has all kinds of anxieties about itself and a desire to want to improve its own station and do the proper thing and seem vastly more well-to-do and privileged than in fact it is. We've produced a shitload of comedy poking fun at wannabe-social-climbers, from The Diary of a Nobody to Basil Fawlty's attempt to hold a gourmet night. Which of course goes horribly wrong, but it's also a joke that he's the kind of person who'd try to put on a gourmet night in the first place. I promise this is coming to a relevant point. There are plenty of class differences around speech and what words you use, but it's a lot less formal than what you're describing (you don't learn that there's a difference between saying "napkin" and "serviette" formally in your lessons, you learn to say either "napkin" or "serviette" in conversation with family and friends, depending on your background), and it's all rooted in the three-way split. Nancy Mitford produced a wonderful and mostly-still-relevant article in 1954 with a list of words for things as used by the upper class and as used by the middle class. The killer is what you say if you don't hear someone clearly. A middle-class person says "Pardon?", because they think it's more polite and refined. An upper-class person, however, says "What?" From Jilly Cooper we have the example of an upper-class child saying to a friend "Mummy says that 'Pardon?' is a much worse word than 'gently caress'" (since it's a much more reliable class indicator). There's the point. Yer actual upper-class person generally isn't scared of swearing when the situation warrants it. You might not often hear them dropping F-bombs every third word like a builder or a sailor , but the key thing is that they're secure enough in their position at the top of the heap to be able to swear without the fear that others might think them lower-class. Only people who are worried about their position on the scale go out of their way to avoid swearing no matter what the context. Mugge being shocked by all the swearing is a critical shibboleth that irrevocably places him no higher than upper-middle. It also points out what a good Englishman he is; despite being a naturalised citizen of German parentage, he's obeying the English rules of being upper-middle-class quite naturally. (Next time I've got some time to waste, I might write about the differences between Mugge's writing and that of Bernard Adams, who came from a relatively humble home, but won scholarships to a good public school and then Cambridge; Adams grew up with the true upper classes, and it shows.) (If anyone finds this interesting, go buy this book right now, a forensic and very readable dissection of the English national character by a sociologist. Brief PDF excerpt here on "Pardon?" and other such words.) Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 01:36
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Trin Tragula posted:You can divide English society into three lumps (the fault lines are blurrier now than they were in 1916 but they're still there); upper class at the top, working class at the bottom, middle class in the middle. The upper class and working class share one important attribute; they know exactly where they are in the scale and don't worry about it all that much. quote:Only people who are worried about their position on the scale go out of their way to avoid swearing no matter what the context. Mugge being shocked by all the swearing is a critical shibboleth that irrevocably places him no higher than upper-middle. Edit - I will, however, unhesitatingly recommend executing every single aristo as a matter of general practice. It's just good sense. quote:(Next time I've got some time to waste, I might write about the differences between Mugge's writing and that of Bernard Adams, who came from a relatively humble home, but won scholarships to a good public school and then Cambridge; Adams grew up with the true upper classes, and it shows.) Xander77 fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Mar 31, 2016 |
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Mar 31, 2016 01:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:Using first hand accounts is more of an art. Cyrano4747 posted:OK, on personal accounts of historical events and a lot of the problems associated with them. Thanks for these really interesting posts. Flipswitch posted:Just found my Grandfather's Naval Pay & Identity book, would anyone here in the thread be interested in pictures? He served in the RN and was from the British Protectorate of Somalia. They're very fragile and it's nice to go through this stuff at least.  Trin Tragula posted:(Next time I've got some time to waste, I might write about the differences between Mugge's writing and that of Bernard Adams, who came from a relatively humble home, but won scholarships to a good public school and then Cambridge; Adams grew up with the true upper classes, and it shows.) I think that someone posted a while ago that MG-42 wasn't a good weapon. I don't know much about guns, but I had thought that it was the best machinegun of the war, and that the Americans based their post-war machinegun on it.
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Mar 31, 2016 02:38
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Hogge Wild posted:I think that someone posted a while ago that MG-42 wasn't a good weapon. I don't know much about guns, but I had thought that it was the best machinegun of the war, and that the Americans based their post-war machinegun on it. I don't know much about how great it was as a machine gun compared to contemporary designs, but I know that it's design definitely influenced many future light machine gun designs, and the sound it makes when shooting is loving GLORIOUS . As long as you aren't on the receiving end.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:14
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The best features of the MG-42 were its light weight and quick-change barrel. People like to get aroused about the cyclic rate but in reality limited ammunition and overheating concerns forced the gunner to average around 150 rpm in combat. Its worth noting that every successor to the MG-42 reduced the cyclic rate to something more manageable.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:24
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Polikarpov posted:The best features of the MG-42 were its light weight and quick-change barrel. People like to get aroused about the cyclic rate but in reality limited ammunition and overheating concerns forced the gunner to average around 150 rpm in combat. Yeah, when you're short on everything, a gun that goes through barrels and bullets insanely fast is a Bad Thing.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:33
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Polikarpov posted:The best features of the MG-42 were its light weight and quick-change barrel. People like to get aroused about the cyclic rate but in reality limited ammunition and overheating concerns forced the gunner to average around 150 rpm in combat.
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Mar 31, 2016 03:45
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