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Which one is the one that you can't ever see? edit: I get being careful with something due to ti being fragile, but usually concessions can be made to get scholars access. At the very least the archive can photograph it to preserve a record of it. Oh wait, no they won't, because most archives are loving idiotic about letting their poo poo get digitized even if is falling apart.
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Apr 16, 2016 17:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:Oh wait, no they won't, because most archives are loving idiotic about letting their poo poo get digitized even if is falling apart. Really? Is this a "nobody wants to spend money on archives" thing, or a "we just don't understand technology" thing? Or a bit of both? Question: when the ACW was going on, were the European nations watching how combat played out closely? Maybe I'm crossing the streams here, but it seems there were a bunch of things that you could have predicted about World War One watching it. PS> I wanna have a friend like William Tecumseh Sherman
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Apr 16, 2016 18:16
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It's the private collection one that I can't access. The archives that hold the other ones are small and don't want to digitise in case that cuts into the number of people coming to visit. Visitors mean funding, hits on a website mean having to explain to the people that hold the collection why that's equivalent to visitors which is surprisingly difficult lenoon fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Apr 16, 2016 |
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Apr 16, 2016 18:24
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Nebakenezzer posted:Really? Is this a "nobody wants to spend money on archives" thing, or a "we just don't understand technology" thing? Or a bit of both? Well, they would have looked at Grant and decided that clearly, if you find yourself facing trench warfare, the bloody-minded will to throw men at the problem was going to eventually lead to victory. But yeah, I'm very sure most major powers had military observers. The issue is that at the same time in Europe, Prussia create Germany through a series of quick, victorious wars (1864, 1866, 1870/71). How does the experience of two newly created armies (by and large) led by a handful of experienced officers compare to that?
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Apr 16, 2016 18:26
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ArchangeI posted:Well, they would have looked at Grant and decided that clearly, if you find yourself facing trench warfare, the bloody-minded will to throw men at the problem was going to eventually lead to victory. When you put it like that, I'm sure that's exactly what they thought. I was thinking "against a prepared, trained enemy frontal attacks result in huge casualties and no advantage, and this was with muskets and cannon. Get cartridge rifles and machine guns into the mix, and these factors become worse."
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Apr 16, 2016 18:35
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You would think they would digitise even if they don't make the scans actually accessible on the net or anything in that a collection of documents that rots entirely into oblivion isn't any good to anyone in any case.
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Apr 16, 2016 18:39
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Nebakenezzer posted:Question: when the ACW was going on, were the European nations watching how combat played out closely? Maybe I'm crossing the streams here, but it seems there were a bunch of things that you could have predicted about World War One watching it. An interesting read short read on the European observers and the things they learned from the ACW is: "The Military Legacy of the Civil War: The European Inheritance" By Jay Luvaas It spends some time covering exactly what they learned and what they failed to learn, and the consequences of that.
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Apr 16, 2016 18:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:Oh wait, no they won't, because most archives are loving idiotic about letting their poo poo get digitized even if is falling apart. So what I started doing at the end of last year and will be doing when I get back to Germany is request the documents that are publicly listed, say "Location 123 Series 456 / Document 1" through "Location 123 Series 456 / Document 20" and then once I scan those I keep requesting "21, 22, 23," etc, until they tell me they went back there and found nothing and then I know that's the end. Having to explain this in a fellowship proposal was a little embarrassing.
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Apr 16, 2016 21:43
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100 Years Ago, Plus Wriggle Room It's the 12th of April. As the South African Horse rides on and on into the Tanzanian interior, the Indian railway engineers have just finished laying a narrow-gauge railway line to connect the Uganda and Northern Railways, in a time that almost defies belief. And there's no rest for the wicked, either; after the shortest of rests they'll be whisked away on a long trip to Arusha, to build a branch line forward towards Kondoa. While that's going on, E.S. Thompson leaves hospital, and a throwaway comment gives us the key to why quite so many South Africans are falling ill. (Spoilers: It's because they're bloody idiots.) Elsewhere: At Verdun, German infantry assaults are temporarily suspended; a seaplane carrier with a giant beaky nose and a fat arse joins the Grand Fleet, and very welcome it is too; Sir Roger Casement is preparing to return to Ireland, but he's already been rumbled by Room 40; the last-gasp effort to relieve Kut splodges and squidges through conditions that in any other context would be considered impassable; and Edward Mousley has the narrowest of narrow escapes from death or permanent disablement, courtesy of an artillery shell and a flying brick. SlothfulCobra posted:What do deserters go off and do after desertion? Do they try to blend into a small hamlet and hope nobody questions the englishman in their midst? Do they try to live on their own out in the wilderness? Do they just sneak over the battle lines to plop themselves into a POW camp? In addition to the ones who left while on leave and melted back into Civvy Street; some cross No Man's Land, and they're inevitably a useful source of information to the enemy before a major battle. (Of course, sometimes people come across claiming there's about to be a big push and eventually turn out to be full of poo poo, so it's not always easy for Intelligence to use them properly.) Quite a few Germans preferred to head into the rear and then cross into Denmark, the Netherlands, or Switzerland. There were a surprising number who found, ahem, sympathetic French villagers and then lived there, posing as medically unfit Frenchmen. When you're having trouble bringing in the harvest with only women, boys, and grandfathers, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth when Private Thompson (or, indeed, Gunner Schroeder) offers to stay, as long as you hide him when anyone who might recognise him is around. Just about the only thing that almost never worked was trying to do a home run from France to Britain, because of the ease of keeping track of who was boarding ships. My favourites, though, are the circular enlisters, of which there were quite a few between 1914 and 1917. These were men who volunteered, went through training, then deserted either before or after going up the line, lived off their saved-up pay for a while; and then they took themselves off to a completely different recruiting-office, volunteered again with a different name, rinse and repeat...
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Apr 16, 2016 22:25
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lenoon posted:It's the private collection one that I can't access. I know they won't do this, but what about digitising so that, if something happens, they have a backup. They don't have to put it online.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:33
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Trin Tragula posted:My favourites, though, are the circular enlisters, of which there were quite a few between 1914 and 1917. These were men who volunteered, went through training, then deserted either before or after going up the line, lived off their saved-up pay for a while; and then they took themselves off to a completely different recruiting-office, volunteered again with a different name, rinse and repeat... Wasn't this a pretty common problem all throughout the Enlightenment or possibly earlier? I remember reading about this happening as late as the Civil War, and I'd bet a pike that HEY GAL's guys had to deal with it too.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:42
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Tomn posted:Wasn't this a pretty common problem all throughout the Enlightenment or possibly earlier? I remember reading about this happening as late as the Civil War, and I'd bet a pike that HEY GAL's guys had to deal with it too. edit: According to Gregory Hanlon, some Italian muster rolls briefly described the physical appearance of soldiers, probably for exactly this reason, but all the records I've seen just have full name and place of origin. That's probably to track deserters or missing persons, here's a guy who went missing and you can see that they asked around his hometown to see if anyone'd seen him:  Jobst Steinnetze from Hermans-Acker, wanted to go home but he did not get there, whether he fell into the enemy's hands or was killed by peasants, nobody knows HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Apr 16, 2016 |
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Apr 16, 2016 22:44
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Nebakenezzer posted:Really? Is this a "nobody wants to spend money on archives" thing, or a "we just don't understand technology" thing? Or a bit of both? I wrote an effort post on this a while ago...effort any way, short version is they all watched with a lot of interest, particularly the Brits and Prussians. the interesting aspect of their observation to me is how....arrogant? they were about it. they took a pretty hardline view of the populist side of the war and that was obviously pretty troubling to British and Prussian officers who were mostly aristocrats. to them, it looked like two mobs of peasants having at one another....which was fair, if not a little shortsighted. they assumed that when competent gentlemanly officers led professional soldiers that things would go much more smoothly. and they did for a time- the 1866 and 1870 wars were quick and decisive, and that kind of reinforced their initial observations. politically they were very concerned about the effects of a conscript army on the relative security of the aristocracy, rightly so as it turned out.
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Apr 16, 2016 22:50
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razak posted:An interesting read short read on the European observers and the things they learned from the ACW is: Lets just do a quick overview from the end of the ACW to the start of the Franco-Prussian war (ie. 1865-1870) France under Napoleon III is a quagmire of varying degrees of incompetence (starting at half and moving up to total). They appreciate that infantry masses with modern rifles can stop any frontal assault. What they don't appreciate is that tightly packed masses of men are horrifically vulnerable to modern artillery. They buy rifles but don't buy cannon. Prussia is completely absorbed in the task of integrating and modernising the other German states it's just absorbed into the new North German Federation. They appreciate a lot, but there's only so much they can get done and it consists of trying to train infantry with now-outdated rifles how to use modernised battlefield tactics and buying the newest and best cannon. Great Britain gets one look at Monitor and the result is like a thunderclap on the establishment. They've been casually drawing up designs and first prototypes for steam powered iron-armoured battleships and the practical demonstration of the ACW makes it really clear to everyone that the entire Royal Navy is now obsolete. For a nation that's hitting the peak of imperial power and riding high on the Trafalgar myth this is a pretty big deal. Britain starts frantically building warships that are bigger and better than what anyone else has building and keeps that up till the end of WW1. But the Franco-Prussian war is so big and so relevant that it pretty much sets the thinking on the continent from then to WW1.
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Apr 16, 2016 23:08
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minor quibble: it was really the French ship gloire that put the royal navy in a tizzy, not so much the American ironclads. warrior was commissioned before the ACW and would have easily handled any ship in either fleet by herself for the balance of the war. monitors turret was pretty directly responsible for modern battleship turrets via HMS devastation though.
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Apr 16, 2016 23:17
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bewbies posted:I wrote an effort post on this a while ago...effort I'm looking through your posts and now I wanna discuss the B-36 with you  e: also maybe talk about the Gin Craze Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Apr 17, 2016 |
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Apr 17, 2016 03:15
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bewbies posted:monitors turret was pretty directly responsible for modern battleship turrets via HMS devastation though. Not really. Britain had their own turret, designed by a naval officer named Cowper Coles independently of Ericsson and the Monitor. Coles had enough popular and political support to design his own battleship because the Admiralty's design wasn't what he wanted. It didn't end well.
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Apr 17, 2016 03:46
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One place the ACW did have an influence was engineers/sappers. A British observer with the Union basically copied the US field manual.
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Apr 17, 2016 04:41
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HEY GAL posted:Hey. Sometimes it's due to something else. For instance, it turns out that nobody actually knows how many 30yw muster rolls are in the Saxon State Archives. See, there are serieses of documents, there in the archive, and then there's the finding aid, which mentions the series and lists samples from the series (but not all of them) without listing the number of documents in the series. That list was made some time in the 50s or 60s, so whoever made it (he or she probably knew how many 30yw muster rolls there were) is probably dead now. Yeah bad/nonexistant finding guides happen. I'm talking about the places that won't digitize the stuff they know they have despite it falling apart.
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Apr 17, 2016 05:16
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This happens even today. A remarkable number of pre-1960 or so New Zealand Government papers' last known location is "in Archives, somewhere", or even more unhelpfully, "dispersed for safekeeping, 1939". The Treaty of Waitangi spent many years as a doorstop in a provincial courthouse because it had been sent there for security during the war, and the people who knew where it had gone either died or retired after that. There's a couple of PhDs in law every year from researchers digging out old colonial legislation that had literally gotten lost along the line.
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Apr 17, 2016 06:44
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As World War II was unfolding, the UK government moved a lot of important papers/symbolically important things to country houses. The Duke of Rutland was able to convince the government that he could properly take care of things at his castle, which was useful as he began redacting his name in some of them to cover up his Great War service record.
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Apr 17, 2016 07:40
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RC and Moon Pie posted:As World War II was unfolding, the UK government moved a lot of important papers/symbolically important things to country houses. The Duke of Rutland was able to convince the government that he could properly take care of things at his castle, which was useful as he began redacting his name in some of them to cover up his Great War service record. and I think all the documents I read spent the war in a huge mountain fortress and nothing happened to them except one or two got lost in the move. I've been to that fortress--it's super sick, and i'm pretty sure there's no ghosts in the well (500 feet deep!) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Apr 17, 2016 |
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Apr 17, 2016 07:44
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Thanks to the Nazi and the Allied bombing of Belgrade in WW2, a lot of the most important documents of our history have gone to flames. 
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Apr 17, 2016 08:02
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HEY GAL posted:...what had he done? If Catherine Bailey's The Secret Rooms is accurate, it was to cover up that his mother had him pulled from the front lines, which he resisted at first. Then he embraced it and stayed out of harm's way. You gotta continue the family name and he was his father's only surviving heir.
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Apr 17, 2016 08:24
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Nude Bog Lurker posted:This happens even today. A remarkable number of pre-1960 or so New Zealand Government papers' last known location is "in Archives, somewhere", or even more unhelpfully, "dispersed for safekeeping, 1939". The Treaty of Waitangi spent many years as a doorstop in a provincial courthouse because it had been sent there for security during the war, and the people who knew where it had gone either died or retired after that. There's a couple of PhDs in law every year from researchers digging out old colonial legislation that had literally gotten lost along the line. Were they worried about the Luftwaffe  or were these records in the UK?
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Apr 17, 2016 10:42
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my dad posted:Thanks to the Nazi and the Allied bombing of Belgrade in WW2, a lot of the most important documents of our history have gone to flames. This also happened in Ireland due to rebellion and civil war
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Apr 17, 2016 11:57
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feedmegin posted:Were they worried about the Luftwaffe Probably more worried about Japan (for a while people were really concerned that the Japanese would get to Australia or New Zealand).
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Apr 17, 2016 13:33
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Rabhadh posted:This also happened in Ireland due to rebellion and civil war
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Apr 17, 2016 17:21
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"Were the floods of 1960 particularly bad?" "On the contrary, Minister. We lost no end of embarrassing documents."
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Apr 17, 2016 18:09
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Is there any easily accessible research/literature about the US Army's participation in the Pacific in late WW2 and what they did different/better/worse than the marines there? I can't find much other than short blurbs stating which units fought where but I'm probably not looking hard enough.
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Apr 17, 2016 19:35
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Malleum posted:Is there any easily accessible research/literature about the US Army's participation in the Pacific in late WW2 and what they did different/better/worse than the marines there? I can't find much other than short blurbs stating which units fought where but I'm probably not looking hard enough. There's lots to read about, but to me one interesting thing is the battle of Peleliu. The amphibious landing, taking the major Japanese strongpoint facing one of the landing beaches, and then the taking of the airfield were all over with in a few days, albeit extremely costly. But a little further inland were the Umurbrogals, a series of volcanic ridges completely honeycombed with passages and caves full of Japanese (googling USMC Umurbrogals will show pictures of what this terrain looked like). The fighting here was notable because the Japanese for the first time adopted a new policy of fire discipline, not opening fire until a Marine unit had moved into a kill zone bisected by lines of fire from several directions from the surrounding ridges. They tried to inflict max casualties in a short time and then stop firing, often before the Marines were able to spot all the firing locations. Then shoot the stretcher bearers who came up to evacuate the wounded. Anyway, the first Marine Division was cut to pieces up there and finally withdrawn, to be replaced by the Army. This doesn't reflect poorly on the USMC at all, it was just the cost of taking the ridges, where daily advances might be twenty yards or less. Fighting up to encirclement of the Umurbrogol pocket- 10 days 1st MarDiv fighting in Umurbrogals- 5 weeks US Army 81st Infantry Division fighting in Umurbrogals- another 5 or 6 weeks This is all from memory and there are a lot of good sites and books out there about it, but the Wiki article on it is not bad at all. Take note of the size of the Pocket, the area was tiny. Although I guess this doesn't really answer your question though, as the Army didn't do anything different or better/worse. It was just a long, hellish slog that I think is very interesting as part of the Pacific War. I do remember that the 1st MarDiv had about one in three dead or wounded, and the entire division was out of commission until Okinawa, six months or so later. e: here is a famous pic of a Corsair having just dropped napalm on top of one of the ridges. You can see all the volcanic rock and terrain: https://imgur.com/a/o9Mbv MrMojok fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Apr 17, 2016 |
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Apr 17, 2016 20:10
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MrMojok posted:There's lots to read about, but to me one interesting thing is the battle of Peleliu. The amphibious landing, taking the major Japanese strongpoint facing one of the landing beaches, and then the taking of the airfield were all over with in a few days, albeit extremely costly. An absolutely awesome response that can be further condensed as such: gently caress Peleliu.
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Apr 17, 2016 20:23
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Arguments about amphibious operations in the Pacific are litanies of fights between army officers and marine offers where Army units move too slowly, increasing casualties while Marine units move too recklessly, increasing casualties.
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Apr 17, 2016 20:23
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An additional note: the whole place was volcanic rock, and it was not possible to dig in, or bury bodies. So the entire place reeked of thousands of rotting corpses and poo poo and piss, in the tropical sun. Combined with millions or billions of flies and various species of crabs feasting on the human wreckage and waste. Hell on earth. gently caress Peleliu, indeed.
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Apr 17, 2016 20:38
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Question for Hey Gal, was there any form of interservice rivalry with your guys? or were things a little too fragmented for such things to take serious root?
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Apr 17, 2016 20:52
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I'm gonna guess that cavalry looked down on footsloggers as they have since time immemorial. Come to that, I imagine that being fragmented actually INCREASED interservice rivalries - it's just that instead of being divided along broad lines, you end up with THIS regiment of infantry hating THAT regiment of infantry while being friends with THIS regiment of cavalry because they helped out in that bar brawl with THAT regiment of cavalry whom we hate because the colonel of THAT regiment slept with OUR colonel's sister etc.
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Apr 17, 2016 21:00
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Tomn posted:I'm gonna guess that cavalry looked down on footsloggers as they have since time immemorial. And dragoons too. Poor guys.
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Apr 17, 2016 21:02
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SeanBeansShako posted:Question for Hey Gal, was there any form of interservice rivalry with your guys? or were things a little too fragmented for such things to take serious root? *the artillery isn't another service, it's an entirely separate thing alongside various armies, and they have huge egos *among the spanish, there's constant bullshit between the captain of the ship and the commander of the soldiers on the ship. The latter is the one in command in battle, whether he knows anything about boats or not *sailors think soldiers are useless and don't know anything, soldiers think sailors are beneath them. The slang term for "boom" if you're spanish is "matasoldados," soldier-killer, because it'll hit people who don't know what's up in the head. *pikemen envy musketeers because it's easier for them to leave the march and go plundering. musketeers envy pikemen because it's a more prestigious role and they make more i think a more pertinent part of their daily lives is probably regional bigotry, there's a thing in the Mansfeld Regiment articles of war about not forming factions based on what "nation" you belong to, and i think in context they're referring to "part of Germany"
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Apr 17, 2016 21:03
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Tomn posted:I'm gonna guess that cavalry looked down on footsloggers as they have since time immemorial. it's also completely fine for really big commanders to just leave on their own and gently caress off to ????? instead of serving under that bastard for one minute longer imagine all the rivalries we hear about during world wars 1 and 2 but it's among semi-independent entrepreneurs, not the citizens of a modern centralized state imagine if general montgomery owned the british regiments under his command, for instance, and could do whatever he wanted with them (exception, as always, is the french, whose officers actually are servants of the French government. In the early 1600s, they are also mostly poo poo.) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Apr 17, 2016 |
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Apr 17, 2016 21:06
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LostCosmonaut posted:Probably more worried about Japan (for a while people were really concerned that the Japanese would get to Australia or New Zealand). Not in 1939 they weren't.
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Apr 17, 2016 21:18
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