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That was a longer post than I meant, the point is that the Allies DID attack into the Dutch East Indies. The New Guinea part of the Dutch East Indies. And they did it before the first landings on Peleliu.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:20
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Tomn posted:Say, question about the Civil War: It was mentioned that Lincoln moderated his political message over time, starting with "We're at war because secession is illegal treason," and shifting over to a more abolitionist tone as the army itself began to grow more in favor of abolitionism. My question is, why did the Union army start leaning towards abolitionism in the first place? Slaves were heavily used in the Southern war effort, from growing food to digging trenches. Technically, the Union's laws said any who ran away should be returned to their owners, and some slave holders tried this. That led to the whole Contrabrand reasoning, as a legal justification to not do this. And a slave is hardly going to run away if he expects to be just sent back. Emancipation ended slavery's legal protection. Otherwise, once the South was defeated by the North, they'd have to rebuild the very plantation and slave system that provoked the war.
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Apr 18, 2016 14:42
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Tomn posted:Say, question about the Civil War: It was mentioned that Lincoln moderated his political message over time, starting with "We're at war because secession is illegal treason," and shifting over to a more abolitionist tone as the army itself began to grow more in favor of abolitionism. My question is, why did the Union army start leaning towards abolitionism in the first place? You usually hear three primary reason: domestic politics (exemplified by the Emancipation Proclamation), the introduction of black troops, and the visceral reaction of seeing the slave world up close. I'm personally not so much sold on the first two and think it was largely the last one. Politically the army was REALLY divided early on, to the point where you had officers both actively working to undermine slavery (Butler, Fremont) and ones actively trying to defend it (McClellan). Abolition really wasn't a terribly popular concept with the rank-and-file, not so much because they had strong feelings one way or another about slavery, moreso because they didn't like the idea of fighting and dying for negroes. This sentiment started to change pretty rapidly when northern soldiers got up-close views of the slave south: remember, aside from a handful of muckraking works like Uncle Tom's Cabin, the general line put out both by southern plantation owners/politicians and sympathetic northern news sources/authors (of which there were many) was the "happy friend of the family on the farm, he's way better off than northern factory workers". They didn't have much in the way of photographs or other evidence to suggest otherwise, so this line was widely accepted throughout the country right up into the first years of the war. As the north started occupying southern territory along the Eastern seaboard and the Mississippi though, soldiers saw the real thing up close, and it was a huge, huge shock. I'm parroting McPherson a bit here and I don't remember the book in which he discusses this in detail, but he argued that the combination of seeing the misleading images of slavery combined with the fact the south was actually defending this system had a profound effect on an awful lot of soldiers. Lincoln timed his messaging to coincide with this shift in thinking very well, and it really helped things along. By the time the casualties and the draft turned the war into a more populist kind of conflict it was being very effectively sold as a democracy vs slave-based aristocracy all the way across the army. This didn't resonate with everybody...particularly Irish conscripts....but it was enough. I'll also parrot McPherson a bit more and say that the introduction of black soldiers has been somewhat overstated in the development of an abolitionist conscience in the army. Black soldiers were of course not terribly well received, and their combat records were at best mixed...not due to any shortcomings on their part, but due to the way they were employed (see: Crater). There was a lot of racial strife pretty much everywhere black soldiers were stationed, and of course racism was still rampant in the army right through to the end of the war (and decades beyond). SA favorite son Sherman was arguably the worst about it of all the Union army commanders; he outright refused black troops in his ranks and even went so far as to prevent them from marching in the giant parade at the end of the war for who knows what reason. Point being, there wasn't a major shift in the assumptions of white superiority, et al, that resulted from the introduction of black troops, and I really don't think it had much effect overall on the sentiments of the army towards slavery.
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Apr 18, 2016 15:33
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Cyrano4747 posted:Bayonet charges were almost always something that was used once one side started wavering to conclude the matter. You didn't break a formation with a bayo charge, you encouraged a formation that was in the process of breaking to get the gently caress off the field. The Carolinian-era Swedish infantry's usual way of doing things was something like "approach to 50 paces, salvo, approach to 25 paces, salvo, charge." Which is perfectly good and cool whenever you enemy's troops are lovely and not well entrenched. Doing that with a tired army on the Ukrainian steppe kinda ends up with you losing your Great Power status.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:22
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bewbies posted:We should do both of these things, what are your thoughts? Well in your post history you have a lot about strategic bombers. I'll try to give myself topic headings as to not be too ramble-y - Strategic bombers: I agree with you generally on strategic bombers (IE they were often a poor investment if you look at how much they cost/what the return on that investment was) though I think I'm a little more supportive of it, if only because disruption of Nazi industry became a major net plus. I know I've possibly written here (definitely elsewhere on SA) that strategic bombing in the Second World War had two different goals: 1. Break the will of the people by bombing the poo poo out of them; and 2. Blowing up the industrial underpinnings of a nation's war machine. I think #2 proved itself worthwhile and ultimately was a great asset in defeating the Nazis. #1 was a total failure, and even seems to have had the opposite effect of its stated goal. While Allied night bombers had more reasons to keep attacking (it started as a morale boosting exercise and continued as an invasion of Europe took a very long time to put together) it also becomes rather stark that the Allied night bombers were for the most part a big waste of resources. This is especially true for Britain, that could have used some of its heavy bomber types in much more useful ways, like as maritime patrol aircraft against U-boats. Unless you had that nifty bomb aiming radar for attacking precision targets at night (IE bombing stuff with the same accuracy as the daylight bombers) it was really for the best part a bad show. I'm not demonstrating any blazing insight by describing this part of the war as "trench warfare in the sky" but it's a depressingly apt analogy for Allied Night bombing, as much was sacrificed for little gain. The B-29: I also have to agree with you on the B-29, that it is very close to a Axis style procurement boondoggle. I'm not super well read on the subject, but I'm guessing this was partially because of a "too big to fail" mentality? Certainly the engines seemed to suffer from that. (I also have to laugh at the idea that this project was so important that they had consolidated develop a fallback bomber in the B-32 Dominator that was supposed to be less ambitious as a hedge, but still ended up with a bunch of technical issues, and the problems were so bad that the USAAC considered 1. Making a B-29 with different engines, and 2. Let the fallback actually enter production because even though the B-29 had been approved for production years ago, poo poo was still going poorly.) My only point of contention (and it's one that is highly debatable) that it is extremely easy in hindsight to see that the program wasn't the best use of resources, but very difficult to see when you are fighting a war and trying to plan for every contingency. While obviously I can't dismiss the former, and the former is in fact extremely important in trying to figure out future actions; I'm just saying that as an objection it carries less weight with me. Speaking of: The B-36: I built a model of one a year or so ago, and ended up doing a infodump on it on my blog. Given my views on judging decisions and their cost/benifit ratios, I take extremely mind exception to your remarks that the B-36 was a waste of time! Yeah, by the time it flew everybody knew that aerospace had been through a huge revision that had not touched the B-36, but it took roughly a decade for the results of that revision, the B-52, to enter service. Before that, the B-36 was not only the biggest game in town, it was a trump card in the early cold war that the Soviets (or anybody else, for that matter) just didn't have. As to its survivability, well, more sympathetic here. It was a "shitload of defensive cannons" bomber that would have been almost impossible to shoot down by WW2 standards, and really drat difficult to shoot down by the Korean War's- but as you said, assume missiles, SAMs, and the like and it becomes entirely different. I can't comment as to how high it could fly when it was packing a 17 ton Castle Bravo strength hydrogen bomb, and TBH I think many B-36s would have destroyed themselves attacking with it. Just to swing back to the B-29 for a sec, do you know what the strategy was for B-29 raids against Japan? It seems like the thought was simply "Get in range, bomb Japan. Oh, fire is the way to go, is it?" PS> Never heard of the "Gin Craze" before I came across you mentioning it. The whole thing blows my mind. This seems related: in the Guinness book of World Records, while the book so to speak is closed on consumption records, they do list the alcohol consumption of William Pitt the younger, British PM. Over the course of a year, he consumed: 574 bottles of claret, 854 bottles of maderia, and 2410 bottles of port.
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Apr 18, 2016 16:56
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Not-So-WW2 Data Today's post is all about the many small arms munitions used by the Czechs after WW2. We take a look at a couple of pistol rounds (for the CZ52) and one of the original rounds for the VZ.52 semi-automatic rifle, chambered in 7.62mm x 45mm and not the Russian standard 7.62x54 or 7.62x39. A handful of 7.92mm x 57mm, otherwise known as 8mm Mauser, rounds out the selection for today. So check out the blog, and see what Czechoslovakia had in its inventory!
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Apr 18, 2016 16:59
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HEY GAL posted:
Do you record and/or care about how these names are spelled today? That J looks like a palatalization, i.e. a Viktoř.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:06
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The B-36 is really hard to turn up information on, but the very few sources I remember seeing about it against early jet fighters had it as a very serious problem just because it did really well at high altitude. However missiles and afterburners made it utterly obsolete if it wasn't already. I'd love to know if more is floating around than the one USAF test with a Sabre and one account of a Meteor pilot I found.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:09
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I think the US strategic bomber force was actually a huge advantage in the South Pacific where having bombers with this range and payload could devastate Japanese bases and in that part of the pacific it was much more difficult to repair infrastructure. If the Japanese had anything similar they probably could've shut down Henderson Field much more effectively. That being said, the medium bombers that the IJN and IJA preferred were more useful against ships themselves, though.
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Apr 18, 2016 17:45
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Tomn posted:I'm honestly having some trouble working it out, but it looks like it's probably the sail itself that sweeps people up, since near as I can tell galleons of the period didn't have lower yards on their mizzenmasts (that is, the lower edge of the sail on their rear masts weren't attached to a pole attached to the mast, only the top edge). The mizzen wasn't gaff rigged but a lateen with one end of the yard pointing downwards, could have referred to that. Not sure it reached below six foot of the deck, seems a bit unpractical. The sail certainly wouldn't have reached that low. More likely the actual killers were blocks attached to the rigging or even the rigging itself.
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Apr 18, 2016 18:13
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xthetenth posted:The B-36 is really hard to turn up information on, but the very few sources I remember seeing about it against early jet fighters had it as a very serious problem just because it did really well at high altitude. However missiles and afterburners made it utterly obsolete if it wasn't already. I'd love to know if more is floating around than the one USAF test with a Sabre and one account of a Meteor pilot I found. Yeah, early fighter jets (think MiG-15s, F-86s) were optimized for higher speeds at lower altitude, while the B-36 had been developed to operate at altitudes above 41,000 ft. With its huge wings and large control surfaces, it was also a lot more maneuverable at high altitudes than early jet fighters, too, which would have been a solid advantage considering it was still a gun and cannon job shooting things down. RB-36s over China often had MiG 15s try to intercept them - only to have the MiGs stall 15,000 ft below them. (This would be with the RB-36 flying at 55-60k ft.)
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Apr 18, 2016 19:31
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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Do you record and/or care about how these names are spelled today? That J looks like a palatalization, i.e. a Viktoř.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:08
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Nebakenezzer posted:Yeah, early fighter jets (think MiG-15s, F-86s) were optimized for higher speeds at lower altitude, while the B-36 had been developed to operate at altitudes above 41,000 ft. With its huge wings and large control surfaces, it was also a lot more maneuverable at high altitudes than early jet fighters, too, which would have been a solid advantage considering it was still a gun and cannon job shooting things down. RB-36s over China often had MiG 15s try to intercept them - only to have the MiGs stall 15,000 ft below them. (This would be with the RB-36 flying at 55-60k ft.) It is one of those things that boggles the mind, something as huge as the B-36 being more maneuverable than a gun and cannons fighter. Of course things like the SA-2 made the whole "ha ha I'm too high up to touch" method obsolete. Very good infodump on the B-36.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:25
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HEY GAL posted:would it still hold that function if a German's spelling it? The Musterschreiber for this company is Christian Gerdtner, from Freiberg in Saxony. Honestly, I have no clue. The J for palatalized consonants is a Scandinavian thing today (and something to that effect was back then, eg. Oxenstierna ~ Ochsenstern, where star is currently stjärna), but there's no telling how a 17th century Saxon would spell anything. He might have thought up his system of transliteration himself, or he might have seen some Swedes with J's in their names denoting palatalization, or anything, really.  Since it's a Bohemian Victor, there's probably a palatal consonant in there, but no telling how it got translated into the J.
Osama Dozen-Dongs fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 20:29
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Osama Dozen-Dongs posted:Honestly, I have no clue. The J for palatalized consonants is a Scandinavian thing today (and something to that effect was back then, eg. Oxenstierna ~ Ochsenstern, where star is currently stjärna), but there's no telling how a 17th century Saxon would spell anything.  quote:He might have thought up his system of transliteration himself, or he might have seen some Swedes with J's in their names denoting palatalization, or anything, really.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:32
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J as a way of showing palatalization actually makes more sense if he's German ; German j is the palatal glide /j/ since IPA was made by/for Germans. You're still reading tea leaves though so I'd wanna see the data.
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Apr 18, 2016 22:47
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100 Years Ago (Now with Added Scooby-Doo Jokes) It's the 13th of April. In the Caucasus, the Russian Brains Trust undergoes an amazing transformation from abject cowards to gung-ho fighters. General Hugh Trenchard, who you might have heard of in relation to another war, appears to be in favour of installing a dictatorship in Britain to better fight for freedom; Grigoris Balakian trusts to dumb luck, and dumb luck comes through for him; E.S. Thompson gets rained on and admits that some men of the Cape Coloured Regiment are "quite a serviceable lot", which from a white South African is high praise indeed; Edward Mousley might just be drifting from sincerity into sarcasm, although it's hard to tell; Corporal Louis Barthas, as he is again, is not the only person in the battalion to benefit from recent promotion; Evelyn Southwell gets home on leave after a minor scare at Boulogne; and Maximilian Mugge betrays his foreign origins by claiming with a straight face that the extremely distant attitude of his officers towards the men is somehow against "the spirit of true British democracy", instead of being a perfect example of it.
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Apr 18, 2016 23:22
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Any good books on how firearms and european contact influenced wNative American and/or African warfare?
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Apr 18, 2016 23:31
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cheerfullydrab posted:Peleliu was definitely not necessary. Taking every single island to "protect the flank" was not US doctrine during the war, because it was hideously wasteful and also pointless, two adjectives which pretty well describe the battle for Peleliu. There are several examples of Japanese strongholds being bypassed and successfully isolated. The best of these is Rabaul, which, if you look at it on a map, seems as if it would be a major flank danger to certain Allied strategic moves. It was recognized that this argument was bunkum. Rabaul was neutralized with isolation and never even assaulted. The real point of the whole back and forth over Peleliu is that Dugout Doug was a complete rear end in a top hat. One thing I've always thought interesting in a theoretical sense-- if they had bypassed Peleliu or Iwo... eventually the war ends, and you've got a firmly entrenched, huge group of troops who have been waiting to give their lives up killing as many Americans as possible. Dug-in and prepared doesn't even begin to do it justice. There are many stories, not all apocryphal or Gilligan's island scripts, of small units of Japanese solders holding out, hiding in the jungle for years after the war ended. What would have been done with Peleliu/Iwo in this case? Just starve them out while dropping leaflets announcing that the war ended a while back? What happened with some of the larger garrisons that were actually bypassed? Did they have to hear the emperor's recorded statement announcing unconditional surrender for themselves, before they gave up? MrMojok fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 02:52
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MrMojok posted:One thing I've always thought interesting in a theoretical sense-- if they had bypassed Peleliu or Iwo... eventually the war ends, and you've got a firmly entrenched, huge group of troops who have been waiting to give their lives up killing as many Americans as possible. Dug-in and prepared doesn't even begin to do it justice. Except this scenario doesn't work at all, because you just take a captured IJN ship, sail it over to Peleliu, and have some captured General get off the boat and order them all to surrender. If that fails, just starve them out. By the end of the war, the bypassed garrisons like Truk were already starving and pretty willing to surrender.
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Apr 19, 2016 04:22
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Hiroo Onoda surrendered when his commanding officer turned up and ordered him to surrender. The Phillipine government gave him a full pardon (probably because Japan was a big trading partner, and that relationship wasn't worth jeopardising). I can't imagine the local government or civilians were too pleased that some rear end in a top hat got away with murder and robbery for 20 years.
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Apr 19, 2016 05:24
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Didn't that dude later join a "Japan did nothing wrong" kind of organization?
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Apr 19, 2016 05:56
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my dad posted:Didn't that dude later join a "Japan did nothing wrong" kind of organization? He was part of Nippon Kaigi, which is an outright "Restore Imperial Japan" organization.
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Apr 19, 2016 07:03
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Holy poo poo.  I probably shouldn't be surprised, though.
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Apr 19, 2016 07:12
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HEY GAL posted:well, once you invent the bayonet, your stabbing-dudes are also your shooting-dudes. what to do with the pike and shot--or how the musketeers could defend themselves without pikes, which is why the Swedish Feather was tried out--was an area of debate throughout the 17th century until the bayonet solved it Please tell me pike-length rifles were designed and/or used in battle at some point 
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Apr 19, 2016 07:58
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Tias posted:Please tell me pike-length rifles were designed and/or used in battle at some point
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Apr 19, 2016 08:03
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MrMojok posted:One thing I've always thought interesting in a theoretical sense-- if they had bypassed Peleliu or Iwo... eventually the war ends, and you've got a firmly entrenched, huge group of troops who have been waiting to give their lives up killing as many Americans as possible. Dug-in and prepared doesn't even begin to do it justice. Many thousands of Japanese soldiers remained all throughout the Empire, many in areas that had never been part of the front line. A few continued fighting, but mostly only small groups of extreme die-hards. The rest were either taken prisoner and sent home or melted into successor conflicts. Intact Japanese occupying administrations were used by the victors in multiple instances for probably longer than they ever should have been. Most shamefully for the US was the way we continued the Japanese colonial regime in Korea with a little more enthusiasm than the Koreans might have liked. The Soviets took over half a million Japanese prisoners, members of the feared and supposedly elite Kwantung Army that had plagued China for over a decade. These prisoners represented a far greater number of Japanese personnel than any American infantrymen ever shot or blew up on any godforsaken coral shithole. The vast, vast majority of these disappeared passively into the gulag to be worked to death. Some of them were held until well into the 50's. The myth of the Japanese soldier who won't give up is just that, a myth.
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Apr 19, 2016 09:24
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HEY GAL posted:some english idiot thought of giving longbow archers pikes as well, is that dumb enough for you? Throw an axe in there, and I would legit be aroused 
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Apr 19, 2016 09:42
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Tias posted:Throw an axe in there, and I would legit be aroused
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Apr 19, 2016 09:44
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No brain, no pain! 
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Apr 19, 2016 09:47
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How about a pike with a longbow attached? You put your left arm through a leather loop that is attached to both the pike and the longbow. You plant the butt end of the pike firmly in the ground and wait for the cavalry/infantry charge. When the charge is coming on, you fire the bow, while keeping the pike in a ready position. Then, at the moment of contact, you hold the pike with both your right and left hands. Those few seconds you save by not having to drop the bow and pick up the pike could mean the difference between life and death.
Teriyaki Hairpiece fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Apr 19, 2016 |
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Apr 19, 2016 09:55
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Isn't that a perfect example of an over designed military boondoggle? Like the f35 of the fifteenth century?
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Apr 19, 2016 10:15
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I'm surprised noone wanted to arm pikemen with "frag mine on a long stick". Make it twice as long and require 2 carriers. And call it "Schweressturmspitze" or something 
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Apr 19, 2016 11:40
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alex314 posted:I'm surprised noone wanted to arm pikemen with "frag mine on a long stick". Make it twice as long and require 2 carriers. And call it "Schweressturmspitze" or something You would either need a very small and weak mine to prevent blowing yourself up, or a mine strong enough to properly blow up the other side. In the first case, you commit suicide by angry, slightly smudged men. In the second case by blowing yourself up. Doesn't seem like a terribly efficient way of waging war.
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Apr 19, 2016 11:54
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Directed frag mine on a long stick.  edit: Seriously though, I'm pretty sure that's a niche already filled by canister shot, as far as field combat goes.
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Apr 19, 2016 11:56
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I know they would be heavy, unwieldy and prone to blowing. It also would be more practical to have dudes lobbing grenades with a slingshot (and only a bit less hilariously dangerous for your formation). Still a man can dream about some Mad Max in his 30yw 
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Apr 19, 2016 12:14
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alex314 posted:heavy, unwieldy and prone to blowing. I say that about the ol' fauxton torpedo 
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Apr 19, 2016 12:15
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The Japanese used shaped charges on a stick as one of their main man-wielded anti tank devices. It was probably superior to alternatives such as a mine on a piece of string.
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Apr 19, 2016 12:16
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steinrokkan posted:The Japanese used shaped charges on a stick as one of their main man-wielded anti tank devices. It was probably superior to alternatives such as a mine on a piece of string. Lunge mines?
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Apr 19, 2016 12:16
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FAUXTON posted:Lunge mines? Lunge mine gives too much dignity to what was basically a spear that kills its user.
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Apr 19, 2016 12:21
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